by Patrick Gale
The family had spent the morning in the American Museum at Claverton Manor. There was a constant need to save money because Dad earned so little so their agreed routine was only to visit one place a day that charged an admission fee and to fill the rest with the free pleasures of walks and churches. But then Mum was reading something called The Yellow Book, and discovered that the house where Dad’s family used to live had its garden open for charity that afternoon. So they bent the rules, since the next day was to be spent entirely on a long walk from Bradford to Freshford and back via Iford Manor, and drove there next.
Dad’s family house was unexpectedly grand; not a castle or a country seat, but not an ordinary person’s house either. It stood in the centre of one of the handsome villages that Jim had trouble telling apart; and each village had an old church and several big houses apparently vying to be best. This house was definitely best. It held itself symbolically back from village life by having a deep, lily-filled strip of water – a moat in effect – between its front garden and the street. Not a moat, Dad explained, but a carp pond, a once-regular source of protein and a leftover from the medieval abbey whose lands had become forfeit at the Dissolution. The house had large stone balls atop two outer gateposts, which Dad said was how a visitor in the old days could tell which house in a village was the manor. Jim passed over a pretty stone bridge and entered the front garden between two fanciful stone gazebos. In one of these an old man stood guard, taking entrance money. In the other, his wife, who, he loudly confessed, did everything but mow the grass and trim the hedges was manning a plant stall.
‘Wander wherever you like,’ the man told them. ‘The house is shut apart from the servants’ hall, where our daughters are serving a jolly good tea.’
‘Why didn’t you tell him who you are?’ Mum asked as they walked away from the entrance but Dad seemed not to have heard her.
They followed the gravel path that encircled a deep island of laden rosebushes underplanted with a dusty blue flower whose label she then stooped to admire. ‘Nepeta,’ she said wistfully. ‘Catmint. Lovely. We could grow that but maybe it wouldn’t look so good without the roses.’
‘I didn’t see the point,’ Dad told her. They were always doing this, having two conversations at once. ‘It would mean nothing to them. They’re the second or third family to live here since Uncle James left.’
They carried on around the pretty courtyard garden then under a mossy arch into the garden proper which, by Pendeen standards, was enormous. A sequence of high-hedged sort of rooms, each with a different colour, theme or botanical feature led to a terrace presided over by two barely humanoid statues Dad said were meant to be pre-Roman, and a view across uninterrupted countryside marred only by a rumble from the M4.
There was a large bench where the three of them sat to enjoy the hint of a breeze coming off the fields below, where swallows were skimming the surface of a wheat-field. Not for the first time that holiday, Jim wished Carrie were with them. At twenty-one, she felt the need to assert her independence, at least in small ways, like taking her own mysterious trips rather than coming on family holidays.
He was becoming aware there was something not quite right about his sister, not in the head, just in her life. Something in the tone their parents and other adults adopted when they spoke of her implied she was special, meaning not normal. Certainly it wasn’t normal still to be living with your parents at twenty-one, or for a girl in Pendeen at that age not to have a boyfriend, husband or, at the very least, a baby by then. He suspected it didn’t help that she persisted in dressing like a boy and made coffins for a living. ‘Death and art are my bread and butter,’ she liked to say, meaning coffins and picture framing. She had recently discovered there was a market for pet coffins too. She had tailormade three cat caskets and even, which had made Jim giggle, a coffin for a much loved Siberian hamster. He could not understand what kept her living at home. He intended to be off at the first opportunity and had already quietly ascertained that, when the time came, he could aim higher, and further away, than Penwith or Truro College. So he understood perfectly why she would elect to avoid a week in a static caravan with them. But he missed her keenly whenever they ventured out into the world together, not just because she had a surer instinct than their parents for worldly values but because, with her marked similarity to their mother, he felt she made them unmistakably a family. Without her, he worried, they looked like three people selected at random for a social experiment or, worse still, like two unrelated adults with a stolen boy.
