Coral Glynn (2 page)

*   *   *

On the few afternoons when it wasn’t raining and Mrs Hart slept soundly, Coral walked in the Sap Green Forest. She explored the different pathways through the woods, each of which emerged, surprisingly, into a different world: a churchyard, an abandoned aerodrome, the overgrown garden of an old house, the water meadows. The woods were not very large, she realised, but there was nevertheless a feeling of isolation in the centre of them.

One day as she emerged from the woods onto the path that led to Hart House she saw a solitary figure standing on the footbridge. It was a gloomy afternoon, slurring towards darkness, and there was something foreboding about the tall dark figure standing perfectly still on the bridge, like a sentry. Her instinct was to turn around and hasten back into the woods, and wait for the figure to disappear before she returned to the house, but she realised that she had been seen; the figure raised a hand in greeting, and kept his arm raised, as if he were hailing a cab. It was the Major.

Coral looked behind her into the wood, as if there might be a similar figure summoning her from the opposite direction, or as if there might be a figure behind her whom the Major hailed. But there was nothing, no one, just the dark craw of the forest, so she was forced to move forwards and join the Major on the footbridge.

“Hello,” he said as she approached. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Been for a walk in the woods?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said again, as if that were the only word she knew.

“It’s a shame about the weather,” he said. “Such a wet spring. Still, it must be nice for you to get out of the house.”

She was about to say yes again but stopped herself.

He looked at her then—they had both been gazing at the still-swollen water rushing beneath them—and though she felt his gaze, she did not return it, but continued to study the water, as if trying to look through it for something lost at the bottom. After a moment he looked away at the woods she had vacated and said, “I used to know the woods very well as a boy. Walk in them, and play in them. They were much larger then, and wilder. Well, not wild, not wild at all, of course, but they seemed wild to me. A child’s perspective.” He paused, as if she might comment on his memory, but she did not, so he continued. “It’s difficult for me now, to walk in the woods, the ground is so uneven. I do all right with my stick as long as it’s flat. Pathetic, really.” He tapped his cane against the railing on the footbridge.

“What happened?” Coral asked. She looked at his cane, but they both knew she was looking at his legs. He wore green tweed pants and brown leather laced boots. The boots were perfectly polished and the leather looked rich and supple; they were a lovely chestnut colour.

“My injury?” he said.

“Yes,” said Coral. “I wondered, but perhaps it is something about which you do not care to speak.”

“I suppose your being a nurse—”

“Yes?” said Coral.

“I suppose, your being a nurse, these things interest you.”

“Well, no,” said Coral. “I only wondered.”

“Most girls. Well, girls are funny about injuries, aren’t they? Damages. But I suppose nurses aren’t.”

“I only wondered,” Coral repeated, once again apparently betraying the dearth of her vocabulary.

“I damaged my right leg and the left was badly burnt. I wear a brace.”

“You seem to do very well with it,” Coral said.

“As I said, I can manage the straight and narrow, which I suppose is all a man like me is entitled to. Yet I miss the woods. I had a fort in the woods, when I was young, where I played at soldiering. I wonder what’s become of it.”

“I could help you perhaps, if you’d like,” said Coral.

“Help me with what?” asked the Major.

“Help you to walk in the woods.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s impossible. I can’t endure being led about like an invalid.”

“Of course,” said Coral. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, it’s I who am sorry, I assure you.”

Coral said nothing. A cat appeared from beneath the footbridge and sat on the bank, cleaning its paws.

“That’s Pippin,” said the Major. “Mother’s cat. He ran away when she became ill and makes himself scarce. Pippin!” he called, but the cat took no notice. “Animals are odd, aren’t they? They cope so differently from humans.”

“Yes,” said Coral.

“It’s getting dark,” said the Major. “I did not mean to interrupt your walk. You must value your time away from Mother. Like Pippin.”

“Oh, no—” began Coral, but the Major turned and walked back across the bridge, towards the house. Coral waited for him to disappear behind the garden gate before she followed. While she waited, the darkness completed itself.

*   *   *

That evening, when Coral was returning her dinner tray to Mrs Prence in the kitchen, the Major emerged from the library.

