The Holm Oaks Read online

  THE HOLM OAKS

  P M Hubbard was a British writer known principally for his novels of crime and suspense. Born Philip Maitland Hubbard in 1910, he was educated at Elizabeth College in Guernsey and then at Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for English verse in 1933. Serving in the Indian Civil Service from 1934 until its disbandment in 1947, he returned to England to work for the British Council in London. After retiring to work as a freelance writer, he contributed to various publications including Punch. Hubbard’s first novel, Flush As May, was published in 1963, and he went on to publish sixteen more for adults, plus two written for children. The author lived in Dorset and Scotland, and many of his novels draw on his interests and knowledge of country pursuits, small-boat sailing and folk religion. Often set in rural and remote outposts, he viewed place as a central character. In his obituary printed in The Times he was described as a ‘most imaginative and distinguished practitioner’, writing with an ‘assurance and individuality of style and tone.’ He died in 1980.

  THE HOLM OAKS

  P M HUBBARD

  THE LANGTAIL PRESS

  LONDON

  This edition published 2011 by

  The Langtail Press

  www.langtailpress.com

  The Holm Oaks © 1965 Caroline Dumonteil, Owain Rhys Phillips and Maria Marcela Gomez

  ISBN 978-1-78002-048-8

  THE HOLM OAKS

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was left the Holt House quite unexpectedly by my Uncle Clarence, who was a bad old uncle I had seen next to nothing of. I never knew why he left it to me. Knowing Uncle Clarence, I think it was probably to hurt someone else, but I never found out who. Whoever they were, they kept their mortification to themselves. If they heard what happened later, it may have been some consolation to them.

  When I had the solicitors’ letter, I thought of it simply as a superbly convenient legacy. It was convenient because I had just been squeezed out of my job, and I badly needed the money to tide me over until I decided whether to get back into the rat-race or risk working on my own. It was only later that it occurred to me that I now owned two houses and might sell either. The Winchester house would fetch much more than Uncle Clarence’s, and must be much more expensive to live in. The Holt House might be habitable. At least it was worth looking at. I went down the next week-end. Elizabeth came with me.

  Elizabeth was my wife. She was tall and fair and willowy. When we were first married, she used to look like God’s own vestal virgin, which made it all the more impressive when she behaved as she sometimes did. I was crazy about her then, but there is always another side to everything. I suppose it showed how far things had drifted when she went back to her bird-watching, which suited very well her earnest tenacious, rather irritant type of mind. She was in fact very knowledgeable and surprisingly dedicated, and I believe had some quite important scalps under her belt, if that is where you keep scalps. We maintained a reasonably peaceful working surface. I still do not know whether she was as conscious as I was of the depths beneath. There were no children.

  It was well into September, and we should really have started the last part of our drive earlier. By the time we came out over the downs and saw the sea it was already almost evening, and the weather did not help. There was heavy cloud everywhere, moving but continuous, and a chilly breeze coming in briskly between grey sea and grey sky. It was not the sort of coast I care for. It was all too gradual. The land just gave up trying and slithered into the sea like an exhausted swimmer. There were no rocks, no cliffs, only an endless shingle beach, carved out in places where a stream ran out or the sea had broken in and turned itself into an only half-salt lagoon. Even from where we were you could hear the sea on the beach. The whole south was full of it. It would be hell when the wind blew. The area had been scheduled by the planners as one of great natural beauty, but that must have been when the sun was out. It had a fascination, but I did not warm to it. We got back into the car and drove down into Marlock.

  Marlock undoubtedly looked like a village in a scheduled area. It was stone and thatch. The street wound picturesquely and the woodwork was well painted. There was a post office that sold a lot of other things, a shop where you could buy stamps and a pub called the Anchor. When I asked for the Holt House, the post-mistress turned her eyes up, as if the previous owner had left a bill unpaid or ruined her daughter. From what I remembered of Uncle Clarence, he might well have done either, though in the natural course of things the first seemed more likely. He must have been all of eighty when he died.

