Daniel Martin (38 page)

‘Yes, fine. This is the bit I can stand.’ She glanced round behind her, where there was a scattering of Anthony’s Catholic cronies, some in uniform, then grimaced. ‘I suppose you don’t know a good rite of de-sanctification?’

‘Laughing at it will help.’

‘You think?’

But then she moved on, as if she did not care how conventional she seemed.

Before our weekend at Compton, I took Roz out to dinner. It meant slightly hurting Caro, who became inquisitive as soon as I said there were things Anthony had said I’d rather pass on alone; but I mollified her by making her waste an hour one evening with me poking round a jewellery antique shop for something she thought Roz might like, by way of penance on my side for having deprived her of so many years of birthday presents. We finally picked out a silver and floss-agate necklace, and Caro also (if you can’t beat them, buy them) came away with something smaller that chanced to catch her eye.

Roz seemed to like her present, and certainly not to have expected it; and promptly took off the beads she was wearing and put on the gift. The evening went well. I heard a little of her own life, at work and in private; then I led us to the past. I gave her a much more circumstantial account than I had originally meant to, though I hid even the faintest suggestion that her mother and I had ever known anything but friendship. I took the blame, tried to explain my misguided motives over the play, and made very sure that she knew I saw her parents’ reaction had been the only possible one. A little of this she had gone over with Jane, it seemed; and she told me how Jane had once said of me to her that I ought never to have married Nell and that I wasn’t altogether to blame. For a moment I had a curious sense of Jane herself having once been on the confessional brink with the girl opposite me.

‘Did she tell you why?’ She smiled. ‘I’m only a niece. But even I find her a bit much at times.’

‘She’s changed. Much more than your mother, I suspect.’

‘That’s just her problem. Jane’s. Not changing. In spite of all her talk about it.’

‘You don’t take it seriously?’

‘I’ll believe it when I see it. You know, it’s her Catholicism. Somewhere that’s still there underneath. It’s all very well her going through the Funeral Mass like someone with a bad smell under her nose. Talking about the crows and all the rest. Deep down that’s where she still is. In some strange psychological way. All the sin-and-guilt bit.’

‘But transferred to a different creed?’

‘We argue about it.’

‘And she doesn’t agree?’

‘She usually does one of her retreats. I haven’t had her life, I can’t know. Etcetera.’

It wasn’t difficult, after my own soul-baring, or semblance of it, to keep Roz talking about her parents. I didn’t really discover anything I hadn’t already been told by Anthony and Jane themselves… or guessed at. It was more a case of a new angle on known facts; a dramatic irony. Roz had a revealing habit of calling her mother by her Christian name, yet always referring to Anthony as ‘my father’, which seemed to reflect the reality of that household during the latter years… not anything so simple as a male being ganged up on by his females, but a zone of unspoken distance between male and female intelligences. She repeated a very similar phrase to one I had heard from Jane: there was so much that never got said. And it wasn’t that she hadn’t loved him, simply that she never knew how to approach him except along certain prescribed lines, sometimes it was ‘terrible, almost as if we were his adopted children and he had to show an interest’. I asked if their following Jane out of the Church had disappointed him.

Obviously. But it never came across like that at the time. I was sixteen, Jane knew what I felt… we went off one day, just he and on one of his orchid jaunts and I spilt the beans—and he was marvellous. Talked about doubt, and faith… you know, as if it was a philosophy problem. Asked me to try a little longer. But when I said at the end of next term that I still felt the same, he didn’t argue at all. He was absolutely reasonable, never tried to win me back. I think with Anne he just gave up—accepted the same thing was happening. I see now it isolated him unbearably. It’s absurd, he even protected us from ever remembering the problem existed. Catholics who didn’t know the scene, they’d come to dinner or whatever, and innocently bring up something, just Catholic chitchat. And he’d kill it stone dead.’ She paused, then said, ‘I did mention it the last time I saw him. My losing faith.’

‘Whether it had hurt him?’

‘That I was sorry it had hurt him.’

‘What did he say?’

‘That he preferred me as I was to what he had tried to force me to be.’ A tiny tremor crossed her face, and she looked down.

‘Let’s change the subject.’

‘No.’ She shook her head, and smiled up. ‘I’m… it’s just… being too late now.’

‘He was very honest and very shy of emotion, Roz. That’s a lethal combination, when you’re faced with ordinary mortals.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘And your potential new stepfather’s more outgoing?’

‘Oh, Peter’s fine. He’s supposed to be very brilliant, but he enjoys life. He can be rather a clown, actually.’

