Читать книгу One Summer at Deer’s Leap - Elizabeth Elgin - Страница 7

We left Deer’s Leap at six the following evening; three cars, in convoy, sort of. Me to pick up the A59, Beth to take Jeannie to Preston station in an ancient Beetle that was worth a bomb, did she but know it, and Danny in the estate car to pick up the children and their gear down in Acton Carey.

I drove with Danny in front going far too fast for the narrow lane and Beth driving much too close behind. I knew what they were up to. I was being hustled into the village so that if the airman appeared again, I wouldn’t be able to stop.

We got there without incident and Danny flagged us down. Then he and Beth and Jeannie gave me a hug and a kiss through my open window and said I really must visit over the Christmas break – if not before – and how lovely it had been to have me.

‘Let me have a look at the book, uh, as soon as you can.’ The holiday was over. Jeannie was wearing her editorial hat again. ‘When you get to chapter ten, run me off a copy; I’d like to see how it’s going.’

‘Of course. Want to make sure I don’t start mucking about with the storyline,’ I grinned; ‘introduce a good-looking ghost?’

‘Now, Cassie,’ she said quite sternly, ‘I thought we’d forgotten all that. You said you’d keep shtoom about it.’

‘And I will. Not a word to the parents when I get home. Promise.’

Mum and Dad didn’t believe in ghosts anyway; only in things they could touch and see and smell – and in Dad’s case, drink from a pint pot.

‘That’s all right, then,’ Beth beamed. ‘Mind how you go, Cassie. See you!’

Waving, I pulled out, yet before I’d gone a couple of miles I was planning how I could get to drive past that place again without Beth and Danny getting wind of it.

I concentrated on the winding, tree-lined road that dropped slowly down to Clitheroe, then rose sharply at the crossing of a river bridge. Not far away was Pendle Hill; somewhere not too distant was Downham. Witch country, without a doubt, with wild, lonely tracts of land where ghosts and witches could roam free; one ghost in particular, looking for a girl who once lived at Deer’s Leap. A young man who didn’t realize he was dead.

Jack Hunter. He had flown, I shouldn’t wonder, from the airfield that was probably called RAF Acton Carey. The coming of bombers to that little village must have caused quite a stir, yet now all traces of the base had gone. Even the track that ran round the perimeter of the airfield had grassed over and could only be picked out, Danny said, in an exceptionally dry summer when the grass on it browned and died. You could trace the outline of it then, he said, and wonder about those too-young men who trundled their huge bombers around it before takeoff.

Jack had been one of them, though I’d thought it politic not to ask Danny specifically about him in view of what had happened. He’d looked about my age. I frowned. I couldn’t imagine those nervous fingers grasping whatever it was they had to pull back to get that great, death-loaded plane into the air. Lancasters, they’d been. A Lancaster bomber and a Spitfire and a Hurricane flew over London during the Victory in Europe celebrations, fifty years on, yet Jack Hunter was still twenty-four.

A great choke of tears rose in my throat and in that moment I didn’t care about broken promises, nor letting well alone nor even about snoopers from the tabloids upsetting the peace of Acton Carey if news of a World War Two ghost leaked out. As far as I was concerned it was, and would remain, between me and Jack Hunter and the girl it seemed he was looking for.

How I would go about it, where I would begin, I didn’t know. But I liked doing research; could pretend I was setting my next novel in the countryside around Deer’s Leap; might even be able to poke around there if the house stood too long empty and for sale after Beth and Danny had left.

Yet they weren’t leaving for six months and I couldn’t wait that long.

I noticed I was passing the Golf Balls at Menwith and decided to think about Jack Hunter tomorrow and concentrate instead on the roundabout ahead at which I would turn left to bypass Harrogate, a pretty run through Guy Fawkes country.

I indicated left, then closed my mind to everything save getting home before dark. Home to Greenleas Market Garden, Rowbeck. Safe and sound and ordinary.

Rowbeck is very small. Everyone knows everyone else and their parentage. We’ve been lucky, with only one weekender in the place. She’s a teacher who intends living in the village when she retires, so she has been made welcome and the neighbourhood watch keeps an eye on her cottage when she isn’t there.

Rowbeck is on the Plain of York where the earth is rich and black and bounteous. Distantly we can see the tops – the hills of Herriot country – where winters can be vicious and shepherds work hard to make a living.

