by CL Skelton
‘And why not? You’d plough up my bottom field behind my back, so why shouldn’t I talk behind yours.’
‘So it’s your bottom field now, is it? Just when did you get the title deeds? Or have we turned the whole damned place over to your chinless pink-coated wonders for once and all?’
‘Where’s Madelene, Noel?’ Harry pleaded, trying vainly to get the attention of either of his children. The door to the library, slammed behind him by Noel, once more swung, this time more sedately, open.
‘Madelene is here,’ Madelene announced, her voice delicate to the dangerous point of fury, as well Harry knew. He hastened across the room, extending his arms to her instinctively.
‘My dear, you are not hurt?’
‘Hurt? No. Angry, annoyed, humiliated, yes.’ She glowered at Noel. ‘Thanks to your foolish peacock and both your charming children. That one,’ she waved a dismissive hand at Vanessa, ‘leaves me waiting half an hour in the ditch, and that one,’ she indicated Noel, ‘hauls me out without so much as a word and tears off on his smelly tractor without waiting even to see if the engine will start.’
‘Well,’ Noel said sourly, ‘it started. Or else you wouldn’t be here.’
‘So who should know that it would start or that it would not start, or go on fire or blow up and blow me to smithereens?’ Madelene shouted. ‘You could have waited a minute of your precious time!’
‘To be harangued by two women in one day? No thanks. Engines don’t blow people to smithereens, Madelene. Shotguns do that,’ he added, glowering again at Vanessa. ‘What have you said?’ he demanded again, suspiciously.
‘Only the truth.’
‘And what is that?’
‘That if you plough up the bottom field the Hunt will never meet at Hardacres again, and the last little touch of what all of us have stood for will be gone. Over. Finished. We might as well just pack up and leave.’
‘What a splendid idea,’ said Noel, and Vanessa dissolved incongruously in tears. It was a tactic she had employed at intervals throughout her life, usually to save some favoured pony from sale or, conversely, lure Harry into yet another auction ring folly. Noel was unimpressed.
Harry lit his pipe, hobbled to his fireside chair, and motioned to Madelene to take the other.
She hesitated, moved slightly towards him, and stopped. For the first time he noticed how pale she was, and how her delicately-coloured lips were set so tight that an unaccustomed narrow age-line appeared on either side of her slender nose. He saw her glance at his squabbling middle-aged children and knew she wanted to be alone with him. Searching for the most graceful words to achieve that effect he only managed to mutter, ‘I don’t believe the children will be waiting for tea.’
‘On the contrary, Father, I feel the need of a cup very badly now,’ Vanessa sniffed as Mrs Bennett entered with the tray. She hastened off for additional china, and Madelene suddenly sank into the chair by the fire, shook her head once at the hopeless intrusion of people all around her, and buried her face in her hands as she, too, broke into tears.
Harry clambered, astonished, to his feet, crossing the fireside to stand beside her. Madelene’s tears, an almost unheard-of rarity, were as genuine as Vanessa’s were false. ‘My dear, what is it, were you hurt?’
‘Not me,’ she sobbed. ‘It is not me.’
‘But what?’
‘It’s Sam,’ she cried, shaking her head as Vanessa and Noel turned to stare.
‘Sam?’ Harry said, startled. ‘Surely Sam’s not ill?’ The thought was incomprehensible. The twins were health and fitness personified, joint coaches of the Ampleforth school rugby team.
‘No,’ Madelene sobbed. ‘Not ill. He’s gone. Sam’s gone. Terry telephoned last night. Sam’s left.’
‘Sam? Left Ampleforth?’ Harry said. ‘But where?’
‘No one knows. He’s just gone. He told the Abbot some months ago, and Terry yesterday morning. And he left, like that, alone. Oh Harry, where will he go?’
There was a silence, in which Vanessa stopped sniffing, realizing she’d totally lost her audience. Then Noel said, ‘Where will he go? Here, of course. Where else? And that’s all I bloody need. A bolting monk. A bolting bloody monk.’
He turned on his heel and stormed out, slamming the ill-used library door once more.
