Grace Hardie

by Anne Melville

  ‘He’d have all that at home.’

  ‘Then let’s go and find him. I’ll show you where he’s working and leave you to talk.’ But outside the house Andrew hesitated for a moment. ‘There’s something I’d like to show you first of all,’ he said.

  He led the way round the side of the square house. The original garden area had been formally laid out in terraces and parterres; roses and herbs were still growing in the elaborate patterns which had been outlined by gravel paths two hundred years earlier. But Grace could see that within recent years the new residents had been allowed to make private gardens for themselves in the pleasure grounds. It was to one of these that Andrew now took her.

  ‘Philip designed this, and dug it out, and planted it,’ he said.

  ‘Is he strong enough to dig?’ She was surprised.

  ‘His muscles are strong. He can do anything that doesn’t need sudden spurts of energy. He’s learned how to take things steadily and regulate his breathing to keep pace with the effort. But I didn’t bring you here to make that particular point.’

  He waited silently as she studied Philip’s garden and considered the implications of what she saw. The design was an extraordinary one. A wide stretch of grass gradually narrowed as it led further and further into what appeared at first sight to be a maze of flower beds. But it was not a true maze, for there was only the one path which circled and doubled back on itself and spiralled inwards before ending at last in a circle of lawn. Around this had been planted young yew trees which would eventually grow into a high wall.

  Grace might have found the place disturbing, but instead felt comforted, even relieved.

  ‘After Philip was gassed,’ she said, ‘I made a sort of – of object. It was exactly this kind of shape – although quite different, of course, going upwards instead of on the ground.’

  She paused, checking what seemed to be an incoherent rambling. ‘What I mean is that when I saw Philip in hospital for the first time I knew what he was feeling. I could understand the hurt that had been done to his mind as well as his body. I still understand that. If he comes home with me, I shan’t badger him with questions. I shall tell him my worries, because that’s what I need, someone to talk to; but I shan’t expect him to solve them. He can make a garden for himself at Greystones as well. I know that his wound is deep inside. I’ll never ask more of him than he’s able to give.’

  ‘Good. Tell him that. And tell him, as well, that he can come back here whenever he likes, for as long as he likes. Let’s go this way.’

  They retraced their steps to the edge of the grassy spiral and then moved towards a walled garden even larger than the one at Greystones.

  ‘Philip has invented a new fruit,’ Andrew told her as they walked. ‘A cross between a blackberry and a raspberry, with no thorns. Last year there was only the first trial crop, but this year he picked enough to experiment in making jam and wine. He’s just planting out cuttings to increase the stock. He seems to have an instinct for what can and can’t be done in the garden. Here he is. Come back to the house afterwards and tell me what has been decided.’ He left her to go through the arched entrance of the walled garden alone.

  Philip was on his knees, using his fingers to press the cuttings into the ground and tuck the earth around them. He looked up as she approached. There was a peacefulness about his smile of welcome which dispelled Grace’s misgivings. At some point in the past two years he had come to terms with himself. ‘Can I help with anything?’ she asked.

  Without speaking, Philip produced a small garden trowel from the pocket of his habit and indicated a line parallel to his own where more cuttings should be planted. Grace set to work; and as she worked, she talked. Without asking any questions, without pausing for any comment, she told him all she had recently learned, starting with the parlous state of The House of Hardie and David’s plans to mortgage Greystones.

  Philip showed surprise when she spoke of Felix, straightening himself to look questioningly at his sister. She told him about her visit but was not ready – perhaps she would never be ready – to confess her own responsibility in the matter.

  ‘I’ve been worried about it all,’ she said at last. ‘Wondering whether I’m being selfish – whether I owe a duty to the business, and what the right thing to do is. But now I’ve stopped worrying, because I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to make Greystones earn its keep, so that I needn’t ever ask David for money. And if he won’t take over the bills for Felix, then I shall earn enough for that as well. Even if I have to go out to work. I’m an experienced shop assistant after all! But I think the land will provide enough.’

  Giving a slight nod, Philip began to tread down the earth beside his row of cuttings. With everything said that she had come to say, Grace watched without speaking for a few moments.

  ‘I need company,’ she admitted at last. ‘Someone to talk to. Someone to stop me becoming the sort of old maid who chatters to canaries. Besides, Mother’s going to get a terrible shock when she comes home and finds the servants gone and no money for quite ordinary things. I’d like to feel that I have your support.’ She laughed. ‘There’s a vacancy for an unpaid market gardener, too. Will you come home, Philip? To do whatever you like, but just to be there. Please.’

  So long was the silence that she could hardly endure it. But the request was not a trivial one; she had known that he would have to consider it very carefully. When at last he looked up, the sound of his voice, which she had not heard since he was wounded, amazed her by being unchanged, except for the effort needed to control his breathing.

  ‘Three days,’ he said. ‘Will you allow me three days?’

  ‘Oh, Philip!’ She had been so determined to pursue her choice of life alone if necessary that only now did she recognize how devastating a refusal on her brother’s part would have been. She flung herself into his arms, half crying – but almost at once began to laugh, so incongruous did it seem to embrace a man who looked like a monk.

