The Hardie Inheritance

by Anne Melville

  ‘It must be horrid, having to leave your home.’ She sat down to face him across the table, well aware that he did not want to chat, but feeling that it would do him good. Her comment, though, went too directly to the heart of his distress, and for some time he was not able to answer.

  ‘You’ll be able to go back when the war is over,’ she added in an attempt at consolation.

  ‘Shall I want to go back? When you see twenty-five years’ work spoiled in a week, you think that only a fool would make the same mistake twice, stake his happiness on something so quickly spoiled.’ He looked up at her, trying to explain. ‘You know that people are going to die. Your wife or yourself, one of you’s got to face bereavement one day. Doesn’t make it any easier when it happens, of course, but it’s, well, in the natural order of things. But land: you think that land will last for ever. For your own lifetime, anyway.’

  He sighed.

  ‘You don’t make any other plans, that’s the trouble. Just what’s going to happen on the land next season. That seems enough. So when you haven’t got the land any more, you haven’t got anything. But no, I shan’t go back. Even if it becomes possible, it will be for the boys to start all over again. So I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself. Don’t know at all. I never really liked France. My roots are here. But –’

  He sat with his head bowed as though on the verge of tears. Trish stared at him with an intentness of which he was unaware.

  ‘Did Jean-Paul tell you that Philip had died?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Yes. That was the last letter I got. Oh, I should have told Grace how sorry I was while I was up at the house.’

  Trish drew in a breath to speak but then let it out again, wondering whether she would do better to wait. Patience was not one of her virtues, though. She put her elbows on the table and leaned earnestly forward.

  ‘It was something I wanted to do, after he died. To keep the vineyard going as a kind of memorial to Philip. You know about the vineyard, don’t you?’

  ‘It was my idea. I sent the original vines.’

  ‘Of course! Well, I asked Jean-Paul if we could keep it going, and he said not without him. But I got him to show me how to do the pruning before he went. The thing is, though, I didn’t realize how much time it would take just tying the vines as they grow. And Grace expects me to spend hours in the vegetable garden. It’s too much, really, just like Jean-Paul said it would be. If you’re going to stay here, Mr Frith –’

  ‘Oh, call me Andy,’ he said. He tilted his head as he looked at her. ‘Well, go on.’

  ‘I was thinking of what you said about having a feeling for land, and wondering whether you needed to own it for that. Because you must know the Greystones land just as well as what you had in France.’

  ‘Better,’ he said. ‘When you’re a boy, you cover your territory in a different way. Get to know every twig and puddle. That’s what I meant about my roots.’

  ‘It’s not my business, really,’ said Trish. ‘It’s for Grace to say. But we need someone like you here. Everyone keeps telling us all that we should grow as much of our own food as we can, and at Greystones we do it more than most people, but it’s terribly hard work now that Philip’s dead and Jean-Paul has gone. And Grace really wants to spend more time on her carving and I ought to be doing homework though I don’t specially want to, and so you see we do need you terribly badly.’

  ‘But Grace might not want –’ He checked himself and stared at Trish for a long time. His face gave no indication of what he was thinking.

  ‘Let’s go and have a look at these vines,’ he said suddenly. ‘See what sort of a mess you’ve been making of them. Just let me cover the milk, though.’

  He set the jug down in a bowl of cold water to keep it cool, and covered it with the beaded muslin that his mother must once have used as a protection against flies. With the simple domestic action he seemed to shrug off a little of his depression, and he strode across the sheep meadow towards the vineyard with no trace in his movements of the heaviness which had earlier weighed him down.

  ‘Well, most of this looks healthy enough,’ he said approvingly, testing the firmness of the nearest stakes and wires. ‘The Riesling Sylvaner’s doing very well. But I see what you mean about the tying. Getting out of hand, isn’t it?’

