Dear Deceiver(20)

'Sit down!' Rory, she realized, had been trying to get a word in. The  two he had got came out like a small explosion. She obeyed them, her  cheeks flaming. 'Yes, I eat lunch, yes, you can get it for me. No,  you're not leaving Glenglass. And-let me finish.' He saw her lips move  and thumped the table. 'Of course what should be done with Jennie is to  get her back to school. She's taking O-levels next summer. But I know  defeat when I see it and she won't shift till this is all over.  Meantime, she needs a body to fuss over. Yours will do.'

'Body?' She blinked again.

'Body,' Rory repeated with what seemed amazingly like mischief. 'Don't despise it. It's as gorgeous as ever.'

Now she knew she was going crazy. Or he was. One of them was seeing and  the other hearing things that could never be. She felt her eyebrows  rise.

'Have no fear, I've no designs on it at the moment,' he said coolly.  'Another time, perhaps. And again have no fear. That sort of thing is  all I have in mind. Our marriage was so incredibly bad I'd never risk it  again.'

She was so angry she had no, room for embarrassment. 'Sorry. You forget, it takes two.'

'I forget nothing.' The eyes were steady as rocks.

Haidee sighed. 'Well, if I stay...'

'No "if'. You're staying.' At last he rose. 'And remember again, Toby  thinks his mother is dead. If you can't accept that, say so now. I won't  have him forming an affection for someone who won't always be there.'

'You've not got a very good opinion of me, have you?' she challenged.

'You're right,' he told her. 'Shall we go?'

'Not till I make my condition. No one must know we're married and you mustn't...'

'Oh, come off it, girl!' He did not let her finish. 'I've kept my mouth  shut for the past ten years. What makes you think I'm going to open it  now?' He swung the door open and glared disapprovingly as she passed  through. 'That thing you've got on your head looks exactly like a  tea-cosy!'

The path was the same one they had followed last night with the  difference that now it was possible to see the detail underfoot-oak  galls, wood-sorrel, shield fern, and to the right, leaf-scattered and  with a dark gape at its base, the badger's earth. This morning, however,  no ghostly black-buttoned snout was visible.

Haidee, suddenly remembering Jennie's flight, wondered aloud where she had gone.

'If she left you at Cats Spinney you shouldn't need to ask,' was the  baffling reply. 'You went often enough yourself, and Mother Mary's still  in the hot seat.'

Mother Mary? Haidee put two and two together. That large grey and white  building she'd noticed across the fields must have been a convent. Less  simple was the reference to having visited it herself. Worse was to  come.

'I daresay you'll be looking her up? She asked about you not long ago.'

'She must be-pretty old.'

'Pushing eighty, I should think. She saw us all grow up.' She  assimilated the implications and they were not reassuring. Mother Mary  cancelled out what last night had seemed an astonishing lucky double,  the discovery that the two doctors in Glenglass and the present Church  of Ireland incumbent had all come there within the past three years.                       
       
           



       

The house had just reared into the gap ahead when they came to the big  oak which last night had impressed her by its size. Shadows have a way  of magnifying, but not in this case. The tree was enormous. It stood  there, still with a lot of green from the late summer, and looking as  though it could have seen Strongbow's Norman knights ride through the  Kingdom of Leinster.

'Have you any idea how old it is?' Her eyes had intercepted an inquiring glance from Rory's.

'At a guess three or four hundred. Ask me when it's down and I'll work it out for you.'

'Down?' She was shocked. 'You're not going to fell it?' His gaze had  narrowed. Haidee Brown often said the wrong thing, but it seemed that  this time her plea had been appreciated.

'Not willingly,' he said shortly.

By unvoiced consent, they had both stopped walking.

'I still have your autograph.' He held out his right hand and she saw on  the brown of one figure a pucker of white scar. It made no sense but,  as with the mention of Mother Mary, two and two went together this time  with a thrill of revulsion. 'And mine is still there for posterity.'

She looked puzzled.

