“Are you reminding me in your subtle way that it’s time to eat those steaks?”
“Not consciously I wasn’t.”
“Well, if we don’t eat them now, they’re not going to be eatable. Come along.”
It was a perfect meal, eaten under perfect circumstances. He even opened a bottle of wine, rough and red, the exact complement to steaks and french bread, and we finished with cheese and biscuits and a bowl of fresh fruit, topped with a cluster of white grapes. I found that I was ravenous and ate enormously, wiping my plate clean with a thick white crust, and going on to peel an orange so juicy that it dripped from the ends of my fingers. When he had completely finished, David went inside to make coffee.
“Shall we have it outside?” he asked through the open door.
“Yes, let’s, down by the river.” I went in to join him, to run my sticky hands under a tap.
He said, “You’ll find a rug in the chest in the hall. You take it down and settle yourself and I’ll bring the coffee.”
“What about the dishes?”
“Leave them … it’s too good a day to waste slaving over a hot sink.”
It was comfortably like the sort of remark my father would make. I went and found the rug, and took it back outside, and went down to the sloping lawn and spread the rug on the sunlit grass, only a few yards from the edge of the river. After the long dry summer, the Caple was running low, and there was a bank of pebbles, like a miniature beach, between the grass and the deep brown water.
The apple tree was loaded with fruit, windfalls lay at its feet. I went to shake it, and a few more tumbled to the grass, making soft plopping noises. Beneath the tree it was shady and cool and smelt pleasantly musty, like old lofts. I leaned against its trunk, and watched the sunlit river through a lace-work of branches. It was very peaceful.
Soothed by this, comforted by good food and easy company, I felt my spirits rise, and told myself briskly that this was a suitable moment to start being sensible about all my half-acknowledged fears. What was the point of letting them churn around at the back of my mind, nagging like a bad tooth, and giving me a perpetual stomach ache?
I would be realistic about Sinclair. There was no reason to suppose that he wouldn’t accept responsibility for the baby that Tessa Faraday was going to have. When he returned to Elvie on Monday, he would probably tell us that he was going to be married, and Grandmother would be delighted (hadn’t she thought the girl was charming?) and I would be delighted too, and need never say a word about the telephone call I had overheard.
And as for Gibson, he was getting old, there was no denying it, and perhaps it would be better for all concerned if he were to be retired. But if he did have to go, then Grandmother and Sinclair between them could surely find him a little cottage, perhaps with a garden, where he could grow vegetables, and have a few hens, and so keep himself happy and occupied.
And as for myself … This was not so easy to shrug off. I wished I knew why, yesterday, he had brought up the question of our getting married. Perhaps it had been simply an amusing idea to pass the half-hour after our picnic lunch. As such, I would have been prepared to accept it, but his kiss had been neither cousinly, nor light-hearted … just to remember it made me uncomfortable, and it was because of this that I felt so utterly confused. Perhaps he had done it deliberately, to upset me. He had always been a wicked tease. Perhaps he simply wanted to gauge my reactions …
“Jane.”
“Um?” I turned and saw David Stewart watching me from the sunlight beyond the broken shadow of the tree. Behind him, I saw the coffee tray, set down by the rug, and I realized that he had spoken my name before, but that I had not heard. He dipped his head under the low branches and came to stand in front of me, putting up a hand to prop himself against the tree.
He said, “Is anything wrong?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“You look a little worried. You also look very pale.”
“I’m always pale.”
“And always worried?”
“I didn’t say I was worried.”
“Did … anything happen yesterday?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that I noticed you weren’t very anxious to talk about it.”
“Nothing happened…” I wished I could walk off and leave him, but his arm was over my shoulder, and I couldn’t get away without deliberately ducking beneath it. He turned his head to watch me from the corner of his eye, and beneath this familiar, disconcerting regard, I felt my face and neck grow warm.
“You once told me,” he said pleasantly, “that when you lie, you blush. Something is wrong.…”
“No, it isn’t. And anyway, it’s nothing…”
“If you wanted to tell me, you would, wouldn’t you? Perhaps I could help.”
