She did not come back to the window; and in any case if she had proceeded to strip herself naked in full view, I should not have stayed to see. I mention this, not to falsify, as it well might, my general picture of myself, but to show the sort of state I had already got into over Carol Wainwright. I hope I do not wrong the generality of my sex when I say that the man who would turn his back on a piece of unsolicited voyeurism is, unless he happens to be a saint, at least a bit of a case.
It was almost completely dark in the wood now. I went back slowly, but more from an unreasonable wish to prolong my walk than because I could not see my way. I was getting to know the wood very well, and was conscious of an increasing respect for it. If you feel about trees as I do, individual trees, even in a wood as homogeneous and close-grown as this, soon assume personal characteristics, and you steer from known tree to known tree through the crowd of still undifferentiated others. So I went slowly but without hesitation, touching the familiar stems as I passed them. My mind was almost entirely taken up with what I had just seen, but I liked the wood better because of it.
I was almost at the far edge, and beginning to see a glimmer of vestigial daylight between the trees in front, when something flopped down out of the darkness above me and took off in a heavily dipped course just over my head. I thought at first it was an owl, but an owl that flew as badly as that would never catch anything. Also there was a double streak of white at the back of it as it went ahead of me. It looked like a barrister who had put his bands on back to front and was finding it difficult to fly in his gown. It was not like any sort of owl I had ever seen. I lost it before it was clear of the trees, and of course it was gone by the time I was clear of them myself. It had flapped off somewhere into the dusk, but what it was doing at this time of night, or what it had been up to in the wood, I had no idea.
I met Elizabeth coming out of the gate. She was hurrying as if she was late for an important appointment. She said, ‘Have you just come from the wood?’
‘Yes.’ I wondered whether any explanation was needed, but at this stage I did not think it was. The time for explanations came later. At this stage I was alone with a purely private experience.
She said, ‘Did you see anything?’
I had a lunatic impulse to say, ‘Yes, thank you, I was just in time,’ but of course I did not say it. Instead I said, ‘A bird flew out of the trees just ahead of me. Heavy sort of chap. I didn’t see where he went.’
She said, ‘Could it be the one we saw the other evening?’
‘Which other evening?’
‘The first time we came down. It flew out of the wood, do you remember, as we came back to the car. It went off towards the mere.’
‘I remember, yes. It could be the same. I didn’t see much of him that time. This was a funny one, all right.’
‘Funny how?’ She was almost breathless in her anxiety.
‘Well, as I said – an ungainly flyer. Oh, and he had a white streak on him somewhere, at the back, I think.’
‘Jake—’ Elizabeth clutched me by the arms and looked up at me with the sort of expression on her face she had once used for very different reasons and with a very different effect. ‘Jake, do you mean here? A pair of white streaks here?’ She took one hand off me and traced the line of an imaginary pigtail down the back of her slender neck.
I thought. ‘It could be,’ I said. ‘He was flying away from me, and it was almost dark. But what I saw could have been something like that. Is it important?’
Elizabeth let go of me and turned to look over in the direction of the mere. She said almost under her breath, ‘The nuchal plumes. The nuchal plumes, by golly.’ She turned back to me. ‘He didn’t say anything?’ she asked.
‘Not a word. Should he have? He almost fell on my neck. I suppose he might have apologised, but I think in his ungainly sort of way he was in a hurry. Now tell me what I have missed.’
She shook her head. ‘You haven’t missed anything,’ she said. ‘I have, apparently. But I’ll see him again. It seems almost too good to be true but I think – I think it might be a Night Heron. It was that cry that first gave me the idea. Do you remember that evening, in the wood, as we came up from the beach?’
I remembered it now. ‘Horrible choking noise?’ I said. ‘I thought something was being throttled. I didn’t like it a bit.’
‘That’s it. That’s it, don’t you see? Like a man vomiting, the book says.’
‘It was all of that.’
