The Foreigner

by P. G. Glynn

  “Or given it to you and Stan?” Marie enquired mildly. “Would that, in your view, have been the action of a mother of sound mind – one who finally recognised which of us had sacrificed the most for her?”

  “We’d have provided for Lucy,” Alice said, on the defensive. “She’d always have had a roof over her head. And who are you to judge how much I sacrificed?”

  “It was Mam, not me,” Marie smiled, “who did the judging – quite rightly. Alice, with Mam not in her grave yet, is now the time to be … ”

  “ … clearing the air?” her sister interrupted. “Yes, I think it is. If we act quickly we can still make changes to that ridiculous Will, which isn’t legal. Why, who’s to say whether you even wrote Mam’s wishes down? For all I know, you wrote words of your choosing, not hers.”

  “Nama would never do that!” Suzy protested hotly. She had been helping Helena lay the tea-table until this conversation.

  “Oh, wouldn’t she?” Alice retaliated. “You don’t know her like I do. She’s devious and always has been.”

  Lucy, mortified by the argy-bargy, nevertheless rushed to Marie’s defence: “That’s utterly untrue! Marie’s the best sister who ever lived.”

  “I’ll bet she is,” said Alice. “I bet you and she have plotted this between you.”

  “You’ve said enough,” Marie told her; “rather more than enough, actually. The fact is that in anticipation of your accusations I read Mam’s words out loud in front of both her and Mr and Mrs Griffiths. When I finished she nodded her head and the Minister was satisfied that her wishes had been met. So if you have any further grievances, these should be referred to him. Now, for the sake of the mother you once professed to love, kindly shut up!”

  +++++

  At Hugo’s suggestion they were walking on the Sugar Loaf, where Marie had so often walked with Pa. Then she was the child with the parent. Now she was the parent and her son was well into adulthood. So roles changed. So life progressed from generation to generation. And Hugo was learning that the parental role was not necessarily an easy one. It might seem to be, theoretically, but often didn’t work out like that in practice. It wasn’t working out like that for him with Suzy. He told his mother: “I need to apologise.”

  “Why?”

  He was silent awhile. Walking there amidst the heather and bracken had the usual effect of soothing him. He said after a bit: “I used to judge you … used to think I knew better than you did. But that was before I discovered how difficult it is, bringing up children and trying to do one’s best for them. What I see as my best, they see as … something else. Suzy does, especially.”

  “Does she?”

  “Yes.” He glanced sideways at Marie. “I expect you’re aware that, more than anything, I’m thinking about Vienna. It worries me sick that she’s so intent on going there to stay with Tante Lenka. But nothing I say seems to make any difference.”

  “You once saw Vienna as preferable to London,” Marie couldn’t resist reminding him.

  “I know I did – and now I’m getting my comeuppance! Does everything we do in life come back on us?”

  Marie smiled. “Most things seem to, or such is my view. Which makes a good case for doing things right – if only we recognise what’s right at the time!”

  “Yes – if only!”

  “Which particular aspect of Suzy’s visit worries you sick?”

  “All of it! It’s so far for Suzy to go on her own – and who’s to know what Tante Lenka’s true motive is, in inviting her for a whole year and stipulating that she has to be seventeen? The whole thing makes me so uneasy.”

  “As it does me. But Suzy won’t listen to reason, will she?”

  “No,” he groaned. “She’s as stubborn as a mule when it comes to Vienna and Tante Lenka. She even seems to have shelved her acting ambitions for the time-being. They’re on hold while she tries to convince me that Vienna, not London, is the place to be.”

  “What’s your wish for her?”

  Hugo said after a bit: “Just that she is healthy and happy … and fulfils herself.” He grinned wryly. “Once I’d have wished that I could keep her here with me in Gilchrist, but I’ve long since realised the futility of that wish! Suzy has shown me, time and again from an exceptionally early age, that she’s her own person and that she plans to live her own life – which of course is only right. I wouldn’t want her to end up like Aunt Lucy, tied to parental apron strings. I suppose that, in a nutshell, I just want what’s best for my daughter.”

  “As I do,” said Marie. “You mentioned her acting ambitions. How do you feel about those?”

  “I was opposed to them, as you know – but now they seem infinitely preferable to the trip to Vienna.”

  Marie stooped to pick a sprig of heather. Then, gazing pensively across the green valley to where Gilchrist nestled, she said: “You never knew my Pa, more’s the pity, but he had a wonderful way of dealing with this type of situation. When talking to me, which I imagine was very similar to you talking to Suzy, he tended to inject things I wanted to hear in with the things he wished to get across to me.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, when I was set on going to London he agreed that that was a good idea in the long term, but somehow instilled in my mind the benefits of Swansea as a short term compromise. He said that the experience I gained in Swansea would stand me in good stead for the rest of my life – and he was right. No experience is ever wasted, as I’m sure you too have found. So why don’t we use Pa’s philosophy with Suzy?”

  After consideration, Hugo interpreted: “Yes – mentioning Vienna in the short term, then London and the rest of the world! I could even suggest a month with Tante Lenka, rather than a year … unless you’d be willing to talk to her?”

