Ivy Tree (2 page)

"My past," I retorted, "never produced anything quite like this! That was some welcome your poor Prodigal was going to get, wasn't it? I—er, I did gather you weren't exactly going to kill the fatted calf for Annabel? You did say Annabel?"

"Annabel. Well, no, perhaps I wasn't." He looked away from me, down at the stretch of gleaming water. He seemed to be intent on a pair of swans sailing along near the reeds of the further shore. "You'd gather I was trying to frighten her, with all that talk."

It was a statement, not a question, but it had a curiously tentative effect. I said: "I did, rather."

"You didn't imagine I meant any of that nonsense, 1hope?"

I said calmly: "Not knowing the circumstances, I have no idea. But I definitely formed the impression that this cliff was a great deal too high, and the road was a great deal too far away."

"Did you now?" There, at last, was the faintest undercurrent of an Irish lilt. He turned his head, and our eyes met.

I was angry to find that I was slightly breathless again, though it was obvious that, if this excessively dramatic young man really had intended murder five minutes ago, he had abandoned the intention. He was smiling at me now, Irish charm turned full on, looking, I thought irritably, so like the traditional answer to the maiden's prayer that it couldn't possibly be true. He was offering me his cigarette-case, and saying, with a beautifully-calculated lift of one eyebrow: "You've forgiven me? You're not going to bolt straight away?" I ought, of course, to have turned and gone then and there. But the situation was no longer—if, indeed, it had ever been— dangerous. I bad already looked, and felt, fool enough for one day; it would look infinitely more foolish now to turn and, hurry off, quite apart from its being difficult to do with dignity. Besides, as my fright had subsided, my curiosity had taken over. There were things I wanted to know. It isn't every day that one is recognised—and attacked—for a 'double' some years dead.

So I stayed where I was, returned his smile of amused apology, and accepted the cigarette. I sat down again where I had been before, and he sat on the wall a yard away, with the collie at his feet. He was half-turned to face me, one knee up, and his hands clasping it. His cigarette hung in the corner of his mouth, the smoke wisping up past his narrowed eyes.

"Are you staying near by? No, I suppose you can't be, or everyone would be talking . . . You've a face well known in these parts. You're just up here for the day, then? Over here on holiday?"

"In a way. Actually I work in Newcasde, in a café. This is my day off."

"In Newcastle}" He repeated it in a tone of the blankest surprise. "You?"

"Yes. Why on earth not? It's a nice town."

"Of course. It's only that . . . well, all things considered, it seems odd that you should have come to this part of the world. What brought you here ?"

A little pause. I said abruptly: "You know, you still don't quite believe me. Do you?" For a moment he didn't reply, that narrow gaze still intent through the smoke of the cigarette. I met it squarely. Then he unclasped his hands slowly, and took the cigarette out of his mouth. He tapped ash off it, watching the small gout of grey feathering away in the air to nothing.

"Yes. I believe you. But you mustn't blame me too much for being rude, and staring. It's a queer experience, running into the double of someone you knew."

"Believe me, it's even queerer learning that one has a double," I said. "Funnily enough, it's a thing one's inclined to resent."

"Do you know, I hadn't thought of that, but I believe you're right! I should hate like hell to think there were two of me."

I thought: and I believe you; though I didn't say it aloud. I smiled. "It's a violation of one's individuality, I suppose. A survival of a primitive feeling of—what can one call it—identity? Self-hood? You want to be you, and nobody else. And it's uncomfortably like magic. You feel like a savage with a looking-glass, or Shelley seeing his doppelganger one morning before breakfast."

"Did he?"

"He said so. It was supposed to be a presage of evil, probably death." He grinned. "I'U risk it."

"Oh, lord, not your death. The one that meets the image is the one who dies."

"Well, that is me. You're the image, aren't you?"

"There you are," I said, "that's just the core of the matter. That's just what one resents. We none of us want to be 'the image'. We're the thing itself."

"Fair enough. You're the thing itself, and Annabel's the ghost. After all, she's dead." It wasn't so much the casual phrasing that was shocking, as the lack of something in his voice that ought to have been there. The effect was as startling and as definite as if he had used an obscene word. I said, uncomfortably: "You know, I didn't mean to ... I should have realised that talking like this can't be pleasant for you, even if you, well, didn't get on with Annabel. After all, she was a relative; your cousin, didn't you say?"

