The angry pink that flagged his cheekbones was suddenly reminiscent of the plump-faced country boy whose dreams Suzanne had trampled on. It was the spurt of an old flame, the echo of an outrage that would never completely die. He would not scathe Haidee Brown like that because what she felt or blamed him for would matter less than walking on the blue-green Sitka needles.
The thought may have made sense, in fact it did. Strangely, however, in the making of comfort its failure was total.
Haidee had spent years being careful for her mother; it was odd to have the boot on the other foot, but certainly, as a protector, Jennie excelled herself. She held back branches in case Haidee would get her face slapped, she guided anxiously over awkward bits of track, and she was assiduous about giving a helping hand over a gate.
At the point where a forage harvester was digging out the new fire line Rory left them. ‘If you’re near Cats Spinney and see Tom,’ he suggested to Jennie, ‘ask him to call to the office on his way home.’
They went on to the wood in question and located Tom who was spraying heather growths. He looked very little older than Jennie herself and it seemed he had just left school and was gaining practical experience before applying for an appointment as Forestry trainee.
‘They only take boys, worse luck,’ Jennie confided. ‘I wish Women’s Lib. would do something about it before it’s too late. Too late for me, that is. I’ve only five years left. You have to be under twenty. Have an apple,’ she invited, hitching herself on to a gate. ‘Can you manage? I should have helped you. Sorry.’
You couldn’t say you were up against a stone wall. Nobody could have been more polite or co-operative. And friendly with it. Sitting there with apple juice on her lip and her hands on the fence rail, Jennie talked forest quite as knowledgeably as Rory himself.
Soil acid brought on the peat which in turn supported the heather covering Tom had been spraying. Herbicides were used a lot these days. They were very effective.
‘On birds and animals too, or don’t they bother to find out?’ Haidee could not resist the thrust.
The brown eyes turned on her, wide and compassionate. ‘You shouldn’t worry so much, honestly. It’s the law of nature. Actually, that’s not the point. They are careful about poisons and the Forestry Service supports wild life, they make a point of it, they do, honestly ... but if rabbits burrow into the nursery beds—or badgers—there aren’t many rabbits now because of myxomatosis, you know, that sort of thing, they’ve no option.’ Her face seemed all round eyes and snub nose. ‘I’m lucky, I suppose. I’m like Father. You’re like Mother, I think, and she’s been dreadfully unhappy. It was awful. There was nothing we could do.’
She talked and Haidee listened, swinging her toe and letting her eyes adjust to the gloom of the conifers and the still green ferns beneath them. It was a good camouflage for what she took a moment to distinguish, a dead rabbit and a living one crouching beside it. Even when she called Jennie’s attention to it, the rabbit did not run. It did not even stir.
‘You’d better not look,’ Jennie said thoughtfully. ‘It’s blind. It’s got myxomatosis. You know what I’ve got to do.’ She did it, without emotion and faultlessly. The rabbit punch, she called it. It was instantaneous.
Walking back from Cats Spinney through the main wood, Haidee had to pass the Forester’s Office. As she did so, its door opened and Rory emerged. He seemed surprised to see her alone. ‘Where’s Jennie?’
It had been slightly mysterious to Haidee too. Jennie had suddenly asked to be excused. Someone she wanted to see, she’d said, and had ducked swiftly under the fence and gone running across the moor.
‘Ah yes.’ Rory nodded acceptance. It registered with a stab of curiosity that he knew the answer. ‘So you came back on your own? Find the way all right?’
She had already thanked providence yet again that direction was one of her strong suits. ‘Of course. Why shouldn’t I? I used to live here. Remember?’
‘I’m hardly likely to forget. So why keep telling me?’
Had she? Was she over-playing her hand? It jolted her into attack.
‘You seem to need it. The day before yesterday you practically asked for my credentials.’
‘And if I may jog your memory.’ The voice was unpleasantly creamed off. ‘Last night you refused to give them to me.’