  Trish nodded. Content now to leave him to make up his own mind, she stood still as he walked up and down the rows, patting away the tendrils which seemed to stretch out to touch him as he passed. By the time he returned to stand beside her again he had made up his mind.

  ‘As you say, it’s for your stepmother to decide. Or your father, perhaps, if he’s the master here now.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Even as she laughed at the idea, Trish had time to notice the oddity of her surprise. It might have been considered normal for a man who married the owner of a property to consider himself its proprietor. But nothing in his behaviour had ever suggested that to be the case. ‘No, my father’s terribly fond of the house. It was built by my grandfather, you see. But gardening isn’t his line, any more than it’s mine. Greystones is still the Hardies’ place.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Andy, ‘why don’t you tell your stepmother that you had this idea about putting me to work here and you realized that it shouldn’t have come from you and so you didn’t exactly ask me the question: but you got the impression that I’d be glad to help out if I was wanted. Well, more than that – that I need a roof over my head and I’m looking for a chance to earn it. Then it’ll be up to her to raise the subject if she wants to, and if she doesn’t there’ll be no hard feelings.’

  ‘I’ll do it now!’ exclaimed Trish, and began to run up the hill, pausing only to call over her shoulder, ‘Don’t forget the blackout!’

  Ellis had returned from a day in London by the time she reached the house, so she was able to pant out her idea to both of them at once.

  ‘What do you think?’ Grace asked Ellis with a note of doubt in her voice which was surprising in someone who normally made all the decisions regarding the property without hesitation.

  ‘How you feel about it is up to you,’ Ellis replied. ‘But speaking in a practical sort of way, I’d have thought it solved all your problems. And his. From what you’ve told me, his father was always more than a mere gardener, and the boy may well have inherited his loyalty to the land.’

  ‘Not exactly a boy!’ exclaimed Trish: but she understood what he meant.

  ‘My only doubts would be about the vines,’ Ellis suggested. ‘To give him a free hand on the fruit and vegetables and general maintenance would be absolutely fine, I should have thought, but is it really worth struggling on with the vineyard?’

  ‘I think that might be the attraction for him,’ suggested Trish. ‘I mean, that he’d do the donkey work for the sake of looking after the vines.’

  ‘Could be. Well, we’d better let Grace sleep on it.’

  It seemed an unnecessarily cautious answer to Trish, who could see no possible objection to her inspired plan. Why were grown-ups always so stuffy and slow to recognize good ideas? But by the next morning, although no one said anything directly to her, she could tell that a decision had been made. There was a change in the atmosphere, a lightening of the sky. She found herself excited by the atmosphere of coming and going and planning for the future. Greystones had come to life again.

  Chapter Three

  ‘I’m in Oxford.’ Sheila’s voice over the telephone sounded breathless, almost secretive. ‘David will be at the shop all day, but he doesn’t need me hanging around so I wondered if little Max and I could come up for an hour or two?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Grace did her best to inject a note of welcome into her voice, although without any great success. There were very few people whose company, in her opinion, justified the loss of her working hours, and her sister-in-law was not one of them.

  The two women had nothing in common. Sheila’s only topics of conversation were her children and the affairs of the church
which was not just a place of worship but also the centre of her social life. Her conventional mind made no pretence of understanding Grace’s way of life and for a long time she had kept away in disapproval. But perhaps the advent of a husband and stepdaughter had made Grace more respectable in her eyes, for since then she had invited herself to Greystones several times.

  Although she sought the invitation from Grace, it was Mrs Hardie with whom she and Max usually spent their visits. No doubt she would do so again today. And Trish must be somewhere around and could help to amuse them. With any luck half an hour’s chat over a cup of tea would be enough to discharge the duties of a hostess.

