‘We’re going to Oxford,’ she said. ‘I have to register my father’s death.’
What a strange day for us to have come together again.
She said, ‘You’ll have to make allowances. You do realise, don’t you, that I’m mad with grief.’
I hardly knew the part of town we went to – a part in which people other than students lived. It was drab. There were pawnbrokers, and shops with brooms and plastic buckets piled up on the pavement outside. There was a canal overhung with weeping willows, but the water was stagnant. I felt sorry for the tourists emerging from the bus station, looking eagerly around for something to photograph. We drove past my old college. I saw tree-tops above the wall. For three years I’d come and gone freely there. I thought how galling it must be to live in this city, whose gardens and cloisters are reserved for transients, whose settled inhabitants are confined to the clogged streets – like servants stationed in a palace’s corridor, only glimpsing the splendid rooms through doors left ajar.
Nell led me to a Victorian municipal building of a kind that was familiar from home. A woman questioned her in a patient, tactful tone, as though dealing with an invalid. While she filled in her forms at an otherwise empty desk I looked out of the window at a buddleia whose pendulous purple flower clusters were being greedily sucked at by white butterflies. I thought, No one would think of looking for me here. And, I must call that number.
‘That was lovely, wasn’t it, so peaceful,’ said Nell, when we were walking towards the car.
Then she laughed and said, ‘You see, I am mad. But I just can’t tell you what a treat it was to be able to sit still and be quiet in there. Grief is very tiring.’
We drove back by a different, longer route. Nell pulled over in a narrow lane and said, ‘I’ll show you where it’s going to be.’ The lane petered out, and became a grassy track. At the end of it was an ancient church, very small, with fragments of faded wall paintings, and with wooden stalls, like pens for animals. Nell took me into one. There were narrow ledges to sit on along its wooden walls. ‘Dickie and I used to bring that old Noah’s ark with us,’ she said, ‘and line up all the animals during the sermon. We thought no one could tell. I suppose everyone in the church was listening really. There’s no electricity. We brought candles in winter.’
Her father would be buried here in two days’ time, she said. She cried a bit. I went out into the churchyard and paced around looking at the hoary old evergreen trees and the view across the valley. Wheatfields, meadows full of red cows, big trees laden with dark leaves, tattered white and yellow flowers. This was the rural England the people who came to my country yearned for in their homesickness. In three years at Oxford I had never been anywhere that excluded the twentieth century so successfully. I thought about exile. I wondered where I would sleep that night.
There was a row of half a dozen more or less identical tombstones, with handsomely carved scrolls and volutes. The two most recent read ‘Fergus Rossiter 1951–1958’ and next to it, ‘Christopher Rossiter 1910–1985’. I’d never met the man, but I remembered how Flora and everyone used to talk about him on those days when we went out to Wychwood for Sunday lunch. We’d lounge around on the floor, with music playing, and the old butler bringing in coffee with cream and chunks of brown sugar that was like the jaggery at home. I remember how decadent it all seemed, how we were like tribals gorging themselves in the palace of a deposed emperor. They were all a bit afraid of Uncle Christopher, but they all said how gentle he was, how generous.
I thought, What on earth am I doing here? I lay down in the sun, and the smell of new grass was there. Had it not been for all this hullaballoo I might never have had it in my nose again. I thought about my son, the silky wetness of his mouth, the way he lies on his back and pats his tummy, asking to be tickled, the tiny plugs of snot I prise from his nostrils with the nail of my little finger – what an extraordinarily intimate action that is. I shut my eyes, and felt tears seep out of them, and then I think, forty-eight hours after leaving my country, perhaps for good, I think I went to sleep.
*
Nell my darling
Lil just rang me with the dreadful news. I am writing to your mother of course, but I wanted to write separately to you because one of the things I remember most fondly of Hugo is the way you and that fat yellow dog of his would follow him around. I wonder whether you remember how devoted you were as a small girl, always on his tail. And he adored you. I hope you know that. Of course he was the sort of Englishman that might never have said. You could probably tell that he’d have been as lost without you as vice versa. But just in case you couldn’t, I’m telling you now. He was a lovely man, and you have been a lovely daughter to him. Take care of yourself, and of that baby. I’ll come to the funeral.
