The Bloody Wood (2 page)

All this was now fading in the summer dusk. To the east and north the wood curved round the house at only a near remove, and this was where the nightingale sang. You could climb through the wood by various paths to higher ground – passing here and there across a glade which in spring would be a sea of bluebells, and here and there beneath enormous senatorial oaks which had been part of a great forest once. There was a belvedere that looked down a long grassy ride into a vista closed by a church tower. There were several cave-like places, decked out in the eighteenth century as grottoes with shell-work and curiously eroded stones – retreats, you had to suppose, in the height of summers fiercer than ours. There was a spring, issuing from a rocky outcrop much embellished in the same age with tritons, dolphins and urns, from which a stream ran gently downhill and through a succession of small deep pools upon whose surface the water-lily leaves were never quite still. In the wood, in fact – as Appleby vulgarly put it to himself – you had all the works. But everything was contained in no great space, you would find upon more careful survey. Go through the wood, and in no time you were in the village. And the village was now no more than the fringe of the town. The town was creeping round Charne. Still just held invisible, it was nevertheless biding its time to strangle the place.

Appleby thought of Grace Martineau, a sick woman swathed in shawls, waiting too.

‘Perhaps we should move indoors?’ Charles Martineau said. He spoke – carefully – not to his wife, but to the company at large. ‘It turns chilly. And there may be damp in the air.’

Martineau had nothing of the hypochondriac about him. The notion of damp in the air was not one that would come to him naturally. He must live at present, Appleby thought, submerged in anxious care, knowing himself on the verge of loss.

‘No, Charles.’ Grace Martineau replied before any of her guests could. ‘Let us stay a little longer. This place keeps the warmth of the sun. And we must hear the nightingale once more.’

‘Yes, of course. But would you be the better for a rug? Shall I ring for Friary on this telephone?’

Mrs Martineau had turned on a low light. She could be seen to look at her watch.

‘But, Charles, it is Friary’s hour for his little walk.’

‘So it is. But the telephone won’t go unanswered because of that, you know. Perhaps–’

‘I am quite warm. I am quite comfortable.’ The pitch of Mrs Martineau’s voice had risen a little, so that for a moment her comfort was scarcely shared by her guests. But of this she seemed at once to be aware, for she signed to Judith Appleby to take a seat closer to her, and began to speak on a relaxed note. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘about Friary’s being like a clock?’

‘I know that everything is always very punctually conducted at Charne. And when things are like that, I suppose it is the butler who is responsible.’

‘Yes – but I am thinking of this little evening walk of his. It is something about which Charles is very indulgent; he says that an evening walk ought to be within the command of anybody who sees it as a rational pleasure.’

‘Is that how Friary sees it?’

‘My dear Judith, I don’t think I could swear to that. Friary dresses for it a little too fashionably. That is to say, he puts on a well-cut dust-coat over what we may call his professional attire, and makes his way through the wood to the village. I think he goes to the Charne Arms, but no doubt he is conscious of the beauties of nature on the way.’

‘That is what we like to think,’ Charles Martineau said. He seemed to be catching hopefully at some shift in his wife’s mood. ‘It is certainly why I sanction this regular withdrawal at an hour at which butlers are commonly required to buttle.’

‘I think it very nice of you,’ Judith said. ‘It’s not as if Friary can be regarded as in a category of indulged because ancient retainers. He’s surprisingly young. And he’s good-looking, too.’

‘Ah – I see the direction in which your mind is moving.’ Charles Martineau glanced at his wife, and laughed quite gaily. ‘It appears very likely that Friary may have affairs of the heart in the village. But we prefer to suppose – just to avoid anxious thoughts – that the sole purpose of his vespertine pilgrimage is brief relaxation within some favoured circle of superior
habitués
in the village pub.’

‘And if he is a wooer,’ Grace Martineau said, ‘he is certainly a brisk one. I’ve never known him not be back in the music room before anybody’s bed-time, and very much in command of his decanters and syphons.’

‘He comes back through the wood?’ Judith asked.

‘Oh, certainly. It is what I was going to say. You know the little belvedere? Well, I must confess to an absurd habit, if Charles will let me. Charles, may I tell?’

‘You may.’ Charles Martineau leant forward and lightly touched his wife’s hand where it lay, emaciated and fine-boned, on the arm of her chair. It was a gesture too unselfconsciously tender to be embarrassing.

