Fiercombe Manor (27 page)

“Are you quite all right down there, Alice?” he said. “You seem rather distracted.”

Of course I didn't answer his question quite truthfully. Good old British reserve had me smiling gamely and teasing him for worrying unnecessarily. What else could I say? That I sensed a kind of melancholy down there in that secret and secretive valley? That I thought sometimes that it might be infectious? I couldn't bear to have him look at me as Mrs. Jelphs did occasionally, almost as if I was doomed.

His concern must have undone something in me, though, because once I had begun my descent into the twilit valley, the trees pressing in and closing over me once more, I felt my eyes fill with
tears. It didn't occur to me at the time that I was simply lonely. Dora still hadn't written, and I was starting to think she never would. Tom hadn't reappeared either, and I had begun to think I would never see him again.

Meanwhile the baby—apparently oblivious to any turmoil or anxiety I might be feeling—seemed to thrive. Just as the mercury continued to climb steadily, he seemed to grow a little more each day, until I showed in all my clothes, even those that had been quite loose when I arrived. I worked diligently at every task Mrs. Jelphs gave me, from patching old curtains to rinsing hundreds of pieces of china, and I knew she was pleased with me. I opened my diary one night and was shocked to realise it was August.

Something peculiar happens when you set out to recount the past. You begin with the obvious, the easy to explain—in my case, my burgeoning pregnancy and the incredible weather. I have never known a summer like it, not before or since. Each morning I drew back the curtains and searched the sky above the escarpment for a single cloud or the welcome veil of haze. It was always in vain. The sky by late morning had always deepened to a hard china blue that arched pitilessly over us until the relief of sunset.

Those are the sort of simple observations my diary records in such English style: my health and the weather. But as I write now, smaller details trickle in and demand to be recorded. It is as though the memory is a series of interconnecting rooms, each leading to the next, less visited one, if only you'll try the door.

I remember Tom's eventual return to Fiercombe in exquisite detail—as clearly as I can still remember the day James and I spent in Kensington Gardens and the pivotal evening that followed, when I let a man take me to bed for the first time. Usually, when you find yourself attracted to someone, everything else obligingly slides out of focus. Not on those two occasions, though. While one took
place in the city and the other in the countryside, they have been filed away in the same compartment of my memory. Not because the actual events were similar, but because the sensation was the same: a realisation that I was about to jump, despite being unsure whether I should.

I'd woken late that day after another series of vivid, unsettling dreams, some of them about Elizabeth—or rather, the shadowy figure with the long dark hair I always imagined—and others about James. In one, a person I knew was James had the face of Tom.

I had planned to walk up the bluebell path to see Mr. Morton again, but then Nan said that he had gone to stay with his niece in Cornwall for a week. I felt irrationally jealous of this woman I had never met, imagining an ordered life in a pretty cottage high on the cliffs, the rhythmic crash of the sea far below and supper laid out on a table that had been brought into the garden for the summer. She wouldn't be carrying a child its father didn't even know about.

After Nan had gone for the day, and knowing that Mrs. Jelphs had said she would be spending the morning in Painswick, I decided that I could risk having a quick breakfast in my nightdress before giving in to the now-ever-present pull of the diary in the summerhouse. I splashed my face with water, grimaced at my hair, which was tangled and wavy after another sweltering night, and wandered down the stairs, clasping the hot, swollen skin of my growing stomach.

In the tranquillity of the empty kitchen, my mind swung from James to Elizabeth and back again. The baby was restless that morning, his every twist inside me a reminder of the mistake I had made. Not that it had felt like a mistake; what it had overwhelmingly felt like at the time was love.

It was the only time I had ever seen him at the weekend. His wife was safely away at her sister's in Norfolk, and I had told my mother that I was going shopping and then dancing with Dora. I hadn't been at all convinced he would even turn up, but when I came up out of the underground at Piccadilly Circus, into the overcast afternoon, he was waiting for me.