With much love
From your not-uncle Nicholas
Antony
It is really rather extraordinary how lucky I’ve been. A homosexual who was never publicly shamed. A traitor who was rumbled, but never overtly punished. A mediocre scholar who has been able to make a decent living writing about beautiful things.
I don’t think it’s improper to start counting your blessings when you hear of a death.
Hugo and I were never close. I think I gave him the creeps. I wonder what happened to him at Eton. I’ve seen photographs – he was a very fetching boy.
When I first started visiting this place he was the one who was always coming up with money-making schemes – rent out the empty cottages, let the fishing. He was an energetic man. He couldn’t stand the waste of it all. Christopher would hear him out and then say, ‘Let’s leave it until the bailiffs are at the door, shall we?’ As far as Christopher was concerned, Wychwood existed for his pleasure and that of his friends. It wasn’t a commercial asset.
Flora owns Wychwood now. Christopher put the deeds in her name, keeping only a life-interest in Wood Manor for himself and Lil. ‘Darlings, I really must take you to see King Lear,’ I said. But the arrangement worked.
Flora gave me the lease of this lodge for a laughably small sum so that Jack could be near his parents while I nursed him. Lil and I came for a snoop around it, and as we stood looking at the view from the bedroom window she said, ‘Fergus would have had Wood Manor once he was old enough to want a place of his own.’
I asked her, ‘Did it take away the point of Wychwood for you when he wasn’t here to inherit it?’
‘Oh gosh, inherit,’ she said. ‘No one’s going to inherit anything any more, haven’t you noticed? That’s why you lot have so much stuff to sell.’ She’s right. Death duties make excellent lubrication for the picture trade. She said, ‘Woldingham’s son drowned too, you know. Continuity – it’s just a con.’
Flora has made her life into a performance, and this place, which was once so private, into a public show. Benjie busies himself, effectively selling Flora – my precious pimp, she calls him – which means that he is also in the business of selling Wychwood. For Benjie, everything is business. Has to be. I think the bailiffs are, if not at the door, at least heaving into view over the far horizon.
I remember the fuss when young Mark Brown led some harmless walkers into the forest. Now there are cars rattling over the cattle grid outside my door at all hours. The old stud farm transformed into a kind of ghetto for holiday-makers – a quadrangle of tiny dark houses where the horses used to munch and blow. Drinking troughs, that were functional when I first saw them, full of bedding plants. (How old Green would have despised them. He never allowed annuals outside the kitchen garden.) The tack room lined with washing machines. The mounting block fenced off in case some idiotic child falls off it. In the outbuildings on the home farm people doing ‘craft’. Coaches en route from Oxford to Stratford stop there, and out pour trippers to buy unglazed pots and woolly shawls and garden ornaments made out of old tree-stumps. Even Green’s precious walled garden is now a garden centre where people can buy potted fig trees in the fond hope that one day these little plants will spraw
l like the ancient one that was hacked back to allow free passage for their shopping trolleys. They’re the wrong variety, young Green told me. He couldn’t get hold of examples of the proper one. They’ll never thrive.
The trippers and shoppers and weekend-renters are a host of Gorgons. The thing they come to see is killed stone-dead by their gaze. Even the house’s private parts (and, yes, I know that phrase is a euphemism – I’m talking about violation here) feel different when, glancing out at the park, one is likely to see a golf-buggy putter across one’s eyeline, taking a group of old codgers to the clay-shooting range.
Hugo tolerated it all. We used to argue about it. He wasn’t sentimental as I am. He understood that estates like this one were always sources of income whose proceeds allowed their owners to play peacock at court. But Woldingham made something precious here, something that is now, or so it feels to me, being unmade. And I’m not just talking about the gradual dispersal of his picture collection.
