The Holm Oaks

by P. M. Hubbard

  I do not know whether Elizabeth or I was more shocked by their reply. They said that the land going with the house lay mainly to the west of it and embraced three sides of Marlock Mere, which I took to be the lagoon where Elizabeth had seen the pink-foots. The wood had formerly been part of the property, but the late Mr Haddon had sold it shortly before his death to a Mr Wainwright, who was understood to be a resident of the locality.

  I do not think we either of us for a moment doubted who Mr Wainwright was or where he lived. Unless we were all at sea, Mr Wainwright was called Dennis and lived in a house already called Holm Oaks. All he had done was to make his actual property measure up to its fancy name. What Uncle Clarence had been at, unless it was the sheer irresponsibility of the moribund elderly, we could not imagine. For the matter of that, his decision to leave the house to me might have been equally outrageous, but I do not think I could be expected to see it like that.

  At any rate, there we were. If we moved into the Holt House, our nearest neighbour would not, as we had thought, be a quarter of a mile away, but, if he chose, a matter of twenty yards from our gate. The enormously tall Mr Wainwright, who snapped things in his hands outside his front door at night, and then went inside to turn off his wife’s wireless, could if he wanted lurk in the trees and watch us, as we, from the most innocent motives, had watched him. What his reasons might be for doing anything of the sort I could not imagine. But I did not like the possibility, and Elizabeth certainly did not like being deprived of her expected rights in the wood, which she was by now pretty certain contained something specially exotic in the way of birds. We both felt that we had been in some way cheated of our inheritance, though it was probably only myself who saw how unreasonable the feeling was.

  ‘There must be a right of way,’ I said. ‘There’s that path through the wood from the gate. It’s the only direct access to the road. However wicked or potty Uncle Clarence was, his solicitors wouldn’t have let him part with his right-of-way through. And in that case you’ve got the run of the wood in practice, unless Dennis fences the path. And I really can’t see why in the world he should. At any rate, you’ve got three sides of the Mere, which is where the geese are. I can’t say I’m all that keen on the wood myself. I’m glad it’s there, of course, but I’m not dead set on spending much time in it. Do you remember what stinking iris smells like?’

  Elizabeth shook her head. She was not really listening. ‘At least as bad as it sounds,’ I said. ‘Carrion, more or less. It’s difficult to believe that a healthy vegetable can smell so like dead animal.’

  She shook her head again. ‘I’ve got an idea about that wood,’ she said. ‘It may be all nonsense, but it could be tremendous. It’s only a matter of watching.’

  ‘And it doesn’t worry you that, if you do find a colony of Great Auks there, they’re Dennis’s Auks, not yours?’

  ‘Of course it worries me. I hope your Uncle Clarence is roasting in hell fire for doing this to us. But I’ve still got to go and see if the Great Auks are there.’

  Stella was told about Marlock that evening. She spent a lot of time in London, and used the room she kept with us only when she felt like it. I was in the sitting-room when I heard Elizabeth say, ‘Oh hullo, Stella. You know this house Jake’s been left at Marlock? We’re going to sell this and go and live there.’

  Stella came into the room first with Elizabeth behind her. She was five years younger and a head shorter. She was as slight as her sister, but the slightness had a bony quality, even at sight, which you never noticed in Elizabeth, at least until you came to grips with her. Also, she was as dark as Elizabeth was fair. They were different in every sort of way.

  Stella said, ‘Hullo, Jake. Pretty rushed decision, isn’t it?’

  ‘Only the Marlock side. There’s nothing to keep me here in any case. Now there’s this house sitting there empty, all ours if we want it. It seems a pity not to try it. If it doesn’t do, I can always sell it and look for something else.’

  Elizabeth said, ‘But—’ She stood there, looking from one to the other of us.

  Stella turned to her. ‘But what?’ she said. ‘It seems a reasonable view.’

  ‘I shan’t want to sell it. I think it’s lovely.’

  For a moment Stella considered her. Then she turned to me. ‘Tell me about it,’ she said.

