A Summer in the Country

by Marcia Willett

  “BRIGID’S WONDERING if she should suggest that Michael and Sarah should come down to meet you.” Frummie looked at Alexander inquisitively. “How do you feel about it?”

  “Confused,” he answered calmly. He laid the newspaper courteously to one side and watched Frummie taking notes on the contents of his breakfast table. “I like a good old-fashioned breakfast,” he told her, lest some detail might have escaped her. “Sausages, bacon, toast and marmalade. All those years abroad, I never got out of the habit.”

  She was entirely unabashed. “I was never one for more than a cup of black coffee,” she said. “So how do you manage to stay so thin?”

  “Much the way you do, I imagine. It’s genetic.” “How do you know that I don’t diet madly?” He smiled. “Because you look quite right with your thinness. Now Brigid is too thin.”

  She settled down on the chair opposite, enjoying this opportunity to be intimate with him. The big kitchen-living room was full of sunlight, and various cooking utensils lay carelessly abandoned on the worktops, yet a faindy impersonal atmosphere clung to the room. Perhaps Alexander did not have enough luggage with him to stamp his personality upon the house—or perhaps it was simply too early. Although he had allowed her to assist with his moving in, he had been quite intractable in refusing to permit her to unpack for him. There were some books on the windowsill, and newspapers littered the big square table, but there was very little other evidence to give clues to the kind of man he was. No doubt all would be made clear in time. Meanwhile she was very ready to discuss Brigid’s thinness.

  “Why shouldn’t that be genetic, too? Diarmid was thin. Well, lean and rangy. Brigid’s just like him.”

  “You don’t think she’s too thin?”

  “Well…” She wriggled impatiently. If she said “yes” he might ask her the reason and if she couldn’t give one it might sound as if she didn’t care about her daughter. If she said “no” it might be the end of this little session. Anyway, he was right: Brigid did look rather gaunt. “I’ve noticed that it only needs the loss of a pound or two for Brigid to look peaked. It might be Humphrey going off. It’s quite a long spell, this time.”

  “Isn’t she used to it by now?”

  “Yes.” Nettled by his obstinacy she took a more direct line, “Of course she wasn’t too happy about you being here, you know.”

  He seemed unruffled by this oblique accusation. “I can well imagine it. So you think I am the cause of her weight loss?”

  Frummie shrugged. “A contributory factor,” she said airily. “There might be other reasons. Brigid and I are not particularly en rapport, you know.”

  “I had suspected as much.” His thoughtful tone robbed the words of any sting. “It’s odd, isn’t it, how much easier it often is to relate to people other than one’s own flesh and blood?”

  She looked at him approvingly. “You’re so right. Why should it be, I wonder?”

  “Probably guilt. But I might think this way simply because it happens to be my own personal experience. Humphrey and I will never be able to be close. He mistrusts me and I feel guilty about certain decisions I took relating to his upbringing. My guilt and his mistrust stand between any other feelings of love and anxiety which we might feel for each other. Yet because of our relationship we cannot treat these feelings lightly and circumnavigate them as we might with other people less important to us. Precisely because he is my son I am unable to connect.”

  Frummie regarded him with amused surprise. She hadn’t expected such honesty so early in their growing friendship. “It’s exactly the same with me,” she admitted. “I feel guilty because I ran off to London and left Brigid with her father. She resents me for abandoning her and my guilt makes it impossible to relate naturally with her as I do to Jemima, my other daughter. I feel her resentment. It’s fatally easy to dislike people that you hurt.”

  “It’s because they are a constant reminder of our weaknesses and failures.”

  “Is that why you stayed away?” she asked curiously.

  “We stayed in touch,” he answered carefully, “but he made it clear that I was not to be a part of his new life. I went abroad when his mother died, you know, and remarried quite quickly. Humphrey felt that he was forced to build a new life for himself, that I had abandoned him. He was very proper in letting me know everything that happened in it but made it clear that I had no right to participate in it. All my letters went to his BFPO address.”

