A Few Green Leaves (18 page)

‘We mentioned him, of course. And she said again that I might keep an eye on him at the cottage.’

‘That was somewhat ambiguous, wasn’t it? Or was she being sarcastic? Does she know about you and Graham?’

‘There isn’t all that much to know. I don’t know how I feel about him.’

‘How does
he
feel about you?’

‘Oh, we get on quite well together,’ said Emma evasively, ‘and, of course, we have the work experience in common….’ She sounded doubtful at this and Beatrix immediately took her up on the jargon phrase ‘work experience’. What exactly did she mean by that and in what way was it relevant to a state of love between two people?

‘Oh
love
,’ said Emma impatiently. ‘I wasn’t thinking about
love
.’

‘In the Victorian novel’, Beatrix said, ‘a young woman had nothing like this. A hero could hardly share the work experience of a governess.’

‘You don’t think in
Villette
, perhaps? But that wasn’t quite what I meant – hardly to be compared with the years at L.S.E….’

‘If you made blackberry jelly you could take some to Graham, couldn’t you?’ said Beatrix, adopting a more practical approach. ‘And I dare say Tom would be glad of a pot.’

‘I can’t go taking jelly to every lone man in the village,’ said Emma. ‘And what about Adam Prince, while you’re about it? Can you see me going up to the rectory with a pot of jelly? Tom wouldn’t know what to say. And talk of the devil, here he is now, wandering aimlessly along the lane, not even picking blackberries.’

Tom seemed embarrassed at meeting the two women and murmured something about spindleberries – could Emma and Beatrix distinguish their leaves or point out the exact spot where they were to be found in the autumn? Apparently it could be of historical interest, of importance in the matter of hedge-dating.

But nobody really knew what the leaves of spindleberries looked like and Tom moved on, saying that he really ought to be getting back, there were so many things he should be doing.

‘Poor Tom, I expect he misses Daphne,’ said Beatrix, ‘although they never got on very well. Now he has no human contact at the rectory, only Mrs Dyer coming in to clean. You’ll have to take pity on him.’

‘I don’t see what I could do,’ said Emma, ‘and after all, nobody likes to be pitied.’

Beatrix glanced at her daughter, startled by a certain fierceness in her tone She wondered if Emma was pitied in the village. Judged by the harshly conventional standards of the inhabitants, she probably would be.

Tom, too – they were a pair. She smiled. Taking pity on somebody might not always be the same as that pity which is thought to be akin to love. ‘ “Pity is sworn servant unto love,” ‘ she quoted. ‘Do you know that?’

‘Who is it? Some obscure Victorian poet?’

‘No, an Elizabethan, Samuel Daniel. Minor, I suppose, but you probably know some of his sonnets.,..’ Her voice faltered, for Emma probably did not. It was sometimes a grief to her that her daughter was not better read in English Literature, with all the comfort it could give. A few sad Hardy poems, a little Eliot, a line of Larkin seemed inadequate solace.

‘We’re going round the manor this evening,’ Emma said, as if the mention of Tom had reminded her. ‘I suppose you’ll come?’ She peered down into the dark glistening mound of blackberries they had just gathered and noticed a small white grub moving among them.

‘I’ll put some sugar on these, then we can eat them raw,’ said Beatrix, who had not seen the grub. ‘Yes, I’ll come tonight.’ Great houses, even when they had seen better days, provided an agreeable link with her literary interests.

It was the usual party going round the manor, dominated by Miss Lee, who had ‘known the family’ and was, as always, very ready to point out ways in which things were different from the old days. Even the books lying on a low coffee-table in one of the rooms lived in by Sir Miles and his family drew a disapproving comment from her. ‘Horses, yes, one would expect that, but old Sir Hubert wouldn’t have had some of this rubbish in the house,’ she muttered, pointing to the latest lurid-looking paperback novel of a popular American author. ‘And Miss Vereker would
never
have allowed the girls to read this kind of stuff.’

She had doubtless forgotten that such popular literature had not been available in those far-off days, but nobody bothered to remind her of this.

‘One of the girls did the flowers,’ she went on, ‘and Miss Vereker always did the flowers in the hall.’

‘Not Lady de Tankerville?’ Beatrix asked.