There’s a Broad into Rowbeck, which runs round the green in a circular sweep, then out again by the same road; a sort of circumnavigation that takes all of forty seconds, driving slowly.

The only other way out of the village is by a narrow lane at the top end of the green by the church. That’s where we live. Half a mile further on the lane becomes little more than a track, then peters out. Only the odd farm tractor passes. It’s a nice place to live if you like the back of beyond – which I do.

Dad was doing the evening rounds of the glasshouses when I got back and putting down a saucer of food for the hedgehog that lives in the garden and eats slugs and is worth its weight in gold. Mum said did I want a cup of tea and could I unpack tonight and put out my dirty washing? Mum always washes on Mondays and bakes on Fridays, no matter what. She runs the house like clockwork, with a place for everything and everything in its place. It’s because her star sign is Virgo and she can’t help it. She’s inclined to cuddly plumpness and hasn’t a wrinkle on her face.

Dad came in and remarked that the first of the early spray chrysanths should be ready for cutting in about a week, though we could do with a drop of rain. Only when Mum had poured and we were sitting at the kitchen table did he ask if I’d had a nice weekend.

‘Dad! That house is just beautiful! I’d kill for it!’

‘Out of the way is it, like this place?’

‘Greenleas is secluded; Deer’s Leap is isolated. They get snowed up in winter, but in summer it’s magic. You can look out into forever from the upstairs windows. I’ve never seen such a view. It’s in the Trough of Bowland.’

Dad said he’d never heard of it and I said I wasn’t surprised; that it was as if the people who lived there had conspired through the ages to keep it a secret and out of the reach of incomers. Foreigners, I meant, as in Yorkshire folk and people from further north. ‘You look over to Beacon Fell and Parlick Pike and Fair Oak Fell and it isn’t far from witch country.’

‘There’s no such thing as witches.’ Mum pushed a plate of parkin in my direction.

‘I know that, but it’s so beautiful; sort of breathtaking. Jeannie’s sister is leaving there at the end of the year. It would break my heart if it were me.’

‘Seems as if it’s made an impression on you. You haven’t gone over to the Lancastrians, have you?’

Dad looked a bit put out. The Wars of the Roses may be long over, but in Lancashire and Yorkshire they still keep the feud going, if only over The Cricket.

‘Of course I haven’t, but I’d love to go there again, just for another look. Beth – that’s Jeannie’s sister – has invited me for a goodbye party, sort of. Christmas in a house like that would be wonderful.’

‘So what’s this precious Deer’s Leap like, then?’ Mum sounded a bit piqued because I was making such a fuss over a house I mightn’t even see again and because, I suppose, I could even consider spending Christmas anywhere else but Greenleas.

‘We-e-ll, it’s stone, and tile-roofed. One end of it has a gable end that’s V-shaped and it has three rooms and an attic in it. The middle bit has a huge sitting room, with a terrace outside, and two bedrooms. Then there’s an end bit with a big kitchen and dairy and pantry, and a narrow little staircase off it to three rooms above. I suppose the workers slept up there when it was a farm and they wouldn’t have been allowed to use the main staircase. The windows are stone-mullioned, and all shapes and sizes. From the front it looks as if it’s still in the sixteenth century, though it’s been tarted up at the back. It’s a smaller version of Roughlee Hall, Danny says.’

‘Never heard of that place, either,’ Dad shrugged.

‘Of course you have! Surely you’ve heard of the Pendle Witches. Alice Nutter lived at Roughlee. She was a gentle-woman and how she got mixed up in witchcraft, nobody seems to know. She was hanged on Lancaster Moor in 1612.’

‘And you believe such nonsense?’ Mum clucked. ‘All that stuff is a fairy tale, like Robin Hood.’

‘They don’t seem to think so around those parts.’

‘If they believe that, they’ll believe anything!’ Mum had the last word on witches. ‘And I forgot – Piers rang.’

‘What about?’

‘He didn’t say and I didn’t ask!’

‘Well, he’ll ring again, if it’s important.’

‘Aren’t you going to call him back?’

‘Don’t think so.’ As from this weekend, I’d stopped jumping when Piers snapped his fingers.

Mum put mugs and plates on a tray, wearing her button mouth. She placed great hopes on Piers. He was Yorkshire-born, which was a mark in his favour, and even if he had defected to parts south of the River Trent and was earning a living amongst Londoners, she considered it high time we were married.

‘Think I’ll go and unpack. Then I’ll write to thank Beth. By the way, she was really pleased with the flowers.’

