‘It’s very kind of you, Mrs Green, but I’ll be all right, I will really. Thank you for bringing the letter. You shouldn’t have troubled. Tomorrow would have done.’
‘That’s all right. Well, if you’re sure … I’ll be up in the morning to help you with the house. Good night, Miss Gilly.’
‘Good night.’
I went back to the cooling fireside, turning the envelope over in my hand … Thick, good paper, typed. The crest of some firm, vaguely familiar to me. I opened it. It held a folded document with an official look to it; another, smaller envelope; and a covering letter bearing the same crest. I read it.
Sat down slowly. Read it again.
It was from Martin and Martin, the solicitors in Salisbury.
They were forwarding a letter, they wrote, from my cousin Miss Geillis Saxon, who, they regretted to inform me, had died suddenly a month ago on July 16th, of pneumonia following influenza. With Miss Saxon’s letter they were enclosing a copy of her will, in which I would see that she had named me as her sole beneficiary, leaving me her house in Wiltshire ‘with its entire contents’. The accompanying letter had been lodged with them when the will was signed, and Miss Saxon had instructed them to forward it, together with a copy of the will, to reach me on August 12th, 1948. She had presumably meant the copy of the will ‘for information only’, but by a sad coincidence (they wrote) her death had occurred shortly before the specified date. They were sorry to be the bearers of such sad news, but they hoped to be of service to me in the future. If I would let them know when I would like to travel down …
My fingers seemed stiff. I opened the other envelope. I had never seen Cousin Geillis’s handwriting, but somehow, characteristically, it spoke of her.
My dear Geillis,
I have never given you my address, because I live very much to myself these days. But if you like to come now to Wiltshire, the house is called Thornyhold, and is on the edge of Westermain Forest. The train stops at St Thorn and the taxi knows the way.
There is no such thing as coincidence. The house is yours whenever you need it, and when you read this letter that is now. Don’t leave it too long before you come down. You will find everything here that you have most wanted. Take it and be welcome, my child. Look after Hodge. He will miss me.
Your Cousin Geillis.
The last of the ashes fell in with a soft puff of grey smoke. I was staring at the date of Cousin Geillis’s letter. It had been written more than six months ago, on December 9th, 1947.
5
I can hardly remember now what I had imagined Cousin Geillis’s home to be like. The reality is always very different from a mental forecast, and inevitably wipes out the false image. I believe I had envisaged something of the picture-postcard variety, something romantic, rustic and picturesque, an ancient thatched cottage cosily nestling in flowery woodland, with briar roses thick in the garden hedge, and lilacs crowding beyond the chimney pots. Something, in fact, conjured up from the country memories of childhood.
The name itself should have suggested that Thornyhold was not in the least like that. It had, as I discovered, once been the agent’s house on a big estate long since broken up into several farms. A timber village had been built some miles away, where the Forestry Commission had bought its acres and planted its regimented softwoods. Two long driveways ran through ancient woodlands, to meet at their centre in a space where once the great house had stood. Here, there was now only a pile of huge sandstone blocks, with balustraded steps rising to an empty doorway, and one wall still standing with its window frames rustling with the boughs of trees. The balusters, the carving over the windows, and beyond, the ruined archway and weedblanketed cobbles of the stableyard, told of a once-stately Georgian mansion. But everything, including the last scion of the family, had long since gone. Apart from the foresters’ village, which went by the name of Westermain, all that remained was the gatehouse, a tiny structure split in two by the main gates, and the former estate agent’s house, deep in the woods, where Cousin Geillis had lived.
I saw it first on a dampish day of September, almost a month after my father’s death. All was settled, his simple will read, the main part of the vicarage furniture either sold, or left in place: some of the larger pieces had gone with the house for the last two or three incumbents, and I left others, knowing that Thornyhold still held all Cousin Geillis’s furniture. I had saved the few pieces that my father had treasured, and these were in store and waiting till I saw what room there was in my new home.
