Tales from a Master's Notebook

by Various

  ‘Will he eat with us?’ Teresa asked, on the day Julian moved his meagre possessions into the cottage.

  ‘I hope not,’ said Franco. ‘The kitchen’s not bad down there, is it?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Bethany got it ready. She asked for money to buy some bits and pieces, and to get the chimney swept, and so on: was that all right, my darling?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Franco smiled. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You can just see the lights on down there. Through the trees.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  They both gazed out.

  ‘You won’t expect anything of Julian?’ he said, suddenly worried.

  ‘No!’ she laughed. ‘No, I won’t!’

  ‘He’s so hopeless.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Dad’s favourite, of course, when we were little. Until he got so morally superior.’

  ‘Younger children always have it so easy,’ she said. ‘He’s not even a viable person, really; while you and Harriet are brilliant.’

  It was true that Julian would never have seen the commercial potential in the 13th Earl’s junk that Franco and Harriet had seen. Between them, they had done a magnificent job. Visitor interest was currently focused on the drawing room hung with fifty-two identical Green Lady portraits, in different states of repair, some of them with their original Boots the Chemist price labels (ranging from 25s. to 32s. 6d) still attached. (There had been a piece about the Green Ladies in the Guardian Weekend Magazine, which had certainly done no harm to business.)

  ‘He couldn’t have done any of it,’ said Franco.

  ‘I know, darling. Poor Julian, to have missed out.’

  They both pondered, briefly, poor Julian, and what he had been missing.

  A thought struck Franco. ‘I wonder if I ought to go down to say hello. I haven’t actually seen him for a few years, you know.’

  From his tone, Teresa knew that the suggestion was not sincere. The last thing he wanted was for her to agree. She smiled.

  ‘I think it’s entirely up to you, darling,’ she said. ‘But he’s probably very tired from the journey.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘He probably just wants a bath and an early night.’

  ‘Well, that’s what I’d want, certainly.’

  ‘And Bethany said she would wait there to show him everything.’

  ‘Did she? Isn’t she marvellous?’

  It was when Julian had been in the cottage for a month or more that he and Franco expressed their first outright difference of opinion. Despite his long familiarity with Julian’s high-mindedness (Julian was just two years younger, so they overlapped at both Winchester and Christ Church), Franco was still hurt that Julian took so little interest in the success of the Hoagland Hall family enterprise, seeming to regard it as beneath him. Julian’s first tour of the place was a predictable disappointment; it turned out that the German woman on Patmos (despite expecting her boyfriend to pay his way) had been a highly persuasive New Age kind of person, doing astrological readings for the tourists and also holding firm views on karma, Eastern systems of medicine, and the incompatibility of spirituality and possessions. From this point of view, she and the priggish Julian had been very well matched. So, when he was first exposed to the heaps of stuff that were the Hall’s famous selling point, he did not laugh or marvel, as Franco had hoped; he was genuinely shocked and offended. On seeing the veritable cathedral of old Betamax tapes in the stables (twenty thousand of them, acquired in batches by the 13th Earl over a period of fifteen years), Julian turned literally green. Franco pressed on, regardless. Julian’s heightened sensitivities were his own problem.

  ‘I know,’ he said, with a chuckle. ‘There’s a conceptual art postgraduate at the Courtauld doing a PhD on it. She’s contrasting it with Legoland. Wait till you see the Maclaren baby buggies. We’ve got seven hundred and fifty, all blue and white. It’s phenomenal.’

  Afterwards, Julian invited himself to dinner with Franco and Teresa, by way of apologising for his reaction to the exhibits; but it didn’t come out like an apology, and it was the last time he came up to the big house. He brought lethal Greek liquor as a peace offering; after dinner, he lit up a Greek cigarette at table, despite Franco saying, ‘I’d much rather you didn’t do that,’ and Teresa reflexively emitting a little scream.

