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VICTORIA CLAYTON
Moonshine
DEDICATION
Remembering Constance Boyle, my Irish grandmother.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Fifty-Four
Keep Reading
About the Author
Also by the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE
The waves scattered the lights from the Swansea to Cork ferry as though tossing silver coins to the marine life of the Bristol Channel. The wind flung the contents of my stomach after them. I bitterly regretted the Battenberg cake.
‘You don’t look well, dear,’ the motherly stewardess had said. ‘Take my advice and have a little something to settle your insides. The crossing’s going to be rough.’
Discouraging though this sounded, they were the first kind words that had been addressed to me all day. She had put down the plate before me and urged me to eat. It would have been impolite to refuse. Now my imagination was haunted by those lurid pink and yellow squares of cake, clad in wrinkled marzipan. As I pressed the cold iron of the ship’s rail against my burning face a sense of monstrous ill-usage overwhelmed me and I groaned aloud.
‘You poor thing! I’ve suffered from mal de mer myself and it’s no fun. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where thy victory?’
The voice was male, self-assured, amused. I suppose there is something comical about sea-sickness if you don’t happen to be feeling it. I wanted neither the sympathy nor the teasing but nausea and faintness made flight impossible. I would have fallen if the stranger had not taken my arm.
‘Steady! Come on, let’s sit down.’
He half carried me to a row of benches. Naturally, at this hour of howling purgatorial darkness, they were empty.
‘I feel awful!’ I moaned. I would have added, ‘The human race is despicable and life is a hideous pantomime,’ if I had not, even in this moment of crisis, a disinclination to make myself utterly ridiculous.
‘It’s bad, I know. You just want to die.’ He pushed me on to a seat and sat down beside me.
‘I do!’ I sobbed, the kindness in his voice encouraging me to give way to melodrama. ‘You’d better let me throw myself in. It’ll be the solution to every problem.’
‘Not for me, it won’t. People might think I pushed you overboard.’
‘How like a man! It’s got nothing to do with you. They’ll think, quite rightly, that I couldn’t stand another minute of this beastly boat going up and down, up and down. Oh, how I hate the sea!’
The man laughed. ‘We haven’t left the bay yet. Mumbles Head is over there, to the right. There’s only a slight breeze and the water’s as smooth as the proverbial mill-pond.’
I lifted my head. The lights of Swansea rose and fell most unpleasantly but the moon sent an unbroken path of beams across the water to meet them. The howling was all in my mind.
‘I hate mill-ponds.’ I continued to cry.
‘That’s right. Let it all out.’ My self-appointed nurse patted my arm from time to time. ‘Now.’ He handed me his handkerchief. ‘Have a good blow. Feeling better?’
I blew. ‘I feel worse if anything.’
‘The trick is not to register the motion of the ship. Don’t, whatever you do, look at the rail. Keep your eyes fastened on something on board. A lifebelt, a noticeboard or a ventilation funnel. Or, even better, look at me.’
The light from the saloon window fell on the right side of his face. I saw someone reassuringly ordinary, fairish, with prominent ears. I could just make out a cheek creased in a smile.
‘I suppose you’re a journalist.’ I was too tired to put as much venom into the accusation as I would have liked.
‘My goodness, you know how to hit where it hurts! Do I look like a sot and a liar? Have I the appeal of a tramp with rotting gums and a leaky urinary tract?’
‘You are, aren’t you?’ I persisted.
‘I’m a literary agent. A pretty innocent game, on the whole. Are you a film star who wants to be alone?’
‘Well … no and yes.’
I stared at him, trying to pierce the darkness and the bone, cortex and synapses that housed the impulses operational in lying. The last ten days had destroyed my trust in anyone I had not known from the baptismal font.
‘What can I say to convince you?’ He felt inside his coat. ‘Wait a minute.’ He stood up and searched his trouser pockets. ‘Here we are. Car keys and useful torch attached. Present from a desperate godmother. At the time I thought it was a bit mean but now I’m grateful.’
He directed a pencil beam on to an open passport. I saw the photograph of a young man with a high forehead and bat-wing ears. Below this it said, Literary Agent.
‘See?’ He directed the light on to the white slot on the passport cover. The name was Christopher Random. ‘That’s me. I can show you my driving licence, if you’d like.’
‘I believe you. I’m sorry I doubted. You’ve been extremely kind, Mr Random.’
‘You can call me Kit.’
‘I’m sure you’ve got more interesting things to do than sitting here with me.’
‘I was about to have some supper. You ought to eat something.’
I shuddered at the idea of the cafeteria with its stuffy smell, smeary tables and bottles sticky with congealed ketchup. ‘I can’t go inside.’
‘All right.’ He stood up. ‘Promise you won’t do anything silly?’
‘Like what?’
He paused. ‘Like look at the waves.’
I closed my eyes. ‘I promise.’
The crying had made me feel better, as it always does. I felt light-headed now, and immensely weary. For the past week and a half I had slept shallowly for no more than a couple of hours at a time before a sense of something being terribly wrong had dragged me back to consciousness. Now I sat in a state of apathy feeling the vibration of the engine through the slats of the bench, the slow chilling of my feet and fingers and the tip of my nose. The realization that I need do nothing for several hours as every second the boat took me further from home seemed like an extraordinary kindness for which I was inexpressibly grateful.
My thoughts wandered and revised my impressions of the day. There had been a long train journey. I had been gripped by an obsessive fear that I was being followed. The man sitting opposite me seemed to be watching me covertly from behind the open pages of his Gardener’s Weekly. I became convinced that he was a newspaper reporter. After we passed Cheltenham he struck up a conversation with the woman next to him. He was a retired miner with silicosis. I saw again his eyes, mild, uncomplaining, his long upper lip and his patchily shaven chin as he talked about his passion for gladioli. And then, as I dozed, it grew redder and more angular, with fierce eyes and bared teeth. It became my father’s face.
I roused myself and pulled my jacket closer round me, for though it was July the breeze from the sea was freezing. A young couple sauntered past, arm-in-arm, gave me a curious glance and walked on. I fell again into a waking dream in which my father’s face was constantly before me. His expression of ferocity as he threw down the newspaper at breakfast ten days before had lodged itself so securely in my memory that whenever I ceased to think actively it floated up from my subconscious to fill the vacuum.
We had been sitting in the dining room, a shrine to Victorian mahogany, brown leather and second-rate watercolours. There were always twelve chairs round the table and we had occupied the same places from the time my brother and I had left the nursery. As in a dentist’s waiting room, we sat as far apart from one another as the arrangement allowed.
My father was a small man and, with characteristic perversity, had chosen to marry my mother, who at five feet eleven was seven inches taller than he. This had embarrassed me horribly as a child. It seemed to detract from the dignity of each and I was afraid that people might laugh at them. If my father was in a good humour with my mother, he called her ‘Lanky’. Her name was actually Laetitia.
When I examined the photograph on my mother’s dressing-table of my father in uniform as a young subaltern I could see he might once have been attractive. His hair had been thick and sandy, his brows well marked, his expression keen and pugnacious. Now he was largely bald so that clumps of hair sprouted above his ears in speckled tufts and his eyebrows were unruly. He bore a striking resemblance to a wire-haired fox terrier. He spoke in an aggressive, impatient manner and when he was angry the spaces between the thousands of freckles on his face became tomato red and the bridge of his short, hooked nose grew purple.
Of course he was going to find out.
When I had seen the newspaper neatly folded by his plate, placed there by our daily, Mrs Treadgold, I knew the moment of revelation had come. The story had been the third item on the television news the night before. I had switched it off with a fluttering heart and a sick feeling in my stomach as soon as I saw Burgo’s face appear on the screen. Luckily my father considered television plebeian, so he never watched it. For the remainder of the evening I had sat in painful suspense by the telephone in the hall in case one of my father’s cronies at the Army and Navy Club should have seen the news and be stirred by curiosity to ring him up on the pretext of condoling with him. No one had. Perhaps they too were a little frightened of him.
I cannot explain why I was afraid of my father. I could not remember a time when I had not heard his approach with apprehension. Even when he was in a jovial mood, there was something combative in his voice and manner. And I knew how rapidly the joviality could turn to rage. I could be coldly analytical behind his back and sarcastic, even defiant, to his face, but none the less I dreaded his anger.
The moment had come. I had braced myself inwardly and pretended to be busy with the marmalade while he cut the rind from his bacon, buttered toast and poured himself a second cup of tea before picking up the newspaper. I heard the abrupt cessation of crunching as his eyes fell on the offending photograph. He had let out a sudden roar of fury that made me drop my knife.
‘What! … No! … I don’t believe it!’ My father’s voice, usually distressingly loud, had an ominous strangled sound. He clutched the edge of the table as though unseen hands were attempting to drag him away.
My heart, which had been pounding more or less continuously for the last few days, skipped a couple of beats. But I forced myself to look indifferently, even coldly, at him. We were alone in the dining room – my mother being an invalid now and Oliver unable to get up before noon. My father’s small brown eyes were watering with shock and he was making a gobbling sound in his throat. I watched him, wondering with a frightening detachment if he were about to have a stroke. He threw his napkin to the floor, clapped his hands on to the arms of his chair, stood up, strode round the table to where I sat and prodded energetically at the front page of the Daily Chronicle:
‘Well? Is there a word of truth in this?’
I stared up at him dumbly. He seemed to interpret my silence as denial.
‘I want you’ – my father was breathing heavily and his eyes were bulging and crazed with red lines – ‘to tell me why anyone should … want to make up this disgusting farrago of lies.’ I noticed with a detached part of my mind that a blob of spit had landed on the butter. I made a mental note of exactly where so I could scrape it off afterwards.
‘Well? Well?’ He tried to shout but violent emotion had divested him of strength. ‘Are you going to give me some sort of … hah! … explanation?’
I stood up, perhaps subconsciously to give myself the advantage of height. I was three inches taller than he. I wiped my fingers slowly with my napkin while schooling my face into an expression of challenge and defiance. ‘If you mean, have I been having an affair with Burgo Latimer, yes, I have.’
He landed a smack on my jaw that knocked me sideways and made my teeth rattle. ‘Whore! Bitch! Shameless whore!’
I shut my eyes to prevent tears falling and though my cheek immediately began to throb I remained outwardly calm. I braced myself for a second blow but it did not come. Probably it was the undeniably proletarian flavour of domestic violence that saved me.
‘By Christ!’ he said at last. ‘That ever a child of mine … behaving like a bitch on heat … common little tart … the disgrace … never live it down … sacrifices for my country … my own daughter … how am I going to hold up my head in the club?’
I knew it would be pointless to attempt an explanation. I let him rave uninterrupted to get it over with as soon as possible.
‘I blame your mother,’ he concluded, in a tone into which some of the bittersweetness of having been deceived and betrayed was beginning to trickle. ‘She’s filled your head with sentimental claptrap. I suppose you fancied Latimer was in love with you. I hope he was good enough in bed to justify compromising the first decent government we’ve had for years. Don’t imagine you were the only one! He’ll have had his leg over every party worker under forty. What fools women are!’
‘You kept your word, I see.’ Kit evolved from the darkness and stood before me, laden with bulky objects. ‘Feeling better?’ He dropped a pile of blankets on the bench beside me and proceeded to wrap me in them. A man in uniform approached with a tray.
‘Just put it there. We’ll help ourselves, thanks.’ Kit put something into his hand and he slid away with a respectful murmur. ‘Now.’ Kit began to unwrap packages. ‘Never let it be said that we English can’t enjoy a picnic whatever the weather, even in the middle of the night on a ship trying to stand on its head. Cheese sandwich, madam? Or would you prefer cheese and pickle? Or there’s cheese and egg, and, for the connoisseur, cheese and sausage.’
‘I thought you said something about a mill-pond.’ Suddenly I found I was even a little hungry.
‘So I did when it was. As smooth as. But we’ve got out beyond the point now and it’s blowing up. No’ – as I turned my head to look – ‘just take my word for it. Now have some hot coffee and if you eat up your sandwiches you can have a treat afterwards. I managed to commandeer the last two jam doughnuts. When in my extreme youth we had them for tea, Nanny used to wash them under the bathroom tap to get rid of the sugar because she feared for our tooth enamel. Ever since then, when things have looked on the bleak side, I’ve found there are few things more comforting than a dry, plump, sugary doughnut. Other men may hanker for foie gras but I thank God my tastes are more easily satisfied.’
Warm within my nest of blankets, with a strong breeze in my face, looking up at the stars while I ate the sandwiches and sipped the cooling coffee, I began to feel the truth of the saying that stuffing holds out a storm. It would be too much to say that I felt cheerful but while Kit was talking nonsense and when I was not thinking about Burgo I began to feel a little less miserable.
Ironically, it was entirely due to my father’s passion for interfering with other people’s lives that I had met Burgo.
By my own reckoning I had removed myself from my father’s sphere of influence years before. As soon as I was capable of living independently (that is, the summer after I left school), I had spent three months living in a bed-sitter in Earls Court and working in an antique shop. That autumn I had enrolled at London University to read History of Art and after graduating I took a poorly paid but interesting job at Boswell’s, one of the smaller auction houses. I shared a tiny house with two friends, Sarah and Jasmine, in an enchanting cul-de-sac near the river in Chelsea. To help pay the rent I spent some of my spare time writing articles for periodicals about things like embroidered textiles, fans, silhouettes and custard pots. For relaxation I was entertained by my share of the large, fluctuating collection of men friends about whom Sarah, Jasmine and I speculated endlessly over bottles of cheap wine in the intimacy of the shabby but pretty sitting room of 22 Paradise Row.
Jasmine was in love with a married man called Teddy Bayliss. Though Sarah and I had told her (until we were in danger of sounding like evangelists for the Divine Light through Abstinence and Purity) that this was asking for trouble and bound to make her miserable, it was impossible to be anything other than sympathetic when one saw her lovely face ravaged by grief. Naturally, after the first wild rapture of romance with Teddy had passed, all our predictions came true. There were long lonely evenings in thrall to the telephone, broken dates because of wifely comings and goings or the demands of his children, the misery of imagining him sitting by a Christmas tree unwrapping presents with his family while Jasmine sat in a suite at the Savoy, watching her mother drift into a gin haze. Though the trials of her situation were commonplace, even hackneyed, this did nothing to alleviate the unhappiness they created.
