Disputed Land

by Tim Pears

  The drive led down from the road to the front of the house, whose imposing three-storeyed facade, with its eight sash-cord windows, each with four panes of glass but growing smaller as they ascended, always brought to my mind that great line from the Bible, ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions.’ In summer each one of the eighteenth-century bricks from which it was built seemed to contain a range of sandy hues, but under this grey sky they presented a pale, bloodless uniformity. We drove on, past the wide and empty gravelled forecourt, following the drive as it continued, arcing around the garden and past the rather dilapidated coach house and outbuildings, to the parking bay by the stables. I was glad to see only one other car parked beside Grandma’s butterscotch coloured Range Rover, Grandpa’s saloon and Jockie’s white Mini van: a bright, lime-green, brand-new Citroën Berlingo. One of those high square vans with the side panels replaced with glass and seats installed, for domestic use. Dad eased our muted, shapely veteran into the space beside it. ‘I don’t think we need to ask whose that is,’ he said, chuckling.

  ‘Pass me my dark glasses,’ Mum said, joining in. ‘What must it be like when the sun’s out? Good Lord.’

  The front door of the house opened, but no one emerged. Not a human being, at least. Instead, Grandpa’s English setters shouldered their way out and came bounding across the yard. I got out of the car, bent down and opened my arms and they came straight for me, dark Leda almost knocking me over in her exuberance. Selena – Sel – the lighter one, hung back, trembling with excitement but shyer than her sister, until I called her in and she came. I buried my face in their hair, hugging them to me.

  Sel reminded me of myself. A bewildering condition had overtaken me that previous spring. I’d always been one of the more confident children in my class at primary school. I was the first to put my hand up in answer to a question, or to volunteer for public speaking: I’d often read the prayers at assembly, and been the narrator of a dozen plays. While most children declaim their lines in a monotone aimed at the floor, teachers knew they could count on me to enunciate words clearly, lay stresses in the appropriate places, and project my voice to the audience. ‘To paraphrase the great Zero Mostel,’ Dad declared approvingly after one Christmas production of Scrooge, ‘you reached the drunks at the back of the school hall, Theo.’

  I continued in this manner during the first two years at comprehensive: talkative, ebullient, relaxed with girls as well as boys. Around Easter of this year, however, a sinister change had crept over me. I found myself weirdly uneager, unwilling, to speak in front of people other than my parents and my friends. Asked to read something aloud in class my eyes seemed to hesitate as they scanned the lines; letters blurred into one another. In conversation I’d think of something to say but then, instead of hearing it uttered, would become aware of the journey from my brain to my tongue, along which the words got jumbled up.

  Sounds issued from my mouth that made no sense. I became, in short (though still in written tests that summer term one of the brighter kids in the year) an idiot. It’s a characteristic of Homo sapiens, however, to adapt to changing circumstances and I soon developed a coping strategy: that of mentally rehearsing what I wanted to say before I said it. This involved visualising myself speaking, some moments in the future. The trouble was that by the time this rehearsal had taken place, as if in a small antechamber of my mind, conversation was liable to have moved on, so that even if I could say my piece without hindrance it rarely bore any relevance to what had since been said by someone else, and I looked an even bigger div than before.

  This, I understood, was shyness, and its sudden onset inside me was a mystery, particularly since I’d always viewed other children who suffered from it with pity, if not contempt.

  Matters were not helped by the fact that my voice was itself taking on a life of its own. Words burped from my lips, unpredictable eruptions. Deep growls, loud barks, high-pitched squeaks emerged, sometimes all within the same sentence. Other boys mimicked me, girls giggled behind their books, I was sure of it. I convinced myself that members of the public – in shops, on the pavement – would turn their heads upon overhearing me, startled, before turning politely away.

  It was, fortunately, but a short step to the solution: silence. I stopped speaking. A remarkably successful tactic, it covered up my shyness, except when I blushed, which happened whenever someone expected me to talk. I turned what I knew to be an unlovely shade of puce, but remained defiantly mute: I didn’t care what they thought. At least they wouldn’t think I was a fool.

