A Summer in the Twenties

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘She’s older than me—thirty-five. Very neat and quiet and small. Not at all my idea of an American. She’s read everything, and thought about it. Been everywhere too—mention a country and she’s stayed there and looked at the temples and met the Minister of the Interior and inspected the gaols—she takes a little typewriter everywhere she goes and before anyone else is awake she gets up and taps away for a couple of hours, sending off reports to all the organisations she belongs to about all sorts of things . . . Minnie’s all energy, and yet somehow she finds time to sit all morning with a neurotic old soak like me, or go bird-watching with Ian—he approves of her no end, spite of what she’s done to Nan—she isn’t any kind of fanatic, you see, although she believes absolutely implicitly . . .

  ‘Anyway, when she’s around I feel I can manage. And it’s true, Tom. She stayed on Malinsay for a month and then Nan got in touch with a few friends on the mainland and asked if Minnie and I could come and stay. They were pretty chary, you can imagine. After all, some of the things I’ve done when I was cut are pretty well folklore by now in the West Highlands, but for Ian’s sake and Nan’s they said yes, mostly. And it turned out all right. Honestly, you’d have laughed to see their faces changing the first evening when they realised they weren’t going to have to get the chauffeurs in to hold me down. And of course they adored Minnie. You should have heard Potty Caithness grunting away at her when we were saying good-bye, asking when she was coming again . . . And I can keep it up, Tom. I’m getting better all the time. What happened at Paddington was the first real splurge for months.’

  ‘Are you going to tell Miss Heusen about that?’

  ‘Yes, of course. You can’t shock her. She won’t even make me feel ashamed. She’s Mrs. Heusen by the by. She was born Minnie Gassaway, of all things, but when she was nineteen she married this fellow, old enough to be her grandfather but she seems to have been very fond of him. He passed on five years ago. There weren’t any children, but she’s not too old to have them, and she wants to.’

  ‘You seem to have fallen on your feet at last. I can’t tell you how glad I am. Have you said anything to Father?’

  ‘I’ve funked that so far. Minnie made me come down to talk to the family, but I thought I’d better clear the ground with you first. Of course once I set Minnie on Father she’ll have him eating out of her hand. How’s the old devil keeping these days?’

  ‘Just the same. Butterflies and regimental history and county skulduggery, varied by the odd crazy scheme. He made me learn to drive a train for the General Strike. I had quite an interesting time of it . . . One thing, though, Ger—he talks about money more than he used to. It’s preying on his mind a bit. You mayn’t find he’s all that set on taking you on if you aren’t bringing anything in.’

  Gerald laughed, an outpouring of good humour, an almost painful echo of times spent larking around Sillerby when Tom had been a small boy trailing in the wake of his hero-brothers.

  ‘He can stop worrying if I marry Minnie, Tom. Old Heusen owned a chain of shoe-factories and left her the whole lot. Our idea is that we should buy back Gattings and Hatchers and do up one of the farm houses and live there until Father goes. Minnie could do all that, and put Tapwith and Home Farm in order too, and re-lead the roof at Sillerby, and not even notice she’s spent the money.’

  For the first time Tom felt a curious pang, not exactly of jealousy but of pointlessly wasted stress and penny-pinching all his growing years.

  ‘If it’s illusion anyway,’ he said.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘Uh . . . that’s a rum thing, Tom. Scientists, you know—they’ve done wonders for me, and their healers really can heal, and the rest are good, quiet, serious, admirable people. But practically all the ones I’ve met are absolutely rolling.’

  ‘Perhaps you‘ve just met the ones who are rich enough to travel.’

  ‘I don’t know . . . I ought to send Minnie a wire, I suppose. And Father. Have you got a Bradshaw? I’d like to get straight up to Sillerby, if I can. You’ve been a great help, Tom, and I’m ever so grateful to you.’

  Tom told Judy about the visitation while they were sitting under a willow in a meadow below Cumnor Ridge. Her silver Lagonda blazed in the sun where she had pulled it off the road by the old stone bridge. A swan and five half-grown cygnets drifted just below the arches, maintaining their position with apparently magical indifference to the rush of the stream; one had to make a deliberate effort to envisage the rubber-black legs paddling steadily below the still bodies.