“Oh—hello,” he said, as if he were surprised to find her coming down the stairs, when it could have been no one else, unless his mother had miraculously recovered.

“Good evening, Major Hart,” Coral said.

“Yes,” he said. “Good evening, Miss Glynn. I wanted only to say to you—to tell you—that I am sorry for what I said to you this afternoon, and for the way I spoke.”

“You needn’t apologise,” said Coral. “I—”

“No, I must. Please allow me. You were being kind, and I was ungentlemanly. Do forgive me.”

“Of course I do,” said Coral.

“It is odd,” he said, “that you are more at ease with disfigurement than I. It has been difficult for me to accept how I am.”

“You are fine,” said Coral. “Truly, you are. You are alive.”

“And now I am ashamed,” said the Major. “For you are correct. I have not the slightest reason to feel sorry for myself, or to wish to be other than I am.”

“I only think of my brother—”

“Of course you do,” said the Major, “and how insensitive of me. Now you must forgive me for that as well.”

“I must return this tray to Mrs Prence,” said Coral. “I do not want to keep her waiting. And I must put your mother to bed.”

“Of course,” said the Major. “How is Mother?”

“She is fading, I think,” said Coral. “Would you like to sit with her awhile?”

The Major looked up the stairs, towards the room where his mother lay dying. “No,” he said. “We were through with one another a long time ago.”

Coral could think of no reply to this admission and so she shouldered open the door to the kitchen and descended with her tray. When she returned to the hallway the Major was gone and the door to the library was closed. She stood outside it for a moment, listening, but heard nothing.

*   *   *

Clement Hart was a solitary man, but he did have one friend, a friend of his youth, whom he loved. He had known Robin Lofting since they were boys; they had gone to grammar school together; their mothers had been friends and they often spent the summer holidays together in Tismouth, where the Loftings rented a seaside cottage. Robin still lived nearby and they met every Thursday evening for a drink or two at The Black Swan.

“How is your mother?” asked Robin.

“I don’t know,” said Clement. “The same, I suppose. How dreary it is to die like that. I’d much rather a bullet through my head.”

“That’s a cheery thought,” said Robin.

“Well, I just wish people would go when their time is nigh.”

“This is your mother we’re speaking of.”

“Yes, and you know better than anyone I’ve a right to feel as I do. I wish I had a jolly, happy mother like yours.”

“Oh, it wasn’t all lemonade and iced cakes with Rosalie.”

“Yes, but at least she liked children. Or other people, for that matter. I don’t think my mother ever met a person she liked. Including my father, of course. What a wretched woman. It’s all I can do to stop myself rushing upstairs and holding a pillow against her face.”

“Have you got a new nurse?”

“Yes,” said Clement.

“Ancient or nubile?”

“I rather like this one. She’s a nice girl.”

“Nubile?”

“You’re such an ass, Robin. As if you ever cared for nubility.”

“Nobility, perhaps. But we are men drinking in a pub, so one must say certain things, mustn’t one? For appearances’ sake, if nothing else.”

“Oh, God. I care nothing for appearances. I’d like to go away somewhere and live a hermit’s life.”

“People once had hermitages, I think. To be picturesque. They’d build false ruins and follies on their grounds. But I don’t think that happens much anymore. But you could be a hermit in the Sap Green Forest. Dolly could bring you casseroles.”

“How is Dolly?”

“Dolly never varies. That is part of her charm. Perhaps the entirety of her charm. She is a little like a dog in that way.”

“Robin, you oughtn’t compare your wife to a dog.”

“Oh, but I mean it in the nicest possible way. I love dogs. Except for Dolly’s, of course, which are thoroughly execrable creatures. They are constant in their characters, as she is in hers. I wish you would marry.”

“Why?”

“Because then we would be equal. We would both have wives. The story would be complete.”

“What story?”

“The story of us,” said Robin.

“It is complete,” said Clement. “It ended long ago.”

“But not in any formal sense,” said Robin. “The narrative stopped, but it did not really end. Did it?”

“I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about,” said Clement.

“Oh, don’t make me sad,” said Robin. “You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“But it is pointless to talk about it. It is forgotten.”

