Chapter 13

I’m trying as best I can, though that isn’t saying much, to paint a picture of the people who came into our lives, that is to say: who came into my life because, of course, they were in Ellie’s life already. Our mistake was that we thought they’d go out of Ellie’s life. But they didn’t. They’d no intention of doing so. However, we didn’t know that then.

The English side of our life was the next thing that happened. Our house was finished, we had a telegram from Santonix. He’d asked us to keep away for about a week, then the telegram came. It said: ‘Come tomorrow.’

We drove down there, and we arrived at sunset. Santonix heard the car and came out to meet us, standing in front of the house. When I saw our house, finished, something inside me leaped up, leaped up as though to burst out of my skin! It was my house – and I’d got it at last! I held Ellie’s arm very tight.

‘Like it?’ said Santonix.

‘It’s the tops,’ I said. А silly thing to say but he knew what I meant.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s the best thing I’ve done… It’s cost you a mint of money and it’s worth every penny of it. I’ve exceeded my estimates all round. Come on, Mike,’ he said, ‘pick her up and carry her over the threshold. That’s the thing to do when you enter into possession with your bride!’

I flushed and then I picked up Ellie – she was quite a light weight – and carried her as Santonix had suggested, over the threshold. As I did so, I stumbled just a little and I saw Santonix frown.

‘There you are,’ said Santonix, ‘be good to her, Mike. Take care of her. Don’t let any harm happen to her. She can’t take care of herself. She thinks she can.’

‘Why should any harm happen to me?’ said Ellie.

‘Because it’s a bad world and there are bad people in it,’ said Santonix, ‘and there are some bad people around you, my girl. I know. I’ve seen one or two of them. Seen them down here. They come nosing around, sniffing around like the rats they are. Excuse my French but somebody’s got to say it.’

‘They won’t bother us,’ said Ellie, ‘they’ve all gone back to the States.’

‘Maybe,’ said Santonix, ‘but it’s only a few hours by plane, you know.’

He put his hands on her shoulders. They were very thin now, very white-looking. He looked terribly ill.

‘I’d look after you myself, child, if I could,’ he said, ‘but I can’t. It won’t be long now. You’ll have to fend for yourself.’

‘Cut out the gipsy’s warning, Santonix,’ I said, ‘and take us round the house. Every inch of it.’

So we went round the house. Some of the rooms were still empty but most of the things we’d bought, pictures and the furniture and the curtains, were there.

‘We haven’t got a name for it,’ said Ellie suddenly. ‘We can’t call it The Towers, that was a ridiculous name. What was the other name for it that you told me once?’ she said to me. ‘Gipsy’s Acre, wasn’t it?’

‘We won’t call it that,’ I said sharply. ‘I don’t like that name.’

‘It’ll always be called that hereabouts,’ said Santonix.

‘They’re a lot of silly superstitious people,’ I said.

And then we sat down on the terrace looking at the setting sun and the view, and we thought of names for the house. It was a kind of game. We started quite seriously and then we began to think of every silly name we possibly could. ‘Journey’s End’, ‘Heart’s Delight’ and names like boarding-houses. ‘Seaview’, ‘Fairholme,’ ‘The Pines’. Then suddenly it grew dark and cold, and we went indoors. We didn’t draw the curtains, just closed the windows. We’d brought down provisions with us. On the following day an expensively acquired domestic staff was coming.

‘They’ll probably hate it and say it’s lonely and they’ll all go away,’ said Ellie.

‘And then you’ll give them double the money to stay on,’ said Santonix.

‘You think,’ said Ellie, ‘that everyone can be bought!’ But she only said it laughingly.

We had brought pâté en croûte with us and French bread and large red prawns. We sat round the table laughing and eating and talking. Even Santonix looked strong and animated, and there was a kind of wild excitement in his eyes.

And then it happened suddenly. А stone crashed in through the window and dropped on the table. Smashed a wineglass too, and a sliver of glass slit Ellie’s cheek. For a moment we sat paralysed, then I sprang up, rushed to the window, unbolted it and went out on the terrace. There was no one to be seen. I came back into the room again.

I picked up a paper napkin and bent over Ellie, wiping away a little trickle of blood I saw coursing down her cheek.