  Philip’s eyes were laughing as well, although he said nothing more. It came as a second relief to understand that she could help him almost as much as he would help her. He had always been her favourite brother: the quietest and kindest of the boys. They would live separately and yet together in the house which each of them loved. Everything would be all right.

  Part Eight

  Mistress of Greystones 1927

  Chapter One

  On the morning of her thirtieth birthday, in June 1927, Grace Hardie rose early. Splashing her face with cold water, she pulled on a pair of khaki socks which had once belonged to one of her brothers, and then dressed quickly in the dark blue workman’s overalls which could be called her gardening clothes or her working clothes or simply her everyday clothes. Although it was a Sunday, there would be no time for morning service today.

  In a few hours there was to be a family luncheon party. Jay, still unmarried, would make the journey from London alone, but David would be bringing his wife and children. Midge and Will had only a short distance to travel from their house in North Oxford. Before they all arrived at noon Grace would dress herself as befitted a hostess, but the day must start with its ordinary working routine. There was no need to be tidy yet.

  Her tower bedroom contained no mirror. As she ran a comb through her hair, she walked from window to window looking out; inspecting her domain.

  ‘Lovely day.’

  She made the comment aloud without being aware of it. Had she realized how often she talked to herself, it would not have worried her. Other people did the same, surely. For different reasons the three inhabitants of Greystones – Grace and her mother and brother – rarely indulged in social conversation. Grace used her own voice to break the silence and thought nothing of it.

  Carrying her flat house shoes in her hand, she went to the garden room which had once been the schoolroom. Her Wellingtons perched upside down on the handles of the croquet mallets which stood, chipped and peeling, in their rack. Until a few months earl
ier she had always left the boots where they fell after she kicked them off. But one morning, as she worked her feet into the tight, clammy rubber, her heel shot down with such force that it squashed dead a nesting mouse.

  Disposal of the corpse had brought on one of the asthmatic attacks from which nowadays she suffered only rarely. She remembered them as recurring events in her childhood, when no one realized what they were, assuming her simply to be ‘chesty’. Only gradually had various conditions been recognized as triggering her attacks: the pollen of particular trees, certain kinds of fog, cats, horses, anxiety, anger. Adding mice and murder to this list, she now took care to hang the boots mouth downwards.

  Her first tasks of the day were the usual ones of feeding the hens and pigs. Philip, who always rose at five, would already have milked the goats. Returning to the garden room, she picked up a trug and a pair of secateurs, laughing aloud at the picture she must present.

  Cutting flowers was one of the few household tasks which a lady might perform for herself without loss of dignity. She remembered being told that twenty years earlier by her mother, who even after the birth of so many children was still slender then; golden-haired, tall and graceful as she snipped at roses.

  No one would ever take Grace, in her boots and overalls, to be the lady of the house. The short layered style into which Philip trimmed her black hair was, as it happened, currently in vogue, and so was her slim, straight figure; but Grace neither knew nor cared what was ‘in’ or ‘out’ in the world of fashion. Nevertheless, she retained a sense of the ridiculous. A costume which was acceptable, even sensible, for her working hours was inappropriate for the gathering of roses.

  She stepped into the garden and looked up at the clear midsummer sky. The heatwave of the past few days seemed set to continue; but that did not persuade her to change her plans and set out a picnic instead of a formal luncheon.

  During the past few days she had cleaned and polished the dining room and drawing room until the mahogany shone like glass and carpets and cushions gave off a delicate perfume of rose water. It was no business of David’s if the three permanent occupants of Greystones ate their meals as a rule at the scrubbed kitchen table and retired in the evenings each to a separate room. More than six years had passed since he had last been invited to visit his old home. She did not intend to give him the satisfaction of discovering the shambles which perhaps he expected.

  David had never forgiven his sister for her refusal to offer Greystones as a sacrifice to The House of Hardie. Grace for her part had been slow to abandon a suspicion that without her opposition he would not merely have mortgaged it but allowed it to be sold. She had been angry, too, at what she saw as his spitefulness in cutting off funds from their mother as well as herself.

  But the passing of time and a successful survival had mellowed her attitude. Since her mother appeared to feel no bitterness, why should she? What did upset Lucy Hardie was the coldness between two of her children. So today’s family reunion represented a gesture of reconciliation – but Grace was determined that it should be seen to come from strength. That was why the table was already set with silver and crystal which shone and sparkled as if there were still a staff of eight to wash and polish. Only the great rose bowl and the six posy horns were waiting to be filled.

  Breathing deeply to fill her lungs in the clear air, she set off across the terrace, over the lawn and into the serpentine garden, striding to its further boundary for the sake of the exercise. She would pick the flowers on the more meandering course of her return to the house.

  The serpentine garden was Philip’s self-indulgence. In the three acres of the walled garden, fruit and vegetables grew, as they had always grown, in rows of military straightness. But just as he had created a personal garden in the community from which Grace had enticed him, so too at Greystones he had felt the same need to carve out a shape from the ground – very much as Grace herself carved wood or stone.

