“Highland cattle,” exclaimed Fred, looking on to a rugged field.
“Mr Monteith likes to keep some of them,” the chauffeur said. “I hear there are two calves expected. Maybe you’ll be here when a calf is born.”
“I can help,” he said. “I’ve done it before.”
“I don’t think,” said the man, “that anyone but the vet and the head cowman will be let near the cow when she gives birth.”
But as they arrived in front of the house a boy rushed through the garden, crying to Fred, “Come quickly, Father says, and you can see the calf born.” Turning to Molly he remembered, “Father says will you excuse him. One of the cows is calving.”
“Right,” said Molly, and as the two boys raced away she made her way up the steps. Donald Monteith’s wife, Jessica, was in the hall when she arrived. Molly stared at the stags’ heads mounted on the walls with incredulity.
“I’ll show you to your room first,” Jessica Monteith said. She was a tall woman with pale red hair. As they went upstairs she said, “I take it Willy found your son.”
“They both dashed off,” Molly said. “Is Willy your son?”
“Yes,” Jessica said and as they reached a landing over which hung a large painting she walked a little way along a corridor and opened the door of Molly’s room.
“We’re in the drawing room. Do come down when you’re ready,” she said. “Your son will be upstairs in the nurseries, in the room next to Willy’s. I’m sure he’ll enjoy himself – all the toys are there.”
After she had gone Molly stared upwards in amazement. The ceiling was painted all over, with men and women in eighteenth-century versions of Roman clothes. There were bulls and goats and swans. From the window she could see, beyond the garden, hills rising. And as she watched she saw two figures, her hostess’s son and her own, running up through the grass. Halfway up they bent over, examining something. Molly combed her hair, washed her hands and put on fresh make-up. She left her hat on the bed and went downstairs. There were six people in the vast room, where logs burned in a huge grate. The walls were pale, a grand piano stood at the other end of the room. A great vase of pale lilies stood on a table. Windows on one side looked over the garden and out on to the hillside.
Donald Monteith, in tweeds, said, “It’s not a beautiful house, architecturally, but we’ve lived here a long time and we come here whenever we can. Partly because I’m a sportsman when I get the chance.”
Molly, who knew he spent most of his time between the City of London and Miami, said, “Nice to have somewhere to go. What about the calf?”
“False alarm,” he said, looking disappointed.
There were two other couples in the room, the Floyds and the Jamiesons. Mary Floyd, small, dark and pretty, said, “You live in Kent, Lady Allaun?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “But I have to be in London a lot, too. The problem is that there are factories in both spots.”
“Quite schizophrenic,” said Mrs Floyd. Molly saw in her eyes that mixture of anger and pleading women frequently offered her. They felt they had no reason to regret their lives, which were led around their homes and marriages, yet they wondered if they might be doing something else.
“Yes, it can be,” Molly said to her dryly, thinking of her £100,000 debt and the threatened transport strike which would put her out of action.
“You’re such a busy woman –” Harold Jamieson said, coming up to her with an odd look on his face, half afraid, half challenging. She knew he was remembering that her life with men had been a shambles and that half her business operations were dubious if not actually illicit. Well, she thought, she couldn’t deny it. She looked at him, in his London suit, caught a glimpse of Donald Monteith, in his tweeds, and suddenly recognized Arnold and Norman Rose, standing with their glasses in their hands, at the bar of a drinking club in London. She smiled rather broadly and said to Jamieson, “I just make money selling bikes and I offer jobs to a few people and luckily, so far, I’ve never had to fire anybody yet – or only for pinching.”
Jamieson, who had just closed a spares factory in Middlesborough and made 200 workers redundant, said “I pray you never have to. It’s not a pleasant experience.”
“On either side,” Molly said.
“Let me get you another drink, Molly,” Jessica said. But glancing at the doorway, where a woman in a green overall stood, she said, “Oh – well, lunch is ready.”
She sat next to little Colin Floyd who said enthusiastically, “I’ve been wanting to meet you. I think this whole Messiter business has been a tour de force. I don’t know how you’ve managed it.”
He was a handsome little man, chief shareholder and managing director of a thriving electronics firm. She said, “I’m not out of the wood yet. I’m pretty worried about this transport strike.”
“Aren’t we all?” he told her. “It’s easier for the Monteiths of this world. They have big interests abroad which cushion them. I’m a British businessman working exclusively in Britain. I have to deal with the many vagaries of British life. Still, cheer up, the strike may not happen.”
“I’ve decided that if it does,” Molly said in an undertone, “I’m getting the workforce to ride the buggers to the docks. They’ll call me a strike-breaker, it’ll embarrass my brother Jack no end – he’s an MP – but my idea is that it’s like the old notice in the pub. ‘We have agreed with the bank that we will not cash cheques if they will not sell beer.’ See, if the unions don’t interfere with me I won’t interfere with them. The problem is, will the workers do it?”
“That’s always the problem here, it seems to me,” said Caroline Jamieson feelingly. “No wonder money’s flooding out of the country. Are you interested in opera?” she asked Molly.
