Vane came to my room several times over the next few days, but on each occasion his demeanour suggested that the visit was little more than a courtesy, while I, for my own part, must have made it plain enough that I had no interest in prolonging our stilted exchanges. I was vague and easily distracted – by the creak of a floorboard in the corridor, the murmur of voices from the hallway – and Vane, who was, after all, no fool, could hardly have failed to realise that it was Eleanor I wanted to speak to.
I don’t think I was capable of such insights at the time, but I see clearly now how strangely our roles had changed. Excitable, irreticent and prone to fits of weeping, I clamoured incessantly for Eleanor’s attention during her visits while she, listening intently or speaking with gentle gravity, drew me patiently back to a world I had ceased to care for. I sensed a fine judgement at work there: she seemed to know what I needed before I knew it myself, and showed considerable skill in countering my irrational resistance to her suggestions. I remember in particular how adroitly she brought me round, on the evening of my fourth day back at the villa, to her view that it was time for me to leave my sick-room and get out of the house. I was not, I told her peevishly, well enough to do so, but she was insistent.
‘I’m not asking you to go far. Take breakfast with us tomorrow, and then come down to the barn with me. You’ll feel better for the change of scene.’
‘And worse for the journey. I’ve only to stand and my legs start shaking.’
‘The more reason to set them moving. I’ll wake you at seven tomorrow.’
‘Eight o’clock would suit me better.’
‘I shall be taking breakfast at half past seven.’
‘I shall come down,’ I said grudgingly, ‘and perhaps take a turn round the garden. I very much doubt that I shall be able to accompany you to the barn.’
I saw her smile very faintly, as though with satisfaction at something accomplished, before rising from her chair. ‘We can discuss that over breakfast,’ she said.
The clock had barely struck the half-hour when I came down the next morning, but Vane and Eleanor were already at breakfast, eating in silence at opposite ends of the table. Vane rose as I entered, extending his hand in greeting.
‘Welcome back to the land of the living,’ he said with a brittle smile. ‘It’s good to have you with us again.’ He seated me in the chair beside his own and poured me a cup of coffee. ‘What will you have?’
I settled for a slice of toast. ‘We’ll soon build you up,’ said Vane, sliding the butter-dish towards me. ‘Soon put the flesh back on your bones.’
I looked down at my wrist, so thin and frail against the dense weave of the linen tablecloth, and wondered with a flash of panic whether I should ever find my place again in the solid world of everyday things. I took up my knife and began to spread the butter, trying to disguise the trembling of my hands.
There was a light tapping at the door, and a maidservant entered. ‘Post for Mr Redbourne,’ she said, holding out a letter.
‘Leave it there,’ said Vane brusquely. The girl placed the letter on the sideboard and withdrew, but she had no sooner gone than Eleanor rose deliberately to her feet, crossed the room and retrieved it.
‘Charles might want to read it now,’ she said, addressing her father over my head as she set the letter beside my plate.
The air seemed to thicken around us. Eleanor stood at my side, leaning a little inward, her body so close to mine that I felt, or imagined I felt, the warmth of it on my own skin. Vane’s face, I saw, glancing up, was rigid with suppressed fury. I picked up the letter and slipped it into my inside pocket.
‘It’s from my uncle,’ I said. ‘I’ll read it later.’
Eleanor stepped away and returned to her place. She sat down, rolled up her napkin and slipped it into its silver ring; then she leaned back, folding her hands demurely in her lap. Vane ate slowly, chewing each mouthful with a thoroughness that seemed in some obscure way to be directed at, or against, his daughter, but at last he pushed back his chair and we all rose together.
As we reached the french windows, I stood aside to let Eleanor pass, and was about to follow her out when Vane plucked at my sleeve. ‘Might I have a word with you, Redbourne?’
Eleanor stopped in her tracks and turned to face us. ‘Charles has promised to come down to the barn with me,’ she said. ‘I have something to show him.’
‘And I,’ said Vane coldly, ‘have something I wish to say to him. Perhaps you’d be good enough to leave us alone for a few minutes.’
I sensed that Eleanor expected me to respond. What should I have said, though, caught there between father and daughter on the sunlit threshold? I said nothing, and after a moment Eleanor stepped back. ‘I’ll wait for you on the path,’ she said. She flung away and strode off down the slope, her skirt swaying with the vigour of her movements.
Vane watched her until she disappeared from view behind the long curve of the shrubbery. ‘Let me advise you,’ he said, ‘not to let my daughter monopolise your time. I shouldn’t like your convalescence to be hindered by any demands she might make on your resources.’
‘I believe,’ I said carefully, ‘that she has my best interests at heart. It’s difficult to judge such matters but I suspect that her attentions have, if anything, hastened my recovery.’
‘Indeed?’ He drew out his cigarette case but paused on the point of opening it, and returned it to his pocket. ‘There’s something else,’ he said. ‘Your correspondence with your uncle … The fact is, I’d be grateful if you’d avoid any mention of my domestic difficulties when you write. I mean, I hope you won’t touch on the matter of Eleanor’s illness.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’
He gave me a crooked smile. ‘You’re a good man, Redbourne. I shall be sorry to see you go.’
I could hear the struts and slats of the veranda ticking softly as the sun heated them. Vane placed his hands on the rail and stared out across the garden, his shoulders hunched.
‘As soon as I’m strong enough—’
‘Please,’ he interrupted. ‘You mustn’t imagine that I’m hurrying you on your way. You must take your time. I won’t hear of you leaving a moment before you’re ready.’
