The Singing Tree Read online

  To his credit however, whatever distaste he felt privately, the owner of the house did not show it. He said levelly, ‘I am not engaged to be married, and my father thought it inappropriate to use his title in America. As far as the legal side of the situation is concerned, I believe it’s possible that, as the property is entailed, your option might have been valid only while my father was alive, Mr Dursley.’

  Flower saw her grandfather’s neck begin to swell, his ruddy face become more purple.

  She said hastily, ‘I think we should have tea now. There’ll be plenty of time to talk later. I assume you are spending the night here, Sir... I don’t know your first name.’

  ‘Roderick.’

  ‘Which was your room when you lived here, Sir Roderick?’ she enquired.

  ‘The third one along the west corridor. It has a stuffed leopard in it.’

  ‘I expect you’d like to sleep there tonight, although I’m afraid the leopard is now in the attics. It’s not everyone’s idea of a fun thing to have in a bedroom,’ she said with a grin.

  For the first time she saw a responsive gleam of amusement in the vivid dark-lashed blue eyes.

  ‘No, I dare say you’re right—although, when I was a schoolboy, I thought it the finest thing in the house. It was shot by one of my great-uncles in the days when killing wild animals was an acceptable activity.’

  ‘The thing I like best of all is the black and gold chair with swan’s-neck arms,’ she told him. ‘It’s in my room. I don’t sit on it. The caning is brittle with age. I just like to have it there and look at it.’

  She was trying to establish a rapport. Her instinct told her that bullying—her grandfather’s favourite weapon—would never work with Roderick Anstruther. He would have to be persuaded to change his mind or, at worst, to agree to a compromise.

  ‘There’s no need to put me up. I should like to look over the place, if I may, but I can stay at the pub,’ he said.

  ‘They aren’t doing bed and breakfast any more, and we shouldn’t dream of allowing you to stay anywhere but here. When did you arrive in England?’ In her desire to keep the conversation going while her grandfather’s hot temper cooled Flower’s next question came without thinking. ‘Did you come over on Concorde or by the longer flight?’

  He said drily, ‘I managed to get a stand-by ticket for the night flight... if you know what a standby is, Miss Dursley.’

  For the first time since she had entered the room he gave her a brief but comprehensive scrutiny. As his cool eyes swept from her newly done hair to the toes of her Italian boots she knew intuitively that he had her pegged as a decorative but empty-headed rich girl, pampered from birth and with little idea how the other half lived.

  Her own hackles rising a fraction, she said crisply, ‘Of course. For anyone travelling alone, stand-bys are a marvellous saving. Did you have to wait long?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘Even so, the flight itself is tiring. I remember being terribly jet lagged when we came back from Palm Beach on a night flight.’

  ‘You probably ate the meal and watched the movie. I slept all the way over.’

  ‘All the comings and goings didn’t disturb you? And the lack of space—especially for someone of your size?’

  ‘Nothing disturbs a moonlighter when he gets a chance to get his head down. I could sleep on a crowded sidewalk.’

  Although his years in America had not altered his English accent, they had obviously made him adopt American usage.

  ‘What’s a moonlighter?’ she asked.

  ‘Someone who supplements his income with a second job. Here, I believe, it’s more often a means of evading tax than a financial necessity as it has been in my case.’

  Abel said, ‘If you’re that hard-pressed for money I’m damned if I see how you think you can live here. I reckon you’ve no idea what it costs. The ‘eating alone will set you back six thousand a year, never mind the bill for repairs. It’s a constant expense, a place this size. You need my kind of income to live in a mansion these days. Otherwise you’re sunk before you start.’

  Sir Roderick listened in silence. While he had been conversing with Flower he had done what a good host should have done, although it would never have occurred to Abel to wait on anyone. He had taken her grandfather’s cup and saucer and a plate to him, and offered the sandwiches to him before replacing them near Flower and helping himself to two or three.

