Love Song Read online

  Crawford nodded.

  ‘He used to be part of the place, Miss Claire,’ Amy called back, before serving a cold lemon soufflé with a lime and mango coulis.

  Crawford sighed suddenly after she had left them. ‘I have a sort of open invitation, always have had. The Fellowes and my family are inextricably interlinked, as it were …’

  He sighed again, and his face seemed to darken. Sensing that she might have blundered, Claire said nothing more, only smiled and made a ‘mmm’ noise, because the pudding was so delicious.

  ‘I should have come back before, and now, in some way thanks to your buying the picture, and – well, I have made time, I have come back. And I am so glad that I did. It’s forced me to realize a lot of things about myself, and about the past, forced me to come to terms with things.’

  Claire nodded at the tablecloth, and although she was feeling shy, sensing that he was feeling sombre, even sad, she said in her hesitant way, because she did not really want to talk about things that were very near to her, ‘Sometimes it’s very difficult, isn’t it?’ She was thinking of her mother. ‘To come to terms with things, I mean, and make – well, make it all fit back again. It’s just as if – well, it’s just as if you’ve dropped a plate and you try to stick it all together again, but it comes out quite a different shape. I’m beginning to think that it’s actually, probably, better to leave the plate dropped. You know, just carefully pick up all the pieces and make it into something else. You know how people do with mosaics, they pick up all those smashed pieces, all kinds of things – and then they make a beautiful floor of it. They make sense of all that chaos that surrounded them. And when you stand back and look at it, there it is, smashed bits no longer, but a beautiful floor full of colour and somehow with much more to it than if there had been no broken plates at all. That’s what I think, anyway. Probably stupid. But that’s what I think we have to do with life.’

  Crawford lit a cigar from a thermidor laid on the coffee tray and stared at Claire through the candlelight. ‘You have some sadness, too, haven’t you?’

  Claire nodded, ‘Oh yes. That’s why I’ve been thinking, really, about everything, about making sense of things.’

  ‘It’s understandable.’ Crawford smiled. ‘Don’t stop! More for tomorrow, please, more thoughts.’

  He finished his cigar in silence, and shortly afterwards Amy reappeared and they took leave of her, and each other, and thanks to Bryndor’s clean air, Claire had hardly climbed into bed before she fell fast asleep, dreaming that she was swimming on the back of a dolphin while Crawford held up a torch for them to see their way through the dark.

  * * *

  The weather stayed brilliant, and so the next day, after a breakfast of eggs and bacon and home-made saffron rolls and honey, and cups of delicious coffee, Crawford suggested that they take a picnic to one of the other islands. He had hired a boat and the services of one of the local fishermen.

  ‘Only an idiot would imagine that he can steer his way around these islands,’ he said to Claire as they clambered on board the sturdy little blue-painted fishing boat. ‘Some of the most famous shipwrecks ever have occurred round here, and it’s not just the tremendous currents or the unseen rocks. It’s because the weather is so changeable – calm as a millpond one minute and the next as rough as a storm in the Aegean. You have to have been born here to sail here.’

  Once away from the shore, Jimmy the fisherman headed almost purposefully, or so it seemed to Claire, towards a ring of wicked rocks, which she realized surrounded most of Bryndor. A passage of sea ran between the row of needle rocks and some much larger granite ones, one or two of which were big enough to be classed as islands themselves, although from the boat they looked unassailable. But it was worth the hazards for here were the bird colonies that Crawford had spoken of, communities of guillemots and fulmars, terns, cormorants and kittiwakes, screaming, diving, calling and fishing in the now gently swelling seas. But nowhere were there any puffins.

  There were some seals, but fewer in number than Crawford remembered from years gone by.

  ‘Got any fish on you?’ he asked Jimmy.

  ‘Some bread.’

  ‘They’d eat brown paper, this lot.’

  Claire tossed them some crusts, watching how they seemed to love basking on the rocks warmed by the Gulf Stream, and how their expressions close to were filled with friendliness, and how little they shifted their positions, except when tempted by the bread. They stared at the newcomers with big limpid eyes.