  The two visitors who were shown into the drawing room an hour later provided a startling contrast in appearance. Sheila, always a sturdily-built woman, had become stout since the birth of her fourth child. Max on the other hand was small for his age, and everything about his body was compact and neat. He was always on the move but – unlike Boxer and Dan, who during their stay at Greystones had tended to barge around noisily and clumsily – his movements were under control and even graceful. Everything about him – the back of his head, his chin, his ears, even his eyebrows – seemed to be more pointed than was usual. Grace saw him as an elf, who should be dancing on his toes round a giant mushroom instead of sitting politely in a drawing room.

  ‘Could Trish take little Max out to look at the statues?’ asked Sheila, almost before the first politenesses had been exchanged. ‘The fresh air –’ Her voice trailed away, but not before she had made it clear that she had something to say without her son listening.

  Trish, who hated to be excluded from grown-up conversations, looked sulky for a moment but did as she was asked.

  ‘It’s about Max that I want to talk to you,’ Sheila said, looking from Grace to Mrs Hardie after the door had closed. ‘Everyone thinks that there’ll be an invasion now. And that there’s bound to be bombing before that – to knock London out, so to speak.’

  Grace did not disagree, but as her mind leapt ahead to the possible point of this remark she had to fight to prevent her dismay from revealing itself in her expression. From David’s point of view it might seem reasonable that he should control the affairs of The House of Hardie from Oxford rather than London, but if he thought he could come with his family to live at Greystones he would have to think again. ‘Harrow hardly counts as London, does it?’ was all she said.

  ‘It’s got railway lines. The main line to Scotland is only a quarter of a mile away from us. It could be a target. And bombs don’t always fall exactly where they’re intended to. David doesn’t plan to move, and of course I must stay with him. John’s in the air force and Lily’s going to do her first year at college before she decides what sort of war work to do, and Peter’s away at school all term. But little Max – I don’t know what to do for the best. He’s too young just to be packed off with a crowd of other evacuees. I’d never have a moment’s peace, thinking of him crying in bed, missing his home. And yet if he stays and the bombing starts and he’s frightened or hurt …’

  ‘You want him to come here,’ said Mrs Hardie. ‘Well, of course –’ But she checked herself and looked at Grace, as Sheila was already looking.

  ‘You had evacuees here before, didn’t you?’ Sheila reminded her. ‘And if the bombing really does start, I suppose they’ll ask you to have someone again. I thought you might actually prefer to have your own nephew rather than some strange child. And of course I wouldn’t ask you until it actually became necessary. But for our peace of mind, just to know …’

  Grace stood up and walked over to one of the drawing room windows. Outside, Trish and Max were playing a complicated game of tag which seemed to involve Max in climbing through the hole in the large stone sculpture which stood in front of the house. The boy moved like a gymnast – and indeed, as that thought entered her mind, he ran towards the sculpture, jumped as high in the air as if he had a springboard and turned a handstand over the stone. She blinked in surprise at his agility and smiled to see the gleeful expression on his face as he dared Trish to attempt the same feat.

  There was nothing about his slight but athletic body or expressive pointed face which bore the slightest resemblance to his father’s dark solidity or his mother’s stout respectability. It was as though he were a changeling. To accept him into the household might expose her to a surfeit of visits from the brother she still disliked, but between those times there would be no need to be constantly aware of Max as being David’s son. He would be himself. Dan and Boxer had proved that it was possible to have children in the house and survive. She smiled, making her acceptance a gracious one.

  ‘Of course. We’d be delighted to look after him whenever you feel it’s necessary. I’ll get a room ready for him so that you can phone up at short notice and send him here.’

  ‘He should come before he needs to,’ said Mrs Hardie, speaking with a more definite tone than had been usual in recent years. ‘For a little holiday, with no sense of emergency. So that he’ll know in advance which is his room and what sort of life he’ll be leading.’

  ‘That would be very kind.’ Once again Sheila looked to Grace for agreement. Then she blushed slightly. ‘I’m afraid – I’ll provide a mackintosh sheet, of course – I’m afraid he does sometimes wet his bed still.’

