Читать книгу The Squire Quartet - Brian Aldiss - Страница 17

Pippet Hall, Norfolk, Christmas 1976

His mother had cared enough for the Jews to do something positive for them.

That was in the early summer of 1938 when, as a widow of one year’s standing, she had taken the Normbaum family into the Hall. They were refugees from Hitler’s Third Reich, and had fled from Hamburg leaving almost all their possessions behind. Patricia Ann Squire – supported by her sister, Tom Squire’s Aunt Rose, who was also living at the Hall in those days – had invited the poor Normbaums to stay indefinitely.

During the Christmas of 1976, Squire thought of those distant pre-war days as he gazed down upon the face of his dead mother.

Patricia Squire had died during the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Her body would lie in its coffin over Christmas and be consigned to the ground on the twenty-eighth of December, at eleven o’clock in the morning, in the church of St Swithun, Hartisham.

The sense of the dead body in the house made for a subdued Christmas when, after breakfast on Christmas morning, everyone retired to the morning room for present-giving and-receiving. Squire left as soon as he could, and went to sit by the mortal remains of his mother.

Downstairs were Teresa, the girls, and her parents, Madge and Ernest Davies; Tom’s brother, Adrian; together with Deirdre and Marshall Kaye, Tom’s sister and brother-in-law, who always drove over from Blakeney to stay at Pippet Hall for Christmas, bringing with them their three children, Grace, Douglas, and Tom. Uncle Willie would arrive later, after the family had been to church.

An LP of carols from Norwich Cathedral played on the record player. Nellie the Dalmatian rooted among the discarded wrapping paper.

Squire waited upstairs in the small room, furnished with little more than the open coffin. Fragments of scripture, platitudinous saws, floated through his mind.

We are but little time upon this earth.

What’s done cannot be undone.

Ashes to ashes.

Your place is with the living. Join the children downstairs.

And that old quotation from Walter Savage Landor:

There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there are no voices, O Rhodophe, that are not soon mute, however tuneful; there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.

John Matthew Squire, his father, dead so many years, had once cried the name of the red-haired Patricia Ann Hodgkins with all the emphasis of passionate love. Now both were gone, and the echo of that cry could be heard only in his own head, and in the heads of his sister and brother.

There was no immortality, of that he was certain, or none in the sense that the Church intended. Yet there was no death, or at least there was a residue of life. For that vast and perennially never-entirely-satisfactory thing, his relationship with his mother, grievously damaged on the very day of his father’s death by her savage beating of him, ostensibly for shooting the mastiffs – though even at the time, in his many kinds of grief, he perceived that the beating was merely her pain, her confusion in the face of death, her hatred of this unexpected beastliness, which had driven her to attack him – still hung and would ever hang between him and the phantom domains of his past.

Looking away from his mother’s emaciated form, and her closed face splotched by greys and browns unknown in living nature, he gazed with sorrow on the still world of Christmas outside. A light fall of snow, followed by an iron frost, had welded the previous night’s mist to the trees. Every bare twig had its nimbus of cold. The grass of the lawns was furred with white. It was a white and blue-grey picture. Death seemed to have deprived the world of colour. The still cold had enlarged the plantation and created a deadness in its depths so that it resembled an ancient forest, or perhaps he saw a spectre of it as it would be a century from now, when his eyes and the eyes of his children would no longer perceive it.

He allowed himself to picture two Shire horses, such as had worked on his father’s estate when he was a boy, pulling a great trunk from the forest, of the trunk being set light to, and of cheerful flames leaping to the ashen sky. Truly, one could understand how, long before a sailing ship and a pious old man in monk’s habit had brought Christianity to these shores, men had set out with animals to drag in the yule log and burn it, ensuring that the death of the sun in the embers of winter solstice was temporary merely, not lasting.

But the sun was dead, he thought. Every year it did die a little. Though less swiftly than he.

The door opened and Teresa entered in her Sunday clothes. Patricia Squire’s body had been brought in its coffin to a small room on the top floor, which had served in its time as maid’s room, children’s room, and box room. The passage outside was thinly carpeted and Squire had heard his wife’s footsteps approaching.

Teresa was dressed in a light coat with fur-trimmed pockets. She wore a fur hat which haloed her hair, and carried gloves. Her smile was warm and loving.

‘We’re ready to go to church, Tom, if you are.’

He rose hesitantly. She went over to him where he stood by the window and put her arms about him, running her hands through the hair at the base of his skull, murmuring to him.

‘I’m sorry about your poor old mother, my darling. It’s sad for you, I know. And it wakens up that old wound of your father dying so tragically. I know that too because I’m a part of you. Don’t grieve too much, darling – I’ll be your little mother as well as your plump little wife. We’ll be fine, you’ll see.’

They all walked to church as they always did, through the ringing cold, down the drive, over Repton’s bridge, along the village street, up the hill, to St Swithun’s, twelve of them where there had been thirteen the previous year. Several cars were parked outside the church, including the Porsche belonging to Ray Bond, the flashy builder who had bought the vicarage. The five-minute bell was ringing as they walked between the gravestones, the children, who had led the way impatiently until now, dragging behind.

