by Lorna Gray
I shook my head. ‘No. But I can assure you that even if she had, you can certainly rest easy about her furniture. I don’t think a few grubby chairs and a table with a barley twist and the veneer curling off are going to amount to much of a fortune, whether it is hers or his. If she’s got your brother’s wealth hidden away somewhere, it isn’t in the furniture.’
‘And the paintings? It doesn’t take an expert to deduce that the pair in the living room were fairly shabby, but the one on the kitchen wall …? I saw it as we passed down the hall.’
We were moving smoothly down through a sequence of hard bends. There was a sort of magnetism in the steadiness of his concentration on the road ahead. This narrow dip before the coming rise was the head of the long valley that housed my cousin.
‘Was there a dark sort of landscape practically hanging in the smoke above the stove? I didn’t really notice it, which means it must have been modern. Dad has coached me into being very severe upon anything less than about a hundred years old. It’ll take me a lifetime to undo that training. You sound as if you’ve got a better eye.’
He told me plainly, ‘My mother was a collector. But all that aside, it fascinates me that Mrs Abbey hasn’t mentioned this particular myth in the course of her manoeuvrings. I would give quite a lot to know whether or not I should be taking that detail as reassuring.’
My silence obviously communicated rather more than it ought.
I felt his sideways glance as we reached a crossroads where the main road sliced across our little lane. It was being travelled by about five cars and a bus. He was amused. He was grinning a little as he remarked, ‘Don’t concentrate so hard on looking calmly detached, Emily. You’re not teetering on the brink of being dragged into a treasure hunt, I promise. I called it a myth and it is. The rest of the stories about what John did died with him and they can stay there. Sometimes I feel …’ A hesitation. ‘Well, the truth is I feel that picking through the memories of this place is like meeting a stranger and even without the deep complication of managing my father’s varying wishes, it would have been a perfectly valid reason for staying away. I don’t want to know him like this.’
A quick intake of breath and an adjustment of the grip of his hands upon the wheel and that was it. He said in an altogether different tone, ‘Ready for this?’
He tipped his head at the cluster of buildings that ranged on the other side of the crossroads. They were Nissen huts laid out in two clusters around the weed-strewn concrete emplacements where anti-aircraft guns had once stood. This was the former air-raid lookout station and if Mr Winstone’s attacker was one of the local squatters, this was where he lay his head.
We weren’t actually here to harass the residents into a confession. The Captain was here under another guise. This time he really was wearing the uniform of the squire’s deputy and I simply hadn’t noticed because the difference between this and the Captain’s usual demeanour was very subtle.
The right-hand array of huts was very orderly. They even had ordinary things like a sense of community. They had collected a giant stack of rubbish and scraps of timber and I realised they were gearing up to have their own small VJ Day celebration with a bonfire. I suppose I’d been expecting the squatters’ camp to look grimly prison-like and occupied by underfed men who bore the shadows of their war experiences in every gesture, but the residents had painted nameplates on their houses and planted fragrant vegetable plots, and it was all guarded by one solitary woman who had been tasked with minding the children while everyone else was out working the fields.
She was shy and I would have sworn, even without hearing her accent, that she was a displaced Londoner. Her blank stare and the habit she had of keeping a hand on her partially opened door, ready to shut it quickly, told me that she had once lived in an area where strange men who called unannounced were more often than not the louts sent to extract a little extra rent. She took the Captain’s message that the residents were all encouraged to attend the Colonel’s meeting in the Manor farmyard tomorrow and then she confirmed with the minimum possible words that there had been no other cars visiting today, nor – answering a quick addition from me – had their vegetable gardens been plundered. It was hard to be sure she was really hearing our questions properly and not just giving an automatic negative, but we couldn’t do more.
‘Rather short and to the point,’ remarked the Captain as we returned to his car. ‘Hard to act the part of the squire’s son when only one tired-looking mother is there to hear it. I really ought to have paid more attention to the lessons of my youth and remembered that they work until dusk when they’re harvesting.’
