The Hardie Inheritance (25 page)

But the two London boys were shy. Perhaps they too had felt proprietorial on their return and now were equally resentful that the territory was to be shared. Grace interrupted the awkwardness with a brisk conclusion to what she had been saying earlier.

‘Anyway, we'll be very glad to have you living with us again, Dan and Boxer. Do you want to have the same bedroom as last time?'

The two boys nodded.

‘Right. Go and collect your things to take up to it, then. Max, you go and help Mrs Barrett with her pastry. She's making a big apple pie for us all, and I expect there'll be enough over for you to cut out little tarts. Trish, open all the windows of the bedroom and give it a good airing, will you?'

‘Yes, ma'am. This moment, ma'am.' She led the way indoors and upstairs, with Terry following behind. ‘You never saw their
room when you came to take them away, did you? It's an odd shape, because it was planned for twins, so they could each have a bed in these sort of alcoves and then share the middle of the room for playing.'

Opening the door, she made a face at the musty smell, and hurried to open the windows as she had been told.

‘When the house was built, there were maids to light fires in all the bedrooms,' she told Terry. ‘But now there's no heat upstairs at all and the rooms get damp if they're not used. But we'll warm the mattresses and sheets and things.' She looked critically round the room. ‘It's a bit shabby, isn't it?'

‘Doesn't look as if it's been redecorated since the day the house was built,' agreed Terry. He walked across to the window and tugged at a peeling tag of blotched and yellowed wallpaper. A long triangle of the paper came away from the wall, bringing with it lumps of plaster.

‘You're spoiling it!' exclaimed Trish indignantly.

‘Not much to spoil. It's all damp. There'll be bad trouble with the wood if you're not careful.'

‘It certainly doesn't look very cheerful. I could paint it, though. On top of the wallpaper, as long as you don't make any more holes in the wall.'

‘Make things worse, that would.' Terry took a penknife from his pocket and stuck it into the skirting board. ‘Not too bad,' he admitted. ‘Tell you what, Trish. If your mother wouldn't think it an impertinence. This time I've only got as long as it needs to settle the boys, but next time I get an ordinary leave I could come here, if you'd have me, and strip the walls down and replaster and put on an undercoat. Then you could finish off the painting – and add pictures, if you wanted to, like you did in that little room downstairs.'

‘D'you know how to?' asked Trish. ‘How to plaster walls, I mean.'

‘I was apprenticed to a builder when I was fourteen. Only lasted a couple of years, because I got the chance of a market licence. So I didn't finish serving my time, but I can turn my
hand to most things around a house. Anyway, couldn't look much worse, could it?'

‘Suppose not. Well, we'll have to ask Grace. But I should think she'll be pleased.'

She chose a private moment to put the question, because she had a comment to add on it.

‘It would be nice to have the room looking smart, wouldn't it?' she suggested. ‘And besides, I don't suppose Terry's got anywhere to go for his leave now that his house has been bombed.'

‘We can't act as a welfare refuge for the whole of the East End,' said Grace; but she did not say it as an objection.

‘It would be different for Terry, with his brothers here already and wanting to see him whenever they can. I expect that's why he wants to do some work here, to feel that he could earn his keep.'

‘I was only teasing. Yes, of course he can come. And we shall be very glad of his help.'

As it turned out, he was able to write less than four weeks later to give the date of a forthcoming leave. Trish asked Grace for some money and took the boys down to the covered market in Oxford to choose material for curtains. On their return, she set them the joyously messy task of stripping the wallpaper off their room while she went to find Mrs Hardie.

‘I wondered,' she asked, ‘whether you could show me how to make curtains.'

Mrs Hardie, who in recent months had grown vague and listless, looked at her more sharply than usual.

‘What you mean is, you wonder whether I would make curtains for you.'

