The Hayburn Family

by Guy McCrone

  “Why not, Lucy? I’ve been like this before, and I’ll be like this again. It’s nasty, but it’s natural. All I have to do is to stay here in my room. If I feel like food, I’ll have it sent up.”

  “But Robin will be left alone.”

  “Well? That has happened before, too. The servants will look after him. He has his books. He’ll be all right.”

  “But, Phœbe—”

  “Lucy! Please! This head of mine can’t stand arguments. And Henry says he needs you.” So that was that. And yet Lucy’s reluctant going had left Phœbe wondering a little.

  During that warm morning she had lain in a restful twilight made by lowered blinds and half-drawn curtains. The windows they cloaked were open. Now and then a light breeze caused the hangings to move. Outside noises came to her. The cackle of farm hens from across the still fields. Heavy gardeners’ boots beneath her window. The snip of garden scissors. The bellowing of a bull somewhere in the far distance. Sounds of the summer. Later, she had heard a servant come from the house, heard the click as she arranged Robin’s chair, heard the girl exchange a joke with the young gardener, then heard Robin’s brief thanks and his assurance that he had all he needed.

  What happened next she could not recall. But she must have slept for a time, she supposed, since about three o’clock she had wakened up, feeling better. She remembered the hot afternoon stillness.

  She got up, crossed to a window, and turned back an edge of the blind to look down and see what Robin was doing. Usually, at this time of day he drowsed a little, his chair shaded by the birches. But now he was wide awake, sitting upright and looking about him. Phœbe was about to pull up the blind and call through the open window, asking why he was so lively, when, on a sudden impulse, she decided to leave him, turned away, and went to bathe and dress herself.

  Something, she did not later remember what, had left her restless. She had wandered from room to room thereafter, persuading herself that she, the mistress, must see that everything was in order.

  Stephen and Lucy’s room. Idly she examined Lucy’s toilet silver, wondering at its luxury. It had never been her wish to have anything so expensive, so handsome for herself. She picked up Lucy’s crystal flagons of perfumes and lotions, taking out the stoppers and smelling the contents like an inquisitive little girl. She had felt tepid, a little, towards Stephen and his wife. Their gods were neither her gods, nor were they Henry’s. But they were easy, pleasant guests. And his brother’s presence, she had kept telling herself, must be of some comfort to Henry in these days of Robin’s illness.

  Now her husband’s workroom and study. Henry’s work-table was in its usual confusion. A T-square. A drawing-board with paper pinned to it. Technical magazines. Sheets of script. Henry could not keep his work away from his home. Absently she picked up a blueprint lying unrolled on the table. She saw it had something to do with a ship’s engine, but could make nothing more of it.

  As she made to put it back, she saw that it had been lying over a large square envelope upon which, in pencil, Henry’s impatient hand had scrawled “Robin”. Reaching for it, she found it was unsealed and appeared to be much thumbed.

  Making a clear space on the table, Phœbe sat down in her husband’s work-chair and shook out the contents. These were pages cut from magazines containing the three or four stories that Robin had succeeded in publishing. Some poems. A few letters beginning: “My dear Father”.

  So Henry was keeping these things; treasuring now, in spite of all, the results of his son’s unwelcome gift. Knowing her husband, she understood why. Understood, too, why he had kept them without telling her. Henry was like that. But she could read nothing now. Perhaps later. Phœbe folded them together, slipped them back into their envelope, laid it down, and drew the blueprint over it.

  Robin’s room. Full of everything that was Robin’s. His books, his prints, his rug of tartan rags before the fireplace. Her own photograph in the middle of the mantelpiece.

  She had given him the old Viennese photograph of his real mother now that the truth had been told to him. It seemed to fascinate him endlessly. It lay, she knew, in a drawer of his writing-table, for he had taken it out more than once to ask questions about that pert, smiling girl who had given him life. Phœbe had forced herself to hide her instinctive dislike of these questions, but now she slid the drawer open.

  As she picked it up, she found that it overlay yet another photograph, a photograph she had never seen before. One of an odd-looking young woman in queer monkish clothing, strangely beautiful in her way, with her cropped curls and her regular, vivid features. Phœbe hung over this for a time. She did not need to be told whose picture this was. But at last she put it back, glanced again at that Viennese girl, then she closed the drawer and went.

  A bumble-bee was humming over a bowl of roses on the upper landing. There, downstairs, the sunshine, striking through the open door, made a square of white light on the rug and tiles of the front hall. The half-grown house spaniel, a present for Robin from his Uncle Mungo Moorhouse’s kennels at Duntrafford, lay in the shadow, just beyond this hot square, panting and snapping at flies. Seeing her above him, he beat the floor lazily with a stump of black tail, his eyes imploring her not to expect him to go for a walk until the day grew cooler.

  Now, perhaps, she might go out and have a look at Robin. Phœbe took two steps downwards, then, thinking she heard a footfall in the drive, and disliking the thought of meeting strangers, remounted, and turned back quickly into her room.

  III

  It was still in semi-darkness. She went once more to the window and turned back the blind, making again a chink to spy through. She had wanted, she remembered, to be sure that no one had come to trouble Robin.