‘It’s hurt you… There, dear, it’s nothing much. It’s just a wee cut from a sliver of glass.’

My eyes met those of Santonix.

‘Why did anyone do it?’ said Ellie. She looked bewildered.

‘Boys,’ I said, ‘you know, young hooligans. They knew, perhaps, we were settling in. I dare say you were lucky that they only threw a stone. They might have had an air gun or something like that.’

‘But why should they do it to us? Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Just beastliness.’

Ellie got up suddenly. She said:

‘I’m frightened. I’m afraid.’

‘We’ll find out tomorrow,’ I said. ‘We don’t know enough about the people round here.’

‘Is it because we’re rich and they’re poor?’ said Ellie. She asked it not of me but of Santonix as though he would know the answer to the question better than I did.

‘No,’ said Santonix slowly, ‘I don’t think it’s that…’

Ellie said:

‘It’s because they hate us… Hate Mike and hate me. Why? Because we’re happy?’

Again Santonix shook his head.

‘No,’ Ellie said, as though she were agreeing with him, ‘no, it’s something else. Something we don’t know about. Gipsy’s Acre. Anyone who lives here is going to be hated. Going to be persecuted. Perhaps they will succeed in the end in driving us away…’

I poured out a glass of wine and gave it to her.

‘Don’t, Ellie,’ I begged her. ‘Don’t say such things. Drink this. It’s a nasty thing to happen, but it was only silliness, crude horseplay.’

‘I wonder,’ said Ellie, ‘I wonder…’ She looked hard at me. ‘Somebody is trying to drive us away, Mike. To drive us away from the house we’ve built, the house we love.’

‘We won’t let them drive us away,’ I said. I added, ‘I’ll take care of you. Nothing shall hurt you.’

She looked again at Santonix.

‘You should know,’ she said, ‘you’ve been here while the house was building. Didn’t anyone ever say anything to you? Come and throw stones – interfere with the building of the house?’

‘One can imagine things,’ said Santonix.

‘There were accidents, then?’

‘There are always a few accidents in the building of a house. Nothing serious or tragic. А man falls off a ladder, someone drops a load on his foot, someone gets a splinter in his thumb and it goes septic.’

‘Nothing more than that? Nothing that might have been meant?’

‘No,’ said Santonix, ‘no. I swear to you, no!’

Ellie turned to me.

‘You remember that gipsy woman, Mike. How queer she was that day, how she warned me not to come here.’ ‘She’s just a bit crazy, a bit off her head.’

‘We’ve built on Gipsy’s Acre,’ said Ellie. ‘We’ve done what she told us not to do.’ Then she stamped her foot. ‘I won’t let them drive me away. I won’t let anyone drive me away!’

‘Nobody shall drive us away,’ I said. ‘We’re going to be happy here.’

We said it like a challenge to fate.

Chapter 14

That’s how our life began at Gipsy’s Acre. We didn’t find another name for the house. That first evening fixed Gipsy’s Acre in our heads.

‘We’ll call it Gipsy’s Acre,’ said Ellie, ‘just to show! a kind of challenge, don’t you think? It’s our Acre, and to hell with the gipsy’s warning.’

She was her old gay self again the next day and soon we were busy getting ourselves settled in, and getting also to know the neighbourhood and the neighbours. Ellie and I walked down to the cottage where the gipsy woman lived. I felt it would be a good thing if we found her digging in her garden. The only time Ellie had seen her before was when she told our fortunes. If Ellie saw she was just an ordinary old woman – digging up potatoes – but we didn’t see her. The cottage was shut up. I asked if she were dead but the neighbour I asked shook her head.

‘She must have gone away,’ she said. ‘She goes away from time to time, you know. She’s a gipsy really. That’s why she can’t stay in houses. She wanders away and comes back again.’ She tapped her forehead. ‘Not quite right up here.’

Presently she said, trying to mask curiosity, ‘You’ve come from the new house up there, haven’t you, the one on the top of the hill, that’s just been built?’

‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘we moved in last night.’

