by Mary Stewart
I saw Mrs Bates bridle, and said smoothly enough: ‘Don’t trouble, Lisa. I – I’d sooner go up by myself. I’m sure you’ll understand.’
Lisa had stopped half way to the sink, looking irresolute, and rather too surprised.
Mrs Bates was nodding again, with a kind of triumph in the tight compression of her mouth. Con took another new roll, and saluted me with a tiny lift of the eyebrow as he turned to go. ‘Of course you would,’ he said. ‘Don’t treat Annabel as a stranger, Lisa my dear. And don’t worry, Annabel. He’ll be so pleased to see you that he’s not likely to rake up anything painful out of the past.’
Another lift of the eyebrow on this masterly double-entendre of reassurance, and he was gone.
Lisa relaxed, and seemed to recollect something of her lost poise. ‘I’m sorry.’ Her voice was once more even and colourless. ‘Of course you’ll want to go alone. I was forgetting. It isn’t every day one gets a – an occasion like this. Go on up now, my dear. Tea’ll be ready in half an hour . . . Mrs Bates, I wonder if you would help me with the teacakes? You’re a much better hand at them than I am.’
‘Which is not to be wondered at, seeing as how I’m north country bred and born, which no foreigner ever had a good hand with a teacake yet,’ said that lady tartly, but moving smartly towards the table.
Lisa had stooped again to the oven. Her back was towards us. I had to say it, and this was as good a moment as any. ‘Betsy, bless you, singin’ hinnies! They look as good as ever!’
Lisa dropped the oven shelf with a clatter against its runners. I heard her say: ‘Sorry. Clumsy,’ in a muffled voice. ‘It’s all right, I didn’t spill anything.’
‘You don’t think,’ said Mrs Bates crisply, ‘that them singin’ hinnies is for you? Get along with you now, to your Granda.’
But the nod which went along with the briskly snapping voice said, quite plainly: ‘Don’t be frightened. Go on. It’ll be all right.’
I left the kitchen door open behind me.
It was obvious that no questions of identity were going to rouse themselves in the minds of Mrs Bates and her husband; but the real ordeal was still ahead of me, and if there were ever going to be questions asked, my every movement on this first day was going to be important.
So I left the door open, and was conscious of Lisa and Mrs Bates watching me as I crossed the flagged back lobby, pushed open the green baize door which gave on the front hall, and turned unhesitatingly to the right before the door swung shut behind me.
‘It’s a very simple house,’ Lisa had said. ‘It’s shaped like an L, with the wing shorter than the stem of the L. The wing’s where the kitchens are, and the scullery, and what used to be the dairy, but all the dairy work’s done in the buildings now, so it’s a laundry-house with a Bendix and an electric ironing machine. There’s a baize door that cuts the kitchen wing off from the main body of the house.
‘It’s not the original farmhouse, you know, it’s what you might call a small manor. It was built about a hundred and fifty years ago, on the site of the old house that was pulled down. You’ll find a print of the original farm-house in Bewick’s Northumberland: that was a square, grim-looking sort of building, but the new one’s quite different, like a small country house, plain and sturdy, certainly, but graceful too . . . The main hall’s square, almost an extra room . . . a wide staircase opposite the front door . . . drawing room to one side, dining room to the other with the library behind; that’s used as an office . . . your grandfather’s bedroom is the big room at the front, over the drawing room . . .’
As the baize door shut, I leaned back against it for a moment, and let myself pause. It could not have been more than three quarters of an hour since I had met Bates in High Riggs, but already I felt exhausted with sustained effort. I must have a minute or two alone, to collect myself, before I went upstairs . . .
I looked about me. The hall had certainly never been built for an ordinary farmhouse. The floor was oak parquet, and the old blanket-chest against the wall was carved oak, too, and beautiful. A couple of Bokhara rugs looked very rich against the honey-coloured wood of the floor. The walls were plain ivory, and there was a painting of a jar of marigolds, a copy of the Sartorius aquatint of the Darley Arabian, and an old coloured map of the North Tyne, with Forreft Hall clearly marked, and, in smaller letters on a neat segment of the circle labelled Forreft Park, I identified Whitefcar.
