Faustine (7 page)

Jasmine seems to know the sound and she rises, walking away from the bench across the lawn to the overgrown terraces at the back of the house.

I follow. I want to ask her, What are you doing here? Where is Muriel now? And who was the man who came into my room in the middle of the night?

But Jasmine has disappeared, through reeds and shrubs, into a door that leads in from a terrace with pots and a couple of ragged palm trees. I decide to follow her in.

The loggia, if that’s what it is, that runs along the back of Woodford Manor is as run-down as the rest of the place, with broken lattice-work against peeling walls and a sagging ping-pong table. Last year’s leaves, still unswept, huddle in corners, and a leaking pipe, with its own spoor of green fungus, disgorges an uneven drip on to the floor.

It was while I was searching for the door which must have admitted Jasmine that I saw the waterlogged bundle, on the cracked cement under the ping-pong table. And as I crawled under to retrieve the photographs – for in this mausoleum of the image, it was clear that this was what they were – I had that feeling again, the feeling I’d had in the bedroom at the top of the flight of oak stairs, in the house, the sense of being intently scrutinized, of being, even, about to be accosted by someone who was just waiting for me to let down my guard.

Then the feeling passed. I flipped through the
photographs
. At the same time, Mrs Neidpath, now in a green overall to match the institutional atmosphere of her part of the manor, walked along the terrace, stopped, and stared at me.

The pictures, folded like a crumpled bankroll in my hand, were all romantic in the extreme.

Lisa Crane – as if, under all the masks of a quarter of a century ago, the fancy dress of the decade of Revolution,
Love and Change, there had always been a truth of
innocence
and beauty, unalterable by the latest fashion or fad – Lisa in these pictures danced, graceful as a swan, demurely attired as a maiden on a village green at a summer festival.

Was this the real Lisa, then? I stared entranced at the whiteness of the arms, the swooning lips, the eyes that looked naïve and hopeful. The sophisticated, world-weary Lisa who Warhol doubled and trebled, reproduced a
thousand
million times around the globe, was this the Lisa Crane who was said to be so rich and powerful that no one man could ever satisfy her? Who, like Catherine the Great, had retinues of suitors and diamonds the size of pigeon’s eggs, and still these were never enough to satisfy her jaded appetites, so that she preferred the company of deaf-mutes, dwarves and circus freaks? This lovesick dancer in white tulle? It could hardly be.

The man (her partner, but it is so hard to see in these old photographs, where light had seeped in from the nights and days and years since that last, swirling waltz) has his back to the camera and only the svelte line of his elegantly
dinner-jacketed
body gives an intimation of male beauty.

Lisa had been in love, and it’s always depressing to see pictures of an old love – or so I reflected. There’s something of the desolation of yesterday’s confetti on a station platform, when the bridal pair have long been waved off and gone.

And if she had loved like that, who could the man have been?

 *

Mrs Neidpath stepped forward, narrowly missing the drip from the half-disconnected pipe. She had clearly come in search of me, and, stuffing the sodden Polaroids into the pocket of my coat, I tried to come forward to meet her in turn, a pleasant smile (I hoped) on my face.

For after all, what was I doing here? If I was a tourist, it was enough that the disturbances on the downs had caused me to spend the night. I should have left by now. If I was – and here I came up against a brick wall, for who else could I be expected to be? – if I was considered to be someone else by the Neidpaths, then they must wonder what I was doing here, talking to the housekeeper – for as far as I could make out, this was Jasmine’s function.

It was time, I thought, that I explain properly to Mrs Neidpath the reason for my arrival, describe my need to find Muriel Twyman and hear, if she had any information on the subject, where my poor vanished grandmother could be.

Before I had time to embark on any of this, however, Mrs Neidpath, who had reached the edge of the ping-pong table, and swept off a small army of dead flies as she did so, was handing me a piece of folded paper.

She stood watching as I undid the folds and read the script, black and boldly written – as if, I thought with a sudden feeling of panic, no piece of paper could be large enough to contain the writing of this correspondent, as if the slightest encouragement would cause that great hand to spread over hill and dale, claiming everywhere as its domain.

Yet the message was simple and short. ‘I’m sorry about last night. Please forgive me.’ That was all. I folded the paper again and slid it into the pocket of my coat, alongside the superannuated photographs of a wealthy image-queen who had danced all night once and must be old now, if not dead.

