Disputed Land

by Tim Pears

  The twins stopped at this point, and turned around. Baz marched towards Holly and I, and shouldered his way between us. We turned, to see Jockie pushing a wheelbarrow full of gardening tools into the storeroom at the end of the stables.

  ‘Here, Jockie,’ Baz called towards him. ‘Would you mind very much sticking our bags in the conservatory?’

  Jockie rested the barrow on its back legs and scuttled across the yard in quick, rheumatic little steps. He wore a dark three-piece suit, which only when he came close could you see was stained and frayed. He was, as everyone knew, precisely the same age as Grandma – seventy-five – and his father had worked here for Grandma’s father, and they’d been exactly the same age, too.

  Jockie began unloading items from the boot of the giant car.

  ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like them taken right inside?’ he asked. ‘Into the entrance hall?’ Standing beside Baz, Jockie, you could see, wasn’t much taller than the twins.

  ‘No, the conservatory will be fine, Jockie,’ Xan told him expansively. ‘We’ll take it from there.’ He and Baz strode towards the house. Holly was still standing there with the same expression of outraged puzzlement. I wondered what Mum would say to me later were she watching this scene out of one of the windows.

  ‘Let me take the big one,’ I said, reaching to lift a leather suitcase, which Jockie was attempting to drag over the lip of the car boot. He leaned neatly across, managing to block my way.

  ‘I’ve got ’em,’ he said. ‘No problem for Jock. You get on in, Theo.’ Using his shoulder, he eased me with surprising force out of the way.

  Holly and I traipsed across the patio. Dusk was falling.

  5

  My parents had been given – or perhaps had asked for, I wasn’t sure – the ‘blue’ bedroom, at the top of the stairs. Aunt Gwen was in the ‘yellow’ room at the end of the corridor, Jonny and Lorna in the ‘red’ bedroom to the left of the stairs – designations which bore no relation to actual colours, on the walls or anything else. These terms referred to some earlier era of decorative scheme, one assumed, and despite subsequent refurbishment were kept in current, confusing use.

  Across the landing from Mum and Dad was my grandparents’ wing, which consisted of their large bedroom and en-suite bathroom, and also Grandpa’s dressing-room, which had a small divan bed in it where when I was younger I was allowed to sleep when I stayed in the summer. I would lie there in the mornings while Grandpa shaved at the small sink. He had an ancient radio on the shelf permanently tuned to Radio 4, and would talk back to the people on the Today programme as if it were being broadcast personally to him; would admonish the presenters when he thought they were rude, say ‘Humbug!’ to guests, groan at the latest Test score. He called everyone by their Christian name, thanking Charlotte for reading the news and Gary for the sport. It was a peculiar thing to do. I’ve been disconcerted recently to catch myself doing the same.

  Where Melony was going to sleep I didn’t know. There was a narrow landing up on the top floor, before you went into the converted attic space with its sleeping berths in the eaves. I’d noticed a bag and a pile of books on the bed there and assumed Sid had nabbed it.

  My father was reading the newspaper on one bed. I lay on the other, watching Mum put make-up on at a table with a tilting mirror. I told my parents that we had a project next term in Sociology on ‘Regions of Britain’. I had the idea to prepare a talk on regional accents, using recorded examples of my own family. Grandpa had an old tape recorder I could bring into service; otherwise I might be able to borrow the dictaphone which Baz had mentioned Uncle Jonny carried with him everywhere.

  In the three and a half hours since our arrival, I told my parents, I’d noticed all sorts of subtle differences between us. Grandma spoke like the Queen, I explained, and Uncle Jonny did the same, as did the twins. Aunt Lorna’s accent was similar except that she was clearly foreign, and as we were an island nation of immigrants it was just as well to have a recent example. Grandpa, on the other hand, had a less posh, more neutral accent than Grandma, and his was the one the elder son, my father, had copied.

  ‘Steady on,’ Dad said.

  ‘That’s not a criticism,’ I reassured him. ‘Because I’ve copied it too, from you.’

  ‘With the occasional Cherwell gangsta lingo added,’ Dad said.