' "Oh, Rosalind," ' he told her. ' "These trees shall be my books



And in their barks my thoughts I'll character." '



Now she had it, now she knew what to look for. It was there, further along the trunk. One word, cut irregularly. Suzanne.

'Before I knew better, of course,' he added quietly.

It seemed sad. Disillusionment was always sad. The mantle of Suzanne  demanded that she remain defiant or at best oblivious, but she wanted to  say something gentle.

His eyes raked her quizzically: 'Nowadays, if I catch anyone marking my trees they're for it!'

Marking trees-he was regretful only for the tree. And he had got her feeling sorry for him. Confound the man!

'Oh, honestly,' she expostulated. 'Just because you read Shakespeare...'  ridiculously, even that was annoying. He was emerging as a man of taste  and culture, it would have been easier to write him off as a barbarian.  'Anyway, it's crooked. I like my name to look nice!'

It had not seemed a particularly forceful remark, but clearly its effect  was strong. He backed. 'Not again, please. That's what you said the  last time and I'll carry the mark to my grave!'

A stillness seemed to have fallen. Her reason told her that the remark  was the first thing you'd think of when you saw uneven letters, but  something more potent than reason made her suddenly chill. What little  ghost stood between them putting words into her mouth?

'How old were we then?' she creased her forehead.

'About ten, and we loathed each other. I hacked out your name in the  first place because I hoped you might get into a row for it. You hoisted  me with my own petard, or should I say, stuck me with my own penknife?'

It certainly obliterated romance.

'I wonder why we ever married.' She was thinking aloud, forgetting how dangerous it could be.

'You wonder?' he echoed. 'That's my privilege and, believe me, I use it  often. Why did I marry you, Suzanne? How could I have been so dumb?'

It was too much. Or else she had gone too deeply into the part she was  playing. 'I suppose you couldn't have-wanted me? I didn't exactly see  you hating me last night...'

His face checked her. Twelve hours ago as he'd stood by her bed it had  changed to a kind of compassion. The same look was in it now.

'Watch it, girl. You're getting in too deep.'

Kindness, she allowed, kindness after a fashion. He had seen her frayed  nerves and caught the note of passion in her voice. She did not deny it,  but as she followed him across the lawn to the steps and the golden  cushion of Brand's slumbering form she felt like a child who had been  well and truly slapped.





CHAPTER FIVE



A fortnight flashed by. There was Toby in a Prussian blue sweater at the  badger's sett showing her first the bedding which the occupier had  dragged out that morning and then the neatly dug latrines: 'That's where  he goes to the jacks!' There was Brand who liked to get himself in the  picture, scooping Rory's pen off the table with a crescent paw, trotting  proudly home with catches of fieldmice, stalking through the leaves,  his round eyes popping with excitement. Where had this been all his  life? Truth to tell, there was a certain similarity between Brand's eyes  and Haidee's.                       
       
           



       



She would sit at the glass in Suzanne's shabby bedroom lifting her brown  switch and turning her head, first left, then right. Without spectacles  her eyes under their high arched brows were round and startled. The  frightened rather than the frighteners. So what could Rory have meant?

She looked in the glass more often during that fortnight than she had  done in the whole of her life. She looked-bright-eyed with her hair  tucked up in the pom-pom cap he disliked; in floral pyjamas with her  hair brushed and floating; coated and gloved for church with her switch  pinned into a coil. But, though she lived in a forest, she was no Snow  White. The mirror did not speak her name. It put it as plain as the nose  on her face. 'If that's gorgeous my name's not Davy.'

The days shortened and curtains had to be drawn and lights lit for the  evening meal. After this Toby's lesson books were spread at one end of  the table and Rory's work programmes and account books at the other.

'He never used to do his work here,' Toby confided, half pleased, half apprehensive. 'He always went back to the office.'

'Well, perhaps it's too cold there now,' Haidee returned.

'No. It's heated,' he asserted. 'Oh, gosh, I s'pose he's checking on me.'

Perhaps so. Haidee knew only that the house seemed happy, and it pleased  her to think that, doomed as it was, its last months should find it  echoing to laughter and song.