What was now called Nudd Manor was a mansion of considerable antiquity, and would undoubtedly be described by the estate agents as ‘mellow’ should Miss Montacute decide to sell it up. Even so, the centuries behind it were not nearly so numerous as those behind the home farm. The farm, in fact, had been the original manorial dwelling, and was still not without suggestions of its former feudal consequence. For example, the kitchen – familiar to Gloria for as long as she could remember – was as large as the hall in which the late Mrs Montacute, posed beside the playing or piddling fontana minore, had been accustomed to receive her guests. And from the kitchen you could look out on a grove of oaks. Mr Carter (who was now blind and never seen in the fields) had always been proud of the oaks and of their having been let stand where corn might grow. Gloria could recall his telling her, when quite a small girl, that the oaks were as old as England.
There was a lane to traverse and a stream to cross; Gloria paused on a footbridge to survey the scene. She was without much grasp of leases and tenancies, but she did know that she owned the farm quite as definitely as she owned the manor. The knowledge somehow troubled her. The farm was quite clearly the Carters’ farm, and yet in law it was nothing of the kind. If old Mr Carter suddenly went mad and ordered the cutting down of the oak trees she could stop it at once. Mr Thurkle would take this sort of proprietorship for granted, but it seemed strange to her that she should have any sort of control over mature people who for generations had been doing just what they were doing now: conjuring wheat and turnips, milk and wool, out of the quickened earth. It put her in an unsatisfactory relationship with the Carters – with any Carter. The money-thing – which was also the class-thing – would always make itself felt.
But why, after all, should it matter? Without being particularly prompted to articulate an answer, Gloria walked on. She had done so for only a dozen paces, however, when she was brought to a halt by a loud whistle from not far behind her.
If a whistle brings you to a stop, it may be expected to make you turn round as well. For a moment, at least, Gloria didn’t do this. She was occupied by the amazing discovery that it was Saturday, and that on a Saturday Harry was quite likely to have come home for the weekend. She felt properly disconcerted at having chosen a Saturday afternoon to call on Harry’s mother. Not that she had made any resolve to shun Harry or ignore his existence. She acknowledged to herself, on the contrary, that he occupied some rather urgent corner of her mind – and that he was quite clever enough to break free of it, if given half a chance, and roam about as he pleased. It was just that he required thought. There was some dimension to Harry that she hadn’t at all grasped, and which it was important that she should.
Meanwhile, the whistle was repeated. It was a rural whistle; a whistle, indeed, such as you might hear from a shepherd who is bringing a dog to heel. Gloria turned round. Harry was doing his wood-god act. In wholly decent areas, that is to say, he was naked; and where he was naked, he was splendidly bronzed. On an afternoon full of lingering autumnal warmth this was entirely in order. So was the implement he carried: a wicked-looking, gently-concave blade on a long pole. It was a billhook, she supposed, and he had been thinning out a coppice with it. She thought, however, of pictures she had been seeing in Italy in which saints major and minor – and young and handsome as well as old and with elaborately crimped beards – stroll negligently around carrying the instruments of their martyrdom. But that was not quite what she was really seeing. There was something more elusive and teasing, something from farther back, that she was being reminded of. It was an illustration in a history book used at school. Had it been about the French Revolution – or about Jack Cade, and people of that sort? Certainly it was with improvised weapons just such as Harry was carrying now that persons of a plebeian order had been represented as advancing threateningly upon their betters.
This recollection, totally irrelevant as it seemed, struck Gloria less than the fact that, having twice whistled, Harry was standing quite still on the path behind her. It was almost as if he expected her to trot obediently back to him. But this effect lasted only for a moment; it was a minute calculated joke made possible only by that nice sense of timing which a good rugger player must possess. Harry was advancing at a run, with his billhook high in air. Its carriage in this fashion was a simple safety precaution; at the same time he might have been a charging Zulu or the like out of a boy’s artless imagining.
‘Gloria, my dear!’ Harry said. And he was standing laughing in front of her.
‘Hullo, Harry.’ Gloria spoke with a calm hollow even to her own ear. She had realised instantly how very definitely Harry was out of that corner and roaming. ‘I was going over to have a chat with your mother.’
‘Chat’ was a word unknown to Gloria’s natural vocabulary, and although she wasn’t normally sensitive to extreme linguistic nicety she recognised it as another sign that she mightn’t be going to do too well. She noticed, too, that she had used an unfortunate tense – and it was a slip which Harry’s swift grin showed he hadn’t missed either. Yet Harry’s intuitions couldn’t, in these few moments, have been sharper than hers. Fleetingly she found herself in two places at once – with neither of them a field-path near Nudd. One was inside Nudd itself, and she was walking round the house with Harry in the dusk of a fatal evening, looking at pictures: an uncomprehending couple, but not indisposed to join hands. The other was the Accademia, and she was having pictures explained to her by Octavius. These two imagined places, remembered occasions, belonged to different universes.
