The Ivy Tree (31 page)

‘Do you know,' I said, ‘I'm quite aware that that was a
non sequitur
, but it was also a compliment.'

He looked surprised. ‘Was it?' He seemed to consider. ‘Yes, I've got it. So it was. Well, I didn't see it, but if I had I would have meant it.'

‘Fair enough,' I laughed. ‘Except that
then
you'd never have said it.'

He smiled slightly. ‘Probably not. The curse of Scotland, the padlocked tongue.' But his eyes weren't amused.

I said, before I thought: ‘Maybe. But is it any worse than the curse of Ireland; the tongue without a latch, even, let alone a lock?'

He grinned then, spontaneously, and I knew he was thinking as I was, too late, about Con. But all he said was: ‘Or the curse of England; the double tongue?'

I laughed. ‘We had to have that crack, didn't we? The old, old war. What a mercy that neither side means it . . . Do you like living in the South?'

‘Very much. I've good rooms in London, and my work takes me out as much as anyone could want.'

‘Do you think you'd want to settle permanently in London?'

We had clambered over a ridge of fallen stones, jammed by time into a bank of solid clay. Below us, round in another angle of the quarry, I could see water.

He stopped. He still had his pipe in his hand. It had gone out. He examined it carefully, but absently, as if he was not quite sure what it was. Then he stuffed it into his pocket. ‘You mean if I married Julie?'

I hadn't been ready for quite such direct dealing. ‘Yes. Yes, I did mean that. Perhaps I shouldn't have—'

‘If I married Julie, I should still have to go where my work was,' said Donald bluntly, ‘and it won't always be at West Woodburn.' He looked at me. ‘Are you trying to tell me that she'll want to come and live here?'

‘No.'

‘Ah. Well, I didn't altogether get the impression that she was wedded to the place.'

‘She's not.' I hesitated, then added, equally bluntly: ‘Nor likely to be.'

He looked at me sharply. Beside me a tuft of silvery hair-grass had fluffed into a lace of pale seeds. I ran my fingers through them, and then regarded the handful of tiny particles. I took a breath and plunged on. ‘You know, I wouldn't dream of saying this sort of thing to you, if it weren't important. You may think I'm speaking out of turn, and if so, I hope you'll forgive me.'

He made the slight, indescribable sound that, in the North, manages to express assent, deprecation, interest, dissent, apology – anything at all that the listener cares to read into it. It sounds like ‘Mphm', and you can conduct whole (and perfectly intelligible) conversation with that one sound, anywhere north of the Tyne. As a contribution from Donald, it was unhelpful.

I opened my hand and let the seeds drift down on to the clay. ‘Have you said anything to Julie yet?'

He said quite simply: ‘No. It's been – so quick, you see . . . eight weeks since we met, that's all. I don't mean that
I'm
any the less sure, but I don't know if she . . . well, she's so young.'

‘She's nineteen. Nowadays girls know their own minds at nineteen.'

‘Do they?' I caught a slight hesitation in his manner then, and wondered if he had been suddenly reminded of another nineteen year old, eight years ago at Whitescar. He said: ‘I rather thought Julie had given every indication of not knowing.'

‘Bill Fenwick? He's a nice boy, I think, but I assure you, you needn't worry about him.'

‘I wasn't thinking about Bill Fenwick.'

‘What do you mean, then?'

‘Connor.'

‘
Con?
' I stared for a moment, then said flatly: ‘If you'd asked me, I'd have said she didn't even like him.'

He had taken out his pipe, and was filling it again, more, I thought, for something to fidget with than because he wanted to smoke. He glanced up across it, and I thought his look sharpened. ‘I should have thought he was the very sort of chap a girl would be bound to fall for.'

‘Oh, lord, lord, he's attractive,' I said impatiently. ‘You might say devastating. But Julie's never shown any signs of falling for him, and she's had plenty chance to . . . Goodness knows, if she wasn't susceptible to sheer blazing good looks like Con's at fifteen or sixteen, then she probably never will be. You forget, she was brought up here; she probably thinks of him like a brother . . . and not a particularly favourite one.'

