Jenny had grown fond of the Mini and she liked driving; it occupied her mind and lightened her spirits. You couldn’t think of Colin and fight your way out of London, though the westward route seemed a great deal easier than traveling southeast to her parents. Away from London, the omens and the weather seemed unfavorable and her spirits began to sag. A solitary magpie strutted at the roadside – one for sorrow, two for joy, but there was definitely only one. The towns dripped dispiritedly, people huddled drearily under umbrellas. The countryside, glistening grayly under sheets of rain, seemed lowering, hostile; and on the exposed stretches of the road, the wind snatched at the Mini with sinister playfulness.
She began to think that her ex-roommates had been right after all, she was crazy. She had no experience of country life, but something told her that her mother’s nice, unmarried farmers would be few and far between. She suddenly pictured herself alone with the historical novelist and she had no experience of novelists either, alone in a grim and solitary house on a windswept waste of bog and moor.
Well, I’ve got Mini, she comforted herself, so if it’s really unbearable I can leave.
Wincanton was roughly halfway so she stopped for coffee and sandwiches. And driving on afterward, she could feel herself beginning to tire. Mr. Kearsley had insisted that she was to leave the A30 and avoid Exeter so the road had grown smaller and more exciting, but the journey was beginning to seem interminable as journeys with an unknown end do.
She stopped again in Launceston, tempted by a sign advertising cream teas. Historical novelists might be too immersed in history to bother with meals – especially tea – safer to eat when one could. Strengthened, she took the A30 again. The moor was invisible in the driving rain, which slapped and slashed the car with what seemed an almost personal animosity. The windshield wipers seemed powerless against the onslaught, the car shook and shuddered under the wind’s battering. Ghostly trucks loomed through the gray murk, burying the Mini under the torrents of water their huge tires churned. At last, she saw the sign where she was to leave the main road and follow Margaret Shaw’s directions. A tiny road appeared to lead into uninhabited regions.
Turned away from the wind and sheltered by high banks, the nerve-wracking noise of the storm lessened; the Mini no longer felt under attack. The lane-like road shot downward, passed through a hamlet, climbed steeply, twisted, turned and brought her to a cross roads. Jenny stopped to read the directions. Unpronounceable names, almost certainly spelled incorrectly, for taking them down over the telephone she had not wanted to sound bone-headed by asking for them to be spelled out again and again. Not one of them corresponded to the names on the signpost. The landmarks seemed the best bet “You come to the moor,” “a bridge over a stream,” “a few houses and a post office.” Right, left, left, right, she memorized and drove on uncertainly into the dusk.
She crossed a cattle grid and found herself on the moor. The gray sky widened. Brown hills looked stem and craggy but were not dose enough to tower. Yellow gorse shone bravely in the wild gray light.
She came to a signless cross-roads where Mrs. Shaw’s directions refused to apply. There was no one in sight, no cottage, no car. Opening the window, she listened. Wind, rain, running water, the distant baa of sheep, the sudden startled cry of large birds. Nothing else. She drove straight on. She was deep in the moor now, brown, flat areas lay around her. The hills stood away from the road, their rocky outcrops somber and secret against the sky. With a feeling of growing panic, Jenny drove on and on. Visions of darkness falling, of a never ending journey, of a night spent alone in this lonely, primitive place began to haunt her. Tenseness was making her drive badly, nervously, braking for nothing. She passed a dark block of trees – conifers – with swarming flocks of birds circling feverishly above them, pitch black against the fading sky. She passed ponies on the road wandering without purpose, gangling foals, their woolly coats slicked down with rain.
And then at last a signpost which read, miraculously, “St. Marla.” The feeling of nightmare vanished. She must have come miles out of her way, but at least now she was on the right track. She came to the bridge over the stream and then left the moor and passed through a village dark and gaunt against a windswept skyline. The road led down again into trees, out into farmland and then at last, it brought her to St. Marla. There was the church, the green, the pub and the post office – all tiny, but it was reassuring that they really existed. She felt deadly tired. Why, she wondered as she took the narrow road out of the village, did her employer have to live in the wilds; was solitude really necessary for writing books?
