The Woodcutter

by Reginald Hill

  So it had proved.

  Thirteen-year-old Alva was proud of her father, but it had always been her mother she pestered for stories of her life on the stage. Now, after vacillating for a good hour between the two main exemplars in her life, it was not without a small twinge of disloyalty that she finally wrote that what she wanted to be was an actress.

  At the time she meant it. But somewhere over the next few years that urge to get inside the skin of a character had changed from interpretation to analysis. She discovered that wanting to understand was not the same as wanting to be. The actress had to lose herself in the part; Alva found that she wanted to preserve herself, to remain the detached observer even as all the intricate wirings of personality and motivation were laid bare.

  Psychiatry gave her that option, but she soon discovered that the observer had to be an actor too. When she read Hadda’s account of his first encounters with Imogen, she felt a great surge of excitement. To be sure, there was a deal of hyperbole here. The bolder the picture he painted of himself as the victim of a grand passion for one woman, the dimmer his sense of that other degrading and disgusting passion became. But in his effort to stress that his love for Imogen was based on some collision of mind and spirit rather than simply a natural adolescent lust, he had fallen into a trap of his own setting.

  What did he say? Here it was . . . there was next to nothing of her! She was so skinny her ribs showed, her breasts looked like they’d just begun to form, she looked more like ten than fourteen . . . Yet he’d been sexually roused by this prepubescent figure, and sexually satisfied too. This was probably what he saw in his fantasies thereafter, this was the source of those desires that had brought about his downfall.

  She recalled a passage in the first piece he’d written for her, when he was in his best hard-nosed thriller mode.

  Imogen was sitting up in bed by this time. Even in these fraught circumstances I was distracted by sight of her perfect breasts.

  Stressing his red-blooded maleness, trying to distract her attention, and his own, away from the fact that it was unformed new-budding bosoms that really turned him on.

  And now she knew she would need to call upon her acting skills when next she saw him. She must give no hint that she saw in this narrative anything more than an honest and moving account of first love. Indeed, it might be well to give him a quick glimpse of that Freudian prurience he was accusing her of. He was, she judged, a man who liked to be right, who was used to having his assessments of people and policies confirmed. No way could she hope to drive such a man to that final climactic confrontation with his own dark inner self, but with care and patience she might eventually lead him there.

  Another spur to caution was the fact that he’d obviously got the writing bug. She’d seen this happen in other cases. The people she dealt with were more often than not obsessive characters and this was something she liked to use to her advantage. Her guess was that he’d have another exercise book ready for her, but if she annoyed him, he’d punish her by not handing it over.

  That was his weapon.

  Hers of course was his desire that what he wrote should be read! Withholding it might punish her, but only at the expense of punishing himself.

  So she prepared for her next session with more than usual care.

  ii

  ‘Wolf,’ she said. ‘Tell me about your father.’

  ‘What?’

  She’d wrong-footed him, she could tell. He’d expected her to home in on that first sexual engagement on top of Pillar Rock.

  ‘Fred, your father. Is he still alive?’

  ‘Ah. I see where we’re going. Oedipus stuff, right? No, I didn’t blame him for my mother’s death; no, I didn’t want to kill him; and no, just in case you’re too shy to ask, he never abused me in any way. Unless you count the odd clip around the ear, that is.’

  ‘In some circumstances, I might indeed count that,’ she said, smiling. ‘I was just wondering about his attitude to what’s happened, that’s all. You do indicate that when it came to your marriage with Imogen, he wasn’t all that keen.’

  That got the flicker of a smile. The smiles, though hardly regular, came more frequently now. She took that as a sign of progress, though, paradoxically, in physical terms her goal was tears, not smiling.

  ‘That’s putting it mildly,’ he said. ‘He was even more opposed than Sir Leon. He at least in the end gave his daughter away. Dad wouldn’t even come to the wedding.’

  ‘Did that hurt you very much?’