I could not understand the attraction. Jasmine was sweet-natured, gentle, generous and half-Chinese. Her waist-length hair was black and lustrous, her skin golden, her features childlike and enchanting. Teddy was middle-aged, had mean little eyes, scant hair, an undersized chin, an oversized stomach and a self-conceit that seemed entirely unfounded. To see him treating Jasmine with a careless assurance that seemed to take her devotion for granted made us furious. We did everything we could think of to release her from the spell that made her blind to his ass’s head – lecturing her as mentioned above, telling her that Teddy was a boring and pompous bastard, introducing her to nicer, more attractive men – but she remained enamoured.
Sarah, who owned the house in Paradise Row, and to whom Jasmine and I paid rent, had her own theory about this.
‘Jazzy sees her father twice a year. He kisses her politely, gives her an inscrutable smile and a cheque and asks her to call him a cab. Ergo, she’s looking for a father substitute.’
On the sole occasion Jasmine’s father and I had met, he had shaken my hand and told me that Communism had been the end of civilization as far as China was concerned. Then he had whipped a book from his pocket and removed himself to the far end of the room to read. He held some diplomatic post at the embassy in Paris. It did not seem to me a position for which he was particularly well suited.
‘But would you say that Teddy was exactly an ideal father figure? Having an affair with a girl half his age would seem to me to disqualify him from the start.’
‘Don’t be so literal, you fathead!’ Sarah was a forthright girl, a barrister-in-training. She enjoyed polemic. ‘Jazzy doesn’t want a bloke smelling of pipe tobacco with slippers and a woolly waistcoat. She’s looking for an authority figure to lead her through the maze of life and instruct her in every instance, including sex. Surely you know that all little girls have powerful sexual feelings about their fathers?’
I looked at Sarah’s round brown eyes in her round face, framed by straight brown hair.
‘I can say with absolute certainty that I never did.’
‘You’re afraid to admit it to yourself, that’s all.’
‘Afraid would be the word, all right.’
‘Anyway,’ Sarah continued with energy, ‘Jazzy’s still in many ways a child. She doesn’t understand cause and effect. She refuses to take responsibility for her actions. Like a baby, she simply responds to the most pressing physical need.’
‘I still don’t see why that makes the repulsive, chinless, paunchy Teddy—’
‘What a dunce you are! There’s nothing special about Teddy except his age and his unavailability. She has to struggle to engage his attention. That feels familiar, therefore comforting. Those of us who’ve had reasonable relationships with our fathers can move on from there to seek men who satisfy our grown-up emotional and intellectual needs as equals.’
‘So far we don’t seem to have had much success.’
It was true that there were men of all kinds turning up on the front doorstep of Number 22 to take us severally out to lunch, dinner, the theatre, the cinema, exhibitions, home to meet their mothers, and sometimes to bed. But neither of us had so far met anyone who met all our requirements for more than a few months. Sarah had had a string of lawyer boyfriends who were unsatisfactory because they much preferred sex to arguing. My boyfriends tended to be artistic and unsatisfactory because they were self-absorbed, neurotic, unreliable, and always borrowing money. Once I had got as far as announcing an engagement in The Times before I came to my senses and called it off. The unpleasantness this engendered and my own deep regret for causing pain had put me off such conventional behaviour for good. After the tremors had ebbed I decided that if I met someone I wanted to marry I would do it at once and without more ceremony than the register office provided. No one had so far tempted me to put this plan into action.
None the less, it would be true to say that my life was continuing satisfactorily until one morning not long after the above conversation – 22 April 1978, to be precise – a telephone call from my father had come as a rude blast shattering the idyll.
TWO
‘It’s your mother. Broken her hip. You’d better come at once.’
‘Poor thing! Is she in pain? How did it happen?’
‘Fell down the library steps. Her own fault for frittering her life away with those damned stupid fairy tales.’
There was triumph in my father’s voice. His reading matter was confined to the Trout and Salmon Monthly and the Shooting Times. He considered a taste for fiction evidence of bohemian depravity.
‘I suppose it could have happened anywhere.’
‘Stop arguing, Roberta! Your mother needs you. I’ll tell Brough to meet the twelve-fifteen.’
Brough was valet, butler, gardener, handyman and driver. Due to a childhood illness that had resulted in a humped back, he was a tiny man, much shorter even than my father. Though he sat on several cushions, his view from behind the wheel of our Austin Princess was largely sky. My father regularly deducted the repair of wings, bumpers and headlamps from his wages, then lent him a subsistence to prevent him from starving. After twenty years of service, Brough was several thousand pounds in debt to my father. Because of this he seemed to feel he had no choice but to do my father’s bidding, however unreasonable the task and the hour, and to put up with any amount of calumny in the process. Understandably Brough was a morose man, given to violent outbursts of temper when out of earshot of my father.
‘I’ll get a taxi from the station.’
‘This is not the time to start throwing money about when I’ve the fruits of your mother’s confounded carelessness to pay for. That damned clinic charges the earth.’ Nor were reports of the general standards of hygiene of the Cutham Down Nursing Home encouraging. But my father presumably thought it was worth paying for a superior sort of dirt.
‘I’ll come tomorrow on the ten-fifteen.’
‘You’ll come today, my girl, or I’ll know the reason why!’
There followed an unpleasant exchange which bordered on a row. A compromise was reached and I went down to Sussex late that afternoon.
‘How are you, Mummy?’
A temporary bedroom had been made of the morning room, ill chosen as such for it faced due north and was perpetually in shade.
My mother opened her eyes and sighed. ‘Terrible. Can’t sleep.’
‘Were they kind to you in the nursing home?’
‘They were harridans.’ Her voice was alarmingly weak but she managed to get a little emphasis on the last word. ‘Ill mannered. Coarse and stupid. Like being nursed by a gang of Irish road-menders.’
‘What a good thing you were able to come home early.’
‘They said I ought to stay in at least until the stitches were taken out. But your father insisted on my being discharged. It’s ninety pounds a day.’
Her skin was lined and greyish. Her gooseberry-green eyes were reproachful and her mouth quivered with resentment.
‘Poor Mummy.’ I bent to kiss her and stroke her once pretty, fair hair from her forehead. ‘Does it hurt very much?’
‘Don’t pull me about.’ She jerked her head away. ‘You know how I hate it. It’s perfect agony, if you want to know.’
I looked around the sickroom, noticing that the grey and white-striped paper was beginning to peel at the cornice, that the Turkey carpet had a hole in it and the bed on which my mother lay was propped up at one corner by a stack of books.
‘This is such a dismal room.’ I put an extra brightness into my voice to compensate. ‘We must see what we can do to cheer it up. I’ve brought you some flowers.’
She looked at the bunch of exquisite pink and green-striped parrot tulips I held out, then turned her eyes away. ‘I prefer to see flowers growing out of doors where Nature intended them.’
My eye travelled through the window to where Brough was hacking with uncontrolled fury at some spotted laurels, growing in a landscape of dank shrubbery and sour grass.
‘I’ve brought you some chocolate. Walnut whips. Your favourite.’
My mother closed her eyes and screwed up her face. ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never been ill. In the state I’m in, rich food is simply poison.’
‘I’ve also brought the latest Jeanette Dickinson-Scott.’
‘I expect I’ve already read it.’ Her eyes opened. ‘What’s it called?’
I looked at the cover on which was a painting of a Regency belle in a low-cut purple dress, with powdered hair and a loo mask. ‘Amazon in Lace.’
‘Who’s in it?’
I flicked through the pages. ‘Someone called Lady Araminta. And her guardian Lord Willoughby Savage. He’s got sardonic eyebrows, long sensitive fingers and a jagged cicatrice from cheekbone to—’
‘You may as well give it to me.’ My mother’s hand appeared from beneath the bed cover. When I looked in, half an hour later, she was reading hard and sucking the top of a walnut whip.
After that the days had crawled by at an invalid pace. There was plenty to do but only things of a most unrewarding kind. Cutham Down, once a village, now a small town, was in a part of Sussex that had a micro-climate of bitter east winds and exceptionally high rainfall. After my maternal great-grandfather had amassed a fortune bottling things in vinegar – ‘Pickford’s Pickles Perfectly Preserved’ was the slogan – he had sold the factory and applied himself to the serious business of becoming a country squire. In the 1880s Cutham Hall had been a pleasing two-storey Georgian house with a separate stable block set in the middle of forty acres. This had not been grand enough to suit my great-grandfather’s newly acquired notions of self-consequence so he had added a top storey and thrown out two wings, at once destroying the elegant façade and making the house unmanageably large.
Cutham Hall had ten bedrooms, most of which had not been slept in for decades, and a number of badly furnished rooms downstairs in which no one ever sat. My father lived in what he called his ‘library’, a room of mean proportions which housed the remains of the various hobbies that he had run through. There were drawers of butterflies and beetles pinned on to boards. There was a sad red squirrel with a crooked tail, his first and only attempt at taxidermy. In a cupboard were his guns and fishing rods. On the walls were photographs of meets at Cutham Hall from the period when he had been enthusiastic about hunting. No books, of course. He was really only interested in amusements that involved killing things.
Oliver and I spent most of our time in the kitchen where there was an ancient lumpy sofa by the Aga and a television, ostensibly ‘for the servants’. We had no indoor servants unless Mrs Treadgold, our daily, counted as one. She had a twenty-eight-inch colour television in her tidy, warm, watertight bungalow and would have scorned to watch anything on our tiny flickering black-and-white set with its bent coat-hanger aerial.
For about three days after my return home, Mrs Treadgold and I diligently dusted and vacuumed the ancestral acres of mahogany and carpet. I could tell by the quantities of cobwebs and dead flies that they were unaccustomed to so much attention. Then, by tacit agreement, exhausted by labour that was as dreary as it was pointless, we closed the doors on the unused rooms and allowed them to sleep peacefully on beneath a fresh film of dust. I took over the cooking and shopping while Mrs Treadgold cleaned the few rooms we lived in. Between us we looked after my mother.
My chief duty was to keep her supplied with books and, as she read all day and half the night, I was constantly on the road between our house and the four libraries in the county to which she was a subscriber. Her taste was for romantic fiction. I had my name down for every novel that had the words ‘love’, ‘heart’, ‘kiss’, ‘bride’, ‘sweet’ or ‘surrender’ in the title.
‘I’ve read this,’ my mother said during the second week of my servitude, casting my latest offering aside. ‘Don’t you remember? You got it out last week.’
‘Can’t you read it again?’
‘I know what happens in the end.’
‘Of course you do. The handsome titled hero subdues the heroine’s pride and spirit until she loves him so much she’s prepared to let him do unutterably filthy things to her despite her natural disinclination. That’s always going to be the ending. She’s never going to go off with the good-natured wall-eyed coachman or decide she’d rather run a dress shop.’
But my mother affected not to be listening. ‘You can ask Treadgold to bring my tea now. And tell her not to slop it in the saucer. That woman’s so clumsy, she could get a job at the nursing home easily. You’d better go and see what Brough is doing. Now I’m lying here helpless I suppose the place is falling to rack and ruin.’
‘It looks fine,’ I lied. ‘You mustn’t worry about it. Just concentrate on getting better.’
My mother threw me a sidelong glance of annoyance. It occurred to me then that she much preferred lying in bed and being waited on to the unremitting slog of trying to run a large decaying house with severely limited funds. I could sympathize with this. I went to see Brough as instructed.
The forty acres my great-grandfather had begun with had shrunk to four as parcels of land had been sold piecemeal during the last hundred years to prop up a pretentious style lived on an insufficient income. Most of the remaining acreage had been given over to shrubbery which required little attention. Brough had a comfortable arrangement in the greenhouse with a chair, a radio and a kettle by the stove where he sat for hours on end, no doubt brooding over his thralldom. On this occasion I found him actually out of doors, spraying something evil-smelling over hybrid tea roses of a hideous flaunting red.
‘Wouldn’t they look rather better if they had something growing between them?’ I suggested, hoping to strike a note of fellowship with this remote, furious being. ‘Perhaps some hardy geraniums or violas—’
‘This is a rose-bed.’ Brough’s angry little eyes were contemptuous.
‘Yes, but it needn’t be just roses …’
‘The Major wouldn’t like it.’
The Major was my father.
‘How do you know he wouldn’t?’
‘Because he told me. He said, “Brough, whatever you do, don’t go planting anything between them roses. Over my dead body.”’
One cannot call someone a liar without disagreeable consequences. I walked angrily away and set myself the task of weeding the stone urns on the terrace. A harvest of bittercress shot seeds into the cracks between the stones as I worked, there to take ineradicable root and, just as I finished, the handle of one of the urns dropped off and smashed, leaving two large holes through which the sandy earth trickled on to my shoes in a steady stream. I went indoors.
My brother Oliver, the fourth inmate of this unhappy house, threatened daily to shake the plentiful dust of home from his feet. He was twenty, nearly six years younger than me, and could certainly have done so without anyone objecting. I think my father might even have been willing to drive him to the station himself, had he been convinced that Oliver would board the train. Oliver was currently an aspiring novelist. He was working on something satirical about a Swiftian character who, like the fortunate Dean, was adored by two equally desirable women. Despite having completed a mere ten pages Oliver was convinced that this was to be his passport to success and a new life. I loved my brother dearly and to see him struggling to maintain a fragile self-confidence was painful. I already knew the plot of Sunbeams from Cucumbers backwards and it seemed promising.
‘It’s all in the writing, you see,’ he explained, lying full-length on the sofa after a lonely afternoon of creation, while I peeled potatoes for supper.
It was three weeks after my return and my mother had not yet managed to totter further than to the commode set up for her in the corner of the morning room. I was sinking into a lethargic despondency at the prospective length of my term of servitude.
‘You know the saying “kill your darlings”?’ Oliver went on. ‘I think it was Hemingway who said it. Well, as soon as I write anything that seems any good, I have to destroy it immediately. So, naturally, it takes a while to get a page done.’
‘You’re sure you aren’t taking it too literally?’ I put the saucepan on to boil. ‘I mean, if you only keep the bits that aren’t any good, isn’t that defeating the object?’
