Touch Not the Cat Read online

  I would not think that way. I would not.

  The yew alone burns lamps of peace

  For them that lie forlorn.

  That was the way to think of them. Peace I had had offered to me, and loss was not yet. This was still my home, and it still held what I had come here to find.

  I went slowly down the muffled path towards the gate. The shadows of home reached out for me, comforting me, closing me round.

  So, at the same moment, in the same shadows, did my lover. He was here. He was here in the cool night, stronger and closer than at any time since I had left Ashley. Every shade of feeling came, direct as if spoken, strong as the scent of the breeze sieving the yew trees. There was welcome, pleasure, and with it all a kind of apprehension. I paused to identify this, and unbelievingly registered it as guilt, or shame . . .

  I had just reached the lychgate. The darkness here, cast by the roof, was palpable. I paused, groping before me for the latch of the gate. Guilt or shame? From him? From me he must have been getting a mixture almost as confusing; surprise, questioning, reassurance making it clear that whatever it was, I was with him, and part of it . . .

  My hand, groping in the dark, touched cloth. For one wild, heart-stopping moment I thought he was here, and that I had touched his sleeve. Then through the loose folds I felt the wood of the gate. Some garment or rug had been left there, draped over the top bar. My brain identified it even before my fingers had felt the ribbed silky surface, the weight of the cloth. A cassock. The robe I had seen him wearing, flung down here as he left the churchyard . . . Guilt and shame indeed. The kind of thing he might be feeling if he had recently been in the vestry, trying locks he should not have tried, carrying away things he did not want anyone to see?

  What is it? Was it you in the church? I asked the question sharply, but got no reply. The patterns were fading. He was moving away.

  At the same moment I heard, close at hand, steps going fast through the graveyard grass, away from me. He must have been standing all this while, motionless, on the other side of the wall of yew.

  Lover? Lover!

  He ignored me. The steps quickened. I heard the faint ping and thrill of the wire that crossed a gap in the broken wall between the churchyard and the Court gardens. Beyond the gap was the tangle of a neglected shrubbery, and a door into the old, high-walled garden where the glasshouses were. And now, faintly behind the black of the trees, I saw the night slacken into silver. The moon was rising. In a moment she would be above the trees, and there would be light enough to see.

  Near me was a gap between the yews. I thrust through it, and ran across the grave-humped grass. I knew every tombstone, and its name, as well as I knew the books in the schoolroom shelves. The dead would not mind my step; we had known each other a long time. I reached the gap in the wall just as the moon showed enough to send a gleam along the wire. I laid a hand to it; it was humming still. I clambered through into the whippy undergrowth of the shrubbery. Elderberry and ash saplings, raspberry canes gone wild, ivy trailing snares along the ground, and somewhere the peppery sweetness of lad’s love. Nettles, too, knee high. I swore under my breath, and plunged forward onto the trodden twist of moss that was the path to the walled garden. The gate in the high wall stood ajar, and there was moonlight on the apple trees beyond. I ran through, and paused at the head of the shallow, slippery steps.

  Across the centre of the garden, from east gate to west, ran a wide avenue of apple trees, espaliered with stretched arms like stiff ranks holding hands. The moon, sailing as swiftly as a galleon with a fair breeze, cleared a beech tree to light the ranked blossoms, and between them the empty pathway hatched with their shadows. Nothing moved, except the boughs of the high trees beyond the wall, shifting in the light wind and sending dark and glitter flying across the glasshouse roofs.

  Then I saw him, for the second time that night, still no more than a tall shadow melting into the other shadows. He, too, had paused. He was standing in the shelter of the far gate. Beyond him lay the old rose garden, and then the maze, and the apple orchard where my cottage stood, and the water-meadows beyond the Pool, where the field path led to the village.

  I hesitated. He must know who was pursuing him. If he wanted me, he had only to wait for me. In fact – I realised it now – he had waited for me. I had been a long time in the church. He could not have failed to catch my response to him, back there at the lych-gate, and now, standing as I was full in the moonlight, he must see me and know I had followed him.

