Grace Hardie (37 page)

The serpentine garden was Philip's self-indulgence. In the three acres of the walled garden, fruit and vegetables grew, as they had always grown, in rows of military straightness. But just as he had created a personal garden in the community from which Grace had enticed him, so too at Greystones he had felt the same need to carve out a shape from the ground – very much as Grace herself carved wood or stone.

The pattern here was not a tight spiral but a series of gentle curves which swelled and closed so that almost every step along the grass revealed a different view of the shrubberies which edged it. Grace had contributed to the design by bringing some of her larger carved shapes out of the studio to stand in alcoves framed by leaves and, indeed, had designed some of the carvings specifically for their settings.

Returning to the house with her trug basket laden, she plunged the flowers into a stone sink full of water in one of the sculleries. In the spacious days of the previous century, when Greystones was designed, separate rooms were provided for all the duties of the servants, as well as for the pleasures of their employers.

Philip came in at the same moment carrying baskets full of all the vegetables they would need. Some he had forced in a hot bed to be sure of having them ready in June; whilst several crowns of asparagus had been held back to prolong their season. He had already, earlier in the morning, brought in the milk and enough strawberries to feed the whole family. The chickens had been killed and plucked three days before, and the goat cheese had been maturing for several weeks.

Lucy Hardie, meanwhile, was preparing breakfast. Six
years earlier, when she returned from China, she was certainly startled and probably dismayed to discover what had happened to Greystones in her absence, but she accepted the situation without making more than one attempt to heal her daughter's quarrel with David. Confirming that the house had always been Grace's property, she asked with an extraordinary humility whether she might continue to live in it.

Grace had been worried about her mother at that time, and would almost have preferred her to react to the changed situation with indignation. Instead, she had seemed apathetic, making no complaint as she took on her own shoulders some of the duties which always before had been performed by servants. Her only positive action was a command to David that The House of Hardie must pay the increased fees for his brother Felix. The expense was not to be borne by Grace alone.

Under the terms of Gordon Hardie's will, his widow was entitled to a share of the business profits: but out of what he claimed to be proper caution, David had contrived that there should be no profits. Will had to be paid a better salary, and he himself was entitled to fees for the hours he had to spend on the business. Interest must be paid on the loan made necessary by Grace's intransigence. All the takings after this were spent on new stock – most of which, in the nature of a vintner's business, would not be ready for sale for several years. And now a recession was affecting sales. There was always, it seemed, some reason why his mother, who had refused to take his side, should receive not a penny from what had once provided the livelihood of the whole family.

Whether or not Lucy thought that she was being unkindly treated, she did not complain. For the first few months after returning she spent most of her time in the studio, and the walls of the boudoir which had become her
drawing room were now covered with the paintings she produced in this period.

There were water colours of her husband's grave in China, with a background of distant mountains. There was a large and carefully worked picture of the nurse who had cared for Gordon Hardie before his death. Grace thought this unsuccessful, because the woman somehow failed to look Chinese. A less sombre group of paintings, done from memory, depicted scenes from Lucy's honeymoon: the gorges of the Yangtse River, a mule train, a flimsy bridge over a river and, in pride of place, a sketch of Gordon Hardie as a young man, looking in amazement at a valley carpeted with gold and white lilies.

The therapy of painting had drawn Lucy at last out of her depression and into a cheerful interest in Grace's efforts to live off the Greystones estate. In those early days their only source of cash was Philip's disability pension, and there were some lean times before they mastered the arts of storing and preserving enough food to last through the winter. Right from the start, however, they had enjoyed the co-operation of the former head gardener. Rather than lose his cottage as well as his employment, Frith had agreed to an arrangement under which he found his own wages by keeping some of the food which he grew on the Greystones land and selling it in the city.