‘It means you must cut out the showy, self-conscious passages.’ Oliver licked out the bowl in which I had made a batter for apple fritters. School and the army had bred in my father a taste for nursery food which meant that solid English puddings, of the kind that require custard, were obligatory at lunch and supper. ‘My problem is that to lose self-consciousness I have to be drunk. But not so drunk that I can’t hold the pen. It’s a delicate balance. You’ve no idea what a serious writer has to suffer.’ As he said this at least twice a day I felt I was beginning to get a pretty good idea.
It was unfortunate that alcohol did not agree with Oliver. He had tried beer, whisky, wine, sherry, even crème de menthe, but they all made him wretchedly ill. He was a handsome boy with dark, almost black hair, a large, slightly bulging forehead, which gave him the appearance of a solemn child, a sensitive, girlish mouth and my mother’s green eyes which, because of the drinking, were matched by his complexion. On bad days his skin was the colour of a leaf.
‘I think this place is part of the trouble,’ he went on to say as I cut corned beef into cubes for a hash. ‘How can one be inspired when living in an atmosphere of intellectual aridity and Pecksniffian hypocrisy? That tosh Mother reads is atrophying her brain. She’s so miserable with Father that she can’t bear to live in the real world. I sometimes wonder where Father’s getting his spiritual nourishment. I can’t believe being beastly to his children and kicking Brough around is quite enough even for a man with the mental acuity of a wood louse.’
‘I can answer that as it happens. I drove into Worping this morning to see if Bowser’s had any new romances and afterwards I stopped at the Kardomah for a cup of coffee. While I was there Father came in. That was strange enough but what made it even odder was that he was with a woman.’
‘No!’ Oliver swung his legs round to sit up, his green face lit by excitement. ‘What was she like? And what did he say when he saw you?’
‘I was sitting in the corner behind a sort of trellis screen covered with plastic ivy. I could see them quite clearly by peering between the leaves but he never knew I was there. I heard every word they said.’
‘Go on!’
‘She was asking him about Mother. Father said she’d do a lot better if she put some damned effort into it, instead of lolling about, filling her head with rubbish. He never let illness get him down, he said. If he had anything wrong with him he always went out for a brisk walk over the Downs and blew it away. I don’t suppose a brisk walk would do Mother’s broken hip any good at all.’ I paused in the act of chopping onions to wipe my stinging eyes.
‘Don’t stop now!’
‘She said something about being sure he was a brave man. He couldn’t have done what he did in the war unless he’d been really courageous.’
‘So he didn’t tell her about being sent home with a bad case of Tobruk tummy to a desk job in Devizes. What was the woman like?’
‘In her fifties, plump, hennaed hair, a lot of make-up and jewellery. Her name’s Ruby. Not his usual type. Apparently they’re having dinner on Friday at the Majestic in Brighton. She was quite excited and giggly about it. She must have had a sad life if dinner with our father is her idea of fun.’
Oliver gave a bitter laugh. ‘So he’s got a bit of rough on the side. How drearily unoriginal. I wonder if he pays her?’
‘Actually I thought she was rather too good for him. She spoke kindly about Mother. She seemed concerned. And when Dad ticked her off for saying “serviette” – he’s such a hideous snob – she looked crushed. I felt sorry for her.’
‘The old bastard! And when I think what a fuss he made about Gaylene!’ Gaylene was a girl who had worked the petrol pumps at a garage in a neighbouring village of whom Oliver had been much enamoured. ‘He had the nerve to call her a draggle-tailed slut. I’ve a good mind to leave tomorrow!’
I seized the moment. ‘I think you should, darling, though you know I’ll miss you like anything. I’ll ring David this minute and ask him if you can come and stay.’ David was an ex-boyfriend of mine, with a flat in Pimlico, who had offered this boon when last I had discussed the problem of Oliver with him.
We sat up until one in the morning detailing plans for Oliver’s escape. David professed himself willing to harbour the son of Hemingway, provided I would have dinner with him the following week. This was no hardship as I was still fond of David, though only in a sisterly way. I went to bed feeling glad that this depressing episode of my life would not be entirely unproductive of good after all.
When I knocked on Oliver’s door the next morning, having got up at the ghastly hour of six to drive him to the station, there was no answer. I went in. The alarm clock was on its back in the farthest corner of the room and Oliver had both pillows over his head. He became almost violent when I tried to drag him out of bed. He came down to lunch in his dressing-gown and was bathed and dressed by four. By this time he had decided that as he’d had a brilliant idea for the novel he had better spend the rest of the day working and go up to London the following morning. This became the pattern for the next three days.
After that I cancelled the arrangement with David, except for the dinner as this would have seemed unattractively opportunistic. I tried to resign myself to the fact that I was powerless to help Oliver. The only good I could do him was to encourage him to go on writing. I made myself available for any amount of pep-talking and amateur psychotherapy. I bought him vitamin pills and sent him out for walks to catch whatever daylight was left. But all my efforts amounted to little. The novel proceeded at a rate of a couple of sentences a day. The truth was that Oliver was afraid to go. Some part of him clung desperately to home, hoping that even now he might be blessed by some vivifying drops from the fount of parental love.
‘Mm … Kit?’ I muttered thickly, my mouth crammed with doughnut. ‘If you’re a literary agent, I suppose you help novelists get published, do you? I mean, I happen to know someone who’s written this absolutely brilliant book. It’s practically finished, and I can assure you it’s quite exceptionally good, only he needs some professional help. You know, whom to send it to, what to say in the letter, perhaps even a friendly eye cast over the text and a few constructive hints?’
Kit was silent for a moment or two and something like a sigh escaped him. It occurred to me that probably a great many people had approached him with just such a request.
‘It’s a cheek to ask, I know,’ I said humbly, ‘and of course I’ll pay you, but … Well, it’s my brother, actually, and of course you’ll think I’m prejudiced—’
‘Your brother? In that case, the services of Roderick, Random and Co. are yours, willing and gratis.’
‘Oh, how kind!’ I felt a gush of enthusiasm for this stranger who had not only plucked me from the verge of shipwreck, warmed me and fed me but now offered to help rescue my darling brother with at least an appearance of eagerness. ‘I don’t know how to thank you. He’ll be so grateful.’
‘You can start by telling me your name.’
‘Certainly. It’s Bobbie.’
‘Bobbie? Don’t tell me, your parents wanted a boy.’
‘It’s a nickname. Not elegant, I know, but it’s what everyone calls me.’
Except for Burgo. He disliked abbreviations. I had, he said, a perfectly good name that suited me perfectly.
‘So what’s the other bit?’
‘Oh, let’s not bother with formalities, as you said.’
‘What a mistrustful girl you are. Who would have thought that beneath that angelically fair exterior there ticks such a suspicious mind?’
I stiffened and drew away from him. ‘How do you know what colour my hair is? It was already dark when we left Swansea.’
‘I was speaking poetically. Fair meaning pretty, you know. I hope you’re pretty. I’m prepared to bet that you are. But I’ve no idea whether you’re as blonde as a Viking or as dark as an Ethiopian.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I relaxed. ‘Things have been … Lack of sleep is making me neurotic.’
‘Actually the name Bobbie makes me think of someone with a pudding-basin haircut, red cheeks and a punishing serve. A sister to all men, always willing to make the cocoa, a jolly good sport.’ I felt a tug on one side of my head. ‘But your hair’s long and you say it’s fair. I’m awfully glad. I’ll be happy to make the cocoa every time.’
‘We’ll have to do without it tonight. It must be at least ten o’clock.’
Kit shone the meagre beam of his torch on to the dial of his watch. ‘Half past. Are you ready for your berth, Bobbie? Shall I escort you to the door or will that give rise to impertinent gossip, do you think?’
‘I don’t think I can face it. I went to look at my cabin when I came aboard. It’s several floors down. Horribly claustrophobic. I booked too late to get a single berth. My bunkmate was jolly and friendly but smelt penetratingly of the stables. Apparently she’s going to Ireland to buy horses. I’m not sure my stomach can stand being tossed about all night in a miasma of manure. Anyway, it’s rather lovely up here and I’m not cold now.’ And it was, in truth, lovely – if rough. The wind seemed to be blowing hard, or perhaps that was the motion of the ship, but the moon, three-quarters full, suffused the drifting clouds with silver. ‘But you must go to bed. You’ve looked after me beautifully and I’m grateful. I shall be perfectly all right.’
‘I’m not at all sleepy. Why don’t you put your feet up and I’ll tuck you in. Here, rest your head on my coat. Don’t worry,’ he said as I made noises of protest, ‘the steward’s keeping us under observation from the saloon window. He’ll be the perfect chaperon. And as soon as I’m the least bit weary I shall leave you to it. Will it bother you if I smoke?’
‘Not at all.’
The delicious smell of a Gauloise mingled with the tang of salt. The stars rolled languorously to and fro above my upturned face as the giant cradle rocked beneath me. It was strange to be lying with my head almost in the lap of a man I had known for two hours but at the same time it felt companionable. I began to relax. For ten days now I had slept patchily, always with a sense of foreboding. My rib cage stopped aching; my eyelids ceased to twitch.
‘Marvellous, aren’t they?’ Kit blew out smoke. ‘Impossible to believe they’re indifferent to our joys and sorrows, isn’t it?’ I realized he was talking about the stars. ‘There’s one that’s definitely winking at us. No wonder people make wishes by them.’
‘If wishes were butter-cakes, beggars might bite,’ I said drowsily. At least I thought I had said it, but it may just have been part of my dream.
THREE
Something brushed against my cheek.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.’
I opened my eyes. The sky had paled mysteriously. It took me a second or two to realize that this must be the dawn. I twisted my head and saw someone – Kit – looking down at me, smiling. Something hard pressed against my ear. I put up my hand. It was a coat button. I struggled to sit up, encumbered by blankets, my muscles unresponsive with cold. ‘How long have I been asleep? What time is it?’
Kit looked at his watch, squinting in the grey light. ‘Ten to five.’
‘It can’t be!’
‘You were terribly tired.’
‘I hope I didn’t snore.’
‘You were as quiet as a little cat. From time to time you purred and once you shouted “No!” quite fiercely. That woke me up.’
‘Have you been here all night?’
He nodded.
‘You must have been so uncomfortable. Really, you should have gone to bed.’
‘I’m as stiff as an ironing board,’ he admitted, ‘but I managed to doze. I’m one of those lucky people who can get by on not much sleep. I’ll just walk about a bit and I’ll be fine. We’ll be in Cork in less than an hour.’
‘Cork!’ I felt a rush of emotions, predominantly apprehension.
‘Where did you think we were going?’
‘Well, there of course. It’s just that I’ve never been to Ireland before. And everything was arranged at the last minute. Oh, Lord, I can’t move my fingers! And my neck’s broken, I think.’
‘Come on.’ Kit pulled me up from the bench. ‘We’ll get our circulations going.’
We strolled about together until the blood had returned to our hands and feet. There were no other passengers on deck, only members of the crew who gave us particular looks and pointed smiles. Probably they assumed we were lovers who had preferred a romantic consummation beneath the stars to a struggle within the confines of a narrow bunk in a prosaic cabin. We stood at the stern rail, drank brown tea and ate tasteless white rolls filled with hard-boiled eggs and mayonnaise. We watched the sky blush with gleams of coral, salmon and rose. Slowly it flooded with gold.
‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ said Kit. ‘Doesn’t it make you glad to be alive?’
‘Mm … yes,’ I said, more decidedly than I felt. Foam streamed in the wake of the ship. Gulls slid up and down the grey-green waves and quarrelled over the last crumbs of my breakfast. I wished the ship would sail on and never come to land.
‘Now I can see for myself that you are fair,’ Kit said. ‘In at least two of the … let’s see’ – he counted on his fingers – ‘six meanings of the word that I can think of immediately. Neither a market-place nor good weather. Beautiful and with light-coloured hair, yes. And I’m willing to bet that you’re just and impartial. But never mediocre.’
‘Oh, don’t! It was so lovely to forget about me. I must look a wreck. And of course I’m not impartial. No one is, however hard they may try to be.’ I attempted to run my fingers through my hair but it was tangled by the wind.
‘I’ll comb it for you,’ suggested Kit. The brightening rays of the sun shone through his ears, turning them crimson. His hair was curly and brown. His eyes were blue and intelligent. It was an appealing face, with its high forehead and good-humoured mouth. Not handsome but attractive.
‘Certainly not. People will think I’m an escaped lunatic and you’re my keeper.’
‘I shan’t mind if you don’t. That steward hasn’t taken his eyes off you since you woke up. You’re putting colour into his drab existence. Can’t you gibber a little and play with your lips? Where’s your sense of civic duty?’
‘I probably am a lunatic. Only a madwoman …’
I paused. Kit had been so sympathetic that I had been tempted to tell him something of my circumstances but then I thought better of it.
‘Oh dear. That suspicious look again. You’re as wary as a bird of paradise who’s just spotted a woman in a rather dull hat.’
I laughed but said nothing.
Kit turned to lean his back against the rail so that he could look directly into my face. ‘Forgive me if this is an impertinent question, but when we get into Cork will there be a husband or a boyfriend standing on the quay, counting the seconds?’
I thought of Burgo, imagined him with the collar of his coat turned up against the importunate July breezes, hands in pockets, frowning, impatient of delay, already running ahead in his mind, planning what we were going to do, where we were going to eat, make love. I felt a pang of desolation.
‘No.’
‘I see. Would it be presuming to ask where you’re going to in such solitary splendour? I promise not to divulge the information to MI5.’
‘I’m going to Galway. To Connemara.’
Kit whistled. ‘Among the mountainy men? It’s a wild sort of place and they’re a strange, interesting breed. “To Hell or to Connaught”, as they used to say. Meaning, of course, that there was little to choose between them.’
‘Where’s Connaught?’
‘Where you’re going. The ancient kingdom of the West. Where Cromwell sent the indigenous Irish after dispossessing them of their nice, fertile, well-drained lands in the east. Are you an accomplished Gaelic speaker?’
‘Not a word. Will it matter?’ I had a vision of myself shut away in some mountain fastness, in a household of eccentrics of whose culture and language I was entirely ignorant. Anthropologists would no doubt have delighted in the prospect. I found it alarming.
‘Not at all. Despite the efforts of the Gaelic League and Sinn Fein to establish it as the first language, it’s fiendishly difficult and the majority of Irish speak English. I just wondered if you were writing a book about the Gaeltacht or researching the dress code of the high kings or something like that.’