‘Yes,' admitted Trish. ‘Not for me, though. For Dan and Boxer. Because Auntie Sheila brought all the things to make Max's room look bright and homey – the rug and counterpane, and curtains and the lamb for putting his pyjamas in – and he's got his own toys. But Dan and Boxer haven't got anything at all. I want to make the room a bit more cheerful.'

‘Have you got the measurements?'

Trish produced a drawing she had made of the window and the curtain rail. ‘I showed this to the market lady and she said how much I'd need, to allow for shrinking. There are blackout curtains hanging there already, which would do for lining.'

‘I'll see what I can do,' promised Mrs Hardie. ‘But you'll have to thread the needles for me.'

‘Oh, thank you. And there's something else. The walls are going to be painted this time, not papered, and I thought it would look more interesting if the two alcoves were a different colour from the rest of the room to make them look sort of deeper.'

‘A good idea.'

‘But the thing is, I don't know which colours will make them look deeper and which will flatten them out again. And ought they to be quite different colours, or just different shades of the same thing?'

‘I remember soon after you first came here, I gave you painting lessons, and that was what I wanted to teach you – how to use colour to suggest distance or contrast and all that kind of thing. All you wanted to do was to slap pillar-box red around.'

‘I was only little then,' Trish pointed out. ‘You were trying to show me quite difficult things and I didn't understand. If you'd try again, I'd listen this time. Because I can see that some colours go together and some don't – but only when I
can
see them, if you know what I mean. Mind you,' she added honestly, ‘I still do like pillar-box red. If Terry has time to do the walls of my room when he's finished the boys' I shall paint the walls bright white with the outlines of black shapes on it – squares and circles and things – and clusters of little red dots inside them. I can see exactly how I want it to look, although I don't know whether I'll be able to do it neatly enough.'

Mrs Hardie looked startled by the prospect of such a transformation of the house which had been her home for forty years, but raised no objection. Some of the old life returned
to her eyes as on cold winter evenings she used her own paintings as illustrations of how colour could be mixed and used. Failing eyesight prevented her from any longer producing the detailed flower sketches which had once given her such pleasure, but she opened her paint box again to give her young pupil practical illustrations of primary and complementary and contrasting colours.

‘Did you know,' Trish asked Terry when he arrived for the second of his leaves. ‘Did you know that shadows aren't really grey at all? Or at least, not necessarily. If you screw your eyes up and look you can see that they're a bit yellow and a bit blue and a bit of all sorts of other things.'

‘You painting shadows all over the walls, then?'

‘'Course not. Come and look at my room.' He had left it, at the end of his previous leave, ready for her to decorate.

‘It's not quite right,' she said critically. ‘I wanted the white to be all smooth, with no brushstrokes showing, but I couldn't get it like that. And there's more black than I meant, because sometimes the brush wobbled and then I had to make the whole line thicker. But it's not bad, is it?'

‘Not what I'd call restful,' suggested Terry. ‘All those red spots. I'd feel as if I was sleeping inside a bad case of measles!'

‘Who wants to be restful now? Anyway, I can do it all again next year in different colours if I want to. You know what I'd like to do, Terry? I'd like to go right through the house making every room exactly the right colour for the person who lives in it. I mean, I'm a black and white with splodges sort of person. Grace's room ought to be just white, plain white. Mrs Barrett is a cheerful orange and brown. Ellis is blues and greys. And Grandmother is pale pink and pale green.'

‘What about the house? Doesn't that have a colour of its own?'

That was a new idea to Trish, who had been thinking only of the bedrooms which were a manageable size. She knew that even in the most slapdash manner she could not tackle the high entertaining rooms. She considered the point for a moment,
recognizing that when moving from one room to another there should not be too many shocks to the eye.

‘They're right already. My grandfather wrote it all down when he designed the house. Red for the dining room and the library. Pink and green for the drawing room and the morning room. I suppose that's why I think those colours are right for Grandmother. It's just all the porridgy bedrooms that need changing.'