Below the map, on the oak chest, stood a blue ironstone jug, and an old copper dairy-pan, polished till its hammered surface gleamed like silk. It was full of blue and purple pansies and wild yellow heartsease.
Whitescar had certainly not suffered from Lisa’s stewardship. I reflected, in passing, that Lisa had been wrong about Mrs Bates. Mrs Bates by no means disliked her; her attitude of armed neutrality was a faint reflection of the ferocious affection she had hurled at me. Anyone who could keep a house as Lisa had, had almost certainly won Mrs Bates’ loyalty, along with as lively a respect as a Northumbrian would care to accord a ‘foreigner’.
I went slowly up the wide oak staircase. The carpet was moss-green and thick; my feet made no sound. I turned along the landing which made a gallery to one side of the hall. At the end of it a window looked over the garden.
Here was the door. Oak, too, with shallow panels sunk in their bevelled frames. I put out a finger and ran it silently down the bevel.
The landing was full of sunlight. A bee was trapped, and blundering, with a deep hum, against the window. The sound was soporific, dreamy, drowning time. It belonged to a thousand summer afternoons, all the same, long, sun-drenched, lazily full of sleep . . .
Time ran down to nothing; stood still; ran back . . .
What did they call those queer moments of memory? Déjà vu? Something seen before, in a dream perhaps? In another life I had stood here, facing this door, with my finger on the carving that, surely, I knew as well as the skin on my own hands . . . ?
The moment snapped. I turned, with a sharp little movement, and thrust open the casement beside me. The bee bumbled foolishly about for a moment or two, then shot off into the sunlight like a pebble from a sling. I latched the window quietly behind it, then turned and knocked at the door.
Matthew Winslow was wide awake, and watching the door.
He lay, not on the bed, but on a broad, old-fashioned sofa near the window. The big bed, covered with a white honeycomb quilt, stood against the further wall. The room was large, with the massive shiny mahogany furniture dear to the generation before last, and a thick Indian carpet. The windows were charming, long and latticed, and wide open to the sun and the sound of the river at the foot of the garden. A spray of early Albertine roses hung just outside the casement, and bees were busy there. For all its thick carpet, cluttered ornaments, and heavy old furniture, the room smelt fresh, of sunshine and the roses on the wall.
On a small table beside the bed were three photographs. One was of Con, looking dramatically handsome in an open-necked shirt, with some clever lighting throwing the planes of his face into relief. Another, I guessed, was Julie; a young, eager face with vivid eyes and a tumble of fair, fine hair. I couldn’t see the third from where I stood.
But all this was for a moment no more than a fleeting impression. What caught and held the eye was the figure of the old man reclining against the cushions on the sofa with a plaid rug across his knees.
Matthew Winslow was a tall, gaunt old man with a thick mane of white hair, which had once been fair. His eyes, puckered now and sunken under prominent brows, were grey-green; they had once been exactly the same colour as my own; now the edges of the iris had faded, but the eyes still looked bright and hard as a young man’s. His mouth, too, was hard, a thin line between the deep parallels that drove from nostril to jawline. It would have been, for all its craggy good looks, a forbidding face, had it not been for a gleam of humour that lurked somewhere near the corners of mouth and eyes. One would certainly not, at first glance, take Matthew Winslow for a man who needed to b
e guarded from anything. He looked as tough as pemmican, and nobody’s fool.
In response to his gruff summons I had entered the room, and shut the door quietly behind me. There was a pause of complete stillness, in which the buzzing of the bees among the pink roses sounded as loud as a flight of aircraft.
I said: ‘Grandfather?’ on a note of painful hesitation.
His voice was harsh when he spoke, and the words uncompromising, but I had seen him wet his lips and make the attempt twice. ‘Well, Annabel?’
There was surely, I thought confusedly, some sort of precedent for this, the prodigal’s return? He ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him . . .
Well, Matthew Winslow couldn’t run. That left me.