‘I’m going to be housekeeper to a family named Macchuin.’
Kit whistled again. ‘That’s the last thing I’d have guessed. What do you know about them?’
‘Almost nothing. I answered an advertisement in a newspaper. When I telephoned, the woman I spoke to said she was desperate for help. She engaged me on the spot.’
‘And you accepted, just as impulsively?’
‘All relevant questions, apart from how to get there, went out of my head. I needed to get away.’
‘I hope you won’t feel as urgent a need to get back. They might be dipsomaniacs, drug-smugglers, sexual psychopaths or an IRA stronghold, for all you know.’
‘Perhaps all those things at once. Though we only talked for five minutes at the most I liked the impression I had of Mrs Macchuin. And I was flattered that she seemed so thrilled when I agreed to come.’
‘Only someone absolutely hell-bent, neck-or-nothing, on escape would be encouraged by such enthusiasm. Are you impetuous, rash, devil-may-care by nature or are the bailiffs after you?’ When I smiled but didn’t say anything he went on, ‘So what did this excitable woman say? Any kind of job description?’
‘All I know is that there are three children between the ages of eight and sixteen, and six adults, one of whom is generally away. Mrs Macchuin sounded exhausted rather than excitable.’
‘Worse and worse. Why is she exhausted, I wonder? Badly behaved children? Too little money? Or too much Mr Macchuin, perhaps.’
‘I didn’t ask. I was trying to think myself into a new role. The sort of person who does as she’s told and doesn’t ask questions. An efficient, invisible menial.’
‘You’ll never be that. Invisible, I mean. You don’t look terribly efficient but here appearances may be deceptive.’
‘I must admit my life so far hasn’t really demanded efficiency. But it can only be a question of application.’
Kit sighed and shook his head. ‘I see problems ahead.’
‘It’ll only be for six months or so. Then I’ll go back to London, probably.’
‘I wish you’d trust me.’ He looked at me gravely. When I did not reply he pointed behind me and said quietly, ‘Land ahoy.’
While we had been talking the ferry, unobserved by me, had been turning slowly. We were about to enter a wide channel bounded by distant promontories, perhaps a mile apart. I felt excited as I examined the low cliffs, half hidden in mist, trying to imagine my immediate future.
‘Your first view of Ireland,’ said Kit. ‘It’s such a beautiful country with the best people in the world, yet the most terrible things have happened here. Do you know anything of Irish history?’
‘Not much.’ I dredged my mind for facts. ‘Um … Cromwell and the Siege of Drogheda. And there was the Battle of the Boyne. James the Second. I think he lost. That’s about all I can remember. Oh, and of course the IRA. I don’t understand any of that. Why did they assassinate Airey Neave? Wasn’t he trying to help the Irish?’
‘Ah, that’s a complicated one. You may as well forget your history lessons. Seen through Irish eyes, Ireland has suffered eight hundred years of merciless exploitation beneath the yoke of English imperialism. Make no mistake. We English are still the “Old Enemy”.’ I must have looked alarmed for he added, ‘Don’t worry. You won’t be held accountable. They’ll be charming to you. It’s the British government and the army they hate. But you’d better acquaint yourself with some proper Irish history if you’re going to make sense of the place. The Irish take enormous pride in their long struggle for national identity. Now they’ve joined the EEC things are looking up economically and a cultural change radiating from Dublin is gradually persuading the country people to abandon their inwardlooking, backward-looking colonial complex, but essentially you’ve still got a population that is rural, conservative and poor.’
‘I thought it was such a fertile country. Why is it poor?’
While Kit was talking, one part of my mind absorbed first impressions of my new country of residence, which I hoped would be something of an asylum. As we steamed into the mouth of the River Lee towards Cork Harbour I saw gentle hills, fields and farmsteads lit by a rosy light. Then the channel broadened and they receded into haze.
‘Again that’s not easy to say in a few words. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century conditions for the peasantry were tough but they were healthy and happy enough if one can believe the historians. Thackeray, in his Irish Sketch Book of 1842 described the Irish as being like the landscapes: “ragged, ruined and cheerful”. But then they were struck by the worst disaster in Irish history: the Great Famine, when the potato crop failed four years in succession. Out of a population of eight million people one million died of starvation or disease. Two million, probably the brightest, most energetic ones, emigrated, mostly to England and North America. So much misery and loss is bound to have an effect on a nation’s psychology. A sort of fatalism, a melancholy, that leads to inertia.’
‘Oh yes, I see. But did we – the English I mean – do nothing to help?’
‘Not enough, in my opinion. Certainly not enough in the opinion of the Irish. But there isn’t enough time to explain exactly what happened. We’re coming into Ringaskiddy. That’s the ferry terminal. It’s another two or three miles to Cork itself.’
The ship was turning as sharply as a large ferry can, which is not very, and we were moving at a sluggish pace towards land. The terminal was the usual noisy, busy, ugly conglomeration of warehouses, cranes, lorries and moored craft. Much too quickly it increased in size. The propellers reversed to reduce our speed to dead slow and we drifted towards the quay. Until this moment I had been lulled into a state of passivity by the knowledge that there was no alternative to idleness while the ship was in motion. Now anxiety returned with full force.
‘I’d better go and get my things.’
‘No hurry,’ said Kit. ‘Most of the passengers are still asleep. They’ll take the cars off first.’
‘All the better. I’ll go before there’s a crowd.’
‘What’s your cabin number? I’ll fetch your cases for you.’
‘No, really. You’ve already been kind beyond the call of duty. And I ought to wash my face and brush my teeth.’
‘How are you getting to Connemara?’
‘Train. Apparently it takes all day to go a hundred and fifty miles. I have to change twice. Then a bus from Galway to Kilmuree. But I shall have scenery to look at.’ I tried to sound enthusiastic.
‘I’ve a better idea. For the next few weeks I’m travelling round the country spreading light and hope among my lonely authors. Part business, part holiday. There’s a delightful old boy on my list who lives near Westport. Writes books about geology. Sells about four a year but we like to diversify. He’ll be thrilled to see me a few days early and I can drop you off at your destination.’
‘You’ve got a car?’
‘Picturesque though a high-perch phaeton is, I find it inconvenient. And too exposed to the elements.’
‘I couldn’t possibly ask you to change your arrangements.’
‘But I can insist, truthfully, that I’m happy to do so.’
‘I’m being met at the bus station.’
‘All right. I’ll drop you there.’
‘But not until seven o’clock. In the evening, I mean.’
‘We’ll have a leisurely lunch on the way.’
It was too good an offer to refuse. I descended to collect my things. My cabin-mate was still asleep, lying on her back with her mouth open, snoring like a nest of wasps. The smell of horses had intensified. A wild creature with matted clown triangles of hair and smudged saucer eyes stared at me from the mirror.
‘My word!’ said Kit as I rejoined him on deck half an hour later. ‘I was beginning to worry that you’d jumped ship. But it was worth the wait. You look glorious. That colour is marvellous with your skin and hair.’
I felt a stab of pain then, remembering Burgo saying the same thing, almost word for word, about the pale yellow linen dress I had put on.
‘I don’t want to give the Macchuins the impression that the steamiron and I are unacquainted. My skirt not only bears all the signs of having been slept in but looks as though it might have been used as a picnic tablecloth as well.’
‘I’m not so conceited as to suppose that you put it on for me.’
Kit’s expression was non-committal but there was a slight sharpness in his tone. Had I sounded ungracious, I wondered?
‘There’s the old bus now.’ He leaned over the rail and pointed to a red sports car being driven off the ramp and along the quay. The hood was down so we could see quite clearly a man in overalls behind the wheel, playing with the dashboard and flashing the headlamps. Kit watched with the sort of glazed impassioned look that mothers get when people bend to coo admiringly into the pram.
We were the first passengers to present ourselves at customs and were through it in no time. Kit’s car gave a throaty roar at the first turn of the ignition key. My experience of cars was limited. In London I used buses and the underground. My father’s ancient Austin Princess and my mother’s battered Wolseley were my transport in the country. They rounded bends under protest and were rebellious when it came to starting. Kit’s car seemed barely able to contain itself as we trundled through the streets of Ringaskiddy. It had a gravelly growl and made little menacing rushes at obstacles, like a lion on a leash.
‘All the men are giving you envious looks,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about cars. Is it something terrifically glamorous?’
‘It’s an Alfa Spider. But it isn’t the car they’re jealous of.’
Some men consider it only polite to keep up a steady trickle of compliments.’ I liked Kit and I was grateful to him, but I had no heart for the game. To flirt successfully you must believe yourself to be desirable. I was near to hating myself. Depression threatened. I pushed it away. I owed it to Kit to be a cheerful passenger.
The urban sprawl at the outskirts of Cork offered nothing particular to admire but the surrounding countryside made up for that. It was at once apparent why Ireland was called the Emerald Isle. It was not just emerald, though. Different tones of green – olive, apple, lime, grass, sage and chartreuse – reflected the sun with a glossy luxuriance. Even the light was green.
‘That’s Blarney,’ said Kit, waving vaguely towards the west. I looked but saw only a church spire. He began to recite:
‘There is a stone there that whoever kisses,
Oh, he never misses to grow eloquent.
’Tis he may clamber to a lady’s chamber
Or become a member of Parliament.
‘I know which I’d rather,’ Kit went on. ‘As Topsy said, I’m mighty wicked and I can’t help it, but I lack the cold-blooded cynicism necessary to be a good politician.’
I glanced quickly at Kit’s profile but it was a picture of perfect innocence.
‘Look over there, to the north-west. The Boggeragh Mountains.’
I saw a series of massive heather-coloured triangles. We purred between stone walls that divided the land into tiny boulder-strewn fields while the trees laid blue and purple bars across the road, empty but for a few wandering sheep. Beside the road ran a sweetly purling river and seconds later we crossed it by means of a small hump-backed bridge.
‘What wonderful names. This really is fairy-land.’
‘Certainly it is. And you must be careful to keep on the right side of the good folk. They can be spiteful if crossed and they never forgive an injury.’
I examined Kit’s face carefully for signs that he was teasing me. He must have felt my eyes upon him for he turned his head briefly and smiled. As we drove north through the small town of Mallow and on towards the Ballyhoura Hills, I watched the landscape unfolding into higher and ever more beautiful curves and angles, marvelling that I had been ignorant all my life of so much beauty lying in wait across a small sea.
I found myself wondering what Burgo would have thought of it. It occurred to me that in the twelve months that I had known him I had not once heard him comment, favourably or adversely, on the works of Nature. Had this been because our meetings had so often been snatched from commitments elsewhere, appointments with other people, and there had not been time to think about our surroundings? No, that wasn’t it. Burgo had often been irritated by the shortcomings of the places we had been obliged to make use of. In fact he was highly conscious of his environment and of the way his presence changed things. Does that make him sound egotistic? Well, he was. Surprisingly, this had not stopped me loving him.
He was not, on the face of it, a vain man. I suppose his clothes must have been made for him because despite his height – he was six feet four inches – they fitted him perfectly. But I never heard him mention his tailor. His hair was straight, silvery fair, untidy. Probably he knew he was attractive to women so he never fussed about what he looked like, never looked in mirrors, was careless about mud and creases, did not seem to possess a comb. It was this confidence which had drawn me to him, which had been the fatal lure, I decided as I slid down in the car seat to escape the wind that whipped my hair into my eyes. Burgo’s attitude was neither aggressive nor defensive. This must have been because his ego was never in danger. Other people’s insecurity amused him. Possibly mine was what first attracted him. Certainly the occasion of our meeting had been unpropitious.
Dangerous though I knew it to be, a sense of ease and restfulness I had not felt for days tempted me to let my mind wander back to those first weeks of knowing him, when I had managed for the most part to live only for the moment; when only to think of him had lifted my despondent mood and made my heart race.
FOUR
Burgo and I had met five weeks after my return to Sussex to look after my mother. The encounter was preceded by a period of almost unrelieved dreariness. Despite visits from a physiotherapist, my mother had made no discernible progress. I had sub-let my room in Paradise Row so that Sarah could continue to pay the mortgage. I became supersensitive to the awfulness of Cutham Hall. When I walked into the house the smell of my father’s cigar-smoke mixed with the rubbery smell from carpet underlay that was beginning to perish made me feel sick.
‘It’s the Conservative lunch on Wednesday,’ my father had said at breakfast towards the end of the fifth week. ‘As your mother refuses even to look at the wheelchair provided for her at enormous trouble and expense, you’ll have to stand in.’
We were alone as usual so I knew he meant me, though he did not look up from his boiled egg. I cannot think quickly first thing in the morning. Irrelevant thoughts went through my mind. The wheelchair was on loan, gratis, from the Red Cross and had cost him only the telephone call I had made to order it and the cupful of petrol I had used when driving to pick it up.
‘You don’t mean you want me to go with you?’
‘There isn’t anyone else.’
‘Well, thank you for such a flattering invitation but on Wednesday I’m taking the kitchen sofa covers into Worping for dry-cleaning, then I’m dropping the Wolseley at the garage to be serviced and while that’s being done Oliver and I are going to the cinema. Mrs Treadgold’s agreed to stay later to look after Mother.’
‘You can do all that any day of the week. Your mother was tremendously relieved when I said I’d take you. You don’t want to set her back, do you?’
‘Please!’ said my mother later as I poured her a cup of tea the colour of white wine and buttered wafer-thin slices of toast. She had protested she was too weak to do her own buttering. ‘Please, for my sake, go to that ghastly Conservative lunch with him. He has to have a woman on his arm. If he’s on his own he feels as naked as going without trousers. He’s threatening to make me go in the wheelchair. As if I could! If you knew the pain I’m in. All the time. It’s relentless.’
‘Honey or marmalade?’
‘Marmalade. Sometimes I think I’m going to take all my painkillers at once and finish it for good. When your father starts hectoring me I absolutely make up my mind to do it. If he mentions this beastly lunch one more time, I shall.’
Brough, wearing his peaked cap and a cheap grey suit from the Co-op which was his chauffeur’s uniform, drove us to the Carlton House Hotel in Worping where the lunch was to be held. I had offered to drive so that Brough would not have to kick his heels, throwing stones at seagulls, for two hours but my father was adamant that we should travel like important dignitaries in the back of the Austin Princess, hoping perhaps to excite envy and admiration in the breasts of his political brothers.
