Dear Deceiver(12)

'Like the one at Rockingham,' Rory Hart went on. 'Perhaps not quite so  extensive. That's twenty-two acres-and has also brought us some  mudslinging, as you may know.'

They were not wasting time. The road still wide and still with vistas of  green slopes and smoky blue hills had run through Newtown Mount  Kennedy. He turned right and Haidee saw properly the ranges of rolling  hills they had left behind. There was something distinctive about Irish  mountains. What they lacked in grandeur was supplied them in soft  multi-coloured cladding, a general richness of misty blues and browns,  soft greens, dull heathers and often with forestry skirts.                       
       
           



       

A modest plantation of Christmas trees about a foot high flashed past on the left. 'Is that part of a forest?' she asked.

'That?' He made her feel she'd said something foolish. 'No. That's  somebody's waste land earning its keep under the Government Private  Planting Grant Scheme. Twenty pound per acre State grant.'

The mountains were losing their gentleness and Haidee her sense of  direction. She had seen Roundwood on a signpost, but Rory had followed  that road for only a short distance. Now they were in a basin of hills.  The line of one swept diagonally from left to right and all the way up  it was the dark saw edge of conifers. The whole area indeed was a pocket  of forestry with plantations making fans, bands and trapeziums on the  bare mountain and standing like ramrods along the road. Just here and  there the tree invasion was not complete and granite heights peppered  with quartz were barren against the blue of the afternoon sky. She could  well imagine deer up there on the moor.

Startlingly, Rory Hart all but voiced the thought. 'I forget, was Honey  the cat in the trap or the deer that got chopped on the road?'

A needless cruelty. Haidee's eyes went fearfully to the basket on the  back seat. 'Did you have to remind me? I've explained. I had to bring  Brand. At such short notice there was nowhere else for him to go.'

'Why burden yourself with him at all? He's not your cat. Have him put down.'

Have him put down! Brand! Choosy, strong-willed, possessive, show-you-who's-boss-Brand! Even to think it was obscene.

'That's like you,' she flashed. 'I think more of my animals than that.'

'And less of your people.' The eyes stayed unblinkingly on the road.

'I'm here, aren't I?' Haidee countered angrily. After all, what business  was it of his? Suzanne's mother with everything to forgive had brushed  aside even the thought of it. 'And that's because of Jennie. My mother  has let bygones be bygones. I hope she will too.'

'Just-Jennie?' The question dropped quietly and before she could make any attempt at answer the car slowed down.

'We've been fencing, Sue,' Rory Hart said softly. 'All the way from  Enniskerry neither of us has had the guts to ask the other for an  amnesty. If you remember our parting ...' He paused to let a flock of  Aylesbury ducks waddle across to a ditch.

'I...' she stopped awkwardly. Rory Hart exterminating squirrels and  wanting Brand put down was one thing. Rory Hart dropping into the  diminutive 'Sue' was quite another. A portrait painter had recently said  that character lay in the mouth rather than the eyes. This mouth was  wide and had a twist to it. What had put it there? Cynicism? Doggedness?  Self-control? No matter. Today, it was a lean face with clefts in the  long brown cheeks and tramlines on the forehead. A black sweater under  the jacket of khaki suede shaded his eyes to grey. In fact, now that the  light was draining from the hills he seemed to match his forest.

Hard as the trees he reared and not likely to care tuppence about a love of fifteen years ago.

Yet strangely it did not rest there. 'We little thought then that the  day would come when we would be driving home together to Glenglass,' he  said with uncanny truth.

Haidee said no and felt it a lame comment. Apparently her companion felt  so too. 'You never told me what you felt when you heard I was in charge  here.'

The mixture of naiveté and pride was for no sensible reason unbearable.  It brought a flash of how he would have looked at, say, twenty, hair  tinged with auburn, round ruddy cheeks, full lips parted in a sunny  teasing smile. Absurdly, she wanted to cry out: 'Don't show me this side  of you. I don't want to know.'

'I didn't feel anything much,' she said carefully. 'It all happened such a long time ago.'

Calculated to cool, it seemed to act like a drench of cold water.

