The House Above the River, page 2
A small grey fishing boat passed him, coming down river from Tréguier, making for the hard at Penguerrec. There were a man and a boy in it, who stared at him as they passed, but did not speak to him until he called to ask them if he was in a good position where he had anchored. The man nodded, and grinned widely. As he chugged on, Giles heard him say something in the Breton dialect to the boy, who shouted with laughter.
The tide that had carried them into the river early that morning, had turned at eleven, and was now near the bottom of the ebb. The fall was about thirty feet, so that the banks now seemed very high. The landing-stage, Giles saw, was built in three sections, one fixed, and two floating. As the latter sank with the water, iron ladders appeared, leading vertically from one to the next. The floating sections moved up and down on iron rings round posts, pontoon fashion. The ladders must be slimy and slippery when the water sank away from them, he thought, though by now they had dried in the sun. He understood why the boats fastened to the stage had been tied to the section furthest out in the river. This part was still floating, though the launch appeared to be aground.
Giles went below to sort out his charts and put them away. Presently he heard a shout, and going on deck saw Tony and Phillipa waving to him from the stage.
There was a girl with them. He saw that she was slim and tall, nearly as tall as Tony, and that she had fair hair, glinting in the sun like the leaves of the trees behind her. He was too far off to see her face clearly.
He stood up in the cockpit and waved back, hoping his crew had not asked the stranger aboard. He had come to Brittany to enjoy sailing and scenery and to get away from the exactions of his work. Not to begin a social round. He had no objection to visiting old friends on other yachts; he was sure to meet some of them in the course of the trip. But strange girls, provincial French at that, and on the very first day … !
Tony and Phillipa had some difficulty getting down the second ladder with the shopping. It seemed to be still very slippery. They had more difficulty getting the dinghy away from the stage. Their weight sank it in the mud, for the water was very shallow where they had tied up. The fair-haired girl climbed lightly down the ladder to shove them off, and then stood for a minute or two watching as they, moved away. Phillipa called goodbye, and the girl answered in an unmistakably English voice, and turning quickly, went back up both ladders and disappeared among the trees.
“Who was that?” Giles asked, when his crew were on board again.
“We met her in the village,” said Phillipa. “She’s English.”
“So I heard,” said Giles.
“Her cousin owns the house—it’s a small château, really, in the woods there. And the landing-stage is his. We ran into her first on the road to the village.”
“It was rather funny,” Tony explained. “We asked her in our very limited French if she knew where we could get milk and things, and she told us, also in French. Then a bit later, when we’d got everything in the village and were coming back, and had just turned off into the wood, we met her again.”
“She told us we were trespassing, and we tried to explain, but our French didn’t run to it, and then she laughed and said she was English, too.”
“She allowed you to go on trespassing, I gather?” Giles suggested.
“Yes, indeed. She seemed quite pleased we’d come. She took us back up the road to the main gate of the house, and showed us a path from it that joins the one we took from the landing-stage, which incidentally peters out half-way up the hill. She came right down with us.”
“So I saw,” said Giles, sourly. A provincial French girl would have been bad enough, but a fellow-countrywoman was the end.
“You couldn’t have seen very clearly,” said Phillipa, “or you wouldn’t say it like that. She’s terribly pretty, isn’t she, Tony? Really, quite beautiful.”
“She most certainly is. I’d have asked her to come off for tea on board, only she wouldn’t have been able to get back comfortably for several hours. I thought we were going to have to wait, ourselves. We three on board the dinghy would have stuck.”
“Tides have many uses,” said Giles.
Tony and Phillipa exchanged glances, but said nothing. The latter began to sort out the food she had bought.
Later in the evening, Giles said, “I suppose you thanked that girl for letting you use her stage?”
“Her cousin’s stage,” said Tony.
“Same thing.”
“Not really. She doesn’t live here. Only staying the summer.”
“Really? Had she any right, then, to give you permission to go through the grounds?”
Phillipa interrupted.
“The cousin and his wife are away in Paris. I imagine she’s in charge. Until tonight, that is. She said they’d be back.”
She did not add that Susan Brockley had invited them all to the château for coffee in the morning. That could wait until the skipper was in a better mood.
“I see.” Giles’s manner expressed total indifference. “Not that it matters,” he said. “We’ll run up to Tréguier in the morning and have a look round and lunch at a place I know where they give you a damned good meal. Then on to Lézardrieux in the afternoon.”
But the next morning they woke to find Shuna wrapped round by a fog much denser than the one through which they had entered the river the day before. It lifted a little towards noon, and they could see the landing-stage dimly in the mist. But by then it was too late to carry out any of the plan Giles had put before them so confidently the night before.
Chapter Two
“I’ll have to do some more shopping,” said Phillipa. “We may be stuck here for days. Susan told us the fog banks often lie over the sea for a week at a time, when it’s brilliant weather on land.”
Giles, who knew this only too well, merely said, “We’ll row down to the hard.”
“But we can’t see it.”
“We can find it.”
“What’s the objection to the landing-stage?” Tony asked. “We’ve got permission.”
“Not from the owner.”
