Sextet

by Sally Beauman

  With excitement and delight, Lindsay had rushed from room to room, while Colin pointed out to her its various architectural features. Lindsay loved its wide-boarded, uneven oak floors, which reminded her of the deck of a ship. She loved its beams and low doorways, which meant Colin had constantly to duck his head. She loved its old and twisting stairs, the soft honey stone of its lintels, and the kitchen, with its scrubbed floor, warm range, rag rugs, dresser and array of blue and white china dishes.

  Such was her delight that it was some while before she noticed that Colin was becoming quieter and quieter. The more she exclaimed and praised, the unhappier he became—and Lindsay, realizing the reason for this, blushed guiltily at her own stupidity and was silenced. Colin, after all, did not want her to live here. He wanted her to live in Shute Court, and—although that issue remained unresolved between them, Lindsay not answering his proposal and Colin not pressing her—she could understand that he now felt it was a mistake to have brought her here. He had not foreseen, perhaps, the extent to which this place, small and humble no doubt by his standards, would please her.

  Later that evening, still feeling an unaccountable residual anxiety for Tom, she telephoned him at his Oxford lodgings. But Tom, deep in an essay on Nietzsche, claimed he was too busy to talk, and too busy to see her for the next few days. Lindsay, who had been longing to see him, resigned herself to this; over dinner, she began on her questions about Shute again. Colin could not be persuaded to describe his house, however; he admitted it was large—well, quite large; beyond that, not one word could she prise from him.

  As the hour grew later, and outside, owls called to each other, she began to suspect that Colin had further plans for that night, which he had not disclosed to her. Lindsay was drawn to that brass bed, in that blue-painted bedroom; for once, Colin showed no haste to be there. They sat in front of the wood fire, in the small beamed sitting-room, drinking a delicious wine which Colin said was a Bordeaux, and Lindsay kept calling a Burgundy. As midnight approached, Colin grew more and more tense; his face became pale and fixed and his replies increasingly distracted.

  Eventually, as midnight struck, he rose to his feet, and taking her hand, pulled her upright.

  ‘It’s Sunday now,’ he said. ‘It’s the first Sunday in Advent. I’m going to show you Shute now. I want—I’d like you to see it by moonlight.’

  Lindsay was moved by his expression and by the fact that he had evidently planned this. Had she ever doubted how much this meant to him, those doubts would have vanished now. She had never seen him more serious; she could sense his agitation and she could see his determination to conceal it.

  It was cold outside; the air was fresh and still, and a light rain was falling. They put on coats and boots and scarves. Colin took her hand in his and, as before, held it inside his coat pocket. They set off down the track from the house, Colin refusing to use a flashlight. Her eyes would grow used to the darkness, he said, and Lindsay, unused to walking in the dark anywhere, and certainly unused to walking in the dark in the country, found this was so. The moon, high, round and seeming in constant motion as small clouds moved across its face, gave easily enough light. There was no colour; it was like walking through a negative. The moon silvered the track ahead of them and gave to the familiar—a hedge, a post—a fleeting, fluctuating shape she found restful. Above them, there was a myriad of stars; the only sounds were their footsteps and the calling of the owls. The air smelled of earth, of the rain and of woodsmoke. Lindsay felt tranquillity steal into her mind; the world of cities, planes, cars, appointments and people, fell away from her. Clasping Colin’s hand and looking at him with love, she felt they breathed in truth and breathed out contentment.

  Then Colin, taking her hand more tightly, drew her away from the track and into a small wood. There, Lindsay’s moonlit confidence began to desert her. In part, this was because, used to cities, the wood itself unnerved her. Here, there was less light, the moon shining through the branches and illuminating the ground only in patches. The undergrowth was thick; from all sides came tiny sounds she could not identify. The rain dripped and pooled the path; there were constant rustling, scurrying noises, and she had to keep telling herself that these were caused by the harmless nocturnal activities of small animals. Rabbits, weasels, she said to herself, and then acknowledged the truth: these sounds were not causing her fears; her fear was for Colin. She was afraid, very afraid, that when she finally saw this house of his, she would betray a reaction that would hurt and disappoint him.

