‘This was your plan from the beginning.’ I croaked, whitely.
He could not have heard my words but he inferred my thought. ‘Yes, it was always my intention,’ he bragged. ‘You would have sold your soul for nothing.’
Then his car roared away up the street. My legs gave way and I sank to the ground. But my spirit did not fail me. ‘I have not sold my soul,’ I whispered to myself, ‘I have saved it.’
‘Yes,’ Kenneth said, helping me to my feet, ‘you have.’
August turned in to September. I was busy in the shop and in the evenings Awan and I sat in our attic room at the Plough together. We read books or sewed, and were content. The weather remained clement, warm days and nights with a thrilling chill of autumn. We kept our window open. The breeze from across the moor was fresh and clean, and made us realise how stagnant and confined the precincts of Tall Chimneys had been. We did not go there, it held nothing for us. What devastation the fire and then the roof collapse might have wreaked was beyond my imagination. The wanton destruction Ratton’s men might have caused salvaging the furniture and chattels could only have made a bad thing worse. I mourned the gatehouse, but wished Colonel Beverage’s sister-in-law happiness in it; it was indeed a peaceful tower, a refuge for a woman battling demons if ever there was one.
Awan and I visited Casterton School and met with Enid Makepiece, the headmistress. She was a thin, upright person, her hair scraped unbecomingly into a small bun at the back of her neck, her clothes dour, but she engaged Awan in eager conversation, probing her gently to assess her level of competence, favourite books and particular enthusiasms. The girls at the school all seemed happy, the facilities good. It was situated in a small hamlet not unlike our own village, hard against the soft hills of the Yorkshire Dales. In the afternoon we walked to Ingleton falls, and Kenneth and Awan and I took off our shoes and stockings and paddled in the icy, gem-strewn water. The action awakened memory for both Kenneth and me. We exchanged a knowing glance across the tufted grass.
‘I think I’d like to try it,’ Awan said, on the journey home, ‘only, I’d be worried about you, Mummy. Won’t you be lonely?’
‘I will miss you,’ I said, ‘but I won’t be lonely. I’ll have Ann for company.’ Ann Widderington’s two sons had been offered council accommodation for their wives and families. She had offered me the rooms above the lambing shed where, in the war, the Land Army girls had lived.
Kenneth gave an odd cough, and said, ‘Give it a try, lass, if you like. If you don’t like it, you can come home.’
The following week Kenneth came back early, just as I was shutting up the shop and pulling the blind down on the newly puttied window. ‘Come for a walk with me,’ he said.
We walked without speaking along the village street, past the neat cottage gardens and the tidy yard of the farm. We came to the church and the gate into the graveyard.
‘Shall we visit Rose and John?’ I asked him, putting my hand on the catch.
‘Not today,’ he said, and motioned that we should continue. We passed the grey school and the playground. The Rectory looked deserted. ‘I wonder when Mrs Beverage’s sister will come,’ I mused.
‘I have been making the gatehouse ready for its new occupant,’ Kenneth offered.
‘Have you? Are there to be bars at the windows?’
He shook his head. ‘The new tenant has been imprisoned long enough,’ he said.
‘Does she come from an asylum, then?’ I asked, genuinely curious, but Kenneth just smiled.
We came to the entrance to the lane which led to the gatehouse, that ribbon of road across the narrow neck of moor. I hesitated. ‘I’m not sure I want to go that way,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we go down to Clough Farm?’ Its gateway stood almost opposite. ‘We can survey the old Land Army girls’ quarters,’ I said. ‘I might need you to do some repairs.’
‘Come this way,’ Kenneth said, motioning towards the gatehouse. ‘It will be all right.’
‘I suppose you want me to confront my ghosts,’ I remarked, following him along the rough track.
‘No,’ he said, and took my hand. It was an act both unprecedented and extraordinarily natural. His hand was firm and cool and surprisingly soft, considering the nature of his work. Mine, within it, felt small but very comfortable. We walked on together, along the road to Tall Chimneys, not speaking. We looked at the myriad colours of the moor, the soft olive of moss, the golden glory of bracken and the dusky purple heather. Tufted spikes of moorland grass fringed black bog, and granite cairns were peppered yellow with lichen. The sky above us was palest blue, empty of cloud. A curlew keened over towards the abandoned airfield, and the belt of trees stood guard around the corpse of the old house.