Suzanne probably would not have turned a hair. Haidee was almost annihilated. She fought desperately against the tide of mortification until at last anger, as much at herself as at him, came to her aid. ‘If I may jog your memory we had broken up. I’d left you. It’s asking a bit much—’
‘Of you, Suzanne?’ The mocking words seemed to contain a truth, horrible but not to be questioned. She floundered, her mind boggling and hotly conscious that her face could be her betrayal.
As though in confirmation, Rory put a hand to the wooden door of the office. ‘Come in here. We’d better have this out.’
Inside, he thumbed off his hat and laid it on the table. ‘Sit down. Not exactly the Hilton, but we won’t be disturbed.’
She sat nervously, looking at the map on the pitch pine wall, the blue green tweed in the hat and the record sheets alongside it. Rory sat too, but without a trace of nerves. His mouth was wider than she’d realized and its line was arch. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she challenged.
‘I was wondering what we could do about your eyes.’
She started.
‘You’re not wearing your glasses. Don’t you know they’re a necessary protection?’
It was true she hadn’t put them on that morning. She remembered it, blinking. ‘No, Just for travelling. Car and train, actually.’ His own eyes had the depth of pools, very quiet, very shadowed. Sunlight settled slowly and pinpointed them. ‘And for bird-watching.’
‘Bird-watching?’
‘Yes. On the Bull. I go quite often. I like to know what I’m looking at.’
‘Yes,’ Rory said quietly, ‘so do I. Actually.’
Her blood had started to chill when unexpectedly his lips quirked. ‘All right. This could go on for hours. You don’t need them, I do. Wear them, girl, as long as you’re in Glenglass.’
Most of this was a riddle. She took issue on the last part.
‘I’m not. Won’t be, I mean. I told you last night—I’m going.’
‘Last night you were hysterical.’
‘I wasn’t. You took me by surprise.’ She was beginning to think that after all glasses would be a protection. The eyes boring into hers not only looked like blue steel but had an almost physical and a terrifying effect. She felt her own open wider in protest. ‘When my mother asked me to come here, I was prepared to meet you again but not to live with you. I thought Jennie was on her own. If I’d known you were looking after her, there would have been no need for me.’ Truth gave her voice a ring. ‘If, of course, I could persuade her to come back with me to Dublin...’
‘You’d be wasting your time. Jennie won’t budge from Glenglass.’
‘I realize that. And here she doesn’t need me.’
‘I disagree.’
Haidee blinked astonishedly.
‘You can be a body,’ he said calmly. ‘Not somebody pretending to be something they’re not.’
The map of the forest on the wall in front of her seemed to be going round. ‘I beg your pardon!’ she gasped.
‘I don’t beg yours,’ the implacable voice went on. ‘You were never a mother figure. You proved that with Toby. And as for loving Glenglass, that’s absolute cobblers. You ran off because your stepfather was determined to see it properly looked after by those who knew how. Beech grows faster than oak, for instance, so there are places where, big as it is, you have to watch out for the oak. Jennie understands this, you call it destruction. You see a rabbit with myxo and you weep and kid yourself it’ll recover. But it won’t. Nature’s laws are inexorable. Jennie wouldn’t think twice about what had to be done.’ He broke off impatiently. ‘Don’t look at me like that. I
t’s only an instance.’
‘More than that,’ Haidee submitted. ‘It happened this morning. A blind rabbit, actually.’
He was silent for so long, gazing at her, that she felt uncomfortable.
‘I interrupted you. Sorry. Did I put you off?’
You put me off twenty-two years ago,’ he said with a gleam. ‘When you were ten and told me off for trespassing because I was the grocer’s boy. You don’t do it any more, I’m glad to say.’
It was Haidee’s turn to be silent, pricked by something illogical and unfair. She was not the culprit, she was not the spoiled daughter of the big house. Why should she feel such remorse?
‘Anyway, I’m going,’ she said. ‘You took a long time to say all that. It wasn’t necessary. I knew it already.’ She pushed the chair back and rose. ‘And oughtn’t we to be getting back? For lunch, I mean. You do eat lunch?’
