by Jane Gardam
‘I did.’
‘No, dear, you couldn’t. He was quite ga-ga by the time you were born. More or less under lock and key—though he improved when he came to live with us at the end. He didn’t live very long after Mother.’
‘I did. I did know him.’
‘I expect your mother told you about him.’
‘She never knew him. I did. He used to talk while he painted. Very hot days in summer.’
‘I expect that was a dream. The days in summer always seemed very hot when we were children. Somebody must have told you about him.’
‘He wore wellingtons,’ said Margaret.
‘I don’t see that that’s so marvellous,’ said Terence.
‘It shows it can’t have been that hot,’ said Alfred.
‘He painted snakes.’
‘Yes,’ said Binkie. ‘Yes—that is true. He did paint snakes at one stage. Not at the end—his last pictures were quite different. Just big quiet blocks of colour. Charles—my brother—you don’t know Charles, you boys—Charles and I loved them. He did them when he lived with us at Dene Close, before he died. Charles has quite a few of them—he took them with him to Australia.’
‘I’ve seen some. In galleries,’ said Margaret.
‘Even the snake pictures are valuable now of course—and the early landscapes of Greece are treasures. They’re said to be better than Lear’s.’
‘Who’s Lear,’ said Terence. ‘Thought he was a king.’
‘Charles would have loved to have one of those.’
‘It’s a shame Charles wasn’t here yesterday,’ said Margaret, ‘for the unveiling.’
‘It’s a pity your mother wasn’t here,’ said Binkie. ‘It was very much noticed, I’m afraid.’
‘You know Mother,’ said Margaret. ‘Insisted we all come and then said that it would be impossible for her to leave Father Carter. She’s so mad on the parish. She’s parson’s wife of parsons’ wives. Albs and cottas. She’s so—excessive. Though nice,’ she added.
Binkie looked at Margaret and said, ‘For a child of twenty you are ancient at times.’
‘You ought to have been the parson’s wife, Binks. It was you who should have married Father Carter. He’d have liked it better in the end. Poor ma. She’s—oh, tremulous. She’s like the famous Renoir. Over the sitting-room fireplace. Oh my!’
‘The Girl in the Garden,’ said Alfred. ‘People come to the door to see it all the time. We’re going to charge them soon, Mother says, it’s to go to the stained glass restoration fund.’
‘The Girl in the Garden,’ said Binkie. ‘I wonder what they would say to that in Turner Street? Your mother was solidly behind Turner Street once, you know, you children. For years. Unswervingly. Naked and unadorned.’
‘That must have been pretty disgusting.’
‘Not your mother naked and unadorned. Her view of God was naked and unadorned. The Saints let nothing distract from the source of light. No stained glass there.’
‘Father Carter’s not so keen on the stained glass either. Not as much as Ma now,’ said Margaret. ‘And he hates that boy with his mouth open over the grapes on the marble plinth you gave him. Says it looks ridiculous in Stepney. He’s all right, Father Carter. You were the one for him though, Binks.’
Binkie said that it had been a great surprise to everyone that Father Carter had married at all, he was so High, and the two boys fell about again at this. Then they wandered away to throw stones down at the sea, which whispered faintly back at them. Binkie and Margaret ate biscuits and were quiet.
Margaret said at last, ‘Tell me about her. Mother. That day.’
Binkie said nothing.
‘There’s a mystery of some sort, isn’t there? About that day?’
‘Which day?’ Binkie asked, several moments later.
‘The day I . . . climbed the cliff. Got stuck out on the . . . The day Father—I can’t remember.’
‘The day you can remember but won’t.’
‘I was only eight.’
‘Which means nothing.’
‘I know that. But it’s my business. At least it’s other people’s, not mine. Their business to tell me.’
‘No. It’s other people’s business, but not to tell you. I can’t be the one to talk to you about your mother.’
‘There was some sort of talk about her being wild in some way that day. In some way disgusting.’
‘Disgusting?’
‘Well—running about the beach with no clothes on or something.’
‘Oh, Margaret! How ridiculous!’
‘Don’t put on your Girton voice, Binks. What was it? It’s what I heard anyway.’
‘Whoever . . . ?’
‘I don’t know. Rumours. That fat woman with the chest and the medals who was at the unveiling.’
‘Booth? Sister Booth? She never knew your mother. Or you.’
‘Yes—she did know me. They took me—afterwards. I got to the Hall in the rain. They took me into the lodge. She was there. She was rather a frightening woman. I’d seen her once before.’
‘What rubbish! You are like Charles with your ideas of figures of doom.’
‘But there was something, Binkie. And Charles going away. We never saw him again. We went away. Then he went away. What was it all about?’
