Grace Hardie (11 page)

‘I thought you'd decided you were a poet.'

Jay had spent the first days of the summer holiday sprawled in the shade of the beech tree while he composed verses addressed to a beautiful young woman – although at that time, as far as Grace knew, he was not acquainted with any girls of his own age at all. He was regularly ragged by the whole family for the wholeheartedness with which he threw himself into each new enthusiasm – a wholeheartedness matched only by the rapidity with which he abandoned one role in order to play another.

‘I wasn't
being
a poet,' he mumbled. ‘I was just pretending to be one.'

‘What's the difference?'

‘I can't explain. I just know, that's all.' He turned away with the suspicion of a pout on his face.

‘But I want to understand.' Jay being honest about his previous pretensions was a more interesting person than Jay aggressively pretending. ‘I mean, what you
are
is a schoolboy. But you won't stay that for ever. You don't want to. So I can see that you must be something else at the same time. Our futures – mine as well as yours – must be inside us now, if only we could recognize them. In July you thought you
did
recognize yours: you were going to be a poet. Now you say you were only pretending. How did you find out?'

‘If you put a real thing and a pretending thing next to each other, you can see which is which.'

‘So what's the real thing?' She tugged at his unwillingness to speak. ‘Come on, Jay. Tell.'

‘You'll laugh.'

‘No, I won't. Honour bright.'

For a moment longer he hesitated, whilst Grace's eyes stared steadily into his. ‘Well,' he said. ‘In London, while the others were all at their parties and things, Barrington and I were allowed to do pretty well whatever we liked. We went to the theatre almost every night. I'd never been before. Have you?'

Grace shook her head. ‘What did you see?'

‘We saw Nijinsky. Of course, I'd never be able to dance like him. And we heard Chaliapin singing Boris Godunov, but I wouldn't be able to sing either. We went to the music hall lots of times as well. Gosh, performing like that – I mean, standing on a stage and being yourself and trying to make people laugh …' He gave a mock shudder. ‘No. But as well as that we saw some plays. One of them was
frightfully boring. And some of them were rather silly. But that didn't seem to matter. It was just that while I was in the theatre, watching ordinary people pretending to be other people, I realized what I was. What I
am
. Really.'

‘You mean that you want to write plays instead of poetry?'

‘Oh no.' Jay was indignant at her mistake. ‘I mean that I'm an actor.'

‘You want to go on the stage!' With a struggle Grace managed to keep both laughter and astonishment out of her voice. ‘Mother and Father will have a fit.'

‘I don't know if that's what I want. It could be. But what I might want to do is different from what I
am
.' The sulky expression returned to his face. ‘I knew you wouldn't understand. But you asked me what was inside me, and that's the answer.'

‘You think that what you are and what you do are two different things?'

‘Well, look at Father,' said Jay earnestly. ‘He's an explorer. It's the only thing he cares about, really. Think of those books he reads! All the time he's fiddling around in his plant room, he's dreaming of making another trip some day, to look for new plants. He knows a lot about wine and he knows how to run a business, but being a wine merchant is just something he has to do to get money for the family. And even Mother … She's not interested in running the house and paying calls on people, not really. But when she's painting – haven't you noticed? If you go into the studio when she's painting, she'll look up but she won't see you properly for a moment. And then her face changes. As though she's coming out of a dream. I don't mean that she wants to be an artist; not to earn money for it. But she's a painter inside herself, I'm sure. Everything else is a kind of pretending.'

Grace considered this analysis with surprise and interest. Her youngest brother's aptitude for mimicking other people frequently led him to reveal – almost without intending it – an unexpected insight into their characters; but she couldn't recall that he'd ever before put it into words.

‘Does everyone feel that, d'you think?' she asked, genuinely interested. ‘All the boys?' Her elder brothers were young men now, but she still called them the boys. ‘Frank?'