I went down by train. Our old car had long since begun to cost too much in repairs, and besides, I would no longer be entitled to the petrol allowance my father had claimed. So it was sold with the rest. For all I knew, Cousin Geillis had had a car, and this would be mine along with Thornyhold itself. But that could wait. All I wanted now was to get away. The sale of my effects had gone through more quickly than I had expected, so, laden only with a couple of suitcases, and the ring of keys I had asked the Salisbury solicitors to send me, I set off for St Thorn and that taxi that knew the way.
It did. When I gave the driver the address he paused with one of my cases half lifted into the boot.
‘Thornyhold, is it? Miss Saxon’s house? The old lady that died a few weeks back?’
‘Yes.’
He shut the boot on the cases, and opened the back door for me. ‘A relation of yours? I’m sorry about that.’
‘A cousin. My mother’s cousin, actually. You knew her, then? May I sit in front beside you, please?’
‘Sure. You’ll be more comfortable there anyway.’ He saw me seated, shut me in, and took his own place. ‘No, I wouldn’t say I knew her. But she always took my taxi when she came home from travelling. A great traveller she was till the last year or so. Used to tell me about it. All over the world she’d been.’ A sideways glance, carefully incurious. ‘Nice for them that can do it. But she never did look all that comfortably off, even.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said.
I would, though. Cousin Geillis had by no means left a fortune, but she had left me what would, along with my father’s few hundred pounds, keep me modestly for some time. Very modestly. All I wanted, wealth abounding. I looked out of the taxi window as the houses dwindled back and the road began to wind between high, banked hedges full of ivy and holly glistening with recent rain, and the red berries of honeysuckle twining through pillowfight drifts of traveller’s joy. I hesitated. But I was going to live in this part of the world, and people might as well know what, in any case, they would soon find out. ‘I haven’t seen Miss Saxon since I was a child, but I was her only relative in this country, so she left the house to me. I’m going to live there.’
‘Well,’ said the driver, and I could hear the reservations in his voice, ‘it’s a nice part of the world. A bit lonesome, perhaps, down there in Westermain. You got a car, I suppose?’
‘Not at the moment. Did Miss Saxon have one?’
‘Never saw one, but I wouldn’t know. Only ever saw the old lady when she came home by train. Folks from that side of the forest do their shopping at Arnside. But if you should be looking round for something, I might be able to put you in the way of a good second-hand car. Hannaker’s garage, other side of the cinema, next to the White Hart.’
‘Well, thank you. It depends a bit on whether I can get petrol coupons.’
‘You ought to get those easy enough, living right out there, and I’d see you all right, no problem.’
‘Well, thank you,’ I said again. ‘My name’s Ramsey, by the way. You’re Mr Hannaker?’
‘Yes. Call me Ted.’
I sat back. ‘You spoke of the forest. That’s Westermain?’
‘Yes. We’re coming into it now.’
I knew, of course, that ‘forest’ did not necessarily mean woodland, but some tract of unfenced land, a wild uncultivated space which had formerly been wooded. The road now left the hedges and farms of the tilled countryside and ran, narrow and white, across moorland wher
e rusting bracken competed with straggly heather and wide patches of reedy green where cattle grazed. Clumps of fir trees, with their rooks circling like smoke, stood up against the sky. The driver pointed. On the horizon half a mile away I saw the delicate, trotting shapes of deer. Rabbits scuttled for cover into the thickets of gorse. There were copses of birch, with their leaves round and golden as sequins. Not a house in sight. Then the road dipped gently, to thread a hump-backed bridge over a smooth river.
‘That’s the Arn,’ said Mr Hannaker.
‘And is that Arnside beyond those trees? I thought I saw a building of some sort.’
‘No. Arnside’s a few miles yet, right beyond Westermain. What you saw was just the old abbey, St Thorn. It’s a ruin, nothing left now but a few pillars and some broken walls, and maybe a couple of fallen arches.’ He laughed briefly at his own joke. ‘Nothing worth keeping up, but it must have been pretty once. Here we are now. Westermain woods.’
