Tandia (39 page)

'English law, sir?'

E.W. looked slightly taken aback. 'Why, all law, of course!

I am not aware that the English are any different from any other people when they are at the receiving end of things. Natural justice is the beginning of all true justice; we shall see where it leads. I think you might profitably spend a little time in the Bodleian consulting the work of John Fawcett, though, of course, I am more anxious to read your
own
thoughts on the subject.'

E.W., skilfully moving both of them towards the door, continued his instructions. 'So, please, dear boy, not too many notations in your essay on the thoughts of men long dead. Profundity is seldom achieved by misquoting the opinions of those who cannot return to defend themselves. It is an unfortunate habit cultivated by the more modest minds at Oxford who can only impress their peers by building a bulwark of old ideas. It disguises, of course, the absence of any new ones of their own. By all means use the quotes of the dead to clear the known ground, then dare to walk the wildest unknown path. In this way we can look forward to some intellectual progress.'

At the door they shook hands formally. 'Goodbye, Peekay.' He rubbed his hands together, as though he had suddenly made up his mind about something. 'By Jove! Next time you come I shall serve you Darjeeling. I believe you have given me the courage to liberate myself!'

At the conclusion of her final year at Chelsea Arts School Harriet had applied for a grant to the National Arts Foundation, submitting two small maquettes of work she hoped to complete. The first was to be a three-quarter size study of two horses, while the other was a life-size sculpture of a boxer. Her application was successful and the grant enabled her to take a small cottage attached to an old stable with a lofted ceiling, which she hoped to convert into a studio.

The cottage, which went by the unprepossessing name of Cow Cottage, lay about five miles out of Oxford in a setting beside a small brook and amongst tall old oak trees which now stood bare and bleak against the December landscape. The doorway to the cottage was partly overgrown by a climbing white rose Peekay identified as Francis Eileste, while the garden was overgrown with sweetbriar roses and camellia fighting for a space in the pale sun with the weeds and bramble. Harriet, trudging happily around it in a pair of wellington boots, claimed to discover all manner of lovely things cowering under the onslaught of weed, winter and neglect.

Harriet, like Peekay, had grown up in the country. She had spent her childhood in Norfolk and was familiar with gardens. 'I shall have a lovely cottage garden. It's all here waiting for spring and a little love,' she exclaimed happily. Hymie, on the other hand, was not reassured so easily.

He would pass through the three acres of rolling lawns, talking about watering devices for carefully planted beds like the ones in the Levy family garden in Pretoria. He looked at it all as dispassionately as he might a small public park. 'Sure,' he said, looking disapprovingly at the stone cottage buried in weed and neglect, 'I hope you don't expect any of this love you're talking about to come from me? God made my arm to drive a gold Parker 51. Why else would He have given me thirteen of them for my barmitzvah?'

Peekay, on the other hand, was delighted. He longed to get his hands onto a bit of dark, wet earth again and, like Harriet, he could sense that the two-hundred-year-old cottage garden, given a little encouragement, would stage a magnificent comeback in the spring. He also loved the cottage, with its ancient shingle roof, green with moss and lichen, and its Headington stone walls - none too straight, so that the front door leaned decidedly to the left, as did all the windows. He pointed to the south wall of the cottage. 'It looks as though the big bad wolf stood on that side of the house and huffed and puffed and damn nearly blew it down!'

'Christ! What a mess!' Hymie snorted. 'Who are we supposed to be? The three little pigs?'

The interior of the cottage consisted of one large room with a hearth forming the centre of the northern wall which was blackened by a century or two of smoke from the open fire. The early afternoon light strained through the dirty windows, making the interior almost dark. The room hadn't been used for several years and, though dusty, was surprisingly dry and very cold. The floor was of heavy slabs of blue slate, although it was hard to tell in the semi-dark; they could equally have been brown or grey. There was no electricity and no evidence of plumbing. Water was obviously carted in from the brook.

'Jesus! Talk about cosy!' Hymie said in disgust, flicking his cigarette lighter to examine the hearth. 'Shit, Harriet, there's no bloody stove!'

The toilet, a small wooden construction, stood at the bottom of the kitchen garden beside the stream. It too leaned, though from the weight of a very old clematis, its winter-bare vine hugging the entire edifice and pushing it to the right, as if in stubborn defiance of the direction the cottage had decided to take.

The stable, which was more like a barn, was actually larger than the cottage, and the hayloft had been removed, leaving a vaulted ceiling. 'When I can get two large windows set into either side of the roof it will make a perfect studio.'