‘And perhaps noticed that it’s the hay they’re gathering at the moment, not the barley harvest. And I think farming folk call any ripening grain ‘corn’, just for the sake of confusion.’
‘There you go, then.’
‘The Colonel isn’t going to tell them he’s evicting them, is he?’
A grimace as the car turned left onto the main road and charged upwards through the gears. Suddenly the Captain was enjoying this car. He answered my question quite as if we weren’t racing towards the brow of a hill. He said, ‘Heavens, no. My father wouldn’t want that on his conscience even if he did own the land, which he doesn’t. No. The invitation we’ve just given them is to hear an announcement my father intends to make of an equally significant but less tyrannical nature about the role he’s set to play in their long-term employment.’
The next junction took us back onto the narrow lane towards the village. It was the same route I’d walked with my case from the bus stop. I thought I saw a glimpse of Freddy when we passed through the little dip with the farmstead and all the horses. Then I saw a raven above a hedgeline.
I was just running on to saying something mindless about it when the man beside me abruptly said, ‘You’re obviously too discreet to ask, so I’ll just have to tell you. The reason why my father came back today is because we Langtons are in as bad a state financially as the rumour merchants say and we’re going to have to cut and run while we still can. The estate further down the valley that belonged to my uncle has gone already and we think we’ve got a buyer for the Manor. Father’s going to explain some of this to the estate workers and tenants at his meeting tomorrow.’
The car slowed to a crawl as we took the turn down through the village triangle, past the terrace of workers’ cottages and round towards the dark shadow cast by the barn that housed the machinery.
The engine died. In the silence, the Captain added, ‘That much is soon going to be common knowledge, but this part isn’t, so please don’t let it go further. My father is selling the estate to a timber merchant.’
‘Not a farmer?’
‘No. No one wanted it. And even this fellow hasn’t signed and sealed the deal yet, so don’t go scaring the villagers. There’s a scheme in place that will allow our tenants to buy their houses at a sensible price and Hannis will oversee the work to finish the harvest, so there’s employment for now. But, in all honesty, I’m not sure how it’s all going to change in the long run. People will say we should fight tooth and nail to meet the mortgage on this place, but the son who valued the estate and understood it as much as my father does is gone and let’s just say that my salary isn’t capable of keeping that many people afloat on a debt of this scale. We’ve got to get out for our own sake and, if we want to do it cleanly for the sake of everyone else, we’ve got to do it now.’
He seemed to be waiting for me to speak, so I said the first thing that came into my head. I said in a very small voice, ‘You keep putting me in a very peculiar position of trust by telling me these things and I still don’t quite understand why.’
‘Don’t you?’ he asked unhelpfully. I was thinking of the concession he’d made about the cause of his slight limp on the stairs this morning, amongst other things.
Then he climbed out and came round to drag open my door. ‘Six o’clock,’ he commented as I joined him in the still air of t
he yard between this barn and the older one with the pockmarked stone that was presently shining like a buttercup.
‘Teatime,’ I replied, for want of anything better to say. He agreed. And then he very obviously didn’t say anything else. His gaze ran over the utterly barren beds of his father’s vegetable garden.
His ill-concealed hint made me smile. I said suspiciously, ‘Are you waiting for me to offer to cook your dinner?’
He grinned. ‘If, by asking that, you’re implying that you really are willing to consider catering for the masses, give me your key and I’ll walk down and fetch some of your cousin’s stores.’ I thought he was rather overestimating my culinary skills. Or perhaps this was a tactful way of avoiding that uncomfortable discussion about how safe I might feel at that cottage on my own this evening because he was already saying, ‘Go on. I can save you that much labour, at least. You don’t want to walk all the way down there and back up again after the day we’ve had, do you?’
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘But I didn’t begin the day by requiring the assistance of a walking stick.’