‘You think so? I'm not very knowledgeable about these things. It just seemed to be so likely, and so . . . suitable.'

‘Suitable? I doubt it! Anyway, Julie's not a nitwit, and she's had plenty of time to fall for Con if she was ever going to, instead of which . . .' I paused, and brushed a finger idly over a tight purple thistle-top. ‘Things are a little – difficult – just now at Whitescar. I can't quite describe why . . . it's a sort of emotional climate . . .'

‘I know,' he said, surprisingly. ‘Everyone seems a little too much aware of what other people are doing.'

‘You've felt it? Then you know what I mean. It's partly to do with my coming back, and Grandfather's stroke, and his making a new Will . . . oh, and everything. But it's rather horrid, and definitely unsettling. I know Julie's feeling it, and I'm so afraid she'll do something just plain silly. If it weren't for that, I'd be quite happy to settle back, and depend on her good sense and good taste, but just at present . . .' My voice trailed off, awkwardly.

‘Do you know,' said Donald, ‘whether you meant it or not, that was a compliment?'

I glanced at him. He looked amused, relaxed, confident, calmly pressing the tobacco down into the bowl of his pipe. I suddenly realised that I had been tempering the wind to a fully grown and completely self-possessed lamb. I had underrated Donald, and so (I thought with amused relief) had Julie.

I took a little breath of relief. Then I grinned maliciously. ‘Think nothing of it. That was my double tongue. How do you know I meant you?'

His eyes twinkled. ‘It never occurred to me that you could mean anyone else. That's one of the blessings of being a Scot, a profound and unshakable conviction of your own worth.'

‘Then hang on to that, and forget about Con,' I said. ‘Heavens above, what's got into me? Donald, don't ask me why, and blame me for an interfering so-and-so if you like, but I wish to goodness that you'd simply ask the girl!'

He sent me that sudden, transforming grin. ‘It'll be a pleasure. Now, come along, and be careful down this slope, there may be loose bits. Here, take my hand. That's it.'

‘Goodness, that water's deep, isn't it?'

‘It is that. Round here now. It's all right, you can walk on the edge, the rock's safe.'

The water lay still and billiard-green in the shadow of the ledge where we stood. The edges of the pool were as sharply quarried as those of a swimming bath. On two sides the water was held in by a right angle of the high cliff; at the side where we stood, the quarry was floored with flat, bare rock, as smooth as concrete, which dropped squarely away in front of us to the water level some four feet below.

Here the water was in shadow, oil-green, slightly opaque, and somehow dangerous looking, but where the sunlight struck it, it was lucid with grass-green colour streaked with weed, and beneath the surface the planes of quarried rock showed clearly, coloured according to their depth, green-gold and gold-jade, like peaches drowned in chartreuse.

I said: ‘Why is it that even the most awe-inspiring things in nature, like volcanoes and ice-cliffs, and deserts and things, look kind and innocent compared with places where men have worked and built things, and then abandoned them? This is
sinister
.'

He laughed. ‘Professionally speaking, I'd say it all depends if they were abandoned long enough ago. If a thing's old enough, it's purged, I suppose, of all the nastier wreckage – like the rusty iron, and that old boot there; and can you tell me where in the world that pram can have come from? – like finding a nice clean skeleton, instead of a decaying body.'

‘For goodness' sake! You give me the creeps. Did you bring me here to show me a body?'

‘No.' He pointed down through the water towards one of the slanting slabs of stone that showed like a buttress shoring up the side of the pool. ‘Do you see that bit of rock?'

‘The one that's lying on a slant? Yes. It looks as if it had been shaped, doesn't it? Such a nice, regular oblong.'

‘It has been shaped.' Something in his voice made me look at him. He said: ‘Look at it again. Don't you see the marks?'

I peered down: ‘I . . . think so. I can't be sure. Do you mean what looks like a sort of rough scoring, diagonally across the block? That's not artificial, surely?'