  This secondary affliction, by the way, was one I’d inherited from my mother; the physical symptoms, at least, though in her case they had a different cause. Whenever Mum grew restless, irritated, building up to anger, blushing was the tell-tale sign. I was probably the only one who spotted it, though, because it was subtle, almost hidden. A gradual flushing of the skin of her neck, and then her ears becoming red (and both were often hidden, by collar or hair).

  My companionable parents shared, on the surface, similar temperaments, but my mother was as passionate as my father was diffident, detached, amused by life. Her emotions were not, however, ‘on show to the general public’, as she put it. Public displays of emotion, in point of fact, were one of the many things that annoyed her – and brought that subtle blush to her neck. Others included battery farming, parking charges in hospital car parks, cosmetic surgery, fox-hunting, and all forms of injustice: she embarrassed me throughout my childhood by intervening in playground games if she thought a child was being bullied. Mum liked to engage me in argument on ethical issues from as far back as I could remember; she’d encourage me to form an opinion and then she’d disagree with it, not to indoctrinate me with her own views but for the pleasure of debate. And, I would come gradually to realise, to make me aware of the space we are all given in which to form our own moral ground, which she expected me to then defend.

  I didn’t reckon to suffer my shy affliction with Grandpa or Grandma – that summer’s visit had been a lovely relief from it; with Jockie, the gardener, and Bronwen, their housekeeper, too, I’d been at ease. Maybe it was just because old people’s hearing was useless: they didn’t even seem to notice the fluctuations of my vocal cords. But the prospect of five days with my uncle and aunts and odd cousins – five days of nods, shrugs, shakes of the head in place of speech, of terse, mumbled replies, of stammering muteness – filled me, I confess, with dread.

  3

  The setters could not stay still, slobbering all over me, licking my face with their long wet tongues, enveloping me in their refulgent, meaty breath. Hugging Leda and Sel tightly to me, nuzzling my face in their thick winter coats, I experienced a great surge of happiness, followed by disappointment with the realisation that there were not only beautiful dumb animals but also human beings to be dealt with.

  I opened my eyes, and stood up. While I’d been hiding behind the dogs, people had emerged from the house, and were exchanging kisses with my parents. Dad gave Auntie Gwen, his younger sister, a big, clumsy hug. Mum kissed Gwen’s two daughters, my cousins. I could tell no one was sure whether to kiss each other’s cheeks one or two or three times, but it afforded them all something to make an awkward joke about. Auntie Gwen gave me a hug, too. She was chunkier than my mother. She had a great mop of curly grey hair on her head, which frizzled my face as I leaned in to her.

  ‘My, how you’ve shot up, Theo,’ she said.

  ‘Mum!’ said Holly, the younger sister.

  ‘I know, I know,’ Gwen chuckled. ‘Sorry, Theo, everyone must tell you that.’

  We hadn’t seen each other since the summer before last, but even before Gwen had spoken I’d noted that I was now closer in height to Dad than to any of the women standing in the yard.

  The grown-ups exchanged their usual inanities – ‘Good journey?’ ‘When did you get here?’ ‘Decent driving weather’ – while my cousins and I stood in silence, until Holly said to me, while gesturing towards her mother, ‘You going Afr
o too?’

  I kind of shrugged and nodded at the same time. My tight curls must have twisted their way down my father’s side of the family. Dad claimed to have had similar hair before he lost most of it, and had promised me he’d dig out a photo of himself from the nineteen seventies to prove it.

  Sidney, who was fifteen, looked just like she had last time: thin as me (though more stick than wire, you might say), with flame-red hair and black-framed, over-sized spectacles just like her mum’s, through which her large eyes peered at the world, seemingly confused by and at the same time somewhat delighted with it.

  Holly, however, had changed. We were exactly the same age. Not quite the same birthday, but the same star sign. I should make clear that I did not believe in astrology; it was, in my opinion, absolute nonsense. ‘Which is typical,’ I’d told Holly, when we stayed with them on that weekend trip to their house in London eighteen months earlier, ‘for a Scorpio,’ which I thought was quite a good line. While Sid lay sunk in a beanbag, reading a book, Holly and I had spent most of our time in their garden together, playing badminton or bouncing up and down on their trampoline.