  Mum, I continued, had a similar accent to her son and husband, but whereas certain words pronounced by Dad betrayed his upper-class origins (‘hise’ for house, for example) and his slide down the social ladder, so different words spoken by Mum (like ‘sile’ for sale) indicated the Greater London suburbs she came from and her own climb up a similar number of rungs, to where they’d met.

  At this point my father said I sounded uncharacteristically, and unpleasantly, precocious. He also mentioned that certain birds, such as chaffinches, had regional accents.

  My mother objected that what I was talking about was much less to do with region than with class. ‘I haven’t finished,’ I said. My throat ached, and I realised that I’d not spoken so much in ages. I described the way that Auntie Gwen – who worked for the Borough of Lambeth or the council of Brixton or something – only sounded so different from the rest of her birth family if you failed to listen carefully. In fact, her accent was similar to Dad’s (and her vocabulary, too) but what she did in order to disguise her well-to-do upbringing was to swallow every syllable. Which, in turn, made you realise that what Grandma and Jonny and the twins did was to drawl all the time.

  ‘Sid and Holly are different again,’ I said in conclusion, ‘from each other as well as their mother. Sid talks more like Dad and me, which may be a result of reading books, while Holly talks more like a proper cockney. Or at least what people call a Sarf Londoner.’

  ‘Very observant, Theo,’ Dad said. ‘We’ll make an anthropologist of you yet.’

  ‘I still think it’s more about class,’ Mum insisted. ‘Which is no less interesting. See what Mr Tiler says.’

  It was quite impressive the way Mum remembered the names of all my teachers, even at secondary school. I’m not sure my father could have named a single one of them. ‘I could record Jockie, too,’ I suggested. Despite his name, Jockie had famously never been within two hundred miles of the Scottish border, but was a true Salopian, born and bred in the Corvedale. ‘And as for Bronwen,’ I added, ‘you couldn’t get any more regional than her. I bet she still speaks Welsh.’

  On top of the mahogany chest of drawers was a framed photograph of my father, aged fifteen or sixteen, riding a pony rounding up sheep on one of the hills around here. I realised that, of course, he and my aunt and uncle were back in the same rooms they’d grown up in. A single Airfix model of a camouflage-coloured Spitfire hung by a cotton thread from a tack embedded in the ceiling, and on the windowsill stood a row of hand-painted medieval knights, traces of Dad’s childhood remaining from the successive clearances and refurbishments since his departure.

  ‘It’s serious, then?’ Mum said, staring at herself in the mirror as she applied mascara to her eyelashes. My mother rarely wore make-up; when she did, it looked as if she were putting on some slightly weird fancy dress.

  My father murmured agreement as he turned a page of the newspaper.

  ‘You think so?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  Mum made eyes at herself and, satisfied with her work, pushed back the stool and stood up. ‘Brave to bring her here, though,’ she said. She started to unwrap the large blue towel around her. My parents had always wandered around our house in whatever state of undress they felt like, and indeed still did, despite my registering numerous official complaints.

  ‘Wait,’ I cried, swinging my legs off the bed. ‘It’s all right, I’m leaving.’ The last thing I needed to see was my mother’s naked bits and pieces.

  * * *

  Auntie Gwen and Melony were helping Grandma in the kitchen. My grandmother spotted me before I could slip past and ordered me to finish laying the table.
I put glasses out, and then reached up to get the water jug shaped like a fish, and filled each glass. The water made a hollow glogging sound as it gulped out of the spout.

  As I walked through my grandparents’ sitting area, Grandpa was showing the twins his barograph, with its infinitesimally slowly revolving cylindrical drum, driven by clockwork. A sheet of paper was wound around it, on which an ink pen marked the atmospheric pressure, giving an indication of change in the weather. When I stayed in the summer Grandpa let me help him change the paper – spares were kept in a tray at the base of its oak case – and refill the ink knib. We’d polish the bevelled glass together.

  ‘An aneroid barometer,’ Grandpa explained to the twins. ‘It measures small changes in air pressure, using a metal alloy that expands and contracts.’

  ‘But I can get the weather in two seconds,’ Xan objected.