  We drove on seawards, with the land falling away on both sides of us. The road was still tarmac, but only just. Then it turned right-handed over a narrow bridge, and as the car bounced over it two great birds got up heavily from a steel sheet of water on our right.

  Elizabeth said, ‘Stop, Jake, for God’s sake,’ and flung herself out of the near-side door with her glasses at the ready. For three or four seconds she stood there by the palpitating car, bent forward and following the circling birds with the glasses. If she had had a tail, it would have stuck straight out behind and twitched slightly. Then she lowered the glasses and let herself back into the car. She was a little breathless. ‘Pink-foots,’ she said. ‘Jake, they’re pink-foots.’ I resigned myself from that moment to living at the Holt House, which I had never yet seen. I could not in the nature of things know what it could do to us all, but there seemed in any case to be no alternative.

  A minute later I saw a house to the left of the road straight ahead. It was silhouetted against the sky, and must have been right over the beach. It was brick and looked hideous. At the same moment the holm oaks came up on our right. There seemed to be five or six acres of them in a long strip, clinging to the last slope of land above the shingle. I was as much a maniac for trees, in my way, as Elizabeth was for birds, but these were interesting rather than beautiful. They were very close-grown, and none of them more than twenty or thirty feet high. Elizabeth pointed to my side of the road. ‘There,’ she said.

  There was an iron farm-gate in the right-hand fence and a board said ‘The Holt House’. For a moment I was confused and then relieved. The brick house, at least, was not for us. For us a track led off, rubble-paved but motorable, skirting the landward side of the wood. I got out and opened the gate.

  We jolted along for nearly a quarter of a mile, almost under the edge of the brooding trees. They were built to stand the southwest gales, and here on the lee side the breeze did not move them at all. They were quite silent and even muffled the voice of the sea. It was dark already inside the wood, but I could see the scarlet seed-pods of stinking iris glowing like coral on the black leaf-mould. I suppose this was the holt. At any rate, when we turned round the far end of the wood, there was the Holt House, right in front of us.

  It was all of cream-coloured stone, very straight up and down and uncompromising. There were tall sash-windows on the ground and first floors and the dormers of a second floor broke the slope of the roof. It was not a big house. There was something a little forbidding in the way it stood up out of that flat, shelving landscape, but it did not lack character. It was National Trust stuff compared with that red-brick horror at the other end of the wood. What with this and the pink-footed geese, I began to think better of my Uncle Clarence than I had yet.

  There was no made garden, but close-cut grass between stone walls all round the house. Behind, the flat green stretched away westwards along the coast as far as one could see. On the landward side there was a single paddock between the house and the lagoon where we had put up the geese. On the seaward side there was nothing but a short green slope to the edge of the shingle. In front, eastwards, the edge of the oak wood ran within twenty yards of the front gate. The wood was unfenced, and I saw there was a pa
th leading from the gate straight into it. This would give direct access to the metalled road, but only for people on foot. Anything on wheels had to go, as we had come, round the north side of the trees.

  We had not told anyone we were coming. We did not expect to find the house open, and it was not. We walked round it, talking in half-whispers against the perpetual mutter of the sea, and flattened our noses on the ground-floor windows. There was no furniture and the windows were uncurtained. Whatever possessions Uncle Clarence had had, they had gone elsewhere. The house, stripped, silent and empty, was ours and there to receive us. It was not a shiny house, but there was nothing visibly wrong with it. So far as appearances went, we could move in tomorrow. I did not know quite what went with it, but the wood at least should be ours.

  I walked back to the gate and looked up at the front of the house. I could still find nothing against it. It was unforthcoming but strictly neutral. The place was different. It would take a lot of living in.