  ‘We’re used to that. We had the same trouble with Boxer. He’d never been away from home before.’

  ‘It happens even at home, I’m afraid. To tell you the truth, he and his father … I suppose it was because we thought we’d finished with having children. It was quite a shock, having to start again with a baby in the house. And when he became a toddler, that was even worse. He never seemed to sleep. Always on the go. I got tired, and David got irritated. And he, Max I mean, gets frightened when he’s shouted at. David was always a good father to the other three, but he doesn’t seem to like Max.’

  Grace was hardly acquainted with her youngest nephew, who on previous visits had spent all his time with his grandmother. But as she listened to Sheila’s comments she felt more and more interested in getting to know him.

  ‘You have a chat with Mother,’ she suggested. ‘I’ll go out and play with him for a little while, so that he feels he knows who it is who’s inviting him for a holiday.’

  There was a surprising element of satisfaction to be found in accepting the situation. Sometimes – although not often – Grace worried that her obsession with her own work and preference for her own company revealed an unnatural lack of family feeling. On such occasions she found it necessary to itemize her relationships with her brothers, for it was reassuring to remember that she had adored Frank, who was dead, had felt sympathy with Kenneth, who had run away for reasons quite unconnected with her, and had loved and cared for Philip until he too had died. As for Jay, her feelings towards him were almost maternal. It was only David to whom she felt cold, and to show affection to one of his sons would in an odd way help to prove that it was not as a brother that she disliked him but simply as a man whom she would never have needed to meet had they not been born to the same parents.

  Odd, she thought to herself as she took Max’s hand and led him off to be introduced to the hens and the sow, odd that she should think of herself as a free woman, untrammelled by family relationships, when in fact she was a daughter, sister, wife, stepmother and aunt.

  She had made no effort to adapt her long, fast stride to the age of her companion. Max was neither running nor skipping in his effort to keep up. Instead, his feet moved rapidly in what was clearly a pattern which he had invented, occasionally crossing over and back again and incorporating little hops and jumps. He watched his own toes moving, concentrating on the effort to repeat the pattern correctly.

  If there was one thing more than any other that Grace liked in a child, it was the ability to concentrate. Trish had it to a marked degree, although her periods of concentration usually ended in an orgy of destruction. Dan and Boxer had been quite different, needing contin
ual stimulus and encouragement to keep them at a single task. It seemed to Grace that Max would prove to be more like Trish and herself. There would be no need for him to struggle against his aunt as he had to struggle against his father. It might take a little time to find what exactly it was that he was so anxious to encourage in himself, but she would succeed in the end through sympathy.

  ‘Would you like to come and spend a little holiday here with me, Max?’ she asked. ‘We’d love to have you.’

  Chapter Four

  The blitzkrieg which had been so confidently expected and feared began on the night of 7 September 1940. Two days later Max Hardie arrived at Greystones for what had been described to him as a second holiday.

  On the last Sunday in September, nine months after he had taken his two half-brothers away from Greystones, Terry Travis brought them back again.

  Trish was enjoying an hour of freedom when she heard the bell ring. It was part of her weekend duty to keep Max amused. But Sheila had been anxious that his Bible education should not be neglected, and since no one in the Greystones household was a churchgoer or prepared to undertake the long walk to take him to Sunday School at the Quarry church, Mrs Hardie had undertaken to spend an hour each Sunday morning reading and explaining Bible stories to him.

  At the sound of the bell Trish came downstairs, just in time to see Mrs Barrett going in search of Grace while the three visitors stood in the hall as if uncertain of their welcome.

  When she first glimpsed Dan and Boxer a year earlier, they had been frightened and unhappy, and they were frightened and unhappy now. But on that first occasion it had been clear that, although poor, they were well cared for. The boys themselves and their clothes had both been clean and neat. The same could not be said today.

  As though realizing that he was under observation, Terry looked up and smiled.

  ‘Look, there’s Trish,’ he said to the boys.