Chapter Three
Sam did not return to Hardacres. Noel had misjudged him and later grudgingly admitted so. They had all misjudged him. Whatever his reasons for leaving, whatever his plans for the future, they did not include landing himself as either a financial or emotional burden on Noel, Harry, or any member of the family. Whatever he was doing, he was doing alone.
Madelene, with Harry accompanying her for moral support, motored to Ampleforth where a long, kindly discussion with the Abbot and a further long discussion with Sam’s twin, Terry, did little to clarify the situation, although both managed in some way to ease her anxiety. The Abbot assured her that Sam’s departure was amicable, the result of their mutual careful conclusion that the life of Brother Jude of the Order of St Benedict was not, after all, for him.
‘He found he did not truly have a vocation,’ the Abbot said simply. ‘Many have found the same. That is what these first years are for. Still, they are not wasted years but years of discovery. Now we will see to what use he puts them.’ He had smiled, offered sherry and then left them alone in the guest-room with Terry.
Terry, or more correctly Brother Erkenwald OSB, looking remarkably sedate in Harry’s eyes in his flowing black habit, slowly turned his gaze from his mother to his great-uncle and back to his mother. Then with an expression reminiscent of the many times throughout their childhood when his brother had escaped unscathed from some mutual prank and left him holding the baby, he shrugged and grinned wryly. Apparently Sam, with whom he had shared every secret from infancy, had kept totally to himself and the Abbot his momentous decision.
‘He said, “I’m going.” I said, “Where?” I thought he meant the pub or something. I just couldn’t believe it. For a moment, you see, I wanted to go, too. That’s why he didn’t tell me, you know, until he was ready to leave. It took all his nerve to do something without me. And he knew I’d be the same. I still feel amputated. I keep talking to walls and expecting them to be Sam. It’s like during the war, when I was in the bag. It’s bloody awful being a twin sometimes, you know.’ He paused, and sipped at the glass of sherry the Abbot had provided, and looked out of the window at the boys of the school on the playing field below. ‘Still, it has its compensations. You needn’t worry about him, Mother. He’s quite all right. You understand.’ He touched one finger lightly to the side of his forehead, a gesture that somehow evoked the uncanny communication the twins had always, like many twins, shared. ‘I’ll let you know if anything goes wrong.’ He grinned at Harry and Harry was uncertain if he was joking or not.
‘I do not understand, I do not forgive,’ Madelene said slowly, ‘that he did not let us know. Why did he not contact me? That was so unkind.’
‘Because he knew I would,’ Terry said logically. ‘It’s very hard, you must understand. It’s rather like a divorce, I would imagine. Makes it terribly hard to face the family at first. He will. When he is quite sure. When he is sure enough that nothing can change his mind.’
A week of silence followed. Madelene went about her work and her daily life in a state of suppressed nerves that only revealed themselves when the telephone rang and she leapt for it demonically. It was never Sam. Harry, who did telephone regularly, reassured her each time that Terry was no doubt right and her errant son would make contact as soon as his mental state allowed, a viewpoint that Madelene found far from comforting. Harry himself, still convinced that Sam would turn up at Hardacres, jumped up at the sound of every arriving vehicle and Noel, with less friendly intent, cast each one a baleful glare until it vindicated itself by not producing the Prodigal Brother.
So it was that when, late on the following Friday afternoon, a large black taxi, followed directly by a blan
k-sided workman’s van, pulled up in front of the main entrance, the entire resident family came instantly to attention. Harry, who had been enjoying a quiet glass of sherry with Hetty before Rodney and Vanessa joined them for dinner, hobbled quickly to the window and was joined there by his wife. Both leaned forward, pressing anxious faces against the glass. Vanessa and her husband had just appeared from behind the house and both, dressed alike in jodhpurs and hacking jackets, also stopped in their tracks and stared. Noel, who had just arrived back from Driffield with a load of feed-sacks in the shooting-brake, clambered out of that venerable vehicle and began striding purposefully towards the arrival, brows lowering ominously as he approached. The door of the taxi opened slowly, distractedly, as someone inside made some arrangement with the driver. Then a tall figure stepped down, tall, rangy, and unmistakably wearing a skirt. The woman straightened her back, smoothed a stray strand of dark-grey hair into the bun at the nape of her neck and came face to face with Noel, who hadn’t had time to change his expression.
