‘Puh, Ruh, Eh, Guh,’ Agatha is intoning.
‘I say “Pee, Are, Ee, Gee,”’ Helen says.
I realize that the pregnancy kit is in her hand. I take it from her at once and ask, as a diversionary tactic, who made the knitted creature.
‘Grandma made it,’ Helen says. ‘But she’s dead now. She collected lots of china. Mummy’s got it.’
‘Mice and china,’ Aggie says. ‘But I wish we still had the mice.’
There is a knock and, after almost no pause, in walks Pen’s oldest sister. I’ve gleaned over dinner that she’s home for the summer from medical school somewhere in London. It strikes me now that she’ll make exactly the sort of doctor who loves to have your leg off and your womb out if possible.
‘I thought as much,’ she says, sounding just like the Dragon Lady. It takes me a moment to collect myself and realize that I’m not the object of her intervention. She is addressing herself to the little ones. ‘It’s the squeaking that gives you away,’ she says and her eyes bore through each of them in turn.
‘Sorry, Julia,’ Helen says.
‘Sorry, Julia,’ says Agatha.
‘Off you go,’ she says. ‘Chop chop. We don’t pester visitors in their bedrooms.’
Some of us do, I think. And, after she and the little ones have departed, I debate with myself whether or not ‘chop chop’ is my most unfavourite expression.
In spite of my tiredness, I have difficulty falling asleep. The bed is huge and cushiony and I have grown accustomed to sharing a hard, three-foot divan with Izzy, who is all knees and elbows. Somewhere around eleven o’clock I wrench the bolster from under my pillows and arrange it parallel with my body so that I can embrace it and damp its feathery bulk with my tears. I think about telephoning my grandmother in the morning and fixing up to go and stay.
As my thoughts begin to disassemble, they touch down briefly on shelves of china. My Grandma, too, collects china. She has lots of Staffordshire salt-glaze. Then I picture the mice trapped under the tea-cups on the dresser of The Tailor of Gloucester, the mice that the tailor’s cat Simpkin is saving for his supper. Mice and china . . .
In the morning, I notice that the emaciated wooden Jesus hanging on the cross over my bed has, at some time, made a break for freedom. One of his hands has wrested itself free from the nail that must have penetrated the palm, but somebody has tied it on again with string. The self-serving callousness of this gives me the creeps: you just keep hanging there and save us, all right?
I remember my mother once testing me on my European Geography. She was holding my school notes in her hand as she tried me on German manufacture.
‘What is Nuremberg famous for?’ she says.
‘Wood carving,’ I parrot. (See notes.) ‘And wooden toys.’ There is a pause before we both burst out laughing. We scream with laughter until we cry.
‘Really,’ Mum says, ‘these notes are something else.’
It’s Friday and Dad is home. At supper we say to him, ‘What is Nuremberg famous for?’ Then we both snort and choke. I spray Dad with gouts of mashed potato.
‘Am I missing something?’ he says, after a while.
‘Wood carving!’ we scream. ‘And wooden toys! Nuremberg is famous for wood carving!’ We laugh uncontrollably, though both of us know that, five decades earlier, my dad’s grandfather went missing in Nazi Germany.
Right now I take out my pregnancy testing kit and I lock myself in my bathroom against a possible repeat invasion by the medical older sibling. I catch my early morning midstream urine in the plastic beaker provided, and stick in the tab designed to change colour, one way or the other. Then, frantic to find somewhere safe to leave it through the morning, I drag a chair to the huge old pedimented hanging cupboard and I stash it away on the roof.
When I finally go downstairs, I discover, to my horror, that Pen is gone. He has gone into the office with his father to start the first day of his new life as the boss’s oldest son; the one who will step into the Opus Dei’s nasty, perforated shoes. Helen and Agatha are off at school. The Old Thing has gone off into town, first to drop them and then to visit the doctor.
‘She’ll be at the hospital,’ says the medical sibling. ‘It’s Thursday.’ She is helping herself to a hefty bowl of Jordan’s Crunchy from the sideboard. Ambrose and two of the others are already seated at the table, munching. One of them is the groany girl and the other is the barn owl person whom I find distinctly less terrifying than the rest. He told me, the previous evening, that he has just come back from a post-A-level year out, mapping the Peruvian Andes. I sit beside him in suitably cowed fashion, and begin to spread a slice of bread with jam.
