by Stephen Fry
“All right.”
By the time the hedgerows had leapt up by the roadside and the gables of the hall were flashing behind the parkland trees, I believed myself to be more or less, as Max Clifford would say, “up to speed,” Lilac and all.
I dropped Davey off at the back of the house before restabling the car. He was to slip upstairs, unseen if he could help it, while I explained to the household that the poor angelic mite was all fagged out after a hard day’s mending bumblebee wings, healing bruised buttercups, smiling sweetly at the raindrops and generally being David. Once he was safely between the sheets he could be visited without anyone being the wiser as to the local details of his injuries.
Simon was waiting for me in the garage yard. I stopped the car and pulled myself out, leaving the engine running.
“It’s nearly seven,” he remarked, a hint of complaint in his voice. I had arranged in my note to him that we should RV here at half past five.
“Never mind about that,” I said. “You manoeuvre this bastard thing into its hangar. My driving days are over.”
His enthusiasm for cars got the better of his grumpiness. He climbed in, nosed the Mercedes into the garage and switched off the motor. I stood in the yard waiting for him to come out. The rain had stopped and everything shone and dripped, fresh as a washed salad.
Simon remained in the gloom of the garage for an inexcusably long time.
“What are you doing in there?” I shouted into the darkness. “Singing the bloody thing to sleep?”
He emerged two or three minutes later, edged round the car and closed the double doors of the garage.
“There was blood on the front passenger seat,” he said. “I wiped it off.”
“Ah. Good man. Now, if it’s seven, I had better go to my room and change.”
We walked back towards the house.
“I got your note, Uncle Ted. I haven’t told a soul. I wouldn’t of anyway.”
“Wouldn’t have,” I muttered.
“Oh, sorry. I never get that right.”
“Well, don’t apologise for it, for God’s sake.”
Simon had a quality that seemed to bring out the mental bully in me. All bullies become more and more irritated by their victim’s acquiescence in being bullied, which inclines one to bully all the more.
“Are you cross with me?” Simon asked.
“I am excessively annoyed with myself, as it happens,” I said. “Annoyed with myself for being irritable with you, annoyed with you for allowing me to be irritable with you, annoyed with myself for allowing myself to be annoyed, and most of all annoyed with myself for being stupid.”
There were too many “annoyeds” and “irritables” in that sentence for Simon to be able to decipher its meaning, so he changed the subject.
“Is Davey all right?”
“He’ll live. I banished him to his bedroom. And what of Clara?”
“She’ll be okay. I sent her to bed too.” He bent down to pull up a weed from under the cotoneaster that grew along the wall around the side of the house. “I suppose Davey is furious with me?”
“He thinks you’re jealous of his powers. He thinks you deliberately chose your moment to crash through the woods and humiliate him. He thinks you are evil.”
Simon gaped. “That’s pathetic.”
“Well, perhaps. And what’s your point of view? What do you think of Davey?”
He thought about this.
“He’s my brother.”
“Yes, yes. But what do you think of him? What’s it like to have him for a brother?”
“I can’t really remember not having him as a brother. He can be a pain. I mean, let’s face it, he is a bit weird. And he really pisses me off with all that bloody anti-blood-sports stuff. I mean, he claims to love nature so much, but surely he can see that we wouldn’t have all these copses and spinneys if it weren’t for the pheasants. Everything would be flat fields for thousands of square miles. The woodland doesn’t just support game-birds, you know. There’s wild flowers and wild mammals and insects that completely depend on shooting.”
“Of course, of course, of course.” I wasn’t in the mood for a lecture on killing. “I’m talking about the other side of Davey.”
“Look, here’s Max,” said Simon and I received the impression that he was relieved to be spared the necessity of answering.
Max was standing outside the front door in a dark suit, looking up at the sky with benevolent approval, as if it were a junior management executive who had successfully cut back on their workforce without provoking a strike.
