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Authors: Elizabeth Wilhide

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary, #Genre Fiction, #Historical, #Cultural Heritage, #Contemporary Fiction, #Literary, #Historical Fiction

Ashenden (38 page)

BOOK: Ashenden
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“Friction, in a word. Can’t guarantee they’d want the same thing.”

“You can’t guarantee anything in life,” said Frances. “These houses take a lot of looking after, as you should know. If you’re so keen to keep it in the family and ensure that it’s lived in, you would double the chance of that happening.”

“Perhaps,” said Hugo, sighing. “At any rate, all this is an embarrassment of riches, however you look at it. That was one of the unsettling things about the interview this morning. You suddenly see this place through someone else’s eyes. It’s been such an obsession for so long.”

“For you both,” said Frances.

He nodded. “For us both.”

They stared into the unlit fire.

“Women our age start to become invisible,” said Frances after a while, “to ourselves as well as to other people. It’s the time of life. I should know, having gone through it. From Reggie’s point of view, a door is closing for good, and I think what is worrying her is that she is realizing that it will never close for you. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if Miss Miniskirt hadn’t rattled her. And all the other legions of Miss Miniskirts out there.”

“Reggie’s too sensible for that.”

“No one’s too sensible for that. You can’t override such feelings with intellect or common sense.”

“If you’d met the girl this morning, you’d realize how silly and empty-headed she was. I had to spell ‘escritoire.’ ”

“Silly, perhaps, but young, available, and fertile.”

“You are very blunt.”

“So they say.” Frances lifted her spectacles and rubbed her eyes. “What Reggie needs right now is to feel wanted.”

“She is wanted and she knows it. She’s always known it.”

“Perhaps she needs reminding of the fact. All couples fall into habits. Those that remain couples for long enough, that is. Tell her about her sister and show her how much you care about her. And whatever you do, don’t propose a holiday or a cruise. Or buy her anything. That would be fatal.”

“I’ll tell her in the morning.”

“Tell her tonight, if she’s still awake.”

“And spoil her sleep?”

“She may sleep all the better for hearing it. It’s not her sister that she’s worried about.”

“Perhaps you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right,” said Frances. She laughed. “I so often am.”

*  *  *

“Are you awake?” he said, coming into their bedroom.

“I think so,” she said.

One of the lamps was burning, and the great bed with its hangings seemed to him to be like a ship resting at anchor, darkness looming over the tester and beyond towards the windows. A moth flitted against the lampshade, doomed to crash again and again in its thirst for light. He thought about what Frances had said, debating with himself—and with her in his mind—whether he should tell his wife about her sister now or leave it to the morning. His mother’s belief that procrastination was a great evil, which she had instilled into him when he was very young, had served him well in business over the years, and he decided, acknowledging this higher authority, as mothers remained even when one was fully middle-aged, that he must be guided by the same principle on this occasion.

He undressed and got under the light summer covers, shifting the dogs with his feet.

“Reggie.” He reached an arm around her. “There’s something I must tell you.”

“What is it?”

He could feel her nerve endings coming to life all the way down her body.

“I’m afraid your sister’s pregnant again.”

“Was that the call this morning?”

“It was,” he said.

She turned over in bed to face him.

“I’m sorry. I should have told you straightaway. It’s been on my mind all day.”

They lay in silence for a while, then she let out a long sigh. “Well, I have to say that’s a relief. I knew you were keeping something from me and I was beginning to imagine—oh, never mind what I was imagining.”

He stroked her face. She had always had such smooth skin. “I would never do anything to hurt you, you must know that. Never have and never shall.”

An embarrassment of riches, he thought, and nothing more prized than their life together. Twin compass points was what they were: he remembered his Donne, although he would never have quoted poetry, not even after a good dinner.

She moved closer towards him. A little air came in through the windows. Everything was still, except the moth pattering against the shade.

“My poor sister. It won’t be easy at forty-five.”

She reached over to switch off the bedside light, and the next time he asked if she was awake, he didn’t get an answer.

*  *  *

By the time the article was published six weeks later, Reggie had forgotten all about it. In the interim there was Bunny’s funeral, with all its attendant sadness and regret, followed by Charlie’s birthday, which was celebrated at the Swan in Goring.

