* * *
Irene walked stiffly back towards the house after her lesson, feeling relieved it was over until she reminded herself that riding just once was not going to wash. She would have to do it again, and again, and try to master it and enjoy it. She fought against the sinking feeling that gave her, and paused in the yard to pull off her gloves, a finger at a time. There was movement from one of the farmhouse windows, and Irene hoped Nancy had been watching, and had seen her on the horse. Just then, the old groom, Hilarius, came out of the great barn, and since Irene’s first impulse was to turn away, go indoors and pretend not to have seen him, she made herself square up and introduce herself. She hoped that Nancy were still watching.
‘Hello,’ she said, holding out her hand for Hilarius to shake. ‘I’m Irene Hadleigh.’ The old man paused in his progress, and peered down at his filthy palm before apparently deciding not to take Irene’s. She let her hand drop, feeling foolish, and hoped Nancy had stopped watching.
‘Ar,’ said Hilarius. Irene couldn’t guess his age. He was bald on top, with straggles of grey hair around his collar; she couldn’t tell the colour of his eyes – they were merely a glint through narrow gaps in his eyelids. She noticed that his eyelashes, though they were few, were still jet black.
‘You … look after the work horses, is that right?’ she tried, floundering. Her mouth had gone dry and she didn’t feel right. Something fluttery and strange was inside her head, making it hard to think, or focus her eyes. She blinked rapidly, and every time she did a shadow seemed to coalesce around the old man, receding when she tried to see clearly. The sun was high in the sky, and her own shadow was stunted, close to her feet. But the old man somehow seemed to cast a huge shadow. Far bigger than himself, and fathomless. He watched her with that distant glitter of his eyes, and Irene found herself backing away.
‘Ar, that’s right,’ he said, but Irene hardly heard him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured, powerfully unwilling to look him in the eye, or to be near him. The fluttering inside was getting worse, and she felt cold. He seemed to radiate cold. ‘Won’t you please excuse me,’ she whispered.
Inside, Irene sat down on the horribly uncomfortable chair that lived in the hallway, and had been designed to be looked at but not sat in. She took a deep breath, and swallowed.
‘Everything all right?’ said Nancy, coolly, as she came along from her sitting room.
‘Yes. Quite all right. Thank you.’ Irene rose, smoothing her gloves between her fingers.
‘Jolly good. Excuse me.’ Nancy went past, and up the stairs.
‘Is that my good lady wife?’ Alistair called, from the kitchen.
‘Alistair! You’re home,’ said Irene, relieved to find she wasn’t alone with Nancy.
‘A bit early for lunch, I know, but I couldn’t wait to hear how you’d got on. Well?’
‘Oh, I don’t know – you’d have to ask Pudding. I didn’t fall off, anyway.’
‘Well, that’s a start.’ Alistair laughed. ‘But how did you like it?’
‘Well enough, I think … I wasn’t sure what to expect. Pudding’s talkative, isn’t she?’ she said, to head off any questions about when she would next ride.
‘Oh, yes.’
‘And rather ghoulish. She always seems to want to tell me some hideous story about a battle or a ghost or something.’ At this, Alistair chuckled again.
‘Yes, she always did like the more blood-curdling stories. I once caught her and a companion – little Maisie Cooper, I think it was – under a hedge, dissecting a rat. They’d each brought a paring knife from home to do the job. They can’t have been more than eight or nine years old.’
‘That’s hideous!’
‘Thoroughly. They told me it was anatomy, in fact, and insisted that the rat had been run over by a wagon full of beans, so it was quite humane.’ He smiled at Irene’s disgusted expression. She thought about Hilarius, and when she did the fluttering returned, albeit in a weaker way. She’d decided against saying anything when the words came anyway, unbidden.
‘I just met Hilarius, the horse groom.’
‘Oh yes? Solid as a rock, that old chap. People have never taken to him, in the village; they can be so spooked and peculiar at the idea of a foreigner, at times. But he’s a good sort.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Irene, not in the least bit surprised to hear that the man was not well liked.
