I Capture the Castle (20 page)

Just then he opened his eyes and said: “You don’t like it, do you?”

I felt myself blushing.

“Like what?” I said.

“My beard,” said Simon.

“You were wondering how any man could wear one unless, of course, it has acquired a fascination of horror for you. Which is it?”

“As a matter of fact, I’m getting used to x.”….”

He laughed and said that was the ultimate humiliation -every one did.

“Everyone except me,” he added.

“I

never see myself in a glass without feeling astonished.”

“Would it be rude to ask just why you do wear it?”

“It would be natural, anyway. I grew it when I was twenty-two, for a bet, and then kept it out of sheer pigheadedness-it looked so wonderfully unsuitable for a Wall Street office; I was with a cousin of my Mother’s there and our dislike was mutual.

And I think I felt a beard kept me in touch with literature. But it probably has some deep psychological significance—I expect I’m trying to hide an infamous nature from the world.”

“Well, it’s quite the nicest beard I ever saw,” I said.

“Do you think you’ll ever get rid of it?”

For some reason, that made him laugh. Then he said:

“Oh, in ten or twelve years, perhaps—say when I’m forty.

It’ll be so useful to come down without it one morning, looking twenty years younger.

Does your sister hate it?”

I wondered if I said “Yes,” whether he would shave it off to please Rose. And I suddenly wasn’t sure that I wanted it to go.

“You must ask her yourself,” I said, laughing.

He looked at his watch and said he was afraid he couldn’t wait any longer for her.

“Neil’s picking me up at the Godsend inn at a quarter after twelve. Be a nice companionable child and walk to the village with me.”

He got up and held out his hand to pull me to my feet. Then he looked up at Belmotte Tower.

“I meant to ask you to show me over that,” he said, “but there’s no time now. It’s more impressive than ever, at close quarters.”

“Have you got used to it belonging to you yet?” I asked.

“But it doesn’t—well, not for a little matter of around thirty years. Anyway, it takes me all my time to realize that Scoatney does.”

As we walked down the mound I told him how I had imagined his first glimpse of Scoatney, that night back in March.

“Large as it is, it had shrunk,” he said.

“Do you mean you’d seen it before?”

“Oh, yes, when I was seven. Father brought me over with him when he patched up the row with my grandfather—which unfortunately, broke out again when Father became an American citizen.”

“Did you know Scoatney was going to be yours then?”

“Good Lord, no—there were six lives between me and it.

And I loved it with a most precocious passion. I remember standing at the top of the staircase looking down on my grandfather, my father and uncles, and a cousin of my own age all at tea in the hall, and thinking: “If they were all dead, Scoatney would belong to me.”

And then rushing screaming to the nursery, appalled at my wickedness. I sometimes think I ill-wished all my relations then.”

“It’d be a powerful lot of ill-wishing for a child of seven,” I said.

I tried to imagine him, very small and dark, on the Scoatney stairs where I sat watching the dancing.

“My grandfather called me “the little Yankee” which infuriated me. But I thought he was wonderful. I wish I could have seen him again before he died—perhaps I oughtn’t to have waited until he agreed to it, but I didn’t like to force myself on him.”

Then he told me that the position had been particularly difficult because he had never been sure if old Mr.

Cotton would leave him enough money to keep Scoatney up-the estate is entailed but the money isn’t, and without it Simon would just have had to lease the house and stay in America.

“It must have been very mixing for you,” I said, “not knowing whether to settle down there or fix your mind on England.”

“You’re dead right it was mixing—sometimes I think I shall never get un-mixed. Oh, I shall strike roots here eventually, I guess.

But I wish I could have known when I stood on those stairs.”

We had come to the stile leading to the lane. He sat on the top rail for a moment, looking at the barn.

“That’s magnificent,” he said.

“Wonderful old timbers. Oughtn’t I to repair the roof his I’d like to be a good landlord.”

I said that was our job, as we have the castle on a repairing lease.

Then we caught each other’s eyes and burst out laughing.

“You won’t count on us doing it this year?” I added.

He helped me over the stile, still laughing.