  He was looking, I was certain of it. I heard the creak of the gate opening in the far wall, and then the pause. I stood getting my breath and trying to open my mind to reach him again. But nothing came except that muddled mixture of exhilaration and amazement and guilt. I wondered again, but this time wholly without blame, what he had been doing in the church. Whatever it was, I was with him; I had to be. I sent him all I had of love, and need and longing, and got the answer, more clearly even than the wind across the trees. Not yet. Trust me. Not yet. There was another creak as the garden gate shut fast. The latch dropped. I was alone in the garden.

  I trudged back the way I had come, and, regaining the churchyard, went by the normal route to the farm.

  The darkness hid the dilapidation of the big farmyard. Barns and sheds lay on the left, and on the other side the chimney-stacks of the farmhouse stood up into the moonlight. The house had been empty ever since the farm lands, which were not part of the trust, were sold. The farmer who had bought the land had not found it worth his while to repair the house, which had stood empty now for years; it was used as a storehouse and even, occasionally, to house young stock. The hens roosted there, and pigeons nested in the attics. Adjoining it, and in heartening contrast, were the two farm cottages, which still belonged to Ashley. These showed whitewashed walls reflecting the moonlight, and brightly lit windows with gay curtains.

  In the cottage nearest to the farmhouse the Hendersons lived; Mr Henderson, a man well into his sixties, was sexton and grave-digger to Ashley and One Ash; his wife ‘did for’ the Vicar, and obliged at the Court when asked. She also cleaned and mended for Rob Granger, who lived in the other cottage. When I was a child the Grangers had lived at the big farmhouse, but a couple of years after Mr Granger’s death, when the farm was sold, Rob and his mother moved into the cottage. Mrs Granger herself had died not long after, and now Rob lived alone.

  As I crossed the yard the door of his cottage opened, and he peered out, silhouetted against the light.

  ‘That you, Miss Bryony?’

  ‘Oh, Rob, hullo! How nice to see you again. Yes, it’s me. How did you guess?’

  ‘Well, I reckoned you’d be coming across for the bike. I knew you were here. I saw you come out of the church. You went after him, did you?’

  I stopped dead. ‘You were there? Do you mean to tell me you saw him?’

  ‘I did. Quick as a hare out of the vestry door and behind the yew walk. He stood there the best part of an hour.’

  ‘You actually watched him?’

  ‘Aye, I did.’

  ‘And you didn’t ask him what he was doing?’

  ‘I didn’t rightly like to, seeing who it was.’

  There was a pause of seconds. At the moment when it would have been remarkable, I asked: ‘Well, who was it?’

  He looked surprised. ‘You didn’t talk to him, then? I made sure he was waiting for you.’

  ‘Apparently not. Who was it?’

  Something, in spite of me, must have come through my voice. He said quickly: ‘You’ve no call to worry. It was only your cousin. One of them, that is. I couldn’t tell for sure, not in that light, or lack of it. But an Ashley; I couldn’t mistake that.’

  ‘Then why did you stay to watch him?’

  ‘I don’t rightly know.’ He showed no resentment at the rather sharp question. ‘The way he came running out of the vestry . . . I didn’t recognise him at first, so I went up, careful, under the bushes by the wall, where I could see. I saw the c
hurch lights go on then, for a minute, and I saw it was one of the Ashleys. I guessed that it might be you in the church. Then the main lights went off again, but you didn’t come out.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I – I wanted the dark.’

  ‘I guessed that. And I think he did, too. He stayed there, waiting for you.’

  I said nothing. I was fighting back disappointment so acute that I was afraid he would notice it. I stood looking down, uncertain what to say next. I had quite forgotten my errand to the farm.

  ‘Won’t you come in?’ said Rob. ‘No sense in standing out in the yard. Come in now, do.’

  He stood back in the doorway to let me through. I went into the kitchen where, it was obvious, he had just been about to cook his supper. There was a place set for one at the table, and beside the stove was a pack of sausages and some tomatoes, with a packet of peas defrosting in the warmth.