Reggie was conscious that she was subdued throughout most
of the birthday party, looking out over the rushing weir, awash in memory of the time she had lunched here with Bunny, all those years ago when they had visited the house together. The restaurant had been redecorated since then, veal Marengo was off the menu, and the dessert trolley was laden with a monstrous trifle. The tablecloths were still pink, however.

After they finished eating, a waiter brought a cake lit with candles and embarrassed Charlie, who tried to dive under the table. Then there were presents. Hugo slipped Charlie an envelope, and he tore it open long enough to register the amount and mutter his thanks.

“Blimey! You lucky thing!” said his younger sister, Ros, peering over his shoulder.

Afterwards, Winifred produced a square package wrapped in blue-and-silver paper. “And this is from us.”

“What is it?” said Charlie, shaking it. He was a vivid boy, with a slight air of devilment about him.

“Don’t shake it,” said Winifred, whose hair had been rigidly set for the occasion.

As Charlie unwrapped the package, a look of sheer wonderment and joy spread across his face. No gift giver could ever have hoped for a better reaction. For a time, he was too stunned to say a word.

“Are you going to let us know what it is?” said Hugo, smiling.

Charlie held up the box. “It’s a Nikon F,” he said, his eyes wide.

Jeremy, his father, cleared his throat. “Well, if one is going to pursue a hobby, one might as well take it seriously.”

“Thanks, Dad. Thanks, Mum. I can’t believe it!” Charlie was already opening the box, lifting the camera out of its packaging, turning it over in his hands.

“Good suggestion,” murmured Winifred, on her way to the ladies’. Reggie glanced at Hugo and read nothing in his expression.

In the car on the way home Hugo said, “At least he got his camera.”

The article, when it finally appeared the following Sunday in a paper they did not normally buy, was called “The Way We Live Now.” It was as bad as Reggie had feared. She was described as a
“svelte brunette in her early fifties,” Hugo as a “titled industrialist said to be worth millions”; the article alluded to their childlessness as if this had been a matter of choice—“the two of them rattling around in a huge Georgian mansion on their own”—and got the names of the dogs wrong. Barely half a paragraph was devoted to their restoration of the house, rather more to the numbers of staff they had “waiting on them hand and foot.” Retold, the story about Panton and Mrs. Marsham helping Reggie to reassemble the chandelier became a tale of exploitation. The second half of the feature contrasted the “Lyells’ lavish stately home set in thousands of acres of rolling Berkshire countryside” with the three-bedroom council flat with “condensation running down the walls” occupied by the Travers family of Poplar, an unemployed docker, his wife, and five children.

Much to Reggie’s surprise, Hugo found it funny. “I’m absolutely certain,” he said, throwing the supplement to one side, “that the heading must have been the sub’s idea. I’ll eat my hat if that girl’s read a word of Trollope.”

Reggie felt no such equanimity. After breakfast, she fetched her secateurs and went out into the garden, where she deadheaded roses for the remainder of the morning with rather more savagery than strictly speaking was necessary.

   14   
The Fête: 1976

Y
ou can reach a turning point without realizing that’s what it is; most people don’t. Afterwards, with hindsight, you make it out, but at the time it seems like more of the same—another year gone past, the habits that creep up on you which were innovations in their time but have become traditions through repetition. It’s hard to spot the moment when you get old—the date won’t be on the calendar. Harder still to tell when you’ve done enough, when there is nothing more left to do except bow out with grace.

*  *  *

This year no one speculated what the weather would be like. Everyone knew the weather would be the same as yesterday and the day before, and the week before and the weeks before that. No need to worry about it raining or to gaze up at the skies, which were as blank and blue as a Mediterranean destination; no need to check for incoming weather systems and depressions over the Atlantic that might spoil things. All summer, days of endless sun had parched the ground, turned what was green brown and dusty, yielded up the ridgebacks of ancient barrows and Saxon settlements. A holiday mood prevailed, which made people bare parts of their bodies that had never been bared in public before. “Mustn’t complain,” they said, fanning themselves, shoulders and arms burned lobster red. The Ploughshare put picnic tables in its garden, and the landlord
was surprised when after a few weeks the saloon bar became noisy again with the chuntering of the fruit machines and the ringing fall of coins. As the heat wave went on, only the children, swooping on their bikes across melting tarmac, were in seventh heaven.

