by Lorna Gray
It was an exceedingly odd statement. But my surprise was nothing to everyone else’s reaction. They weren’t surprised; they were dumbstruck. It left Matthew Croft stranded in the middle of the room and she had even silenced Mrs Winstone. But it was Danny’s reaction now that shocked. The gloom in this house was consuming everyone, but I could still see Danny. I could identify him from the intensity of concentration that passed from him to that woman.
Danny’s stillness now had an entirely different quality from the awkwardness that had prevented him from halting her dominion over his father’s treatment. His expression also swept away the fantasy I had been harbouring that there was a secret between them and it was love. The expression on his face was blank like that of a person facing a sudden resurgence of defensiveness that ran deep; deeper even than Mr Winstone’s wound.
This was because Danny could tell as well as I that the odd turn of Mrs Abbey’s speech had the taste of revenge on someone, but it wasn’t meant to rebuke Danny for his manoeuvrings over taking Mr Winstone to the doctor. I thought this was directed at Matthew Croft for his rudeness in dissecting Mr Winstone’s visit to her house, although, to do Mrs Abbey credit, I didn’t think she had meant her remarks to have this impact. This wasn’t within her control. Something very nasty began to build in the damp corner beyond the fireplace and it grew bolder when Mrs Abbey straightened.
She was flushing and trying to act as if she hadn’t said a thing. She knew she’d made a mistake. She attempted to make amends by urging Mr Winstone onto his feet and then there was a sudden rush of life back into this room as stronger hands than hers lunged to keep the old man from falling. There was a scuff as the armchair was moved aside and then a decisive lurch of men across the room towards me and the door.
I was outside before I knew it. They were driving me along from behind. After all that anticipation, the fresher air of a dusky August sky was no relief at all. The shadows chased me out. These people were disturbing me far more than any brief distress of finding an old man on his path and I thought I had remembered now what old business Mrs Abbey had stumbled into talking about. My cousin had mentioned something like this in her letters.
The squire was an old army man and my cousin called him Colonel, presumably because my cousin didn’t owe him the same deference he got from those who deemed him lord and master. Her letter had mentioned the tragedy of a son’s death in some sort of incident in the winter. She’d implied that the loss had shattered the entire community, and I’d witnessed proof myself now of its wounds. But having said so much, my cousin’s letter had declined to convey the rest, in part due to her preoccupation at that time with her own mother’s death and also to supposedly preserve tact and to save misunderstandings later. And also, I’d thought, to irritate my curiosity in that infuriating way people have when they have something they wish they could talk about but don’t want to be the gossip who tells you.
As it was, I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to find out the rest quite like this. There was an additional hint within my cousin’s letters that a local man had been caught up in the mess and I thought I had some idea now of who that local man might be.
Mrs Abbey began to rapidly retract her judgement of the old squire’s neglect of his estate. It was too late though. It was horrible but it was as if Mrs Abbey had accidentally summoned the dead son, poor man, and it was his shade, or at least the shadow of his end, that crept after us from the house.
Now she was bustling ahead and chattering about her wretched squatters instead. And all the while I thought the strangest thing of all was that no one simply swept it all away with the obvious retort that Mr Winstone hadn’t been hinting anything at all. The poor man could barely recall meeting me on his path; he certainly wasn’t giving graphic accounts of the terrors that had walked him home and connecting them to any old business that could affect people like this.
Mr Winstone was scuttling along behind her, between his helpers. He wasn’t terribly steady on his feet. It was only after they had made it through the gate and past me to move on towards the car that Danny said something rather dry that made the ugliness that had been working its tentacles after them along the path sharply turn on its heel and climb out over the garden wall. He said that he was glad that someone was on hand to give such a well-founded explanation of how his stepfather’s injury today had stemmed from that scene in March, because this was the first mention he’d heard of that tragedy for almost six months. His dry humour was for his friend’s sake. I knew it was because it drew that man’s attention from the immediate task of preventing the invalid from pitching headfirst into the side of the car. I saw Matthew Croft right the old man and then turn his head to give a surprisingly warm grin. And then I was only left with the puzzling realisation that while I had been watching and worrying over the reasons why a man like Danny Hannis might find himself unable to risk offending Mrs Abbey, I really should have been noticing that she didn’t like his friend at all.
She was, however, perfectly, convincingly repentant. She knew she’d made a crass mistake and if she didn’t, she certainly found out when it cost her the right to accompany Mr Winstone on his trip to consult the doctor. I felt almost sorry for her when she joined me just as the men were depositing their charge in the passenger seat. She had been roundly excluded from the crush as Mrs Winstone organised herself into the back seat. Danny was folding himself in beside his mother without so much as a glance for the neglected neighbour. It became all the more humbling when the small dog clambered in after them. The only person who didn’t go was the wavy-haired youth Freddy, who was hovering by the bumper in that helpful way people have when they desperately want to be useful but have no idea what to do. I thought he was waiting for orders and it belatedly occurred to me that Matthew Croft had been intending to offer the boy as my companion when he’d been trying to organise my walk home.
