The Hardie Inheritance (6 page)

‘It feels almost as though it
was
a hundred years ago.' Mrs Hardie's smile showed how well at ease she felt with her young kinsman. It sounded as though she was just about to confess to the social misalliance which was the cause of the family quarrel – and perhaps even admit to the reduced circumstances in which she now lived. But Grace's attention was no longer on the conversation. She had noticed Andy standing on the far side of the oak tree, watching the scene.

She had asked him to tea, and he had come. But it was clear that he did not intend to interrupt the family group. Nor would it be an appropriate moment for Grace to invite him to join them. She was well aware of that; but nevertheless felt a pang of regret as, after catching her eye, he turned and walked away. Would he come back later? She was surprised by the intensity of her wish to see him, to have time to talk. It was because her brief girlhood romance had never had time to work itself through to a natural end but had been too violently disrupted by war. She felt as though she and Andy still knew each other intimately, although common sense told her that their separate lives during the past eighteen years had made them strangers. When he paused to look back for a moment now, she raised a hand in a gesture which she hoped he would understand.

Then it was time to be polite again. The invitation to visit Castlemere, which Mrs Hardie had declined, was being pressed upon Grace, and curiosity made her eager to accept. A day was fixed when Lord Rupert would call to drive her over in person. What a day of excitements this had become!

Andy returned, as Grace had hoped, soon after Lord Rupert's Lagonda had passed the lodge and turned out of the drive. Tea by that time had been cleared away, but Philip produced a bottle of his home-made wine.

Andy did not disguise his astonishment that the family of a vintner should choose to drink anything but the best French wines, but he was offered no explanation. The House of Hardie was run now by Grace's brother David – the brother who had asked her to pledge Greystones as security for a loan and who had never forgiven her for her refusal. The days when cases of wine were sent up to the house whenever requested were long since over. It didn't matter. Philip enjoyed putting weeds and surplus crops to good use, experimenting with different blends and laying the results down for several years. Had Andy arrived later in the evening, he might have been offered the 1927 apple and raisin wine which in maturity had become as dark and creamy as a sweet sherry. But instead, Grace's own favourite was produced: the young nettle wine whose sharp bite was particularly suitable for a hot day.

Although Andy was taken aback by the refreshment on offer, Grace was amused to see that her mother showed no surprise at being expected to entertain socially the gardener's son – someone whom she had last seen acting as a junior member of her outside staff.

Some of the credit for her relaxed manner must go to Andy himself. He, like Philip's wines, had matured with age. He was thirty-eight years old, the father of a family, a man of standing, no doubt, in his own community. His freckled face had changed
very little since he was eighteen, but he had lost the lean look of his youth, and the foreign cut of his suit helped to emphasize the fact that he could no longer be neatly categorized inside an English class system. Besides, over the past ten years his father had been not so much the Hardies' head gardener as their partner in a market gardening enterprise. Mrs Hardie no longer – as had happened in pre-war days – ordered peaches or pineapples or asparagus out of season to be picked for the dinner table, but instead asked what she could have to cook for the evening meal. Andy would certainly have learned from his parents how much the old order had changed.

He himself, although certainly much altered, was still the same person as the boy with whom Grace had fallen in love. As she watched him, at once earnest and polite, conversing with her mother, she felt a small glow of satisfaction. Unsophisticated as she was at the age of sixteen, her judgement had been sound enough to fix her affections on a man who would have proved worthy of them. There was nothing in her behaviour then of which she need feel ashamed – and she had long ago forgiven Andy for his betrayal of her trust. Now that the barrier of fortune had disappeared, they could be friends again – and friendship, in Grace's solitary life, was a most precious gift.

Andy was at ease too. As he set down his glass after sampling the brown, tangy liquid, he addressed Philip on equal terms: a man who grew grapes questioning a man who made wine without them.

‘What is this made from?'

It was Grace who answered. She and her mother were both accustomed to spare Philip the effort of talking.

