by Sara Seale
They arrived at last, and he woke his sleeping passengers.
“Home,” he said. “Run along in. I’ll put the car away.”
“There’s nothing,” said Sarah, stifling a yawn, “like making the lodger work. Come on, Kathy. I’ll make some tea.”
But once inside the house Kathy said she was too sleepy for tea and Sarah abandoned the idea. She put her arms round her sister in the darkness.
“Thank you for the dress, darling,” she said. “I had a wonderful time. Kathy—”
Kathy placed a finger on her sister’s lips.
‘Tomorrow,” she said drowsily. “Tomorrow we’ll talk.”
They kissed, and arms entwined they went upstairs to bed, leaving Adrian to lock up.
It snowed steadily on New Year’s Day and the day after. The tops of the mountains were covered and Slieve Rury wore a graceful cap of white. It was intensely cold. Nonie lighted fires in all the rooms, and Sarah showed Adrian how to build the turf so that his bedroom fire would last all night. In the morning she rowed across the lough to replenish stores from Casey’s and Adrian went to help her.
If they got much more snow, she said, the roads would very likely become blocked.
“Does that often happen?” he asked.
“Not often, but once we were cut off for nearly a fortnight and I’d forgotten to get any stores. We lived on stirabout and tough hens.”
“Stirabout?”
“Porridge to you. They keep the north road open with snow ploughs, of course, but no one bothers about us.”
There was something strange about crossing the lough in the falling snow. It was as if they were isolated in a fairy world of their own, for each shore was a hazy outline, almost obliterated by the curtain of snow, and the lapping of the water against the bows of the boat was the only sound that broke the stillness. Small drifts gathered on the thwarts and frozen flakes clung to Sarah’s hair like a sprinkling of apple blossom.
“What are you smiling at?” Sarah asked, pulling on her oar.
“I was getting fanciful,” he said. “This is a strange experience and smacks of magic. It must be the snow on your hair. It looks like apple-blossom.”
“There used to be a story about snow maidens who floated down the mountain streams, crowned with blossom in the spring to melt in the lough, but I forget it now,” said Sarah. ‘Did you think when you came to Dun Rury, Adrian, it would be like this?”
“Not for a moment. The prospect of living on stirabout, and a landlady who’s scarcely reached the age of discretion would have kept me well away.”
She smiled, used to his teasing now.
“You’re so different to how you sounded in your letters,” she said. “You’re different even from when you first came. You were terribly bossy and on your dignity.”
“Well, you were rather on your dignity yourself, you preposterous creature!”
“Perhaps you’re melting like the snow-maidens.”
“Perhaps I am.”
“You didn’t want to melt, did you, Adrian?”
“I’ve found a crust of hardness is a very useful form of self-protection.” For a moment his voice had its old familiar edge.
“But crusts and cores are different things,” she said. “And it’s the core that matters.”
“And you think I have a tender core?”
“I’m not sure. I think you might have.”
“The Flinty One?” he said, and she laughed.
“Oh, did you know we called you that?”
“Well, I’ve sometimes wondered if you realized how much can be heard from the nursery window when you’re all on the terrace. You have a remarkably carrying voice, my dear Sarah.”
“Oh, golly!” She grimaced at him over her shoulder. “Well, they always say listeners hear no good of themselves.”
The north shore slid towards them, ghostly through the felling snow.
“You’d better let me take her, I know the beach,” Sarah said.
He surrendered his oar and watched her manoeuvre the boat into the little creek which did not even boast a landing stage.
“You handle a boat better than you do a car,” he said with a grin, and she replied proudly:
“My father taught me. Can you remember all the things we’ve got to get?”
“Didn’t you bring a list?”
“No, I left it on the kitchen dresser.”
“H’m, the practical one of the family.”
“Oil is the main thing. We must get lots and lots of oil. When we were snowed up before we ran out at the end of the first week. We had to live in the kitchen to save the lamps and undress in the dark.”
‘Very uncomfortable. Be careful, now.” But she had already jumped out of the boat and into a foot of icy water.
“Ow!” she exclaimed. “It’s cold!”
“Really, my dear child! Now you’ll have wet feet and won’t be able to change for another hour. It’s enough to give you a bad chill this weather.”
“I’ve had wet feet before,” she observed mildly, and he shook his head.
“Does nobody ever look after you?” he said.
The snow persisted. Like a silent challenge it fell remorselessly from the leaden skies and Dun Rury was marooned. The south road became impassable after three days, the edges of the lough froze to solid ice, and each morning Adrian helped Sarah shovel the show from byre and stable.
“It’s the roof that worries me,” she said. “There are so many weak places and the weight of the snow may fetch it down.”
“Don’t you repair before the winter?” he asked, seeing for himself the neglect into which the place had fallen.
“There’s never been the money,” she replied. “Next year I’ve promised myself a new roof for the stable if I can save a bit. But there are so many things—the fences, the drainage, and the house itself—it’s falling to pieces before my two eyes.”
“You’re fighting a losing battle,” he said gently. “It would have been better to sell.”
“No,” she said, suddenly stern. “I’ll never sell Dun Rury.”
