Notwithstanding: Stories From an English Village

by Louis de Bernières

  Other people may not think it beautiful, but it’s beautiful to me mainly because I always loved it. I loved my childhood here, and I loved the house when I had to go abroad on military service, because it represented everything I was fighting for, and I loved it when I came back to Notwithstanding from Korea, and settled into the life I was born to. Here is the clump of bamboos behind which I used to conceal myself when playing hide-and-seek with my brothers and sister. Further up there on the left is a bird table that I made when I was at school. It’s amazing that it hasn’t rotted away by now. The lawn isn’t very smooth, there’s too much couch grass, but we used to set up a putting green on it in the summer, and it ruined my father’s scores at the real golf course because he kept hitting the ball a long way past the hole. Here is the big apple tree that was so easy to climb, and produced great Bramleys that my mother made into pies. One year we tried to make cider, but it was very sharp. We had rabbits in the orchard, in a big wire enclosure that was movable. They kept the grass mown if you remembered to move the cage around. Of course they’d escape quite often by burrowing underneath, and they’d go and raid the vegetable patch, but they came when you called them anyway. The cage started life as a chicken run, but we found the pullets too ill-natured. There used to be a modest fruit cage just here as well, and I frequently had to go into it to free the robins and blackbirds that got stuck inside. They would fly about in a silly panic, and didn’t know you were trying to be helpful. ‘Funny kind of fruit cage,’ my father used to say. ‘Keeps birds in rather than out.’

  The house isn’t very old. It’s Edwardian, in the Surrey farmhouse style. I remember when the Virginia creeper and the wisteria were planted, and now they’re all over the walls. I don’t know who the architect was, but it’s a very conventional design. Most of the other family houses around here are quite similar. The first people to live in this house came down from the north. I think they were in textiles. Then it belonged to a writer who was quite famous in his time, but now no one’s even heard of him. Then it belonged to a retired naval officer and his wife, and then it was ours. I have so many happy memories. I don’t ever want to leave.

  Inside there are five bedrooms. My parents had the one at the back. Mine was above the kitchen. Every morning the smell of frying eggs and sausages would get me out of bed in a good mood. My room wasn’t big, but it was big enough for my model aeroplanes to hang from the ceiling on string, and for my toy soldiers to have decent-sized battles. I had a little cannon that worked on a spring, and you could put ball bearings or matches into it, pull back the lever, release it and mow down the enemy. When I grew up I would find little ball bearings all over the place.

  My brother Michael shared a room with my other brother Sebastian. They were twins, but not identical. My sister Catherine had the room opposite my parents, and sometimes I would creep into her room at night with a sheet over my head and give her a fright. Or I’d listen for when she went to the loo, and I’d lie down at the corner of the corridor and grab her ankle as she went past in the dark. It worked every time. Then my mother told me to stop, because it was unnerving being woken up by screaming in the middle of the night. Catherine used to get revenge by leaning over the banisters and spitting on my head when I was underneath in the hallway. It’s hard to imagine that she grew up to be so beautiful and refined, and married a baronet.

  On the top floor up the back stairs, under the roof, is a lovely big dusty attic. I think it had been fitted out for a servant to live in, because it had a proper little fireplace, and the rafters were all boarded in. I spent hours up there. I fixed a dartboard to the wall, and I threw darts at it, backhand, underarm, over my shoulder, every possible way. I got very good at it. It was one of my party tricks. I used to go up there when I was miserable as well because no one would know I was weeping.

  I always liked the bells. You’d press a button on the wall in any room, and it would ring in the pantry, and a little brown semaphore would wave back and forth in a box above the door, and indicate which room you were ringing from. Catherine and I used to push the buttons to make my mother go to the front door only to find nobody there. Once my mother went to the door and when she opened it, the cat was sitting there on the mat in the porch, looking up at her as if he’d pressed it himself. The cat just walked past her into the hallway and my mother was briefly astonished, until she realised that it couldn’t possibly have been Tobermory who rang the bell. The cat was named Tobermory after a talking cat in a story that my father read to us once. The moral of the story was that if you can talk, it’s better not to tell the truth.

  Our phone number was 293, amazing when you consider how long the numbers are nowadays.