“If his cousin has given us leave I don’t suppose he’ll be surly about it. Why should he? Fellow-countrymen and all.”
The argument continued for a few minutes, but was settled when Phillipa said, “If we don’t go soon we shall never get back in time for lunch. Anyway, the tide will be much too strong to row against corning back from the hard. So let’s get going, and use the stage.”
She stepped down into the dinghy with the shopping bags and milk can, and the men followed. Tony took the oars and set off for the landing-stage. Giles only said, “The tide is flooding till twelve noon,” and left it at that.
They met no one on the walk up through the wood. As they mounted, the mist cleared, and the sun began to stream through the branches. When they came to a fork in the path, Phillipa pointed to the left.
“That goes up to the house,” she said. “It gets wider a bit further on, with rhododendrons and azalea bushes, and marvellous hydrangeas in flower. Very wild, though. We didn’t see anything like a real garden, did we, Tony?”
“If you mean a lawn, no. But quite a lot of roses.”
“What about this path?” Giles asked, pointing to the right.
“That comes out on the road. It’s the one we went up yesterday. It sort of peters out further up, and the brambles are wicked.”
Giles strode ahead on the right hand path. The delay in the cruise was infuriating, but there was nothing to be done about it. If the fog lifted he could take Shuna up the river on the engine later in the afternoon. In the meantime there was this village to explore. A meagre substitute for the day he had planned. But he accepted frustration. He had come to believe it was inevitable.
The path brought them into a rough field bordered by a bramble hedge. Beyond this a gate led into a narrow road. They climbed the gate and turned left towards the village.
“You see,” said Phillipa, pulling off her cardigan. “Bright clear sky, no wind, no mist. Glorious summer.”
“Hellishly hot,” grumbled Tony.
“Take off that thick sweater, then.”
“I haven’t got a shirt on.”
“Penguerrec won’t mind a naked torso. Just another mad Englishman. Anyway, Giles is respectable enough for two.”
Dear Giles, she thought, glancing sideways at him. He always manages to look marvellous in any circumstances. He was wearing fawn slacks and a thin russet-coloured shirt, that went admirably with his brown face and nearly black hair. No wonder the village girls turned to stare after him as they passed. Such a pity he never even wanted to speak to a woman if he could help it. Such a pity: such a waste.
The road dipped to the river, going round in a wide curve. They dropped back into the mist, through which the low roofs of the village appeared dimly.
“I want to get round to the hard,” said Phillipa, “and see if I can find some lobsters and what they call seafruit.”
“Judging by what you get in Tréguier,” said Giles, “you ought to find plenty of oysters and such. You go ahead. I must send off some postcards, if I can find any. Did you come across a post office yesterday?”
“Further on,” said Phillipa. “All the shops are in one wide street. The church is at the end of it. The post office is just beyond the shops. A grey front, with a few notices on it.”
“Right,” said Giles. “Are you going with Pip, Tony?”
“I’ll go to carry back the homards,” he answered.
“More likely to be langoustines,” Giles told him. “Or spider crabs. You’ll probably be given them alive, too.”
“Then I think I’ll stick to oysters,” said Phillipa, shuddering.
She and Tony turned off along a road that seemed to lead on towards the sea, and Giles went up, climbing again into the sunshine.
He was writing the addresses on his postcards in the post office, when he heard a clear voice, in an unmistakably English accent, asking for stamps. He looked up. The girl with the shining hair, and it still shone, he noted, even in the subdued light of the post office, stood beside him, struggling with the currency.
Phillipa had said she was pretty, even beautiful, he remembered. She was not, by his standard. But then his standard had been fixed so long ago. Fixed for good; for bad, really. He ought to change it, by force of will, if possible. Phillipa said the girl was beautiful. Her hair was yellow, she probably had blue eyes to go with it, the cheek he could see was a clear gold-brown, the make-up pleasing. All right, then, she was pretty.
With a violent recoil from such a conclusion, he turned back to his postcards, but when he looked up again, she was still there, facing him now. He noticed, with pleased surprise, that the eyes were not blue, but amber, with dark lashes. She really was rather lovely.
She said, quite simply and naturally, “I saw you yesterday, didn’t I, from the landing-stage? On your boat in the river?”
“Yes,” he found himself saying, just as easily. “I saw you, too.”
“It’s very thick again today, isn’t it?”
“Unfortunately. I wanted to get on to Lézardrieux this afternoon.”
She opened her eyes very wide.
“But you won’t try it, will you?”
He shook his head, smiling at her evident concern.
“My cousin tells such awful tales of the things that happen to boats among the rocks round this part of the coast,” she went on, flushing a little. “But of course you know all about it.”
“I’ve been in here twice before,” he said. By this time his postcards were stamped and he had paid for the stamps and was ready to go. There was no need to talk to this girl any longer. Perhaps just a word of thanks for the use of the landing-stage.
She accepted his formal little speech gravely. This should have been the end of the conversation, but he found himself saying, “I must pick up my crew at the hard. They are on an oyster hunt.”
“Oh,” she said. “But they won’t find any there. I mean, the fishermen bring everything up to the village. It all goes into Tréguier in a van that comes out every day. Unless you order in advance.”
