A Summer in the Twenties

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘What do you see, Tom?’

  ‘Oh well . . . it’s just . . . I’m afraid I thought you were pushing the game on a bit fast, and it worried me . . . arranging for me to come in the Gorringes’ party and so on.’

  Her eyes widened like a child’s caught out in mid-deception, then she gave him a mock-sweet smile and vanished into the darkness of the coach. Her grey-gloved hand fluttered in the doorway like a moth, a gesture of farewell, a challenge to follow.

  The interior reeked of mothballs. The lamp gave too little light to show how dusty it all was, but it had the feel of having been regularly looked after. The body was wide enough to take four large people a side and Judy had settled into the furthest corner, shrunk into it as if for refuge. Tom put the lamp on the floor, hiding all but her legs in the upward shadow cast by the seat. When he sat, half way along and on the same side, the whole body of the coach swayed on its ten-foot springs, and the leather of the seat crackled with age.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she said in a dreamy voice. ‘I was an unhappy little girl. Now she seems a quite different person. I don’t often think of her as me. She used to spend a lot of time alone in the dark here, hiding.’

  ‘Your mother told me she had been a pretty rum little girl.’

  ‘Did she? Why did she tell you? She never talks about that sort of thing—at least I’ve never heard her.’

  ‘Something started her off—a dream she’d had, and then something I said which reminded her of it. I don’t think she really wanted to tell me. It just came out.’

  ‘What have you done to upset her, Tom? I can’t ask. She’d guess at once why I wanted to know.’

  He told her, taking much longer over it than he had with Bertie, trying to explain his feelings as well as the events around them. This turned out to be almost bafflingly difficult. At the time he had done what seemed to him the only possible thing, but when he came to analyse why this should have been so reason was very little help, the hindsight a positive barrier. He had been moving according to laws of emotional logic in which the categories of Aristotle or Hegel, though they might describe parallel phenomena belonging to the world of reason, could not make adequate connections. He was not at all sure how much Judy understood. She said nothing until he came to the meeting with Kate Barnes.

  ‘Oh, was it really her? What’s she like? I should love to meet her—though I suppose she’d think I was a complete fribble.’

  ‘I don’t know. She certainly thought I was a silly ass of the first water—I think she’s changed her mind now—but she was very jolly about it. She laughs a lot, you know. Shall I try and fix a meeting?’

  ‘Oh, yes, do, please. We mustn’t tell Mummy. Go on.’

  When he had finished she sat silent for a while, and then said something which seemed to have nothing to do with his story, though her tone showed that she thought it relevant.

  ‘Guess who I met in Scotland?’

  ‘No idea. Mr. Baldwin?’

  ‘Doesn’t he go to Aix or somewhere? I was staying with the Dunnerys.’

  ‘Don’t know them, Friends of my sister Nan’s, I think. Oh, I know—Gerald!’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Good Lord . . . I suppose it’s not as surprising as all that. He told me he was going the rounds of all those loopy Highland earls. Did he have Mrs. Heusen with him?’

  ‘Did he not!’

  ‘What did you make of her?’

  ‘Terrifying. Small and quiet and hard as teak.’

  ‘Gerald said . . .’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean she’s wicked or anything. Fact, one of the ways she’s terrifying is being terrifyingly good. But it’s her and your brother . . . You know Mummy’s horrid little dogs? They’re actually pretty sporting. Mummy isn’t much of a one for walks, but when Mr. Binns comes—did you meet him? He’s Daddy’s curate—he takes them up the Wold and lets them chase rabbits. So whenever he’s in the room they just sit and watch him, waiting for him to snap his fingers at them to show he’s ready to go. Your brother watches Mrs. Heusen like that, all the time.’

  ‘He’s been in a pretty bad way, you know. If he’s able to stay with Lord Dunnery and not get slung out in forty-eight hours, it’s all because of her.’

  ‘He’s very sweet. I got him to myself one afternoon and we spent it all talking about you. He thinks you’re the bee’s knees, but he’s worried about you, Tom.’

  ‘About him taking over Sillerby?’

  ‘About Mrs. Heusen taking over Sillerby. That’s what’s really going to happen, and he knows it. She’s quite like Mummy underneath.’

  The link between Gerald and the episode on Marfleet Strand suddenly became obvious.

  ‘I rather like your mother, you know,’ he said. ‘She may not like me, but . . .’

