Dear Deceiver

by Doris E. Smith

  ‘No more than I can disapprove of giving.’ A smile softened the straight lips. ‘Some discerning person has said that when you give possessions you give but little, it is when you give of yourself that you truly give.’

  There was silence.

  But it’s not true, Haidee thought despondently, it’s what I hoped, perhaps, but it hasn’t worked.

  ‘It’s no good,’ she sighed. ‘You saw Jennie. She suspects and she’s wretched. She’ll never let me help her.’

  Eyes, old and very wise, looked into hers. ‘Perhaps not, but then you came to her in the worst possible disguise.’

  ‘You mean ...’

  ‘Yes, I mean Suzanne. Is it so strange, my child? Can you not see the problem? Jennie has grown up in the shadow of Suzanne. She’s been a legend here. Her disappearance gave her a romantic aura and her poor mother kept her on a pedestal. It must have been comforting, I should think, to feel that that kind of competition was not around.’ Were the eyes twinkling? Haidee could not be sure.

  ‘You have been very innocent, my dear,’ she heard Suzanne’s old friend say very kindly. ‘I, who am not supposed to know about such things, can tell you that. And time is against you. Last year or next year, it could have been that much easier.’

  ‘Please, Reverend Mother, you’re too clever for me. Won’t you explain?’

  The wimple moved again, slowly, from side to side. ‘No, child, I’ve said too much. But think a little. Put on another pair of shoes. You’re fifteen, not child, not woman, you know how to love but not how to lose, and a year still seems eternity.’

  The conversation looked like ending. It had revealed no startling facts. What Mother Mary had said Haidee, in part, had guessed at. What it had done was to put Jennie in true perspective. She was not primarily the custodian of the family fortunes with a duty to question a newcomer’s bona fides, but someone standing to lose the man she loved. And standing to lose him only to the one who had chained him for fifteen years.

  ‘Then if I told her I wasn’t Suzanne ...’ Haidee spoke her thoughts, ‘it could make things right.’

  ‘Could it?’ Mother Mary echoed enigmatically. ‘I said I wouldn’t advise you child, but I will say this. It came to me just now as I let my thoughts dwell on the name of this church. You have put your shoulder to a wheel, perhaps inadvisedly, perhaps that great good may come. Don’t depart from it. Take each step as it presents itself. The Holy Spirit will end it for you in the right way.’ She stood up and the folds of her long skirt fell to the floor about her. ‘We must go now. Jennie will not have stayed long with Sister Gabriel.’

  Back once more in Glenglass the visit was hardly discussed.

  ‘Did you like the chapel?’ Rory asked, and received Haidee’s enthusiasm with a nodded: ‘Yes, I thought you would.’ After supper he went out to a meeting.

  ‘If Mother gets better,’ Jennie asked abruptly, ‘will you stay with us for good?’

  Damn this waiting, Haidee thought angrily, it’s cruel.

  ‘Darling, don’t hope,’ she said softly. ‘That only makes things harder. No, I won’t stay,’ she added. ‘I have a life of my own now. I’ll be going back to it.’

  ‘Does Rory know?’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with Rory,’ Haidee returned firmly. ‘Only with you. In case you ever need me. Do remember that, Jennie, please.’

  It was typical of human nature that it would not let her feel one thing at a time. The light in Jennie’s eyes, slow and deep like a smouldering wood fire, was satisfying. The constriction in her own breast gave exquisite pain.

  Next morning she was hanging some of Toby’s garments on the line in the clearing at the back of the house when scuffling sounds came from a thin screen of young beeches on the forest perimeter. Brand had a weekly ‘bag’ of blackbirds some of which he did not always kill. Haidee was not as skilled as she wished at rescuing them, but at least she tried.

  She tried now, dropping the peg basket and rushing into the undergrowth. Brand was there as she’d guessed, dragging out something quite large and furry. She gave a yell and Rory in the act of getting into his van heard her and came running over. He whistled when he saw the prey.

  ‘God’s fish, a weasel! Clutterbug you’re coming on.’

  Haidee thought the reverse. She was not pleased with Brand. The weasel had a charming little face and it was dead.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ Rory said. ‘Look how he’s done it.’

  The teeth marks were not on the throat but on the stomach.

