The Song of Hartgrove Hall by Natasha Solomons Page B

counting time, Fox?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Whatever for?’
    â€˜He’s always done it,’ says George, laughing. ‘Conducts us all like we’re a ruddy orchestra.’
    â€˜I don’t. I’m marking time to something I hear in my head.’
    â€˜That’s what I said.’
    â€˜No. It’s not the same thing at all. I don’t even mean to do it.’
    Edie’s staring at me and she doesn’t find it funny. ‘What are you hearing now, Fox?’
    Suddenly self-conscious, I don’t hear anything any more. The silence rings and the moment is quite broken.
    â€˜I’m going for a walk,’ I say.
    As I leave the kitchen I hear George making jovial remarks about the cold and the likelihood of my freezing my balls off. I wish that for once he could remember he was talking to a girl and not to Jack or me or some fellow in the mess.
    â€”
    Snow has fallen through the night and in the early light the gardens and hills glint a weird and unearthly white. The lake is frozen solid, its surface a flawless expanse. The slate sky stoops low, brimming with snow yet to come. The cold is fierce and I can hear the creak of ice. The trees are ringed with white, branches tinselled with hoarfrost. Her imperfections concealed by the fresh blanketing, the house and garden appear as elegant as a debutante. The white lawns are smooth and perfect, the weed-strewn beds quite hidden. The broken statues on the loggia appear to float, lost in some kind of macabre, injured dance.
    I’m pierced by longing – if only the house could always be like this. When we were children, Jack and George used to tell me that before Mother died the gardens looked rather smart. Then the formal ponds had not been drained nor their stone linings smashed, but were kept stocked with squirming golden fish. The lawns were rolled and cut every other week. They teased me with stories of summer drinks parties on the loggia where Mother held court; the General had even been known to laugh and neglect to wax hismoustache. It all seemed frightfully unlikely – a distant bedtime story – and I’d once made the mistake of telling them so, at which they’d closed ranks and stopped talking about that time altogether.
    And yet perhaps it’s out of kindness that they don’t talk about her any more, not wanting to rub it in that they remember her and I don’t. I know they pity me for not having any memory of our mother. I was barely three when she died – from complications arising from diabetes. The truth is that I’m sorry for them. They know what was lost. They remember the house and those days before the fall. The present can only ever be some sort of sad imitation. For me it’s a relief not to be weighted with such sorrow and regret. I don’t miss her. I have no memories of grief.
    At the far end of the garden, the ugly corrugated Nissen huts erected by the army are buried under a foot of snow so that they’re more like witches’ cabins. Mist hovers like steam above the river. I’m cold from standing still and, shaking the stiffness from my arms, I stomp across the lawn. I want to be the first one to mark it. It’s a childish satisfaction – like dashing red crayon across a white page. This morning a fox has beaten me to it; there are the slinking pads of his feet and here the tick-tick tracks of a bird. Then I notice footprints. Someone with small feet has been out before me this morning. I picture Edie standing in damp socks beside the range and I wonder whether it was her. I decide it must have been and choose her tracks to follow. It feels strange to trace a person’s journey rather than that of a fox or a hare, a little like spying. I suspect she wouldn’t like it, but somehow this doesn’t stop me.
    Her footsteps travel straight across the lawn towards the shrubbery and then, rather than slip-sliding down towards the