‘We pick young nettle tips in spring and boil them like spinach. I can tell you, the smell is disgusting. Philip does all the skilled work; the fermentation.'

‘Do you sell any of it?'

‘Not the nettle wine. Not everyone likes it. But elderberry wine, yes. Your father takes some of that down to the market
for us.' Grace flushed a little as she admitted it, although it was foolish for someone whose family had in earlier generations prospered by selling wine commercially to be ashamed of this small-scale activity. The cash it brought in enabled them to buy the sugar needed both for the wine they consumed themselves and the preserves of fruit which Mrs Hardie stocked up for each winter. Sugar, like shoes, was something which could not be produced on their own land, but must be bought for money.

‘Do you never use grapes?'

Grace shook her head. ‘The vine that you probably remember was in one of the glasshouses. We don't heat those any longer.'

‘But you could grow vines out of doors.'

‘Surely not. They wouldn't ripen in an English summer, would they?'

‘Romans,' said Philip. On the rare occasions when he spoke, he was economical with words; but Andy, understanding his meaning, nodded.

‘That's right. The Romans had vineyards in England – even further north than this. I was walking about earlier on, while your visitor was here. The ridges on the lower pasture, you know, below the house – I reckon that's old terracing. Facing south-west, sheltered from the north, draining down well. There could have been a vineyard there once. Could be again. Though nowadays anyone who wanted to plant would take the rows north to south. Let me show you.' He stood up, eager to lead the way down the hill.

Both Mrs Hardie and Philip shook their heads smilingly. The visit of their young relative had interrupted their usual daily routine and they were anxious to return to work. Only Grace, who had abandoned her carving for the day when she took off her working clothes, was prepared to walk down through the upper meadow and stand with Andy on the highest of what must certainly have been a series of terraces long ago.

‘A row going north to south would cut across these lines,' she pointed out; for the meadow, like the house itself, had a south-west aspect.

‘All the better,' said Andy. ‘The extra height would allow more sun to reach the end of the rows. It would be more difficult to plough the land for the first time, I suppose – but you wouldn't need to use the whole meadow. An acre would be quite enough to start with to see how it went. About three thousand vines, say.'

‘Three thousand!' Grace had thought they were discussing only a small test area: half a dozen vines, perhaps, from which an experimental wine could be made by the same method which Philip applied to raspberries or redcurrants. ‘You're not suggesting that we should attempt to start a proper vineyard here!'

‘It's easier than you might think. In France –'

‘We're not in France,' said Grace. ‘And we have no labour. Who is going to dig out three thousand holes and drive in three thousand stakes and plant and prune and hoe for three or four years, I suppose, before the first fruit is seen? And all for nothing, perhaps, if the soil proves unsuitable or the summers too cold.'

‘The soil's all right. And it's autumn that matters, not summer. I remember some good Septembers and Octobers here. Five years out of six you'd get a good ripening.'

‘Anyway –' Grace hardly listened to his interruption – ‘we couldn't possibly afford to buy vines on such a scale.'

‘Well, you could cut the number by half and plant them at six feet instead of three. Or even fewer to start with, and root the prunings to build up stock.'

Grace shook her head. ‘Your mother must have told you about the change in our circumstances,' she said. ‘We're very content with the way we live; and thanks to Philip's war pension and your father's help in selling produce as well as growing it, we have as much money as we need, just about – but nothing extra that we could possibly risk in such a way. I
mean, it would be far too much for your father to undertake on top of his present work, wouldn't it?'

‘That's something I need to talk to you about,' said Andy, his enthusiasm fading into gravity. ‘Doctor's not too cheerful about Dad. Not to beat about the bush, he's dying.'

‘Oh, Andy, I'm so sorry.' Instinctively Grace put out a hand and felt it firmly taken. ‘Is it his chest? I've heard him coughing in the mornings.'

