A Hint of Witchcraft (29 page)

She sat for a long time with the photograph in her hand. It told her how she had appeared to him and for the last time. But straining every resource of memory to picture him as he had looked at her, she could only hear his voice calling her name – and remember that she had walked away without answering or looking back.

The spring days crept by. The blackbird practised daily and perfected its song, a threnody for first love. Regret for what might have been was slow to fade. After a time she put the photographs away with his letters. It was to be years before she would look at them again without heart-ache.

CHAPTER XXII

Jane Bondless had grown used to the unpredictability of circumstances and the futility of planning too far ahead. Miss Crane never recovered from the illness which had kept her in Cannes, but lingered month after month, while at Bourton-on-the-Water, Constance Bondless dealt single-handed with the purchase and restoration of the house they had chosen. And the room Margot had painstakingly prepared at Langland Hall remained empty.

Consequently Edward's plan was executed in reverse. Jane could not come to England; instead Margot went to Cannes. Her low spirits and languor after Miles's death had alarmed her father who had not realized the closeness of their attachment. It may have been a word of warning from Toria Link that drove him in sudden panic to take Margot to Cannes himself. They arrived within twenty-four hours of his telegram.

‘You're the most sensible woman I know,' he told Jane. ‘You'll know what to do.'

She knew there was nothing to be done but wait for the change of scene, fresh company and a share in looking after Miss Crane to have a healing effect. Margot grew fond of the old lady and stayed until she died in the following July – then helped with the sad final arrangements and the closing of the apartment. When she and Jane were free to go home, they were reluctant to part and Jane was persuaded to make a short visit to Langland before joining her sister: a welcome spell of leisure in which she had ample time for letter-writing.

Langland Hall

19 August, 1931

Dear Connie

You were right – up to a point. There is everything here to supply the background of one of Mrs Radcliffe's or Bram Stoker's novels: a ruined priory with at least one hooting owl; an old house, rather dark with rambling passages, cavernous cellars and seven unoccupied bedrooms (there may be more) – situated in open country merging into moorland where heather is in full bloom.

So much for the setting. The characters have strayed from a different milieu. Not a trace of Dracula in Edward Humbert. He is kind, preoccupied – a clever forehead (you know I always notice foreheads) – much saddened since I saw him last – and older. Aren't we all?

My room is charming: a bay overlooking the garden, pale chintzes, a traditional local quilt in white honeycomb; and Margot has converted the dressing-room that opens off it into a tiny sitting-room where I am writing this.

James Pelman met us at Elmdon station and brought us here. He asks to be remembered to you. I told him that you hadn't forgotten those holidays in Cornwall long ago when he was always the one to come to the rescue in emergencies. Remember when you were stuck halfway up – or halfway down Ebb Cliff? I gather that Lance is very like his father.

The two couples who have the smallholdings, the Todds and Amblers, produce fresh vegetables, home-grown tomatoes and marrows and we have abundant eggs and goat's milk. Edward was quite touchingly pleased when I told him how much I enjoyed such luxuries. Apparently there were tremendous difficulties when he first took over the Hall, but in the hands of Mrs Beale, the housekeeper, things now run very smoothly. In fact I'm not needed here and thanks to dear Miss Crane's generosity I need never work for my living again. But I have promised to stay on as a guest for a week or two. Margot and I are going to find it hard to part with each other: we have got on so well together.

Has Jobson finished repairing the wall under the bathroom window? There's no point in ordering a carpet for the sitting-room until he has renewed those floorboards, but you could be looking at samples. A soft green? Bluish, not yellowish.

More later.

My love,

Jane.

P.S. I must just add – there is one person here who matches the setting: a rather daunting woman, in her forties, I should guess, known as Toria Link. Why did I put it like that? Toria is her name, short for Victoria, I suppose. Too old to be a tweenie but a sort of woman of all work. Even Mrs Beale treats her with caution. I believe she is devoted to Margot. The interesting thing is that she reminds me of someone – I can't think who. A long pale face, deadly serious, like one of the awe-stricken onlookers in an oil-painting of a massacre or a shipwreck. I'm sure she has a history.