I thought of the girl in London, and Gibson … and myself, and all my fears came flooding up again. “Nobody can help,” I told him. “Nobody can do anything.”
He left it at that. We went back into the sunlight, and I found that I was cold, my skin crawled with goose-flesh. I sat on the warm rug and drank coffee, and David gave me a cigarette to keep the midges away. After a little, I lay down, my head on a cushion, my body spread to the sun. I was tired and the wine had made me drowsy. I closed my eyes, and the river noises took over, and presently I was asleep.
I awoke about an hour later. David lay a yard or so from me, propped on one elbow and reading a paper. I stretched and yawned, and he looked up, and I said, “This is the second time this has happened.”
“What has happened?”
“I’ve woken, and found you there.”
“I was going to wake you in a moment anyway. Wake you up and take you home.”
“What time is it?”
“Half past three.”
I eyed him drowsily. “Will you come back for tea at Elvie? Grandmother would love to see you.”
“I would, but I have to go and see an old boy who lives out in the back of beyond. Every now and then he starts fretting about his will, and I have to go and reassure him.”
“It’s rather like Scottish weather, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“One week you’re in New York, doing goodness-knows-what. The next you’re trailing up some remote glen to set an old man’s mind at rest. Do you like being a country lawyer?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.”
“You fit in so well. I mean … as though you’d been here all your life. And your house and everything … and the garden. It all goes together as though someone had matched you up.”
“You match too,” said David.
I longed for him to enlarge on this, and for a moment thought he was going to, but he seemed to change his mind, and instead got up, collected the coffee things and his paper and carried them back up to the house. When he returned I was still lying there, watching the river, and he stood over me, put his hands under my shoulders and pulled me to my feet. I turned and found myself in the circle of his arms, and I said, “I’ve done this before, too.”
“Only then,” said David, “your face was all swollen and blotched with crying, and today…”
“What about today…”
He laughed then. “Today you’ve collected about six dozen more freckles. And a lot of old apple leaves and grass in your hair.”
He drove me home. The hood of his car was down, and my hair blew all over my face, and David found an old silk scarf in the cupboard on the dashboard and gave it to me, and I tied it over my head.
When we came to the roadworks, the lights were red, so we waited, the engine of the car idling, and watched the approaching traffic filing towards us down the single-line track.
“I can’t help feeling,” said David, “that instead of straightening out this bit of road, it would have been better to demolish the bridge and build a new one … or even to do something about that hellish corner on the other side.”
“But the bridge is
so pretty…”
“It’s dangerous, Jane.”
“But everyone knows about it, and takes it about one mile an hour.”
“Not everyone knows about it,” he corrected me drily. “In summer every other driver is a visitor.”
The lights turned green and we moved forward, past a huge sign saying RAMP. A funny thought occurred to me. “David, you’ve broken the law.”
“Why?”
“The notice said Ramp. And you didn’t.”
There was a long silence, and I thought, Oh, God, which is what I think when I’ve said something funny and the other person doesn’t think it is.
“I don’t know how to,” he said at last.
“You mean you’ve never been taught?”
“My mother was a poor widow. She couldn’t afford lessons.”
“But everyone ought to be able to ramp, it’s one of the social graces.”
“Well,” said David, easing his car over the humpbacked bridge, “for your sake, I’ll make a point of learning,” and with that he put down his foot, and with the wind roaring about my ears, he drove me back to Elvie.
Later, I showed my grandmother my single purchase, the navy blue sweater I had bought in the gunsmith’s.
“I think,” she said, “you were very clever to find anything at all in Caple Bridge. And it certainly looks very warm,” she added kindly, eyeing the shapeless garment. “What will you wear it with?”
“Pants … anything. I really wanted a skirt, but I couldn’t find anything.”
“What sort of a skirt?”
“Something warm … perhaps next time you go to Inverness…”
“What about a kilt?” said my grandmother.
