Life: An Exploded Diagram (10 page)

And they really were. Are.

I wanted to tell Jiffy all this, but I didn’t know how. Didn’t have the words. I was only fourteen, after all. And the other boys would have called me a pretentious prat, and worse. But old Brother Juan Sánchez had set me on my course. I’ve made my living these past thirty years painting and drawing things exactly and intensely as they
are
and letting them speak for themselves.

In time, and reluctantly, Jiffy recognized that I wasn’t going to become one of his inspired splatterers. He even praised (and, to be fair, greatly improved) my technique, even though he used the word
technique
as if it were a sad and regrettable impediment. He never gave me a mark higher than B. So I was just a bit pleased when I passed my O level with a grade A. My best piece of exam work was a pencil study of my grandmother’s hand resting on our table next to an orange. I was terribly proud of it. Hands are difficult. Textured globes aren’t exactly easy, either. I liked the way the surface of the orange was echoed in the skin of Win’s work-coarsened, sixty-two-year-old hand. She was a patient model. She sat for hours with her Bible in the other hand. She could have memorized the book of Job in the time it took. Perhaps she did.

I have a framed print of the Cotán painting here in my apartment. It hangs opposite the photograph of my young grandparents. I keep meaning to move it. Because when I look at it, I see Percy and Win reflected in the glass, hovering in the eternal darkness at the heart of the painting, just to the right of the apple — Sorry, quince.

E
DMUND MORTIMER’S KIND
and faulty heart finally gave out on a crisp October morning in 1960, a week after he’d presided over his forty-ninth Harvest Festival. (Which turned out to be the last Harvest Festival celebrated in the great Tithe Barn at Bratton Manor Farm. Gerard Mortimer did not share his father’s fondness for outmoded rustic customs, nor did he care for the expense involved.)

According to the old man’s wishes, his coffin was carried to the cemetery on one of the farm’s wooden carts, which happened to be the same age as himself. The cart was pulled by his last surviving pair of shire horses, Titan and Magnus, who were somberly but splendidly kitted out in gleaming black harness and plumes of black feathers. The route took them through Borstead’s market square, which was crowded with respectful onlookers and astonished children.

Inside the leading car of the funeral cortege, the atmosphere was prickly. Gerard Mortimer was embarrassed and deeply irritated. It was typical of his father to dictate that this occasion be turned into some sort of damned . . . parade. The
horses,
for God’s sake, as if he were royalty. All these people ogling them, the men taking their hats off and bowing their heads, the women wiping their noses with handkerchiefs. Ridiculous. Gerard’s wife, Nicole, had allowed herself to be carried away by it all. She’d started lifting her hand to the crowd like the queen mother until Gerard had reached across and seized her wrist. Françoise, his troublesome fourteen-year-old daughter, squirmed and pouted between them, as if wearing a black skirt and knee-socks was a form of cruel and unnatural punishment.

Gerard leaned back in the leather seat. It was all right; it would soon be over. Then he could start, at last. He’d been waiting one hell of a long time.

On the second Saturday after he’d stowed his father in the family crypt, Gerard Mortimer drove his dark-blue Humber into Ling’s yard. George greeted him.

“Morning, Mr. Mortimer. I’m sorry for your loss. We all thought very highly of your father. A real gentleman.”

“Yes. Yes, indeed. Thank you, George. How are you getting along with the Ferguson?”

“Well,” George said, “we . . .”

“Show me.”

Concealing his surprise — and his anxiety — George led Mortimer over to where the tractor stood semi-eviscerated in one of the lean-to workshops.

“The main problem is the oil pump —” George began, but Mortimer cut him off.

“I want to talk to you, George. Not about this piece of junk, and not here. What are you doing this afternoon?”

“Well, I . . . nothing much, I suppose.”

“Good. I’ll pick you up after you’ve had your lunch. Say, two thirty? Lovelace Road, isn’t it?”

George stood rubbing his graying chin stubble, watching Gerard depart. The man was a rum’n. Not a bit like his father. Harder. Impatient. Not a trace of the old man’s buttery Norfolk burr, either. Touch of a Yank accent. His men, behind his back, called him Zherrah, mimicking the way his wife pronounced his name. French, or French-Canadian, or whatever she was. Uppity posh foreign crumpet. What the hell did he want to talk about that couldn’t be said here?

George watched the big car pull smoothly away from the gates and wondered what he’d done wrong.

At a quarter to three, Ruth ducked away from the living-room window.