Attempting to reverse into a space before the hotel’s porte cochère Brough crushed a plastic ‘No Parking’ sign and from the accompanying crunch of metal I guessed something had happened to the rear wing.
A man in a tail coat and striped trousers came running down the hotel steps. ‘You can’t park here. Didn’t you see the sign? This space is reserved for the mayor and the brass hats.’
‘I am a brass hat, as you put it,’ said my father, getting out of the car.
At that moment the mayor’s car drew alongside. It was of a size and magnificence to empty the rate-payers’ pockets before anyone had even considered street lamps or drains, and all traffic came to a standstill.
‘There was a time when the damned peasants knew their places,’ said my father with feeling. ‘I blame the Welfare State.’ He strolled up the steps and disappeared into the hotel.
I saw that we had already drawn a crowd who were watching Brough’s attempts to disengage the rear wheel (which had become wedged against the kerb) with unconcealed amusement. ‘I’d better go in,’ I said. ‘See if you can find a space in the car-park.’
I opened the car door in time to hear one of the witnesses to our humiliation say, ‘Who was that pompous idiot?’
‘That’s Major Pickford-Norton,’ said his companion. ‘The sort of man the Conservative Party needs like a hole in the head. Blimpish, bloated with self-consequence—’
‘Oh-ah-ha-a!’ said another, whom I vaguely recognized. I think he had once been to our house for a shooting lunch. He threw me an embarrassed glance. ‘Gentlemen, allow me to introduce you. This is Miss Roberta Pickford-Norton.’
There was an uncomfortable silence. None of this was my fault yet I felt myself blush with mortification.
‘Miss Pickford-Norton,’ said the one who had called my father a pompous idiot. ‘I apologize for my unparliamentary language. Will you let me try to make amends by buying you a drink?’
He put his hand under my elbow and I found myself being borne upwards into the hotel foyer. He ushered me into the dining room, which was already nearly full. Several men and women surged towards him and began conversations, while others waved and tried to catch his eye.
‘Hello, Lottie, how are you? Yes, I know, but you must excuse me for a moment. Good to see you, Herbert, talk later? Hello, Mrs Cholmondeley. No, I hadn’t heard. Really? Let’s talk about it after lunch.’
He tightened his grip on my elbow and steered me into a side room, which was comparatively empty.
‘Just a minute.’ He went away and reappeared almost immediately with two glasses of white wine. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘I hope you like speeches and being bored to hell and drinking’ – he sipped his wine and shuddered – ‘something you could clean paintbrushes with because you’re in for it now and no mistake. And in addition you’ve had to put up with my unforgivable rudeness. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to stamp off in a rage. In fact’ – wheeling round to look about him – ‘if I weren’t the most selfish of men that’s exactly what I’d advise you to do. It’s going to be unmitigated hell. But I hope you won’t. If you can find it in your heart to forgive a blundering idiot – I mean me – I’d be grateful because I can see at a glance you’re the only person here I want to talk to.’ He grabbed a bowl of peanuts from a nearby table. ‘You look hungry. Won’t you celebrate a truce with a friendly nut?’
He had dark eyes that slanted upwards at the outer corners. Despite his repentant tone and the solemnity of his expression I could see he thought it was funny. My parents never found anything amusing and Oliver was usually in the toils of creative agony. My own sense of humour, having fallen into desuetude, revived. I took a few nuts to show there were no hard feelings.
‘I forgive you,’ I said. ‘I’m not tactful myself. But you’ve confirmed my worst fears. I didn’t want to come. I hate politics and I loathe politicians. Particularly Conservative ones.’
‘I quite agree with you. About politicians, anyway. A worse lot of crooks, egomaniacs and shysters you’ll never meet. Though I think the Labour Party’s just as bad. Superficially they appear more altruistic but mostly it’s cant. Individually they’re just as greedy and dishonest. All politicians have had to cheat and connive and flatter to get their seats. Another nut?’ I shook my head. ‘However,’ he went on, ‘I like politics. I think it’s exciting to feel you can change things for the better.’
‘That would be satisfying, if you really thought you had. Improved things, I mean. But so often what politicians do seems to result in nothing more than manipulating statistics.’ I looked at my watch. ‘I only came to please my father. Perhaps he won’t notice if I go away for an hour. I could creep back at the end when the worst is over.’
‘That would be the wisest course.’ He lifted his eyebrows. They were dark, in striking contrast to his white-blond hair. I thought of the hero of Amazon in Lace, s, whose sardonic eyebrows worked overtime. The absurdity of this thought made me smile. ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Clearly you have a forgiving nature. I wish I could come with you. It’s years since I saw anything of the English seaside. We could have walked along the promenade and looked for shrimps and anemones in rock pools and I could have tried to impress you by skimming stones on the waves. Why don’t we have tea—’
‘Latimer! Dear chap!’ A man with a large curved nose like a puffin’s beak placed an arresting hand on my companion’s shoulder. ‘Well, well, well! This is a pleasure! Haven’t seen you for, let me see, is it two years? Not since that polo match at Windsor. D’you still play?’
‘No. I bust my arm and I’ve been too frightened to get on a horse since. Miss Pickford-Norton, meet Reginald Pratt.’
I held out my hand.
‘How d’ye do?’ Mr Pratt squeezed it briefly while giving me a quick measuring glance before dismissing me as someone of no importance. ‘You know, Latimer, you shouldn’t let a little thing like a broken arm put you off. Why don’t you come down next weekend and join us for a bit of practice? You’d soon get your eye in again.’
‘No, thanks. I never enjoyed it above half anyway. I only played to please my father-in-law. Do you like the game, Roberta?’
‘I don’t like team—’ I began.
‘How’s the lovely Lady Anna?’ Reginald Pratt interrupted. ‘Why don’t you bring her along to some of our constituency dos? Shame for her to be sitting at home on her own while you have all the fun.’
‘She’s in France. And she hates this kind of thing.’
‘Oh. Pity. Still, no false modesty, Latimer!’ Mr Pratt had edged round so that his back was turned towards me. ‘You were a damned good player! Now, Leslie falls off every chukka, don’t you, old boy?’ He poked a finger into the ribs of the man who had come up to join us.
‘I like that!’ Leslie laughed until his face was pink. ‘Who was it fell off last week and smashed his own bloody stick to matchwood, eh?’
I put down my glass and walked into the dining room.
‘Roberta!’ shouted my father as soon as he saw me. ‘Come and meet Mrs Chandler-Harries.’
A middle-aged woman in a scarlet wool suit standing next to him was beckoning from across the room. I moved slowly between long tables decorated with arrangements of yellow spider chrysanthemums and blue napkins folded into mitres. Mrs Chandler-Harries seemed to have Reginald Pratt’s share of chin. It swelled in rolls above her pearls and quivered as she talked. My father (the rat) cleared off at once.
‘So this is Roberta.’ Flecks of red lipstick had transferred themselves to her front teeth. ‘Of course you won’t remember an old woman like me.’ She was right. She had hard, inquisitive eyes which travelled from the collar of my shirt to the toe of my shoe, pricing as they went. During the remainder of our conversation they trawled the crowd over my shoulder hoping to net bigger fish, returning only occasionally to my face. ‘You went to dancing classes with my little Nancy.’
I remembered Nancy Chandler-Harries. A poisonous child with a squint, which she could not help, and a boastful manner, which she could.
‘Nancy will laugh when I tell her I’ve run into you and where. She said wild horses wouldn’t drag her along to a lunch at the Carlton House with a lot of old fuddy-duddies. But then Nancy is so popular and has so many demands on her time.’
I kept my face expressionless with some effort. ‘How is Nancy?’
‘She’s engaged to be married to the most charming boy. His family have the most marvellous place in Hampshire. He’ll inherit the title, of course. His family adore her. Of course, though naturally I’m prejudiced’ – she gave a deprecating laugh which did not convince – ‘I must say I think they’re lucky to have her … winning ways … instinctive good taste … firm hand … poise … charm …’ I stopped listening. I disapprove of violence under any circumstances but after this I could cheerfully have taken little Nancy outside and put out her lights for good.
There are moments when one becomes aware that one is alone in an unsympathetic world. I felt depressed to the depths of my being. I acknowledged that it must be my fault. It could hardly be the rest of the world’s. Yet who could deny that Mrs Chandler-Harries was a complacent, insensitive … I realized she was looking at me expectantly.
‘Sorry. What did you say?’
‘Are you married or engaged?’
‘Excuse me, I really must … before the speeches begin …’
I turned away and began to move towards the door. Someone clapped their hands for silence.
‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ Reginald Pratt was fiddling with a microphone. ‘Before we partake of this veritable feast’ – he waved a hand at the buffet table on which were stainless steel dishes of something sweltering beneath an apricot-coloured sauce: probably coronation chicken – ‘first I must say a few words about our late lamented Member, Sir Vyvyan Pennell. We extend our sympathies to dear Lady Pennell.’
The applause that followed was lukewarm.
‘Ghastly woman,’ murmured the man standing next to me, to no one in particular.
‘Sir Vyvyan did sterling work on our behalf and we shall all be the poorer for his sudden demise. That is to say …’ Reginald Pratt made a snorting noise, unpleasantly amplified. ‘… we would be the poorer were it not for the fact that we’re privileged to have in our new Member one who has done such … um … sterling work in the constituency of Hamforth East and comes to us as a new broom … blah … blah … blah.’
‘Hear, hear!’ came heartily from the audience.
Reginald continued to fumble through an obstacle course of clichés. I tried to get through the door but a large woman in a quilted waistcoat was leaning against it.
‘We are fortunate,’ Reginald Pratt continued, ‘to have as our representative in Parliament a man who combines the gift of the gab with an ability to get to grips with any number of subjects, ranging from …’ He consulted his notes. ‘… the need for more university places for the underprivileged to home ownership for council house tenants and—’
‘What about inheritance tax!’ someone called out.
‘That is to say, taxation, of course and … and artesian wells for the Sudan—’
‘Bugger the Sudan,’ muttered a man in green tweeds to the woman in the quilted waistcoat. ‘If you ask me this fellow’s a damned Socialist.’
Mr Pratt realized that his audience was becoming restless. ‘Well, you don’t want a long speech from me—’
‘Hear, hear!’ cried the wits.
‘Suffice it to say, I’ve known him a good while and there’s no doubt he’s an excellent chap and quite terrifyingly clever into the bargain. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Burgo Latimer.’
The man who had fed me peanuts took Reginald’s place at the microphone. He acknowledged the applause with a raised hand.
‘Thank you, Reggie. I must begin by paying my own tribute to Sir Vyvyan, who, unlike most Members of Parliament, was not in love with the sound of his own voice …’
Roars of laughter greeted this.
‘Too drunk to stand up,’ muttered my neighbour.
‘The man was an alcoholic,’ said the woman in the quilted waistcoat. ‘It said in his obituary he made his last speech in nineteen sixty-nine. God knows why he was paid a salary.’
‘I can’t claim such modest reserve,’ continued the new MP for Worping. ‘I intend to speak in the House on Friday on the subject of terrorism in Europe. The recent murder by the Red Brigades of the unfortunate Mr Aldo Moro, a crime as pointless as it was inhuman …’
Mr Burgo Latimer had his audience’s attention immediately. Everyone there was concerned about threats to civic order. He made a short, eloquent speech and looked thoroughly at home in his surroundings. He radiated confidence. The chest of every man listening seemed to swell with the certainty that they had their finger on life’s pulse. Despite the stuffiness of the room every woman looked rejuvenated.
The applause afterwards was enthusiastic. The woman in the quilted waistcoat darted forward to secure her seat. I was through the door in a moment and breathing the salty air of freedom. I spent an enjoyable three-quarters of an hour in Worping’s two antique shops, bought a cream jug which I could ill afford but which I was almost certain was Worcester, and ate a tomato and cheese roll, watching the breakers pounce like cats on to the shingle and attempt to claw the pebbles back into the sea.
I merged with the crowd as the lunch ended. My father was flushed with wine, coronation chicken and the sort of self-congratulatory, status-confirming conversation he enjoyed. He had not noticed my absence.
‘Not a bad do, on the whole,’ he said as we sped home. ‘Though I’m not sure about the new chap. I don’t like a politician to make jokes. Running the country’s a serious business. You can be too clever.’
‘Surely cleverness is always a good thing.’
‘Not when it means you can’t see the wood for the trees. Latimer’s the kind of Conservative who wants to appeal to the lower orders with a lot of socialist-type reforms. Putting more money into state education. It won’t wash. People don’t want their taxes spent on reforms they’re not going to benefit from.’
‘If what you say is true, he obviously isn’t that clever.’
‘Well, he thinks he’s clever. That’s what I mean. It’s the same thing.’
‘Not at all. Everyone secretly thinks they’re clever. But a few people really are.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t chop logic with me, Roberta. It’s a damned unattractive trait in a woman.’
We travelled the rest of the way in silence. The telephone was ringing as I walked into the hall. I picked up the receiver. I was still angry but I attempted to sound even-tempered.
‘Hello?’
‘Roberta? This is Burgo Latimer. Will you have dinner with me tonight?’
‘Dinner? I couldn’t possibly—’
‘Please don’t say no. If I don’t have a decent conversation with somebody human I may go mad. I’ve had all I can take of the burghers of Sussex. I’m beginning to wonder if there’s anyone on this earth who feels remotely as I do about anything. It’s a lonely feeling. Surely you know what I mean?’
I remembered liking his voice before, that hurried way of speaking, as though his mind was working furiously.
‘Should you be a Conservative MP if you feel like that?’
‘Can you think of a single job in which you don’t have to put up with people whose company you don’t enjoy?’
I thought of my own job. Of my boss, who was known to everyone as Dirty Dick because he was ineptly lecherous; of Marion in the antiquarian books department who was a poisonous gossip; of Sebastian in Musical Instruments who was morbidly touchy and difficult.
‘How do you know we have anything in common? I don’t suppose I said more than twenty words.’
‘That’s because I did all the talking. I want a chance to repair that. Besides, I knew before the twenty words. One does know these things.’
