Good Hope Road: A Novel (17 page)

She took his hand in hers, raising the hairs on his arm as she gently rubbed the oil into his wrist. ‘The thing is, Jim Stonebridge’ she said ruminatively, ‘I might be going country.’

At first, he stubbornly refused to meet her gaze. When he did, it was with a still angry, shuttered expression that gave nothing away. She looked steadily at him as he bored into her eyes with his own, and the tautness of his expression began slowly to yield. A series of fleeting, warring emotions in his face – anger, desire, resentment – gave way to an unaccustomed vulnerability. Still she looked into his eyes, and gradually he let down his guard; reluctantly, he let her in.

Swallows swooped and called in the sun; from somewhere in the distance, the sound of a horse neighing. He noted these only vaguely, focused on her, on those large, dark-fringed eyes. Two people, caught in a moment, on the hay-covered floor of an old, red-painted barn. Staring at each other, drinking each other in. Seeing and being seen, beyond the utilitarian membranes of word and gesture. Searching out the hidden shoals and secret bends that lie at our cores, deep, dark and filled with promises for the unlocking.

pring took firm hold of the hills, belying its fitful start, in what Jim would secretly come to view as a natural mirroring of the way things happened between Madeleine and him. They took the horses out deep into the woods, riding down old, forgotten paths. Oaks, their branches felted with the fuzz of new leaves, threw dappled patterns across the ground. He pointed out the gullies carved by ancient rivers and primordial ice; in those folds and pleats of earth, one morning, a rare pink lady’s slipper.

Digging up a skunk cabbage, he cut through the rootstock that lay just beneath the soil. He pushed back the tight layers of unborn spathes to reveal a bud, still dormant, but already a deep, wine red. It would flower next spring. A few leaves in, another bud, naked and pale – it would bloom the year after that. Five buds in all, each smaller and tucked further in than the last. A quintet of spring seasons, hidden beneath the earth, patiently biding their time.

He showed them to her, then doubting that she would understand, felt foolish. He became brusque, slicing through the rootstock and tossing it on the ground, but she picked it up, parsing through the leaves with a solemn, dedicated wonder. On the way back that evening, they came upon two painted turtles, one following the other in a slow, ponderous motion across the dirt road, their shells wet and gleaming, as if varnished.

At first, the Major, still unsettled by the flashback memory that her first visit had provoked, stayed out of Madeleine’s way. He’d go deep into the orchard, or shut himself away in the library just as she was due to arrive. Jim, too, contrived to keep Madeleine’s visits to the farm as few and brief as possible, whisking her away for long rides on the motorbike, or arranging to meet her elsewhere. Whenever she asked about his father – ‘He’s tied up with his correspondence,’ he’d say glibly, or, ‘He’s resting.’

‘Resting? It’s ten in the morning,’ she countered once.

‘It’s his leg. Been bothering him.’

She nodded, not believing a word. ‘Douggie said they used to hunt together years ago,’ she said suddenly. ‘How come you never told me that?’

A barely perceptible stiffening of his shoulders.

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘So why’d he stop? The Major – hunting, I mean?’

‘What’s this,’ he said exasperatedly, ‘an inquisition?’

‘Maybe.’ She leaned forward to kiss him quickly on the lips. ‘So why did he?’

‘They used to hunt together, alright? From before the war. Garland and his flatlander buddies would come down from Boston during hunting season, and the Major would show them around the woods, take them to where the easiest coveys lay. When I was old enough, he’d take me along too. After a while though, after he came back from France, things changed. He changed. It didn’t interest him any more, hunting.’

She didn’t press further, not letting on that Douggie Garland had said a whole lot more when she’d asked him, soon after the gala. The Major had grown increasingly bellicose and unpredictable, he’d said. ‘Out there in the woods, you’ve got to have full confidence in the men you’re with. Those are real guns we use, not some trifling toy, and a single mistake can prove fatal. Stonebridge was a good enough sort, but when he showed up drunk one time . . .’ He’d taken the Major aside, suggested it was perhaps best that he went home. ‘It didn’t go down too well,’ he recounted dryly.

Although she said nothing of this to Jim, he knew instinctively that Garland had told her what had happened. What she didn’t know though, was how it had ended.

He’d tugged on his father’s hand, trying to pull him away. Judy, still only a six-month-old pup, cowered behind him, frightened by the raised voices, tail tucked between her legs. It had scared him too, the look on his father’s face. The Major shook free of Jim’s grasp, furiously cussing out the men. It was only when Jim stumbled backwards over the pup and nearly fell that he seemed to recall the presence of his son.

‘Come along, Jim,’ he said roughly, ‘we don’t need this.’

They’d headed west, in the opposite direction to the group, the Major limping forward at such a punishing pace that Jim struggled to keep up. Judy loped back and forth between the two of them, first alongside the Major, then turning loyally back to the boy, confused by this fractured progress. Jim reached down to pat her head, trying to reassure her and she whined and pressed her nose into his palm.

The Major had pushed on, scaling the ridges so rapidly that he was frequently lost from sight. Judy started to labour, tongue hanging out, puppy legs buckling. Jim hoisted her into his arms, staggering under her weight. He blundered through a bramble thicket, drawing the cuffs of his canvas shirt over his hands best he could to protect them from the thorns. A branch whipped across his cheek, leaving a thin, bloody scratch. He emerged at the other end of the thicket to silence. He stood still, listening for his father’s footsteps, but all he could hear was the pounding of his own heart. No sign of his father, nothing around but trees and sky. He drew a shaky breath, quelling the sharp prick of tears in his eyes. Judy whined again, sensing his distress.