  Now he sat quietly, eating and drinking, while her grandfather tried to hector him; and, though his tanned face expressed nothing but civil attention to what was being said to him, she sensed that he was as implacable in his determination to repossess the house as her grandfather was to hang on to it.

  ‘Perhaps you’ve got it in mind to open the place to the public?’ Abel said presently. ‘That’s no simple solution, let me tell you. I’ve been into the matter. I know what I’m talking about. You need about fifty thousand visitors a year to break even, never mind make a profit. I doubt if you’d get half that number, not without a lot of expensive advertising and investing in various attractions. A house of this size by itself doesn’t have enough drawing power.’

  He leaned forward, wagging his finger. ‘It’s estates that keep these big houses in the black, and here there is no estate. Your great grandfather sold most of it off to meet his losses from gambling, so I’m told. And what little was left of the land was got rid of later by your granddad. A right pair of fools, by the sound of it.’

  For the second time Flower caught a glimpse of a fleeting gleam of amusement in their visitor’s summer-sky eyes.

  ‘You don’t mince your words, Mr Dursley.’

  ‘No, I don’t... never did,’ agreed Abel. ‘I’m a plain-speaking man of the people, and proud of it. I never had any advantages when I was young. In fact, I’m not ashamed to say that I came from what in them days was called a slum. Inner cities, they call them now, but it’s the same thing. I knew nippers who went to school barefoot and I only had a pair of gym shoes... winter and summer

  As he warmed to his theme, Flower clenched her teeth on a yawn. She had heard all this many times before, and no story bore constant retelling.

  She began to think about what to wear for dinner. Not anything too elaborate, because for all she knew their guest might have brought nothing with him but a change of trousers and some clean shirts. All the same, his unexpected presence made her review her new clothes with an excitement which had been lacking earlier.

  Presently, taking advantage of one of her grandfather’s pauses for breath to offer him another cup of tea and anticipating, correctly, that their visitor would again wait on the old man, she said, ‘If you’ll give me your keys, Sir Roderick, I’ll go and arrange for your luggage to be brought in and have your bedroom prepared for you.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s not inconvenient?’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  He handed over an ignition key with the tag of the car-hire company.

  ‘And the keys to your luggage?’

  ‘I have only hand-luggage with me. My grip isn’t locked.’

  About an hour later, after their visitor had gone up to his room to have a shower before dinner, Abel said, ‘You know what he really wants, don’t you? Cheeky young whipper-snapper! Not to live ‘ere. Not on your nelly! What he wants is to screw some more cash out of me.’

  ‘You may be right about that, but he certainly isn’t a whipper-snapper, Dodo. He’s six-feet-two if he’s an inch. Anyway, considering the rate of inflation since the original lease was signed, surely he’s entitled to more money? Everything else has gone up. Why not our rent?

  ‘Because I’m already paying a king’s ransom to keep the place insured and repaired. It was close to the works, and convenient, but I reckon now I’d have done better to find a place I could buy. If it hadn’t been for the entail his father would have sold it to me.’

  The works he referred to were an enormous flour-mill surrounded by a complex of bakeries making every ki
nd of bread and pastry. It was the heart of his empire, and from it a fleet of vehicles, decorated with scenes of harvest fields, country kitchens and happy, healthy families, delivered his wares to supermarkets and shops all over England.

  His brand was a household name blazoned on roadside hoardings and on the advertisement panels in the London Underground, and brought into millions of homes by commercial television.

  ‘I haven’t made many mistakes in my life, but I reckon that was one of them,’ he went on in a sombre tone. ‘I’m too old now to want to move again.’

  ‘Do you think he may be right about the option to renew being invalidated by his father’s death?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’ll have it looked into first thing tomorrow.’

  He struggled to his feet from the deep armchair. Always a hearty trencherman, he was many pounds overweight and had been advised to reduce and to cut down on cigars and brandy. However, he chose to ignore his doctor’s advice and tonight it struck Flower that he looked somewhat under the weather.

