Of course, the food was not the chief incentive for my visits to Ladyfield. I rapidly grew fond of both Fleur and Dickie and I thought they were often glad to have someone around with whom they were both … well, not intimate exactly, one cannot become that in a matter of weeks, but thoroughly relaxed. Three is only a crowd when two of the three are in love. Fleur told me she had never had a close female friend. At her smart and expensive school her farouche manners had not helped her to win popularity with staff or girls. Also she had hated tennis, dances and Radio Luxembourg and had been wholly uninterested in clothes, make-up and boys. Her experience of living as an outcast in an intensely conformist society had been enough to put her off other girls for good.
She excepted me from this comprehensive proscription, I divined, because her beloved brother had expressed a desire that we should be friends. For my part I found it easy to comply with Burgo’s wishes. Fleur was honest and affectionate, which I appreciated, coming from a family who would have preferred to be grilled over hot coals than show one any tenderness. And she was extremely generous. I learned not to praise anything for I would find it on the back seat of my car when I reached home. Once she gave me her favourite dress when I admired it, another time it was a beautiful emerald ring which had belonged to her mother.
I returned the dress on the grounds that it was too short. The ring I gave back to Dickie who promised to put it for safe-keeping in the bank. But he insisted I keep the Mennecy silver-mounted snuff box painted on the lid with sprays of roses. I have it still and treasure it despite associations of guilt. When Fleur was riding (often with Billy, much to my regret) or walking the dogs, again accompanied by Billy as often as not, Dickie and I would talk about gardens and draw up plans for the China House.
Though I knew quite a bit about the history of gardening and could just about tell a Lychnis from a Linaria, I knew little about the practical side of horticulture, never having owned a garden. Discovering this, Dickie loaded my car after each visit with gardening books with which I cheered the hours at Cutham. I learned the comparative virtues of a Portland rose and a Bourbon, the pruning requirements of various groups of clematis, which Michaelmas daisies were resistant to mildew and to recognize the absolute desirability of a Paeonia mlokosewitschii however fleeting its flowering. Dickie and I spent happy hours among the flowerbeds, planting, weeding, staking and dead-heading until our hands and clothes were imbued with the scent of catmint, rosemary, bergamot and thyme. Those seven weeks – was it only seven? it seemed like an entire summer – were a delightful respite.
I had news of Burgo occasionally. He sent Fleur a scribbled postcard from Leningrad, then one from Moscow, after that from Kiev and finally from the South of France. She always showed me the cards, assuming that I would share her pleasure in reading them. His style was laconic. Something about the traffic or the hotel, the view or the heat. My apprehensions about Burgo dissolved as I began to forget what he was like in relation to me, and saw him instead through Fleur’s eyes as an older brother, generally absent, preoccupied, wonderfully clever, sometimes impatient and unkind but just as often forbearing.
One evening – it was the beginning of August – Dickie rang to suggest a picnic in the garden of the China House. The cement was dry in the newly constructed lily pond and he wanted me to come and celebrate the turning on of the hose. I drove over to Ladyfield and walked out on to the terrace. Burgo was sitting at the table beneath the wisteria.
‘Hello, Roberta.’ He stood up as I approached. His hair, bleached whiter by foreign sunbeams, brushed against the dangling bronzed leaves. He was smiling. I had forgotten that he always looked as though he saw something amusing that was hidden from the rest of us. ‘How delightful to see you again.’
He had the advantage, of course. He had known I was coming. As I felt the blood drain from my limbs and rush to my heart with a jolt that was thrilling to the point of being painful, I realized at once that I was in terrible trouble.
ELEVEN
‘Have a drink.’ Burgo poured me a glass of wine. ‘Fleur’s polishing Stargazer’s hoofs and Dickie asked for twenty minutes’ grace to get his hoses linked up.’
I sat down. The garden had grown dim and my ears were filled with a sound like rushing water. I picked up the glass and took several reviving sips. He was saying something but I could not understand it. I tried to pull myself together and fixed an expression on my face which I hoped was intelligent, or at least sensible.