The road curled upwards from the bridge to run between ranks of trees. These were huge and seemed very old, standing back from the road among the tall autumn bracken. They were mainly oaks, with beech and elm and smaller trees like holly interspersed. Where trees had fallen they had not been cleared, and lay in thick tangles of creeper and fern. Fifty yards or so in from the road’s edge the forest looked as impenetrable as a jungle. So for perhaps another mile. Then we were running alongside a high, crumbling wall, built of stone in more expansive days, with broken gaps where the great trees had grown through them and where encroaching ivy, eating the mortar from the joints, had pulled them down.
‘Thornyhold,’ said the driver.
He slowed, and the taxi turned in through the massive ruinous pillars of the main gate.
To either side of this crouched a tiny house. The eighteenth-century passion for symmetry had split the gatehouse into two. The pieces were twins, mirror images. There were lace curtains in the windows, a suburban touch which looked oddly out of place in the country.
In the window to our left, as we passed, the curtain twitched slightly, then fell back into place. In its twin window on the right the lace hung still, but behind it, vaguely, could be seen a movement, as of someone rocking to and fro, to and fro.
Then the taxi was past, and gathering speed up the long winding avenue.
‘Funny sort of house that, I’ve always thought,’ said Mr Hannaker. ‘Looks as if there’s only one room on each side. Some old-time landlord’s idea of a joke. Do you suppose they live on one side and sleep on the other?’
‘Goodness knows. Do you know who lives there?’
‘Name’s Trapp. She’s a widow woman. All the old lady ever told me. Keep themselves to themselves, the folks over this way.’
‘It’s a long driveway, isn’t it? Is it far now?’
‘Another quarter mile, maybe. There’s a road off soon, but you won’t see it till you’re right on it … Here we are.’
He swung the wheel as he spoke, and we turned left into a narrower driveway. ‘There’s the gate. You expected?’
‘Not that I know of.’
The car stopped. He came round to open my door, and jerked his head sideways.
‘Reason I asked, there’s smoke from the chimney.’
‘Is there?’ I straightened and looked.
The driveway here came to a dead end, with a smallish turning circle for the car. The surface of the drive was pitted and green with disuse; the marks made by the taxi were the only signs that a vehicle had ever been this way. On either side the woods crowded in, to meet where a hugely tall thorn hedge barred the way. Set deep in this hedge was a small wicket gate that had once been white. The quickthorn met over it, and had been cut and trained to form a thick green archway. Beyond the hedge nothing could be seen of the house but a roof of grey slabs patched golden-green with lichen, and rosy with thick tufts of houseleek huddled below the tall chimney-pots.
From a chimney on the left a faint veil, of heat rather than smoke, slowly climbed towards the boughs of the beeches that towered beyond.
‘The lawyers must have arranged for someone to come down and open up for me,’ I said.
‘Well then, that’s all right,’ said Mr Hannaker, ‘I’ll just see you in, though. Your heavy stuff coming later, I reckon?’
‘Yes. That’s very kind of you. Thank you.’
He pushed open the wicket gate for me, picked up my cases and followed me up the path.
The path was straight, brick-paved, and only about ten yards long. This was the north side of the house, and the strip of garden between hedge and house wall would get very little sun. Even so, the garden was something of a shock. Though I had learned from the lawyers that Cousin Geillis had been poorly for some weeks before her death two months ago, I had somehow still expected the place to be as she had described it to me, but at that time of year a few weeks’ neglect can soon transform a richly flowering garden into a mass of weeds and seed-heads, and the tidiest brick path into a slippery ribbon of moss and algae. To my dismay the house, which should have held up longer against the lack of care, had something of the same dilapidated look. There must have been a storm not long ago, for the windows were hazed with leaf-blow from the encircling trees, a roof gutter sagged under a tangle of fallen twigs, and from that and other places dripped the water of a recent shower. Everywhere were the damp drifts of autumn’s first leaf-fall. At the windows the curtains hung crookedly, as if pulled back by a careless hand, and on the sill of what was presumably the kitchen window – to the left below that smoking chimney – I could see pots full of dead and dying plants.