‘No, her ladyship never cared for flower arranging. And Miss Vereker had such original ideas. There was always an arrangement of wild grasses in season – dried in the winter, of course – and she had a way with fir-cones.’

‘And now we come to the chapel,’ said Tom in an attempt to get away from Miss Vereker and her flower arrangements, ‘a fine late seventeenth-century building.’

The chapel was rather more than Sir Miles had bargained for when he bought the house or ‘acquired the property’, as some put it, so he had shut it up, feeling that putting it to any secular use “might bring disaster on his family. It would have been convenient to turn it into a billiard-room or even a library – though none of them were great readers – or even to pull it down, but it turned out to be a ‘listed building’ or something of that sort, with its carving that might just possibly be Grinling Gibbons, and its floor made of a special kind of rare marble. He didn’t want some retired male do-gooder or bossy elderly woman coming snooping round and threatening to ‘do’ something about it, getting up petitions and that kind of thing. So the chapel was kept shut up but could be visited by parties going round the house, as on this September evening, when the days were drawing in and it was nearly dark by half-past seven. The idea of being buried in woollen seemed quite attractive in the chilly gloom of the chapel, Tom thought as he reminded the party of the edict of 1678, just about the time when the chapel would have been built. Mr Swaine, the agent, who was officially conducting the party round the house, was keeping in the background, feeling that the rector knew much more than he did about the history of the place, though not quite as much as that woman Miss Lee, who seemed to know everything about the more recent past.

‘In Sir Hubert’s time’, she was saying, ‘they had family prayers in the chapel every morning and evening.’

‘Is Sir Hubert buried in the mausoleum?’ Emma asked, her question coming out rather too loud and clear in one of the temporary silences.

‘But of course,’ said Miss Lee with enthusiasm. ‘You must let me show you some time.’

‘And the girls, I mean the daughters, and Miss Vereker – are they also buried there?’ Magdalen Raven asked eagerly.

There was a shocked silence as Miss Lee explained about the ‘girls’ – one killed in the Café de Paris air-raid in 1941, the other now living in the South of France, and Miss Vereker, very much alive with her nephew and his wife in West Kensington.

‘Wood came here, of course,’ Tom said. ‘And Dr Plot found a particularly interesting stone in the grounds – that was his only comment on the house or garden. It had borne a shape closely resembling the female pudenda, he remembered, but did not mention this.

Beatrix was inclined to encourage Tom to tell them more about the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century associations of the house, but before she could continue on these lines the talk returned to trivialities and somebody asked Tom for news of his sister.

‘Daphne? Oh, she seems to have settled down very well,’ said Tom heartily. ‘She and her friend Miss Blenkinsop – you remember, she often used to stay here – have now acquired a dog.’

‘What sort of dog have they “acquired”?’ Beatrix asked in a dry tone.

Tom did not seem at all sure what sort it was. ‘A large one, I believe. Daphne did tell me the breed, but unfortunately I’ve forgotten what it was.’

‘They’ll be able to take it for walks on that delightful wooded common,’ Emma said, and their glances met in a kind of sympathy. Perhaps she would take a pot of bramble jelly to Tom after all, if the next lot turned out well.

‘Did you get many blackberries this afternoon?’ Magdalen asked. ‘I saw you coming back. My son-in-law likes me to get a walk every day and I nearly came out myself, then I thought it might be better to wait a day or two if many people had been picking.’

‘Miss Vereker was famous for her blackberry wine,’ said Miss Lee. ‘Old Sir Hubert used to say that it was better than….’ She paused, unable to remember the precise name of the famous French wine it had been better than. ‘Chateau something or other,’ she concluded. ‘I don’t suppose she’s able to gather many blackberries in West Kensington….’

‘If this carving is
not
Grinling Gibbons,’ Tom was saying, ‘it is certainly by one of his pupils – just look at these swags of flowers….’

But nobody was looking. The chapel was cold (‘chilly’) and musty with being shut up all the time. There was a chance to see some of the bedrooms and that was going to be much more interesting. Then, at the end of the evening, there was to be coffee at Miss Lee’s house and they were all looking forward to that. There would be tea also for those who did not like coffee or were influenced by the popular superstition that it was supposed to keep you awake.

‘As if coffee as weak as this could possibly keep anyone awake,’ Emma whispered to her mother.