  ‘Of course it bloody hurt me,’ he said angrily. ‘But I was ready for it, I suppose. He wasn’t exactly supportive when I started bettering myself. I thought he’d be proud of me, but he made it quite clear that he thought I’d have done better to follow in his footsteps and become a forester.’

  ‘Did he have any reason to think that was what you were going to do?’

  Hadda shrugged and said, ‘Yeah, I suppose so. I’d always gone along with the assumption that I’d leave school as soon as I could and start working under him on the estate. I mean, why wouldn’t I? I loved working with him, I’d been wielding an axe almost since I was big enough to pick up a teddy bear without falling over. And working outdoors in the countryside I loved seemed the best way of carrying on the way I was.’

  ‘So what changed?’

  ‘Don’t act stupid. You know what changed. I met Imogen.’

  ‘You carried on meeting after that first time?’

  ‘Obviously. All that summer, whenever we could. She needed to keep quiet about it of course. Me too. It was easier in my case, I just went on as normal, taking off in the morning with my walking and climbing gear. She had to make excuses. She was good at that, I guess. She couldn’t manage every day, but if three days went by without her showing up, I started getting seriously frustrated.’

  ‘You continued having sex?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t we?’

  ‘She was under age. And the danger of pregnancy. Did you start using condoms?’

  ‘No, she said she’d taken care of all that. As for her age, I suppose I was under age too to start with. Anyway, it never crossed my mind. We were at it all the time. Always out of doors and in all weathers. On the fellside, in the forest.’

  He smiled reminiscently.

  ‘There was this old rowan tree that had survived among all the conifers that had been planted commercially on the estate. We often used to meet there early morning or late evening if one of us couldn’t manage to get away for the whole day. Imo would slip out of the castle and I would go over the wall behind Birkstane, and be there in twenty minutes or so. We didn’t even have to make a special arrangement. It was like we both knew the other would be there under the tree.’

  ‘This was the rowan you had dug up and transplanted to your London garden?’

  He said, ‘You remembered! Yes, the very same. They were harvesting the conifers in that part of the forest and it looked as if the rowan would simply be mowed down to give the big machines access. So I saved it. A romantic gesture, don’t you think?’

  ‘More sentimental, I’d say. Men in particular look back fondly on their adolescent encounters. Pleasure without responsibility, I can see its attraction. So you’d meet under this tree, have a quick bang, then go home?’

  This was a deliberate provocation. The clue to what he’d become had to lie in this first significant sexual relationship.

  He looked at her coldly.

  ‘It wasn’t like that. We drew each other like magnets. I felt her presence wherever I was, whatever I was doing. She was always with me. Under the rowan we were in total union, but no matter how far apart physically, she was always with me.’

  She was tempted to probe how he felt now, whether he still believed that Imogen had genuinely shared that intensity of feeling. But she judged this wasn’t the right moment. Concentrate on getting the facts.

  ‘So when did it end?’

  ‘How do you know it ended?’

  ‘Because it h
ad to. From what you say of Lady Kira, she wasn’t going to be fooled for ever. Also that first piece you wrote, the one about living in a fairy tale, in it you talk about the woodcutter’s son being given three impossible tasks and going away and performing them. That implies an ending – and a new beginning, of course.’

  ‘Did I write that? Yes, I did, didn’t I? It seems a long time ago, somehow.’

  ‘Three weeks,’ she said.

  ‘Is that all? We’ve come a long way.’

  He spoke neutrally and she was tempted to probe but decided against it. The more progress you made, the more dangerous the ground became.

  ‘So, the end,’ she said.

  ‘It was in the Christmas holidays,’ he said slowly. ‘We’d both gone back to school in the autumn, her to her fancy ladies’ college in the south, me to the comp. I couldn’t wait for the term to finish.’

  ‘You didn’t think she might have had second thoughts about your relationship during those months apart?’