“I don’t think it is. And the fact that we are talking about not talking about it proves this.”

“Shut up,” said Clement. “Go and get us another drink.”

Robin went up to the bar and got two more pints of ale. As he sidled back across the crowded room, he saw his friend sitting alone at their little table in the dim lamplight, staring down at his two hands, which were placed before him on the table-top. He appeared to be studying them for some obscure reason, as if he might be asked to identify them from a large assortment of severed hands at some later date. Robin stopped for a moment, struck by the beauty of Clement’s sad face, and felt his love for his friend as an almost unbearable pain.

He pretended he was a waiter and placed the two glasses on the table, one before Clement and one before his empty place. “Anything else I can get you, sir?”

Clement looked up at him, and saw the love in Robin’s eyes, and looked quickly away. “Sit down, you fool,” he said.

Robin sat.

Clement had moved his hands to his lap but regarded his glass of ale with the same preoccupying concentration. “Perhaps I shall marry,” said Clement. “Perhaps I shall marry Coral Glynn.”

“Coral Glynn? Who is Coral Glynn?”

“The nurse,” said Clement. “Mother’s nurse.”

“Your mother didn’t let you marry an industrialist’s daughter. She would never allow a nurse.”

“My mother will be dead,” said Clement. “And besides, I am no longer beholden to my mother.”

“You weren’t beholden then, either,” said Robin. “You were a man.”

“I agreed to wait until after the war. It made no sense to marry at that time. Many people felt that way.”

“If you loved Jean, it did,” said Robin. “She obviously thought it made plenty of sense to marry during the war. Even if she was engaged to you.”

“Well, it is all in the past,” said Clement.

“Everything is in the past,” said Robin. “Everything we know, that is.”

“Please don’t become philosophical. It doesn’t suit you.”

Robin leant down and sipped from his too-full glass of ale, and then picked it up and drank from it. He put it down. “Are you serious?” he asked. “About marrying the nurse?”

“Of course not,” said Clement. “It was only an idea.”

“Perhaps it is a good idea,” said Robin.

“She is a lovely girl,” said Clement. “I rather like her.”

“That seems like reason enough to marry her,” said Robin. “It is more reason than I had.”

“And it is surely my last chance,” said Clement. “I will never meet another girl again, if I become a hermit.”

“You may come across some Diana in the woods,” said Robin. “You never know.”

“Oh, yes I do,” said Clement. “If Mother dies—when Mother dies—and this girl goes away, I shall become a hermit, but not in the woods. I shall become the hermit of Hart House.”

“Nonsense. The two of us will go on meeting here, and I’ll drag you up to London on occasion. You may become quite a gay roué, in fact. And Dolly and I will have you over, and Dolly will invite all her buck-toothed, pigeon-toed unmarried friends, and see to it that you marry one of them. She wants you to be married even more than I.”

“All the more reason to marry Coral.”

“How are her teeth? And her toes?”

“Perfectly normal, as far as I remember. But I have not made a study of them.”

“Perhaps you should. Or, better yet, perhaps I should. I must come and meet this nurse. I know better than anyone what kind of a girl will suit you. Or bring her to us, for dinner or something.”

“I can hardly do that,” said Clement. “She is here to nurse my dying mother, not socialise with me. And I have barely spoken to her, in any case.”

“Then how do you know you like her? I find that the way women talk, and what they talk about, matters quite a lot. Of course, Dolly only became insufferably loquacious after she said ‘I do.’ Two little words, tell-tale drips, before the deluge.”

“You are always so cruel about Dolly, yet I know you love her. I think you are cruel about her for my sake, and there is no need for that. I am happy that you love her.”

“Well, then, it is only to make you happy that I do love her. It is my way of loving you.”

This admission befuddled Clement. He said nothing.

“I will come and meet Coral Glynn,” said Robin, “and decide if you should marry her. I was right about Jean, remember, but you did not listen to me then. You listened to your mother.”

“How can you meet her? She is always in with my mother. Or down in the kitchen with Mrs Prence, or up in her bedroom. I have to lurk about like mad to encounter her myself.”