‘For someone who seems to crave a quiet life, you sound as if you envy her.’
This came from him after a particularly incoherent lecture from me on the wonderfulness of a life spent charting far-flung places on behalf of the War Office. We were making gentle conversation about something that was easy for me. We were talking about my cousin.
I ran a lazy hand over my hair. ‘Do I? I suppose I do envy her in a way. Since you grew up at the Manor you probably remember that your father’s old steward had seven children. My cousin is the youngest of them and the only daughter. I don’t know her brothers terribly well, but she’s terrifically bright. She studied geography somewhere very prestigious and later, by the time her father the steward died and his widow moved into that cottage, she had work as the assistant to someone important at the Royal Geographical Society. It was her apprenticeship to them that got her the part she was to play in the war. She became one of those fearfully invaluable people who worked right on the edge of things, gathering intelligence and surveys and so on and assembling it all into useful maps. I would have loved to have had something important like that to contribute. Imagine the places she must have seen.’
‘And this from the pacifist. Anyway, they’d have never let a nice young thing like you go. Work and travel of the nature undertaken by your cousin requires a rather harder breed of person. And I don’t, by the way,’ he added quickly as an afterthought, ‘mean that as a set-down. I’m fully aware that most people are capable of extraordinary courage when presented with a certain situation. But it doesn’t mean we should recklessly put every fresh generation there just to prove the point.’
We were coasting gently into a village – the next one along on the ridgetop, which housed the shop that Mrs Abbey wouldn’t use.
The change of speed prompted me suddenly to say shyly, ‘You’re being very kind.’
I saw his eyebrows lift. He might have pretended that he hadn’t understood, but he didn’t. He confided gently, ‘You didn’t actually do anything wrong, you know. At least no more than I.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But it helps that you say it.’ I nearly added ‘Captain’ to the end of that but it was hard to use his title out loud now. Instead I gave a restful sigh as the heart of the village curled into view. It was a pretty little chequerboard of communal vegetable gardens surrounded by the most uneven square of cottages I’d encountered here yet. I said wistfully, ‘I do envy her. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I envy you. You have this confidence that helps you act, secure in the belief that your judgement is sound, even if other people don’t immediately see it that way. I don’t know if it is typical of women or unique to me but either way, my confidence is always behindhand to the act. It likes to wait, to see how the event has been received before the first hint of self-belief finally, grudgingly, creeps into the scene.’
I made him laugh.
Then my exclamation made the car slow. His head turned almost at the same time as mine to see what I had seen.
The short run of houses and rough cottages that made up this village were set on a square built around rough vegetable gardens. Nestling into the wall that bounded the far corner of these gardens was the blackened hulk of what had once been a communal outhouse. There were a few village boys standing about – all limbs and tanned skin and aimlessly kicking about ashes while the smell of charred wood drifted on the warm air. The smell was familiar to me. It had drifted down the valley last night.
The boys drifted down in a similar manner too, only they came to admire the car. Their answer to my enquiry of what had happened here wasn’t very pleasant. Someone had lately relieved the gardens of their vegetables and then, last night, after the agitated villagers had harvested what remained, the shed had been set alight. These gardens had not been the first to be hit like that in recent weeks, we were told, and in precisely that order. I thought it almost gathered weight for that other neglected theory about who had hit Mr Winstone; the one where he’d disturbed a passing vagrant. It was not a grateful traveller who repaid his debt of food in this time of shortages with an act of vandalism.
The other vital piece of news the boys could give us was, however, rather more beneficial for my peace of mind. This was the second car they’d seen today and the other was a black Ford ‘Y’ and it had taken the lane to the left at the end of the vegetable gardens towards Gloucester. We took the road to the right since the Colonel had no tenants in the other direction. It meant we didn’t need to pursue the driver of that car in a race to the next name on the list in the accounts books.
‘May I borrow your other great specialism?’
The Captain’s voice brought me out of a deep musing on the peculiarities of responsibility; the way this man bore the responsibility of doing what he could to manage any threat to his father’s tranquillity, set against the probability of bringing his family name deeper into this himself if he made a reckless choice. In my mind, the latter would have been something like going tearing down into the streets of a city after that man; which wasn’t, needless to say, a decision I remotely craved. I hoped the Captain knew that. Not that there would ever have been any hope of tracing that Ford in the crowded streets of the nearby city anyway, but there was always that niggling suspicion that, given what I’d just said about confidence and my capacity for uncertainty until it was proved I’d been understood, it was possible that my sudden abstraction of thought might be taken as disappointment that we were meekly leaving that man to make his escape.
With that in mind, I turned my head and said with unnecessarily brightness, ‘This sounds ominous. Which specialism is that?’
‘Did you happen to notice the stack of furniture in the barn back there? At Eddington, I mean?’
The debate about whether the Captain was imagining that I was feeling disappointment or otherwise was proved irrelevant. He wasn’t detecting anything in me and, quite simply, he wasn’t foolhardy. He knew precisely where his responsibility lay. It lay in knowing that I was not the sort of passenger to incite a man into pursuing a dashing chase and it lay in seeking to understand the details of what we had already seen.
