Dear Hugo

by Molly Clavering

  Joan Whitburn’s eyebrows rose. “What? Did you never take a lump of sugar from the bowl when you were very young?” she asked mockingly. “I doubt very much if anyone else here would care to have their past examined closely. We all have something hidden, I expect.” Her glance swept over our faces. “Elizabeth—Miss Monteith—even Catherine! I don’t say anything about the men, for I know they must have!”

  We were laughing, though unwillingly, for her light mocking voice was hard to resist, and her eyes seemed to include us all in a conspiracy against Miss Bonaly, when I suddenly found that lady’s gaze fixed on me so keenly that the colour rose to my cheeks. I had something in my past which I did not want known, my engagement to Ivo: and though my reasons for hiding it were just that I did not want it pawed over and spoiled by Miss Bonaly herself and others of her kind, I had kept it secret, and intended to continue to do so. If the old horror likes to believe that I have a guilty secret, and a Past with a capital P, nothing will stop her. But I wish that silly and unnecessary blush had not appeared while she was staring at me!

  Suddenly Catherine said—I noticed that her face was pinker than usual, too—“I don’t think this is very funny, Joan. Let’s play at something else.”

  “Funny? It’s not only boring but ill-bred,” Lawrence Whitburn muttered, but his sister heard.

  “Oh, dear me! Am I in disgrace?” she said, her eyebrows even higher than before.

  “You allow your sense of humour to run away with you, Joan,” suddenly remarked Colonel Greenhill. “Shouldn’t do it. Not very kind.”

  He was one of those little dapper fair men with a spare figure and that gentle almost diffident manner which so many regular soldiers have, causing one to wonder what they will be like in action—where they usually display flawless coinage—and I expected Miss Whitburn to scarify him with a single sentence. But she did not. She looked at him quickly, then looked away again.

  “I’m afraid I have been boring you all,” she said with a brilliant smile, “Unforgiveable in a hostess! Let us go into the drawing-room, shall we? Anyone who hasn’t finished their coffee can bring it with them.”

  She stood up and led the way, and we followed in a bunch to the long drawing-room with its three windows in a row facing down the valley. Lightning was playing over the dark sky in the distance, and as everyone stood watching it for a moment (everyone except me: I’ve told you how I feel about thunder-storms), I saw Joan Whitburn put her hand on Colonel Greenhill’s sleeve, and heard her murmur, “I’m sorry, Toby.”

  I was amazed. I should have expected her to be furious with him; and even more astonishing was the composure with which he received the apology. “That’s all right, Joan. But you must keep those claws of yours in, my dear,” he said, giving the white fingers on his arm a light tap. “Now what about dealing with your old lady’s missions and letting her get home before the rain comes on?”

  Joan Whitburn turned away quite meekly. “Oh, Miss Bonaly,” she said. “If you will tell me what I usually give to this, I will let you have it now.”

  By the time she had found her purse and counted five shillings into Miss Bonaly’s skinny hand, the first large drops of rain were falling, splashing down through the heavy leaves of the motionless trees.

  “You can’t possibly bicycle to Ravenskirk in this. One of us will run you home,” said Lawrence Whitburn. “Alan—?”

  I thought that Miss Bonaly would have been quite pleased to spend the rest of the evening at Chapelwood, and that young Alan was not at all anxious to drive her, but he said at once that he would go and get the car.

  When she had left and the curtains in the drawing-room had been drawn across the darkening vista, where the straight and endless shafts of the rain were constantly and brilliantly shown up by lightning, Lawrence Whitburn turned on his sister and said: “What the devil were you playing at in the dining-room just now?”

  Joan might take Colonel Greenhill’s rebuke with meekness, but not her brother’s.

  “My dear Lawrence,” she said, the drawl in her voice rather exaggerated. “Don’t, I beg of you, follow my bad example and be a bore too! Wouldn’t some of you like to make up a table of bridge? Or shall we play Samba?”

  The three men and Elizabeth decided on bridge, and Catherine said she would like to look on in the hope that she might learn something about the science of bidding, which left me, rather to my dismay, tête-à-tête with Miss Whitburn.