  ‘It was just the shock, Franco,’ said Julian. ‘The scale.’ He spoke sweetly; he had drunk most of the Greek stuff himself.

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Franco, as Teresa stood up and opened a window. ‘Not everyone can see the wit in all this. It’s something Harriet and I have to deal with every day.’

  Julian frowned. It wasn’t that he was missing any wit. He tapped some ash on to a saucer. ‘Why do you think the old man went for Betamax tapes, then?’

  Franco was ready for this. He had given countless interviews over the past years, after all. ‘Because they were worthless, Julian. No one else wanted to collect them. It was just Dad with his hippie past making some point about materialism. When you think about it, Betamax tapes almost epitomise material ephemerality and worthlessness.’

  Julian nodded. ‘So you really don’t think it’s to do with Mummy?’

  ‘Mummy?’ Franco shot a glance at Teresa. He had predicted that Julian would disagree on principle with anything he said, but he had no idea what Julian was getting at with this one.

  ‘Well. We had a Betamax machine, didn’t we, when we were small?’

  Franco, shrugging, said he couldn’t remember. He didn’t see how it was relevant. He felt uncomfortable. ‘Lots of people bought Betamax machines.’

  ‘But Mummy bought ours,’ Julian said ‘Don’t you remember? She used to record things for us during term so we could watch them in the long vac.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Franco said. Now that he thought about it, yes, he did remember how their mother – who had died from cancer when he was ten – had written to him at school sometimes about the episodes of Blue Peter that he wouldn’t be missing, after all. There had often been a pile of tapes marked ‘Franco’ when he got home.

  Julian took a final drag. ‘And of course she pushed us round in those Maclaren buggies when we were smaller still.’

  He pulled a face, as if to say, You know I’m right, don’t you? And Franco said, ‘I thought you came here to apologise?’

  And then Julian said, ‘How can you take this stuff at face value, Franco? Are you really so stupid? Remember when I had to explain to you that Mummy was ill?’

  ‘Because she said she was OK! I was only ten!’

  ‘And I was only eight.’

  And then Franco said (and he wasn’t proud of it), ‘Oh, why don’t you piss off back to Greece?’

  After his departure, Franco gazed down to the cottage, seeing the lights on. He dared not admit to himself how angry he felt. That night, at 3 a.m., he slipped downstairs to look at the baby buggies in their artful ranks – ten rows of seventy-five – and was reassured. With only moonlight in the room, there was truly something beautiful about them; something happy and nostalgic. But they were still, most definitely, crap.

  Julian felt bad about his behaviour at the dinner party. When he was relating it to Bethany in bed later that night, though, he was surprised when she pointed out that his smoking at the table had possibly been the worst part of what he’d done.

  ‘Really?’ he said.

  ‘People don’t do that, Julian,’ she said. ‘Or not without asking. Did you ask?’

  ‘I can’t remember. Shouldn’t think so. But anyway, I don’t think it was the smoking. He just hates it when I’m right. It’s appalling, what they’ve done here. It’s obscene.’

  ‘I’d love to visit Greece,’ said Bethany.

  ‘I’d love to take you,’ he said. And then he sat up abruptly. ‘Let’s go tomorrow,’ he said.

  Bethany laughed. ‘You know I can’t.’

  The thing with Bethany, by the way, had started the very first evening of Julian’s occup
ancy. She had waited for him in the cottage, having baked him a vegetarian moussaka, and warmed up the living room with a log fire. She was a woman who valued the high opinion of others; Franco and Teresa had recognised this trait, and trusted her with the tea room, with fabulous results. Franco was careful not to praise Bethany too often in front of his wife, as Teresa could be jealous of homemaker talents in other women (she didn’t mind if they were beautiful). But there was, in fact, little danger of bad feeling. Teresa loved Bethany almost as much as Franco did. This lovely thirty-year-old woman was all smiles; she dealt with the public beautifully; she ran a charming staff of ten; and the fact that she had once been in a freakish road accident with her boyfriend (in which the boyfriend died) was something her adoring employers neither knew about nor suspected. Julian, by contrast, had discovered Bethany’s secret trauma within a couple of hours of meeting her. It was just a knack he had. When buried misery was in his vicinity, he was a veritable human divining rod.

