by A. S. Byatt
He had to kneel down in the muddy track, damaging his trousers, reminding him of playground agonies; he gripped, tugged, balanced.
“Is the chair stable?” he said. “I seem to be tipping you.”
“It’s d-designed for s-stability. I have the brakes on.”
The full real anxiety of the position slowly came over Roland. Any wrong move, and she would have been over. He inserted his hands into the mud, and scrabbled. He found a not very effective twig and scraped. He used another flint as a primitive lever and finally fell back, clasping the offending object in both hands, damaging the haunches of his trousers too.
“There,” he said. “Like dentistry. It’s out.”
“I am very grateful.”
“You were in a bit of a fix. You must have skidded over it one way and then it tipped back and put up this sort of tooth, like a ratchet, look.” He became aware that she was trembling. “No, wait a minute, let’s get the chair back on the track. I’m afraid my hands are muddy.”
He was out of breath by the time he had canted her back, ground her round, settled the chair on the rough track again. Its wheels dripped mud. She turned her face up to him then. It was large and moony, stained with the brown coins of age, thick with ropes and soft pockets of flesh under the chin. The eyes, huge and pale brown, were swimming. From under the smooth, pulled-back grey hair at the sides of the hat trickled large drops of sweat.
“Thank you,” she said. “I had got myself in a very foolish position. I might well have gone over. F-foolhardy, my husband would say. I sh-should s-stay on the level ground. My dependence annoys me.”
“Of course,” said Roland. “Of course it must. You were all right really. Someone must have come.”
“Just as well you did. Are you out walking?”
“I’m visiting. Out with a friend.” Where was Maud? “Marvellous air. You can see so far.”
“That’s why I come up here. The dog is meant to stay with me, but he never does. My husband likes to poke about in the woods. Where are you walking?”
“I don’t know. My friend knows. Shall I walk with you, a little?”
“I don’t feel very well. My h-hands are shaky. If you would be good enough to come to—the foot of the track, down the wold, my husband—”
“Of course, of course.”
Maud came up. She looked neat and clean in her Burberry and Wellingtons.
“We got the chair out,” Roland told her. “It was jammed on a stone. I’m just going to walk down the hill with this lady—her husband’s there—she’s had rather a shock—”
“Of course,” said Maud.
They progressed, all three, Roland behind the chair, down the track. The land over the hill was thickly wooded. Through trees Roland saw again, more leisurely, a turret, a battlement, white in the gloom.
“Seal Court,” he said to Maud.
“Yes.”
“Romantic,” he offered.
“Dark and damp,” said the lady in the wheelchair.
“It must have cost a fortune to build,” said Maud.
“And to maintain,” said the lady in the wheelchair. Her leather hands danced a little in her lap, but her voice was steadying.
“I suppose so,” said Roland.
“You are interested in old houses?”
“Not exactly,” said Roland. “We wanted to see that one.”
“Why?”
Maud’s boot sliced into his ankle. He suppressed an exclamation of pain. A very dirty Labrador appeared, out of the woodland.
“Ah, Much,” said the lady. “There you are. Useless great lump. Useless. Where’s your master? Tracking badgers?”
The dog measured its blond belly in the mud, agitating its stern.
“Tell me your names,” said the lady in the wheelchair. Maud said quickly, “This is Dr Michell. From London University. I teach at Lincoln University. My name’s Bailey. Maud Bailey.”
“My name is Bailey too. Joan Bailey. I live at Seal Court. Are you a relation?”
“I am a Norfolk Bailey. A relation far back. Not very close. The families haven’t kept up—” Maud sounded repressive and cold.
“How interesting. Ah, here is George. George dear, I have had an adventure and been rescued by a knight. I was entrenched on the top of Eagle’s Piece, with a huge stone under my wheel and the only way out seemed to be over the edge, most humiliating. And then Mr Michell here came along, and this young woman, whose name is Bailey.”
“I told you to keep to the centre of the track.”