  Now, standing by the cars, Holly appeared still tomboyish, in her stance and attire, but now her jeans were tight on curved hips, and layers of T-shirt and hoodie couldn’t hide a definite feminine development in the upper regions. She was also now as tall as her elder sister. It was hard to believe they were siblings, red-headed Sid with her pale, angular features and smile that suggested she was trying to pay attention to you while not losing altogether some other thread of thought preoccupying her; while Holly was blond, with sallow skin, a pert nose, full lips and – possibly because of the brace she wore on her teeth – a strangely compressed smile that suggested some mischief had just occurred, or was about to. There was also something disconcerting about her gaze, and you only realised what it was if you studied her very closely: Holly was infinitesimally cross-eyed.

  ‘Want a hand with your stuff?’ Sid asked.

  ‘We’re sleeping all together in the nursery,’ Holly grinned.

  The boot of our car was full. I handed Sid and Holly Mum’s laptop bag and walking boots, and my rucksack and guitar case. Then I noticed that my other cousin, Matt, had come out of the house and was saying hello to Mum. Shaking hands rather than embracing. If Holly had changed, her nineteen-year-old brother had undergone a weird transformation: my handsome cousin had cut short his long brown hair and dyed it the colour of strawberry roan; wearing a well-cut suit, it was apparent that he’d lost weight; the bone structure of his face had altered; and he was three or four inches shorter than he had been at the age of seventeen. Walking towards him, I understood that I was wrong, it wasn’t Matt at all, but some other man. Moments later it became clear that this wasn’t a man but a young woman – a school friend of Sid’s, maybe? An orphan, perhaps? My brain underwent a dizzying series of reassessments while, laden with luggage, I trudged the short distance from the car across the patio. As I reached the stranger I saw that, up close, she was older than she had appeared from far away; much older, closer in age to Auntie Gwen than any of her children.

  ‘This is my son, Theo,’ Mum said. ‘Theo, meet Melony.’ What this woman’s relation to anyone was, my mother – if she knew – didn’t say. My hands were full, but I muttered hello on my way past, following Holly and Sid into the house.

  Our footsteps rang on the flagstones in the open hall, the girls’ voices echoed off the walls and up the wide staircase. Everything was as it had been when I was here in the summer except that the hallway was garlanded with Christmas cards: vertical displays stuck to strips of Sellotape hung from the ceiling, and pendant streamers of cards looped over lengths of string pinned to the corners of ceiling and walls. A backcloth erected for the performance for which we were gathering, as both performers and audience, of this family Christmas.

  In the spacious drawing room, sofas and chairs had been shifted to make space for a wide, tall tree in the corner. Holly and I added a few wrapped presents to those already at its base. At its top a golden angel spread her wings an inch below the high ceiling. Strands of blue and silver tinsel, and fairy lights, were strung around the branches. The baby grand piano was in the opposite corner of the room.

  ‘Where’s Matt?’ I asked.

  ‘Coming straight from Uni,’ Holly said. ‘Still working on a production for his course. Get here later today.’ She looked at her watch. ‘At least, that’s what he said.’

  We walked through the room where the TV and Grandma’s desk were – Sid had already returned to the sofa there, curled up with a book – and I found Grandma in the kitchen. She was sitting in her chair at the Aga. A pot of stew, or soup, simmered on the warm plate behind her.

  ‘There you are, dear boy,’ she said. ‘I won’t get up.’ I bent down to hug her. We’d barely made contact before she barked in my ear, ‘Yes, yes,’ and fended me off, as if to say, All right, that’s enough, we’ve got that formality out of the way. ‘How are you?’ she asked. ‘Still growing? Good. Not smoking, are you?’

  ‘Of course not, Grandma,’ I said. I glanced at Holly and saw her smirking, and the combination of our complicity in the face of our grandmother’s eccentricity and the way that Grandma said whatever she felt like, not giving a damn what anyone thought, had a naturally emboldening effect upon me, as it had in the summer. ‘I’m only thirteen, Grandma.’

  ‘Tommyrot,’ she said. ‘Your father was smoking on the sly at your age. I caught him behind the chicken shed.’ Here she nodded in a vague direction outside. ‘You know what I did with him?’

