by CL Skelton
Appleby settled himself on the sofa next to Sam and peered at him over his spectacles. He had shown signs of doubting his rationality ever since the reading of Harry’s will, and now his face reflected a hardening conviction that Sam was insane. He was saying in deeply offended tones, ‘I don’t know what you were thinking of. You would have been facing a murder charge.’ Sam ignored him.
Rodney was still stuttering about, between his daughter, who was sobbing yet, and his wife. He leant over and said, his voice shakily helpful, ‘Why don’t you just get in that lorry and go away somewhere for a while, please, Sam. Just go off and cool down. We’re quite all right, really …’
Vanessa came closer, still holding the trembling girl, her voice as always echoing in the wood-lined room, ‘I mean, it was jolly decent looking out for Mary, but he didn’t really do anything, did he, love?’ The girl turned her face away, cringing in embarrassment, and when Vanessa came closer with her, towards Sam, she tugged to be free. He saw to his dismay that she was more afraid of him than she’d ever been of Mike. He shook his head, and waved Vanessa back.
‘Take her out, Vanessa,’ he said. ‘She’s afraid.’ She nodded, uncertainly, but led the girl away.
Noel passed them in the doorway, returning from outside. He looked around the room with a wry grin, which settled on Sam. He said, ‘I thought I was bad, but you’re a real maniac.’ There was genuine admiration in his voice. He looked around the room, startlingly cheerful, his grey straight hair falling in wild chunks about his ears. ‘Anybody like a drink?’ he said.
Before anyone could answer there was the sound of sharp, high-heeled footsteps at the door and a dry, hard, feminine voice said, ‘So here’s the party then. Aren’t we all having fun?’ Helen Hardacre Brannigan stepped into the room, wrapped in black mink, her shrewd eyes wrinkled up with sour amusement. Behind her, red-faced, stood Vanessa, still clutching her unhappy daughter, and it was as evident from her blushing face as from Helen’s words that the whole tale had been told.
Rodney said again, his hand on Sam’s shoulder, ‘Come on, old son, just go out for a drive. We’ll see you later.’
But Helen said, ‘Oh, don’t. We’re just leaving anyhow.’
The solicitor got to his feet, glared once, unamused, at Sam, and hastened to Helen’s side.
‘I do hope, Mrs Brannigan, that this unfortunate incident …’
She merely waved him away. ‘Go on,’ she said crustily, ‘all of you. Just before I go, I want a word with my grandson. Alone.’ They all filed out, obediently. Helen Hardacre Brannigan was accustomed to being obeyed. Sam stood up as they did so and turned to face her. She turned briefly, and pushed the heavy door of the library closed until she heard the click of the latch. Then her face broke into an ancient, crêpey smile, cracking the weight of powder on her rouged, ravaged face. ‘Tell me something,’ she said, her eyes mischievous. ‘Why are Catholics so violent?’
Sam shook his head, raising his hands in a helpless gesture of remorse, ‘Helen, there is nothing I can say …’
‘No, I’m serious. I’d really like to know. You, Mike, both of you, just alike. What is it …?’
Sam shrugged, and smiled slightly, also. ‘Perhaps we get forgiven too often. I don’t know, Helen, but I am most grievously sorry.’
She dismissed that with a quick wave of her gold-laden hand. ‘Oh, please, don’t be. You’ve done me a favour. That’ll keep him in line for at least a week.’ She glanced down at the inlaid table and saw the guttie’s knife. Her eyes lit. ‘Oh my dear, this is rich. So you’ve won the family heirloom.’
Sam nodded. He said, ‘I don’t think that was quite what Harry intended when he gave it to me.’
She smiled. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t know about that,’ she said, laughing to herself. ‘Ah, Sam, your grandfather would be disappointed in you,’ she said. He looked at her curiously, wondering where Joe Hardacre fitted into this. She smiled again. ‘He had a saying, you know. If a thing’s worth doing, its worth doing right.’ She grinned and picked up the knife, running her perfectly manicured claw-like nail along its razor edge. ‘You should have slit his stupid throat,’ she said. There was such disgust in her voice that Sam felt illogical remorse now towards Mike.