‘Sounds to me as though you're going to be an artist when you grow up.'

Trish stared at him in a puzzled manner. There was something wrong with that remark, although it took her a moment to think what it was. Then she worked it out. In Rupert's company, or Jean-Paul's, she could not pretend to be an adult. They had known her since she was six, and felt themselves to be of a different generation. But although Terry also was a few years older than she was, she felt on equal terms with him. They were meeting on her territory, so that his self-confidence as a workman was matched by hers as a hostess. It was a shock to be reminded that he too might see her only as a schoolgirl.

‘I'm grown-up already,' she said with a touch of indignation in her voice.

It was not true, of course. She just felt that it ought to be. If only the years would fly, fly, fly.

‘How did it go?' When Trish arrived home from school Grace, unusually, was waiting to welcome her. Dan and Boxer also came running to hear her news as she put her bicycle away in the coach-house.

‘Well,' said Trish. ‘Considering that it's inhuman to expect a person to spend midsummer day in an examination room and considering that it's an extra form of torture if it happens to be that person's eighteenth birthday and considering that it's' completely ridiculous that a person who only wants to go to art school should be expected to know all about history and Shakespeare and that sort of thing, it wasn't too bad.'

Grace, who had been treated to her stepdaughter's views on the Higher School Certificate at frequent intervals during the past two years, smiled in relief.

‘I think it'll be all right,' said Trish. ‘I'm only required to pass. No nonsense about credits or distinctions. Anyway, it's all over. No more exams. No more school, even, if I happen not to feel like it.'

‘Will you stop going then?' asked Boxer. At twelve, he had two more years of education to endure and would certainly leave earlier if he could.

‘No. The last three weeks should be rather fun. No proper lessons. Is there any more
real
news?'

The invasion of France had begun a fortnight earlier. She was torn between excitement at the prospect of victory at last and anxiety about her father. Ellis was in almost as much danger as the fighting men whose exploits he was recording on film.

‘More of those pilotless bombs falling on London,' Dan told her. ‘But it sounds as though everything's going all right in France.' It was the fourteen-year-old who most regularly listened to the radio news and moved coloured pins and flags over the large map which hung on the wall of the boys' bedroom. ‘I moved Rupert today,' he added. Trish had made tiny figures of the soldiers in whose fate they were all most interested and had fastened them to the heads of drawing pins. ‘There's a postcard for you. From Rome, I think.'

‘Rome! Why didn't you tell me?'

‘It's only just come.' But Trish did not wait to hear. Already she was running out of the stable towards the hall.

Rupert was her most faithful correspondent. Jean-Paul, who had joined the Free French army, wrote mostly to his father, enclosing only messages for Andy to pass on to her, and Terry was not a letter-writer at all. Until a month earlier he had been stationed near enough to Greystones to enable him to spend every leave there, and felt this to provide sufficient contact with his brothers and their hosts. But for two years Rupert had sent her long letters from the North African desert. Sometimes she felt that they were not exactly addressed to her as an individual, but were merely words that he needed to put on paper, with the choice of recipient to be decided later. But since he did so often choose her, she had no complaints about that.

For several weeks now there had been silence, which was eventually explained by news of the landings in Italy. The announcement of the fall of Rome had been made only a little while before that of the Normandy landings. If Rupert was safely in the city, it must surely mean that the worst was over for him.

Grace caught up with her while she was reading the card for the second time.

‘Trish dear, there's something I want to ask you about. I had a telephone call from my brother today.'

‘Uncle David?'

‘Yes. It's about Max. Apparently one of these flying bomb things came down in Harrow yesterday.'

‘Was Max hurt?'

‘Oh no, no. It was in the next street, I gather. Though the blast caused damage over a wide area. All the windows at the back of the house were blown out. More important than that, Sheila had another of her heart attacks. The shock, I suppose. It sounds as though she'll be all right, but obviously David's worried. The thing is –'