  ‘They are so beautiful,’ she called to Crawford and Jimmy over the increased engine noise as Jimmy finally eased the boat away from the rocks, revved the engine up and slid it into reverse, swinging hard to port to steer well clear of one of the seals who had slipped into the water searching for scraps.

  ‘Now let’s go in search of the vanishing puffin.’

  Claire would have spent all day watching the seals, but since Jimmy was offering her the helm of the sturdy little fishing launch she forgot about seals in the excitement of heading the boat towards a vast rock a mile away.

  Now they were away from the protection of the island and its reef the seas were slowly building as the tide turned, so with Jimmy’s help she kept the craft headed directly into the wind and the swell. Above them grey and white gulls with black-tipped wings circled and swooped, filling the air with their call of kittiwayke, while cormorants and shags dived from the cliffs straight into the seas for food already espied.

  ‘Look!’ Claire cried out to the two men excitedly as suddenly four birds flew off the side of the rock, their short wings beating over-fast and their bright orange legs stuck out behind them like rudders. ‘Puffins!’

  ‘They’re so unlike anything else,’ Crawford called back to her, shading his eyes to watch them. ‘Even the way they fly.’

  ‘They’re auks, aren’t they? I was reading about them in a book at my cottage this morning.’

  ‘That’s right. But then so are razorbills, the black and white birds we saw back there with the guillemots.’

  ‘I wonder what the great auk was like?’

  ‘Aukly nice, I should think. Sorry, terrible joke.’

  Crawford grinned boyishly, and with that Claire abruptly understood that deep down inside him, until now, he had been followed by a shadow. But quite suddenly it had gone. She could feel it in his aura, as she could feel his happiness and contentment as the puffins flapped their way across the seas in search of food and the shags dived sharply and swiftly into the dark blue depths about them. She could feel the only shadow that was following him now had been cast by the sun.

  He turned back to her. ‘I can’t remember feeling happier, do you know that?’

  * * *

  Day after sunny day followed this first boating and fishing expedition, days during which it seemed to Claire that Crawford grew more boyish, and she grew more mature, as she realized just how unwell he must be.

  The knowledge, like so much that is kindly, came to her very gradually, although she had first been alerted by Maisie Fellowes’ saying Take care of him, won’t you – I know you will as she left, as if Claire was in on the same secret as the rest of them, as if she too knew what there was to be known.

  Thereafter it was Amy who, although careful to be nonchalant around ‘Master Crawford’, nevertheless by her care of him, and even more by the way her eyes turned to look at him when he was not looking at her, made Claire increasingly sure that Master Crawford was coming to terms with a shorter future than she would have wished him.

  ‘I think the Fellowes are leaving us Bryndor,’ Crawford joked as they set off on yet another expedition, this time to an island with a famous restaurant. ‘I think they’ve run off and left us, and we’ll soon find that we have to run the place for them while they sun themselves elsewhere.’

  Claire smiled at Crawford, and then at Amy, who had just joined them on the terrace with their picnic basket.

  ‘No picnic today, Amy,’ Crawford told her
. ‘We are lunching at the wonderful Skiffys on Mintoul.’

  ‘You’ll take the basket with you, Master Crawford, or there will be no dinner tonight for you, and that’s my last word on it.’

  She handed the basket to Crawford, who raised his eyes to heaven. ‘There never is any arguing with you, Amy, and there never was.’

  ‘There’s elevenses there for the two of you, hot coffee or home-made lemonade, ginger snaps and chocolate chip biscuits, made with plain or white chocolate. And Jimmy’s lunch is egg mayonnaise sandwiches, sardine and cucumber sandwiches, sausages with herbs and accompanying mustard, and a cheesecake; lemon also. And for his luncheon, ginger beer, but nothing alcoholic for we have no wish to see him crashing into the rocks.’

  She said this every morning about the ginger beer, as if it was a prayer that would keep them safe.

