Death of a Huntsman (19 page)

I wanted to point out, tensely, that I was not a child. Instead I said:

‘I might even start to walk back. You can pick me up on the way.'

‘Do entirely as you wish,' my mother said. ‘Have it entirely your own way.'

A minute later she disappeared with my sister up the gravel drive, between thick shrubberies of lilac and laurustinus, towards the stone white-windowed house that could be seen, with its high white doorway and its big black iron boot-scraper, at the end.

Presently I heard the door-bell ring. After a few moments I saw an elderly maid in white cap and apron answer the door. Then my mother and sister disappeared into the house and after that I suppose I sat there for four or five minutes before I became aware of an extraordinary thing.

I suddenly experienced an overwhelming curiosity about the house. I felt that I had to see it after all. It was not simply that it was in itself very different from all those virginia-creepered, half-towered desirable residences we had seen all summer. It was not simply because it had no virginia creeper to smother the walls. It was true that it had a big pale yellow rose, with almost plum-coloured foliage, growing above the door, and over one gable one of those huge magnolias, with thick polished leaves, whose flowers are so like large pure cream chalices when they open in late hot summers.

All these things were attractive in themselves but they had nothing to do with what I had started to feel. What I felt had nothing particularly to do with beauty, with the charm of the yellow rose above the doorway, the flowerless magnolia cool in the heat or the drenching fragrance of the long row of limes. It had nothing to do, either, with that curious sensation people so often experience with places, and with houses especially: the sensation, not always pleasant and sometimes uncannily disturbing, that they have been there before.

What I felt was a rather startling sense of communication with that house. Of course the sensory impressions and perception of the very young are often over-acute
and perhaps the definition of what I felt may sound absurd. But this is the way youth feels and it did not seem at all absurd to me that afternoon that the house had, as it were, something to say to me. That is perhaps a naïve and clumsy way of putting it and the only other way I can express it is to say that it was rather like your being in a room and hearing urgent whispers of conversation going on in another. In a situation like that you are more than eaten up with overwhelming curiosity. You realize that if you don't listen at that moment, quickly, it will be too late. You will never know what the urgent whispers of conversation are about. It will all be lost and you will regret it for ever.

That was why, a few moments later, I was walking up the drive.

I rang the door-bell twice, but nothing happened. I discovered afterwards that there was only one servant indoors and that she at that moment was showing my mother and my sister through the rooms upstairs.

After another two or three minutes I decided not to ring again and I started to walk back down the drive. And then, for the second time, I experienced that extraordinary feeling of curiosity. And almost at once, not stopping to think, I turned and began to walk round to the side of the house, through a large archway of yew, into the gardens beyond.

The gardens sloped away sharply, in a series of terraces joined by stone steps, to the river. I was surprised to see them, in contrast to the front of the house, running
wild. Tall coarse yellow mulleins, with caterpillar-eaten leaves, had sown themselves all through the flower-beds, among the roses and even, at one place, in broken cucumber frames. Sunflowers were presently going to obliterate the beds of asparagus. Soon there would be nothing to be seen of a plantation of raspberries, struggling with an invasion of white convolvulus in full trumpet bloom.

I walked slowly through this choking mass of vegetation to the river. A path ran along the bank, heavily shaded by big balsam poplar trees. You could smell the fragrance of balsam leaves in the hot flat air and in the shadow of the trees the river was dark, with deep under-skeins of weed.

Halfway along the path was a little wooden landing stage with a seat on it. It was surrounded by a hand-rail and a punt was chained to the end. The punt, the little seat, the landing stage and in fact everything about it were, unlike the garden, surprisingly well kept. The punt had recently been painted a fresh bright green and even the name of the house,
Orleans
, had been picked out in white at the stern end.

I followed the path for forty or fifty yards along the river and began presently to approach the boundaries of the garden on the other side. It was wilder than ever there, with a few straggling pyramid pear-trees growing in long meadow grass as tall as wheat and in full seed.

