Jane Gardam - The Man in the Wooden Hat

“ Like to !”

“It is yours to use as long as you like. I am in touch with dear Eddie’s clerk. He will make all the arrangements. Why do you weep?”

“With joy and disbelief. Oh, Delilah, it’s like a musical!”

“There is, I fear, no music at our dacha,” she said, “except the music of the rooks and the morning chorus of a myriad other species of feathered creature; the pizzicato of the rain and the crashing tympani and singing strings of the west wind. There’s no electricity, dear, no running water and no abominable telephone.”

“Oh, it’s not abominable! How else could we be talking?

“Milk and bread are delivered daily to the lane — a little climb up from the back of the house. Also the daily papers. You can give them lists of groceries and you will pay in the basket provided before you go home. No one will disturb you. Dexter has a splendid theatrical library, if a trifle damp, and there is the evening softness of lamplight.”

“Delilah — I’m a bit potty at the moment. I’ve had surgery and I’m still full of anaesthetic. I’ve just had a hallucination. Is this another?”

“Hallucination, dear? No. Hallucination demands vision. Nor am I an aural manifestation. The return fare from Waterloo to Tisbury Junction is modest and you will be met. Contact Eddie’s clerk. Bring a wrap for the early mornings so that you can walk in the dew. And an insect repellent. You will be quite alone.”

“Are we going to meet there, Delilah — dear, beloved Delilah? I’m so bloody lonely.”

“Very good for you, dear. And I hardly think we’ll meet. My duties to Dexter are very onerous. He sends his love. We shall possibly meet again one day, of course. These things may happen. I don’t suppose”—her voice trailed away to nothing, then came back like a thread on a lute string—“you’ve heard anything about the gardens? They haven’t cut them down, have they? My London forest trees?”

She said, “No, no. I’m sure not,” and the line clicked shut.

But the phone number? She couldn’t call Delilah back. She must telephone Chambers. She must think of timetables on the Southern Railway. She must make lists of supplies. She must phone Edward. She must think of supper.

In the fridge she found milk and food, and on the table yet another bouquet of flowers from Edward and a note from the Inn with the times of Sunday services at the Temple church. Then the phone began to ring again and again, friends from near and far. The world grew smaller and smaller and so crammed with kind enquiries that she left the receiver off. Kind and rowdy, the city surged up to her from the river and the Embankment and the Strand, rich and glorious. Tomorrow she would be coping with rooks.

Then she saw, in the mail on the desk, a packet from Hong Kong lying beside the cards and she took it across the room and slowly and carefully opened it. Inside was a short double string of pearls with a diamond clasp and a note saying, He is better. He will live. Return these at your peril. For ever V. PS: Where did you go?

It was a train ride of pure celebration. A train ride like childhood’s. Edward’s Chambers saw her on to the platform and right into the reserved seat for Tisbury Junction. The clerks gave her chocolates and told her that there would be a taxi waiting. At Tisbury she climbed out upon the single-track platform and sat on a seat in the sun and, like an old film, a man came along and said in a country voice, “Taxi, ma’am? Let me take your case.”

He drove along the lanes and she saw a tree above a hedge like a hen on a nest, then a long stone wall, and in a gap in the wall she looked down upon a dell and a massive stone chimney pot attached to something unseen. The driver and the bag went ahead down the slope until they were on a level with the chimney pot and looking at an almost vertical track below and a thatched roof.

“I’ll never get the case down there. This must be the back. There must be a front way somewhere.”

“What shall we do?”

“I’ll have a try.”

He trundled and slithered, Elisabeth following, and they arrived at a paved yard and a back door. She paid him.

“You O.K. here, miss?”

“Yes,” she said, liking the “miss.” “Thank you,” and leaving the luggage in the grass she went looking for the front door where she had been told there would be a key under a mat. She could find neither door nor key and the silent valley beyond watched. In an outhouse which was an earth closet there was a huge black iron key and she thought she would try it in the back door, and set off further round the gentle, sleeping house and came to a front door with a Yale key in it, waiting to be turned. Inside were dark rooms and the smell of damp books. She saw furniture under dust sheets, a paraffin lamp with a cloudy globe, a box of matches alongside and a fresh loaf on the table.

It was not yet dusk and so, after standing a kettle on a black stove that seemed to be warm, she walked outside again into the garden.

It was a glade cut out from woodland. The stretch of grass that led to more faraway trees was not so much lawn as meadow where vanished trees were waiting somewhere to reclaim their home. She felt the stirring of life under the grass and saw spirals of bindweed standing several feet high seeking some remembered support. They swayed as if they were growing under water. There was nothing more, only the dwindling path, the dwindling light, the pearly quiet sky.

She returned to the house, removed the kettle, found a staircase behind a cupboard door, reached a bedroom with wooden walls and smelling of cedar trees. She opened the window and looked at the glimmer of the evening and without even a drink of water, without locking the house or turning a key or taking off her coat, she lay down on the patchwork quilt and listened to the end of the day. Soon all the small sounds stopped, and she slept.

It was an eerie dawn, blowy and cloudy, and she had no idea where she was. When she remembered, she listened for the rooks but they were silent. She was afraid for a while that yesterday’s journey belonged to someone else. Then, rolling from the bed, walking to the window, she saw that this was a strange place but in some way she knew it. The window looked at a wall of vegetation so close to the glass that she could stretch and touch if she opened it. She saw the roof of a shed that must be the earth closet. Yet she had remembered golden space.

And then she remembered that she had chosen the tiny back bedroom to sleep in. The other room with its mighty feather bed had seemed too intimately a part of the Dexters’ lives to disturb. She went downstairs, dragged the black kettle across the wood-burning stove until it was over the hotplate — still hot. More wood was needed and when she looked, there it was. She found a tin teapot and a tea caddy that said it was a present from Blackpool. A jug of milk stood in a bowl of water on the pantry floor. Across the top, it had a muslin cloth weighted down with little coloured beads. The pantry stones were cool under her bare feet.

She carried her tea with her towards a door — the cottage was shadowy — which she pushed open to reveal the stretch of meadow-lawn cleared from the forest. The trees around were wildly tossing and the grass was wet with dew. A fox stood still in the middle of the space, staring at her with black eyes, interested in an alteration of the scene. A dead bird hung down heavy and soft on either side of the fox’s mouth. It turned tiptoe on its black feet and was gone. Then the wind dropped and lemon-coloured light soaked over the garden and the river spread wide to the horizon where above the far trees a triangle of hilltop was crowned with a knot of trees like a garland.