  ‘That’s very neat,’ Rory went on approvingly. ‘He must have got it on its back. Good work, Buggy. Didn’t think you had it in you.’ He looked from the smirking cat to Haidee’s face. ‘Hasn’t she congratulated you? Shame!’

  ‘If you want to know I wish he hadn’t,’ Haidee said.

  ‘I don’t want to know—actually,’ he returned, mocking her. ‘I’d rather remain in ignorance and hope you were getting sense. However, when you get back to this life of your own you speak of, doubtless you’ll be able to make him a feather duster again.’ He took the weasel by the tail and marched away with it.

  It left as always a pricked sensation. How poorly he rated her. How contemptuously he had spoken. Relations with Suzanne, hectic as they had been, had never, she felt sure, had the greyness of contempt or deceit. It was Suzanne he had chosen to bear his name and his child and, miserably as she had treated him since, she had given him his son.

  They all seemed to be stacking up against her, the things Suzanne had been, blazing, fearless Suzanne of whom she herself was such a pale shadow.

  She went back dispiritedly to the kitchen.

  It must have been an hour later that she realized something was going on in the near side of the wood. Men’s voices were audible and the orange tractor was travelling along a ride. She saw young Tom go by with a coil of rope over one shoulder. Someone called something and Rory’s voice shouted back: ‘Right, take her away!’

  Curiosity sent Haidee to investigate. The little group and the tractor were some distance in from the clearing and as she went diffidently up the path the tractor moved in her direction. She stepped aside into a low-lying clump of laurels and stood watching.

  Axes had been swung in the wood for days, but this part, which romantically she thought of as Big Oak Territory, was the area she knew best and she began to feel quite hot with concern. Would the owls find themselves homeless, or the badgers’ earthworks be damaged? Had ‘the Gallows’, a pair of beeches, straight, slender and joined by a horizontal branch, been marked down? Anxiety for all these swept through her.

  The tractor was dragging a rope. She saw it on the ground curling through the leaves like a serpent till suddenly it came up in a great U, went taut and vibrated. Behind it the whole grey-brown background seemed horrifyingly to quake.

  She saw then, sickeningly, where the other end of the rope had been attached. It wasn’t ‘the Gallows’ or the tawnies’ pitch. It was the big oak, the king itself. Rory was having it torn out by the roots.

  It leaned and she caught her breath, a child again, praying: ‘Don’t let it, God, do something!’

  It was surely a sign that just then should come a hissing sound and the cruel stretch of rope turn into two frayed ends. They dangled feebly as the giant, still unconquered, settled back into its stance.

  Haidee could have cheered.

  ‘I thought that,’ Rory observed. ‘The rope won’t do it.’

  He walked up to the tree and studied its gnarled trunk. He had grown, she thought fancifully, in the same shape; an oak man rather than a beech or a poplar; strong, heavyshouldered, of average height. That tree was a part of his life. It would have seen him at Toby’s age cycling round to the back door with his basket of groceries, it would have seen him as a forestry pupil, his round cheeks firming and his chin becoming more rugged; it would have seen him coming back without Suzanne but with their child. And trees, she fancied, had the uncompromising sagacity of an animal. It would ha
ve seen her stand with Rory that morning when he had shown her the name carved on its bark, but never for one moment would it have thought, that old tree, that here was Suzanne come home...

  Old tree, stout, faithful old tree, clinging so determinedly to its place...

  Unable to bear it any longer, Haidee turned away. She knew the snapping of the rope would not spare it for long. It had in any case been shaken to the roots. And yes, she had been right. The torn end of rope was already being cut from the towbar of the tractor and a steel cable fastened instead.

  It was only another proof that in Glenglass nothing was sacred, nothing stood before man of iron and heart of flint.

  Some minutes later over the sound of the vacuum cleaner came a distant rumble and crash.

  She was back in the kitchen rolling pastry when the door opened.

  ‘Any coffee going?’ Rory asked.

  The kettle had just boiled. She poured milk into a pan and put it on to heat. He found cups and saucers and the jar of coffee.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he said abruptly. ‘I know you’d grown fond of it.’

  She darted a wide-eyed look.

  ‘I’ve been putting it off for months,’ he continued, meeting it. ‘I knew it was rotten, but it’s almost history, that tree. And oaks aren’t very common in Glenglass. I’ll tell you how old it was if you like when I’ve had a chance to count the rings.’