  Outside the gate, where the rubble road ended, there were two paths, one going straight ahead into the wood and one right-handed towards the beach. I turned right-handed and a moment later heard Elizabeth pattering after me. She said, ‘Jake, Jake, wait for me. It’s lovely, don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s not lovely,’ I said. ‘That’s the geese. It could be ghastly. I admit it could be superb at times. It’s a hell of an undertaking. What do you think Stella would make of it?’

  Stella was Elizabeth’s younger sister, and the only other more or less permanent member of the household. Elizabeth said, ‘Stella?’ I knew the tone at once. It meant, roughly speaking, that so far as she was concerned Stella could do what she liked about it, and it was up to me to feel the same. ‘I think Stella would approve,’ she said. ‘There’s lots to paint.’

  I came out on to the top of the beach and saw, stretching away straight on both sides of me, the vast sweep of banked pebbles, with the sea lying level in front of it and the grey downs raising themselves reluctantly behind. Stella was a sad person, and her art, though she made a sort of living at it, always seemed to me a sad art. She might like the place, in fact. And she need not be here all the time, which was more than could be said for me. I said, ‘Yes, I suppose she might. Who do you think lives in that brick abortion over on the road? They’d be our only neighbours, by the look of it. Not but that the wood is a pretty effective insulator.’

  ‘Farmer, probably. All the land is in hand, and we’re some way from the village.’

  We picked our way eastwards along the top of the shingle, where the dense-packed stones never shifted, and the coarse green of the land’s edge found its way up between them. When we came to the corner of the wood, I stopped. I peered in under the trees but did not want to go into them. It was grey dusk now out on the beach and the wood was quite dark. Even from here the trees made no sound that could make itself heard above the noise of the sea. Only holm oaks could have made a wood of this size in a place like this, and they did not really like it. They had turned their backs on the sea, and their packed tops had built themselves into a long wind-repellent curve as the land climbed under them.

  Somewhere behind me Elizabeth gave a yelp, and I turned and went back to her. She was standing a little way down the slope of the beach, looking down at a dead bird spread-eagled on the pebbles. It had been dead some time, but it had been shot. ‘Cormorant,’ I said. ‘They’re vermin, you know.’

  She shook her head. ‘They oughtn’t to shoot them,’ she said.

  ‘The sea’s big enough, and they’re lovely birds.’

  ‘Tell that to the fishermen,’ I said. I walked on, saw, at two different places, orange cartridge cases between the grey stones and then stopped dead. I did not share my wife’s addiction, but even I did not think anyone ought to shoot terns. I hoped Elizabeth would not see it, but she was close behind me and before I could alter course, she caught my arm.

  ‘Jake,’ she said. ‘Jake, it’s horrible. Who could do a thing like that?’

  ‘Boys, probably. Anyone can have a shotgun, and anything flying is fair game if you’re ignorant enough.’

  ‘I won’t have it here.’ She spoke thickly, through almost shut teeth. I knew that voice.

  I said, ‘You won’t?’ I stopped and looked at her, and for a second or two we stood and faced each other. She was almost as tall as I was, and her face was only just below mine. Her eyes opened wide and stared into my eyes. It had been a great trick of hers in the old days. Her eyes were very long and blue. She said, ‘Jake, we are coming here, aren’t we? We must. I love it here.’

  I had not really anything to say. After all, the house was mine. There was no stake money. I could sell it as well in six months’ time as I could now. And I did not know anything decisive against it. If the balance of advantage was adverse, time would bring it to account. I was conscious, in some way, of the venture, which poor Elizabeth was not, but I could not reject it out of hand.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘But we must come and have a proper look at it. It’s no good hanging about now. It will be pitch dark in half an hour.’

  We walked back along the beach to the corner of the wood. As we turned up the path, something in the trees choked horribly. It was not an easy sound to describe, but in that dark, unpopulated place, it was extraordinarily unpleasant. I said, ‘What the hell’s that?’