Museum people are all conservators of a sort. But I’m a bit taken aback to find that I am hardening into a conservative as well. Funny that. I must tell Mr Giraffe next time we meet. I can imagine the little grimace he’ll reward me with. He doesn’t like jokes.
*
‘Anwar told me to ring you.’
‘Right. We’ll talk on the other line. Can you wait by the phone.’
‘Yes sir.’
Click. Silence. Phone rings.
‘No need for the sir. Call me Bates. So what are we going to do with you?’
‘I’m hoping you’ll tell me that, please.’
‘Mmm. I’ll come down. Can you stay where you are?’
‘Yes. Yes, I think so. For now anyway.’
Selim gave the address, and the name of the railway station.
‘Noon tomorrow.’
Click. Silence.
‘So?’ said Flora.
‘Someone’s coming to see me. Tomorrow.’
‘You must be knackered.’
‘I’ll be OK.’
Flora and Benjie lived upstairs in the west wing. The great rooms on the ground floor were open to the public often enough to make it simpler just to keep them closed up between times, rugs and upholstery protected by sheets of polythene, curtains drawn. ‘It breaks my heart,’ said Underhill, to anyone who visited him in his lodge. But it was no longer his business.
Every Thursday the crew came down and spent the night, so as to be ready for the Friday-morning shoot. Flora’s get-ups, since the series sold in America, had become ever florider (a little pun her producer liked). Fashion had veered away from her. Other women her age wore stretchy black clothes under leather jackets. She upholstered herself in chintz or brocade. Her face was large, her long hair worn in looping swags above it, held up with combs made of tortoiseshell or mother-of-pearl. She had earrings shaped like birdcages, or like galleons or pineapples or helicopters. She made a spectacle of herself, not just in the way she dressed but in the way she swooped and fluttered. For the show she wore high-heeled shoes in jewel colours, with pompoms on the toes or laced with satin ribbon, that made her seem freakishly tall.
Benjie watched her metamorphoses.
‘Have I done this to you?’ he asked. ‘Once upon a time I was the one in fancy dress.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ she said. ‘I was in disguise. I looked like a perfectly nice ordinary girl when you met me, but there was always this weirdo waiting to get out.’
Standing by the window with Selim, though, she was perfectly nice and ordinary again. Face bloated from crying, huddled into a baggy tartan dress.
‘I’m in the way,’ he said. ‘I feel so bad. I shouldn’t have come.’
She put her hand on his arm. ‘Honestly. It’s good for us to be distracted. It’s the oddest thing about a death. There’s really not very much you can do about it. Have a bath, why don’t you. Dinner in an hour. We’ll make a plan for you tomorrow when this person’s been.’
*
In Berlin, Jamie learnt to play chess.
He had a flat, but it was just a place to be lonely in. Jamie liked to work with noise around him. He’d carry his typewriter down the apartment building’s grand stone stairs, which smelt of ammonia, and around the corner to the Turkish café where the Gastarbeiters argued loudly over their glasses of tea. The proprietors were two brothers; one tall, gentle, with beautiful down-drooping eyes, the other cleverer and troubled by a perpetually dripping nose. They let Jamie take over the table by the window. He’d told them he never drank alcohol until he’d finished work for the day. He thought shame might help him make the claim good.
There were views of Istanbul on the walls, some in evocative old photographs, some woven into rugs coloured with harsh synthetic dyes. Come suppertime he’d bolt down whatever the brothers’ wives (who stayed behind the beaded curtain across the kitchen door) had cooked – spinach and aubergine and gristly meat, spiced with substances Jamie couldn’t name and spooned over mounds of rice. He’d talk to himself as he ate, trying out phrases. Then tiny cups of sweet sludgy coffee while he rapped out his story. The brothers let him use their fax machine. By the time he’d sent off his piece one or other of them would be at his table, the board set out and the raki waiting. Soon the other brother would pull up a chair to watch. Every night Jamie was defeated. Every night Mustafa or Akbar would patiently explain, in their rapidly improving English, where he had gone wrong.
