I came to appreciate his qualities the more when I went to Harrow.
The holidays passed all too swiftly, as I compared his manners and his company with the urchins who were my schoolmates, and the masters, stiff and sober, lacking to my mind all humanity.
“Never mind,” he used to say, patting my shoulder before I started off, white-faced, a trifle tearful, to catch the coach to London.
“It’s just a training process, like breaking in a horse; we have to face it.
Once your schooldays are behind you, and they will be before you’ve even counted, I’ll bring you home here for good, and train you myself.”
“Train me for what?” I asked.
“Well, you’re my heir, aren’t you?
That’s a profession in itself.”
And away I would go, driven by Wellington the coachman to pick up the London coach at Bodmin, turning for a last glimpse of Ambrose as he stood leaning on his stick with the dogs beside him, his eyes wrinkled in sure and certain understanding, his thick curling hair already turning gray; and as he whistled to the dogs and went back into the house I would swallow the lump in my throat and feel the carriage wheels bear me away, inevitably and fatally, along the crunching gravel drive across the park and through the white gate, past the lodge, to school and separation.
He reckoned without his health, though, and when school and university lay behind me it was then his turn to go.
“They tell me if I spend another winter being rained on every day I shall end my days crippled in a bath chair,” he said to me.
“I must go off and search for the sun.
The shores of Spain or Egypt, anywhere on the Mediterranean where it is dry, and warm.
I don’t particularly want to go, but on the other hand I’m damned if I’ll end my life a cripple.
There is one advantage in the plan.
I shall bring back plants that nobody else has got.
We’ll see how the demons thrive in Cornish soil.”
The first winter came and went, likewise the second.
He enjoyed himself well enough, and I don’t think he was lonely.
He returned with heaven knows how many trees, shrubs, flowers, plants of every form and color.
Camellias were his passion.
We started a plantation for them alone, and whether he had green fingers or a wizard’s touch I do not know, but they flourished from the first, and we lost none of them.
So the months passed, until the third winter.
This time he had decided upon Italy.
He wanted to see some of the gardens in Florence and Rome.
Neither town would be warm in winter, but that did not worry him.
Someone had assured him that the air would be dry, if cold, and that he need not have any fear of rain.
We talked late, that evening.
He was never one for early bed, and often we would sit together in the library until one or two in the morning, sometimes silent, sometimes talking, both of us with our long legs stretched out before the fire, the dogs curled round our feet.
I have said before that I felt no premonition, but now I wonder, thinking back, if it was otherwise for him.
He kept looking at me in a puzzled, reflective sort of way, and from me to the paneled walls of the room and the familiar pictures, and so to the fire, and from the fire to the sleeping dogs.
“I wish you were coming with me,” he said suddenly.
“It wouldn’t take me long to pack,” I answered.
He shook his head, and smiled.
“No,” he said,
“I was joking.
We can’t both be away for months at a time.
It’s a responsibility, you know, being a landowner, though not everybody feels as I do.”
“I could travel with you down to Rome,” I said, excited at the idea.
“Then, granting the weather did not hold me back, I’d still be home by Christmas.” “No,” he said slowly, “no, it was just a whim.
Forget it.”
“You’re feeling well enough, aren’t you?” I said.
“No aches or pains?”
“Good God, no,” he laughed, “what do you take me for, an invalid?
I haven’t had a twinge of rheumatism for months.
The trouble is, Philip boy, I’m too much of a fool about my home.
When you reach my age, perhaps you’ll feel about it the way I do.”
He got up from his chair and went over to the window.
He drew back the heavy curtains and stood for a few moments, staring out across the grass.
It was a quiet, still evening.