'Lord save us,' Rory Hart remarked in a flat tone, 'you have changed. You're not the same person.'

'A lot has happened to me,' she excused herself.

'And to me.'

It recalled someone whose existence she had temporarily forgotten. The  boy Toby. And Toby's mother who for some reason was not with her husband  and her son. So whatever happened between Rory Hart and Suzanne Desmond  all those years ago had not stopped him marrying and finding, alas,  another dose of unhappiness. 'I'm sorry.' It was a fool thing to say,  but it was out before she could stop it.                       
       
           



       

'You said that as though you meant it.' Again it was the soft disarming tone.

For the minute all thought of acting left Haidee's head. What Suzanne  would or would not have said mattered net at all. She spoke as herself.

'I do. The past is behind us now.'

'It has its legacies.'

'Can't we forget them?'

'I thought you had,' Rory Hart said dryly. 'Glenglass is one place I never thought to see you.'

It sounded more ominous than friendly, but Haidee set herself not to notice.

He had taken a turn between two pillars. The road still seemed a public  one, for a car had preceded them and little knots of children on their  way home from school were shuffling through the leaves. To the right  blazed the shrivelling torches of beech and chestnut. To the left behind  wire fencing was one dark tree after another, straight and uniform as  organ pipes.

'Go on,' Rory bade grimly, 'say it. The word is-telegraph poles.'

Beside them a board read: State Forest. Glenglass.

Haidee's breath had been taken. The moment had crept up on her. It  wasn't fair. There had been no clue, no name, no gates. Surely there  should have been gates. Had they been taken down and sold? She thought  of the little pillars they had passed.

'You-what have you done to it?' she gasped. 'I didn't recognize it. You saw that. I didn't recognize it.'

'I saw.' The tone was cryptic.

She took a risk, waving her hand at the funeral pines. 'They're horrible. The whole place is changed. I wouldn't know it.'

'So you said.' Again the expressionless voice. 'But that's what it's all  about, isn't it? Change. Things change all the time. Tastes.  Coastlines. Liturgies. Laws. And people.'

Without warning he started to sing-a jaunty graceless air which had been on the streets of Dublin for many a long year.



'Where are your eyes that looked so mild!



Hurroo! Hurroo!



Where are your eyes that looked so mild

When my poor heart you first beguil'd?

Why did you skedaddle from me and the child?



Why, Johnny, I hardly knew ye!'



Haidee, stiff with apprehension, thanked Providence for the second last  line. It at least did not lit the case. Every other sentiment was  horribly, terrifyingly true.

The blue eyes mischievously dilated looked her way for a second and the  song stopped. 'Hi, Johnny!' In some way he made it seem like a question.

With a positive armada in flames behind her another burning boat would  hardly be noticed. This was a strange man, but no other had ever come so  boldly close. She said gravely: 'Hi!'

Despite the portrait painter who went for mouths, eyes had a fledgling  lack of pretence, and Rory Hart's eyes were not bold but tranquil and  serious. Something glimmered in them now and they all but smiled.

Haidee hadn't been watching the road. The shriek of brakes and the car  jerking to a stop took her breath for the second time in ten minutes. A  boy's round open mouth swam for a second before her eyes. There followed  the high explosive laughter of children who had had a fright. She  looked at the driving seat and Rory Hart's brow was beaded with sweat.

'I'll swing for that child!' he vowed.

'What happened? I didn't see.'

'Just as well.' He opened the door, said: 'Young idiot,' to no one in  particular and: 'Toby! Come here. What the devil were you playing at?'

The boy appeared carrying a school bag against his scarlet anorak. He  was about ten, an apple-cheeked broth of a boy with the knees of a  footballer and a brown pudding-basin haircut. 'Sorry!' he said  cheerfully. 'I didn't see you.'

'Sorry!' his father echoed wrathfully. 'That's a fat lot of use. Sorry  won't buy me a new car. Get in.' The tone was scathing and Toby, Haidee  noticed, had gone bright red, particularly about the ears.

'It's all right. I...'

'Get in,' Rory Hart repeated. 'And don't argue. Wait a minute,' he added  sharply as the back door was being opened. 'Wipe your feet.'