“Ted. Simon. Splendid,” he said as we approached. “Rain’s stopped. Glorious evening.”
“More on the way, actually,” said Simon.
“You seem very cheerful, Max,” I remarked.
“And you look like shit, old boy.” Which, I suppose, I did. My skin and scalp were scratched by brambles and my clothes were devastated by rain, sweat and mud.
“I’ll go in now,” Simon said. “See you at dinner.”
Max took my arm and walked me to the lawn. “As a matter of fact, Tedward, I am cheerful.”
“Really?” I said, frigidly. I hated it when Max used Michael’s name for me.
“I might as well tell you, if you hadn’t already guessed, that I asked Davey to see what he could do about Clara.”
“Has she been ill?”
“Oh, come off it, Tedward, you know perfectly well what I’m talking about. Anyway, David did see her. Always found the boy an intolerable little prick, if you must know. Hated having to ask him a favour. So goody-goody. Nothing in this world less bearable than an anti-business snob. He’ll spend his father’s nasty money when the time comes, right enough, don’t you worry. But, well . . . I can’t deny his ability. I don’t know what he did. It must have been very intense. Clara’s absolutely knocked out by it.”
“And it’s worked?” I stared at him. It had never crossed my mind that, after Simon’s intervention, David’s cure might actually have been effective. Aside from anything else, in crude physical terms, she had not appeared from my angle so much to have swallowed her medicine as to have spewed it down her front.
“I’ve just spent half an hour with her in her room.”
“You mean her teeth are straight and her eyes look in the same direction?”
“Well, no. Obviously he can’t alter her appearance just like that. But inside, Tedward! I’ve never seen her so cheerful and so . . . confident. It’s absolutely miraculous. We’ve sent that girl to psychiatrists and nuns and summer camps and God knows what. It’s unbelievable.”
I agreed and nodded enthusiastically while he gibbered on.
“She wouldn’t tell me how he did it, but I wouldn’t care if he fed her eye of newt and ear of bat. The squint will correct itself soon, apparently, and the teeth too. And she’s just so much . . . oh, you’ll see. You’ll see.”
“Fabulous,” I said. “Bloody marvellous. But look, I must bath and change if I’m not going to be late for dinner. See you at the bin.”
Oliver was gliding up the stairs as I made the hallway.
“Well!” he said, turning at the sound of the front door. “Another happy meeting of the Somme Re-enactment Society, I see.”
“Yes, most amusing. I got caught in the storm, if you must know.”
“I think the storm got caught in you, dear.”
I headed up the stairs towards him. “By the way,” I said, “has Jane been asking after me?”
“No, heart. There was a message to say she can’t come till tomorrow.”
“Why not?”
“More tests. Doris Doctor just refuses to believe. They probably want to exhibit her at the Royal College of Surgeons. Shall we bustle? We mustn’t be late for din-dins.”
I wallowed in my ba
th, gazing at the sky and clouds painted on the ceiling, a tumbler of the ten-year-old clutched in my fist. I wished I could wash myself clean of everything. I wished Jane were here. I wished I was back in London. I wished I wasn’t so old, so confused and so cross. At least there was whisky. A bottle, that’s all I asked for, a full bottle of . . .
As I peered through the mist of steam at the angels looking down on me from their trompe-l’œil heaven, a small thought arose somewhere in my mind like a bubble of marsh gas. I dropped my whisky glass in surprise. Other thoughts began to pop to the surface, each lighting the other in a lightning path like will o’ the wisp. Could it be possible? I wondered. Did these sudden zig-zags of light lead anywhere, or was the parallel of ignis fatuus appropriate and the whole burst of thoughts nothing more than a false trail into the swamp? Hum . . .
I reached out an arm for the telephone handily placed in an alcove by the bath.