  The pattern here was not a tight spiral but a series of gentle curves which swelled and closed so that almost every step along the grass revealed a different view of the shrubberies which edged it. Grace had contributed to the design by bringing some of her larger carved shapes out of the studio to stand in alcoves framed by leaves and, indeed, had designed some of the carvings specifically for their settings.

  Returning to the house with her trug basket laden, she plunged the flowers into a stone sink full of water in one of the sculleries. In the spacious days of the previous century, when Greystones was designed, separate rooms were provided for all the duties of the servants, as well as for the pleasures of their employers.

  Philip came in at the same moment carrying baskets full of all the vegetables they would need. Some he had forced in a hot bed to be sure of having them ready in June; whilst several crowns of asparagus had been held back to prolong their season. He had already, earlier in the morning, brought in the milk and enough strawberries to feed the whole family. The chickens had been killed and plucked three days before, and the goat cheese had been maturing for several weeks.

  Lucy Hardie, meanwhile, was preparing breakfast. Six years earlier, when she returned from China, she was certainly startled and probably dismayed to discover what had happened to Greystones in her absence, but she accepted the situation without making more than one attempt to heal her daughter’s quarrel with David. Confirming that the house had always been Grace’s property, she asked with an extraordinary humility whether she might continue to live in it.

  Grace had been worried about her mother at that time, and would almost have preferred her to react to the changed situation with indignation. Instead, she had seemed apathetic, making no complaint as she took on her own shoulders some of the duties which always before had been performed by servants. Her only positive action was a command to David that The House of Hardie must pay the increased fees for his brother Felix. The expense was not to be borne by Grace alone.

  Under the terms of Gordon Hardie’s will, his widow was entitled to a share of the business profits: but out of what he claimed to be proper caution, David had contrived that there should be no profits. Will had to be paid a better salary, and he himself was entitled to fees for the hours he had to spend on the business. Interest must be paid on the loan made necessary by Grace’s intransigence. All the takings after this were spent on new stock – most of which, in the nature of a vintner’s business, would not be ready for sale for several years. And now a recession was affecting sales. There was always, it seemed, some reason why his mother, who had refused to take his side, should receive not a penny from what had once provided the livelihood of the whole family.

  Whether or not Lucy thought that she was being unkindly treated, she did not complain. For the first few months after returning she spent most of her time in the studio, and the walls of the boudoir which had become her drawing room were now covered with the paintings she produced in this period.

  There were water colours of her husband’s grave in China, with a background of distant mountains. There was a large and carefully worked picture of the nurse who had cared for Gordon Hardie before his death. Grace thought this unsuccessful, because the woman somehow failed to look Chinese. A less sombre group of paintings, done from memory, depicted scenes from Lucy’s honeymoon: the gorges of the Yangtse River, a mule train, a flimsy bridge over a river and, in pride of place, a sketch of Gordon Hardie as a young man, looking in amazement at a valley carpeted with gold and white lilies.

  The therapy of painting had drawn Lucy at last out of her depression and into a cheerful interest in Grace’s efforts to live off the Greystones estate. In those early days their only source of cash was Philip’s disability pension, and there were some lean times before they mastered the arts of storing and preserving enough food to last through the winter. Right from the start, however, they had enjoyed the co-operation of the former head gardener. Rather than lose his cottage as well as his employment, Frith had agreed to an arrangement under which he found
his own wages by keeping some of the food which he grew on the Greystones land and selling it in the city.

  Gradually Lucy had developed her own contributions to the search for income. She painted water colours of the Oxford colleges and their gardens, and these were sold for her by the shop which supplied her materials. The farmer who rented the sloping meadow as grazing for his sheep allowed her to run two ewes of her own with his flock, and she taught herself to spin and dye and weave their wool. Neatness with the needle was one of the few practical talents encouraged in a daughter of the aristocracy, and Lucy made the clothes for all three members of the household. In addition, she had learned to cook.

  ‘How did we ever put up with overcooked meat and vegetables for so many years?’ she would ask in amazement as, after a few disasters, she began to produce far tastier meals than anything that Mrs Charles had ever sent to the table. And whenever Grace expressed the hope that she was not becoming tired or overworked, she recalled the hours she had once devoted to giving instructions and sorting out the problems of the servants’ hall. It might be eccentric to live without a domestic staff, but there was freedom in eccentricity.

  Today, as it happened, there was to be help in the house. The inclusion of David and his family in the birthday celebration was not intended to elicit pity for their poverty but to show that they could manage comfortably without his help. The three of them had planned and prepared the menu for a feast. So in order that they could enjoy it in a gracious manner as host and hostesses, Lucy had asked Mrs Frith to serve and clear the meal.

  She arrived early, accompanied by her eldest granddaughter.

  ‘Andy’s staying with us,’ she explained cheerfully to Grace. ‘The maddymoselle –’ she had never referred to his wife as anything else – ‘knows better than to show her face. But he brought his twelve-year-old, Jeanette, to meet us this time. She can’t understand a word I say or say a word I can understand, but she’ll be handy enough at podding the peas and broad beans and scraping the new potatoes.’