There was a long, awkward pause. ‘If you don’t mind,’ I said at last, ‘I shall go and find out what Eleanor wants to show me.’
Vane turned slowly towards me. I imagined from his expression that he had something more to say, but he drew himself up stiffly and strode past me into the house.
I was weak, certainly, and the path to the barn was more heavily overgrown than I remembered, but the walk was not the ordeal I had imagined. At breakfast I had managed to swallow a few mouthfuls of Vane’s strong coffee, and now my spirits lifted as I followed Eleanor down, a little hesitantly but without great difficulty. My senses had been refined by my illness, the sense of smell above all, and I remember snuffing the air in a state of febrile excitement, almost overwhelmed by the heady mix – the subtle perfume of Eleanor’s hair and clothing, flowerscents wafted from the garden, the heavier undertones of vegetation bruised by my boot soles, the rich smell of cattle-dung rising from the meadows below.
And then, as she pushed back the barn door, the tang of freshly cut eucalyptus wood. I could see at once what she had been up to in my absence: just inside the doorway, in the middle of a scatter of chippings, stood a pale upright form some three feet in height, vigorously rather than cleanly sculpted, its contours unmistakably feminine.
‘Is this what you wanted to show me?’ I asked, stooping to examine the piece. It was evidently unfinished, its surfaces still rough, but it was apparent to me that Eleanor had discovered, whether in the medium or elsewhere, a new and exhilarating source of inspiration. The figure was incomplete, like a piece of damaged Greek statuary – headless and all but limbless – yet charged with vitality. Above the truncated thighs and the broad curve of the buttocks the waist narrowed and twisted sideways and backwards, the torso drawn taut against the sustaining fullness at its base; the armpits were exposed and hollowed and the breasts and shoulders raised, as though the missing arms were reaching for heaven. Not strictly naturalistic yet suggestive of a deep understanding of natural forms, it was a remarkable achievement, and all the more so in that Eleanor appeared to have had only the most basic implements at her disposal: ranged on the floor behind the sculpture were a rusted saw, a broad-bladed gouge, a large iron file and a primitive mallet crudely fashioned from a length of reddish timber.
She squatted down among the chippings and lifted her face to mine. ‘There’s no one else I can show it to,’ she said. ‘And even you … I couldn’t be sure you’d like it. You do like it, don’t you?’
‘Very much indeed.’ I wanted to reach out and touch the figure but some sense of the gesture’s subtler implications held me back. ‘It’s a wonderful piece.’
‘There’s more to be done, but only surface work. The lines of the carving are all there, almost exactly as I envisaged them when I began. And you know, Charles, all the time I was working on her I knew she was going to come out right. I can’t explain it very well, but it seemed to me that she was lodged in the wood like a tree-spirit, and that if I just let the grain guide my blade I should find her. Does that make sense?’
‘Of a sort, yes.’ I straightened up and stepped back for a longer view, conscious that she was scrutinising me as carefully as I was scrutinising her handiwork; and it was at that moment that I recognised the connection between what I was looking at and the stumpy totem she had shown me in the hayloft. It was far from obvious, because the relationship wasn’t traceable in the form itself but in what lay beneath the form – some dark, illicit knowledge of appetite and power.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, when I delicately touched on the matter. ‘From the moment I walked into the shop and saw her there, I knew I wanted to make something as strong and beautiful as she was. But you can’t just copy someone else’s work. I had to come at it my own way, and I could only do that when the time was right. This is the right time. And this,’ she added, unbuttoning the cuffs of her blouse, ‘is only the beginning.’
I dragged a chair to the doorway and, as she worked, sat staring out into the light, lulled into a state of reflective ease by the rhythmical rasp of her file. At long intervals she would break off and we would exchange a word or two but, perhaps divining my mood or perhaps simply absorbed in her task, she left me largely to my reveries. My thoughts ranged widely but I found them returning repeatedly to the walled garden at the Hall, an admired ornament to the estate in my father’s time but pitifully neglected in my own. With its cold-frames smashed, its peach trees blighted and its espaliers unpruned it had become, over the years, an emblem of my own despair. Yet Preece had fashioned his garden out of raw wilderness; all I needed to do was to restore order to a plot of fertile land cultivated by my ancestors for more than a century. Yes, I should take the garden in hand, and the orchard too; and then, why not set new fruit trees in the meadow beyond? And beyond that again? I imagined the slope as it might appear in some future spring, clouded with blossoms, or glowing red and gold in late summer as the fruit sweetened on the boughs.
I lost track of the time, but it must have been close to midday when I eventually roused myself and rose unsteadily to my feet. Eleanor was on her knees in front of the figure, her back turned towards me so that I saw, with a hot, tender shock, the small bones of her neck above the collar of her blouse. Her sleeves were rolled back to her elbows and she held the file loosely in her left hand. As I watched, she ran the flat of her other hand with a long caressing movement down the figure’s skewed flank and across the belly, dislodging a shower of pale dust; and with the action I experienced a surge of giddy exultation so intense that I reeled sideways against the warped boards of the door.
Eleanor looked round sharply. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ I answered, steadying myself as best I could. ‘Nothing to speak of.’
Back in my room that evening, I opened the top drawer of my writing-desk and took out the aboriginal girl’s bracelet. For Eleanor, I thought, shifting its small weight in the palm of my hand. I slipped it into the pocket of my outdoor breeches but I had no sooner done so than I began to wonder how she might construe such a gift, and I spent the night in a foolish agony of indecision, sleepless through hours of darkness so miserably protracted that it seemed the dawn would never come.