Or not quite. And here she was confronted by – or, rather, peripherally aware of – something very difficult indeed. Harry’s impact owed a little of its momentum to Octavius, and rather more than a little of its momentum – absurd as this was – to her cousin Jake. In fact, she’d been put on skids, got on the run. Or she was like a ball in one of those idiotic gambling machines men fool around with in pubs. Down she went, bumped from one pin to another. Once started, just that happened. And there wasn’t much the ball could do about it.
‘Oh, my mother’s gone out,’ Harry was saying easily. ‘She won’t be back till supper time. You must come to tea with her tomorrow. We always have a tremendous tea on Sundays.’ He glanced around him, as if admiring the afternoon. ‘We’ll go for a walk.’ He tossed the billhook carelessly on the ground. ‘And I shan’t need that.’
They went for a walk, climbing rapidly to the down. Harry pretended that Gloria went too fast for him, and puffed and blew. He pretended they had a leash of puppies with them, and disentangled them from Gloria’s feet. But he appeared not to have in mind any recapitulation of a former occasion. For when they arrived in front of the ruined barn he hesitated and then shook his head.
‘No good there,’ he said decisively. ‘Full of harvest bugs by now. In half an hour you’d be scratching at your tummy like mad.’
It was characteristic of Harry that, having conjured up this not wholly polite image, he didn’t cap it with anything further in a similar vein. Gloria wondered whether his talk was equally impeccable when he was out with village girls. The thought of village girls was displeasing – but what it gave rise to, she had to admit, was a jealous rather than a misdoubting reaction. There were a good many frank-hearted young women in the neighbourhood, and she had come to acknowledge that it would be silly to think of Harry Carter as a virginal soul. Of course he’d been with some of them. She found herself wondering whether Octavius Chevalley had ever been with a girl at all. But these were gross speculations, which she resolved not to pursue.
‘Harry,’ she asked abruptly, ‘how’s Australia?’
‘Australia?’ For a moment Harry seemed uncomprehending. ‘Oh, yes! It may come to that yet. But at least not for a while.’
‘It sounds attractive in some ways. Marvellous surf.’
‘Not if you’re hundreds of miles in the interior, wrenching your guts out clearing scrub.’ Harry had glanced at her swiftly and curiously, as well he might. It was mysterious to Gloria that she had brought this subject up.
‘I think you should go,’ she said decidedly. ‘And take care not to get married first. An Australian wife’s essential, if you hope to settle down.’
‘Nonsense!’ Harry shouted this word to the winds. His spirits were rising, and she sensed him as very sure of himself. ‘I shall marry you, my dear. And, as you’re a great heiress, we’ll buy a sheep station six times the size of Warwickshire, and live happily ever after.’
There was something about this that, at least for the moment, disconcerted Gloria very much. She couldn’t quite make out why. Of course she had herself turned on a flippant note – under an impulse rather like that which makes one grab at a slipping shoulder-strap. So perhaps it was no more than that Harry was being flippant in return. It was certain that, no time ago, he had seemed serious in his wooing her with talk about Australia. Now he was making a joke of it, and she felt it to be a joke beneath which there lay nothing substantial at all. What had happened in the interval? Well, she had indeed become, with unexpected promptness, what Harry called a great heiress. Perhaps he was saying – being so cockily confident as he was – that they’d marry without buying an Australian sheep station; that they’d make do with buying Warwickshire instead.
But that was quite wrong. For there were two things, and two things only, that she confidently knew about Harry. The first was the simple one that he had for her a powerful and specific appeal of a sort which she’d been brought up to regard as perilous to maidenhood. The second was just coming back to her now. She’d never buy Harry Warwickshire, or anything else in a big way. He wouldn’t let her. Some principle of pride in him – and it couldn’t be of a Satanic sort – insisted that her wealth was an irrelevance with which he’d have nothing to do. Even if there was something perverse in this – sub-Satanic, say – there was something very heady as well. Gloria had fled from Italy, having been hunted, however indecisively and ineptly, for her gold. Harry was a hunter, without a shadow of doubt. She believed he was also a suitor, which is a different thing. And her possessions didn’t come into it.
These two pieces of knowledge which Gloria had, or believed she had, about Harry Carter had only to run together to render her very vulnerable indeed. If Gloria had a Guardian Angel (although she had perhaps never so much as heard of such a being) he was certainly alerting himself for rapid downward flight as he watched this walk on a Saturday afternoon.