‘Jo, do you really know what you’re taking on? We could live in half poverty for the rest of our lives just to keep this thing going. Is it worth it?’
‘Do we have a choice? I think the question answers itself, Nat.’
He put down his glass and stubbed out his cigarette. He came then and sat on the bed beside me. ‘I’ll do it if you say I must. By God, what a child Robert Birkett has left behind in you. You’re still as weak as a kitten, and yet you’ve already begun to fight. You’ll fight for every last thing in this place, won’t you? You’ll give an inch at a time, and argue all the way – and probably win something back. When you first came you seemed such a quiet type – cool and sophisticated, but not tough. Now you suddenly seem as tough as old boots. I don’t really understand your sort of Birkett. He didn’t want to fight – except when they put him in a war. I suppose I’d do well to remember that you are the daughter of a V.C.’
‘I’m also Vanessa’s daughter,’ I said. ‘Stop worrying, Nat. Birketts fight when there’s something to fight for. He’s left us plenty of that ...’
He sighed, and slipped off his shoes, lying back on the piled-up pillows that supported me. ‘Yes, plenty ... God, I’m tired. I started feeling tired when I saw the newspapers this afternoon. All that horrible muck about the Condesa and La Española. Well, we couldn’t expect to have kept that quiet ... If only we – you and I, Jo – could have started with just my farm. I’ve never minded a simple fight. Farming’s all a fight – but it’s fighting things you understand – the weather, crops, sheep – ordinary things like that. A simple enough ambition for a simple enough fight. And what did I get? – you and Thirlbeck. Well – I suppose nobody ever has it easy ...’ His voice trailed off; he closed his eyes, and his body curved against mine as if for warmth and comfort. I drew the eiderdown over him.
‘Well, it is a start,’ I said. He didn’t answer, and in a few minutes his deeper breathing told me he had fallen asleep as swiftly and completely as a child. After a while he even snored gently, in rather the way the dogs snored in their deepest moments of sleep. We were not like new lovers then, but people long accustomed to each other, facing together the problems of a new and cruelly acquired inheritance. There was going to be no easy way. I thought that the ghosts of Thirlbeck, whatever they were, whatever form they took, would not easily forgive a shrugging off of the tasks laid before us. They had not forgiven Robert Birkett his desertion of his place and responsibility, and in the end they had brought him back to die here. As they had brought me here – to live.
Nat’s voice came again sleepily. He spoke with his eyes still closed. ‘I didn’t tell you, did I? – the great news. One of the eagle’s eggs hatched today. And ... and I put away the Bentley.’
In a very little while he was asleep again.
IV
The next morning we were ready very early. Tolson was waiting in the library where the oak coffin rested – the coffin which contained all that remained of the Spanish Woman in her last night under the roof of Thirlbeck.
Nat, and George Tolson with his sons, carried the coffin between them. It was so early the mist had not yet lifted from the tarn, and all we could see was the low white swirling blanket over the water, and rising from it, startling in the early sun, the peaks of Brantwick and Great Birkeld were revealed in their bald strength.
The coffin was laid on trestles in the newly tidied chapel. Mrs Tolson’s table was covered by a starched white cloth. The priest was waiting, with a young boy as acolyte, both robed for the Mass. I noticed that his vestments were the white of joy, not the black of mourning. I had asked him to recite the Mass in Latin. ‘She didn’t understand English,’ I had said.
And afterwards she was buried among the Birketts. I laid Thomas’s white violets on her grave. Who, on that bright morning, could believe in ghosts? What she had brought with her lived with us, now and for ever. A sense of peace, of happiness, stole across me. It might be that, with her final laying to rest, the Birketts themselves would know change. Now that she was at last accepted among us, accorded her due place, her spirit would become for all of us the benign presence it had always seemed to me. And she was truly among us. Standing in place above the grave, the results of Nat’s labours yesterday with Ted Tolson, was the tall rough obelisk, with the uncertain hand and spelling.
Juana The Spanishe Woman.
The priest was finished; the holy water sprinkled. ‘Requiescat in pace.’ For Nat and myself there was an additional blessing, perhaps the beginning of a special grace passed on to us by the Spanish Woman, who lay at last in a hallowed grave. ‘And may you live in peace.’
The Property of a Gentleman: One House. Many secrets. Page 40
