Touch Not The Cat (18 page)

He took his time. When he spoke at length his voice was quiet, but I could feel the tension in the arm that encircled me. "I think you know the answer, don't you? When we were talking awhile ago about the fishing cat, I said the place was rotten, and that's true. You know it is. It's been falling to pieces, bit by bit, for years. It's a burden to the living, even if you count keeping it going as homage to the dead. That's not the way to live now, when the dead can no longer supply the living with the means to keep their memorials going." He took a breath like a sigh. "I'm sorry, love, this is the wrong time to talk to you like this, but you asked me. I doubt if you've had the time to think about it yet, since Cousin Jon died, but you can't seriously expect either of us, Emory or me, to go on running this—this National Trust reject, even if we did have the money to do it with? There are other things to do with money, Bryony. For us, anyway."

"I suppose so."

"All right, so Cousin Jon might have thought we should want to. But you're a different generation, you know the score. These are the seventies, and the world's wider than Ashley Park. If there aren't the means to save it, then it'll have to go. We've got to face that."

"James, I'm facing it."

His arm tightened, and he held me close. His cheek touched my hair, but he didn't attempt a caress. "Well, I've said what I promised to say, and I'll leave it. But you will think about it, won't you?"

"Of course I will. But Daddy only died a week ago, remember, and until I know what he wanted, and why—"

"I know, love, I know. I'm sorry. This is a hell of a time to talk to you about breaking trusts and leaving Ashley, but when we started this we weren't to know what would happen to your father. And now my own father's ill, and worried half out of his mind, and things are pressing, and—well, hell, there it is.

Another of those silences. The hammering had stopped. I thought of the fishing cat lying broken under the water, and, for some reason, of the pavilion with its riot of honeysuckle and the sagging walls of yew and Cathy's voice asking: "Is that the table where he wrote his poems?"

"Francis," I said suddenly. "How does Francis feel about all this? I thought he loved Ashley."

"He does," said James. "He's a throwback, is Francis. Anyway, he wouldn't notice if the place fell to pieces round him, as long as he could sit in the maze like William Ashley, making verses. What on earth did I say? You jumped."

"Nothing, really. Only you were reading my thoughts. Do you often do that?"

A pause, as long as four quickened heartbeats. Then he said, easily: "Twin and I do it as a matter of course. Shades of Bess Ashley, the gipsy, didn't you know?"

"It must save a lot of telephone calls," I said lightly.

He laughed. "Oh, it does. But you were saying about Francis. I doubt if he would refuse to help break the trust. The point is, even if we did break it, we wouldn't have any designs on the house itself. That's unsaleable, so one might as well make a virtue of necessity, and leave it alone as a corner of ancient England on its own tight little island. It's the land that would have to go."

"For what?"

"For whatever would bring the most money."

"Building land brings the most."

He answered what I had not said. "Well, and why not? People have to have houses. And when they drive the new motorway across Penny's Flats, we'll be in Birmingham commuter country." He must have felt something in my silence, because he added, rather edgily: "Look, Bryony, you said you'd be realistic. Just because we played here as kids doesn't mean our kids will ever have the chance, or, my God,
want
the chance."

"I wasn't. I was thinking about the other people in volved. That must be what was making Daddy think twice. There's the Vicar, for instance. What happens to the Vicarage? I suppose that would be safe enough, though I can hardly see Mr. Bryanston hemmed in with housing projects, and without the garden. But there are the Hendersons, and Rob Granger. Would you sell their houses?"

"Why not? They'd have first option to buy them themselves."

"The Hendersons might, but I'm sure Rob can't afford to."

"Then he ought to. He had the farm, after all. If he didn't manage to make a go of that, there's no reason why we should be responsible—"

"Be fair. His father drank every penny they ever made, and knocked Rob and his mother around on Saturdays for good measure. He left them in debt up to their necks, and if Rob hasn't managed to save the price of a house since the old brute died you can hardly blame him. What's more, if it weren't for Rob this place would have dropped to bits a darned sight sooner."

"O.K., O.K.," he said, half laughing. "What have I said? Sorry, I didn't mean it like that. I've always liked Rob, and I know what he's done for you and your father. And now I've made you angry when I want you to listen."