“Not much, I’m afraid,” Molly said. “I’ve seen a lot of plays recently.” For a little while they discussed the plays running in the West End until Monteith boomed across the table, “More wine for the Boadicea of British industry,” and Molly said, “The trouble is, Boadicea got beaten.”
“Well, my dear, I’m sure that won’t happen to you,” he said.
Colin Floyd turned to Monteith and said, “You know I’ve got a craving for a round of golf. I don’t suppose there’s a course near here.”
“Straight in the car after lunch,” Monteith said instantly. “What a remarkable thing – I was thinking along those lines myself.” He pushed his glass back. “That’s enough of that then. Did you bring your clubs?” he asked Floyd.
“Well, it just so happens that I did,” Floyd told him.
“Good man,” said his host. “Just the thing to put the ulcers on the run. Jamieson?”
“Try to leave me behind,” said the red-faced man. And bang goes my chance of cornering you in the library or attacking you in the conservatory, thought Molly Allaun. Well, I’ll nobble you yet.
So that afternoon Molly splashed and swam with the two boys in the water under the green dome of the swimming pool. Then Willy took her on a tour of the farm with its clean hay-filled byres, containing clean, fluffy cattle, and its neatly painted chicken huts outside which fat hens scratched in well swept runs. It looked almost like a farm set up for city children to visit on educational trips. Fred talked knowledgably with the farm manager and, carrying home two eggs from the hens, they all went back, the boys discussing their trips to Disneyland as they walked through the darkening formal garden, where chill misty air hung over the clipped bushes and trees, which had been trimmed into the shapes of birds and crowns. Over supper upstairs in the attic rooms Fred decided that he would stay for a week or two. “Gavin will be needing help with the pheasant chicks,” Willy said importantly.
“You haven’t been invited and you have to go to school,” Molly said. “And I’m afraid I can’t spare the time to stay here with you.”
There were ten more guests for dinner. They all sat round a big table in candlelight. Next to Molly was Colin Floyd. On her other side she had a neighbour of the Monteiths, Sir Grah
am Keyes. Molly, by now getting the shrewd impression that none of this dream of loch and glen was without commercial underpinnings of skyscraper and Concorde to New York, was not surprised to find the industrialist buried beneath the laird. “What am I doing here?” she thought in amazement, sitting in the light of candles in old silver sconces, with portraits of the Monteiths, one dating from the seventeenth century, on the walls around her. Glancing about her at the women’s jewels, winking in the candlelight, and the solid faces of the men, she felt almost frightened, noticing that here all was not as it seemed, catching, occasionally, the gamblers’ expressions, watchful eyes in seemingly relaxed faces. And the room filled suddenly, in her mind’s eye, with the figures of the unemployed and hopeless, in their anoraks, faded overcoats, cheap shoes and old sneakers. They leaned against the walls of the room and against the old paintings. They were pale. I must be mad, she thought, hauling her attention back to Graham Keyes. He said, “There’s only one flaw to my land – the moor’s just enough tracks for cycles and it’s just steep enough to make bicycling difficult unless you’ve legs like a marathon runner. So do you know what they do?”
Molly laughed and said, “They get little power-driven cycles –”
“Which scare the pheasants all over the place,” he said. “I tried to ban them but, do you know, my gamekeeper caught two poachers the other day and that’s what they were using – quick and easily manoeuvred in the lanes, you see.”
“I’m sorry,” Molly said. She added, “I had a dream last night that they were soundless, sort of floating through the air.”
“What’s that?” he asked, “wish fulfilment or woman’s intuition?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “What’s your guess for the coming years – floating bikes?”
“Who knows?” he said and leaning across the table said, “Barnabas – what’s your horoscope-Johnny give you as a prediction for the coming years? Lady Allaun would like to know.”
“Wouldn’t we all?” said Jessica Monteith.
The man opposite drank from his claret glass and said jovially, “He advises me to make sure I’m wearing clean underwear in case I’m run over crossing Piccadilly Circus and taken to hospital. Listen, Keyes, I don’t pay a man five hundred guineas a year to tell you the future – just me.
Colin Floyd said, “Good God – you give him that? Is he worth it?”
“He is to me,” he said.
“I just can’t see you sitting in a flat in Cricklewood while some tatty character gazes into a crystal ball,” Keyes said.
“Cricklewood?” the man called Barnabas replied. “He lives in Belgravia.”
But Molly, drifting back into the dream where the room was filled with silent, watchful faces of the poor, began to think nothing was real, not the candles, the plates, the women’s jewellery – nothing seemed substantial. Something’s going to happen, said a voice in her head, and as she tried to contend with the expectation running through her, for no reason, she realized that Colin Floyd had broken off his sentence and that Jessica Monteith was standing at the table, trying to catch her eye while the other women had left and were drifting to the door. She realized that something Isabel had told her about was happening – the ladies were withdrawing.