Then he said:

“Listen, Cassandra, there’s something I want your father to know and I don’t like to tell him myself. Can you make him understand that I don’t mind at all about the rent, that I shall never mind, even if he doesn’t pay a cent for the rest of his lease his I’d like him to know that I’m honoured to feel he’s my tenant.”

“I’d call him more of a guest than a tenant,” I said, and we both laughed again. Then I thanked him and promised to tell Father.

“Do it tactfully, won’t you? Don’t let me sound gracious and patronizing.”

“But I do think you’re gracious—the right kind of gracious.

There’s a right kind of patronage, too, you know.

Perhaps Father’ll dedicate his next book to you as its “only begetter.”” “What a nice child you are,” he said quietly. “Not too consciously naive?”

I swear that I said it without thinking—it just leapt from my mouth. It was looking at the barn did it—while we talked I had been remembering that day, gloating over the way things had changed.

His head jerked round.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing in particular,” I said, lamely.

“I daresay some people think I am.”

We were passing the barn. And that minute Heloise put her head out from where I sat listening that day, and let forth a volley of barks-she takes naps on the chaff with one ear well open for rats.

“Were you up there?” said Simon.

I nodded. We were both of us very red.

“How much did you hear?”

“Just that, about me.”

Heloise came dashing out of the barn still barking, which I hoped would mean the end of the subject; and stooping to pat her was a good way to avoid his eyes. But she instantly stopped barking, and then he bent down and patted her, too, looking at me across her.

“I’m so terribly ashamed of myself,” he said.

“I

apologize most abjectly.”

“Nonsense. It did me a lot of good,” I told him.

“That wasn’t all that you heard, was it his Did you hear his I didn’t let him finish.

“Come on, we’ll be late for your brother,” I said.

“Just let me get rid of my journal.”

I ran off and put it in the barn, taking my time over it; and I talked very determinedly about the weather as I rejoined him.

“It’s the loveliest first of May I ever remember,” I said, and then made rather a business of calling for Heloise, who had disappeared.

She put her head out of the frothy cow-parsley looking like a bride. “The country’s all dressed in white lace,” I said as we walked down the lane.

He was silent so long that I thought he hadn’t heard me. Then suddenly he said: “What? Oh, yes—sorry. I was trying to remember what you could have heard me say about Rose.”

I tried to think of the most convincing way to reassure him.

“Well, whatever it was, she doesn’t know it,” I said at last.

I am an honest liar when I take my time; he believed me at once.

“You wonderful child not to tell her.”

I heard myself explaining to God as I always do about good, kind, useful lies. Simon started to tell me why they “got Rose all wrong.”

“It’s because she’s so original,” he said.

“Original his Rose?”

“Why, of course-even the way she dresses.

That frilly pink dress —and borrowing a real crinoline-was “It was—” I meant to say “It was Topaz who thought of all that,” but I stopped in mid-sentence—”pretty, wasn’t it?” I finished up.

“Everything about her’s pretty.” He went on to talk of her for quite a quarter of a mile: how different she was from the average modern girl—and because of that he hadn’t understood her, had thought her affected—when what she was, of course, was unique.

Everything Rose does is original, apparently, even the way she dances, inventing little steps of her own. And she is so intelligent he kindly said I was, too, but Rose is a wit (a fact not as yet disclosed to her family). As for looks-she’d have been a toast at any period of history.

I could whole-heartedly agree about the looks. I told him I could imagine her arriving at Bath with all the bells ringing and Beau Nash welcoming her as the reigning beauty; that fetched him considerably.

Rose lasted us until we were passing the larch wood, when he stopped and spoke about the greenness of the larches.

“There’ll be bluebells in there before long—you can see the shoots now,” I told him.

He stood staring into the wood for a minute, then said:

“What is it about the English countryside-why is the beauty so much more than visual? Why does it touch one so?”

He sounded faintly sad. Perhaps he finds beauty saddening—I do myself sometimes. Once when I was quite little I asked Father why this was and he explained that it was due to our knowledge of beauty’s evanescence, which reminds us that we ourselves shall die.

Then he said I was probably too young to understand him;

but I understood perfectly.