  “It doesn’t sound like Humphrey.” Frummie shook her head, her brow wrinkled. “He’s such a friendly, open person.”

  ’Is he?” He was watching her almost eagerly. “You like him?”

  “Oh, tremendously. He’s been, terribly kind to me, you know.”

  “I’m glad.” Alexander turned his chair aside, crossing his long legs. “I’m very glad. And so Brigid is thin because of me and not because of Humphrey.”

  “Well, I didn’t quite say that.” Frummie felt a strange empathy with him. “She and Humphrey have been terribly happy together, have no fear about that. I think, if you want the truth“—“Yes,” he said soberly, “I want the truth“—“that their early bond was based on the fact that they’d both been abandoned, if you see what I mean. They were a bit like the babes in the wood. Humphrey and Diarmid got along famously together. They might have been father and son …”

  She paused, aware of her tactlessness. Alexander was staring ahead of him. “I envy him,” he said gently—and she felt a pang of anguish for him.

  “Is that why you came back?” she asked. ‘To make certain?”

  He sighed, a long indrawn breath. “Yes,” he said at last. “Humphrey wrote to me some months ago, telling me about this posting and that he would soon be retiring. Agneta had died and I wanted to come back to England. Everything seemed to work together. I decided to ask if I could stay.”

  “Were you surprised when he said yes?”

  “Not terribly.” He looked amused. “I knew that you were here, you see, and I traded on Humphrey’s sense of fair play.”

  She laughed, throwing back her head. “You don’t pull any punches, do you?”

  He chuckled too. “I had nowhere to go, you see. I counted on his filial feelings. I’m sure you know exactly what I mean?”

  “I do indeed.” She was delighted with him. “And was it the truth?”

  “Was what the truth?”

  “That you had nowhere to go. I understand that it wasn’t the real reason. You’ve told me what that was—but was it the truth? That you were homeless?”

  He hesitated for a moment and she watched him curiously, strongly attracted to him. “It was the truth,” he said at last. “I’d sold up in Sweden but there was a three-month gap before I could take up my new residence. It seemed as if I were being led here, if that doesn’t sound too fanciful. It was true, though, that I had nowhere else to go.”

  “I see. Well, it was the same for me. My husband went off with a much younger woman and I was left with nothing and nowhere to go. I loathe the country but, at that moment, Foxhole was a sanctuary for me. Of a sort.”

  ” ‘There is but one safe thing for the vanquished; not to hope for safety,’” he murmured. “It must have been very hard for you.”

  She parried the keen, penetrating glance with a bitter thrust of her own. “A touch of the Prodigal Mother, you feel? Forgive me, daughter, for I have sinned? Well, it was. Like you, I counted on Brigid’s loyalty and Humphrey’s generosity but it stuck in my throat, I can tell you. They were both so damned noble about it. Determined that I shouldn’t feel my humiliation or the weight of their kindness. I threw it back at them whenever I got the chance. I went to the Social Security and got Housing Benefit and insisted that Brigid had a rent book. How she hated it.” She stared at him, her mouth set in a bitter line. “Each time I give her the money and watch her initial the book I feel a stab of pure satisfaction here.” She struck her breast lightly with a clenched fist. “He left the whole lot to her, of course. Diarmid,
I mean. Not a thing for me. God, how I grew to hate him!”

  “He wouldn’t let you have her?”

  Her face relaxed slowly into an expression of resigned despair. “No,” she said. “No, he wouldn’t let me have her. I really believed that he’d let her go. I simply couldn’t imagine him coping, you see. He was so… distracted by his bloody work—bound up in it. But he dug his heels in. He saw how he could strike back at me and, of course, I had no chance against him. Back then, forty-odd years ago, no judge in his right mind would have found for me, the erring wife, against Diarmid’s noble uprightness.”

  “And Brigid?”

