I Capture the Castle (21 page)

As a rule, Mrs. Jakes only serves bread-and-cheese but she managed cold sausages as well, and some honey and cake. Neil ate his sausage with honey, which simply fascinated me-but by then almost everything was fascinating me. Cherry brandy is wonderful.

But I don’t think my haze of content was all due to the cherry brandy—the glasses are so small. (i had lemonade for my thirst.) It was everything together that was so pleasant—the food out-of doors the sunshine, the sky through the chestnut tree, Neil being nice to me and Simon being more than nice to Rose;

and, of course, the cherry brandy did help.

While Neil was getting me my second glass I took a good look at Rose. She was wearing her very oldest dress, a washed-out blue cotton, but it looked exactly right for sitting outside an inn. One branch of the chestnut came down behind her head and, while I was watching, a strand of her bright hair got caught across a leaf.

“Is that branch worrying you?” Simon asked her.

“Would you like to change places his I hope you wouldn’t because your hair looks so nice against the leaves.”

I was glad he had been noticing. Rose said the branch wasn’t worrying her in the least.

When Neil came back with my second cherry brandy, she said:

“Well, now that we’ve finished lunch, I’ll have one, too.” I knew very well she had been envying mine. Then she called after him:

“No, I won’t — I’ll have creme de menthe.”

I was surprised, because we both tasted that at Aunt Millicent’s once and hated it heartily; but I saw what she was after when she got it—she kept holding it up so that the green looked beautiful against her hair, though of course it clashed quite dreadfully with the chestnut leaves.

I must say she was being more affected than I ever saw her, but Simon appeared to be enchanted. Neil didn’ the winked at me once and said: “Your sister’ll be wearing that drink as a hat any minute.”

Neil is amusing-though it is more the laconic way he says things than what he actually says; sometimes he sounds almost grim and yet you know he is joking. I believe this is called wisecracking.

Rose was right when she said he thinks England is a joke, a comic sort of toy, but I don’t believe he despises it, as she feels he does;

it is just that he doesn’t take it seriously. I am rather surprised that Rose resents this so much, because England isn’t one of her special things in the way it is mine-oh, not flags and Kipling and outposts of Empire and such, but the country and London and houses like Scoatney. Eating bread-and-cheese at an inn felt most beautifully English-though the liqueurs made it a bit fancy. Mrs. Jakes has had those two bottles for as long as I can remember, both full to the top. We sat talking until the church clock struck two and then the nicest thing of all happened: Miss Marcy began a singing class. The windows of the schoolhouse were open and the children’s voices came floating out, very high and clear. They were doing rounds;

first, “My dame hath a lame, tame crane,” then “Now Robin lend to me thy bow,” and then “Summer is acumin” which is my very favorite tune—when I learnt it at school it was part of a lesson on Chaucer and Langland, and that was one of the few times when I had a flash of being back in the past. While I listened to Miss Marcy’s children singing I seemed to capture everything together mediaeval England, myself at ten, the summers of the past and the summer really coming. I can’t imagine ever feeling happier than I did for those moments-and while I was telling myself so, Simon said:

“Did anything as beautiful as this ever happen before?”

“Let’s take the kids some lemonade,” said Neil. So we got two dozen bottles and carried them across. Miss Marcy nearly swooned with delight and introduced Simon to the children as “Squire of Goandend and Scoatney.”

“Go on, make a speech-it’s expected,” I whispered. He took me seriously and gave me an agonized look. Then he told them how much he had enjoyed the singing and that he hoped they would all come to Scoatney one day and sing for his mother. Everyone applauded except one very small child who howled and got under her desk-I think she was scared of his beard.

We left after that and the Cottons said they would drive us home.

Neil went to settle with Mrs. Jakes and I routed Heloise out of the kitchen-she was bloated with sausage. When I came back Simon was leaning against the chestnut staring at the schoolhouse.

“Will you look at that window?” he said. I looked. It is a tallish window with an arched top. On the sill inside stood a straggly late hyacinth with its white roots growing in water, a jam jar of tadpoles and a hedgehog.

“It’d be nice to paint,” I said.