Was he right? It was true that I had felt disappointed to discover that he was, of all breeds of men, a ‘scurvy politician’, historically despised, universally mistrusted. I remembered that he also had a wife.
‘I’m afraid I’d rather starve to death than set foot in the Carlton House Hotel again.’
‘There you are! We do feel the same. I think you’ll find where we’re going the food will at least be all right.’
‘You seem to presume your invitation’s irresistible.’
‘I’m hoping against hope.’
The truth was, I was not only lonely myself but also horribly bored. Oliver was dear to me but not much of a companion as he was asleep most of the time I was awake. My parents limited their communication to exchanges of practical information and complaints. Mrs Treadgold and I had a handful of conversational topics – my mother’s progress or the lack of it; Mrs Treadgold’s own health which was undermined by every germ, allergy and chronic disability to be found in her medical dictionary; and the previous night’s television programmes – which we ran through dutifully each day. The friends of my childhood had left Sussex years ago and fled to London or abroad.
‘Well … I don’t know. It seems rather odd. We hardly know each other …’
‘I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty.’
FIVE
‘You’ve missed some wonderful scenery,’ said Kit.
I opened my eyes. I had been asleep.
‘Where are we?’
‘In the car-park of the pub where we’re stopping for lunch. I’d better put the hood up. You never know in Ireland when it’s going to rain.’
‘But it’s gloriously sunny.’
‘That doesn’t mean a thing. You’ll see.’
While Kit fastened the canvas roof I took stock of our surroundings, yawning. The inn, which stood on the main street of a small village, was low, white-washed and charming. Behind it rose dark trees and, behind them, more mountains.
‘Look at those mountains. That pair like raised eyebrows.’
‘Rather as you might expect, they’re called the Paps of Anu. She was a goddess of fertility.’
‘Of course. I should have known. But, being a woman, it never occurred to me that they bore the remotest resemblance to breasts.’
‘Can we men help behaving like children in a sweet shop when you women are so delicious and desirable?’
I examined myself in the rear-view mirror. Neither epithet could with truth have been applied to me. ‘I’ll need a little while in the Ladies’ with soap and a comb to get the smuts off my face and my hair to lie down.’
‘You go ahead. I’m going to nip across to that telephone kiosk to let my host know I’m about to descend on him.’
‘Supposing he’s away? Or he already has guests?’ I still felt guilty about having disrupted Kit’s plans.
‘He never goes away. And the house is large and infinitely accommodating. Don’t worry. The Irish are tremendously relaxed about these things. Dean Swift once travelled into the country to have dinner with some friends at the house of a stranger. Swift was a difficult, acerbic sort of fellow, as I’m sure you know, and he grumbled all the way there, but he was so delighted with the welcome he received, the standard of cooking, the excellence of the cellar, the elegance of the house and the arrangements made for his comfort, that he stayed for six months. Ireland’s changed since those days but the Irish themselves are as gregarious as ever.’
‘I can’t imagine many people I’d want to have to stay for six months. Certainly not someone as exacting and irritable as Swift.’
‘I shall do my best to be neither of those things.’
Ten minutes later I emerged, much tidier, from the cloakroom to find Kit sitting at a table in the bar, smoking a Gauloise, a bottle of wine in a plastic paint bucket full of ice at his elbow. I sat beside him and took a sip of wine, which was not good but not bad either. The bar was fairly dark and despite the warmth outside a fire burned in the hearth. We were the only people there.
‘This is lovely.’ I meant not just the wine but the liberating feeling of being a stranger in an unknown land.
‘I hope it’s cold enough. The Irish mostly drink beer and whiskey. An ice bucket is an unknown quantity outside the big towns.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I think it’s all charming.’ I admired the artwork, several religious pictures in primary colours, a photograph of the Pope in a cardboard frame decorated with tinsel and a reproduction of Holman Hunt’s Light of the World.
‘T’ere ye are at last, madam.’ A waiter came over to our table and winked at Kit. ‘Worth waiting for, wasn’t it? Madam’s as lovely as a rose. And what’ll you both be eating now? We’ve chicken or fish. But I’m t’inking the fish is a little past its best. I don’t say it’s off exactly but it’s got a smell on it I shouldn’t care to bring t’rough the house.’
It was the first time I had heard the famous brogue in its native setting: th pronounced as t and s preceding a consonant softened as in ‘pasht its besht’. It was beguiling.
We decided on the chicken and I asked for a glass of water.
‘I suspect the fish doesn’t exist,’ said Kit when he had gone. ‘Only he wanted, in a true Irish spirit of hospitality, to have an alternative to offer us.’
‘Really? How friendly and kind. Rather different from the English attitude, isn’t it?’
‘The Irish and the English have little in common. Except that neither nation is celebrated for its food. If I were you I’d have cheese instead of pudding. There isn’t much you can do to ruin a piece of good Irish cheddar. The last time I ordered apple pie in a country pub it was brought to my table in its cardboard box to reassure me it wasn’t a cheap homemade effort. The waitress kindly squirted the blob of cream from the aerosol can in front of me. You can understand it, really. When the majority of the population once lived on potatoes and buttermilk anything from a shop seems like luxury. The white tags on tea-bag strings are known as “wee glamours”.’
‘Not really?’ I laughed. ‘I think that’s delightful.’
Kit smiled at me. ‘I must say it’s cheering to be with someone who’s so ready to be pleased.’
‘I expect I sound idiotic. It’s just that recently things have been rather … difficult. This seems so different. It’s a relief to have left it all behind.’
‘You’ve had a bad time?’
‘It was my own fault. One must expect to take the consequences if one behaves stupidly. But that’s all in the past. Don’t let’s even think about it.’
‘I wish you’d trust me.’
‘It isn’t that.’ I stared hard at a picture of Christ standing on a hectic, crimson cloud. ‘I don’t want to tell you because …’ I paused. ‘The truth is I’m ashamed.’
‘That sounds intriguing.’ When I did not say anything he added, ‘But I’m not to know why?’
I shook my head.
The waiter brought us a plate of sliced bread, already buttered, and my glass of water. Despite the glass being chipped and smeary I smiled and thanked him. He clapped his hand to his waistcoat pocket, roughly where his heart was. ‘O-ho! She’s a dazzler!’ He gave Kit another wink. ‘Yer t’e lucky man now,’ he whispered mockconspiratorially. ‘They’re saying in t’e kitchen t’e two of ye must be on yer honeymoon.’
‘I wish we were,’ said Kit.
‘Arrah!’ The waiter’s voice was warmly sympathetic as he rested his hand on Kit’s shoulder. ‘She’s keeping ye waiting, toying with ye like a cat wit’ a mouse, but ye’ll appreciate it all the more when she gives t’e green light. Bless ye both.’ He hurried away.
I drank some of the water which was warm and swimming with specks of rust. I hoped it was rust. ‘I’ve heard of Irish charm but I didn’t expect to be flattered into a state of mild hysteria.’
‘He’s laying it on a bit thick.’ Kit laughed. ‘It’s a national game, playing the stage Irishman to tourists: the rollicking, red-nosed loveable rogue; the lazy, boozy, belligerent, professional Celt. And there’s something true in it as well. As a race the Irish are friendly, hospitable, good crack – that means company – and on the whole they do like to talk and get drunk. They prefer to say what they think will please, which I rather like. But there’s often a degree of self-parody beneath all that passion and melancholy that can catch you unawares.’
‘So I’m to disbelieve the flannel but take it as a gesture of goodwill?’
‘It’s a game but it’s quite good fun to play it.’ Kit’s eyes held mine expectantly. ‘Though nothing’s much fun for you at the moment, is it? I know I’m in danger of seeming offensively inquisitive but I wish you’d tell me what the problem is.’
‘Oh, please, let’s not talk about me. I’m heartily sick of the subject. And you’d be horribly bored, I promise you.’
Kit’s expression became regretful. ‘I’ve a confession to make,’ he said. ‘I hoped you’d trust me so I wouldn’t have to. But I hate the feeling that I’m deceiving you. After I’d telephoned Phelim O’Rahilly – who, by the way, is raring to see me so you needn’t feel guilty about my change of plan – I went into the village shop to buy a bar of chocolate to sustain us during this afternoon’s drive. The English papers had just arrived. Even upside down I could see it was a good likeness.’
I suppose I must have developed something of a phobia about newspapers because I felt the blood drain from my face at the mere mention of the horrible things. My fragile pretence of lightheartedness crumbled. ‘Oh,’ I said, pressing my lips together to prevent them trembling.
‘So, Miss Roberta Pickford-Norton, all hope of concealment is at an end. However, you are under no obligation to say anything.’
‘But anything I do say may be used in evidence against me?’
Kit shook his head. ‘Despite the inflammatory nature of the reporting, it hasn’t changed my view of you by one tittle or jot. I know what journalists are. And politicians.’
‘Is it bad?’
Kit raised his eyebrows and widened his eyes.
Some instinct made me say, ‘You bought it, didn’t you? Let me see it.’
‘You won’t like it.’
‘Hand it over.’
Kit drew the paper from under a cushion. It was one of the less reputable newspapers, though the distinction is fine.
The headline was: Labour Backbenchers Demand Resignation of New Minister for Culture. In smaller print was the caption: War hero’s daughter in love scandal. The photograph beneath was of me driving out of the front gates of Cutham. I was looking straight at the camera, my eyes staring and my lips drawn back in a snarl. There was a caption beneath the photograph. Roberta Pickford-Norton, 26, leaves ancestral home for Belgravia party. Next to it was a studio photograph of a woman in a striped shirt and pearls, who leaned her chin on her hand and smiled into the lens. Beneath it, it said Lady Anna Latimer, 35, daughter of the Earl of Bellinter. I read the article.
Lady Anna, the minister’s wife, has assured friends she will stand by her husband despite being devastated to discover he has been engaged in a year-long relationship with blonde bombshell, Pickford-Norton, whose father was decorated for bravery for his part in the battle for Tobruk in 1942. Slim, green-eyed, convent-educated siren, Pickford-Norton, is well-known in aristocratic circles for her wild behaviour and outspoken views. She told reporters, ‘Who gives a **** about his wife? She’s middle-aged and past it and anyway fidelity is a naff, middle-class thing.’ The Labour Party is united in calling for Latimer’s resignation but the Prime Minister, Margot Holland, who was clearly angry to find herself embroiled in scandal barely seven weeks after taking office, said in her statement yesterday, ‘Burgo Latimer is a gifted, hard-working and conscientious member of the team, who has a great deal to contribute to the future of both the party and the country. This is muck-raking by the Opposition of the most discreditable kind.’ Sources close to Pickford-Norton have denied she is pregnant by Latimer. Lady Anna, who is childless, is believed to have recently undergone the latest treatment for infertility: in-vitro fertilization. Continued Page Two.
I opened the paper to see a photograph of Burgo, striding along the pavement towards 10 Downing Street, looking preoccupied. I felt such a sense of loss, such a longing for him that I almost burst into tears.
‘I don’t want to read any more.’
I stood up and thrust the paper on to the fire. It burned brightly, then fell into the grate. Kit went to work with the poker to avert the burning down of the inn.
‘Sorry,’ I said dully. ‘It was your paper. I ought to have asked.’
‘You did the right thing. That’s all it was fit for.’
‘Most of it isn’t true. I’ve never in my life said anything about Burgo’s wife, even to him. What could I possibly say? I’ve never met Anna and Burgo hardly ever talked about her. I’m not remotely aristocratic. My father comes from a long line of undistinguished army officers and clergymen. Nor was I going to a party in Belgravia. I was going to the surgery to get some Valium. Not at all glamorous.’ I tried, unsuccessfully, to laugh. ‘My father wasn’t decorated, nor was he a hero. I went to a Church of England school. Nothing’s true. Except – except that I did have a love affair with Burgo. And I suppose that’s all that matters.’
‘Millions of people have affairs. Why should you be ashamed? My mother’s had more lovers than birthdays and I don’t believe my father minds a bit as long as nothing gets in the way of his own philandering.’
‘Yes. Well, as you say, adultery is commonplace. But when you see your name in every newspaper, from broadsheet to gutter press, and you know that people the length and breadth of Britain are calling you a heartless, scheming whore, you feel profoundly hurt. It seems I’ve done something so terrible that anyone feels justified in saying the vilest things about me. Yesterday a well-known female columnist wrote an article deploring women who let down the sisterhood. She mentioned me by name, saying that in a few years my lifestyle would show on my face. Lying and cheating and fornicating would plough deep fissures from brow to chin, my body would become diseased from sexual excess and my hair would fall out from over-bleaching. While Lady Anna would deepen in beauty like a fading rose … It was rubbish from beginning to end but I can remember it almost word for word. Hatred was in every line. I’m frightened by so much hostility. I couldn’t recognize myself in the woman she condemned. I feel I don’t know who I am any more.’
To my dismay, my eyes filled with tears. Kit took my hand. It is wise to be wary when men offer brotherly comfort. It is generally a prelude to something far from brotherly. But Kit’s grasp was warm and consoling. He neither squeezed nor stroked, he simply held my hand in his while I worked hard at being sensible, grown-up and self-controlled.
‘Surely you don’t plough fissures,’ said Kit, after a while. ‘You plough furrows, or lines perhaps, but fissures occur from hard surfaces splitting from weakness in their composition—’ I may have looked reproachful for he interrupted himself to say, ‘Sorry. It’s the job, you see. You have to weigh every semicolon for sense and fitness. Something those journalists couldn’t begin to do, even if they wanted to.’
‘Probably it’s just my pride that’s been wounded.’ I slid my hand away and tried to speak lightly. ‘As a child I desperately wanted to be good, above all things. I spent hours on my knees begging God to make me heroic and saintly: a cross between Gladys Aylward and Thérèse de Lisieux. I longed to radiate seraphic purity.’
‘I must say you don’t strike me as being especially prim and proper. There’s a light in your eye that I’d say was a warning to the faint-hearted.’
‘Wholly misleading, in that case. I like to be in control of things, not luxuriating in sensuality.’
‘Hm. Pity. Are you sure? When I look at this slender hand’ – he picked up mine again and turned it over – ‘I see the nails painted dark red, the skin smooth and white.’ He tapped my ring. ‘Emerald and diamonds, aren’t they? Now my aunts – my father’s sisters – whom I always think of as the embodiment of virtuous women, corseted by self-discipline, have strong square callused hands with nails cut savagely short, a little dirty from washing the dogs and digging up the herbaceous borders. They are strangers to hand cream. Ditto rings. Your hands are much more like my mother’s, of whom, naturally, they strongly disapprove.’
