by Sue Gee
School fell away. From high on the moor, on the clear summer days, he could see the distant buildings of the town, which he visited only for provisions, rumbling in on the bus. Sometimes, passing the shut-up gates, he saw some of the boys, out of uniform.
‘Afternoon, sir.’
‘Afternoon, McNulty. Hindmarsh.’
He put bread and cold meat and groceries into a bag and rode home. The bus was full of holiday-makers. After supper, he lit the lamp and settled to writing once more.
There’s a great big moth just come in at the door, I think it might be a Puss Moth . . .
The letters gave shape to the days, comforted and uplifted him as nothing else had done. He saw her bright intent face as she read of the otter, the larks, the fat lambs taken down to market, the bubbling call of the curlew, which was everywhere now. It all went in, with news of their families, the only people he could tolerate. Dad’s had a commission from a house outside Haydon Bridge, quite a grand place, he says. They want a new sideboard, something modern. He says everyone’s after Art Deco now.
Sometimes, visiting his parents, he almost gave them her love.
He packed boxes of vegetables to take them for Sunday lunch in Birley Bank, or to take to her parents for Saturday supper in Cawbeck. Not that they were really in need, with their own well-tended gardens, but still – he knew that they liked it. On Saturdays he took the bus out across country: the windows open, the summery wind blowing in from across the fields. In Cawbeck village, he walked slowly in the afternoon heat, along to grassy Church Lane, and through the churchyard. Tall cow parsley was fading now in high summer, but the scent of it hung in the air. Up on the moor there was only the heather and gorse.
Margaret Coulter, née Ridley, beloved wife of Steven
19th June 1912-3rd December 1936
I set gorse on your grave, my love, just a few sprigs in a jar, as you used to have it in the kitchen, and I felt you so close beside me. They’ve put sheep in the churchyard again, and the grass is cropped neat round your stone . . .
Andrew Ridley was home for the long vacation, talking more easily now: of his finals coming up, of his lodgings, his tutors; of criminal law, of something called tort. They had supper out in the garden, the four of them, where there should have been five. The cat came prowling out of the flowerbeds, sometimes with a mouse or a vole. Bats flitted about as the sun went down, and the scent of roses was everywhere.
‘Take some home with you, Steven.’
Her mother wrapped them in newspaper, wet at the stems. Back at the cottage, he put them in one of the stone jars they’d found in a cupboard when they moved in, and set it on the washstand, once filled with that terrible blood. The scent filled the room like a prayer, or benediction.
Your mother has sent me home with roses again. They’re up in our bedroom, darling.
He washed, went to bed, took her into his arms.
The town was almost empty now, everyone gone to the coast. Long summer days by the sea.
I’m thinking of that time we walked out to Lindisfarne from Alnwick, and almost got cut off by the tide.
He was cut off by the tide now, and on many days had no desire at all to return.
It’s just us, as it used to be, darling.
The town was very hot, away from the moor’s cooling breeze.
Just us, just us . . .
But there was Miss Aickman, walking with her basket along Market Street, stopping in the Square and greeting him. He almost jumped. Yes, he was keeping well, thanks, and hoped she was, too.
‘And there’s Mr Embleton,’ she said suddenly, and he turned and saw him, in jacket and open shirt, walking down through the Square and waving. A young woman was beside him: tall, in a straight green dress and straw hat.
‘Steven!’ Frank was striding up. ‘Miss Aickman, good to see you.’
Introductions, smiles, Frank so easy and kind. ‘Our school secretary. My friend Steven Coulter. My friend Margot Heslop.’
She held out her hand with a smile. ‘How do you do?’
Dark hair was visible beneath the rim of pale straw; she carried herself as if a book lay flat upon her head. She was Margot, not Margaret, and Frank had mentioned her before, but the name was close enough for his stomach to do a nosedive.
‘How do you do?’ He took her hand awkwardly, and at once released it.
Then Miss Aickman said she must be off, and the three of them stood there in the shade of the trees, Frank saying how he’d hoped he might see him, and how was he, and do please come up one day this week, come up tomorrow for lunch, everyone was there. Margot would be joining them. He touched her arm lightly; she gave him a smile.
‘That’s very kind.’ Steven floundered for an excuse. ‘May we leave it for a day or two? I’m a bit – well – I’m keeping to myself at present.’
‘Of course.’ Frank gave his own easy smile. ‘Just come when you can.’
And they said their goodbyes, and he turned away from them.
Was he tipping a bit towards madness? Unable to make conversation with a woman just because of her name? Unable to accept an invitation? He was too much alone, they all said it: his parents, her parents. But he’d been an only child, he reminded them all, he was used to solitude. In the long summer holidays of his boyhood, he’d often been out alone day after day, with his dog and his sandwich, walking lanes high with cow parsley and rose bay willow herb, meeting no one but a farm worker, or pony and trap, clip-clopping along in the heat.
This is different, Steven, love.
It was. But those days had made it possible for him to be alone now. To long to be alone with her, just the two of them.
You need to be with people sometimes, it’s not good for anyone—
Andrew Ridley came up, bringing a cake from his mother: they went walking together, taking bread and cheese. That felt good, because he was a part of her. They talked again about Edinburgh, Andrew hoping to get articles in the autumn with a firm in Prince Street.