At least he no longer looked entirely Vietnamese. Dad had always said that it was likely his father had been a serving American soldier. (He never mentioned rape but Jim was studying warfare at school and knew that this was the most obvious reason for a refugee to have abandoned her baby.) And as Jim grew, a second, more Western face was emerging from behind his mother’s. In his first twelve years, he was evidently his mother’s son, uncomplicatedly, sweetly Vietnamese-looking, however Vietnamese looked. But now that he finally started to grow, his father’s genes seemed to emerge from dormancy and his face and limbs were morphing dramatically and with them his character. Ironically it was only as he started to look less oriental that he felt the need to assert his oriental side and began to feel moments of directionless anger at whoever or whatever had cut him off from all it represented.
He was still small for his age, however. Several girls in his class were already growing tits and Jade Clegg had twice now tugged up her tee-shirt sleeve to grant him a flash of her downy armpit hair, which he found at once deeply shocking and something he hungered to look on again. He had thought a lot about his real parents recently and, after comparing notes with Teagan, decided that he preferred not knowing who they were as it set him free from disappointment and let him fantasize they looked like Keanu Reeves and Gong Li.
He had discovered that adoptive parents with sufficient money could go to specialist agencies that would find them a baby resembling one they might have produced themselves. He had idly fantasized there might be a service offering the process in reverse, whereby parentless children could be given computer-generated approximations of how their father and mother might have looked. He had heard too how adopted children could grow to resemble their non-biological parents. Certainly his accent was something like his mother’s if, he hoped, a little more streetwise and a little less Archers. And Carrie assured him he had acquired Dad’s laugh. Sadly, mere proximity would never give him Dad’s height or Mum’s easy strength.
‘So did you grow up here?’ he asked as they watched the swallows.
‘No,’ Dad said. ‘I grew up in Bristol. My father didn’t live here either, but my uncle did. My father’s older brother. Your Great-Uncle James was the one who sold it.’
‘Wasn’t he rich enough?’
Dad smiled. ‘Not at all. That’s why he had to sell. Back then it was a big concern, not just the house and garden but there was a lot of farmland too.’
‘You never told me that,’ Mum told him.
‘You never asked,’ he said. ‘Our ancestors built the house,’ he went on to Jim. ‘One of them bought the land when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and her son built the house, or most of it. It was added to a bit over the years.’
‘And they lived here all that time?’ Jim was appalled at such immobility and lack of audacity.
Dad nodded. ‘Farmers don’t move. Then they started marrying well and they became gentlemen.’
‘Like a sex change?’
‘No!’ Mum laughed.
‘They didn’t have to work,’ Dad explained.
‘They were rich, then?’
‘For a while. Yes. They must have been. You can look them up in old copies of Burke’s Landed Gentry in the reference library.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Oh. It couldn’t be more stupid. It was a sort of directory of old families with land.’
‘So girls knew who to marry and who to avoid,’ Mum put in. ‘
We should tell them, Barnaby. I bet they’d let us inside then.’
‘Oh no. They’re busy. Anyway, it’ll all have changed. It’s not as though there are still ancestral portraits.’
‘But there would have been,’ she said.
‘Maybe. I hardly remember. Yes, I expect there were once. I don’t think I ever saw them. My grandfather sold some probably and James sold the rest. Who wants tea?’
‘Me,’ Jim said. He was extremely hungry as lunch had been only warm lemonade and sandwiches in the car and not enough of them. Having tea out was a rare indulgence and he knew, long since trained by Carrie, to opt for the least expensive item on the menu. This tended to be scone or toasted teacake. It was never gâteau.
A noisy family party walked out onto the terrace beside them and he was surprised to feel a stab of resentment. The peaceful interval on the bench with no one else in sight had fostered the illusion of ownership. This could have been his father’s garden and these people trespassing on his father’s lands. He saw the boy stare and knew he was seeing tall thin husband, short round wife and undersized foreign boy who had no business with them. He stared back with as much hostility as he could muster, wishing he had continued saving for reflective traffic cop sunglasses and not blown the money on trainers. He sensed that with sunglasses he would look merely cosmopolitan rather than foreign; the distinction was subtle but definite. He had learnt a trick from would-be tormentors at school, and he now pictured the boy in uncontrollable, babyish tears, snot dangling from his nose and a protective forearm across his eyes.