“I was just thinking that. If I were a painter I believe I’d always paint windows.”

I looked up at the inn.

“There’s another for you,” I told him.

Close to the swinging signboard with its crossed gold keys there was a diamond-paned lattice open, showing dark red curtains and a little sprigged jug and basin, with the brass knob and black rail of an iron bedstead behind. It was wonderfully pain table “Everywhere one turns—” He stared all around, as if he were trying to memorize things.

The Vicar’s housekeeper drew the blinds down against the sun, so that the vicarage seemed to close its eyes.

(Mrs. Jakes had told us the Vicar was out or we would have called on him.) Miss Marcy’s children were very quiet. I suppose they were all guzzling lemonade.

There was a moment of great peace and silence. Then the clock struck the half-hour, a white pigeon alighted with a great flutter of wings on the inn roof just above the open window; and Neil started the car.

“Don’t you think this is beautiful?” Simon asked him, as we went over.

“Yes, pretty as a picture,” said Neil, “the kind you get on jigsaw puzzles.”

“You’re hopeless,” I said, laughing. I did know what he meant, of course; but no amount of pretty-pretty pictures can ever really destroy the beauty of villages like Godsend.

Rose went in the back of the car with Simon.

Heloise and I were at the front—part of the time Neil drove with his arm round her.

“Gosh, what sex-appeal she has,” he said. Then he told her she was a cute pooch, but would she please not wash his ears his Not that it stopped her; Heloise can never see a human ear at tongue-level without being a mother to it.

When we got back to the castle I felt it was only polite to ask them in, but Neil had made an appointment for Simon with the Scoatney agent. Simon is obviously most anxious to understand everything about the estate, but I don’t think the agricultural side comes naturally to him. It does to Neil-which seems a waste when he isn’t staying in England.

“Did Simon fix anything about seeing us again?”

I asked Rose, as we watched them drive away.

“Don’t worry, they’ll be round.” She spoke quite scornfully; I resented it after the Cottons had been so nice to us.

“Very sure of yourself, aren’t you?” I said.

Then something struck me.

“Oh, Rose-you’re not still counting it against them-what I overheard them say about you?”

“I am against Neil. He’s my enemy.” She flung back her head dramatically.

I told her not to be an idiot.

“But he is-he as good as told me so, before you came this morning.

He said he was still hoping Simon would come back to America with him.”

“Well, that doesn’t make him your enemy,” I said. But I must admit that his manner to her is a bit antagonistic. Of course, owning Scoatney is really what is likely to keep Simon in England, but I suppose marrying an English girl would tend to as well.

“Yes, it does-anyway, I hate him. But he shan’t, he shan’t interfere.” She was flushed and her eyes had a desperate look—a look that somehow made me ashamed for her.

“Oh, Rose, don’t bank on things too much,” I begged.

“Simon may not have the faintest idea of proposing-American men are used to being just friends with girls. And they probably think we’re too comic for words—just as Neil thinks the English country “Blast Neil,” she cried furiously. I would rather see her furious than desperate-it made me think of the day she turned on a bull that was chasing us. (it turned out to be a rather oddly shaped cow.) Remembering this made me feel very fond of her, so I told her all the nice things Simon had said about her on our walk to Godsend. And I made her promise never to tell him I had lied to him-even if she marries him. I should hate him to know, even though I did do it to be kind. Oh, I see more and more I ought never to have let her get it out of me that conversation I over heard. It not only started her off hating Neil, but has made her extra relentless to Simon—she will marry him or burst.

We found Topaz asleep on the drawing-room window-seat-she looked as if she had been crying, but she woke up quite cheerfully and said our lunch was in the oven, between plates (we had it for tea). When we finished telling her about the Cottons, she said:

“How on earth are we to return their hospitality?

I’ve been wondering ever since we went to Scoatney.

Dinner’s impossible-with no dining-room furniture. Could we manage a picnic lunch?”

“No, we couldn’t,” said Rose, “we’d only make a mess of it. Leave them alone—let them run after us.”

She went off upstairs. Topaz said: “Don’t blame her too much the first time girls feel their power it often takes them like that.”