‘So she should be! Your dad grew them!’

‘Won’t be long,’ I smiled. Long enough, though, to let Mum get over whatever wasn’t pleasing her.

I hung the green dress on a hanger, then wondered what to do with the two silk arum lilies, because even to say the words ‘artificial flowers’ is blasphemy in our house. So I stuck them in a drawer because they were a part of the weekend, and I couldn’t bear to throw them away.

I sat back on my heels. To open my case was to let out Deer’s Leap and Jack Hunter and the promise I’d made to Beth and Jeannie to forget him. Yet I couldn’t, because somehow he was a part of that house; was connected to Deer’s Leap in some way, and I had to know how.

Common sense told me to leave it, that ghosts didn’t exist. But Beth had half admitted that maybe they did in the very real, very solid form of a World War Two pilot whose plane had crashed more than fifty years ago. A very attractive man and Piers’s exact opposite.

Piers. I hoped he wouldn’t ring tonight when the spell of Deer’s Leap was still on me. Just to hear him say ‘Cassandra?’ very throatily – he rarely calls me Cassie – would intrude on the magic. For bewitched I was, with the enchantment wrapping me round like a thread of gossamer that couldn’t be broken. One gentle tug on that thread would pull me back there whether I wanted to go or not.

And I wanted to go.

By Monday morning I’d sorted out my priorities. All thoughts of the weekend were banned until after I switched off my word processor. I have to set myself targets. The contract said that Harrier Books wanted the manuscript by the end of December, so it couldn’t be delivered any later than the first week in January, even allowing for the New Year holiday.

I write in my bedroom. There’s a deep alcove in one corner that is big enough to accommodate my desk. My latest extravagance was to hang a curtain over it so that when I’d finished for the day I could pull it across and shut out my work. What I couldn’t see, I figured, I couldn’t worry about. The curtain has proved to be a good idea.

I had just finished reading last Friday’s work and got my mind into gear, when the extension phone on my desk rang. It would, of course, be Jeannie. People had got the message now that up until four in the afternoon it was best not to ring. Only my editor was allowed to disturb my thoughts.

‘Hi!’ I said brightly. ‘You made it home OK, then?’

‘Cassandra?’ a voice said throatily.

‘Piers! Why are you ringing at this time?’

‘Do I need a chit from the Holy Ghost to ring my girl?’

‘I – I – Well, what I mean is that it’s the expensive time. You usually ring after six …’ I closed my eyes, sucked in my breath and warned myself to watch it.

‘I rang yesterday. Didn’t your mother tell you?’

‘Of course she did.’ My voice was sharper than I intended.

‘You didn’t ring me back.’

‘I was late getting home – the traffic. I was tired …’ I tell lies too, Piers.

‘So how did the weekend go?’ It seemed I was forgiven.

‘It was nice.’

‘Only nice, Cassandra?’

‘Very nice. Jeannie’s family are lovely, though I didn’t meet the children,’ I babbled. ‘They were away at camp and –’

‘You sound guilty. Did you have an extraordinarily nice time?’

‘Piers! I’m not feeling guilty because I have nothing to feel guilty about! If I sound a bit befuddled it’s because I had a whole paragraph in my head and now it’s gone!’

‘You’ll have to think it out again then, won’t you?’

‘It isn’t that easy! Once it’s gone you never get it back again – not as good, anyway.’

‘Oh dear! I’ll ring again tonight if you tell me you love me.’

‘Why should I, at ten o’clock in the morning?’

‘Cassandra – what’s the matter?’ The smooth talking was over. He actually sounded curious.

‘Nothing’s the matter. I’m working, that’s all. If I were a typist in an office I probably wouldn’t be allowed private calls and I certainly couldn’t yell that I loved you over the phone for everyone to hear!’

‘You don’t yell it. “I love you” has to be said softly …’

‘Yes, and secretly for preference.’

‘Then say it softly and secretly from your bedroom.’

‘Piers …’ I said in my this-is-your-last-warning voice. ‘I am busy!’

‘OK! Pax, darling. I’ll ring tonight! Get on with your scribbling.’

I sat back, part of my make-believe world once more, reading from the screen, searching my mind for the lost paragraph.

But it didn’t come. All I could think was that for once, in all the four years of our on and off affair, I’d challenged Piers and almost won!

‘Pop out and get me a few tomatoes, there’s a good girl. And tell your dad it’ll be on the table in five minutes!’