  ‘Are you all right, Dodo?’ she asked concernedly. ‘You look awfully tired this evening.’

  ‘Had a poor night last night. There’s no need to fuss over me.’

  His tone was brusque, making her suspect that he didn’t feel well but wouldn’t admit it.

  ‘I’d sleep better if I had more confidence in your brother’s abilities,’ he added with a frown. ‘He’s not putting his back into the job. I can’t rely on his judgement.’

  This, too, was a recurring theme. Stephen Dursley, three years Flower’s senior, was the old man’s natural successor as chairman of the company. But Stephen was being forced to play a role for which he had no real aptitude.

  She was glad to escape to her bedroom and relax in a warm bubble-bath, with her hair piled inside a large lacy bath-cap.

  There were other things she wanted to think about rather than the battles between her brother and grandfather. She wondered how long Roderick Anstruther was planning to spend in England and if, though neither married nor engaged to be married, he had an unofficial partner.

  She didn’t know much about his mind yet, but physically he was undeniably attractive. Tall, well-built, with long-fingered hands which looked capable of crushing strength but which had handled the fragile porcelain tea-service with none of her grandfather’s clumsiness.

  Both Abel and Stephen were noisy men; bangers of doors, rattlers of teaspoons, shouters. She supposed she took after her mother who, according to Abel—who had never thought much of his daughter-in-law—had been ‘a bundle of nerves’. At any rate, Flower preferred quietness to clamour. The loud, aggressive way her brother drove his Porsche was always an irritation to her, and his liking, before his marriage, for the noisiest discos was something she had never shared.

  Revivals of schmaltzy numbers from the twenties and thirties appealed to her more than current hits. She adored ‘Begin the Beguine,’ sung by Julio Iglesias, the good-looking Spanish pop star who was also a qualified lawyer. This afternoon in the car she had heard another song she liked.

  She began to hum it, her quick ear for a tune making it easier to remember the melody than the lyric. But she could remember one line. ‘When we met, I felt my life begin...’

  And that, she realised with a start, was precisely what she was feeling at this moment. That just now, downstairs in the drawing-room, her life had entered a new phase.

  At last, when she had more or less given up hope of meeting anyone like him, the idol of her teenage fantasies had materialised; not merely a passable likeness to the man of her dreams, but a replica of him.

  How extraordinary that, after an interval of three hundred years, the genes which had shaped Piers Anstruther should be duplicated in his descendant. Or, perhaps, not as strange as it seemed. It could be that the vivid blue eyes and the hard lines of cheekbone and jaw had occurred in other Anstruthers whose faces had not been recorded by portrait-painter or miniaturist.

  ‘When we met, I felt my life begin...’ As she sang the snatch of the song she knew that she wasn’t in love yet. But she could be... tomorrow or next week... if Roderick Anstruther’s nature was as attractive as his looks.

  She was ready for love, ripe for it. Now that she had given up hankering after a career as a designer her only other ambition in life was to be married. With two or three adorable tots whose childhood she would make much happier than her own had been.

  Roy and Josie Dursley, her parents, had not been a well-matched couple. She could remember hearing their raised, angry voices in the sitting-room below her bedroom when they had lived in the suburbs.

  Before the accident in which they had lost their lives she had been at a day school. Afterwards her grandfather had transferred her to a boarding-school. For one term she had been miserably homesick. But the next term Emily had arrived and a friendship had blossomed which they still kept up with frequent letters.

  Emily had been in love with Andrew since she was thirteen years old, but he had not taken her seriously until she was eighteen. Now, when Flower went to stay with them, it made her ache with longing to experience the happiness they shared.

  Perhaps today, at long last, she was on the threshold of it.

  Steady on: you don’t know this man yet. He may be a prize rat, she warned herself as she rose from the winking froth of bubbles, her slim body still slightly golden from a week at Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera at the beginning of September.

  No longer as agonisingly potent as it had once been, the five-year-old memory of her first abortive love-affair sent a pang of remembered humiliation through her.