CHAPTER 9
I
Podmore’s felt hammer gonged the conversation to an end. I replaced the receiver and hauled myself from the tub. Years ago I discovered, and you may find this useful, a trick which enables one to dress quickly after a bath. The problem with clothing oneself when not fully dry is that one’s shirt and especially one’s socks will frot and rub frictively against the skin. They won’t slide easily on: a man can pull a shoulder muscle or crick a neck trying to wrestle with clothes in a damp post-balneal state. My discovery is that the use of a good old-fashioned bath-oil will solve this problem. It leaves the skin smooth and sleek as a seal’s and sir’s shirtings and half-hosements will practically leap from the floor and wrap themselves around him in a gladsome twinkling.
I was therefore able to glide serenely into my underlinen and stand before the mirror, patting my well-rounded tummy while I considered the little errands that had to be completed before dinner. Just two essential visits would . . .
I was distracted by the sound of moans and gasps floating through the wall from the Fuseli Room next door, where Oliver was billeted. I finished dressing, brushed my hair and came out into the corridor. Oliver emerged at the same time. He looked guiltily towards the door of his room.
“Ted, you double beast. Were you listening just now?”
“Listening? To what?”
“I’m afraid Mother was enjoying a quick one off the wrist. I’m a noisy lover when it comes to myself.”
“My dear old Oliver,” I said. “When my life is so impoverished that I find I have nothing better to do than listen to an old man wanking, I will put a bullet in my head.”
I had been listening, however. A man does. I parted from Oliver at the top of the stairs.
“Just have to pop back and check something,” I said. “Think I left a packet of Rothies in my room.”
I hurried back along the corridor and towards the passageway where the children slept. Having paid my respects to Clara, a fruitful conversation, I slipped down the stairs and out of the front door. I skimmed across the drive, panting like a dog on a hot day, crossed the front lawn, skirted the west drive and achieved the park from the side. After all, I didn’t want to scramble up and down that bloody ha-ha again. The sky was thickening to charcoal as new storm clouds gathered, but the light, although mucky for a July evening, was perfectly good enough to see by. I picked my way carefully through isolated heaps of horse dung, confident that Tubby would have stabled the horses against the bad weather and that I would escape rape or trampling from a loose stallion. I found what I was looking for and bent down to get a closer look. Satisfied, I straightened myself with a grunt and returned to the house.
Only Max, Mary, Michael and Oliver were in the small drawing room when I arrived. Michael and Mary were sitting on a sofa in the corner, talking quietly while Oliver presided over the drinks tray.
Max was peering out of the window. It gave out in the direction of the Villa Rotunda and the lake beyond, so I knew he couldn’t have seen me crossing the front lawn.
“Simon was right,” he told the room. “More storms on the way.”
“Ar, these country folk, they ben know,” Oliver croaked.
“That is the worst Norfolk accent I have ever heard,” I said.
“Then you haven’t heard real Norfolk people talking, dear. Their accents are much less convincing than mine, I can assure you. Pour you a whisky?”
“Larger the better,” I said.
I approached the sofa where Michael and Mary sat.
“But, Michael, everyone should know,” she was saying.
“Mary, believe me, I’m delighted. Delighted. Let’s leave it at that.”
“But, Michael, don’t you feel that you have a duty? I mean this gift is something remarkable, something that must be used.”
I hovered behind the sofa, not wanting to interrupt.
“I don’t know, Mary. I just don’t know. You see Annie doesn’t like . . .”
“What doesn’t Annie like?” said the woman herself from the doorway. Acutest bloody hearing you could think of.
There was a fractional pause—too short for a court of law to read anything into, but long enough to embarrass Michael—before Oliver came to the rescue.
“Voddie, dear, that’s what you don’t like. You’re a gin girl. Voddie makes you grumpy. So I’m pouring you a full Jilly Gill of lovely Jenny Gin.”
“Thank you, Oliver.”
I caught Anne’s eye, which was filled with a pleading expression that I found hard to interpret. She gestured to the far corner of the room, away from the others. I joined her there and we pretended to inspect an Oakshett acrylic portrait of the Logan family.
