The Journey Home: A Novel (12 page)

My thoughts often turn to you when I’m at home in Somerset. There the old landowners are losing out one after another to the unscrupulous nouveaux riches. Many members of the old gentry are the salt of the earth and wouldn’t hurt a fly, but in the end have nothing to show for it but their title. And memories of ancient renown. But I don’t have anything against them, quite the contrary, I feel sorry for them.

My thoughts run on like this while Hallgrimur Palsson thrusts his hat at his fellow passengers and urges them to take part in the betting.

“What if there’s a fog? What then?”

The voices which vanish with the coming of autumn are cheerful and whisper secrets in the fading light as the dusk begins to hover down by the brook like smoke from burning kindling. We pause with the lily ponds and the hedges behind us, holding hands and listening, for the murmurings are low.

“The rumor about the florist,” says Anthony.

I remind him of the silence.

“You know it’s untrue.”

When I was small the breeze sometimes used to carry the scent of heather and wet wool from the moors. Sometimes the echo of hoofbeats, when I sat out in the field waiting for Father to come home. I imagined I could hear his voice in the sound: “Disa, darling, what have you been up to today?”

As the autumn nights draw close, the voices tend to change. Sometimes I don’t like it and try to ignore them, avoiding the passages of the old hall and taking care to shuffle through the fallen leaves so that the rustling will drown their whisperings.

What are you doing here? The earth doesn’t recognize your tread, it forgets the sound of your footsteps as soon as you are gone.

If I stand opposite the wall of the hall and call his name, not even the echo of my voice can be heard. “Jakob,” I call, “Jakob,” but get only silence in return. The same silence as when I tried to reach him after he had gone. A deathly silence.

Anthony’s cousin, Lady Galsworthy, a woman in her sixties, tall and thin with an aquiline nose and hawk eyes, stayed with us for nearly a week before Christmas. It must have been two years ago. “It’s time you two tied the knot,” she said. “For decency’s sake, if nothing else.”

She wiped the drip from the tip of her red nose with a white handkerchief. “Good gravy, dear,” she said to me. “What a difference it would make if my cook could make such good gravy.”

She stayed for nearly a week but it was my good fortune that she got the flu and spent three days in bed. I tried to avoid talking to her as far as possible.

She and Anthony used to go sledding together when they were children visiting their grandfather.

“Do you remember when we fell? And you stood up and said . . .”

“Good gravy, dear. For decency’s sake, if nothing else.”

“I want you to know it’s untrue what they say about us,” repeats Anthony. “I hardly know the man.”

We stroll home. I can’t stand this weakness and am ready to explode at him when suddenly I hear a cheerful voice in the breeze and bite my tongue. I’m convinced it’s a child’s voice, a boy laughing. Perhaps he’s with his mother down by the road.

“Untrue,” he says.

Over the fields the blue dusk rolls like slow waves toward a deserted shore.

We will reach Iceland at nine tomorrow morning. I receive the news with mixed feelings, glad to be free of this deadly dull company but nervous about my homecoming.

What do I have to say to him? My words can never be anything but an epilogue. They cannot help him in any way. What can he know about me? What can he want to know about me? As little as possible, I imagine.

Why are you doing this? I ask myself, listening to the autumn rain beating on the porthole. Why? I need fresh air.

Someone says he saw two gulls flying by a moment ago. I go up on deck and think I see a white wing in the mist, a white wing which turns into a speck of light and vanishes. I have a premonition of a rock out in the fog, a rock covered with seaweed and a seal clambering on to it. Why, I don’t know. My thoughts are wandering. I try but cannot control them.

The clowns await the evening in their best clothes, newly shaven and reeking of aftershave, wet-combed, with an aperitif in their hands, smiling and happy as slugs in damp moss. They’re free of all doubt and anxiety, adjusting their ties for the fourth time, looking in the mirror and watching themselves raising their drinks to their lips.

