Making It Up (27 page)

Hester received his comments with a basilisk stare. She was thinking about botrytis and black spot. She followed his pointing finger, as he indicated the crack running up the back of the house, and that bulge, and made a mental note to give the old climbing rose a really good pruning in the autumn. The Conservation Officer was talking about house repairs, which were none of his business, frankly. What a nerve. When he mentioned that he would be writing to her about this, just to clarify matters, she told him under her breath that he could do what he bally well liked, gave him a wintry smile, and began to herd him through the house to the front door, where they parted. Hester returned to the garden; a tussle with some bindweed soon put the tiresome fellow out of her mind. The Conservation Officer found that his car had collected a ticket, for being six inches over a yellow line; his notes about number twelve Sheep Street became a degree more excitable in consequence.

A few days later Hester glanced at the Conservation Officer's letter with distaste, and dropped it into the wastepaper basket. The letter was three pages long and had numbered paragraphs, a style she found offensive. There was stuff about features of historical and architectural interest, and other stuff about essential restoration, which she did not wish to hear. She had the same sense of being got at by officious meddlers as when she received one of those missives from the bank manager. She was far too robust in character to feel persecuted; rather, she was put on her mettle. There were these importunate people closing in; it was up to her to fend them off, them and their blustering titles—Conservation Officer, County Archivist. Her father would have done the same. She had binned sackfuls of petulant documents after his death.

The Conservation Officer's fears about number twelve Sheep Street were entirely justified. Like the carcass of an animal, it was experiencing a process of corruption; it was being gnawed and bored, it was crumbling, it was festering. There were woodworm and death-watch beetle, damp rot, dry rot, fungal invasions, and the rear elevation was slowly falling apart. Left to itself, it would disintegrate, over time, with all that was therein—the books, the bric-a-brac, the furnishings. It was under attack; nature and the laws of nature were closing in, just as society was closing in on Hester Lampson.

She had kept society at arm's length, hitherto. She took no part in the town's activities. She had not seen the need for friends; she had dealings with only a handful of acquaintances. Relatives were tolerated but had to make all the running. As for the social operation itself, she had steered well clear; she ignored political discussion, she did not vote, she availed herself of the various freedoms and safeguards of democracy without any sense of obligation. She was lucky to live in the twentieth century; it would have been less easy to get away with this level of detachment at any other time.

But the world had caught up with her, in the form of the County Archivist, who was appealing to her conscience and her sense of responsibility, and the Conservation Officer, who became insistent, in further letters. He was courteous, if cool, and reminded her that he had certain powers, which he would be reluctant to enforce, but . . . And then there was George Bain, who spoke for the world of Mammon, with which she had never before been concerned.

Far away, Max Binns, who began it all, was most satisfactorily installed with a group of new friends in a decaying mansion in Hove, where indulgence of every kind was a condition of residence. Eventually, this exercise in freedom of choice and defiance of the law would be terminated by a very public police eviction of all concerned; Max's parents would find a photograph of their son, cheerily brandishing a banner of defiance from the windows of the invaded building, spread across their morning paper. As for the aspiring author of the history of Hawkford, who had also had a hand in the exposure of number twelve Sheep Street and its contents, she continued to beaver away, frowning over the indecipherable handwriting of the past, and occasionally wishing that you could make things up when the surviving evidence is either too thin or too dull. Number twelve Sheep Street would merit a passing mention in her book, which was published by a small press and was to enjoy a small but steady sale in the Museum and the Country Bookshop.

Thus are we all fingered by the actions of strangers. Hester Lampson, who had spent a lifetime trying to avoid involvement with other people, was now locked into a cycle of exchanges with the County Archivist, the conservation people, and George Bain, a process that she would succeed in prolonging without giving any satisfaction to either of the first two, until a fatal bout of pneumonia one winter put paid to any further negotiations.

The books rode it out, of course, having done what books do—changed people's lives. Though perhaps not in the more usual sense. Unread, they still managed to manipulate, to have an effect. And so it would go on; eventually they would be dispersed, would float free of their temporary mooring at number twelve Sheep Street, and continue upon their way, primed with their insidious power.

 

 

A History of Hawkford
by Penelope Lively. Followed up perhaps with a few articles in not especially learned journals, and the occasional piece in
Country Life.
Books could well have shunted me in that direction, and the great and good W. G. Hoskins was indeed a formative influence, though not in a scholarly way; rather, his interpretations of English landscape came to seem a metaphor for the interlacing of past and present.

I
s there some directing factor, from day one? Some cast of mind
that will always prevail, that will insist that we go in one direction rather than another? Is the plump, curly-haired toddler riding on my father's back in Alexandria in the photograph of 1934 already programmed to become addicted to reading and writing, to prefer thoughtful, argumentative men, to want children, to need to live in one way rather than another?

