Читать книгу A Fortnight by the Sea - Emma Page - Страница 7

CHAPTER 2

Godfrey walked rapidly away down the drive. Only three or four weeks ago he had told himself that he might not have to endure for very much longer the presence in his house of a succession of total strangers. And now – he drew a long appalled breath at the notion – it might be years before he could finally close the door on that motley horde.

He halted for a moment, brought all at once face to face with a thought that had been bobbing about somewhere in the recesses of his brain and now sprang out to confront him with chill reality . . . It is no longer a question of tolerating or not tolerating holidaymakers at Oakfield. If the Official Receiver walks in through the gates of Osmond’s, the unimportant little firm of Barratt’s will slide into bankruptcy a week or two later without the attentions of whirring television cameras or crackling microphones. A couple of paragraphs in the Chilford Gazette, a few lines in the trade section advertising the machinery to be disposed of for what it would fetch. And the forthcoming auctions page displaying a photograph of Oakfield, details and measurements relentlessly listed below.

He came out on to the road and turned right, in the direction of Miss Tillard’s bungalow, away from the centre of the village. The soft air strayed against his cheek, bringing with it the scent of the sea.

It had been Elinor Tillard’s idea in the first place, he remembered suddenly, that they should take paying guests at Oakfield. She had thrown the words half-jokingly into a tea-time conversation not very long after the lawyers had finished winding up old Mr Barratt’s estate. There had been the death duties of course – Godfrey had expected that – but what he hadn’t expected was the leanness of his father’s bank balance and share holdings.

Looking back on it now, he could see that his father simply hadn’t been much of a businessman. In his youth he had followed the family tradition of spending some years in the Army, then he had lived a pleasant enough life in the village where he had been born, withdrawing to some extent from local society after the death of his wife, becoming increasingly absorbed as the years went by in purely private interests and hobbies. He hadn’t been a shrewd investor and time had eroded much of the fair-sized fortune he had inherited.

Not that I seem to be turning out a financial wizard myself, Godfrey thought ruefully. But he couldn’t see, even now, that he had behaved foolishly four years ago when he had decided to sink what remained of his father’s capital in a run-down firm that could with diligence and shrewdness be restored to prosperity.

He’d gone to Tillard and King’s, the Chilford estate agents – his father-in-law, now dead, had been a partner in the firm; he’d listened to their advice, furrowed his brow over the lists of properties and settled at last on this little woodworking business. The owner had been in poor health and had recently suffered a heart attack which had left him with no alternative to retirement. The price was very reasonable and Godfrey had always had a liking for the sounds and smells of workshops littered with curling wood-shavings, ever since his first attempts at carpentry in his schooldays.

The concern had appeared fundamentally sound. Housebuilding looked a very healthy growth industry. He had been confident of success – too confident, he could see that now clearly enough – and he had moved little by little, like many another inexperienced man, into the vulnerable position in which the greater part of his production depended on a single outlet. He let out a groan as he contemplated the extent of his folly.

‘It will take a little time before we’re really on our feet,’ he had said cheerfully over the teacups four years ago.

‘Meanwhile—’ Pauline had said, with a questioning glance that spoke of school fees, domestic help, repairs and rates.

‘Meanwhile,’ Aunt Elinor had echoed smilingly, ‘you could take in summer visitors. You’re only half a mile from a good beach, you’ve plenty of room, it would give Pauline something to think about while the boys are away at school, it would help to pay the expenses of Oakfield.’ Neither of the women had suggested that he should sell Oakfield, perhaps because they were well aware his ears would be closed to the idea. The family solicitor had raised the matter once, without conviction, knowing his man. ‘I am bound to say,’ he had observed, looking blandly into Godfrey’s eyes, ‘that the best advice I can offer you is to put Oakfield on the market and move into a smaller house.’ Godfrey hadn’t troubled to reply. He had merely shaken his head, once, decisively, and that was the end of that.

But Aunt Elinor’s joking remark had lingered in his mind, had imperceptibly turned at length into decision. ‘Only for a year or two,’ he’d said to Pauline, ‘just until we’re on a firmer footing.’ Characteristically he had informed her of his decision without even making a show of consulting her. It wasn’t that he had a bulldozing temperament or harboured outdated theories about women’s place in the scheme of things, he was simply following instinctively the pattern his father had laid down. Godfrey’s mother had died when he was a child, so long ago that he had no memory of her; he had been an only child, more or less brought up by Bessie Forrest – Bessie Meacham as she was now, of course. There had been no one to question his father’s edicts and Godfrey had grown up under the impression, which it had never seriously occurred to him to question, that a household arbitrarily ruled by one man represented a perfectly normal and in no way undesirable state of affairs.