Trees crowded her, a wrought iron gate stood open, sagging a little as though past shutting. She plunged down into a jungle of rampant evergreens. The drive divided, the left signposted Kilruthan House and the right Kilruthan Lodge, that was it. She drove through the greenery and came suddenly upon the house. It was brightly lit with an outside lamp, which showed her that the drive ended and a stone flagged path led to the white house. Jenny gathered her suitcase, handbag and coat and made a dash for the shelter of the porch. Away from the fierce aggression of the moorland winds, the rain fell lifelessly, but the sound of water running in every conceivable tone and tune engulfed her. She looked across a grassed and paved courtyard lit by the lights of the Shaw house and saw an identical building, unlit, less cared for, lurking in the shadows like a reflection in a dark and stagnant pond. Its gutters seemed badly in need of attention, here a wide, white sheet of water cascaded gracefully, there a solid torrent poured down a wall and slopped into a flower bed. The rain fell mutely on the soggy grass, with angry slaps on the flagstones and with strange primitive drummings on the various materials of the outhouse roofs.
Jenny, suddenly filled with dread that she was knocking at the wrong house, that really she belonged to the dark and gloom of its twin, was greatly relieved when the door opened and the rich, fruity voice she knew from the telephone exclaimed, “Ah, the new secretary comes to Kilruthan at last! Out of the dark and the storm. My dear, what a dramatic arrival. I hope you didn’t have any really horrible adventures?”
Jenny saw a bulky, middle-aged woman refusing to relinquish youth. Her hair, a curly, brightly hennaed mop, looked unreal. Suntan make-up, green eyeshadow, a red-gashed mouth masked the bloodhound mournfulness of a sagging face. She wore a pants suit in burnt orange.
“I was lost for a time on the moor. I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, but I found my way back again. Otherwise everything was fine,” Jenny assured her. They stood looking at each other. Then Margaret Shaw broke the silence.
“You’re even sweeter than you look in your photograph,” she cried triumphantly. “Well, first to your room, then for a reviving drink, then supper.” Margaret Shaw took Jenny’s coat and handbag and made for the stairs. “My dear, I do hope you are going to like it here. Please, please don’t let this terrible first impression put you off. I promise you the weather won’t do this again for months. This is your room. It looks across at the other house, I’m afraid, but you may like that coming from London.” She went to the window and drew back the curtain. “The Forrests, my landlord and his lady live there.” To Jenny, it still looked uninhabited.
“I do hope you’re going to be warm enough,” Margaret Shaw felt the radiators anxiously. “I turned the central heating up to dry us out and there’s this electric heater.”
“It’s lovely,” answered Jenny. She had had a vague feeling that resident secretaries might suffer the same sort of treatment as governesses in Victorian novels, but this room seemed palatial after a lifetime of sharing with Cathy and then Mandy.
“Bathroom,” announced Margaret Shaw, whisking out to the landing and opening a door. “It’s all yours unless we have a guest. I’ve one of my own. Now I’ll leave you to unpack. Come down as soon as you’re ready. I’m longing for a drink and a nice, cozy feminine chat.”
Left to herself, Jenny turned off the electric heater, the room was stiflingly hot, and for the first time for horns thought o
f Colin. Probably, she thought dismally, he’d telephoned at last, bursting with some lovely invitation, some delicious plan; if only she’d been patient… Still, the physios had promised to write and no doubt they would. Dull letters full of chat about their patients. Not fascinating personal detail which opened your eyes to another person’s life, but dull, “categorizing” information which reduced them to the types in which the physios believed. “A scream,” “A wolf,” “a nice old thing,” “a cross old thing” …but they would say if Colin had telephoned and at least she wasn’t there, gazing down at the empty pad, choking with disappointment.
As she stowed her clothes in the spacious mahogany chest of drawers and hung them in the substantial wardrobe, she allowed herself the luxury of a small fantasy in which Colin pursued her to Cornwall and then, much cheered by the unaccustomed warmth of his imaginary embrace, she changed into purple velvet pants and a purple snakeskin top. She’d been rather worried about her clothes for, egged on by Mandy, she’d become a much more adventurous dresser in the last year, but Margaret Shaw didn’t look as though she’d want a subdued secretary and certainly not a dowdy one.
