The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  *

  Susan Bailey’s father had been the Church of Scotland vicar of a parish outside the small cathedral town of Dunkeld, some twenty miles west of Glenalyth. And though, as Madeleine had told me, the living there had long since withered and died and the church had become a part ruin, Susan still lived there in the old rectory, a small, white-faced, Georgian house, surrounded by rook-infested trees on a rise above the Tay, looking out over the railway bridge down the valley where it crossed the big river, taking the main line northwards.

  I’d phoned her the day before and she remembered me at once, in a crisp voice – not aged at all, it seemed, the anglicised Scots tones of another age giving precise commands down the line. And I thought then how unlikely it was that she would tell me anything about Lindsay, so that I mentioned nothing about him on the phone, hoping to find my chance when we met in person.

  Apart from some daily help from the woman in the gate lodge she lived entirely on her own, but not without money and with two Scots terriers, one black, the other a Highland white – just like the whisky advertisements. All three of them came out of the glass porch to meet me as I drew up in the black Volvo Estate. The rooks cackled fearfully in the upper branches of the tall chestnuts and the terriers barked.

  We shook hands and I felt like a doctor with bad news from the big dark car, the photograph I’d taken from the attic burning a hole in my inside pocket. But she took my hand in both of hers with an unexpected warmth and a smile that was affectionate as well as simply cordial.

  ‘Peter! Here you are: twenty years to the month since I last saw you. I was looking in my diary. 1956 – that summer you were up here, you’d broken your heel, it was all in plaster – do you remember? It’s so nice of you to have come and seen me. Come in, come in. Or shall we walk?’

  She was over seventy. But something – exercise and the moorland life – had kept her young. And though the dark hair of the old photograph had turned quite white, the rest of her appearance was that of a woman at least ten years younger. She had an extraordinarily good complexion for someone her age – fine and pale, the skin barely wrinkled apart from vague indentations at the corners of her eyes and mouth, the mere tracings of age. Whatever pain and disappointment she’d suffered was not apparent here, so that once more I began to doubt my earlier deductions about her and Lindsay. No hurt seemed to lie behind her calm, faint blue eyes; a refined and courteous confidence marked her long straight face. Human aberration seemed a complete stranger in this self-sufficient, sensible, attractive old lady.

  She took a blackthorn walking-stick from the porch and put on another of the straw hats that I’d remembered her in, and together we walked away from the house, a small breeze running up from the Tay valley beneath us, just sharpening the hot afternoon, stirring the huge chestnuts, leaving minute sighs in their branches, the only other sound a full murmur of bees and inseets devouring all the blossom of high summer. We went down the back drive, exchanging news and Smalltalk, until we came to a box-hedged path that led to the old parish church, a cracked steeple and yew trees looming up ahead of us, the dogs worrying at imaginary rabbits in the thick undergrowth, but starting nothing in the drowsy heat of this enclosed space where the breeze had died.

  ‘Lindsay’s dog, Ratty,’ I said casually. ‘He’s an extraordinary creature. Almost speaks to you.’

  She took no notice of this casual introduction to Lindsay, replying without any change of tone: ‘Terriers do, some of them. Uncanny.’

  I opened an old wicket gate and the dark granite church came clearly into view ahead of us now and she called to the dogs, who had disappeared. We looked at the dilapidated building. Slates had fallen from the steep roof and a crack in the stone was about to bisect the square belfry.

  ‘I wanted it repaired,’ she said, waving her stick at it. ‘But the estimates were preposterous. And the Commissioners weren’t interested. I didn’t want it to fall down.’

  The dogs joined us now and we walked towards the vestry door. Then she said quite casually, so that I thought she had sensed all along the real reasons behind my visit: ‘Lindsay and Eleanor were married here, you know. Christmas 1935. I always thought it such bad luck, having a wedding and Christmas almost together. Well, that was one reason for keeping it up. The dead will have to look after themselves, don’t you think?’ She waved her stick at the old tombstones falling about in the long summer grass, poppies rearing up here and there and huge white daisies, the whole place gone to seed in waves of bright colour.