She’d written to Cora McKinley, since Alistair had been so keen that she write to somebody, and Irene found herself wanting to try harder for him. Besides, doing all these things that scared her was proving a good way to distract her from Fin’s last letter and what it had said. She very much still needed to be distracted from that. Her letter to Cora had been rather vague, suggesting that they might go into Chippenham or Bath together one day, and the morning after her riding lesson, Keith Glover brought Cora’s reply. Her handwriting was a series of exuberant swoops in black ink. We must! Or – even better – how do you fancy the coast? My cousin Amelia has a little villa – well, perhaps I’d better call it a hovel, to manage your expectations – in the hills near Lyme Regis. I’d been thinking about descending upon her, with it so terminally hot. You must come with me! There’s simply nothing like sea bathing for whipping up the spirits. Write back immediately and say you’ll come. Just us girls. Alistair looked delighted when she showed him.
‘Good old Cora,’ he said. ‘You’ll have a lot of fun, I’m sure.’
‘You think I ought to go?’
‘Well, yes.’ He looked surprised. ‘If you’d like to, that is. I’d miss you, but if you promised to come back again before very long …’ He smiled, pleased, and gave her a kiss. Irene attempted to stifle her reluctance to go. Cora had been easy enough company – garrulous enough to make up for Irene’s lack of conversation. But she wasn’t sure if she could pretend to be all right in front of Cousin Amelia; she wasn’t sure how they would take her, how it would go. She imagined hearing whispered conversations, and stifled laughter behind her back. It caused her a flood of nerves, but she went to her writing room and took out a note card, and penned her acceptance of the invitation. Her mother had often instructed her, growing up, to feign the proper feeling, the proper form, until the proper feeling arrived. Or simply to keep on feigning if it didn’t.
Every time Irene did one of these new things – went for a ride, introduced herself to somebody, exchanged a civil word with Nancy – Alistair seemed happy. Happy that she was trying, that she seemed to feel better, that she was making herself at home, at last. And Irene had started to find that making Alistair happy made her feel a little better too. She wavered, frequently. Twenty times a day she told herself that she couldn’t do it – she couldn’t accept that Manor Farm, and her marriage to Alistair, were her life from now on. They were her present reality, and they were the only future she had, and she had no idea how she would ever be reconciled to that. Twenty times a day she felt despair lapping, dangerously, around her ankles – a rising tide that would drown her if she let it. If she stood still, and watched it rise. So, twenty times a day she tried to take a step towards higher ground, even though it wasn’t always obvious where that might be. But Alistair – and the ease with which she could please him – seemed a reliable stepping stone. The following morning, when Irene announced that she was going to visit Louise Cartwright, the doctor’s wife, she let Alistair’s warm smile of approval be her reward in advance. It also prevented her from backing out.
‘Bravo, Irene,’ he said. ‘She always did love Clara’s raspberry lemonade – you might take her a bottle from the pantry.’
Following Alistair’s careful directions, Irene went on foot, which was the best way until she was confident enough to ride on her own. The lane up to Spring Cottage was too steep for the gig; the only way to reach it by road was by making a huge loop through Ford. The sun beat down and Irene walked incredibly slowly, ostensibly so that she wouldn’t arrive sweating like a shire horse but mainly because,
now she was out and on her own, she was horribly nervous. She tried to think of at least five safe topics of conversation she could rely upon if it all dried up: the weather, of course; Pudding teaching her to ride; how very busy the doctor must be; the best places to shop in Chippenham. Try as she might, she couldn’t think of a fifth, and was terrified that she’d mention Pudding’s brother Donald. She’d tried to talk to him about flowers for the house a few days before, and his terrible scars had been such a shock that she’d recoiled before she could stop herself. When she’d realised that the young man was simple she’d retreated, loathing her own inadequacy. What could one possibly say to a mother about a son who’d been so damaged by the war? Irene prayed that Louise wouldn’t want to talk about it.
However, once the Cartwrights’ hatchet-faced housekeeper had led Irene to where Mrs Cartwright was sitting, limp, in a garden chair, it became abundantly clear that she wouldn’t want to talk about Donald. Or about anything else. When none of her overtures met with any response she could understand, Irene sat in terrified silence, entirely wrong-footed. Her heart hammered and her mind, though it churned and sped, drew a complete blank as to how she should proceed. In the end Mrs Cartwright sat forward, shaking her head, and said:
‘But who are you, young lady? I don’t understand why you refuse to tell me.’ Irene repeated her name but Mrs Cartwright simply shook her head again, looking lost.