  The man had been a fortune-hunter, attracted by her grandfather’s millions, not by the naive girl who had fallen headlong in love with him.

  Although, looking back, she knew that her feeling for him had never been the deep lasting love she had thought it was at the time.

  Like many girls of that age, she had been more in love with love than with the man concerned. And afterwards, afraid of being hurt again, she had carefully avoided any serious entanglements.

  Until now...

  CHAPTER TWO

  No girl in her right mind, thought Flower as she puffed Rive Gauche into the air and twirled through the sensual vapour to envelop her hair and her person in an aura of delicious French fragrance, no girl with a particle of sense would not dress to the top of her bent when a man who might be the man had suddenly walked into her life.

  But, instead of wearing any of the new things she had bought in London, she went down to dinner in a pair of black velvet Italian knee-breeches several seasons old, and a shirt of hand-embroidered white voile with ruffles at the neck and wrists.

  The breeches were no longer high fashion but, worn with the sheerest of black tights and low-heeled black velvet slippers, they were still extremely becoming to her long slender legs and neat hips.

  Her grandfather didn’t like trousers of any sort on women. But the femininity of the shirt, both in fabric and style, counterbalanced the boyishness of the breeches. And what could be more traditionally seductive than a pair of black-stockinged ankles?

  When she joined the men in the drawing-room, her grandfather was wearing a burgundy velvet smoking-jacket with a foulard cravat in the open collar of a silk shirt.

  Roderick had changed into a well-cut suit of lightweight grey worsted. His shirt had blue and white stripes with a plain white collar, and his tie was dark blue silk. His hair was still slightly damp from the shower, and the darkness of his beard was less noticeable, suggesting that he had shaved. Polished soft black leather loafers had replaced the brown ones in which he had arrived.

  They were both holding the elaborately cut glasses Abel preferred to plain ones. His was a tumbler containing brandy and soda. Roderick’s was a glass of pale sherry.

  Her grandfather didn’t ask her what she would like to drink. He had grown up in a world where women waited on men, not the other way round. If he had noticed that in some circles men attended to
women’s comfort he had seen no reason to change the habits of a lifetime.

  Knowing this, she smiled at them both and went to the lavishly stocked cocktail cabinet to fix herself what would look like a pink gin but was actually the Angostura bitters and tonic without the gin.

  Flower enjoyed wine with her meals. She had avoided drinking spirits since the night when, seventeen and trying to appear sophisticated, she had asked her date for a vodka and tonic. Later she had found herself coping with a pass which would have been easier to handle if her wits had not been addled by what in retrospect she’d guessed had been two double vodkas.

  The lid of the cabinet was lined with mirror-glass in which she could see the two men standing on the old Persian rug in front of the log fire. She shot a swift glance at Roderick and saw he was watching her.

  He was still watching when she turned round and strolled to the fireside, pretending not to know he was looking at her.

  Her grandfather was holding forth on American foreign policy. Evidently he had decided to drop the subject of the lease for the time being.

  Flower seated herself in one of the Anstruthers’ Hepplewhite painted elbow chairs and, crossing her legs, gently swung one velvet-shod foot. The cut steel buckle, one of a pair she had found in a London antiques market and stitched on the slippers herself, glimmered in the rosy firelight and the subdued radiance given off by two silk-shaded lamps.

  She was striving to appear very calm, very much at her ease. But inwardly she was excited; intensely aware of the tall assured figure with a glass in one hand and the other thrust into the pocket of his trousers.

  ‘Are you interested in politics, Miss Dursley?’ he enquired a minute or two later when the flow of Abel’s opinions stopped while he swallowed some brandy.

  ‘Not in the least,’ she admitted.

  Long ago she had given up the pretence of being more—or less—intelligent than she was, or of liking things she didn’t like in the hope of pleasing the man of the moment. It was better to be true to oneself, she had found. Pretence was too much of an effort. It was never worth it.