I had not thought of this. It seemed a splendid idea. Kilts are the cosiest things in the world, and the colours are always mouth-melting. “Where could I buy a kilt?”
“Oh, my dear, you don’t need to buy one, the house is full of them. Sinclair’s worn kilts since he could walk and not one has ever been thrown away.”
I had forgotten the happy fact that a kilt, unlike a bicycle, is sexless. “But that’s a marvellous idea! Why didn’t we think of it before? I’ll go and look right away. Where are they? In the attic?”
“Not at all. They’re in Sinclair’s room, in the cupboard on top of his wardrobe. I packed them all away in moth balls, but if you do want one, we can hang it out to air, and get rid of the smell, and it’ll be as good as new.”
Not wanting to waste a moment, I went in search of a kilt. Sinclair’s room, for the moment vacant of its owner, had been cleaned and swept, and was immaculately tidy. I remembered this inherent neatness had always been strong in his character. As a boy he could not stand disorder, and never had to have his clothes folded, or his toys put away.
I took up a chair and went across to his cupboard. This had been built in to the alcove at the side of the fireplace, and the space above the top of the wardrobe was put to use as extra cupboard space for suitcases and out-of-season clothes. I stood on the chair and opened the doors, and saw a neat stack of books, some motoring magazines, a squash racket, a pair of swimming flippers. There was a strong smell of camphor coming from a huge dress box, all laced up with string, and I reached up to lift this down. It was heavy and awkward, and as I struggled with it, my elbow caught the pile of books, and dislodged them. Encumbered as I was, there was nothing I could do to stop them falling, and simply stood on the chair and listened to them crashing, in terrible disorder, to the floor.
I swore, took a firmer grip of my burden, lifted it down, laid it on the bed, and stooped to retrieve the books. They were mostly text books, a Thesaurus, Le Petite Larousse, a life of Michaelangelo, and, at the bottom …
It was thick and heavy, bound in scarlet leather, the cover emblazoned with a private coat-of-arms, the title tooled in gold letters on the crimson spine, A History of the Earth and Animated Nature, Volumes I and II.
I knew that book. I was six years old again, and my father had brought it back to Elvie after one of his spasmodic forays into Mr. McFee’s second-hand book shop in Caple Bridge. Mr. McFee had died a long time ago, and the shop was now a tobacconist’s, but in those days my father had spent many happy hours discoursing with Mr. McFee, a cheerful eccentric with no tiresome prejudices about dirt or dust, and browsing through endless shelves of musty volumes.
He had found Goldsmith’s Animated Nature by chance, and brought it home in triumph, for not only was it a rare volume, but it had been privately bound by some previous noble owner, and was, in itself, a thing of beauty. Delighted with it, wanting to share his pleasure, the first thing my father did was to bring it up to the nursery to show to Sinclair and myself. My reaction was probably disappointing. I stroked the pretty leather, looked at one or two pictures of Asian elephants, and then returned to my jigsaw puzzle.
But with Sinclair it was different. Sinclair loved everything about it, the old printing, the thick pages, the aquatints, the detail of the tiny drawings. He loved the smell, and the marbled endpapers, and the very weight of the big old book.
The addition of such a prize to my father’s collection seemed to merit some sort of ceremony. Accordingly, he went off to fetch one of his own Ex Libris labels, a woodcut, with his initial wound about with much decorative plant life, and solemnly affixed it to the marbled endpaper of Goldsmith’s Animated Nature. Sinclair and I watched this operation in total silence, and when it was done I heaved a sigh of satisfaction, because it had been accomplished so neatly, and because it proved, beyond any shadow of doubt, that the book now belonged to my father.
It was then taken downstairs and left on a table in the drawing-room, along with some magazines and daily newspapers, where it could be admired, and handled, and perused in passing. It was not spoken of again until two or three days later when my father realized that it had disappeared.
