Just in time I realized that Burgo could not possibly be interested in our family travails. I suppressed my indignation. Outwardly that is. I stared unseeing into the bushes as they flashed past. I was simmering with rage. How dared my father tell Brough to change all the lightbulbs in the house to forty watts so that it was virtually impossible to read at night and then make extravagant donations to the Conservative Party merely to impress a lot of men who despised him anyway?
‘Now you’re angry.’ Burgo sounded sympathetic.
‘Not at all. It was a lovely evening. Thank you so much for inviting me.’
‘I can almost hear the snorts of fury.’
‘Do you have a busy day tomorrow?’
‘Yes. Come on, Roberta. You needn’t pretend. You’re miserable and angry because you’ve been forced to live at home. You’re homesick for London and freedom and your job and who could blame you? You hate spending your days in the sickroom and your evenings washing up.’
‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘It’s grim. I don’t suppose a salt mine could be much worse.’
‘Colder. And darker.’
I explained about the forty-watt bulbs. ‘The worst thing about it is that I don’t feel I’m doing any good,’ I concluded. ‘I could put up with it if I saw the least sign of improvement. My mother barely speaks to me and never gets any better. She seems to prefer Mrs Treadgold’s company to mine. She’s our daily. Though, heaven knows, my mother grumbles all the time about how clumsy she is. No matter how hard I try, tidying rooms, arranging flowers and so on, the entire place feels like a mausoleum for flies. When I planted some heliotrope in the urns on the terrace they went from a healthy green to brown in three days and died. I’m sure Brough watered them with weed-killer. He hates anyone to interfere with his pogrom against Nature.’
‘Can’t Mrs Threadbare do the nursing? It would save your father the cost of your keep.’
‘Treadgold. He’s actually talking about cutting down her hours. I think I might kill myself if he does.’
‘You wouldn’t consider jumping bail?’
‘What, going away and leaving them to it?’ I shook my head. ‘I admit I’ve once or twice considered it. But I can’t. I don’t trust my father and my brother to look after my mother properly.’
‘I thought you’d say that. You’ve a tender conscience.’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Do you think anyone would even ask me to devote myself to domestic vassalage? Of course not. Partly because I’m a man. And because they’d know I’d be useless. But just suppose for the sake of argument they did. I wouldn’t dream of agreeing to do it. I might put up with boredom and discomfort and the suppression of my immediate pleasure for a brief period if it was in my own interest to do so. I endure things like today’s lunch because that’s part of my job, which is supremely important to me. You, on the other hand, put up with the lunch solely to please your father.’
‘I did escape the major part of it.’
‘True. That gives me hope for you. But most people are thoroughly selfish, Roberta, and if you don’t make a fight for survival you’ll be in danger of being trampled underfoot in the rush.’
‘You make me sound feeble-minded and spineless. A doormat. I’ve always thought of myself as being someone who knew what she wanted and who went out to get it. But I hope not at other people’s expense. I know that sounds revoltingly sanctimonious,’ I added apologetically.
‘That’s quite right and proper and it’s what we’ve all been taught. But the doing of it’s so much harder than the theory would have it. If virtue is its own reward, it explains why there isn’t much goodness in the human race. I’m like everyone else in that it gives me pleasure to do good to others. I’m happy to make the relevant telephone calls, write the necessary letters, have a word in someone’s ear. I might even undertake an arduous journey or put myself through a whole evening of dreariness if it benefited someone who deserved my help. But these would be trivial privations. I should never throw away the things that make me what I am, the mainsprings of my happiness. My work, my love, my greater good.’
It occurred to me then that we might not be talking simply about the sacrifice of my joie de vivre to serfdom. Was there the suggestion that I might be giving up a valuable contribution to my happiness by withstanding his advances? Then I reminded myself that he had made none.
‘Beware the man who begins by telling you that you’ve got life all wrong,’ Kit interrupted. ‘It’s a prelude to him telling you how right you can get it if you’ll only do exactly what he tells you. And before you can say “Family Planning Clinic” you’re too busy sending him to heaven a dozen times a day to fret about a modus vivendi.’
‘Should you be exposing your own sex as a band of cynical, intriguing libertines?’
