At the door Jean, with her hand in Mary’s, tried to remember what the other thing was that James expected her to say. “My brother and I—my brother—we hope you will be very happy here.”
“Thank you,” said Mary, and then, because she already loved this woman and must see her again, but not in a house which terrified her, “Will you come out with me in my car sometimes? I don’t drive fast and with you I shall be driving just to look at the beauty around us, not to get anywhere.”
Jean’s face lit up with a joy out of all proportion to the normality of the suggestion. They had no car at the vicarage. James, with his great physical strength, preferred his bike and his long legs; and in any case his brilliant classical mind was curiously inept when it came to machinery. Even had they had a car it would have been a torment to drive with him. But with this wonderful gladiolus woman it would be heaven. She had not seen the beautiful country around Appleshaw because her physical weakness was too great for walking, and she had often thought that if she could see it she might feel better. “Thank you!” she ejaculated, and she was so happy that as she turned away she seemed almost steady on her feet.
Mary waved to her and went back to the garden. She walked slowly along the moss-grown path beside the jungle that had once been a herbaceous border, her thoughts busy with Michaelmas daisies, goldenrod and peonies. In the shrubbery on the other side, when she crossed over to it, she found among the weeds japonica, guelder rose, escallonia and actually a couple of laurels, all of them grown into trees. She was afraid that the pruning and digging and replanting that were necessary were beyond Mr. Baker but he must choose his own helper. It would not be everyone who could work with him.
She went down to the end of the lawn and sat on the edge of the empty pond, close to the pink and white blossoms of the crab apple trees, and looked up at the boy with the bow and arrow, remembering the glimpse of him she had had as a child. He had waited for her a long time. She sat by him lulled almost to sleep by the birdsong and the bee hum and the warmth and scents of spring. Then twelve o’clock struck from the church tower. Twelve already? Mrs. Baker would be wanting to leave, and she got up and went toward the house. As she passed the willow tree she paused. She still had the odd feeling that there was someone there and again she put out her hand to part the branches. Then it flashed through her mind: not yet.
When she reached the kitchen Mrs. Baker was already putting on her coat and tying her scarf over her head. “I’ve prepared the veg, dear,” she said. “And I’ve stewed a few apples and made a custard. Should last you over Sunday. The fowl will be ready come one o’clock. If I were you I’d just slip along with your car to the Dog and Duck. It’ll be quiet now and suitable for a lady. In the evening it’s more noisy. Down Starling Lane, that turn by Orchard Cottage, the Randalls’ place, the cottage with the blue door. You can’t miss it.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Baker,” said Mary gratefully. “The apples and custard look good and the fowl smells wonderful. I’ll do as you say about the car.”
“That’s right, dear,” said Mrs. Baker. “See you Monday. Bye-bye.”
She went out through the back door and down the path through the kitchen garden to the door in the wall leading to some lane that Mary had not discovered yet. The thought of discovery gave her a thrill of excitement.
3
She got into her car and followed Mrs. Baker’s directions. Between the Randalls’ kitchen garden and the inn there was an orchard, with beehives under the trees. The Dog and Duck was old with deep thatch and a painted sign. The lane went on beyond it, through gilded meadows toward the green-roofed splendor of a vast beech wood. She got out of her car and went into the bar, fearful lest it should have been modernized. But it was still much as it had always been, with an old black settle beside the wide fireplace, hunting prints on the walls and a huge cat heaped on the counter. Only this counter was modern, with rows of glasses on shelves behind it and leather-topped high stools in front.
She had expected to find the bar empty but it was full of a pleasant blue haze of tobacco smoke and two men, one of middle height, stocky and strong, the other tall and broad-shouldered, were smoking their pipes and talking to Jack Beckett behind the counter. A wonderful Labrador lay on the floor beside the tall man. The talk was of country things and Mary would have liked to stay unseen for a minute or two and listen to it, but though she moved quietly she was not a woman who could hope to enter a room unobserved and Jack Beckett at once stared at her in frank and delighted admiration. His three last remaining teeth, two top and one bottom, gave as much charm to his wide smile as the first three of a baby. The other two men were instantly on their feet. The one with the dog stepped back, his dog moving with him as though they were all of a piece, but the other turned toward her with a half-smile and a glance that took her in very efficiently indeed. He fetched a stool and placed it for her with an air. He had gray eyes, sandy hair and a broad pleasant snub-nosed face. She could not place him at all. His clothes were those of a well-to-do farmer but not his well-kept hands or his sophistication.
“I did not mean to disturb you,” she said in her unusually deep, cool and beautiful voice. “I came to thank Mr. Beckett for saying I may garage my car here.”
“Ah, it’s Miss Lindsay!” roared Jack Beckett. He had a very gentle and sucking-dove roar and Mary instantly liked him. “I thought as how it might be you, ma’am. What will you take, ma’am?”
Mary had not meant to take anything but she felt at home with these men, even with the one who moved all of a piece with his dog and whom she had not looked at yet, though she was very conscious of him. He seemed to have a gift of stillness. She sat on her stool and said, “A gin and lime, please.”
