It was a still November day, colorless and sodden. The big elms were as dark as wet haystacks and the woods huddled dispiritedly in a vague mist.
The trees broke to the right of the Court and the house rose up like a gigantic silver ghost.
It was a battered old Tudor building with an air of not having been properly cleaned; blackened and weather-soaked, unconscionably averse from change, it had held its own for four hundred years.
The stones looked as if they were made out of old moonlight and thin December sunshine. A copse of small golden trees, aspen and silver birches made a pale screen of light beside the house and at its feet, the white water stretched like a gleaming eye.
There wasn’t a tree Winn hadn’t climbed or an inch he hadn’t explored, fought over and played on. He wanted quite horribly to come back to it again, it was as if there were roots from the very soil in him tugging at his menaced life.
His mother advanced across the lawn to meet him. She wore a very old blue serge dress and a black and white check cap which looked as if it had been discarded by a jockey.
In one hand she held a trowel and in the other a parcel of spring bulbs. She gave Winn the side of her hard brown cheek to kiss and remarked, “You’ve just come in time to help me with these bulbs. Every one of them must be got in this afternoon. Philip has left us — your father threw a watering can at him. I can’t think what’s happened to the men nowadays, they don’t seem to be able to stand anything, and I’ve sent Davis into the village to buy ducks. He ought to have been back long ago if it was only ducks, but probably it’s a girl at the mill as well.”
Winn looked at the bulbs with deep distaste. “Hang it all, Mother,” he objected, “it’s such a messy day for planting bulbs!” “Nonsense,” said Lady Staines firmly, “I presume you wash your hands before dinner, don’t you, you can get the dirt off then? It’s a perfect day for bulbs as you’d know if you had the ghost of country sense in you. There’s another trowel in the small greenhouse, get it and begin.” Winn strode off to the greenhouse smiling; he had had an instinctive desire to get home, he wanted hard sharp talk that he could answer as if it were a Punch and Judy show.
In his married life he had had to put aside the free expression of his thoughts; you couldn’t hit out all round if the other person wouldn’t hit back and started whining. Every member of the Staines family had been brought up on the tradition of combative speech, the bleakest of personalities found its nest there. Sometimes, of course, you got too much of it. Sir Peter and Charles were noisy and James and Dolores were apt to be brutally rough. They were all vehement but there were different shades in their ability. Winn got through the joints in their armor as easily as milk slips into a glass. It was Lady Staines and Winn who were the deadly fighters.
They fought the others with careless ease, but they fought each other watchfully with fixed eyes and ready implacable brains.