“Then we shan’t be lucky. I’d better go down and find them and tell them so. How do I get there?”
She began to explain, and he realised that it was more complicated than he had thought, with the mist making landmarks invisible.
“It doesn’t sound as if I’ll find them,” he said, and added, on a sudden impulse, “unless you will very kindly show me.”
She looked at her watch.
“Yes,” she said, with the same straightforward simplicity. “I’d like to see them again. I told Henry, that’s my cousin, Henry Davenport, about them, and the boat, and he said it was quite all right about the landing-stage.”
“Don’t bother to come if you haven’t time, Miss Davenport.”
“Oh,” she laughed. “I’ve all the time in the world, really I don’t have to do anything. Francine, Henry’s housekeeper, is too marvellous. There are maids, as well. It’s unbelievable, after England. Quite feudal.”
They began to walk away down the village street. When they came to the end of it and moved off along the steep cobbled road to the hard, she said, as if there had been no break in the conversation. “And my name isn’t Davenport, it’s Brockley, Susan Brockley. Henry is my mother’s nephew, though he’s about twelve years older than me.”
They walked down the hill out of the mist of the village into a thick all-embracing fog. Guided by Susan, there was no difficulty in finding the hard, but Giles began to wonder if his crew had found it, and in any case how he was going to find them. For though he and the girl wandered up and down the grey stones, and though they asked several of the fishermen if they had met two foreigners trying to buy shellfish, they met with no response but brief shakes of the head and muttered negatives. Only one man condescended to speak to them, and he and Giles recognised one another.
“You passed me last evening, going down the river,” Giles told him, in French.
“You wanted to know if you were safe where you’d anchored. There is not much danger just there, in the river” the man grinned, implying a double meaning.
“I didn’t want to go aground,” Giles explained, wondering a little.
“One always takes the ground.”
“With ‘legs’, yes. I have no ‘legs’ for my yacht. We don’t need them in the English harbours.”
The man grinned again, pityingly. Giles and Susan turned away.
“No good telling them we don’t have thirty-foot tides on our side of the Channel,” he said. “They expect to dry out here.”
She did not answer and they walked back up the hill in silence.
“I seem to have missed Tony and Pip altogether,” Giles said when they had walked the length of the village street, inquired at the shops, and drawn a complete blank.
“They probably gave it up and went back to the landing-stage,” Susan suggested.
“More than likely. I’d better get back there, myself. In any case it’s getting on for lunch time.”
“I’ll show you the quickest path,” she said.
They went into the grounds of the château by the main gates, and along a broad drive, marked by the wheels of cars, and bordered by a generous crop of weeds. The drive led them in a wide sweep round and up the hill. Below, on their right, the mist lay thickly in what seemed to Giles to be a clearing in a hollow. He pointed it out to his companion.
“Actually it’s that creek off the river,” she answered. “The one that goes back from the harbour. Very shallow at low tide. Almost all a sort of muddy sand, which is supposed to be dangerous. There’s a notice Henry put up, but of course the village people wouldn’t think of bathing there at all. I like it, but it’s rather a weird sort of place.”
They went on, climbing more steeply now, but the drive had been cut into the slope, and the way was not as steep as the path Giles had used earlier. The mist was left behind again, the sun shone brightly through the overhanging trees. But not with the clear, heartening warmth he had welcomed when he came out on the road with Tony and Phillipa. The air of the drive was motionless, hot, oppressive, smelling of damp and decay. The whole approach to the house had an uncomfortable air of neglect, of effort exhausted.
They walked round another bend into a broad sweep of rough gravel. The house, half in shade, stood on the far side.
It was quite an attractive place, Giles thought. The two small conical towers, one at each end, were in the tradition of the châteaux; the warm yellow-grey stone of the walls carried on this style, though the size and general appearance of the rest of the building did not suggest any great age.
But the ubiquitous air of neglect hung over the house. Tall weeds pressed against the foot of the stone walls, filling what might have been flower beds on either side of the door. A climbing rose, unpruned for years, covered the corner of the house. Its weight had broken it away from the wall and new shoots had thrust their way into a laurel bush nearby, and were festooned across a path that led from the drive round the hidden corner. Giles noticed, with amused disgust, that a new path had been trodden in the grass round the laurel bush in order to avoid the obstructing rose.
He saw that Susan was watching him intently.
“Your cousin has a very big place to keep up,” he said.
She shook her head sadly, understanding what he meant.
“He doesn’t. I wish he would. But he’s been so worried …”
Giles looked at his watch, and said quietly, “You must tell me where I go from here. Tony and Pip will be wild if I’m late for lunch. Pip has great plans for it.”
“I don’t think they will,” Susan exclaimed, in quite a different voice. “I think they are here at the moment, talking to Henry!”
She pointed towards the house, and Giles, who was trying to find a path from the drive, turned back again. As his eyes swept the windows in turn, looking for his friends, his attention was drawn upwards by the sudden movement of a curtain. For a few seconds a face, chalk-white, staring, looked out at him. Then it was gone, leaving him breathless with shock.