Kathy was not shy of invading the nursery now. A crate of records had arrived from England just after Christmas and Adrian enlisted her help in unpacking and listing them. She spent long delightful hours in the nursery while Adrian taught her his system of filing and played many of the records for her delectation. He liked to watch her exquisite face while she listened.
“You know,” he told her once, “you are rather like some of this music—delicate, questing, lost in clouds or dreams. When will you wake up, I wonder?”
She looked at him and her lips parted expectantly.
“But you explain the dreams,” she said softly. “I only needed a guide.”
“I’ve never considered myself as a young girl’s guide before,” he said humorously. “But if I can help you towards a real appreciation of music, Kathy, I’m very happy to do it.”
It was not quite what she had meant, but she replied a little breathlessly,
“Oh, yes, Adrian, if you would. I’m beginning to think Miss Macnamara was rather—rather limited in her teaching.”
“Miss Macnamara being your music mistress? Well, most of them usually are, unless you’re lucky in your school, as I was.”
He began to tell her about the master at his own school who had been so exceptionally brilliant. She was a good listener, and as the days went on he came to enjoy those intimate hours in the nursery when she would sit by the fire, her large eyes fixed on his face while she asked him shy questions.
“You’re very sweet,” he told her gently, and the days slipped by, scarcely noticed by either of them, while the snow fell, shutting them into a small warm world of their own where outside matters seldom trespassed.
Sarah, coming back from the farm at tea-time, would look up at the lighted nursery windows and feel an unaccustomed sense of pain. What did they talk about all those long hours, she wondered. Sometimes she saw them through the window as
they bent together over the table, and once Kathy looked up, laughing, into his face and he tucked one of the dark curls behind her ear. Kathy with her dreams and her gentle spirit ... would it be surprising if he were to love her?
Sometimes she would carry tea up to the nursery and then wish she had not, for she felt like an intruder when she found them together in the firelight with the lamp still unlit. Adrian would watch her lazily as she set down the tray with a clatter and lit the lamp, and in the spreading ring of light she would observe her sister’s face, soft and flushed, her eyes bright with dreams, and for no reason she would find herself snapping at Adrian’s next remark.
She did not think the tea-parties were a success. Kathy, she imagined, resented the intrusion, and Adrian himself, she thought, regarded her with a quizzical eye. She would sit rather silently while Kathy poured the tea and waited on Adrian with charming solicitude, and think of those other nursery teas so long ago, with her father burning the toast, while his attention wandered as it always did to his eldest daughter, and the smell of the whisky with which he insisted on lacing his tea mingling with the smell of lamp oil and turf and burnt toast so that Nonie, coming in to fetch Danny to bed, would exclaim that the place smelt like a saloon bar.
“What are you thinking about?” she heard Adrian ask on one of these occasions.
“Other nursery teas,” she answered reminiscently. “Do you remember, Kathy, when Danny was still small and Father used to have tea with us up here and burn the toast because he was always looking at you?”
“I remember you once attacking him with both fists to get his attention, and he telling you that was no way to capture a man’s heart,” Kathy laughed.
Adrian smiled.
“Were you violent even then, Sarah?” he asked idly, but his eyes, had she been watching them, were compassionate.
“I didn’t often try to wean him from Kathy,” she replied carelessly. “It wouldn’t have been much use, anyway. I was a very plain child.”
“But did Nonie never tell you that handsome is as handsome does, and beauty is but skin deep, and all the rest of those comforting clichés?”
“Well, they didn’t comfort me. I only thought it most unfair that Kathy’s hair curled and mine didn’t. I used to think that was the reason she could always get round people.”
“The real reason was that you always flew into rages and I didn’t,” said Kathy a little smugly.
Adrian laughed”
“Soft ways are usually the most disarming,” he said, and Sarah saw his eyes follow the turn of Kathy’s head as she moved and the lamplight fell full on her delicate profile.
Sarah, watching them, thought with sudden passion: it’s the same old story; just so used Father’s eyes to follow her when she moved and his voice grow gentle as he spoke. With Father I could accept being shut out because I knew he loved me too, but with Adrian I can’t accept it and I don’t know why.
“Have some more cinnamon toast,” she said quickly, and he grinned as he helped himself.
“I shall get fat,” he said.
She looked at his long lean frame and laughed derisively. “You! You’re herring-gutted!” she said, to which he retorted lazily:
“Speak for yourself!”
After tea she would leave them to go out to the farm again or help Nonie in the kitchen, but Kathy would linger on, enjoying this new warm intimacy the snow-bound house had forced upon them, finding for the time, in Adrian, all the nebulous qualities she had desired in Joe.
“Sarah seems to work very hard,” he said once, and she answered timidly, detecting a rebuke in his voice:
“Sarah’s always been the man of the family. I—I’m not very useful, really, Adrian.”
He smiled at her kindly.
“You’re not built for rough weather, are you, Kathy?” he said. “Your function in life is to charm, I don’t doubt, and you do that very nicely.”
“Do you think so?” she said, clasping her hands to her breast. “Do I charm you, Adrian?”
“You’d charm any man,” he told her gracefully, and she took the easy compliment with all seriousness.
