The Antique Dealer’s Daughter. Lorna Gray
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a boy who was very afraid that the Colonel’s return brought the threat of fresh harm to his tall and caring Matthew Croft.
We were peering for footprints in the baked mud of the bank above the stream. There was nothing there but the neat little hoof prints of thirsty sheep, at least nothing that we could see by starlight. There was nothing here to shake the overriding sense of my own care for this boy. I found that I was saying clumsily, ‘Mr Croft didn’t kill him, did he? Didn’t cause the son’s death, I mean?’
I shouldn’t have said it. I had only meant to establish the limit of the bad feeling between the Langton family and the other man before adding something reassuring, but the boy beside me, naturally enough, completely misunderstood my intentions. He was suddenly very ready to be angry.
‘No! Of course not.’ He stood there glowering at me in the night, hands balled into fists by his sides and hair all dishevelled again. This really was something that he was asked all too often. It also, I think, cut far too close to a memory of a near loss of his own.
‘Well then,’ I persevered gently. ‘I really think you needn’t worry any more. From the way Captain Langton reacted when I mentioned Mr Croft by name, it seems to me that the family is just as desperately keen to avoid an encounter with that past as you are. You mustn’t think the Colonel means to create a fuss by coming back, or that his return is designed to bring fresh upset for Mr Croft. Captain Langton was …’ I searched for a sensible way to put it. ‘Well, to be brutally honest, he sounded like a normal human being who’d had a bit of a shock when I mentioned that Mr Croft was helping Mr Winstone. You can believe me, Freddy. Really you can. So don’t be afraid for Mr Croft any more, Freddy, please.’
The boy blinked. I’d surprised him. He hadn’t expected my only objective to be plain reassurance. But he did, I saw with relief, understand it. For a moment, his fierceness had made him seem suddenly very young indeed. Then he abruptly relaxed.
Shyly, like a guilty child after a fit of the rages, he gulped and said quietly, ‘You’re very nice, Miss.’
‘Not really. It’s just the truth.’
‘You hope,’ he retorted, but he was only contradicting me for the sake of form. Then he abruptly abandoned the search of the riverbed and led the way across rough ground towards my cottage.
A drowsy bird twittered in one of the taller trees. It set off a cock pheasant, who set off another, and so on until the warning cry barrelled up and down the valley in a relay from one tree to the next. There were an awful lot of pheasants up there. Their voices mapped the twists and turns of the valley far beyond the point where it curved away into the smothering oblivion of darkness.
It made me think again that I really ought to walk Freddy home. I said as much and he sniggered with that boyish confidence that never fails to charm. ‘It would pose a bit of a problem though, wouldn’t it, Miss? We’d be up all night walking each other back and forth.’
We were at my garden gate. I set a hand on the weathered wood and tipped my head thoughtfully at him. ‘You don’t seem very nervous.’
I saw him shrug with hands in pockets. His attention was on a pebble he was turning underfoot. Tangled hair was falling over his brow as he said, ‘You said yourself that the fellow brought Mr Winstone home before he met you and bolted. There’s not much point in being afraid of a man like that. He probably didn’t mean to hurt Mr Winstone anyway. He’s probably just a vagrant who came back from the war a bit strange and Mr Winstone caught him unawares.’
‘You think it was one of Mrs Abbey’s squatters?’
The boy’s gaze lifted. ‘Well,’ he said simply. ‘No one who knows Mr Winstone would do it, so it must have been. Goodnight, Miss.’
And on that practical piece of reasoning, he left me and loped complacently off into the gloom. I walked rather less energetically into my cousin’s house and bolted the door. It was, I thought, one thing to be giving reassurance to a frightened youth about the way Captain Langton had spoken of Matthew Croft, but it didn’t do much for my own worries about letting the boy go. Responsibility always did take the form in me of a vivid awareness of the present set against all the things I should have done before but hadn’t. It was complicated marriage between duty and an enduring feeling of guilt that stemmed from all those childhood moments that had long passed and the knowledge that there would never again be a chance to repay what I owed to those people, so I’d better act well now.
But committed as I was to the idea of playing a fuller part these days, it must be said that helplessness was sometimes still preferable to the occasional experience I have had of the other end of the spectrum; the sheer chill of sometimes acting calmly where care and duty had united to override every other serious principle. Those were the moments that brought me into an acquaintance with the dark things in this world that I would otherwise have quite cheerfully ignored, and I hated them.
They made me wish I could run away. They saddened me. The idea that this life was placing me in the company of conflict filled me with a sense of hopelessness for the future and an urge to seek peace elsewhere. It was the principal motive for this visit to my cousin’s house, after all. Only now I had the memory of the other responsibility that had met me today; the one that had led me to pick up an old man from his path and brought me into an encounter with the long list of other worries that went with this place. So at this moment I was contemplating leaving this place again tomorrow and walking the two miles to the bus stop with a view to riding into Gloucester and joining my cousin, as if peace might be found there instead.
The single thing that checked me was my other fear; the one where I am afraid I will discover a few years from now that instead of finding the tranquillity I crave, I’ve actually developed a terrible habit of dramatising the more ordinary parts of life and fleeing from them for absolutely no good reason at all. So really I had no intention of going anywhere.
Except, of course, to bed and the hope that tomorrow would be an easier day.
Unfortunately, as it turned out, I also have a habit of falling into naïve optimism, and in this instance the lesson came in the form of a light knock upon the front door at about eleven o’clock as I prepared to go upstairs at last.
My visitor was Mrs Abbey and I’m afraid to say that for a brief childish moment I was tempted to feign deafness and leave her out there. But then maturity or responsibility or pure idle curiosity or whatever it was dictated that I opened the door and let her in.
As first entrances went, hers wasn’t favourable. The first thing she did as she stepped in a slinking manner out of the dark and along the cramped hallway was to eye the proliferation of oriental vases on the narrow shelf that snaked away at head height into the kitchen and remark, ‘I see Miss Jones hasn’t yet brought herself to clear away the old lady’s ugly knickknacks.’
They were very ugly and it was, I realised then, absolutely no wonder that I’d been running a long argument with the past and loneliness tonight. These feelings dwelt here in this house. Each of the rooms in this cottage was consumed by the fuss and clutter of a dead person’s tastes. In the hallway, my aunt’s commemorative plates joined a flight of ducks to soar away up the stairs. In the tiny sitting room, fading cross-stitch samplers competed for space with Victorian day beds and fragments of broderie anglaise. Upstairs, in the room designated to be my bedroom, there was just enough space between the display of thimbles and the miniature hazel hurdles for my suitcase and the bed. I’ve never met anyone before or since who could compete with the scale of Aunt Edna’s commitment to traditional crafts. All the time that I’d been working myself up towards going to bed, I’d struggled to convince myself that her shade wasn’t watching from the collection of shadows on the coat rack. She’d died six months ago and in hospital rather than here, but I wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t the sort to indulge in a spot of haunting all the same.
Suddenly, in an unexpected way, Mrs Abbey’s bluntness made me like her. It made me lead the way down the short step into the kitchen and I should probably explain why my cousin Phyllis wasn’t presently in it herself. The explanation for her sudden trip to the city of Gloucester had been