‘Sit down!’ Rory, she realized, had been trying to get a word in. The two he had got came out like a small explosion. She obeyed them, her cheeks flaming. ‘Yes, I eat lunch, yes, you can get it for me. No, you’re not leaving Glenglass. And—let me finish.’ He saw her lips move and thumped the table. ‘Of course what should be done with Jennie is to get her back to school. She’s taking O-levels next summer. But I know defeat when I see it and she won’t shift till this is all over. Meantime, she needs a body to fuss over. Yours will do.’
‘Body?’ She blinked again.
‘Body,’ Rory repeated with what seemed amazingly like mischief. ‘Don’t despise it. It’s as gorgeous as ever.’
Now she knew she was going crazy. Or he was. One of them was seeing and the other hearing things that could never be. She felt her eyebrows rise.
‘Have no fear, I’ve no designs on it at the moment,’ he said coolly. ‘Another time, perhaps. And again have no fear. That sort of thing is all I have in mind. Our marriage was so incredibly bad I’d never risk it again.’
She was so angry she had no, room for embarrassment. ‘Sorry. You forget, it takes two.’
‘I forget nothing.’ The eyes were steady as rocks.
Haidee sighed. ‘Well, if I stay...’
‘No “if’. You’re staying.’ At last he rose. ‘And remember again, Toby thinks his mother is dead. If you can’t accept that, say so now. I won’t have him forming an affection for someone who won’t always be there.’
‘You’ve not got a very good opinion of me, have you?’ she challenged.
‘You’re right,’ he told her. ‘Shall we go?’
‘Not till I make my condition. No one must know we’re married and you mustn’t...’
‘Oh, come off it, girl!’ He did not let her finish. ‘I’ve kept my mouth shut for the past ten years. What makes you think I’m going to open it now?’ He swung the door open and glared disapprovingly as she passed through. ‘That thing you’ve got on your head looks exactly like a tea-cosy!’
The path was the same one they had followed last night with the difference that now it was possible to see the detail underfoot—oak galls, wood-sorrel, shield fern, and to the right, leaf-scattered and with a dark gape at its base, the badger’s earth. This morning, however, no ghostly black-buttoned snout was visible.
Haidee, suddenly remembering Jennie’s flight, wondered aloud where she had gone.
‘If she left you at Cats Spinney you shouldn’t need to ask,’ was the baffling reply. ‘You went often enough yourself, and Mother Mary’s still in the hot seat.’
Mother Mary? Haidee put two and two together. That large grey and white building she’d noticed across the fields must have been a convent. Less simple was the reference to having visited it herself. Worse was to come.
‘I daresay you’ll be looking her up? She asked about you not long ago.’
‘She must be—pretty old.’
‘Pushing eighty, I should think. She saw us all grow up.’ She assimilated the implications and they were not reassuring. Mother Mary cancelled out what last night had seemed an astonishing lucky double, the discovery that the two doctors in Glenglass and the present Church of Ireland incumbent had all come there within the past three years.
The house had just reared into the gap ahead when they came to the big oak which last night had impressed her by its size. Shadows have a way of magnifying, but not in this case. The tree was enormous. It stood there, still with a lot of green from the late summer, and looking as though it could have seen Strongbow’s Norman knights ride through the Kingdom of Leinster.
‘Have you any idea how old it is?’ Her eyes had intercepted an inquiring glance from Rory’s.
‘At a guess three or four hundred. Ask me when it’s down and I’ll work it out for you.’
‘Down?’ She was shocked. ‘You’re not going to fell it?’ His gaze had narrowed. Haidee Brown often said the wrong thing, but it seemed that this time her plea had been appreciated.
‘Not willingly,’ he said shortly.
By unvoiced consent, they had both stopped walking.
‘I still have your autograph.’ He held out his right hand and she saw on the brown of one figure a pucker of white scar. It made no sense but, as with the mention of Mother Mary, two and two went together this time with a thrill of revulsion. ‘And mine is still there for posterity.’
She looked puzzled.
‘ “Oh, Rosalind,” ’ he told her. ‘ “These trees shall be my books
And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character.” ’
Now she had it, now she knew what to look for. It was there, further along the trunk. One word, cut irregularly. Suzanne.