Burgo’s eyes were Fleur’s shape exactly, slanted, sylphic. But his were darker and sharper. He was wearing a dark blue shirt, the sleeves rolled to the elbows, jeans that had once been khaki and were faded by the sun and scruffy navy espadrilles. The impact of his presence left me in no doubt that I had been deceiving myself if I thought I was interested in him only as Fleur’s brother. He was saying something about England in summer. I forced myself to concentrate.
‘It’s perfect.’ Burgo narrowed his eyes to look across the expanse of lawn down to where a pair of crinkle-crankle hornbeam hedges drew one’s gaze to a statue of Flora and beyond that to where the beechwood began. ‘I’ve longed for this.’
He leaned back in his chair to follow the progress of a house martin as it swooped over the grass, looking for insects. The wisteria’s second flowering, nearly over now, dripped scent over our heads and bees foraged ceaselessly in the collapsing mauve blossoms.
‘Have you?’
‘Now, for a brief while, I can stop thinking,’ said Burgo. He brushed back his hair from his forehead. ‘I can breathe again. Allow myself to feel.’ He turned his head sharply and looked at me.
I dropped my gaze immediately. I wished I could breathe. I drank half my glass of wine in several swallows and stared fiercely at the grey teak of the table, mottled with silvery patches where wasps had tried to chew it.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ he asked.
‘Only on loan. How was Provence?’
‘Hot. Dry. Scorched to dust.’ He glanced at the knot garden, swirls of box, germander and lavender, which surrounded the terrace. ‘I much prefer the sound of blackbirds to cicadas.’
I was conscious of a feeling of gratification. I had no idea then that this was the beginning of a hateful process of keeping a tally. It took me weeks, months even, to recognize that in some secret, shamefaced part of my mind I was reckoning the score between Anna and me.
‘How was Leningrad?’
‘Beautiful but depressing. It confirmed all my assumptions about Communism.’
While he talked I examined a patch of violas flowering in a gap between paving stones at my feet. I came to know intimately the blushes and streaks of lilac on their primrose-coloured faces. Suddenly he was talking about my mother.
‘Oh, it’s kind of you to ask. She’s no better, really. If anything, slightly worse. At least … physically she’s the same but she seems rather confused.’
‘What do you mean confused?’
I related the conversation about the toaster.
‘I’ve known Cabinet Ministers who believed there were fairies at the bottom of the garden.’
‘Lots of people don’t have much grasp of science. I’m one of them. But she’s said other things that bother me. Yesterday she refused to eat her potatoes because she said they were winking at her and it put her off. And when she talks she sometimes growls like a dog. She used to have a light, rather charming voice but these days she sounds like a sailor from Marseilles. In timbre, I mean. Of course, she speaks English.’
‘Perhaps she’s been lying down too long and isn’t getting enough blood to the brain.’
‘Perhaps. I wonder.’ What a relief it would be if the explanation were so simple. These days a thread of anxiety about my mother ran through all my waking hours. Talking about my fears with someone who did not immediately dismiss them as nonsense was comforting. But of course he was being polite. The symptoms of my mother’s illness could not be of interest. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a tedious subject: other peop
le’s sick relations.’
He made a motion with his hand, sweeping this aside. ‘Has a doctor seen her recently?’
‘In desperation I persuaded our GP to call but she shut her eyes and refused to speak to him. He went away very cross.’
‘If the man’s not up to dealing with a mildly difficult patient I’d go over his head and get a specialist in.’
‘Do you think I should? But I don’t know how. I thought one was supposed to ask to be referred.’
‘Sometimes you have to cut corners. Leave it to me. I’ve got meetings all day tomorrow but I’ll sort something out. Don’t worry.’
It was as though the clouds had parted and a god had descended on suitable throne-bearing apparatus. But fear of disappointment made me tell myself he would have forgotten all about it even before I left Ladyfield to return to Cutham.
Aloud I said, ‘That would be a greater kindness than I could ever repay.’