"I was going to marry her."

I was just drawing on my cigarette as he spoke. I almost choked over the smoke. I must have stared with my mouth open for quite five seconds. Then I said feebly: "Really?" His mouth curved. It was odd that the lineaments of beauty could lend themselves to something quite different. "You're thinking, maybe, that there'd have been very little love lost? Well, you might be right. Or you might not. She ran away, sooner than marry me. Disappeared into the blue eight years ago with nothing but a note from the States to her grandfather to say she was safe, and we none of us need expect to hear from her again. Oh, I admit there'd been a quarrel, and I might have been"—a pause, and a little shrug—"well, anyway she went, and never a word to me since that day. How easily do you expect a man to forgive that?"

You? never, I thought. There it was once more, the touch of something dark and clouded that altered his whole face; some thing lost and uncertain moving like a stranger behind the smooth facade of assurance that physical beauty gives. No, a rebuff was the one thing he would never forgive. I said: "Eight years is a long time, though, to nurse a grudge. After all, you've probably been happily married to someone else for most of that time."

"I'm not married."

"No?" I must have sounded surprised. He would be all of thirty, and with that exterior, he must, to say the least of it, have had opportunities.

He grinned at my tone, the assurance back in his face, as smoothly armoured as if there had never been a flaw. "My sister keeps house at Whitescar; my half-sister, I should say. She's a wonderful cook, and she thinks a lot of me. With Lisa around, I don't need a wife."

"Whitescar, that's your farm, you said?" There was a tuft of sea-pink growing in a crevice beside me. I ran a finger over its springy cushion of green, watching how the tiny rosettes sprang back into place as the finger was withdrawn. "You're the owner? You and your sister?"

"I am." The words sounded curt, almost snapped off. He must have felt this himself, for he went on to explain in some detail.

"It's more than a farm; it's 'the Winslow place'. We've been there for donkey's ages . .. longer than the local gentry who've built their park round us, and tried to shift us, time out of mind. Whitescar's a kind of enclave, older than the oldest tree in the park—about a quarter the age of that wall you're sitting on. It gets its name, they say, from an old quarry up near the road, and nobody knows how old those workings are. Anyway, you can't shift Whitescar. The Hall tried hard enough in the old days, and now the Hall's gone, but we're still here . . . You're not listening."

"I am. Go on. What happened to the Hall?" But he was off at a tangent, still obviously dwelling on my likeness to his cousin. "Have you ever lived on a farm?" "Yes. In Canada. But it's not my thing, I'm afraid."

"What is?"

"Lord, I don't know; that's my trouble. Country life, certainly, but not farming. A house, gardening, cooking—I've spent the last few years living with a friend who had a house near Montreal, and looking after her. She'd had polio, and was crippled. I was very happy there, but she died six months ago. That was when I decided to come over here. But I've no training for anything, if that's what you mean." I smiled. "I stayed at home too long. I know that's not fashionable any more, but that's the way it happened."

"You ought to have married."

"Perhaps."

"Horses, now. Do you ride?"

The question was so sudden and seemingly irrelevant that I must have looked and sounded almost startled.

"Horses? Good heavens, no! Why?"

"Oh, just a hangover from your looking so like Annabel. That was her thing. She was a wizard, a witch I should say, with horses. She could whisper them."

"She could what?"

"You know, whisper to them like a gipsy, and then they'd do any blessed thing for her. If she'd been dark like me, instead of blonde, she'd have been taken for a horse-thieving gipsy's changeling."

"Well," I said, "I do know one end of a horse from the other, and on principle I keep clear of both . . . You know, I wish you'd stop staring."

"I'm sorry. But I—well, I can't leave it alone, this likeness of yours to Annabel. It's uncanny. I know you're not her; it was absurd anyway ever to think she might have come back . . if she'd been alive she'd have been here long since, she had too much to lose by staying away But what was I to think, seeing you sitting here, in the same place, with not a stone of it changed, and you only changed a little? It was like seeing the pages of a book turned back, or a film flashing back to where it was eight years ago."