She told me a little about him. He came from the North, from Tyneside, a shipyard worker’s son ‘only you’d never guess’; a major scholarship to Oxford, Anthony’s student, never looked back. There were two children by his first marriage, he had been the guilty party, he fancied himself as a rogue male in those days. The girl had been one of his graduate ex-students and there had been something of a scandal.

‘Why didn’t he marry her?’

‘I honestly don’t quite know. Jane says he wanted to, but something went wrong. His ex-wife’s a frightful little bore, she still lives just round the corner from us.’

‘Yes, I heard.’

She gave me an amused quiz. ‘You seem to have heard an awful lot that night.’

‘The Gestapo would have been proud of me.’

‘I’m just rather surprised you got anywhere.’

I looked down from her eyes.

‘I was given a kind of commission by your father, Roz. Of course he didn’t know about Peter, which rather lets me out, but he did ask me to keep the breach closed. And I very much want to do that. Not just because he asked me to. With all of you. If it would help.’

‘I think it already has. We also had a talk. After I drove you to the station that day.’

‘As long as she didn’t feel I forced her to say too much.’

She smiled. ‘She felt she’d forced you to listen too much.’

‘At least we have a good go-between.’

She touched her agate necklace. ‘Now she’s been so shamelessly bribed.’

We talked about Paul then, and other things. Roz had to work the following Saturday, and had had to give up the idea of coming with us to Compton. But she promised to come down in the spring to Thorncombe with her current boyfriend. It was not quite mere avuncular charity. Following my re-entry into the family orbit, I had begun to have dim memories of the spirit of the place as it had once been, long before I bought it; indeed, why I had bought it if one can buy ghosts. But they must wait.

Caro had wheedled herself the Friday afternoon off, and we were on our way soon after lunch in my Volvo, not her Mini. She had hesitated fractionally when told her weekend was pre-empted by her need to square her conscience with her mother as much as by me but that was all. We had actually gone to the funeral on the understanding that the deed should be done at some point there. However, the fence-taker quailed when it came to it, and I could hardly blame her. It was neither the time nor the place, and the sight of so many Oxford faces had produced a febrile socializing mood in Nell when we returned to the house. Once again, on our way back to London, I had found myself in the unaccustomed role of defending mother against daughter not altogether convincingly. I had been the loser too long not to enjoy this proof that I was now the more conversable.

She was a little too determined to be gay on the second journey to Oxford, there was a touch, although she would have hated me for saying it, of her mother’s febrility about her. It transparently hid a nervousness: Nell to be faced with Barney, myself to be faced with Compton. She began once more warning me, almost as if we were visiting total strangers, about how Country Life it all was, I must be ‘good’

In the days that had passed we had tacitly dropped all mention of Barney. She was usually home, when she stayed out, soon after midnight; but at least once, I happened to be awake, I heard her letting herself in well after three. It showed the next morning, though I said nothing. She looked permanently tired, in fact; but not, however hard I searched, unhappy. She was moving into the new flat that following week and at least I consoled myself that there she would not be turfed at such ungodly hours out of whoever’s flat or bed they were presently borrowing. I couldn’t quite understand why she had to return home as it was; however, that was also forbidden ground. But in other matters we had both set out to understand each other better. I told her about Jenny, about Abe and Mildred; and more of why I had left her mother for Andrea. Then one evening when she was in, she saw on my desk the messy pages, covered in corrections, from the Kitchener scene I had been working on all day; said nothing; but suddenly during supper, an hour later, asked if she could try to type it out.

‘Not worth it. It’s so far from final.’

‘I just thought… ‘ I waited a moment, then got up and went and found the scene; came back and put it beside her, and kissed her head. She had played secretary for half an hour, and I used what she finally appeared with as the basis for an impromptu tutorial about scriptwriting and its problems. The scene still read weakly, and I explained why. It was really a lesson for me. She was suddenly the younger child I had never known: full of questions… perhaps for the first time understanding what such work was about. It was not what really had to be said, but it helped.

We arrived in Oxford. I had a more private experience of the affection I knew existed between aunt and niece. Jane herself was in a much more relaxed mood than at the funeral; a definite, if guarded, air of release from nightmare, of composure regained. We had an early tea with them, and then she took me upstairs while Caro, ungraciously helped by Paul, washed up. There was a small carton of books and botanical papers to do with orchids: what Anthony had asked I should take.

‘I haven’t included all his drawings and notes and things, other than the ones in the margins. Paul’s not interested, but I thought he might like to have them one day.’