Beyond all this was another hedge of yew, ten or twelve feet high, with a path cut through the grass beside it. I started to walk up this path. Then, halfway up the
slope, I heard a voice. It was a man's voice and it seemed, I thought, to be talking to itself in the hot still air.

And it was talking very remarkably. I am not sure at this distance of time if I can remember word for word exactly what it was saying but presently what I heard was, I think, something like this:

‘It forms a ladder of its web so that it can climb up it to any height—even up a pane of glass. They smell awfully disagreeably but apparently the Romans thought them delicious. They were a favourite dish of theirs.'

That was about all I heard before I came upon the man himself, standing by the hedge. He was a man of sixty or so, a little under medium height, rather spruce, with very smooth grey hair. He was wearing a cream shantung summer jacket, grey trousers with a chalk stripe in them and a white panama.

There was nothing in the least remarkable about all this. What was remarkable was that he was holding a branch of about half a dozen leaves in his hand. At first I thought he was talking to these leaves. Then I saw that I was mistaken. Something was crawling up the branch and I concluded, mistakenly as it turned out, that he was talking to that.

It was a thick, pink, naked, quite repulsive caterpillar.

If it is surprising for a girl of seventeen to come upon an elderly gentleman in a strange garden talking to an ugly caterpillar it must be equally surprising for elderly gentlemen to have conferences of this kind interrupted by strange girls of seventeen.

The surprising thing was that he did not show surprise
at all. He looked at me, then looked at the caterpillar, which had now reached the tip of the branch, and seemed for a moment undecided which of us to attend to first. Then, very deftly, he turned the branch the other way up, so that the caterpillar could climb up it again, and with the other hand raised his panama.

As he took off his hat I saw that his eyes, remarkably blue in the brilliant sunshine, transfixed me.

‘Good afternoon,' he said.

I began to explain how it was I was there, how sorry I was to interrupt him and so on, and he said, ‘Yes. Oh! yes. Yes, of course,' several times, watching me with the remarkably blue bright eyes while I in turn stood watching the caterpillar.

‘Will this lead me back to the house?' I said.

‘One moment. One moment,' he said and then started to address the hedge:

‘It seems I have visitors. About the house. You understand, dear, don't you? I'll show you a figure of the goat later. It's rather a treasure. This one's a bit of a freak of course. He ought not to be out now. He ought to have been out in May, but that's how it is sometimes.'

Of course youth is very quick to spot the ridiculous. And suddenly I thought I'd never seen anything quite as killing as the business of holding this repulsive caterpillar on a stick and carrying on a two-part conversation with it and a hedge. It seemed funnier still when, through a break in the hedge, I saw the flap of a big pink sun-hat on the other side and heard a woman's voice say:

‘Of course, dear. That I shall look forward to immensely. Au revoir, Frederick. Goodbye.'

‘Au revoir,' he said.

Already by this time the caterpillar had climbed to the top of the branch and now the man in the panama, turning to me, deftly twisted the branch upside down so that the caterpillar could climb up it again.

‘Do come this way,' he said.

To my surprise he began to lead me back down the path, towards the river. All the time he held the branch at half-arm's length, rather like a torch, and I didn't think I'd ever see anything quite so fatuous.

As if to make the whole thing more ridiculous he seemed absolutely absorbed in me. He talked very quickly, in rather a flutey sort of voice, asking all sorts of questions. Then, unable to take his eyes off me, he eventually completely forgot the caterpillar, which finally reached the top of the stick and sat there looking most disagreeably naked and slightly bloated.

‘So you've come to see this house?' he said. ‘Well, well. How nice. Indeed. How nice. These are the only two houses that front on the river here. All the rest of the land, you see, is meadow. With a continual danger of floods, you see, so that you can't build down there. It's only just here, because of this bend and the big bank, that it's been possible to have these houses.'

It was, I still thought, extraordinarily funny: the prattling flutey voice, the enthusiasm, the eagerness, like that of a boy, and always, of course, the caterpillar.