“Paul and I are practically your next-door neighbors, Miss Lindsay,” said the stocky man.
“If The Laurels can be said to have neighbors,” said the tall man. “It’s a place apart. A deep sort of place.”
He had come back to his stool beside her, with his dog, and for the first time she turned to look at him. His face was disfigured with burns. Plastic surgery had done what it could for him but even so the marring of his face was grievous, and he was blind. She felt no sense of shock, rather of familiarity, as though she turned back, or forward, she did not know which, to John. Yet this tall untidy man with his short rough graying hair and bowed shoulders was physically not in the least like John, always so immaculate and straight and easy on the eye. Nevertheless he was like him in some way that she could not define yet, and her sympathy and liking went out to him. And he was right about The Laurels being a place apart.
“I liked your cousin,” he said. “In her good times she used to ask me to tea with her in that parlor that feels like a cave under the sea. Always cherry cake and tea so strong it nearly knocked you down. And in her bad times Mrs. Baker used sometimes to fetch me to help get her upstairs to bed. She used to kick our shins like a good un.” His boyish grin made her realize that he was not as old as he looked. “But whether it was the good or bad times, I liked her tremendously. She never complained.”
“I’m glad you liked her,” said Mary. “Do you live in the house at the bottom of my garden?”
“No, that’s Roger Talbot on your right.”
Mary smiled at the stocky man. “Nice to have you there.”
“Long may you think so,” he said. “My wife and I are quiet enough but the kids are at the tree-climbing stage. Should they fall out on your side of the wall I hope you will wallop them and send them back again.”
Children, thought Mary, that’s it. Children in the trees looking at me with hostile eyes. A hostile child under the willow. They played in my garden when Cousin Mary was ill. It’s their garden. Aloud she said, “I like children. I taught them for years.”
“You don’t look like a schoolmarm,” he assured her.
“Don’t I?” said Mary coolly. “I’m sorry. I’d like to look like what I admire.”
He laughed. “Touché,” he said.
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They turned then and drew Jack Beckett into their talk, until there was the sound of a car outside and Mary and Roger Talbot turned to look out of the window. A smart shooting brake had just drawn up and a large man in immaculate tweeds was emerging from the driving seat. Mary saw only his back but she had an immediate impression of opulence and power. Two others, similarly attired, were climbing out behind. The two men with Mary wordlessly communicated and Paul spoke. “Jack, I’ll take Miss Lindsay out at the side door and show her the barn. It’s the one where you keep your car? I know. It’s this way, Miss Lindsay.”
The side door led through a short passage to the yard at the side of the inn, bounded on one side by the orchard. “That was Hepplewhite, the squire,” explained Paul. “He’s in the city, directing companies or something of that sort, but I never do understand what these blokes do in the city. He spends his weekends here, shooting with his cronies, and they come and have drinks before lunch. Forgive us for hurrying you out as we did. The fact is you would have been cornered. You’d have had to dine there tonight and play bridge afterward. He’d have sent the car to fetch you. He wouldn’t have listened to any excuses. He’s not a listener. Neither of them is. They’re most awfully kind but their hospitality seizes you unawares like a spring trap. You know?”
“I know,” said Mary. “Thank you. I’d rather not be trapped on my first day, and I didn’t come here to play bridge.”
They crossed the road to the orchard and leaned on the gate, the scent of the apple blossom coming to them on the light wind. From the crimson of the unopened buds to the white of the fully opened petals, every gradation of rose color was present in flights and drifts on the lichened branches. The apple trees were old and it seemed a miracle that such misshapen age could support this airy lightness.
“Just by our fence, where our garden joins the orchard,” said Paul, “there’s a fallen tree lying in the grass. But it still has a bit of root in the ground and every spring it breaks into blossom and every autumn it bears apples.” He spoke with awe, from the depths of himself, as only one man or woman in a thousand has the power to do. What did that apple tree mean to him, she wondered, and what did this orchard mean? Far more than it meant to her, though she realized that each spring that she lived here it would mean more.
“I’d like to ask you something,” he said suddenly. “If you haven’t come here to play bridge then why have you come?”
The question shot out at her with a directness which she might have thought rude had she not already begun intuitively to understand this man. Suffering had had an effect with which she was familiar. The refusal of self-pity and despair had turned it from lead to fire, burning up the subterfuges and dishonesties below the surface of the inherited veneer of manners and thought that most men and women think are their true selves, and the veneer with them. He was forged now all of one piece, as he and the dog were of one piece, and spoke as he thought, rude or not. The blindness had helped perhaps. She imagined that if you were blind you must either live shut within yourself or seek with others a true and honest communication. Nothing else would be much use in the dark. It was this true communication he was seeking with her, and she with him, and the suddenness of this conversation did not surprise her. Paul was a man to know what he wanted instantly, and if it was right that he should have it he would take it at once if he could. She knew now why he reminded her of John, for coupled with John’s courtesy, as with Paul’s gift of stillness, there had been an alarming honesty, and his capacity for abrupt action, based on lightning decisions of great insight, had made him a naval commander of genius. She would find other likenesses presently, she believed, for already she was as much humbled before this man who was so much younger than herself as she had been years ago before the man who was so much older. With no premeditation she gave him the truthful answer to his direct question.