Harriet explained. 'It's the only real expense actually, except for a coat of limewash inside the cottage and here and there a few tiny repairs. Otherwise the place is perfect, don't you think?'

Hymie lit a sobranie before answering. 'My grandmother on my mother's side, with only a large black frying pan on her back, fled from a shtetl in Russia where every house was a Taj Mahal compared to this dump!' He looked appealingly at Harriet. 'Do me a favour, come and live in Oxford? I tell you what. I'll buy you a bicycle so you can pedal out to this dump every day to work.'

'Oh, Hymie, can't you see how romantic it is?' Harriet exclaimed.

'Romantic? No stove! No plumbing! No bathroom! No bloody toilet! The only mod con you're going to enjoy around here is a hot and cold running nose!'

Harriet smiled. 'With a birch-log fire in the hearth, winter will soon pass and when spring comes you'll think it's a miracle, just you wait and see, Hymie Solomon Levy.'

'A miracle is right! A miracle if you're not dead in this cow of a cottage!'

Peekay was secretly glad. Harriet had asked him to pose for the boxer sculpture and he liked the idea of coming out into the country to do so. He'd known Harriet for fourteen months and had been careful to keep the relationship strictly kosher, always making sure that the three of them were together. She belonged to Hymie; but in his mind at night in bed, she belonged to him. At first he'd tried to dismiss her from his thoughts, telling himself how futile it was to allow his imagination to own her. But it didn't work. The famous Peekay mind control collapsed in a whimpering heap at the thought of Harriet in bed with him.

Peekay was not even sure, given the opportunity, that he'd have the courage anyway. His experience of women was one fantastic night with Carmen. He was hopelessly short of experience in the preliminaries. He'd been totally indulged by Carmen but in the process had received very little useful information in the preliminary kissing and feelup department. His mind was filled with schoolboy stuff, breasts which pumped up like rocks when you felt them and nipples that stood up so you could practically roll one around in your mouth like a large plump raisin. But the practicalities of, for instance, unhooking a brassiere, were beyond him. However hard he tried to imagine it, he knew he couldn't do it.

The trouble was that Harriet was so nice. Peekay felt guilty about making love to her in his imagination. She wasn't just a stunning-looking girl you wanted to do it to. She was someone you wanted to like anyway. She was intelligent, independent and fun. She could be formidable in argument and she would kiss them both spontaneously, hug and touch and be loving, as though it was a perfectly natural thing to do. Which it was, of course; but which it also wasn't, of course.

After over a year together Peekay wasn't so sure Harriet was Hymie's girl. Harriet seemed to treat him no differently to the way she treated Peekay, ami Hymie didn't seem to mind this in the least. They were seldom together alone and Hymie made no deliberate attempts to make this happen. If Hymie was sleeping with Harriet, they were going to great pains to conceal it from him.

The trouble was that he and Hymie never talked about it. It was the only thing they hadn't shared. This was mainly Peekay's fault. Because he felt the way he did about Harriet he was afraid Hymie would find out if they talked about her. Peekay wasn't sure he could hide his true feelings from his friend. So he'd gone along with the platonic bit, the two brothers and a sister thing they'd developed between them. It was infinitely better than having no Harriet in his life and Hymie seemed more than happy, even gratified by the arrangement.

Sex was the weakest link in the relationship between the two friends. Hymie had always seemed rather ambivalent about the subject. At school, when puberty had struck like lightning to keep their right hands cupped and guilty and where loud-mouthed fantasy had kept them all from going mad, Hymie had always remained cool. The contagious delirium caused by the overheating of the group's collective sexual imagination seemed to pass him by. It wasn't as though he drew apart, he simply didn't contribute. This was unusual for Hymie. In most other things his opinion played a leading role. Peekay had once bounced his fist against someone's head for suggesting Hymie was a queer. But he had to admit that when the boys woke in the morning and carried their towels to the showers draped over their rigid tent poles, Hymie always sauntered in, slack as a wind sock on a still morning, his towel slung casually over his shoulder.

If Hymie didn't take much of a physical role in the restoration of Cow Cottage, as usual he made things happen. He sent Bobby and Eddy, Peekay's two former sparring partners from the Morris Works, scrounging around builders' yards until they'd found two huge Gothic arched windows. The two boxers arrived at Cow Cottage in a Morris van 'borrowed' from the works on a Saturday morning and before mid afternoon, when the light was beginning to fade, they'd shaped two large holes in the stable roof and edged them in plywood covered with copper sheeting. The following day they'd hoisted the windows up onto the roof and fixed them neatly into place. Hymie had paid for the windows; they were Harriet's Christmas present from him. But when he'd gone to pay the lads they wouldn't hear of it.

