The Holm Oaks

by P. M. Hubbard

  It was nearly dark when I got home. Elizabeth was in the kitchen, boiling eggs for our tea because we had missed lunch. She was humming quietly to herself. She said she had seen nothing in the wood to interest her. Whether she had seen Carol walking back along the beach she did not say.

  She was off to the wood again soon after breakfast next morning, and came back in a state of high excitement. She said, ‘Everything’s boiling up together. You should have been there. First there was a man from the Forestry Commission. The van was marked. He got out and walked round the wood for a bit, sniffing almost audibly. Then he got back into the van and ruffled papers for a bit, plans and things. Then he got out and went to the house. I was lurking in the trees across the road. There’s quite a hide there. Did you know? You can see the whole front of the Wainwrights’ house. I waited to see him come bouncing down the steps, like unwelcome callers in the comic strips, but nothing happened for quite a while. When he did come out, he opened the door for himself and came out quite quietly. I’ll bet you anything Dennis was still in the study, biting the edge of his desk. The little man – well, he wasn’t all that little really, but no match for Dennis – he came down and out of the gate. He was sweating slightly and running his finger round inside his collar. Honestly. I’m not making this up. And he had a small, rather satisfied smirk on his face, as if he had had the better of it, but was a bit shaken all the same. I didn’t see Dennis at all. I waited a bit, but he never came out. Then as I was starting to come home, there was another man, actually in the wood. He had come along our track and left his car half-way along, and walked into the wood from that side. But he hadn’t got very far. He was just peering about, looking at the trees. He didn’t stay long. I don’t know if he went to see Dennis too. It would have been an experience for both of them, wouldn’t it, after the Forestry man?’

  ‘If he was the Rural District surveyor,’ I said, ‘he wouldn’t need to go and see Dennis, I don’t think. All he’s got to do is to confirm that the wood is as shown in the map and report on the state and value of the trees. I imagine they’ll get this Preservation Order served by post.’

  ‘Never mind. I’m sure our nice shaggy Absolam will tell us when it is going off. Perhaps I could watch the postman deliver it.’

  ‘If I were you,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I’d spend too much time in the wood – not in the far end of it, anyhow. I know you’re proud of having started all this, but that may well have come out. Dennis’s feelings towards you at the moment must be quite indescribable. All right,’ I said, when she giggled at this, ‘I know it gives you a kick, and I can’t say I blame you. But in all seriousness, I’d watch out for Dennis, if I were you. I wouldn’t trust that man with a stick in his hand more than I’d trust a sabre-toothed tiger with his mouth well open.’

  She said, ‘Do you really think he’d go for me?’ She looked at me wide-eyed, but the apprehension was only half-serious, and there was a small unattractive streak of fascination in it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I don’t regard him as suitable material for experiment. It’s up to you, but I’d lay off the wood for a bit if I were you – unless, of course, nycti comes to hand suddenly.’

  ‘But that’s just it,’ she said. ‘He has. At least, I think he has. The absurd thing is that it was just as you said. In fact, it was more or less because of what you said. You know you said I’d be looking for the Rural District surveyor and find nycti. Well, when I saw him there, peering about at the trees, I remembered what you said and after he’d gone I had a good look in that part of the wood. And there is something there. I couldn’t be absolutely certain, and I didn’t want to disturb him. But I’m fairly certain there’s something of about the right size roosting in one of the oaks. It’s a good deal further up towards our track than I’ve ever looked before. I think he must shift his ground a bit. Anyway, I’ve marked the place, and I’m going to try it again this evening.’

  ‘You seem to have had a good morning,’ I said.

  Her smile was almost a simper. ‘Wonderful,’ she said.