It worked. The boy visibly flinched and hurried to rejoin his parents who were arguing noisily about whether a tree in the field below was an alder or a surviving elm.
Jim averted his eyes from the unmistakable sight of his mother surreptitiously checking how much cash was left in her purse. Neither parent had a credit card as they shared a belief that spending money you didn’t have was foolhardy and possibly immoral. He overtook her swiftly to follow Dad along the ornamental rill.
‘So did you never want to live here?’ he asked him.
‘There’s no point wanting what you can’t have. I was never going to have the money to buy a house like this, let alone run it, and it wouldn’t have felt right for a priest.’
‘But … say if you hadn’t been a priest. Say you’d been a … a …’ Jim had trouble thinking of anybody rich. ‘A footballer.’
‘Most unlikely.’
‘Or a surgeon.’
‘Unlikelier still. Anyway, isn’t it nicer to visit and not have to do all the weeding and gutter-clearing?’
‘I suppose so,’ Jim said, picturing Carrie mowing the grass at home and his mother, only last week, up on a ladder at the side of the house to replace a couple of roof slates that had blown down overnight. To be fair Dad often offered to help with practical tasks, but he was so useless at them people tended to do them slyly and swiftly behind his back rather than have him make a mess of lawn or hedge. Which in turn must have given him the delusion that such tasks only rarely needed doing.
They arrived back at the house’s rear, where a fulsome red rose had been painstakingly trained across the tawny stonework. The three of them stood before it breathing in the scent and watching bees reel from flower to velvet flower.
‘Not a hope of that with us,’ Mum said. ‘Not with the winds we get. But I might try some of that catmint under the fig or beneath the windows. I was just talking to a nice woman who said it’s tough as old boots and very cheap to spread as it splits so readily in the spring. And maybe some of that pretty wormwood. What was it called?’
‘Artemisia ludoviciana.’
‘That’s the one.’
Dad knew nothing about gardening but could be relied upon to remember Latin names on Mum’s behalf; she treated him like a human notebook, pointing him towards plant labels or references on Gardeners’ Question Time, then consulting him months later when poring over seed catalogues.
They followed a painted sign announcing teas into the servants’ hall, a barnlike room that had once been the house’s kitchen and retained a magnificent range with a clockwork spit mechanism above it. Luckily there was no menu – this not being a regular restaurant – simply the one flat rate for a pot of tea and a slice of cake. Cake, not scone! Scones out were never as good as Mum’s own, which always led to muttering about money wasted, whereas cake of any kind was an unqualified treat so less likely to be criticized in the eating.
Just after they were served, other groups drifted in, including the noisy family with the gawking son, which was a relief as it felt a bit odd being waited on by the severe daughters of the house and his parents were less likely to draw them into conversation if the daughters were kept busy. Mum pointed to a huge coat of arms emblazoned on an old wooden board hung high over the fireplace.
‘Is that yours, then?’ she asked Dad.
He glanced at it. ‘Not strictly. It’s the Palmer family crest – my great-grandmother’s. See the scallop shell? And that would have been done several generations ago, so ours would be different again.’
Jim noticed something odd going on in his manner – a show of lack of interest (‘Oh. That old thing.’) rubbing against a stirring of pride (‘My family has a coat of arms.’).
‘Funny, really,’ Mum said. ‘Here we are eating tea like anyone else and those girls have no idea you’re the lord of the manor.’
‘Are you a lord?’ Jim asked, startled.
‘No,’ Dad said. ‘But the Johnsons were lords of this manor, I suppose, and the Palmers before they became Johnsons.’
‘No suppose about it,’ Mum said.
‘All right. The Palmers were the lords of the manor. Which meant they were paid tithes by the less wealthy families in return for, well, protection, I suppose. It’s utterly meaningless now, though. Although it’s the sort of thing you can sell to gullible people. Occasionally there are unexpected duties attached. Some family from London buys a place like this only to find they’re now expected to pay for church repairs or to maintain the village school. So far as I know there was no male Palmer heir, which was how great granny inherited which makes me lord of the manor since my uncle died without issue. And when I die it’ll be you!’