Sir George was small and wet and bristling. He had laced leather boots with polished rounded calves, like greaves. He had a many-pocketed shooting jacket, brown, with a flat brown tweed cap. He barked. Roland took him for a caricature and bristled vestigially with class irritation. Such people, in his and Val’s world, were not quite real but still walked the earth. Maud too saw him as a type; in her case he represented the restriction and boredom of countless childhood country weekends of shooting and tramping and sporting conversation. Rejected and evaded. He was not carrying a gun. Water stained his shoulders, shone on his footwear, stood in drops on the furry ribs of the socks between his breeches and his boots. He considered his wife.
“You’re never content, are you?” he said. “I push you up the hill and then you’re not content to take it steady on the track, oh no. Any harm done?”
“I do feel a bit shaken. Mr Michell came in time.”
“Well, you weren’t to expect that.” He advanced on Roland, his hand held out. “I’m very grateful. My name’s Bailey. The idiot dog is meant to stay with Joan, but he will not, he will go off on his own little expeditions in the gorse. I expect you think I should have stayed up there, ha?”
Roland demurred, touching his forthright hand, stepping back.
“So I should. So I should. I’m a selfish old blighter. There are badgers, though, Joanie. Not that I should say so, encourage trespassers, wildlifers, terrifying the poor brutes out of their wits. The old Japanese juniper’s in good fettle, too, you’ll be glad to know. Quite recovered.”
He advanced on Maud.
“Afternoon. My name’s Bailey.”
“She knows,” said his wife. “So’s her name, I told you, she’s one of the Norfolk Baileys.”
“Is that so? They aren’t seen about here very often. Less than badgers, I’d say. What brings you here?”
“I work in Lincoln.”
“You do, do you?” He did not ask at what. He considered his wife with some intensity of observation.
“You look clammy, Joan. You aren’t a good colour. We should get you home.”
“I should like to ask Mr Michell and Miss Bailey to c-come to t-tea if they would. Mr Michell needs a wash. They are interested in Seal Court.”
“Seal Court isn’t interesting,” said Sir George. “It isn’t open to the public, you know. It’s in a bad way. My fault, indirectly. Lack of funds. Coming down round our ears.”
“They won’t mind that. They’re young.” Lady Bailey’s large face took on a set expression. “I should like to ask them. For courtesy.”
Maud’s face flamed. Roland saw what was going on. She wanted proudly to disclaim any interest in penetrating Seal Court: she wanted to go there, because of Christabel, because, he guessed, Leonora Stern had been turned away: she felt, he assumed, dishonest in not saying straight out why she had an interest in going.
“I should be very glad of a brief chance to wash,” he said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
They drove in convoy round behind the great house, on a sopping weed-infested gravel drive, and pulled up in the stable-yard, where Roland helped Sir George to disembark the wheelchair and Lady Bailey. The short day was darkening; the back door swung in heavily under a Gothic porch over which a rose, now leafless, was trained. Above, rows of dark windows, with carved Gothic frames, were dark and blank. The door had been elongated to remove steps, so that the wheelchair could go in. They progressed along dark stone co
rridors, past various pantries and flights of steps, arriving eventually in what later turned out to have been the servants’ hall and was now superficially, and partially, converted for modern living.
At one end of this dim room was an open fireplace, in which a few huge logs still smouldered in a bed of white ash; on either side of this were two heavy, curved and padded armchairs, covered in velvet, a dark charcoal colour, patterned with dark purple flowers, a kind of glamorised fin-de-siècle bindweed. The floor was covered with large red and white vinyl tiles, rubbed in ridges that betrayed the presence of flagstones underneath. Under the window was a heavy table, thick-legged and partly covered with an oilcloth patterned in faintly tartan checks. At the other end of the room, which later proved to lead out to the kitchen and other domestic offices, was a small two-barred electric fire. There were other, slightly threadbare chairs, and a collection of extremely glossy, lively pot plants, in glazed bowls. Maud was worried by the lighting, which Sir George turned on—a dim standard lamp by the fire, a slightly happier lamp, made from a Chinese vase, on the table. The walls were whitewashed, and bore various pictures of horses, dogs and badgers, oils, watercolours, tinted photos, framed glossy prints. By the fire was a huge basket, obviously Much’s bed, lined with a stiff and hair-strewn navy blanket. Large areas of the room were simply empty. Sir George drew the curtains, and motioned Roland and Maud to sit down by the fire, in the velvet chairs. Then he wheeled his wife out. Roland did not feel able to ask if he could help. He had expected a butler or some obsequious manservant, at the least a maid or companion, to welcome them into a room shining with silver and silk carpets. Maud, inured to poor heating and the threadbare, was still a little disturbed by the degree of discomfort represented by the sad lighting. She put her hand down and called Much, who came and pressed his body, trembling and filthy, against her legs, between her and the sinking fire.