‘My dear, don’t look so frightfully appalled,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘I’m not staying or anything gruesome like that.’
Noel’s dour face broke into a wide grin and he extended one work-grimed hand. ‘Jane. How delightful. We didn’t expect you, at all.’ He was still grinning as Jane looked around her at the circle of staring faces, both in and out of the house.
‘So I gather,’ she said.
‘No, please,’ Noel continued, relief over his respite from Sam bringing out a totally uncharacteristic desire to make social amends. ‘You must forgive us, but we’re rather at loose ends around here. We were more or less expecting someone else. Sort of.’ He tugged at a lank strand of his thinning hair, looking over his shoulder for help from his father, who was emerging from the front door.
‘Yes,’ Jane said, turning to greet her brother. ‘And something tells me I can guess just who that might be.’
Quickly she embraced Harry, exchanging two affectionate cheek kisses. Lady Macgregor was a woman of sixty, a woman whom life, rich in experience and not without considerable misfortune, had sculpted to a point of high perfection, so that on the border of old age she was genuinely beautiful.
Jane was the only one of Sam and Mary Hardacre’s three children to be totally at home in the world of the establishment; she alone had been born to it. Harry and his older brother Joe had each known the full depths of their parents’ early poverty, and each had watched Sam Hardacre’s extraordinary rise from the fish quays to country squiredom. Neither to Joe nor to Harry would Hardacres ever be anything but an extraordinary place, a fairy-tale handed them in their adolescence. To Jane it was simply home. She had been born there, like innumerable other well-born ladies of earlier times, had played about its vast gardens in childhood, and been sent out well prepared into an elegant world from its doors. If her marriage to the future Lord Macgregor had delighted and stunned her family, and perhaps outraged their detractors, to Jane it was only natural. Ian Macgregor was precisely the sort of young man she’d been schooled to expect and she made him, in their few years, an excellent wife, as comfortable at his side as her mother had been at the side of Sam Hardacre the guttie.
As a girl she had not been beautiful ‒ she had inherited too much from her father for that ‒ but was always thought attractive. Her strong-boned, honest face, and her direct blue eyes, surmounted by well-groomed luxuriant dark hair, glowed with character. Jane had enough tragedy in her life to have justified a retreat into sorrowful mourning but, too strong for that, she rose above it all, in time, and that character strengthened in her face until now, a tall, gaunt, handsome woman with a ready humorous smile, she caught and held the attention of anyone she wished.
In the years of her early widowhood women did not remarry, but later, after her son was grown and he too died in another war, there were offers of marriage, often from gentlemen of considerable standing. Jane turned them all down, good-naturedly but firmly. That part of her life was done, she would say, and she knew, even if others did not, when to let go of the things of youth.
Perhaps for that reason, Jane Macgregor had a tremendous affinity with the young, and her small house on the Macgregor estate was often filled with young friends, many of them the children, and even grandchildren, of her own contemporaries. Among the Hardacres she had fond friendships with Vanessa and Rodney’s little daughter Mary Gray, and also with all three of her niece Emily Barton’s young children, Ruth, Olive and Paul. Most family visits ended with Jane playing cards or billiards, or listening to modern dance music with the young, while her own generation were abandoned to their solemn adult state.
Before she would enter the house, Jane asked that her taxi-driver and the driver of the hired van be taken into the kitchens for a cup of tea, as she would be needing their services quite shortly and saw no reason why they shouldn’t enjoy some refreshment while they waited.
‘Of course,’ Harry said, taking her arm. ‘But surely you’ll be staying for dinner.’
‘No. On the contrary, I will be staying fifteen minutes. Oh, don’t look so relieved, Noel, it’s most ungracious,’ she added with another grin.
Noel appeared genuinely dismayed and said, ‘Oh please, Aunt Jane, do stay. Honestly, I’d like nothing better. I’ll even change my shirt.’
‘For that miracle, I could almost be persuaded,’ she replied. ‘But I really can’t wait. I’ve promised Emily that I’ll be in Kilham by five. I can assure you, we have a great deal of work to do this weekend. A great deal. Philip is out of his mind.’
