The House at Tyneford (50 page)

I felt the sunshine warm upon my cheeks. So, I was to be an aunt. I experienced a tug of excitement. Perhaps I could knit the baby something—I was rather tired of making socks for soldiers. I remembered soon after Margot and Robert married, Anna and I lingering over breakfast on the balcony. I can see it now: the table laid with a white cloth, a scattering of crumbs from our bread rolls, the red geraniums in the flowerpot. “I don’t mind whether it’s a boy or a girl,” said Anna, “as long as the child’s musical.” I frowned, hurt, and Anna reached out, catching my hand. “Oh, my darling, I couldn’t care less about your prowess. It’s simply that music is all Margot really understands. I think having her for a mother will be easier if the child is also a musician.” She gave me an arch smile. “Naughtiness, baby will learn from her aunt.” I said nothing, just sipped my coffee and pictured the baby belonging to Margot and Anna’s coterie of musicians, sharing in that language from which I was inevitably excluded.

Reading Margot’s letter all those years later, nothing was how we’d imagined it to be. A goldfinch alighted on the garden wall, the sunlight catching the bright feathers on his head, and started to warble. I wondered if the baby would be able to sing or if she’d be like me. It didn’t matter. Anna was wrong. Margot wouldn’t mind if the baby wasn’t even a music lover. Though she’d probably still name him Amadeus if he were a boy or Constanze for a girl.

On a cool afternoon in early October, I decided to take a walk along the bluffs. Harvest and haymaking were finished and I was savouring a brief lull before the ploughing started. It was one of those days when the sea battled against the wind, and the roar and crash of waves smashing into the black rocks was drowned out by the wind screaming along the cliff path. My ears ached with cold and, blown by the gale, I lurched and stuttered toward the precipice like a drunkard. It was safer low to the ground, so I crouched, fingers grasping at the hawthorn and thistles to steady myself. The earth smelled of loam and heather. From this height, the curve of the bay below appeared as if it had been scooped out of the land, the honeyed cliffs as smooth as the inside of a clay cup spinning on a potter’s wheel. The sea washed the beach, white sheets of water rolling up and down, coating the pebbles with layer after layer of rushing white foam. It was wild up on the cliff, and as the light began to fade I was almost frightened. When I looked back down at the beach, I saw the figure of Mr. Rivers standing in the surf.

I scrambled down the steep path to the beach and hesitated, watching him from a distance, before calling out, “Mr. Rivers! Daniel.”

He turned and waved, and I ran across the strand toward him, my feet grinding into the pebbles. As I approached, I saw to my surprise that he was not dressed in his usual outdoor work clothes but in one of his prewar suits. His brogues were sluiced by the tide and I frowned at the spoiling of good shoe leather.

“What are you doing?” I asked, catching his elbow and drawing him farther up the beach.

“It’s finished,” he said.

I frowned. “What’s finished?”

“Tyneford.”

His face was pale and dark circles shadowed his eyes. Between clenched fingers, he clasped a letter. “They’re taking over the house. The village. Everything. We have to leave by Christmas.”

He stepped back from the shore and walked a few paces up the beach. The wind roared through the trees and made the dune grass sing. I chased after him, easing the letter from his hand.

I read it through twice and then, hands shaking, returned it to Mr. Rivers.

“They gave it to me first,” he said tonelessly. “A day’s courtesy. The rest of the village will get theirs tomorrow.”

I started to speak but he shook his head.

“There’s nothing to be done. I’ve been to see the major-general. It’s quite decided. Everywhere from East Lulcombe to Kimmeridge is to be cleared of civilians.”

I felt myself reel. The sound of the sea crashed through me, drawing out my breath with the tide.

“No,” I said. “No.”

I loved this place. I loved the wildness and the salt water cracking against the black rocks and the greylag geese crying overhead and the sea pinks reaching over the cliff tops and the adders basking on the heath, the song of the fishermen and the rainbow bellies of the mackerel, the silent church and the glimpse of Portland in the mist and the way the weather was as changeable as a Mozart opera—one moment sunny and warm, gulls laughing in the bay, and the next rain pockmarking the waves. I loved the wooden fishing boats dawdling in the bay and the sweep and rush of water in the dark. Here, I had loved Kit. I loved him swimming among these rocks and filching cockles in that tide pool and running along Flower’s Barrow. Here we met and fell in love. He stays in Tyneford in the echo of the sea upon the shore and—

“How can we leave him?” I pleaded.

Mr. Rivers sighed. “He’s gone, Alice. He left us first.”

I shook my head. “No. Kit is in Tyneford. This is the only place we’ve known together. We shared these pebbles and this sea.”

Mr. Rivers took my hand and drew me down to sit beside him. “Then it’s right you should leave. That we should both go. Each of us needs to start somewhere new. Try to live a little again. He died. We didn’t.”

He reached his arm around me and pulled me tight into his side.

“You’re young, Alice. You should have a sweetheart. Those wretched WAAFs have endless boyfriends. You should too.”