  I love sitting here at Christmas time, at the end of the garden. I don’t feel the cold. I like to sit here because the house looks so wonderful with the Christmas tree behind the French windows. There’s a full moon, and I can see everything around me with perfect clarity. The stars are out, and I can never remember which ones are the planets. Perhaps they’re the very bright ones. Sebastian used to point them out to me, but I don’t know how he knew. I used to point them out to girlfriends when I was being romantic, but I was bluffing. I knew that they didn’t know either. The house and the garden and the sky look like something out of a Christmas card, appropriately enough. The only thing missing is snow. I only ever remember one white Christmas, when it snowed as we came out of church, and Catherine was wearing a lilac coat with a hood that had a lining of white rabbit fur that framed her face and made me think that she was the prettiest sister that anyone ever had. Everything is silver and shadow now, except for the Christmas tree, which is glowing with all sorts of different-coloured lights that reflect off the tinsel and the glass balls.

  It reminds me of that dreadful night of the fire. We had little candles in those days, little candles that sat on cups that clipped to the branches of the Christmas tree, along with all the tatty taffeta angels that we’d inherited. It looked magical but it wasn’t ever a good idea. Trees dry out, and they’re full of resin. They go up like a torch.

  We all went to midnight Mass, and when we got home we had a nightcap. We talked about plans for Christmas Day. My father used to like to go shooting, but my mother more or less forbad him. She said it wasn’t nice to go round bowling over rabbits and blasting birds out of the sky on the day when our Saviour was born to bring peace and harmony to the world. We decided we’d all walk to Abbot’s Notwithstanding and back again before lunch, but my mother would have to drop out because someone had to baste the goose. I think she was probably relieved, because she wasn’t a great one for unnecessary exercise.

  The whole family were there, including the baronet. We liked the baronet. He didn’t put on any airs, and he didn’t have any side. He had a quiet charm and a confidence. He gave up the army for Catherine’s sake, because she didn’t want to have to be sent off all over the world at a moment’s notice. It was decent of him because he was a Coldstreamer, he was doing well, and he obviously loved it. He and Catherine came down from Cambridgeshire in the Riley to be with us for Christmas. Sebastian and Michael came down from Merton, and I was living at home anyway, because I didn’t want to move anywhere else, not unless I married, and anyway I’d found a decent job in Guildford. I paid rent to my mother without telling my father, which seemed the best thing. Knowing her, she spent the money on shoes.

  That night, what with us being tired and having a tot of whisky inside us, we forgot to put out the candles on the tree, just as anyone might, but the next thing I knew, I woke up choking. I got out of bed, hacking and coughing, and I groped about in the smoke. But I couldn’t find the light switch and there was a terrible pain in my lungs, and I was coughing so much that it was agony. I felt that I was vomiting my lungs up. My eyes stung so badly from the smoke that I couldn’t open them, and even so they were still streaming with tears. I remember the pain, the coughing, the stinging in my eyes, and the insuperable fear, the not knowing where I was in the room, t
he roaring noise, and then it was as if my chest and my brain were full of molten lead, and I must have passed out. I don’t really know what happened next.

  As I sit here at the end of the garden, on the rockery, looking at the Christmas tree with its electric lights, it’s hard to believe that the house was almost gutted. The tree must have set the curtains alight, and so on. Anyway, it’s all been repaired, and you’d never know that anything happened. It’s part of the wonder of the house. It doesn’t die, it just keeps on evolving. The house is alive. It watches over me always, and it’s watching me now.

  The house may be alive, but my family aren’t. They all perished in the fire, from inhaling the smoke, every one of them, including the cat. Even so, it doesn’t stop them turning up. Just now my father put his hand on my shoulder, and said, ‘Come on, my boy.’ Death hasn’t changed him at all. He’s just as solid, he’s still got the same voice and even the same smell of Three Nuns pipe tobacco. He wears the plus fours and long socks and brogues that I used to find so embarrassing and old-fashioned. Every time I sit here, he comes and asks me to leave. I wish he wouldn’t. I love him, but he isn’t entitled to tell me what to do any more.