‘Wonderful looking place it is,’ she said. ‘We’ve all been up to look at it while it was building. Makes a difference, doesn’t it, seeing a house like that where all those gloomy trees used to be?’ She said to Ellie rather shyly, ‘You’re an American lady, aren’t you, so we heard?’

‘Yes,’ said Ellie, ‘I’m American – or I was, but now I’m married to an Englishman so I’m an Englishwoman.’

‘And you’ve come here to settle down and live, haven’t you?’

We said we had.

‘Well, I hope you’ll like it, I’m sure.’ She sounded doubtful.

‘Why shouldn’t we?’

‘Oh well, it’s lonely up there, you know. People don’t always like living in a lonely place among a lot of trees.’

‘Gipsy’s Acre,’ said Ellie.

‘Ah, you know the local name, do you? But the house that was there before was called The Towers. I don’t know why. It hadn’t any towers, at least not in my time.’

‘I think The Towers is a silly name,’ said Ellie. ‘I think we’ll go on calling it Gipsy’s Acre.’

‘We’ll have to tell the post office if so,’ I said, ‘or we shan’t get any letters.’

‘No, I suppose we shan’t.’

‘Though when I come to think of it,’ I said, ‘would that matter, Ellie? Wouldn’t it be much nicer if we didn’t get any letters?’

‘It might cause a lot of complications,’ said Ellie. ‘We shouldn’t even get our bills.’

‘That would be a splendid idea,’ I said.

‘No, it wouldn’t,’ said Ellie. ‘Bailiffs would come in and camp there. Anyway,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t like not to get any letters. I’d want to hear from Greta.’

‘Never mind Greta,’ I said. ‘Let’s go on exploring.’

So we explored Kingston Bishop. It was a nice village, nice people in the shops. There was nothing sinister about the place. Our domestic help didn’t take to it much, but we soon arranged that hired cars should take them into the nearest seaside town or into Market Chadwell on their days out. They were not enthusiastic about the location of the house, but it was not superstition that worried them. I pointed out to Ellie nobody could say the house was haunted because it had been just built.

‘No,’ Ellie agreed, ‘it’s not the house. There’s nothing wrong with the house. It’s outside. It’s that road where it curves round through the trees and that bit of rather gloomy wood where that woman stood and made me jump so that day.’

‘Well, next year,’ I said, ‘we might cut down those trees and plant a lot of rhododendrons or something like that.’

We went on making plans.

Greta came and stayed with us for a weekend. She was enthusiastic about the house, and congratulated us on all our furnishings and pictures and colour schemes. She was very tactful. After the weekend she said she wouldn’t disturb the honeymooners any longer, and anyway she’d got to get back to her job.

Ellie enjoyed showing her the house. I could see how fond Ellie was of her. I tried to behave very sensibly and pleasantly but I was glad when Greta went back to London, because her staying there had been a strain on me.

When we’d been there a couple of weeks we were accepted locally and made the acquaintance of God. He came one afternoon to call upon us. Ellie and I were arguing about where we’d have a flower border when our correct, to me slightly phoney-looking, manservant came out from the house to announce that Major Phillpot was in the drawing-room. It was then that I said in a whisper to Ellie: ‘God!’ Ellie asked me what I meant.

‘Well, the locals treat him like that,’ I said.

So we went in and there was Major Phillpot. He was just a pleasant, nondescript man of close on sixty. He was wearing country clothes, rather shabby, he had grey hair going a little thin on top and a short bristly moustache. He apologized for his wife not being able to come and call on us. She was something of an invalid, he said. He sat down and chatted with us. Nothing he said was remarkable or particularly interesting. He had the knack of making people feel at their ease. He touched quite lightly on a variety of subjects. He didn’t ask any direct questions, but he soon got it into his head where our particular interests lay. He talked to me about racing and to Ellie about making a garden and what things did well in this particular soil. He had been to the States once or twice. He found out that though Ellie didn’t care much for race meetings, she was fond of riding. He told her that if she was going to keep horses she could go up a particular track through the pine woods and she would come out on a good stretch of moor where she could have a gallop. Then we came to the subject of our house and the stories about Gipsy’s Acre.

‘I see you know the local name,’ he said, ‘and all the local superstitions, too, I expect.’