Frank, who was twenty-two, had gone into the business which one day he would own, bringing to The House of Hardie his considerable talent for organization. Whether or not he proved to be a knowledgeable vintner, he was certainly going to become a successful businessman.

‘Frank likes running things and bossing people about.' Jay's summing up agreed with Grace's own opinion. ‘The being and the doing may be the same thing for him. I don't know. Or if they aren't, he hasn't found out yet, like I have.'

‘The road to Damascus!'

‘You can laugh, but –'

‘Don't be so touchy, Jay. I'm not laughing. Not really. You're saying something important. I'm just trying to think whether it's something general or just about you, that's all.'

‘Well, take Andy Frith,' said Jay. ‘Andy would know what I mean.'

Grace allowed her surprise to show. The nineteen-year-old gardener's son – who had been employed straight from school as assistant to his own father – was her favourite companion, but she couldn't imagine what he had in common with Jay. She said so.

‘Andy is a grower,' said Jay earnestly. ‘He's paid to grow things and growing things is what he'd want to do
even if he wasn't paid.' He laughed, pleased with himself. ‘I shall call this the Hardie theory of happiness. You're happy when what you are is the same as what you do.'

‘What am I?' asked Grace.

Jay looked surprised. ‘You're a girl.'

‘Is that everything? Under your theory, I mean? Doing as well as being?'

‘You'll get married and have babies,' said Jay. ‘That's what being a girl is.'

‘Aunt Midge never married.'

‘Perhaps no one asked her to.'

‘She might like being a headmistress better than having babies.' But Grace could tell that her brother, who had little love for his own schoolmasters, was not convinced by the suggestion, and she hardly believed it herself.

‘Anyway,' he assured her. ‘You're different from Aunt Midge.
You'll
get married.'

‘I suppose so.' It was true. That was what would happen. Grace took it for granted. It was what she wanted, in a way. The only problem, if it was a problem, was that she could not quite imagine what it would be like. But probably everyone who was still living at home with parents had the same difficulty in seeing the way ahead. And certainly, unlike Jay, she had no alternative vision of something inside herself which would demand to be expressed in a different way.

‘One more tango,' she said.

As they danced, she looked down at her brother. He was a strikingly good-looking boy, with thick fair hair which rose in waves from his forehead, and darker eyelashes, long and curling. To Grace it seemed unfair that a brother should have the attributes which would have been so much more useful to herself.

She knew that she was not pretty. She had inherited her father's strong features instead of her mother's blonde beauty; and the high forehead and wide eyebrows which looked distinguished on him were forbidding on a sixteen-year-old girl. She was tall for her age, and her hands were too large. The wide stretch of her fingers was useful for playing the piano, but at other times she felt self-conscious, wishing that she – like her brothers – had pockets in which to hide them. Her dark eyes might have been attractive in someone else's face, but contrasted too dramatically, she felt, with her pale complexion.

Often – unfairly, in her opinion – she was reproved by her mother for staring. Grace believed it only polite to look straight at anyone who was talking to her, and certainly she liked to study objects with a sustained scrutiny, as though by concentration she could see all sides – and even the centres – at once. She could not help it if her eyes seemed to focus more strongly than other people's. She was only looking. Presumably she had also inherited from her father the intense gaze with which he seemed magically able to deduce from the outside of some bulb or even seed what it would become one day.

‘You're staring,' said Jay, as severely as if it were their mother speaking.

‘Sorry. I was just thinking. About what you said. It was interesting. Rather like one of Father's lilies. Until it goes into the earth it's just a small brown object, rather ugly, with scales flaking off it. But the flower is inside all the time, waiting to emerge.'

‘Not the same.' Jay gave an elaborate twirl and bow as the music came to an end. ‘The lily can't be anything but a lily, and nobody can stop it. But we have choices. And if we choose wrong, we may never find out that we're lilies at heart. If you see what I mean,' he added, giggling at the ridiculous comparison.