Jenny went down, inspecting everything. A wide, white staircase with a slight curl in it. A biggish hall, which had room for a chest, a couch and several chairs. On one side, a door led into a cloakroom, on the other into a small modern kitchen. A passage led away into the rest of the house. The first door she opened disclosed a dining room, the second a drawing room. Both had windows on the courtyard, both were formal, furnished suitably in large heavy pieces, both lacked character and looked unlived in. A door at the end of the passage stood ajar and it was there that she found her employer. Margaret Shaw gave cries of delight at her appearance and began to pour generous helpings of gin.
“This is the writing room,” she announced. “No, wait, first of all we must drink to our association. Our working life – our conspiracy. It will be a sort of conspiracy. You’ll meet the characters in their earliest stages, before they jell. You’ll know which ones have shaken me off and taken their fates into their own hands.”
Jenny drank willingly, it all sounded a good deal more exciting than Mr. Kearsley’s water pumps. “And is this where you work?” she asked, looking around the white, partly booklined room with its emerald green sofa and chairs.
“I live in here,” answered Margaret Shaw. “It’s the only room in the house that really seems to belong to me. And then there’s the view, you’ll see it tomorrow if the weather clears. We look right across the valley to the moor. Did you see much of the moor? Did you get the feeling of it, the extraordinary timelessness? When one thinks that half England was moors and wastes and forests once before they started all this messy fanning. All those hideous mangelwurzels and turnips, all those claustrophobic hedges they planted. It was the eighteenth century which was to blame. Well, I suppose it started after the Restoration, but most of the evil was done in the eighteenth. Other centuries produced the concept of chivalry, Christianity, courtly love, art, but the eighteenth ruined everything with its scientists and root crops and farm machinery.”
It was a new attitude to history for Jenny and she looked a little blank as she considered it. Margaret Shaw refilled her own glass. “Well do sit down, you must be exhausted after that drive. And I’m longing to hear all about life in London. Is it all the press would have us believe?”
Jenny removed her mind from the eighteenth century. “It depends on you,” she said. “People make what they want of it. Well, perhaps not exactly what they want. I mean you can choose the sort of life you’re going to lead. You can work or you can drop out. You can smoke pot, but you don’t have to. You can sleep around or stick to one person; it’s up to you.”
“And you chose to leave,” said Margaret Shaw.
“Yes, for a time.” Jenny didn’t feel inclined to talk of Colin yet. “Being free isn’t altogether easy,” she said by way of explanation. “And it’s such a very abrupt change from home and school; you have to make up your mind about so much at once.”
“But home and school are supposed to have given you standards.”
“Yes,” Jenny sounded doubtful. “School gives you standards and teaches you to question them in the same breath so you’re thrown back on your own judgment.”
Margaret filled their glasses and then she showed such genuine interest in the most minute details of flat-sharing that Jenny was prevailed upon to give quite an elaborate account of her life with Mandy and the physios.
They fortified themselves with more gin before they moved into the kitchen to organize their meal.
“Pate first, you make the toast,” said Margaret Shaw. “Bread is in the bin and there’s the toaster. Widow Gethin has made her ‘Children of the New Forest’ stew – that’s my name for it – which we have only to take out of the oven and eat. And then there’s a mousse ‘warming’ on top of the fridge. By the way, you must tell me if there’s anything you hate, to eat, I mean. I can’t bear to think of anyone struggling through some dish they loathe out of politeness. Trays?” she went on before Jenny had time to reply. “We shall be overcome with shyness if we seat ourselves formally at the dining room table; it’s a terrible conversation destroyer that room. Let’s slum comfortably in the writing room.”
Jenny agreed to trays. Floating mistily in an alcoholic haze, she already felt a friendliness, almost an affection for her employer. Her conversation was exhausting; it made demands which Jenny felt quite incapable of meeting, but it was full of ideas. Martin had had ideas, but they had always seemed stale, secondhand, and he’d taken so long to explain them that one’s attention had always wandered before he reached the point. Mrs. Shaw’s ideas flew out like bullets, harmless bullets; they biffed and battered, but they didn’t bore.
“Now I must tell you about the Forrests,” said Margaret Shaw as they piled the supper plates for Mrs. Gethin to deal with in the morning. “They are coming in to coffee. It’s rather hard on your very first night, but they wouldn’t deny it, they’re aching to see you. Your coming is quite a sensation in our lives. After the long dull winter we’re all thrilled to see a new face.”
Jenny accepted this as a gin-inspired exaggeration. “They own the house, this house?” she asked.
“Yes, I rent it partly furnished. Nigel inherited the whole place about twenty years ago from an uncle, but the old man – he was about ninety – had let it go and the Forrests simply hadn’t the money to put things right; they just lived here with the place falling about their ears. Then some relation of Rosemary’s died and left them a few thousand, but by this time the center of the house was absolutely honey-combed with woodworm and dry rot and deathwatch beetle. It had to be pulled down and the wings, which were in much better condition, were turned into separate houses. They decided to live in one and let the other to rich Americans for huge sums. So they did this one up with all mod. cons., oil-fired central heating, the lot, but Nigel wouldn’t spend a penny more on theirs than was essential to keep it standing.”
“Oh, that’s why it looks so dark and dismal compared with this house. It gave me a fright when I arrived,” admitted Jenny. “I thought, supposing Mrs. Shaw lives there.”
Margaret Shaw shuddered. “I wouldn’t, don’t you worry. I won’t even enter the place except between June and September. I insist that they come here and poor Rosemary, worn out with filling oil lamps and carting coke and coal about, unfurls like a flower in the warmth. Oh, and look Jenny, not Mrs. Shaw, if you don’t mind. Do you think you could manage Margaret?”
The Forrests were like creatures from another world. A burrowing underground world. They stood small, gray and vaguely rodent beside the flamboyant Margaret and blinked a little as though unused to light.
Nigel was of middle height but bent and spare, with cold blue eyes which gave nothing away and a tight, soured mouth. Rosemary looked small and stocky, but she was so deeply enveloped in huge pullovers, a polo-necked sweater, a thick tweed skirt and stout woollen tight
s that you couldn’t tell where clothes ended and she began. She wore no makeup, her brown hair was braided and twisted around her head. She had good features and, despite her weather-beaten skin, she should have been pretty, thought Jenny, but somehow her face was marred by the dead, “beaten-by-life look” that clouded her gray eyes.
No sooner had Margaret sat them down with coffee and brandy (she advised Jenny not to mix the grape and the grain, but to stick to gin), than they had to get up and divest themselves of their top layers of sea-going sweaters.
“You’ve got the heating turned up far too high, Margaret,” said Nigel rebuttoning his tweed jacket. “A waste of money. Who wants to be as hot as this? And you’ll ruin the furniture.”
“Nonsense,” said Margaret vigorously. “Don’t be such an old skinflint. As landlord you should be delighted that I’m keeping your house dry and a whole host of rots at bay.”
Rosemary changed the subject hastily. She asked about Jenny’s journey, her life in London, her jobs. They took too much interest in her: they delved into her youth, her relationship with her sister, her parents. It was more like a cross-examination than friendly interest, thought Jenny, deciding that she’d had enough and deliberately closing up. She forced a question of her own. What did they do here? Were they writers too?
Nigel mulled the question over, deciding carefully on his answer. “Not writers as such, though I must admit to having had a book published many years ago now, and it didn’t receive the attention which Margaret’s work always draws forth.”
“You should have kept at it,” Margaret told him briskly. “Twenty books sell each other, one book just drops into oblivion.”
“Quite,” agreed Nigel coldly. “And perhaps I might make the point that whereas my book could only have been of interest to a select minority, you command the allegiance of the mass audience.”
Rosemary changed the subject. She began to tell Jenny how close they were to the sea, only ten miles from Ermeporth, and if she liked sailing or surfing… Nigel interrupted, “There is no need to remind us that we’re in the last month of peace before the summer hell-hordes take us over. Another month and the roads will be choked with lunatic drivers,” he went on, his voice shaking with anger, “the beaches crammed with screaming children. Moronic picnickers will invade us. Remember that lot in the field right outside the house last year? No, you can take all those so-called ‘leisure interests’ and dump them at the bottom of the sea and let Ermeporth be a fishing village again with reasonable men doing a reasonable job.”
A Place With Two Faces Page 2