Small things. Inevitable things, soon to be put right by an owner’s care. The air of depression and neglect that hung over the place could not hide the fact that the house was handsome. It was stone-built, and, though not large, was well proportioned, with an attractive door and long-sashed windows. No doubt the south face would be better still, and certainly more cheerful, with the ‘best’ rooms overlooking the main garden, where the trees stood back to let the sunlight in.
There was a knocker on the door, a lion’s head mouthing a ring. It should have been bright brass, but now showed a dull olive-green. I had the key in my hand, but that smoking chimney made me hesitate. I put a hand to the door-knob.
Before I could turn it, the door opened. A woman stood there. About ten years older than I was, I guessed. (I was twenty-seven.) Not so tall; fresh-faced, blue-eyed and brown-haired, with smooth rosy cheeks, and the wrong red too thick on a small mouth. In spite of stocky figure and thick ankles she was pretty, with dimples at the corners of a mouth very ready to smile.
She did not smile now. Her gaze went straight past me, with scarcely a pause, to the driver, and the cases which he had dumped beside me on the step, then to the open wicket beyond which the taxi waited.
‘Good afternoon,’ I began.
‘Good afternoon, miss.’ Her voice, with its country accent, was soft and breathless. ‘It’s Miss Ramsey, is it?’
‘Yes. And you are—?’
‘I’m Agnes Trapp, from the gatehouse. I was cleaning up. I wasn’t expecting anyone today.’ She sounded flustered, and all the time she was speaking her eyes flickered from me to the driver, to the taxi by the gate, to the two heavy suitcases, then back to me again. ‘They said – the lawyers said she’d be coming soon, but they never told me the day, and they never said there’d be two ladies. She’s in the car, is she, the old lady? I’ve only readied one of the rooms, but if you’re staying just now I can easily sort another one for you. If they’d told me – But you’d better bring her in now, and not keep her waiting in the car.’
‘Look, don’t worry,’ I said quickly, ‘it’s all right. There is only me. No one else. I’m Miss Saxon’s cousin, Geillis Ramsey.’
‘But I thought – they never said – I just thought—’ She stopped, and swallowed. Her hands plucked at the apron she wore, and she flushed vividly. The red began at the neck of her blouse, then rose, smooth and swift as the firs
t wave of the tide, right up to the hairline.
‘I’m sorry if I startled you,’ I said uncomfortably. ‘The solicitors didn’t say anything about getting someone in to open the house for me, and I wasn’t sure which day I could get away, or I’d have let them know, and they might have got things clearer. They did send me the keys, so of course I just came down as soon as I could.’ Embarrassed, I was talking too much and too quickly. As if, I thought with acute discomfort, I had caught the woman out in some dishonest act, and was myself feeling guilty in consequence, as one does. As I had always done. The feeling was familiar, and so was the placating note in my voice: ‘So please don’t worry, Mrs Trapp. I’m sure everything will be lovely, and I’m so grateful to you for coming along.’
‘Well,’ and now she smiled, a charming smile full of relief and pleasure. The flush had gone, as quickly as it had risen. ‘How silly of me. But when they said her cousin, I was looking for an old – an older lady, that is. You’re very welcome, miss, and it’s good you were able to come so soon. It’s been kind of lonely with no neighbour here in Thornyhold. We’ve been looking forward to you coming. I’ll take the cases in for you now, shall I?’
She lifted them and stood waiting while I paid Mr Hannaker. He thanked me, repeated his promise about a car, nodded at Mrs Trapp and took himself off.
6
I followed Mrs Trapp into the house. It must have been built at the same time as the great house; there were the graceful proportions of the eighteenth century, scaled down to the humbler requirements of the squire’s agent. The hall was square, with doors opening off it to left and right, and beyond the left-hand door a staircase with wide shallow treads leading up to a broad landing. At the rear of the hall was a shallow archway through which a kind of minor hallway could be seen, with a tall window showing a glimpse of trees and sky, and to the right of this another door which led, presumably, to a drawing-room. The floor was tiled, and felt gritty underfoot, and the rugs were clearly in need of a good shaking.