There was a certain sharp thrill in discovering how far his intentions mirrored mine. I asked rather more seriously, ‘Did the furniture match the pieces in the house? Some of it was very good in its day.’
‘In its day?’
I explained, ‘Time, a family of boys and a leaking roof have taken their toll, I think. My dad is very severe upon any piece that would require extensive repairs. Unless, of course, it has been undertaken by his workshop, in which case it has been ‘sensitively restored by an expert’. Why do you ask?’
I saw the brief show of a smile. ‘Did Mrs Abbey happen to mention the other rumour that abounds around my brother’s name? The one that says that the hoard the policemen recovered last March was only the tip of the iceberg and he’s got vast troves hidden away yet?’
I shook my head. ‘No. But I can assure you that even if she had, you can certainly rest easy about her furniture. I don’t think a few grubby chairs and a table with a barley twist and the veneer curling off are going to amount to much of a fortune, whether it is hers or his. If she’s got your brother’s wealth hidden away somewhere, it isn’t in the furniture.’
‘And the paintings? It doesn’t take an expert to deduce that the pair in the living room were fairly shabby, but the one on the kitchen wall …? I saw it as we passed down the hall.’
We were moving smoothly down through a sequence of hard bends. There was a sort of magnetism in the steadiness of his concentration on the road ahead. This narrow dip before the coming rise was the head of the long valley that housed my cousin.
‘Was there a dark sort of landscape practically hanging in the smoke above the stove? I didn’t really notice it, which means it must have been modern. Dad has coached me into being very severe upon anything less than about a hundred years old. It’ll take me a lifetime to undo that training. You sound as if you’ve got a better eye.’
He told me plainly, ‘My mother was a collector. But all that aside, it fascinates me that Mrs Abbey hasn’t mentioned this particular myth in the course of her manoeuvrings. I would give quite a lot to know whether or not I should be taking that detail as reassuring.’
My silence obviously communicated rather more than it ought.
I felt his sideways glance as we reached a crossroads where the main road sliced across our little lane. It was being travelled by about five cars and a bus. He was amused. He was grinning a little as he remarked, ‘Don’t concentrate so hard on looking calmly detached, Emily. You’re not teetering on the brink of being dragged into a treasure hunt, I promise. I called it a myth and it is. The rest of the stories about what John did died with him and they can stay there. Sometimes I feel …’ A hesitation. ‘Well, the truth is I feel that picking through the memories of this place is like meeting a stranger and even without the deep complication of managing my father’s varying wishes, it would have been a perfectly valid reason for staying away. I don’t want to know him like this.’
A quick intake of breath and an adjustment of the grip of his hands upon the wheel and that was it. He said in an altogether different tone, ‘Ready for this?’
He tipped his head at the cluster of buildings that ranged on the other side of the crossroads. They were Nissen huts laid out in two clusters around the weed-strewn concrete emplacements where anti-aircraft guns had once stood. This was the former air-raid lookout station and if Mr Winstone’s attacker was one of the local squatters, this was where he lay his head.
We weren’t actually here to harass the residents into a confession. The Captain was here under another guise. This time he really was wearing the uniform of the squire’s deputy and I simply hadn’t noticed because the difference between this and the Captain’s usual demeanour was very subtle.
The right-hand array of huts was very orderly. They even had ordinary things like a sense of community. They had collected a giant stack of rubbish and scraps of timber and I realised they were gearing up to have their own small VJ Day celebration with a bonfire. I suppose I’d been expecting the squatters’ camp to look grimly prison-like and occupied by underfed men who bore the shadows of their war experiences in every gesture, but the residents had painted nameplates on their houses and planted fragrant vegetable plots, and it was all guarded by one solitary woman who had been tasked with minding the children while everyone else was out working the fields.
She was shy and I would have sworn, even without hearing her accent, that she was a displaced Londoner. Her blank stare and the habit she had of keeping a hand on her partially opened door, ready to shut it quickly, told me that she had once lived in an area where strange men who called unannounced were more often than not the louts sent to extract a little extra rent. She took the Captain’s message that the residents were all encouraged to attend the Colonel’s meeting in the Manor farmyard tomorrow and then she confirmed with the minimum possible words that there had been no other cars visiting today, nor – answering a quick addition from me – had their vegetable gardens been plundered. It was hard to be sure she was really hearing our questions properly and not just giving an automatic negative, but we couldn’t do more.
‘Rather short and to the point,’ remarked the Captain as we returned to his car. ‘Hard to act the part of the squire’s son when only one tired-looking mother is there to hear it. I really ought to have paid more attention to the lessons of my youth and remembered that they work until dusk when they’re harvesting.’
‘And perhaps noticed that it’s the hay they’re gathering at the moment, not the barley harvest. And I think farming folk call any ripening grain ‘corn’, just for the sake of confusion.’
‘There you go, then.’
‘The Colonel isn’t going to tell them he’s evicting them, is he?’