In the drawing room Jessica told her, “It’s absurd – we actually don’t do it in London. Just while we’re here. That’s because half the time in London the guests are from America or other places where the custom died out, or never existed. The men are supposed to swap racing tips or whatever they do while we talk about our children and household management. I believe they sit there telling dirty jokes. I know we do, sometimes. Actually, it’s rather fun, I think.”
Feeling bullied, Molly said, “It’s like what professional criminals do when they’re planning their next job. They say, ‘Why don’t you girls step upstairs and try on each other’s clothes while we talk some man’s talk.’ And the women all go out of the room.”
There was a silence, broken fairly quickly by Jessica, who said, “Well, actually I think it’s rather a nice old custom being maintained.”
But she saw she had made the women feel gloomy and excluded, as if their dresses and jewels had suddenly become burkhas and leather nose pieces. Before she could make amends Jessica said into the small silence, “I was expecting Bert Precious, but he had to stay in London today. He’s coming up by the shuttle tomorrow morning.”
Graham Keyes’ wife asked, “Is Corrie coming, too?”
“Oh no,” Jessica said. “She’s still in Canada.”
“Looking after her father?” enquired the other.
“I gather he died,” Jessica said. “But I think it was what happened to their son which drove them apart. So very sad.”
“There’s no reason for it,” the other woman said. “Corrie and Bert did everything parents could. It was exactly the same with the Fellowes family – devoted parents, a lovely, bright girl – such a useless tragedy.”
“I blame the pushers,” Mary Floyd said angrily. “They’re responsible. And I just don’t believe that enough’s being done to track them down.”
Molly felt removed again. She still saw, outside these windows, which were curtained, the crowd on the hillside. As she sat in the room with the other women, who talked of their friends and places she had never been to, she felt the gulf between herself and the other women to be very great. How could it be otherwise? It was not even a matter of background but of how she now led her life. She must seem to them very tough, almost freakish, doing the job most of them left to husbands, brothers and fathers.
Jessica moved across the room and turned on a lamp. “So peaceful here, isn’t it?” she said, smiling at the silent Molly.
“Oh yes,” she agreed, “very peaceful.”
“These old houses are unique,” Mary Floyd said. “It’s partly the sense of one family having lived here for hundreds of years. Just imagine – one day, in due course, Willy will be living here with his wife and children.”
“Yes,” said Jessica, but Molly had the idea that small Mary Floyd’s ebullience, born of what looked like a united marriage, did not strike all the women as being appropriate. Second wives themselves, some of them, they all knew that divorce and the birth of new children would result in their own evictions and the disinheriting of their children. Quite a nervy world, thought Molly, who in that sense had never had anything to lose.
And, again, came the sense of change coming, almost excitement which made it hard to concentrate, until, later, the men came in looking cheerful, and drunker than they had been at dinner. Jessica went over to her husband and put her arm through his. “You said not long,” she told him. “And look how you’ve kept us waiting.”
“We’ve bored each other sufficiently now,” he said. “We join you with great relief.” But Molly reflected that as they sat over the port they might well have been talking business. She badly wanted to talk to Jamieson about her bicycle engine but was beginning to realize that here was a world where men talked business and exchanged tips in clubs, changing rooms, after the ladies had left the dinner table – anywhere women were not admitted. But she was fighting, still, through the strange, dreamy state she had entered. After chatting for about half an hour she declared herself to be rather tired and went up to bed.
Lying in the silence, between linen sheets, she soon went to sleep. She awoke with the clear voice singing to her in French – “Comme le vent dans les blés de mon pays.”
Next day she stood right at the top of the windy hill behind the house with Colin Floyd. On the other side of the hill the voices of the two boys came to them in gusts on the breeze.
“Phew,” she said, for it had been a somewhat steep scramble. “Isn’t it lovely?”
Floyd, also breathing hard, said, “Yes – perfect.”
They sat on the grass in silence looking across the valley, where the house lay, and over the hills opposite. Down the valley, in a small plantation of firs, lay the waters of the loch.
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“There must have been a farm here for hundreds of years, even before they built the house,” Floyd said. “It makes me think how much I’d like to own a country house – but, of course, you do.”
“I married into a collapse and turned it into a bicycle factory,” Molly told him. “I’m not the sort you can trust to respect the past. I couldn’t afford it, for one thing.”
Floyd laughed. They sat watching the two boys, who were shooting at each other from behind hillocks.
Floyd stood up. “Bert!” he called, waving. “Bert! Is that you?”
The lean figure in a greenish tweed suit stopped on the path and waved. As he toiled up Molly saw he had a long, pale face and very large, hazel eyes. His eyebrows were strongly marked, although his hair was light brown. “Bert Precious,” explained Floyd as he came up. “An old friend. Do you know him?”
“No,” said Molly.
As he got to the top he grinned at Floyd and shook his hand. In some ways, she thought, it was a clown’s face, long and mobile, expressing innocence. She felt she might have met him somewhere, but was not sure. He looked at her and smiled broadly as if, she thought, they really did know each other.
All The Days of My Life Page 69