As we walked on, I asked Simon questions about American country and he described some of the old New England villages.

They did sound nice: very trim and white—much more spacious than our villages, with wide streets lined with shady trees. And he told me about little places on the coast of Maine, where he had spent vacations. He says “vacations” where we would say “holidays.”

Although I still think his voice is like extra-good English, I now realize that almost every sentence he speaks has some little American twist—”guess” for “suppose, …. maybe” where we use “perhaps,” “I’ve gotten” when we would say “I’ve got”-oh, there are dozens of words. And he is much more American with me than he is with Father, and very much younger; with Father he chooses his words so correctly that he sounds quite pedantic and middle-aged, but with me he was almost boyish.

“Why, the may’s out already,” I said, when we came to the crossroads—the buds on the hedges were tightly closed, but there were dozens of open ones on the tree by the signpost. I set a lot of store by may—I once spent hours trying to describe a single blossom of it, but I only managed “Frank-eyed floweret, kitten-whiskered,” which sticks in your throat like fish bones ““The palm and may make country houses gay,”” quoted Simon.

“I think it’s that poem that makes me feel the Elizabethans lived in perpetual spring.”

Then we remembered the rest of the poem between us and by the time we got to Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit, In every street these tunes our ears do greet M. Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

we were into the village.

“Can you hear any birds obliging with those noises?” I said.

“Let’s listen,” said Simon.

We listened. We heard:

Somebody hammering, A hen announcing an egg, A cottage wireless saying it was the British Broadcasting Corporation, The pump on the village green clanking —all rather ugly noises, really, but the church clock striking the quarter somehow drew them together into one pleasant country sound floating on the light spring air. Then Heloise shattered it all by flapping her ears after rolling on the green.

“And how many things can you smell?” I asked Simon.

We counted up:

Wood smoke, A farm smell coming on puffs of breeze (we subdivided this into:

Straw, hay, horses, clean cows: good Manure, pigs, hens, old cabbages: bad—but not too awful if only in little whiffs), A wonderful pie cooking somewhere, The sweet, fresh smell which isn’t quite flowers or grass or scent of any kind, but just clean country air—one forgets to notice this unless one reminds oneself.

“I wonder how many more things Heloise smells,” said Simon.

“Let’s see, what could Chesterton’s dog Quoodle smell? Water and stone and dew and thunder…”

“And Sunday morning—he was so right about that having a smell of its own,” said Simon. Oh, it is amicable being with some one who knows the poems you know! I do hope I get Simon for a brother-in-law.

We crossed the green and turned down the short lane that leads to the prettiest bit of Godsend. The church, which is Norman (and a bit of it may be Saxon), stands on one side of the lane between the Queen Anne vicarage and Miss Marcy’s little eighteenth-century schoolhouse; “The Keys” inn is opposite, but because the lane curves just there they all seem part of one group—Topaz says the “composition” is very beautiful.

“The Keys” is painted cream and has very irregular gables; beside it is an enormous chestnut tree—not in bloom yet but its leaves are at their very best, all new and vividly green, with some of the sticky buds still unopened. There is a bench with a long table against the front of the inn, partly shaded by the chestnut—and sitting there, with stone bottles of ginger beer, were Rose and Neil.

It turned out that she had come across the fields from Four Stones to get a cake of scented soap from the post-office shop (topaz is giving us a shilling a week pocket-money while the Vicar’s twenty pounds holds out), and had found Neil there buying cigarettes.

“And when I said you’d be along soon, she very obligingly waited,” he told Simon. Perhaps I imagined it, but I did think he sounded a bit satirical. We sat down, Simon by Rose. Neil asked me what I would have to drink. I was going to say lemonade and then a wild idea struck me: “Could I have a cherry brandy his I’ve always wanted to taste it.”

“You can’t drink liqueurs before lunch,” said Rose in a very grownup way.

“Yes, she can if she wants to,” said Neil, going in to the bar. Rose shrugged her shoulders rather histrionically and turned to talk to Simon. He did look pleased to see her. After a few minutes he suggested we should all lunch there and called out to Neil to arrange it.