For Rosamund
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
I
‘These damned local trains are always late,’ said the railway official as he got in.
He was speaking to his companion but the jerk of the carriage as they moved off enabled Norah to nod in agreement. Not that she welcomed the intrusion. All the way from Brecon in this leisurely train she had been lucky enough to have the compartment to herself: the local people divided at her door like water about a rock – she was a stranger and it was enough – but these men had no such prejudices.
They were both in dark suits, one a good deal the elder and senior in position, so it was only through their conversation that she knew their business. The older one made no attempt to hide it and scarcely ever stopped talking, in a soft Welsh voice, except briefly to pull up the window when the train gathered speed. The younger, a very dark man, thin with sharp bright eyes, glanced at her legs, then up to her face, assessing her, ready to smile if she did.
She did not, being sleepy and hot and restless after a tedious journey. London to Bristol and Bristol to Brecon was reasonable enough; then across country in this little local train with three carriages and an engine shaped like a bathroom cistern. They had already stopped a dozen times and taken on and discharged a large number of black-clad passengers. She had thought at first there was a funeral; but unrelieved black was apparently the universal best wear of the country people around here, as Welsh was the universal language. She had hardly heard a word of English until the two men came.
The afternoon sun was streaming in on her, and it was too late to move now. At times the train would take a sharp curve and in the shade she would begin to wake up; but always it twisted back again to bring the sun full in on her face, and back would come drowsiness weighing on her eyelids to the rhythmic clanking of the wheels.
She almost dozed; and woke to hear the older man saying softly he wanted to kill something. It sounded disturbing at first but what he was saying was that they intended to kill this line as soon as ever they could.
‘It’s no good, Tom. You talk about the viability of the railways. They can never be viable while money is trickling away supporting these useless and totally uneconomic branch lines. This is one we would kill tomorrow if we could get government sanction.’
‘It’s not at all badly patronized,’ Tom said.
‘A few people going to market or visiting relatives. A few school kids in the morning. What’s the use of that, with a whole string of stations to maintain, track to keep up, wages to pay? To make anything at all we’ve got to cut and kill. It’s a surgical necessity.’ There was a quiet rancour in his voice: it amounted to enmity, as if this line – and perhaps other lines like it – had done him a personal and unforgivable injury. They were passing through a wooded valley with steep, rocky sides. Below the line was a placid river with bone-white pebbles and cows standing hoof-deep in the water.
Tom said: ‘People round here would miss it. For many it’s the only means of communication.’
‘They’ll find others. Cars are cheap. Buses can run. You’ve got to chop off the small arteries to make the larger ones healthy. It’s part of modernization. We’ve got to make the government see that.’
To Norah, who had come to learn quite a lot about arteries when her father died earlier in the year, the metaphor seemed inapt, but it was not her business. The train chugged on, and mercifully it changed course so that the sun now fell only on her feet. They stopped at another station, and the station-master, a man with a long red nose, was telling the guard the winner of the two-thirty. A hen was picking at the grass between the lines.
The country now softened into rich pasture land. Perhaps she was nearly there. She had always pictured Althea Syme living among wide lawns and shady trees.
As it happened she had first met Mrs Syme on a train; but not one at all like this; a great green French boat train two years ago when John Faulkner had been first taken ill, in his Paris flat, and Norah had been sent for. Althea Syme had been in the same compartment, also travelling alone. She was instantly sympathetic and her offer of help, though not accepted, was kindly and warmly meant.
They had met a number of times since then; in Paris, in London, and then in Bournemouth, where Norah had gone with her father and where the two women had seen a lot of each other. ‘I took to you the moment we first met,’ Mrs Syme said, ‘because you’re awfully like the daughter of an old friend of mine. But since then a rapport has grown up, don’t you think? I hope it’s not misunderstood. It’s – a little unusual between an older and a younger woman – the generations usually have so little in common – but I hope we shall continue to keep in touch. Any help I can offer you, you’ve only to ask.’
Another station. The engine was breathing like an old man who had to sit up in bed with asthma. The name was Pant-y-Dwr. Appropriate. In many of these stations the station-master’s house was built into the platform and flush with the booking office. From where she sat she could see directly into one room; a table laid for a meal, spotless cloth, big china teapot, blue pattern plates, a white cat asleep on a chair. Was all this to be changed, disrupted, destroyed – by the railway people themselves, if the government would but give permission?
A creaking of couplings and they were off again. What was the appeal of Althea Syme? She was a woman who somehow contrived to be good-looking in spite of her features. Spectacled, with a long, clever upper lip, over-plentiful carelessly combed brown hair looped low on her forehead. Not much sense of dress – she always chose things that made her look bigger. There was something luxuriant about her, a bit tropical: the leaves of the tree had grown over-large. But such a quick mind and so youthful an approach to life that Norah never felt she was with a woman in her mid-fifties.