One night Akbar said, ‘There’s something happening in Prague. People climb over a wall there. They vanish from the country they are in, and sesame sesame they are in another country.’
‘Yes,’ said Jamie. ‘It’s magic. West Germany’s embassies are turning into black holes, wormholes, white-rabbit holes.’ (He was trying out phrases again.) ‘It’s happening in Warsaw too.’
A television played silently in the corner of the café. On the screen a man in a belted jacket stood in a refugee camp near Budapest, gesticulating towards some coaches lurching over the track behind him.
‘Your friend!’ said Akbar. The man had joined Jamie’s table more than once. ‘Will you go there too?’
‘I hope,’ said Jamie. ‘But my father-in-law … I don’t know.’
Selim
In the airport I saw my face on the television – my flight was news even before I had boarded the plane. I thought I was scared and indignant. But a part of myself that I didn’t want to look at was exulting. I matter! Here, though, I’m an uninvited guest, not that much of a nuisance, just beside the point.
They put me in what they call the Fortescue room. It’s cold. Flora apologised for it, but said, ‘We’re just there, across the landing. I thought you might like to have other people around.’ She showed me the bell pull. ‘Not that we’ve got housemaids running around with oil-lamps and coal scuttles,’ she said. ‘But you know. Just so as you know you could raise an alarm.’ It was thoughtful of her.
I fell asleep again, woke up in the dark, and thought of my boy again, and of Sunita. For fourteen years we had longed for a child. Then at last we were blessed. What had come over me, that I had just abandoned them like that? I thought about kidnapping and blackmail. I moaned and whimpered aloud. I didn’t think about intellectual freedom or religious tolerance or any of the principles for the sake of which I’d just messed up my life. I thought about Hugo Lane. I thought, All that lives must die. There is nothing special about you, I said to myself. Know ye not ’tis common. Commonplace. How undignified to race from one country to another, trying to escape the inevitable.
For a while my whole body shook uncontrollably. I wrapped my arms around it, trying to restrain it, but it bucked and juddered like a panicking sheep. I looked at the bell pull, but I thought if this is death, let it come. But it was nothing of the sort. It was just fear and a deep self-disgust. When it passed I slept again, for a long time.
Next morning, when I looked out of the window, I could see a peacock strutting at the far end of the lawn and a Mughal-style pavilion at the h
ead of an ornamental canal. There are no nations, only places. Everything mingles. Birds, gazebos, assassins. You can’t keep them out.
Antony
It turned out that no one was going to do anything for Nell’s friend Selim. A man from Scotland Yard came down. Quite elderly. I took against him. Brusque in a way he probably thought was authoritative, but could equally well be described as plain rude. He said, ‘Hugo Lane used to be here, didn’t he?’
‘He died last week,’ I said. I’d offered to do the station run, and as it was a drizzly day I brought him and Selim back to the lodge and left them in the kitchen with tea and biscuits. I put myself on sentry-go, dead-heading roses in the front garden, so as to be ready to deflect any nosey visitors. No one came. I got out the special sharp spade and began dividing up clumps of comfrey and transplanting feverfew. They say a witch had this house once.
Living with a garden designer doesn’t mean you have a live-in gardener. I used to give Jack trowels and secateurs for birthdays. Now I use them myself. He never got his hands dirty. ‘The shoemaker’s children go barefoot,’ he would say. His mother, a rather annoying woman whom I have to bless for the pragmatic calm with which she accepted my role in her son’s life, had a huge stock of such old saws (or oldish – I suspected her of making a good few of them up). Towards the end, of course, there was no question of his digging and delving, but I think he liked to watch me doing so. He’d lie on the bath-chair, that astonishing hair of his spreading around him, pale as a blessed damosel, and berate me for the clumsiness of my pruning technique.
Eventually Selim waved at me to come in. I felt like a parent being given the result of a child’s medical examination. The man said, ‘Well, we’ve had a good talk.’ Selim gave me a beseeching look. I weighed in.
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