Now that I came to think of it, our appointment was a very vague one. The time for organised assignations and accurate timing had not yet come. Stella went off after breakfast, and I spent the morning alone in a fever of anticipated difficulties and imaginary conversations. Elizabeth and I had lunch in a mood of carefully sustained cheerfulness, and after lunch I went into the wood and walked slowly along the central pathway. I was, in fact, almost exactly half-way along it when I met Carol Wainwright walking slowly in the opposite direction. We neither of us said anything at first. We stopped and stood looking at each other, there in the dark pathway. The trees, so far as we could see them from below, did not move at all, but the invisible tops kept up a steady background of noise. I could not hear the sea. She was muffled from the ears to the calves in a dark red coat that made her look smaller than ever.
I said, ‘What was it you asked your husband about, and he said he couldn’t find?’ I do not know what, after all my considered openings, put this in my head. I suppose it had been worrying me ever since that first evening and of course the worry had grown on me.
She put her hands in the pockets of her coat and stood with her feet a little apart, looking up at me. ‘When was this?’ she said.
‘About three weeks ago, I suppose. At the end of September. In the evening. There was a man singing Nessun dorma, and in the middle you called out to your husband and asked him if he had found something. He was outside the door. He said he didn’t know where it was.’
‘And where were you? Hiding in the wood?’ She had coloured very slightly, but her voice was elaborately detached. I shook my head. ‘Standing in the road, with my wife. But it was almost dark. It was the first time we came down. I didn’t see you, or only for a moment through the window.’
She nodded. ‘It was a gramophone record,’ she said.
‘Yours?’
‘Yes. More opera, I’m afraid. Does that shock you?’
‘Did you ever find it?’
‘No.’
‘Why should it shock me?’
She shrugged. ‘It does some people. It would have me, once, I think. Only down here—’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I think I really do know. I was pretty startled by Nessun myself.’ I had a very clear picture of this small white woman in a grey world, playing Italian opera to herself to keep herself warm. I think if she had not had her hands in her pockets, I should have gone straight to her and taken hold of her.
She smiled suddenly. ‘You should have heard Una furtiva lagrima,’ she said. ‘Only that was the one I lost.’
I said, ‘You didn’t play Nessun for very long.’
‘Didn’t I? Oh no, I remember.’ She coloured again. ‘Would you like me to show you the wood? I expect you think you know it, but there’s more to it than you’d think. There’s another main ride, parallel with this one, between this and the beach, and a whole system of cross-rides. It’s all overgrown, of course, but it was a careful piece of planting, and the original trees are very complete. It’s only the undergrowth and the new stuff that clutter it up.’ She turned, still with her hands in her pockets, and went off between the trees southwards towards the beach. She wore quite elegant stockings and what in another woman I should have thought of as sensible shoes. She seemed able to go through the tangle with that even padding walk of hers without collecting snags at every other step. She was not at all the kind of woman one generally describes as feline. She had a lot of cat-like qualities, but they were not the qualities which man for some reason picks on as most characteristically cat-like. She was above all very neat and profoundly economical in all her movements. ‘There,’ she said, ‘do you see?’
There was in fact a gap in the big trees on both sides of us. Now that I came to consider it apart from the intrusive tangle, I could see that there had, as she said, been a ride here, running the length of the wood parallel with the central path. It was filled from side to side with saplings and undergrowth, but the old trees walled it with uncompromising lines and nearly met overhead. Down the middle of what had been the ride, not straight, but picking its way zig-zag through the tangle, there was a well-marked path, very narrow, but beaten firm underfoot and clear above, though hardly to my height. Allowing for the difference in height, it was like the path a wood-animal makes, but I did not think there could be badgers here. I knew who had made it, in fact. Carol Wainwright turned left and went off along it, heading for her end of the wood. I followed as best I could, ducking under the branches that cleared her head and working my way rather noisily through the passage she negotiated with hardly a whisper. If it had not been for the wind in the tops of the trees, you could have heard me moving from fifty yards off. You could not have heard her in a flat calm. She never took her hands out of her pockets. She might have been walking along a rather crowded pavement.
Then the path jinked sideways suddenly, and there was a circular clearing, hardly more than six feet across. One of the original oaks had fallen here and left two logs, just big enough to sit on in comfort, and a couple of feet apart. She waved me to one of them. ‘Sit down,’ she said. She herself sat on the other. We were not quite facing each other, but near enough.
She sat there with her hands thrust into her pockets, her head sunk into her upturned collar and her sensible shoes neatly disposed side by side. It was cold in the wood when you stopped walking. She smiled at me suddenly out of her coat-collar. It was like a child who on an impulse has let you bodily into one of its chosen secrets. She said, ‘We shan’t be disturbed here, I think. Now tell me why you have been watching the house.’
I sat there with my legs stuck straight out in front of me. I was too long to sit on my log with her compact tidiness, and I did not want to crouch. I stared between my slightly muddy shoes and saw no means of prevaricating and no reason for prevarication. ‘To see you,’ I said.
‘But why like that?’
‘I don’t know anything about you, you see. And I was in love with you. I have been in love with you since you came into the room and your husband introduced us. I’m sorry if it seems unreasonable.’
