The Woman at the Window (18 page)

‘And you have a family of course?'

Anna was swept away by the elegant way he asked, as if he were begging the most enormous favour.

‘A girl and two boys,' she said.

‘Delightful,' Sir Robin said, plainly eager to know more. 

‘Alice works at Goldman Sachs. Gained a Two One in Maths.Two more marks and it would have been a First. She has a partner, as they call it nowadays. Hans. A very nice boy. Alwyn is completing his first year at Jesus College, Oxford. He's a very wild Welshman. The Dafydd ap Gwilym and so on. Arfon is still at school. Mad on rugby. Thinks of nothing else. Idris wants him to do law. We shall see, shan't we?'

‘Marvellous,' Sir Robin said.

At last Anna had sensed her husband's disapproval and the stream of triumphant information suddenly dried. Sir Robin stroked his long beard as though he were calculating a small sum.

‘Alice, Alwyn and Arfon. And your surname begins with A, Mr and Mrs Adams. What should we say? Top of the list. Nothing but the best. And why not? Absolutely splendid.'

The best thing was to laugh. A good laugh establishes an atmosphere of goodwill. For Anna it was a relief. Idris was capable of putting on a frosty, almost hostile, front the moment he felt the occasion warranted it. Part of his training, she assumed, in the bank. Idris made an effort to relax. All the same, when it did come out, it did sound rather like a bank manger questioning a client.

‘Sir Robin,' he said. ‘How long is it since you lived in the Plas?'

He added in a less inquisitorial tone: ‘Such a charming old manor house. Late seventeenth century, would it be?'

‘Oh, years and years,' Sir Robin said vaguely. He raised both hands to feel the back of his neck. ‘I might have caused an occlusion, laughing so much.'

The word sounded distinctly medical. Anna showed sympathy and concern.

‘Much too conscious of my skeleton these days,' he said. ‘I suppose it comes of being so thin. It's all I've got left. The connection between my spine and my cortex. It's not the time of year, of course, but even on a fine day like this, I see it like a solitary cabbage stalk with a mangy green head standing all alone in a bare windswept field. Pretty awful that. I mean disrespectful of the blessings of nature. My poor Marcia always said I was not bodily grounded.'

The tone had become more light-hearted with the mention of his wife's name. Anna's lips were parted. She had a vague recollection of a Lady Marcia Williams Price who had been regarded as a formidable presence even in rumour. 

‘She was a Czech national you know. Sudeten-deutsch. Her family were in the Almanac de Gotha for heaven's sake.
Erste gesellschaft
and all that. Enough to keep them going during the Nazi occupation. But didn't save them from the Commies. They had to skidaddle from Czechoslovakia in 1948, all the jewels and family heirlooms in a couple of suitcases. In those days back in the fifties, there was still a network of country houses around. Even butlers.We still had a butler. And a pretty good wine cellar from my father's time. They were able to get Marcia into Roedean. She was christened ‘Marguerite' by the way, but she was already ‘Marcia' by the time I met her. Strange isn't it? People still thought of themselves as ‘well born' in those days. Of course bags of jewels don't last forever. The sixties blew all that sort of thing away, just after we were married. We weren't really equipped to deal with all the equalitarian pressure around. No education. We'd been brought up to believe we were the best by right of birth, which was rubbish of course. Nothing worse than impoverished country squires. Dabbling in this and that and succeeding in nothing.'

‘You had family?'

Idris Adams tried to sound sympathetic. At least it was cool in the kitchen. It would be a long walk in the heat of the afternoon to where they had left his BMW. He would have liked to have learned more about the wine cellar. He took a lot of interest in wine. It was an interesting topic of conversation with important clients.

‘Two delightful little girls, Lucy and Lilly. I still like thinking of them as little poppets. Awful isn't it? Old men dwell too much in the past. Well of course they do. There isn't anywhere much else where they can go to. You may remember Lilly?'