Amusement jerked his head aside and fixed his gaze on nothing. A curve plucked at the corners of his mouth as he said, ‘That wasn’t my cane, Emily. I thought you’d been sharp to spot my twinge and now I know. The stick belongs to my father and I was merely the porter charged with carrying it along to his room with his coat. Anyway, the real motive behind my current offer to jog down the hill is that it’s the sitting down and doing nothing that’s really murder. Walking doesn’t hurt at all, and it helps to prove it to myself every once in a while.’
I remembered what he’d said about his hospital stay and having to remember how to walk and was sorry. His attention returned to me. He saw the question I wasn’t bold enough to ask. He told me simply, ‘I caught a bullet. In London of all places, after coming through the war relatively intact. Put like that it sounds rather close to your idea of unending conflict, doesn’t it, but actually it was pretty undramatic and the real damage was caused by the tourniquet in the form of a belt that some helpful passerby twisted about my right thigh. They did it to stem the flow, where a good firm wad of something and a bit of pressure would have done the job perfectly well. Unfortunately, I wasn’t exactly in a state at the time to give my own instructions. But I am now and I think you really would prefer to keep my father company while I run our errands, wouldn’t you?’
I really could take a hint when I heard it. ‘Well …’ I began.
‘Yes?’
‘If it really is six o’clock – might I use your telephone to call my cousin?’
‘Of course,’ he said crisply. ‘The telephone is … well, you know where it is, don’t you?’
And with another disorientating glimpse of understanding that revealed just how unselfconscious I’d grown in his company, he was near enough to put out his hand to take the key from my fingers just as soon as it began to emerge from my handbag.
Chapter 12
I might have worried about letting myself into the Colonel’s kitchen unannounced but I presumed – correctly as it turned out – that the old man would accept my presence as naturally as he would have acknowledged his old housekeeper or one of the women from the village coming in to clean. The Colonel shuffled in when he heard the door shut, ascertained it was me and not his son Richard, tossed a paper down on the table, and then shuffled out again. I didn’t mind. I’d spent the day keeping increasingly easy company with his son, but I wasn’t exactly aiming for familiarity with the man who was lord and master of these parts. A minute or so later, I discovered that there had been no real need for me to manage a tête-à-tête alone with the squire anyway while the Captain walked down to Phyllis’s cottage on a quest for supplies; because Mrs Winstone had passed by and left a quite spectacular pigeon pie.
She’d left a note about it on the counter. The other note, the crumpled letter that the Colonel had lately thrown down onto the round kitchen table in a fit of temper and then forgotten, was from the housekeeper and it explained why the Captain hadn’t added her name to the list of doubts in our day. Presumably he’d unearthed this shortly after his arrival and his father had just re-read it now. In the note, Mrs Cooke wrote that she had fancied a little holiday and implied that after thirty years or so of uninterrupted service it was the sort of trip where she was going to take some time to decide whether or not to come back. The cold rejection of her closing instruction to send all communications care of her sister in Gloucester carried its own message to her employer, but for me the only part of it that could have possibly justified the feeling I had in this quiet sunlit kitchen was the brief sentence that mentioned Mrs Abbey. It wished to make the reader aware of all that lady’s kindnesses over the past months.
I smoothed the creases out of the paper with my fingers and then set it neatly beneath a pepper pot on the counter, out of the way. Then I passed through the house to the stairwell and there I discovered just why the Captain was working so hard to keep his father’s peace intact.
The Colonel’s unfriendliness wasn’t just a mark of a bullying nature. He lurched out of his library just as soon as I opened the door to the study that housed the telephone. I think he must have forgotten I was there because the click of the door had drawn him out and he spoke his son’s name and then stopped at the heart of the stairwell, glowering when he saw it was only me. I suspected, in fact, that he couldn’t remember who I was at all.
The structure of the man’s face was impressive in its way but his cheeks were blotched with red beneath white hair that was combed but woolly. He was standing, a dark-clad man, at the point where the immaculate chequerboard floor met the curling sweep at the foot of the banister. The light cast from the expansive windows made it hard to see how old he was. Perhaps he was only in his early seventies but he looked like a broad man who had lately grown unexpectedly frail. The sharply angled sunlight was picking out the loose fit of his suit. The impression was of an older, sharper man than his son where all warmth had been etched away as a weakness, leaving behind something that this old soldier wished would bear an edge like steel but was, in truth, as insubstantial as hammered tin.