‘Don’t apologise. I think I like your being in love with me. Only I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it.’
‘There’s nothing you can do about it. But please let me go on seeing you.’
She said, ‘Mr Haddon—’
‘Don’t you think, as I’m in love with you, you might call me Jake?’
‘All right, Jake, then. Do you do this often? I mean meeting strange women in the woods and telling them you are in love with them.’
‘I don’t do it at all. I haven’t been in love with anyone for years now. Let alone told them so.’
She thought about this, looking at me all the time with the slightest smile half hidden in her coat-collar. Then she said, ‘Have you really thought what you’re doing? Suppose I decide to fall in love with you?’
‘I want you to, of course. I want it more than I can remember wanting anything.’
‘But you don’t know—’ She thought again, frowning now and groping for words. ‘You don’t know anything about me, do you? You’ve just said so. You don’t know what it would mean if I did.’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘I know that much already. It would be all or nothing. But the whole place is all or nothing, and here I am.’
‘You know that, do you? That’s something, anyhow.’ She thought again. ‘I’m a worse case than you. I’ve never loved anybody, not since I was a child.’
‘Don’t you think it’s time you did?’
‘It’s time, all right, high time. Too high for comfort. That’s what you’ve got to think about.’
‘I have thought. I was thinking yesterday when you walked in on me. Or trying to think. I wasn’t being very successful. I’m past thinking about it, Carol. The only question for me is whether I hadn’t better go now.’
‘You mean away from here altogether?’
‘Yes. Sell the house at once. Cut my losses, I suppose. I
can’t go on as I am.’
She got up suddenly, throwing the collar back clear of her face and looking down at me with immense seriousness. The illusion of childishness had gone completely. She did not even, seen like this, look a particularly young woman. The skin was flawed round the eyes and under the throat. I sat still on my log with my legs thrust out in front of me, but if I had been prostrate on my face, I could not have been more completely at her mercy.
She shook her head, very slowly, without taking her eyes off my face. I did not know whether she was shaking it at me or at herself.
‘Don’t do that,’ she said. ‘Not yet, anyhow. I must think. Let me go now.’
I got up and we walked back to the central path without another word said. There she touched my arm once and left me. I hardly remember leaving the wood, but I remember how the noise of the sea burst on me quite suddenly as I came out of it. I know I did not go into the house at all, but walked along the beach westward into the still freshening wind.
CHAPTER SIX
The cheerfulness of lunch continued over tea, and needed less maintaining. I was myself in a curiously light-headed mood. Tremendous waves of exultation went through me like electric charges, so that I wanted to snap my fingers and wave my arms in time to unheard melodies even when I was holding a teacup or cutting myself a slice of cake. Underlying these, and emerging when they faded temporarily, was a desperate impatience bordering on despair. I was aware, all the time, of appalling and inevitable decisions that stood between me and the consummation of a suddenly apprehended and almost unbelievable happiness. My mind was totally unconditioned to emotions of this intensity, and behaved with the bewildering unreliability of a sedentary body suddenly involved in long forgotten exercise. I noticed, but did not mind, an inconsequentiality in what I said that must have bordered on incoherence.
Elizabeth was still in the state of barely suppressed exhilaration which she always experienced, and was seldom able to disguise, when Stella had left us, and found in my mood an answer to her own that did not require further explanation. I doubt if two people so completely at cross purposes ever got on so well. There was a monstrous instability in the whole relation that avoided collapse by its own inherent momentum. She was full of plans to get the distressing, but certainly unmistakable, exclamation of nycticorax on to the tape as incontrovertible proof of his presence with us.
‘The wood is the place,’ she said. ‘That’s his fixed spot, and he’s away from it all night, I imagine. If only I can find where he lies up, I can get the recorder rigged up when he’s out shopping and then, with any luck, switch on early next evening without disturbing him. Then if he gives tongue when he’s getting up, as he seems to do, I’ve got him.’
I saw no reason, now, to head her off our end of the wood at that hour of the evening. ‘We’ll have to picket the wood at dusk,’ I said. ‘If we take up positions just inside the trees and fairly well spaced out, we might both hear him. Then if we each move towards where the sound seems to come from until we meet, we oughtn’t to be far off the spot. Then the next night we can close in on him a bit. It may take a night or two, but sooner or later one of us is bound to be almost up to him when he performs. Or near enough, anyhow, to get a recording the next evening if we plant the recorder wherever we are. It can’t be far off the central path, because I was coming along it when he flew right over me. You still haven’t heard him out on the mere?’
‘Not yet, no. He may not actually feed there. Or perhaps he doesn’t talk when he’s feeding. No, the wood’s the place. Do you mind if we have a go this evening? I don’t think time is on our side, and I couldn’t bear to let him get away from me.’
‘All right. It’s not going to be so easy with this wind. It was dead quiet when we heard him the first time. But then we were out on the beach. It’s much quieter in the wood, even with the wind, and I should think he makes quite a noise when you get up to him.’
