The Anniversary

by Ann Swinfen

  The Anniversary

  Ann Swinfen

  Copyright © Ann Swinfen 2010

  Kindle Edition

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1996 by Century

  First paperback edition published in 1996 by Arrow

  Ann Swinfen has asserted her moral right under the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified

  as the author of this work.

  All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than

  that in which it is published and without a similar condition

  being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  For David

  and for our children

  Tanya, Michael, Katrina, Nikki and Richard

  With love

  Chapter 1

  The watercolour of St Martins on the wall above the telephone table had been painted by Frances Kilworth's younger son Tony just before he left art school, and given to her four years ago on her fiftieth birthday. She looked pensively at it as she spoke.

  'Yes, of course I'll be there, Natasha.' She raised her voice slightly. At ninety-four her grandmother's hearing was remarkable, but she had never been at ease on the telephone.

  'I'm driving down very early, before the traffic builds up on the M4. Giles still isn't quite sure whether he can make it. Rehearsal in the morning. They're filming a second series of his sitcom – the one that's doing so well.'

  Natasha Devereux gave a snort down the telephone, which might have been a suppressed laugh. Probably not a favourable one.

  'Can we expect him later, then, doushenka?'

  'He's going to try to come down after lunch. That would mean he could manage most of the day.' Frances recognised a familiar note in her voice, at once apologetic and pleading. It often surfaced when she spoke of her husband to Natasha. She despised herself for it.

  'Drive carefully,' said Natasha automatically before ringing off, as if Frances were still a teenager, dashing about the Herefordshire lanes in her beloved soft-top MG. Frances sighed. Gone. Long gone. Vanished with that younger self, who now seemed as remote as a stranger.

  Frances stood for a moment with her hand still on the telephone. The watercolour constantly filled her afresh with delight. Tony had managed to catch the endearing atmosphere of the place – the jumble of styles, from the mediaeval tower and the half-timbered sixteenth-century main house to the elegant Georgian frontage and orangery (now dilapidated), added when the family had aspired to gentility in the mid-eighteenth century. By showing it from an unusual angle he had been able to reveal its haphazard chronology. The horseshoe formed by the house and stableyard was flung round like the rough embrace of the military cloak St Martin himself had wrapped around the shivering beggar. In the right foreground (slightly shifted by artistic licence, she thought) was the great copper beech, planted in 1790 and recorded in the estate book of the period. Its partner, mirroring it across the lawn, had begun to rot in the sixties and had come down in a storm seven years ago. The surviving tree was the first they had learned to climb, she and her brother Hugh, soon after their mother had brought them to St Martins to escape the blitz.

  * * *

  Hugh will never find me here, thinks Frances, crouching under the rhododendrons. She holds her breath. He is ranging about the lawn, poking at shrubs with a stick, peering down the well that Mummy is always so fussed about. Then he seems to lose interest. He throws down his stick and starts to climb the copper beech. He jumps and catches hold of one of the lower branches, then walks his feet up the trunk and claws at the branch until he gets his tummy over it. Soon she can see nothing of him but the shaking of the branches. Furious, she crawls out from under the rhododendrons and runs across the lawn.

  'You're supposed to be finding me!' she wails.

  He drops neatly from the tree beside her, and grabs her arm.

  'Got you!'

  'It's not fair!'

  She hits him.

  Soon they are rolling over and over amongst the dead leaves under the tree, punching each other until they are tired.

  Later, when they are lying on their backs, gazing up through the branches at the patchwork of purple leaves and blue sky, she complains again.

  'You are a beast. It wasn't fair.'

  He rolls over on to his stomach and grins to himself.

  * * *

  The morning of Saturday, 11 June, 1994, dawned milky white as Frances joined the M4 at Junction 10. The road stretched westwards ahead of her, almost empty. In three hours' time the tarmac would be hot with the friction of the hundreds of tyres rolling over it, the trees in the adjacent fields shaking with the thunder of lorries pounding to and from London.

  Now she could see a kestrel hovering lazily overhead – not three miles from Reading. She reached up and wound back the sunroof, then pressed the buttons to open both front windows fully. Her sensible Cavalier hatchback could never rival the excitement of her old MG, but she still drove in a wild tangle of air when she was alone. Giles objected peevishly when he travelled with her, closing windows, hunching down with his coat collar turned up when she refused to turn on the heating, ostentatiously coughing into his handkerchief with unspoken reproach: My voice has to be cherished, I need to be cosseted, my looks and my voice are my fortune.

  She shook herself in irritation. No need to think about Giles just yet. She would reach St Martins in time for breakfast. Probably before the children had even woken up. Yesterday afternoon Tony had collected Katya after school, on his way from London, and driven her down to Herefordshire; Lisa and Paul had planned to drive over from Worcester during the evening. It was only a month till the baby was due, but Lisa had insisted that she could not possibly miss the party.

  'Not come to St Martins' fiftieth anniversary, Mum? I wouldn't miss it for the world. Anyway, Natasha would never forgive me.'

  Frances had made protesting noises down the phone.