It was as if my thoughts had been spoken out aloud, for a low laugh – or so I thought – sounded from the far end of the terrace, where an exotic garden, filled with hanging creepers and hibiscuses in urns, most of them cracked by the frosts of successive winters, had once been carefully created. Mrs Neidpath seemed to hear nothing, though, and
turned to leave the roofed-over but dripping place where we now stood.

– But who is this from? I said, pulling the paper out from my pocket again, once more thinking I heard that laughter – this time from somewhere just at the edge of the loggia. Mrs Neidpath paused in her stride, and gave me an odd look.

– It’s from Mr Crane, she said.

She left, walking rapidly through the hanging ferns and trailing baskets of fuchsia that constituted this half-derelict tropicana.

I didn’t care to search for the door at the end of the room that was half swallowed by the garden and go in search of Jasmine, and decided to go round to the back door of the manor instead.

 *

Something tells me I will see Muriel soon. And I will
persuade
her to leave with me tonight, to come to the other side of the world, where we can start up a new life together. We can open our own nursery, I said in my mind to my grandmother. And you can retire there, Grandma. And in the holidays we’ll go to the beach together!

– Mind you, Jasmine says, they were a perfect couple.

We are in one of the tumbledown cottages that sits,
interspersed
with make-believe granaries and storehouses, around the village green that was the feudal fantasy of the family that once owned Woodford Manor.

In searching for Jasmine, and going to the back door of the manor once again, I have found relief and reassurance: the kitchen, antiseptic no longer, has the warm smell of baking bread, and a pleasant clutter of cooking utensils and foodstuffs, while the fat volume of Mrs Beeton’s household recipes – Muriel’s book – is lying there on the scrubbed pine table.

Of course she is here. Jasmine promises she will tell me ‘the whole story’. And more important, she says, my grandma will come back tonight – but from where I can’t, apparently, yet know.

– Come to the house where I stay, Jasmine says, as I stand looking down at the recipe book (open, rather mystifyingly, at a section on the cooking and presentation of a Christmas dinner). And I follow her across the cobbles (the Neidpaths are nowhere to be seen), resolving not to ask why she doesn’t stay in the house itself – though I can’t blame her if she doesn’t wish to. It seems to be becoming clearer, at least, that Mr and Mrs Neidpath are the custodians of this shrine to a bygone age and have little to do with either Muriel or
Jasmine’s role here. I wonder, but I won’t ask yet, any more than I will mention the note of apology from the intruder of last night, whether Lisa Crane did in fact disappear long ago, and Muriel and Jasmine are closing up the house prior to a sale (there’s a sense of an impending end, but maybe the old trunks have always stood in the hall of the manor; and most probably the curtains have been closed for as long as anyone can remember round here).

Then, if the sense of an ending of something does turn out to be justified, why the feast?

For, walking round from the loggia and my encounter with Mrs Neidpath, I looked in through the dark, mullioned windows of one of the rooms and saw a table laid for a meal – and a magnificent banquet at that. A long table, mahogany, I think (Maureen Fisher had teased me before I left that I’d soon be hobnobbing with lords and ladies and eating off mahogany tables, with silver and Waterford crystal by the mile); and in this case laid with gold plates and goblets of a glass that seemed to be made of ruby and diamond, so bright was the dancing reflection from the sunlight as it went in there. Six places, as far as I could see – the light was bright outside and it was dark in the panelled room, with its fusty tapestries and a tall screen covered in dark velvet. Why, I wondered, had Mr Neidpath said last night that there was ‘no dining-room at present’ when there very certainly was – unless of course he meant that the dining-room was out of use, in preparation for a banquet the following night?

Yet the table settings, silver platters on lacy mats,
candelabra
, gold and silver vine and ivy intertwined on tall gold treetrunks, each branch with its cluster of candleholders, the pepper-pots like silver chess pieces, as brightly polished as the rest – all in marked contrast to the decrepitude of the rest of the house – also seemed to suggest a presentation
rather than a real meal, eagerly awaited. Didn’t the stately homes of England, as Maureen had taken a distinct pleasure in informing me, ‘have enough swag on the dining-tables in the state apartments – where no one ever eats, mind you’, to house and clothe the horrifyingly large numbers of poor and starving on the streets of London? Isn’t this board
prepared
for a ghostly festivity – a banquet that exists only in the imagination? Without food, wine or guests, the splendour of the table exists for the benefit of tourists only; a feast without substance or time.

 *

Muriel will come back tonight, that is all Jasmine has said. I must content myself with that, even if it seems highly unlikely that someone like my grandma would be invited to eat off gold plates.

