Hungry Hill (52 page)

“Do you still churn the butter, Aunt Harriet, and skim the cream off with a scallop shell?”

“Does Uncle Tom still ride out to Ardmore on Sundays?”

“Do you remember how we played charades after tea, and mamma pretended she could not guess the word, and knew all the time?”

“Have you forgotten the picnic on Kileen moors, and Kitty falling into the bog?”

“And the expedition to the Bule Rock?”

“And the party the garrison gave on Doon Island?” The years in London were as though they had never been. Eton and Oxford existed no longer. Adeline and Lancaster Gate were an evil dream.

Molly had remembered his wish for the tower room, and Hal looked around it that first evening home, his heart too full to speak. The Boles had never used the room, and a damp, unlived-in smell still clung about the walls. The pictures were faded, and some of them green with mould. On the top of an old cupboard was a case of birds’ eggs, thick with dust. He had forgotten whom they belonged to. Was it his grandfather, who had won the silver cup for greyhounds? He took them down and cleared away the dust. There were bits and pieces of an old fishing-rod too. Too broken to be of any use.

He was glad the Boles had done nothing with this room. It was intimate, personal, belonging only to the family. Home was the same, unchanged, but a little shabbier, a little more worn. Some of the carpets were threadbare. The curtains in the dining-room were falling to bits. The servants that Molly had brought with her from Robert’s home said that the kitchen range was almost useless, and the pump in the stable-yard was broken.

“But what does it matter?” said Molly at dinner. “We’re home again, and if the turkey has to be roasted in front of the dining-room fire on Christmas Day it will taste all the better for it.”

Once more the lapping of water in the creek.

Once more the full moon over Hungry Hill.

There was so much to see, so much to do, and all in a little space of time. It was queer to see none of the old horses in the stables, and the coach-house was empty because the carriage had been sent away to London many years before. Old Tim was dead. The groom that Robert had brought with him lived in Tim’s old quarters over the stables. Some of the windows were broken, there was grass growing between the cobbles.

“And it used to be kept so beautifully,” sighed Molly to her husband. “I remember the boy washing down the yard every morning, before the horses were groomed, and then Tim bringing the carriage round to the front door, if mamma wanted to go down into Doon-haven. Even if the Boles did not bother about the upkeep, you would think the agent would have seen everything was in order.”

“Always the same story when the owner goes away,” said Robert. “You can’t really blame the agent, or anyone. They feel no interest is taken. What’s the use, they think, in looking after a place when the man it belongs to doesn’t come near it for ten years?

Never mind, Molly, we’ll try to get it into-some sort of shape while we are here.”

Hal and his sister went up to visit the cottages at Oakmount, and they came away silent and disheartened, because after the first flood of conversation they felt tongue-tied and out of place.

“Ah, you’re the image of your mother,” said Tim’s widow to Kitty. “The same sweet eyes, God rest her soul.” She ran on in this way for several minutes, making them feel welcomed and remembered, but then she started to bewail the times, the hardness of living, her only son and daughter both gone to America, her eyes fixed all the while on Hal.

He gave her all the loose change in his pocket, which she seized greedily, and when they had said goodbye Hal looked over his shoulder and saw her muttering to herself, her face wrinkled, different, and he knew that she had forgotten them already, his mother’s memory was a trick to please them; all that mattered to Tim’s widow was the loose change in her hands.

They went down to the Rectory, where Uncle Tom and Aunt Harriet soon restored them to cheerfulness.

“Ten years is a long time,” said Uncle Tom, “but you must not worry about it. You’ve come back, and you are going to stay. What do you intend to do with yourself, Hal, when you leave Oxford?”

“Nothing,” smiled Hal, “except enjoy myself and paint pictures for my friends.”

Aunt Harriet shook her head.

“You’ve been learning bad ways, I can see that,” she said. “Too much money and too little leadership. Come and help me churn the butter.

Jinny will show you how to do it.”

The white-scrubbed dairy, and Aunt Harriet bustling with the pots and pans.

“Come and work for your living,” she said, “instead of lounging there on the table, drinking buttermilk.

Jinny has twice your energy, for all your size.”