Inside the church, where worshippers retained their coats to ward off the damp which the massively old-fashioned Victorian heating system did little to dispel, brass plates commemorated the names of the fallen who had given their lives for the country in two world wars. The organ, which was delivering a voluntary based on, or aspiring towards, Holst’s ‘Christmas Day’, under the skeletal fingers of Mr Beaumont, had been presented by the Squire family to commemorate the fallen.

Tom Squire’s first sight of the Normbaums had revealed huddled figures in ill-fitting overcoats, staggering into the hall of Pippet Hall, late on a summer evening before the war. Spinks, the Squire’s old stableman, brought in a couple of battered cardboard boxes and set them down by the stairs, leaving without a backward look. Young Squire had not understood the alien gestures of the newcomers. He had immediately understood Spinks’s unthinking gesture of dislike and disapproval. He stood on the stairs, refusing his mother’s invitation to come down, resenting this intrusion of foreign things into his home, this threat of coming war into Hartisham, into his county of Norfolk.

Why should they look so ugly, why should they dress so incongruously, when this super, kind, rich English family was letting them stay here, safe from Hitler, free, no charge? Why couldn’t they look grateful instead of scared?

He had long since forgiven himself that ungenerous reception of the Normbaums, and his flight upstairs into the bedroom when his mother called him peremptorily down to greet their guests. What had been less easy to forgive, what perhaps should never be quite forgiven, but should lie about in the mind like a dead albatross, a warning for all worse and more subtle situations to come, was the way he had secretly sympathized with Hitler’s – well, in those days one did not realize it was extermination – Hitler’s extirpation of the Jews.

In the newsprints and on newsreels, ground out in the local fleapit before the appearance of Humphrey Bogart, or Eddie G. Robinson, or Will Hay, or Errol Flynn, Hitler looked rather nice and sensible in his uniform. Tom could not believe what Uncle Robert said about Hitler being a ‘villain of the first water’. But he disliked the look of the German Jews, seen scuttling here and there in heavy clothes, dirty, drab, suspicious, the men with matted black beards and strange hats, the women fat and weepy. Their eyes were so frightening. Why should they inhabit Germany? It seemed a good idea to get rid of them if they were causing trouble, as everyone said they were.

Now here these troublemakers were in his own house, in father’s house, and father would surely never allow that. Already the trouble was starting. He had had to exchange his pleasant big room next to his mother’s for a smaller room on the top floor, redeemed only by its stunning view over the rear of the house, the stables, the farm, the village, and the distant tower of Thornage church. Rooks and pigeons were his companions.

Mr Normbaum spoke good English. He was cosmopolitan. But he disappeared almost as soon as he had deposited his wife and children at the Hall. The wife spoke almost no English, the two children, Rachel and little Karl, none. Memory, which after a while proves to have none of the fading properties of the body enshrining it, still held that scene in the hall, under the chandelier, with the door in the background open on sunset sky: Spinks balefully moving away, waistcoated figure averted, mother going forward, arms open in smiling welcome, tall Mrs Normbaum, two ill-clad little children looking up apprehensively into the shadows to where something scuttled away.

It took some days to realize how beautiful those children were, the blue-eyed Rachel in particular.

During the sermon, the Rev. Rowlinson mentioned Patricia Squire, in order to remind his scanty parishioners of the good she had done in her lifetime. He had occasion to mention the fact that she had given refuge to a Jewish family in the troubled days before the last war broke out.

‘All times in this realm of earth are troubled. Although it may seem to our eyes that the kinds of troubles vary, that we have to fight against various sorts of evil, that is only because our mortal lives are so short. Could we but look at matters with a wider scan, had we the vision of the Almighty, we would see that there is really only one sort of evil, that evil puts on many guises, yet remains itself, and that it is in us all. Patricia Squire worked all her life against evil …’

Limitations of intellect did not prevent the Reverend Rowlinson being a good vicar; indeed, perhaps they helped him. But what he said was only partly true, or only partly useful. For, given the brevity of life’s span to which he made reference (a snide but traditional way the Church had of making you depressed and therefore not so actively bad), one had to make ad hoc arrangements against evil; so it suited all and sundry to chop evil up into parcels and, by pretending it was divisible, remain able to divide and conquer it. Given a bit of luck.

For instance, there was the evil of ignorance, such as the young Tom Squire showed in his lack of sympathy for Hitler’s suffering Jews. That lack had been banished when he was in his teens and acquired knowledge. The dreadful revelation of Belsen and the other concentration camps, which almost coincided with the first flush of puberty, jarred him like the passing of a terrible express train. It had jarred him with knowledge. As an earthquake levels tall buildings, he felt whole edifices of ignorance fall within him. He saw the wickedness of the Nazi regime and – on a par with it if knowledge cannot be quantified, as old Rowlinson appeared to be claiming – his own wickedness. (Yet the wickedness lived even in its own ruins. How grateful he had been when he read Orwell’s words, ‘I could never find it in my heart to dislike Hitler.’ He wondered if all the British felt that way. Hadn’t they said, even at the sour end of the war, ‘We should have joined up with the Wehrmacht and smashed the Russians while we had the chance’? … The things that were said, between individuals, between husband and wife, seemingly so transient, never forgotten … ‘I’ll be your little mother as well as your plump little wife …’)

As the sermon laboured on, Squire’s attention wandered. His younger brother Adrian sat on one side of him, Teresa on the other, in the family pews. In a niche on the wall just above them stood a bust in white marble of Matthew Squire, 1689–1758, one of the benefactors of the church. Anxious, in his nouveau riche state, to keep in with the Church as well as the local gentry, Matthew had endowed the church with a fine wooden pulpit, carved by William Kent, no less, probably from timber left over from the construction of the Hall.