Having finished her letter, Miss Bondless found Margot in the garden and they walked down to Fellside to the post office. The late August day was warm, their pace leisurely. Although they had been together for the best part of a year – perhaps because of that – there was much to talk about.

‘If only Mother could have known how well things have turned out! How comfortably for Father, I mean. Mrs Beale has been a godsend.'

When in the previous autumn Mrs Rilston left for Cheltenham and Bainrigg House was closed, Mrs Beale lost no time in transferring herself to Langland Hall. It was well known that Mr Humbert was in need of a housekeeper and even before Mr Miles's tragic death, Mrs Beale had had no intention of remaining at Bainrigg under the new Mrs Rilston, of whom strange things were being said in the village. It couldn't possibly be true that Mr Miles's fiancée had been involved in some way in the death of that girl whose body was found in the Lucknow Chimney, but neither could one take orders from the sort of person of whom such things were said. Her arrival at Langland, bringing with her Jenny and Elsie, had put Margot's mind at rest. But now—

‘I hadn't realized how different it would be. I feel like a guest in my own home.'

‘A pleasant feeling, surely.'

‘It doesn't feel right, especially after having been idle for so long.'

‘You did think of taking up your studies again. You would have time now.'

Time, but no inclination to retreat into the byways of history. The long holiday had itself been a retreat; the sunshine and palms, the outdoor cafés and well-to-do people with time on their hands already seemed unreal, all the more so in contrast to Fellside with its Co-operative store and the headstock and chimney of its colliery. Men were coming out of the pit gates at the end of a shift, faces blackened with coal dust, eyes and lips black-rimmed and strangely pale.

‘Good God! How do they stand it? One has to see them like this to realize what it does to them.'

‘It was drummed into us as children. “Never forget that the comfort we enjoy depends on men working a thousand feet underground in seams no higher than this table, for eight hours a day”. It used to be longer.'

‘That must have curbed your youthful appetites. But your father was right: personally I shall never feel the same about stirring a fire.'

‘You're back home then, Miss Margot.'

One of the men had stopped. It was a moment before she recognized him.

‘Ewan! How are you? Father told me that you had left us.'

He was thinner, his features taut and more firmly defined.

‘It was a good life at the Hall but I was getting soft.' Despite the long shift underground Ewan spoke with energy. ‘I told Mr Humbert – I want to get to grips with the workers' struggle against the capitalist exploitation of labour. “You can't do it on your own”, he said, “and you need education and experience”.'

The upshot was that under Mr Humbert's guidance he had applied for one of the Mineworkers' Training Schemes. It involved work underground and attendance at the Elmdon Technical College.

‘I'll have a certificate and maybe get a Union job some day. As I see it now if you want justice in the world you have to fight for it. We want to see these pits nationalized instead of run to fill the pockets of the likes of Laverborne. And we want to get more working men into Parliament.' In his blackened face his eyes shone; his lips, pallid pink, were eloquent.

‘Come on, Ewan lad.' A hand was clapped on his shoulder. ‘Get off your soap box or you'll miss the bus.'

‘I'd better be pushing off.'

‘Come and see us, Ewan. And remember me to your mother.' And, when he had gone, ‘I've never seen him so happy. I wonder what can have changed him.'

‘He's found an aim in life.'

‘Toria will miss him.'

‘They were friends?'

‘In a strange sort of way. I remember her saying that he had a good heart.' At that time there had been little sign of it.

‘There's something familiar about her as if I'd seen that face somewhere else.'

They walked home in companionable silence, Jane teased by a resemblance she could not place, Margot dismayed to find herself envying Ewan and wishing that she too could have an aim in life.