  But her mocking mood seemed to have gone. She sat quietly working at a piece of embroidery and talking about the garden at Chapelwood.

  The thunder was still rolling like drums, but coming no nearer, and I felt less strung-up in consequence.

  “It’s horrid to feel like that—too much electricity in your system, I expect,” said Miss Whitburn suddenly. “And Miss Bonaly appearing like all Macbeth’s three witches rolled into one didn’t help.”

  I agreed.

  “Do you suppose we shall be like that when we come to her age, whatever it is?” she asked thoughtfully.

  “I don’t see why we should. I imagine that Miss Bonaly has always been the same, and is only growing more so.”

  “Oh, well—she is a horror, poor old thing! Tell me, do you know Mrs. Kilmartin well? She lives quite near you, doesn’t she?”

  “Next door,” I said. “I have begun to know her—since her husband died. Before that all her time was occupied in looking after him.”

  “Lawrence knew them both, early in the War,” murmured Miss Whitburn, looking critically at the petal she was working on. “I was in India then, so I never met any of those people. Shall I ask her here? Would she come, do you think? Or does it distress her to be reminded of those days?”

  “I don’t think it does,” I said, thinking of Mrs. Kilmartin’s animation when talking to Lawrence. “And I am sure it is good for her to go about and meet people.”

  “Well, I will. Lawrence will be pleased.” She gave me a quick glance of impish intelligence. “I do like to please him sometimes. Not too often, it wouldn’t be good for him, but now and then.”

  There really did not seem to be anything to say in answer to this, so I said nothing, and presently the car could be heard returning, and Alan came in demanding Samba.

  Catherine was dragged away from her seat between her father and Lawrence, and the evening ended with such a noisy game that the bridge-players complained of not being able to concentrate.

  I enjoyed it, and was quite sorry when the time came to go home. Lawrence drove me back, and insisted on waiting until I had collected Pam from Wallace Cottage, where he had been spending the hours of my absence with Mrs. Kilmartin.

  “You must come again soon to Chapelwood,” he said at my door. “Or what about joining us one day when the grouse-shooting begins? We usually walk them up, but we have a small drive early in the season and it might amuse you.”

  I said I should like it very much if Atty could be included in the party, to which he agreed at once.

  After he had gone, I wondered if perhaps he thought it would be safer to have me in the butts than wandering about the moors getting in the way of the guns! But that is unkind of me, Hugo, because really Lawrence Whitburn is a pleasant and attractive person, especially when you get to know him a little.

  CHAPTER XV

  AUGUST, 1952

  Here we are at the end of August already, half-way through the holidays. I am guiltily conscious of not having written to you for at least six weeks, but when Atty is at home there seems to be no time for anything except feeding and entertaining him and his young friends. It is not surprising that exhausted parents (never to mention honorary Aunts) begin at this stage to long for the day when their loved ones go back to school! And of course as soon as they have gone, the house is so empty and silent and unnaturally tidy as to be dismally depressing.

  I took note of what you said in your last letter about allowing Atty to pay visits to his school friends during the holidays, and indeed, Hugo, I would never dream o
f discouraging him if he wanted to go. But you know how unsettled his life has been. He still wants to come home and stay at home at the end of each term. Though I feel as if he had been part of my life for a long time, and I cannot picture Piper’s Cottage without him, it is still only a year since Rex made the arrangement with me to look after Atty. I feel very strongly that any suggestion that he should go visiting must come from Atty and not from me. I hope you will think that I am right, but if you don’t, then, in Aunt Nettie’s phrase, “you must just do the other thing.” Dear me, how very rude that looks, written down! Please excuse—but I know you enjoy what you call “Aunt-Nettie-isms”.

  In the meantime Atty is having his friend Playfair to stay, which will probably lead to a return invitation. Then it will be up to Atty to accept it. He has gone off to the Junction to meet his guest, and I am snatching what will be the last chance for a week to write to you, or at least to start my letter.

