Ashes In the Wind (38 page)

Donhead was a jewel, a small Georgian house built as a hunting-box for an Earl of Shaftesbury in 1770 that never felt the hand of the Victorian improver. It looked over its own deer park across downland to the beginning of Cranborne Chase.

‘We’ll have to get rid of the fallow deer,’ said Linda.

‘Not much point in an empty deer park,’ said James. ‘They’re very beautiful, and they need only a little feeding in the winter.’

James fell in love with the deer as well as the house. The herd was small, a dozen hinds and a couple of optimistic younger bucks that were kept well away from the hinds by a dominant male. James named him Achilles. Achilles’ antlers were a powerful contrast to those on the young bucks, and explained why they kept their distance. James left the annual cull to his tenant farmer; there was no shortage of takers for the venison.

In the Treasury, James’s good fortune had a surprising impact. It was as though the acquisition of a fortune had brought with it not just independence – he no longer had to hang on for his pension – but an added influence in argument and an enhanced moral authority.

‘If this man had not twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow,’ he reminded himself.

Even the Permanent Secretary, the source of the adverse report after the ATCS row, congratulated him on his good fortune. James thought his earlier censure was completely unfair; he regarded the Donhead legacy as an offsetting unfairness.

The next morning Anna suggests they walk across to the mainland and back.

‘The pilgrims managed it. Why don’t you check the tides?’

They have two hours to make the passage; they set off barefoot on the wet sand along the guide poles; the sand is cold but surprisingly firm. Anna strides ahead; James enjoys looking at her calves and ankles.

‘That’s what made me love you. They were all I could see when you worked on my back.’

‘Your back wasn’t too bad.’

They reach the mainland end of the causeway and turn round. Two-thirds of the way back, Anna says, ‘Let’s look at the refuge box. I want to see what it’s like.’

It sits on strong piles high above sea level, a wooden sentry box in grey tongue and groove with a pitched roof; a fifteen-foot vertical ladder leads up to the opening. There is no door and a bench around three sides. Anna is first up the ladder. As James steps into the box, she puts her arms around him, kisses him, runs her hands down the inside of his jeans.

‘Sit on the bench.’

‘We can’t do it here.’

‘I think we can.’

Anna rucks up her skirt, shrugs off her pants, unzips James’s fly.

‘You said we couldn’t do it here. Look at you.’

Anna carefully lowers herself onto James – they are both laughing, both aroused.

‘You planned this from the moment you saw the refuge box; that’s why you wore a skirt.’

‘Yes. Come on, come on, we’ve got to beat the tide.’

Anna and James do beat the rising tide, reorganize their clothes, climb back down the ladder and walk back to Holy Island. The tide has come in fast, and they trot through water at mid-calf level for the last hundred yards.

‘Perfect timing,’ says Anna. They walk on, holding hands, and then James stops and turns her towards him.

‘Anna, I don’t want this to end. I want to be with you. I want you to come and live with me at Donhead.’

‘Me? At Donhead? I can’t imagine...’ and Anna begins to laugh, stopping when she sees the hurt look on James’s face.

‘Darling James, that’s the nicest thing I’ve ever heard. But I’d be way out of my depth. Donhead’s far too grand for me, you’re far too grand for me.’

‘I wasn’t too grand in the refuge box.’

‘That was lovely. But living together at Donhead? That’s quite different. Are you sure I’m not just a holiday romance? And I’ve still got to deal with Zach.’

‘You can’t go back to him.’

‘No, I can’t. But there’s still unfinished business between us.’

‘Well, I’ve asked you. I love you. That would make it work.’

‘You lived there with Linda for years, had your daughter there. I couldn’t move in among all that.’

Over breakfast, Linda had told him that she was leaving.

‘I’ve found someone else,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to live with a husband who is just a polite, uninterested companion. You don’t love me any more, and you haven’t for a long time.’

James thought about persuading Linda to stay; he had assumed that their marriage was much like most other couples who have been together for fifteen or twenty years, and perhaps better than most. They didn’t fight, in public or in private; Linda got on with the garden and James with his career. His protestations lacked the conviction that might have persuaded Linda to change her mind.

‘That’s my point. You’re not even angry that I’m sleeping with another man. It’s all about the disruption to our – your – domestic arrangements. You can replace me with a housekeeper, and you won’t have to make conversation with her.’