We approached the gatehouse. The boards had been removed from the upper windows and the crazed leading had been renewed. The windows were clean and clear of inveigling ivy, which had been clipped back neatly. Asters grew in pots along the path which led to the door. The old lean-to had been demolished. A two storey extension had taken its place. The tangled garden had been cleared; there was a hen house, a couple of raised vegetable beds, a greenhouse. I was vaguely envious, but it did no good to wish for what could not be.
We admired the garden for a while and then Kenneth took out a key and unlocked a brand new door. He opened it and ushered me inside. The new addition housed a small but well-fitted kitchen. There were herbs in pots on the window; scoured saucepans hung from hooks in the ceiling. The living room had been cleaned and painted; it was fresh and bright. The Weeks’ old furniture remained, polished to a high shine. Blue Willow crockery stood upon the dresser. There were flowers in a vase on the window ledge, new curtains. The old chairs had been reupholstered and set before the fire. The fire was laid with kindling and coal; matches stood ready to light it. The ghosts I had felt on the night Kenneth had found Awan seemed banished; I could feel no presence except our own - Kenneth’s and mine. All that had been between us from our childhood and since, and whatever was burgeoning now that at last I understood, filled the space to overflowing. It was wholesome and benign and yet strangely stirring - more than sufficient for that small room.
‘Look upstairs,’ Kenneth said. ‘See what you think.’
In the upper room the divan was made up with fresh sheets, the floor sanded, the walls papered. The westerly sun streamed in through the open window bringing the scents of the moor and the sound of birdsong.
It was perfect, just perfect, I thought, and envied the woman who would live there.
But then other details caught my eye. The paintings John had made of me after the death of Cameron Bentley had been framed and put up. My own belongings began to make themselves evident; my clothes hung on a rail in one corner, my quilt was folded at the foot of the bed. Those were my books on the shelf. I stepped into the newly formed room above the kitchen, a tiny bathroom where my toiletries had been placed, and a bale of new towels.
All the while Kenneth waited in the middle of the downstairs room. As wondrous as the gatehouse in its new colours was to me, it was he who formed the focus of my thoughts. Each delightful new discovery simply increased the intensity of my sense of the man waiting, patiently waiting, in the room downstairs. I had a vivid recollection of those times - years before - when John had stood where I now paused, and tried to see what was before him but found his mind inexorably drawn to a figure in the room below.
Slowly, I descended the stair. Kenneth remained still and implacable on the new rug, and said nothing, and, in doing so, as he always did, said everything there was to be said.
‘This,’ I said wonderingly, ‘is not for Mrs Beverage’s sister, is it?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It is for you. It is yours.’
I frowned and shook my head a little. ‘How..?’
Kenneth gave a sly grin. ‘Colonel Beverage has no sister in law, deranged or otherwise. He acted for me. Ratton wouldn’t have sold the place to me.’
I looked at him lost for words. He wore his wo
rking trousers and old boots. His shirt cuffs were turned back, his hands hung loosely by his side. His hair flopped, as it always had done, over his forehead. He returned my gaze, steadily. He was not, I realised, shy at all. He was not awkward or tongue-tied or taciturn. He was just contained, at peace with himself. He was sure of things and he didn’t need words to explain or justify them to anyone.
Of the two of us it was me, in fact, who struggled to speak. ‘And what…’ I began. ‘I mean, how…?’
‘Just as you like,’ he replied, easily. ‘You will live here, and work at the shop. You will be free, and safe and independent.’
‘And you…?’ I ventured.
He put his head on one side. ‘I will not be far away,’ he said.
‘And if I…?’
‘Yes,’ he said, and took the step or two which closed the gap between us, such a small gap, in the end, it proved to be. ‘Yes. If you want, we will.’