  If you are remembering the size of Piper’s Cottage and wondering where I am going to stow this extra body, the answer is that I keep a spare bed in the box-room, which has been set up in Atty’s room, and the two young gentlemen can wallow there together. Playfair, I need hardly say, is known to his intimates as “Foul play,” “Dirty work” or more tersely, “Foul.” What a very elementary sense of humour the young have!

  *

  Lawrence Whitburn did not forget that he had invited us to his grouse-drive, and Atty and I spent a day of brilliant sunshine among the heather on the hill behind Chapelwood. I should not like anyone to know it except you, Hugo, but I would have been happier wandering as I liked over that wide empty moorland, with time to admire the lovely variations of colour shown by the flowering heather, instead of walking at the pace dictated by the line of guns all morning, and standing or sitting in Lawrence’s butt all afternoon.

  Miss Whitburn came up with the lunch, looking elegant in her quiet tweeds, and perched on a shooting stick beside Colonel Greenhill in his butt during the afternoon drives. Elizabeth Drysdale sent a message to say that she thought three of her family would be quite enough, and she proposed to spend a peaceful day alone in the garden; but Catherine, who was on holiday, was there, and walked beside Lawrence Whitburn through the hot morning. She looked pale and a little tired, and after lunch refused to share young Alan Whitburn’s butt, saying that she would keep her father company.

  Atty and Anthony Drysdale tramped manfully among the thick heather with the rest of us, and joined the beaters in the afternoon, and such was the effect of hard exercise, sunshine and hill air, that Atty fell asleep at the supper-table half-way through his pudding when we got home.

  During the morning we came to the top of a long ridge and looked over into a little valley with the usual hill-stream winding in silvery links through it. Half-way down its length, sheltered by a few scattered oaks and ashes, stood a house, quite a plain white house with a steeply-pitched roof of old slate, its walls dappled with shadows from the tall trees round it. One part of it, higher than the rest, topped by crow-stepped gables, had obviously been a peel-tower.

  Something about the way it stood above the burn, with a garden full of flowers about its old walls, and green lawns descending in shallow terraces to the water, made me fall in love with the house as soon as I set eyes on it.

  “What a delectable place!” I said to Lewis Drysdale, who was beside me at the time. “I suppose it is miles from everywhere, but I should love to live there!”

  “You’ve lost your sense of direction, Sara,” said Lewis with a laugh. “That is Corseburnhead, and the road you see following the waterside comes out into Ravenskirk opposite the hotel. It’s only about a couple of miles from the village, no further than Carmichael. Of course you couldn’t live there without a car unless you were prepared to tramp four miles every time you wanted to go shopping, but it has electricity—you can just see one of the grid pylons if you look, on the hillside beyond the house. Elizabeth and I looked at it when we first came here, but it isn’t big enough for all of us, and they only wanted to let it furnished then. I believe the owner died not long ago. It will be for sale now, I daresay—”

  He went on talking about the house, and the probability of being snowed-up there in winter while we moved away along the ridge, but I only half-heard him. I wanted desperately to leave him and run down into that beautiful lonely valley, and see the house close at hand. I wanted to sit in the sunny garden, and most of all I wanted to walk through the delectable house itself.

  It is quite absurd, Hugo, how that house has taken hold of my imagination. I dreamt about it that night, and woke up bitterly disappointed because I was no longer there. I am fond of my dear little Piper’s Cottage, and Corseburnhead would be too big for me and too far from the village to live in alone, but still—I almost wish I had never seen it. Really, for a quiet sensible spinster to allow her feelings to run away with her like this over a house which is in every respect unsuitable for her is most ridiculous!

  *

  Perhaps it is just as well that Atty’s friend Playfair is here, for with two boys—or three when Anthony comes to join them, which he frequently does—to feed, I have no time to dream about houses. All my waking hours are devoted to producing enormous meals and trying to keep Piper’s Cottage from looking too much of a pig-sty. At night I fall into bed and sleep without stirring until, all too soon, it is time to get up again.