  Marie smiled. It was as if Pa were at her shoulder telling her that everything was going to work out right finally. “I’m more than willing,” she told her son. “I’ll be happy to talk to Suzy.”

  +++++

  Hugo had loaned Marie his car. No longer a tenant farmer, he now owned his own farm and was prospering so he had upgraded his Morris to a second-hand Daimler. This, thank heaven, was not the Silver Flash with red crocodile-leather seats favoured by the gaudy Lady Docker before her husband Sir Bernard lost his chairmanship of his Company, but it ran so smoothly that Marie marvelled at her son’s success. Hugo had not needed inherited wealth: he had succeeded all by himself. Wasn’t that better, and healthier, than being cushioned as Otto had been by family money?

  It was, by Marie’s reckoning, and she thought how proud Pa would have been to know that his grandson bred champion sheep. He would have been thrilled, too, to see that his great-grandsons were growing up to love the land he had loved and to learn that they planned to study at agricultural college with a view to farming in Wales like their father. Two of Hugo’s children were Welsh in their thinking, while Suzy was a free spirit. Well, Pa would understand this just as Marie did. These mountains had never hemmed them in.

  With Suzy beside her Marie was driving high in the Brecon Beacons, whose velvety slopes were unlike those of any other mountains she had ever known. Their texture and height were awe-inspiring and their craggy tops seemed to touch the sky. Pa told her as a child that the highest, Pen-y-Fan, cast its shadow right to the sea, which had been easy to believe. Pa had also said that the Brecons acted as a magnet for mists and that their moods should never be trifled with. Failure to treat them with the utmost respect often resulted in death. Cloud clung to the tops of the mountains now but, lower down, autumn’s sun shone on to the streams and the soft greenery. In these conditions it was hard to imagine getting lost in fog and dying of exposure. Today the Brecons were as friendly as they could sometimes be deadly.

  “I wish we’d gone into Abergavenny, or even into Brecon,” said Suzy as Marie braked eventually. “Towns are much more interesting than the country.”

  “Your great-grandfather would disagree. He believed that the countryside was endless
ly fascinating, with its changing seasons and all its secrets.”

  “Secrets?”

  “Yes.” Marie gazed up at the jagged contours of Pen-y-Fan and said: “Pa saw nature as guardian of all knowledge: the key to the mysteries of the universe. On our walks he would make the most amazing discoveries and share them with me. He had a perpetual sense of wonder at God’s creativity.”

  “You sound as if you loved him very much.”

  “I did. You’d have loved him too, Suzy, and he would certainly have loved you.”

  “Daddy doesn’t. Sometimes I think he hates me.”

  “That’s about as far from the truth as it can be. Shall we walk for a bit? Walking might help things.”

  Linking arms and well protected against the wind, they left the car and started upwards along a rough path. Below them was a large reservoir almost entirely encircled with trees and above were the taller mountains, soaring skywards: gentle and potentially treacherous. Sheep grazed unhurriedly nearby and a lone hawk patrolled the sky.

  “I’d like to be a bird,” said Suzy. “I’d sooner be almost anything, or anyone, but me.”

  “I know that feeling.”

  “Do you, Nama? Do you really?”

  “Oh yes! And at coming up to sixteen I experienced it more or less unbearably.”

  “Saying that I’m coming up to sixteen sounds much better than saying I’m fifteen. Sometimes I think that I’ll never be sixteen, let alone seventeen.”

  “Just like you used to think that you’d never be ten?”

  “Yes. But things were so much simpler then.”

  “They are, when we’re very young.”

  “I didn’t know I was young. When I came to stay with you in London I thought I was grown up.”

  “Didn’t we have fun?”

  Suzy sighed. “Yes, we did. I often wish I could be ten again and that the week we had could go on forever.”

  Touched to the quick, Marie told her: “It can.”

  “How can it?”

  “All that we were and that we had then, we still have.”

  “No, we don’t. We’ve moved on from that and I want … ” Suzy’s eyes were perilously bright and her chin quivered “… I want to go back!”

  Marie gave her a big hug and then said: “Yes, we’ve moved on, but we’re also still where we were.” Indicating her heart area she explained: “I hold you safely in here as a baby, as a small girl taking her first wobbly steps, as a child of ten travelling on her own all the way to London and singing with the voice of an angel at Nell’s party … and now as a teenager on the bewildering brink of womanhood. You are everything you were as well as all that you will become and the complete Suzy, who’s an essential part of me, exists right now in the present. Does any of this make sense?”

  “Yes … I think so. You do still love me, then?”

  “My darling,” Marie said, hugging her again, “I’ve loved you for … longer than you can imagine and nothing will ever change that.”

  “Not even my going to Vienna to stay with the person you think killed Carla?”

  Marie took a deep breath. “No, not even your attachment to Lenka. I said ‘nothing’ and meant nothing. Would you believe me, though, if I told you she isn’t as she seems?”

  Immediately on the defensive, Suzy queried: “How do you mean?”