Burgo gave me a look I recognized, which seemed to ask if I intended to maintain the fiction that social punctilio had any part to play in our relationship. I felt the blood rush to my face.
‘Here we are!’ Dickie appeared round the corner of the house. ‘Hello, Bobbie.’ He hobbled round the table to kiss my cheek. ‘The pool’s filling nicely and Mrs Harris is setting out the grub. Exciting, isn’t it? Of course Fleur doesn’t care two straws for our little garden and we all know Burgo’s mind is fixed on solving the troubles of the world. But you share my pleasure in our own little Utopia, eh?’
‘I certainly do! I’m longing to see the pool with water in it.’ I kissed Dickie with real affection. He was perhaps the nicest man I knew. And I was thankful to have a third person to ease the tension that continually threatened to take Burgo and me to a point beyond the bulwarks of propriety when we were alone. ‘And I adore picnics.’
‘It won’t be a real picnic,’ said Burgo. ‘I saw Beddows and Billy carrying down a table and chairs. We shan’t have to sit on rugs that smell of dogs, eating disintegrating Scotch eggs and drinking tepid tea.’
‘At my age,’ said Dickie, ‘I like to be comfortable. And the leg doesn’t take kindly to the hard ground. I agree there ought to be something primitive about a real picnic. But Mrs Harris has her standards and it makes her miserable to fall below them.’
‘I once went to a smart entertainment which the hostess called a dîner sur l’herbe,’ said Burgo. ‘We were rowed out to an island in the ancestral lake by uniformed flunkeys. We ate lobster and swan from heirloom porcelain and silver and were entertained by a wind trio of hautboy, serpent and crumhorn. On the return journey the flunkey in charge of the picnic baskets, who had been keeping up his spirits with the lees of the bottles, upset the boat. The male guests had to dive to the bottom of the lake to fetch up priceless Sèvres and dishes hammered by Paul Storr. My dinner jacket shrank to the size of a baby’s vest.’
Dickie and I laughed at this and I felt immediately reassured. What remained of my disquiet dissolved as we walked down to the China House.
‘It’s a funny thing,’ said Dickie. ‘I know so little about the Chinese except unpleasant practices like binding women’s feet and the slow drip, drip of the Chinese water torture.’
‘Don’t forget Chinese burns,’ I said.
‘There you are! How can you reconcile these barbarisms with such a developed sense of beauty?’
‘It’s a question of obedience, perhaps,’ suggested Burgo. ‘A national concept of beauty depends on a conformity of ideas. I believe you can indoctrinate any race to do brutal things by convincing it that they’re not outlandish practices but the norm.’
‘I really don’t think I could be persuaded to push bamboo shoots up anyone’s fingernails,’ Dickie protested. ‘And I’m positive our dear Bobbie’ – he patted me on the arm – ‘is incapable of behaving barbarously.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It would depend on what the pressures were. Supposing the only way you could save your own family from torture was to torture someone else’s? Where would one’s principles be then? It’s easy to lose sight of the unreasonableness of demands when there isn’t any reasonable behaviour to show them up.’
‘Where would politicians be if people were able to resist psychological manipulation?’ said Burgo.
‘Now, you don’t mean that, Burgo,’ said Dickie. ‘You’ll give Bobbie the wrong impression altogether. She’ll think you’re not to be trusted.’
‘She thinks that already.’ He sent me a sideways glance and again I felt an electrifying sense of danger.
‘Nonsense!’ said Dickie.
We had reached the China House so I was saved the necessity of replying. We pushed through the narrow gap in the hedge that led into the little garden. Mrs Harris was laying the table that had been set up on the grass in front of it. The pool contained an inch of water which had captured the hue of a robin’s egg from the sky. Limestone boulders had replaced the rose-beds and already there were fronds of young ferns in the crevices.
‘I wish Bobbie would come and live here with us,’ said Fleur to Burgo as we ate lovage soufflé followed by turbot, then camembert and figs. ‘We adore having her but she insists on going home, even though her parents are monsters of stinginess and selfishness.’