“When Father was alive,” she said wistfully, “he had such plans for me. We were going to Dublin, he and I, and he would squire me, he said, just as he used to squire my mother. Father was so proud of me.”
“And Sarah?” Adrian asked with a lift of the eyebrow. “Wasn’t she going to Dublin, too?”
“Och! Sarah has no use for cities,” Kathy said. “Dun Rury is all she’s ever wanted.”
“I wonder,” said Adrian. “I think she had a great love for her father. Was it always that way, Kathy?”
“What way?”
“You first and Sarah a very poor second?”
Her blue eyes widened.
“I don’t understand you,” she said. “Father loved us both.”
“Never mind,” he replied. No, Kathy wouldn’t understand. The right of beauty had been hers since she was born. It was a right that could not be disputed.
There were bright days when the snow stopped falling and the sun shone on the blinding hills. Then they would build snow men and pelt one another with snowballs, and Sarah would trudge through the snow dragging a homemade sleigh with provisions for the isolated cottages down the glen. They would invade Nonie’s kitchen, shaking the snow from their clothes, demanding hot drinks at all hours of the day, and she treated them all alike, grumbling equally at Adrian if he failed to remove his boots at the door and setting him to any chore he felt inclined to do. He was one of the family now, and she closed her eyes to the weekly cheque his presence brought to the house.
Often he would sit talking to her when the others had left the kitchen, and then she would come to her own chair by the fire, and darn sheets while she told him stories of Dun Rury before it had sunk to its present decay.
“Then you didn’t share the general opinion that the place should be sold?” he asked her once.
She was silent for quite a while before she answered. “Well, as to that, I wouldn’t be knowin’,” she said slowly. “Mr. Denis—that’s Miss Sarah’s father—would never sell, and the place a burden to him before he died, an’ Miss Sarah carries out her father’s wishes, but what is the right of it I wouldn’t be knowin’. There’s Danny, you see, an’ there’s Miss Sarah herself, though she wouldn’t be thinkin’ she would be livin’ anny different. But there’s no money to put the place to rights an’ the day of the small farm is over, so they tell me. Machinery, electricity, certified herds is what is wanted now.”
“But could the place be farmed in the old way and pay for itself—with a few improvements, of course?”
“Ah, sure it could, if there was money for the improvements, but will you tell me where that’s comin’ from?” she replied. “Do you ask for a home-farm to be more than self-supporting, and maybe a pig or a calf for market an’ a bit of butter for the tourist? That’s what it was in the old days and had Mr. Denis not run through his money with his horses an’ greyhounds, an’ bettin’ an drinkin’, there’d have been no need for boarders at Dun Rury, for saving your pardon, sir, it’s guest to the house you should be, an himself turnin’ in his grave for hospitality that is bought.”
Adrian smiled.
“Times are changing everywhere, Nonie,” he said. “It’s no longer considered shameful to sell what is marketable, whether it’s commodities or just good will, but Sarah works too hard. She’s too young to be shouldering the responsibility of a family.”
Nonie smiled at him over her darning.
“Well, that’s the way it is,” she said. “Miss Emma’s never known responsibility, Miss Kathy’s the fine lady through no fault of her own, an’ Danny’s only a child. Miss Sarah—well, she’s her father over again, stubborn, passionate, with never a hold on the money. But she has courage, that wan, never you doubt that.”
“I don’t doubt it, Nonie,” he said gently. “Sometimes it makes me feel like weeping.”
There
was no more snow, but it would lie, Nolan said. With the bitter black frosts it would lie till rain came. From the nursery windows the scene was very lovely. The lough shimmering under the clear, bright sky, reflecting the sheeted hills, and the shining, unbroken expanse of whiteness stretching as far as the eye could see.
There had been no mail for over a week, and Adrian let his work drift. In a world where time was not there was no longer any sense of urgency. He drifted himself, and relaxed in the long, uninterrupted hours of Kathy’s undemanding companionship.
Once Sarah found him in the library. He was sitting at the piano, improvising on the old melody—The lark in the clear air. She had known before she entered the room that it was not Kathy playing and she stood in the doorway listening. To her untutored ear there seemed nothing faulty in his execution, but he suddenly crashed his hands down on the keys, then sat looking at them as if he hated them.
She ran across the room and leaned over the piano.
“Play it for me,” she said. “Play it for me to sing to.”
He looked up at her and the old bitterness was back in his face.
“It’s useless,” he said harshly. “My hands are dumb, clumsy—I have to fumble for the notes.”
“Is it the first time you’ve tried since they mended your hands?” she asked.
“The first time for many months—and the last.”
“Play it for me,” she said again. “Play the lark in the clear air. It’s so quiet, so gentle, it will not hurt you.”
His mouth tightened and he touched the keyboard uncertainly.
“What key do you like it in?” he asked, and she, laughed. “You know I don’t understand about things like that. I think I start on that note.” She struck a note with one finger and her hand brushed his.
“A major,” he said automatically and began to play the introduction. As her voice rose, fresh and clear, he glanced up at her, and watching her thin, unaware face he forgot his hands.