  The ridiculous thing is that I do not know, now, whether the Tree Preservation Order was ever served on Dennis Wainwright. I suppose it must have been in due course, if not of law, at least of executive procedures. The cumbrous machinery we had short-circuited into unexpectedly rapid motion probably threw up its end-product. For the matter of that, the holm oaks are still there. I suppose Dennis must have been diverted once for all from his intention by the actions of the Forestry Commission. From then on events ran smoothly to catastrophe. I did not see Carol again during that time. The background of the whole nightmare was my apprehension for her, shut up in that horrible brick box with the frustrated and certainly enraged Dennis. But then I had been apprehensive for her before, and, apart from the look I sometimes caught on her face when her husband was mentioned, she never let up about the details of their relationship. If I had in fact seen her, even once, and got from her some inkling of what he had in mind, things might have ended differently. But as it happened I never did. And in any case she probably never knew.

  It must have been two days after the Forestry Commission had delivered their warning that Elizabeth came running into the house somewhere between noon and lunch-time. I heard her calling ‘Jake! Jake!’ as she came up the path, and we met in the hall. She said, ‘For God’s sake come. There’s a whole army of men disembarked at the far end of the wood with trucks and God knows what else. He can’t be going to defy orders, can he? I can’t bear it. Shall I phone Mr Absolam?’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Let me at least see what they’re up to.’ We went out along our track on the north side of the wood. I think we ran at times, I know I was hurried along by an almost frantic Elizabeth. There was, as she had said, a small army of men deployed round the farther end of the wood, but it did not take long to see what they were doing.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘At least – I don’t know what his game is, but these chaps aren’t cutting anything. They’re fencing.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Elizabeth said, ‘But he can’t shut us out of the wood. Jake, he can’t do that, can he?’

  ‘He can’t stop us using the path. He can keep us out of the rest of the wood, I suppose, if he wants to. If he’s mad enough, he could fence round the wood and fence along both sides of the path. But it doesn’t make sense. I don’t know what he’s up to. I tell you what, though. The test will be what he does at the ends of the path. If he puts up stiles or gates, it will show he doesn’t intend to dispute the right-of-way. Anyhow, judging by the way they’re working at the moment, these chaps are starting along the north side of the wood. At that rate the end of the path they come to first will be the one opposite us. If they fence that right across, I’ll open fire at once. In the meantime, we must just sit back and watch it.’

  ‘Can’t I—?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, Liz, you mustn’t do anything at all. He’s got a perfect right to fence round his wood if he wants to. And so long as the men don’t go crashing about inside the wood, it’s not going to upset nycti or anyone else. For goodness’ sake, wait and see what they’re up to. It will take them some time to get round, though I must say he’s evidently told them to make a rushed job of it. When they’re packed up this evening, we’ll go along the track and see if we can see what they’re doing. Until then do please keep clear.’

  She had been riding high for days now, and did not like being crossed. She said, ‘Oh well, if you think—’ and melted away to the kitchen where she got ready a rather scrappy lunch. During the afternoon she took out her glasses towards the mere, but I knew they would be trained along the north side of the wood as much as across the water. At teatime she said, ‘They’re just putting posts in. They’re being very slow.’ Later, when it was almost dark, we walked out along our own private track on the north side of the wood, going as stealthily as if we were a mile inside a preserved park and heading for the pheasantries. They were
, as Elizabeth had said, putting posts in. They were concrete posts, standing six feet clear of the ground and pierced for several lines of fencing wire. What they were in fact going to carry was not apparent. But it was a strong, professional and certainly expensive job. And it was going fast, for all Elizabeth’s impatience. The posts were already nearly half-way along the northern edge.

  The wind had died out completely. The grey dusk was silent and rather foreboding. On this side of the wood we could not hear the sea at all. I felt oddly like a besieged garrison, with the enemy creeping slowly round our defences. This was ridiculous when it was not us they were enclosing, but the sense of hostile forces moving towards us from the other end of the wood was very strong.