At first we weren't sure what to do or where to go, our routine taken away from us by all the hours that stretched ahead, unplanned. In the end, he hailed a cab and we went west to Hyde Park. He had the idea of taking a little rowboat out onto the Serpentine, but it was much too early in the year. Instead, as a sort of joke for getting the season wrong, he bought me an ice in the café afterwards. When dusk fell, rosy light diffused by tissue-paper clouds high above the city, we crossed the Long Water to sit on a bench in a deserted corner of Kensington Gardens. I was light-headed from having eaten nothing but the ice all day. I must have been cold, too, though I didn't notice.

“Your eyes change all the time,” he said when we had been sitting there quietly for a while.

“My eyes? What do you mean?”

“The colour of them. They're grey when the weather is, and bluer when the sun's out. Now they look almost violet.”

I felt my cheeks turn pink with pleasure from the compliment.

“You know I've fallen in love with you,” he said softly.

I nervously laid my hand on top of his, and he lifted it to his lips to kiss the back of it. “I don't think I do know. At least, I can't quite believe it yet.”

“You'll have to when we marry,” he said.

I was lost in this memory—utterly transported to London—when the sound of an engine brought me out of my reverie. It had to be Tom, back at last, and the coincidence of his arrival just as I
had been indulging in wistful reminiscence about James seemed significant. I was so slow in surfacing fully from the past that I only remembered I was still in my nightdress as the kitchen door opened. It was too late to bolt.

“Hello,” I said sheepishly.

He looked up from putting his bag down, his face clearing as he registered my presence. “Oh, Alice, it's you.”

Taking in my nightdress, he straightened and regarded me wryly. “Not getting dressed today, then? I suppose it is rather too hot to bother.”

I was wondering how I could get up from the table and leave the room without exposing more of myself when he laughed.

“Don't fear, I'll leave you in peace. I need to change, and then I thought of going for a walk. Do you want to join me? I don't insist on a change of clothes, though you may be more comfortable.”

“Well, I do usually go for walks in my nightdress, but perhaps I will go and find some shoes, at least,” I managed to say.

He laughed again. “Jolly good. I'll see you back here in ten minutes then.”

Once we were more suitably dressed, we left the manor and made our way past the churchyard and out onto Fiery Lane. I realised he was heading for the overgrown meadow I had seen from the window of the little summerhouse. There was a stile to get into it, virtually out of sight behind a hedge of hawthorn, that I would never have noticed. He helped me over it and squeezed my hand lightly before letting it drop. I hadn't held a man's hand since James.

“I didn't think you'd be up to a three-mile route march to the other end of the valley,” he said, and I was touched that he'd been so considerate. “Besides, it's a lovely spot. I used to come here often, albeit with a bow and arrow or a catapult in those days. I always forget how lovely it is.”

It was a meadow from a children's story: small and square and sloping and apparently entirely ignored by the grown-up world. Strongholds of wildflowers had sprung up amongst the long grasses, and in the bottom corner stood a venerable old oak tree, the far reaches of its lowest branches dipping close to the ground. I could just make out the tinkling chimes of moving water where a spring surfaced nearby.

I looked back at Tom, but his thoughts were somewhere else, his face younger but also sadder than I had yet seen it. I knew without asking that he was thinking about his brother—they had obviously come here together as boys. He hadn't told me how Henry had died, but for no good reason, I had assumed it happened elsewhere—a deadly outbreak of influenza in the school sanatorium, or something along those lines. Now I wondered.

As with Mrs. Jelphs and what had happened to Elizabeth, I felt I couldn't possibly ask. Tom would tell me if he wanted to.

We wandered slowly around the perimeter until we reached the spring, where it was cooler. The sunshine was remarkable for England—not only in its intensity, but in its unbroken appearance over so many days—but I suppose we'd already grown accustomed to it, as people seem to grow accustomed to almost anything. Like those used to much more arid climes, we naturally sought out the shade, and found a pretty place to sit beneath the oak, resting against one of the low-slung branches.

