Westwood (40 page)

But she could find no reference to Westwood-at-Highgate, for part of the index was missing, and so were some fifteen pages from the middle of the book, and she was forced to conclude that the house had never played an important part in the life of the village; and had never been considered striking enough even to deserve a picture in the
History of Highgate
.

It was disappointing, but she read on, her mind darting into the past like a swallow drinking from a fathomless tarn. The quiet minutes crept by; the sunlight poured through the thin silk curtains in a glory, and every now and again the wind-bells tinkled faintly on a passing breeze, and the sound died away. She read eagerly, impatiently, taking the words like
messuage
and
hundred
in her stride, guessing at the meaning and using it to build up the picture that was slowly growing in her mind. The history was not easy to read, because it gave so many sociological and geological and historical facts in their own technical language and no attempt had been made to
combine them into a general description conveyed in smoothly flowing phrases; the book had been written in the ’eighties, when readers possessed both leisure and attention to give to their serious reading and expected, when they bought a book, to give both; and so the picture which began to form itself in her mind had not the specious clearness of one drawn in a reader’s mind by that modern hybrid, a novelist-historian-antiquarian, but had something of the validity and unexpectedness of truth; it reared itself upon a base of facts plainly recorded, and the more attractive to her because of that plainness. Nevertheless, her imagination began to work.

Solitude; a solitude of thick forests, occasionally broken by glades and small meadows where the swineherds had their huts; little hovels as close to the earth, and as defenceless, as roots or mossy stones and as much a part of the landscape; a solitude whose rustling stillness was unbroken for days at a time by any sound of human life save the distant note of a hunting-horn. The huts and the fields and churches and even the castles were small in this Haia-gat (or hamlet-at-the-entrance-of-the-enclosure) of nine hundred years ago, and the people themselves seemed to be rising in their armour and straight red and blue clothes that had once been bright but were now stained and dim with dirt and age, out of a darkness of rotten leaves and putrid straw and filth; the peasants wore tunics made from animals’ hides, with the hair left on them. Nothing was clean, as we know cleanliness, except the flowers and leaves and, in the monasteries, the Altar of God. The Name of Jesus was familiar in men’s mouths, and His Name and Spirit burned in this world of nine hundred years ago. Sweet Jesus, they prayed. If a child sickened, it usually died, and so did men and women. There were miles and miles and miles of that fresh, shadowy, awesome forest,
horrida sylvis
, as the Romans called it; the forest swept up to Hampstead and over Harringay (or Harringhaia, ‘the-enclosure-of-the-field-of-hares’); the forest rolled in blue-green waves in the summer, in brown-purple leafless waves in the winter, over the hills to the north of London. And here, riding through the endless forest along narrow tracks marked by wolf-droppings, came the Bishop of London, who owned these lands, to hunt the wild boar; the purple-black shape rooting busily in the tangles of blackberry bushes, shaking down their white flowers in spring and their red leaves in autumn as he dug for roots to eat. The bristles of the boar’s forelegs were matted stiffly with mud. Margaret thought of the Prince-Bishop’s feet in leather hunting-boots, and the dagger in its chased silver sheath at his side. Every article of his dress had been made by hand and was precious in its rarity; every shoe, hat, glove, was precious in those days because there were so few of them and they took so long to make and so long to send to the few hundred shops in Europe. She remembered a pyx that she had once seen, made in 1520, that had been slightly irregular in shape, beautiful, and with the pathos of an object made by hand and displaying the hand’s fallibility. In the towns – she thought – in the towns the streets were not paved and there were no lights at night. On the long summer evenings, in the streets of those wooden towns built round a small castle of wood and stone, the children must have played in the dust. Perhaps a bell rang from the stone church, tiny and dark, with one Latin book locked away in a wooden chest. They were Christians, those people.

The forest trees threw their long shadows out into the glade where the town stood, and the women carrying water in wooden buckets glanced into the forest, where it was already dark, and thought of the winter and wolves.