  “Brigid loved her father. And Foxhole. We should never have married and I knew it very soon after the deed was done but, by then, Brigid was a poor little casualty of my passing lust and poor judgement. Diarmid would have stuck it out. To be fair—though it’s something I try to avoid—I believe that he loved me after his own quiet, unemotional fashion. But it was impossible. I loathed the screamingly dull emptiness of the country and Diarmid was not, by nature, a companionable man. He was gorgeous to look at, frighteningly bright, terribly well read, but I’m a frivolous, party-loving person. I like gossip and fun.” She paused, not looking at him, touching the toast rack gently with one finger, turning it round and round. “The man I’d lived with in Paris and London before I met Diarmid wanted me back and, after a while, short visits, a weekend here and there, simply weren’t enough. One day I just went. I told myself that Brigid would be allowed to join me but my own desires were stronger than my love for her.” She smiled her self-mocking, down-turned smile. “Might as well be honest about it. That’s how it was at the time. I was allowed to see her here, but he refused to let her come to me in London. I think he was afraid I’d run off with her. I would have done, too. But here, the whole scene was impossible. Brigid nervous. Me brittle. Diarmid louring in the background. Of course, she had no idea that her father was withholding her from me and I couldn’t bring myself to make her party to our rather sordid battles.” A shrug. “In the end I stopped coming here. I stayed in touch with cards and letters but it simply didn’t work. I married Richard and then Jemima came along.” She paused again. “I’m not a particularly maternal woman, you know, but I love my children in my fashion. Jemima was like her father and terribly easy to love. Everyone adores Jemima… Well, everyone except Brigid.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “Is it? It’s hardly Jem’s fault that I left Diarmid and he behaved so unreasonably. I left Jem’s father too.”

  “But you took her with you.”

  She frowned at him. “It was a completely different set of circumstances.”

  “Does Brigid know that?”

  “I’ve no idea, I imagine so. I’ve never talked to her about it.”

  “So how would she know?”

  Frummie shrugged irritably. “Perhaps she doesn’t. I can’t discuss it with her. The obstacles between us are too great. Her resentment and my guilt. You said it yourself. Because she is my daughter I can’t communicate properly.”

  “We must content ourselves with the knowledge that they have made each other happy. My son and your daughter.”

  She glanced at him sharply. “Yes, that’s true. But you won’t make any attempt to see Humphrey?”

  “I think not. Why upset the applecart at this late date?”

  “What about your grandchildren? And a great-grandson now, don’t forget.”

  Alexander smiled at her. “Do you think their lives would be significantiy enhanced by my sudden appearance?”

  “I don’t know.” She felt oddly uncomfortable. “I’ve told you, I’m not madly maternal so I don’t have this belief in the sanctity of family. My grandsons have done splendidly with the minimum interference on my part.”

  “Then I expect they’ll manage without mine,” he said amiably. “And now that you know what I have for breakfast are you going to help me clear it up? Or was your visit purely an inquisitive one?”

  “Oh, sheer nosiness, I assure you. And I hate washing up.” She grinned at him, relieved by the change of atmosphere, grateful to him for the lighter touch. “So where will you go when you leave here? Have you bought a house somewhere?”

  He stood up, shaking crumbs from his jersey. “I shall go north, to the Borders.” He answered patiently, amused by her persistence. “And now that you’ve satisfied your curiosity and have no intention of being useful, you might leave me in peace. Oh, and when I’ve cleared up, I shall be writing letters and then going for a walk. After lunch I shall sleep. I’m telling you all this in case you feel the need to drop in again later for further infonnation on my habits. Perhaps we might have a drink this evening before supper.”

  “Perhaps we might” She was quite unmoved by his directness. Standing up she hesitated for a moment, as though about to make a further comment, but decided against it. “Come over at about seven, if you feel like it,” she said lightly—and slipped out, closing the door behind her.