‘Before I knew better, of course,’ he added quietly.
It seemed sad. Disillusionment was always sad. The mantle of Suzanne demanded that she remain defiant or at best oblivious, but she wanted to say something gentle.
His eyes raked her quizzically: ‘Nowadays, if I catch anyone marking my trees they’re for it!’
Marking trees—he was regretful only for the tree. And he had got her feeling sorry for him. Confound the man!
‘Oh, honestly,’ she expostulated. ‘Just because you read Shakespeare...’ ridiculously, even that was annoying. He was emerging as a man of taste and culture, it would have been easier to write him off as a barbarian. ‘Anyway, it’s crooked. I like my name to look nice!’
It had not seemed a particularly forceful remark, but clearly its effect was strong. He backed. ‘Not again, please. That’s what you said the last time and I’ll carry the mark to my grave!’
A stillness seemed to have fallen. Her reason told her that the remark was the first thing you’d think of when you saw uneven letters, but something more potent than reason made her suddenly chill. What little ghost stood between them putting words into her mouth?
‘How old were we then?’ she creased her forehead.
‘About ten, and we loathed each other. I hacked out your name in the first place because I hoped you might get into a row for it. You hoisted me with my own petard, or should I say, stuck me with my own penknife?’
It certainly obliterated romance.
‘I wonder why we ever married.’ She was thinking aloud, forgetting how dangerous it could be.
‘You wonder?’ he echoed. ‘That’s my privilege and, believe me, I use it often. Why did I marry you, Suzanne? How could I have been so dumb?’
It was too much. Or else she had gone too deeply into the part she was playing. ‘I suppose you couldn’t have—wanted me? I didn’t exactly see you hating me last night...’
His face checked her. Twelve hours ago as he’d stood by her bed it had changed to a kind of compassion. The same look was in it now.
‘Watch it, girl. You’re getting in too deep.’
Kindness, she allowed, kindness after a fashion. He had seen her frayed nerves and caught the note of passion in her voice. She did not deny it, but as she followed him across the lawn to the steps and the golden cushion of Brand’s slumbering form she felt like a child who had been well and truly sl
apped.
CHAPTER FIVE
A fortnight flashed by. There was Toby in a Prussian blue sweater at the badger’s sett showing her first the bedding which the occupier had dragged out that morning and then the neatly dug latrines: ‘That’s where he goes to the jacks!’ There was Brand who liked to get himself in the picture, scooping Rory’s pen off the table with a crescent paw, trotting proudly home with catches of fieldmice, stalking through the leaves, his round eyes popping with excitement. Where had this been all his life? Truth to tell, there was a certain similarity between Brand’s eyes and Haidee’s.
She would sit at the glass in Suzanne’s shabby bedroom lifting her brown switch and turning her head, first left, then right. Without spectacles her eyes under their high arched brows were round and startled. The frightened rather than the frighteners. So what could Rory have meant?
She looked in the glass more often during that fortnight than she had done in the whole of her life. She looked—bright-eyed with her hair tucked up in the pom-pom cap he disliked; in floral pyjamas with her hair brushed and floating; coated and gloved for church with her switch pinned into a coil. But, though she lived in a forest, she was no Snow White. The mirror did not speak her name. It put it as plain as the nose on her face. ‘If that’s gorgeous my name’s not Davy.’
The days shortened and curtains had to be drawn and lights lit for the evening meal. After this Toby’s lesson books were spread at one end of the table and Rory’s work programmes and account books at the other.
‘He never used to do his work here,’ Toby confided, half pleased, half apprehensive. ‘He always went back to the office.’
‘Well, perhaps it’s too cold there now,’ Haidee returned.
‘No. It’s heated,’ he asserted. ‘Oh, gosh, I s’pose he’s checking on me.’
Perhaps so. Haidee knew only that the house seemed happy, and it pleased her to think that, doomed as it was, its last months should find it echoing to laughter and song.
Much of the singing she did herself. Her voice was not great but it was pleasant and she lilted as naturally as she talked.
Dear Deceiver Page 10