  I checked. ‘I’m afraid I’ve come at a bad time.’

  He went past me and threw a couple of billets of wood on the fire, then hooked a foot round the leg of a chair and hitched it forward.

  ‘You haven’t at all. I’ve got your bike here for you; it’s not in the barn; I brought it into the scullery. And I got a can of petrol for it. It’ll not take a minute to fill up and get it ready. But look, why don’t you stay a bit first? I was just making a bite of supper, and you’re welcome to have some. There’s plenty. It’s only sausages, dead easy if it suits you.’

  Since I had obviously interrupted his cooking, and just as obviously he wanted his meal before he started getting the bike ready for me, I accepted. ‘I’d love that. Look, I’ll cook while you set for me, shall I?’

  ‘Okay. Want some chips with it?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  Mrs Henderson had left her apron hanging behind the door. I put it on, and busied myself at the stove I got the grill going, and laid the sausages and tomatoes to cook while Rob took things from drawers and cupboards, and, neat-handed as a sailor for all his size, laid the extra place and sliced bread and tipped another helping of frozen chips into the frying basket. There was no question of looking out the best china for Miss Bryony; I had been an intimate of the Granger household all my life, and had taken things just as they came. Fish and chips straight from the newspaper, and yellow shop cakes with marshmallow cream, had been the ‘tea-at-Mrs Granger’s’ treat of my childhood. I watched Rob set the knife and fork and find an extra plate to heat, and I felt the blackness of the yew walk, the loss and disappointment, recede from sight. Here, with the bright fire and the tick of the cheap alarm clock, the hiss of frying chips and the smell of sausages, was yet another welcome that Ashley was holding out to me. This, too, was home.

  Rob glanced up and caught the tail end of the look, but gave no sign that he understood it. He was a tall young man, big boned, with big hands and feet and the deceptively slow movements of the countryman. He was very dark, brown as a gipsy, with black hair, and eyes so dark that it was hard to tell iris from pupil, and harder still to read the expression in them. His speech, too, was slow, but the soft country voice and his habit of silent pauses masked a fair intelligence which should have had a better chance to develop. His mother had been the village school-teacher, a gentle, lonely girl who had fallen for good looks and what she thought of as simple ways, and had married Matt Granger, a handsome lout who first of all neglected, and then frankly ill-used her and her child. I myself as a child had never realised why little Robbie, as he was called then, had sometimes stayed off school, or sometimes come with bruises as if he had been fighting. But when Matt Granger tumbled drunk into the Overflow one night and was drowned, Rob took on his father’s job of running the home farm with no emotion apparent other than deep satisfaction and relief; and though she said nothing at all, Mrs Granger, quiet as ever, seemed happier. She died some two years later of a neglected cancer, soon after Rob, for all his struggles, had had to admit defeat over the farm, which his father had run into the ground and deep into debt. My father, having sold the land, invited Rob to stay on as caretaker and man-of-all-work around the Court. It was something of a surprise to everyone when Rob, who understandably enough had never been devoted to Ashley, and who might have done better for himself elsewhere, accepted and stayed.

  He came to my elbow, watching as I turned the sausages under the grill. ‘Shall I do those now?’

  ‘It’s all right. Nearly done.’

  ‘I’m sorry about your Dad.’

  ‘Thank you. I brought his ashes home, did you know? That’s why I came tonight. I wanted to put them in the church. Did the Vicar tell you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m coming back in the morning to – well, to scatter them.’

  He had lifted the pan of peas off the stove, and was busy draining them. He added a knob of margarine and shook them to dry in the hot pan. He said nothing.

  ‘Rob—’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘You’re sure you couldn’t even make a guess?’

  He must after all have sensed my trouble, back there in the yard. He didn’t ask me what I was referring to, nor did he lift his eyes from the peas. He shook the pan thoughtfully. ‘If I had to, I’d have said it was one of the twins, but you know yourself they’re bad enough to tell apart in daylight, let alone a black evening like this.’

  ‘Could it have been Francis?’