  ‘Never crossed my mind,’ he said wearily. ‘Not vanity, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was just a certainty, like knowing the sun would rise. But when we met in December, it was harder for us to get whole days together when the weather was bad. I mean, a teenage girl wanting to go for a solitary stroll in the summer sunshine is one thing. In a winter gale it’s much more suspicious. We met more and more often under the rowan tree. A blizzard blew up, it was practically a white-out. We sheltered among the trees till things improved a bit, then I insisted on accompanying her back through the grounds till the castle was in sight. Sir Leon had got worried and organized a little search party that included my dad. We met them on the estate drive. I’d have tried to bluff it out, say I’d run into Imogen somewhere and offered to see her home, but she didn’t bother. I think she was right. They weren’t going to believe us. I went home with Fred, she went home with Sir Leon to face her mother.’

  ‘What did Fred say?’

  ‘He asked me what I thought I was doing. I told him we were in love, that I was going to marry her as soon as I legally could. He said, “Forget the law, there’s no law ever passed that’ll let you marry that lass!” I said, “Why not? There’s nowt anyone can say that’ll make a difference.” And he laughed, more snarl than a laugh, and he said that up at the castle the difference had been made a long time back. I didn’t know what he meant, not until the next day.’

  ‘You saw Imogen again?’ guessed Alva.

  ‘Oh yes. Sir Leon brought her down to Birkstane. They left us alone together. I grabbed hold of her and began gabbling about it making no difference, we could still do what we planned, we could run away together, and so on, lots of callow adolescent stuff. She pushed me away and said, sort of puzzled, “Wolf, don’t talk silly. We never planned anything.” And she was right, I realized later. All the plans had been in my head.’

  ‘And was this when she set you the three impossible tasks?’ asked Alva.

  ‘Who’s a clever little shrink then?’ he mocked. ‘Yes, suddenly this girl every bit of whose body I knew as well as my own turned into something as cold and distant as the North Pole. She said she was sorry, it had been great fun, but she’d assumed I knew as well as she did that it would have to come to an end eventually. I managed to stutter, “Why?” And she told me. With brutal frankness.’

  His face darkened at the memory, still potent after all these years.

  Alva prompted, ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said surely I could see how impossible it would be for her to marry someone who couldn’t speak properly, had neither manners nor education, and was likely to remain on a working man’s wage all his life.’

  Jesus! thought Alva. They really do bring their princesses up differently!

  ‘So these were the three impossible tasks?’ she said. ‘Get elocution lessons, get educated, get rich. And you resolved you would amaze everyone by performing them?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I had a short fuse, remember? I went into a right strop, told her she was a stuck-up little cow just like her mam, that I weren’t ashamed to talk the way everyone else round here talked, that a Hadda were as good as an Ulphingstone any day of the week, and that my dad said all a man needs is enough money to buy what’s necessary for him to live. She smiled and said, “Clearly you don’t put me in that category. That’s good. I’ll see you around.” And she went.’

  ‘She sounds very self-contained for a fourteen-year-old,’ said Alva.

  ‘She was fifteen by then,’ he said, as if this made a difference. ‘And I was sixteen.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I moped all over Christmas. Must have been unliveable with. Dad headed off to the Dog as often as he could. Then New Year came. Time for resolutions about changing your life, according to the guys on the telly. I started fantasizing about leaving home, having lots of adventures, striking it rich by finding a gold mine or something, then returning, all suave and sexy like one of them TV presenters, to woo Imogen. Only she wouldn’t know it was me till she’d been overcome by my manly charms. Pathetic, eh?’

  ‘We all have our dreams,’ said Alva, recalling her teenage fantasies of collecting a best actress Oscar.

  ‘Yeah. I’d like to say I set off to chase mine, but it wouldn’t be true. I just knew that, whatever I wanted, I wasn’t going to get it hanging around in Cumbria. So I set off to school one morning with everything I owned in my sports bag and all the money I could raise in my pocket. And I just kept on going. The rest as they say is history.’

  ‘I’d still like to hear it,’ said Alva.

  ‘Come on!’ he said. ‘You strike me as a conscientious little researcher. The meteoric rise of Wilfred Hadda from uncouth Cumbrian peasant to multi-millionaire master of the universe has been charted so often you must have got it by heart!’