  This is his home, she kept saying to herself; he cannot help his home. It is the place where he grew up; he loves it; it is as cruel and wrong to shun it as it would be if he had grown up in some slum tenement.

  Yet this argument did not altogether convince. She must try to imagine this house, she thought, then she would be prepared, and could, if need be, feign her reaction. By then, her mind had already laid out that park, the terrible perfection of that park; now she must try to face the house itself. She knew it would not be quite large, but very large; she immediately made that adjustment to Colin’s statement. She found she could begin to see this very large house, this mansion. It was perched up, she discovered, on some eminence. It was grey, austere, grand; its architectural style was both classical and assertive. She felt this house might well resemble Mansfield Park, or perhaps that great edifice, Mr Darcy’s Pemberley. On the other hand, it might look, dear God, like Brideshead, or Thrushcross Grange, or Manderley. It would be like all of those places, she thought, in that it exacted a charge from interlopers such as herself who crossed its threshold. That charge was a male child, a son for the son, an heir for the heir; this hidden aspect of his house, Colin had not mentioned once. She wondered now, for she could feel how tense and anxious he was, whether he would ever be able to bring himself to mention it. She looked towards him; she knew he loved her; with pain, she accepted that on this subject he would remain utterly silent.

  ‘Through here,’ Colin said. He held out his hand to her. ‘Let me help you over the stile.’

  They had reached the edge of the wood at last. The moon, veiled by some ragged scrap of cloud, was revealing nothing. Ahead of her, Lindsay thought she could glimpse something still—and something moving. She gave Colin her hand and climbed over. She stepped down onto soft grass, cropped by animals. Colin put his arm around her shoulders and turned her a little. He raised his fingers to his lips; Lindsay peered into shadows and tried to make substance of shadows. A light gust of wind washed soft rain against her face; the cloud stayed still and the moon moved, bestowing radiance.

  At first, Lindsay did not see the house. She saw that there was a river, wide and swift-flowing, curving along a valley. Ahead of her, beneath the spreading branches of a tree, a group of roe deer were grazing. She could see the females, heads bent to the grass, the moonlight greying the lovely curves of their necks and flanks. A little apart, head lifted and alert, there was a stag; she just glimpsed the branching of his antlers, then he scented their presence, and with one accord, moving at speed like a single creature, the herd ran off. She listened to the soft drumming of deer hooves; following the deer’s passage with her eyes, she found she was looking at Shute.

  It was not as she had expected. It was not set up upon an eminence, but lay against the side of the hill, as if it had gradually grown up from the ground over the centuries. There was, at one end of its irregular outline, an attempt at a fortification, for there was some form of tower or gatehouse there. Leading away from this was a long quiet frontage, which had a collegiate or monastic look. It had glorious ranked windows which the moon made silver and mercurial; she could see square bays; she glimpsed curved gables, gentle stone embrasures, clustering and fantastic chimney-pots; and, seeing a house built not for display, but for the quiet delights of domesticity, she gave a low cry of unfeigned pleasure.

  ‘Oh, it’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘Colin, I never imagined it would be this beautiful…’

  Colin, who had bee
n watching her face with the utmost intentness, gave a sigh. All the tension left his body. His heart, which he was sure had stopped beating for some while, now began to beat strongly.

  ‘It’s the most romantic house in England,’ he said, looking at it with love. ‘At least, so it’s been said…’

  ‘Who said that?’ Lindsay asked, still staring at the house. ‘They were right; it is romantic. It’s wildly romantic…’

  ‘I think it was William Morris,’ Colin said, ‘or it might have been Ruskin.’

  One of them, Colin thought, had said something roughly similar. He hesitated; oversell, he knew, could be fatal.

  ‘Oh, what’s that glorious tower thing at the end, Colin?’

  ‘Well, it’s a gatehouse really. A tower-shaped sort of gatehouse.’

  ‘I love towers. I love gatehouses.’