  ‘A tree fell on the car,’ Bethany said, as she collected his plate and placed it in the newly installed dishwasher. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘It was on the news,’ she said. ‘The car was crushed; it was a miracle I got out. His little daughter, who was in the back, she was killed too.’

  Julian was confused by Bethany’s casual manner in telling this. Was she being brave, or was she in denial? She kept rejecting his sympathy, either way.

  ‘Oh my God. And you were driving?’

  ‘Yes, but that was irrelevant. As I said, a tree fell on the car. It was random.’

  It was true that it had been on the news. In the pictures, you could see a huge tree, in full leaf, horizontal, filling the width of the road, with glimpses of the crushed car underneath.

  ‘But you must have blamed yourself.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t. Why should I?’

  Julian frowned. It was tough sometimes, being the cleverest person in the room.

  ‘You must have had counselling?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Look, I don’t really like to talk about it. It was five years ago.’

  Julian couldn’t leave it there.

  ‘In Chinese medicine,’ he said, ‘they would say that a buried trauma like that would come out in your body – maybe in your hands. Have you had any strange tingling or paralysis or anything?’

  Bethany pulled a face. ‘I’m not Chinese,’ she said.

  Julian stopped pushing. He knew he was sounding judgemental. Which was why he decided, by way of changing the subject (and saving the occasion), to take the lovely Bethany to bed.

  Franco started to wonder what it was like in the cottage. At night, when he was trying to sleep, he would picture certain aspects of the little house: the turn at the top of the stairs; the fireplace; his mother’s watercolour pictures on the walls. He was thinking of his mother more and more since Julian had come home. There was a flash of a memory – a smell of disinfectant; the treads on a wide flight of stairs; the squeak of rubber-soled shoes on a shiny floor. He never usually bothered about remembering his childhood because Harriet, being three years older, remembered it better than he did. He had always excelled at delegation. But now he realised he needed to ask Harriet a few things. For example, he had never considered it before, but wasn’t it odd to have no known relatives on your mother’s side? On the Donington side, there had been grandparents, plus cousins and great-uncles. But their mother’s side had always been a blank.

  As it happened, Harriet had been thinking about her mother, too. It had occurred to her to write a brisk potted history of the family for the second edition of the Hoagland Hall visitor brochure, and she had naturally focused on the more comical or grotesque aspects of the Donington inheritance, such as the 10th Earl’s steaming success in the guano business. Of her father and mother, she had reported only the random but obsessive collecting habits of her eccentric father; she’d said nothing about his marriage. Anyone interested enough to research the 13th Earl online, however, would quickly be reminded of his notoriety in youth: headlines from the 1960s concerning the ‘Donington Druggies’ were accompanied by flash photographs of Harriet’s youthful, leggy parents lolling on dark velvet cushions next to members of the Rolling Stones. Such pictures Harriet copied and dragged into folders on her computer. Another picture showed the more sedate golden couple in their thirties, laughing together in the grounds of Hoagland Hall with their three children: Harriet herself (aged six) standing next to Franco (three), and Julian cradled in his mother’s arms.