  “Simply that Lenka can be two different people, which can lead to confusion both for her and for those close to her.” Without a pause Marie went on to ask: “Are you thinking of doing some studying in Vienna? We haven’t discussed your post-school studies recently, have we? Yet I had it in my head for some reason that you were still intent on becoming an actress.”

  “I am,” Suzy said. “It’s just that Aunt Lenka suggested … ” realising that she couldn’t possibly tell Nama about her aunt’s mention of Austrian Empresses, she swiftly said: “Oh, it’s complicated! I don’t know what you mean about her being two people.”

  “Nor do I, really, except that she has a dark side to her as well as a light side – which can at times make her unrecognisable.”

  As if glimpsing her aunt’s darkness, Suzy shivered. She asked: “Is it silly of me, to think of going to Vienna for a whole year when I’ve no plans to study over there? I’ve been meaning to ask you, actually, what I need to do to get accepted at the Brodie School.”

  Alleluia! Keeping a grip on herself, Marie said: “A year is quite a long time to take from your young life at what could be a crucial stage in your acting studies. You see, if you proved yourself to be outstanding, we could possibly accept you at sixteen - even though we seldom bend our rule not to take students who are under eighteen … and you’d be a fully fledged actress after nine terms, with an Acting Diploma that could take you everywhere.”

  “To stardom?” Suzy asked. “I meant what I said, back then, to you and Charles. I intend not just to be an actress, but to be a star!”

  “We both knew that … and Charles will, I’m sure, be helping to guide your path.”

  Suzy smiled happily and said: “I could always suggest to Aunt Lenka that I visit her for a month, after my first year with you at the Brodie School.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Thank you, Nama.”

  “What for?”

  “For helping me stop feeling foggy. I now feel as if I know where I’m going – and how to get there.”

  “Is it a good feeling?”

  “It’s better than good!”

  “Then that’s probably thanks to my Pa, who used to say that nothing compared with a walk in the mountains for clearing the mists away.”

  61

  Suzy had prepared very thoroughly for her audition. She had rehearsed and rehearsed and was now running on adrenalin. So much depended on this! It was essential that she gave not just of her best, but also of something extra. She simply had to be exceptional. If her heart would only stop thumping in her ears and the twins would stop asking questions, all would be well.

  “Are you nervous?” asked Robert as their taxi transported them from their hotel to Hampstead.

  “I would be, in your shoes,” said Daniel. “I’d be scared stiff.”

  “Thanks for that!” Suzy responded. “If I wasn’t nervous before, I would be now. Do you realise that today will either be the best or the worst day of my whole life?”

  Hugo smiled. His beautiful daughter was dramatic to her fingertips. How he would miss her, when she was living in London! But at least – thanks to Mama – she wouldn’t be as far away as Vienna. And she was so set on becoming an actress that these days he was just thankful that she was happy. “Make up your mind that it will be the best,” he said, “and it will be – if not of your whole life, then of your life to date.”

  “That’s the kind of thing Nama would say.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really! You don’t know her as well as I do, do you, Daddy?”

  He supposed that was probably true. He had wasted so much time judging Mama that instead of seeing her objectively he still saw more faults than virtues. As Helena squeezed his hand he said: “I’ll have to remedy that.”

  +++++

  When the door opened and Suzy stepped in, Guy thought his mind to be tricking him. She was Marie, surely: Marie as he first knew her in 1919. From the flowing mane of dark hair to those violet eyes and that beguiling smile, she could only be Marie!

  His brain told him that time had moved on but his heart lurched as if there had been no passing of the years. To calm his emotions he looked to his right. And there she sat, beside him: the Marie he had seemingly loved all his life. His love for her was stronger than hers could ever be for the boy in the wings, but he could live with this. Now that he saw her on a daily basis, and was working with her again, he felt more or less fulfilled. If there was something missing he tried not to think about it. He was not one for taking major risks.

  To his left sat Edward, the son closest to his heart, who at twenty-two was already making a big
impression. With Edward some day Principal here, the School’s future was assured and the Brodie name would be perpetuated. And James was out there, acting in films and aiming to be a director. The Tavistock Theatre might have been committed to the annals of the past but Father had started something that was continuing. Now, as Suzy recited the poem of her choice, Guy listened …

  “‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

  Knocking on the moonlit door;

  And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

  Of the forest’s ferny floor:

  And a bird flew up out of the turret,

  Above the Traveller’s head:

  And he smote upon the door again a second time:

  ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

  But no one descended to the Traveller;

  No head from the leaf-fringed sill

  Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

  Where he stood perplexed and still.

  But only a host of phantom listeners

  That dwelt in the lone house then

  Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

  To that voice from the world of men:

  Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

  That goes down to the empty hall,

  Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

  By the lonely Traveller’s call.

  And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

  Their stillness answering his cry,

  While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

  ‘Neath the starred and leafy sky;

  For he suddenly smote on the door, even

  Louder, and lifted his head:-

  ‘Tell them I came, and no-one answered,

  That I kept my word,’ he said.

  Never the least stir made the listeners,