‘A pity Graham didn’t join us this evening,’ Beatrix said. ‘He might have had a good influence on the level of conversation.’

‘Indeed, yes,’ said Tom, who had come up to them. ‘Dr Pettifer would have been most welcome, but of course if he’s writing a book….’

‘Oh, is he writing a book, your friend?’ Miss Lee asked. ‘What is it about?’

‘Nothing very interesting, I’m afraid,’ said Emma disloyally, but why should she be loyal to Graham? Yet as she spoke she seemed to catch the eye of Canon Grundy, in his silver frame on the piano, the light shining on his high clerical collar, and the sight of him gave rise to a slight feeling of shame. ‘I mean, it’s a rather specialist sort of book,’ she added.

‘Oh I see, not popular,’ said Miss Lee in a comfortable tone, as if relieved that she would not have to read it.

For the second time that evening Emma found herself exchanging a sympathetic glance with Tom.

As the unmistakable end of summer approached – misty mornings, the first falling leaves, the days inexorably drawing in – Graham found himself coming to the conclusion that as far as Emma was concerned he had ‘bitten off more than he could chew’, to quote a phrase his mother sometimes used (even his academic attempts at L.S.E. had come into that category, he remembered). Yet he had not exactly bitten anything off, it had been thrust at him in the form of Emma writing to him after the TV appearance. But he need not have responded – he could have ignored her letter, pretended he had never received it, if it came to that. Why had he sent that postcard? Vanity and curiosity mixed? He was flattered that Emma should have written and curious to see what she was like now. Well, he had seen and now he knew. Their meeting had
not
been the kind of amusing romantic encounter he had imagined – certainly not romantic, hardly even amusing, though she had a kind of wry wit. It had been an ‘amusing’ idea to take the cottage in the woods and he had managed to do a good deal of work, made substantial progress with his book, but the village atmosphere and Emma’s apparent involvement in its activities had proved surprisingly inhibiting. Really the whole thing had been Claudia’s fault. None of the Emma situation would have come about if Claudia’s upsetting behaviour had not coincided with the TV discussion programme and Emma’s response to it. Certainly he would not now be walking with Emma in the woods on a sultry late September afternoon after an inadequate lunch.

‘This is a part of the woods I haven’t really explored,’ she was saying. ‘I’ve always been intrigued by the name – Sangreal Copse – what do you think the origin can be? The rector says it comes from the land having belonged to St Gabriel’s college in the old days.’

‘Quite possibly, I should think,’ Graham said in a bored tone. He had not really wanted to go for a walk and now he felt he was childishly ‘dragging his feet’, another reminder of childhood days.

‘I’m sorry you didn’t come round the manor with us,’ Emma said. ‘It was an interesting evening.’

‘I was trying to finish the first draft,’ he said, ‘and didn’t want to break off.’ But really it had been the prospect of the kind of conversation and company he had met at the hunger lunch that had put him off the excursion. Also, he did not want to be seen in the village as a kind of appendage or ‘boy-friend’ of Emma’s.

‘I believe people live here,’ said Emma, changing the subject. ‘Look, through those trees.’

A low roof came into view and then another and another, revealing a little cluster of bungalows, each with its neat box-like garage.

‘How horrid!’ Emma exclaimed. ‘Not exactly what you’d have expected or hoped for, judging by that evocative name.’

‘Well, people have got to live somewhere,’ Graham said aggressively, but really, was it worth arguing the point? There was no doubt that the bungalows – one might almost call them ‘dwellings’ – were ugly and out of place.

‘So much for my romantic ideas about Sangreal Copse,’ said Emma sadly.

They walked on along a rough road which connected the bungalow dwellers with the village and then farther into the woods, where a path led through scrubby grass and mean bushy undergrowth to another low building some distance away. And suddenly there was an appalling smell. At first it was indescribable, though as they advanced closer to it Graham found himself remembering visits to his grandmother in the country and the smell of the poultry house there when he had helped to clean it out. What could it be? Neither Graham nor Emma had so far commented on the smell as if it were a kind of social embarrassment and they did not know each other well enough or were not on sufficiently intimate terms to mention it. Graham thought again of his grandmother’s poultry house, but the origin of such a stench seemed unlikely here in these bleak surroundings, yet the explanation when it came was obvious and he had been right. A gaunt wooden structure came into view and the silence was broken.