  ‘Might have been, I suppose. But I’d have thought he was a mite too tall for Francis.’

  ‘But it could have been?’

  He did look up at that. ‘I suppose so. Why, were you expecting Francis?’

  ‘No. But if it wasn’t Francis, it would have to be Emory, and—’

  I stopped. I had never taken it further, even to myself, and I certainly could not do so to Rob. It could not be Emory, the secret friend with whom I had shared my thoughts since childhood. It could not. If it had to be one of those two, it must surely be Francis . . . Francis, who was nearer my own age, and of whom – where one could touch that elusive and self-contained personality – I was unequivocally fond. Emory, the eldest of the three, was, as they say, something else again. I had never had any illusions about Emory. As a child, of course, I had adored my tall cousin, so easily dominating the rest of us, but generous about allowing a small girl to tag along where he led the Ashley gang. He had grown into a tough-minded man, determined, and quietly self-sufficient. James, his twin, had a touch of the same ruthlessness, but tempered with something less aggressive. Francis, as tough in his own way and very much quieter about it, had opted out of most of our ploys and gone doggedly on with his own affairs. A loner, my cousin Francis. But then, I supposed, that was what writers had to be. And surely, if it were he, I would have had a hint of it from him . . . ?

  Francis or Emory . . . But, in spite of the knowledge, I found myself thinking about James as I had last seen him.

  An Ashley to the fine bone; tall, with fair hair which had darkened slightly – to his relief – as he grew older. The long grey eyes of all the portraits, straight nose, hands and feet too small boned but well shaped. Pleasant voice. A way of doing what he wanted, and doing it so charmingly that you overlooked the self-interest and thought he was doing you a favour. Clever, yes; shrewd, yes; not perhaps overimaginative about other people’s needs, but kind, and capable of great generosity. About his attitude to women, or his relationships with them, I knew nothing.

  I had my mother to thank that I was able to be so objective about my father’s family. She had been a highly intelligent, incisive woman, who had written a couple of novels that had dropped dead on the market, but that had contained a good deal of quiet but acid observation of the people around her. It was she who had taught me to stand back sometimes from life and look at it, even to stand back from those I loved.

  Certainly from those I thought I might love. Which brought me back to my troubled thoughts, and the cottage kitchen, and Rob saying:

  ‘Why should it?’

  ‘Why should it what?’

>   ‘Be Emory?’

  I must have looked quite blank. He said patiently: ‘In the churchyard.’

  ‘Oh. Because James is in Spain, and Emory’s over here. He rang up from England on Wednesday, when I was in Bavaria. Look, Rob, the chips are done, can you strain them?’

  ‘Sure.’ He lifted the pan over to the draining-board. ‘Well, then, say it was Emory. Seems funny he didn’t want to see you.’

  ‘Maybe. Rob, you said you saw him coming out of the vestry. Did you see when he went in?’

  ‘No. I was down shutting up the greenhouses, you see, and when I came back I heard the dogs barking, so I took a look around, and I saw the vestry door was standing open. I didn’t think it could be the Vicar – for one thing the dogs wouldn’t bark for him; then I saw whoever it was was using a torch, so I waited to see him. I thought it might be some of the village boys out for a lark. Then I saw you going into the porch.’ He grinned. ‘Say this for you, Bryony, you don’t make more noise than a vixen. Remember when I used to take you poaching? I never heard you till you came right up to the church door.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘I’d half a mind to follow you in, in case there was something wrong, but then the flashlight went out and I saw this chap coming out of the vestry, sharpish, and bolting away across the graveyard. I’d have followed him, only I saw it was one of the Ashleys. And he didn’t run far; stopped right by the yew trees, and waited. I reckoned he was waiting for you. He was out of sight of me there, but I’d have seen him if he’d moved. I hung around and watched, just in case . . . Then the Vicar came down, and went into the vestry, but the chap didn’t budge. Did he see you, do you suppose?’

  ‘I think so. If not then, he must have seen me later in the kitchen garden. The moon was quite bright.’