‘I’m not saying we’re all the same. Or even that the new Minister for Culture is such a one. Merely remarking that there are some snakes out there, coiled seductively in the grass. Anyway, tell me how the evening ended.’
It had ended without incident. Simon, having satisfied his thirst for speed, drove us slowly over the thin gravel beneath the horse chestnuts that lined the drive and drew up by the front steps of Cutham Hall. The house was in darkness except for a faint light from the third storey where Oliver slept.
‘Thank you for a marvellous evening.’
‘It was angelic of you to come out at such short notice.’
As the interior light flashed on I grabbed my coat and hopped out rather quickly, conscious of Simon standing to attention, his hand on the open door. Then I turned and bent my head to look back into the car. ‘I hope your meeting goes well tomorrow.’
He looked at me solemnly but again there was in his eyes something that made me suspect he might be laughing at me. ‘Thanks. Goodnight, Roberta.’
‘Goodnight.’
I smiled but probably, as my face was in shadow, he did not see me. I watched the red tail lights disappear among the deeper shadows of the chestnuts with feelings composed equally of relief and regret. Well, to be strictly truthful, there might have been a predominance of the latter. But, anyway, it hardly mattered. I was quite sure that the invitation would not be repeated.
Ten days passed in which I performed my duties with a lightened heart. Being reminded that there was fun to be had and that there were people who did not find me provoking (my mother), self-willed (my father), or bossy (Oliver) was good for my morale.
None the less it was a difficult time. Every day Oliver got up at tea-time and wrote feverishly during the night, covering pages of foolscap which the next morning I collected from the floor of his room where they lay in crumpled heaps round an empty waste-paper basket. I lent him money from my precious and dwindling fund to buy more paper. Also some biros to replace the fountain pen that leaked and was gradually staining his hands and face until he resembled an Ancient Briton decorated with woad.
My mother had been grumbling about the lumpiness of her mattress. I had a new one sent from Worping. Her complaints trebled, this time about its hardness. She sulked for a whole day when I gave her a piece of toast with her lunchtime consommé in an attempt to persuade her to eat something more nourishing than walnut whips and the violet creams that she devoured daily by the half-pound. The woman who owned the sweet shop had had to place an extra order with the wholesalers to keep up with demand. When the physiotherapist came my mother drew her sheet over her head and refused to speak to her.
‘Poor old thing,’ said the physiotherapist, whose name was Daphne, as I accompanied her to the front door. ‘They get awkward, you know. We’ll be the same, I dare say, when we’re her age.’
‘She’s only fifty-one,’ I said.
‘Never!’ Daphne riffled through a sheaf of notes. ‘Well, goodness gracious, you’re right! Dear, dear! And I’d thought she must be seventy-odd. She’s such a bad colour! And her hair’s that thin you can see her scalp.’ This was true. The quantity of hair I brushed daily from her pillow c
ould have stuffed the offending mattress. ‘You’d better get the doctor to her.’
‘She refuses to see one.’
Daphne tut-tutted as she manoeuvred her hips behind the wheel of her tiny car. ‘Well, I don’t know. Anyway, there’s no point in my coming any more. Ta ta, love. I’d get someone in for definite.’
As I watched her chug down the drive, I wondered what I ought to do. I managed to catch my father by the front door, just as he was going out.
‘There’s nothing wrong with your mother that a bit of effort on her part wouldn’t cure,’ he said. ‘It’s all in the mind.’
‘I’m not so sure. She still can’t walk without help. Her hip ought to be healing faster than this.’
‘What you know about the healing of fractures could be inscribed on a piece of lead shot. If you don’t mind, I’d like to get off.’ He tried to close the door but I hung on to it. ‘Damn it, Roberta, let go! You’d like to warm the South Downs at my expense, I know.’
‘The heating isn’t on.’
He ran down the steps to prevent the rain from spoiling his shining brogues and spotting the nap of his suit. I wondered if he was going to meet Ruby. It was a favourite trick of Brough’s to let out the clutch just as my father was stepping into the car, which caused it to jerk forward and him to fall on to the back seat with a yelp of protest. I could see from the grim satisfaction on Brough’s face as he drove away that, though frequently played, this little joke was by no means stale.