‘Of course. And if he’d ever like these back.’

‘I’m sorry he’s being so boorish. He needs to be back at school.’

‘Taking it hard?’

‘It’s difficult to get through at the moment. I think he needs either to be completely alone with me or away from me. These last few days, so many people have been dropping in. He’s so unreasonable. For a basically rather bright child.’ But as if she felt she was unfairly unloading her troubles, she smiled. ‘Anyway. Roz, you have won.’

‘… been won by.’

‘I was got out of bed at midnight to hear about your evening.’

She added, ‘And the present that wasn’t necessary. But was loved.’

‘Caro chose it.’

‘Roz was thrilled.’

She looked down at the books between us, aware that I was searching her eyes for more than these trivialities.

‘Survived?’

‘By some miracle.’

‘And what news from America?’

‘He’s written.’

The telephone began to ring outside, and she went to answer it.

By the time she finished Caro and Paul had appeared from their chores, and we were four again.

We talked in the car, of course, but somehow everything was dominated by the brooding young adolescent in the back seat beside his mother. The weather was heavy and grey; windless, no rain, and quite mild, but with an oppressive and seemingly immoveable canopy of cloud. If it had needed a presiding human spirit, Paul would have done for the part. Caro fell over herself to involve him in whatever we were talking about, and he would give some answer; but he never volunteered anything. If something was said that had the rest of us smiling, he would look at Jane—I saw this once or twice in the driving-mirror—but not in the way children sometimes look at their parents for guidance in their own reaction; much more to blame it, as if he knew she was putting on an act… even though it was no more than that of ordinary civility. He sat, too, strangely thrust back, like someone who doesn’t trust the driver. It occurred to me, when we were climbing into the Cotswolds, that he really wanted to be in the front seat, and I suggested he changed places with Caro.

‘No, I’m all right.’

“Thank you,’ murmured Jane.

He left a really killing little pause, exquisitely timed to show he was being coerced.

‘Thank you.’

His behaviour was so grotesque that I began to feel sorry for him. Plainly the death had disturbed him much more deeply than he was prepared to show; and I could recall my own childhood well enough to remember those moods when every tenderness, like every well-meaning briskness, only drives you back further into your shell. But I couldn’t remember my sulks lasting more than a day. I decided we should leave him in his misery, and when once more Caro got rebuffed, I touched her arm and managed to signal that she stop trying.

We arrived at Compton just before dusk. The lodge-gates—the lodge itself was lived in now by one of Andrew’s tractor-drivers, it seemed were wide open, and we swept up one of those endless drives that demand a barouche, or at least a Rolls, if one is to arrive in appropriate style. Then we were in front of the grey Palladian house; gravel, some impressive urns and balusters, half the façade in bleak darkness, they nicknamed that the Frozen Wing, since it was too expensive to heat except on special occasions; but the graceful tall windows on the ground floor of the other half shone a welcome yellow in the twilight. A door opened: Andrew looming in a bulky white polo-necked sweater, Nell slight beside him, a dumpy schoolgirl of Paul’s age in jodhpurs, Caro’s half-sister Penelope, or Penny: two Irish setters they came down the steps, dogs and people, and there was a great shaking of hands, embracing, crosstalk; then Andrew helping me with the luggage. When we came into the splendidly proportioned hall, I saw a little boy in a dressing-gown sitting at the top of the first curved flight of stairs.

‘That’s the Runt,’ said Andrew. ‘Still in quarantine.’

Jane and Caro stood at the foot of the stairs, talking with him, and I was brought forward by his father.

‘This is Caro’s daddy, Andrew. Say howdy-do.’

The boy shuffled to his feet, and bobbed his head. ‘Howdy-do. Sir.’

Nell murmured, ‘He’s been rehearsing that all afternoon.’

Whatever else Andrew had had to sell to make the estate viable, it had evidently not been paintings or furniture, and the interior of the house came as something of a shock to me. It had impressed me long ago when I was there for his twenty-first, but I had expected to be less awed this time. I think what surprised was not so much the decor in itself as the fact that anyone could still live in such surroundings in contemporary England. It lacked the frigid museum feel of stately homes thrown open to the public, it was clearly lived in, and with an easy informality, but there lingered something artificial, unreal in its space and elegance, its predominantly eighteenth-century chairs and sofas and pots and paintings. We had gone into the drawing-room and sat round a fire in a loose circle, but that still left three-quarters of the room unoccupied. It was a little like a film set, one half expected a side open for the camera. We had drinks. Nell sat with curled-back legs on the carpet in front of the fire, while Andrew sprawled and chatted to me about Volvos, he was thinking of trying one. Penny, who evidently took after Andrew and was a bad case of puppy fat, sat on a huge settee between her aunt and Caro, while Paul huddled, silent as always, in an armchair.