‘Ewan was right,' she said, as they sat down to lunch. ‘Life can be too soft and easy. I don't want it to be like that.'

She had the impression that Jane was not listening. Since there were just the two of them, the meal was informal and it was Toria who brought in the omelette. Her stately manner certainly commanded attention: Jane's eyes never left her until the door closed behind her.

‘She's beginning to haunt me. I expected to find a ghost or two at Langland but not the ghost of somebody I've forgotten.'

But the face with its high cheekbones and deep-set eyes was too striking to be that of a ghost – unless the ghost of a martyr perhaps. It was unlikely that in all her varied experience she had seen the woman before. It must be that she was like someone else, or the woe-begone yet forceful countenance, as she had suggested to Connie, was such as an artist might choose as the prototype of suffering womanhood, to include in a painting, the subject a catastrophe of some kind. She could have seen a similar face looking out from a canvas in a gallery or some civic building.

Margot was pleased that Jane found so much to interest her in her father's rather fine collection of volumes on the history of art: Italian, Dutch, English, Spanish, lavishly illustrated.

‘You won't mind if I wander round a little – and settle in?'

Jane, lost in contemplation of Hieronymus Bosch's
Hell
had not even heard.

The wandering round and settling in threatened to take longer than Margot intended. There had been changes: the Amblers' goats had multiplied; the kitchen premises had been altered under Mrs Beale's direction; Jenny and Elsie shared one of the empty rooms. Langland without Ewan had not appealed to Bella who had preferred to stay in Ashlaw and was now working at Dr Pelman's (and it was about time the place was cleaned up, as she made no bones about telling him).

Other things had not changed. If the stones of the priory had shed another layer of ancient dust on the level greensward, it was too fine for mortal eye to see. A blackbird, silent on the gatehouse, may not have been the bird that made her weep two Aprils ago. But there was sanctuary still between the ravaged walls such as pilgrims must have found when they came through the bluebell wood. She went a little distance along Beggars' Way but soon turned back in sudden restlessness. There had always been so much to do. She remembered almost with affection the early days at the Hall: the bare boards and uncurtained windows, the howling draughts and improvised meals, the sense of purpose and being needed.

Alex would soon be home. He would not be returning to Kenya.
Africa is too big,
he had written,
and too terrifyingly beautiful. It takes over one's life. One has to keep noticing it. The skies are too wide and too splendid. They diminish me to a pinpoint. And another thing – native life is harsh and primitive but the people are rooted in their natural surroundings. They have dignity and the kind of security that comes with patterns of behaviour centuries old. They haven't suffered – at least not yet – the evils of an industrial revolution. I think they're better off than the victims of the Depression queuing for dole and soup. They're the ones who need help.…

‘He's off on another tack,' Lance would say.

But where was Lance? It was surely rather odd that having been home for three days after months of absence she had not yet seen him. She had taken it for granted that he would be at the station or would come on the first evening.

‘We don't see much of Lance these days,' Edward remarked that evening at dinner. They were alone: Jane was dining out with Dr Pelman in Elmdon. ‘He seems to spend all his spare time in town. I'm beginning to wonder if there's a young lady.…'

‘Father!' She immediately regretted the protest and added hastily, ‘That would be a surprise.' But there had been more than surprise in her reaction to so unwelcome an idea. Other people fell in love and fell out of it again, Alex for instance, or had their hearts broken by it, but not Lance. There would be something incongruous in the concentration of all that single-minded energy on some girl in Elmdon. Which girl? Freda or Phyllis might have known but Phyllis had no sooner been finished than she had become engaged to the nephew of a Swiss banker, and Freda was demonstrating high-class dishes for a commercial photographer. It had always been possible to talk freely to Lance but to ask him about a love affair was out of the question. He would tell her about it when he thought fit.

Absent in the flesh he might be but he cropped up again in the conversation next morning. He had joined his father and Jane for coffee at the Castle Hotel where they had dined.