She looked down at the book again.
The killing of a deer or boar, or even a hare
, she read,
was punished with the loss of the delinquent’s eyes
.

And then, with her imagination glowing like a window of rich stained-glass, she read of the tradition that Odo of Bayeux, brother of William the Conqueror, was the first Norman owner of
the forests of Highgate; and how one of these hunting-crazy bishops (possibly Odo himself) had in the years between 1066 and 1080 caused a hunting lodge to be built on a hill in the forest, and formed the great park of Haringey (Hornsey) into a chase.

Entranced, she read on; the hunting lodge was
doubtless a square embattled building of shaped stones … surrounded by a moat, the entrance being by a drawbridge
.

The Bishops of London used to live there occasionally and hunt from there, but
because of its age
and state of decay the place had been destroyed in the fourteenth century, and all that remained of it were traces of the foundation walls and the moat; some of the stones of these walls had been used in the rebuilding of Hornsey Church. These traces remained so late as the year 1888. Mr John H. Lloyd, author of the
History
, had himself seen them …

‘Margaret, I’m hungry. Linda wants dinner,’ said a plaintive voice at her side. Dazed, still hearing the hunting-horns of nine hundred years ago, she looked slowly up and met Linda’s mild eyes. For a moment she gazed at her without speaking. So strong was the potion in which her imagination had been steeping itself that she experienced no sense of shock at returning to the contemporary world. The glamour extended itself to the room in which she sat, to Linda, and to every object surrounding them both.

‘Linda’s hungry,’ said the child again, gently putting a hand on her arm.

‘And so is Margaret!’ she answered cheerfully, shutting the book and standing up and taking the little hand. ‘Come along, let’s see about some lunch – why, Linda! It’s nearly one o’clock. No wonder we’re hungry!’

She finished reading the account of the Bishop’s Lodge that day, and although the first wonderful glow of imaginative delight did not return, she was left with the determination to go herself to look for the site of the Lodge, and to stand, if possible, upon the very ground where it had stood. For it was within two miles of her own home! A peasant living where she now lived could have seen the tower of the Lodge upon its hill from the low doorway of his hut, while from that tower itself the glint of spears moving across the wooded plain would have been visible for miles. She derived so much pleasure from these reveries, while she worked about the house and played with Linda, that the time passed quickly and she experienced none of the oppression felt on her first visit.

There was no doubt that Linda’s was a happy spirit; a shade more of helplessness, a greater abnormality in the speech and the shape of eyes and hands, would have produced such a disagreeable impression that only a strong love could have endured the child’s presence; but as it was, her loving nature (even more affectionate than is usual among such children) shone through the limitations of her body and almost atoned for its deficiencies, and by the end of the first week of her nightly journeys to Westwood-at-Brockdale, Margaret had begun to care for her, not as a little lacking girl for whom she felt shrinking pity, but as
Linda
; a person, though not a fully developed one; as much a person as some beloved cat or dog (piteous comparison! but not so piteous, perhaps, as it sounds); with the personal tastes and habits that form a character and mark its differences from other characters. There was no doubt, either, that Linda liked Margaret to be in the house and to read to her and play with her and sing to her; Margaret even thought, after her visits had been going on for about ten days, that she detected a slight, a very slight, improvement in Linda’s speech and a quickening of her intelligence, and she put this down to the stimulus of her own young, quick brain acting upon a brain naturally retarded but also artificially kept back by the kindly, unintelligent conversation of a Mrs Coates. She did not dare to mention this to Dick; it seemed so arrogant, so unkind to Mrs Coates, who had endured two years of unnatural existence with a mentally deficient child, but she herself felt increasingly sure that Linda had
been living a lonely and abnormal life in her miniature fairy palace, and that some outside companionship, even some childish companionship, would be beneficial to her.

But she found the journey out to Brockdale very tiring after her long day’s work in the hot, noisy school, and for the first two or three evenings she had felt that she really could not go on with the plan; she did not get home before eleven at night, and then there were exercise books to be corrected and lessons to be prepared for her classes, and the weather was so hot (it was now the first week in a rarely beautiful May) that she could not get to sleep when at last, nearer one o’clock than twelve, she did go to bed.