‘That and the two white plumes at the back of the neck. And a heavy slow flyer, about the size of a crow. Jake, it really is a heron, I believe.’ She took a long breath. ‘Nycticorax,’ she said.
‘You can say that again,’ I said.
‘I can,’ she said. She laughed rapturously. ‘Nycticorax nycticorax. That’s its proper name. Nycticorax nycticorax, according to Linnaeus. Jake, it’s fabulous.’
‘And now you’ll be in all the books?’ I said.
I had not meant to say it indulgently. I still wanted Elizabeth to be happy, and I was pleased to see her so elated, but she turned on me rather fiercely. ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I haven’t discovered the damned bird. But it’s a very rare visitor, and an observation is important. Only I must get a cast-iron identification. And I don’t think they ever stay much later than this. I wish I could see it by day, but they roost, you see, in the woods all day, and only come out at night to feed. I expect this one feeds down by the mere.’
I said, ‘If he makes that obscene noise anywhere down by the mere at night, you ought to be able to catch up with him. You’ll never find him in the wood if he chooses to lie up there all day. With that colouring and the trees as thick as they are you couldn’t see him in a hundred years.’ It was perfectly true, but I was conscious, even while I said it, that for some possible future reason I did not want Elizabeth wandering about in the wood all day. The evenings would have to take their chance. It was very dark in the wood in the evenings, and there was plenty of room for people to be there without seeing each other. And in any case, in the evenings Nycticorax would be out on the mere, vomiting happily to himself and poking about for whatever nasty sort of food he fancied. The holm oak was never my favourite tree, but by God, I thought, your Night Heron was not the most elegant of birds. For the moment, at any rate, the wood was no good to Elizabeth. She turned, and we went into the house together.
She said, ‘What about these Wainwrights? Ought I to go and see them? They don’t sound very gay, from all you say.’
I had seen this coming. ‘They’re not,’ I said. ‘She’s quite pleasant, but doesn’t say much, and he’s a decided oddity. I don’t see why you need make any point of seeing them. We’re bound to run into them one way or another soon. But it’s up to you. You may get a bigger hand from them than I got. So far as I’m concerned, I don’t know anything against them yet, but I’d even rather they owned the wood than that it wasn’t there at all. They don’t seem to do much with it, I must say. I wonder what he wanted it for and how much he paid for it?’
Elizabeth was up in arms at once. ‘They wouldn’t do anything to it, would they?’
‘I hope to God not. I am getting to like it more and more. Only it could do with a bit of proper attention. I wonder if old Wainwright would sell it back to me? But I’d better find out first what he gave for it.’
‘Do you really think he’d sell?’
‘It’s no good – I simply don’t know what he’d do in any circumstances. If you can make any more of him than I can, you’re welcome to try. But I’ll tell you one thing. I may be wronging him, but I have a strong suspicion that nothing would make him so hell-bent on anything as the feeling that we were against it.’
‘Us in particular?’
‘I don’t know about that. He may be like that with everybody. But us, certainly. It’s only my guess, of course. But I fancy if you told our Dennis that nycticorax favoured a particular tree, you’d find that that was just the tree that had been m
arked out for thinning. If you want nycti back next year, the best thing you can do is to beg Dennis to cut down the lot.’
‘You make him sound a poppet, I must say. But don’t worry. I’m not putting any ideas in his head.’ She got up and went to the door. ‘Stella phoned,’ she said. ‘Did I tell you? She’s coming down this evening.’
‘Oh? No. Good.’