Sir George came back and built up his fire with new logs, hissing and singing.
“Joan is making tea. I’m afraid we don’t have too many comforts or luxuries here. We live only on the ground floor, of course. I had the kitchen made over for Joan. Every possible aid. Doors and ramps. All that could be done. I know it’s not much. This house was built to be run by a pack of servants. Two old folk—we echo in it. But I keep up the woods. And Joan’s garden. There’s a Victorian water garden too, you know. She likes that.”
“I’ve read about that,” said Maud cautiously.
“Have you now? Keep up with family things, do you?”
“In a way. I have particular family interests.”
“What relation are you to Tommy Bailey then? That was a great horse of his, Hans Andersen, that was a horse with character and guts.”
“He was my great-uncle. I used to ride one of Hans Andersen’s less successful descendants. A pig-headed brute who could jump himself out of anything, like a cat, but didn’t always choose to, and didn’t always take me with him. Called Copenhagen.”
They talked about horses and a little about the Norfolk Baileys. Roland watched Maud making noises that he sensed came naturally, and sensed too that she would never make in the Women’s Studies building. From the kitchen a bell struck.
“That’s the tea. I’ll go and fetch it. And Joan.”
It came in an exquisite Spode tea service, with a silver sugarbowl and a plateful of hot buttered toast with Gentleman’s Relish or honey, on a large melamine tray designed, Roland saw, to slot into the arms of the wheelchair. Lady Bailey poured. Sir George quizzed Maud about dead cousins, long-dead horses, and the state of the trees on the Norfolk estate. Joan Bailey said to Roland, “George’s great-great-grandfather planted all this woodland, you know. Partly for timber, partly because he loved trees. He tried to get everything to grow that he could. The rarer the tree, the more of a challenge. George keeps it up. He keeps them alive. They’re not fast conifers, they’re mixed woodland, some of those rare trees are very old. Woods are diminishing in this part of the world. And hedges too. We’ve lost acres and acres of woodland to fast grain farming. George goes up and down protecting his trees. Like some old goblin. Somebody has to have a sense of the history of things.”
“Do you know,” said Sir George, “that up to the eighteenth century the major industry in this part of the world was rabbit-warrening? The land wasn’t fit for much else, sandy, full of gorse. Lovely silver skins they had; they went off to be hats in London and up North. Fed ’em in the winter, let ’em forage in the summer, neighbours complained but they flourished. Alternated with sheep in places. Vanished, along with much else. They found ways to make sheep cheaper, and corn too, and the rabbits died out. Trees going the same way now.”
Roland could think of no intelligent comments about rabbits, but Maud replied with statistics about Fenland warrens and a description of an old warrener’s tower on the Norfolk Baileys’ estate. Sir George poured more tea. Lady Bailey said, “And what do you do in London, Mr Michell?”
“I’m a university research student. I do some teaching. I’m working for an edition of Randolph Henry Ash.”
“He wrote a good poem we learned at school,” said Sir George. “Never had any use for poetry myself, but I used to like that one. ‘The Hunter.’ Do you know that poem? About a stone-age chappie setting snares and sharpening flints and talking to his dog and snuffing the weather in the air. You got a real sense of danger from that poem. Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap’s versifying. We had a sort of poet in this house once. I expect you’d think nothing to her. Terrible sentimental stuff about God and Death and the dew and fairies. Nauseating.”