He nodded. ‘Nothing to be done, doctor says. So I have to ask you about my mother. Would you let her stay on in the lodge, after? She'd be miserable living with us, not speaking the lingo, and she can't be doing with my wife at all. I could pay a bit of rent, what you thought was right. And I could send one of my boys over. Not the eldest, because he's got his eyes on the family land. But the next one, Jean-Paul, he's a bright boy. Learnt a bit of English from me already. He'd be company for my mother. And he could be useful to you on the land. He's thirteen. Not got his full strength yet – and none of my father's know-how, of course. But you'd find him a good worker if you showed him what to do. You could pay him in food, with a bit of pocket money. He wouldn't expect the market proceeds, not till he was old enough to be useful.'

Grace, troubled, was silent – not considering Andy's suggestion, but thinking about his father, who had been part of her life at Greystones ever since she could remember. While aware that he was ill, and sorry on his account, this was the first moment at which it was brought home to her how much the Hardies depended both on his work and on his willingness to sell their surplus produce. Philip possessed all the necessary gardening skills, and Jean-Paul certainly could be useful in the steady labour of keeping the gardens tidy, but none of the family would enjoy acting as a salesman. If only Andy himself … but there was no point in day-dreaming.

‘Of course your mother will be able to stay on,' she said at last. ‘And we'll be glad of your son's help. But –'

‘But I see what you mean, yes, you can't be tackling a
vineyard, not just now.' Andy was changing the subject with a deliberate briskness; and releasing her hand as he did so. ‘Tell you what, though. Suppose I were to send over just half a dozen roots with Jean-Paul when he comes. Just to try out the soil and the weather. Your brother could take cuttings in a year or two, if they settled in well. Wouldn't commit you to much in the way of work. But might be interesting?'

‘I'll ask Philip what he thinks. Thanks for the offer, anyway.' They began to stroll down the terraced meadow, its grass kept short by the grazing sheep. But almost at once Andy came to a halt again, looking down at the flatter land which lay between them and the centre of Oxford.

‘Have you thought of selling any of your land?' he asked abruptly. ‘Must be more'n you can manage. And would put a bit of money in your pockets.'

Grace shook her head. They had moved round the side of the hill as they talked. The view from here was no longer obstructed by the wood, as it was when she looked from her bedroom window. Instead it offered – or rather, had offered once – a vista of open countryside, broken by the villages of Cowley and Temple Cowley, with Iffley in the distance. Even when she was a little girl the barracks had already been in evidence at the foot of the hill, but only later had the sprawling buildings of the Morris Motor Works begun to spoil the view. They were still spreading. She could see from here the unfinished building which would contain a new production line – and between the spokes of the roads which stretched from Carfax was growing a grid of narrow streets to house the workers who were swarming to Oxford to take employment in the motor car factories. The bricks and concrete were creeping towards Greystones. At all costs she must preserve her own land as a buffer; a no-man's land on which no builder could set foot.

‘The villagers would lynch me if I let the wood go,' she said laughingly. The inhabitants of Headington Quarry claimed old-established poachers' rights on the strip of woodland which
bordered the stream. They took furze for their fires and acorns for their pigs and rabbits for their pots. There were plenty of rabbits left to be eaten at Greystones itself and, in return for the Hardies' forbearance in respect of the lower land, it was tacitly understood that no one would trespass or steal from the cultivated ground higher up the hill.

‘Do you remember how we used to play there as kids?' Andy asked her.

‘I remember how you planted a forest once. Acorns and conkers and sycamore wings. All in about a square yard of ground. Shall we see how it's grown?'

She felt once again like the little girl she had been when nine-year-old Andy first showed her his plantation as she led the way into the wood – although the shoes and stockings she was so unusually wearing were inappropriate for such an exploration. Andy needed to take her hand as she made an unsteady crossing of the stream by means of a fallen tree trunk, and he did not let it go. She thought nothing of it. It was as if they were children together again. Only when they reached the boulders was her heart pierced by a memory of the day when she had ceased to be a child.