  'If anything disastrous should happen,' Lisa said stoutly, 'Paul can always run me into the hospital in Hereford. It only takes twenty minutes. But I'm fine, really. Never felt better.'

  This was not strictly true, but for Lisa Fenway the birth of her first child and Natasha's party for the fiftieth anniversary of the St Martins community had become somehow entangled in her mind. She had an odd, superstitious belief – which she would have admitted to no one, not even Paul – that if she did not go to the party something dreadful would happen to the baby. Which was idiotic of her, as she knew very well.

  * * *

  Frances switched on the car radio, tuning in to Classic FM. It offended her by playing only fragments, never completing a piece, but it provided an agreeable and undemanding background to the drive. She had always preferred driving alone, but since her marriage it was a pleasure she had rarely been able to enjoy. For years there had been the demands of others, creating tensions, making the metal and glass box into a prison. First Giles. In those days (before he had lost his licence) insisting on driving, though he was not nearly as good a driver as she was. Then Anya, fretting in her carrycot, the back seat around her wedged with carrier bags full of nappies and baby powder and made-up bottles of formula. Then Nicholas and Tony and Lisa. All of them quarrelling, wanting to stop, demanding to be sick or to go to the loo, and being pacified with chocolate by Giles, who laughed at Frances's rules about no sweets between meals.

  Then, much later, when Anya and Nicholas were almost grown-up and Tony and Lisa were bored and aggr
essive teenagers, it started all over again with Katya.

  I'm too old for this, Frances had thought, assembling a new set of baby paraphernalia, alien in design and purpose from the objects that had cluttered her early motherhood.

  Tony and Lisa had complained and bickered about the space in the car being encroached upon by the new baby. Who – then – had been angelic. Quiet and good, with a smile to melt hearts. But her brother and sister had been unmoved.

  'Honestly,' she had overheard Lisa saying to Tony. 'At their age. I think it's disgusting.'

  Tony had snickered. 'Just Dad trying to prove he's still virile. Or Mum trying to stop him straying.'

  * * *

  Giles cried, that time, in the autumn of 1980. Tears, of course, came easily to him. They were one of his professional skills. No more to be trusted than his charm, once so enchanting.

  'I swear to you, Frances,' he said brokenly, burying his face in her breast. 'You are the only woman I love. That little bint who's been in the Noel Coward with me – honestly, I was just giving the kid a bit of fun, showing her the sights, introducing her to some useful people.'

  He heaved himself up, glowering. Frances noticed that he was beginning to thicken about the waist.

  'How dare she ring you up like that! Who does she think she is?' he demanded crossly.

  Ah yes, this is the real Giles. His sense of dignity is offended. Little Ms Bootsie Fabersham (what a ridiculous name) is finished. She has not played the game by his rules. She has invaded his bolt-hole, his private place, my home.

  Her eye was caught briefly by a cool still life painted by Natasha and hanging on the bedroom wall. It was a study in yellows and greens, with a shaft of sunlight falling diagonally across a table.

  He kissed her hair, stroked her.

  Why don't I have the strength to throw him out of my bed, out of my life? Frances asked herself resentfully, knowing that she would not, feeling herself melt. Pitying him, with his injured pride.

  She had not taken the pill for months. Until now there had been no need. She was not really worried. After all, she told herself, I am forty. Nothing can possibly happen after just once. But it did. And the result was Katya. A beautiful baby. Perfect in every way.

  And three months before her birth, Giles was photographed with his latest girlfriend, attending the première of a film in which he had played a minor role.

  * * *

  In the bedroom she liked best at St Martins – a queer, lopsided space up under the mediaeval roof beams – Katya Kilworth stirred and pushed back the duvet, but did not wake. Her clothes were scattered all over the floor, a heap of black – skirts and sleeveless tunics and baggy jeans and boy's football boots. In bed she wore a grandad woollen vest with buttoned neck and long sleeves. It sported a wartime utility label in the back, which was currently considered by Katya's peers to be cool. She had bought it in the local Oxfam shop for 50p. After she had worn it for an hour or so, it developed a curious smell – reminiscent of wet dog. It was scratchy and too hot, but she had bought it to annoy her mother and so felt obliged to wear it.

  Irritably she half woke, threw the duvet off the bed entirely, then stripped off the woollen vest and flung it across the room. The pale light of early morning fell on her from the uncurtained window, and she looked at herself in disgust, loathing her body. She threw herself on to her face, clutching a pillow in her arms and remembering, as she drifted back into sleep, her balding teddy bear. She kept it hidden at St Martins, to avoid the shame of Mum turning it up in Reading. Tomorrow she would rescue Ted and bring him back to her bed. No one disturbed your privacy at St Martins. Which was odd, really.

  * * *

  Two floors below, Natasha Devereux lay awake on her high, severe, four-poster bed. She slept very little these days. Not profound sleep. On the other hand, she dozed frequently. During the day, sitting in her favourite high-backed chair in the window bay of the drawing room, she would be dozing and yet at the same time aware, in some part of her mind, that she was still present in the room. So that Irina or Mabel, coming in to urge unwanted cups of tea on her, would start to tiptoe out again – only to be confronted with her disconcertingly sharp eyes. Sometimes they manoeuvred William into the chair opposite, where he would sit, quiet and biddable as a well trained dog. My son-in-law, since his stroke, looks older than I do myself, thought Natasha a little complacently. Even though he is seventeen years younger.