I didn’t mean to give Matthew Croft time to remember. I was a few yards away, at the limit of the pockmarked garden wall, and I would have left there and then except that Mrs Abbey had her hand on my arm as she told me earnestly, ‘You’ve been badly shaken by your brush with this fellow, haven’t you?’
She was speaking as though nothing else mattered beyond Mr Winstone’s injury. Perhaps nothing else did. They all knew each other, these people, and the slip about a man’s death must have been made by others before. I played for the same indifference while carefully dodging away from that clutching hand of hers. After all, it had last been seen grasping a bloody rag.
I remarked lightly, ‘Shaken by that man? No.’
She looked disbelieving. ‘You kept dithering in and out of the room all the time that we were talking.’
I conceded the point with a faintly worn smile. Rightly or wrongly, I soon took advantage of a disturbance within the car to make my getaway from all of them. That telephone was ringing again – that blessed reminder of noisy things that belonged in the companionable bustle of my familiar city life – and I went to it like it was a lifeline.
Chapter 4
Suddenly it wasn’t as late as I’d thought. I supposed escape might feel like that. The large house that stood on the opposite side of the triangle was still touched to warmth by the last of the day’s colour. It wasn’t the one that was ringing. That was coming from the other side of the village; in the space after the church but before the turn where the lane coursed away downhill. This grand house was the steward’s house and it was where my cousin had lived and grown until her father had died and her mother had retired to the cottage. I’d only visited these parts once as a child and that had been when I was eight. I barely remembered it but I did remember the village boys who had waged cheerful war with my cousin’s older brothers while my cousin scolded and I trailed about behind the lot of them like a pathetic undersized shadow. It was possible that Danny Hannis had been one of them.
The house seemed to be a boarding house for farm workers now. There was a steady stream of them passing between the steward�
�s house and what I’d taken earlier to be a derelict farmyard, only now it was flooded with light and crowded with men and tired carthorses. This, suddenly, was the bustle I was used to. Here the crowds took the form of dusty males ranging along the lines of various low stone walls, smoking and drinking weak beer. The farmhands were all, to a man, tanned and wiry. None of them wore a pale summer jacket. I suspected that most weren’t wealthy enough to own one.
Freddy didn’t own one either. He caught up with me before I’d even reached the point where the track veered to the right, downhill to my cousin’s cottage, or left around the lower limit of the churchyard and towards that telephone. He grinned at me as he fell into step beside me. He was all limbs and amiableness. ‘I don’t mind walking with you, Miss.’
The boy matched my sense of escape. He was on that cusp between childhood and manhood. He was aged perhaps fifteen and his face had the unsymmetrical structure of a teenage boy whose features were just beginning to settle into the mould of the man he would become. He wasn’t tall. He was perhaps my height and no more, but he had an endearing air of doubtful friendliness; warm and cheerful because it was in his nature to be so, but doubtful because perhaps other people didn’t always welcome it.
A certain sense of this boy’s niceness after that room full of adult complications made me protective but perhaps less tactful than I ought to have been. I remarked, ‘I’m going to answer that telephone. But I’ll be very glad of your company if you can explain to me precisely how it happens that there is so much danger tonight that I must let you escort me about the place, and yet somehow once I’m home I’m supposed to be perfectly happy to send you merrily onwards to your own home alone.’
He wasn’t offended. He told me simply, ‘My home isn’t just downstream from the turbine house Mr Winstone mentioned.’
Ah.
I confessed sheepishly, ‘That’s my cousin’s nearest neighbour. I thought that little brick hovel was somebody’s cottage.’
I made Freddy laugh. ‘Absolutely it is. And did you notice that it comes complete with running water laid on beneath the floorboards? You should be careful who you say that to. The turbine house is a matter for local pride. It gives light to the farmyard and the Manor. And it would give power to the steward’s house too if we had a man in there at the moment. We’re as modern as you like here.’
But not so modern, I thought, that anyone thought to mind the traditional distinction between the luxuries experienced by the land-owner compared to those of his tenants.
Then Freddy added doubtfully, ‘Did you say you were going to answer that? It’s in the Manor. Someone should be there.’
That told me what dwelling had the boldness to possess a telephone in this humble place. Its busy farmyard yawned in the gloom beneath us, where life hummed from every ancient stone and sagging roof, and stables for carthorses nestled against the rear wall of a massive stone barn. Below, the trackway descended into stillness. So did the cobbled surface that curved along the front of the enormous barn and veered left at the corner of another. There was no farmhouse attached to this enclosed run of buildings. There was no reassuring glow from watchful windows to oversee either route. Moths and shadows were the only traffic on this trackway. And the memory of Mrs Abbey’s summoning of ghosts and odd strangers, which to these people was also the correct description for me.
I dithered and spoke before I’d thought. ‘You’d think that Mr Winstone would be able to name this man if he’d ever met him before, wouldn’t you?’
Freddy only said politely, ‘Miss?’