“Christabel LaMotte,” said Maud.
“Just so. Funny old bird. Lately we get people round asking if we’ve got any of her stuff. I send them packing. We keep ourselves to ourselves, Joan and I. There was a frightful nosy American in the summer who just turned up out of the blue and told us how honoured we must be, having the old bat’s relics up here. Covered with paint and jangling jewellery, a real mess, she was. Wouldn’t go when I asked her politely. Had to wave the gun at her. Wanted to sit in Joan’s winter garden. To remember Christabel. Such rot. Now a real poet, like your Randolph Henry Ash, that’d be something different, you’d be reasonably pleased to have someone like that in the family. Lord Tennyson was a bit of a soppy old thing too, on the whole, though he wrote some not bad things about Lincolnshire dialect. Not a patch on Mabel Peacock though. She really could hear Lincolnshire speech. Marvellous story about a hedgehog. Th’otchin ’at wasn’t niver suited wi’ nowt. Listen to this then. “Fra fo’st off he was werrittin’ an witterin’ an sissin an spittin perpetiwel.” That’s real history that is, words that are vanishing daily, fewer and fewer people learning them, all full of Dallas and Dynasty and the Beatles’ jingle jangle.”
“Mr Michell and Miss Bailey will think you are a frightful old stick, George. They like good poetry.”
“They don’t like Christabel LaMotte.”
“Ah, but I do,” said Maud. “It was Christabel who wrote the description I read of the Seal Court winter garden. In a letter. She made me see it, and the different evergreens, and the red berries and the dogwood and the sheltered bench and the silvery fish in the little pool.… Even under the ice she could see them suspended—”
“We had an old tom cat who used to take the fish—”
“We restocked—”
“I’d love to see the winter garden. I’m writing about Christabel LaMotte.”
“Ah,” said Lady Bailey. “A biography. How interesting.”
“I don’t see,” said Sir George, “that there’d be much to put in a biography. She didn’t do anything. Just lived up there in the east wing and poured out all this stuff about fairies. It wasn’t a life.”
“As a matter of fact, it isn’t a biography. It’s a critical study. But of course she interests me. We went to look at her grave.”
This was the wrong thing to say. Sir George’s face darkened. His brows, which were sandy,
drew down over his plummy nose. “That unspeakable female who came here—she had the impudence to hector me—to read me a lecture—on the state of that grave. Said its condition was shocking. A national monument. Not her national monument I told her, and she shouldn’t come poking her nose in where it wasn’t wanted. She asked to borrow some shears. That was when I got the gun out. So she went and bought some in Lincoln and came back the next day and got down on her knees and cleaned it all up. The Vicar saw her. He comes over once a month, you know, and says Evensong in the church. She sat and listened in the back pew. Brought a huge bouquet. Affectation.”
“We saw—”
“You don’t have to shout at Miss Bailey, George,” said his wife. “She’s not responsible for all that. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t be interested in Christabel. I think you should show these young people Christabel’s room. If they want to see. It’s all locked away, you know, Mr Michell, and has been for generations. I don’t know what sort of a state it’s in, but I believe some of her things are still there. The family has occupied less and less of this house since the World Wars, every generation a little less—Christabel’s room was in the east wing that’s been closed since 1918, except for use as some kind of a glory-hole. And we, of course, live in a very small part of the building, and only downstairs, because of my disability. We do try to have general repairs done. The roof’s sound, and there’s a carpenter who sees to the floors. But no one’s touched that room to my knowledge, since I came here as a bride in 1929. Then we lived in all this central portion. But the east wing was—not out of bounds exactly—but not used.”
“You wouldn’t see much,” said Sir George. “You’d need a torch. No electricity, in that part of the house. Only on the ground-floor corridors.”
Roland felt a strange pricking at the base of his neck. Through the carved window he saw the wet branches of the evergreens, darker on the dark. And the dim light in the gravel drive.
“It would be marvellous just to have a look—”
“We should be very grateful.”