‘I think it was. Those marks would be sharply scored originally; chisel marks. That block's been under water a long time, and even still water will smooth out a stone surface, given time.'

I stood up and looked at him. ‘Given time?'

‘I don't know how long, because I don't know when this part of the quarry was flooded. But those stones down there were quarried about two thousand years ago.'

‘Two thou—' I stopped short and said, rather blankly: ‘You mean the
Romans
?'

‘That's my guess. About two thousand years ago they opened a quarry here. Later, possibly much later, the “white scar” among the woods was re-opened and worked again. Perhaps the Roman workings were already flooded; at any rate, new ones were started, and the original ones left to the weather. And now, this year, with this dry spring, and the drought, the water-level sinks a couple of feet just when I chance to be poking about in this part of the world, and I see the stones. That's how things happen.'

‘Is it – is it important? Forgive me, I'm terribly ignorant, but what does it tell you, apart from the fact that they got building stone from here, for the Wall?'

‘Not for the Wall. Hardly, when they were driving that along the whin sill anyway. They quarried the stone for the Wall on the spot.'

‘For the fort at West Woodburn, then? Habitancum, where you're working?'

‘The same applies. There's stone there. They dug the local stuff whenever they could, of course, to save time and transport.'

He seemed to be waiting, eyeing me in amiable expectation. It was a moment or two before the very simple conclusion presented itself.

‘Oh! Yes, I get it. But, Donald, there's nothing Roman hereabouts, is there? At least, I've never heard of anything, and surely, if there were, the one-inch map would have it marked?'

‘Exactly,' said Donald.

I stared at him stupidly for a moment or two. ‘I . . . see! You think there
may
be something? Some Roman work that hasn't been found yet?'

He pushed his pipe down into a pocket, and turned away from the water's edge. ‘I've no idea,' he said, ‘but there's nothing to stop me looking, is there? And now, if you're ready, I'll be taking you down to Whitescar, and then I'll get along to see Mr Forrest, and ask his leave to go poking around in his policies.'

13

When we got to the farm, it was to find a slightly distracted Lisa watching for me with some tale of disaster that involved a cream trifle, and Tommy, the black and white cat.

‘And I'll wring his neck if he comes near the dairy again,' she said, violently for her.

I said mildly: ‘We've got to remember he's eating for eight.'

‘Nonsense,' said Lisa, ‘he had them days ago. Oh, I see what you mean. Well, even if he
is
feeding seven kittens, and let me tell you if only I can find them I'll drown the lot, that's no excuse for taking the whole top off the trifle I'd made for your Grandfather's birthday dinner.'

‘Just a minute,' said Donald, ‘no doubt I'm not just at my best today, but who has taken the trifle?'

‘That beastly Tommy.'

‘The black and white cat? The fat one I – the one who was in to tea the other day?' Donald liked cats, and had made friends with them all, even the little half-wild tortoiseshell that lived like a wraith under the hen-house.

‘That's the one. And not so fat either, now he's had his kittens, but after half the trifle and a pint of cream—'

I said helplessly, seeing Donald's expression: ‘It's all right. Nature has not suspended her laws, not yet. Everyone was wrong about Tommy – except that marmalade brute from West Lodge, at least I suppose it was him, because now that Tommy's unmasked he's the only tom for miles. Oh lord, I'm getting muddled too. And poor Tommy's figure wasn't due to incontinence – at least, not of the kind we thought; it was just kittens. Seven of them.'

‘And Annabel saw them in the loft, and didn't tell me till next morning, and by that time the brute had shifted them, and he's too fly to let us see him going to feed them.' Lisa slapped a basket down on the kitchen table.

‘You wouldn't drown them all? All?' Donald spoke in the carefully non-committal voice of the man who would sooner die stuck full of arrows than seem to be soft hearted over an animal.

‘I certainly would, and Tommy too, if he gets in the dairy again.'

‘You can't change a personal pronoun overnight,' I said apologetically, to Donald. ‘I'm afraid Tommy won't even decline to Thomasina. He'll be Tommy till the end of his days.'