The real worry burst out and it matched the blazing colour that still just touched the sky behind the darkened curve of the opposing valley hillside. I said bitterly, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t hear anything. I must have been at home when it happened. I was outside, sitting on my cousin’s front step. The turbine house would have been just out of sight around the bend of the track and I heard nothing. I must have followed them almost step for step up the hill and yet I saw nothing. There was nothing at all except the endless murmur of that telephone.’
I turned suddenly and chose the lane above the barn. I could hear my old friend that telephone still, but rather less insistently against the muffle of that great stone barn. Now it was a forlorn note of neglect. The farmhands were all going home for the night and not one of them thought he should answer it. I knew why. It was someone else’s job and, besides, after the tension I’d encountered in that room after the mention of the Colonel’s son, I could guess that none of them would dare.
I wondered if Danny might. Only he wasn’t likely to be released from his care of his stepfather for a while yet.
The Manor stood a little aloof from the village. We scurried along the frontage of that vast stone threshing barn and passed its gaping void of a vacant doorway. The cobbled drive rose past the stone barn to nose onto a narrow yard that was lined to our left by another older, rougher barn and on our right by the beginnings of parched garden terraces. No beans or cabbages were tended here. Above all this towered the Manor, a building that thrust up old weathered Cotswold gables all along its western face. Mullioned windows studded three floors and hundreds of tiny diamond panes of glass were each turned crimson by the last glimmer of daylight. It was all at once bleak and the most beautiful house I had ever seen.
A sudden doubt made me ask, ‘Freddy? Where is the doctor’s house?’
Freddy didn’t know I was thinking about that man again. The one who had been supposed to be going to fetch help. The boy told me innocently, ‘They’ve gone to the next village along. A place called Winstone.’ He caught my look. He grinned. ‘Mr Winstone’s kin took the name when they travelled into Somerset sometime around the dawn of the universe and in the time since, nature and work have conspired to carry him back again. Him and Mrs Winstone have been married for nearly twenty years, I think.’
Freddy was also unaware that part of this determination to answer the telephone was the tantalising idea that the Manor might be about to gift me the opportunity to speak to my cousin. I might be able to ask her advice before consigning myself to the silence of a solitary night in her cottage. The invitation was certainly lingering there in the air.
The kitchen door was unlocked in a manner that implied someone ought to be at home. I hallooed as one was meant to upon trespassing into a private house, but then I stepped in and found the light switch. Its garish yellow glare revealed a cavernous void that showed very little sign of regular use. The whole place confirmed Mrs Abbey’s statement that the Colonel was spending his bereavement elsewhere.
It made me say to the boy, ‘Didn’t you say someone still lived here?’
He was looking pale in the harsh electric light. I made him come inside so that I could shut the door before all the summer insects could swarm in after us. This little piece of practicality made him muster the words to reply, ‘The housekeeper.’
His voice was very small. His wide eyes were taking in the clean surfaces and empty stores. The farmyard might not have been as derelict as I had supposed, but here the abandonment was real. It was not, however, so old that dust was yet filming the bare surfaces and still that wonderful beacon of life was justifying our intrusion by persisting shrilly.
I followed its call through to where the high beams of the kitchen dropped into the cooler air of a narrow dining room. The light from the kitchen was strong, but this place was made oppressive by walls of panelled oak. Almost the entire space was occupied by an enormously long and very old banqueting table. I didn’t need my father’s training in the trade to recognise its value. Nor did it require his skill to identify the ancient mechanism for a spit-roast within the equally massive but decrepit fireplace. It too was gloomy in that way that spoke of a livelier past long neglected.
By the time I had proceeded through the turns of an impossibly dispiriting passage, the caller had given up and so had I, nearly. I couldn’t find a light switch and the array of paintings that belonged to the era when yo
ung gentlemen took grand tours had swiftly given way to the cold metal of old muskets and gin traps. Then I emerged into the loftier space of a broad Georgian stairwell and here was salvation in the form of an elegant table lamp. The moment it was lit, it felt as if I had stepped out of a museum and into a home. I had been beginning to feel thoroughly unwelcome in a place that preferred to be left alone to sleep and dream of the lingering weight of the son’s death. There was also, predictably enough, a growing sense of unease brought on by the memory of that unlocked door and the realisation that the man who had dropped Mr Winstone almost by my feet might have taken flight this way. The feeling was made worse when I checked the shadows in the passage behind me and realised that Freddy had not followed me here.
That wonderful table lamp saved my ebbing confidence; saved everything. A small stack of letters had been collecting by its side for a matter of a fortnight at most. Here I was in a space where a white plasterwork ceiling hung high above at the level of the attic floor. Glass consumed the entire end wall of the house except for the black rectangle that was reserved for a wide front door. Dusky blues shot across the sky outside and the lamp sent rainbow hues racing after them across the chequerboard marble floor. This place was no monument to mortal decay or the lair of a dangerous man; more the tidy corner where the family ought to have been, only they had lately but temporarily stepped out for a while.