  Harriet had never been married. The truth of the matter was that she just didn’t appeal to any kind of man, partly because she was always far too keen to impress men with her intelligence (which was not outstanding, in any case); partly because she was grossly insensitive to the feelings of others; but mostly because she had a strange shrieky posh voice which basically triggered an instinctive flight or fight reaction in more or less everyone she talked to. After studying art history, she’d worked for a couple of years as a publicist at a London publisher’s, where the family name was a marvellous asset, but the shrieky voice unfortunately was not. It did not endear her to her colleagues, either, that at the end of her first month, she opened her payslip and said, screaming with laughter, ‘Fucking hell, you couldn’t live on that, could you?’ On leaving the publisher’s (by mutual agreement), she found it hard to find another berth, and moved back to Wiltshire, where she had lived ever since. From her London days, she still remembered a painful lunch with her father on the occasion of her 25th birthday, at a modest Greek restaurant near the British Museum. His behaviour had baffled her at the time, and it baffled her still. He hadn’t even been drunk. He had just taken her hand in his and looked at her with tears in his eyes, as if about to declare ‘I love you.’ Instead of which he said, bizarrely, ‘Your mother loved dolmades so much.’ And then, when she had taken a breath to say something, he had placed his hand over her mouth and said, ‘No, Harriet, please don’t.’

  Six weeks after Julian’s return from Greece, Franco started to suspect that his brother was having an affair with Bethany. He didn’t know whether to tell Teresa. If she asked him how he knew, he would have to admit that on most nights now he watched the cottage through a telescope from the top of the house; he had also followed Bethany. One day when he observed Julian strolling through the grounds in the early afternoon, clutching an empty plastic shopping bag (thus, on his way to the village), Franco actually ran down to the cottage and let himself in. Inside, it was exactly what he had expected: untidy but somehow elegantly so. Warm, with the smell of coffee, last night’s coal ash, and freshly baked bread. Serious paperback books about the end of capitalism lay pointedly open on the arms of the only comfortable chair in the sitting room; Bethany’s knitting basket was on the old settle; on the rustic kitchen table lay two well-thumbed issues of the New Statesman and also Julian’s laptop, open at his Facebook page, where he had been – of course he had – sharing footage of the latest humanitarian crisis in the Middle East with friends around the world.

  Franco didn’t stay to look at anything else. All the high-mindedness on display in Julian’s cottage made him simply furious. Of course, it was irrational for him to take it personally, but it was too late to change the habit of a lifetime. Julian had always been able to outrage him. When they had briefly shared a London house together in their twenties, Franco had one day reached for the box of teabags in the kitchen and found that Julian had defaced the picture on the box – of a charming Indian tea-picker lady in a sari – by scoring it with a blue ballpoint pen until he’d obliterated it completely. On the morning of Franco’s wedding to Teresa at a romantic plantation house on a Caribbean island, Julian had, typically, made a point of visiting the local slavery museum, despite Franco begging him not to. Afterwards, Julian refused to say anything about what he’d learned there, in the interests of not ruining the day for everyone else – which natur
ally meant he still succeeded in ruining the day for everyone else.

  Franco marched back to the house, where he was due to talk with Harriet. On the way, he met Teresa, who looked worried.

  ‘Bethany’s got a problem with her hands,’ she said. ‘She keeps dropping the individual pot pies.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She says they’re going numb. Apparently she’s been suppressing a trauma.’

  ‘Suppressing a what?’

  ‘I know. Anyway, I told her to let someone else take over while she gets some rest.’

  Franco’s face filled with despair. Bethany was indispensable: how could anything happen to Bethany?

  Teresa afterwards remembered her surprise at the strange way Franco took the news about Bethany. He spun on his heel and glared back towards the cottage. ‘Julian!’ he said.

  It is now two years later. Julian’s memoir, My Father’s Tat, has been published to much acclaim. Its haunting baby-buggy cover was instantly iconic, and Julian has been compared in literary circles with no less an author than Edmund de Waal. It is no hindrance at all to his success that he is posh and humourless and morally self-satisfied; he is a huge draw at literary festivals, where he takes to the stage barefooted, in a white panama hat and linen trousers, carrying a couple of open beer bottles. It helps his mystique considerably that his beautiful wife Bethany suffers from a psychosomatic disability in her hands which has necessitated his moving into Hoagland Hall, despite his well-known preference for the tiny modest cottage in the grounds.