  ‘Do you always spoil everyone like this, Amy?’

  Amy looked back at Claire and then over to Crawford. ‘The world could do with more spoiling, couldn’t it?’ she asked. ‘There’s too little spoiling if you ask me.’

  Reaching Mintoul by boat took them all morning, but only because Crawford insisted on stopping everywhere they could to watch yet more birds diving, catching, flying and diving, endlessly delighted by their activities, so much so that when they landed it took Claire a few minutes to be able to walk steadily, so much had her body lost its stability with the motion of the waves and the rocking of the boat.

  ‘Look – people!’

  Crawford glanced down at her, and he himself was surprised at the cultural shock that the sight of his fellow human beings, tourists like himself, presented after the tranquillity of Bryndor.

  ‘They only really come here for the restaurant. There’s little else here, just Skiffys and the sea.’

  But just Skiffys was rather more than a restaurant, as she found out once they had climbed up to it.

  It was a white-painted building which, when seen from the outside, might have been a restaurant on a Greek island, with chairs set about and a vine-covered entrance through which live music could be heard playing. But inside the atmosphere was somehow neither Continental nor Greek, nor British. It was just, as Claire said afterwards, ‘its own person, like him, really’.

  Skiffy was a tall man with an amiable smile and a soft voice. He moved from table to table, greeting old friends, patting children on the head, joking, handing out glasses, menus and napkins, seeing to everyone and inspecting every dish as it came from the kitchens. Not a moment was missed by him, and not a dish placed that he had not scrutinized first.

  ‘Ah, now, Mr Crawford, we have never met, but John Fellowes warned me that you were coming and that you liked your fish.’

  Crawford seated himself after Claire and then smiled across at the restaurateur. Claire saw that there was a moment of immediate recognition between them, a moment that said, You like to eat, and I like to cook!

  ‘I like fish very much indeed,’ Crawford nodded.

  ‘I have some sea bass today.’

  Crawford closed his eyes momentarily. Sea bass, his favourite, his eyes said when he opened them again.

  ‘Just caught, and chef is even now preparing it. In half an hour, say? With a bottle of the Heugel Traminer?’

  ‘Maître Skiffy. Just run through how it is prepared, for my assistant here, Claire Merriott. I’m afraid she still has L plates on as far as food and wine are concerned, but she is learning very fast.’ Crawford looked at Claire affectionately.

  ‘The bass is caught by our own fisherman, and cooked in the following manner. It is cleaned and prepared and then laid upon a bed of lemon slices, seasoned with thyme and oil and salt massaged into it, also a good handful of herbs inside – all this placed in foil and sealed. We bring it to the table as soon as it is cooked with a sauce made from the herbs which has been fiercely boiled. Delicious.’

  It was delicious, and before it they ate prawns simply done in butter, but so large and juicy that finishing by dipping fresh bread in what remained of those juices was a mouthwateringly rhapsodic moment.

  ‘Eating and drinking well is so important. England is only now after hundreds of years coming to terms with the puritan ethic that to do either was somehow wrong. Terrible to think of all those white-faced British children being thrown tasteless food and stoking up on chocolate because they are given nothing to eat that actually has flavour.’

  Claire looked round the restaurant. It seemed to her, at that moment anyway, to be filled with people enjoying themselves eating and relaxing in a convivial atmosphere, and she saw that Crawford had to be right, because the restaurant was packed, but not just packed with couples.

  ‘You must be right, because all the families who are here with their children are all eating and smiling and laughing, having a great time. There’s not one person who doesn’t look happy here, who doesn’t look as if they wouldn’t swap places with anyone.’

  ‘It can’t be that difficult, can it? To give people food that tastes of something?’

  The sea bass, ‘that noble fish that the Italians literally worship’, Crawford told Claire, when it arrived was as noble and tasted as delicious as promised by the admirable Skiffy. It was followed by a ricotta pudding served on a sauce of pistachios and kirsch.

  Afterwards Claire smiled at Crawford. Placing her spoon back on her plate she sighed with the sheer pleasure of the moment. ‘Wow. That was just to die for!’