‘I’m really worried about Mother,’ I said that evening.
My father, Oliver and I were sitting in the dining room, eating tapioca pudding. My father had removed three of the four bulbs belonging to the brass chandelier. The remaining bulb, high above our heads, only deepened the shadows cast by the giant sideboard and the enormous pseudo-Tudor court cupboard. More useful was a measure of dusty light which sneaked past the rhododendrons that crowded, like inquisitive passers-by, round the dining-room windows.
‘Jam, please.’ My father snapped his fingers in Oliver’s direction.
‘It’s a magnificent colour.’ Oliver stirred the jam and allowed a spoonful to plop back into the pot from a considerable height. Not surprisingly, he missed. ‘Exactly the colour of a ruby, isn’t it? Ruby.’ He repeated the action with the same result.
‘When you’ve finished smearing food over the table, perhaps you’ll be good enough to let me have it,’ barked my father. I felt like barking too. I had spent nearly an hour that morning polishing the beastly thing which seemed to expand as I laboured to the size of a tennis court.
‘OK. No need to get waxy.’ Oliver sent the jam-pot sliding across the couple of yards that separated them, leaving a long scratch.
‘I am not waxy, as you call it.’
‘I read a delicious book this afternoon.’ Oliver rolled his eyes and pursed his lips, assuming the camp mannerisms he knew annoyed my father. ‘Such lovely poetry. It’s called The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Such an interesting word, isn’t it? Arabic, I suppose. The Ruby-at.’
My father paused in the act of shovelling down his tapioca to regard Oliver suspiciously. ‘If I didn’t know you’d been after every scrubby little tart in the neighbourhood I’d be worried that you were queer.’ He flung down his spoon, tossed his napkin to one side and stood up. ‘I’ll have my coffee in the library.’ He walked off without bothering to shut the door, as though he were a rich milord with an extensive retinue.
‘He’s so stupid he never sees the point of anything.’ Oliver was cross that his barbs had failed to lodge in our father’s conscience.
‘What do you think about Mother? She ought to be getting better by now. She looks at me sometimes in a way that’s quite disconcerting. Huge, staring eyes. And she seems rather muddled.’
‘Muddled?’
‘This morning she complained that the toast smelt of electricity.’
‘Women are never any good at science,’ said Oliver with a complacency I felt was misplaced considering he had failed Physics O level twice. ‘I refuse to believe Father and I have genes in common. I’m really the descendant of an itinerant minstrel and a gypsy princess who carelessly laid their baby beneath a blackberry bush. While they were canoodling among crow-flowers and long-purples an officious person discovered me and carried me off to Worping Cottage Hospital.’
I gave up trying to interest him in my own preoccupations. ‘Help me with the supper things, will you?’
Oliver groaned. ‘You’re a slave-driver, you know, Bobbie. Men don’t like to be bullied. You’ll never get a husband if you go on like this.’
‘I don’t want one if it means I’ve got to wash up every night for two.’
‘I’ve just had the most brilliant idea for my novel,’ he pleaded. ‘If I don’t write it down at once I might forget it.’
‘Make a quick note.’
‘That won’t do. Its brilliance is in the expression, not the naked fact. It’s a question of atmosphere and mood. It’s already beginning to fade as we speak. I must hurry or it will be gone for ever.’
I hesitated. Had Dorothy Wordsworth insisted that William put down his pen to help her sow the peas? I doubted it.
‘Go on, then.’ I gathered up the napkins to be washed.
‘You’re a dear darling, Bobbie. Will you get me some more paper tomorrow?’
‘All right. But couldn’t you write a bit smaller and on every line? It’s getting rather expensive—’ I was speaking to an empty room.
‘Do you think my mother’s getting a little … confused?’ I asked Mrs Treadgold the next morning as we washed up the breakfast things together.
‘How do you mean, dear?’
‘Not making sense. It might be delayed shock from the fall, perhaps. Have you noticed her saying things that don’t quite add up?’