‘You don’t want to come back here, then?’
‘We’ll see. Edinburgh’s a good place to start.’
They ate their lunch near the Roman fort, saw a line of young men in uniform marching down the hillside. Back at the cottage, he made tea and they polished off most of the fruit cake. The moment he’d seen Andrew off at the bus stop, walking back up the stony track in the dusk, he was writing again.
Andrew was here this afternoon – we walked out to the fort. Caught sight of a group of the Fusiliers, out on exercise . . .
The evenings grew shorter; wind whipped over the moor. He got out his books, from the case beneath the clock. For a morning it felt as if he’d never seen them before. Then Romans and raids and monasteries began to tick away in him as he looked at the syllabus; he planned lessons, pulled out a book about Bede, pulled out more about Henry VIII, for the Upper Fifth. Wolsey in power; the breach with Rome. He knew that he had to go back to school. Not once since her death had he ever thought he would leave, except in the week leading up to the funeral. Then, he had thought he would never do anything, ever again.
I’m getting ready for term as usual, darling . . .
And he knew that once it all began he probably wouldn’t write to her again. Not like this, with this sweet, comforting intensity. On the last day, before the first staff meeting, he put all the letters in a pile, and re-read them. Then he put them into a brown foolscap envelope and kissed it, and tucked it into the bookcase, next to her childhood copy of Jane Eyre.
He climbed the stairs to bed, took her into his arms once more; lay with the window open, looking out at the last summer stars.
Part Three
1
Another foul wet autumn afternoon. But here, in the drawing room – music! Diana’s fair head was bowed over the cello, skinny little George held his violin aloft, and Margot, now and then, caug
ht sight of her hands and dark hair reflected in the upraised lid of the grand. Half-past three, but the fire and the lamps were lit and the room shone against the rain sweeping across the garden and beating against the tall squared window panes.
The last bars faded. They were still for a moment. Then Diana sighed, George lowered his bow, and Margot turned on the piano stool to look at them.
‘Yes?’
‘I think so.’
‘Can we just take that from letter K?’
‘If we do it any more we’ll have nothing left for tonight.’ George almost shook himself, like a shivering little animal, and walked across to where the violin case lay open on a chair. His feet in scuffed brogues sounded loud, then soft, moving from board to rug. He laid down his violin, and closed the lid.
Whimpering and scratching came from outside the door. He tiptoed over, flung it wide.
‘My friend!’
‘Oh, George! You’ve made him jump.’
He bent to the sleek black head.
‘In you come.’
Wag wag, patter patter, over to the fire.
‘Good dog, that’s it.’ He flung himself into the wing chair and patted the seat. A black nose poked in, a head squeezed adoringly against his thigh. George leaned back, patting the sleek coat, closing his eyes. ‘Any chance of tea?’
‘I expect you’d like us to make it.’ Margot closed her score. Diana was resting her cello on its stand, wiping the bow.
‘How kind.’
It was freezing out in the hall. ‘Must light the fire after tea.’ They hurried down the passage, with its row of bells which nobody rang any more, and into the kitchen. A huge room to heat, but warmer in here with the range. The big black kettle hummed.
‘Are you nervous?’ Diana pulled out a tray from the rack.
‘I’m always nervous.’ Margot opened the pantry door. An ice-house. ‘You know I am,’ she said, and then: ‘I can almost see my breath.’ She drew a covered half fruit cake from a shelf and came out shivering, closing the door behind her with her foot.
‘It never shows. And George always pretends he’s not.’ Diana put a cotton-lace cloth on the tray, set out cups and saucers, pulled open a rattling drawer for knives and teaspoons. She’d been coming here since childhood, knew every shelf and cupboard. There had been Nanny, then, of course. Nanny and Miss Renner.
The day nursery had beeen made into a schoolroom; the four of them sat round the table, Miss Renner at the top in a high-backed chair. Maths books, poetry anthologies, a globe. French conversation.
‘Bonjour, mes enfants.’
‘Bonjour, mademoiselle!’
Miss Renner had a fiancé, she told them, fighting in France. Captain Gibson. She pinned little flags in the map on the wall, to show them important places. As the years went by, so the pins moved. Liege. Ypres. Neuve-Chapelle. Loos. Verdun. The Somme. None of them ever forgot the Somme.
‘Shall we have toast?’
They carried it all back to the drawing room, the grandfather clock in the hall just striking four, the rain going on and on.
‘What good girls you are.’
‘Make yourself useful and put another log on.’
The Hepplewick Trio, taking tea. George had come up with the name.
‘This is where we met, where it all began.’
Margot Heslop, Diana Embleton, George Liddell.
‘Frank would have made it a quartet.’
‘But Frank isn’t musical, is he?’
‘Political.’
A general sigh.
Hepplewick Hall lay well back from a quiet lane, the entrance shielded by trees. A broad, left-curving drive swept up to a flag-stoned terrace. The house was elegant, built of stone, with tall chimneys, and the plans which William Newton had drawn up in 1761 were still kept in the bank in Morpeth. Newton had grafted the house on to the fifteenth-century pele tower, empty and looming. Margot’s father said he wasn’t sure if you could graft something grand on to something much simpler, but that was the word they all used.