Gradually Lucy had developed her own contributions to the search for income. She painted water colours of the Oxford colleges and their gardens, and these were sold for her by the shop which supplied her materials. The farmer who rented the sloping meadow as grazing for his sheep allowed her to run two ewes of her own with his flock, and she taught herself to spin and dye and weave their wool. Neatness with the needle was one of the few practical talents encouraged in a daughter of the aristocracy, and
Lucy made the clothes for all three members of the household. In addition, she had learned to cook.

‘How did we ever put up with overcooked meat and vegetables for so many years?' she would ask in amazement as, after a few disasters, she began to produce far tastier meals than anything that Mrs Charles had ever sent to the table. And whenever Grace expressed the hope that she was not becoming tired or overworked, she recalled the hours she had once devoted to giving instructions and sorting out the problems of the servants' hall. It might be eccentric to live without a domestic staff, but there was freedom in eccentricity.

Today, as it happened, there was to be help in the house. The inclusion of David and his family in the birthday celebration was not intended to elicit pity for their poverty but to show that they could manage comfortably without his help. The three of them had planned and prepared the menu for a feast. So in order that they could enjoy it in a gracious manner as host and hostesses, Lucy had asked Mrs Frith to serve and clear the meal.

She arrived early, accompanied by her eldest granddaughter.

‘Andy's staying with us,' she explained cheerfully to Grace. ‘The maddymoselle –' she had never referred to his wife as anything else – ‘knows better than to show her face. But he brought his twelve-year-old, Jeanette, to meet us this time. She can't understand a word I say or say a word I can understand, but she'll be handy enough at podding the peas and broad beans and scraping the new potatoes.'

‘Twelve years old!' exclaimed Grace. Was this then the child whose birth destroyed Grace's first love affair? Once upon a time she would have turned away, but time had healed the wound. ‘I haven't seen Andy for years,' she said to Mrs Frith. ‘Ask him to come up tomorrow and say hello?'

Smiling at Jeanette, she spoke to her in French and was rewarded with a smile. She was not an attractive girl, and there seemed no trace of Andy in her dark hair and sharp features. If I'd married Andy, thought Grace, what sort of daughter would I have had? She only just managed to restrain herself from asking the question out loud.

Curiously, the query failed to arouse her interest. It came as a new thought that she did not particularly like children and had no wish at all to have any of her own. There was excitement in independence. To be tied by the demands of babies and young children must be an unbearable imposition.

Had she married, she would have raised a family as a matter of course and might never have discovered the pleasures of being her own mistress. Not for the first time, she recognized how her own mother's life had been shaped by the burden of child-bearing and child-raising. What a fortunate escape she had had herself!

When everything that could be done in advance was ready, she went upstairs to dress. The frock she put on had been made by her mother out of a length of silk bought in Shanghai. Jay and Aunt Midge would recognize it as being five years old, but David and Sheila would never have seen it before. Its dropped waist flattered her slim figure, the pleated hem shimmered in the sunlight and the jewelled colours of the fabric made a dramatic contrast with her pale skin. Carefully she eased her feet into her only silk stockings and a pair of patent leather shoes borrowed from her mother.

‘Fancy dress party!' she exclaimed aloud to herself and laughed with amusement. Walking with care, because she was unused to high heels, she made her way down the spiral staircase of the tower.

Her mother and Philip were still upstairs, dressing themselves for the occasion, but Mrs Frith was on duty to open
the front door and announce the visitors. Grace stood for a moment in the doorway of the drawing room, stroking her silk dress with her fingers. Then she sat down to wait: the mistress of Greystones, ready to receive her guests.

‘To Grace!'

Midge and Will Witney had brought vintage champagne as a birthday gift, and it was Will who proposed the birthday toast at the end of a magnificent meal.

Except for the youngest of David's three children, imprisoned in the high chair which had last been used by Jay, they all stood up, murmuring congratulations. Only David showed by an extra comment that the rift between them had still not quite healed. ‘Not that I suppose you'll ever admit to being thirty, Grace. I've noticed that young women, especially spinsters, seem to remain twenty-nine for quite a long time.' He lifted his glass again and smiled as though this would take the sting out of his words.