  The white voile bed curtains stirred and billowed in the breeze from the windows. She had caught from her English husband the habit of leaving the windows open at night, except in the most severe weather.

  'Leave the windows open, Edmund dousha moya?' she had exclaimed, scandalised, the first time they had slept together, that joyful night in Paris, the spring after the Great War. 'The night air is poisonsome, everyone knows this.'

  'Poisonous, my darling, not poisonsome,' he said, laughing, touching her lips with the tip of his finger. 'And that is foolish nonsense taught you by your Nianyushka. I have slept with the windows open all my life, and look at me!'

  And she had looked at him. He still wore uniform. It was not so splendid as the Russian uniforms of her childhood, but the sober, well tailored lines defined the shape of him, filling her with longing. He started to undress, exposing the scar on his chest that he had earned at Passchendaele, still pink and vulnerable. She began to kiss it.

  Now, lying in the bed at St Martins, she was filled with wonder that she could have survived this last half-century without him, after a second war, nearing its end, had taken from her the man the first war had brought to her. It seemed inconceivable – such a gulf of time. By tenuous links her thoughts slid to Anya, her troubled eldest great-granddaughter. At thirty-four, thinking her life was over. Anya was only just beginning.

  She keeps too much to herself, thought Natasha. What is going on in that tight, well controlled brain of hers? Too much she thinks of things, of ideas, of theories. All beautifully categorised and indexed and filed. She never speaks of the feelings. Irina, now, my so-disappointing daughter, she speaks of feelings all the time, her own feelings. Always they are hurt or offended in some way. But Anya – no, she is like Edmund, very British. Does she even speak of feelings with this man of hers, whom she is so reluctant to bring to my party?

  * * *

  In the tiny bed-sit in North Oxford, which was all she could possibly afford – no, more than she could afford – Anya Kilworth lay very straight on her back under a single plain white sheet. She was not asleep. Probably she had not slept all night. She loved this room, especially when the trees were in leaf. Without lifting her head from the pillow she could look out through the uncurtained window at a rolling seascape of treetops, just now heaving gently in the light summer wind. The spiky candelabra of horse chestnuts, pink and white, caressed the looser, wilder, yellow cascades tumbling from the laburnums.

  The back garden of this house – divided for many years amongst a shifting population of students, graduates and university hangers-on – was in a state of rampant neglect. The laburnums had seeded themselves, and were scattered about in every size from finger length to a height of twenty feet or more. If you ventured into the garden you had to fight your way through an undergrowth of cleavers and bindweed and ground elder, clawing at you to waist height. There were tunnels where the secret cats of North Oxford patrolled on their nightly business and at the far end, beneath the crumbling garden wall of brick, lay the remains of an asparagus bed, from which Anya had been able to pick a few shoots last week when Spiro came to dinner.

  It had been meant as a reconciliation. They would have a pleasant, relaxed meal and talk about neutral subjects. Make a fresh start. But somehow it had gone wrong. They started to quarrel, and then they were shouting at each other. To her horror, Anya heard herself telling him to leave. It seemed to be some other person speaking – a shrewish woman with a harsh, self-righteous voice. She did not want him to go, and had been cold with shock ever since.

&nbs
p; She had seen him once, two days ago, in the Bodleian. They had nodded at each other and walked on without speaking. He was supposed to be coming with her to St Martins today. A month ago at least, they had arranged to meet at the station, in time for the Hereford train. Should she ring him to remind him? No, it would be too humiliating. What if he did not turn up at the station? Should she wait? He had the infuriating Greek habit of indifference towards time. If you missed a train, so what? Another one would come, today, tomorrow.

  I wish I could talk all this through with someone, thought Anya. Though I know I'm not the kind of person who talks about such things. I wish I were the sort of daughter who can talk to her mother, the way Lisa talks to Mum. Though Mum is hardly the best person to give advice. Granny Irina is useless. Once, I might have gone to Natasha, but she is getting so old now, and frail. I can't burden her. And although I have lots of acquaintances – colleagues, people I go to pubs with – I don't really have any close friends. Mum would at least understand the dilemma I'm confronted with.

  Anya smiled a little bitterly, flung herself crossly on her side and looked at the clock. God, it was still only six.

  * * *

  Frances Kilworth stopped once only on her journey. Not because she needed petrol, but because she liked to get out and stretch and view the countryside away from the tunnel-like motorway with its monotonous scenery. She had turned off the M4 at Junction 15, to take a shortcut cross-country, instead of following it the long way round to the M5. Giles always wanted to keep to the motorways. It confirmed his perception of himself as busy and sought-after, dashing about the country on the blue lines radiating out from London. It was the source of one of the many irritations between them that Frances much preferred the adventure of unknown country roads. Little hidden villages, valleys concealed from the major highways by enfolding hills, were to her an enrichment of the experience of travelling. She had never been able to make him see that her cross-country routes often shortened the journey as well as making it less tiring.