"Eight years is a long time."

"Yes. She was nineteen when she ran away."

A pause. He looked at me, so obviously expectant that I laughed. "All right You didn't ask ... quite. I'm twenty-seven. Nearly twenty-eight."

I heard him take in his breath. "I told you it was uncanny. Even sitting as close to you as this, and talking to you; even with that accent of yours . . . it's not really an accent, just a sort of slur . . . rather nice. And she'd have changed, too, in eight years."

"She might even have acquired the accent," I said cheerfully.

"Yes. She might." Some quality in his voice made me look quickly at him. He said: "Am I still staring? I'm sorry. I was thinking. I—it's something one feels one ought not to let pass. As if it was . .. meant."

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing. Skip it. Tell me about yourself. You were just going to. Forget Annabel; I want to hear about you. You've told me you're Mary Grey, from Canada, with a job in Newcastle. I still want to know what brought you there, and then up here to the Wall, and why you were on that bus from Bellingham to Chollerford today, going within a stone's throw of the Wins-low land." He threw the butt of his cigarette over the cliff, and clasped both hands round the uplifted knee. All his movements had a grace that seemed a perfectly normal part of his physical beauty. "I'm not pretending I've any right to ask you. But you must see that it's an odd thing to accept, to say the least. I refuse to believe that such a likeness is pure chance. Or the fact that you came here. I think, under the circumstances, I'm entitled to be curious"—that swift and charming smile again—"if nothing else."

"Yes, of course I sec that." I paused for a moment. "You know, you may be right; about this likeness not being chance, I mean. I don't know. My people did come from hereabouts, so my grandmother told me."

"Did they now? From Whitescar?"

I shook my head. "I never heard the name, that I remember. I was very little when Granny died, and she only knew what my great-grandmother told her, anyway. My own mother was never much interested in the past. But I know my family did originally come from somewhere in Northumberland, though I've never heard Granny mention the name Winslow. Hers was Armstrong."

"It's a common name along the borders."

"So she said, and not with a very savoury history, some of them! Wasn't there an Armstrong once who actually lived just here, in the Roman Fort at Housesteads? Wasn't he a horse thief? If I could only

'whisper' horses like your cousin Annabel, you might suppose—"

"Do you know when your people left England?" he asked, not so much ignoring my red herring as oblivious of it. He seemed to be pursuing some very definite line of his own.

"I suppose in my great-grandfather's time. Would that be somewhere about the middle of the last century?

About then, anyway. The family settled first at a place called Antigonish, in Nova Scotia, but after my father married, he—"

"What brought you back to England?" The singleness of purpose that seemed to be prompting his questions robbed the interruption of rudeness. Like an examiner, I thought, bringing the candidate back to the point . . . Certainly his questions seemed to be directed towards some definite end. They had never been quite idle, and now they were sharp with purpose.

I said, perhaps a little warily: "What brings anyone over? My people are dead, and there was nothing to keep me at home, and I'd always wanted to see England. When I was little, Granny used to talk and talk about England. She'd never seen it, but she'd been brought up on her own mother's stories of 'home'. Oh yes, I heard all about 'bonny Northumberland', and what an exciting city Newcastle was—I almost expected to see the sailing-ships lying along the wharves, and the horse-trams in the streets, she'd made it all so vivid for me. And Hexham, and Sundays in the Abbey, and the market there on Tuesdays, and the road along the Tyne to Corbridge, and the Roman Wall with all those lovely names . . . Casde Nick and Boreovicium and Aesica and the Nine Nicks of Thirlwall ... I read about it all, too. I've always liked history. I'd always promised myself that some day I'd come over, maybe to visit, maybe—if I liked it—to stay."

"To stay?"

I laughed. "That's what I'd told myself. But I hadn't seen myself coming back quite like this, I'm afraid. I—well, I was left pretty badly off. I got my fare together, and enough to tide me over till I got a job, and that's my situation now. It sounds like the opposite of the usual story, doesn't it? Usually the lone wolf sets out to the New World to make his way, but I—well, I wanted to come over here. The New World can be a bit wearing when you're on your own, and—don't laugh—but I thought I might fit in better here."