The women are doubtless still powdering their noses, as special care must be taken in all the preparations for the final dinner. Tomorrow they will be back in their gray, mundane lives, half-dried haddock and boiled potatoes, children crying in the night and emptiness by day, a furtive glass of sherry in the evening to try to dispel the gloom. The wheels keep turning and the bells conscientiously mark each step toward the end. Sometimes someone gets a promotion and a party is thrown. “Head accountant,” says the wife to her friends and looks with admiring eyes at her husband who puts on a modest face, though he knows he deserves the position. All that drudgery for all those years.

There’s a poker game in progress in the smoking room when I come in again. The learned doctor is in full flight, the first glass having lifted his soul from the depths of his hangover. Apparently he remembers our last exchange and takes care to avoid my eye.

“Good evening, Madam!” cries his companion. “Can we invite you to join us for a hand?”

My thoughts turn to Anthony.

That spring we had decided to repair the stone wall down by the road, as well as the wall between the main building and the conservatory. It was also a matter of urgency to wallpaper and paint the guest rooms in the north wing, though perhaps it could be claimed that it was no less a priority to carpet the billiards room and games room. Then Anthony pointed out that it would be better to replace the netting around the tennis courts sooner rather than later, and I didn’t see how we could delay any longer putting new glass in the greenhouse. On top of all this came the traditional spring chores which Old Marshall usually took care of. Only this time we couldn’t rely on him because he had fallen when climbing down from the tractor a week before, slipping on wet wood and breaking his leg.

“He’ll have to start cutting down anyway,” I told Anthony. “The dear chap is getting old, as you know.”

Anthony tried to cut such talk short. “That sort of mishap could happen to anyone,” I remember him muttering.

I then said something along the lines that perhaps someone else could take care of the heaviest jobs.

“You can be the one to tell him,” he replied.

Of course, neither of us could summon the courage to discuss this with the old man. It’s not as if we didn’t have other things to attend to, with no more than a month left till the first guests were expected. We had often been let down by the firm of workmen we had used during the past few seasons— they were extortionately expensive—and so we decided to let things take their course and advertise for handymen to help us.

Having carefully scrutinized all the offers we received, we agreed to hire two men from Surrey. What decided the matter was that they claimed to have worked for Lord Greene of Joldwynd.

“The people at Joldwynd should know about workmen after all the bother they’ve had there,” said Anthony. “Only seven years after his house was built, Lord Greene was advised to knock it down and build a new one from scratch. An excellent fellow, Lord Greene,” he added.

I asked him to speak to Lord Greene to check up on the men’s reliability but for some reason he never got round to it.

For the first week they never stopped working. They slept in the east wing and were up with the lark, worked all day, didn’t linger over their meals but ate in silence in the kitchen and went early to bed. They were both in their late thirties, one lean and slight in appearance, the other burly but not tall. They began outside, as it was fairly mild and dry for the first few days. The stones which had fallen out of the wall by the conservatory were back in place in no time and the wall by the entrance was soon as good as new. The day they began to put up new netting around the tennis courts it started to rain and I expected them to take a break from outdoor tasks and come inside. But they kept going, putting on mackintoshes and boots, and not letting the downpour interfere with their work. I breathed more easily and told Anthony that I didn’t know how we had ever managed without them.

The painting went without a hitch but by then their meal breaks seemed to be getting longer. They also went to bed later than before, generally sitting in the billiards room in the evenings, playing cards, sometimes rummy but more often poker. I suspected them of playing for money.

Anthony sometimes looked in on them in the evenings and in my opinion the burlier man was rather too matey with him, so I tried to make sure that his visits to them didn’t last long. Eventually I had to tell him that I thought it best if he stayed away from them completely in the evenings.

