Ivy Tree Read Free

said, "that's just the core of the matter. That's just what one resents. We none of us want to be 'the image'. We're the thing itself."
    "Fair enough. You're the thing itself, and Annabel's the ghost. After all, she's dead." It wasn't so much the casual phrasing that was shocking, as the lack of something in his voice that ought to have been there. The effect was as startling and as definite as if he had used an obscene word. I said, uncomfortably: "You know, I didn't mean to ... I should have realised that talking like this can't be pleasant for you, even if you, well, didn't get on with Annabel. After all, she was a relative; your cousin, didn't you say?"
    "I was going to marry her."
    I was just drawing on my cigarette as he spoke. I almost choked over the smoke. I must have stared with my mouth open for quite five seconds. Then I said feebly: "Really?" His mouth curved. It was odd that the lineaments of beauty could lend themselves to something quite different. "You're thinking, maybe, that there'd have been very little love lost? Well, you might be right. Or you might not. She ran away, sooner than marry me. Disappeared into the blue eight years ago with nothing but a note from the States to her grandfather to say she was safe, and we none of us need expect to hear from her again. Oh, I admit there'd been a quarrel, and I might have been"—a pause, and a little shrug—"well, anyway she went, and never a word to me since that day. How easily do you expect a man to forgive that?"
    You? never, I thought. There it was once more, the touch of something dark and clouded that altered his whole face; some thing lost and uncertain moving like a stranger behind the smooth facade of assurance that physical beauty gives. No, a rebuff was the one thing he would never forgive. I said: "Eight years is a long time, though, to nurse a grudge. After all, you've probably been happily married to someone else for most of that time."
    "I'm not married."
    "No?" I must have sounded surprised. He would be all of thirty, and with that exterior, he must, to say the least of it, have had opportunities.
    He grinned at my tone, the assurance back in his face, as smoothly armoured as if there had never been a flaw. "My sister keeps house at Whitescar; my half-sister, I should say. She's a wonderful cook, and she thinks a lot of me. With Lisa around, I don't need a wife."
    "Whitescar, that's your farm, you said?" There was a tuft of sea-pink growing in a crevice beside me. I ran a finger over its springy cushion of green, watching how the tiny rosettes sprang back into place as the finger was withdrawn. "You're the owner? You and your sister?"
    "I am." The words sounded curt, almost snapped off. He must have felt this himself, for he went on to explain in some detail.
    "It's more than a farm; it's 'the Winslow place'. We've been there for donkey's ages . .. longer than the local gentry who've built their park round us, and tried to shift us, time out of mind. Whitescar's a kind of enclave, older than the oldest tree in the park—about a quarter the age of that wall you're sitting on. It gets its name, they say, from an old quarry up near the road, and nobody knows how old those workings are. Anyway, you can't shift Whitescar. The Hall tried hard enough in the old days, and now the Hall's gone, but we're still here . . . You're not listening."
    "I am. Go on. What happened to the Hall?" But he was off at a tangent, still obviously dwelling on my likeness to his cousin. "Have you ever lived on a farm?" "Yes. In Canada. But it's not my thing, I'm afraid."
    "What is?"
    "Lord, I don't know; that's my trouble. Country life, certainly, but not farming. A house, gardening, cooking—I've spent the last few years living with a friend who had a house near Montreal, and looking after her. She'd had polio, and was crippled. I was very happy there, but she died six months ago. That was when I decided to come over here. But I've no training for anything, if that's