The Woodcutter

‘Fred, your father. Is he still alive?’

‘Ah. I see where we’re going. Oedipus stuff, right? No, I didn’t blame him for my mother’s death; no, I didn’t want to kill him; and no, just in case you’re too shy to ask, he never abused me in any way. Unless you count the odd clip around the ear, that is.’

‘In some circumstances, I might indeed count that,’ she said, smiling. ‘I was just wondering about his attitude to what’s happened, that’s all. You do indicate that when it came to your marriage with Imogen, he wasn’t all that keen.’

That got the flicker of a smile. The smiles, though hardly regular, came more frequently now. She took that as a sign of progress, though, paradoxically, in physical terms her goal was tears, not smiling.

‘That’s putting it mildly,’ he said. ‘He was even more opposed than Sir Leon. He at least in the end gave his daughter away. Dad wouldn’t even come to the wedding.’

‘Did that hurt you very much?’

‘Of course it bloody hurt me,’ he said angrily. ‘But I was ready for it, I suppose. He wasn’t exactly supportive when I started bettering myself. I thought he’d be proud of me, but he made it quite clear that he thought I’d have done better to follow in his footsteps and become a forester.’

‘Did he have any reason to think that was what you were going to do?’

Hadda shrugged and said, ‘Yeah, I suppose so. I’d always gone along with the assumption that I’d leave school as soon as I could and start working under him on the estate. I mean, why wouldn’t I? I loved working with him, I’d been wielding an axe almost since I was big enough to pick up a teddy bear without falling over. And working outdoors in the countryside I loved seemed the best way of carrying on the way I was.’

‘So what changed?’

‘Don’t act stupid. You know what changed. I met Imogen.’

‘You carried on meeting after that first time?’

‘Obviously. All that summer, whenever we could. She needed to keep quiet about it of course. Me too. It was easier in my case, I just went on as normal, taking off in the morning with my walking and climbing gear. She had to make excuses. She was good at that, I guess. She couldn’t manage every day, but if three days went by without her showing up, I started getting seriously frustrated.’

‘You continued having sex?’

‘Why wouldn’t we?’

‘She was under age. And the danger of pregnancy. Did you start using condoms?’

‘No, she said she’d taken care of all that. As for her age, I suppose I was under age too to start with. Anyway, it never crossed my mind. We were at it all the time. Always out of doors and in all weathers. On the fellside, in the forest.’

He smiled reminiscently.

‘There was this old rowan tree that had survived among all the conifers that had been planted commercially on the estate. We often used to meet there early morning or late evening if one of us couldn’t manage to get away for the whole day. Imo would slip out of the castle and I would go over the wall behind Birkstane, and be there in twenty minutes or so. We didn’t even have to make a special arrangement. It was like we both knew the other would be there under the tree.’

‘This was the rowan you had dug up and transplanted to your London garden?’

He said, ‘You remembered! Yes, the very same. They were harvesting the conifers in that part of the forest and it looked as if the rowan would simply be mowed down to give the big machines access. So I saved it. A romantic gesture, don’t you think?’

‘More sentimental, I’d say. Men in particular look back fondly on their adolescent encounters. Pleasure without responsibility, I can see its attraction. So you’d meet under this tree, have a quick bang, then go home?’

This was a deliberate provocation. The clue to what he’d become had to lie in this first significant sexual relationship.

He looked at her coldly.

‘It wasn’t like that. We drew each other like magnets. I felt her presence wherever I was, whatever I was doing. She was always with me. Under the rowan we were in total union, but no matter how far apart physically, she was always with me.’

She was tempted to probe how he felt now, whether he still believed that Imogen had genuinely shared that intensity of feeling. But she judged this wasn’t the right moment. Concentrate on getting the facts.

‘So when did it end?’

‘How do you know it ended?’

‘Because it had to. From what you say of Lady Kira, she wasn’t going to be fooled for ever. Also that first piece you wrote, the one about living in a fairy tale, in it you talk about the woodcutter’s son being given three impossible tasks and going away and performing them. That implies an ending – and a new beginning, of course.’

‘Did I write that? Yes, I did, didn’t I? It seems a long time ago, somehow.’

‘Three weeks,’ she said.

‘Is that all? We’ve come a long way.’

He spoke neutrally and she was tempted to probe but decided against it. The more progress you made, the more dangerous the ground became.

‘So, the end,’ she said.

‘It was in the Christmas holidays,’ he said slowly. ‘We’d both gone back to school in the autumn, her to her fancy ladies’ college in the south, me to the comp. I couldn’t wait for the term to finish.’

‘You didn’t think she might have had second thoughts about your relationship during those months apart?’

‘Never crossed my mind,’ he said wearily. ‘Not vanity, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was just a certainty, like knowing the sun would rise. But when we met in December, it was harder for us to get whole days together when the weather was bad. I mean, a teenage girl wanting to go for a solitary stroll in the summer sunshine is one thing. In a winter gale it’s much more suspicious. We met more and more often under the rowan tree. A blizzard blew up, it was practically a white-out. We sheltered among the trees till things improved a bit, then I insisted on accompanying her back through the grounds till the castle was in sight. Sir Leon had got worried and organized a little search party that included my dad. We met them on the estate drive. I’d have tried to bluff it out, say I’d run into Imogen somewhere and offered to see her home, but she didn’t bother. I think she was right. They weren’t going to believe us. I went home with Fred, she went home with Sir Leon to face her mother.’

‘What did Fred say?’

‘He asked me what I thought I was doing. I told him we were in love, that I was going to marry her as soon as I legally could. He said, “Forget the law, there’s no law ever passed that’ll let you marry that lass!” I said, “Why not? There’s nowt anyone can say that’ll make a difference.” And he laughed, more snarl than a laugh, and he said that up at the castle the difference had been made a long time back. I didn’t know what he meant, not until the next day.’

‘You saw Imogen again?’ guessed Alva.

‘Oh yes. Sir Leon brought her down to Birkstane. They left us alone together. I grabbed hold of her and began gabbling about it making no difference, we could still do what we planned, we could run away together, and so on, lots of callow adolescent stuff. She pushed me away and said, sort of puzzled, “Wolf, don’t talk silly. We never planned anything.” And she was right, I realized later. All the plans had been in my head.’

‘And was this when she set you the three impossible tasks?’ asked Alva.

‘Who’s a clever little shrink then?’ he mocked. ‘Yes, suddenly this girl every bit of whose body I knew as well as my own turned into something as cold and distant as the North Pole. She said she was sorry, it had been great fun, but she’d assumed I knew as well as she did that it would have to come to an end eventually. I managed to stutter, “Why?” And she told me. With brutal frankness.’

His face darkened at the memory, still potent after all these years.

Alva prompted, ‘What did she say?’

‘She said surely I could see how impossible it would be for her to marry someone who couldn’t speak properly, had neither manners nor education, and was likely to remain on a working man’s wage all his life.’

Jesus! thought Alva. They really do bring their princesses up differently!

‘So these were the three impossible tasks?’ she said. ‘Get elocution lessons, get educated, get rich. And you resolved you would amaze everyone by performing them?’

‘Don’t be silly. I had a short fuse, remember? I went into a right strop, told her she was a stuck-up little cow just like her mam, that I weren’t ashamed to talk the way everyone else round here talked, that a Hadda were as good as an Ulphingstone any day of the week, and that my dad said all a man needs is enough money to buy what’s necessary for him to live. She smiled and said, “Clearly you don’t put me in that category. That’s good. I’ll see you around.” And she went.’

‘She sounds very self-contained for a fourteen-year-old,’ said Alva.