  ‘No, Grandma,’ I lied. ‘No idea.’

  ‘I made him smoke the rest of the packet, one fag after another.’ She looked up at me and then at Holly with a smile of deep self-satisfaction. ‘You never saw a child so ill. I left him throwing up in the grass and one thing I can assure you both: Rodney’s not smoked another cigarette in his entire life.’

  Apart from my Uncle Jonny and Aunt Lorna’s mansion in north London – ‘the monstrosity’, as my parents referred to it – my grandparents’ country house was the most impressive I knew. It had large rooms, spacious hallways and landings, with high ceilings and exposed wooden beams. It even had two staircases, so that if you wanted to avoid someone, or just needed a little privacy, the house obliged you.

  The basement cellar had been converted by Grandpa into a study, and some store rooms, while the old nursery, at the top of the house, was where we children would sleep. As Holly helped me haul my stuff up the two flights of stairs, I calculated that ten adults and seven children could comfortably sleep in this building. Even without setting up extra camp beds or blow-up mattresses, which there was plenty of space to do.

  ‘Yeah, it’s a bit spooky,’ she said.

  In the nursery, which ran most of the length of the top floor, a series of alcoves had been cut into the eaves and a mattress placed in each one, creating half a dozen little billets. Holly and I dumped my stuff up there.

  ‘That’s mine,’ Holly informed me, pointing to a rumpled duvet covered with clothes. ‘Why don’t you go next to it, and the twins can have the ones across from us?’ She gestured towards my guitar. ‘How much do they pay you?’ she asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your parents.’

  I looked at my cousin’s face, but there was nothing there to help me work out what she might be on about. ‘Pay me for playing my guitar?’

  ‘Don’t they pay you?’ Holly shrugged. ‘What’s this big Christmas mystery, anyway?’ Seeing my further incomprehension, she continued, ‘Why we’re here. Grandma and Grandpa asked everyone to come, right? Don’t get me wrong, I mean, it’s great, but why?’

  ‘No idea,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I guess we won’t know till everyone’s here.’ Holly stared at me, as if she suspected I knew, but wasn’t telling. ‘We just have to be patient.’ I looked away from her inquisitive gaze. There was a door at the end of the nursery. ‘Have you been through there?’
>
  ‘It’s locked,’ she said, making a face to show she’d tried it.

  I walked past my cousin and, with the modest magnanimity of my greater knowledge of the house, reached up to the top of the door frame. I felt along it and soon discovered the key.

  ‘I’ve never been in here,’ Holly admitted as I unlocked the door, and entered. The room, illuminated weakly by the light from a single small window, was filled with old pieces of furniture and odds and ends. Wooden chairs, a towel rail, leather suitcases, a pair of roller skates, a tailor’s dummy, a hatstand, framed paintings, a large porcelain bowl, a small chest of drawers, all covered with a coating of dust. It was like a forgotten junk shop, and was a striking contrast to the rest of the house, kept spotlessly clean by Bronwen, who came in four times a week and also laundered, ironed and helped Grandma with the cooking.

  We poked around, until Holly started sneezing.

  Downstairs, my father and the stranger, Melony, had joined Grandma in the kitchen. It was a long room, divided by a wide island, beyond which was the eating area: the dining table stood in front of a long set of sash windows that gave on to the great wide valley of the Corvedale, on whose far side lay Wenlock Edge. A soft drizzle was beading the glass.

  ‘I love those berths where you lot are sleeping,’ Melony told Holly.

  ‘We did it when the first grandchild appeared,’ Grandma told her. Not, ‘We had it done,’ or ‘We paid builders to do it.’ I imagined that Melony would assume our grandparents had done it themselves; would visualise them both up there, Grandpa sawing away, Grandma knocking in nails. It was her customary way of talking – ‘We built the conservatory twenty years ago’ – a kind of aristocratic boastfulness.

  ‘The children seem to like it,’ Grandma said with a shrug, as if this were no concern of hers. ‘Can’t imagine why they do, really. In the summer I let them stay in the summerhouse. Don’t I, Theo?’