Hetty had appeared at the door, in her customary tweed skirt and cardigan buttoned to the neck. She wore thick grey stockings and bedroom slippers of tartan wool. Jane sighed slightly at the sight of her, a sigh that had less to do with Hetty’s ill-health than Hetty’s dreary manner of dress. In Jane’s view, feeling hellish was no justification for looking hellish and that, she was sorry, was that.
‘Jane dear, how lovely,’ Hetty murmured, extending woolly arms. Jane leaned forward for the customary kiss, feeling guilty about her recent thoughts because Hetty did look dreadfully pale and grey. ‘What’s brought you here?’
‘A mission of mercy,’ Jane said, as they entered the drawing-room, with Harry trailing and Rodney and Vanessa clumping along behind in their riding boots. Harry set about pouring drinks and Jane continued, ‘I had a desperate telephone call from Emily. They had just arrived at this wondrous purchase of Philip’s, after motoring for hours in the pouring rain, and she discovered that, wonder of wonders, he bought the place without ever looking at the upstairs.’
‘Surely never,’ Rodney said. He was a tall, bald man of near Jane’s own age, considerably older than his wife, and his conversation, when not about horses, tended to such astonishments and little else. Rodney appeared permanently amazed by the world outside his stable-yard, a place of heathens and madness.
‘I’m afraid so,’ Jane said briskly. ‘The roof was leaking, two ceilings were down, and none of the rooms had been decorated since the First War. Apparently Philip fell in love with the bar, checked it was stocked well, and left it at that. So there they are, ready to open to an eager public in a fortnight’s time, may Heaven help them. I told Emily I’d come down via Edinburgh, drop into Jenner’s for curtains, take the next train to York for the wallpaper and, well, here I am. What you see in that splendid little blue van out there is the entire interior of The Rose at Kilham. Pre-fab, so to speak.’
‘Jane, you are awfully brave,’ Hetty said in hesitant admiration.
‘I’m awfully thick, if you ask me,’ Jane dismissed. ‘Still, I couldn’t leave them floundering. And I am quite capable. I’ve just finished four bedrooms in the new inn, for Heidi, in Strathconon.’
Harry nodded. He had evidence of Jane’s ability himself. Last year she had quietly saved him a considerable amount of money by redecorating the entire upstairs of Hardacres single-handed. He had never yet met a task of which she was not, if required, totally capabl
e. During the war she had driven tractors on the farm with cheerful, inventive glee. For the one Hardacre born never needing to work, she was remarkably adept at all manner of it.
‘How kind of you to stop in to see us,’ Hetty murmured, adjusting her footstool in front of the fire, ‘when you are so busy, after all.’
‘Oh, I’m afraid this isn’t exactly social, my dears,’ Jane said at once. ‘I have a message to deliver, you see, or else I am rather afraid I’d have given you all a miss.’ She grinned again. ‘Do tell, Madelene isn’t by chance around?’ She waited while the roomful of her relatives made their customary little silence whenever Madelene’s name was mentioned in Hetty’s presence. Jane was the only member of the family, other than the naive Vanessa, who refused to indulge in this little hypocrisy, feeling as she did that Hetty had by now surely come to terms with the situation, indeed perhaps finding it in some ways to her advantage. It did, Jane was well aware, rather do away with that nagging question of bed.
‘Oh, Madelene,’ Rodney said blankly, as if he had just remembered who she was.
‘I say, Jane, haven’t you heard?’ Vanessa blurted in her embarrassingly imperceptive way.
‘Heard what?’
‘About Madelene’s Sam. He’s bolted. Bolted and gone to ground. Quite the most extraordinary thing!’
‘Quite,’ said Jane with a slight twitch of her long, thin nose. She raised her glass of malt whisky, which she much preferred to the more usual lady’s drink of sherry, and took a long, careful sip. She set the glass down. ‘Yes, actually, I was aware. We had a long telephone conversation two nights ago, Sam and I. Please let Madelene know that he is in excellent health, and working hard at his new job.’
‘Where?’ Harry demanded. ‘What job? Why did he telephone you, of all people? Is he in Scotland?’
‘No. He’s in Yorkshire. I told him I wouldn’t say exactly where just yet, if you don’t mind. He’d rather a little privacy yet. Do try to understand,’ she said, echoing Terry, and sounding very like another young person trying to explain youth’s vagaries to middle-age.