I began to sob, and he rocked me gently.

“His life was tragic. Yours oughtn’t to be.”

“But I don’t want to leave this place. This valley. This bay.” I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “I was lost and then I was home.”

“I know,” he said. “It casts a spell over you. There’s something about the place. I was born here; so were my father and my grandfather. I thought my grandchildren would grow up playing in these woods.” He sighed again. “But the war has changed everything. It would have changed eventually—it’s just happening all at once in a rush and we’re not ready for it.”

He gave a bitter laugh. “We were all so worried about the damn invasion and losing the place to the Nazis. I joined the auxiliaries, for Christ’s sake. And the invasion came anyway.”

“Even your gun couldn’t keep them out.”

We both fell silent, remembering the night on the same beach and Mr. Rivers shooting at the void. He plucked a golden pebble off the ground and sent it skimming into the waves, where it bounced again and again across the surface before finally sinking into the opaque water. As it vanished, sadness overwhelmed me, cold as the October sea.

“Perhaps it’s good for us. It’s not right . . . this . . . you and I,” he said as I rested my head on his shoulder, and I shuddered, not knowing whether this was a return of the old propriety or a reference to our mutual grief. He continued, “Sometimes I feel that it will be a relief to get away from here—from the house, which is, honest to God, falling down about our ears—and away from all the memories. There are so many everywhere that sometimes I choke on them.”

I was crying silently now, and he wiped away my tears with his thumb.

“Don’t cry, Alice. Please, don’t cry. They say we can return at the end of the war. As soon as it’s all over we can all come back. The old life can start again, if you like.”

I smiled and stroked his hand but we both knew that this was the end of Tyneford.

Five hundred years lay in packing boxes. Mrs. Ellsworth received the news well, filling only one pocket handkerchief with her tears. Mr. Rivers would not dismiss the staff; they had a home with him, if they wanted it. Art was to tend the garden, and Mrs. Ellsworth determined to keep house for the evicted squire—the thought of Mr. Rivers boiling his own egg was a travesty too far. Yet, to Mr. Rivers’ surprise and regret, Mr. Wrexham declined. He received the news standing up in the library, refusing the offer of either a brandy or a seat. He was silent for a moment.

“I am much obliged for the generous offer, sir. But I am not in the first flush and perhaps this is a suitable juncture for me to consider my retirement. I think I might live with my brother in a quiet spot by the sea.”

He crossed to the window and adjusted the curtain sash, which had caught and creased. Once it was smooth, he turned back to Mr. Rivers. “Is there anything else, sir?”

Privately, I wondered what had made the old butler choose to leave the Rivers family service. I couldn’t imagine that fishing with Burt held such appeal. Perhaps the servant could not bear to see Mr. Rivers in such reduced circumstances, or perhaps he considered that, once he left, Mr. Rivers was no longer the master of Tyneford House. Or else it was simply the end of the old world as he had forecast all those years ago, and he chose not to cling to it, but to withdraw with his customary dignity. He would slide out of our lives with the same discretion with which he left the gentlemen to their port after a good dinner.

The house itself seemed forlorn. Every creak of wood was a reproach and the wind sighed through the eaves at night. Mrs. Ellsworth ceased entirely to polish the parquet and dust gathered in drifts behind doors, while Mr. Wrexham uttered not a word of complaint. I decided that it was better we left—a sharp good-bye—rather than watch the slow decay increase each year: the guttering fall off the west gable and not be replaced, the attic roof collapse, dry rot take hold in the ancient panelling, the damp steal up from the cellar into the great hall. We could remember the house as she had been, luminous and proud, lights in every window and storm lanterns flickering across the lawns. In memory she remained a great English country house, always ready to receive her guests as their motorcars drew up outside, chauffeurs opening doors and ladies strolling up to the porch in a flurry of fur coats. In our minds it would always be summer as we took tea on the terrace, the scent of bluebells from Rookery Wood drifting like smoke across the lawns.

My own future was uncertain. Each night after dinner I retired to the library with Mr. Rivers. His calendar sat on his desk, leering at me. Another day gone. And another. I wanted to turn it facedown, as though that would pause time. Anna and Julian would never see this place. Neither would Margot. Mr. Rivers buried himself in arrangements; he had a house on the other side of Kimmeridge Bay, and he supervised the removal of the most precious things: paintings of the ancestors, photographs of Kit and the smaller pieces of furniture. Everything else would have to be packed in the cellar and locked away.

“Alice,” he said, looking up from his desk, “what are you going to do?” He paused and swallowed. “You know that you cannot come with me. Other places are not like Tyneford. People would talk. I don’t care about me—they can say what they like about me, but not about you.”

I didn’t like to tell him that people already talked.

“Don’t worry,” I said brightly. “I shall be fine. I’ll become a land girl. There’s a farm at Worth Matravers short of hands.”

Mr. Rivers frowned. “Yes, I know it. Nigel Lodder’s place. He’s a good man.” He looked at me sharply. “I want you to check with me first. I don’t want you going just anywhere.”