Pauline was seven years younger than her husband. At the time of her marriage she had been overwhelmed by a sense of her astounding good luck, and she had been brought up in a home where the mother was gentle and compliant, the father ruled the roost and there were no sons to challenge this arrangement. The early part of Pauline’s married life had been spent in a military environment in which it seemed quite natural for men to issue orders. If she had ever felt resentment after their return to civilian life, if she had come to wish to be treated as a partner rather than as an uncritical subordinate, she never actually got as far as opening her mouth and saying

Godfrey turned a bend in the road and glanced up at the top of the next rise, to where Miss Tillard’s bungalow stood over on the left with a narrow belt of trees to the rear but unscreened in front, looking out over the wide countryside, down towards the village of Westerhill a mile or so away.

A small green car was parked beside the house. Nightingale’s car. The doctor was standing on the verandah with his bag in his hand, talking to Theresa Onil. It was clear from his stance and the way he was facing that he was just about to go inside. Godfrey slackened his pace. A good ten minutes or more before Nightingale would be ready to leave. A few moments later Theresa turned and led the way indoors.

The bungalow would have looked a good deal more at home under the burning skies of Africa than in its orderly setting in the gentle English landscape. In the early nineteen-fifties the old colonial life on the Gold Coast had ended for ever in a series of changes and upheavals that Miss Tillard had viewed with dislike and apprehension. She was no longer young enough to adapt herself and her professional attitudes to new ways; when she learned of the proposal by which Europeans in her position were to be allowed to opt for an early pension – together with a handsome lump sum – it didn’t take her long to make up her mind to leave the country where she had worked for thirty years.

She had come back to the neighbourhood of Chilford where she had been born and brought up. Her father, a partner in a local firm of estate agents, was now dead, but her brother, of whom she had always been fond, had taken over the half-share in the firm and lived on the outskirts of the town with his wife and two daughters. He had found Elinor a small furnished house in which she and Theresa Onil had lived for the year during which the bungalow had been designed and built to Miss Tillard’s very precise specifications.

She had reconstructed as nearly as possible the dwelling she had occupied for the last fifteen years as headmistress of the African school. The bungalow was raised up on a kind of plinth in a way that made sense in the tropics where any whisper of breeze was welcome. A wide verandah supported by slender pillars ran along the front of the house; even the wicker chairs and tables arranged in casual groups carried a note of that other way of life, remote now, part of the past, already beginning to be fossilized.

Godfrey’s easy pace had brought him to the top of the rise and the gate that led into Miss Tillard’s garden. Flowerbeds filled with brilliant cannas were cut into the smoothly sloping lawn. He paused and looked down towards the village, at the church, the central green, the satellite cluster of buildings, and beyond, near the summit of the gentle incline that rose up at the far side of the village, the clubhouse on the golf-course.

He let himself in through the gate. The bungalow stood at a physical remove from the village, and its occupants were isolated also by the way in which they kept themselves aloof from local contacts. This was partly because Miss Tillard found it very difficult to get about; she kept an unwelcome souvenir of her final days in Africa in the shape of an exceedingly troublesome hip joint. The farewell ceremony had taken place at the school; the leather trunks stood locked in the hall. On the day before she was due to wave goodbye, Miss Tillard took it into her head to enjoy a nostalgic ride in a local bus. She hadn’t done such a thing for a quarter of a century, since the days when she was newly out from England, a young and humble member of staff, without a dignified position to keep up.

The buses were strange, not to say fearsome vehicles, ramshackle to the point where it was astounding that every jolt over the roads didn’t cause them to fly apart. Decorated in garish colours, crammed with passengers, and invariably ornamented with painted signs of a religious nature, at once stoutly optimistic and realistically aware of peril implicit in the next lurch.

Miss Tillard had been accompanied on her fateful excursion by Theresa Onil, then a young woman in her early twenties. She had been enrolled as a pupil at the school not very long after Elinor became headmistress; a couple of years later her mother had died and Theresa had been kept on as a boarder, her fees being paid by Elinor who liked the girl and felt sorry for her. Besides, there was really nowhere else for her to go. She seemed to have no knowledge of any relatives back in her native village, and Miss Tillard knew that a light-skinned child was unlikely to be welcomed by any connections who might be discovered. Inquiries were made through the District Commissioner but no one came forward to claim Theresa.