 *

Your mother and Harry, Jasmine is saying.

We’re in a makeshift sitting-room in the cottage on the green. It’s all faded chintz and half-sagging armchairs, as if Jasmine has pillaged an old part of the manor not given over to the exhibition of Lisa Crane. For comfort’s sake I’m sitting on the floor, while Jasmine sits in a low chair that looks as if it’s had any number of nursing mothers sitting on it before it was thrown out (by the vain, childless Lisa?) to the general dumping-yard that is the green, with its storeroom-
cum-disused
racket court. Jasmine has lit a fire, and although it’s midsummer – and we can hear bursts of shouting from cider punks on the downs, and see the sun on the green beech leaves outside – it’s damp in here and needs the blaze of wood, some of it driftwood picked from the sides of the river, Jasmine says, blown down from the Woodford forest in a storm. It’s slow to get going at first, and Jasmine tells me to fan the flames, picking up a newspaper which, I see
with a now-familiar feeling of unease, is dated over twenty years ago, and which adds to the sense of an enchanted place, marooned like its owner, in time.

 *

– Of course, I was very pleased for Anna. Jasmine has lit a small cigar, and I’m able, as she peers through smoke into the room, to look at her closely for the first time. I wonder how I can ever have thought her to be my grandmother. Muriel had something special about her – I know I’m not the only one to think or to have thought that – and Jasmine Barr must have always been extremely run-of-the-mill. Her eyes are small – ‘piggy’, as Maureen would no doubt label them – and her mouth has a resigned look, rather bitter but trying to appear friendly, I suspect.

But then, of course, she is old. The lines that gather round eyes and mouth seem to have trapped her – in this look of slightly irritated submission, perhaps – and it’s impossible to imagine what she would have looked like when she was young.

Jasmine’s hand, with its lumpy blue veins and
washerwoman’s
fingers – puckered, and looking as if they’ve spent more than half a lifetime in water, whether rinsing clothes or washing crockery and pots and pans – moves jerkily with the cigar, weaving a further web of blue smoke across her face, confusing further the line where chin meets neck, and a puddingy layer of secondary chins go down to a breast the colour of plucked chicken. I know – and I know I’ve never thought about it with any seriousness before in my life – that I never want to grow old.

– She changed so much, after meeting Harry, Jasmine goes on, in this account (of which I feel wary) of my mother’s life. Haven’t I had enough, sent out to distant relatives 12,000 miles away, growing up without a mother and deprived of
my grandmother, without hearing of Anna’s romance? And how does it bear on the story of Muriel, which I’m told I need to hear before I’m reunited with her at supper tonight?

Nothing, it seems, will stop Jasmine, and I suspect she’s one of those vicarious sex-lifers, who get their kicks from seeing the joys and pains of others.

– Anna even gave up some of her evenings that were dedicated to the collective, Jasmine says, with a chuckle which I consider to be in bad taste, even if I have little sympathy with my mother’s feminist good works. Is she going to be made out now as a foolish romantic, a traitor to her cause?

– Harry even got Anna to go dancing! Jasmine says, her smile widening and the little vertical lines above her mouth gathering together and fanning out again like a concertina. And that meant, of course, getting out of those eternal jeans and wearing a dress from time to time!

 *

Something, something I don’t like at all, stirs in me at the mention of this. I can’t think what it can be when the name Harry triggers off nothing in me. But then, truth be told, I don’t remember Jasmine either, and she assures me she was round countless times, even reading stories to me in bed if Muriel was busy elsewhere. I will banish this half-worm of a memory, as it crawls on to the skeleton of my infancy twenty-four years ago. I tell Jasmine I’m glad to hear Anna had enjoyed herself, but I don’t remember Harry at all.

Now it’s Jasmine’s turn to be shocked. Can it really be true that I don’t remember Harry? Surely I must.

– He was the most wonderful looking man, Jasmine says. Well, you’re much too young to have gone to the movies in those days, but you’ve seen them on TV, even in Australia (and here Jasmine made the country where I had grown up
a penal colony still, so that I sided with Maureen in my mind, resolving to tell her of the decadence of this English country house, given over to the worship of dead icons of a too-permissive age).

– Marlon Brando, Jasmine is saying, or maybe to go back a bit, Clark Gable. It was always hard to make up your mind with Harry – he looked different from one day to the next: very black, blue-black hair, such a charming smile.

– I don’t remember anyone called Harry, I say.