Elizabeth knew that she had not told me, and knew that I knew this. It was a sort of game to be played on established lines and according to certain rules. Elizabeth had to display a complete indifference to her sister’s feelings, movements and general well-being, and I was expected to reflect this attitude. I did not keep it up with Stella herself, of course. I talked straight to her, straighter, perhaps than I ever talked to anyone. I liked her company, and was glad when she chose to join the household, which she would now, I imagined, do less frequently and for fewer days at a time. This also, I do not doubt, Elizabeth knew, but so long as it was not allowed to appear too openly, she did not seem to mind, or at least was prepared to accept it. I believed that if Stella was ever in any real trouble, Elizabeth might worry over her and do her best for her. But Stella had long been established as the capable one of the family. Nothing ever did go wrong with Stella. She lived her own life and managed her own affairs without, so far, a husband to help her out. Elizabeth, as the elder sister and mistress of a household Stella chose to frequent, answered this independence with a sort of studied casualness in respect of everything she did. I had not up to then found any particular difficulty in playing third man to this odd relationship, but this was mostly because no one was ever ready to push the thing to a point where the seams began to open up. There were, so far as I knew, no great depths of emotion involved, and one or the other of the parties was always ready to sheer off if a direct clash seemed imminent.
So I said, ‘Oh? No. Good,’ and took up my crossword as if my train of thought had scarcely been disturbed. Perhaps, in fact, it had not. My mental preoccupation with a woman I had barely been introduced to was already beginning to insulate me considerably in my other relations. But it would be nice to have Stella down and see what she made of the place.
I heard her car about an hour later and went down to the gate to meet her. Elizabeth was out. She had probably gone down to the mere after nycticorax. Stella climbed out of the car and stood up stretching her legs. She said, ‘Hullo, Jake.’ Then she walked, not up to the house, but straight down the path to the beach, and stood there, on the top ridge of the shingle, looking about her. It was quite dark now, but the sky was as clear as it had been all day and the stars were brilliant. The winter stars were starting to show up at nights, and I thought I could see the Pleiades heaving themselves coyly out of the mists in the south-east. The sea, luminous in itself and barely wrinkled, kept up its Mediterranean whisper all along the beach.
‘Golly,’ said Stella. It was a family word. She and Elizabeth both used it. She turned and came back up the path and we went in through the gate and up to the house. In the lighted hall, she threw off her head-scarf and loosened the collar of her coat. Her bony, intense face emerged suddenly from a sort of cloak of impersonality, and she looked at me sideways.
‘What a place, Jake,’ she said. ‘Do you realise what you’ve let yourself in for?’
I nodded. ‘I think so. It’s a bit all or nothing, isn’t it?’
‘That’s a mild way of putting it. So long as you know what you’re doing.’
‘I haven’t committed myself,’ I said. ‘I can always sell it if I want to.’
She smiled. ‘Don’t kid yourself,’ she said. ‘If you’re here six months, you’ll never get away.’
‘I’ll risk it.’
‘Where’s Elizabeth?’
‘Down by the mere, I think. You passed it when you came over the bridge. There’s some fabulous night-bird reared its remarkably ugly head, and she’s out looking for it.’
‘Show me the house, then.’
‘I’m on the south-east corner,’ I said as we went upstairs. ‘Elizabeth has got the north room, so that she can keep an eye on the mere. There’s a nice south-west room you could have, or you can take your pick of the second floor. I’ve put your things up there for the time, but it’s for you to decide.’
‘I’ll have a look round,’ she said. ‘I gave a lift to the neighbour, by the way. Just down from the village, I mean.’
‘The sinister Dennis?’ I said.
‘Not Dennis. This was a woman. Minute white woman with a voice to match.’
‘That would be Mrs Wainwright. I’ve met her once.’
Stella went on walking round the empty rooms. ‘I’d like to paint her,’ she said. ‘No use for a head, I don’t think. If she’s that colour all over, she’d be wonderful for a nude. The fleshtints would be splendid and she’s nicely put together.’
She did not look at me at all. I laughed as best I could. ‘I don’t know her that well,’ I said. ‘You’d better ask her yourself. But you’d better have a look at Dennis first. I don’t think he’d approve.’
She nodded. ‘Only an idea,’ she said. ‘No hurry. Jake, I can’t decide without daylight. I’ll doss down where my stuff is for tonight and make up my mind tomorrow.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’ll get your gear out of the car.’