When they had been with us for just under three weeks, I had to go on a brief trip. I went away every year at this time, taking little Marilyn with me and traveling for two to three days. We didn’t go far, no farther than Hampshire or Devon, sometimes to Wiltshire and a couple of times to Cornwall. This trip was undertaken in search of good fresh ingredients at reasonable prices and we visited one farm after another, often four or five in the same day. Of course, I have always been loyal to the Wakefields, but there’s no harm in having other cards up my sleeve when it comes to negotiating with them. In addition, I must admit that not everything they provide is equally good. For example, I have made it my custom to buy duck and pheasant from Liphook in Hampshire and make sure I have the papers lying on the table when Mr. Wakefield comes to do a deal with me. “The Liphook Game Farm,” meets his eye, “Supplies Pheasant Eggs from a Stock of 10,000 Birds. Cross Mongolian Eggs at Reasonable Prices (I underline ‘reasonable’ in red so it definitely won’t escape his attention), All Infertile Eggs Replaced. Wild Ducks for your Pleasure, etc.”

We hadn’t got farther than the outskirts of Salisbury when I was struck with a sense of unease. The spire of the cathedral appeared above the woods ahead of us against the backdrop of a few aimlessly drifting clouds, humble as an index finger reaching out to the Almighty and usually a comforting sight. As it rose before me, I felt nervous, though I gave no sign of it, either in the car or later when we stopped at a pig farm and stepped out into the mild air. We looked around quickly as usual, but I felt worse and worse as day wore on. We had planned to eat supper with the people at Liphook and stay there overnight, but when the meal was over and we sat down in the sitting room with a cup of coffee and glass of port, I suddenly decided to go home. Perhaps Marilyn had already sensed that something was wrong. She asked no questions, just gathered our things together and roused the driver, who had probably been dropping off.

A mist shrouded the landscape on the way home and from time to time the heavens opened. When we stopped at a narrow bridge over the Avon, I opened the window and thought I could hear an owl hooting in the darkness. In the distance the clouds gleamed.

When we drew up at the house, it was past one o’clock. Lights blazed from many of the windows in the main block and I smelled woodsmoke as soon as I opened the car door. The chimney was pouring out smoke and the front door stood wide open. I walked straight in and didn’t stop until I came to the door of the billiards room. The first person I saw was our neighbor, the Earl of Helmsdale, who had nodded off in a chair by the fire. Then, as I got nearer, I caught sight of Anthony and the workmen. Anthony tried to focus on me with bleary eyes. He was dead drunk, sitting or rather slumped at the card table, too far gone to open his mouth. The workmen sat there with him, also drunk but still with their wits about them.

“Welcome, madam,” said the burly man.

“Welcome to our house,” said the other. “Next time perhaps you wouldn’t mind knocking before you enter.”

“And wiping your shoes.”

They laughed like madmen.

Empty bottles lay littered across the floor: whiskey, gin, and two red wine bottles, a 1951 Margaux and a ’45 Mouton which I had put by as an investment. The Earl of Helmsdale snored, while Anthony took off his hunting cap and stared at it as if he had never seen it before.

“Our mate Anthony put the house up in the last game,” said the burly man.

“We’ve got the paper to prove it,” added the other, waving a sheet of pale yellow stationery at me which I recognized at once. It was my writing paper. They couldn’t have got hold of it from anywhere but the desk in my bedroom.

“How dare you!”

“We’ll employ you in the kitchen. Someone’s got to feed us.”

“And wash up. Someone’s got to wash up too.”

“You will regret this!”

“Anthony, wake up! Wake up, mate! Tell us about this florist we’ve been hearing about.”

At that point I lost my temper. Before I knew it I was down in the cellar, flinging open the door of the gun store. I seized a Browning double-barreled shotgun, loaded it in a tearing hurry and raced up the stairs. Marilyn was just coming in with our things.

“Disa? What’s going on?”

Without answering her I stormed into the billiards room, not stopping till I got to the card table and aimed the shotgun first at the burly man, then at his companion.

“Get out!”

They were stunned, either with amazement or fright, and didn’t move. But having reached the end of my tether, I took aim at the hearth and fired. The shot reverberated through the house, whining up the chimney and waking the birds in the trees, rousing the ghosts in the attics and echoing in the quiet of the night. The two men leaped to their feet and dashed to the door in a panic. I followed close on their heels as they ran away from the house, firing again when I thought they were slowing down.

“Did you get the lion?” bellowed the Earl of Helmsdale when I returned.