I went quickly across the room and knelt down beside the sofa, and put my hands on his lap, on top of the plaid rug. His thin hand, with its prominent, blue-knotted veins, came down hard over mine, surprisingly strong and warm.
In the end it was easy to know what to say. I said quite simply: ‘I’m sorry, Grandfather. Will you have me back?’
The hand moved, holding mine together even more tightly. ‘If I said no,’ said Grandfather crisply, ‘it would be no more than you deserve.’ He cleared his throat violently. ‘We thought you were dead.’
‘I’m sorry.’
His other hand reached forward and lifted my chin. He studied my face, turning it towards the light of the window. I bit my lip and waited, not meeting his gaze. He said nothing for a long time, then, as harshly as before: ‘You’ve been unhappy. Haven’t you?’
I nodded. He let me go, and at last I was able to put my forehead down on the rug, so that he couldn’t see my face. He said: ‘So have we,’ and fell silent again, patting my hand.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Con’s portrait, the fine mouth just moving into that smile of his, full of challenge, and something that was more than mischief; an exciting, and, yes, a dangerous face. Well, Con, it was done now, all behind me, the burned boats, the Rubicons. We were over Becher’s Brook, the Canal Turn, the lot, and into the straight. Home.
Con’s eyes watched. What good would it do now to lift my head and say: ‘Your beloved Con’s betraying you. He’s paying me to come and pretend I’m your grand-daughter, because he thinks you’ll die soon, and he wants your money, and your place.’ And something in me, some little voice I’d never listened to before, added: ‘And once he’s made certain of that, I wouldn’t give twopence for your life, Grandfather, I wouldn’t really . . .’
I stayed where I was, not speaking.
The old man said nothing. The bees had gone. A small bird flew into the roses by the open window; I heard the flirt of its wings, and the tap and swish of the twigs as it alighted.
At length I lifted my head, and smiled at him. He removed his hands, and looked at me under the thrust of his brows. If there had been any sign of emotion in his face, it had been banished now.
‘Get a chair.’ He spoke abruptly. ‘And sit where I can see you.’
I obeyed him. I chose an upright chair, and sat correctly and rather primly on it, knees and feet together, back straight, hands in lap, like a small girl about to recite her catechism.
I thought I saw a glimmer of appreciation in his eyes. ‘Well?’ he said. Without moving, he seemed all at once to sit up straighter, even to tower over me. ‘You’ve got a lot of talking to do, girl. Supposing you start.’
7
Some men has plenty money and no brains, and some men has plenty brains and no money. Surely men with plenty money and no brains were made for men with plenty brains and no money.
From the Notebook of the Tichborne Claimant.
‘Well?’ said Lisa softly, like an echo.
She was waiting at the foot of the stairs. A shaft of sunlight through the hall window dazzled along the edge of the copper bowl of pansies. She had her back to the light, and I couldn’t see her expression, but even in the one softly uttered word I could hear some of the trembling uncertainty she had showed in the kitchen. ‘How did it go off?’
I had paused when I saw her waiting, and now came reluctantly down the stairs.
‘All right. Far better than I’d have expected.’
She gave her withdrawn, close-lipped smile. It was as if, with this quiet lying-in-wait, these careful whispers, she was deliberately putting me back where I belonged; inside a dusty little cell of conspiracy, able to share my thoughts and hopes only with herself and Con, bound to them in a reluctant but unbreakable intimacy.
She said: ‘I told you there was nothing to be afraid of.’
‘I know. But I suppose conscience makes cowards of us all.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. A quotation. Shakespeare.’
She looked faintly resentful, as she had in the kitchen when Con and I had seemed to be moving too fast for her. Perhaps the quotation irked her, or the realisation that I hadn’t come from Grandfather’s room bursting with confidence; or perhaps she didn’t like to be reminded that I had once had a conscience. At any rate she slammed the door of the conspirators’ cell hard on me once again. ‘You’re very literary today. You want to be careful. It isn’t in character.’
I smiled. ‘I’ve had plenty time to settle down and improve my mind abroad.’
‘Hm. He didn’t – he wasn’t suspicious at all?’