  ‘Indeed,’ she said, reaching into her document case. ‘I’ve got copies of most of the articles here. There’s general agreement on events after your return. But their guesses at what you did between running away as a poor woodcutter’s son and coming back with your rough edges smoothed and enough money in the bank to launch your business career make speculation about Lord Lucan read like a Noddy story. Anyone get close?’

  ‘How would I know? I never read them. Which looks best to you?’

  ‘Well, I’m torn between the South American diamond mine and the Mexican lottery. But on the whole I’d go for the Observer writer, who reckons you probably got kidnapped by the fairies, like True Thomas in the ballad.’

  That made him laugh, a rare sound, the kind of laugh that made you want to join in.

  ‘Yeah, go with that one,’ he said. ‘Away with the fairies, that’s about right. Did he have a good time, this Thomas fellow?’

  ‘It was a strange place they took him too,’ said Alva. ‘Hang on, he quotes from the ballad in his article. You’ll have to excuse my Scots accent.’

  She opened the file and began to read.

  ‘It was mirk mirk night, there was nae stern light,

  And they waded through red blude to the knee;

  For a’ the blude that’s shed on earth

  Rins through the springs o’ that countrie.’

  When she finished he nodded vigorously and said, ‘Oh yes, that guy knows what he’s talking about. So how did Thomas make out when he got back?’

  ‘Well, he had a bit of a problem, Wolf,’ she said. ‘The one condition of his return was that thereafter he was never able to tell a lie.’

  Their gazes locked. Then he smiled, not his attractive winning smile this time, but something a lot more knowing, almost mocking.

  ‘Just like me then, Elf,’ he said. ‘That old lie-detector mind of yours must have spotted long ago that you’re getting nothing but gospel truth from me!’

  ‘Gospel? Somehow I doubt if your runaway years had much of religion in them!’

  ‘You’re so wrong, Elf,’ he said with a grin. ‘I was a regular attender at chapel.’

  ‘Chapel?
’ she said. ‘Not church? That’s interesting. None of the speculation in the papers suggested a religious dimension to your disappearance.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, suddenly irritated. ‘Can we get away from what those fantasists dream up? Look, Elf, I’m trying to be honest with you, but if I say there’s something I don’t want to talk about, you’ve got to accept it, OK?’

  ‘OK, OK,’ she said making a note. ‘Let’s cut to the chase. Age twenty-one, you’re back with a suitcase full of cash, talking like a gent, no longer sucking your peas off your knife, and able to tell a hawk from a handsaw. How did Imogen greet you?’

  ‘She asked me to dinner at the castle. There were two or three other guests. Sir Leon was very polite to me. Lady Kira watched me like the Ice Queen but hardly spoke. I joined in the conversation, managed to use the right cutlery and didn’t knock over any wine glasses. After dinner Imogen took me out into the garden, allegedly to cast my so-called expert eye over a new magnolia planted to replace one that hadn’t made it through the winter. Out of sight of the house she stopped and turned to face me. “Well, will I do?” I asked. “Let’s see,” she said. And stepped out of her dress with the same ease that she’d stepped out of her shorts and trainers on Pillar Rock all those years ago. When we finished, she said, “You’ll do.” Couple of months later we married.’

  ‘Despite all the family objections?’

  ‘We had a trump card by then. Imo was pregnant. With Ginny. Made no difference to Dad and Sir Leon. They still stood out against the marriage. But Lady Kira seemed to see it made sense and that was enough. She calls the shots at the castle. Always did. So poor Leon had no choice but to give his blessing, and shake the mothballs out of his morning dress to give the bride away.’

  ‘Poor Leon?’ she echoed. ‘You sound as if you have some sympathy for him.’

  ‘Why not? He’s married to the Ice Queen, isn’t he? No, fair do’s, he may not have wanted me for his son-in-law, but I always got on well with Leon. And he went out of his way to try to make things right between me and my dad. Just about managed it the first two times. Third time was beyond human help.’