Georgia was unsympathetic.

‘Dad, all you two have been doing for years is getting along. You don’t, either of you, care enough even to have rows. You’ll be better on your own, and William loves her.’

‘We used to love each other,’ James protested, but he realized that Georgia was right. He would be better off on his own.

On their last evening on Holy Island, James has booked a table at the little restaurant next to the priory. The Fisherman’s Rest is small and unpretentious. There are two old wicker lobster pots in the window, and a dozen of the green glass balls that were used to keep the tops of the nets afloat. James and Anna study the menu at a table in the corner while they drink their first glass of wine.

A middle-aged couple come into the restaurant; the man looks at James and says with real pleasure, ‘Jimmy! Jimmy! What brings you to our neck of the woods? Shall we join you?’ He doesn’t wait for an answer, pulls up a chair for his wife and sits down himself. He introduces his wife, ‘You remember Imogen,’ and says to Anna, ‘You must be Georgia – I haven’t seen you since you were eleven.’

‘Georgia’s in New York. This is my friend Anna Pearson. We’re here for a few days.’

James has known Matthew Barrington, the only person who ever calls him Jimmy, since National Service. They always sit next to each other at regimental dinners, meet for dinner once a year at the Cavalry Club, exchange Christmas cards and have, other than their two years together in the army, remarkably little in common. But James has always liked Matthew’s uncomplicated, unchanging attitude to the world, his total lack of political correctness. He is wearing, James notices with a little smile, his permanent casual uniform of yellow corduroy trousers, brown suede chukka boots, a regimental tie and a regimental boating jacket. Anything else would have been shocking.

James and Matthew talk to each other while Imogen cross-questions Anna. Matthew is intrigued by Anna’s job.

‘Sports therapy and massage, eh? My God, I wished I’d met you before they opened me up for my slipped disc. Are you responsible for Jimmy being in such good shape?’

Anna laughs; it’s impossible to dislike Matthew.

‘His elegant shape is entirely down to me; he’s lost ten pounds since I took him in hand.’

‘We’re here on a week’s retreat at St Aidan’s. Imo is a good Anglo-Catholic, and I’m here to lose weight. This is the one night I get out of the Holy Gulag for a decent meal.’

‘Not staying for pudding and coffee?’ says Matthew later as James and Anna get up to go. ‘Imo and I need the calories. I’ll get the bill. This is my home turf, not yours.’

As they walk back to the hotel, James says, ‘He’s one of my oldest friends, although we hardly ever see each other. He hasn’t changed an iota since I first met him – dress, opinions, jokes, everything the same.’

‘I can believe that; I liked him in spite of myself.’

‘The thing about Matthew is he’s extremely clever. He got a First in Natural Sciences at Cambridge, he knows a lot about the opera, and he’s an expert on British native trees.’

‘Imogen is a different matter, she’s a real piece of work. Should have been an Inquisitor. I nearly found myself telling her about Zach.’

Anna giggles and says in a good imitation of Imogen’s voice, ‘Do you know Hugh Northumberland? The Percys have a holiday place in Allenmouth, don’t they?’

They walk on, and then Anna says, ‘That’s why Donhead wouldn’t work. I have nothing, absolutely nothing, in common with people like that. They belong in your world, and I don’t, I never will. And he thought I was your daughter, didn’t he? But you asking meant a lot to me.’

James kisses her cheek and doesn’t reply.

They have breakfast in bed the next morning and James tries again.

‘I meant what I said about living together. It needn’t be at Donhead. I could pass the house on to Georgia and come and live up here with you.’

‘I’ve heard you talk about Donhead. You might move out, but you’d never forgive me. I’m a Geordie, we’re practically Scottish up here; you English seem like foreigners a lot of the time.’

‘I’m not English. You wouldn’t like me if I was. I’m Anglo-Irish.’

‘You had a strange childhood,’ says Anna. ‘But then so did I. Perhaps that’s what we have in common.’