‘Gipsies’ warnings in profusion,’ I said. ‘Far too many of them. Mostly old Mrs Lee.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Phillpot. ‘Poor old Esther: she’s been a nuisance, has she?’

‘Is she a bit dotty?’ I asked.

‘Not so much as she likes to make out. I feel more or less responsible for her. I settled her in that cottage,’ he said, ‘not that she’s grateful for it. I’m fond of the old thing though she can be a nuisance sometimes.’

‘Fortune-telling?’

‘No, not particularly. Why, has she told your fortune?’

‘I don’t know if you can call it a fortune,’ said Ellie. ‘It was more a warning to us against coming here.’

‘That seems rather odd to me.’ Major Phillpot’s rather bristly eyebrows rose. ‘She’s usually got a honeyed tongue in fortunes. Handsome stranger, marriage bells, six children and a heap of good fortune and money in your hand, pretty lady.’ He imitated rather unexpectedly the gipsy whine of her voice. ‘The gipsies used to camp here a lot when I was a boy,’ he said. ‘I suppose I got fond of them then, though they were a thieving lot, of course. But I’ve always been attracted to them. As long as you don’t expect them to be law-abiding, they’re all right. Many a tin mug of gipsy stew I’ve had as a schoolboy. We felt the family owed Mrs Lee something, she saved the life of a brother of mine when he was a child. Fished him out of a pond when he’d gone through the ice.’

I made a clumsy gesture and knocked a glass ashtray off a table. It smashed into fragments.

I picked up the pieces and Major Phillpot helped me.

‘I expect Mrs Lee’s quite harmless really,’ said Ellie. ‘I was very foolish to have been so scared.’

‘Scared, were you?’ His eyebrows rose again. ‘It was as bad as that, was it?’

‘I don’t wonder she was afraid,’ I said quickly. ‘It was almost more like a threat than a warning.’

‘A threat!’ He sounded incredulous.

‘Well, it sounded that way to me. And then the first night we moved in here something else happened.’

I told him about the stone crashing through the window.

‘I’m afraid there are a good many young hooligans about nowadays,’ he said, ‘though we haven’t got many of them round here – not nearly as bad as some places. Still, it happens, I’m sorry to say.’ He looked at Ellie. ‘I’m very sorry you were frightened. It was a beastly thing to happen, your first night moving in.’

‘Oh, I’ve got over it now,’ said Ellie. ‘It wasn’t only that, it was – it was something else that happened not long afterwards.’

I told him about that too. We had come down one morning and we had found a dead bird skewered through with a knife and a small piece of paper with it which said in an illiterate scrawl, ‘Get out of here if you know what’s good for you.’

Phillpot looked really angry then. He said, ‘You should have reported that to the police.’

‘We didn’t want to,’ I said. ‘After all, that would only have put whoever it is even more against us.’

‘Well, that kind of thing has got to be stopped,’ said Phillpot. Suddenly he became the magistrate. ‘Otherwise, you know, people will go on with the thing. Think it’s funny, I suppose. Only – only this sounds a bit more than fun. Nasty – malicious – It’s not,’ he said, rather as though he was talking to himself, ‘it’s not as though anyone round here could have a grudge against you, a grudge against either of you personally, I mean.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘it couldn’t be that because we’re both strangers here.’

‘I’ll look into it,’ Phillpot said.

He got up to go, looking round him as he did.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I like this house of yours. I didn’t think I should. I’m a bit of an old square, you know, what used to be called an old fogey. I like old houses and old buildings. I don’t like all these matchbox factories that are going up all over the country. Big boxes. Like beehives. I like buildings with some ornament on them, some grace. But I like this house. It’s plain and very modern, I suppose, but it’s got shape and light. And when you look out from it you see things – well, in a different way from the way you’ve seen them before. It’s interesting. Very interesting. Who designed it? An English architect or a foreigner?’

I told him about Santonix.

‘Mm,’ he said, ‘I think I read about him somewhere. Would it have been in House and Garden?’

I said he was fairly well known.

‘I’d like to meet him sometime, though I don’t suppose I’d know what to say to him. I’m not artistic.’

Then he asked us to settle a day to come and have lunch with him and his wife.