‘He was drunk, Helen,’ he said. She raised one eyebrow, her fingers still fondling the knife.
‘When a man spends his whole life drunk, it ceases to be an excuse,’ she said. She turned the knife over in her hand, studying it. ‘What delicious justice,’ she said. ‘The best use anyone ever put it to.’ She extended her hand, with the knife in it, handle first, to Sam. He hesitated and she said, ‘Go on, take it. You might have to defend the Faith again some day.’ She grinned, her ancient, watery eyes still sharp. He took the knife from her, still uneasily, and slipped it back into the pocket of the fisherman’s smock. He realized two things suddenly, about his grandmother, one of which he should have realized long before. She was, firstly, extremely intelligent. And secondly, under the right, radically different circumstances, he would have liked her.
‘Why are you doing this, Helen?’ he suddenly said. She made no answer, but half-turned away, as if she had suddenly grown coy. ‘Surely you don’t intend to live here?’
She turned back and her eyes took a stony glitter. ‘Oh yes,’ she breathed, ‘I’ll live here. For a while, anyhow, I’ll live here.’ She stalked to the window, her mink darkly enfolding her, and stared out with her old eyes squinting against the bright light. She waved distractedly across the lawns with one hand, on which diamonds flashed rainbows in the sun. ‘Long enough for me to hear the bones turning over down there,’ she indicated the family mausoleum, just out of sight behind the beeches. ‘That long, anyhow.’
‘Just for that, Helen?’ he said gently. She turned to face him, her eyes narrowing slightly and her mouth made a small defensive pout amid its spiderweb of wrinkles.
‘No,’ she said slowly, her voice thin and crackly, suddenly very old, ‘I’ve got other reasons. It’s a good investment. You wouldn’t argue that.’
He shrugged. ‘Then you’ll sell again?’
She wrapped her mink tighter, as if the room, warmed by fire and May sunshine, were not warm enough. Her voice dropped, and hardened. ‘Oh yes. I’ll sell. I’ll sell it into so many little pieces, scraps; I’ll cut it up, and divide it, and undo it all, until no one will ever know there was an estate here at all. I’d put a damned factory right in the middle if I could, but the damned planners won’t let me, I don’t suppose.’ She looked questioningly at him.
‘I don’t suppose,’ he said softly, his eyes sad.
‘That,’ she continued, pointing to the grey and green glory of the May beech wood, ‘I will turn into a housing estate.’ She grinned her malicious grin. ‘Maybe a council estate. That would be appropriate. I’ll ring their graves with the pride of the working classes. How’s that?’ She grinned again, almost playfully, but he did not return her smile. ‘Why look so sad?’ she said. ‘That should please you, after all. Aren’t the poor supposed to inherit the earth?’
Sam said, ‘The people you speak of are the people I live and work with every day. I have absolutely nothing against them. I am only sad to see something beautiful destroyed, for whatever good purpose.’ He turned from her, his eyes sweeping hungrily over the grey, still trunks of the beeches, and their perfect shadows. ‘And,’ he said quietly, ‘it’s the meek who inherit the earth. The poor get the kingdom of heaven. That’s not the same thing. The poor in spirit,’ he added. ‘That’s not the same thing, either.’
‘A theologian,’ said Helen wryly.
‘I’ve read the Bible.’
She was quiet. ‘Yes,’ she said eventually, ‘I daresay you have.’ She looked at him carefully. It was always hard for her to regard him as one of her own. He was so different from all of them. The twins had always seemed to her as changelings among the blue-eyed, fair-skinned Hardacre clan. The Hardacre men were all either big and solid, like old Sam, and her Joe and Arnold, or thi
n and craggy, like Harry and Noel. This one with his warm dark eyes, and lithe French grace, had no place among them. And yet he was her grandson, the only surviving child of her only son. Helen had not been a model mother; her children were largely an interruption and an annoyance in her life. The girls had not interested her at all. But she had been proud of her son. Like many strong women she preferred, and identified with, men. And an element of that long ago affection remained. She said, ‘Don’t be angry at me, Sam. I’m not trying to hurt you, you understand.’
‘If you hurt my family, you will hurt me.’
She wavered, just for an instant. But she had not come all this distance, both in years and miles, to soften at the end.