  ‘It’s pretty fantastic. The sort of place you’ve got to come to terms with if you can. There’s an endless shingle beach on one side, miles of it, and a sort of salt lagoon on the other. Marlock Mere, apparently. And a wood of holm oaks in front, almost on top of the beach.’

  ‘Which we don’t own,’ said Elizabeth. She went out of the room, shutting the door behind her.

  ‘We don’t own it,’ I said, ‘because my blighted uncle sold it to the neighbours just before he died.’

  ‘There are neighbours?’

  ‘At the other end of the wood, a quarter of a mile away. Unknown quantity in a red-brick villa.’

  Stella sat down and looked at me. ‘What do you really think, Jake?’ she said.

  ‘I really think it’s worth trying. I think you might like it, as a matter of fact. It’s a nice house.’

  ‘But a doubtful place?’

  ‘Doubtful, yes. It could go either way.’

  She nodded. ‘Birds, I imagine?’

  ‘Plenty of birds. Geese and all sorts. Only somebody seems to be shooting them a bit.’

  ‘The neighbour?’

  ‘I don’t know. I hope not, for everyone’s sake.’

  She nodded again. ‘You’re the boss,’ she said. ‘When do we move?’

  ‘Pretty soon, I imagine. We’d want to be well dug in before it starts to blow us off the beach.’

  ‘Right. It’s a long way from London, but I think I’m rather looking forward to it.’

  ‘I hope to God you’re right,’ I said.

  I myself saw the inside of the Holt House for the first time during the last few days of September, and we moved in bag and baggage at the end of the first week in October. In point of fact there was as little wrong with it inside as there was out. Uncle Clarence had made himself comfortable in his wilderness, and even if the household machinery was not architect-designed or up to the minute, it all worked. Elizabeth, who had got what she very badly wanted, but knew she was dragging me behind her, went about in a curious kind of determined happiness. I took advantage of the moral climate to leave most of the work to her. She nobbled for herself the first-floor room looking towards the mere. This did not worry me – I preferred sea and trees – but it was the only room with a north light. Stella could have the run of the second floor, but the dormers were all east or west, and, as usual, not very big. Stella did not move with us. She said she would come down later when the worst was over. I think privately she preferred to make the best of the pickings rather than risk a clash with Elizabeth over the main carcass. I had all the ordinary man’s horror of the rows that occasionally blew up between them. Stella knew this perfectly well, and for the most part, where there was war, she kept it cold.

  Early on the second afternoon I left Elizabeth to it and walked out of the gate and into Mr Wainwright’s wood. As I had thought, the path went straight through to the road, and our right-of-way had been preserved. The thing was a plantation, not natural woodland. Someone had put it down, I suppose, three generations back, and had seen the trees well up before they had let go their hold. Since then nothing much had been done. There had been no thinning, and with few early failures the trees were now much too close together. Also they had been allowed to branch too low, and the whole wood had heeled over slightly in the prevailing south-westerly winds. There was an impenetrable tangle not very far above one’s head and there could be next to no daylight, even in summer. The path itself was clear, but the rides leading off it were blocked with debris and bleached undergrowth. It was a sad place, even at that time of day and in still weather. The sound of the sea on the beach, which varied in intensity but never stopped,
was no more than a whisper. There was no other sound whatever. If there were birds in the wood, they were very silent ones.

  There was a lot, even now, I could do with that wood, but it was not mine to do anything with. All I could do was walk through it, and this I did, over the spongy green of the path, until I saw daylight at the far end, with the tarmac of the road gleaming at the bottom of the gap. There were no fences or stiles. As I got closer to the end, the far side of the road took on a familiar look, and I saw it was the Wainwrights’ garden hedge. The path came out almost, but not exactly, opposite the house.

  I paused, approached the gap cautiously, put my head out into the road and found Mr Wainwright leaning on his ornamental front gate. His head turned my way at the same moment, and for a time we looked at each other, steadily if slightly askew, across the width of the road. Then he straightened up and I stepped out on to the tarmac. We both managed a smile at about the same moment. I only hoped my eyes were a bit less obviously watchful than his were. His smile hardly got above the bottom of his nose. He was a very tall, stiff man, and curiously neat. In a place and weather which sent me naturally to superimposed jerseys he wore a solid dark suit with a collar and tie. I wondered whether he had been somebody’s butler, but he did not sound like it. He said, ‘You’ll be Mr Haddon. I heard you’d moved in.’ There was a faintly Celtic flavour somewhere, but it was the voice he had grown up with and argued an educated background.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Mr Wainwright?’