"I'm not angry. It's not that I'm not on your side, James. I am. And I was listening. You were talking about commuter country. Well, all right, all being equal, that's the way things might have to go.

But had you thought? Ashley hasn't an outlet to Penny's Flats."

His head turned, sharply. He stared. His eyes, in the close dusk, looked dark, gipsy Ashley eyes. I felt a queer little tingling thrill at the base of the spine, and looked away. He said, sharply: "Of course it has. That's its whole value. This strip along the Pool runs right through the apple orchard to the road."

"Yes, but that's not Ashley Trust. It's mine."

"Oh, I see." He sounded amused. "Holding out, are you?"

"For the present, yes. I've got to have a home, and I'm planning to stay here till . . ."

"Til?"

"Well, for a bit," I said, evading it. "James, let's leave it for now, may we?"

"Of course, if you say so. But—"

"Yes? But?"

"There was something else. As a matter of fact," he said, rather abruptly, "I haven't even got to the hard bit yet. Look, would you like—shall I get some more coffee?"

"No, don't bother, for me. Go right on. What is the hard bit?"

"Well, I was saying. After your father had refused to consider the trust any further, my father asked Emory and me to do what we could, as quickly as possible. Emory and I talked it over, and we agreed to go to Bavaria and talk to your father. He must obviously have had reasons for his decision, which he didn't want to talk about by telephone, and which might be too complicated to write.

But before that it seemed only sense to—well, to take a look at Ashley itself."

"So then?"

"I meant, take a look at it with the idea of a sale in mind." He cleared his throat.

"Obviously, we wanted to get into the Court and find out, as a basis for discussion with your father, what there was in the way of quickly disposable assets. We didn't approach your father about this because . . . well, damn it, it was a little difficult under the circumstances. He was ill, and he'd have thought we were being a bit previous. A foot in his grave, as it were. I'm sorry."

I said nothing.

I could feel tension running through his arm. He said abruptly: "We didn't get in touch with the Underhills either, because there was no need. I told you about that. By pure chance—it really was pure chance—Emory met Cathy at a party, and she asked him down."

"Convenient."

I felt his look. "You sound a bit abrasive. Don't you like her?"

"From what I've seen of her, I like her very much. I'm just not sure that I like her being used by Emory."

"Did I say he was using her?"

"Isn't he?"

"I wouldn't put it like that." But I thought he sounded uncomfortable.

"That had better be true, you know. Jeff Underhill is what they call a tough cookie, and at a guess he adores his daughter. If she's fallen for Emory, and I think she has, and hard, then Emory had better reckon it as serious."

"I imagine he does. I only said that he didn't plan to live at Ashley on her money." He sounded thoroughly edgy now. "Damn it, do you have to assume he's going to damage her in some way? If a girl like that falls for you, you've got to be a bloody plaster saint not to take a second look, at least."

"So you have."

Somehow, almost unnoticeably, his hand had lifted from my shoulder, and his arm now lay harmlessly along the back of the seat. "It's the James-Emory thing that gets you, isn't it? You'll have to take my word for it that nothing's happened that Cathy would mind remembering, even if she ever found out we'd played that game with her. Which she won't." He glanced at me again, but I made no comment.

"Actually, I don't like it any more than you do. . . . There are things I'd rather be doing than escorting an eighteen-year-old who's in love with someone else. I don't think Emory ever would have started it, but in a way Cathy herself forced it on us."

"How on earth?"

"Oh, there was one date they had made, and Emory couldn't keep it. When he phoned, she was so mad that he thought she'd call the whole thing off, and this was just at the time when we very much wanted to get down to the Court, and if there had been a quarrel with Cathy we could hardly have come down, even through Emerson. So Emory soothed her down and got me to go instead. It never crossed her mind. It was a harmless sort of date—she and Twin hadn't known each other more than a few days, so I didn't have any soft lights and hot music to face. . . . And today it was a case of coming down to see Jeff Underhill, rather than of making love to Cat. Believe me, I've no idea how far Twin's pushed the boat out, nor do I want to. I wouldn't bet on not giving myself away to Cat, and God help us all if that happened." I caught the gleam of a sideways, smiling look, and one finger came away from the seat back and touched my shoulder blade, a feather touch. "If you like, love, I'll promise you here and now not to do it again."