  This went on for three days. We never saw Dennis Wainwright or had any contact with the men doing the fencing. We knew them all well by sight through the glasses, and Elizabeth gave them pet-names and took an interest in their personal relations, but we never had speech with them. This was mostly on my insistence, I think because I believed Dennis would expect us to question his workmen. But one thing was settled by late on the second day. He was not going to shut the path. At our end of the wood the fence was broken by a rather repulsive but perfectly reasonable concrete stile. There was no indication so far of any attempt to fence the path itself. The posts crept past the Holt House and rounded the corner of the wood above the beach. From now on we saw nothing of the men at all unless we went out on to the beach deliberately, which Elizabeth did at regular intervals. They worked from the road at the far end of the wood.

  I forget how long it was before the posts were complete and they began to hang the fencing. It seemed quite a long time, and all the time the wind never blew above a whisper, and the men banged and shouted to each other in the grey silence. When the fencing started, we had the final answer. There was sheep-netting up to four feet, heavy two-way netting in six-inch squares, impermeable to anything much bigger than a cat. The two feet above it were covered by strands of barbed wire, set close and drawn hard. It was a formidable barrier. We still did not know what it was for.

  They finished the job by lunch-time one day, and by mid-afternoon Elizabeth came back from the beach and reported that they had all packed up and gone home. She seemed almost mildly regretful, as if she missed the excitement. After tea we went out and for the first time climbed the concrete stile that gave access to the path. We tiptoed along the path into the middle of the wood. I remember thinking how seldom Elizabeth and I had been in the wood together. For all her passionate interest in nycticorax, I still found her presence there incongruous and for some reason uneasy.

  That last calm of the autumn was still with us, and the wood was completely silent. All round us, invisible but making its presence felt, the wire frame shut us in. When we got to the other end of the path we found a stile similar to the one we had just climbed, but we did not climb it. Away to our left, and exactly where my observation post had been, there was a full-width gateway in the fencing, closed by a five-barred farm gate of steel tubes. Even the gate had wire mesh hung on it. I remember thinking the place was like a zoo, and for the first time a strong whiff of uneasiness crept into my mind about Dennis Wainwright’s intentions in all these monstrous defences.

  I said something to Elizabeth, in a whisper full of forced jocularity, about nycticorax being well protected from unauthorized intruders if his presence there became known. She took it quite seriously and agreed it might be a good thing. Fencing or no fencing, I believe she was still determined to make her recording and establish her observation. All I wondered about was Carol. But whatever Carol did, the wood was spoilt now. The ridiculous thing was that if it had been fenced from the start, I believe it would have made little or no difference to anything that had happened there. But by fencing it like this, now and in deliberate though still obscure defiance, Dennis had put his hand on it more indelibly than if he had patrolled the central path hourly in his John Bull breeches, swinging his heavy stick. Whatever happened to Carol and me, the wood was not ours any more. If Elizabeth and nycticorax still wanted it, they could have it.

  We tiptoed out of the wood, Elizabeth still in a condition not much different from muffled hysteria, and myself full of an appalling disquiet I could feel no logical justification for. We left the wood behind us, hushed, completely enclosed and empty. I thought it was waiting for something, but I did not know what. We heard the telephone ringing as we came in at the gate and Elizabeth ran ahead to answer it.

  She came out and said, ‘Jake, it’s for you. I think it’s David Sangster.’ David Sangster was the junior partner in the firm of solicitors I patronised. He was my sort of age and a friend of mine. He said, ‘Jake? Jake, listen. We’ve had a letter from a chap called Wainwright. He’s the man your uncle sold the wood to. Do you know the one I mean?’

  I said I did. I asked how Dennis Wainwright had got on to them. ‘Probably through Marples,’ said David. Marples were my late uncle’s solicitors. ‘Anyway, he found us. Tell me, has there been any discussion of the possibility of your buying the wood from him?’

  ‘I did make a very tentative suggestion. He wouldn’t consider it at all.’

  ‘Oh. Well, his letter here suggests that he may now be prepared to consider it. But it’s a pretty odd letter. Look, Jake, I don’t want to talk at length over the phone. I wondered if you could run up to town and have a word with me about it?’