For Althea was nothing if not enterprising. She lectured all over the place on political economy and hygiene; she wrote gardening features for the Press. She was always travelling abroad. She found time to write to the papers on matters of moment, particularly if they concerned women’s rights, and she had the good fortune to be known to editors, so that most of her letters got in. Where women met, the name Althea Syme meant something.
She had been a widow nine years, owned an estate and property in Montgomery and Cardigan, and had a son of fifteen to whom she claimed she gave the maximum freedom in all things. Norah admired enterprise and originality and a refusal to conform, and in all these things it seemed to her her friend excelled.
A month ago she had received a letter:
30th August, 1951
‘My dear,
I had not heard of your father’s death. Why didn’t you write? Will you take as said the stereotyped expressions of sympathy, which you know I sincerely feel? Your plans no doubt will be vague as yet, but if when things are settled you should like to spend a few weeks with me here, don’t wait for a further invitation, please.’
A week later another letter which, characteristically, had carried on where the first left off.
‘Or better still. Are you working yet? I imagine not, because you told me you’d not be returning to the job you gave up when your father was taken ill. Well, I want a secretary. Indeed, I ne
ed a secretary, as I have just sacked the one I had! It would be of course entirely a business matter, and I would pay the going rates, but how agreeable it would be to mix business with pleasure! A month’s trial (on both sides)? It’s deep in the Welsh mountains. But perhaps you won’t mind that. Do come.’
Another river winking and glinting over the stones. The train at last was going faster, gaining on the down grade.
The older man said: ‘Like it or not, Tom, conurbations are the thing of the future. Centralization of city, town, village, hospital, school. In the mid-twentieth century we can’t afford to straggle all over the countryside in hamlets and cottages with tiny pubs and churches and women’s institutes and the like. As the population explosion goes on the towns will grow and grow, but the isolated districts of Scotland and Wales and Cumberland will shrivel and die. And on the whole, not altogether a bad thing.’
‘Not a bad thing?’
‘Well, these are odd districts. I was born here, you know. You Cardiff people who travel up here twice a year haven’t really a notion. You think Wales is civilized. All right then, so it is. But don’t include these mountain districts. And I’m not talking about before the war, boy. Last year I met a farmer who’d lost some sheep, and he was as sure as took no contradiction that someone’d put the evil eye on him. And he knew who it was, too. He’d been to see an old woman who gave him some things in little linen bags that he was to hang over his door . . . And at the little pub where I shall spend tonight, the wife there had erysipelas for a year and the doctors could not touch it, but she went to see a white witch and in three days it was gone.’
So they were superstitious, Norah thought. Did it matter? Except for this railway there probably hadn’t been much change to mark a thousand years. In the days when Edward the Elder was driving the invading Danes out of the Severn Valley those mountains would still have been there in the distance, mist-capped and rain-swept, or gleaming like bronze helmets in the sun. There would be this same moss-green valley winding among the sombre hills, and single-storeyed cottages not dissimilar from those now sheltering among the trees. What got into a man that, having been born here, he had such a desire to uproot what the landscape had long since absorbed – this out-of-date little train chuffering past unpainted signal boxes and rusty stations? The sacred needs of British Rail? The peremptory demands of grey-faced accountants?
‘And mind you, there are many other things go on in these parts besides the charming of braxy. On more than one occasion when I was a lad . . .’ The train went under a bridge. ‘. . . Some say malicious gossip, of course, but I can tell you, boy, it was nothing of the sort . . .’
A long tunnel; but when they came out of it the sunshine had gone. It was as if they were in a twilight world. The train slowed to a stop, and just for a moment it seemed to her that the two men had climbed out and that her father got in and sat in the seat opposite her. He was wearing strange grey clothes which gave off a peculiar smell, and he looked thin and pale and drawn. Her father hadn’t liked Mrs Syme. He had thought the friendship unhealthy. Perhaps he had even been jealous. Now, sitting opposite his daughter in the carriage, he took her hand in his icy hand and seemed to be speaking a warning, which was drowned by the shrill whistle of the train.
She just managed to choke back the beginnings of an exclamation as the younger railman turned to look at her. The train was slowing. This was a station of more importance; new houses about, a timber yard. The two men were really going now, rising, picking up their briefcases, hands on the carriage door. She rose quickly also.
‘Excuse me. Is this Morb Lane?’
‘Llanidloes,’ said the older man pleasantly. ‘Your station is two stops farther on.’
II
‘Miss Faulkner?’
A big dark man in a chauffeur’s uniform. Althea had said she would be met.
Morb Lane seemed pretty much the end of the line. The empty train was shunting off towards a cluster of points and a few old small locomotives which had apparently been put out to grass. In the distance a clump of fir trees were grouped like the spires of a cathedral.
‘I’m Timson, miss. This is all your baggage?’
A surly face, over-square, obstinate, and cropped hair that bristled about the back of his neck. They made no conversation on the way, which first was on a fair tarmac road, then through two villages leaving clouds of dust behind them, with farm hands leaning on pitchforks. They turned up a road with an AA sign Impracticable for Motorists and soon began to climb. The big car filled the narrow way. Potholes developed, with here and there ridges and outcroppings of rock.