I retrieved my hand. ‘The ring belonged to my grandmother. I like beautiful things, perhaps more than I ought, but I’m not a hedonist. I don’t believe that the pursuit of pleasure is the highest good.’
‘What is, then?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose … behaving in a way which causes the least harm. One shouldn’t be indifferent to the effect one’s behaviour has on other people. It’s impossible to talk of these things without sounding like a prig. What do you think?’
‘I’m not so high-minded as you. I think if you enjoy yourself then you’re less likely to be a burden and a nuisance and more likely to be amusing. If that’s hedonism, then I approve of it.’
‘I’m not high-minded at all. As I’ve demonstrated rather publicly.’
‘So now you feel you’re forever disqualified from sainthood?’
‘It seems so.’
‘So what’s the real story? I don’t believe you dragged a protesting, happily married man from the arms of his miserable, barren wife.’
‘Apparently she’s determined not to have children. One of the few things Burgo told me about her was that she dislikes them and is afraid of getting fat.’
‘And do you think that’s true?’
‘Why shouldn’t it be? It’s not a particularly attractive attitude but it’s perfectly rational.’
‘Are men generally truthful when discussing their wives with their mistresses, do you think?’
‘I suppose not. But Burgo’s not quite like other men. Oh, I know people always say that when they think they’re in love,’ I added when I saw scepticism in Kit’s blue eyes.
‘Are you in love with him?’
‘Who knows what love is? Mutual need? Desire? Vanity? Illusion? I wish I knew.’
‘What’s he like, then?’
What was Burgo really like? I wondered.
The landlord appeared at that moment with our food. The chicken had been boiled to an unappetizing grey, a match for the overcooked cabbage. I knew if I did not eat I would get a headache and feel faint by the evening but the newspaper article had killed my appetite.
‘It’s bad, but not that bad,’ Kit said when I put my knife and fork together, having managed less than a quarter of what was on my plate. ‘Surely you can get those potatoes down? Come along, I’ll butter them for you and they’ll taste better.’ He unwrapped a square of butter, which had come in a foil packet with the rolls, and spread it over the vegetables as though I were a child. To please him I forced down a few more forkfuls. ‘That’s a good girl. Now eat that bit of chicken breast just to show you forgive me for upsetting you. I’m an ass and I’m really sorry.’
‘You’ve been my absolute salvation.’ I ate the chicken. ‘I’m sorry to be so pathetic.’
‘All right, so we’re both thoroughly remorseful. Now, Scheherazade. If you wish to avoid strangulation, carry on with your tale.’
I began to tell Kit about Burgo.
SIX
‘Why are you dressed like that?’ Oliver had asked on the evening of the Conservative lunch at the Carlton House Hotel.
We were in the kitchen. I was wearing my mac buttoned to the neck while I washed up my mother’s supper tray.
‘I’m going out to dinner and I don’t want to splash my dress. It’s silk and even water marks it like crazy.’
‘What’s for supper?’
‘It’s called a navarin, but you’d better tell Father it’s lamb stew or he won’t eat it. It’s a classic French dish. It’s got peas and beans and turnips in it. It’s delicious, honestly.’
‘It doesn’t sound it.’
‘There’s Brown Betty with gooseberries for pudding.’
‘Oh, good. Custard or cream?’
‘Cream.’
‘Where’re you going?’
I took off the mac and examined my reflection in the mirror by the back door. My hair is naturally wavy and resists all attempts to tame it. I had fastened it back from my face with two combs. My eyelashes are dark, luckily, but I had thickened them with mascara. I had painted my lips with a colour called Black Pansy which I had found in the village shop. The deep red made my mouth look sulky but was effective, I thought, with my skin, which is pale. I fished the pink plastic case from my bag and applied a little more for good measure.
All the time I had been washing my hair and putting varnish on my nails I had been conscious that my blood was circulating a little faster. It was a measure of how miserable being at home was making me, I told myself, if going out to dinner with a man I knew nothing about, except that he had a job I rather despised and was married, could lift my spirits so dramatically. Not that the last was relevant. A Member of Parliament taking a single woman out to dinner in his own constituency could not afford the least breath of scandal. He would not dare to flirt with me. And even if he did, I was immune to his charms. Sarah and I had so often listed the reasons why it was certifiable madness to have anything to do with married men that we could have given public lectures on the subject.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Who’s taking you?’
‘A man called Burgo Latimer. Our new MP.’
‘Really? That sounds grim. What’s he like?’
‘He’s a Conservative but he’s not what you’d expect.’
‘What’s different about him?’
‘I don’t know, really. He isn’t dull, anyway. There’s the doorbell. Don’t tell Father anything about it. He won’t approve.’
‘What shall I say? He’s bound to give me the third degree if he thinks there’s a mystery.’
‘You’re the novelist. Make it up.’
Burgo was standing with his back to me when I opened the door. I had forgotten how tall he was.
‘Some good trees,’ he said, turning, ‘but if there’s one plant I can’t stand it’s the spotted laurel. It makes me think of a dread contagion. And you’ve got so much of it.’
After his telephone call I had tried to remember his face but could only be sure about his eyes which I knew were dark brown and his hair which was straight and of that extreme fairness – a sort of white-blond – that generally one sees on small children. It had the same juvenile texture, soft and untidy, and was, I guessed, worn a fraction too long for the conventional tastes of his female acolytes. His nose was finely shaped with arched nostrils, his mouth full. It might have been considered a slightly effeminate face but for the eyes. They were sharp, amused, combative.
‘We’ve practically got the National Collection of dingy shrubbery,’ I said.
I followed him down the steps to where an enormous black car stood on the gravel.
I was relieved he hadn’t expected to be invited in for drinks with my family. It seemed this was an opportunity to soft-soap the voters that he was willing to write off. Or perhaps he knew that even if he had snubbed my father, made a pass at my mother and taken an axe to the furniture, Cutham Hall would always be a staunchly Conservative household.
‘You can starve a laurel,’ I continued, ‘leave it unpruned for years then hack it to the ground, but it’s almost impossible to kill it. It’s difficult to love something that can be thoroughly abused and taken for granted. You need a little uncertainty. The feeling that you have to nurse the guttering flame.’
‘And this is so true of love between humans.’
A man in a real chauffeur’s uniform, grey piped with blue, which would have made Brough horribly jealous, had rushed round the car to hold open the rear door nearest the steps. Burgo went round to the other side and slid in beside me.
‘This is Simon,’ said Burgo, when the driver returned to his seat. ‘He drives me when I’m in Sussex. Miss Pickford-Norton.’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I don’t use the hyphen. I call myself Roberta Norton. Or, more often, Bobbie.’
‘How democratic,’ said Burgo.
‘Pickford is my mother’s maiden name. My father added it on when they married. It’s a bit of a tongue-twister.’
Also I thought, but did not say, that it was an embarrassing piece of social climbing on my father’s part. He liked to talk of the Pickfords of Cutham Hall as though they had lived there for centuries instead of barely a hundred years. And he kept quiet about the pickling.
‘I like Roberta, though. Pretty and old-fashioned. Bobbie doesn’t suit you at all. Step on it, Simon. We don’t want to be late.’
Simon spun the wheels on the gravel and we shot away. The suspension was so good that one hardly noticed the potholes.
‘Where are we going?’
‘A place called Ladyfield. You won’t have heard of it. It’s about fifteen miles from here.’
Burgo leaned forward and closed the glass partition that separated the front from the back.
‘Obviously you don’t worry about appearing democratic.’ I admired the acres of polished walnut and quilted leather. The back seat was the size of a generous sofa and you could have fitted a dining table and chairs into the space for our legs.
‘Simon won’t mind being excluded. He’s thrilled to be asked to drive fast. He doesn’t often get the chance.’
‘I really meant, this is an opulent car.’
‘It isn’t mine. It belongs to Simon. He’s a dedicated Conservative so he lets me have the use of it at a reasonable rate. It doesn’t do me any harm to be conspicuous but the real reason I like it is because I can stretch my legs and sleep off the coronation chicken on my way back to London.’ He extended them as he spoke and they were, indeed, unusually long. ‘When Simon’s not driving me about he makes a living ferrying brides to and from church at a stately crawl.’
This explained the powerfully sweet aroma of scent and hairspray that clung to the upholstery. I opened the window a fraction.
Burgo leaned forward and picked something from the floor. ‘There you are. Confetti.’ He handed me some scraps of silver paper, then swayed towards me as Simon took a tight bend at speed. The draught from the open window blew the tiny bell and the horseshoe from my hand. ‘I find all sorts of things in here.’ He looked in the ashtray and then felt along the edge of the seat. ‘There you are.’ He showed me a lace handkerchief, crumpled into a ball. ‘It’s still damp with tears. At least I hope it’s tears. Once I found a garter. Another time a copy of Tropic of Capricorn with the spicier sections marked. Last week I found a photograph of a young man torn in two. Themes for a whole book of short stories.’
‘Don’t you ever drive yourself?’
‘I don’t have a licence. I gave up after the fifth attempt to pass my test. I offered the last man a bribe but he still refused to pass me. I found it reassuring, in a way, that he was incorruptible. My temperament isn’t suited to driving. I get bored and my mind wanders. In London I take taxis. It’s an opportunity to hear what people really think, talking to people who don’t know I’m an MP. Naturally the cabbies all have strong views on politics and are usually much further to the right than I am.’
‘My father seems to think you’re practically a Marxist.’
‘In theory I approve of some elements of Marxism but I disapprove of despotism, which is the only way you can implement it, humans being so unequal. History’s shown us that Marxism and Fascism have a lot in common. Both systems rely on collective brainwashing to educate the populace and extreme brutality to crush rebellion. And that’s positively my last word this evening about politics. You’ve told me unequivocally that you hate them and I’ve had enough of them today to satisfy the most ardent politicophile.’
‘I like political history, though. Distance lends enchantment.’
‘What do you really like?’ He slid lower in his seat, folded his arms and turned his head to rest his chin on his left shoulder to look at me. ‘What makes you want to get up in the morning?’
Meeting his eyes, observant, curious, humorous, I felt a moment of disquiet, almost alarm. What was I doing speeding through the countryside to an unknown destination with this man who was a stranger? Reality is so different from one’s imagining. Getting dressed alone in my bedroom, I had felt excited and confident. Now Burgo was beside me, I felt oddly uncertain of myself and almost wished myself safely back in the gloomy dining room at Cutham.
‘Well.’ I looked down at the little heap of multicoloured confetti near his shoe and attempted to restore my composure by giving my attention fully to the question. ‘Breakfast, for one thing. I usually wake up hungry. And extremes of weather. Not only sun but snow and wind, too. I even like wet days if it’s a proper deluge. That’s the only thing I don’t like about living in London: you hardly notice the seasons, except as an inconvenience. Nature’s confined to a few dusty plane trees growing out of holes in the pavement. I really love flowers and gardens. But London parks are too tidy. And I hate African marigolds.’ Careful, I thought, you’re starting to gabble. Don’t let him see you’re nervous. If only he’d stop looking at me. I put up my hand to check the combs in my hair, then was annoyed with myself for fidgeting. ‘I’d always be willing to get up to see the first bud open of an oriental poppy called Cedric Morris. It’s the most subtle shade of greyish pink.’ Now you’re sounding like a plant dictionary. Stupid, stupid. ‘And I nearly always want to get up for work. I work for an auction house. I used to be in the antique textile department but last year I moved to porcelain. There’s always the chance that something good’s going to be brought in for valuation or to be sold. I can’t often afford to bid for anything myself but just to see something beautiful – to touch it – gives me pleasure.’
‘What do you call beautiful?’
‘Practically anything that’s eighteenth century. Ignoring the smells and the lack of antibiotics and dentistry, Angelica Kauffmann seems to me to have led the most enviable life. She was prodigiously talented and got to see most of the wonderful houses and gardens and exquisite furniture of the age.’
‘Ah yes, she was a painter.’
‘And absolutely on a par with the men. Sir Joshua Reynolds was a great admirer. Have you seen her work at Frogmore?’
‘No. But I shall, now you’ve put me on to it. Do you paint?’
‘In an amateur way. The need to earn a living is my excuse for not being better at it. But the truth is that I can’t make up my mind what I like best. Textiles, fans and objets de vertu are passions but I’m equally besotted by porcelain, especially Chelsea and Longton Hall. As for early English walnut furniture …’ I made a sound expressive of longing.
‘Describe an average day.’
I told him about my job. Now I was on familiar territory I grew calmer. I felt a brief return of my London self. I was used to working with male colleagues, to being as much at ease with men as with women and confident that I knew what I was talking about most of the time. Burgo was a good listener. He gave me his whole attention and asked the right questions. I relaxed and wondered what had made me lose my nerve in that absurd way. It must be Cutham that disagreed with me.
‘I like the idea of a life spent in pursuit of beauty,’ Burgo said.
‘Is that the impression I’ve given? Well, perhaps. Some people would think that superficial. Cold and selfish. And subjective, of course.’
‘Only if they were thinking of beauty in its narrowest sense: the acquisition of fine objects. And even with material beauty, things must be honest, well conceived and well made to be beautiful. Keats said it succinctly enough in that wonderful sonnet. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Or was it the other way round? When we come to abstractions – goodness, truth, unselfishness, charity, justice, fortitude – in practice they’re indivisible from one another and from beauty. I knew I’d like talking to you. You’re an enthusiast and so am I. About different things but that doesn’t matter. I like that dress. That is a subjective judgement. What do you call that colour?’
‘I don’t know. Pistachio, perhaps.’
‘Your eyes are almost the same colour, a mixture of green and grey with that ring of gold round the iris. I’ve never seen anything like them.’
‘I think you said your wife was in France? Is she on holiday?’
‘She spends a lot of time in Provence. She has a mas there with a few acres of vines. She likes heat.’
‘Does she make the wine herself?’
‘No. She has someone to do it for her. She prefers to read and sunbathe and sleep. Sometimes she goes for walks or entertains. Anna is not an enthusiast.’
‘It sounds a charmed life.’ I wanted to ask more about her but was afraid of sounding inquisitive.