“Women shall work, and men shall play,” teased Hal, pulling Jinny’s hair. “Do you remember when I tipped you out of a wheelbarrow, Jinny, and made you cry?”

“Yes, but you kissed her afterwards and said you were sorry,” said Aunt Harriet.

Hal dug his finger in the bowl of yellow cream, and looked slyly at Jinny, who, with sleeves rolled up and hair pinned on top of her head, was working the handle of the churn.

“I suppose you’re too old to kiss now, Jinny,” he said.

“Much too old,” said Jinny gravely.

“And too sensible to fall out of a wheelbarrow?”

“It depends who was wheeling it.”

“Would you like me to take you round the garden and see?”

“I would not.”

“Then we’ll go fishing in the creek instead, if you’ll be good enough to trust yourself to me.”

“I won’t promise anything,” said Jinny, “until you take your fingers out of the cream.”

Hal laughed, and slipping off the table, he took his place beside her and worked the handle of the churn.

“Oh, Jinny,” he said, “you’ve never been away, so you don’t know what it is to be home again.”

It was no use getting depressed because the years had come between them and the people of Clonmere. The place had not changed. And every moment must be enjoyed. It was a truly happy Christmas. The kitchen range was coaxed into cooking the turkey, and Hal, as master of the house, was persuaded to carve it, which he did in such generous fashion that nothing remained at the end for himself but the carcase. It was a great party, with the Brodricks, the Spencers, the Callaghans, and the Flower cousins from Andriff, Simon and Judith and Frank, and after the Christmas dinner had been eaten they all played hide-and-seek in the new wing, the empty rooms echoing with running feet, and calls, and laughter. Tom Callaghan stood with his wife in the passage leading to the new wing from the old house, listening to the thumps, and bangs, and shouts of triumph.

“What a tragedy!” he said softly. “And it might have been thus all these years. The rooms furnished, instead of bare. The girls and that boy growing up where they belonged. And Henry his old dear, generous self.”

“Will he ever come back, do you think?” asked Harriet.

The Rector shook his head.

“You’ve seen his letters,” he said, “you can understand what has happened to him. He’s a different man.”

“Hal’s so like him,” said his wife, “the same charm, the same smile, and yet something lacking, not the enthusiasm, not the drive that Henry had. And he sometimes talks so bitterly for a boy not twenty-one.”

“Ten years’ neglect, and all his mother’s teaching thrown away,” said Tom. “If Henry would break down the barrier that has grown up between them… but even then, I wonder. The foundations have been knocked away.”

Kitty ran down the stairs of the great hall, pursued by her cousin Simon Flower. Lizette, her thin face flushed for once, tip-toed into the drawing-room that had never been used. Laughter came from the gallery above, where Robert had caught Molly, and the two waltzed to the head of the stairs.

In the little boudoir above the barred front door Hal struggled with the windows to the balcony. They were rusted and damp, and would not open.

“This was to have been my mother’s room,” he said.

“Father planned it for her, next to the bedroom. Do you like it?”

Jinny nodded.

“I’ve often looked at it from outside,” she said. “I used to trespass here, you know, when the Boles were away. It’s just as I imagined. In the corner there your mother would have had her writing-table, close to the fire. And there would have been a chair here, and another there.”

She smiled at Hal, her eyes warm with understanding.

“Do you remember her?” he said.

Jinny shook her head.

“Only just that there was someone with a very soft voice and dark hair, who used to kiss me when I came to tea,” she said.

Hal stared in front of him, his hands in his pockets.

“I know,” he said. “The terrible thing is that I can’t remember more than that either. And yet she was the person I loved best in the world.” Once again he struggled with the windows, but the damp had too great a hold on them. “I can’t open them,” he said, “they’re shut for ever.” He turned away, shrugging his shoulders. “Let them stay, then,” he said. “No one will ever live in this part of the house now.”

She followed him along the gallery to the stairs.

The hide-and-seekers had taken themselves off to the old house. The great hall was deserted.

“It’s queer,” said Hal, “but as a rule you hear of the haunting of old buildings, never new. And yet I feel this wing is full of ghosts.”

Jinny put out her hand to him.