From down in the hall Elizabeth called, ‘Stella?’
‘Here,’ Stella said. ‘Coming.’ We went downstairs together.
CHAPTER FOUR
Stella chose the second floor and began to spread her things over it in the way she had. She was a great accumulator of minor physical possessions, and established her effective ownership of a place more quickly and thoroughly than anyone I knew. As Elizabeth could not pretend to need any of the second-floor rooms, and had already had a free choice of the first floor, this did not matter. The weather held for a day or two more, and Stella was out on the beach most of the time, trying to capture that vast blue and gold emptiness in very thin paint and cursing steadily under her breath at what she considered her failure to do so. Elizabeth lay in her hide and waited for the exotic visitors she constantly hoped for, and I spent a lot of time in the wood, deciding what should be kept and what got rid of if ever I got my hands on it, and wondering when and where I might come up with Carol Wainwright. We were all, I suppose, happy in a rather restless, half-baked sort of way. Those were the last days of even comparative peace. The weather hung in the balance, waiting for the breakup. So in fact did a great deal else, but we could not know this.
I went into the wood early on the afternoon of the second day after Stella’s arrival. With all the landscape bleaching steadily round it, the heavy perennial green of the oak leaves seemed darker than ever, and nothing stirred under them. I went to my hide, but saw nothing. The door of the red-brick house stood open, but there was no sign of life anywhere. I sat down, rather uncomfortably, on a dead branch that was not wide enough for the job and put my head on my arms. I wondered whether I could not break away and achieve some reasonable peace of mind again, but I was already to a frightening extent trapped. Stella had been right about the place, but Stella did not know the half of it. Left to itself, it was a place I could have surrendered to peaceably and let myself in due course be absorbed by. As it was, the whole place was permeated for me by the nagging image of Mrs Wainwright, so that I could neither be at peace there while she was at the other end of the wood, nor break away from it with my luck still untried and the mystery of her still unexplored. The only thing to do, as far as I could see, was to push things, so far as she was concerned, to a point where they fell decisively one way or another. Even if, as the most inglorious result, I simply outgrew my illusions, my life here might become manageable again, whatever it had been in the meantime. The only difficulty was that I found it very hard, at the moment, to push things forward at all. The first meeting, to be of any use, had to be a chance one, even if the chance was to some extent contrived: and at present the chance was not occurring
, and I did not know how to engineer one.
I noticed now that the leaves had started to rustle over me. The calm had cracked. The air was beginning to move. I still did not lift my head, but listened, with my head on my arms, to the stir and whisper of the wood all round me. When at last I said, ‘Hell,’ and looked up, Mrs Wainwright was standing in the path I had made not a couple of yards from me. We looked at each other fixedly for what seemed a very long time. Neither of us smiled at all. There was from the start an almost deliberate rejection of social pretences on either side.
She said, ‘You’re not a very sensible person, are you? This isn’t a very sensible thing to do. Are you very unhappy?’ Her voice was just on the edge of kindness, so that I felt neither so completely silly as I ought to have felt nor encouraged to put myself irremediably on her sympathy. I remembered Stella’s saying she had a voice to match. It worried me because it accorded with my own observation, and for some reason I shrank from taking over, in Mrs Wainwright’s case, the impressions of Stella’s accurate, dispassionate mind.
I said, ‘Not unhappy. Confused, I admit. Confused as hell. Did you know I was here?’ I heaved myself up off my uncomfortable perch, and found that one leg had gone fairly completely to sleep. I staggered, clutched a tree-trunk for support, and stood there, leaning over and rubbing the back of my thigh. We were still looking at each other. It was almost unbelievably unromantic.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen you here before. And I’ve been here when you weren’t here. I thought I’d come out and tell you. I didn’t think it would be a good idea if Dennis saw you.’
The Holm Oaks Page 3