  ‘That’s medieval.’ Colin was beginning to feel more encouraged. ‘It’s the only part of the original house that’s left. Various Lascelleses kept adding bits. They had this compulsion to build. Apart from the gatehouse, what you’re looking at now is mostly late Tudor and partly Jacobean.’

  ‘Oh,’ Lindsay gave a long sigh. ‘It was there at the time of the Armada. When Shakespeare was writing his plays. Mary, Queen of Scots was alive then. Raleigh was discovering his New World…’

  ‘Yes,’ said Colin, feeling this was a fairly accurate summation.

  ‘It has a Wars of the Roses sort of look too,’ Lindsay went on. ‘And I can just imagine crusaders riding off to fight the Saracens…from the gatehouse, that is.’

  ‘Definitely,’ said Colin, who by then was inclined to agree to anything.

  ‘I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if Henry VIII didn’t stay here, with Anne Boleyn.’ Lindsay gave a deeper sigh. ‘While he was still in love with her, of course. Some years before he chopped off her head.’

  Colin hesitated then. To this, the purist in him could not consent. Anne Boleyn, executed in 1536, was, strictly speaking, unlikely to have visited a house the construction of which commenced some fifty years later. On reflection, he felt he could stretch a point.

  ‘More than possible,’ he said. ‘Maybe he composed Greensleeves for her here…You never know.’

  ‘Colin, my dates aren’t that bad. I’m teasing you.’ Lindsay turned to look at him. He saw she had tears in her eyes. ‘I’m teasing you and I’m not teasing you. And it’s lovely—so very lovely.’ She paused. ‘I don’t think it frightens me, after all. I thought it might, you see. I thought it might be, you know, grand. Regimented. Marble halls. Great staircases…’

  ‘I love you,’ said Colin, realizing the wisdom of showing her the house from this side and at night. He need not mention the large eighteenth-century wing, invisible from here, until the morning, he decided. William Kent’s contributions to the house, he felt, were better approached with circumspection. Lindsay would cope with Kent, he was sure, in time. After all, she was prepared to forgive his money and his ancestors. If he could ensure that his careful plans for the rest of the night, and for the following day, went as well as this, his opening move, then success might be his.

  Accordingly, and with deep emotion, he kissed her. When this long kiss finally ended, and Lindsay drew back from his arms with a blind, urgent look, Colin, who felt equally urgent, but determined, caught her by the hand and began to draw her towards the house. He was having difficulties with his voice, which had dropped and kept catching.

  ‘I want to—show you the inside. Introduce you to my dogs. My father will have gone to bed, but I want you to meet my dogs. I have these two old dogs, and—Lindsay, quickly. Darling, this house is nearer…’

  Lindsay, not inclined to argue, allowed herself to be drawn up the slope towards the walls of the house. The moon lit it and hid it. Reaching a dark porch, Colin drew her inside it and began to kiss her again. Then, suddenly remembering another aspect to his plan—a key aspect—he drew her out again into the moonlight, where, as resolved, he again proposed to her. He watched the moonlight move upon her face and brighten her eyes. Lindsay took his hand in hers and kissed it. In a halting way, beginning the sentence, breaking off, then beginning again, she said that she needed more time to consider—but so sweet and so gentle was her expression as she said this that conclusions leaped into Colin’s brain. He could see she was anxious to cause him no pain by this answer; he felt at once a soaring conviction that progress had been made. An advance on silence, he thought, drawing her towards the studded oak door deep in the porch. He must persevere; he would soon—it must surely be soon—be rewarded with acceptance.

  Colin had left his father very explicit directions; as a result, his home looked as it usually did, which was untidy and idiosyncratic. As he had foreseen, Lindsay did not notice the Gainsborough portrait in the entrance hall, partly because it was badly lit—in fact, unlit—and partly because she was distracted by the room’s very noticeable oddities. These included a line of walking boots, stout shoes and gumboots sufficient in number to have shod the feet of a small army; a mountain of binoculars, field glasses and small telescopes; a baby owl, one eye open and one shut, perched on the back of a chair by the fireplace, and, in a cardboard box lined with newspaper, a small hedgehog, which smelled pungently.