  We stood and listened, but nothing happened. I had not the least wish to go and investigate. ‘Come on,’ I said. I made for the car, and Elizabeth, a moment later, came after me. A bird came out of the wood, hardly visible against the dark cloudbank, and flew heavily across in the direction of the lagoon. It was a biggish bird, as big as a crow; only no decent crow would be out at that time of night. I stopped by the car. ‘See him?’ I said. ‘What was he? Heavy sort of flyer.’

  Elizabeth stood there, staring after the long invisible bird. Then she shook her head. ‘I – I don’t know,’ she said. She seemed a little breathless. ‘I’ve never seen anything—’ She stopped and got into the car. ‘We’ll see him again,’ she said.

  I drove cautiously back along the top edge of the wood and got out to open the gate. Even if it was my gate, it had not seemed right to leave it open. I ran the car out on to the road and stopped. There were lights showing down to the right. ‘Let’s go and have a look at the neighbours,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not going to talk to them?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Just have a look at them. It’s dark enough and they’ve got plenty of lights on.’

  I ran down the road quietly with only the sidelights burning. This house had a garden. Even in the near-darkness, it looked prim and almost suburban. Whatever it was, it was no farm. The house was a brick box with a high-pitched roof and fancy features, and there was a garage and a couple of small outhouses. There were no farm-buildings. However and whenever it had got here, it might just as well have been in Wimbledon. There was an ornamental wrought-iron gate incorporating what was presumably the name of the house. It was called Holm Oaks. I stopped the car. We both got out and stood there in the dark narrow road, staring incredulously at this unexpected addition to the local amenities.

  The windows of the ground-floor front were brightly lit and uncurtained, but the house was a bit above the level of the road, and our private view began only halfway up the walls. As we watched, a woman’s head moved across the room. All I could see was that it was a dark head. I did not think she could be very tall, but it was difficult to judge. There was a sudden flurry of music, and a tenor voice rang out with enormous clarity, ‘Nessun dorma—’

  It was canned music, of course. One of the pop operatic singers, by the sound of him. Not my sort of music, in fact, but coming out of that brick villa in that sea-shot wilderness it was startlingly beautiful.

  ‘Mm,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Cultural types. Hundred favourite classics.’

  For no very good reason, I rallied to the defence of Holm Oaks. ‘Some people like it,’ I said. ‘It’s a marvellou
s voice.’

  Elizabeth said, ‘Well—’ Then the front door opened, and a very tall man came down a couple of steps into the front garden. We ducked, simultaneously and instinctively, like guilty children. I was thankful I had left the car a bit up the road. The whole situation was completely ridiculous, and I had a strong inclination to giggle. I think if he had walked down to the gate and seen us, I could not have gone to live in the Holt House at all, and the whole of what followed would never have happened. But he stood there, at the top of the sloping garden, with the brightly lit hall behind him, and none of us moved. Only the beautiful tenor voice sang on in self-conscious ecstasy.

  I never saw exactly what happened. There was a sharp snap, as if something had been broken suddenly in mid-air. I heard the man move, and when I looked again, he had turned and was facing back into the doorway. The singer paused, and against a rather muted orchestra I heard a woman’s voice call, ‘Dennis! Have you found it?’

  The man said, ‘No, I don’t know where it is.’ He threw something, quite deliberately, into the darkness beside him. Then he went inside and shut the door. The singer started up again, but was cut off short in the middle of a lovely high note.

  I said, ‘Come on,’ and we straightened up and scuttled back to the car.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Elizabeth went down to Marlock three days later to see the drains and the heating, and saw two Bean geese, and a rare sort of sea-bird whose proper name I forget. I know that when I called it a Queen Tern, she said it was unworthy of me, as perhaps it was. I wrote to my Uncle Clarence’s executors and said that I had decided to take personal possession of the Holt House and occupy it myself, at least temporarily. I asked them for details of the land that went with the house. They had said it was five acres more or less, and I asked them particularly to confirm that this included the wood.