  ‘But there’s something living about a marriage – that you shared in – that makes you want to keep the building where it happened.’ She spoke in so sensible a tone that sentimentality could be no part of her thought. ‘So much sadness about churches,’ she went on. ‘Except for people marrying in them. Worth preserving for that, for Lindsay and Eleanor’s sake.’ I remembered Rachel telling me how Susan had made a shrine at the Rectory out of Eleanor’s things. It seemed true, and yet a surprising thing for such an apparently sensible old woman to do.

  She went on ahead of me now, picking her way confidently through the overgrown tombs towards the vestry door which she opened with a key, and we walked out of the heat into a musty damp, the smell of many winters’ ruin, where the water had stained the Victorian fleur-de-lis wallpaper, running the red pattern together into what looked like streaks of blood now. There was a pile of hymn-books and psalters on a bench and a lot of mouse droppings in all the corners. She picked up one of the hymnals, attempting to clean the mould off it with a cuff.

  ‘It’s what you came to talk about, I imagine: Lindsay. And us,’ she said without looking up.

  ‘Well –’

  ‘Why not? The others won’t. Apart from a few words from Madeleine I’ve heard nothing.’ She opened a cupboard now and took out a large, leather-bound book, putting it up on a small vestry lectern before thumbing through the pages. It was the church’s marriage register.

  ‘There,’ she said, as I came to her shoulder. She pointed to the signatures. Lindsay’s I recognised at once; clear and precise. Eleanor’s was quite different: a sprawling, unformed signature, flowery almost. The date: ‘December 18th, 1935.’

  The vestry door was open and I could feel the wafts of heat coming in from the shimmering afternoon outside. One of the terriers was flat out, panting on the threshold, while the other, the younger white one, looked outside, whimpering minutely, still anxious to play. The world stopped just then. Again, as in that moment on the porch at Glenalyth while I was talking to the old Brigadier and Ratty had come behind us, I had the clear impression that Lindsay was in the room with us; that, through looking at these faded signatures, I had gained access to the exact moment in time when he and Eleanor had made them; a feeling that wasn’t eerie at all, since it was so clear: that I was in the presence of Lindsay and his first wife – who were there about us, in all but a material sense, in that small musty room.

  ‘It snowed all day. Like a fairy tale.’ Susan broke the silence. ‘Half the guests never got here. And most that did had to stay the night – strewn all over the hall and drawing-room.’ She smiled at the memory. But again it was simply an amused, rather than any sentimental reflection on the past.

  ‘There was snow, was there?’

  A bumble bee flew into the room and droned about for a moment, before swinging away out into the warm air again.

  ‘They should have put it off till spring, when weddings are.’ Susan closed the register and put it away. ‘But Lindsay was going to have been abroad then. So it was all held in a snowstorm. Just cleared a bit during the reception, I remember. The sun came out then and the champagne was too cold.’

  She pulled the tattered vestry curtain aside and we went into the chancel of the church.

  ‘I know you don’t think I can tell you where Lindsay is,’ she said, walking up to the old mahogany altar rails and looking at the east window above them: a picture of Christ in the pre-Raphaelite style with the Lamb of God in his
arms, and a lot of very woolly sheep beneath on a green hill. ‘So you must want something else.’ She gazed vacantly up at the bleeding crown of thorns which seemed so inappropriate an addition to this otherwise placid Victorian agricultural scene.

  ‘You didn’t like Lindsay, did you? I wondered why.’ I thought the time had come to be honest with her.

  ‘I liked Eleanor.’

  She turned and came down the chancel steps, walking past me rather slowly and regally, her face set now with a purpose that it had lacked before, a kind of brave disappointment in her features. She was like a bride, stood up at the very last moment, returning from the alter alone, but determined to go forth and make the best of things.