  ‘On his PDA,’ Baz confirmed, pulling his own from his pocket as Xan did likewise, whereupon they competed to see who could summon up a forecast the quickest.

  ‘What’s your postcode?’ Xan asked Grandpa.

  Sidney was slumped in a chair. I bent down to see the cover of the book she was reading. Becoming aware of my presence, Sid peered up at me, eyes blank behind her glasses. Then she closed her book, the forefinger of her left hand inserted to keep the place, and with her right hand felt above her head: isolating a single red hair, she tugged it from her scalp and placed it in the book where her finger had been, before putting the book on the table beside the chair and following me through to the drawing room.

  Dad and Uncle Jonny were sitting either side of the fire. Holly was perched on the arm of Jonny’s chair, but when she saw us she came over, and the two sisters asked each other what was being rustled up in the kitchen, and how long it was going to be. Holly wore a tight T-shirt and a short skirt over tights with multi-coloured, horizontal stripes. The colours of the rainbow were in them, probably; circling, one above the other.

  ‘Theo’s staring at Holly’s legs,’ Xan announced loudly. I’d not been aware of the twins coming into the room behind me. Sid and Holly turned their attention towards me.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I stuttered.

  ‘He’s blushing,’ said Baz.

  ‘Too close to the fire,’ I mumbled, edging even further away from it than I already was, and from my cousins.

  ‘The tights look cool, don’t they?’ Sid said. ‘I got them to put in her stocking, but she didn’t want to wait.’

  ‘Not after our parents agreed we wouldn’t do stockings this year,’ Holly said.

  ‘Be careful what you say,’ Baz admonished her. ‘My brother still believes in Santa Claus.’

  ‘So does Baz, actually,’ said Xan.

  ‘Exactly,’ Baz agreed.

  Mum was sitting on one of the sofas, talking with Aunt Lorna. Both of them had dressed up for dinner, in their own ways. My mother had little interest in clothes. She objected to shopping on principle, an imposition upon her time. All her and Dad’s clothes came from Marks & Spencer online – her idea of a shopping spree was the acquisition of a brand-new pair of walking boots from Milletts – and she was glad that nowadays I was happy to mooch around town buying my own.

  Aunt Lorna, on the other hand, could have been the very model for the clothes she wore. She never grew older, for one thing. Seeing my poor mother next to Lorna made me wonder whether it was the admin, the research – shut up in her study or at a desk in the Bodleian Library – or the actual teaching that had aged her. Probably all three.

  Aunt Lorna worked as an interior designer, which, according to my father, was someone who was paid by a client to tell them what colour paint to put on their walls and where to put their furniture, although Lorna didn’t actually do that work herself, she only advised. Uncle Jonny earned so much money that she didn’t need to do it; Lorna herself called it her hobby. ‘I like to help friends,’ she would say in her slightly foreign accent, and with a modest shrug.

  Mum claimed that Lorna worked hard enough, running round the shops and on the treadmills in the gym, which she undoubtedly visited every day. But in actual fact my mother and my aunt had more in common than might have been expected: they were united in opposition to their mother-in-law.

  My father, in Grandma’s opinion, was a country boy who, after a youthful sojourn in the city, following his undergraduate studies with a doctorate, should by now have long since returned to the country. He could have taught in a local school or college, or even taken over Grandpa’s business. It was Mum who kept us in Oxford, according to Grandma, she the Head of Department, competent and driven, quite at home in what Dad referred to as ‘the trenches of academia’. He himself remained a junior member of staff who ‘kept his head down’, content to teach a little, do some research, publish the occasional article, fulfil the minimum of administrative obligations.

  It was obviously true that, as Mum said, the decisions my parents made were ‘none of her bloody business’, but the thing was that I knew Grandma was right. When Dad had come to collect me from my month-long visit that August, and stayed for a long weekend, I’d gone to look for him one evening and found him in the field up above the house, sitting on the ground, leaning against the trunk of a beech tree. There was a glass of wine beside him, and he’d rolled himself one of his occasional cigarettes. I lay on the grass close by. It was only when he wiped his hand across his face that I realised my father had been weeping. After the moment it took me to recover from this unsettling sight, I asked him what he was sad about.