  ‘I could, yes, easily. Tomorrow, if you like.’

  ‘Yes, I wish you would. I’m tied up for lunch, unfortunately. Will the early afternoon do?’

  I said it would, and we left it at that. Elizabeth said, ‘What did David want?’

  ‘He wanted me to come up and see him some time. I gather there are odd points outstanding about Uncle Clarence’s will he’d like to get sorted out. I said I’d go tomorrow. Do you want to go to London?’

  She hesitated, pouting a little. ‘Why the urgency?’ she said. ‘No. I don’t want to be away a whole day just now. I might have liked it later.’

  ‘We can go again,’ I said.

  ‘All right. You go tomorrow, then.’ She was not really satisfied, and I could not blame her. It might be nothing, but I was not going to mention a letter from Dennis Wainwright to Elizabeth until I had seen what was in it. From David’s tone, it did not sound disastrous, but he was apparently being a bit cagey over it, and my instinct was to be cagey myself.

  Unless you wanted to do it by road all the way – Stella did regularly, but I found it unnecessarily tiring – the journey to London meant driving into Burtonbridge and getting an early train to town. There were trains back in the evening. It gave you a reasonable time in London, but it made a long day from Marlock. I was away by half past seven next day. It was a dark morning. There was still no wind at all, but I had a feeling that the calm was not going to last much longer. As I drove along its northern edge the wood looked pitch dark behind its new, white fence, but nothing looked at me through the wire. When I came to the gate on the road, I thought I saw Dennis Wainwright’s head in the garden of his horrible house. It struck me as odd that I was going a hundred and twenty miles to look at a letter from the man across the road. It certainly never occurred to me to turn down the road and ask him what it was all about. I could not even be completely sure he was there. I turned left and drove to Burtonbridge.

  David looked at me curiously over the tops of his glasses, but handed me the letter without comment. After introducing himself and saying he understood they were my solicitors, Dennis Wainwright had written:

  ‘It is my wish that there should be no further personal contact of any sort between your client Mr Haddon and myself or any member of my family. As the existence of a right-of-way through my wood makes such contact very difficult to avoid, I am prepared to sell Mr Haddon the wood at the price I originally paid for it plus the cost of subsequent improvements’ – this presumably meant the fencing – ‘on the express condition that he undertakes to avoid all future personal
contact with myself or any member of my family. In the alternative, I am prepared to pay for the extinction of his right-of-way at a figure to be agreed and on the same general conditions.’

  It was written in a hand as big as the man himself, with fierce angles and heavy down-strokes. I looked up and met David’s speculative eye. ‘I don’t know what you’ve been doing to him,’ he said. ‘That’s your business. What does his family consist of?’

  I looked at him blandly. ‘So far as I know,’ I said, ‘only his wife.’ David’s eyebrows rose ever so slightly. Blandness was no good with David. He said, ‘It’s an unusual proposal, to say the least of it. I don’t know how this no-contact condition would be enforceable. That depends on the way the contract was drawn, I suppose. If it made the whole sale voidable for a breach of condition, you’d have to be pretty careful. It looks to me as if you’ve got to be pretty careful anyhow. What do you want us to do about it, Jake?’

  ‘I’ll have to think,’ I said. ‘I’m grateful to you for getting me up to talk about it, David.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, well, I thought I’d better, rather than simply pass it on to you through the post. All right, Jake. I’ll acknowledge and say we are in touch with you and are awaiting your instructions. And you let me know what you decide. And as I say, be careful in the meantime. In any case, better not deal with him direct.’

  ‘Not on your nelly,’ I said. We exchanged chit-chat and he saw me off, still with a speculative look in his eye. I had an early dinner at my club and caught the last train for Burtonbridge. It was not a late train, but it would be late enough before I was home. By half-way I realised that the speed of the train was only partly responsible for the roaring forces outside the windows. We were running head-first into a gale. Whenever it had reached Marlock, our autumn truce with the weather was over. The beach would be chaos.