‘You can see how you like my house,’ he said.

‘It’s an old house, I suppose?’ I said.

‘Built 1720. Nice period. The original house was Elizabethan. That was burnt down about 1700 and a new one built on the same spot.’

‘You’ve always lived here then?’ I said. I didn’t mean him personally, of course, but he understood.

‘Yes. We’ve been here since Elizabethan times. Sometimes prosperous, sometimes down and out, selling land when things have gone badly, buying it back when things went well. I’ll be glad to show it to you both,’ he said, and looking at Ellie he said with a smile, ‘Americans like old houses, I know. You’re the one who probably won’t think much of it,’ he said to me.

‘I won’t pretend I know much about old things,’ I said.

He stumped off then. In his car there was a spaniel waiting for him. It was a battered old car with the paint rubbed off, but I was getting my values by now. I knew that in this part of the world he was still God all right, and he’d set the seal of his approval on us. I could see that. He liked Ellie. I was inclined to think that he’d liked me, too, although I’d noticed the appraising glances which he shot over me from time to time, as though he was making a quick snap judgment on something he hadn’t come across before.

Ellie was putting splinters of glass carefully in the waste-paper basket when I came back into the drawing-room.

‘I’m sorry it’s broken,’ she said regretfully. ‘I liked it.’

‘We can get another like it,’ I said. ‘It’s modern.’

‘I know! What startled you, Mike?’

I considered for a moment.

‘Something Phillpot said. It reminded me of something that happened when I was a kid. А pal of mine at school and I played truant and went out skating on a local pond. Ice wouldn’t bear us, silly little asses that we were. He went through and was drowned before anyone could get him out.’

‘How horrible.’

‘Yes. I’d forgotten all about it until Phillpot mentioned about his own brother.’

‘I like him, Mike, don’t you?’

‘Yes, very much. I wonder what his wife is like.’

We went to lunch with the Phillpots early the following week. It was a white Georgian house, rather beautiful in its lines, though not particularly exciting. Inside it was shabby but comfortable. There were pictures of what I took to be ancestors on the walls of the long dining-room. Most of them were pretty bad, I thought, though they might have looked better if they had been cleaned. There was one of a fair-haired girl in pink satin that I rather took to. Major Phillpot smiled and said:

‘You’ve picked one of our best. It’s a Gainsborough, and a good one, though the subject of it caused a bit of trouble in her time. Strongly suspected of having poisoned her husband. May have been prejudice, because she was a foreigner. Gervase Phillpot picked her up abroad somewhere.’

A few other neighbours had been invited to meet us. Dr Shaw, an elderly man with a kindly but tired manner. He had to rush away before we had finished our meal. There was the Vicar who was young and earnest, and a middle-aged woman with a bullying voice who bred corgis. And there was a tall handsome dark girl called Claudia Hardcastle who seemed to live for horses, though hampered by having an allergy which gave her violent hay fever.

She and Ellie got on together rather well. Ellie adored riding and she too was troubled by an allergy.

‘In the States it’s mostly ragwort gives it to me,’ she said —‘but horses too, sometimes. It doesn’t trouble me much nowadays because they have such wonderful things that doctors can give you for different kinds of allergies. I’ll give you some of my capsules. They’re bright orange. And if you remember to take one before you start out you don’t as much as sneeze once.’

Claudia Hardcastle said that would be wonderful.

‘Camels do it to me worse than horses,’ she said. ‘I was in Egypt last year – and the tears just streamed down my face all the way round the Pyramids.’

Ellie said some people got it with cats.

‘And pillows.’ They went on talking about allergies.

I sat next to Mrs Phillpot who was tall and willowy and talked exclusively about her health in the intervals of eating a hearty meal. She gave me a full account of all her various ailments and of how puzzled many eminent members of the medical profession had been by her case. Occasionally she made a social diversion and asked me what I did. I parried that one, and she made half-hearted efforts to find out whom I knew. I could have answered truthfully ‘Nobody,’ but I thought it would be well to refrain – especially as she wasn’t a real snob and didn’t really want to know. Mrs Corgi, whose proper name I hadn’t caught, was much more thorough in her queries but I diverted her to the general iniquity and ignorance of vets! It was all quite pleasant and peaceful, if rather dull.

