The Colonel's Daughter (22 page)

Wouldn't do that to your father, would you? Turn his own people against him? Dead is he? Oh. Expect I should be dead, by rights. That dog, Mac, must be dead by now. And those other fleabags, Chuppy and Whatisname. Only thing my wife could pronounce properly in Spanish as far as I know was Narcisco Yepes. Know him?
Narthithco Yepeth!
So how the hell does she manage in Portugoose? Eh ? Just wanders about in her sunhat, pointing, I dare say.
Watero las orangerias gracias. Portare immediatementi il breakfastino!
Beats me how you can make a life out of that twaddle! Perhaps she hasn't got a life. She never writes to me. I send her a Christmas card each year, for old time's sake. Sent her an out-of-date printed one last year by mistake: ‘With Best Wishes for Christmas and the New Year from Lord and Lady Bressingham', it said! My God, that will have made her break a few ornaments! Fidelity Belcher. I'll wonder to my dying day what happened to her in Macassar.

Show you round the house now. Got a scarf or something? Got any gloves? When I was a boy, there'd be twenty or thirty staying for Christmas. Everybody going in and out of each other's bedrooms in secret! We children used to spy on the night flitters; called them the Somnambulists. Always had a fascination for sex, but Roman Catholics want to take all the fun out of it. Can't imagine why I married one. Didn't suit me at all. I should have had a string of young wives with tearing fingers, like Daff.

Oh, I like your scarf. I like striped things. I told Curry, we're going to build a roller coaster bigger than Battersea! Paint all the structure green, shape the little cars like wasps and bees and let the people yell their heads off, flying above the cedars like insects. Imagine looking out of that window and seeing that – people whizzing over the trees! I'd have loved it. I'd have kept it going round the year. But I expect that's where I went wrong with the council: too keen. Phlegmatic lot! Don't seem to care a jot that Bressingham's sinking into the moat. I told them, give me permission for the funfair and the lion pit and the aviary and I'll put Bressingham on its feet again within a year. I was only asking for
permission.
Not for money. But they refused me. Story of my life: people reaching for their bloody bedjackets and saying, never.

Off we go, then. Always put a macintosh on when I do the tour of the house; protects me from the damp. Dry rot, wet rot, mould, fungus – we've got it all here now. The Somnambulists would turn in their graves! There used to be fires in all the bedrooms and furs on the four-posters. The room Gordon allegedly slept in had a tiger skin as a hearth rug. Can't remember what we did with it. It got the moth, I wouldn't wonder. Or perhaps I sold it off when I bought Lady Bressingham the Quinta San José. I can't remember. Rooms are practically empty, though, now. Don't expect finery, will you? Just a lot of cold, empty rooms now. Nothing much to look at. Terrible legacy, a house like this in an age like this. Glad I haven't got a son to leave it to. Daff's pregnancy was phantom. Did I tell you that? Your gloves match that scarf. Very nice. You're a very bright, lovely woman. If I was younger, you wouldn't be safe with me. Dunno how that phantom got into Daff. Through the air conditioning in the Bentley perhaps! Don't understand women. Never will now, will I? My daughter. Daff. My wife. All potty in one way or another. People are. That's why I wanted to give them a funfair – to let them have a good scream.

A Shooting Season

‘You're writing a
what
?'

‘A novel.'

Looking away from him, nervously touching her hair, Anna remembered, the last time I saw him my hair wasn't grey.

‘Why the hell are you writing a novel?'

Grey hairs had sprouted at forty-one. Now, at forty-five, she sometimes thought, my scalp is exhausted, that's all, like poor soil.

‘I've wanted to write a novel ever since I was thirty. Long before, even . . .'

‘You never told me.'

‘No. Of course not.'

‘Why “of course not”?'

‘You would have laughed, as you're laughing now.'

Anna had always been enchanted by his laugh. It was a boy's giggle; (you climbed a cold dormitory stairway and heard it bubble and burst behind a drab door!) yet their son didn't have it: at sixteen, he had the laugh of a rowdy man.

‘I don't approve.'

‘No.'

‘It's an act of postponed jealousy.'

Well, if so, then long postponed. Six years since their separation; four since the divorce and his remarriage to Susan, the pert blonde girl who typed his poems. And it wasn't jealousy, surely? In learning to live without him, she had taught herself to forget him utterly. If she heard him talk on the radio, she found herself thinking, his cadences are echoing Dylan Thomas these days; he's remembered how useful it is, if you happen to be a poet, also to be Welsh. Three years older than her, he had come to resemble a Welsh hillside – craggy outcrop of a man, unbuttoned to weather and fortune, hair wiry as gorse. Marcus. Fame clung to his untidy look. No doubt, she thought, he's as unfaithful to Susan as he was to me.

‘How did it start?'

The novel-writing, he meant, but he had a way, still, of sending fine ripples through the water of ordinary questions which invited her to admit: I was in love with him for such a long time that parting from him was like a drowning. When I was washed ashore, the sediment of him still clogged me.

‘I found there were things I wanted to say.'

‘Oh, there always were!'

‘Yes, but stronger now. Before I get old and start forgetting.'

‘But a
novel?
'

‘Why not?'

‘You were never ambitious.'

No. Not when she was his: Mrs Marcus Ridley, wife of the poet. Not while she bore his children and made rugs while he wrote and they slept.

‘Do your pockets still have bits of sand in them?'

He laughed, took her strong wrist and held her hand to his face. ‘I don't know. No one empties them for me.'

*

Anna had been at the rented cottage for three weeks. A sluggish river flowed a few yards from it: mallard and moorhen were the companions of her silence, the light of early morning was silver. In this temporary isolation, she had moved contentedly in her summer sandals, setting up a work table in the sunshine, another indoors by the open fire. Her novel crept to a beginning, then began to flow quietly like the river. She celebrated each day's work with two glasses, sometimes more, of the home-made wine she had remembered to bring with her. She slept well with the window wide open on the Norfolk sky. She dreamed of her book finished and bound. Then one morning Margaret, her partner in her craft business, telephoned. The sound of the telephone ringing was so unfamiliar that it frightened her. She remembered her children left on their own in London; she raced to answer the unforeseen but now obvious emergency. But no, said Margaret, no emergency, only Marcus.

‘Marcus?'

‘Yes. Drunk and full of his songs. Said he needed to see you.'

‘And you told him where I was?'

‘Yes. He said if I didn't, he'd pee on the pottery shelf.'

*

‘Marcus.'

The rough feel of his face was very familiar; she might have touched it yesterday. She thought suddenly, for all his puerile needs, he's a man of absolute mystery; I never understood him. Yet they had been together for ten years. The Decade of the Poet she called it, wanting to bury him with formality and distance. And yet he surfaced in her: she seldom read a book without wondering, how would Marcus have judged that? And then feeling irritated by the question. On such occasions, she would always remind herself: he doesn't even bother to see the children, let alone me. He's got a new family (Evan 4, Lucy 3) and they, now, take all his love – the little there ever was in him to give.

‘You look so healthy, Anna. Healthy and strong. I suppose you always were strong.'

‘Big-boned, my mother called it.'

‘How is your mother?'

‘Dead.'

‘You never let me know.'

‘No. There was no point.'

‘I could have come with you – to the funeral or whatever.'

‘Oh, Marcus . . .'

‘Funerals are ghastly. I could have helped you through.'

‘Why don't you see the children?'

He let her hand drop. He turned to the window, wide open on the now familiar prospect of reed and river. Anna noticed that the faded corduroy jacket he was wearing was stretched tight over his back. He seemed to have outgrown it.

‘Marcus . . .?'

He turned back to her, hands in his pockets.

‘No accusations. No bloody accusations!'

Oh yes, she noticed, there's the pattern: I ask a question, Marcus says it's inadmissible, I feel guilty and ashamed . . .

‘It's a perfectly reasonable question.'

‘Reasonable? It's a guilt-inducing, jealous, mean-minded question. You know perfectly well why I don't see the children: because I have two newer, younger and infinitely more affectionate children, and these newer, younger and infinitely more affectionate children are bitterly resented by the aforementioned older, infinitely less affectionate children. And because I am a coward.'

He should be hit, she thought, then noticed that she was smiling.

‘I brought some of my home-made wine,' she said, ‘it's a disgusting looking yellow, but it tastes rather good. Shall we have some?'

‘Home-made wine? I thought you were a business
person
. When the hell do you get time to make wine?'

‘Oh Marcus, I have plenty of time.'

Anna went to the cold, pament-floored little room she had decided to think of as ‘the pantry'. Its shelves were absolutely deserted except for five empty Nescafé jars, a dusty goldfish bowl (the debris of another family's Norfolk summer) and her own bottles of wine. It was thirty-five years since she had lived in a house large enough to have a pantry, but now, in this cupboard of a place, she could summon memories of Hodgson, her grandfather's butler, uncorking Stones ginger beer for her and her brother on timeless summer evenings – the most exquisite moments of all the summer holidays. Then, one summer, she found herself there alone. Hodgson had left. Her brother Charles had been killed at school by a cricket ball.

Anna opened a bottle of wine and took it and two glasses out to her table in the garden, where Marcus had installed himself. He was looking critically at her typewriter and at the unfinished pages of her book lying beside it.

‘You don't mean to say you're typing it?'

She put the wine and the glasses on the table. She noticed that the heavy flint she used as a paperweight had been moved.

‘Please don't let the pages blow away, Marcus.'

‘I'm sure it's a mistake to type thoughts directly onto paper. Writing words by hand is part of the process.'

‘Your process.'

‘I don't know any writers who type directly.'

‘You know me. Please put the stone back, Marcus.'

He replaced the pages he had taken up, put the flint down gently and spread his wide hand over it. He was looking at her face.

‘Don't write about me, Anna, will you?'

She poured the wine. The sun touched her neck and she remembered its warmth with pleasure.

‘Don't make me the villain.'

‘There is no villain.'

She handed him his glass of wine. Out in the sunshine, he looked pale beside her. A miraculous three weeks of fine weather had tanned her face, neck and arms, whereas he . . . how did he spend his days now? She didn't know. He looked as if he'd been locked up. Yet he lived in the country with his new brood. She it was – and their children – who had stayed on in the London flat.

‘How's Susan?'

No. She didn't want to ask. Shouldn't have asked. She'd only asked in order to get it over with: to sweep Susan and his domestic life to the back of her mind, so that she could let herself be nice to him, let herself enjoy him.

‘Why ask?'

‘To get it over with!'

He smiled. She thought she sensed his boyish laughter about to surface.

‘Susan's got a lover.'

Oh damn him! Damn Marcus! Feeling hurt, feeling cheated, he thought I'd be easy consolation. No wonder the novel annoys him; he sees the ground shifting under him, sees a time when he's not the adored, successful granite he always thought he was.

‘Damn the lover.'

‘What?'

He'd looked up at her, startled. What he remembered most vividly about her was her permanence. The splash of bright homespun colour that was Anna: he had only to turn his head, open a door, to find her there. No other wife or mistress had been like her; these had often been absent when he'd searched for them hardest. But Anna: Anna had always
wanted
to be there.

‘I'm not very interested in Susan's lover.'

‘No. He isn't interesting. He's a chartered surveyor.'

‘Ah. Well, reliable probably.'

‘D'you think so? Reliable, are they, as a breed? He looks pitiful enough to be it. Perhaps that's what she wants.'

‘And you?'

‘Me?'

‘What do you want, Marcus? Did you come here just to tell me your wife had a lover?'

‘Accusations again. All the bloody little peeves!'

‘I want to know why you came here.'

‘So do I.'

‘What?'

‘So do I want to know. All I know is that I wanted to see you. If that's not good enough for you, I'll go away.'