‘Fleur!’ protested Dickie. ‘It’s extremely rude to criticize Bobbie’s parents.’
‘I don’t think they’re as bad as that,’ I said. ‘If that’s the impression I’ve given I was probably exaggerating in a bid for sympathy. The truth is, they should never have married. They’re quite unsuited.’
‘I can’t think of many marriages that make the people in them feel better rather than worse,’ said Fleur.
‘Mine makes me feel heaps better,’ Dickie said at once. ‘It’s the very best thing in my life.’
Fleur’s cheeks took on a bright colour. Her eyes grew soft. ‘That’s kinder than I deserve.’
I was pleased by this evidence of Fleur’s fondness for Dickie. Though I loved being with them I was often wounded on his behalf by Fleur’s careless attitude. Particularly when I saw her with Billy.
‘Marriage is a means to an end. One marries to have children, to secure property, continue a line, to simplify taxation,’ said Burgo. ‘Why people should yoke themselves together fiscally and expect to relish each other’s maddening inconsistencies is more than I can understand.’
‘There you go again, pretending to be cynical,’ protested Dickie. ‘It’s learning to like people’s maddening little ways because they’re part of them that makes for love. The rest, fancying the cut of their jib, wanting to kiss them, is all very enjoyable but nothing to do with real love.’
Fleur dropped her head back and crammed a fig whole into her mouth. A trickle of juice ran down her chin. With her dark curling hair and slanting eyes she looked like a bacchante.
Poor Dickie. I had several times been up to Fleur’s bedroom. It contained a double bed but the single pillow and the solitary bedside lamp beside a large photograph of Burgo confirmed the fact that Fleur slept alone. Bowls of water and biscuits and baskets took up much of the floor space. The counterpane was marked by fur-lined depressions, the furniture was scored with claw-marks and there was a distinct smell of tom-cat. It was hardly surprising that Dickie was keen to play down the importance of the physical side of marriage.
‘I disagree.’ Burgo spoke rapidly and waved a hand for emphasis, an elegant hand with long fingers like Fleur’s, though cleaner and without bitten nails. ‘It isn’t cynical at all. I don’t say there’s no such thing as love. Of course there is, and it includes finding other people’s idiosyncrasies enthralling, besides desiring them physically. It may even co-exist with marriage. But marriage is for other purposes and you shouldn’t ask too much of it. It’s like being disappointed that an aeroplane isn’t a time machine. A plane is a superbly efficient method of getting about the globe fast. But to expect it to take you to the fourteenth century is unreasonable.’
‘I don’t see
how you can separate things into different compartments like that,’ Dickie objected. ‘Marriage, if you spend any time together, can’t be just a contract to give the income-tax man one in the eye. You’d be bound to have some pretty strong feelings about your spouse – though not necessarily all affirmative, I grant. Eskimos, Maoris, Choctaws; they all have ceremonies of some kind. It’s human nature for men and women to want to get together beside their very own cooking-pot in some sort of exclusive arrangement to keep the world at bay. And it’s just what the doctor ordered when you’re past your first youth: swapping the hurly-burly of the what’s-it for the deep peace of the double bed and all that. Darby and Joan, Jack Sprat and his wife.’ He stared up at the deepening sky seeking further illustration. ‘Adam and Eve, you know.’
‘They didn’t have much choice.’ Burgo smiled. ‘As far as I remember they were the only two people there.’
Dickie laughed good-naturedly. ‘You know what I mean. I’m no good at arguing. What do you think, Bobbie?’
‘As the only unmarried person present obviously I can’t speak from experience. I think probably my own idea of marriage is much more exacting than wanting to be taken to the fourteenth century. But if those hopes weren’t fulfilled I suppose I’d try to persuade myself that a good marriage was whatever I had.’
‘You’d risk settling for something thoroughly inferior by doing that,’ said Burgo. ‘But you might be right. Perhaps self-delusion is necessary for happiness.’
Moonshine Page 13