  She walked down the nave now and stopped in front of another stained-glass window half-way along the south wall. Here, I could see, was a more recent design in the leads, a portrait in the literal, chocolate-box style of the thirties of a dark-haired woman set against a background of rhododendrons in full flower whom I took at first to be Mary Magdalen depicted in some Scottish grove. But on looking more closely I was surprised by the legend beneath: ‘In Memoriam: Eleanor Phillips. 1912–1937. “When the day breaks – and the shadows flee away.”’ There was no other comfort added, just the plain statement of memory, of birth and mortality, embedded in the lemon-yellow and green glass. And now I was aware of a great emptiness in the church, of present life alone in the musty building: no longer the extraordinarily vibrant sense of Lindsay and his first wife that had so clearly been about me in the vestry, but the feeling that, without knowing anything of their life in between, I had experienced both their marriage and their death to each other in the space of a few minutes.

  She said, ‘Rachel has been talking to you. I was so sorry you two didn’t marry. That was when you last came up here – in ’56. I thought you should have. But Lindsay said you had no prospects, that you were too young. Yet he was only twenty-five when he married.’

  ‘It was hardly his fault. Though with a bit of encouragement from him, Rachel might have changed her mind at that point.’

  ‘Exactly. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? He wanted her for himself. He was such a possessive man, without knowing it. And, of course, no one else suspected it. He wouldn’t let her go. It was as simple as that. And I told him so.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve said the same thing to Rachel. But it never did any good. People set on a course –’

  ‘Oh yes, I know – just like Eleanor.’ Susan chuckled almost, waving her stick at the glass, at the dark-haired, idealised woman with almond-shaped eyes and thin cheeks who gazed out of the rhododendron bush with the formal serenity of an old court photograph, a beautifully starved debutante lost in a wood. ‘Eleanor would never see the same thing – that polite ruthlessness of Lindsay’s. But I did. Which was probably why we never married in the end.’

  ‘I’d no idea …’

  The church suddenly started to fill again: another door had opened into the past – into other times and people and the fevers then, who filed into the building now like a late congregation.

  ‘Oh, I wanted to,’ Susan went on much more brightly now. ‘In many other ways – for other things.’ She paused and came closer to the picture of her sister, inspecting it minutely as if searching out some invisible mark or sign known only to her.

  ‘I never knew that.’

  ‘Why should you? No one did. Not even Eleanor.’ She spoke to the picture now. ‘But now that he’s gone, why not? One gets so tired of living with omissions all one’s life.’ She leant forward and rubbed at what I saw now was a speck of bird dropping on the glass. ‘My father had this window put up as a reminder, since she was buried so far away. It isn’t very good.’

  ‘In … Zagreb, was it?’

  ‘Yes. Huge, heavy, Viennese sort of cemetery: you know – angels playing granite violins. I went to see her tomb once.’

  ‘I never really heard what happened out there,’ I said gently, still thinking that Susan might suddenly decide to dry up on all this uncomfortable past and start talking about the weather and the crops. But she didn’t.

  ‘She ran out the front door of the Palace Hotel one morning – straight under a tram,’ she said shortly.

  ‘Yes. I knew that –’

  ‘Do you think what happened between them then has something to do with Lindsay’s disappearance now?’ Susan turned from the glass and looked at me rather carefully.

  ‘It – yes, it may have.’

  ‘Very well then. I’ll tell you, because I think you may be right.’

  We left the church then, and walked back by the box hedge, and then towards the formal pleasure gardens at the far side of the rectory, the dogs recovered now after their shady siesta, off after imaginary rabbits once more. The afternoon was warm and sweet-smelling as we came in among the rose beds.

  ‘I was a little older than Lindsay after all,’ she said, picking up a trug and secateurs from a wooden wheelbarrow before moving into the bushes. ‘And Eleanor was several years younger. Makes a difference when one is young. He and I were in our late teens. Eleanor was still almost a child. My father had been padre in one of the General’s regiments during the Great War, so we were accepted neighbours of the Phillipses. Spent whole days over at Glenalyth, as Lindsay did over here.’

