Haidee knew this and also that he had let bygones be bygones. The thought of leaving him so soon again was heartbreaking, so the news five minutes ago that the friend who had looked after him before could not, for family reasons, oblige again had been in one setback and solution.
‘Going away again?’ Skipper’s mistress echoed Inquisitively next morning. ‘Where to this time?’
‘Over there,’ Haidee responded cryptically, and pointed across the bay to the red and white chimney on the generating extension, the soft looming saddles of the Dublin foothills and the peaks of the Sugar Loaves. ‘Wicklow. I’ve a friend in hospital. I’ve promised to go and stay with her daughter.’
The face of Skipper’s mistress changed. ‘Aren’t you very good? Just what your mother would have done if she’d had her legs. Do you know what I sometimes think? I think, when two people are close, the way you and your mother—God rest her—were, the one that dies puts a bit of themselves into the one that’s left. I have that belief and I have it very strongly.’
True or false, the thought was a cushioning against not second but at least fifth or sixth thoughts. On the strength of it Haidee finished her packing and took Brand’s carrying basket from the top of the wardrobe. The sight of it sent him scurrying on short agitated legs under the sideboard. He had known it, of course, felt it in his whiskers. Besides which, snoozing on the morning paper he had seen that the day’s star point for Aries was ‘Care necessary’. When the basket lid closed he gave a howl of such misery that the expedition was very nearly abandoned. But at that moment Skipper’s master, who came home for lunch and had been appraised of the situation by his wife, knocked to offer them a lift into town.
The Enniskerry bus left from a historic site. Eleven hundred years ago marauding Danes had rowed their black boats up the bay to a dark pool where they had moored and landed. The black pool was to become Dubh Linn or Dublin, the landing place Poolbeg Street.
Friday afternoon traffic made city progress slow. There was the south-east corner of Stephen’s Green, almost unrecognizable with its concrete multi-storeys and the National Film Theatre. There was the canal at Charlemont Bridge and a pub called the Barge Inn. At Milltown they crossed the Dodder with tinkers’ skewbald ponies standing in the rain, and ahead the Dublin Mountains looking on this afternoon of low cloud like the backs of elephants. Next Dundrum village and beyond it the country opened out. The mountains were low and brown with white houses and spinneys of orange leaves. At Lamb’s Cross the fields held sheep. Near Stepaside the first dark slashes of conifer plantations made whiskers on the cheeks of the hills. At Kilteman a herd of Jerseys grazed and a scuttle of brown hens ran into a cottage garden. In Golden Ball the Catholic church had blue and white weather boarding and a brick red belfry.
Ahead now on the left were landmarks, the mountain called Katy Gallagher with the chimney of the old lead smelting works making a finger on its crest, and near it the cone of the Sugar Loaf. These were lost as the road plunged through the Scalp. On the right a tide of red bracken washed up to boulders, incredibly poised. On the left the softwood plantings of Enniskerry Forest ran to the skyline.
The road came out again, ran highly over green dips peppered with gorse and suddenly—beautiful even in misty rain—the spire of Enniskerry church came up in a gap dead centre and the rest of the village, trees, roofs and clouds filled in about it like a frontispiece. It is a view most people have photographed and hardly one has seen without a lift to the heart. Haidee was the exception. She looked at it dry mouthed and with sinking spirits.
It was the point of no return.
The bus descended into the market square which was more like the hub of a wheel with roads, signposted Glencree Youth Hostel, Dublin and Bray, Delgany, Glen O’ the Downs branching off it like spokes. It swung round a tall-towered war memorial with a green dome and the straggling remnants of summer roses and stopped. Haidee took Brand by the handle of his basket, the bus conductor took her case. All three of them got out.
‘All right?’ the conductor inquired.
Brand thought it far from all right and said so. If he could know how truly he spoke, Haidee thought scaredly, as her eyes sought vainly for the timber lorry that certainly was not there. The only vehicle in sight apart from the bus was a rakish car in a smart shade of topaz brown. It was parked outside the Powerscourt Arms opposite.