Both boxers had become friends, particularly of Peekay. They'd become infinitely better boxers after working out with the young South African who was generous with his knowledge and was often in their corner on a Saturday night calling the tactics. They'd also met Harriet on several occasions and it was clear they approved of her thoroughly, urging Peekay in a good natured way to wrest her away from Hymie, whom they referred to as, 'the Management'. Bobby would shake his head. 'She's a fighter's lass, lad. 'Taint no good wastin' a good sort like 'er on the Management!'

They were both originally farm lads and seemed to be able to turn their hands to most things. They'd returned the following Saturday, having again 'borrowed' a works van, and spent most of the day loading up the furniture Harriet had found in a number of second-hand locations around Oxford. They'd even been reluctant to stop for lunch, a couple of bottles of Morrell's brown ale and hunks of bread and cheese with thick wedges of freshly dug onion.

The onion was a self-sown distant relative of an antecedent onion patch and had revealed itself when Peekay turned the soil in the kitchen garden, binding it with lime and manure in preparation for the new planting they planned for spring. Peekay had also repaired the garden beds and fixed the drainage, leaving a generous clump of mint and aromatic bronze fennel and another of cotton lavender and Jerusalem sage which seemed to have thrived on the harsh times. He also left several smaller clumps of lily-of-the-valley and bright yellow winter aconite to add a spot of cheer. Against the wall of the stable forming the southern side of the kitchen garden and only a hop, step and jump from the back door of the cottage, grew damson and quince, while along the northern edge ran a badly neglected hedge of rosemary which he trimmed and weeded so that the gaps would grow back in the summer. The brook, a sprightly little stream, formed the bottom border to the garden.

By nightfall on the fourth Sunday, three weeks and a day after Harriet had told a slightly bemused farmer she'd pay him the fifty pounds a year rent in advance, she'd moved into Cow Cottage. The interior of the cottage smelt of fresh calcium and paraffin from the four hurricane lamps suspended on chains from the blackened beam which ran down the centre of the room. Two large second-hand kilims lay on the scrubbed slate floor, which had turned out to be a rich brown colour. At the end of the room, furthermost from the hearth, stood a large imitation Queen-Anne bed of oak veneer, purchased for three pounds from a dealer in Aylesbury, while in the centre rested an enormous chesterfield with broad curved arms of flat wood which looked straight out of a Noel Coward play. Two matching armchairs made up the rest of the centre of the room. The chesterfield and armchairs were covered in a red moquette edged with brass studs in the style of the thirties. The arms of the suite were badly scratched with several dark cigarette burns in the wood, but Eddy promised he'd cut the varnish back, clean it all up and re-lacquer them over the Christmas break.

Further along the room near the hearth stood a fairly large scrubbed-pine kitchen table with six bentwood chairs and a kitchen dresser. Finally, sitting squat and happy in the corner to the right of the hearth was 'Bobby's Bounty', a black pot-belly stove Bobby had discovered in a gatekeeper's lodge at an entrance to the Nuffield works.

Eddy had fitted the stove with a new chimney and fixed the flue, and Bobby had set to work on it with stove black, finally buffing it up until it glowed a deep, contented black. On the door of the small stove, in raised cast-iron lettering, read the words 'Rocky Mountain Cooker' and in smaller letters below, 'Made in British Columbia: home of the Canadian Mounties'.

With the little stove had come four bags of washed coal, sufficient to last the winter, which Bobby and Eddy explained had been mysteriously placed in the back of the Morris van when they'd left it parked beside a coal truck outside a pub close to the single men's hostel where they lived.

While the handsome little cooker boasted only one plate it worked a treat and when its fat, round belly was fired up it kept the room nice and warm, even without a fire in the hearth.

Harriet had yet to add such things as bookshelves and posters and the general clutter of things that come to stay in a home, but when the hurricane lamps were lit at night, the room had a bright yellow warmth. Even in daylight, with the windows now clean, the light in the room was soft. Harriet's only initial concession to her femininity was a brilliant patchwork eiderdown on the double bed and lace curtains which framed the small cottage windows. Also, there were two huge damask pillows plumped against the bedhead in a most inviting manner.