  ‘Oh, but she does! She told me. ‘That’s the real reason she was so furious. She couldn’t understand how somebody she wanted to have on her side turned out to be an enemy.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m an enemy.’

  ‘But I’m glad you like her. I do . . . especially when she’s not there.’

  Tom laughed and stretched.

  ‘But she’s terrifying too, isn’t she?’ said Judy. ‘I know she can’t do anything to me except stop giving me money and anyway I’ll have some of my own when I’m twenty-five, but . . . You know, I sometimes truly think she’s a sort of witch. I’ve got a witch-mother. She has this power over me which isn’t anything to do with the ordinary world . . .’

  She was absolutely serious. He could hear her voice shaking.

  ‘Sometimes you can undo that sort of spell with a kiss,’ he said.

  There was a brief pause.

  ‘All right,’ she said, and before he could move flung herself along the seat and into his arms. The touch of her lips, stiff, chill and rubbery, confirmed her tension and showed no sign of relaxing. Grandfather had been notorious for his gallantries, but surely not with the help of this uniform when it came to the actual encounter.

  ‘Something’s missing,’ he said, letting her ease free so that her head lay on his shoulder. ‘Eye of newt, do you suppose?’

  ‘I’ve told Woffles I’m never going to marry him.’

  ‘Poor old Woffles. He can’t have everything.’

  ‘I told him I didn’t see how he could expect me to marry a man who gave a stunning fancy-dress party and then came to it dressed as a carrot.’

  ‘Did he actually propose?’

  ‘Not exactly, but he wanted the last six dances. I tried to tell him about not really wanting to spend half the night with a prize vegetable, and we had a row, and it worked up to that.’

  ‘How did he take it?’

  ‘It’s difficult to show your feelings when you’re a carrot. He knocked over a tray of champagne glasses.’

  ‘I heard the crash.’

  Her hand roved among the braid of his chest, tracing the stiff intricacies.

  ‘Woffles tells Aunt Ivy absolutely everything,’ she whispered. ‘I’m surprised they don’t call each other “Dearest”.’

  ‘She’ll tell your mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He felt her body soften, relaxing in the slight release of fear that comes from the mere admission that fear exists.

  ‘I think I want to stop playing the game, Tom. It’s been fun. I was planning to spin it out for months. I had my eye on a chap I was going to make you desperately jealous of this Christmas, but now . . . I’m frightened, Tom. I want to get it over.’

  ‘Tell your mother, you mean?’

  ‘Everything’s gone so wrong. First I thought because you were going to have Sillerby she wouldn’t mind so much about Woffles and Rokesley—it’s Rokesley more than Woffles, you know. She’s supposed to be best friends with Aunt Ivy, and she is, but she’s envious all the same . . . then Mrs. Heusen got hold of your brother and she’s going to get hold of Sillerby too and I was a bit frightened, but you met Mummy and she really fell for you, and Daddy adores you anyway becau
se you know a bit about steam engines and the Early Fathers, so I thought it might be all right even without Sillerby. Somebody’s got to live at Brantingham, after all . . . Would you like to, Tom?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘It’s hideous, isn’t it?’

  ‘I rather fell for the rockery. I’m going to read up about Alpines this winter.’

  ‘Did you know that’s where the soul of Brantingham is? Not in the house at all—in the rockery.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘Where’s the soul of Sillerby?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I think it used to be in the stuffed deer in the billiard room, but Father’s moved it up to the Collection Room.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have done that. It doesn’t work. Of course the soul of Rokesley is here.’

  She patted the crackled leather of the seat.

  ‘I suppose it is.’

  ‘Oh I do love you, Tom! It’s amazing, isn’t it? You’re so clever and I’m so stupid and we still think the same way.’

  ‘You’re not stupid, and I’m only good at my books, which is a very minor sort of cleverness.’

  ‘Tosh. Shall I tell Mummy? I don’t know what will happen, I really don’t. She thinks you’re an enemy.’

  ‘I’m a neutral.’

  ‘Mummy hates newts much worse than enemies. You should have heard her during the war . . . Oh, Tom! You were right! Eye of newt! Did you say that on purpose?’

  ‘The first words of a lover after . . .’

  This time her kiss had that startling ferocity of which she was capable and it took him some time to make her gentle. She slid her cheek along his and whispered in his ear.

  ‘Now say something. Don’t think about it, just say it.’