He put the question to Anna who frowned hard with the effort of sympathetic recollection.

‘Well of course not. You are much too young. One so easily forgets how frightfully old one is. We sent the girls to the local grammar, or was it comprehensive by then? Not just to avoid expense. Marcia was terribly keen we should integrate with the local population. That was the way she put it, until I said the Williams Prices had been here since before the flood. We weren't intruders for goodness sake. Well there you are then, she said. And she packed me off for two successive years to a summer school in Harlech to brush up on my Welsh.The trouble was I didn't have all that much to brush up.We have a Harpist's Room, she said.Your great-great-grandfather used to employ a harpist. So what kind of a mongrel are you? I'm not very good at languages, I said, but I'm very good with sheep and cattle. I spoke too soon of course. My pedigree herd was wiped out by foot and mouth.'

‘How terrible.'

Idris was deeply sympathetic. He was ready to draw upon his own experience of valued clients who had been visited with the same plague. Sir Robin was deeply immersed now in his retrospection. It was as though he had much to confess or at least to get off his chest.

‘You understand the anxieties of parenthood?' 

‘Oh, we do, indeed.'

Idris and Anna were in complete agreement. Had they not graduated from romantic lovers to responsible parents?

‘Poor Marcia. As the girls grew up she started to revert to type. All that antediluvian stuff about the marriage market among the central European aristocracy. Our estate was going downhill fast and she thought part of the answer would be to get the girls well married. And since they were mad on horses we had to do all we could to encourage them. Dressage, show jumping, point to point and polo, all that sort of thing. Ruinously expensive. It wasn't cattle or sheep that did the damage in the end. It was those damned horses!'

A heavy silence descended on the kitchen. Sir Robin looked troubled, like a man who still had momentous decisions to make. There was no easy way whereby the married couple could take leave. In any case Anna was too spellbound to move. Idris considered making a helpful comment. After all, he had conquered adversity and was entitled to the authority of a moderately successful man.

‘You were the victim of social and economic forces, Sir Robin,' he said.

He was prepared to elaborate but it would take time to marshal a more precise analysis. The old man was looking at him as if for the first time he had realised that he was entertaining a complete stranger in his kitchen. He had started some kind of an explanation; the woman was listening intently so he may as well finish it.

‘The remedy was worse than the disease,' he said. ‘What a pair of sons-in-law. A social-climbing property developer from Banbury and an Argentinian polo player who claimed he had a ranch near Cordoba which he couldn't touch because of political difficulties. They didn't get on at all but Lilly and Lucy stuck to each other like glue so they had to form fours. It was all about winning and even more about losing. Grooms and trainers and horse transport and bloodstock improvement. It drove us insane over the years. King Lear had three daughters. We only had two. Perhaps we should have had a third. Was there a Mrs Lear? Poor Marcia tore herself apart trying to please her daughters and all they did was turn on her in the end.'

The married couple could no nothing except share an appalled silence that took on the nature of a vigil.

‘It's so good of you to listen to me.'

All the energy had gone out of Sir Robin's voice. 

‘There's never enough time is there? There are no clocks 
in legends. Only in Testaments. Three in the afternoon. The third day. The moment of truth. What will survive of what we had between us? It has to be love. But you don't really know even that, do you? Would you like to see her?'

The couple looked troubled and confused.

‘She's lying on the dining-room table. Empty as an effigy. The dining table we don't use anymore. It's cool in there. We have flowers in there rooted in darkness. She's surrounded by flowers. They glow in the dark.'

Outside they heard the sound of tyres on the gravel. 

‘That will be the ambulance and the police. A little late in fact.'

Sir Robin sounded more cheerful.

‘You've no idea how old people live inside the structure of the social services. Like weevils in wood. I've been expecting them all afternoon. Instead you called. I'm glad of that.'

He smiled benignly at their bowed heads.