  He nodded. He had forgotten to keep his smile going, and was looking down at me with undisguised appraisal. He stood the height of a stone step above me, and was in any case at least half a head taller. I reached the outside of the gate and stood there, still without saying anything. It was his turn to do the talking.

  He suddenly smiled again, much more successfully this time. ‘Well, come in,’ he said. He opened the gate and stood aside. If he had actually said, ‘Will you walk into my parlour?’, I could hardly have agreed more reluctantly. There was nothing I could put my finger on, but I was very glad the wood was as long and thick as it was.

  The garden was as neat as he was, and the house did not improve with full daylight. It would not have mattered if it had been in Wimbledon, but it was very uncomfortable where it was. And there was nothing suburban about the man himself. His head was more like a don’s than a stockbroker’s, with bony frontal lobes, deep-set grey eyes and hollow cheeks; only no don I ever saw dressed like that.

  He showed me into the room on the right, which was the room we had seen the top half of from over the garden hedge. There was a big radiogram in the corner which accounted for the operatic tenor. He said, ‘Sit down, Mr Haddon.’ He sat opposite me and put his hands on his knees. He was still smiling as if he shared some joke with me and expected me to know what it was.

  Presently he took the plunge. ‘The Mr Haddon we knew was your uncle?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ I was not going to help him out, and in any case the less said about Uncle Clarence the better.

  He thought about this. Then he said, ‘This is a very lonely part of the country.’

  ‘Yes?’ I said. ‘Yes, I can imagine it might be.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what your interests are.’

  I hesitated between necromancy and numismatics. Finally I said, ‘I’ve just left a job in Winchester.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, as if this told him everything he had hoped for. ‘You have yet to find your interests here, perhaps.’

  ‘Perhaps so, yes. Of course,’ I said, feeling as if I was conceding a pawn, ‘a new place is always interesting in itself.’

  ‘Oh yes, indeed.’ He looked out of the window for a moment. It was the first time he had taken his eyes off me. He said, ‘We have been here nearly five years now.’ He switched his eyes back to mine again, as if anxious not to miss my reaction to this. I tried to think what my reaction ought to be, but could come to no sort of conclusion at all. I was conscious of a steady weakening of my position, as if I was being forced back into a corner. I side-stepped instinctively. ‘We were in our last house six years,’ I said. I was back in the centre of the ring, and decided to carry the fight to him.

  I said, ‘Do you farm any land, Mr Wainwright?’

  He must have known the answer to this at least as well as I did, and I knew it for certain. I have never seen anything less like a farmer. Nevertheless, he thought all round the question before committing himself. I watched him with polite interest, and in the back of my mind tried to imagine what the Wainwright family’s conversation would be like over the breakfast table. I was wondering what happened if Mrs Wainwright offered him a choice between poached and scrambled, when he said, ‘Well, no. No, I’ve never done any farming. There’s the garden, of course.’

  ‘Of course. I’m not much of a gardener myself, I’m afraid.’ Strengthened by this confession, I gathered my feet under me and started to get up. Then the door opened and Mrs Wainwright came in.

  The only two things I had so far any reason to suspect about her were that she was small and dark haired. Both were correct. She was very small in every direction, but so completely in harmony with herself that her smallness did not strike me until I actually stood up and found myself looking down at her. One did not think of her as a little woman. She was beautifully shaped, but there was nothing cosy or kittenish about her. Nor did she look in the least like a china doll, a Dresden shepherdess or any other sort of earthenware. There was no suggestion of brittleness, either in her appearance or in her voice. She was smooth, shiny and self-contained, a lot younger than her husband and twice as sure of herself. All these things are a matter of taste, but to me Mrs Wainwright was, instantaneously and inevitably, pure dynamite.