Matthew’s bust showed a serious man – but who would not achieve seriousness whilst being carved in stone? The high forehead, the long nose, were echoed in a nearer, living, face: that of Adrian, whose gaze, fixed rigidly on the Rev. Rowlinson, was almost as stony as his ancestor’s.

Squire reflected that he probably spent more time thinking about the long-defunct Matthew than about his still-living brother. Although Adrian was rather a dull stick, that was a mistake; blood was thicker than marble.

Adrian was the only member of the family to subside into the civil service. He had been doing worthy and inscrutable things in Whitehall for a quarter of a century and, for most of that time, had owned a flat near the Fulham Road. Whatever his private delights and excitements, the only episode in Adrian’s life to stir the family had been when he went on a delegation to Bombay and returned with an Indian film actress on his arm, a lady by the name of Sushila.

That had been almost fifteen years ago. Well did Squire remember how he and Teresa had gone to London to meet Sushila on Adrian’s invitation. In theory, Squire thoroughly approved of the match. He too had a taste for the exotic, but had never expected the same to manifest itself in his sober brother; perhaps Adrian’s infant imagining also had been stirred by the dark beauty of Rachel Normbaum.

Sushila was beautiful beyond imagining. Squire and Teresa both found themselves silenced before her elegance. ‘I wear saris here in London because it is expected of me,’ she said. ‘At my home, I am more comfortable in jeans.’

‘Have you visited London before?’ asked Teresa.

Her answer was a silvery laugh. ‘My family is pretty cosmopolitan, I’m glad to say.’

Squire had hardly been able to keep his eyes or hands off her, and had deeply envied his brother – an envy that Teresa had infallibly sensed. He remembered the terrible row after Adrian and Sushila were married, when he had acted as his brother’s best man. But the marriage was not to last. Perhaps Adrian was too set in his ways. A son was born to them but, within two years, the cosmopolitan Sushila was on a plane back to Bombay, with the child. Adrian had never spoken of her or the boy since in his brother’s hearing.

Since those exciting times, the profile had grown sharper, thinner, had acquired a moustache and spectacles with which to regard the changing world. Yet unhappily it seemed no more inclined to exchange confidences than the marble bust behind it.

The Rev. Rowlinson’s sermon came to an end, the congregation rose on frigid feet to unite in ‘Hark, the herald angels sing’.

After the service, all were cheerful. Everyone shook hands with Edward Rowlinson as he stood in his surplice, a tall and not undignified figure despite the loose false teeth, wishing everyone a Happy Christmas as they filed past him at the entrance. Purple-visaged Ray Bond – an Australian gentleman, some parishioners said – shouted out a ‘Merry Christmas’ before jumping into his yellow Porsche and belting off in the direction of the nearest whisky.

When the church was empty, the Rev. Rowlinson put on his blue raincoat and gloves. He and his wife and their grown-up daughter Matilda walked downhill with the Squire party to Pippet Hall. It was customary for them to eat their Christmas lunch at the Hall. The children, Ann, Jane, Grace, Douglas, and Tom, led the way, running and calling, keen to get back to their new toys and games, now that duty was done.

The hospitality offered the Rowlinsons was the last drip of a stream of Pippet Hall hospitality which had flowed over the centuries. The sheltering of the Normbaum family, though an act not without self-interest, had been in that good tradition; but taxes direct and indirect, and the winds of change, had dried it. All that was left was an impoverished squire offering a meal to an impoverished vicar. A turkey bone, a game of Consequences, and duty was fulfilled for another year.

The little Normbaums had soon shown themselves marvellous at games round the house. In no time, Rachel was talking a pretty variety of English, and Karl was hardly slower. Rachel was slender and had blue eyes and dark hair, a dashing, brilliant, affectionate child who became Tom’s first and unconsummated love. Oh, the delight of having her there, of coming back from school in the holidays and finding her awaiting him, long-legged, at Hartisham station (for in those days the old Great Eastern trains still ran). Those were the happy years, the years of sheltered childhood while the war played itself out below the horizon. And the end of the war – unwelcome in many ways, not least because suddenly the Normbaums were gone to Detroit in a new world, and Pippet Hall became empty and full of shadows, debt, dry rot, servants not returning, old order disappearing in shabbiness, damp, and tarnished silver. Then he had learnt – at the time of the Belsen revelations – that mother had taken in the refugees only to save the Hall being commandeered by the RAF.

Mother had friends in the county, in some cases traditional old friends of Squire’s father and grandfather. They helped her. Thomas Squire had neglected them in their old age, preferring more sophisticated friends in Cambridge and London.

At the Hall gates, Squire paused to let Madge and Ernest, his parents-in-law, catch up with him. Matilda, the pale Rowlinson daughter, went on ahead with Teresa and Deirdre to see how the Christmas lunch, the turkey with all its gallant accessories, was faring. As the party progressed past the artificial lake – frozen but not frozen enough to bear skaters – it could hear Nellie barking from the house, and see Uncle Willie’s Austin Maxi standing by the front porch. Like Deirdre and Marshall, Willie always drove over for Christmas Day; unlike them, he would be driving home in the evening, claiming that his cat could not survive overnight without him. He had protested also that Pippet Hall beds were too hard for his old bones.

Despite Patricia’s terminal illness, Squire had insisted on the Hall’s being decorated for Christmas. The party trooped through the front door, exclaiming at the cold now they were safely out of it, and gathered to admire the Christmas tree, which stood in the hall as usual on such occasions. Its lights seemed to emphasize a dreary negation of light which hung this year at the top of the stairs to the upper regions, where the body lay.

But the tree was grand and glittering, swathed in a glass-fibre called Angel’s Breath, which was carefully saved in a hat box from one year to another. The tree had been dug from the grounds and stood in a tub specially constructed for the purpose. At the top of the tree, spreading brilliant plastic wings, was the fairy which Teresa had made; despite its wand, there was about it something of the insect reminiscent of Teresa’s more usual creations. A paraffin stove radiated warmth beside the tree, compensating for the uncertainties of the central heating in this area of the house. From a radio in the sitting room came the sound of Bethlehem bells. The thing lying upstairs would not hear those bells this year as, when living, it had done every Christmas since the invention of the wireless. Soon, there would be no one left who remembered cat’s whiskers and crystal sets; to Squire himself, they were only stories.

As Uncle Willie came into the hall, smiling, to wish them all a Happy Christmas, the children disappeared into the morning room to play with Tom Kaye’s new Scalextric motor race track. The adults, after removing their coats and scarves, went through into the living room, Squire ushering the Rowlinsons hospitably before him.

‘Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without the bells,’ Madge Davies said. ‘Do you remember how funny it was in the wartime, when the churches were not allowed to ring their bells? I expect you remember that, Mr Rowlinson? I feel so sorry that poor Patricia isn’t with us this year – she was quite a campanologist. One can’t help wondering who will be taken from us by next Christmas.’

‘Don’t say that, dear,’ Ernest said. ‘It’s morbid. Besides, we are all in the pink.’

‘What about your back? And Teresa says …’ But she decided not to complete the sentence.

Although the living room struck rather cold, all agreed that it would soon warm up. The room was decorated with boughs of pine tucked behind the pictures on the wall, and with red candles, half-used, which would be lighted again at dusk. To make the fire in the wide hearth burn up, Squire threw onto it elm logs which he had sawn himself. They all stood round the hearth, exchanging idle conversation, except for Adrian Squire, who was silent as usual. He smoked a cigarette unobtrusively, and coughed a little.

‘That is one blessing of the Dutch Elm Disease,’ said the Rev. Rowlinson. ‘It has provided everyone with more wood fuel than they have ever known before. In these days of spiralling prices, it is very welcome.’ He shook his head, as if contradicting his own words.

‘Wood-burning stoves are very fashionable again. Ray Bond told me so,’ said his wife. Dorothy Rowlinson was a large but timid woman with a sharp nose and a memorable amount of grey hair which, though apparently natural, brought to these remote reaches of Norfolk a reminder of the Afro hair-styles affected in Notting Hill Gate. Dorothy Rowlinson’s parishioners claimed that spirits could frequently be smelt on her breath; some said brandy or, the more charitable, sherry; otherwise, none had any complaint about this shy and dedicated woman.

‘It’s fortunate for the look of the countryside that there’s more oak than elm in the region,’ Marshall said, his sharp Bostonian voice in contrast to the rather woolly tones of both Rowlinsons. ‘Northampton and Bedfordshire have been practically denuded of trees. Entire landscapes have changed character in just these last two years.’

Looking mysterious, Uncle Willie took himself off to the morning room, bearing envelopes. He was going to make his annual rather cheese-paring distribution of record tokens to the Squire and Kaye children, and to receive in return their well-simulated cries of grateful surprise.

‘People make a lot of fuss about the elms,’ said Adrian. ‘They’ll grow back again.’

‘I’m damned sure they won’t,’ Marshall retorted. ‘People don’t have time for trees any more.’

‘Oh, surely that’s not so,’ Rev. Rowlinson protested. ‘Dorothy and I are very fond of trees.’

Teresa and Matilda entered, bearing trays of glasses and hot negus. Deirdre followed with crisps in bowls. Grace, now thirteen, slipped into the room to try her aunt’s drink, and tasted it appreciatively. ‘It’s lovely, Aunt Teresa, and not at all alcoholic.’

‘You just take care,’ Deirdre warned her. ‘One alcoholic in the family’s enough.’

When all present were clutching a glass, Squire went and stood at the far end of the room away from the fire, unconsciously framing himself against a window where a landscape in white and blue-grey led towards distant Walsingham. He took a slim book from a shelf and read Journey of the Magi aloud.

‘A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year …’

His voice faltered only once. He kept his thoughts away from the figure of greys and browns lying under the roof with its eyes now always closed, concentrating instead on the magi’s account, and on his discomfort at finding – as many men had done – that after returning from a long journey, one’s native land was also full of strange gods.

He had read this poem every Christmas morning since returning from Yugoslavia in the late forties, before he married Teresa. His mother would have liked him to continue what had become a tradition. He realized how deeply the words still cut, words of an Anglican poet so much crisper, more uncompromising, than the sentimental consolations Rowlinson ladled out. The real Christian message – which went beyond Christianity – was here, that birth and death were hard, conditions between always unsatisfactory, vision intermittent. Christianity must have been a great religion when it belonged to the underdog.

‘Why would you be glad of another death, Uncle Tom?’ asked Grace, when he had closed the book and set it back in its place in the bookcase. ‘Isn’t one enough at present?’

Grace was his favourite niece. She had her mother’s fair hair but was going to be taller and slimmer. He smiled at her and said, ‘That line isn’t a reference to your grandmother. It’s spoken by one of the magi, as I suppose you realize.’

‘But why did he want another death?’

‘I’ve always supposed he referred to his own death.’

She said lightly, ‘I think about God a lot, these days, but I don’t know many people who believe in him.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Of course, the Rev. Rowlinson and Mrs Rowlinson and Matilda all believe in him, but that’s their job, isn’t it? Of course, I suppose it’s easier to believe at Christmas. Do you believe, Uncle Tom, or do you mind saying?’

He hesitated, and immediately felt her interest slip away, saw it in her eyes as they switched their gaze to something happening at the other end of the room. He was tempted to lie to shield her, to say that he did believe. He was tempted to fudge the question, to say that it was a question of perspective. He found himself inarticulate, unable to reply. A thousand answers rose to his mind.

Still with her attention on the other end of the room, where mince pies were appearing, closely followed by the other children, Grace said, ‘Someone at school told me that God existed, but he left Earth at the end of the Stone Age because he could see that mankind was getting on pretty well without his help. But I guess that doesn’t explain Jesus, does it?’

With a polite smile, she made for the mince pies.

How were Jews treated in the Stone Age? He sipped at his negus.

The question of God was a matter of perspective. It was easier to believe as a child, just as it was easier to believe in Santa Claus. The mere fact of having parents to care for you made a parental God plausible. Then one acquired knowledge, and worse succeeded.

He had a disturbing memory of his mother, throwing a cup down on the flagstones in the kitchen, angry because she was having to do her own washing up. Time, one of those grey years in the late forties when, the tide of war having withdrawn, people were still coping with the effects of the flood. People like Patricia Squire expected the servants to come back after the war, expected that life would return to what it was in the thirties. But the young people of Hartisham did not intend to work at menial jobs any more. They saw their chance: they left Norfolk and went to earn good wages in the car factories of the Midlands. The thirties had been reviled in their time; money was short and nothing was as it had been in grandfather’s time, before the Great War. Now, after another war, the thirties were suddenly seen as halcyon. Time gilded them.

The seventies. Everyone complained, comparing them unfavourably with previous decades. Even the forties were now looked back upon with a certain nostalgia. Yet the time would inevitably come when the seventies would themselves be remembered as a time of peace and plenty. So they were, for all their alarms.

He pictured Grace, now munching a mince pie, as a grown woman, saying, ‘Christmases are not what they were when old Granny Squire was alive.’ And later, to her children, ‘Christmases are much more commercial than they were when my old Uncle Tom was alive …’

Plain Matilda Rowlinson brought him a mince pie. As he talked to her, his wife filled his glass with more negus. They smiled happily at each other, not needing to speak. The wine, flavoured with cinnamon and nutmeg, ran across his palate, mingling with the rich taste of the mincemeat.

‘Do you think God approves of mince pies, Matilda?’ Squire asked in sudden mischief. ‘Or does he think they’re ungodly?’

She laughed. ‘I think he leaves it to each of us to decide for ourselves.’

A good answer on the spur of the moment, he thought. All the best gods should leave it to the customer to decide.

It was a question of perspective. Periods of time seemed better or worse according to what followed. When you were young and had seen nothing follow, then time was special. So with God; he was special until you had seen certain things happen, Belsen, authorized murder in Yugoslavia, or your father’s face eaten by dogs.

He strolled over to his sister and slid his arm through hers.

‘How’s things?’

‘Oh, extremely cheerful, all things considered. And you? I was just thinking that with a few of these neguses under my belt I could perhaps face looking at mother. Would you come up with me?’

‘If you like.’

‘Do you remember, people used to say “Bearing up”, if you asked them how they were.’

Deirdre filled her glass and they went upstairs. Her boys, Douglas and Tom, were playing with a Slinky on the stairs. ‘I’ll be down soon,’ Deirdre told them, ‘I’m just going to inspect your grandmother.’

Her defensive facetiousness fell away from her once they were in the small room on the attic floor. Squire stood by the window, gazing out at the iron landscape, listening to his sister’s choked sobs.

He forced himself to speak. ‘She went so suddenly when she went. A week and she was gone. Ten days ago, she was joking, and quizzing me about “Frankenstein”… Teresa had been having bad dreams. She dreamed that a black figure was trying to get into the house. I told her that we would get a better burglar alarm, but now I wonder … Well, it’s easy to believe in portents at such a time – death makes everything irrational.’

Deirdre said, with a forced distinctness, ‘I blame myself that I never came over to see the old girl when I phoned and you said she was unwell. You know what it is, just before Christmas one’s always busy. It was end of term and we had to go over and see Grace in her school play, and Douglas had a cold and Tom had carol-singing and a party … Still, I should have bloody well come over. I can see that now. Poor old thing. I don’t fancy being a corpse, do you?’

Making the effort, he went over to her and put an arm round her shoulders. ‘There’s always guilt at these times. Filthy death, filthy guilt. Let it wash round you, don’t let it stay. We could all do better by everyone; it must be a cosmic law or something.’

‘Old Rowlinson could explain it, I don’t doubt.’

He could no longer bring himself to look down at his mother’s body. ‘I’ll put the lid on, if you’ve had enough.’

‘Oh, I don’t think I could bear to see you do that. Let me get out of here first.’ But she made no move to leave. She adjusted her hair. ‘Why haven’t you got flowers in here? Why hasn’t Teresa put some flowers in the room?’

‘A grey Christmas. Do you remember when we were kids and it snowed heavily just before Christmas, and we got stuck on the bridge at Wisbech? And father just laughed. He was enjoying it.’

‘They’ve both gone now. Mother was such a repository of family history – I can feel it already, there’s going to be a huge vacuum all down the left-hand side, here …’ She sketched a large position vaguely in the air.

‘Well, there’s nothing we can do. Bow to the Grim Reaper, damn him … Irrational … I keep having an irrational feeling that it’s the cold emanating from her that chills the landscape, that she’s become a dreadful natural force, that … it’s as if the corpse erupted out of the dead landscape, the way she keeps bursting into my thoughts …’

‘What’s Adrian said about it?’

‘You know Adrian; he never says much about anything.’

‘It beats me why you wanted to have the body lying here over Christmas. Bit morbid, isn’t it?’

He shrugged. ‘It was her home, after all.’

Deirdre went over to the door with a somewhat slack-shouldered walk he had noted in her lately. She put her hand on the doorknob, then hesitated.

‘Are you afraid of being alone in this house, Tom?’

‘How do you mean? Ghosts?’

She nodded. ‘Ghosts and things like that. Father, for instance.’

‘That sort of thing doesn’t worry me.’

She laughed with a partly derisive note. ‘Of course, you’re so tough. You’ve killed chaps in Yugoslavia – I try to forget that rather nasty side to your character. All the same … What about Teresa? Isn’t she scared? How’s she going to be when you’re trooping round the world doing your TV series?’

‘Oh, that won’t take many weeks.’

‘It’ll alter your lives.’

‘Not at all. And I don’t think she’s afraid of ghosts. She’s never said.’

‘I’d have thought you’d have asked. It’s an obvious enough question, stuck in a place like this. Really, I don’t think I’ve ever liked Pippet Hall, not even when I was a small child … I wouldn’t care to live here. Won’t Teresa be lonely?’

‘She keeps very busy. Her decorative insects are really developing into something tremendously attractive, don’t you think? Aren’t they original?’

Opening the door, casting a last suspicious glance at the coffin, Deirdre said, ‘You, aren’t you lonely here on your own?’

Hesitantly. ‘I am afraid of my own loneliness. But that goes wherever I go. If anything, it’s less here, where I belong.’

‘I can’t stand it when Marsh is away from Blakeney. I’m worse now I’m getting older. He’s already put in for, and been accepted for, some bloody dig on some bloody Greek island next summer. I may go with him. Though you can’t see me living in a tent exactly, can you?’

‘You aren’t quite the pioneering type.’

‘Me perched on some bloody outcrop of Hellenic rock, while Marsh grubs up bits of broken urn?’ She laughed at the ridiculous picture she had conjured.

Squire closed and locked the door behind them.

‘What did you do that for?’ his sister asked. ‘Afraid she’ll get loose?’

They descended together to the lower regions, from which seasonal aromas of roast turkey, sausages, bacon, stuffing, and other fleshly delights arose.

The meal took its accustomed course. First, champagne all round and a loyal toast to the sovereign; that tradition must have gone back as far as Matthew Squire himself.

The toast held special meaning, for the Queen was spending Christmas at Sandringham; it was easy to imagine her with her family, sitting down to table only twenty miles away.

After the toast, Scottish smoked salmon, followed by the main course with all its ramifications – the glistening brown barrel of bird attended by a fleet of small china boats containing gravy, bread sauce, cranberry sauce, and blackcurrant jelly. Then came pudding, flaming luridly, amid cries of delight from the children. Lastly, there was a whole Stilton, wrapped in a napkin, for those to cut at who still had room and courage enough, attended by a good port to wash it down with.

Most of the adults collapsed into chairs after the feast, and somnolence reigned. Marshall joined the children in a new card game. Half an hour later, Teresa and Squire put on their coats and went to see their estate manager. Uncle Willie and Adrian came as well, to walk off the effects of lunch.

The air was cold and still, with a slightly smokey flavour to it.

Teresa took her husband’s arm. Uncle Willie grasped hers, leaning rather heavily against her. ‘Very good lunch, my dear. It’s amazing how much nourishment the human frame can withstand.’

Their footsteps echoed on the frosted ground.

The manager lived in an eighteenth-century farmhouse at the far end of the estate, on the Walsingham road. As they returned, an hour later, Teresa pointed to the western sky, where a thin red bar showed between strata of heavy cloud. ‘The ghost of the sun!’ she exclaimed. A hemisphere of sun emerged from below the cloud curtain, then the whole ball, less lurid than the pudding had appeared two hours earlier. It hung above a furred outline of slope, apparently emitting little light and less heat.

‘Tom, Teresa was telling me about her nightmares,’ Uncle Willie said abruptly. ‘About a dark figure trying to break into the Hall. I suppose I shouldn’t ask you this, but are all your cloak-and-dagger activities with the secret service firmly in the past?’ He drew himself up, trying to straighten his shoulders, peering past Teresa’s furred shoulder at Squire.

Adrian laughed in a way he had, as if thinking better of the humorous aspect that provoked the sound almost before uttering it. ‘You don’t imagine that KGB agents are tracking Tom down in Darkest Norfolk, do you, Uncle?’

Tom said placidly, ‘Be sure there are KGB agents in Norfolk, but they have no particular reason to interest themselves in me.’

To Teresa, Adrian said, ‘KGB, my foot! I’d hazard a guess that that figure in your dream was more likely to be a tax inspector than a KGB man, eh?’

Snuggling her shoulder under Squire’s arm, Teresa said, ‘Let’s go back to the fire. Mother’s death has made us all morbid. Christmas cake is the perfect antidote.’

As they headed for the rear of the house, Willie said, ‘I’m the last of my poor old generation left now. It makes for morbidity.’

She hugged him. ‘You’re the toughest of us all, Uncle, dear,’ she said.

In the waning afternoon light, the side of the house presented an aspect of greyness, as if a blanket had been draped over it. Lights gleamed in the room downstairs, and children could be seen, running here and there, laughing. Matilda Rowlinson was playing a game with them. The last rays of the sun caught the three lower panes of the window of the room where Patricia Squire’s body lay; they gleamed with dead colour as the four walkers went below them into the shade of the house.

‘Perhaps I’ll tell the kiddies a ghost story after tea,’ Adrian said. ‘I always fancied myself as a story teller.’

Red is the colour of dying light, as incandescence sinks towards invisibility. The bars of the electric fire in my bedroom, dying when switched off, when Rachel lived with us. Long ago now.

Rachel’s mother, Rebecca Normbaum, had died some years earlier. Squire was sure his mother had told him as much; at the time, busy with other things, he had paid little attention. He remembered a late photograph of Rebecca, taken in America by polaroid camera when such things were rare in England. A tall elegant woman, still with eyes of blue, though her hair was grey. She stood in a suburban Detroit garden – or ‘yard’, as she and Rachel would have learnt to call it.

Karl, the son, the uninteresting boy, kept the Normbaum and Squire families spasmodically in touch. He was Charles nowadays, name Anglicized, manner Americanized. He had married a striking blonde Jewish girl in Detroit, and commuted regularly with her to Israel in his prospering line of business, which involved car exhausts and gas filters.

At the beginning of the seventies, before the power crisis, Squire had met Charles in London. They had not found much to say to each other, once the reminiscences had been exhausted. Rachel had made a respectable marriage. She lived in a big house. She had two children, both boys, who were doing well. And a dog. She had shares in a downtown restaurant. She and Charles saw each other about once a month.

So the promise of youth deteriorated into family history.

After their meeting, afflicted by a mixture of curiosity and nostalgia, Squire wrote to Rachel. He received no reply. The following Christmas, a printed card arrived. Little Rachel Normbaum was now Mrs Gary Baxter.

Although Blakeney was so near, Deirdre, Marshall, and their children always slept at the Hall on Christmas night. It was part of the tradition. When they were younger, this had been a time for drinking too much brandy and port and playing childish games after the children had gone up to bed. Now they were more staid, and Uncle Willie drove himself off to Norwich at nine-thirty in order, as he explained, to look after his flat and his cat.

Squire and Mrs Davies went to see him off at the front door.

‘You’d better look after your granddaughter, Madge,’ Uncle Willie warned Mrs Davies, as he wound a woolly scarf round his neck. ‘Do you know what Grace said to me?’

‘I’m sure it was something very precocious, Will. Young girls reach the age of – become young ladies very much earlier than they did in my day. I can’t understand it. It must have been something in the diet when we were young.’ She smiled at him teasingly.

‘Come, my dear, you are still a beautiful lady, and Ernest is a very lucky man. Blossoms that flower late go on flowering into the winter.’

Squire, slightly surprised at this flight of fancy from his uncle, asked, ‘What did Grace say to you, Uncle?’

The old man hesitated, then chuckled. ‘Why, she told me that she’d had a dream in which she had gone down to the beach, and there she had seen a fully grown male seal sporting in the waves. Although it was a bit rough, she took off her clothes and joined him, and put her arms round him and held him tight. She said it felt lovely. Those were her words: “It felt lovely.”’

‘She is getting to that age …’

‘It was her comment afterwards that shocked me. She said, “I expect it’s a premonitory dream about enjoying sexual intercourse, don’t you, Uncle?”’