‘I’m sorry then,’ she said, her face going rigid in a fixed, painted smile, ‘but that can’t be helped.’ Then she shook her head, petulantly, tiredly. She had had enough. Vengeance was less sweet than she had imagined, and more exhausting. She was an old lady. ‘I must go now, Sam. I’m tired. It’s time for my nap,’ she added, like a peevish worn-out child. He smiled gently and took her arm, leading her out from the library and into the hall.
‘And what of the house?’ he asked quietly.
‘What of it?’
‘When you sell.’
She waved her free hand, with distracted annoyance, in the air. She was weary now; the discussion had ceased to interest her. ‘I don’t know,’ she mumbled. ‘Maybe it will make a hotel, flats …’ her eyes brightened suddenly, catching sight of the two great portraits of Sam and Mary Hardacre that hung side by side in the galleried great hall, lit from the skylights above. They had been painted, almost as a ritual, in the first year of Hardacre residence at the house known previously as Watton Manor. They showed a man and a woman, quite handsome really, caught in an eternal embarrassment of unaccustomed dress and uncertainty of place. ‘Or maybe,’ Helen said with her old mischievous smile, ‘maybe I’ll just raze it to the ground.’
Sam led her to her car, bent to give her a filial kiss, his eyes avoiding Mike sitting in the dark of the vehicle, making himself small. Then he turned and, as they drove away, walked with bowed head back into the house.
Mary Gray knew he had gone back into the library. She had been watching from the corridor that led past the stillroom and gunroom to the kitchens, and had seen him. In a way she was glad. Her books were still in the library, and they gave her the excuse she needed. In another way, she wished he had just gone out and driven away in his big lorry, the way her father had asked him to, and spared her the ordeal of approaching him. Still, Mary was determined and, even at twelve, Mary Gray knew her mind. She crept down the corridor and through the entrance to the two-storey hall, off which the library door opened. She glanced around, making sure no one was in sight. She expected no one. Her parents had gone back to their flat at the back of the house when the Brannigans left and Noel was in the courtyard, working on the tractor. She wanted no interruptions and was confident she would get none. But she paused still, outside the door. It was all the more frightening approaching him in the still and empty house. As she hesitated, she glanced up, once, to the portrait of the woman who was her namesake. She was supposed by everyone to resemble that woman; certainly she had the same blue eyes and black hair; but Mary always felt that the oil portraits looked like no real people at all, but lifeless statues. She raised her hand to knock on the door and then lowered it again, glancing again to the portrait as if the woman there could give her courage. The painted eyes did look gentle, as if she too, had known what it was like to be young, and afraid.
Mary had always been afraid of Sam. As a small child she had hardly known either of the twins. They were away when she was born, in the army and, by the time she was old enough to be aware of people, they were away again, at Ampleforth. Their rare visits home were her first memories of them, exotic figures in their black Benedictine habits, so tall and dark, and confusing, there being two of them exactly alike. True, they laughed a lot, and offered to play with her, but she had been too awed to play.
Then there had been that brief, confusing spell when one of them, Sam, would appear at the house, no longer dressed in black, but looking like anyone else. But even then she was confused, being yet very young, and was never sure if she was seeing only one of them, or each of them on different occasions. That confusion ended; or perhaps reached its height, on the occasion of the first really clear memory she associated with them; a memory of detail and an exact event, rather than an amalgam of many. That was the day of Terry Hardacre’s funeral at Ampleforth. She had been ten; she was brought along because all the family were going but, as often happens to children at funerals, she was more or less ignored throughout the day. The minds of all the adults were too filled with their own concerns to bother with her. That in itself added much to the fearfulness of that day; the awful unsettling she felt in the presence of so many of the staple figures of her life, suddenly turned aloof, irrational, distracted and strange.
She remembered her mother sitting weeping on the stairs that day, or a day just before, and her father who was so restrained, cursing quietly to himself, over and over again, saying only, ‘Oh damn, damn, damn,’ in a voice of immense sorrow. The funeral itself, with the monks of the abbey like black ghosts in their habits, the terribly sad plainsong, and the tolling bells, made an impression that would never leave her, that she associated ever after with Sam.