"That's up to you." The words were indifferent, but I felt myself relaxing, and the arm came round me again. "Go on," I said, "did you check the 'disposable assets' between you after all? Great jumping beans!" I sat up again, my hand to my mouth, regarding him wide-eyed in the dusk. "The T'ang horse?

The jade?"

"I'm afraid so." He was speaking quietly, straight to the almost invisible flagstones at his feet.

"Bryony, they were ours.

I promise you we only took them after your father's death. This last week. I promise you.

We badly needed a bit of ready cash, and Emory knew of a market, so . . ."

I listened to the tone, rather than to the words. I knew it well. James, led into something by Emory, loyal to his twin but knowing all the time that whatever they had done was, to say the least of it, dubious. Emory, I knew, was more than capable of playing rough, and James, playing with him, had sometimes suffered for it. But Twin had always been right.

I was aware of silence. He had run out of words. I heard myself asking, in a hard voice quite unlike my own: "Did you have to take the pictures from the schoolroom? You might argue that the other things were going to belong to your family anyway, but the pictures were my own, and I loved them."

"I know. I'm sorry. I—it was a mistake. They were taken by mistake. They haven't been sold. As a matter of fact, we planned to put them back, but there hasn't been a chance today."

"Today?"

"Yes, today. They were only taken yesterday. As soon as I found out, I said they must go back, but by that time you were at the Court, and you'd seen the T'ang horse was missing, and you had started asking about keys. It . . . well, it was awkward."

"I suppose it was." I felt a little dazed. "Just a minute, James. You said, 'They were only taken yesterday.' Who took them, then? Emory wasn't here, was he?"

"No. Cat took them for us."

"What?"
A whirling pause, while I tried to assess it. "'For us'? You mean 'for Emory.'"

"If you like."

"I do like." My voice was sharp. "It makes a difference."

"Well, then, for Emory. Look, don't worry, you'll get them back. It was just—"

"I'm not worrying about jade or pictures or anything else. I'm thinking about Cathy Underhill. You got that girl to steal for you."

"That's a hard word."

"It's a hard fact."

"Aren't you making a bit too much of this? The things were ours."

"Perhaps I am. But not nearly as much as her parents would make of it, I'm sure of that. I thought at the time they seemed almost too upset for what had happened. It made me wonder."

"Her parents? For God's sake, you're not going to make a thing out of it, are you? Bryony—"

"Wait a minute, James. This takes some getting used to. Let me alone for a bit."

I got up abruptly and walked away from him, across the newly cut strip of lawn to the lakeside.

There was a low wall there, a length of ancient stonework that had been left to edge the garden; its fissures were planted with wallflowers and toadflax and some trailing glaucous fern that looked silver in the dusk. I stood there with my back to my cousin, staring out over the dimming pool, but without seeing that or anything. It was wrong, so wrong. . . . Yet because it was James, I couldn't give way to my first instinctive reaction; because it was James I must make myself stop and think. . . . Be civilized, I told myself, this sort of shocked recoil isn't even instinctive, it's a conditioned reaction to what you've been taught to call theft.

Well, all right, think.
Was
it theft? As soon as the legal formalities allowed, all these things would belong to Howard, and by the same token to his sons. James had said with perfect justice that the day was gone when the dead could help the living to watch over the property they had amassed and handed down in designs too vast for today to cope with. And it was my cousins who would have to cope, not I. The fact that Jon Ashley was now one of the dead ought to make no difference. My reaction was an emotional one, nothing more. James knew that; he had tried to spare me; but I had forced his hand by my actions at the Court today, so he had had to tell me now, raw though I still was from my father's death.

I thought again, briefly, about Rob and the fishing cat. . . . Yes, James was right here, too: the place, and the life it had represented, was falling to pieces. Even this cottage, the idyllic little cottage with the view of the lake, with its fruit trees, and the honeysuckle and the Fribourg rose, had woodworm and rising damp which I could not afford to combat. If I sold some of my mother's Worcester porcelain to pay for it, that would be ethical. Why should not my cousins, the owners of Ashley, sell the pieces that were theirs? And why, if they were driven for time, should they not have done it this way?