I was reassessing Caroline, reminding myself that it was a miracle she had ever escaped at all from this, and wrily reflecting that I had never really asked her what she didn’t like about Compton, the place; there must have been something, the shut-awayness of it, the provinciality, the patent unreality in terms of the way most of the country lived and something more interior still, some flaw in its psyche. And I speculated a little about Jane as well, how she reconciled all this with her newfound political instincts… with Gramsci and the philosophy of praxis. In that matter I had begun to suspect that Nell and Roz were nearer the truth than I had at first supposed. The subject had not been mentioned since it was first thrown in my face, and increasingly it came to seem a histrionic, if not positively hysterical, gesture of defiance… or certainly of ‘consciousness full of contradictions’; of self-liberation, if one took a kinder view, but still essentially a gesture. For all that, I was glad she was there.

Nell began to tell us the weekend programme. There was only one formal engagement, a Miles and Elizabeth Fenwick were asked to dinner for the Saturday evening.

Caro said, ‘Oh, you didn’t ask that ghastly daughter!’

‘Darling, I do have some tact. He wants to meet you, Dan, actually.’

‘Me?’

‘It’s all rather involved. His prospective son-in-law, it’s a sister, not the ghastly daughter Caro loves so much, he’s trying to enter the film business. I think putting money up rather than anything else, and he’s got in with some character called Jimmy Knight, have you ever heard of him?’

‘No. Is there a production company?’

‘He’ll tell you. Really all Miles wants is to have someone convince him it’s not utter madness.’

‘I’d be lying if I told him anything else.’

‘They’re going to marry anyway. It’s all rather pointless.’

‘Then I’d better lie.’

‘No, do say what you think. I’m making him sound an idiot. Actually he’s an M. P.’

‘Indisputable proof to the contrary,’ murmured Jane.

Andrew and I laughed and Nell raised a finger at her sister. ‘One more crack like that and you’ll be sitting next to him.’ She turned to me. ‘If you could just chat him up for a few minutes. Please.’

‘Of course.’

‘Otherwise there’s riding, walking, guided tours, ping-pong,’

‘Table tennis.’ It was Paul. We all looked at him. He brushed back his long hair, then stared at his knees. ‘That’s it’s proper name.’

‘I beg your pardon. Table tennis.’

Caro said, ‘You’re making it sound like some dreadful seaside hotel.’

‘Just a dreadful country one, darling.’

Andrew broke in. ‘Play snooker, Dan?’

‘I play pool in America a bit. Same principle.’

Andrew winked at me. ‘That’s settled us, then.’

Nell stretched out an accusing arm. ‘But not for you-know-what.’

‘Of course not, dear girl. Perish the thought.’

I had her grave eyes. ‘You watch him. He was down in the village only last week, cheating the old-age pensioners out of their beer-money.’

‘Rubbish. I was doing my squire thing. They expect me to win.’ His eyes flicked lazily towards Jane. ‘Wouldn’t tug their poor old exploited forelocks if I didn’t.’

She smiled. ‘No rise.’

‘Foiled again.’

Nell grimaced at me. She was still sitting propped on one arm in front of the fire.

‘I went down to the cowshed the other day and the two cowmen are there and our shepherd and the tractor-drivers and God knows who else, all in a huddle round Andrew, and I think how sweet, how marvellous it is, the way he gets them so involved in running things… not a bit of it. The pools. Merely where they’re going to put their wretched little crosses this week.’

‘Jolly serious business. New opium of the masses.’

She waved a hand at her husband.

‘I wouldn’t mind if it was just a fiendish plan to keep their minds off asking for more money. But he’s worse than any of them.’ She looked at Caro. ‘Do you know what he did just before Christmas? He offered the Vicar a free share if he’d pray for eight draws at midweek evensong.’

Caro grinned. ‘What did he say?’

‘Good on him. That he’d do better praying for Andrew’s soul.’

Penny said, ‘It was only joking, mummy.’

‘Don’t you be so sure.’

I caught Jane’s eyes for a moment, a hinted smile down; she knew and I knew that Nell was trying to be kind, to put us at our ease, suggesting she had problems that both of us underestimated; and was also proving the very opposite.