Then she yawned so much that I left her to finish her nap.

I got my journal from the barn and remembered Leda Fox Cotton note to Stephen inside. I told myself it was ridiculous to feel resentful and that I wouldn’t even mention the note to him I would just leave it where he would be sure to find it when he came back from work. I thought he might not want the others to see it I felt Rose was liable to be scornful -so I took it to his room. I couldn’t remember being there since we first explored the castle, when that was the bit of the kitchen where the hen-roosts were; Father turned it into two little rooms which Stephen and his mother had—her is just a storeroom now.

When I opened Stephen’s door I was quite shocked at the darkness and dankness; the narrow window was almost overgrown with ivy and the whitewash on the walls was discolored and peeling off in flakes. There was a narrow sagging bed, very neatly made, a once-white chest of drawers with screws sticking out where the handles had come off, and three hooks on the wall for clothes. On the chest of drawers his comb was placed exactly midway between a photograph of his mother with him as a baby in her arms, and a snapshot of me both in aluminum frames much too large for them. By the bed was an old wooden box, with a copy of Jacob Wrestling Father gave him years ago on it beside a volume of Swinburne. (oh dear, is Stephen taking to Swinburne?) That was absolutely all—no carpet, no chair. The room smelt damp and earthy. It didn’t feel like anywhere in the castle as we know it now, but as the kitchen did when we saw it first, at sunset. I wondered if Stephen was haunted by the ghosts of ancient hens. I looked at the photograph of Mrs.Colly for a long time, remembering how kind she was to us in the years after Mother died.

And I remembered going to see her in the Cottage Hospital and then helping Father to break it to Stephen that she wasn’t going to get better. He just said “That’s bad. Thank you, sir. Will that be all now?” and went into his room. After she died, I felt he must be terribly lonely and I got into the habit of reading to him in the kitchen every night—I expect I rather fancied myself reading aloud.

It was then that he got fond of poetry. Father married Topaz the year after and in the excitement of it all, my evenings with Stephen ended—I had forgotten all about them until I stood there looking at his Mother’s photograph. I imagined she was looking at me reproachfully because I hadn’t been kinder to her son and I wondered if I could do anything to improve his bedroom. I could make him some curtains, if Topaz could ever spare the money for them; but the window with the ivy creeping through is the nicest thing in the room, so it would be a pity to hide it. And always at the back of my mind I know it isn’t kind to be kind to Stephen; briskness is kindest. I looked Mrs. Colly in the eye and sent her a message: “I’m doing my best—really I am.”

Then I thought that it would be better for Stephen not to know I had been in his room—I don’t know why, exactly, except that bedrooms are very personal; and he might not like to think I knew what a poor little place it is. I had one last look round. The afternoon sun was filtering in through the ivy so that everything was bathed in green light. The clothes hanging on the wall had a tired, almost dead look.

If I had left the letter, he would have guessed that I had put it there; so in the end I just gave it to him as soon as he came back from work. I explained how it had come, in a very casual voice, and then ran upstairs. He made no comment at all except to thank me. I still don’t know what his plans about London are.

In the evening, while I was working on my journal in the drawing-room, Father walked in—I had been so absorbed that I hadn’t heard him arrive home.

“Hello, did your business go well?” I enquired politely.

He said: “Business? What business? I’ve been to the British Museum.” Then he made a dive at my journal. I pulled it away from him, staring in astonishment.

“Good heavens, I don’t want to pry into your secrets,” he said.

“I just want to look at your speed-writing. Do me an example, if you prefer it—do “God Save the King. “I thought he might as well see the journal—I chose an un-private page in case he was better at guessing than Simon had been.

He peered down, then pulled the candle closer and asked me to point out the word-symbols.

“There aren’t any,” I told him.

“It’s mostly just abbreviations.”

“No good, no good at all,” he said impatiently, pushing the exercise book away. Then he marched off to the gatehouse.

I went into the kitchen and found Topaz cutting ham sandwiches for him; she said he hadn’t told her one word of what he had been doing all day.

“Well, he wasn’t with Mrs. Cotton, anyway,” I said, “because he was at the British Museum.”