Grace stared at him for a moment before tucking the remark away at the back of her mind, to be considered later. ‘Shall we have coffee on the terrace?' she said. ‘And then, who would like a game of croquet?'

After the game Midge and Will were happy to sit with Lucy in the sunshine and Sheila took little Peter upstairs for a rest. Grace and Jay accepted David's suggestion of a walk in the grounds, to show his elder children, John and Lilian, where he had played as a boy.

‘There were no sheep in the meadow then,' he told them. ‘We used to play football here, and cricket. That was when we were older, and had started school. When we were young, we were allowed to run wild in the wood and by the stream.'

He showed the way and the children ran on ahead, shouting with pleasure.

‘What did you play here?' asked John as they entered the wood. It was tidier now than in the old days, because Philip chopped any fallen or dead wood to feed the log fires in the house. Even in her best silk stockings, Grace was willing to accompany them.

‘All sorts of things,' David told the eight-year-old. ‘Hide and seek, of course. And we had bows and arrows. Sometimes we played Robin Hood. Once, I remember, we pretended to have a tiger hunt and got a bit carried away. We killed a cat – Aunt Grace's cat.' He looked around and recognized the two pointed ears of slate which marked Pepper's grave. ‘This is where it's buried. It was a very sad accident. A great pity.'

He looked straight at Grace, who was too astonished to react. Never once in the twenty-four years since Pepper's death had David made any reference to it. Was this, at long last, an attempt at an apology? But even now he had said ‘We', not ‘I'.

Without listening any more to the words, she watched the children questioning their father about the cat. Choosing the two pieces of slate had represented her first realization that shapes were important and could even represent ideas. At the age of six she could not have expressed her thoughts so pretentiously; but it was true, all the same, that Pepper's death had introduced her to the most important activity in her life. Perhaps she ought really to be grateful to David!

The same occasion, besides causing a still unhealed rift between herself and David, had changed the course of Kenneth's life. Or had it merely brought to the surface a side of his character which would have revealed itself sooner or later? Kenneth's compassion, like Frank's talent for leadership, Jay's love of pretence and her own feeling for form, seemed all to have sprung from a single moment of drama, but the seeds must already
have been sown before the accident of Pepper's death.

‘Penny for your thoughts,' said Jay, handsome and selfassured as he walked beside her.

‘I was thinking about you.' She smiled and took his arm, turning back towards the house. ‘Tell me about your new part.'

‘Not so much a part as a series of turns. Nothing in a revue lasts more than about three minutes. But I have got one recurring act as an old man of eighty. A kind of running joke. Ridiculous, isn't it? A fine upstanding youth like me, perfect material for juvenile leads, playing grandfather.' His back hunched, his hands began to tremble and an invisible walking stick supported his shuffling steps. ‘But that,' he said in a quavering old man's voice, ‘can't be what you were thinking about.'

‘No. I was remembering – it was the day you first told me that you wanted to be an actor. That you
were
an actor, whether or not you ever got on stage to prove it. You had a great theory, I remember. Happiness comes when what you do is the expression of what you are. Or something like that.'

‘I was a very perceptive little boy, though I say it myself.' Jay straightened up and the eighty-year-old disappeared. ‘The theory stands the test of time. Though who'd have guessed then that what was lurking in
you
was the soul of a farmer.'

‘No!' protested Grace, astonished that he should see her so wrongly.

‘But you're happy. I can see it. Grace Hardie, spinster of this parish; a horny-handed daughter of toil and happy with it. Just remember, though, that it's only in fairy stories that anyone lives happily ever after. In real life, a happy ending only lasts until tomorrow.'

‘For you, perhaps.' Grace had been told often enough by her brother that acting was an insecure profession. But she was in no mood to argue. She might have explained to him
her amazement that everything which had happened in her life seemed designed to point her in a single direction. But part of her satisfaction lay in the private nature of her work, and the fact that no one guessed how much it meant to her; so she ignored any discussion of happiness and thought about his other point instead.