My driving literary influence was Homer, by way of Andrew Lang's
Tales of Troy and Greece.
And here the most compelling
attraction was that I was right in there anyway, with a leading role: Penelope. I read and reread, steeped in that late-Victorian interpretation of the ancient story. The wine-dark sea, rocky Ithaca, battles, warriors, and gods became as real and urgent as my own world of palm trees, the Nile, the convoys of tanks and armored cars on the road to Alamein, the roistering officers on leave from the desert whom my parents entertained. But the trouble was that I was there with the wrong part, and the story line was not entirely satisfactory. It is made clear that Penelope is not nearly as beautiful as her cousin Helen, who is the fairest woman that ever lived in the world. Penelope is wise and good, qualities that did not have much appeal. Moreover, Ulysses is short-legged and has red hair; evidently not a patch on Hector or Achilles. And that addiction to weaving is tiresome, let alone the shilly-shallying over the suitors. Some reconstruction was in order, it seemed to me.

Andrew Lang trod carefully; he stuck to
The Odyssey
for the story of Ulysses and Penelope, and ignored other, off-stage versions, thus excising the more unacceptable elements of the story. He does not mention the events said to have succeeded their reunion—the banishment of Telemachus and the death of Ulysses at the hands of his own son Telagonus, the fruit of a dalliance with Circe. Above all, he ignores the allegation that Penelope subsequently married her dead husband's bastard while, in a nice symmetry, her own son Telemachus set up with his father's ex-mistress. He leaves out the rumor and innuendo also. Was she, or was she not, the mother of cloven-footed Pan—possibly by the god Hermes, possibly by one of the suitors, possibly by all of them?

 

Paris stole Helen and took her to Troy which was a silly thing to do because then the Greeks came to fetch her back again and they lit a thousand fires outside the gates of Troy and sat there drinking their wine to the music of flutes. Helen was fair but actually there was someone else who was just as fair as she was and that was Penelope, who had to wait for Ulysses to come back from Troy. The Greeks were all brave and good at fighting but so were the Trojans, so it took a long time but in the end Troy lay in ashes. Then Ulysses set off home to see his beautiful Penelope again but he kept losing his way and having adventures and meanwhile Penelope was being pestered by the princes who wanted to marry her because everyone thought Ulysses was dead.

So Penelope turned the princes into frogs and you can hear them croaking still in the reeds beside the river. And then at last Ulysses came home and Penelope said to him, “Thou hast been away for a very long time so I am not at all pleased with thee.” She knew that he had been staying with Calypso for seven years, who was a sort of fairy. And he said that Penelope was meaner than Calypso in comeliness and stature which meant that she wasn't so pretty and that wasn't a very nice thing to say. And he had stayed with Circe too, who was a witch and turned people into pigs but Ulysses seemed to rather like her all the same. So Penelope decided that it would serve him right if she went away with Achilles, who came along at that moment.

And as soon as Achilles beheld Penelope he said, “Thou art more beautiful than rosy-fingered Dawn and I want to marry thee at once.” So they were married that day and Penelope wore a dress of pink tussore silk from Cicurel and afterward they feasted on dates and ripe mangoes and persimmons and chocolate ice cream from Groppi's.

Penelope and Achilles sailed over the wide sea to Egypt and there Achilles said that it was time for him to get into a battle again so he went away into the desert with the other warriors.

There were the Eighth Hussars and the Eleventh Hussars and a great army of Desert Rats and they had armored cars and bren guns but Achilles' tank was better than anyone else's because the gods had made it for him. Achilles chased and slew the Germans until they cried for mercy and then he challenged Rommel to single combat and he killed him. So the Germans fled to the sea and sailed away in their black ships and there was great rejoicing and the army said that Achilles must now be top general.

But Achilles had had enough fighting for the moment and after a great feast he said farewell and he returned to his beautiful wife Penelope and they settled down in a palace with rich tapestries and treasures of amber, ivory, and silver and they had a swimming pool with a high diving board in their garden. And there they lived for ever and ever.

 

 

It was a lovely funeral. I know that sounds an odd thing to say, especially coming from the widow, but it was such a wonderful send-off for him. Everyone was there, and one person who should not have been, but we won't dwell on that. All my friends, and so many of his colleagues though of course most of them I didn't know, but you just smile and smile, don't you? Someone rather high up in the government gave the address, a Sir Somebody, and he was so sweet at the reception after, making a point of coming straight up to me: “Orson was a true citizen of the world. He thought in global terms. Wherever he was, he looked and listened.” Charming man. And I said, “I know. I know. And I was so proud to be beside him.”

I was still devastated, of course. The whole occasion was exhausting. I was in a state of shock. Shattered. I hadn't slept. I must have looked quite fearful. I hid under my hat and hoped no one would notice.

But people were so kind. Everyone saying nice things, and not just about Orson. One felt so
valued
. Maurice Enderby was there, not seen for years, goodness had he aged, and of course he had a terrific thing for me at one time, water under the bridge entirely now but all the same it was rather good for morale to have him fussing around, with quite a look in his eye still: “Can I get you a drink, my dear? Can I find you a chair?” That is something one so much had to do without, over the years—a bit of cosseting, a bit of cherishing. Alone so much. And then when Orson
was
back, the times when he was at home, he was off to the office at some ungodly hour and gone till midnight like as not, he might as well have been still in Angola or Addis Ababa or Chad, dispensing humanitarian aid. There was just as much dispensing to be done in central London, apparently.