  ‘You’re glad?’ she said.

  ‘Of course. It solves such a lot of problems—Gerald, Sillerby, me too. It makes me free.’

  The sun went in behind one of the lolloping silver-and-dark clouds that the wind was trundling in from Wales. Judy smiled and ate another of the strawberries, acid from a feeble summer, which they had bought in Abingdon. They were supposed to be having luncheon at the Randolph, so that Lady Fitzpeter could see that she still had all her charges undamaged, but Judy had telephoned the hotel from Abingdon with a totally false story about the Lagonda’s carburettor; then they had bought their picnic and found this meadow.

  They threw twigs in the river, drank white wine scarcely less acid than the strawberries, and discussed the permutations of pairing that had taken place in Lady Fitzpeter’s party between dinner and dawn; the other men were strangers or half-strangers to Tom, but Judy seemed to know all the girls. They analysed these transient amours a little patronisingly, as if looking down on shifting dunes from the stable platform of their own love.

  Touch and even glance might be subject to Judy’s rules, but there seemed to be quite large areas of the relationship to which they did not apply.

  Tom discovered another such area, much less comfortable, when he was holding the door of the Lagonda for her an hour later. They had been driven from their idyll by the appearance of the cob-swan, who came at them up the bank, neck held low, hissing, wings half-spread. The clouds too, had massed into a rain-impending darkness. Judy paused on the running-board, turned and put her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes were level with his and she looked at him for quite a long time with a strange, cold, speculative stare, like a farmer considering whether one of his beasts is ready for slaughter.

  ‘You’re going to have to be particularly nice to Mummy now,’ she said.

  Before he could answer she pulled him close and began to kiss him, angrily, so that both their mouths hurt.

  7

  Brantingham Manor, 6th July, 1926

  MRS. TARRANT CARESSED the rump of a cast-iron chamois.

  ‘Of course it’s perfectly ridiculous,’ she said, ‘but I am used to it. In fact I’m rather fond of it, which is just as well. You have only two choices with a thing like this, Mr. Hankey. Either you keep it in good order or you get rid of it.’

  She was by no means the leathery, vinegary dragon-priestess Tom had expected. Her face under her wide straw hat was creamy and rounded, with a softly elastic look, as of marshmallow. Her eyes were a strange pale brown, wide set, and her figure, though plump, was not at all stodgy. She moved in an aura of relaxed self-certainty which made it difficult to tell whether anything she said (and so far Tom had only exchanged with her a series of commonplaces about the weather and a few shared acquaintances) was sensibly reserved, or ironic, or (as it appeared when one thought about it afterwards) weirdly imperceptive.

  ‘You’d have a job getting rid of it, wouldn’t you?’ he said.

  It was a fifty-foot model of the Jungfrau, made of rocks set into concrete, adorned with knee-high metal fauna, and planted with even more out-of-scale alpines.

  ‘It is hollow, of course,’ she said, stamping her flat-heeled shoe as though she expected the mountain to boom.

  ‘Do you keep anything in it?’

  ‘Only mowers and things. Cyprian has always wanted to keep his steam engine here, but we found that laying the track up these slopes would be ridiculously expensive.�
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  ‘I’d love to see his engine.’

  ‘No doubt Cyprian will show it you,’ she said, turning away as if more interested in the view than in railway engines.

  The view was admirable in a vaguely oppressive way. Far to the south-east lay the green undulations of Lincolnshire vanishing into mist beyond which lay the North Sea. Nearer, but still three or four miles away, the Humber estuary stretched in gleaming stillness. Belts of woodland hid the industrial villages of the nearer shore, and sooty Hull was out of sight to the left, behind Welton Wold. Half way up the escarpment this strange foreign-seeming garden had been planted, the site deliberately chosen and enhanced so that its owners could gaze out at a huge tract of the England they were prepared to acknowledge and not see any of the England they preferred to ignore. The house itself—dark granite, sprawling, spired and turreted, both harsh and fanciful—was hidden by the crescent of Wellingtonias that had been planted to shelter the miniature mountain from the north and east. Tom tried to imagine Judy, four years old, trundling her wooden wheelbarrow across the slope of lawn below them. It must have been fun for a child having a private mountain to scramble over.