He turned his head away to examine a handsome old house as we flew past. ‘I suppose it is. Are you married?’
‘Not even engaged. I once was for a week, then thought better of it. The awfulness of breaking it off and hurting someone I was fond of taught me a lesson: not to go into these things without being one hundred per cent certain. But as one can’t ever be that I may never get married. It seems such a terrible risk.’
‘That’s not the enthusiast talking. What about your parents?’
‘What about them?’
‘Happy marriage?’
‘No.’
Burgo refrained from drawing the obvious conclusion, for which I was grateful. He continued to look out of the window. Trees overhung the road. Occasionally a flash of fire from the setting sun shot between the leaves and stung my eyes. I closed them to prevent them watering. A minute went by without either of us saying anything. The silence felt comfortable now, as though we had reached some sort of understanding. Perversely, this feeling of intimacy, as though the usual social rules need not apply, made me determined to break it.
‘It’s so kind of you to take me out and give me this treat. But you must let me pay my share.’
He continued to look out of the window. ‘Are you afraid I shall call in the debt by demanding sexual favours?’
I kept my voice detached, though I was disconcerted. ‘Not in the least. A man intent on paying for such things with dinner doesn’t talk about his wife, unless of her imperfections.’
‘So you’re quite confident that what I want is your companionship for what would otherwise have been a lonely evening?’
‘Perfectly confident. Isn’t it possible for men and women to enjoy friendship with nothing else involved?’
Burgo did not reply but turned his head to look at me. It was not a flirtatious look. He did not smile or smoulder. There was no tenderness, no particular friendliness even. It was a look of simple interrogation, as though he wondered whether I meant him to give me a serious answer. I felt compelled to drop my eyes, conscious of a sudden acceleration of the heart.
‘Here we are,’ he said as Simon braked sharply and swung the car between a pair of iron gates.
‘Where?’
‘Ladyfield.’
An immaculately maintained drive was bordered on each side by a double row of limes. Beyond were park-like grounds dotted with stately trees.
‘Is it a private house?’
‘Yes.’
‘Will there be other guests?’
‘Eight more, I believe.’
I was almost annoyed to discover that we would be so well chaperoned. I had come near to making a fool of myself, thinking, as he had perhaps intended me to think because it amused him, that we would be having a cosy dinner à deux with the potential for advance and retreat that this implied. I caught his eye. He was smiling.
‘Won’t the people there think it odd? Thrusting a perfectly strange woman on them at the last minute, I mean?’
‘You don’t seem particularly strange to me.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Fleur won’t mind at all. I ought to say she’ll be delighted but that would be stretching it. I don’t know that she’s ever really delighted by people. She much prefers animals. This is where I stay when I’m in Sussex. When one of her guests rang to say she was ill, I told Fleur I’d invite you.’
‘Is it her house?’
‘Strictly speaking it’s Dickie’s. He’s her husband. It’s been in his family for a couple of generations.’
‘They seem to have prospered.’ I could not help comparing the grounds of Ladyfield with Cutham Hall, to the latter’s disadvantage.
The lights of the house appeared through the trees. The drive curved round in a circle to end before an early Georgian house of soft red brick. Ladyfield must have been built at roughly the same time as Cutham Hall but had escaped Victorian revision. The light was fading but I could see a well-proportioned façade with a pedimented portico, pilasters and a balustrade at roof level ornamented with urns. The half-glazed front door stood open.
‘Well?’ Burgo asked as we stood on the drive after Simon had driven the car away. ‘Like it?’
‘It’s enchanting!’
‘Let’s go in.’
The hall was painted a marvellous rich red, the perfect background for what seemed at a cursory glance to be good paintings. A cantilevered staircase curled round at the far end beneath a Venetian window. It was all quite grand but untidy. On the lovely, worn limestone floor a pair of gumboots stood beside a bowl containing pieces of meat. Beneath a side table was a dog basket from which trailed a filthy old blanket. A halter and a Newmarket rug were thrown over a chair. Burgo examined a pile of letters on the table. He picked up one and read it quickly, then threw it aside.
‘Nothing that can’t wait. Let’s get a drink. Then I’ll run up and change.’
We went into the drawing room. The walls were buff coloured and looked superb with the plasterwork, which was of a high quality and painted, in the correct manner, several shades of greyish-white. Burgo appeared at my side with a glass of something that fizzed.
‘What are you looking at so intently?’
‘Plasterwork’s a particular weakness of mine.’
‘Perhaps, after all, you are a strange woman.’
I stared at the painting above the fireplace. ‘Isn’t that a Turner?’
‘Is it?’
‘It’s an early one. Before he was bitten by cosmic mysticism. But you can see the hand of the master.’
‘You may be able to. I don’t know enough about it.’
‘Oh, I’m a novice myself when it comes to painting. That takes years and years of just looking.’
‘You beast!’ said a voice behind us. ‘I’ve been waiting and waiting for you. And then you choose just the moment I dash out to the stable to arrive.’
A girl, younger than me, I guessed, had come into the drawing room. She walked up to Burgo, threw her arms round his neck and pulled down his head so she could kiss him on the mouth. Burgo disengaged himself from her embrace and held her wrist in one hand while he pulled her ear with the other.
‘Roberta, this is Fleur,’ said Burgo. ‘My sister.’
‘Hello.’ Fleur gave me her hand. It was slightly sticky. ‘Sorry I wasn’t here to greet you. I’ve been drenching a colt. He’s got worms.’
Fleur was small and slender. Her hair was brown, her face soft and round like a child’s. Her eyes slanted up at the outer corners, like his, and had the same dark brilliance, but hers were vague and dreamy.
‘Where is everybody? I thought we’d be the last to arrive.’ Burgo poured a glass of champagne for his sister. She held the stem of the glass in a childish fist.
‘They’ve all come. Dickie took them out to see the Temple to Hygeia.’
‘Dickie’s in the process of repairing an old folly,’ Burgo said to me. ‘Dedicated to the goddess of health and cleanliness. I’m going to change.’
Before I could ask: Why cleanliness? he had gone. There were noises in the hall and then people in evening dress came into the drawing room. I felt a little shy, not only because they were all unknown to me but also because I was certain they must wonder what I was doing there. But my diffidence was as nothing to my hostess’s. She frowned, licked a finger and began to scrub at a mark on the skirt of her beaded dress.
‘You must be Roberta.’ A man with grizzled, receding hair shook my hand. He leaned upon a stick. ‘I’m Dickie. Charmed to see you. Any friend of Burgo’s … Can I give you a top-up?’ I accepted his offer of more champagne. ‘So nice of you to make up the numbers at the last minute,’ he continued. ‘It isn’t everyone one can ask; Homo sapiens is a sensitive, thin-skinned creature.’
‘Yes,’ I said. Then, feeling my reply to be inadequate, I added, ‘It certainly is!’
‘Glad you agree with me!’ The expression in his eyes above his half-moon spectacles was cordial. ‘I must quickly do the rounds with the booze. Fleur darling, look after Roberta. Catch up with you later.’
He limped away. I watched him talking to his friends. He was affable, gave a pat on the arm here, a peck on the cheek there, his pinkish face suffused with pleasure. Fleur abandoned the scrubbing of her dress but kept her eyes on the carpet, her mouth unsmiling.
‘Do tell me about your colt.’ I had once been the proud possessor of a piebald with a large head and short legs and had been to enough gymkhanas and pony-club dances to be able to maintain a horsy conversation without making an idiot of myself.
Fleur’s beautiful eyes met mine with sudden enthusiasm. ‘He’s nearly three and absolute heaven. Bright chestnut with white socks and a blaze. I’ve called him Kumara. It’s the name of a Hindu god. He’s got the most perfect action …’
While Fleur talked, the words coming quickly in a way that was already familiar to me, I speculated about what seemed a striking mismatch. What attractions, apart from a genial manner, had a man like Dickie for a lovely girl at least twenty years younger? He had a wonderful house and appeared to be well heeled, but Fleur did not seem the mercenary type.
‘And I’ve already lunged him twice …’
There was something endearing about the grubby fingernails and a definite tidemark round the neck, half-hidden by the expensive dress.
‘I’ve had a good offer for Kumara but nothing would persuade me to part with him. I love him best in all the world – after Burgo, naturally. But you can’t equate people and animals, can you? I mean, Kumara looks to me for everything. I know that sounds rather sad and selfish, having to be important to something. But Burgo doesn’t need me. He doesn’t need anyone. That doesn’t stop me loving him but it makes it rather one-sided.’
I looked across the room at Dickie, who was roaring with laughter at something he had just been told. He threw back his head and leaned more heavily on his stick to balance himself.
‘Children need you, I suppose for the first few years, anyway,’ I said.
Fleur’s expression changed. Her fine brows drew together and she flushed. ‘Probably they do.’ She grew silent.
Obviously I had put my foot in it. I wondered what the trouble was? Perhaps Dickie was too much of an invalid to … I cast about for a change of subject. ‘What sort of dogs do you have?’
‘I’ve got three. Looby, a black Labrador, Lancelot who’s a red setter and King Henry. He’s a stray, a mixture of Alsatian and poodle, I think.’
Fleur told me the provenance of each dog, their likes and dislikes and particular charms. It ought to have been excruciatingly dull but actually I enjoyed Fleur’s artless confiding style. It was like being with an old friend with whom no pretence is necessary.
‘Darling, you haven’t said a word to Benedict and you know how hurt he gets if you neglect him.’ Dickie had his free hand on his wife’s bare arm, caressing it discreetly with his thumb. ‘Besides, I’m looking forward to talking to Roberta.’
‘I don’t think Benedict likes me at all. And I certainly don’t like him.’
‘Sweetie, he’s crazy about you. Do your duty, there’s a good girl.’
As she slouched off like a rebellious teenager Dickie gazed after her, love transforming his plain features into something pleasant to see. Then he turned back to me, smiling. ‘I was watching you two. Fleur really likes you. She’s no good at hiding her feelings, you know.’
‘She’s charming,’ I said, meaning to please but meaning it, too.
Dickie lifted his upper lip and grinned like a dog. ‘Isn’t she wonderful? The first time I set eyes on her was at a garden party. Burgo was the guest of honour. It was in aid of somebody starving somewhere. It was hot and stuffy and the people were awfully stuffy too. Fleur was standing alone in the shade of a weeping willow. She took off her hat and shook out her hair. There was a band playing. One of those musicals. Te-tum, te-tum, te-tum.’ Dickie hummed something unrecognizable. ‘She started to dance, with her eyes closed, as though she was imagining herself far away. I said to myself, that’s the girl I’m going to marry.’ Dickie’s face as he told me this story had become patchy with emotion. ‘But I had to wait four years before she’d have me. She was only eighteen then and naturally she had other things on her mind besides marriage. And I was already a silly old buffer. I’m fifty this year – nearly thirty years older.’
I tried to look surprised.
‘Yes, it’s not so much May and September, more like February and November.’
I put a note of polite contradiction into my laugh.
‘Actually …’ He pulled a face. ‘I bribed her into marrying me. I said she could have Stargazer as a wedding present. A horse, you know.’ Dickie smiled, then looked solemn. ‘People might think that was an ignoble thing to do: an older man taking advantage of youth and all that; but I knew I could look after her, d’you see? Her parents were dead and she only had Burgo to take care of her. He did his best – there’s no better fellow – but he’s a busy chap. I was in the fortunate position of inheriting money. My family were in soap. “You’ll always love bath-night when you use Dreamlite,”’ he sang, revealing a glimpse of pink plastic dental plate.
I remembered the commercial, one of the first television advertisement campaigns, featuring a girl wearing a tiara, false eyelashes and a pout, sitting in a bath and patting blobs of foam on to her carefully made-up face while a footman in livery, wearing a blindfold, held her bathrobe. Dreamlite, packaged in crested glossy gold paper but extremely cheap, had convinced the nation that there was pleasure and status to be had from an affordable soap. Now I understood why the Temple was dedicated to Hygeia.
‘It was a clever piece of marketing.’
‘Wasn’t it! A simple message, easily understood. That was my father. He was a born businessman. He could have made a fortune selling dust for dining-room tables. It was the sorrow of his life that none of his children took after him. We’re all as thick as fog. Ah, there’s Mrs Harris to say that dinner’s ready.’
A middle-aged woman dressed in black, presumably his housekeeper, had opened the double doors that led into the hall and was standing to the side of them, unsmiling, her eyes fixed on nothing.
‘Come along, everyone,’ called Dickie. ‘Grub’s up.’
I was, on the whole, pleased to find that I had not been placed next to Burgo. It seemed to confirm that I had been asked only to make up the numbers. If I was at all disappointed it was because he would have been more interesting to talk to than the orthopaedic surgeon on my right, who was accustomed to cut ice in his professional life and who shamelessly monopolized every subject we discussed. But the delight of finding myself in a beautiful room filled with wonderful furniture and scented with roses and lilies more than made up for my neighbour’s shortcomings. On my left was a publisher. He dealt only with academic books so he was no use as far as Oliver was concerned. But he was intelligent and agreeable and we had fun talking to each other during our allotted courses. In fact we carried on talking to each other through the pudding and the cheese, though I was guiltily aware that the surgeon was waiting for me to turn back to him.
After that Fleur stood up and muttered something in an offhand way about coffee, which was the signal for the women to depart.
‘Come on!’ She grabbed my arm as soon as we were in the hall. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’ She led me to the kitchen quarters and opened the door of what appeared to be the boiler room. ‘Look!’ she said in a tone of deep feeling. ‘Did you ever see anything more glorious?’
A large black dog – I ought to have said bitch – lay almost hidden beneath a heap of squeaking, squirming puppies. I bent to put my hand among the wriggling bodies. The puppies nibbled my fingers with velvet mouths. I stroked their backs and tickled their fat little paws. I picked one up. ‘This is the first time I’ve held a puppy,’ I confessed, kissing its wrinkled brow.
‘You don’t mean that!’ Fleur’s eyes were full of sympathy. ‘You poor thing!’
‘My father was bitten by one as a child. He’s always hated all dogs since so we never had one.’
‘How dreadful for you! I’m not going to let Looby have another litter. It’s too difficult to find good homes.’ She gave a gasp of excitement. ‘Would you like a puppy?’
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