  ‘With just you two girls?’

  ‘Yes, but he fished, you see: fly fishing, trout and salmon on the Tay here. There was none of that on the loch at Glenalyth. So we got to see quite a lot of him during the holidays. It wasn’t difficult –’ She stopped, bending down over a recalcitrant thorny bloom, trying to cut it firmly, and yet at an angle, at its base.

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘Well, things were excessively formal in those days, you know. Especially among families like ours. Nonetheless, suitable marriages were pondered on, well ahead of time, then. He and I were not discouraged, shall I say. And Lindsay was “suitable” to put it mildly. Besides, I liked him a lot.’

  Susan moved on to another rose bush, a delicate crimson-leafed flower whose perfume, even in the heat, was clear as a bell. ‘He was rather a diffident, withdrawn person – an only child who never got on well with his father, the rough old General. And I liked that side of him. But Lindsay knew what he wanted, too. There was a kind of … frustrated confidence about him. In short, why elaborate –’ She bent over the heart of the rose bush. ‘We took to each other. That was the end of his first year at Oxford, the summer of 1929 or ’30.’

  Having taken a dozen sweet roses in the trug, we moved back now to a long wooden greenhouse at the top of the garden, where Susan inspected a small nectarine tree, trying feebly to climb up one wall, with fruit the size of a marble. ‘Looks like leaf curl, I’m afraid,’ she said and I thought once more she was going to die on me.

  ‘You suggested – he had a ruthless streak,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Yes.’ She turned from the little tree, rubbing one of the diseased leaves to dust in her fingers. ‘I first noticed it in silly things – in games. Tennis or croquet, that sort of thing.’ She smiled now at the memory. ‘Lindsay was really a very bad loser. Terrible. Though he hid this very well, too. Especially if things went badly against him. Very hard to spot. But I saw it several times: calling a ball out on the line more than once, you know?’ She turned to me, suddenly gesturing with her hands, and saying briskly, ‘You see, he desperately wanted to win. A sort of insecurity in the shadow of his war-like Papa, I suppose. And I quite understood that. But then, well, one day – it was up there by that sundial.’ She waved her stick through the door at a broken marble column in the middle of the pleasure garden. ‘We were standing there and I asked him why he did this, why he cheated in small things. He denied it point-blank. And we never talked about it again.’

  We left the baking greenhouse now and went down through the pleasure garden to a little summerhouse looking out on the longish grass of the old tennis court, where we took wicker chairs, and the two dogs lapped thirstily at bowls of wate
r which Susan poured for them out of a watering can before filling an old vase on the table and starting to arrange the roses in it.

  ‘The next summer he asked me to marry him. We were alone, he and I, most of that summer. Eleanor had gone to a crammers in Edinburgh. She had a chance of a place in Lady Margaret Hall that September. Well, I was very cool-headed about his offer. All the same, I said yes, though we didn’t tell either of our parents – which must show some sort of doubt either he or I had about it all. That was 1932. Well, he went back to Oxford then and we wrote to each other – rather careful letters. But the style of the times, I suppose. I was in Edinburgh by then – trying to be a secretary – had rooms just next the Lyceum Theatre with an old cousin. We saw each other over Christmas and all seemed well. And then in his New Year letters he started talking about Socialism – about Marx and about completely changing society and all that – and about Eleanor. He was seeing quite a lot of her in Oxford by then. And that’s when it all started going downhill between us.’

  I had picked up an old croquet mallet from an open box beside me and was letting it swing gently between my knees. One of the terriers got up anxiously, thinking I was about to start a game. I put the mallet down.

  ‘He had obviously persuaded Eleanor of his ideas.’ Susan finished her flower arrangement. ‘But I’m afraid he never persuaded me.’