‘Can’t say I have. Drat, there goes another.’ She put down the cup she had been drying between hands like grappling-hooks and extracted the handle from the tea towel. I went to get the china glue from the drawer. ‘The doctor says my arthuritis isn’t going to get any better. He says I’ll be a wheelchair case before much longer. But I’ll still come in and do what I can, Roberta, don’t you fear. Dolly Treadgold’s never let anyone down yet. And, God willing, she never will.’ She gave a shake of her head, her expression grim. ‘Perhaps that idle good-for-nothing, Brough, could make a few of them wooden ramps to get my wheelchair over the steps. We could tie a feather duster to one wrist’ – she waved what looked like an enviably flexible joint – ‘and a wet cloth to the other.’
‘Let’s hope it won’t come to that,’ I murmured absently.
Mrs Treadgold’s musculature was massive and she could have tossed the caber for the Highlands and Islands. She thought nothing of running up two flights with our ancient vacuum cleaner, which I struggled to lift out of the cupboard. On several occasions she had single-handedly pushed the Wolseley down the drive, with me in it, when it failed to start. I had long ceased to be alarmed when she described spasms, fevers, faints and racking torments that would long ago have carried off anyone less determined to pitch in, rally round, hold the fort and keep the flag flying.
‘What’s your ma been saying then?’
‘Well, she told me the toast smelt of electricity.’ I pulled a face expressive of something between amusement and alarm as I confessed this.
Mrs Treadgold slapped her hands against her aproned thighs, leaving damp palm prints. ‘That’s a funny thing! I was thinking the very same myself yesterday. Well, we can’t both be wrong. You’d better have that toaster seen to.’
I abandoned the conversation.
TEN
On Saturday it rained without ceasing. This was doubly annoying because the rest of the country was having something close to a heatwave and the newspapers were full of alarming stories about people being swept out to sea on lilos, dogs being suffocated in cars and the population being laid waste by the injurious effects of sunburn and heatstroke. I was standing in the ha
ll, staring through the window at the dripping laurels and wondering whether I had time to make a treacle tart for supper or whether it would have to be baked bananas again when the telephone rang. I picked it up at once. Nearly two weeks had gone by since the dinner party and I had heard nothing from Burgo. I had given up letting the thing ring six times before answering.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello, Roberta?’ It wasn’t Burgo. It was a much louder voice accompanied by noisy breathing. ‘This is Dickie Sudborough speaking.’
It took me a second or two to make the connection. ‘Dickie! Hello! It was a lovely party. I’d have written to say so but I haven’t got your address. I did enjoy it.’
‘Did you?’ I imagined his pink, eager face crumpling, pleased. ‘We were all so delighted to meet you. Now, look, Roberta, why I’m ringing you is this. Burgo says you were quite taken with my little temple and had some good ideas I ought to take on board.’
‘Well … that’s putting it rather strongly. I’m sure you have your own—’
Dickie interrupted me. ‘I’m really keen to talk about it with you. What about coming here for lunch on Wednesday? No other visitors, just us. If that wouldn’t be a bore?’
I hesitated. Perhaps Burgo had put Dickie up to this? I might arrive to find the scene reset for seduction. Even that Dickie and Fleur had been mysteriously called away.
‘I’m not sure about Wednesday. I’m rather tied up …’
‘Oh.’ Either Dickie was a good actor or he was genuinely disappointed. ‘I realize it’s asking rather a lot. Particularly as Burgo will be in Leningrad so we can’t offer him as an inducement. I expect I’m being awfully self-centred asking you but I was so bucked to think you admired my little folly—’
It was my turn to interrupt. ‘Actually, I think I can rearrange things. I’d love to come.’
‘You would? That’s excellent. Shall we say twelve-thirty? Fleur will be so delighted.’
On Wednesday, having bribed Mrs Treadgold to look after my mother with the present of a scarf she had always admired, and left a breakfast tray loaded with orange juice, muesli, grated apple and vitamin pills across Oliver’s sleeping stomach (which had a greenish hue too I noticed), I drove myself over to Ladyfield at the appointed time. My father had arranged to go up to town for the day so I dropped him off at the station, looking patrician and affluent in what I could have sworn was a new suit. Naturally he travelled first class.
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