  Oh, to take back that moment, for her mouth to have remained as closed as when she had been eating! As soon as she had said it Claire quickly dropped her napkin and, happily, by the time she had straightened up she felt that the moment had passed. But it could not be denied, it had been a moment, and unbearably, for a few seconds, she saw. that the cloud that had followed ‘Master Crawford’ had come back, so that he was silent for the next few minutes, his eyes gazing out to sea, to the sparkle on the water, to the wind pushing the waves towards the shore, to the distant horizon which seemed to go on for ever.

  After black coffee and home-made Turkish delight, it was too hot to walk round the island, and they were too well lunched. Instead they chose to wander through the ornamental gardens, stopping at all the most exotic plants, whereupon Crawford would patiently explain where they came from and how they had been brought to Mintoul from practically every corner of the earth by the man who had originally built the restaurant as a house, a banker turned sailor turned explorer turned horticulturalist.

  ‘The Victorians were amazing people, much underrated and derided in the last fifty years. Heavens knows why, for the fact is that they were some of the most highly inventive and cultured English generations yet produced. Outside, that is, of their propensity to over-paint masterpieces.’

  They were sitting by one of the large ornamental ponds whose clear waters were filled with rare water lilies and small bright red goldfish. Over them in the soft sea breeze waved the branches of a tall palm, while far out on that same horizon which had so taken Crawford’s eyes over lunch, vast ships moved at a snail’s pace.

  ‘I wish I never had to leave these islands.’

  Crawford looked across at Claire and for one wonderful second she thought he might be going to tell her that she did not have to leave, ever, that they were both going to stay on Bryndor, so dreamy and out of this world had the past days been. Instead he just smiled at her briefly and turned back to the sea once more, preoccupied.

  On the boat trip home Claire came face to face with the reality that she had been avoiding since they had arrived on Bryndor, and that reality was that she had only to go into Crawford’s bathroom to find out the truth about him. Perhaps sitting with her mother for the past months, or perhaps being with Aunt Rosabel, had given her this second or third sense, as being with older people sometimes does, but there it was. She knew exactly what she would find if she went to the bathroom of Crawford’s guest cottage.

  There would be reality in the form of tablets, medicines, bottles with indecipherable names typed
on tiny labels, and they would be called things that started with chl because so many medicines for grim illnesses seemed to do so, or ended with dyl or lyl, and the dull truth would be there for her to see in all its starkness, the truth about why Crawford would turn away and swallow things with glasses of water, or look suddenly, unaccountably fatigued, despite his outward gaiety. The dark shadow that he had, for these last days shaken off would be identified and she would be able to give a name to that reality.

  But what was the point? And again, what was the point?

  Later, when she was helping Amy prepare a simple supper of ham salad and fruit, the old housekeeper leaned across the kitchen table and confided, ‘You’re doing Master Crawford the power of good!’

  Claire looked away, pretending to search for an oven glove, knowing just what she was not saying, and in truth not wanting to know any more.

  ‘For him to come back here, after all that happened, is a miracle indeed.’

  At that Claire did look at her, she could not help herself, for of course the housekeeper’s words prompted the thought After all what happened?

  Amy must have seen the blank in Claire’s eyes because she straightened up and demanded in a low voice, having glanced quickly over her shoulder, aware that Crawford might be ambling in from the terrace outside, ‘You surely knew about the awful business of his young wife, did you not?’

  Wife? Claire could not imagine Crawford married. He seemed so much the loner, the man apart, far too sensitive for the maelstrom of marriage.

  ‘She came here with him every year. They were married so young. Master Crawford, he was brought up here, by Mr Fellowes, old Master John Fellowes that was, that is. Young Master Crawford, he was a cousin of the family, and his parents having been killed in a motor accident he came here and was brought up with young Master John as if they were brothers. Well, then he married young, of course, for he was very handsome and she was a beautiful French girl whom he met here, and of course there was no stopping either of them, but then it happened.’