  ‘I’m a different species of newt.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I suppose I’m trying to fight both sides—some of Kate’s friends, who want rifles and barricades in the streets, and decent landlords hanged at their own gates. And Bertie too . . .’

  ‘You’ve got to be careful about Bertie. Mummy . . .’

  ‘I know. Listen, you don’t have to tell her for a bit. Bertie’s going to talk to her about what happened at Marfleet Strand and try and persuade her I was right.’

  ‘Why? I thought he . . .’

  ‘It rather depends what I find out. I’ll make up my mind then.’

  ‘Are you really fighting Kate Barnes? You sounded—I’m not jealous, honestly, but you did sound a bit enthusiastic about her.’

  ‘She’s an extraordinary woman. I like her, personally, very much. I suppose this is always one of the problems—a lot of your allies are stupid stodges, and a lot of your enemies seem much more amusing. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about her quite a lot, and her uncle and aunt and some of the others, and I still don’t know the answer. What Kate wants in the end sounds fine. It’s the way she thinks she’s got to go to get there . . . somehow she doesn’t see—doesn’t feel—what it’s going to mean to the people who have to live through it. I don’t mean her enemies, I mean the people she thinks she’s working for.’

  She slid her head back, let her lips brush his as they passed and then settled against his shoulder.

  ‘What does it mean to us, Tom?’

  His hand caressed her small hip. Above the belt-line of the trousers one layer of sliding silk intervened between his palm and her skin. He was aware of the poised instant of choice. All the tension now lay in the carapace of his uniform. He had only to take her hand, move it up and show it the little brass hooks that fastened his collar, and then her fingers would begin to undo them . . . They could stop playing the game and return to where they had been the night after Father’s wire had come to Hendaye. She had already rejected Woffles, and in this place which she called its soul she was ready to reject Rokesley too. He bent and kissed her closed eyes.

  ‘I think we should go on playing the game,’ he said.

  Through the stiffness of the crimson cloth he could feel a tremor shake her body.

  ‘Not if you don’t want to,’ he said quickly. ‘Though it’s been much more fun than I expected, and . . . well, I don’t know about proposing to and being accepted by a girl on the rebound from a carrot.’

  ‘Don’t tease.’

  ‘I’m not. It was only a way of putting it. When you brought me here you were pretty upset, weren’t you? The row with Woffles, and having to tell your mother. But you don’t have to—not yet, anyway. I think Bertie will manage things . . .’

  ‘Kiss me.’

  In the luxuriousness of her response he regretted his choice, but it was made.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ve had a row with Woffles and to rub it in I shall toy with the affections of another gentleman.’

  ‘All six dances?’

  ‘Yes. We’ll go back by the nursery and tell them I’ll drive you over, so they can go home when they want, poor things . . . Oh, Tom, I wish I wasn’t used to being rich! I do love you, I do. But not if it means chicken farms.’

  It was only when Tom was hanging up his uniform in the boxy little bedroom at Wiverham, with the dawn chorus racketing outside among the heavy-leaved limes, that the sustained ecstasy of those final dances slid abruptly away. He stood quite still for a while, his bare legs goose-pimpling below his shirt-tails, as he came to terms with the realisation that in persuading Judy that it would be unfair to her not to continue playing her rules for a while he had been behaving decidedly less honourably than he had at the time imagined.

  11

  Hull, 24th August, 1926

  ‘EVENING, MRS. BARNES.’

  ‘Good evening, Mr. Hankey. Mr. Barnes, he’s out, but if you don’t mind waiting. I’ve a pot on, not ten minutes.’

  ‘Will he be . . . ?’

  ‘Only up the Gangway Enders.’

  As always when she spoke of her husband Mrs. Barnes’s tone was of fretful patience, as if anything he was involved in was certain to be an act of wilful eccentricity, such as no wife could have foreseen or prevented but whose consequences she was now fated to endure. This attitude extended far beyond his politics and his gym and his atheism (she herself was a devotee of a splinter off a chip of a schismatic element of Primitive Methodism) to his ordinary work and his smallest comings and goings. The Gangway Enders was a club for retired dockers and seamen, an admirable and harmless institution in which Mr. Barnes, though not yet retired, had typically managed to involve himself as an unpaid helper. From it he brought Mrs. Barnes good gossip, as well as the occasional perk by way of a half loaf or a shin-bone to boil for broth, but Mrs. Barnes was certainly not going to approve of his being there—or anywhere, even at home. It seemed to be one of her axioms that whatever place he was in at a given moment was ipso facto the wrong one. Kate Barnes insisted that she loved him very much.