And presently the caterpillar itself got funnier still. At
the path by the river we stopped for nearly five minutes while he went into a prolonged explanation about the punt and the landing stage. By this time I was not listening very closely and he, more and more absorbed in me, was not looking at the caterpillar.

I saw that it had, in fact, crawled back down the stick and now, slowly and steadily, hunching its back, was crawling up his arm.

‘And what is your name? I mean,' he said, ‘your Christian name.'

‘Laura,' I said.

‘How charming,' he said. The little bright blue eyes glittered, dancing with pleasure as the caterpillar crawled up the neat shantung arm. ‘And what are you?—I mean how old? Seventeen?'

‘Nineteen,' I said.

The whole affair was so ridiculous that the lie about my age was, I thought, not only in keeping with it all but made it, if possible, more fun.

‘Still at school?'

‘Oh! heavens no,' I said. And this time I didn't lie. ‘I haven't been to school all summer.'

‘No?' he said. ‘Well, you don't look like a school-girl. You look too sure of yourself for that.'

I suppose that flattered me: to be told that I looked as old as I had pretended to be. But even the flattery didn't quite cancel out the comic tone of the whole situation. The caterpillar was now, I saw, crawling on his shoulder. I watched it fascinated, ready to shriek if it reached his neck.

He, on the other hand, didn't seem to notice it at all and
presently he said, tapping the little seat on the landing stage:

‘Come and sit down for a minute and tell me all about yourself.'

‘I ought to go,' I said. I began to explain how my mother and my sister would be waiting for me. I said something about their thinking, perhaps, that I might be walking back along the road and he said:

‘Who has really come to look at the house? Your mother?'

‘Oh! no, my sister. You see, she's to be married soon.'

The caterpillar had reached the lapel of his shantung jacket, just above the buttonhole. It was arching its head this way and that, feeling the air.

‘Is your sister like you?'

‘She's fair,' I said. ‘Like my mother. I am like my father's side.'

The caterpillar decided to start its upward journey towards his neck.

Then I felt I must ask him a question.

‘It's such a nice house. Are you going far away?'

‘You're almost the first people to have seen it,' he said. ‘A man did come last Sunday. A stockbroker. From Bedford. Do sit down.' He tapped the seat again. ‘But I've heard no more. Do you know France?' he said.

He moved along the seat. Skirts were a great deal shorter in those days and I fancied he looked quickly at my legs as I sat down. I thought they were very nice legs and I was glad he seemed to think so too.

‘No,' I said. ‘I don't know France. I've never been abroad.'

I suppose the fact that I was watching the caterpillar with such unbroken fascination must have misled him into thinking I was staring solely on him. At any rate the bright blue eyes were continually holding mine in a shimmering, captivated smile.

‘I used to live a great deal in France,' he said. ‘Before the war. Then I came and took this place. But I find the winters very cold in this valley.'

The caterpillar, I noticed, had disappeared.

‘Must you go?' he said.

By that time I had really begun to enjoy the whole situation. It appealed enormously to my sense of humour to see that fat bald creature crawling all over him and now disappearing, at last, behind his neck.

‘No. I suppose I don't have to,' I said. ‘They'll wait for me.'

‘Good,' he said. ‘Now you can tell me more about yourself.'

It was beautifully dark and cool there on the river bank, under the thick poplars, and when a fish rose, just on the line of shadow, it cut the water with a curved slice of silver before it disappeared.

That was about the only thing that moved in the hot breathless afternoon for the next quarter of an hour, during which he said once:

‘Tell me. I've really been most undecided about this house. I'm really very fond of it. But I can't exist in these freezing winters. If this were your house what would you do?'

‘Do you live alone?' I said.

I don't know what made me say that. I suppose it's instinctive in any woman, as soon as a man appears on the scene, to try to assess whether he has attachments or not. I don't know of course. It may not have been that. At any rate he said: