Читать книгу The Squire Quartet - Brian Aldiss - Страница 15

Pippet Hall, Norfolk, June 1977

All the girls cared for was the beautiful weather. They were off early for what they called their ‘secret beach’, hurrying away on bicycles, with Nellie running effortlessly beside them. Teresa’s mother had gone back to her flat in Grantham for the weekend. It was Saturday morning. Teresa and Tom Squire faced one another alone across the breakfast table.

For the past three nights, he had slept in the chief guest room. Teresa was moody and inaccessible.

‘I’m going to drive into Norwich to see Uncle Willie,’ Squire said, as he folded his napkin. ‘Come with me and we’ll have lunch in Cutteslow’s.’

She looked down at her plate. ‘I’d prefer to stay here.’

‘I’ve some business to discuss with him, but I won’t be long.’

Teresa had no answer. She prodded a triangular piece of toast in the rack with one finger, rattling it against the silver sides of its pen. The slight mouselike noise conveyed a powerful sense of futility.

‘All over the world, poor buggers are being shut up in dungeons or hung up by their thumbs. We’ve got peace and plenty. Cheer up and come to Norwich with me.’

He studied the silver coffee service, concentrating in particular on the cream jug with its complex reflections of white cloth and blue room which were, in their turn, reflected in the swelling side of the sugar bowl, minutely, distortedly, but with gallant precision. The arrangement reminded him of a canvas by William Nicholson, which his father had once told him was his favourite painting in the Tate, except for the Cotmans.

He sighed. ‘I really am sorry about the lady-friend, Tess. Sorry the thought of her hurts you, I mean. It will be only temporary … as all things are … Don’t let it mess up our relationship.’

Her anger burned suddenly like a gorse fire, leaping up into her cheek and eyes. She grasped her knife, as if about to strike him with it. ‘“Don’t let it mess up our relationship!” What do I have to do with that? You’ve already messed it up. That’s your role in life. You can’t be relied on. You’re always chasing other women – you don’t want me at all.’

‘That is not so. Perhaps you want it to be so, but it is not. Our relationship is a long and enduring one, I hope.’

She lowered her head, hiding her eyes; the prelude to weeping. He saw with tenderness how the dark roots of her hair were showing through the fake gold.

‘Come with me to Norwich and be sensible. We’ll stroll round the Tombland antique shops.’

‘Another demand!’ she said without heat, looking up. ‘Don’t mess things up. Come to Norwich. Be sensible. I’m sick of being sensible and not messing things up, if you want to know. I’m staying here, as I told you – I have a business associate to see. Go to Norwich on your own. And give up that actress bitch. She’s half your age, it’s filthy! Give her up at once or I won’t be responsible for what happens.’

‘I’ve told you, we’re still filming. It will be over soon. Don’t try to make me angry.’

‘Get her the sack, find someone else for the part, damn her!’

He rose from the table, standing irresolutely with his hand on the back of his chair, aware of the sun outside the windows, chilled by her anger.

‘Tess!’

‘One of these days, you’ll find you’ve cried my name too late. How much more have I got to stand? John going off as he has – that was your fault – Daddy dying while you were screwing that bitch in Singapore—’

He laughed. ‘Since I was out of the country at the time, you can hardly blame me for your father’s death.’

‘How much more have I got to stand? That girl’s only a sex symbol. You’re always chasing symbols. I hope she gets cancer like me and dies before your very eyes, blast her!’

‘I’m going, Teresa.’

‘Go, then, go! She’s waiting for you in Norwich, is she, the slut?’

‘Excuse me.’

He left the room, moving slowly, hoping she would call him back, would recant, would throw her arms round him and say how sorry she was to hurt him, thus releasing him to do the same. Instead, he heard a plate smash. As he went towards the stairs to collect his wallet and keys from his bedroom, he turned the corner of the corridor and almost bumped into a young man in a denim suit hurrying through the hall.

The young man had long but not very long hair. He wore his sideboards long and cut sharp across the cheeks, so that they appeared to be executing a pincer movement against his nose. It was a harmless-looking nose, but the teeth were large and many, seeming to multiply as he smiled, as now he did, in a rather anxious way. ‘Oh, jeez, Mr Squire, you frightened me, lovely morning, isn’t it?’

‘Who are you and who let you in here?’

‘Oh, don’t you remember me? Vern? Vernon Jarvis, how are you?’

‘What are you doing in here?’

The young man fell back a step. He put a cautionary hand out.

‘We met at your party before you flew off to Singapore. I just bumped into that Miss Rowlinson outside, and she said to come in. I heard voices, so I thought—’

He was carrying a smart mock-leather executive’s attaché case, incongruous against his green denim-styled suit and fancy shoes with wedge heels. Despite the heat wave, he wore a fawn turtle-neck sweater under the suit, and a gold-plated ingot stamped with a zodiacal sign on a chain round his neck.

‘You’re the fellow with the brother who runs.’

‘Athlete, yes. Hoping to run in Moscow in the Olympic Games. We talked about that, remember?’

‘You claimed that sport had nothing to do with politics.’

‘You see, Mr Squire, I’m a great admirer of Teresa’s – of Mrs Squire’s wall trinketry. It’s real rinky-dink gear.’

‘Wall-trinketry, what’s that?’

Jarvis lowered the attaché case, hitherto held in a defensive position, and said with a touch of condescension, ‘The wall-trinketry. Those bugs and creepy-crawlies. Those bugs and creepy-crawlies she makes. I aim to invest in them. I’m a director of an exporting firm, and by my calculations—’

‘All right, all right. My wife’s in the breakfast room. I doubt if she’ll want to see you at this hour of the morning.’

Jarvis smirked. ‘Oh, she’ll want to see me all right.’

‘In future, ring the bell before you come barging in, understand?’

‘Yes, that’s quite clear.’ Jarvis smiled at him.

Driving away a few minutes later, Squire saw Jarvis and Teresa by the window of the morning room, deep in discussion. She was leaning against her desk, and did not even look up at the sound of the car. Poor dear, he thought. As if she hadn’t trouble enough without having that young oik to deal with.

The sudden death of her father, Ernest Davies, had shaken her. Ernest had been walking home from a friend’s house in Grantham one evening, when a car bore down on him as he crossed the road, and knocked him over. He had died in hospital a few days later. The car had been driven by his doctor, heavily under the influence of drink. Astrology had closed over Teresa’s head almost immediately.

He switched on the car radio.

He recognized the music at once. The Tom Robinson Band playing ‘Long Hot Summer’. He smiled.

Saturday morning traffic into town was heavy. It took him an hour to reach Norwich, but he was in no hurry.

The conversation had come back to him. Jarvis’s brother hoped to run for Britain in the four hundred metres of the Moscow Olympics. Squire, as a member of the board of anti-Moscow campaigners, tried to explain to Jarvis that the occasion would inevitably be used for propaganda purposes, like the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

‘No, no, Mr Squire, honest, you don’t see, neither my brother nor me are at all political. This is purely and simply a sporting event.’

‘Things aren’t so simple. It’s not what you are, Mr Jarvis, but what you lend yourself to.’

‘No, you’ve got it all wrong, Mr Squire. I know you like politics, but, see, I’m just a businessman, pure and simple, out to make an honest penny, and I hate politics. So does my brother.’

After a drive round, Squire found a parking place in Mancroft Street. Locking the Jag, he walked slowly through Tombland, enjoying the sunshine, stopping occasionally to glance in a shop window. At the bookshop, he walked in and gazed at the books, but saw nothing he wished to buy.

The offices of Challenor, Squire, and Challenor, of which William Squire was senior partner, were built of mellow Georgian red bricks, very similar to the bricks of Pippet Hall. The facade of the building was covered by a venerable virginia creeper, the leaves and suckers of which lapped at William Squire’s office window. William had officially retired the previous year, but still worked every morning, looking after old clients of many years’ standing, who refused to transfer their business to the brisk young partners who occupied the lower floors.

Uncle Willie’s office was at the top of the building. The floors below had been modernized, their small rooms broken down into an open-plan scheme which let in more air and custom, rather in the same way that the fields beyond Norwich – the title deeds to which reposed, in many cases, in the archives of Challenor, Squire, and Challenor – had been stripped of their hedges to let in more air and agricultural machinery. Squire made his way past empty desks and silent computer screens to the third floor.

Uncle Willie’s office was a small room on the side of the building, with a window from which the cathedral could almost be seen. Uncle Willie was pottering round smoking his pipe, with the rather sulky-looking Nicholas Dobson in attendance. Dobson was a nephew who had high hopes in the firm. He lived nearby. His expression suggested that he would rather be elsewhere on a hot summer Saturday morning, but he greeted Squire cheerfully enough.

Coughing, Uncle Willie rested his pipe in a marble ashtray and came round the desk to shake hands formally with his nephew.

‘You’re looking fit, Tom. Gallivanting round the world has been good for you. We’re heading for a drought, could be worse than last year, and that won’t please most of my clients.’ Willie bore a strong resemblance to his dead brother John, Tom Squire’s father. He too had a high-bridged nose and a pugnacious set to his jaw. The deep-set lines of the family face had visited him too. So had the clear skin. Although his hair was white, it remained thick.

Thomas thanked his uncle for seeing him on Saturday, although he knew that the old man, a widower for many years, often visited the office on Saturday mornings in order to keep the lethargy of old age staunchly at bay.

The years had hunched his shoulders. He regarded his nephew with a vaguely aggressive air, and then transferred his gaze to the open window.

‘How’s Teresa?’

‘She’s fine, Uncle. How are the cats?’

‘I’ve had Nickie spayed. She was turning into a regular kitten-factory. Madge, is she all right? Still staying with you? Terrible about Ernest. Madge makes a pretty widow, poor lady. How’s she taking it?’ As he spoke of Mrs Davies, he walked over to the window and looked out.

‘She seems cheerful enough. It’s Teresa who’s upset.’

‘In my experience,’ said Uncle Willie, still gazing out of the window, ‘widows are not too unhappy when they are left to pursue their own lives, though they may make a polite show of grief. It’s different for widowers.’

He turned and inspected his nephew, to see how the remark had registered.

‘Teresa’s having a series of nightmares. Always the same, though details differ. Sometimes it seems to be day, sometimes night. She is sitting or lying down when she sees a dark male figure outlined against the window. Someone is trying to break in. Sometimes she tries to scare him away, sometimes she runs from him, sometimes she wakes to the sound of smashing glass.’

‘Oh, she’s afraid of burglars while you’re away.’ He went over and picked his pipe up, as if the matter was disposed of.

‘There might be another explanation. She complains of back pain. She keeps talking about – well, cancer. She goes to Dr Bell. He gives her analgesics, and she’s gone to the Norfolk and Norwich for check-ups. All reports are negative to date.’

From the other side of the room, Dobson said, ‘They say cancer’s psychosomatic.’

‘Nicholas thinks everything’s psychosomatic, including taxes,’ Uncle Willie said. ‘Do you think she’s got cancer, Tom? Eh?’

‘No, I don’t … I’m anxious, of course, but the tests, as I say, are negative. People do get these ideas, and I wonder if the dream doesn’t indicate something of the force of Tess’s obsession.’

‘Well.’ Uncle Willie shuffled with some papers on his desk, as though he had lost interest in Teresa. ‘I hope that now you’re back home you’ll both settle down, you and Teresa. She’s a good girl but she needs a bit of looking after, don’t forget that.’

Squire considered saying more on the matter, caught Dobson’s eye, and decided against it. He turned to other things.

His London firm had been understanding, and had allowed him maximum freedom during the planning and filming of ‘Frankenstein Among the Arts’; now he had to notify them that he would be away longer than anticipated. He wanted his uncle to draft a proper letter, waiving his salary. There were also some long-standing matters which needed attention, such as a protracted argument with the local authorities over a right-of-way across Pippet land. Dobson brought out his file, and they talked for thirty minutes.

‘Business over,’ Willie said at last. ‘Nicholas, leave the file out and we’ll go and have a coffee.’

Downstairs, at the side door, he made a great business of seeing that the security bolt was functional. Dobson directed a pitying look over his bent back at Squire. Then they sauntered over to a coffee shop almost opposite St Ephraim’s Gate, Dobson walking smartly ahead.

‘They’re still talking about putting a motorway through to Bury and Chelmsford,’ Uncle Willie said, as they selected a table, looking with some dislike at the holiday-makers who surrounded them. ‘Then they’ll continue it up here. It’ll mean the end of East Anglia’s isolation, and the end of Norwich and Norfolk as they have been for centuries.’

‘Don’t worry, Uncle,’ Dobson said. ‘In the present state of the country’s finances, they’ve stopped building roads. Norwich will be safe for this century.’

‘I’m not so sure.’ He picked up the menu with contempt. ‘Once a planner has planned, and lodged his plans in Whitehall, the abstraction seems to acquire an existence of its own … Well, you offer some consolation for our bad trade figures, if they help to protect tradition.’

As the waitress came up, he smiled at her and said, ‘I suppose you’re still making coffee here in the traditional way – with instant coffee?’

She was young and pleasant-faced. She leaned forward, smiling, and supported her weight by resting one hand on the table. ‘I know you’re very fond of our coffee, Mr Squire, and it hasn’t gone up this week.’

‘In that case, we’ll treat ourselves to a cup each,’ he said, looking up at her in a sprightly way. When the girl had gone, he shook his head and said to his nephews, ‘When I was a young man, you were not supposed to address remarks to the waitress. It was bad form. Rigid class structure. I prefer the way things are today. I discovered at quite an advanced age that I enjoy flirting with waitresses. They don’t seem to mind, so why not?’ He blew his nose on a large white handkerchief. ‘The war changed things. Changed everything. Of course, no one knows exactly what waitresses think, doing the job they do.’

‘Come on, Uncle,’ Dobson said. ‘No one knows what solicitors think about.’

‘Increasingly, waitresses,’ said Uncle Willie, with a laugh. ‘This place used to be a Red Cross shop during the war. Did I ever tell you that? Then it became an antique shop. That didn’t last.’

‘I remember the antique shop,’ Squire said. ‘I bought about ten garage signs from the dealer, including a Redline Glyco and a Pratt’s High Test, enamel on tin. We used them in the Pop Expo.’

‘Your father used to chase waitresses,’ Uncle Willie said, ignoring Squire’s remark. ‘There’s always been a sort of naughty streak in the Squire family, I’m sorry to say. That is why we don’t get on with the branch of the family at King’s Lynn – the Decent Dobsons. Except you, Nick. Do you take after your father, Tom?’

John Matthew Squire, his father, had been a countryman, like most of the family in that generation, involved in the affairs of the village and the county. John Squire seldom moved beyond those self-imposed boundaries except when, following the steps of the ancestor whose name he bore, he joined the Royal Norfolk Regiment and went to fight for four years in the assorted muds of Europe, returning home to Hartisham with the rank of major, saying, ‘It was quite a good scrap while it lasted.’

Somewhere along the way, John Squire acquired several tastes which led to his downfall. He acquired a taste for art. To the dogs and horses which were his life, he added the Norwich School of painters. They were local men, they painted local things and were faithful to them, not prettifying too much. With his favourite mastiffs at his heels, John Squire became a notable figure as he toured the country, attending markets and, just as assiduously, dusty old shops and attics. Where he went, his son Tom also went. Together, while the dogs prowled round them, father and son acquired a commendable gallery of watercolours and oils by Old Crome, Stoddart, the incomparable Cotman, and others.

‘Tractors may drive out Shire horses,’ John said, ‘but Cotman is permanent.’

Pippet Hall estate, in financial difficulties after the Great War, became more neglected as the art excursions ranged further afield. John’s red-haired wife, Patricia, was left to supervise the farm and bring up her other two children, Adrian and Deirdre.

John and his son Tom stayed overnight in country inns as they went on what John called their ‘Grand Tours’. The Morris and the mastiffs would be housed in the stables – very few Norfolk inns expected motor cars in the thirties. Tom would often be tucked into a wooden bed in some attic room; his cheek was scoured by a stiff military moustache as his father kissed him good-night, before disappearing below to join whatever company the bar offered; he disappeared with particular promptness if there were women downstairs.

Sometimes the boy would wake in the summer mornings early and run to the window of the strange room, to gaze out at a panorama of rushes and broads, busy bird life, and little boats already launching into the early golden haze over the waters. He always remembered an inn on Hickling Broad, where there was a tame magpie, and he and his father swam naked in the broad before breakfast.

John Squire had a taste also for jazz and popular dance music. Gramophone records began to accumulate at Pippet Hall. Patricia liked that. The records were played on a wind-up gramophone with a huge horn. When Tom and his brother and sister were small, many visitors came to the Hall, attracted by the happy-go-lucky nature of their parents. The visitors sometimes danced to the music of the gramophone, which Tom was allowed to wind. He watched his father as he took his beautiful wife about the waist and whirled her round the entrance hall, where the floor was good for fox-trots.

There was another taste, and one which slowly mastered the master of Pippet Hall. John progressed from being a heavy social drinker to being a heavy drinker. It was that habit which brought about his death, one rainy day in March 1937, when the rest of the family was out of the house.

Tom returned home in the afternoon. The solemn ticking silence warned him that something was wrong. He flung his cap down and ran straight to his father’s study. His father lay in one corner of the study, against a smashed picture frame, the glass of which littered the carpet. It was established later that he must have fallen over the mastiffs while the worse for drink. Both dogs had attacked him. They lurked in the opposite corner of the room, chops still bloody. Their master’s throat had been ripped away, and the flesh of his face torn off.

The dogs sulked behind John Squire’s armchair, knowing their crime. John’s son, aged eight, took down one of his father’s double-barrelled shotguns from the rack by the door, loaded it, and shot both animals through their skulls at close range. Blood and brains spattered in parabolas across the wallpaper. Then he dropped the gun and ran away into the plantation, where he huddled at the foot of a young oak until one of the farm labourers found him after dusk.

It was hard to tell where Uncle Willie’s remarks led, or indeed if they were intended to lead anywhere. He rambled as they drank their coffee, mainly about the ‘naughty streak’ in the family.

‘I don’t think I chase waitresses obsessively, Uncle Willie,’ Squire said.

‘Well, you enjoy a busy life, that I know. When success carries a man beyond family and native heath, he loses his sense of reality. I always say it. A protective sense of reality. A man’s achievements in the material world are often seen to be counterbalanced by deterioration in his personal happiness. Supposing our waitress to marry the Prince of Wales tomorrow, she would undoubtedly come to look back on her humble days in this coffee shop as a time of security and happiness. However she may see the matter now.’

‘It’s not like you to recommend a dull way of life as a paradigm of better things.’

Nicholas Dobson snorted, as if he knew his uncle better, but Willie ignored him.

The old man wiped his lips on the white handkerchief. ‘Don’t be angry, Tom, I’m only offering a warning.’

‘I’ve managed to look after my own affairs fairly well so far. Why don’t you approve?’

Willie looked offended. ‘You are making connections between things I did not intend. That’s always your clever habit of thought, I understand that.’

‘What are you accusing me of?’

Uncle Willie stuck his pipe in his mouth and began lighting it. He said, behind a cloud of smoke, ‘You want to stay home a bit more – that was your father’s mistake.’

Squire leaned forward so that the people sitting at the next table did not hear what he said. ‘Father would have approved strongly of my present work. I care deeply about it, I wouldn’t care if I never went back to the firm. It’s little enough, but I’m good at it, I think. In me there’s a lot of the family’s romanticism. I want to make a contribution to the thought of our country, I want to produce a cultural statement which I believe will help England, and maybe the rest of the world, to live more fully despite its present difficulties. I want to make everyone aware of the immense riches round about them in everyday life.’

‘Through TV? Through television? What can you do for television viewers? You can’t make them switch the set off, can you? I’ve no time for it. Fat lot it has to do with individual life. Paralysis, more to the point.’

With spirit, Squire said, ‘I believe that television has much to do with individual life. Continual box-watching is sad, I agree, sad because it shows you how lacking in opportunities is the average life. But television touches everyone as no art medium has ever done; it represents the triumph of photography, and the wonder is that it’s as good as it is. It must be respected. Why not respect it, develop it, now, rather than mourn for it when it is superseded, as no doubt it will be?’

The waitress had brought the bill on a saucer. Squire brushed away his uncle’s hand and produced some money.

Willie shook his head. ‘I’ve got a set in my flat. Never switch it on, except for the news. Give me a good book any day. Harrison Ainsworth, he’s a good author. I’m just rereading The Tower of London. It’s full of incident and good description.’

‘Very pleasant, I’m sure, Uncle.’ He signalled impatiently to the waitress. ‘You do not refute, you illustrate what I was saying. Carlyle said people always loved the past and the things of the past because it was safe, whereas the future was dangerous, since it had still to be negotiated.’

‘Carlyle was a sensible chap.’

They parted outside the shop, shaking hands. Squire walked briskly in the direction of the Castle. He was angry with himself, he hardly knew why; he had been harsher than he intended with his revered relation.

Nicholas Dobson came hurrying up and fell into step with him. ‘You are upset, and I don’t blame you. I have to say to you that some of us at least support you. You add lustre to the family, Tom, and God knows it could do with it. We’re a miserable lot, the Dobsons even worse than the Squires. We’re just lived lives of dull Norfolk monotony for centuries. As for Uncle Willie’s moans about TV, he’s just a disappointed old man. He doesn’t—’

Squire had slowed his pace. Now he halted. ‘No, Willie’s a fine man. If he’s disappointed, it’s because most people end up disappointed if they had any guts in them originally. They start out in life with high hopes and high ambitions which maybe circumstances prevent them from fulfilling, or they can’t overcome their own limitations. Uncle Willie never quite achieved the career he wished for himself. That isn’t to say that he hasn’t been an honourable man, and served others well thereby. I admire Uncle Willie and won’t hear a word against him. I was too quick with him.’

Dobson put his hands in his pockets. ‘You make me ashamed of myself,’ he said, grinning and looking far from ashamed. ‘But I have to listen to Uncle Willie holding forth a lot more than you do.’

‘It was good of you to come after me.’ He clapped the young man’s arm. ‘If you’ve got time to spare, visit the Castle exhibition with me.’

They crossed Bedford Street and climbed the many steps up to Norwich Castle. Squire got out of breath more easily than once he did. After a word with the keeper, who was an old friend of Squire’s, the two men went into the exhibition. It was crowded with tourists. This was not Squire’s favourite way of viewing any exhibition, but he had been abroad when it visited London.

They regarded objects which had come from the Siberian Collection of Peter the Great. Many articles had been preserved by cold, as articles in Egypt were preserved by the dry atmosphere. There were decorations of wood and leather which had once adorned the horses of nomads. All that remained of the dreaded Scythians rested here behind glass: a woollen pigtail case, part of a boot, a child’s fur coat dating from five centuries before Christ. Chance survivors of their culture, these artifacts were beyond price; isolated from it, they were inscrutable. Whilst the permutations of chance which brought them to this foreign place were incalculable.

Since Nicholas Dobson still seemed eager for company, Squire took him to his favourite pub, The Pyed Bull on the Market Square, for lunch after the exhibition. The pub was crowded. They bumped into two of Dobson’s friends, both of whom were cheerful, out of work, and engaged in touring the country picketing nuclear power plants. They regarded nuclear power as too dangerous to use. When Squire offered them a few statistics on the excellent safety record of the industry, they listened politely, smiling a bit, and then went on enthusiastically about the success they had had at Dungeness.

‘There are many reasons why the country needs to develop nuclear power,’ Squire said. ‘I’m sure you know the arguments, and I won’t bore you with them, but it is at present the best practical alternative to coal and oil.’

‘We’ll just have to go without oil when it runs out,’ one of the young men said. He wore a T-shirt with the words ‘Sid Vicious’ across the chest, but was otherwise well-mannered. ‘Get rid of all the cars spoiling towns.’

‘And the lorries, trains, planes, and ships delivering the goods we need,’ Squire said.

‘There’ll be something else,’ said the other young man. ‘Something always turns up, doesn’t it? We’ll develop Uri Geller powers, telepathy, telekinesis … The powers of the human mind are unlimited.’

Almost despite himself, Squire said, ‘Unfortunately, history gives no indication that that is so. The mind has its limitations – it’s almost impossible to pass on the fruits of experience, for instance. Civilizations make mistakes and fossilize and go under. If we continue to impede latest developments by picketing nuclear plants, or pretend that things turn up of their own accord instead of resulting from hard work and applied intelligence, then we shall go down the drain too.’

‘We’re down the drain already, aren’t we?’ The two young men laughed and soon took their leave.

‘Sorry about that, Tom,’ Dobson said. ‘I knew they’d annoy you. They were doing it half as a lark.’

‘I wasn’t annoyed. They told me what they felt. I told them what I felt. I suppose they regard me as an old-fashioned old man with silly ideas. All the same, you observe that the pendulum has swung dramatically – ten years ago, the man in my position would have been conservative and against nuclear plants. The youngsters would have been calling for innovation. But there, neither you nor your friends could know what the pendulum was doing ten years ago. You were still at school.’

‘We were learning about the hazards of nuclear power.’ He drained his glass.

‘Those hazards have been greatly exaggerated – mainly by the Left for its own interests.’

Dobson smiled. ‘I don’t want to get onto politics, not my favourite subject. Thanks. Let me buy you another beer.’

‘No, thanks. I must get home. Nick, it’s sad that your generation should be against such things as nuclear power. My generation believed in the future.’

‘It’s not so much us that’s against it as ecology itself. We want to save the world, not ruin it. You can’t go on for ever piling technology on technology with no thought for the consequences. Surely you can see that.’

‘Nor can you continue to strip a country of military or economic weapons without suffering the inevitable consequences.’

‘People just aren’t patriotic any more in the old way. We’ve learnt better. You are fond of talking about new developments, why can’t you see that one development is the junking of old emotions like patriotism which did so much damage? The world is really becoming one – something you talk about but can’t understand. I can feel as much sympathy for an oppressed Greek or Chilean as I can for my next-door neighbour.’

‘But, Nick, you probably know damn all about the actual problems of people in Greece or Chile. You’ve just read a paragraph or two in some newspaper or seen something on TV—’

Dobson looked angry. ‘I have every respect for you, Tom, but I’m not going to sit here listening to you knock down everything I say. I have a dream of a better, fairer world. Well, let me have it. You told Willie that you believe in dreams, well, let me believe in mine.’

‘If you’re referring to Teresa’s dream, that happened to be a nightmare, and my point was that it was difficult to interpret. So is yours. I believe yours is a dream of evading real responsibilities. It would be nice in a perfect world, to coast along thinking things are somehow improving of their own accord just because you and your pals hope things will work out that way, but in fact the world is filled with powerful enemies who have a rough way with dreams, are quite prepared to step in and impose their own nightmares.’

‘I don’t believe that either, any more than you believe in my sympathies for the Greeks.’

They parted five minutes later, rather stiffly, and went their different ways.

Squire went to The Nag’s Head and phoned Laura Nye at her London address. He could hear the bell ringing in her flat, but it was not answered. On the following Tuesday he was due to go to London to film the last episode of ‘Frankenstein Among the Arts’, and would see Laura then. Meanwhile, he could only speculate on how she was passing the weekend, as he drove home.

The road north from Norwich, which casually followed the course of the River Wensum, was full of traffic. Squire switched on the radio and drove slowly, blanking out his thoughts by concentrating on the pleasure of the peaceful summer day. Nobody seemed in a particular hurry to reach the coast. Families were going to picnic and swim, no world was dying, there was no invisible and fateful drama such as Solzhenitsyn envisaged being enacted in these unguarded hours. No need for apprehension.

The first sight of Hartisham when coming from the south was the ruins of Hartisham Priory. The priory had been founded in the year 1131. It had once enshrined a relic of the Holy Cross, and had been frequently visited by King Henry III. Now little was left but the ruins of the gatehouse and the south wall, faced with knapped flint. Lumps of masonry stood here and there about the site, now in the care of the Ministry of Works. A few holiday-makers were inspecting the ruins. A child ran laughing through a stone door where the monks had walked in prayer. Squire drove slowly past, then stopped the car on the verge. He walked back to an ice-cream van parked near the ruin and bought three large tubs of strawberry whirl as a surprise for Teresa and the girls.

When he drove up to Pippet Hall, it was to find everything silent, and all windows and doors closed. Carrying the ice creams carefully, he unlocked the front door and went in. He called. There was no response. One of the cats paraded down the stairs, giving a miaow at every fourth step.

In his study, he found a note lying on his desk. He set the plastic cartons down in order to read it, recognizing Teresa’s untidy handwriting as he did so. It was brief.

Dear Tom,

I have to go away on a business matter that has cropped up. I am leaving the children with your sister at Blakeney. My mother will stay in Grantham. No doubt Matilda will look after you.

T.

He sat down at the desk, studying the sheet of notepaper, which looked all the stranger because it bore the Pippet Hall address embossed on it. The cat came to sit beside his chair, looking up at him expectantly before turning to lick its left shoulder. The sound of its rough tongue on the fur was the only noise in the room.

At one moment Squire looked up swiftly, thinking he saw a black figure at the french windows, peering in. A bird had flown by. Nobody was there. He was alone.

An early summer day, the sunshine faint on the brickwork of the house. The clumps of rhododendron bushes, which concealed the yard and garages from the front drive, spread a wedge of shadow across the most easterly corner of the house, shading the dining-room window; that window reflected a parade of people approaching the house, and dissected their figures among its glazing bars.

The parade comprised people of various periods, men and women and children. There were men in the three-cornered hats, knee-breeches and tight clothes of the eighteenth century, women in the high-waisted, low-necked dresses of the Regency, or in crinolines with shawls in a mid-Victorian fashion. There were ladies with shingled hair in frocks with low belts, and gentlemen in lounge suits and spats, together with chaps and chicks in jeans and leather jackets. All climbed the steps of the front porch and went into the house, the door of which stood wide to receive them.

Squire asked rhetorically, ‘What is man’s greatest invention? Some would say the Wheel, or the control of Fire, or cooking, or perhaps the domestication of animals. Some might say the internal combustion engine or the rockets that have taken men across space to the Moon. All these things have been immensely important in the rise of mankind. The list comprises things because our culture tends to think in terms of things, although we act in terms of style.

‘Not the least of the great inventions of the last two centuries is what you are looking at now, on the other side of this lawn. It is not just a house but an embodiment of style, the style of the Enlightenment which still plays its role in shaping our present.’

The viewpoint moved nearer to take in more clearly the house and the figures entering it.

‘There’s a vicar going in, one of Christ’s representatives on Earth. He is walking through a doorway which derives its style from a great portico shrine. He probably doesn’t care about that, as he goes in to sit beside a hearth designed after a miniature triumphal arch or an altar to the Lares. Do the farmer and his wife over there realize that the facade of the house is conceived in terms of a Classical Order, with the windows on its three floors gradated in height? Does that rather corpulent man – perhaps he is a successful draper – have a clear notion of the ideas of the Italian Andrea Palladio or of the English Lords Burlingham and Shaftesbury? And perhaps that young lady with the patched jeans doesn’t realize that she is entering a belated expression of the Renaissance of Roman Architecture on English soil.

‘To these people, and to most of the rest of us, this is simply a comfortable Georgian house. There are still thousands of them of all shapes and sizes all over the country, and the style has been imitated on various scales ever since: for almost two hundred years almost everyone had wanted to live in a Georgian house. What all these people do know is that this extraordinary stylistic phenomenon, which imposes on the domiciles of a small Protestant northern island the temple architecture of a long-vanished heathen Mediterranean culture, results in the most pleasant kind of house ever invented.’

The viewpoint had moved to the interior.

‘The Georgian house is sensibly laid out, easier to maintain than any previous style of home, comfortable, adaptable, and homely. “Home” is an English word, for which Palladio’s fellow-countrymen, for instance, have no word; and the Georgian house is a major contribution to civilization and stability. One finds it nowhere but England and Scotland, and Dublin, and its imitations everywhere.

‘We cannot live without myth. This house enshrines a myth, the myth that life is subject to constant improvement. The Georgian house is a product not only of architectural orders but of the concept of Order itself, to which the early eighteenth century heartily subscribed.

‘Having lived all my life in this particular house, I feel qualified to say that it does promote orderly conduct in the lives lived within its walls – or rather it tends to promote order among the disorderly jumble which constitutes the average life. It doesn’t enforce order, class order, like a Victorian house. It is more than a house: it is a style.

‘In the eighteenth century, there was agreement about style. There are now more people in the world and a greater divergence of taste. In consequence, we have wide divergences in style. Some would say that there is also a greater range of possibilities. That is true, although youth always tends to exaggerate the possibilities available. We are not creatures of determinism, but, unfortunately, the number of things we can do in one lifetime is limited.

‘We observe an example of that law of limitation in the Georgian style itself. I call it an English invention. So it is. But whilst the comfortable English squires and lords of the manor were busying themselves about these homes, the Continent of Europe was about something else – the Rococo. There is no Rococo in England, certainly none of its glories as we know them on the Continent. After the Civil War, we English seem to have settled down to gardening and a limited amount of religion. Instead of the ridiculously pretty baroque churches which grace Europe and South America, we have utilitarian chapels; instead of Fragonard and the great master of Rococo, Tiepolo, we have George Stubbs – what an English name! – and Tom Rowlandson. It’s all a question of style.’

As he spoke, he was following the last of the costumed actors to the steps of the house. There, on the upper step, lay a dozen wrist watches, awaiting revelation like hen’s eggs in straw.

‘Here’s an interesting question concerning present-day style. There has never been such a variety of watches cheaply available as there is today. For all we know, there may never be again – the notion of the future as a period of multiplied diversity is another of the cheering illusions of youth.’

He began to pick up the watches, holding them where the sun – reinforced by a conveniently placed spot – glittered on their cases.

‘Watches are beautiful objects. Perhaps that is why we are all slaves to them. A watch is really a piece of costume jewellery, one of the few pieces of jewellery society approves of the male wearing, since throughout an average day we can estimate the time to within five minutes; or else we are within reach of a clock or someone else’s watch; or else we have escaped routine and do not wish to know the time at all. But for work-oriented cultures, the watch is an essential, like the camera we take on holiday. Both impress us with the precision with which we live: “We were precisely here at precisely such-and-such a time.” Living with precision is a modern style.’

Squire began sorting the timepieces, one by one.

‘This watch is a Quartz LED, LED standing for Light-Emitting Diode. It presents a blank face to the world until you press this button, when the time comes up on a digital display. For me, LEDs are mean and hostile watches, not unlike those sunglasses people used to wear which looked opaque and reflected back the onlooker’s world, so that one could not see the eyes of the wearer. But quartz LEDs are accurate to a degree unknown a generation ago. Armed with such precision, Hitler’s generals could have overthrown him before he ruined Europe.

‘Do you rate your watches for accuracy, or appearance, or reliability, or sheer razzmatazz? Would you like a Mickey Mouse watch, like this one, or a “Star Wars” watch, like this one?’

The dreaded Darth Vader moved a gauntleted arm to twelve noon.

‘This watch is a Quartz LCD, LCD standing for Liquid Crystal Display. It announces clearly that it belongs to the nineteen-eighties. It has forsworn the watch’s traditional association with gold and gold-casing in favour of a heavy dull metal, the sort of thing we imagine Starship hulls will be made of, three centuries from now.

‘It is uncompromising. It does not even call itself a watch any more. It is a Seiko Multi-Mode LC Digital Quartz World Timer, and can give you the time in the world’s twenty-nine time zones. It’s somewhat specialist, being designed for globe-trotters, or those who fancy themselves as globe-trotters. It can give a twenty-four-hour read-out system, with hours, minutes, seconds, day, and date. It also features a perpetual calendar, so that you can find out whether Easter 1991 falls on a Thursday or a Friday, and is programmed until the year 2009 AD. It is water-resistant, and features, as they say by analogy with the movie industry, built-in illumination, so that you can check the time in Rangoon on even the darkest of nights.’

He set the LCD watch down on the step, but it immediately took flight, circled a pampas clump and was lost to view. Squire selected another watch, a more traditional-looking instrument with a leather strap.

‘Whatever it may look like, this is not your old clockwork wind-up watch. Nor is it a clockwork automatic. That old phrase about things “going like clockwork” is now long out-of-date, a fossil of language. Clockwork is no longer the most accurate motion, as it was for centuries. The accuracy of a quartz crystal is measured in seconds per century rather than minutes per week.

‘This is a quartz watch. Not a quartz digital but what we have learnt to call a quartz analogue. It caters for a public who respect accuracy, but who wish to combine living with precision with living with tradition. You notice that the numerals are Roman, just like the numerals on the grandfather clock in the hall of this house. In spite of its twentieth-century interior, this watch aspires to a Georgian exterior, reminding us each time we look at it of a more gracious, less time-devoured age.

‘If you think that makes this watch an example of bad taste, then you are merely being old-fashioned and a little conventional. Good and bad taste are of the past; all that is left us now is multivalent tastes.

‘Even the Seiko Multi-Mode LC Digital Quartz World Timer, last seen heading for Rangoon, subscribes to a twenty-four-hour clock system, with sixty minutes in each hour, passed down to us by Babylonian astronomers and refined by Sumerian mathematics some thousand years before Christ.

‘The facade of this Georgian house represents a triumph of order and symmetry, but order and symmetry are always under threat. We are a species in evolution and not in equipoise. Consequently, we remain uncertain about numbers. Perhaps that is why we find watches so talismanic; watches appear to have numbers if not time well under control. But numbers continue to give us trouble, not least in matters involving currency. Half the people on the globe cannot understand why sufficient money cannot be printed for everyone. Indeed, the world’s present monetary systems have been outgrown, though we struggle on with them, just as previous monetary systems – whether barter or mercantile or purely commercial – have had to be abandoned for more sophisticated infrastructures.

‘A Frenchman’s word for eighty is “quatre-vingts”, or “four twenties”, which betrays the spoor of an ancient numerical system, possibly Celtic, based on twenty, such as Mayan and Aztec cultures once used. Our LCD watch uses “Arabic” numerals. Like almost the whole of modern arithmetic, and the decimal system itself, Europe owes its numerals to the Arabs and Indians. The mathematical systems on which our civilization continues to function were not even possible to visualize until we had got rid of the Roman system of numeration.

‘The Roman letter-numeral system is now used in few places – at the start of books and films, for example, to remind us rightly that we are confronting something which owes little to originality and much to tradition.’

Squire pushed open the door of the house to enter. He used his right hand, so that his shirt and jacket sleeve fell back to reveal an LCD watch on his wrist. It showed the time in Roman numerals, seconds, minutes, hour, and date. The dial stretched right round his wrist.

‘Perhaps one day Seiko will produce a watch like this for those specialists who still study the first lingua franca of Europe, Latin. Taste may please itself; it is judgement which is answerable to others.’

The door swung wide. As the focus zoomed in on the hall, a grandfather clock standing there began to strike twelve in stately tones.

The girls and the dog, all strangely excited, were installed in her mother’s small town house.

She had used the pretext of going down to the shops for groceries to walk on her own. The sun shone. The pavements were hot and dusty. Tourists stood about in appropriate clothes, some of them licking ice-cream cones. She wore no coat, and felt absurd carrying her mother’s stiff shopping-basket. A boy ran up and asked her what the time was. She felt out-of-character, exposed to the world, and could scarcely answer the lad.

Although her open-work shoes were unsuited to walking, she walked. She chose the meaner streets. No one would recognize her, although her father had been a town councillor. The desperation of her thoughts drove her on, an endless disquisition tormented her forward. Someone she passed, staring curiously into her face, reminded her that her lips were moving, in protest, explanation, or accusation.

By the River Witham she stood, staring at its dull pent surface, thinking of all the reasons why she hated rivers, towns, and especially rivers in towns, with their strong flavours of poverty, affliction, distress, aimlessness, winter, death. Backing away, she ran from the water and her thoughts. She walked among trees, glad of a small wilderness, though scarcely conscious where she went. Her father had walked her here with her younger sister, long ago, when they were safe in their innocence. He had been amusing then, amusing and kind: boring only to her adult perceptions.

She blundered into a tree, feeling the dusty bark under her fingertips, calming herself a little before continuing in a less distraught fashion. So this was what freedom was like. Painful and bewildering though it was, at least she was away from Pippet Hall; she was her own self. A doubt crossed her mind – perhaps she would not care for her own company. She found even the silences of the leafy grove an anguish.

Sun shone ahead on a small gravelled clearing, where a bust stood on a central pillar. She went and sat down on an oak bench, sliding off her shoes, lying back so that sunlight poured into her closed eyes and open mouth.

After a while, she took note of her surroundings. She stared at the bust on its pillar. There was an inscription underneath; it read:

In Memory of Ernest Albert Davies

1896–1977

Councillor

He fought for and Saved this Pleasant Place

Erected by his Fellow Citizens

Her father had spent years fighting both town council and a supermarket chain, who wished to level North Wood and make commercial use of the site. Her mother had written to her, telling her of the ceremony, only a few days ago; she had scarcely taken it in at the time, with more urgent things to occupy her.

Now she sat and gazed at the metal representation of her father’s face. He looked sternly beyond her. A thrush alighted on his head.

Setting the empty shopping-basket down beside her on the gravel, she began to weep for all that was bygone.