  CHAPTER 30

  Brigid was sitting in the courtyard, watching the harvest moon rise over Combestone Tor. In the normal course of events she would have been up there, on the Tor, much earlier in the evening, watching the moon rise away to the east, but Frummie had been so anxious for her safety that she’d been obliged to remain at Foxhole. She’d considered inviting Louise to go with her but she’d known in her heart that it wouldn’t be quite the same. Moonrise was one of those magical, heart-stopping moments that must be experienced alone. Huddling herself into her fleece, shivering a little in the chilly air, she wondered if Humphrey would ever truly understand these strange but very real needs. He’d never been home long enough for his tolerance to be put to the test but she could imagine how, to a man as prosaic as Humphrey, her unusual requirements might easily become a source of irritation.

  She crossed her arms beneath her breast and hugged herself, feeling the tension rising and spreading, stiffening her spine and tightening her muscles. How long, she wondered, before he received the letter? What might be his reaction? How would he deal with it? If only it hadn’t been Jenny… She dragged her mind from its weary circling and forced herself to think of other things: of her children and of the wonderful and utterly unexpected telephone call from Geneva.

  “We thought we might come home for Christmas, Mum. Do you think you could cope?”

  “Oh, darling, how wonderful.” She’d been almost speechless with delight. “Of course we can cope. Josh’s first Christmas …”

  This had been her instinctive reaction. Afterwards she’d wondered what atmosphere might prevail, with Humphrey home and the need to find twelve thousand pounds as well as her deception as a bone of contention between them. Even the peaceful beauty of the scene before her-—the moon, framed between the end of the longhouse and the wall of the cottage, pouring its brilliance down on the Tor—could not distract her from her anxiety. Since ‘she’d posted the letter her whole world had become slowly drenched in fear. It coloured everything: stealing peace, corroding joy, draining her of energy. It had been a miracle that for three short days Alexander, by his sheer presence, had kept her fear at bay. His serenity had communicated itself to her, protecting her. Having him with her in the house, seeing his tall, thin figure, passing between his quarters and the courtyard, had given her some kind of insulation. Childlike, she’d felt that nothing could really harm whilst he was near.

  Brigid’s face crumpled a little. She remembered the few lines of a poem she’d read recently …

  The night is very silent, the air so very cold,

  I wish I were a child again and had a hand to hold.

  The deep silence was disturbed by a distant sound; a car, up on the road, climbed the hill and rattled over the cattle-grid, slowing as it approached the end of the track. It sounded as if it had stopped, the engine idling for a moment before it was switched off, and Brigid straightened a little, listening, hands clasped between her knees. She could hear the doves, shifting
and murmuring in their cot, and this tiny, domestic sound made her suddenly aware of the emptiness beyond this small encircled yard: the moor, like some great dark sea, rolling away on all sides whilst shadows crept stealthily across the cobbles. Up on the track there was the sound of a stone rolling, a slithering brought up short, a muffled curse. Blotr curled at Brigid’s feet, sat up, ears pricked, and growled softly. Brigid swallowed in a dry throat, unlocking her laced fingers, every muscle straining in her attempt to hear more clearly.

  Blot stood up, growling deep in his throat, and she caught at his collar. “Stay!” she whispered fiercely. “I said ’Stay!’ Carefully, slowly, she pushed herself to her feet, still grasping his collar, and began to edge towards the house. As she moved into the line of the entrance between the two cottages she stared into the darkness, keeping herself out of the moon’s relentless shining. Beyond the deep shadow of the buildings the track, bright in the moonlight, was empty, yet she had the distinct impression that she was not alone. She felt quite certain that out there, just off the track, waiting in the bracken, was a living, breathing presence. Blot began to bark, a high, warning baying that shivered her blood into icy trickles and made her legs tremble. She gained the door, hauled him inside and slammed it shut, turning the heavy key, crashing the bolts into their housings. Loosed at last, Blot leaped up, barking wildly, whilst Brigid ran into the two living rooms, dragging the curtains together with shaking hands. She raced through the kitchen, closing and locking the lean-to door and, back again in the kitchen, fastening the intercommunicating door whilst Blot continued to hurl himself at the front door, screaming with rage.

  As Brigid reached for the receiver the telephone sprang into life, startling her so that she knocked it from its rest and it hung on the end of its cord, banging gently against the dresser. She seized it.