A grimace as the car turned left onto the main road and charged upwards through the gears. Suddenly the Captain was enjoying this car. He answered my question quite as if we weren’t racing towards the brow of a hill. He said, ‘Heavens, no. My father wouldn’t want that on his conscience even if he did own the land, which he doesn’t. No. The invitation we’ve just given them is to hear an announcement my father intends to make of an equally significant but less tyrannical nature about the role he’s set to play in their long-term employment.’
The next junction took us back onto the narrow lane towards the village. It was the same route I’d walked with my case from the bus stop. I thought I saw a glimpse of Freddy when we passed through the little dip with the farmstead and all the horses. Then I saw a raven above a hedgeline.
I was just running on to saying something mindless about it when the man beside me abruptly said, ‘You’re obviously too discreet to ask, so I’ll just have to tell you. The reason why my father came back today is because we Langtons are in as bad a state financially as the rumour merchants say and we’re going to have to cut and run while we still can. The estate further down the valley that belonged to my uncle has gone already and we think we’ve got a buyer for the Manor. Father’s going to explain some of this to the estate workers and tenants at his meeting tomorrow.’
The car slowed to a crawl as we took the turn down through the village triangle, past the terrace of workers’ cottages and round towards the dark shadow cast by the barn that housed the machinery.
The engine died. In the silence, the Captain added, ‘That much is soon going to be common knowledge, but this part isn’t, so please don’t let it go further. My father is selling the estate to a timber merchant.’
‘Not a farmer?’
‘No. No one wanted it. And even this fellow hasn’t signed and sealed the deal yet, so don’t go scaring the villagers. There’s a scheme in place that will allow our tenants to buy their houses at a sensible price and Hannis will oversee the work to finish the harvest, so there’s employment for now. But, in all honesty, I’m not sure how it’s all going to change in the long run. People will say we should fight tooth and nail to meet the mortgage on this place, but the son who valued the estate and understood it as much as my father does is gone and let’s just say that my salary isn’t capable of keeping that many people afloat on a debt of this scale. We’ve got to get out for our own sake and, if we want to do it cleanly for the sake of everyone else, we’ve got to do it now.’
He seemed to be waiting for me to speak, so I said the first thing that came into my head. I said in a very small voice, ‘You keep putting me in a very peculiar position of trust by telling me these things and I still don’t quite understand why.’
‘Don’t you?’ he asked unhelpfully. I was thinking of the concession he’d made about the cause of his slight limp on the stairs this morning, amongst other things.
Then he climbed out and came round to drag open my door. ‘Six o’clock,’ he commented as I joined him in the still air of the yard between this barn and the older one with the pockmarked stone that was presently shining like a buttercup.
‘Teatime,’ I replied, for want of anything better to say. He agreed. And then he very obviously didn’t say anything else. His gaze ran over the utterly barren beds of his father’s vegetable garden.
His ill-concealed hint made me smile. I said suspiciously, ‘Are you waiting for me to offer to cook your dinner?’
He grinned. ‘If, by asking that, you’re implying that you really are willing to consider catering for the masses, give me your key and I’ll walk down and fetch some of your cousin’s stores.’ I thought he was rather overestimating my culinary skills. Or perhaps this was a tactful way of avoiding that uncomfortable discussion about how safe I might feel at that cottage on my own this evening because he was already saying, ‘Go on. I can save you that much labour, at least. You don’t want to walk all the way down there and back up again after the day we’ve had, do you?’
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘But I didn’t begin the day by requiring the assistance of a walking stick.’
Amusement jerked his head aside and fixed his gaze on nothing. A curve plucked at the corners of his mouth as he said, ‘That wasn’t my cane, Emily. I thought you’d been sharp to spot my twinge and now I know. The stick belongs to my father and I was merely the porter charged with carrying it along to his room with his coat. Anyway, the real motive behind my current offer to jog down the hill is that it’s the sitting down and doing nothing that’s really murder. Walking doesn’t hurt at all, and it helps to prove it to myself every once in a while.’
I remembered what he’d said about his hospital stay and having to remember how to walk and was sorry. His attention returned to me. He saw the question I wasn’t bold enough to ask. He told me simply, ‘I caught a bullet. In London of all places, after coming through the war relatively intact. Put like that it sounds rather close to your idea of unending conflict, doesn’t it, but actually it was pretty undramatic and the real damage was caused by the tourniquet in the form of a belt that some helpful passerby twisted about my right thigh. They did it to stem the flow, where a good firm wad of something and a bit of pressure would have done the job perfectly well. Unfortunately, I wasn’t exactly in a state at the time to give my own instructions. But I am now and I think you really would prefer to keep my father company while I run our errands, wouldn’t you?’
I really could take a hint when I heard it. ‘Well …’ I began.
‘Yes?’
‘If it really is six o’clock – might I use your telephone to call my cousin?’
‘Of course,’ he said crisply. ‘The telephone is … well, you know where it is, don’t you?’
And with another disorientating glimpse of understanding that revealed just how unselfconscious I’d grown in his company, he was near enough to put out his hand to take the key from my fingers just as soon as it began to emerge from my handbag.