  ‘Do the chamois have names?’ he asked.

  Mrs. Tarrant turned back to him with a very odd look, as though he had said something which it was not his place to say.

  ‘They did once,’ she answered. ‘It is strange you should ask that. I haven’t thought about it for years, but a few nights ago I dreamed I was climbing up these paths trying to remember the names of the animals, and I couldn’t. When I was a little girl, Mr. Hankey, I’m afraid I was very difficult. My parents thought there was something wrong with me because I refused to walk or talk, though I was quite capable of doing so. The only person I would talk to was my Nanny. I could make her do whatever I wanted, you see. I used to make her push my perambulator out here and put it by that tree, and I would lie there and look at the mountain all morning. Doctors came to Brantingham to see me, specialists from London and Vienna, but it was no use. Either I paid no attention to them or I screamed until they went away. When I was six Papa had an old Swiss botanist to stay. Papa had met him at Interlaken when he was plant-collecting and the Swiss gentleman would not believe everything Papa told him about the plants he managed to grow here, so far north. Papa forced him to come and see. We are a strong-willed family, Mr. Hankey. While he was here he wandered out one morning to look at the rockery and found me lying in my pram. He was the kind of tiresome old gentleman who tries to strike up friendships with strange children. I do not remember anything about the episode, but apparently he told me that he lived near the mountain. Because his English was not good I believed he was saying he lived in the mountain. I got out of my pram and took him round all the paths and introduced him to the iron animals. That broke the spell. Do you understand?’

  ‘After that you walked and talked like anyone else?’

  ‘Not merely that, Mr. Hankey. I became a sensible and obedient child. I made my parents send Nanny away. I must make it clear that I do not approve at all of the way I behaved until then, and I would never have allowed it to happen to my own daughter.’

  Mrs. Tarrant nodded decisively. There was a sense of closing. She became like one of those remote, white Mediterranean houses, extraordinarily secret-seeming despite being so clearly visible amidst its vineyards. A moment before there had been a glimpse of lives being lived—a child crouched at the gate, a woman calling from a window—but now the shutters were blank and the place might not be inhabited at all. He wondered why she had told him about the episode. Perhaps it was because the dream had disturbed her, an uncontrolled upwelling of a spirit which she thought long since bound fast in one of her inmost caves. Tom’s chance remark had allowed her to bring the creature out into open day, inspect it, renew its gyves and send it back into the depths. So far he had been unable to perceive in either of Judy’s parents any kind of likeness to her, physical or habitual, but Mrs. Tarrant’s picture of the silent, wilful child, screaming at one specialist and ignoring the next, had something in it that related to Judy’s curiously scheming impulsiveness—will embodied in action, the action apparently random but the will directed to a goal. And at least he could guess now why Judy’s Nannies had never been allowed to stay long enough to acquire a hold over her.

  Tom was out on the rockery this morning as a result of another apparently random action. Mrs. Tarrant had a formidable notion of the role of a hostess at a house party. As breakfast was ending she produced a list from her bag and held up her hand for silence, then read out her orders of the day, assigning each guest to some officially recognised pleasure for a precise number of hours. Tom had been cheered that first morning to find himself down to play golf in the same foursome as Judy, but just as he had been getting ready to come down and join the others in the hall a maid had brought a note to his room saying that he was now booked to help Mrs. Tarrant on the rockery. ‘My daughter has thoughtlessly made some arrangement with a neighbour’ was all the explanation the note had contained, and Mrs. Tarrant had told him no more. He had become that unwanted creature, an extra man, and something had to be found for him to do. Normally, he assumed, one of the half-dozen gardeners would have helped Mrs. Tarrant.