He put his arms out and held them there until I stepped into them. Then he cradled my head onto his shoulder. It felt comfortable and familiar and entirely natural to stand thus, saying nothing, saying everything; a whole volume in the quietness.
Down in the crater, Tall Chimneys would be in gloom and shadow, the trees blocking out the last rays of September sun. But at the gatehouse, it was light, still. The old stones of the building were warm and mellow and birds still busied in the trees. The soft wind came across the moor and made the ivy quiver with pleasure.
Epilogue - 2010
Sometimes, when Grandma Wyman had drunk too many Martinis, she got to talking about the old house. She’d lived in the new ranch-house for thirty years, and in the old one for twenty years before that, but, to her, the house in Yorkshire where she’d spent her childhood was ‘home’. Grandpapa Wyman was a Texan to his bone, with a big hat and a Texan swagger and a well-head of oil spouting from his acres of Texan prairie. But Grandma called herself a Yorkshire-woman until the day she died. She said Yorkshire was ‘God’s own County’, something that never sat easy with Texans, who think God, like them, has no interest in anything beyond the pan-handle.[20]
I was the only one of her grandchildren who would stay behind to listen to her talk - the other boys would likely be off at the stables or down at the swimming hole - but I was always different from them. I liked the way she talked; her voice thin and clipped, the words bitten neatly off one by one, instead of chewed, like tobacco. To my childish mind she was a mix of the British Queen and Mary Poppins; all-knowing, poised, kind in a cool, detached kind of way, but at the same time pretty frightening. She was at all times beautifully and classically dressed, like Audrey Hepburn or Bette Davis, her hair and make-up immaculate always. She’d sit in the shaded parlour of the house, the air conditioning keeping her as cool as a corpse, the shades pulled down to keep the sun off her English-rose skin. Her chair was hard and upright - she abhorred the fashion for low, slouching lounge furniture. She’d drink tea from a translucent china cup at three in the afternoon and at five a Martini. She would mix it herself from a tray on a side-table. She did these things habitually - almost ritualistically, as though they constituted cornerstones of a civilisation which would crumble away if they were ever neglected. Sometimes she would have a second Martini, and then, when the glass was empty and she had offered me the olive, she’d begin.
She’d speak of the old house, hidden in a dip in a broad-stretched moor. It was surrounded by trees, with towering chimneys reaching above and damp, scary cellars below. It was built in 1600, before the Mayflower set sail, before Jamestown was even thought of. In my imagination the house was like a sunken ship, its chimneys like masts, its cellars like rotten timbers. The woodlands around it were the frondulant depths of a deep-sea crevasse, the moor above the green, endless sea. And Grandma, in the cool shadows of the room, the pearl-white sheen of her afternoon dress and her nails painted pink like sea-shells, seemed to me like an ancient sea-goddess. I sailed away on her words, and lost myself in their mystery.
She spoke of our great-aunt, Evelyn, a crazed and reclusive individual who haunted the derelict rooms of the old house and bemoaned her incarceration. ‘She’s like the man in that song your father likes so much,’ she once told me, ‘she can check out any time she likes, but she can never leave.’
‘Is she a ghost?’ I’d ask, in awe.
‘She may as well be,’ Grandma said, ‘and she may as well be dead, for all I know, but she wouldn’t realise it either way. As long as the house stands, she’ll stay in it.’
Grandma died in 1993, when I was 17. I wanted to go to Art College but the family asserted itself and I followed my father into Grandpapa’s oil business after I graduated MIT, and married Tammy, also at the family’s behest, in 2006. We began raising a family. My daddy died last year, 2009. It hit me hard; we were close. I’ve run the company in his stead since then but it has been a struggle. With Daddy gone I have felt as though I don’t belong, as though I have been wearing clothes made for someone else. My marriage to Tammy isn’t happy, and my children seem like strangers to me. If I wasn’t an oil man, a big shot in the county and a Wyman, I might confess to having depression, but Texan oil men don’t allow themselves to be afflicted that way.
In April I had a heart-scare and my doctor said I should take a trip, to rest and recover. I knew straight off where I’d go - the old country, the old house. Driving back from the doctor’s clinic in downtown Dallas the idea lifted me like a buoy so that by the time I got to the ranch I was fizzing with it.