‘It was our favourite place in the grounds in the early days of our marriage. We used to sit in it of an evening and gossip famously – about our reading, and the improvements we were going to carry out at Charne, and all our neighbours for thirty miles around. They were quite new to me, for the most part, because I had been brought up in another county.’

‘The belvedere was just the right place.’ Appleby, perhaps because amused by this last territorial touch, put in this cheerfully. ‘Seclusion – and at the same time a marvellous vista.’

‘Yes,’ Mrs Martineau smiled with pleasure, and nodded gently. Whatever county she had been bred in, it was evident that her present part of this one was very dear to her. ‘Well, we have been taking, Charles and I, to going there again sometimes, just at about this time in the evening. You must none of you be offended if we vanish, perhaps tomorrow evening, perhaps the evening after. You will at least be in our thoughts.’

‘Grace means,’ Charles Martineau said, ‘that we shall be gossiping about you all quite shamelessly.’

‘As soon, that is, as we have got our breath – for the climb is a little hard. And it is only Friary who will stop us.’

‘Friary has instructions?’ Judith asked.

‘Oh, no. We like to think he knows nothing about it. But we see him pass – quite close by – and so punctually that it is like having a clock in the belvedere. Which is what I was saying when I started rambling. And then, you see, we come away, Charles and I. Usually together, but sometimes first one and then the other. For we like to show that we can be a little independent of each other still.’

Grace Martineau stopped speaking – and upon her last words there succeeded a silence it might not have been easy to break. Tactfully, the nightingale ended it with another burst of song. They listened until there came a pause.

‘You know, until quite lately, we used to have kingfishers by the stream.’ Mrs Martineau spoke, this time, in a low voice, as if for Judith Appleby’s ear alone. ‘I am afraid we shan’t see them again. But the nightingales have come back, as I have longed for them to do.’ She leant forward, and touched Judith’s arm. ‘There…you see?’

On one of the grassy paths issuing from the wood there had appeared the figure of Friary. His coat could certainly be distinguished as sitting well on him. He moved briskly and with a light tread. He might have been a son of the house, Appleby thought, who had been out and about some necessary business on the estate. One rather expected a hail from him or a casual wave.

But, of course, nothing of the sort occurred. With his gaze decorously averted from his distant employers and their guests, Friary turned right, and disappeared round the back of the house.

The nightingale had ceased, and somewhere in the wood an owl was hooting, as if issuing a challenge to one of those feathered
débats
or wordy wrangles so tediously reported by medieval poets. If so, the nightingale was not taking it on, but now remained obstinately mute. One had to suppose that, belying its reputation for night-long activity, it had tucked its head under its wing and gone to sleep.

This might have been judged the more perverse in the nightingale in that the setting was steadily becoming apter for the exhibition of its prowess. The moon had risen behind the wood, and in the park which lay beyond the forsaken garden not one but half a dozen moonlit cedars were invitingly untenanted. But only the owl hooted again; it was possible to hear a faint splash of water from the stream; it was possible to imagine that one heard, fainter still, a murmur which might have come from waves on a distant beach, but that in fact must come – if indeed it was there at all – from the encroaching city. And into the sky the city cast a dull red glow which the moonlight was now engaged in combating. Charne was a wholly man-made place; within sight of the house nothing more than an occasional weed or shrub or small sapling grew where it hadn’t been told to. Yet everything was sufficiently mature to approximate it to the order of nature – and this order the moonlight might now be felt as championing. It was with a sense of victory that one watched the hot red glare of urban life beaten back in the eastern sky. And already, except in shadowed places, it would be possible to see one’s footing clearly. Appleby, marking this, felt the attraction of the night. He was about to get up and stroll away, when Mrs Martineau broke the silence.

‘I am afraid I took no part in your game,’ she said. Her voice held a note of apology. ‘You must forgive me. My thoughts sometimes go far away.’

‘Our game, Grace?’ It had been after a baffled moment that Charles Martineau said this questioningly.

‘Remembering what the poets have said about the nightingale.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Judith Appleby said this. She had not spoken for some time. ‘Bobby and Diana were playing a game like that.’