We didn't say anything for a time, as if we had known each other much longer than we had and were comfortable thinking our own thoughts in each other's presence. When he did speak, I was on the verge of dozing.

“It's this place I should think of when my father tells me I must come back to sort out some estate matter or other. I would probably feel better about it then.”

I blinked and pushed myself up a little. “Don't you like it here? You're so lucky to have all this.”

It was the wrong thing to say, and his face darkened.

“Oh yes, aren't I the lucky one?”

“I just mean that it's so lovely here. There is so much freedom in all this space. At home, I can reach the end of the garden in twenty paces. That's all I meant.”

“Freedom has nothing to do with how many acres you own,” he said.

“Perhaps they help a little, though,” I said, as gently as I could. It was awful that he had lost his brother, but surely he understood how privileged he was.

He didn't say anything, instead wrenching up daisies and dandelions and picking them apart. I laid my hand over his to stop him, marvelling at my own bravery as I did. Perhaps it was because I could see the boy in him there, in the little meadow he had spent his childhood playing in.

“It's not easy, you know,” he said eventually, the words pushed out as though they were painful to say.

“What's not easy?” He hadn't moved his hand.

“Living with the past.” His voice was so low that I leant towards him to catch the words.

“What happened to Henry, you mean?”

He pulled his hand away and leant back against the branch, his gaze back towards the house, its chimneys just visible above the yews and holly.

“This isn't the way it was supposed to be,” he said. “Henry should be here, running this place, and he would have been too—not just when he was made to come but all year round. He loved the manor. He loved the whole valley. His children would have been running about in here now, just as he and I did. I don't belong
here anymore—I belong in my club in London, halfway down a bottle of scotch.”

I cast around for something to say that wouldn't make it worse. What I really wanted to do was to brush away the lock of his hair that kept falling forward into his eyes, but I simply didn't dare. I thought about what had happened to Henry and how hard it must have been for the little brother who had never been prepared to take on the estate when he grew up. He had lost his brother and gained a huge amount of responsibility in one stroke.

“Your father was the younger brother, wasn't he?” I asked tentatively.

He glanced at me and frowned. “Yes. Why do you ask?”

“He wasn't supposed to inherit Fiercombe either, was he? His older brother Edward was.”

“What are you saying, that firstborn sons are doomed in the valley?” His tone was dismissive.

I shook my head. “No, of course not. I just meant that your father never expected to inherit, but when he did, he managed it admirably. He saved the manor house, didn't he?”

Tom looked at me for a long moment, and I realised how sorry I'd be if we were to fall out.

“I never thought of it like that,” he said eventually.

After that we were quite easy with each other, talking of this and that—silly things from our childhoods and school, all the things new acquaintances talk of, rather than the serious subjects we had begun with.

On our way back to the house, I stopped abruptly, caught out by a twist of pain in my lower back. I sucked my breath in through my teeth until it subsided, and when I opened my eyes I realised he was gently supporting me, one hand under my elbow and the other around my shoulder.

“Alice, what's wrong? Is it the child?”

“No, I'm all right. It was just a twinge in my back. He's getting bigger all the time—every day, it feels like at the moment—and I suppose it's beginning to take its toll.”

“What was he like?” Tom said softly, as we started to walk again.

“Who?” I said, genuinely confused.

“Your husband.” He looked embarrassed. “You don't have to say. If it's too hard for you.”

I hated lying, but it would be even more dishonest to pretend I was too upset to say anything.

“His name was James.”

“How did you meet?”

“I met him in the office where I used to work. He was older than me.”

“You must have loved him a great deal.”

“Yes, I think I did,” I said simply.

We walked on in silence, and I wondered whether Tom had noticed that I'd used the past tense. In truth, I couldn't tell any longer what my feelings for James were. Everything from that time felt jumbled in my head. The clear recollection I'd had that morning in the kitchen was becoming a rarity; my previous existence in London retreating and blurring just as Fiercombe—past and now present, too—was coming to fill every corner of my thoughts.