  Dad shook his head. ‘No, no, not sad, old chap,’ he said, smiling. ‘Not at all. I’m happy, very happy.’ He opened his arms, gesturing forwards. ‘Look.’

  Gazing over the top of the house, I watched the sun setting beyond the Long Mynd across the valley, where a patchwork of green and brown fields was wreathed in a hazy, buttery light. Smoke rose from slow-burning fires, and drifted on the breeze. The Welsh hills around the western horizon were blue. You could see isolated homesteads; odd hamlets which, as Grandpa had told me, ‘were already old when the Domesday Book was drawn up’.

  Dad reached over and drew me to him. ‘I just love it here, Theo, that’s all,’ he said. ‘This landscape. To perceive it, to be in it, to become part of it. That gives me great happiness.’

  Aunt Lorna’s sin was even more specific. When Uncle Jonny had first brought her here, fifteen years earlier, she was enraptured by the house. ‘Wow,’ she said to Grandma, ‘you could really do something with this place.’

  Grandma was so insulted she’d refused to speak to Lorna for years. It had taken all Grandpa’s powers of tact and persuasion to bring about a rapprochement when the twins were born, but even now Grandma rarely spoke to her daughter-in-law unless Lorna addressed her first. She had forgiven neither of them. ‘You could really do something with this place,’ however, had – unbeknownst to our grandmother – become a family catchphrase.

  Grandma now came in to the drawing room. ‘I’ve left Gwen in charge,’ she said, a note of despair in her voice. ‘I do hope she won’t burn everything,’ she added, as if this were a common occurrence whenever her daughter was let loose in the kitchen. ‘Make way,’ she said, shooing Dad out of her chair by the fire. ‘Make way there.’

  Dad went over to help Grandpa, who’d been waiting for Grandma’s arrival, to pour drinks. My attention turned to the large portrait of my grandparents above the fireplace. Painted on the eve of their marriage, it displayed the young couple as owners of all they surveyed, of the landscape of their lives, of their destiny. One of Grandpa’s dogs lay at his feet, the other stood a foot or two away. The portrait was commissioned by Grandma’s father, his final grand gesture, after he’d sold the house to Grandpa, who’d done as he’d said he would: built a business up from nothing and come back for the hand of the woman he loved.

  In the portrait Grandma sat side saddle on a fierce-eyed chestnut horse, which stood at a diagonal in the frame, facing the bottom right-hand corner of it. Grandpa
stood in front of her billowing black skirt, his left arm resting across the neck of the horse, just in front of its saddle. They had been placed in a formal pose, yet looked supremely relaxed, and assured. My father had told me that in his opinion it was a remarkable provincial painting. That the local artist had somehow suggested certain ambiguities in their relationship. Grandma did not wear a riding hat: her hair fell, a little loose, with the hint of a breeze. It was she who drew the spectator’s attention. If this young woman wasn’t exactly beautiful she was undoubtedly dramatic. Angular, graceful and powerful. You couldn’t help thinking that she had tamed the horse, and the handsome man too. But then you looked at it a little longer and thought maybe he had tamed her. While in reality probably all three remained a little wild.

  The contrast with how my grandparents looked now – each dressed similarly to the other, in plain sweater and trousers – made you realise how men and women become androgynous as they age: Grandma’s strong features had sunk into her wrinkled face; her hair, grey and thin, was cut short. Grandpa put a glass of gin and tonic in her hand. They looked more like a pair of soft brothers now, or tough sisters, than the glamorous young husband and wife in the painting.

  Uncle Jonny caught my eye. ‘Over here,’ he said, archly raising his eyebrows. I walked over, and waited, while he, too, waited, smiling slyly. ‘Young man,’ he said quietly, ‘your father’s told me how well you’re doing at school, and I’d like to shake your hand.’ We reached towards each other and shook hands with a certain mock solemnity. When I withdrew my hand, there in my palm, magically, was a note. The particular trick Uncle Jonny managed was to somehow make me press my own thumb against the note to keep it in place, and thus secret. In accordance with the spy-like element of the enterprise I unwrapped the note surreptitiously.