Binkie thought of Ellie’s curious pale green stockings among the clothes for the jumble sale, and Ellie’s bare legs under Charles’s old mackintosh as they huddled later in the tearing rain on the beach. She considered and dismissed, as she had often done before, the sloping shoulders of the child Alfred she so loved. She thought again of the long black gleaming slope of shale, the razor-tooth against which the lifeboat had ground and butted and foundered; of the bodies of poor old Bezeer and little limp Kenneth Marsh washed up three days later far down the coast at Flamborough. ‘Do you keep up your Latin, Margaret?’ she said.
‘Yes. Of course. I have to.’
‘Well yes, I suppose so, reading History. You’re very like Charles, you know. I think of you sometimes as Charles’s child.’
‘Not Alfred?’
They looked at each other. ‘I am my father’s child,’ said Margaret. ‘D’you remember how I once knew the whole Bible backwards and inside out.’
‘You were considerd a miracle,’ said Binkie. ‘It’s amazing how you can teach babies tricks. You were the Miracle of Turner Street—and of Dene Close, too. And I dare say of Seaview Villas. We were all terrified of you.’
‘I was father’s miracle,’ said Margaret. ‘He was awful—awful, but he had the most tremendous sort of power, Binkie. You didn’t know him. Mother used to cry—and the house sort of . . . twanged. But he left me with a sense of God, Binkie. It is a big present.’
‘I can imagine. But—Latin. Margaret, you know the verb exquire? To search out? To elucidate?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, when I’m dead could you put it on my tombstone?’
‘Yes.’
‘With a non in front of it?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Because there’s a lot it’s not wise to fuss over. To prise out. Extract. It is best just to look and be.’
The boys were talking now to someone they had met up with a little distance along the cliff—a woman who had been at the unveiling but whom nobody had seemed to know—for Margaret had at the last minute not been present yesterday. She had been walking about the woods as she had been again today, and everybody had kindly understood. The woman, coming towards them now up the hill, was immense, with a floury powdered face and great bush of very golden fizz for hair. She was wearing a tight dress of purple satin and not quite white gloves and her shoes which had heels like spindles were taking badly to the sandy cliff-top. She was broad-shouldered and haunched like a ploughman, and no longer young, but the two twelve-year-old boys had fallen in step one on either side of her and were both looking up into her face with great attention as they all drew near. It looked like the approach of old and loving friends.
Lydia reached the monument with them and looked down at Binkie and the tall girl. ‘Hullo, our Margaret,’ she said and sat down. ‘I’s clemmed.’
‘You ought to take your shoes off,’ said Terence. ‘They’re not very suitable.’
‘That’s nowt new. I were never a great one for choosing right. Mind, I’ve ’ad me shoes off afore today—and not that far from ’ere. Trouble is, these days I’d nivver get ’em back on again.
‘The tree’s still there,’ she said to Margaret, ‘with the hole for me corsets. They’re going to build round it—what about that?’
‘Introduce me to your friend,’ said Binkie.
‘It’s Lydia,’ Margaret said and nothing more.
‘Yer not that much different, our Margaret.’
‘Will you,’ asked Binkie, ‘er . . . have a fish-paste roll?’
‘No thanks. Yer taller, that’s all.’
‘You’re not much different either, Lydia,’ said Margaret.
From below the soldiers’ cries wavered up unevenly on the wind. They were dragging out the great black hoops of wire which has been sunk deep in the sands all the War. The soldiers’ little bodies were like insects running, in strings and groups. Slowly, unwillingly and painfully, the old wire was dragged away from the shifting drifts of white sand and far above, even the picnic party on the cliff-top, the seagulls sent other uneven calls down again, tilting, watching on the wind, tipping and gliding, sometimes skimming level with the grass, high out over the waves, their eyes brilliant and black, seeing what it was urgent for them to see, unconcerned with what was urgent and mutable for men.
‘What did you do all the War, Lydia?’
‘I lived on at Bishop. I were in munitions. Mekkin bombs.’
‘Did you never marry?’
‘Nivver. I’se not that daft.’ She leaned her big head back and watched the seabirds. ‘In’t they bonny?’ she asked Binkie.
‘What?’ asked Binkie, peering up.
‘Yon,’ said Lydia.
‘You haven’t changed either,’ said Margaret with love. ‘Not a bit.’
‘Oh, our Margaret, but I have,’ said Lydia, ‘I were bloody daft them days.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jane Gardam is the only writer to have been twice awarded the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel of the Year (for The Queen of the Tambourine and The Hollow Land). She also holds a Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime’s contribution to the enjoyment of literature.
She has published four volumes of acclaimed stories: Black Faces, White Faces (David Higham Prize and the Royal Society for Literature’s Winifred Holtby Prize); The Pangs of Love (Katherine Mansfield Prize); Going into a Dark House (Silver Pen Award from PEN); and most recently, Missing the Midnight.
Her novels include God on the Rocks (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Faith Fox, The Flight of the Maidens and Old Filth, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Jane Gardam lives with her husband in England.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