  They’re all here now, as solid and real as when they were alive. There’s Catherine and her baronet, hand in hand, and Sebastian and Michael looking at me pityingly. There’s even the cat. It’s not Tobermory. This one is called Gerald, and he was two cats later. Gerald used to drink from the dripping tap in the bathroom basin, whereas Tobermory would get under the sofa, stick his claws into the hessian underneath, and drag himself along on his back as fast as he could go. Gerald settles on his haunches and looks up at me with interest, as if I were an experiment.

  My mother is here too. She reaches out a hand to try and hold mine and says, ‘Please, darling, please,’ but I take my hand away, not roughly, but gently. I know she loves me, you see, and I don’t want to cause her any hurt. She implores me with her eyes, and still holds out her hand.

  ‘Come on, you big fool,’ says Sebastian, grinning like a schoolboy, and Michael thumps me on the shoulder with the same old fraternal violence and says, ‘Come on, old thing. You’ve been here quite long enough.’

  ‘I’m watching the house,’ I say.

  The baronet lights a cigarette, and when he throws the match to the ground, it disappears. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘I know I’m not strictly family and whatnot, only being married in, as it were, but you’ve got to give it up one of these days, this watching-over-the-house lark.’

  ‘It’s really the house watching over me,’ I say. ‘Anyway, you’re all dead.’

  ‘When are you going to understand?’ asks Catherine, shaking her head.

  ‘What’s wrong with staying here?’ I say.

  ‘Please,’ says my mother.

  After a while they leave, one by one, as they always do. My mother and Catherine give me a gentle kiss on the cheek. It’s surprising how you can distinctly feel the kiss of someone who is dead. My father once surprised me by taking my head between his hands and kissing me on the forehead. He would never have done that when he was alive, and he hasn’t done it since. Michael and Sebastian subject me to more claps between the shoulder blades. They all turn and wave modestly before they fade away not far from where the bonfire always used to be. Only Gerald stays a little longer. He winds himself around my legs a few times, and reaches up to touch a claw to my hand, as he used to when he suspected that it contained a morsel of Cheddar cheese. Eventually he wanders away after the rest of them.

  I don’t understand why they keep coming back. I am glad to see them of course, but they’re dead. I keep telling them, but they don’t seem to be able to take it in. They don’t seem to understand why I won’t go with them. Perhaps death makes you less perceptive.

  Anyway, I am perfectly contented, sitting atop this rockery by moonlight. I love it here. I love this beautiful house, I love the way it holds me as if it had hands and I was cupped inside them. I sit here and it watches over me, I feel absolute happiness, and there’s nothing I’d rather do.

  TALKING TO GEORGE

  THE MIST HANGS above the paddocks and molehills, and the horses snort and nod their heads, their breath condensing in the cold air.

  The girls inhale the scent of leather and saddle cream; their world consists of the creaking of girths, the sweet smell of horses’ sweat, the seduction of straw and the clatter of hooves on the cobbles of the yard.

  The gardener turns into the drive, his pipe stuck into his mouth, the smoke flaring behind him as the motorbike rattles along with its chair bolted on to the side. He has kept the bike in a secret shed for thirty years and more, and his wife knows nothing about it; it is the mistress and lover he never did have, the secret friend, the last connection with youth. It is to him what the horses are to the girls.

  John switches it off and it pre-ignites, reluctant to stop. ‘Bloody thing,’ says John to himself, irritated and perplexed.

  John twists the key in the lock, and the door creaks, the bottom scraping the floor, and, ‘Bloody thing,’ says John again.

  ‘Boy not here,’ he says, ‘gettin’ later every day, he is. Never mind, ’snice to have the place to yourself, first thing,’ and he takes his provisions from a knapsack and opens a tin. He approaches the corner, tweaking the threads of a web, calling, ‘George, George, here, George, I brought you some flies, good boy, look what I’ve got. Bluebottles, two of ’em, yes, yum yum,’ and John leaves the flies for George on his web, turning away to make the tea. The kettle hums, and John hums too ‘… There’ll always be an England, while there’s a busy street …’ John puts four sugars in his mug, and a drop of milk. He lights his pipe for the umpteenth time and is alerted by the sound of a bicycle being propped against the shed and then falling over as it always seems to do. ‘Bloody thing,’ says Alan, outside.