That, and her earliest clear picture of him, standing between his weeping mother, and tall old Aunt Jane, neither looking at, nor speaking to, anyone, was the foundation of her fear of him. It was fed too by the undeniable uncanniness of there having once been two, and there remaining now but one. She was never precisely sure which one of them had died. And, too, as a smaller child, she wondered how she would know if she was seeing the living one, or the dead one’s ghost. The anxious tense concern, the desperate caution, with which the family had treated him at that time was reinterpreted in her childish mind as an extension of her own fear. She would run, hiding in the gardens, whenever she saw him come near.
Later, the fear modified, became more adult, more akin to shyness perhaps, but it never fully left her. She was at boarding school now and rarely home, so she had seen little of him in the last year or more and then only as a fleeting glamorous figure with his beautiful woman friend or, more recently, as a moody inhabitant of the library whom nobody much wanted to approach. She would, just now, have given anything not to knock on that door and enter that dark, book-lined room. But she needed Sam, because only Sam could help her get what she wanted.
She knocked, lightly, but quite firmly. He was a very long time in answering, and when he did say, ‘Come in,’ his voice was quiet and reluctant. Still, she pushed open the door, entered, and closed it behind her. He was sitting slouched down once more on the sofa in front of the big fireplace, and he did not turn to see who had entered. She could see over his shoulder that the fire was dead, white ash.
She stepped a few paces into the room, nervously tugging at the edge of her school cardigan. She saw her books on the desk, and made towards them with a quick jerky action, colliding with a small table as she did so, nearly overturning it and its vase of flowers on to the faded Persian rug. He twisted sharply round at the sound and she gasped and froze, reminded frighteningly of the terrible suddenness with which earlier, he had lunged at Mr Brannigan.
‘I’ve just come for my books,’ she said in a small, squeaky voice. She hurried to the desk. The books, and her papers and notebooks, had been scattered by Mike’s clumsy bulk and were yet splayed across the floor.
‘Let me help you, Mary,’ Sam said.
‘It’s all right. I can do it.’ She began hastily gathering them shoving loose papers inside her folder with abandon. But he stood and crossed the room, and knelt down on the floor, carefully collecting her scattered schoolwork. Cautiously, she too got down on the floor, and began stacking up papers.
He said, ‘Please don’t be afraid of me, Mary,’ without look
ing up. She was startled. She had not realized her fear showed to anyone, least of all him, whom she doubted had ever noticed her.
‘I’m not,’ she lied. He looked up. He was still kneeling, and she had stood to lay her stack of papers on the desk. He was less frightening that way, since she was looking down to meet his eyes.
‘Yes, you are, dear. Please don’t be. I’m sorry I frightened you this afternoon.’ He paused, and said carefully as if he were a teacher explaining something, ‘I have a terrible temper and sometimes I can’t control it very well and I do things I don’t intend. I must,’ he paused again, ‘I must learn to control it,’ as if he were speaking to himself, rather than to her. He smiled. ‘Does that ever happen to you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said eagerly. ‘Sometimes I get so mad I throw things,’ she added helpfully.
He smiled again. ‘I’m sure you’ll outgrow it,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter when you’re a child.’ He was looking at her books. ‘Your mother tells me you wish to read law.’
‘Yes,’ she said, surprised that her mother had spoken of her to him.
‘I did that,’ he said. She was again surprised.
‘Why don’t you practise law?’ she said, with an adult awareness.
‘Oh, I didn’t finish my studies, Mary. I left.’
‘Why? Didn’t you like it?’
He laughed softly. ‘I’m not sure if I liked it or not,’ he said, ‘I was too busy getting in trouble with my brother to really find out. I’m afraid we didn’t study much.’
‘Did they throw you out?’ she asked candidly.
‘No,’ he smiled, ‘I daresay they might have, if there’d been time. No. The war came. And that was that.’
She nodded, accepting that all-inclusive fact of life that all the adults she knew so often referred to. The war had finished the year she was born, but its shadow, in the form of ration cards, and utility clothing, and a thousand adult reminiscences hung over her childhood, as it would for all her generation. She relaxed a little. Hearing him speak of his brother in terms of ordinary human mischief was comforting. She gathered her nerve to approach with her question.