‘Not a good day,’ said the housekeeper, as she ushered Irene out. ‘Try back another time, why don’t you? Good of you to call. I’ll tell the doctor, he’ll be sorry to have missed you.’ But Irene walked a few yards down the hill, until she was safely out of sight of Spring Cottage, and burst into tears. The despair swilled around her feet. She felt shocked, exhausted; the tremulous relief of having survived a situation far out of her depth. And then she thought about Pudding, coping with her mother being so confused as well as her brother being so altered, and forced herself to stop crying. It wasn’t herself she ought to be pitying. Cringing, she remembered offering to nudge Pudding’s mother towards taking her up to London.
By the time she got back to Manor Farm, Irene was angry. She was angry with herself for being so useless, and not knowing what to say; for being frightened by the unfamiliar, and for adding to Mrs Cartwright’s puzzlement and obvious unease. But she was angry with the others too. She might have coped – or at least coped better – if somebody had let on to her that Mrs Cartwright’s illness wasn’t physical. Alistair might have told her. Clara, the housekeeper, might have told her. Nancy certainly might have – she’d merely smiled thinly as Irene had announced her plan to visit. Perhaps there had been a glimmer of amusement, or malice, in her eyes. Quite possibly, now that Irene came to think about it. Still shaky, she went in search of Nancy, not sure what she would say but thinking of something along the lines of it possibly being easier, in future, for her to maintain the Hadleigh standard if Nancy didn’t set out to deliberately sabotage her, and make her look a fool. Nancy would doubtless find it highly amusing, but she resolved to say it anyway. She went through to the back sitting room, where Nancy had her desk and books, but Nancy wasn’t there. The room was incredibly hot and stuffy. Puzzled, Irene looked at the hearth, where the remains of a fire was burning low. She sat down in the fireside chair, took the poker and stabbed at the ashes. Why Nancy had thought she needed to light a fire on such a fine day was a mystery. There were shreds of paper in the ashes, and traces of something blue – a colour that tugged at Irene with its familiarity for a second.
She stirred the glowing embers about and stared into them, searching for something she would recognise, waiting to understand why she didn’t feel she could simply walk away and forget about it. She had that same distracting feeling of something being wrong, or perhaps merely familiar, as when she’d first handled the doll in the old schoolroom – a discordance that was almost like a déjà vu. The sense that there was something to notice, but she wasn’t quite able to see it. Staring hard, she remembered the day her cousin Gilbert had died, and how her greatest shock, when she’d been given the news, had come from realising that she was not surprised. She had known. She’d been to visit him the day before, with her parents. She’d been twelve, Gilbert seventeen. Blond-haired and lithe, and so full of himself Irene hadn’t liked him much at all. She’d played tennis with him on the lawn outside her aunt and uncle’s imposing house in Richmond – a wildly one-sided match, since Gilbert wouldn’t hold back his shots or his serve just because his opponent was so much younger and smaller – and when they’d shaken hands across the net after his inevitable victory, Irene had scowled up at him and seen something flicker in his eyes. A shadow of something passing, like a shred of cloud across the sun; and from the way his nostrils suddenly flared, whatever it was had made Gilbert take a breath. Irene hadn’t thought of anything specific happening, at all – she’d only known that it was significant. That something important was going to happen.
When Gilbert died the next day, from what the doctors eventually decided was a catastrophic and hitherto concealed defect of the heart, Irene had felt peculiar. And not surprised. She’d said nothing about it to anyone, and it was only as she got older, and was able to think about it more, that she wondered. She wondered if sometimes a hindquarter of her mind took more from the things her eyes saw and her ears heard than the main part of her brain was aware of. She wondered whether that hindquarter sometimes jumped up and down and waved its hands, metaphorically speaking, and did its best to be heard, to no avail. So she sat a while longer, sweating, in Nancy’s overheated room and tried to put her finger on what it was she’d noticed without realising it. Then again, there was always the possibility that Gilbert had been a complete fluke, and the feelings she sometimes got were the self-aggrandising delusions of a child. After all, nothing whatsoever had come of finding the old doll. Feeling cross and exhausted, Irene gave the ashes a final stir. She got up and tried to open a window to let in some air, but couldn’t get it to budge.