Had the bus run late and Rory Hart’s driver not waited? Haidee would not have put it past the forester to have instructed him to give her no grace. She was looking forlornly at the black and white hotel and the winged grey horses that supported the Powerscourt coat of arms when a booted burly figure strode out of the doorway. It glanced across, saw the bus and spotted her beside it. The wave that followed was amazingly friendly.
‘Hullo there. Sorry to keep you!’ Rory Hart called. Next instant he stopped and stood as though rooted to the ground. ‘What’s that?’
You would have thought Brand’s inoffensive basket was a case of gelignite.
‘If it’s what I think it is,’ Rory Hart continued, ‘it’s not coming here.’
Very silly, lord knows, because it had come. ‘It’s Brand, my cat,’ Haidee said defensively. ‘I had to bring him. I had no alternative. I asked someone to mind him, but she couldn’t.’
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ the brown head shook, ‘but some arrangement will have to be made. You can’t have him at Glenglass.’
‘Then you can’t have me either,’ Haidee retorted unwisely, and could have bitten her tongue out. ‘I mean...’ she began.
‘I know,’ he said smoothly. ‘I’m out of the boys’ department. I know what you mean.’ For a moment amusement glinted in his face. It soon sobered. ‘You’re welcome,’ he added shortly. ‘It’s been a long time.’ The eyes, curiously steady, were fixed on hers.
‘Thank you. And Brand will be no trouble, I promise you,’ she said nervously.
‘He’ll be more than trouble. Sooner or later he’ll be a tragedy,’ she was answered uncompromisingly. ‘Have you forgotten Bambi and Honey and all the rest of them, because I haven’t. However, your eyes should be open by this, lord knows, so on your head be it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you and don’t come crying to me.’ He took up both case and basket and marched across the road.
It sounded like intimidation and as such it had succeeded. Haidee, watching the basket bobbing from the strong wrist that held it, seemed suddenly to have no knees. In the past few seconds they had turned to water.
Rory Hart stopped at the topaz-coloured car and unlocked it.
‘Yours?’ Haidee asked. Yesterday’s car had been black.
He looked gratified. ‘Yes. Still a new toy. I only picked it up after I’d left you at the hospital. Like it?’ Suddenly he seemed disarmingly young and pleased with himself.
‘Very much. I was expecting a timber lorry.’
Again he gave a friendly laugh. ‘Oh well, you are coming home, you know.’
Doubtless intended to put her at her ease, it had the opposite effect. She had schooled herself to face dangers and difficulties. Kindness made her feel a snake in the grass.
Taking in the terrain without appearing to do so was not easy. Rory had taken the road which was posted Delgany and the Glen O’ the Downs. It went between high green hedges past a turreted bridge and came out on a wide dual carriageway. Much of Wicklow is downland and this was a typical stretch.
The rain had blown off and the sky had patches of blue. To the right, a low-lying white hotel rode the green slope, to the left was forest. A gate with firebeaters in readiness flashed past. She saw ‘Forestry Division’ on a board and wondered if this could be Glenglass. Rory, however, showed no sign of stopping.
‘Bellevue,’ he said casually. ‘Bellevue Wood.’
Was it a trap? She had been straining to read the name and hoping he would not notice. Plainly, it was one Suzanne would have known.
‘I hadn’t realized,’ she ventured. ‘It looks bigger.’
�
�It is,’ he stated, and for a second the dark blue eyes seemed to be appraising her. By the mercy of Providence, it seemed she had said the right thing, but the scrutiny made her uncomfortable. It was as though he had not expected quite that observation. ‘All this that you can see is the same of course.’ He gestured. ‘It’s mixed forest. Amenity. Pro bono publico. Bord Failte don’t permit felling. But on top and away to the left there’s a big softwood acreage not yet open to the public.’
The strange thing, Haidee realized sharply, was that he was handing out the information as though it were natural for her not to know about amenity woodlands and ‘mixed’ as opposed to ‘softwood’ afforestation.
‘Open to the public?’ she began knowledgeably. ‘You mean, these nature trails I’ve read about?’ They had been widely publicised as a feature of Conservation Year. At least she knew enough to be sure they had not been in operation fifteen years ago.