There! A faint crackle through the brush. Ignoring his burning muscles, Jim hurried towards the sound.

At last, the Major’s pace faltered. He lowered his gun, the injured leg dragged behind him. Jim bent to let Judy out of his arms and she gambolled happily around father and son. He looked tentatively at his father, trying to read his expression. He wondered if he ought to suggest they return home.

Judy dropped suddenly into a point, body stiff, her left leg folded into her chest. A rustle, a panicked whirring of wings and a grouse flew out from practically under her nose. The muzzle of the gun lifted, a bang; the dead bird spiralled down. Jim’s heart lightened, bursting with pride. ‘You got it!’

His father had nodded, as if in a trance.

The Major began to dress the grouse. Laying it on the ground, he smoothed the feathers and placed a foot on each extended wing. He grasped its legs, one in each hand, and in a swift movement, north to south, wrenched them apart. The breast popped cleanly out.

He had cradled the meat in his palms, his face so devoid of expression that Jim had thought at first that the tears were just from the trick eye, the one that watered with neither warning nor explanation. The Major made no sound, just the tears –
tears
, Jim realised with a shock – coursing down his cheeks. Jim blinked, utterly crushed, the happiness of just a moment ago, gone. He squatted miserably on the leaf litter, an arm around Judy panting by his side. Hating to see his father so vulnerable, feeling somehow as if it were all his fault. The Major cradled the dead bird in his hands and silently wept, shoulders heaving, as Jim sat staring at the ground, feeling helpless, angry and ashamed all at once, and grateful, so thankful that Garland and the other men were not around to witness his father’s breakdown.

He looked down now at Madeleine’s fingers interlaced with his own. ‘We should get going,’ he said shortly, slipping his hand from hers.

‘Jim—’

‘We should go.’

She followed pensively, knowing he was upset but unsure what to say.

With Freddie leaving so unexpectedly for Boston, the rest of the theatre club had held together only a short while before disbanding. ‘Let’s be in touch, get back together after the summer,’ they said halfheartedly to one another and Madeleine laughingly went along.

Her parents left for home a few weeks later, as did Garland. She wheedled them into letting her stay a while longer. ‘It’s for my art,’ she explained. ‘There’s something about these hills – the colours make me want to sit before a canvas all day.’ Her mother had pursed her lips, incredulous, but powerless before her daughter’s wilfulness.

‘The colours, or is it the Stonebridge lad you intend on studying?’ her father had asked gently. Madeleine had the grace to blush as she kissed him fondly on his cheek.

It was Ellie who talked the Major into having Madeleine over to tea once more. She had grown so sick of Clara Dalloway going on and on about how she had been the one to introduce the two youngsters, right here in her store over by the fabric counter. So ruffled were her maternal instincts by the fact that she had yet to clap eyes on this flatlander who had obviously captivated her Jim, that she nagged and niggled at the Major until he had no choice but to agree.

‘Fine,’ he snapped, ‘do what you want, but leave me out of it.’

‘Whatever do you mean, leave you out of this – it’s your home, isn’t it?’ she demanded.

‘I’m . . . Just set up my tea in the library when the young lady is here.’

‘I’ll do no such thing! You’re the host, James Arthur, and you will have tea with the rest of us,’ Ellie said firmly.

The Major turned, an expression of such bitter anger on his face that for a moment, Ellie quailed. His left eye started to twitch just then, however, the skin tightening and juddering. Pressing the heel of his hand tightly over it, he got up and limped from the room without another word.

‘It’ll do him good,’ Ellie muttered to herself as she watched him go. She started to polish the table vigorously, still somewhat shaken. ‘Do us all good.’

That’s what she told Jim as well, when he said it wasn’t a good idea. ‘Look what happened the last time she came over,’ he reminded her.

‘It’s high time the Major got used to having people around him again.’ Her voice gentled at the worry in his eyes. ‘Don’t you fret,’ she said. ‘I’ll be here this time, it’ll all be fine.’

Haunted by the aftermath of Madeleine’s last visit, the Major grew increasingly tense and tightly coiled, his left eye twitching and watering without notice, setting Jim so on edge that he wanted nothing more than to call the whole thing off. Perhaps anticipating this, Ellie had wisely arranged the tea for as soon as was possible, on the day after the next. Before father and son knew it, the afternoon was upon them.

‘Madeleine,’ the Major said stiffly when she arrived. He extended a hand, but she kissed him on the cheek instead, entirely disarming him. For a second, he was at a loss. ‘It’s a pleasure, my dear,’ he mumbled then, flushing, ‘a pleasure to see you again.’

‘Jim’s been keeping you all to himself!’ a beaming Ellie exclaimed. ‘I was having no more of that.’

‘I can’t . . . no, really that’s far too much . . .’ Madeleine protested faintly as Ellie piled her plate high once more from the avalanche of food on the table. Three kinds of pies, an assortment of sugared cakes, a chocolate pudding, two braided loaves, jam, a large pat of golden country butter, thick and moreish apple butter, maple syrup, a pot roast, jell-o-moulds garnished with pineapple, and a glistening ham, its caramel skin scored into diamonds and studded with cloves.

‘I wouldn’t argue,’ Jim counselled, spearing a slice of ham. ‘Not with Ellie, you’ll never win.’

He glanced again at his father. The tension that had gripped the Major these past couple of days was no longer evident, his gnarled frame relaxed as he tucked into his third helping of the pot roast. Jim grinned. ‘Food’s great, Ellie.’