“I’ve just seen Davey,” she said in a low voice. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Ah,” I said. “Bit knocked up, that’s all. You might as well know that he . . . he had a session with Clara this afternoon.”
“Oh, no . . .”
“They got caught in the rain. Both fine. Just a bit tired. As a matter of fact, Max believes Clara is wonderfully improved.”
“She is?” Annie shook her head sorrowfully. “Davey said something about a row with Simon, but he wouldn’t tell me any more. What happened?”
“You might as well face it, Anne. No point fighting. That boy is a miracle worker. There can be no question about it. Don’t you agree?”
She started to speak.
“Don’t you agree?” I repeated slowly.
She looked at me and caught her breath.
“Oh, Ted!” she whispered. “Oh, Ted, you wonderful man!” She tugged at my sleeve like a child. “I knew I could rely on you. I knew it!”
“Rely on Ted?” Oliver’s voice burst in on us. “I find that hard to believe,” he said and presented Annie with her gin.
“Ted has been an angel and promised to take the twins ballooning at Brockdish tomorrow,” said Annie brightly. “So sweet of him.”
“Balloonists at Brockdish? They sew up the end of a pair of Ted’s drawers and then fill them with hot air, do they?”
“No, Oliver,” I said. “They take a life-sized nylon replica of your ego and ask you to talk into it on any subject. That’s how it’s done.”
“Wit isn’t quite your thing, my love,” said Oliver. “Just a little too cumbersome, you see.”
Rebecca, Patricia and Simon were the last to arrive, Patricia giving me a secret little grin as she came in. She’s been considering my offer, I thought. How delightful.
II
“There should have been twelve of us to dinner tonight,” Annie announced as we filed into the dining room. “But Jane hasn’t come yet and Davey and Clara are having early nights. So we’ll have to have Max, Oliver, Mary and Simon on that side and Rebecca, Ted and Patricia on this.”
“It’s dark enough to be winter,” said Michael, closing the shutters.
“Cosy,” said Oliver.
>
“Gloomy,” said I.
The first course was a smoked goose-breast, and things were going well conversationally until Patricia asked whether Lilac was still healthy.
“She’s fine,” said Simon. “Perfectly all right.”
“The most wonderful thing,” Patricia said. “I mean, that vet was so absolutely sure, wasn’t he? Ragwort poisoning. I looked it up in the library. It’s a chronic condition that causes irreversible liver damage. How can Lilac be all right?”
Simon mumbled something about vets being as capable of making mistakes as anyone else.
“We must face facts, Anne,” said Mary. “I know you don’t like talking about it, but something has got to be said, hasn’t it? Apart from anything else, Max and I are just so grateful to Davey.”
Simon cut into a slice of goose-breast with a violent scrape of his plate.
“I’m very glad that you are happy,” Anne said. “And I’m very glad Clara is happy.”
“And Oliver,” said Max. “Oliver’s happy, too.”
“Oh, yes,” said Oliver. “I’m happy. I can eat disgusting food again and voddie up without fear.”
“And I’m happy,” said Rebecca. “Happy about my daughter.”
“And you must be happy, too, Anne, Michael? You must be happy about Edward,” said Patricia.
“And Simon must be happy about Lilac,” said Mary.
Simon nodded uncomfortably.
“It’s so silly not to talk about it!” Mary went on, her eyes shining. “As if it’s a guilty secret, instead of a wonderful, wonderful miracle that has made everyone happy.”
I laid down my knife and fork with a clatter. Now. It might as well be now.
“Well, I’m sorry to piss on this parade,” I said. “But I’m not fucking happy. I’m not fucking happy at all. In fact I’m as miserable as bloody sin.”
“Of course you are, you miserable old shit,” snapped Oliver. “And you deserve to be, too. Christ almighty, what a piece of work you are.”
“Hold it, hold it!” Michael thumped his hand down on the table. “What is going on here? This is a dinner table. Please!”