‘That’s right. Bellevue has a good trail. I’ve been along it—business and pleasure. It’s the only one open in this area at present and I wanted to see how it’s done.’
‘For Glenglass?’ Surely he wouldn’t like that. His thing to tall intents and purposes was not conservation.
‘It’s to come. Next year, I believe. They’re hinting at a deer enclosure, but I don’t know.’
‘A deer enclosure?’ Were there deer on Glenglass Forest? In the nick of time she checked. This was something else of which Suzanne would be aware.
‘Like the one at Rockingham,’ Rory Hart went on. ‘Perhaps not quite so extensive. That’s twenty-two acres—and has also brought us some mudslinging, as you may know.’
They were not wasting time. The road still wide and still with vistas of green slopes and smoky blue hills had run through Newtown Mount Kennedy. He turned right and Haidee saw properly the ranges of rolling hills they had left behind. There was something distinctive about Irish mountains. What they lacked in grandeur was supplied them in soft multi-coloured cladding, a general richness of misty blues and browns, soft greens, dull heathers and often with forestry skirts.
A modest plantation of Christmas trees about a foot high flashed past on the left. ‘Is that part of a forest?’ she asked.
‘That?’ He made her feel she’d said something foolish. ‘No. That’s somebody’s waste land earning its keep under the Government Private Planting Grant Scheme. Twenty pound per acre State grant.’
The mountains were losing their gentleness and Haidee her sense of direction. She had seen Roundwood on a signpost, but Rory had followed that road for only a short distance. Now they were in a basin of hills. The line of one swept diagonally from left to right and all the way up it was the dark saw edge of conifers. The whole area indeed was a pocket of forestry with plantations making fans, bands and trapeziums on the bare mountain and standing like ramrods along the road. Just here and there the tree invasion was not complete and granite heights peppered with quartz were barren against the blue of the afternoon sky. She could well imagine deer up there on the moor.
Startlingly, Rory Hart all but voiced the thought. ‘I forget, was Honey the cat in the trap or the deer that got chopped on the road?’
A needless cruelty. Haidee’s eyes went fearfully to the basket on the back seat. ‘Did you have to remind me? I’ve explained. I had to bring Brand. At such short notice there was nowhere else for him to go.’
‘Why burden yourself with him at all? He’s not your cat. Have him put down.’
Have him put down! Brand! Choosy, strong-willed, possessive, show-you-who’s-boss-Brand! Even to think it was obscene.
‘That’s like you,’ she flashed. ‘I think more of my animals than that.’
‘And less of your people.’ The eyes stayed unblinkingly on the road.
‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ Haidee countered angrily. After all, what business was it of his? Suzanne’s mother with everything to forgive had brushed aside even the thought of it. ‘And that’s because of Jennie. My mother has let bygones be bygones. I hope she will too.’
‘Just—Jennie?’ The question dropped quietly and before she could make any attempt at answer the car slowed down.
‘We’ve been fencing, Sue,’ Rory Hart said softly. ‘All the way from Enniskerry neither of us has had the guts to ask the other for an amnesty. If you remember our parting ...’ He paused to let a flock of Aylesbury ducks waddle across to a ditch.
‘I...’ she stopped awkwardly. Rory Hart exterminating squirrels and wanting Brand put down was one thing. Rory Hart dropping into the diminutive ‘Sue’ was quite another. A portrait painter had recently said that character lay in the mouth rather than the eyes. This mouth was wide and had a twist to it. What had put it there? Cynicism? Doggedness? Self-control? No matter. Today, it was a lean face with clefts in the long brown cheeks and tramlines on the forehead. A black sweater under the jacket of khaki suede shaded his eyes to grey. In fact, now that the light was draining from the hills he seemed to match his forest.
Hard as the trees he reared and not likely to care tuppence about a love of fifteen years ago.
Yet strangely it did not rest there. ‘We little thought then that the day would come when we would be driving home together to Glenglass,’ he said with uncanny truth.
Haidee said no and felt it a lame comment. Apparently her companion felt so too. ‘You never told me what you felt when you heard I was in charge here.’