Once I got back in my stride, and sorted the wayward paragraph, the words had come well; it was going to be a word-flow day, I’d known it. I’d just come to the end of a page when my stomach told me it was lunchtime and my mind told me it needed a break.

I saw Dad at the end of the garden, so I waved and yelled, ‘Five minutes!’ then went into the tomato house, sniffing in the green growing smell, loving the moistness of it and the lush, tall plants heavy with red trusses. A few tomatoes, at our house, meant a bowlful and not half a pound in a plastic bag. I bit into one, marvelling that half the country didn’t know what a fresh tomato was.

I felt very relaxed. Once I’d got into my stride again, nothing intruded on the make-believe world at my fingertips. I had forgiven Piers, I realized, for ringing when he shouldn’t have done and I had not thought once about the kissing gate through which a World War Two pilot had disappeared.

Now my thoughts were free to roam again, my self-discipline on hold, and I wondered how I should go about finding the name of the family who lived at Deer’s Leap before the Air Force took it and they had to find somewhere else to live.

They might have moved to Acton Carey or further afield. They may even, since losing their acres under a runway of concrete and seeing their trees felled and hedges ripped out, have given up farming in disgust.

It was best I began the search in Acton Carey, but this would be risky, as Danny or Beth would be bound to hear of me doing it. I could not, I realized, visit locally without calling on them and if Lancashire villages were like Yorkshire villages, they would soon discover that a red-haired foreigner had been asking questions in the pub. Villagers close ranks at such times, and mention of anything remotely concerned with the ghost they wanted to sweep under the mat would be sidestepped at once! I would be taken for a journalist, no doubt, and that would be the end of that.

Of course, I could drive past the spot as near to the same time as possible, and I told myself I was a fool for not knowing when it had been. Yet had I known something so weird and wonderful was going to happen, I’d have noted the time exactly and had my tape recorder at the ready! But just a glimpse of a furtive redhead in a bright red Mini on that lonely lane would be worthy of note. I knew how it was at Greenleas if a strange car – obviously lost – drove past.

‘I said dinner in five minutes! What are you doing, Cassie?’ Mum stood in the doorway, flush-cheeked. ‘Composing another chapter?’

I said I was sorry, and pushed the remainder of the tomato into my mouth so I couldn’t talk. Composition was the furthest thing from my mind, so I was glad it’s bad manners to speak with your mouth full. That way, I couldn’t tell any lies.

‘Good job it’s only cold cut and salad,’ Mum grumbled, ‘or it would be spoiled by now.’

Monday, being washday, it was always leftovers from Sunday dinner, because that was the way it had been for the twenty-five years of my parents’ marriage. It was one of the things I loved especially about Mum – the way nothing changed.

A flood of affection touched me from head to toes and I put my arm round her and said, ‘The sky would fall, Mum, if it wasn’t – cold cut and salad, I mean!’

She threw me an old-fashioned look, which turned into an answering smile, then said, ‘Did I hear you on the phone, this morning?’

‘Yes. Piers.’

‘And what did he have to say?’ She chose to ignore my brevity.

‘Not a lot. He didn’t get the chance. I tore him off a strip for ringing during working hours.’

‘Then you shouldn’t have! You’re never going to get a husband, Cassie, if you carry on like that. Men don’t like career women!’

‘Men are going to have to put up with it till I’ve done my third novel. One swallow doesn’t make a summer, Mum, nor two! Anyway, I sometimes think me and Piers aren’t cut out for one another.’

‘Oh?’ Mum’s jaw dropped visibly, which was understandable since to her way of thinking I was as good as off the shelf. ‘Then all I can say, miss, is that it won’t end at a third book. You’ll want to be famous, and before you know it you’ll have left it too late! I think Piers is very nice indeed, if you want my opinion.’

‘Mum!’ I stopped, put my hands on her shoulders and turned her to face me. ‘I like Piers – very much. And yes, I know you watched him grow up, more or less, and he’s considered a good catch around these parts.’

‘He went to university!’ Mum said huffily.

‘Yes, and he’s doing well. But he hasn’t asked me to marry him, yet.’

‘He hasn’t?’

‘No. And if he did, I wouldn’t know what to say. Maybe I ought to have gone to live with him in London like he wanted, but I didn’t fancy being an unpaid servant and a mistress to boot!’