  It is the appalling amount of discussion and argument over every single thing that they want to do which I find so tiring. Never in my life did I know people to talk so much as these boys. “Making arrangements”, they call it, but as they never come to any agreement, but invariably rush from the house arguing hotly and with their plans still unsettled, I can’t help thinking that all this talk is simply for the pleasure of hearing their beautiful voices.

  Charles Playfair—I really do not think it is suitable for me to call him “Foul” or “Dirty”—is a particularly clean looking boy with a wide grin that almost splits his cherubic snub-nosed freckled face in half, and the unfortunate faculty for making his clothes appear as though he slept in them. He and Atty are bursting with goodwill to help me, and make their beds every morning. As soon as they have dashed away on one of their mysterious expeditions, I go up to their room and remake the beds, which after their efforts have the appearance of out-sized mouse’s nests. And why, do you suppose, do they roll up their dressing-gowns and put them under the pillow?

  They caught me at this one morning, when they returned unexpectedly half an hour after they had gone out. Atty was rather reproachful.

  “Aunt Sara, we made our beds!”

  I felt guilty, but got out of it by saying that as it was such a fine day I thought their beds should be aired—and much need!

  Mercifully, Aunt Nettie views the mess they make with an indulgent eye, and does not seem to mind the extra work it entails.

  “Just laddies,” she says with her grim smile as she sweeps up the horrid little oddments with which their carpet is strewn every day—spent matches, scraps of toffee paper, ends of string, odd buttons, and quantities of fluff. All this, as you may recall from your own youth, comes out of their pockets. The quantity of matches makes me suspect that they are experimenting with cigarettes. I keep on hoping that they will make the little brutes sick, but boys must have stronger stomachs than they used to. Of course they don’t have a pull at Daddy’s pipe, they buy cigarettes—which only goes to prove that they not only have tin-lined interiors but far too much pocket-money! In my day we had to make do with home-made substitutes. I remember so well taking puff about with Rex at a nauseous weed of his manufacture: stout brown paper stuffed with dried leaves and hay; and how proud I was because he was sick and I wasn’t.

  It seemed a clumsy method to tax them directly with smoking, though I knew they would tell me the truth, so I tried a more subtle approach. “If I am going to play tennis and climb hills with you I shall have to cut down on my cigarettes,” I said one evening when we were
having a game of Rummy before bed. “It’s so bad for the wind, and I hate to find myself puffing and blowing like a grampus.”

  They looked at one another with a certain uneasiness, I was glad to see.

  Charles said: “But you play a very good game of tennis, Miss Monteith, and you climb hills awfully well for a lady.”

  “I would be better at both if I didn’t smoke at all,” said I. “Look at Mrs. Drysdale, ten years older than me if not more, and as active as her daughter.”

  “Mrs. Drysdale doesn’t smoke,” murmured Atty. They looked at one another again, and I changed the subject, hoping that it would sink in. Certainly there are fewer matches to be seen in the contents of the vacuum-cleaner since then. . . . I wonder if Elizabeth was right when she said I was wily, Hugo?

  *

  Yesterday the Drysdales took Atty and Charles with their own family to Edinburgh for the day, so I decided to walk to Ladymount and see Mrs. Keith. I went the long way through the village, to post some letters, and had turned off at the little road just opposite the hotel, when I realised that this was the way to my lovely house. There was the burn twisting away towards the river just after I had crossed it by a hump-backed single-arch stone bridge. Ladymount, on its gently rising ground, was hidden from sight by encircling woods, which in their turn were surrounded by a high wall, now showing signs of needing repair; and the little road, passing the entrance, curled round the wall and disappeared towards Corseburnhead.

  As I walked up the long avenue I made up my mind to ask Mrs. Keith about Corseburnhead, its past history, its owners, and its future. She would be sure to know it all.

  The elderly parlour-maid received me with a sort of reproachful pleasure. “It’s a long time since you’ve been to see madam, Miss Monteith,” she said as she led me across the hall. “Oh, she’s wonderful—as long as you can keep her from forgetting she’s eighty-three past. But that’s more than we can manage.”

  She opened the drawing-room door. “Here’s Miss Monteith, madam,” she announced.