The light must have been affecting his sight too because those faded eyes could barely look at me while I explained in a clumsy fashion about my permission to use the telephone. Then I realised it wasn’t me that kept making his gaze veer away. Suddenly I perceived the strength of that deep stubbornness that was keeping him tall and stern like this. My hand was out behind me on the handle of the partially opened door to his younger son’s study. I softly eased it shut.
It released him to turn and lead me into the library. I followed. It was disturbingly like a question of choosing sides – and choosing in favour of the side where control had fought a brutal battle over the freedom to feel anything. Then I saw I was wrong. Emotion dwelt here and very powerfully. For a cruel, revealing moment when his gaze touched that closed study door once more, I glimpsed on the old man’s face a reflection of the memory that had touched the boy Freddy, only viewed from the other side, as though he’d been in there that day too.
In the next second it was swept away. In its place, it was possible to trace the same sense of purpose in the Colonel that gave his son Richard his energy and his presence. In this instance, unfortunately, it transpired that the old man’s sense of purpose was being directed towards reclaiming a stiff drink.
The drinks trolley was, I knew, kept in the room opposite so it was clear the Colonel must have managed to venture at least once across the forbidding threshold of his son’s study since his arrival. Now he was clutching a glass and staring out of a deeply elegant sash window between tall overcrowded bookcases with his bearing correct to the point of arrogance. His suit was an expensive navy wool and, it felt mad to think it, but as he stood there in the blazingly slanting light of a lowering sun between panels of darkened wood, he looked like nothing so much as a man in his funeral garb who was gazing defiantly out through prison bars onto a l
andscape that might well have been lit by the fires of hell.
As I say, it was mad to think it. It was one of those moments when imagination really did dramatise and find death lurking in impossible corners. But still I couldn’t help interfering here. Heart beating and acting on an impulse – probably a very patronising, misguided impulse belonging to a fool stepping well out of her permitted social sphere – I reached for the bottle on his desk. It was a very expensive brandy that had become almost impossible to source since rationing. I carried it with me to the doorway. That stern face turned to watch me go.
‘I’m about to set a pie to warm for your dinner, Colonel. Perhaps you would come and help me decipher the controls on your oven?’
For a moment I wondered if the Colonel were about to explode into very much the wrong kind of emotion. His grey eyes had not been made soft by drink. Then I believe it was politeness that ruled – ordinary, everyday politeness – and I heard the shuffle of his tread as he followed my footsteps through the stretch of dark passages and the dining room into the blessedly warm and well-lit kitchen.
He didn’t, needless to say, help me to set the pie in the oven. I doubted that he had ever even examined the contraption and he seemed to forget that plan just as soon as he saw me set the bottle down on the tabletop. So I watched him select a tired old Windsor chair with a tall wooden bow for the back and then navigated my own way about his kitchen. This place was a combination of old and new. The oven had dials for temperature control in complete contrast to the usual old cooking range that would have a cramped cast-iron box for the fuel, but the countertop was stone and it was hollowed in places, speaking of age and memories and the years of kitchen staff who had laboured here.
It struck me that this would have been Mrs Cooke’s domain. Perhaps it had been a mistake to bring him in here after all. He certainly looked out of place. Mealtimes were clearly judged a formal affair to be undertaken in the dining room. He was sitting there in his humble chair, peering about as if he’d abruptly found himself in a strange and hostile territory. It made me chatter idiotically while I found the last crust of the loaf on a board and buttered it before sliding it on a plate to the Colonel’s side. I saw him blink at it for a moment or two before mustering the energy to lift his hand. Unfortunately, the hand got distracted on the way and found an easier weight to lift in the form of his half-emptied glass.