‘A mistress, Cassie! Then I’m glad you told him no! Clever of you, that was. Men never run after a bus once they’ve caught it!’

‘I know. I didn’t come down with the last fall of snow!’ We were getting on dangerous ground, especially about the mistress bit. ‘But I want to be married, I promise you.’

‘Your dad would like a grandson, you know.’

‘I’m sure he would. I want children, too, and after book three I shall think very seriously about getting married.’

‘To Piers?’

‘Probably to the first man who asks me, Mum!’

With that she seemed happy and we walked in silent contentment to the back door where Dad was washing his hands in the water butt.

‘Now then, our lass!’ He gave Mum a smack on her bottom and she went very red and told him to stop carrying on in the middle of the day.

It stopped her thinking about her unmarried daughter, for all that, and the grandchildren she was desperate to have about the place. I gave her a conspiratorial wink, and peace reigned at Greenleas.

Jeannie phoned just as I’d pulled the curtain across my workspace, pleased with a fair day’s work.

‘Hi! How’s it going, then?’

‘Great!’ It could only refer to the current novel. ‘I must spend the weekend partying more often!’

‘Well, Beth meant it when she asked you up there for Christmas. I think she quite took to you!’

‘I’d love to go, Jeannie. I keep thinking about Deer’s Leap and being sad for Beth that she’s got to leave.’

‘She doesn’t have to, but it’s best all round they don’t ask for the lease to be renewed. The twins will start senior school in September. A good state school will be high on her list of priorities. Boarding in winter costs a lot of dosh, you know.’

I said I was sure it must.

‘Meantime, Cassie, you might get to stay there again in exchange for baby-sitting the place. Beth and Danny have hired a caravan in Cornwall for a few weeks in the summer. It’ll be the first decent holiday they’ve had in years. Beth’s a bit worried about leaving the house, though. She wouldn’t want to come back and find squatters in it.’

‘Yes, and there’s the dog and the cats to think about, I suppose.’

‘Kennels and catteries cost money, I agree. So would you baby-sit the house, Cassie? Wouldn’t you be a bit afraid on your own?’

‘You mean you’re really offering?’ I gasped.

‘You’d get a lot of work done, that’s for sure, with nothing and no one to distract you. With luck you could do a fair bit of wordage.’

‘I don’t think I would be afraid – especially with a dog there, but why didn’t Beth say anything about it at the weekend?’

‘Because I’ve only just thought about it. Are you really interested, Cas? I could come and join you, weekends. Shall I mention it to Beth?’

‘She might think me pushy. And what if she doesn’t like the idea of a stranger in her home?’

‘You aren’t a stranger. I told you, she likes you.’

I wondered – just for a second – what Mum would make of the idea.

‘We-e-ll, if Beth agrees …’ I said.

‘She’ll agree. She’s sure to worry about the animals and the houseplants, and we could cut the grass between us. I might be able to fix it so I could stay over until Mondays – get some reading done in peace and quiet.’

‘Mm …’ Jeannie has to read a lot of manuscripts.

‘Well then?’

‘If you’re sure, Jeannie?’

‘I can but ask. I bet they’ll both jump at the chance. It would have to be unpaid, of course.’

My heart had started to thump again, just to think of a whole month there. Deer’s Leap in the summer. I could write and write and only stop when I was hungry.

‘OK, then. I’m game …’

I thought, as I put the phone down, that I was stark, raving mad. For one thing, Mum and Dad wouldn’t like the idea and for another, it wasn’t very bright of me to go there. Not because I’d be afraid on my own – Deer’s Leap would take good care of me – but because I’d be heading straight into trouble. For the past two days I’d been looking for an excuse to get back there without Beth or Danny knowing; to drive down the long lane that led to their house and hope to find the airman again, thumbing a lift. Yet now it seemed it could be handed to me on a plate. I could drive up and down the lane as often as I wanted; could open the kissing gate and find where the path led – and to whom. I could even do a bit of gentle nosing in the village, because once they knew I was living at Deer’s Leap they’d treat me like Beth and Danny and the twins – one of themselves.

The thumping was getting worse and a persistent little pulse behind my nose had joined in. I knew if I had one iota of sense I should be praying that Beth wouldn’t want me there.

Yet I knew I would go back, because Deer’s Leap had me hogtied and besides, there was a pilot who needed my help – not only to find his girl but to be gently told he was a name on a war memorial.

Then the phone rang again and I knew it was Piers.

Oh, damn, damn, damn!