‘And now I recall something I could have joined in with.’ Mrs Martineau’s voice could just be heard. Her strength nowadays seemed to come and go, and at times seemed barely sufficient for articulate speech. ‘I think it is from Keats,’ she said. ‘Didn’t somebody quote from Keats?’

‘I did,’ Diana said. ‘Before I got snubbed. It was the bit about “immortal bird”. I know that was right, because we did it at school. Keats wrote a whole poem just about a nightingale, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, dear, I think he did.’ Mrs Martineau spoke indulgently – as nearly everybody except Bobby Angrave did to Diana, who was undeniably not clever. ‘Only, my lines don’t come from that poem. I’m not sure where they come from.’

There was a moment’s pause. For some obscure reason, nobody seemed eager to prompt Mrs Martineau to go on. But presently she did so of her own accord – and so quietly that she somehow gave no effect of quoting verse.

‘It is a flaw in happiness,’ Mrs Martineau said, ‘to see beyond our bourne. It forces us in summer nights to mourn. It spoils the singing of the nightingale.’

This produced silence. It was a silence lasting until Diana spoke again – and with all the rashness of ignorance.

‘What’s a bourne?’ Diana asked.

‘Well, dear, it can be several things, I believe. For another of the poets, Shakespeare, it is that from which no traveller returns.’

‘Uncle Charles, I think I heard a car. Are we going to have visitors?’ Martine Rivière, a girl at once alert and curiously withdrawn, plunged into the talk. It was reasonable that she should feel diversion to be required hard upon her aunt’s having relapsed upon so uncomfortably sombre a note. But she hadn’t, as it turned out, chosen too well.

‘It must be Fell.’ Charles Martineau’s voice was barely steady. ‘He has formed the habit of dropping in of an evening. It’s on his way home – after doing a late round.’

Gregory Fell, Appleby remembered, was the Martineau’s family doctor. He was a comparative newcomer to the district, and said to be a man of great ability. It would have been surprising, perhaps, if he had really become an intimate at Charne in the way that Martineau’s words suggested. But nobody was deceived. There was too evident a reason why the doctor should pay this evening visit – and why he should frequently appear at other times as well. Appleby wondered whether it was Martineau or Martineau’s wife who insisted upon this paper-thin convention of reticence. If Grace Martineau was to have sleep – it was painfully clear – Dr Fell must bring it to her.

And now, almost with haste, the little party in the loggia was breaking up. The nightingale, should it think to resume its entertainment, would pour out its incredible strains in vain. Nor would the owl be attended to.

‘I think I’ll take a stroll in search of Angrave,’ Appleby said. Almost as if he were as young as Diana Page, he was finding intolerable for a moment the simple fact that somebody was going to die. Or at least he supposed that this was what he was feeling. Certainly he wanted a short spell of solitude before the final ritual assembly in the music room prior to bed-time. ‘There’s sufficient light,’ he said, ‘to track the young man down.’

‘Yes – do go. See what Bobby’s up to.’ Martineau, already on his feet, produced this rather oddly. ‘But don’t, either of you, be long.’ He paused, and seemed conscious that this was a strange circumscription to lay upon a guest – or upon a guest of Appleby’s seniority. ‘It’s turning damp,’ he said. ‘It’s turning chilly.’

‘Charles, dear – shall we go in together?’ Grace Martineau had stood up unaided, but with effort. With an air of whimsical formality, she placed herself on her husband’s arm. But it was a support nobody could suppose her not to need. Together, husband and wife made their way slowly down the little colonnade joining the pavilion to the house. The others followed, trying to disguise the unnatural slowness of their progress by pausing to draw each other’s attention to this or that. Appleby caught his wife’s eye – and knew that Judith was asking herself, precisely as he was, whether all this ignoring of the spectre wasn’t a kind of madness that only the English can produce. Then he turned away, and walked across the terrace.

It was a perfect night in early June. Dropping down from the level of the house, Appleby wandered for a time in the garden, or ghost of a garden, below. Bobby Angrave wasn’t at all on his mind, he found; indeed, he must have mentioned his name merely as an excuse for this quiet prowl. He even thought of making his way to the walled garden to the west of the house, and so ensure himself solitude – for Bobby had appeared to make his way into the wood on the east. But this might convict him of mild disingenuousness if he was questioned later, and for the time being he contented himself with lighting a cigar and strolling up and down where he was.