‘Just think of that,’ Mum said. ‘You’ll still have to bring your own dirty laundry downstairs and make your own bed, mind.’
Jim went to the loo afterwards and Dad joined him. In the corridor that led back to the servants’ hall they stopped to examine a sequence of old photographs. Each showed servants and family posing with either the front or back of the house as backdrop. The family sat on dining chairs on the gravel or lawn and the servants stood behind them, like staff and pupils in the annual school equivalent. Dogs were also present, sometimes obediently posing to the fore, sometimes wandering in a wilful blur further off. In some there were other people – more staff, or possibly just playful houseguests – smiling from upstairs windows. Dad peered closely, then pointed at the centre of one such group, at a formidable old lady swathed in black with a no less formidable baby, swathed in white, on her lap. The men on her either side were as unreadable behind beards and large moustaches as their ancestors would have been behind armour, but the old woman’s face – their wife and mother? – was quite visible and looked like Dad’s in the extreme seriousness he assumed when reading.
‘Your great-great-grandmother,’ he said. ‘That baby is my granny. I remember now she used to have a copy of this picture over her desk.’
‘Aren’t they killing?’ It was the owner’s wife, come to check on her daughters perhaps or simply on a break from manning the plant stall. She had a rounded, well-fed face, plump pearls and extremely neat clothes. She had a well-maintained look, lubricated against the shocks of life. She was, Jim realized, entirely unlike any woman he ever encountered at home.
‘Looking for long-lost relatives?’ she asked and Jim saw her do the usual little eye flick at the tall thin man and short foreign-looking boy.
‘We’ve found my father’s grandmother,’ Jim told her.
‘Oh what fun,’ she said. ‘It’s amazing how many people we get doing this. The Internet is going to make all that sort of research so much easier, isn’t it? And of course maids were listed on the census returns alongside their mistresses. My favourite’s that pudding-faced girl holding the pony.’
And as she clicked on along the corridor past them and pointedly unhooked and refastened a red silk rope that blocked entry into the rest of the house to mere visitors, something small but essential withered within him.
‘She thought your granny was a servant,’ he told Dad.
‘I know,’ Dad said. ‘But it doesn’t matter.’
It had been a long day out by their standards and they drove back to the caravan in silence. One of the good things about not having Carrie with them was being alone on the car’s back seat and being the better able to relish the dull passivity of being driven and not having to participate. He stared out at the passing scenery, shops he would never enter, people he would never meet, with the same pleasurable blankness he brought to watching bad television at friends’ houses, and felt himself get a hard-on in the same uninvolved way, stimulated by vibration and boredom rather than active thought.
He perceived how typical it was that his father should choose to make nothing of something that clearly mattered to him: the house, the family history, the line of inheritance that had wobbled with his grandmother being the only heir and been as good as wiped out now that the male heir was an American-Vietnamese rape-baby and no relation. It all mattered to Dad or they need not have visited. And yet, challenged, he crumpled into diffidence and denial when he could have said, perfectly politely, my ancestors built this house so my family would quite like to see round it actually, at least the downstairs. And then, by a connection that felt entirely natural, Jim perceived that it was the same with God. God clearly mattered to his father, he had built his life and his family’s lives around the church and its needs, he was prepared to earn less than even the miners used to, certainly not enough to let him buy back his ancestral home, not even enough to let them have a holiday in a nice cottage, or even a hotel in the Canaries for once, like normal people, instead of a week in a caravan so small you could have a table or a double bed but not both at once, so that they all had to go to bed at the same time, even if they weren’t all tired. And yet if challenged, faced, say, with a classmate’s father, like Mr Thomas, Teagan’s would-be dad, who said he never saw the point of church, Dad never made a fuss, never said, but you must for the sake of your eternal soul. It matters, Mr Thomas. Truly it does. Just let me explain. Rather, he would shrug – Jim had seen him do it – and say something inoffensive and basically meaningless like, well, we all find our own way, don’t we, because however important he thought it was, he thought it was more important not to make a fuss and risk making anybody, even for a moment, feel uncomfortable.