Meanwhile, the predatory majority have planned a morning of mixed doubles on the tennis court and they are in the process of coercing the barn owl person into taking part, though it materializes that he has an inclination to spend the day doing voluntary work in a local nature reserve.
‘You play, do you, Stella?’ Ambrose says, turning to me.
‘What?’ I say.
‘But she can’t even play table-tennis,’ says the one whose name I can’t remember, with one of her best groans.
Ambrose ignores her. He continues to address me. ‘The point is,’ he says, ‘that Benedict here is longing to be off communing with his newts. He’s making them sunbeds.’
‘But I thought it was adders today,’ says the medical sibling. ‘Isn’t it National Adder Week, Ben?’
‘Whatever,’ Ambrose says. He wafts a hand in a manner unnervingly reminiscent of the Opus Dei. ‘He’s longing to be off with some ungodly creeping thing that creepeth.’
I am in absolute terror of being drawn into a tennis game and horribly grateful that, right now, someone else is drawing their fire.
The newt man smiles sweetly at Ambrose. ‘Our religion will have to cure itself of species bigotry,’ he says. ‘That’s if it’s not to become obsolete. Like Mithraism.’
The predators make eyebrows at each other. Ambrose quotes the chunk of Genesis about man having dominion.
‘Thomas Aquinas,’ says the newt man, ‘interprets “having dominion” as having responsibility to nurture, not to abuse.’
‘Well, are we going to play mixed doubles?’ says the groany one. ‘Yes or no? If she plays instead of Benedict, then it won’t be mixed doubles, will it?’
‘I don’t play,’ I say quickly.
‘In that case,’ says the odious Ambrose, putting down his spoon, ‘I’ll make the time to teach you.’
In the event, my tuition thankfully consists – after the most rudimentary instruction in serving – of Ambrose handing me a half-dozen tennis balls and a racquet and telling me to hit the balls against a brick wall. He places me so that I am visible to him from the tennis court. Every so often he calls out, ‘Keep it up there, Stella.’ Then he goes on with his game.
Suddenly I realize that I am spending the morning in too much sun, being patronized by a boy who has just done his A levels. Am I insane? I stop and stare at them all for a moment. I envisage them without their clothes. I hear the voice of my junior school Sex Ed films: ‘The main difference between Ambrose and the medical sibling is between the legs.’ I see their boobs and willies bobbing with every thwack. I see them growing speeded-up hips and breasts, their pubic hair burgeoning precipitously, like mustard and cress.
I throw down the racquet and move off towards the house.
‘What’s up with her?’ I hear the groany one say.
Back in my room, the colour tab is telling me that I’m pregnant. I discover that the hand in which I hold the beaker has begun to shake violently. I clamber unsteadily off the chair, sloshing pee onto the floor. I watch it, morbidly, as it trickles slowly between two of the broad oak floorboards. Then I seat myself cross-legged on the rug, with my head in my hands. If ‘the Pill’ is reliable, as I know all too well that it is, then this condition could only have come upon me in my very first week with Izzy. This would make the pregnancy almost five months
old. Oh, Jesus. And all this time, I think bitterly, I’ve been swallowing the bloody pill every night, which has been giving me nice, slight, fake monthly periods, just as regular as you please.
My first impulse is to grab the phone and cry all over Izzy. My second is to calm down, and go into town all by myself, and find a doctor. One thing is certain, I decide. I am not to be embroiled with any genuflecting family physician – a physician who, at this moment, will be clamping a stethoscope to the Old Thing’s stretch-marked abdomen.
The Old Thing is back in time for lunch. She has been at ‘the hospital’ visiting the sick, not being examined herself. She has been engaged upon corporal works of mercy. Ambrose sits beside her, leaning his head on her shoulder and stroking her hair. The groany one does the same thing from the other side. They afflict themselves on her in stereo, calling her ‘Mumsie’.
‘Leave her alone, Anastasia,’ Ambrose says. ‘Stop pulling her about.’ Once they have done with their Oedipal rivalries, Ambrose sits up briskly and addresses himself to me.
‘Tomorrow we’ll get you on a horse,’ he says.