“Now that I am here, I realize it is to get to know Cousin Mary, Miss Lindsay, whom I saw only once in my life when I was a child, and also to get to know a man who died in the war.”
He seemed to think this a reasonable answer and asked another question. “Before you realized that why did you want to come?”
“For a reason that still holds good. To get to know an England I’ve never known, the England of the deep country, before there’s no deep country left. And also, and this must sound odd to you, it was an act of obedience. I had to come.”
He turned from the gate. “We must get your car, and ourselves, out of the way before the squire comes out. You’ve not lived in the country before?”
“Never. I’m a Londoner.”
“There are people here you’ll like,” he said. “Miss Anderson, one of the three bravest people I know. The other two are Colonel and Mrs. Adams. When they turn up, love them, please.”
“How do you know I am capable of love?” she asked as they walked toward her car. “Steady affection perhaps.”
“If by steady you mean faithful, there you have it; the kernel of love. I imagine men long for God because of that unchanging faithfulness. The rock under the quicksands. The Psalms are full of it.”
When she had put away the car and they were walking down the lane she said, “You are very direct. You haven’t wasted time talking about the weather.”
“Did you want me to?”
“No, but most people have sufficient caution to hover on the brink a bit before they take a header into friendship.”
“The sighted do. The blind don’t have to. One of the advantages of having been blind for a good many years is that you know almost at once what people are like, and if you’re going to get on. Physical appearance, and trying to use it as a relief map to show you the lay of the land, can be distracting. Without the map intuition comes alive. But blindness has its disadvantages and one of them is that you don’t know the time. Should you say I am going to be late for lunch?”
“It’s a quarter to one,” said Mary.
“Dead on time,” he said, and there was profound relief in his tone.
“When I arrived yesterday,” said Mary, “a young woman with beautiful dark hair was painting the front door turquoise. Is she your wife?”
“She’s my wife.”
He spoke in level tones but she was aware of bewildered grief. They had reached a small wooden gate opening from the back garden of Orchard Cottage into the lane, and the dog stopped. His master stopped too, as though at a voice, for the dog had not touched him.
“I think that’s the most wonderful dog I’ve ever seen,” said Mary.
“She’s a good dog,” said Paul, his hand on the dog’s back. “We don’t need the harness in the country, I know my way about so well, but you should see us dashing through the traffic in Westwater, when I have to go to the dentist or something. She and I trained together at Exeter. She’s my second. When Sam died I thought it was the end, but Bess is even more marvelous. She’s still only five years old.” Mary could sense the relief. When the other half of your being can expect a span of life less than a quarter of your own the passage of time must be something you have perpetually to endeavor to forget. “Look out! Mr. Hepplewhite. Good-bye. I believe my wife means to ask you to tea. You’ll come, please.”
He and Bess were inside the garden with the gate shut, and she was leaving the lane for the green with long easy strides. The advantage of long legs was that you could hurry without appearing to do so. Paul had heard the car before she did, but she could hear it now behind her and feel three pairs of male eyes fastened on her back. She was used to this, and sorry for the interested parties when she turned around, for her back was a good twenty years younger than her front. She escaped into The Laurels with a marvelous sense of safety. As Paul had said, you could go deeply in, finding refuge like a cony among the rocks.
Chapter V
1
MARY was sitting under the willow tree writing letters. She sat on her traveling rug on the grass, her back against the tree, for the necessary garden chairs were still
only on her priority list. It was still only Sunday morning, yet already she felt that she had lived here for years, so happy was she in this place. Her writing pad dropped to the ground and she let it lie there, for except in the evenings and the mornings this was the last lazy day that she would be likely to have for some time. The next few weeks would be full of business, workmen in the house, decisions to make and comings and goings of all sorts. She would enjoy this idleness while she could. It was quiet under the willow tree, for the Sunday bells were momentarily silent. At seven forty-five this morning they had been clamorous and had not allowed her the late sleep she had planned. They were fine bells, deep-toned, loud and lovely, and she had listened to them with acceptance, but their summons had been imperious, bringing before her mind’s eye the strong square tower against the sky. The church was too big to be exactly a comfortable thing to have just over her garden wall. Who had built it and why had they made it so tremendous? She sat for some while in peace, aware of the trunk of the tree behind her back and the ground beneath her as living presences. Her hands moved over the rough grass and she could smell it, and smell the damp growing smell of the tree. I’m going to spend this day entirely alone, she thought, absolutely alone in this peace and quiet. It was the last time she started a fine day in the country with any such expectation.
And then the bells began again and they sounded louder here than they had in her bedroom. They smote upon her temples and her eardrums and she sat enduring them as one endures the crash of thunder and the roar of wind, with exultation but also with alarm. The noise ceased, the clock struck eleven, and in the silence that followed she must have dozed, for suddenly she was awake and painfully alert. There was not a sound to be heard but she knew she was not alone in the garden. She waited, and beyond the willow tree she was aware of a shadow. This is bad, she thought briefly, but not as bad as if, yesterday, I had entered upon the child. Now the child comes to me.