Three Old Men

THE idea was to celebrate Peter Pritchard's eightieth birthday. True it had already occurred but, since the three of us had been in school together, a week or two late was neither here nor there. We were comrades in survival and a little more that that. All those years ago, Augustus Jones, our headmaster, a man given to bouts of enthusiasm, had declared in public that Tom Philips, Roderick Roberts and Peter Pritchard were the best and brightest pupils he had ever had. No doubt a misguided burst of hyperbole, but it stayed with us down the years, sank into an undercurrent of rivalry that seems to have coloured if not dominated our relationship. We should have been friends, perhaps, just for the sake of being friends, not runners pacing each other on a long distance race. We went our separate ways: myself into development via architecture; Rod into medicine and surgery, and Peter, more unusually, into acting. We kept in regular touch to enjoy our minor triumphs en route, and kept our disappointments to ourselves. The record never required we should be confessing to one another. There has to be a little glitter to our progress. There was always an unspecified goal. It has turned out to be old age.

We have survived the journey through the minefield of accidents and ailments. In my own case I have taken life to be an extendable present rather than an accumulation of numbers on the scoreboard. I have done well and I have much to be thankful for. (‘Thankful to whom?' says Rod, who always had a sceptical nature. ‘If you believe that, you can believe anything,' was another of his early dicta.) I pop into the office of Philips & Partners twice a week and play nine holes of golf on a Thursday afternoon. Rod is no longer an eminent surgeon and lives in comfortable retirement in a substantial cottage outside Llandeilo, free at last from recurring marital entanglements. Disappointments, like bereavements, never go away but lose their sting down the years. Peter's career, as one might expect, was more colourful and roller-coaster. He was acknowledged quite early on to be a fine theatre director and later a great classical actor, but he made his money in films, and in particular horror films. His huge eyes, beetle brows, hooked nose and that mellow baritone that easily acquired its touch of menace proved to be greater assets than his intelligence. He married his agent, Maggie Pryce, a tough woman who turned out to have an umbilical attachment to her birthplace in Ynys Môn. We incline to think this had been intensified by having spent several unhappy years in New York. In any case they bought and converted a farmhouse above Penmon with a walled garden and spectacular views of Eryri and the Menai Straits. Sadly, before they had settled in, Maggie was stricken with cancer. Rod and I made a big effort to attend the funeral, but Peter was so bent with grief he barely noticed we were present. He retreated to the farm, weighed down by his cruel fate. He determined to fulfil the dream they had of creating a library and a garden. They would become Maggie's memorial. He gave up acting and films and the theatre, he said, to devote himself to philosophical studies. With the passage of time his horror films became cult items, so that he acquired what he described as ‘posthumous fame' and his retreat kept him out of an unwelcome limelight. He had to avoid the attentions of marauding fan clubs, especially during the tourist season.

I made what might be called the birthday party arrangements. I am not sure why, in the matter of reunions, this should invariably be the case. Perhaps because the other two see me as a businessman. Rod always had a streak of lazy indifference and in the operating theatre he was the centre of a little universe waited on, literally, hand and foot. Peter left everything to Maggie and after her death became chronically unworldly. Maybe I was the one with the most developed sense of social responsibility since I became a developer! I would like to think so. As I get older I have this need to justify my actions or at least explain them. What is it that inclined me to want to share my good fortune with my friends; or should I be more judicial and confess a desire to use my good fortune to transform a hidden rivalry into a more enduring friendship?

On arrival at the Trefarthen Country House Hotel, Rod and I presented ourselves at reception. We were confronted by an exceptionally good-looking Polish girl. I noticed Rod straighten up and brighten visibly. Still the ladies' man after two messy marriages and losing all his outstanding crop of fair hair. The beautiful Pole ignored his covetous smile and gave me all her cool professional attention. Rod was quite put out and I had to restrain myself from chuckling aloud. As we mounted the broad staircase I hear him mutter crossly.