‘My upbringing seemed normal enough to me then; that’s how you think when you’re six, or sixteen.’ James is talking about someone he knows, but from whom he is separated by more than time and the Irish Sea. ‘Now it feels an anachronism, part of the reason why I’ve never quite fitted, like trying to force in a bit of a jigsaw that nearly matches but you know is wrong. My memories are an odd jumble of bathrooms, soap, horses. We had two bathrooms for seven bedrooms, quite a respectable ratio in Ireland then. A bath in four inches of water in a freezing bathroom was a weekly duty, not a pleasure. I remember the hierarchy: translucent Pears in the basin, yellow Wrights Coal Tar in the bath, and Cussons Imperial Leather in the guest room. And the lavatory paper was Bronco, totally non-absorbent, you didn’t wipe your bottom, you sandpapered it. Our social life at Killowen revolved around horses – Pony Club dances, hunt balls, the Pony Club camp. Brilliant ratios.’

‘Ratios?’

‘Boys to girls. One boy to twelve girls at the Pony Club, six hundred boys to zero girls at Winchester, ten boys to one girl at Oxford.’

‘Well, one to one works best. Let me show you.’

I
N
THE
AFTERNOON
they cross the causeway and drive back to Allenmouth through a heavy sea mist. The weather has broken, and they both feel something slipping away. James drops Anna off at her father’s house.

‘That was lovely, all of it – St Cuthbert’s Island, the trip to the Farnes, the refuge box. I loved being with you. You make me feel calm, secure.’ Anna leans into the car, kisses him and says, ‘You won’t be seeing me for a few days. I told you I needed to sort things out with Zach. And then...’ She goes up the steps, the sentence unfinished, turns and waves, and is gone.

‘What does “sorting things out” mean? What’s the unfinished business?’ James asks himself. He finds Anna’s words unsettling after their three days on Holy Island. He knows her response to his Donhead invitation is eminently sensible in theory. In practice he isn’t ready to give up and go south alone.

He takes refuge again in his great-grandmother’s diaries; nineteenth-century Ireland stops him agonizing over Anna. He spends two days with these papers, going out only for an early morning walk along the beach.

On the evening of the second day, he is out on his balcony looking at the birds on the other side of the estuary when he sees Anna walking past on the street below. She is with a tall, strongly built man; Zach looks exactly like Anna’s description of him. He watches until they turn up towards the golf club.

James feels sick, pours himself a whisky and for ten minutes tries to read a book. Then he jumps up, goes down the stairs, and follows Anna and Zach up the hill. He has no clear plan; he cannot bear to sit and think. Perhaps the three of them should talk, although about what is unclear. James reaches the top of the grassy lane; there is no sign of Anna and Zach, no light in the clubhouse. James walks onto the verandah, sees the open door, stands in the little hall. Hears the unmistakable sounds of a couple making love, listens long enough to hear Anna begin to cry out, turns and runs blindly down the hill. Back in the flat, he curses himself. He knows he has become a caricature of a jealous lover. Worse, a voyeur. And he curses Anna. How could she do this after Holy Island? The next morning he gets up early, locks up the flat and catches the mid-morning train back to King’s Cross.

That evening he is back in Donhead; there is a thick pile of letters and bills on the hall table, and otherwise no sign that he had been away. What did he expect? Cobwebs? Squatters? His housekeeper comes in, sorts through some domestic details, tells him his bed is made up, and he goes upstairs to sleep.

A day later he begins to be restored to sanity; he had forgotten the glory of the view across the park and over the downs to Cranborne Chase. He remembers an October evening when he and Linda came over the hill, down from London for their first weekend at Donhead. The country to the south-west was alive with the flickering lights of a hundred fires, farmers burning off the stubble after the harvest. ‘It’s as if the Vikings had landed,’ said Linda. They were still in love then, still overcome by their new inheritance.

James sees the fallow deer are at the bottom of the park by the stream; he goes downstairs, makes himself a cup of coffee, lets himself out through the gate in the iron palings and walks down to the little herd.

There is a single stag standing under an oak a hundred yards away from the rest of the fallow deer. It is Achilles, his left antler broken off four inches above the crown, his right antler missing a couple of tines. There is a deep and bloody scar on his flank. Trotting around the hinds is the cause of Achilles’ downfall, the new dominant male, probably one of Achilles’ sons. James walks slowly back up the hill, unlocks his gun cabinet, takes out his rarely used .275 rifle, and goes back until he is twenty yards away from Achilles, now quietly grazing. He kills Achilles with a single shot to the heart, returns to the house and telephones his tenant farmer.