The Upper and Lower Ashenden combined village fête was always held in the first week of August in the grounds of the Park. Proceeds of the event went to Lady Lyell’s charity. In the old stable block, cakes, fruit, flowers, and vegetables would be presented for judging, a marquee would serve as a tea tent, and scattered around the paddock would be the usual stalls: trestle tables laid out with knitted items and gingham-topped jars of jams, hook a duck, the coconut shy, guess the weight, and the tombola with its ticketed prizes. For three years, the same bottle of port hadn’t been claimed and now had dusty shoulders and disturbed sediments.

Izzie Beckmann was eighteen. In her bedroom she tried on various outfits in front of the mirror, ideology rather than coolness and comfort uppermost in her mind. When she was satisfied with what the mirror told her, she went downstairs.

“My God, Izzie,” said her mother, coming along the passageway. “What on earth are you wearing? You’ll roast. Put on a skirt or some shorts. And what’s that on your fingernails?”

“Nail polish, Mother.”

“Mother” was new; it gave Izzie the distance she wanted from “Mum” and she enjoyed using it.

“Green?”

Izzie spread out her fingers in front of her and nodded. “Green.”

Alison Beckmann winced, not at the nails, but at hearing herself turn into her own mother. Who was she to comment on her daughter’s cropped puckish hair, green polish, and combat trousers, with their pockets and pouches down the legs? She wondered whether coming back to the village had hastened the process or whether it was inevitable wherever you were.

Both her parents were gone now. After her mother’s death last October, they could have sold the house and got a reasonable price for it, but Walter, who was nearing retirement, wanted a change and a garden
of a decent size, and so they had sold their Reading terrace instead, and now, almost thirty years since she had last lived here, she was back in her childhood home. Tom was up in London, and Izzie, who had protested about the move, although not more forcefully than she protested about all the other things she protested about, had had only a term of long bus journeys to and from school before her examinations were over. University loomed in the autumn and then she too would be off.

The doors were open front to back, letting in a through breeze. Even in these unprecedented temperatures the house remained cool, as if it retained the climate of other times.

Her mother, whose fractious spirit hung about the place, had been a vigorous, scourging cleaner. When carpets were beaten, dust had circled in the air, too afraid to land. Dust had never been afraid of Alison and on this hot summer day lay mocking her on every ledge and along the tops of skirting boards. Cobwebs too. Walter had plans and had shown her drawings that demonstrated how the house might be modernized with the knocking down of walls and the opening up of hallways and reroutings of passages, by which she had understood that his retirement from the building trade was going to mean more of the same. When she imagined the house transformed, French windows leading from a large remodeled kitchen on to the garden and the river view, she thought how well he had anticipated the fact that they were both going to need something to look forward to once Izzie had left. All their married life there had never been just the two of them, and to become a couple for the first time would also be something new.

“I want to put flowers on Grandma’s grave,” said Izzie, confirming in the hall mirror what the mirror upstairs had told her. “Can I take these?” She pointed to the vase on the hall table and, not waiting for an answer, hoicked out the brassy marigolds.

“I took some a couple of days ago. They should still be fresh.”

“What are you saying? Are you saying I shouldn’t go?” Izzie’s memories of the grandfather who had doted on her were sketchy and based largely on photographic evidence; her grandmother, however, was her own personal property. “It’s a special day.” There
was scorn in this statement, an implied negligence, although Izzie had been the first to complain about the errands, sickbed visits, and all the other time-consuming attentions an elderly mother required. “You know how much she always enjoyed the fête.” The stems dripped all over the floor.

Alison counted to ten in her head: she didn’t want an argument. Walter handled Izzie better; their temperaments weren’t so much alike. So far as appearance was concerned, her daughter had the pick of both their features, as if she had been presented with a checklist in the womb and ticked them off: I’ll have Dad’s mouth, ears, and height—oh, and Mum’s nose, eyes, and legs while you’re at it. And please make me blond, just to confuse them. Sometimes Alison thought that Izzie wasn’t conscious of her beauty. At other times she was convinced that the determined ugliness of her clothing was her way of calling attention to it. That was to say nothing of the contrast between Izzie’s sharp mind and the fecklessness of Stuart Moss, who was the current boyfriend (and whose combat trousers they were).

BOOK: Ashenden
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