The mixture of naiveté and pride was for no sensible reason unbearable. It brought a flash of how he would have looked at, say, twenty, hair tinged with auburn, round ruddy cheeks, full lips parted in a sunny teasing smile. Absurdly, she wanted to cry out: ‘Don’t show me this side of you. I don’t want to know.’
‘I didn’t feel anything much,’ she said carefully. ‘It all happened such a long time ago.’
Calculated to cool, it seemed to act like a drench of cold water.
‘Lord save us,’ Rory Hart remarked in a flat tone, ‘you have changed. You’re not the same person.’
‘A lot has happened to me,’ she excused herself.
‘And to me.’
It recalled someone whose existence she had temporarily forgotten. The boy Toby. And Toby’s mother who for some reason was not with her husband and her son. So whatever happened between Rory Hart and Suzanne Desmond all those years ago had not stopped him marrying and finding, alas, another dose of unhappiness. ‘I’m sorry.’ It was a fool thing to say, but it was out before she could stop it.
‘You said that as though you meant it.’ Again it was the soft disarming tone.
For the minute all thought of acting left Haidee’s head. What Suzanne would or would not have said mattered net at all. She spoke as herself.
‘I do. The past is behind us now.’
‘It has its legacies.’
‘Can’t we forget them?’
‘I thought you had,’ Rory Hart said dryly. ‘Glenglass is one place I never thought to see you.’
It sounded more ominous than friendly, but Haidee set herself not to notice.
He had taken a turn between two pillars. The road still seemed a public one, for a car had preceded them and little knots of children on their way home from school were shuffling through the leaves. To the right blazed the shrivelling torches of beech and chestnut. To the left behind wire fencing was one dark tree after another, straight and uniform as organ pipes.
‘Go on,’ Rory bade grimly, ‘say it. The word is—telegraph poles.’
Beside them a board read: State Forest. Glenglass.
Haidee’s breath had been taken. The moment had crept up on her. It wasn’t fair. There had been no clue, no name, no gates. Surely there should have been gates. Had they been taken down and sold? She thought of the little pillars they had passed.
‘You—what have you done to it?’ she gasped. ‘I didn’t recognize it. You saw that. I didn’t recognize it.’
‘I saw.’ The tone was cryptic.
She took a risk, waving her hand at the funera
l pines. ‘They’re horrible. The whole place is changed. I wouldn’t know it.’
‘So you said.’ Again the expressionless voice. ‘But that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Change. Things change all the time. Tastes. Coastlines. Liturgies. Laws. And people.’
Without warning he started to sing—a jaunty graceless air which had been on the streets of Dublin for many a long year.
'Where are your eyes that looked so mild!
Hurroo! Hurroo!
Where are your eyes that looked so mild
When my poor heart you first beguil’d?
Why did you skedaddle from me and the child?
Why, Johnny, I hardly knew ye!’
Haidee, stiff with apprehension, thanked Providence for the second last line. It at least did not lit the case. Every other sentiment was horribly, terrifyingly true.
The blue eyes mischievously dilated looked her way for a second and the song stopped. ‘Hi, Johnny!’ In some way he made it seem like a question.
With a positive armada in flames behind her another burning boat would hardly be noticed. This was a strange man, but no other had ever come so boldly close. She said gravely: ‘Hi!’
Despite the portrait painter who went for mouths, eyes had a fledgling lack of pretence, and Rory Hart’s eyes were not bold but tranquil and serious. Something glimmered in them now and they all but smiled.
Haidee hadn’t been watching the road. The shriek of brakes and the car jerking to a stop took her breath for the second time in ten minutes. A boy’s round open mouth swam for a second before her eyes. There followed the high explosive laughter of children who had had a fright. She looked at the driving seat and Rory Hart’s brow was beaded with sweat.
‘I’ll swing for that child!’ he vowed.
‘What happened? I didn’t see.’
‘Just as well.’ He opened the door, said: ‘Young idiot,’ to no one in particular and: ‘Toby! Come here. What the devil were you playing at?’
Dear Deceiver Page 6