Later, as we were making a rather desultory tour of the garden, Claudia Hardcastle joined me.

She said, rather abruptly, ‘I’ve heard about you – from my brother.’

I looked surprised. I couldn’t imagine it to be possible that I knew a brother of Claudia Hardcastle’s.

‘Are you sure?’ I said.

She seemed amused.

‘As a matter of fact, he built your house.’

‘Do you mean Santonix is your brother?’

‘Half-brother. I don’t know him very well. We rarely meet.’

‘He’s wonderful,’ I said.

‘Some people think so, I know.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘I’m never sure. There are two sides to him. At one time he was going right down the hill… People wouldn’t have anything to do with him. And then – he seemed to change. He began to succeed in his profession in the most extraordinary way. It was as though he was —’ she paused for a word —‘dedicated.’

‘I think he is – just that.’

Then I asked her if she had seen our house.

‘No – not since it was finished.’

I told her she must come and see it.

‘I shan’t like it, I warn you. I don’t like modern houses. Queen Anne is my favourite period.’

She said she was going to put Ellie up for the golf club. And they were going to ride together. Ellie was going to buy a horse, perhaps more than one. She and Ellie seemed to have made friends.

When Phillpot was showing me his stables he said a word or two about Claudia.

‘Good rider to hounds,’ he said. ‘Pity’s she’s mucked up her life.’

‘Has she?’

‘Married a rich man, years older than herself. An American. Name of Lloyd. It didn’t take. Came apart almost at once. She went back to her own name. Don’t think she’ll ever marry again. She’s anti man. Pity.’

When we were driving home, Ellie said: ‘Dull – but nice. Nice people. We’re going to be very happy here, aren’t we, Mike?’

I said: ‘Yes, we are.’ And took my hand from the steering wheel and laid it over hers.

When we got back, I dropped Ellie at the house, and put away the car in the garage.

As I walked back to the house, I heard a faint twanging of Ellie’s guitar. She had a rather beautiful old Spanish guitar that must have been worth a lot of money. She used to sing to it in a soft low crooning voice. Very pleasant to hear. I didn’t know what most of the songs were. American spirituals partly, I think, and some old Irish and Scottish ballads – sweet and rather sad. They weren’t pop music or anything of that kind. Perhaps they were folk songs.

I went round by the terrace and paused by the window before going in.

Ellie was singing one of my favourites. I don’t know what it was called. She was crooning the words softly to herself, bending her head down over the guitar and gently plucking the strings. It had a sweet-sad haunting little tune.

 

Man was made for Joy and Woe

And when this we rightly know

Thro’ the World we safely go…

 

 

Every Night and every Morn

Some to Misery are born.

Every Morn and every Night

Some are born to Sweet Delight,

Some are born to Sweet Delight,

Some are born to Endless Night…

 

She looked up and saw me.

‘Why are you looking at me like that, Mike?’

‘Like what?’

‘You’re looking at me as though you loved me…’

‘Of course I love you. How else should I be looking at you?’

‘But what were you thinking just then?’

I answered slowly and truthfully: ‘I was thinking of you as I saw you first – standing by a dark fir tree.’ Yes, I’d been remembering that first moment of seeing Ellie, the surprise of it and the excitement…

Ellie smiled at me and sang softly:

 

Every Morn and every Night

Some are born to Sweet Delight,

Some are born to Sweet Delight,

Some are born to Endless Night’

 

One doesn’t recognize in one’s life the really important moments – not until it’s too late.

That day when we’d been to lunch with the Phillpots and came back so happily to our home was such a moment. But I didn’t know then – not until afterwards.

I said: ‘Sing the song about the Fly.’ And she changed to a gay little dance tune and sang:

 

Little Fly,

Thy Summer’s play

My thoughtless hand

Has brushed away.

 

 

Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me?

 

 

For I dance

And drink, and sing

Till some blind hand

Shall brush my wing.

 

 

If thought is life

And strength and breath

And the want

Of thought is death;

 

 

Then am I

A happy fly

If I live

Or if I die’

 

Oh, Ellie – Ellie…