‘A trip,’ I enthused to Tammy, ‘to find my roots. To find out about - you know…’
But Tammy looked at me - a cold, flat stare. ‘I don’t care to go to England,’ she said. The look in her eyes told me she didn’t care, period.
So here I am, groggy from the red-eye, in a rental car, driving north.
It is May, and this is England and, in contradiction of all I have been told, the sun is out.
It takes me a while to find the village. It has been by-passed by a new road and I skim past the turning in cruise control before I know it. It’s a few miles before I can double back but the scenery is good; rolling hills either side of the road, intensely green like the prairies at home are only seldom, after heavy rain, and a stretch of moor in the distance. The moor is exactly what Grandma described and, in spite of my tired eyes, I know I am close. I run my hand over my face, feeling the stubble of my unshaven chin, picking the sleep from my eyes. I bought coffee at a rest stop a few miles back. It is cold, now, but I drink it anyway. I know I am close.
The village street is deserted, narrow, as all British streets are, buildings on one side and the moor on the other. I park the car on the street and walk past an old grey church with an overgrown churchyard, then a single-storey building with a clock tower. I gather from the engraved founding stone it used to be a school but it’s been made into a dwelling, now, and a dog in the yard tells me to stay away. There’s a row of cottages with tiny yards out front, and a place which used to be a farm but where the barn and stables and what I suppose must have been a milking shed have all been converted into vacation rentals. I wander round the cobbled yard, hoping somebody will show up so I can make enquiries, but there’s no sign of anyone. A tiny shop and a pub are both firmly closed. They look as though they have seen better days - the by-pass must have taken away all the passing traffic. At the end of the village is a shack of a place with a corrugated iron roof and a rotten door. A notice board displays the minutes of the latest parish council meeting and a poster for a thrift sale from two months back. At the side of this building - I take it to be a community meeting room of some description - is an open lot where a solitary woman walks an ancient sheep dog. I wade through the knee-high grass towards her.
‘Good afternoon, ma’am,’ I say, in my best Texan English, ‘I’m looking for Tall Chimneys.’
Whatever she says back to me is unintelligible in terms of the words she speaks, but she gesticulates back down the village street and then in
dicates a turning to the left.
‘Opposite the church?’ I clarify.
She nods.
The turning I find is little more than a track, hardly wide enough for a vehicle, pitted with pot-holes and surfaced with dusty grey gravel. The moor sweeps out on both sides of it; iridescent green and sage-grey with boggy pockets as black as liquorish and pools of water. They reflect the sky like mirrors. The heather is not in flower but the spent seed-heads rattle and whisper around craggy boulders as though they are excited to see me, and somewhere there is running water, but I can’t see where. The textures intrigue me; soft mosses and spiky grass, spongey-crumbly peat and a shimmering haze of insects and pollen and I don’t know what else hovering above like a shimmering veil, and I grope in my knap-sack for a sketchbook and pencil.
For a while I am lost in my drawing. I hear the water and bees and above my head some bird singing like its heart will burst and for some reason I can’t fathom it all has to come out on the paper before I can move another step.
Then I walk along the track in a kind of a dream, like someone walking into their own history.
Ahead of me there is a belt of woodland, and a red-stone house, hexagonal, with self-important stone-work above and windows crazed with leading and a wisp of smoke rising from a stubby chimney and they wind me in like I am a fish on a line. This is what Grandma called the gatehouse. I am amazed it is still standing, still more that it is inhabited.
To the left of the house is a pair of gates, once-imposing but now rusted and derelict and infested with creeper. The stone post securing one of them has collapsed altogether, allowing the gate on that side to teeter inwards, prevented from falling only by the stout chain anchoring it to its brother. He is also badly askew, having parted company from his hinge. It will be easy to get through them. Beyond, there is a tunnel of dimness, green and frondulant, and I am reminded of my childish image of Grandma, the sea-queen.
Tall Chimneys: A British Family Saga Spanning 100 Years Page 37