  ‘Morning, John,’ says Alan, coming in, compensating with cheeriness for his fractional lateness. ‘Tea on the brew?’

  ‘Just about boiled. You make it and I’ll watch.’

  ‘Is that the baccy you grew yourself?’

  John offers his pipe and raises his brows. ‘Have a puff. I say it myself, but it’s all right.’

  Alan is unsure, but he takes the pipe and draws, and tries to restrain his coughs. ‘Blimey, it’s like cigars,’ he exclaims, ‘but it’s kind of sharp, a bit of a bite in the throat.’ He shakes his head, as if in regret, and says, ‘Try as I might, I wasn’t cut out for the weed.’

  ‘You accustom yourself,’ says John, and Alan suggests, ‘You could soften it up with honey, you could try brandy,’ but ‘That’s for nancy boys,’ says John.

  The door scrapes and Sylvie comes in, with a ‘Hello, boys. Kettle on? What’s a girl got to do for her cup of tea?’

  ‘Hello, Sylv,’ say the males, and John’s got a question, a provocation, a pertinent enquiry. ‘’Bout time you got your own kettle, innit? Whoever heard of a stable without a kettle?’

  Sylvie knows that John knows that there is a kettle in the stable. ‘Don’t you want me then?’ she mock-protests. ‘I’ll go away and sulk. Can’t a poor girl get a cup of tea any more? You’re brutes. And anyway, I’m only coming in to say hello to George,’ and she walks across the cracked concrete of the floor, with its patches of ragged matting. Her hips sway without her knowledge, her body speaking the language of enticement without her explicit permission. Alan looks at the hair that flows down her back to her waist, and the hips that are speaking.

  ‘Hello, Georgie boy,’ says Sylvie, peering into the web.

  ‘Hello, Sylv,’ says Alan in a squeaky voice, and then, dropping it down to normal, ‘He gets fatter every day. You know, it occurs to me that he’s probably female. Aren’t the females big, and the males a bit small?’

  John blows smoke from his cheeks, and pretends to growl. ‘I hope he in’t female, ’cause if he is, I’ll chuck him out. Females in the potting shed, I don’t hold with it.’ And here Sylvie puts one hand on her eloquent hip, an
d pouts in reproof, and John’s eyes sparkle. ‘’Cept for Sylv, of course, and anyway, he can’t be female, ’cause what female would put up with a web like that, all covered with dust? She’d be out and at it with a feather duster, spider-sized.’

  ‘You’re out of date,’ says Sylvie. ‘Nowadays we give the duster to the bloke and off we go to karate classes.’

  ‘Females is females,’ John asserts. ‘You know what I think? I think men are closer to nature. Here we are,’ (and he gestures with the stem of his pipe) ‘drinking tea with a sodding great web up in the corner, an’ we don’t care. In fact, we like it. Now, I bet if my missus or your mum came in here and saw George, she’d flip her lid. There’s things that women just don’t understand. Like spiders, and motorcycles, and beer. And did you ever see a woman shoot a catapult? Course not.’ John sucks hard on his pipe. Point proven, but the pipe’s gone out.

  ‘I like George,’ says Sylv, ‘and I like motorbikes.’

  Alan supports her, he wants her to smile. ‘There’s a woman near us who plays cricket, smokes a pipe and shoots squirrels with a twelve-bore.’

  ‘Well, she in’t a woman then, is she?’ says John, and he strikes a match on the floor. Sylvie and Alan exchange a glance.

  ‘What am I up to today?’ asks Alan. ‘Weather forecast says fine.’

  ‘The weather forecast in’t got a gardening nose. You stick your head out of that door and sniff. It’s going to rain, you can smell the crackle and spark.’ John can’t resist a dig. ‘That’ll be a good trick to impress the other nobs with when you go to that university.’

  ‘I’m not a nob,’ Alan protests, although he knows that he is.

  ‘Course you’re a nob … posh voice, mum and dad a car each, nice big house. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care if you are, it’s all right wi’ me as long as you do your work, but this place’ (he waves his pipe) ‘is all my life, and for you it’s a stop on the way.’