Jane Gardam - The Man in the Wooden Hat

“I suppose — I can’t remember if we heard or not. I did write. I sent them a replacement of something I broke. I can’t remember. .”

A very old man appeared out of the hedge and crossed the road in front of them. He was carrying an axe.

“Elisabeth — what is it now?”

“I don’t know. I just have the feeling I’ve been here before. A shuddering.”

“When people say that,” said Edward, “nobody ever knows what to reply, like when they tell you their dreams. Here’s a notice saying ‘The Donheads,’ whatever they are. St. Ague is the one we’re after. ‘ Ague ’—what a name! Here’s the hill marked on the map she sent. It could be quite soon now. What a maze.”

“I think it’s to the left. No, we’ve passed it. It was that double driveway, wasn’t it, dividing left and right? Down and up.”

“No,” he said. “We have to pass a church first. It says on the map. Here’s a church. Here’s Privilege Lane. Oh, yes indeed! Very nice! Trust old Willy! Wrought-iron gates! — oh,” and “Hello Willy! What a marvellous place!”

(Mutual exclamations of joy and Willy at once takes Elisabeth up and away from the house to the top of the garden and Edward takes the luggage while Dulcie goes to make one of her soufflés.)

“What a view, what a view, Willy! What a white and golden view! And Uncle Willy, we’ll never call you Pastry any more. You’re brown as a nut. It must be Thomas Hardy.”

“Thomas Hardy was always going up to London to the theatre but I never leave the Donheads,” and he began to totter back to the house, Elisabeth pretending that she needed his arm when they both knew that he was needing hers. He said, “We have a surprise for you. Two surprises. One is Fiscal-Smith.”

“Oh, Willy, no! How could you?”

“Motoring through looking for a cheap bed and breakfast, he says. Then, miraculously, remembering us.”

“But have you room for us all? You said Eddie and I could stay with you tonight.”

“Yes. Of course. Vast great place, this, in spite of the thatch and the button windows. Someone else is staying, too. Our second surprise: Susan. From Massachusetts. She says she’s not seen you since she was at school.”

“No. She hasn’t. Is she alone?”

“Don’t ask. Husband trouble in Boston. She’s walked out on him and the child. She doesn’t say much. We just let her thump around the countryside on a local horse. We’re used to it. Always doing it.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Willy.”

“Aha — there’s Fiscal-Smith at the front door! The wedding party is complete.”

The table in the palatial cottage was laid for a pre-war, middle-class English afternoon tea. There were dozens of postage-stamp sandwiches, brown and white bread and butter (transparent), home-made jams and seed cake. Dulcie sat behind a silver teapot.

Susan, however, was crouched in a corner on a rocking chair near the fire and her baleful eyes surveyed them. She had a mug of tea in one hand and was barefoot. As Betty and Filth came into the room her mouth was wide open ready to receive the slice of cake that was approaching it via her other hand.

“Susan,” cried Elisabeth, as was required.

“Oh, hullo.”

Filth nodded curtly. He was surprised to find her familiar, and a shadow from his schooldays passed before his eyes. Another girl at someone’s house during the war. Isobel Ingoldby. Tall Isobel, with her loping golden beauty, and her dark moods. He had thought that women were less disagreeable now. He watched this one bleakly. Oh, thank God for Betty.

Everyone sat down.

Later came dinner and Susan ate from a private menu. Again, for Filth, the great wave of memory and — well, actually — desire.

The next day Susan was not about at breakfast but passed the window later upon a steaming horse, not turning her head.

Fiscal-Smith left early. He was aiming to drop in on another old colleague, known to have a spare bedroom, who lived near York. “Have you looked around up there, Filth? Decided where to settle? You are coming Home, I hope? It would be good to have you nearby.”

But were they coming Home? They had certainly worked at it. Filth had prepared an itinerary as thoroughly as he had done for their expeditions to Java and Japan during Bar vacations. They had borrowed a tiny flat in the Temple as a base, hired a good car, bought maps and guidebooks and set forth anti-clockwise, up the Great North Road (now called the A1 and much faster than it used to be.) They by-passed Cambridge because it was so cold and not Oxford, and proceeded towards East Anglia which seemed colder still, and windy. They stayed a night with a delightful ex-judge who had taken up poetry and market gardening. They met his friends who were all, it seemed, growers of kale. They explored the eastern seaboard but Filth found the sea colourless and threatening, and Betty found the glittering churches too big for flower arrangements.

They drove on, up to York which was impersonal and then up to the Roman Wall where they had Hong Kong friends whose bodies and minds had shrivelled against the climate. Approaching the Border country they surveyed Scotland across the lapping grey waters of the Solway. “If our genes are here,” said Filth, “we ought at least to give Scotland a try.”

So they stayed at a grand hotel on Loch Lomond and visited another retired lawyer from the Far Eastern circuit, Glasgow-born and seeming ashamed of ever having been away. He was full of a Case to do with some local mountains that had been stacked with warheads in the seventies. They were all there, oh yes. He himself was not for Aldermaston. Always good to have defences. Bugger the Russians. They wondered if his mind had been touched, perhaps by radiation.

They stepped back from Scotland like people on the brink of a freezing plunge without towels, and turned south-east towards the Lake District and Grasmere because Betty had liked Wordsworth at school. Pilgrims queued outside Dove Cottage and the lakeside was thick with Japanese. They felt foreigners.

“There must be something wrong with us,” she said. “We are jaundiced has-beens,” and they stopped off at a roadside pub as pretty as a calendar to think about it. The pub was just outside the delectable little town of Appleby. It was 1.30 P.M. and they asked for lunch. “ This time of day?” said the proprietor. “Dinner here’s at twelve o’clock! Sandwiches ? You can’t ask him to make sandwiches after one o’clock. He needs his rest.”

So back south. They agreed, unspokenly, not to look at Wales where Filth had suffered as a child, nor Lancashire and west Cumberland where at his prep school — though they never talked about it — they both knew he had been unbelievably, almost unbearably, happy. A time sacred and unrepeatable.

Down the M6 they drove, and the air warmed. They spent a night in Oxford but did not look anybody up. (Too cliquey. Too long ago.) They drifted south towards Pastry Willy. And, for Betty, a dream garden that had probably never existed. She didn’t explain this. She wore new armour now.

And then the hen in the tree and a man with an axe.

Before they left Privilege Hill Betty said, “I’ve remembered, the place I stayed when I was convalescing was called Dexters. At least the people were called Dexter. D’you remember them? From Ebury Street? They were actors.” But Dulcie and Willy, waving from the wrought-iron gate, said there was nobody they’d heard of called Dexter in the Donheads.

“Goodbye,” they all called out to each other. “Thank you. Oh! How we’ll miss you,” and Willy took Elisabeth’s bright sweet face between his hands and kissed it.

Susan went back to Boston the following week and, leaving, said, “Those Feathers — I can’t stand them. Never could. So bloody smug . And politically ignorant . And culturally dead ! And childless. And selfish. And so bloody, bloody rich .”