It was her first experience of suffering endured in an un romantic and unselfish cause. Hitherto her sufferings had been romantic, though she would have been the last person to realize it; for if love and beauty and solitude enter into one’s sufferings, even if these qualities be present only in the mind of the sufferer, of course the pangs are romantic; and her passion for Frank Kennett, her yearnings for a wider life, her adoration for Gerard Challis, had all been romantic as the pains of Heine. But it was not romantic to travel in a crowded train through dull, neat suburbs out to a house where a helpless little girl and a tired, rather impatient man awaited her, one eager for her attention and the other for the supper which she must cook; it was not romantic to wash up in a kitchen full of cigarette smoke after Linda had been put to bed, and sit listening to the nine o’clock news while Dick glanced through the evening paper and made little attempt at conversation; and it was certainly not romantic to drag herself home at eleven at night, tired out and carrying a case full of exercise books.

And all this time the lovely evenings, with their deepening blue skies and their soft stars and flowery trees, were lengthening, lengthening towards the longest day; she could feel and hear, as if in a distant land which she could not reach, England slowly stretching out her flower-wreathed arms in that long, long, fairy yawn that ends on the endlessness of Midsummer Night. Most of
that
night, Margaret thought hopelessly, as she trudged up the hill leading from the station, I shall be correcting French exercises, and I haven’t telephoned Zita for a week, and I wonder how Grantey is, and if Hebe and Mr Niland are going to have a divorce. Oh, how is
he
? Was he very upset about the notices of
Kattë
? How long it seems since I saw him!

Mr Challis was at his best in the summer. His thin blood warmed and his smile became less glacial. It was fortunate, therefore, that the offending notices of
Kattë
should have appeared at the beginning of this heat-wave; as the play continued to run and to please the public, he could turn with a sense of relaxation to the enjoyment of the fine weather. Had any chance acquaintance of Mr Challis’s been asked to take a bet on the likelihood of his playing tennis, they would certainly have betted that he did not. However, he did, and played it well, and (like the young King Henry the Eighth) it was a pretty sight to see him darting about the court in his becoming white clothes. Hebe was heard to remark that Pops was getting slightly sunburnt.

Greatly to his annoyance, the warm weather stimulated Hilda to an even faster whirl of social engagements; she was playing tennis on almost every evening with her friends, in a flutter of short white skirts and pretty bare legs, or going to dances with such of her boys as were on leave,
or sometimes spending an evening at the local cinema, which activities prevented her from seeing Marcus, and caused him to ring her up every few days and testily try to arrange their visit to Kew Gardens. Hilda blithely made excuses; Marcus in the summer would probably be as dull as Marcus in the winter, and she did not like him enough to consider spending this lovely weather in his company. However, he kept on so about going to his blessed old Kew that at last she half-promised to go with him in a fortnight’s time.

‘That is a long time to wait,’ said Mr Challis deeply.

‘Ever so sorry, and all that, but it can’t be helped.’

‘The blossoming trees will be all over.’

‘All over what?’

Mr Challis maintained an offended silence.

‘Marcus?’ said Hilda sharply. ‘Are you still there? I thought you’d gone. Listen, I’ll try and make it on Saturday fortnight; ’phone me up the day before in case I forget, but I’ll try and keep it free. Bye-bye,’ and she rang off.

Mr Challis replaced the receiver, and sighed. A distant howl resounded through the house; Barnabas was being taken off to bed. His grandfather knew that the nurse who was looking after Mrs Grant would brightly reprove him as she glanced into the bathroom on her way upstairs with Mrs Grant’s supper-tray. Seraphina was sitting in the hall laughing with some friends who had dropped in, and downstairs in the kitchen (though of course Mr Challis did not think about
them
, for there were limits) Zita and Cortway were snapping at each other as they prepared dinner.