  She was a very short woman, not four foot six, but without the impression of nippy humour which invested Mr. Barnes. Her build was more that of a Shetland pony, broad and stocky, almost but not quite stunted; moreover she had that animal’s unhumorous and untrusting brown eye, and its air, even on fine days, of being forced to stand under its own private and invisible downpour. ‘You’ll make a fine widow when I’m gone, Tess,’ Mr. Barnes used to say.

  Tom followed her down the exiguous hallway of Number Five, Ulundi Close, past the foot of the stair and into the kitchen. By now he had seen three kitchens in the area and had found them very varied, despite being almost identically arranged and equipped. (Front rooms, into which strangers were normally shown, seemed much the same as each other, unused, airless, cramped with heavy furniture. ‘Front parlours only come alive when you’ve a corpse laid out in them,’ Kate had told him.) The spirit of Mrs. Barnes’s kitchen was of obsessive precision. Every object not merely had its place, but looked as though it knew it. Indeed Tom happened to have been present when her sister, Mrs. Trawder—with whom Tom lodged when he was in Hull—had brought her a brass candlestick as a birthday gift. Mrs. Ba
rnes had been delighted with it, and though it was already gleaming had at once given it a celebration polish, and then spent a good half hour arranging all the other movable objects in the room—pots and crockery as well as ornaments—so that the candlestick should have its only and inevitable location towards the left of the shelf above the stove. When Mr. Barnes had come home that evening he had played a game which both of them clearly enjoyed, noticing first the change of place of his pickle jar, and then following the trail of clues back, greeting each with a nod and a grunt, until he reached the candlestick, but saying nothing in the end. They managed each other very well, Tom had come to realise; though they could hardly speak without instant disagreement, what they spoke about tended to be superficial; in glance and gesture they maintained a dialogue of deep and peaceful consensus.

  Now Mrs. Barnes picked up her husband’s chair and placed it to the left of the table. Ritual apparently decreed that though it was all right for a visitor to sit in it, he must not do so where Mr. Barnes sat, Tom folded his cap and put it in his jacket pocket, then put the parcel on the table. Mrs. Barnes looked at it and glanced away.

  ‘Do you know anyone round here who drinks Ty-Phoo Tea, Mrs. Barnes?’

  ‘One or two perhaps, Mr. Hankey.’

  ‘It’s just that Father went and bought some and Mrs. Donkin felt he was accusing her of something. He found her putting it out for the bonfire and there was a terrific row and they each gave each other notice. I had to save the day by saying I knew someone who might like it.’

  This was an almost true story, arising from one of Father’s spasms of economy three or four years ago, and Tom felt no shame in updating it. At their very first meeting, the morning after he had slept on the front-room sofa following the riot on Marfleet Strand, he had mercifully guessed that it would not do to offer Mrs. Barnes any payment for the night’s lodging. He now paid Mrs. Trawder for his room, and that was quite acceptable, but any help to Mrs. Barnes had to be accompanied by a face-saving pretext. He had found this tricky until one day he happened to mention some facet of the servants’ life at Sillerby, and then it came out that Mrs. Barnes had herself been in service—scullery maid to a doctor’s family in one of the gaunt laurel-surrounded mansions beyond the Willerby Road—and that a dream-life of domestic service in some great household still haunted her. It was possible to bait the trap of charity with tidbits about housekeepers and footmen—a story of Mrs. Bird’s inquisitions or Stevens’s bad temper making it necessary for Tom to sneak a torn jacket away for Mrs. Barnes to mend, and be paid for mending, or to bring a pair of loathed trousers for her to pawn—or just as likely give away to a needier neighbour. Now, for instance, she unwrapped the parcel of tea but stowed only one of the packets in her store-cupboard, putting the other three on the shelf by the door. Later she would distribute them round the Close. Next she poured Tom a pint of tea from the brown enamel kettle on the stove, and added a dollop of sweetened condensed milk. The resulting mixture was bright orange; the bitterness of the stewed leaves mingled with but did not overcome the caramel taste of the milk; it made Tom’s ears ring, but he had found he could swallow it if he thought of it as boot soup rather than any sort of tea.