‘No.’ I spoke a little wearily. ‘It’s exactly as you and Con foretold. There’s no reason why he should be. It never even entered his head.’
She pursed her lips with satisfaction. ‘Well, what did happen?’
My mind went back to the scene upstairs. Well, they couldn’t buy everything.
I said slowly: ‘You can have the main outlines, if you like. I told him where I’d been since I left here, and how I’d been living. You know we’d arranged to tell the simple truth about that, as much as possible.’
‘Did he say much about . . . the trouble? The reason why you went?’
‘If you mean the baby, he never mentioned it until I did. I simply told him I’d been mistaken, and that I’d found out my mistake after I’d gone abroad. And of course I never wrote to tell him so, since I’d no idea that Con had told him about it, and that he’d been worrying. That was all. He was so relieved, and . . . oh, well, skip that. I was quite right, you know, Lisa. It would have been unforgivable to tell him anything else. As it is, we can forget all that part of the story. I don’t suppose he’ll refer to it again.’
‘And Con?’ Her voice had lifted perceptibly.
‘I tried to make it clear that, whatever had happened in the past, nothing in the world would persuade me to – well, to take up with Con again.’ I saw the look in her face, and added smoothly: ‘That, of course, was to protect Con and myself. It was quite possible, you know, that Grandfather was nursing some hopes of a reconciliation. I had to insist that there could never be anything between Con and myself except—’ I hesitated ‘– you might call it armed neutrality.’
‘I see. Yes, that would have been—’ She stopped. That conspirator’s look again. ‘I’m sure you’re right. There was nothing more? Nothing about the – the future?’
‘Nothing at all.’
She looked about her. ‘Well, you can’t say much more just now, that’s obvious. He’ll be coming down soon. Later tonight, when we’re alone, you can tell me all that was said.’
‘Make my report? No,’ I said gently.
Her mouth opened, with as much surprise as if I had struck her. ‘What d’you mean? You surely don’t think that you can—’
‘You probably wouldn’t understand what I mean. But let’s put it like this. I’ve a difficult rôle to play, and the only way to play it is to be it, to live in it, breathe it, think it, try to dream it. In other words, not to have to keep stepping out of Annabel’s skin to remember that I’m just someone pretending to be Annabel. I can’t act this thing in a series of little scenes, Lisa, with commentaries to you and Con in the intervals. If there’s anything vital, or if
I should want your help, believe me, I won’t hesitate to come to you. But the biggest help you can both give me is simply to forget all that’s happened in the last three weeks, and think of me, if you can, just as Annabel, come back to take my accustomed place in my own home. If you keep asking me questions, jerking me back out of my part into the part of Mary Grey, impostor . . . Well, then, Lisa, some day I may get my parts mixed up, and go wrong. And I could go very wrong indeed, very easily.’
I paused, and added, lightly enough: ‘Well, there it is. Forget Mary Grey. Forget she ever existed. Believe me, I’m right. This is the only way to take it.’
She said doubtfully: ‘Well, yes, but . . .’
I laughed. ‘Oh, Lisa, stop looking at me as if you were Frankenstein, and the monster had just got away from you! I’m only talking common sense! And you’ve only to remember that Con and I are mutually committed, even to the extent of signing those deadly little “confessions” for each other to keep, just in case. I’ve no doubt Con keeps mine next to his skin, day and night. Call it remote control if you like, but it’s there! Even if Annabel Winslow is home again, at least you know that she’d got to bat on Con’s side this time!’
‘I – well, yes, of course. Forgive me, I didn’t really doubt you, but this afternoon has been disconcerting, to say the least. You . . . you’re so very good at this. I’ve been the one to be nervous.’
‘I assure you, I’m quaking inside! It’s all right. I won’t double-cross you, you know, Lisa, even if I dared.’
‘Dared?’
I didn’t answer, and after a moment her eyes dropped. ‘Well, that’s that, then. And you’re quite right. I’ll try and do as you say, and forget it all, unless there’s anything urgent. But it certainly doesn’t look as if you’re going to need much help, my dear. If you got away with that—’ A movement of her head towards the upper landing completed the sentence for her.