In the kitchen, Clara and Florence the maid were shelling peas.
‘Excuse me,’ said Irene, distractedly. ‘There’s a terrible fug in Nancy’s room and I can’t find the key to open the window.’ Clara blinked at her, then exchanged a glance with Florence, who shrugged.
‘A fug, Mrs Hadleigh? What kind o’ fug might that be?’ said Clara.
‘The kind that makes it hard to breathe. Why on earth did she want a fire lit, on a day like this?’
‘A fire, Mrs Hadleigh?’ Clara frowned. ‘There’s no fires lit; not been for weeks.’
‘Well, I’m quite sure I didn’t imagine it, Mrs Gosling.’
‘Miss Hadleigh never would take it upon herself to light the fires. They weren’t even laid up ready. And certainly no one’s been to ask us to do it. I don’t believe Miss Hadleigh has even been back since lunch.’ Clara glanced at Florence, who shook her head.
‘Well, I can assure you there is a fire going in her sitting room, and if neither you nor she lit it, then who on earth did?’ said Irene, exasperatedly.
‘Well,’ said Clara, giving Florence a look that might have been meant to imply that Irene had gone peculiar. ‘I’m sure I don’t know, Mrs Hadleigh.’
‘Never mind.’ Irene sighed. ‘Is there a key to the window?’
‘Ar. ’Ee bides zomewur hind o’ the shutter,’ said Florence. Irene stared at her. ‘Cassn’t thee follow I?’ said the maid, incredulously.
‘It’ll be hanging on a nail behind the shutter, ma’am; same as with all the windows,’ Clara translated, speaking slowly, as if to a child.
At the end of the day, Irene told Alistair about her difficult visit to Louise Cartwright, and he looked pained.
‘But I did tell you, darling. I explained that she suffers a degradation of the mind, right back in the beginning,’ he said.
‘Oh.’ It was quite possible. Irene had almost no memory of her first weeks in Slaughterford, back in early May. Alistair took a sip of his gin. They were out on the
terrace, which was alight with late sunshine beneath a vast span of clear sky.
‘I … spoke to you about Donny as well. Do you recall? That he was injured in the war and is … well, somewhat slower, these days.’
‘Yes, I remember,’ Irene lied.
‘Have you met him properly yet? Donny, I mean?’
‘Sort of. I … went out to ask about flowers, but I didn’t get much of a response.’ She sensed what was coming next, and was about to say that she wasn’t up to it, but just then Nancy came out onto the terrace and gave her a measuring look.
‘Yes, you’re better off speaking to Jem about anything you’d like brought in from the gardens. Would you like to meet Donny again now?’ said Alistair. ‘He’s just over in the potting sheds, though I expect he’ll be heading home for supper soon.’
‘Yes, all right,’ said Irene. Happily, with Alistair at her side, the conversation with Donald went far better than the one with his mother had gone. The scars of his wound were still terrible, and at first Irene didn’t know where to look, until she realised that Donny himself wouldn’t notice anyway. He seemed sweet; there was something soft and almost childlike in his slow responses, and the careful way he moved and spoke. Alistair seemed delighted that it had gone so well, and Irene felt again that delighting Alistair might in fact be a worthwhile way to spend her time. She decided, as they returned to the aperitifs on the terrace, that the day hadn’t been a complete bust after all.
In the evening, she and Alistair played cribbage while Handel’s Water Music played on the wireless, and Nancy read a book on the sofa, her legs crossed at her elegant ankles. Irene won three times in a row.
‘You have me quite licked, darling,’ said Alistair. ‘Excuse me while I nip out to greet the prince.’ By this he meant visit the privy, which, whilst it could only be reached by going outside, did at least flush – with such a roaring, gurgling thunder of water that it had been nicknamed the Royal George, after the ocean liner. As soon as he left the room, Irene felt Nancy’s presence grow. Sure enough, she heard the book close, and the creak of the sofa as she rose.
The Hiding Places Page 13