“He’s here,” she stage-whispered.

“Tuh,” Win muttered bitterly. If having Gerard Mortimer turn up outside the house in his bleddy great car weren’t getting Above Yerself, what was?

Ruth hastily pulled off her pinafore and touched up her hair. It was a wasted effort. Mortimer didn’t come to the door. He sat in the Humber and sounded the horn, twice, and George, shaved and in his Sunday best, hurried to the summons.

In Norfolk you don’t need to build very high to have a commanding view of your territory. So when, in 1780, the Mortimers commissioned the architect van Wyck to design a new home a short distance from their rambling Elizabethan farmhouse, he settled for a mere three stories under a shallow-pitched roof. (Usefully, this meant that the servants, who lived in the attics, acquired the habit of stooping.) The problem was, van Wyck quickly realized, that visitors to Bratton Manor would be able to descend from their carriages and walk directly to the front door. And this would never do. The Mortimers would need their guests to
ascend.
So he had the low slope in front of the site leveled for a forecourt, and he extended a grand terrace from the front of the house. That was a far better arrangement; now visitors would have to climb a splendid balustraded staircase onto the terrace in order to gain admittance.

George tried to seem unimpressed as the Humber approached the house. They’d not talked much on the way there. Gerard had driven with exaggerated care, but slightly too fast. Once or twice he’d belched, and George had caught the whiff of alcohol. They passed along the flank of a high-walled garden and then drove through a Victorian archway into a cobbled courtyard surrounded by brick-and-flint outbuildings. The car was immediately surrounded by a small pack of thrilled and noisy spaniels. George, who disliked and feared dogs, hesitated with his door part-open.

“Oh, don’t worry about this lot,” Gerard said. “Too bloody useless to actually bite anybody. They’re the wife’s. She’s dog mad.”

He led George through the furry maelstrom into a large room containing an extraordinary number of boots and coats, as well as a distinct reek of horse. A low, heavy door gave on to a dim passageway.

“This way, George. We’ll talk in the morning room. The females know not to come in there.”

He shoved open a door on the left and led George in. The room was lit by mellow and angled sunlight. It seemed to be both a library and an office. A wall of shelves slumped under the weight of books, box files, and ledgers. A desk strewn with papers stood in front of the tall bay window. A pair of tapestry-covered armchairs sat like plump old ladies at either side of the fireplace.

“Sit,” Gerard said, gesturing, and marched over to a mahogany cabinet. “You a whiskey man, George?”

“Ah . . . now and again.”

“Excellent.”

Gerard brought two heavy glasses and a decanter to the fireplace and sat down. He poured the drinks.

“Cheers.”

“Ta,” George said. He shuddered as the Scotch burned down his gullet.

Much of the wall opposite the fireplace was covered with eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white photographs pinned together into a complex single image. Gerard saw George looking at them.

“An aerial view of the domain, George. We’ll come to that in a minute. First things first.”

He swallowed a glug of malt and leaned back in his chair, resting one foot on the ankle of the other.

“I’ve been talking to Bill Ling about you. He says you’re the best man he’s ever had.”

He raised his free hand, halting whatever it was that George might have been about to say.

“We’re talking man to man here, George. No bull.”

“Fair enough.”

“You were in the REME. North Africa. That right? Heavy armor support?”

“That’s right.”

“So you know all about tracked vehicles? Tanks and half-tracks? Bulldozers? Heavy equipment?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“A skill is a skill, George. I doubt that you’ve lost it.”

“Well . . .”

Gerard leaned to top up George’s glass.

“You probably know — well, everybody knows everything about every other bugger’s business in this part of the world — that I was in Canada for several years. ’S where I met my wife. Montreal. But I spent a good bit of time in Saskatchewan. The prairie. Looking at farming. It was a revelation, George; an absolute
revelation.
Flat as a pancake, Saskatchewan.” He stumbled over the word this time. “A bit like Norfolk. But that’s where the resemblance ends. Because over there, they’ve got fields two miles long and a mile across. Straight fields, George. Rectangles. Can you imagine? They plow using four huge half-track tractors side by side, cutting ten furrows apiece. Four men can plow a square mile in a day. Straight up, straight down, nothing in the way, you see? Harvest, same thing. Four, maybe more, big combines, line abreast. Incredible sight. And the yields are
fantastic,
George. Now, come over here.”

Gerard led George over to the aerial photographs of the Mortimer fiefdom. The composite image was rich in detail. The shadows of trees and hedges and church towers suggested the pictures had been taken early in the morning.