  ‘My father has a bit of a thing about wildlife,’ said Colin, looking at her with hope. ‘When he’s not watching birds, which he does most of the time, he’s rescuing things. Like that hedgehog. The gardener—someone found him the other day. He should be hibernating. Daddy’s been making him a new hibernating nest; he goes back in it tomorrow.’

  Lindsay was undone. Afterwards, she was never sure whether to blame the hedgehog, or Colin’s use of the word ‘Daddy’, which had slipped past his guard and caused him to blush crimson. Hiding her face, she bent over the hedgehog box. The hedgehog, not fully grown, was curled up in a ball, and was slowly beginning to bristle. Lindsay, who knew herself to be a sentimentalist, with a weakness for all animals, particularly small ones, looked at the beauty of its spines. They were darker at the tip, paler at the base. Touching them with one finger, she found they felt soft and vulnerable, except at the tip. If Colin does not say anything about fleas, she thought—most people, in her experience, could not mention hedgehogs without mentioning fleas in the next breath—it will be a sign: I shall know I am right about Colin.

  Colin, watching her with a tender expression, said nothing about fleas. Lindsay waited. Minutes ticked. He still said nothing about fleas. The hedgehog, having decided the possible threat had retreated, lowered its spines and uncurled; Lindsay saw its sharply pointed snout, its black nostrils. It made a snuffling noise, retreated the snout and went back to sleep. Lindsay acknowledged the truth; not that she loved Colin, she had known that for some while, but that she loved him in the right way—that being, as she felt any woman would know, a nice but vital distinction.

  Now there was nothing to do but hope, she thought, straightening. She looked at Colin across the entrance hall. She was aware, dimly, that it was paved with a chequer-board of worn black and white flagstones. She vaguely perceived that it contained furniture and paintings, that there was an owl on the back of a chair, and that two rough-haired dogs, stretching, a little arthritic, had now appeared, and were greeting their master.

  She watched them lick his hands; their tails thumped; they gave small yelps and barks of canine pleasure. She could not even see these dogs clearly, she realized; the rest of the room blurred as she looked towards Colin. He was bending down to his dogs, his hair falling forward across his face, his hand extended. He was wearing an old tweed overcoat, which was muddy. She had a muddled sense that he was good—she knew him to be good—that he was strong, and that he was deserving. Straightening up from his dogs, he met her gaze, his face becoming serious and quiet as he read her expression. With love, her eyes rested on his hair and the beauty of its coloration; they rested on his blue unwavering gaze, and it seemed to her extraordinary that she could once have been blind to t
his face’s distinctions.

  She might have liked, perhaps, to accept him as a husband then, but since she could not, she went across to him, greeted his dogs, then took his hand and went upstairs with him to his bedroom.

  Colin was careful to take a route to this room which led away from the larger and grander rooms here; the Great Hall, he felt, with its bristling displays of ancient weaponry, and the Long Gallery, flanked with too many portraits of too many ancestors, a surfeit of ancestors, could safely wait until the morning. So he took her up to his rooms by a winding back stair, pointing out to her only those small things he felt would please her—the old pane of glass on which, in 1672, a lover had scratched with a diamond the initials of his mistress; the bed-curtains in his room, which had been embroidered and stitched with consummate skill by some latter-day Lascelles wife who had had the patience of a Penelope.

  Lindsay, entering his bedroom and admiring the bedcurtains en passant—she herself hated to sew—saw that the room was at the very top of the house and was open to the roof, with the rafters exposed and the great structure of its beams and king-posts visible. This delighted her. Colin, thankful that his windows faced south, thus giving no view of the more dangerous classical wing of his home, told her that when she woke in the morning, she would look out at the river.

  Lindsay, who had not taken her contraceptive pills for two nights, not since that walk back through the snow from the Conrad, was pleased by this. She had no intention of taking those powerful chemicals again and, feeling that she was giving herself up to the equally powerful forces of nature, she liked the idea that the first thing she would see from these windows was the flow and currents of water.