The country here was wild: moorland and hills with this track winding through. An old mine of some sort, and then Timson had to open a gate and had some difficulty in keeping a flock of sheep on the other side while he drove through. She offered to help, but he said politely, thank you, no, he was used to this.
They drove into an even more barren area, with mounds of shale and ruined empty cottages; then a deserted church with stones piled against the gate, and beside it a house that might have been the vicarage, with frameless windows and a gaping roof. Perhaps the railman’s prediction of dehabitation was already in process. The minor arteries did not need to be cut, they were shrivelling away.
The sun was low now, the hills in shadow. They turned into a shaly valley with two ruined engine houses beside the road. A tall battlemented cloud peered down it, pink-tipped. Mountains all round. Then she saw the house.
Not the expected. This house might have been stolen from the Cotswolds, being of good mellow stone but straggling, with different cambered roofs of grey tiles sloping up towards the ornamental brickwork of various grouped chimneys. It was a big house, of only two storeys but with a few attic windows in the roof, and the windows at one end uncurtained. If she had not known it to be only a hundred and twenty years old she could have mistaken it for Elizabethan.
And its north-eastern end was built almost flush against a precipice which rose fifty feet and then sloped away for perhaps three times that height to a great granite rock. The cliff would offer protection from all the cold winds but some danger, one would have thought, from falling stones. Very surprisingly no garden was visible, only this bumpy road which led through gateposts across a field which itself ran up to the foundations of the house like a green tide.
Getting out of the car while the chauffeur took out her two bags, Norah looked back to see the long valley in the premature twilight of its guardian hills. They stood out over it, here swelling gently, there craggy and dark. You could see one old mine building and some ruined cottages. In the background on the right the bulk of a much larger mountain was outlined against the bright sky.
Then she heard the door open, and turned to be greeted by Althea Syme.
III
Inside, the house was hard to evaluate. It seemed not so much a house built to a plan as a collection of oak-panelled living-rooms put together arbitrarily to suit different tastes. The rooms were dark and mostly large, low-beamed but pleasant, with a lived-in look about them; some good Swansea porcelain, plenty of books, but too many family portraits which didn’t seem to have much merit as paintings. Leading the way upstairs Althea explained that the house had originally been built to accommodate two quite separate families, so there was a tendency to duplication.
As you mounted the first flight you came to a wide landing with three doors and two passages leading off, with, at one side, eight stairs leading down to another short passage (‘our bathrooms,’ Mrs Syme explained, ‘grouped together, I’m afraid, and shockingly inconvenient’), and at the other a staircase leading up. These stairs were narrower, thinly carpeted and steeper. At the top was a heavy oak door hinged back on a chain, and beyond a square passage with two doors.
‘I always thought to put you up here if you came,’ Althea said, breathing deeply with the effort. ‘If you don’t like it tell me at once and come down to the next floor. Miss Harris, my previous secretary, was down
there. But if you do decide to stay here you can have your own little flat and do what you like with it. And there is a bathroom of one’s own, which is an advantage. A trifle primitive by London standards but . . .’ floorboards creaked under her weight, ‘this,’ opening the door, ‘is your bedroom.’ She padded across it and opened a door beyond. ‘And this, if you decide to stay up here, can be your sitting-room. It’s a mess and only half furnished at present, but some of the rooms downstairs are so overcrowded you can take your pick of anything except the grand piano. You could even have that if Gregory were not taking lessons – and incidentally making very smart progress.’
‘I’m looking forward to meeting him,’ Norah said.
‘There’s one slight problem up here. As you can see, we don’t have electricity, but there’s coke-fired central heating on the ground floor and in a few of the first-floor bedrooms. If the weather turns cold you might be driven down.’
‘Not now, certainly.’
‘No, not now. And of course the heat does tend to rise.’ They stopped and looked at each other. Althea smiled and said: ‘Well, my dear, how are you?’
She put her arms round the girl, and they kissed.
‘Fine,’ Norah said. ‘Absolutely fine.’
‘I can see that. And as pretty as ever. You’ve lost weight.’
‘A bit.’
‘It suits you . . . But tell me seriously, within yourself. You’re better? I mean after your father’s death?’
‘Yes, fine. But as you know, we were pretty close, so it’s just taking a bit of getting used to.’
‘I know that. I know . . . I think it’ll do you a lot of good here. I know it’ll do me a lot of good to have you.’
Norah laughed. ‘Well, thanks. You’re – very kind. Honestly, I . . .’
‘What?’
‘Well, I’m very glad to be here, Althea. I’ve been looking forward to it. Thanks for your thoughtfulness.’
They looked at each other again, then the older woman sighed and blinked. ‘I’ll leave you before we get emotional. Dinner’s at seven-thirty. I have an elderly cousin staying here at present, so there’ll be just the four of us.’
Woman in the Mirror Page 1