  It was then that she saw her. Saw the young woman of the photograph, as she crossed the sunlit lawn, her slim figure draped to the ground in clothing such as no woman would ever dare to affect here in this self-conscious country. And the photograph had given no hint of these vivid colours; of the fairness of that head; of that glowing skin.

  Phœbe watched her move across the grass, watched Robin stretch out his arms in welcome, then watched her bend down to catch him up into her own.

  A moment later she was kneeling by him and they were talking, happy and excited.

  These pictures would forever be with Phœbe, together with the memory of how, when she had dropped the blind and withdrawn back into her room, her heart was beating quickly. She had been the unseen witness to a strange, bewildering happening. What was its meaning? Was it that she had seen Henry’s son reach vainly for the things that were his birthright? Reach for a young man’s morning hopes and their bright fulfilment? Hopes that now he must leave behind him? Phœbe could not define such things. But there were times when her instinct told her.

  She had been strangely shaken, she remembered, sitting there in the dim light. Yet strangely, too, it was neither anger nor jealousy that had shaken her. But now, what should she do? Robin, it seemed, had known of and wished for this visit. And his behaviour towards the visitor had told of his joy at seeing her. Should she, Phœbe, go downstairs and ask her to stay for a time? Should she present herself and thus make regular this stolen meeting? And yet, perhaps, they would not want it so. They had, she reflected, expected herself to be away. And what would Henry have to say, if, coming home, he found this girl still with them?

  He had not told her much about his son’s adventure. There had been outlines, that was all. And she had guessed her husband’s reasons. It would have exposed old scars, old unhappinesses better left forgotten.

  But now, at least, every prompting told her to leave these two down there alone.

  She could not remember how long she had been sitting in the darkened bedroom, but when once again she rose and crossed to the window, Robin’s visitor was bidding him goodbye.

  Phœbe stood once more upon the upper landing, listening until the receding steps were gone, then, having waited some moments longer, she picked up her sewing
and went downstairs into the sunshine.

  IV

  Robin lay back against his cushions. His eyes were closed, but a half-smile came and went, and his face was flushed a little. She had crossed the lawn so quietly that he did not open his eyes until he heard the wicker chair creak as she sat down beside him.

  “Hullo, Mother. Head better?”

  “Yes, thanks.” Phœbe took out her work. She was determined to say nothing if he did not.

  Robin lay watching as she chose a coloured thread.

  “Your mother is turning into a blind old woman,” she said, aiming it without success at the eye of a needle.

  She heard his chuckle. “Oh, don’t fumble, Mother! Give it to me. You’re not blind. It’s impatience that’s always been your trouble!”

  She looked about her as he threaded it. The birches with their pale, slim trunks and their frail branches, hanging motionless in the breathless afternoon. She looked across at this house that had not yet had time to feel like home. She watched Robin’s young spaniel, who had decided, after all, to leave the cool of the front hall, and was now flouncing joyfully towards them.

  “There, Mother.”

  “Thank you.” She received the needle from him, took up her work and bent over it.

  “I had a visitor this afternoon,” she heard him saying presently.

  “Yes,” she said without raising her head to look at him. “I saw her from the window.”

  “Uncle Stephen and Aunt Lucy met her at the Exhibition. She’s been sent by an American paper to do descriptions. She’s a writer. She’s the friend I had in Mentone. But I daresay you’ve heard about her.”

  Phœbe continued to sew. “Yes. I’ve heard about her,” she said. And as Robin lay saying nothing more, she added: “Is she coming again to see you? Do you want me to invite her?”

  He thought a little before he said: “No, Mother. She came to say goodbye.” And presently: “No. Everything is finished.” And then, as though to reassure the troubled eyes that had been turned to search his own: “But I’m glad she came. Now I feel quite happy.”

  She had bent again to her work, she remembered, with feelings of relief. Whatever he had felt, Robin was now contented.

  V

  Yes. It was difficult, later, to recapture quite completely the mood of that long, almost Italian, summer. A procession of sun-drenched days moving at last towards a golden autumn. Days that seemed to wait, suspended in time, which, if they could not be happy, still seemed to hold their own strange peace.

  But she could recall how the web of her existence had been shot with bright threads of joy for the child that was to come; with dark threads of pain at the thought of Robin’s going.

  And the visitor who came to him on that still afternoon? Whose coming, he had said, had left him happy? And the part that she had played in Robin’s sorry story?

  There was, of course, the harsh, the Moorhouse answer.

  But Phœbe’s untamed heart refused this rigid judgment, even though it might at the same time refuse to tell her why. Nor did it tell her why she had chosen to cloak Denise’s coming in silence and compassion; schooling memory to see her forever kneeling there by Robin as a haunting, summer dream.

  Other B&W Titles by Guy McCrone

  WAX FRUIT

  AUNT BEL

  Copyright

  First published 1952

  This edition published 1996

  by Black & White Publishing Ltd

  29 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh EH6 6JL

  www.blackandwhitepublishing.com

  This electronic edition published in 2014

  ISBN: 978 1 84502 833 6 in EPub format

  ISBN: 978 1 87363 158 4 in paperback format

  Copyright © Guy McCrone 1996

  The right of Guy McCrone to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Ebook compilation by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay