The Singing Tree

by Anne Weale

  He moved away from Abel towards her. ‘What does interest you?’

  ‘I can answer that in one word—clothes!’ said her grandfather with a chuckle. ‘She’s got cupboards full of ‘em. Enough clothes to stock a boutique, and half of them never worn, I shouldn’t mind betting... or only the once.’

  Before she could refute this statement and answer the question for herself, Watson announced dinner. A little vexed, but hopeful that during the meal she could correct the impression that her only interest was her appearance, she put aside her glass of tonic and led the way to the dining-room.

  The long polished D-ended table could seat thirty people. When they were alone she and her grandfather sat together at one end of it. Earlier tonight she had given instructions to Watson that this arrangement should not be changed but that Roderick Anstruther should sit in her usual place, on her grandfather’s right, facing the painting which looked like a portrait of him in fancy dress.

  Usually it was the footman on duty who drew out and pushed in her chair. But tonight it was their guest who performed this courtesy.

  ‘Thank you.’ She flashed a smile at him before he walked round to his own place opposite hers.

  As she shook out her napkin she wanted to say, ‘It must be a very strange feeling for you to be here after such a long absence.’ But she thought it wiser not to make any remark which might revive Abel’s ire about the lease.

  Instead she said, ‘What is your opinion of American food? I found it rather good...especially the seafood.’

  ‘The seafood and steaks are excellent, and the food served in private houses is often superb. But, like the British, as a nation they eat a lot of junk food.’

  ‘Junk food? What d’you mean by that?’ asked Abel.

  ‘All the things people in the Western World eat which don’t do them any good and probably do them great harm.’

  Her grandfather grunted. ‘Food is food as far as I’m concerned. There’s nothing to beat good plain English food, in my opinion. I’ve no time for fancy foreign dishes smothered in sauce so you can’t tell whether the meat or fish is fresh or not. I don’t hold with dieting neither. Flower’s always half starving herself... fasting... living on fruit juice. I believe in three meals a day. I’ll be sixty-eight soon, but there’s nothing wrong with my digestion. I’ve as good an appetite as you. Always have had. Couldn’t have worked as hard as I have all my life if I hadn’t eaten well.’

  Usually, when her grandfather told people his age in that tone, they felt obliged to express some astonishment that he should be as old as he claimed. Roderick Anstruther said nothing. His eyes skimmed his host’s ruddy jowls and the paunch straining the buttons of the smoking-jacket. Then he looked at Flower and said, ‘Do you have a weight problem, Miss Dursley? I shouldn’t have suspected it.’

  ‘No, of course she doesn’t,’ said Abel. ‘But you know what these modern girls are. They’re all hell-bent on being as skinny as the models in fashion magazines. I keep telling her, any man who is a man, and not a pansy, like most of these designers, likes a girl with a bit of flesh on her. There’s no pleasure in cuddling a bunch of matchsticks. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘There’s certainly a happy medium between too much flesh and too little. I should have thought your granddaughter was an excellent example of it,’ said his guest.

  The odd thing was that although, presumably, this reply was intended as a compliment, it didn’t sound like one. There was something too judicial about it, and the glance he gave at what he could see of Flower’s figure was impersonal rather than personal.

  However she decided to take it as a compliment. ‘Thank you,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘Dodo exaggerates. I don’t starve myself. Occasionally, after a lot of parties, I have one day on nothing but fruit juice. Otherwise I eat what I like.’

  ‘And you like wholemeal bread, I notice,’ he said, looking at the roll she had taken from the silver basket handed to them by the footman.

  He had chosen a similar roll, but her grandfather, who had false teeth, had taken a crustless white roll made in his bread factory.

  She said, ‘Yes, I bought these in London this morning from a shop near my flat. I usually bring some back and they’re kept in the fridge and then lightly damped and reheated. It makes them taste fresh from the oven. They’re good, aren’t they?’ she finished, popping a piece into her mouth.

  ‘Very good.’ He turned to the old man. ‘But isn’t it lese-majeste for your granddaughter to prefer these rolls to your products, Mr Dursley?’

  The remark was made with a smile, but the tone and the glint in his eyes was somewhat sardonic.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Abel, ‘but it seems a damned waste of money to be bringing bread from London when you can order whatever you want from the works, Flower. What’s so special about that stuff? Apart from a fancy London price?’

  Although he would have thought nothing of giving her a four-figure cheque—in addition to her generous allowance—to buy herself the latest thing in furs, had she worn furs—which she did not—he was oddly tight-fisted in small ways. He would spend several thousand pounds on a party to impress his cronies, yet grudge a few pence spent on other things.

  ‘I think it tastes better than white bread, and it’s more filling,’ she answered. ‘I like it even better than French bread.’

  The younger man said, ‘As a man of the people, Mr Dursley, doesn’t it ever worry you that the people’s “staff of life”, as it used to be called, is now an inferior product to the bread of, say, a hundred years ago?’

  ‘There’s nothing inferior about my bread,’ said Abel with a sharp glance at him. ‘It’s made in the most hygienic bakeries in the country, and it’s sliced and wrapped to reach the housewife in perfect condition, ready to stick in the toaster and make into sandwiches or whatever way she wants to use it. You don’t know who’s handled those rolls you’re eating. They could have goodness knows what germs on them.’

  ‘True, but they’re not germs which are likely to kill us and, if we had to, we could live on this for some time. A man wouldn’t last very long on a regime of white bread and water,’ his guest said drily. ‘But perhaps it doesn’t concern you that children brought up on white bread are being deprived of important nutrients?’

  ‘Pah! Talking through your hat!’ was Abel’s impatient response. ‘The children of this generation are a damn sight better fed than mine was, let me tell you. When I was a kid there was still plenty of rickets about. I’ve gone to bed hungry myself when my dad was out of work. There’s none of that now. The kids of this country are better fed than they’ve ever been. Only the other week I was asked to present the prizes at a village school near here. They were kiddies from a housing estate, most of ‘em, and as plump and healthy as my two lovely little great-grandchildren.’

  ‘Plump children aren’t necessarily healthy. They merely have different deficiencies from the children of your generation; deficiencies which may not surface until middle age.’

  Roderick Anstruther spoke with a quiet authority quite different from Abel’s dogmatism.

  ‘I’m sure you know the history of your industry,’ he went on. ‘Commercial bread has been virtually valueless as food since the machinery to refine flour was invented. It’s now so refined it has no goodness left in it.’

  Seeing her grandfather’s scowl growing darker, and feeling it was a contentious topic for their guest to have raised in the house of a bread-manufacturer, Flower said, rather stiffly, ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘One of my father’s friends is a leading American paediatrician who has retired to Arizona. He is seriously concerned by the increase in the number of overweight children, many of whom are actually undernourished in spite of being fat.’

  To her relief, he then changed the subject by saying, ‘You mentioned your flat in London. You work there, I take it, and come home at weekends?’

  ‘No, I live here,’ she answered. ‘The flat is a pied-a-terr
e for when I have things to do in London. My work is here... running the house for my grandfather.’

  As she saw him lifting one eyebrow, she added defensively, ‘A large house doesn’t run itself, and we do a lot of entertaining.’

  ‘You must if it’s a full-time job in spite of the staff you have here now.’ His tone was undisguisedly sardonic. ‘My mother used to manage with two or three part-time cleaners, but we lived very informally. Except on special occasions, we only used the library and the morning-room.’

  ‘I reckon a place this size needs a staff of at least fifteen if it’s to be kept as it should be,’ said Abel.

  ‘You may be right, although my mother used to say that, if a house is reasonably tidy and the flowers are well done, people don’t notice dust.’

  Their guest’s glance came to rest briefly on the two dozen dark red roses in a modern silver bowl bought by Abel when he had discovered that all the containers in Lady Anstruther’s flower-room were old soup tureens, teapots, jugs and mugs, many of them cracked or chipped. That they were lovely examples of Wedgwood creamware, Coalport and Worcester porcelains and other fine early china meant nothing to him. He had no use for anything damaged, however beautiful.

  Nor, if they were like the flowers done by Emily Fairchild and her mother, would he have admired Lady Anstruther’s arrangements of mixed garden and wild flowers. Knowing his preference for hothouse roses and orchids, Flower kept the hedgerow posies picked on her solitary walks to the small sitting-room adjoining her bedroom.

  ‘You surprise me,’ Abel said acidly. ‘One thing I admired about my mother, God bless her, was the way she kept her home spotless. She went through some hard times, poor soul, but she never lowered her standards. You could have eaten your dinner off her kitchen floor.’

  To Flower it was plain that, by implying that Lady Anstruther, for all her blue blood, had been a slattern compared to the late Florrie Dursley, her grandfather was getting his own back for their visitor’s condemnation of the bread produced at the works.

  She could see that, apart from being at loggerheads over the lease, the two men were at odds in every way. All their values were completely different. They would never get on with each other.

  Which was going to make it awkward for her if the man on the other side of the table was the one she had been waiting for so long.

  The first course was followed by Abel’s favourite sirloin. It was roasted on the bone and accompanied by Yorkshire pudding, creamed swedes, cabbage, roast potatoes, a thickened gravy and horse-radish sauce.

  Flower found herself watching Roderick Anstruther’s hands as they cut the prime Scottish beef. She had always had a thing about hands. However attractive a man might be facially, his looks made no impression on her if there was something off-putting about his hands.

  However she could find no fault with their guest’s hands. The long lean fingers were rather square at the tips, with neatly pared, very clean nails. His hands were as brown as his face. Perhaps he had picked up his tan while arranging his father’s funeral in Arizona, or perhaps even in New York it was possible for someone with his colouring to tan during summer lunch-hours and after work. Although, if he had to supplement his income with a second job, it didn’t sound as if he had much time to relax.

  She wondered what the jobs were, and was going to ask him, when he started questioning her grandfather about some changes he had noticed locally. Relieved that the conversation had taken a less acrimonious turn, she reserved her questions for later on.

  The beef was followed by an apple pie with Cornish cream, after which the butler served English cheeses. Flower and their guest sat out this course, although he let her grandfather press him to try the vintage port Abel liked to drink with his Stilton.

  ‘We’ll have coffee in the library, Watson,’ he ordered.

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  ‘I’ve made some changes in the library...brought it up to date,’ said Abel, piling cheese on a water biscuit.

  The younger man’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Oh, really? In what way?’

  ‘I’ve had all the shabby old chairs put away in one of the attics and installed some decent new seating. It’s an entertainments centre now, with projection TV as well as video and a first-class stereo-system.’

  To Flower’s secret embarrassment, he then announced what he had spent on each piece of equipment.

  ‘When we don’t have company we spend most evenings watching a film or two,’ he went on. ‘We’ll watch one tonight if you like.’

  Her heart sank. Her grandfather’s favourite movies were slapstick comedies with Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello. He would screen them not once but repeatedly, guffawing as much at the third or fourth showing as at the first, while she, by the light of a reading lamp, would lose herself in a book.

  She had been a bookworm all her life. Books had been her refuge, her solace, her escape from loneliness. Her grandfather didn’t know it because it was a long time since he had been there, but her flat in London was crowded with books, not just new ones but old ones as well. The hundreds of volumes in the Anstruthers’ library had given her a liking for the look of tooled-leather bindings and the feel and smell of old paper.

  No one whose impression of her had been formed by reading about her in the gossip columns would have suspected that six nights out of seven she was to be found, not at a wild party in London, but tucked up in bed with a book.

  In her nineteenth year, when unhappiness had made her reckless about whom she was seen with and where, she had had the misfortune to be spotlighted by the gossip writers. Exaggerated accounts of her activities had been appearing ever since. Tagged as ‘blonde playgirl Flower Dursley’, she had found it impossible to shed a reputation which, if not entirely without foundation, was ninety-five-per-cent myth.

  If Sir Roderick thought the library had been ruined by having the centre refurnished with a U-shaped sectional sofa surrounding a huge white fur rug on which stood three dark glass coffee-tables, he did not show any reaction at finding Abel’s idea of grand luxe set down in the middle of a fine eighteenth-century book-room.

  He seemed genuinely interested in the video equipment, and listened attentively to his host’s explanation of its finer points.

  When they settled down to watch the film he had selected, her grandfather occupied his usual place in the centre of the U with the other two flanking him on the curved sections.

  Roderick Anstruther refused Abel’s offer of a liqueur and cigar with his coffee. He sat with his long legs crossed and his jacket unbuttoned to show a black leather belt, with a rectangular silver buckle, slotted through the loops of his trousers.

  Flower had noticed many such buckles, usually monogrammed, worn by the rich Americans they had met while staying at Palm Beach. She had had one monogrammed for her brother. But she wasn’t sure that he liked it, and if he continued to put on weight the belt would need replacing with a longer one. Stephen’s body was not hard and fit like that of the man sitting on the far side of her grandfather, waiting for the film to begin.

  With a guest present she felt obliged to watch it. The star was one of the idols of her grandfather’s youth, a toothy ukulele-playing Lancashire comedian called George Formby. Some of his songs were catchy, but Flower thought the script was terrible—terrible enough to be funny.

  Her sense of humour was never far below the surface and she found herself unexpectedly amused and at times rather touched by the naiveté of the film. From occasional glances at him, she judged that their guest was not as bored as she had feared he would be. Amusement took away the hard, uncompromising expression of his face in repose. She liked his low-pitched chuckle.

  She had hoped that tonight her grandfather would be content with one film, leaving the rest of the evening free for conversation. Sometimes he went to bed early and watched television there. She would have liked very much to have their guest to herself, both in order to get to know him better and to show him that she was not
quite as Dodo had presented her.

  However, to her dismay, as soon as the Formby movie ended Abel said, ‘We’ll have a documentary next. I think you’ll find this quite an eye-opener.’ He turned to her. ‘You haven’t seen this one yet, Flower.’

  The film which followed was about the mill and the factories. Embroidered with facts and figures to give it the air of an impartial study, it was basically an advertisement for Abel’s products.

  He, very naturally, watched it with a beam of pride. But Flower saw that their visitor was staring at the screen under brows drawn into a frown. She could tell by the flicker of a muscle at his jaw that his teeth were clenched with suppressed anger. The strength of his reaction baffled her.

  Why should it make him furious to see the white-uniformed employees, busy operating the complex machinery, relaxing in the staff cafeteria and, in the case of the women, collecting their toddlers from the crèche at the end of their shifts?

  As Abel had said during dinner, not only his bread but all his products—which ranged from sausages to television suppers, ready to re-heat by microwave, and baby foods—were manufactured in model conditions. She knew from her own visits to the factories that they were as clean, bright and efficient as the film depicted.

  Could it be merely that he resented being shown the background to her grandfather’s fortune? The fortune which had, in a sense, ousted his parents from their rightful place in the world?

  No, she couldn’t believe it was that. There was something much more complex behind his glowering reaction to the scenes flashing on the large screen.

  ‘Impressive, eh?’ Abel remarked after the film had ended by showing actors purporting to be three generations of a family sitting down to have Sunday tea round a table laden with his foodstuffs.

  Afterwards Flower wasn’t sure what prompted her to launch into an enthusiastic encomium of the film’s merits. She thought it must be because her intuition told her that any comment their guest might make was liable to give Abel apoplexy.