Once, the Hall had had staff: generations of Heslops had rung those bells, summoning cook, parlour maid, footman. Grooms had run out at the arrival of carriages, horses had clip-clopped over the stable-yard. One of them, a tall black hunter, had a portrait up in the dining room, whose walls were hung with Heslops: Margot’s father said it was good enough to be a Stubbs.
These days a Ford Model T stood in a loose box. There were no horses, and almost no staff at all, for in the 1930s the idea of service had given way to the idea of work – when you could get work. It was only the gardener, old Barrow, whose name they’d long since stopped laughing about, who’d been here for ever and still came up twice a week, with Mrs Barrow. She cleaned, and sometimes cooked, while he worked in the kitchen garden, tended the rose beds and the beehive, heaped up bonfires, mowed the endless lawn.
A towering cedar stood on the grass, on the right of the curving drive, and darkened the fine casement windows at the front, but no one had ever wished that cedar gone: generations of Heslops had taken tea in its shade on summer days; a swing still hung there.
‘Push harder! I want to go high!’
They took it in turns, out in the garden after lunch, whenever it was fine. Frank was the tallest, the most in demand as a pusher, strong as a horse at seven, able to bat the ball which Miss Renner threw right into the shrubbery.
‘I’ll get it!’
‘No, me!’
Margot – ‘tall for a girl’ as Miss Renner said, and she herself lean and rangy – went racing over the grass, little George hurtling after. Dreamy Diana stood dreaming.
Cricket and croquet and the swing. And races.
‘Go!’
Down from the sundial and over the lawn, down to the ha-ha, quite a long way. Capability Brown had put it in, riding over from Capheaton in his carriage on a hot afternoon in the summer of 1762, walking with Sir Thomas Heslop over the unmade ground: that was how Miss Renner thought it might have been. Sir Thomas had made his money in coal. He wanted something to show for it: grand house, grand garden. Brown’s elegant plans, too, were kept in the vault in Morpeth.
The children stood on the edge of the ha-ha, panting. Slow-moving cattle grazed the field on the other side. Frank almost always won.
And at the end of the afternoon, the pony and trap came for him and Diana to take them back to Great Whitton, and another for George, to clip-clop him home to Coquet Bridge. Miss Renner went to clear everything away in the schoolroom, and Margot ran looking for her mother.
‘Here I am, darling.’
Up in the broad airy bedroom, up at her dressing table, fastening an earring, smiling at the reflection of her daughter as she came running in, over the blue and green rug. They leaned together, watching the endless images of themselves in the triple glass.
‘So many of us!’
Often, before bed, her mother would play the piano. Sometimes she sang.
‘Now the day is over,
Night is drawing nigh;
Shadows of the evening
Steal across the sky . . .’
The grandfather clock in the hall struck the hour. Margot leaned against the piano and watched the shadows lengthen over the garden.
When it rained – and it rained a good deal – they played inside, allowed in the drawing room to read on the window seat, dress dolls in the corner, spread soldiers on the floor. Miss Renner talked again of her fiancé. She played them marching songs on the piano, singing away. ‘Pack up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’, ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’, ‘Here we are, Here we are again!’
They stamped up and down, they sang as the rain poured on. Sometimes the songs were gentle and sad, not war songs at all: ‘The Eriskay Love Lilt’, ‘Loch Lomond’.
‘And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye . . .’
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The Scots had always raided, and the Northumbrians raided back. The pele tower had been built so strong that no Scot could get in there: that was what Margot’s father told her, and she told the others, thinking pele was spelled peal, and thinking of bells.
Alone in the great big drawing room, she ran her fingers over the piano keys. She gazed at Miss Renner’s music, and at her mother’s, turning the pages. She banged about, she loved it. When she was six, she began to have lessons. By the time she was seven, they knew she was going to be good.
By then, her mother had stopped doing pretty things at her dressing table, or playing the piano in the evenings. She was lying in bed all the time.
‘But I want to see her!’
‘Later, my duck. Mummy’s resting now.’
When Margot was eight, it was 1916. That was the year her mother died, and when Miss Renner pulled her on to her lap and rocked her, she was sobbing not only for Evelyn Heslop but for Edward Gibson, who had taken a lock of her hair to France, and written letters beginning My darling Emily (she pressed the page to her lips), and died in the Battle of the Somme.
‘For me and my true love will never meet again . . .’
They never sang ‘Loch Lomond’ after that. They looked away from the bright little flag on the map. And after that everything changed. Frank and George went off to prep school, Miss Renner stayed bravely on. But a motherless only-child could not be at home with a nanny and a governess for ever, even if there was another little girl sharing lessons.
In 1918, Margot and Diana were sent to boarding school. Thomas Heslop hugged them both to him as Barrow heaved their trunks up into the trap.
‘Please don’t cry.’
‘Don’t you cry, Daddy.’
They clip-clopped away down the autumn lanes.
‘Here we be, Miss Heslop.’
They held hands as they looked at the long flight of steps.