Yes, Grace saw what he meant, and her understanding made her uneasy. ‘I'm going down to the boulders,' she said. Jay would know what she meant.

Deep in thought, Grace made her way round to the side of the house and down the hill. To reach the wood and the stream she had first to pass her father's plant room and glasshouse, and as she approached it she saw Andy Frith emerging, closing the door carefully behind him. He looked excited, as though he had been given good news. Andy spent much of his time helping her father instead of his own, and it might be that one of the new hybrids had just flowered for the first time. She could see that he was longing to tell her something; but he hung back, not liking to speak first.

His appearance reminded her of the doubts which Jay had sown in her mind when he used the gardener's son as one of his examples. ‘We have choices,' Jay had said, and that was undoubtedly true of himself and the other boys. But was it true for her? As her brother had pointed out, she was a girl, waiting to become a wife and mother. One day, perhaps, a young man would walk into her life as once upon a time her father had walked into a garden and fallen in love with the beautiful girl he saw there. But it would not be for Grace to choose whom she would marry. She must wait to be chosen – and who would ever want to love a tall, ungainly girl with fierce eyes and too large a nose? Grace stopped dead in her tracks and directed her gaze straight at the young gardener.

‘Do you think I'm pretty, Andy?'

Even before the words were out of her mouth, she was appalled by her own question. It might have been just permissible to ask her mother or one of her brothers, but
not anyone outside the family. And especially not one of the staff. She blushed – and the more she tried to control the blush, the more rapidly it spread, suffusing her neck as well as her face. Quickly she turned away, hoping that Andy would be tactful enough to pretend that he hadn't heard. But he was clearing his throat, determined to speak although apparently having difficulty in forcing the words out.

‘I think you're beautiful, Miss Grace.'

Unable to believe her ears, Grace turned slowly back to face him. Had her emotions been under control, she might have laughed to see her own blush reflected in Andy's cheeks. Although his arms were so freckled as to be almost brown, his face had the fair complexion which went with his red hair. The wide-brimmed cloth hat which he always wore for outside work prevented his skin from being reddened by the sun. But no hat could save him from the flush which rose from within as uncontrollably as her own.

‘I'm sorry,' Grace mumbled. Was she apologizing for her own forwardness or for Andy's embarrassment? Without waiting to think it out she ran away from him, through the wood and towards the stream.

Panting, she came to a halt by the boulders – and almost at once, as she allowed her fingers to stroke them, they performed their usual miracle by calming her spirit.

The two huge boulders which stood on the bank of the stream were immensely old – millions of years old, according to Andy. Unlike Grace's brothers, Andy had never learned any Latin or Greek at school, but he seemed to know more than the Hardies themselves about the land they owned. The boulders, he had told Grace, must have been moulded by a glacier during the Ice Age. Nothing else would explain their almost perfect roundness. Not quite perfect, because in each of them there was a small, scooped-out hollow about twelve inches across.

The boulders could be approached only through the densest, dampest, darkest part of the wood. They stood in a depression which in the wettest months of the year filled with rainwater to become a pool. Grace had first discovered them when she was six or seven years old. She had been angry about something – what it was, she no longer remembered – and so almost deliberately fought her way through the barrier of brambles which had discouraged exploration before. By the time she stepped into a clearing on the further side of the thorns her skirt was torn and her stockings bloodstained; but both the scratches and the punishment to come were forgotten in astonishment at what she had discovered. It was as though she had broken through a magic wall into a haven of calmness like a prince discovering his Sleeping Beauty.

At that time the hollows in the huge stones had seemed to her to be fingerholds, ready for a giant to pick up one boulder in each hand and hurl them away. Now that she was sixteen she no longer believed in giants, of course – and yet it was odd that the hollows should be so similar, when the stone was too hard to be chipped or carved. She still felt the boulders to be in some way supernatural, out of the ordinary. There was a spooky atmosphere about them.