The Ivy Tree Read online

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘He said so. It was supposed to be a presage of evil, probably death.’

  He grinned. ‘I’ll 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; something lost and uncertain moving like a stranger behind the smooth façade 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 blond, 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 Winslow 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 see 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 . . . Castle 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.’

  ‘Because your roots are here?’ He smiled at my look. ‘They are, you know. I’m sure I’m right. There must have been someone, some Winslow, ’way back in the last century, who went to Canada from here. Probably more than one, you know how it was then; in the days when everybody had thirteen children, and they all had thirteen children, I’m pretty sure that one or two Winslows went abroad to stay. Whitescar wouldn’t have been big enough, anyway, and nobody would have got a look-in except the eldest son . . . Yes, that’s it, that explains it. Some Winslow went to Canada, and one of his daughters – your great-grandmother, would it be? – married an Armstrong there. Or something like that. There’ll be records at Whitescar, surely? I don’t know, I wasn’t brought up there. But that must be it.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, with that charmingly quizzical lift of the eyebrow that was perhaps just a little too well practised, ‘that does make us cousins, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Of course it does. It’s as plain as a pikestaff that you must be a Winslow. Nothing else would account for the likeness; I refuse to believe in pure chance. You’re a type, the Winslow type, it’s unmistakable – that fair hair, and your eyes that queer colour between green and grey, and those lovely dark eyelashes . . .’

  ‘Carefully darkened,’ I said calmly. ‘After all, why go through life with light lashes if you don’t have to?’

  ‘Then Annabel’s must have been darkened, too. By heaven, yes, they were! I remember now, when I first came to Whitescar she’d be only fifteen, and I suppose she hadn’t started using that sort of thing. Yes, they were light. I don’t even remember when the change took place! I was only nineteen when I came, you know, and straight from the back of beyond. I just took her for granted as the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.’

  He spoke, for once, quite simply. I felt myself going scarlet, as if the tribute had been aimed at me. As, in a way, it was.

  I said, to cover my embarrassment: ‘You talk of me as being a “Winslow type”. Where do you come in? You don’t seem to conform.’

  ‘Oh, I’m a sport.’ The white teeth showed. ‘Pure Irish, like my mother.’

  ‘Then you are Irish? I thought you looked it. Is Con short for Connor?’

  ‘Sure. She was from Galway. I’ve her colouring. But the good looks come from the Winslows. We’re all beauties.’

  ‘Well, well,’ I said drily, ‘it’s a pity I haven’t a better claim, isn’t it?’ I stubbed out my cigarette on the stone beside me, then flicked the butt out over the cliff’s edge. I watched the place where it had vanished for a moment. ‘There is . . . one thing. Something I do remember, I think. It came back as we were talking. I don’t know if it means anything . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It was just – I’m sure I remember Granny talking about a forest, some forest near Bellingham. Is there something near your “Winslow place”, perhaps, that—’

  ‘Forrest!’ He looked excited. ‘Indeed there is! You remember I told you that Whitescar was a kind of enclave in the park belonging to the local bigwigs? That’s Forrest Park; the Park’s really a big tract of land enclosed in a loop of the river, almost an island. The whole place is usually just spoken of as “Forrest” – and the Forrests, the family, were there for generations. It was all theirs, except the one piece by the river, in the centre of the loop; that’s Whitescar. I told you how they tried to winkle us out of it. The big house was Forrest Hall.’

  ‘Was? Oh, yes, you said the Hall had “gone”. What happened? Who were they? This does sound as if my great-grandmother, at any rate, may have come from hereabouts, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It certainly does. I knew it couldn’t be sheer chance, that likeness. Why, this means—’

  ‘Who were the Forrests? Could she have known the family? What happened to them?’

  ‘She’d certainly have known them if she lived at Whitescar. The family wasn’t an especially old one, merchant adventurers who made a fortune trading with the East India Company in the seventeenth century, then built the Hall and settled down as landed gentry. By the middle of the nineteenth, they’d made another fortune out of railway shares. They extended their gardens, and did a spot of landscaping in the park, and built some rather extravagant stables – the last owner ran it as a stud at one time – and did their damnedest to buy the Winslows out of Whitescar. They couldn’t, of course. Another cigarette?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  He talked on for a few minutes more about Whitescar and Forrest; there had been in no sense, he said, a ‘feud’ between the families, it was only that the Winslows had held their small parcel of excellent land for generations, and were fiercely proud of it, and of their position as yeomen farmers independent of the family at the Hall, which, in its palmy days, had managed to acquire all the countryside from Darkwater Bank to Greenside, with the single exception of Whitescar, entrenched on its very doorstep.

  ‘Then, of course, with the mid-twentieth century, came the end, the tragic Fall of the House of Forrest.’ He grinned. It was very evident that, whatever tragedy had touched the Hall, it didn’t matter a damn if it hadn’t also touched Whitescar. ‘Even if the Hall hadn’t been burned down, they’d have had to give it up. Old Mr Forrest had lost a packet during the slump, and then after his death, what with taxes and death duties—’

  ‘It was burned down? What
happened? When you said “tragic”, you didn’t mean that anyone was killed?’

  ‘Oh, lord, no. Everyone got out all right. There were only the Forrests themselves in the house, and the couple who ran the garden and house between them, Johnny Rudd and his wife, and old Miss Wragg who looked after Mrs Forrest. But it was quite a night, believe me. You could see the flames from Bellingham.’

  ‘I suppose you were there? It must have been awful.’

  ‘There wasn’t much anyone could do. By the time the fire brigade could get there the place was well away.’ He talked about the scene for a little longer, describing it quite graphically, then went on: ‘It had started in Mrs Forrest’s bedroom, apparently, in the small hours. Her poodle raised the place, and Forrest went along. The bed was alight by that time. He managed to drag the bedclothes off her – she was unconscious – and carry her downstairs.’ A sideways look. ‘They were damned lucky to get the insurance paid up, if you ask me. There was talk of an empty brandy bottle in her room, and sleeping pills, and of how there’d been a small fire once before in her bedroom, and Forrest had forbidden Miss Wragg to let her have cigarettes in her room at night. But there’s always talk when these things happen – and heaven knows there’d been enough gossip about the Forrests . . . of every sort. There always is, when a couple doesn’t get on. I always liked him, so did everybody else for that matter, but the old woman, Miss Wragg, used to blackguard him right and left to anyone who’d listen. She’d been Crystal Forrest’s nurse, and had come to look after her when she decided to be a chronic invalid, and she had a tongue like poison.’

  ‘Decided to be – that’s an odd way of putting it.’

  ‘Believe me, Crystal Forrest was a damned odd sort of woman. How any man ever – oh well, they say he married her for her money anyway. Must have, if you ask me. If it was true, he certainly paid for every penny of it that he’d put into that stud of his, poor devil. There can’t have been much money, actually, because I know for a fact that when they left England after the fire they lived pretty much on the insurance, and on what he’d got for the horses. They went to live in Florence – bought a small villa there, but then she got worse, went right round the bend, one gathers, and he took her off to some man in Vienna. Till she died, two years ago, she’d been in one psychiatric clinic after another – or whatever is the fashionable name for the more expensive loony-bins – in Vienna, and that had taken everything. When Forrest got back from Austria eventually, to finish selling up here, there was nothing left.’