I spend the afternoon hiding in my room, where I stare out at the miles of grey stone wall and wonder what the hell I am doing there, until Helen calls me for tea.
‘We’re in tempry classrooms,’ she says, as we proceed down the staircase. ‘That’s all of us from the East Wing. Nobody else.’ The child is a total wanker, I reflect; a power-hungry obsessive.
At the kitchen table Aggie is sucking her thumb. She stops and comes to sit on my knee. Then she settles in to twiddle her hair and suck her thumb at once. The Old Thing serves us custard creams and chunky slices of bought banana cake. Her offspring promptly embark on a noisy calculation of the ratio of biscuit and cake to family members present, and squabble over who’s had too much. I watch them with an only child’s amazement and distaste, but the Old Thing pays it no attention. She serves tea from an enamel pot of such enormity that it needs a second handle over the spout to make it liftable. I reflect that, for her, every day is like being a helping parent at the annual school sports.
And finally, mercifully, Pen comes home. I see the car approach down the drive. It’s the shiny black one and it contains Pen and his father. I see it turn right towards the cobbled courtyard by the stables, before it disappears from my vision, and then they are both in the hall.
Unlike his father, who is, once again, a pincushion, tightly got up in navy pinstripes, with choking shirt collar and scarlet tie, Pen is elegant and dressy. Clothes always hang well on him. He wears a loose-cut suit of gingery beige viscose. It has a large unbuttoned jacket and he wears it with a cream brushed-wool shirt and burgundy red tie, loosened at the neck. On his feet he has lovely, plain laced brogues the colour of hazelnut shells.
‘Come for a walk with me,’ he says, possibly noticing the look of desperation in my stare. ‘I’ll just change my clothes.’
I am so pathetically grateful to see him that, without thinking, I follow him all the way up the stairs and into his bedroom like an eager little dog. I watch him hang up his jacket and remove his tie. I watch him remove his shoes, before it dawns on me what I’m doing.
‘Oh, my God,’ I say, ‘just look at me. I’ve followed you into your room.’
‘That’s perfectly all right, Stella dear,’ he says, sounding as unfussed as ever. ‘Now if you are unacquainted with the sight of boxer shorts, you may avert your eyes.’ Then he removes his trousers with his back to me while I keep on staring. I note that he has a really nice bum and well-made legs. Then he pulls on his jeans and does them up. He slides his feet into loafer shoes before returning with me downstairs.
‘Tell you what,’ he says, making a detour via the larder, ‘I’ll just grab a beer to drink as we go along. How about you, Stella?’
‘Oh, something soft, please,’ I say, since I’m a total baby about alcoholic drinks. I’ve never lost my dislike of the taste and I’d always sooner be drinking ginger beer. Or Orangina. Or, best of all, Sarsaparilla.
He comes back with two cans, one of which he hands to me. It’s melon-flavoured spring water. He gives me an arm and we head sedately for the shrubbery that borders the park. Were it not for us intermittently swigging from aluminium cans, I suppose we could be rehearsing a marriage proposal scene from one of Jane Austen’s novels.
‘Your father rang last night,’ he says, ‘after you’d gone to bed . . .’
I practically jump out of my skin as I say, ‘Was Izzy there, do you know?’
‘Stella,’ Pen says, ‘I really don’t know that. Why don’t you try telephoning Izzy yourself?’
‘Because,’ I say. I shrug childishly.
‘He spoke very briefly to the Old Man,’ Pen says. ‘He sent you his love and he hoped you’d feel able to call. Now tell me, how was your day?’
I avoid the question. ‘I ought to be asking you that,’ I say.
‘Oh,’ he says, ‘mine was nothing unfamiliar. I’ve worked for my father most of my holidays these last few years.’
I think to myself how weird it is that, for Pen, growing up does not mean going away, getting your parents off your back, launching out into something different and new.
‘But don’t you long to get away?’ I say.
‘Not particularly,’ he says. ‘I’ve travelled quite a bit in my time.’
When I stare at him, he says, ‘I’m to move into my own apartment actually. It’s in the old stables. I’ll show you in a while, if you like. It’s almost ready. I have some decisions to make about the fittings. But now you must tell me about yourself.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I had tennis lessons. Ambrose took me in hand.’ I speak sarcastically, but Pen doesn’t notice.