She had formed an ambition to become a teacher, probably in imitation of her admired Miss Tillard, but she hadn’t managed to pass the examinations. When she was eighteen she had begun to take on a number of unofficial duties which she allotted to herself and discharged with care. By the end of another year or two she was supervising the welfare of the youngest children, occasionally acting as a classroom assistant, helping Miss Tillard with a number of irritating minor tasks and in general making herself useful and agreeable all round.

Elinor had felt a blend of sentimental nostalgia and holiday gaiety as she boarded the bus. Theresa had worn an unsmiling look, considering the expedition both undignified and unwise. On the front of the vehicle a short length of wood hammered into place above the driver’s seat bore the flowing inscription: The Lord Will Lead Me. Beneath it a second piece of wood said simply but alarmingly: To The Cemetery.

Half a mile outside the town Theresa had suddenly seized Elinor’s arm and pointed with horror at the road ribboning out behind them. Elinor had just time to catch sight of a wheel from the bus bouncing along on its own before the vehicle fell over.

When Elinor came out of hospital some weeks later it seemed a very good idea for Theresa to accompany her on the voyage home and see her settled into temporary accommodation. Two or three months had lengthened into six, into a year. And then there was the move to the new bungalow, Theresa would be so useful at such a time. Miss Tillard had always intended to lead an active life during her retirement, but the England in which she perched her exotic bungalow was a good deal changed from the country in which she had grown up; in fact she frequently felt herself in the first year or two after her return as much of an alien as she had felt during the recent upheavals in the Gold Coast.

And physically she had never been the same woman since her disastrous trip in the bus. Time drifted by and she made a cosy little nest for the two of them on the outskirts of this quiet English village. She saw a certain amount of her brother and his family, but nothing like as much as she had expected.

She had barely moved into her bungalow when her brother’s elder daughter got married and took herself off with her new husband to the other side of England. A year later the second girl also married; Miss Tillard had scarcely had time to congratulate herself on the fact that Pauline would be living at Oakfield, more or less on her own doorstep, when she learned that Godfrey Barratt intended to make his career in the Army.

Eighteen months later Elinor’s brother died and his widow sold her house, disposed of the half-share in the estate agency to a Tillard cousin – neither of the girls having the slightest inclination to concern themselves with the firm – and took herself off to Spain to live.

The next eight or nine years floated past Elinor like a none too pleasant dream. She no longer even raised the question of sending Theresa back to Africa; without her she would have felt herself totally isolated, a prey to melancholy. It scarcely ever occurred to Godfrey Barratt’s father, perfectly content with his life at Oakfield, his long-settled hobbies and interests, to invite Miss Tillard in for a meal or to share in an outing, nor did it ever cross the mind of Bessie Forrest – who ran Oakfield after the death of Mrs Barratt – that she might make overtures of friendship to the young African woman at the bungalow.

Miss Tillard was able to feel little regret when old Mr Barratt died and it was with deep relief that she learned soon afterwards that his son was leaving the Army and coming home to settle.

Godfrey stood now just inside Miss Tillard’s gate. Must be about time for Nightingale to be leaving; he walked briskly up the path and pressed the bell. The door was opened a minute or two later by Theresa who gave him her usual calm glance.

‘Do come in.’ She stood aside to let him enter the bright airy hall decorated with mementoes of Africa. ‘I don’t think Dr Nightingale will be much longer.’ She opened the door into the sitting room. ‘If you wouldn’t mind waiting in here.’ A little heavier than when she had first come to England but still trimly built, rather tall, with a graceful, erect way of walking. Not a particularly handsome woman but pleasant enough to look at. Large brown eyes, a smooth skin the colour of milky coffee, shining black hair with a strong wave, taken neatly back and arranged in heavy coils.

A few minutes later Godfrey heard the murmur of voices and after a brief interval the sitting room door opened and Theresa ushered in the young doctor.

‘I gather you’re worried about your aunt,’ Nightingale said cheerfully when Theresa had discreetly removed herself.

‘Actually, Miss Tillard is my wife’s aunt,’ Godfrey said in precise tones.

Nightingale smiled affably. ‘I’ve written her a prescription, we’ll see how she gets along with that. I’ll look in again on Monday.’

‘She’s had a number of these upsets over the last few years.’

Nightingale raised his shoulders. ‘Colonial types,’ he said lightly. ‘Like their curries and their groundnut stews. A bit hard on the digestion. I’ve had a word with Miss Onil, she seems a sensible woman.’ He glanced round the walls, at the wooden masks, crossed spears, curious shaped objects of incised brass. ‘Quite a little outpost of Empire.’ He picked up his bag. ‘No reason why you shouldn’t go in and see your aunt.’