  He had not been pleased. Gardening was an activity he had hitherto viewed from a distance and without interest. There were of course gardens of a sort at Sillerby—the melon-ground, between whose worn brick walls Plaice grew his regimented vegetables; the rose garden with its geometrical beds of always ailing Ophelia and Etoile; dark banks of reverted rhododendrons; the little West Garden, with its sundial and curlicue beds edged with lobelia and carrying in unvarying succession through each year wallflowers, then tulips, then geraniums. For Tom one had gardens round a house in the same way that one had wallpaper in a room, and that was all.

  Gardening with Mrs. Tarrant turned out to be more interesting than he had expected. At least it had the fascination of watching an expert at work.

  ‘Can you tell one plant from another, Mr. Hankey?’

  ‘I know my wild flowers pretty well.’

  ‘That will not do. You can fetch and carry for me, if you would be so kind. It is quite hard work but you look a strong young man. Really it is less nerve-racking for me to work with somebody who does not claim to be a gardener—quite sensible-seeming people still pull the wrong things out. I never let any of my own men do anything but fetch and carry up here. Now, if you will start by bringing me a bucket of peat and another of granite chips—the peat is the second mound along and the chips are at the end . . .’

  She knelt, took a crooked little tool from the pocket of her apron and began to fossick briskly but deftly through the soil round a tuft of gentians. Tom spent his morning running up and down the Jungfrau with a bucket in each hand. Every little pocket of soil seemed to require a slightly different cocktail of ingredients, and there was a surprising amount of rubbish to ferry down—weeds, and the dead-heads of spring-flowered plants, and thinnings from drifts of seedlings, and sometimes perfectly healthy-seeming clumps which Mrs. Tarrant rooted ruthlessly out, declaring that she used to like them but was bored with them now. Between each journey, while he waited for his next task, a stint of conversation took place. These were rather like the pockets of soil on the mountain, each apparently unrelated to the next, unpredictable in shape and content, but (he came to the conclusion) solemnly planned. He got the impression that while he was away Mrs. Tarrant selected not only the subject of the next exchange, but the course it must take, and if one of his answers diverged along some other channel she ignored it as completely as if he had not spoken. Certainly there was no question of his initiating a subject, however uncontroversial or trivial. He discovered this on his first return, when he arrived with the peat and chips and remarked that this was the sort of training of which the coach at the gym would approve.

  ‘Put them there,’ said Mrs. Tarrant. ‘I’m not quite ready yet. Does your father let all the Sillerby farms, Mr
. Hankey, or does he have some of them managed?’

  Tom explained. Her further questions, though well within the proprieties of inquisitiveness, were clearly designed to elicit evidence of the solidity of the Sillerby finances, but though the subject was far from fully explored by the time she sent him off on his next errand, she did not return to it. Instead she talked about a seaman’s charity of which she was president and expanded from there to the running of ‘our’ churches. He remembered that Judy had used the same phrase in the tea-shop at Market Weighton. ‘Our’ churches did not include Brantingham, of which Mr. Tarrant was Rector. They were in fact one church and three chapels built in the dock area by Mrs. Tarrant’s grandfather, and remained as foci for all the intricate politics of alms. Next time she asked Tom what he had done in the strike, and he was able to point out the run of the line on the plain below, along which he had taken his train seventeen times in nine days. She had evidently not heard of the fight in the cutting (strange that the place should be only a few miles over the wold behind them) so he said nothing about it. For one thing the adventure seemed even more absurd now than it had when he had told Judy about it in the President’s Garden; for another thing, though she evidently approved of his driving a train in the strike, he sensed that the anarchic, improvised nature of that particular adventure would not, in her eyes, do.

  ‘I will certainly suggest that Cyprian gets his engine out for you tomorrow,’ she said. ‘He will enjoy showing it off to somebody who knows about trains. And it will make a change from choir-outings. The engine is always a great success with the boys in our choirs, of course, though they do tend to become boisterous. Now will you please bring me haIf a bucket of larch-mould and some more of the coarse grit?’