We put the tea things away, muffled ourselves in heavy coats and set out on our hunt. When we came to the end of the path, we separated and disposed ourselves about twenty yards on each side of it and just inside the trees. The light was going fast. There should not be too long to wait. If we had not heard nycticorax by the time it was fully dark, we were not going to hear him at all. I settled myself as dry and comfortable as possible and tried to think coherently.
I thought entirely about Elizabeth. I could no longer think about Carol Wainwright at all. She was part of my thinking mind and would not be considered objectively. I did not know what I could do about Elizabeth. I knew what I wanted to do, or rather what I had to do. I did not know whether I was capable of doing it. The main trouble was that I did not know, if I did what I had to do, what it would mean to her. Being married to anyone for any considerable time is an almost fatal bar to understanding them. What you know is a relationship, and it is next to impossible to see behind it to the person who would be there if the relationship did not exist. To see ourselves as others see us, whether or not it would ever make a particularly acceptable gift, is, I suspect, child’s play compared with seeing one’s wife as others see her. The only thing I had against Elizabeth was that she got in my hair and, now that I was no longer fond of her, got in my way. I did not wish her any harm, and I shrank abjectly from the idea of inflicting serious pain on her. But I genuinely did not know how serious the pain would be.
The wind died momentarily out of the leaves, and somewhere in the wood, rather over to my left, something woke up and made a noise like a man being sick. It was not very loud or very near. I doubt whether, but for the lull in the wind, I should have heard it at all. But there was no mistaking it. The excitement of the hunt gripped me suddenly. I got up, straightened myself cautiously, took my torch out of my pocket and set off in the direction of the sound.
It was nearly dark now. I moved laboriously on as straight a bearing as I could. I wondered whether Elizabeth had heard him and was on the move too. As far as I could, I kept an eye upwards, but it was not nycticorax himself I was looking for. I was really looking for Elizabeth, coming in on her cross-bearing, and I was undecided how far I ought to go if I did not meet her. It was, as I had told her it would be, much quieter in the wood than it was outside, and uninhibited movement – we had no particular reason to be quiet – ought to be audible at a little distance. Also, I expected her to be using her torch, as I was myself, and it should be possible to see a moving light, even if only at intervals, some time before our courses converged. I plunged on through the thicket, still hoping to meet her coming in on my left, but of necessity chiefly concerned to hold a reasonably direct course towards where, a minute ago, I thought nycticorax had been. I had an uncomfortable feeling that our stratagem, which had seemed so simple and water-tight over tea, was not going to stand up to practice in a now nearly pitch-dark wood.
I saw the light first to my left, which I had expected, but some way ahead of me, which I had not. It was only a flicker, but there was no doubt about it. I stopped and thought. If Elizabeth was already so far ahead of me, my line might cross hers behind the point she had already reached, and the important thing was to stop her. ‘Elizabeth!’ I shouted. ‘Elizabeth! Stay where you are. I’m coming.’
I was startled by the noise I made. If nycticorax had not already gone, he would be off now as fast as his rather laborious flight could carry him. The silence closed in threateningly and completely. Nothing replied. I was in two minds whether to hold on my previous course or to make for where I had seen the light. ‘Elizabeth!’ I shouted again. ‘Don’t go any further. Wait where you are.’ I broke into a blundering run, stumbled over a branch, recovered myself, and came out almost at once into what could only be the central path. There was no sign of Elizabeth anywhere. I stood still and listened. The wind swished continuously in the tops of the trees, and I myself breathed rather more noisily than my short burst of energy seemed to justify. I could not, against this background, hear any movement anywhere.
I began to f
ollow the path eastwards, and was aware, almost at once, that someone was moving along it ahead of me. They were some way ahead, and moving faster than I was, at what sounded like a rather hurried walk. I gathered myself to shout again, but at once thought better of it. Whoever was on the path ahead, it could not surely be Elizabeth. Unless the excitement of the chase had tipped her right off balance, there was no conceivable reason why she should either make off along the path like that or fail to reply to my shouts. And whoever it was on the path must have heard me.
I did not like it. It was not, whatever I felt about it, my wood, and I had in fact no right to be anywhere in it, at night or at any other time, except where I now was, following my right-of-way along the central path. Something of the poacher’s guilt affected me, and I badly wanted to get back over the line into my own ground. At the same time, I resented what seemed to be a surreptitious intrusion on my privacy. I did not like plunging about a dark wood at night, calling loudly to my wife, in the presence of an unknown observer. But basically I think I was afraid. Not logically, because a person who seems determined to keep his distance cannot on the face of it be very dangerous. But underlying my indignation was a purely primitive horror of the night walker, noctu perambulans, the thing that lurks in the trees and does not come out when you call to it. And I still did not know where Elizabeth was.
I had already switched off my torch. Now I stood still again and listened. I thought I heard the movements again ahead of me, but I could not be certain. If they were there, they were fainter. Whoever it was was probably moving out of earshot. I turned and went straight back along the path, refusing to switch my torch on again, and trying not to run. I think if nycticorax had chosen that moment to cough up immediately overhead, I should hardly have checked my stride for him. The pleasurable excitement had gone out of the night’s work, and all I wanted was to get home to a lit room and a drink.
The Holm Oaks Page 5