“Here’s where we are,” Gerard said, tapping the roof of the manor.

Peering, George saw that the Humber was parked in the rear courtyard, exactly where they’d left it ten minutes earlier. He experienced a brief warping of reality, a moment of dizziness. The whiskey, probably.
Go steady,
he warned himself.

“Up here, see, the outskirts of Borstead. You’re, ah . . . no, you’re not quite on it. And way over here is the edge of the airfield. This is the road to Gunston and Norwich. Got your bearings?”

“Aye, I think so. It’s, er, pretty impressive.”

Gerard snorted. “Impressive, eh?” He took a swig from his glass. “You know what I see when I look at this? I see mess. Chaos. Higgledy-piggledy anarchy. Eh?”

George was perplexed. Etiquette, the rules of class distinction, obliged him to agree, but he had no idea what he would be agreeing
with.
So he nodded without speaking.

Gerard tapped his estates again where a square had been marked out with some sort of blue pencil.

“Look here. This is a square mile, give or take. How many separate fields are there in it? Go on, count ’em. No, don’t bother. There’re seventeen. Seven-bloody-
teen.
Nine separate field entrances off four different lanes. Ridiculous. Approximately fifteen percent of land area is bits and bobs of woodland and hedges that never run straight for more than a furlong. Four of the fields have been plowed. D’you see?”

George did indeed see that four irregular patches had been combed. They looked like the whorls and volutions of a giant’s fingerprint.

“Hardly a straight furrow to be seen, is there? Because the tractor had to swerve away from this lump of hedge, here, then around this little bit of woodland, here. The thing is, what’re those trees
doing
there? What are they
for
? What are the
hedges
for?”

George was alarmed. Mortimer had worked himself up, or down, into a state of angry depression.

He managed to say, “I’ve never really thought about it.”

“Ah!” Gerard’s exclamation was a pounce. “Of course you haven’t! Most people haven’t! God knows, my father didn’t. Or wouldn’t. But I have, George. I’ve thought about it a lot. Come and sit down. Top you up?”

“I’m fine for the minute, thanks.”

“Suit yourself. Cigarette?”

“Don’t mind if I do.” (He’d been gasping for one.)

The light was ebbing from the room now. The tobacco smoke rose in flowering blue tendrils.

“Agriculture is a business, George. And like any other business, it’s all about
efficiency.
I tried to get the old man to see that, but . . . well, mustn’t speak ill, and all that. But he was . . . sentimental. ‘The land is a
resource,
Father,’ I’d say. ‘We have to maximize our gain from it.’ And he’d smile and pat me on the head, like I was one of Nicole’s bloody spaniels.”

The intimacy of this image discomfited George, who took a cautious sip of whiskey.

“And it’s not just gain, profit. We’ve got a growing population in this country. More and more mouths to feed. And we’re not going to do it using farming methods that are a hundred years out of date. I saw the future in Canada, George. It’s
mechanization.
Mechanization on a grand scale. Plus”— Gerard held up a finger —“
agrochemicals:
fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides. You can’t bloody
weed
a square mile, y’know.”

“I don’t suppose you can, no.”

“No. But the problem facing me is this: you can’t apply modern methods to country like that.”

Gerard waved his cigarette at the wall of photographs.

“That was designed for horse-drawn plows. Harvesting with scythes. Potato-lifting by hand. A dozen sheep per field. It’s medieval, basically. So, if we’re going to modernize farming, George, we’ve got to modernize the landscape. Straighten it out. Rationalize it. Get it machine ready. Turn this part of Norfolk into clean prairie. That’s my vision.”

Mortimer tossed his cigarette end into the fireplace and sat back in his chair. He smiled.

“And you, Mr. Ackroyd, are wondering why the hell I’m telling you all this, seeing as how you’re not a farming man. Am I right?”

“Well, yes, to be honest.”

“Of course you are. So let’s get down to business. In various places up and down the country, there’s a lot of stuff that’s been lying idle since the end of the war. Ex-military stuff. Tracked bulldozers and so forth — things they used for building airfields and coastal defenses and whatnot. I’m buying up a lot of it. And I’m having some damn serious agricultural equipment shipped over from America. The locals will have their eyes on stalks when they see it, by God. But I’m going to need someone who knows big machinery. Someone who knows how to work it, maintain it. Someone who’s not scared of it. Someone like you, George.”