“You would not mind if it was your mother, would you, Hal?” she said.

She looked young, and brave, and very confident. She was not too shy to hold his hand there, alone, in the silence.

Hal shook his head.

“It’s not my mother who’s the ghost,” he said, “that’s what makes it so queer. It’s the ghost of my father still alive, hiding here in the shadows.” He looked over his shoulder at the black, gaping doors. “Come away, Jinny,” he said. “I don’t want to think about him, I want to think about ourselves. It’s Christmas, and we’ve got to be happy, we’ve got to be gay… .?

When the party at Clonmere broke up at the end of January, Molly and her husband took Lizette off to live with them in the neighbouring county, and Kitty went to stay with her cousins the Flowers at Castle Andriff. Only Hal returned across the water, proposing to spend a night in Lancaster Gate before going back to Oxford.

“Always remember,” said Uncle Tom, as he shook hands with him on the quay at Doonhaven, “that there is a home for you at the Rectory-not for your dear mother’s sake, or for your father’s, but for your own.

We are all very fond of you. Jinny is going to miss your companionship.”

“Thank you,” said Hal, “I shan’t forget.”

There was a great sadness in his heart as the steamer drew away from the harbour into Mundy Bay, and Clonmere, and the village, and Doon Island became once more grey shadows under the hills. The holiday that had meant so much belonged already to the past.

He wondered whether he would ever return, and had a wretched feeling of despair that this was farewell.

When he arrived at Lancaster Gate he found that his father and stepmother were out. He sat alone in the drawing-room, turning over magazines. It seemed to him that the room was full of Adeline. Her books, her knitting, her writing-paper. Everything neat and in order-but somehow lacking comfort, and he sat there in anticipation of her brisk, firm tread, her grating laugh. His old schoolboy dread of conversation engulfed him, and to steady his nerves he went into the dining-room and helped himself to a large whisky-and-soda. It was the only way to get through the evening. Never once had he felt the need of one at Doonhaven. It was only here, in the cold, impersonal atmosphere of Lancaster Gate, that he could not do without it. By the time his father and stepmother arrived he was warm and hazy with false courage.

Life did not seem so formidable, and he felt he could stand up against the world.

“I suppose,” said Adeline before dinner, “Clonmere was fit for a pigsty, and you picnicked in the dirt without any qualms?”

“On the contrary,” said Hal, “Molly fed us like fighting cocks. And no one could go short with Uncle Tom and Aunt Harriet at the Rectory.”

“Is that the Rector whose wife spends all her time in the kitchen?” said Adeline. “I gather he’s your only neighbour for miles. How your father ever stood the life beats me.”

“The Callaghans are the kindest people I’ve ever known,” said Hal. “Uncle Tom and my father were always together in the old days.”

“Faute de mieux,” laughed Adeline. “I don’t think he would find a great deal in common nowadays with a stuffy old parson living at the back of beyond. If it was not for the entail he would sell the place tomorrow. He’s told me so, scores of times.”

Henry came into the room, and dinner was announced a few minutes later.

Hal ate in silence, burning with indignation.

What a liar the woman was, talking light-heartedly about his father selling Clonmere!

He would never do such a thing. But during dinner Adeline talked through him all the time, kept making allusions to the absurd expense of hanging on to places that brought no benefit to anybody, and were only a drag on capital. Never once did she mention Clonmere by name. She talked of friends of hers in the north of England who, she said, had been saddled with an empty house and a derelict estate for years, and had just got rid of it.

“They sold the land at a wonderful price for building,” she said, “and are thankful to be quit of it. Now they intend spending most of their time abroad, I believe. Of course there were no children, and there was none of that absurd entail business.”

It was not until she had left the room after dessert that Henry began to ask questions about Doonhaven and Clonmere. His manner was off-hand and indifferent, but beneath it lay an anxiety, a strange desire to hear and to know, which he wished to conceal. How were the Callaghans, he asked ? Was old Tom much changed, much older ? Had the Boles taken care of the grounds, or was everything becoming overgrown?

Was the agent civil? Did Hal hear any talk about the change-over to tin in the mines, and the prospects for the future?