Now Jasmine’s lurking malice begins to show itself more clearly. She thinks, no doubt, that I’m playing games with her, that I can remember perfectly well the Galahad who came along and rescued my poor mother from the clutches of rabid lesbians (as Jasmine probably sees the collective), and that I’m jealous, pure and simple. I wanted her attention for myself. I resented the lover. It’s all first-year sociology stuff. For the first time, I feel a slight – very slight – twinge of sympathy for Anna.

– No, you wouldn’t remember him very probably, Jasmine says, as I’d seen she was going to say. I mean, he and Anna went out all the time together.

– And I was in the nursery, or tucked up in bed, I say, with some of the same bitterness Jasmine shows, with her face of one who has had to swallow neglect and humiliation – much as I have, I suppose. But I have one sacred thing: Muriel. I have her in a place no one can ever touch. In all probability Jasmine has nothing and no one like that to
provide
a nugget of warmth in the cold world.

– Of course, Muriel took care of you more and more, Jasmine says, and not for the first time, I feel she has some unpleasant gift of looking into your mind and seeing what’s going on there.

– No more evenings out for me and Muriel, she goes on
with a light laugh, and through the haze of smoke from the cheroot she leans forward and chucks a pine cone on the fire.

I stare at the burning cone, and I think of the Woodford woods … the hippies in their circle of firelight, squatting, as Maureen would have it, on private land. Living freely and lawlessly, like gypsies, children carried on their backs.

– No, Muriel was in babysitting you every night, Jasmine says. (I feel I’m supposed to be guilty, as if it had been I and not my mother who had demanded these services.) She loved you, of course … but she got pretty fed up with a diet of nothing but TV, I can tell you!

Colour rises in my face, and the image of the woods and the young people strumming their guitars, blowing their minds in this domain of the sixties, fades rapidly from my mind. How dare this stupid old woman suggest that Muriel was bored with caring for me, that she was anything but blissfully happy when I lay waiting for sleep in my painted child’s bed, secure in the knowledge that the creak of a shoe in the next room or the rustling at the end of the passage was Muriel? I suppose all small children believe those who care for them are put in the world to do just that – and why shouldn’t they? Something, uncomfortably, tells me too that this stage, in Western youth, goes on too long, that children expect to be protected and looked after well into adulthood.

 *

– Then the TV went on the blink one night, Jasmine says. I was there. I have to say I was shocked at the state it put Muriel in. I mean, we had plenty to chat about. There was the recent visit of Bert, which always brought the same
diatribe
– mind you, I agreed with her, Bert had treated Muriel shockingly, there’d been no maintenance at all for Anna
when she was young – all that kind of thing. I’m glad, Jasmine says with a sudden vehemence, that I never married.

Anyway, I’d been worrying quite a bit about Muriel over the past few weeks. Since Harry started taking Anna out, you might say. True, Muriel’s life had definitely changed since a man came on the scene. The cosy all-
women-together
, as your mother’s colleagues would have put it – and Jasmine smiles, showing her discoloured teeth and very pale, spongy gums – the cosy life of what I used to call girls (here she fulfils my expectations, but desists to go further into the murky areas of what she probably would refer to as Women’s Lib), the cosy life didn’t go on any more.

Because Anna and Muriel did seem like a pair of sisters in a way. Before Harry turned up, I mean. There hadn’t been a man around for so long that they bickered, and took turns with the washing-machine and all that – even if, I have to admit, Anna took advantage of her mother’s generous nature, so Muriel definitely had the lion’s share of the
household
chores. But isn’t that what mothers are for?

I found this tactless in the circumstances and looked away from Jasmine Barr and at the window, where a fringe of leaves glowed in the sun, like a stage set. Everything is arranged and false here, it seems, and I fear the outcome, already, of Jasmine’s story. It will be as melodramatic and unlike its subject – the simple, loving Muriel – as this house and garden and hidden river, with its contrived, artificial atmosphere, is unlike the true English countryside of the books I read Chi-ren at home: Beatrix Potter and
The
Wind
in
the
Willows.

– I didn’t blame Muriel for getting restless the way she did, Jasmine goes relentlessly on. It was the very worst time in history, probably, to find yourself all of a sudden
middle
-
aged
.
And Muriel – and I – well, we were both forty-eight years old at the time.

I mean, this was the great explosion of youth – the music, the miniskirts (and Jasmine looks at me with something like pity or condescension in those very small, rapidly blinking eyes). You won’t know what it was like then. If one was older, with legs that didn’t look so good when exposed right up to the thigh, well, you were really excluded from the world.