‘Good,’ he says. ‘That’s excellent.’
I glance at him suspiciously. Next, I say, ‘Pen, is there any way I can get into town by myself? Like a bus or something?’
‘There’s one bus a week, on Wednesdays,’ he says. ‘Market day. Welcome to the country, Stella.’
My disappointment makes me irritable. ‘I know about the country,’ I say. ‘I live in the country.’
‘The Cotswolds?’ he says. ‘On the train line to Paddington? Isn’t that commuter country?’
‘Well, it’s not me who’s commuting to Newcastle,’ I say, ‘in Daddy’s shiny black car. All dressed up in a smart suit and tie.’ I am made irritable not only by the knowledge that I’m trapped, but by an alarming notion that maybe I don’t live in the Cotswolds any more; that I’ve set my life upon a different caste. I tell myself not to be melodramatic, but I can’t help envisaging Izzy usurping my place. I imagine him stretched out arrogantly on my bed, reading my copy of Meg’s Eggs.
We have been walking towards the lake, and now we stop, having reached the water’s edge.
‘That particular shiny black car is mine,’ Pen is saying. ‘I’ve been driving my father, actually.’ He picks up a pebble and skims it across the water, making it bounce twice. ‘The Old Man has Ménière’s disease,’ he says. ‘It affects both his hearing and his balance. At any rate, he doesn’t drive any more – and right now his driver is on holiday.’
I’m hardly listening to him. I refuse to feel pity for the Opus Dei, and my brain is a muddle of emotions. I have moments of wanting Izzy so badly that my heart seems to contract. Then, suddenly, I want to kill him.
‘Shit,’ I say out loud.
‘Fortnum’s, eh?’ Pen says. ‘Poor old Stella.’ And he skims another pebble. ‘Would you care for a swim?’ he says.
‘Me?’ I say, and I shudder. ‘Not me, but how about you?’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ he says. ‘I swam this morning.’
‘But not before work?’ I say.
‘I swim every morning,’ Pen says. ‘Every morning of my life. Two hundred metres before breakfast, or I don’t feel alive.’
‘But not in Edinburgh,’ I say. ‘I never saw you.’
‘That’s because I was always back before you got up,�
�� Pen says, and he laughs, realizing perhaps that he sounds not unlike the most directed of the Three Little Pigs. ‘Survival strategy,’ he says, ‘that’s all. Gets one focused on the day.’ After a while he says, ‘I spoke to Ellen today. She’s desperate not to have her sister cremated, poor girl.’
We don’t speak for a while. Suddenly, I say, ‘Are you in love with Ellen?’
There is a pause. ‘Just friends,’ Pen says and he skims another pebble. This one bounces three times. ‘Ellen doesn’t like blond men,’ he says. Then he laughs again. ‘She must surely have told you that?’
In the evening, before supper, I compromise myself before the assembled company. Even the two extras are there, home for the weekend, from school. We are about to eat al fresco and are relaxing in garden chairs with drinks. Aggie has, as usual, attached herself to me. She and I are sharing the delights of a wonderful old handmade toy – a wooden drum with arrow slits. The drum rotates when spun round on a wooden spindle that I hold in my hand. Aggie turns the drum, making it whizz like anything.
‘But we have to be very careful, because it’s precious,’ Aggie says, parroting what’s been told to her. ‘Heinrich made it,’ she says.
‘Who’s Heinrich?’ I say.
Agatha giggles. ‘Don’t know,’ she says.
‘He was a German POW who worked on the estate,’ Pen says. ‘A woodcarver. Rather before our time. He made the chair in the hall and some of the wooden crucifixes. There’s one in your bedroom, Stella. He was deported after the war – though I believe he was keen to stay on.’
The toy comes with ageing strips of paper that make sort of hatbands around the inside of the drum; strips of paper that have been delicately sketched and hand-coloured with repeating forms of men and horses and windmills; trees and birds and circuses. For the viewer – in this case Aggie and me – who holds his eye to the arrow slits, these sketches turn into moving pictures when the drum is rotated. They are early animated cartoons. She and I are excited by their cleverness.
The Travelling Hornplayer Page 15