  ‘Rotten?’ Haidee murmured. It had looked imperishable. She said so,

  ‘You can’t always tell,’ he answered quietly. ‘You can now, of course, now that it’s on the ground. You can see the split bole. But perhaps you wouldn’t want to.’

  The voice, different and gentle, might have belonged to another person. It was not the first time she had heard it so and it seemed to fit the occasion though so far as she herself was concerned a little poignantly. Suzanne had loved the tree and, autocratic as Rory was about most things, the chinks she’d made in him remained.

  Haidee thought that here Suzanne would probably have refused to see reason. To be in character she ought to rage and storm. Somehow she couldn’t. Angry as he’d made her over the dead weasel, he was at this moment a man who had had to make a difficult decision.

  ‘I will. I can be sensible when I have to. Quite hard, actually.’

  Amusement washed his long face. It wasn’t a thousand miles from tenderness. Hard to believe, but true.

  ‘Did you hate having to do it?’ she asked breathlessly.

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I did.’ He was not the man to give away his feelings, but as she knew him better his unadorned comments seemed less remote. About this particular tree he had cared a great deal.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Well, let’s have the other side now, shall we?’ He gave her a brisk merry look. ‘The thing that makes the world go round. We’ve practically missed the boat, but I think tonight mightn’t be too late!’

  What was he getting at? She stiffened, feeling her eyes go round.

  The deep-set dark blue eyes looked merrier and more mischievous than ever.

  ‘Johnny, you are giving me ideas,’ their owner mocked. ‘I was merely thinking in terms of deer.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘What have you got to wear?’ Rory asked after Haidee had given her amazed acceptance of the invitation.

  This, it seemed, was important. Nothing brightly coloured or plain white. Her waterproof was also frowned on because it could rustle. It was typical of fate, she thought humorously, that she had to go on this their first and last date in the oldest clothes she had with her, tweed pants and sweater, woody brown, the pull-on tea-cosy cap and the loose-fitting camel-hair reefer. Rory shook his head at the latter.

  ‘You’re not going to be warm enough. Wait a minute.’

  He came back with a suede jacket, in an elusive olive shade, one of those lovely timeless garments with a knitted lining and cuffs and a turn-back knitted collar. Unsexed too. In fact she thought it was his own until he held it for her and she saw it did not approach his measurements. Saw too his embarrassed expression, almost as though he were saying: ‘Sorry to do this to you.’

  It fitted, warmly and snugly, and it was beautiful to wear, giving a line to her waist and shoulder, suiting her tucked-up hair.

  ‘Will I do any harm to it?’

  ‘That’s your funeral,’ he said with over-casualness. ‘It’s your coat, after all.’

  Realization came like a thunder-clap. She was silent, pink-cheeked, afraid to commit herself. What had Suzanne been thinking of to leave such a garment behind? Why had Rory not produced it weeks ago? And what was he thinking of her at this moment? She had made it so obvious that she had never seen it before.

  ‘Yes,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I’d forgotten how nice it was.’

  Luck was with her. ‘I’d believe that all right. You hardly wore it.’

  Relief was emboldening. ‘I must have been mad.’

  ‘I don’t know about mad, you were pregnant.’ Eyes swept her uncompromisingly. ‘Two or three weeks after I bought it you had a bump it wouldn’t meet on.’

  To Haidee’s intense irritation she blushed. So silly. She had not baulked at being Toby’s mother and she didn’t think she had found him under a gooseberry bush. But neither had she thought overmuch about those months when supposedly she had lived with Rory and looked forward with him to the birth of their child. Had Suzanne been sensitive about her shape? Had he teased her? Had he been fit to burst with pride? Was that the reason for giving her a present?

  Rory’s voice cut in: ‘You’ll know better with your next husband. Tell him in time and save each of you a red face.’

  She had the feeling this was not as light as it seemed. And, truth to tell, it did not seem all that light. Perhaps Suzanne had not wanted the baby. Perhaps she’d put off telling him in case he would fuss and some way cramp her style. All this was logical, and likely. It was also very sad. And none the less so because Suzanne had left his present behind her, unwanted, unappreciated.

  ‘It’s a long walk,’ Rory had now returned briskly to the present, ‘so I hope you’re ready for it. Just hang on till I tell Jennie.’

