“But what’s the door got to do with it? Why move a door?” Bracewell’s tone had sunk to a confidential level. “Won’t the National Trust people object, anyhow?”
“Not if it didn’t belong there, why should they? They’ll want to take over something as authentic as possible.” He slid out of the car again, and wiped his hands. “All right, leave her with me, and I’ll see what I can do. I don’t think it’s so bad. I’ll try and have it ready for you this evening, barring emergencies.”
“Fine! How late are you on the job?”
“Six, officially, but I’ll be here.” He nodded towards the house, solid and stolid in pleasant, mottled brick beyond the yard and the pumps.
“Right, but if I’m not here before six, I’ll probably be staying over, so don’t wait around for me. If I don’t show tonight, I’ll be in pretty early tomorrow. O.K.?” He fished a plump and elderly briefcase out of the back of the Morris, and departed with a confident and springy step towards the village.
Dave Cressett had run the garage for twelve years, ever since his father’s early death. He was thirty-four now, and a highly responsible, taciturn and resolute thirty-four into the bargain, having assumed mature cares early. His stature was small, his manner neat, unobtrusive and workmanlike, and his appearance nondescript, with a set of pleasant, good-natured features that seemed to be made up of oddments until he smiled, when everything fell beautifully into place. He didn’t smile too often, because he was by inclination a serious soul; but it was worth waiting for. Not a firework display like Hugh’s dazzling laughter, which he shed so prodigally all around him, but the comforting and dependable radiance of. a good fire. Everything about him was equally reliable; which was why business had prospered for Cressett and Martel. Hugh tuned and raced the firm’s cars, with dash and success, but it was on Dave that the clients depended.
Dave had known Hugh since school days, though there were five years between them. He had known Robert, too, for he was within a year of Robert’s age; but nobody had ever really known Robert, sunk as he had been beneath the weight of being the heir, even if there was precious little to inherit, and threatened to be progressively less, and ultimately nothing at all, barring a monstrous minus of debts, if his father lived much longer. Hugh was different. Hugh was carefree, did what he liked and asked afterwards, mixed with whatever company he pleased and never asked at all, got his face dirty and his nails broken playing around with motors when he should have been accumulating O and A levels, and didn’t give a damn for his Norman blood or his aristocratic status. In fact, he was so like his delightful, unpredictable, eighteenth-century anachronism of a father that there was no mistaking the implications. They represented, between them, a late burst of demoniac energy in a line practically burned out. You had only to look at the mother— seven years older than her husband, and his first cousin; they always interbred—and the elder brother to see what had happened to the race, long since bled into debility, overtaken and left standing by history. Tenacious stock, time had shown that, but exhausted at last. Somebody had to break out, marry fresh blood, get fresh heirs and plunge into fresh activities. The ghost of the name would take some laying, but Hugh already stood clear of it, neutral as a clinical observer from outer space. After all, the crude reality was that the name meant nothing now; the doctor and the hotel-keeper ranked higher in importance than the attenuated representatives of past glory, and the vigorous incomers from the towns far higher. Hugh was the one who took the realities as they came, and did not feel his powers and possibilities in any way limited.
For Dave all these considerations were very relevant indeed, because Hugh had worked himself into a partnership nearly four years ago, and the tacit understanding between him and Dinah had been growing and proliferating ever since. It wasn’t even a question of waiting for a concrete proposal; people like Dinah and Hugh didn’t function in that way, they simply grew together without words, and some day, still without words and without question, got married. If Dave knew his sister and his partner, that day was creeping up on them fast.
As far as Dave could see, it wasn’t going to have much to do with him, when it came to the point. Dinah was ten years his junior, and he had had to be father and mother to her, as well as brother, but she was twenty-four years old now, and a remarkably self-sufficient young woman, who ran the house, did the firm’s books and occasionally relieved Jenny Pelsall in the office, with apparent ease. She had all the equipment she needed, a heart, a head, a chin and a backbone. She was a pocket edition, like her brother, but good stuff lies in little compass. He wasn’t worried about Dinah, she’d find her own way, and if she chose Hugh, she wouldn’t be choosing him just for a blinding smile and a light hand on a gear-lever.
He’d got her as far as consenting to go and spend this particular evening with his people at the Abbey; the first formal encounter, this would be, but no amount of Norman blood—or blood of the princes of Powis, either, for that matter—could intimidate Dinah. And, as Hugh said, what the hell, we’re not tied to the place, we don’t have to stick around here if we don’t want to. Admittedly it’s a bit of an ordeal, Robert’s pretty dreary, to say the least of it, and the old girl’s virtually petrified in her devotion to her sacred line. But don’t let it throw you, we don’t have to see much of them when we’re married. And Dinah had said thoughtfully that she supposed they had to get it over sooner or later. Just so long, she had said, as you bring me home before I blow my top. We may not have to live in the same village afterwards, but we do have to live in the same world. And he had promised gaily, all the more readily because bringing Dinah home gave him the best excuse possible for not sleeping overnight at the Abbey. He retained his room there to please his mother, and slept in it when he had to, but he much preferred the free life in the flatlet they’d made for him over the workshop in the yard. Grooms, he said, ought to live above the stable.
Sometimes he sounded, sometimes he even looked, like his dead father, who had come head-over-heels off a horse at an impossible fence five winters ago, when the Middlehope hounds drew the shoulder of Callow, and everyone else diverged cravenly towards the gate. He had fallen on his head and shoulders and broken his neck, and there went the last survivor of the eighteenth century in these borders, trailing his comet’s-tail of heroic stories, amorous, bibulous and equestrian. For years he’d arrived and departed as unpredictably as hurricane weather, vanishing whenever he got too far into debt or into difficulties, or too many local girls were in full cry after him with paternity suits, reappearing after his wife and son had got things under control again, and always finding a warm welcome waiting. Hugh had his fierce good looks and sudden disarming moods of sweetness and hilarity; but Hugh didn’t run after women or plunge head-down into debt. He doted on cars, raced them, doctored them, made respectable money out of them. And Dinah was his only girl.
The fog thickened a little again towards evening, and Hugh was late getting back from Comerbourne. The resprayed car had to be delivered to one of the new houses on the other side of the village, which meant a ten-minute walk back from there; and Dinah was ready and waiting some time before the back door crashed open in the usual headlong style, to indicate that the junior partner was home. He came in wreathed in chilly mist and glowing apologies, six feet of tightly strung nervous energy even at the end of the working day.
Dinah rose and picked up her coat. She was wearing a plain, long-sleeved shift in a delirious orange-and-olive print, that stopped short five inches above her knees.