  Mr Wainwright heaved himself to his feet and said, ‘You haven’t met my wife, perhaps?’, as if even that was something he was not entirely sure about.

  ‘No,’ I said. I stood there looking at Mrs Wainwright in what I felt certain was a rather inappropriate manner, and she stood looking at me with friendly but completely dispassionate appraisal.

  ‘This is Mr Haddon,’ he said. ‘He has just moved in to the Holt House. With his family, I think? I believe you have a family, Mr. Haddon?’

  Mrs Wainwright’s hand was silk-smooth, firm and quite cold. We made the appropriate murmurs, and I managed to get my eyes off her and back to her husband. ‘At the moment,’ I said, ‘only my wife. My sister-in-law will be joining us occasionally.’ I went on with my drift towards the door. I did not at all like being there with the two of them together. I said I must be going, it was time I went back to help my wife with the unpacking, she would be wondering what had happened to me.

  Neither of them said anything at all. We all drifted out through the front door into the neat front garden and down as far as the gate. I said I was glad we had met; we should be meeting again, no doubt. This took me out of the gate and on to the road. Mrs Wainwright stood just inside the gate and her husband behind her. The difference in height was almost grotesque. She said, ‘Did you come by the wood, Mr Haddon?’

  I said, ‘Yes,’ and she nodded. I got myself across the road and into the opening of the path. I suppose I must have said good-bye. I am fairly sure neither of them did.

  I went through the wood slowly, staring at the green moss as I trod on it. I had the answer to one at least of Mr Wainwright’s questions. I had found one thing to interest me here for a start.

  CHAPTER THREE

  As soon as we were at all settled, the cloud blew off and the wind dropped, and we went into a week of St Luke’s summer. The sunlight lay flat and yellow all day to the cloudless horizons, and the sea whispered on the beach as peacefully as a municipal reservoir in a drowned Welsh valley. Only the oak-wood remained impervious to the enchantment. The trees had seen too much weather to trust any of it, and bowed themselves resolutely over their private darkness. Elizabeth lay out most of the day with her glasses and he
r notebooks in a hide she had built herself overlooking the mere, and at other times, especially in the evening, went walking in the wood looking for something she did not find. I also walked in the wood, but at other times and looking, I suppose, for something quite different. Like her, I did not find what I was looking for, or not then.

  What I did find was that if I turned off the path fifty yards or so before it reached the road and made my way parallel with the path and a bit to the north of it, I could come to the edge of the trees right opposite the red-brick house. I made myself, with time, a devious but reasonably clear passage there, and used to stand, satisfactorily screened, but with the whole front of the house visible to me, waiting for a glimpse of the quiet, white woman who, it seemed to me, so incongruously lived there. I had not behaved like this since I was about sixteen, but I could not, even under severe self-examination, be brought to admit that there was anything undignified in it. Carol Wainwright was no Lolita, nor even a little tobacconist’s blonde. She was what I had been looking for, consciously or unconsciously, ever since I had lost my illusions about Elizabeth. Even at this stage, when we had hardly more than seen each other, I had no doubts about this.

  Oddly enough, it was I who finally found what Elizabeth was looking for. I suppose I should be thankful that it was not the other way round. I went into the wood after tea, in the last red light of a perfect evening. I walked, automatically and without any real hope or purpose, to my hide opposite the Wainwrights’ house, and as I got there the lights went on in a first-floor window, and Carol Wainwright came and stood just inside the window, with the lights behind her and the last of the daylight on her face. For half a minute or more she stood there, looking out over the wood to the fading saffron sky westwards. It was impossible to see what her expression was. Then she made a small gesture of resignation and, crossing her hands over in the way women do, pulled her jersey over her head. There was nothing in the least improper in this. I had a glimpse of very smooth arms and shoulders, but no more than I could have seen if she had been wearing a dinner-frock and much less than if she had been wearing a bathing-dress. It was the loneliness and casual intimacy of the gesture that hit me between wind and water. I had the feeling that I had been, for a second or two, alone in her room with a woman who had seemed to carry an almost tangible privacy about with her.