  Jennie might not be too pleased, Haidee thought, and she was right. ‘Not pleased’ was understatement. Jennie came to the door of the sitting-room, bright pink and stormy-eyed. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ Rory said flatly. ‘It’s too long to leave Toby.’

  ‘You wouldn’t rather have taken her than me?’ Haidee asked anxiously as they set out.

  ‘If I had I’d have asked her,’ he returned bluntly.

  It was fair comment, but had they heard the last of it? In the past week a new word for Jennie had suggested itself. She was intense. At first she had seemed one hundred per cent her father, now Haidee could see much that linked up with Antonia and Suzanne. What was she thinking at this moment?

  ‘Make up your mind, girl,’ Rory bade irritably. ‘Deer or Jennie? Which is it to be?’

  A second made the decision. This was something no scruple should make her lose. ‘Deer.’

  It was nine o’clock, dry and frost-sharp. In the wood the ride showed up smoke-pale for a matter of yards and then lost itself in the tunnel ahead. The banks above them were cliffs of darkness, the whole of the lower level a bottomless pit. She guessed they were not following the main path, though at one point she recognized the thin trunks of ‘the Gallows’.

  And as her eyes got used to it, the darkness became a page to read—the long greedy clutches of exposed roots, the light patches made by laurel and hart’s-tongue, the screwing note of an owl, a blackbird waking querulously. A dog fox barked in the distance; Toby had told her they bred in the fields nearby.

  ‘If you want to talk here, you can,’ Rory remarked surprisingly. ‘You won’t be able to later when we come to a gallery.’

  A ‘gallery’, it seemed, was the path a deer wore for itself in thick cover.

  ‘There is something
.’ It had puzzled her for weeks, but she felt shy of voicing it. ‘Something personal, actually. Will you mind?’

  ‘Try me and see.’

  ‘You never told—my mother we’d married.’ It was still hard to say. ‘Ten years ago. All that time, I mean.’ It was not particularly clear what she did mean and it was not helped by her foot catching in a trail of ivy. ‘Sorry,’ she jerked as he grabbed her.

  ‘If you can’t look where you’re walking,’ he said reprovingly, ‘you’d better take my hand.

  ‘Now then,’ he went on when he had hers firmly in custody. ‘You want to know why I didn’t tell your mother. Funk, I suppose. I was hardly likely to forget how she looked on me in the past. Glenglass House set more store than most by its tradesmen’s entrance.’

  ‘Oh, but that’s silly!’ Haidee expostulated. ‘I didn’t take any notice of that. I married you because...’ Horrified, she pulled herself up. What had she been going to say?

  Haidee Brown, you nitwit, thinking like a book, you were going to say ‘because I loved you’.

  ‘Yes, Suzanne?’ It was a voice dry and mirthless. ‘Say it, why not? It can’t hurt either of us now. You married me because I was all you could get.’

  She could have protested. Words indeed were rising to her lips, words she felt sure must be true. ‘Even if I did, I loved you afterwards, when I understood you, when we’d had Toby.’ But feeling was one thing, fact another. Suzanne could not have felt like that because she’d deserted, put Paul in front of Rory and Toby, gone off ... mad silly creature, it was absolute cobblers, but she’d done it.

  ‘And you never told my mother.’ The only safe thing was to go back to the starting point. ‘And I don’t think it was because you were afraid.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ He sounded most uninterested.

  ‘Of course you could have been paying her back, not letting her know she had a grandson. Was that it?’ She felt quite astonished at herself for going on when his eyes staring at her were so round and angry.

  ‘That most emphatically was not it. How could I tell her, girl? What in the name of God was I to say? “Please, ma’am, you’ve lost a daughter but, lucky old you, you’ve gained a son, and he’s going to be the boss round here!” ’ He drew a breath. ‘In the beginning it was funk. If that’s so strange to you I can’t help it. I was pretty green and insecure in those days. I’d dreamed of you for so long that getting you and losing you all in the space of months was a knock-out. I couldn’t believe you wouldn’t come back and I waited. If you had, I might have brought you home. I don’t know. When I came myself years later it was too late. Your mother was in the thick of her campaign against the Division. She used to paint slogans on my car and she’d got the press taking an unhealthy interest. If they’d got wind she was my mother-in-law we’d have been a nine days’ wonder. And I’d probably have been moved. That’s why I held my tongue, girl, no other reason.’ He glared.