No one was particularly concerned, Goldsmith’s Animated Nature had simply been moved. Someone had borrowed it, perhaps, forgotten to put it back. But no one had. My father began to ask questions, and drew nothing but blanks. My grandmother searched diligently, but the book did not come to light.
Sinclair and I were then involved. Had we seen the book? But of course we hadn’t, and said so, and our innocence was never questioned. My mother started to say: “Perhaps a burglar…” but my grandmother pooh-poohed this. What burglar would turn a blind eye to the Georgian silver and make off with only an old book? She insisted that Goldsmith’s Animated Nature was simply mislaid. It would turn up. Like any nine-day wonder the mysterious affair died a natural death, but the book was never found.
Until now. In Sinclair’s cupboard, neatly filed away with some other possessions for which he did not have a regular use. And it was as beautiful as ever, the red leather smooth and soft to touch, the lettering bright and gold. Standing with it, heavy as lead in my hands, I remembered Father’s Ex Libris, and I lifted the front cover of the book, and saw that the marble endpaper and the Ex Libris had been removed altogether, delicately and finely, close to the spine, probably with a razor blade. And on the white fly-leaf which lay below was written in Sinclair’s firm, black, twelve-year-old writing:
Sinclair Bailey,
Elvie.
THIS IS HIS BOOK
9
The beautiful, fine weather went on. On the Monday afternoon, my grandmother, armed with a spade and a pair of gardening gloves, went out to plant bulbs. I offered to help her, but she declined. If I was there, we would only talk, she said, and nothing would get done. She would be quicker on her own. Thus rejected, I whistled up the dogs and set off for a walk. I don’t much like gardening anyway.
I went for miles and was out for two hours or more. By the time I returned, the brightness of the day was beginning to fade, and it was turning cold. A few clouds had appeared over the tops of the mountains, blown from the north, and a drift of mist lay over the loch. From the walled garden, where Will was stoking a bonfire, plumed a long feather of blue smoke,
and the air was filled with the smell of burning rubbish. With my hands deep in my pockets, and my head full of thoughts of tea by the fire, I crossed the causeway and came up the road beneath the copper beeches. One of the dogs began to bark, and I looked up, and saw, parked in front of the house, the dark yellow Lotus Elan.
Sinclair was back. I looked at my watch. Five o’clock. He was early. I went on, across the grass, ankle-deep in fallen leaves, on to the gravel. As I passed the car, I trailed my hand across one glossy bumper, as if to reassure myself that it was really there. I went into the warm, peat-smelling hall, waited for the dogs, and then shut the door behind me.
I heard the murmur of voices from the drawing-room. The dogs went to drink from their bowl and then collapsed in front of the hall fire. I unbuckled the belt of my raincoat, and pulled it off, toed off my muddied shoes, smoothed my hair down with my hands. I crossed the hall and opened the door. I said, “Hello, Sinclair.”
They had been sitting on either side of the fire, with a low tea table between them. But now Sinclair got up and came across the room to greet me.
“Janey … where have you been?” He kissed me.
“For a walk.”
“It’s nearly dark, we thought you’d got lost.”
I looked up at him. I had thought that he would be noticeably different. Quieter; tired, perhaps, from his long drive. More thoughtful, weighed down with new responsibilities. But it was obvious that I had thought wrong. If anything, he looked gayer, younger and more lighthearted than ever. There was a glitter to him that evening—a shine of excitement, like a child on Christmas Eve.
He took my hands. “And you’re as cold as ice. Come on over by the fire and get warm. I’ve kindly left you one piece of toast, but I’m sure if you want some more Mrs Lumley will make it.”
“No, that’s fine.” I pulled up a low leather stool and sat between them, and my grandmother poured my tea. “Where did you go?” she asked, and I told her. “Have the dogs had a drink? Were they wet and muddy? Did you dry them?” I assured her that they had, they weren’t, and I hadn’t needed to. “We didn’t go anywhere wet, and I picked up all the heather off their coats before we got home.” She handed me the cup and I folded my cold hands round it, and looked at Sinclair.
The End of Summer Page 11