While Squire and Uncle Willie laughed, Mrs Davies pretended to look affronted. After Willie had gone, she said as she retreated with Squire from the chilly regions of the front door, ‘Willie Squire is such a nice man. Ernest and I have always admired him. A pity he doesn’t marry again. I suppose even marriage is unpopular or something these days – so many people seem to be getting divorced.’

‘Most of them tend to remarry. It’s what Dr Johnson calls the triumph of hope over experience.’

‘I’m so glad that you and Teresa are happily married, and have this lovely house, full of such exquisite workmanship.’

‘Sometimes I am afraid she feels imprisoned here.’

‘Oh, no, not Teresa.’

He took her arm and led her into the warm living room, where her husband was already setting out a Scrabble board.

Later in the evening, the children submitted to Adrian’s ghost story and then climbed upstairs to bed. Madge and Ernest followed them, and the Rowlinsons left.

Marshall Kaye threw an additional log on the fire and stretched out before it on the sofa, next to Adrian. Deirdre smiled at her husband and returned to the novel she was reading. Teresa trimmed the candles, which were now the room’s sole illumination, while Squire poured everyone a malt whisky.

‘Not for me,’ Adrian said, waving a hand. ‘I’m fighting against middle-aged fat.’

‘You’re very thin, Adrian,’ Teresa said. ‘A whisky would do you good.’

‘It’s refusing all the whiskies that would do me good which keeps me thin.’

‘Middle age should not be devoted to abstinence,’ Kaye said, raising his glass and sipping.

‘What is middle age for, Marsh?’ Teresa asked her brother-in-law. ‘I’ve yet to find out.’

‘Well … it’s a sort of reprieve-period, in my book. You’ve finished mating and the furtherance of the species. Your waistline becomes more important than the rat-race … I guess it’s a time when you’re supposed to become wise and good.’

Laughing, Squire brought his glass over and sat down by the fire with them. ‘Most people get more awful in middle age, not more good, and take to drink or politics. Although revolutionaries start young, other shades of politician get involved only when they’re past the optimal breeding age.’

‘Must be a correlation there,’ Kaye said, laughing.

‘When I was a child,’ Adrian confessed, ‘I thought that acquiring knowledge would infallibly make one good. Now I suspect it warps the soul.’

‘That’s a useful bit of knowledge to have.’

Squire said, ‘We can recognize distinct stages in a man’s life. Puberty. Mating. Family-rearing. After that, with the initial biological directives losing their force, he turns to complaining about the state of the country.’

‘Sorry to hear your directives are losing their force, Tom,’ Adrian said.

Kaye took the remark more seriously. ‘I’m all for complaining about the state of the country. I know it’s rather an obsessive British occupation, but in the States it’s regarded as unpatriotic, which it shouldn’t be. Why, we’ve had to import Solzhenitsyn to do the complaining for us. That’s bad.’

Deirdre looked up from her book. ‘Stop grumbling about America, Marsh. Just because they have their own way of doing things.’

‘Good old America,’ he said. ‘So close to God, so far from everyone else.’

‘It is disconcerting the way Russian thinking of various types has so greatly influenced the West, on both the Left and the Right,’ Squire said, reaching for the decanter. Adrian jumped to his feet.

‘I’m going to bed. Politics is something I gave up, along with whiskies that do me good. Thank God that Britain, for all its faults, is not a political nation. To hear you talk, Tom, with your knowing insinuations that there are KGB agents snooping round the grounds, you’d think the poor old country was a dead duck.’

‘As to that,’ said Squire, leaning back and pointing a hand at his brother, ‘as to that, Adrian, old sport, will you dream more sweetly in your whisky-free sleep if I tell you categorically that there is a dedicated band of Soviets and their Warsaw Pact hyenas, all with the most unfriendly intentions towards this sceptred isle, within six or seven miles of this comfortable fire?’

Adrian did his sawn-off laugh. ‘My dear Tom, you are getting to be, you know, a bit of a bore with this Lord Chalfontism of yours. Perhaps it really is compensatory fantasy for lack of the old biological drive.’

Squire stood up, set his whisky glass on the table, and raised his right hand, arm extended, to shoulder level. He swung the arm until it pointed almost due north.

‘That way’s the coast, right? You wouldn’t disagree there. Not more than five miles away as the crow flies or the shell whizzes, right? All round our shores, hugging the two-mile limit, are Soviet spy-vessels, monitoring everything that goes on ashore. Five and two make seven.’

‘Rubbish!’ said Adrian. ‘We’d never let them.’

‘We can’t stop them.’ Squire lowered his arm. ‘They’re seven miles away, sitting in a well-armed ship of modern design. They monitor everything, local radio, police reports, the lot. Plus anything their numerous secret agents ashore like to beam out to them. How come you don’t know this, Adrian? It’s no secret. Is it that you don’t want to know it?’

‘It can’t be true. What could they learn? Anyhow, we probably do just the same to them.’

‘We haven’t got the vessels. You know how the defence budget has been pared away by successive governments year after year for thirty years. That’s right, isn’t it, Marsh?’

Kaye drained his glass. ‘We’re even closer to the bastards at Blakeney. You can see them through the binoculars. Let’s get to bed, Tom. This is no talk for Christmas Day. Maybe, as Solzhenitsyn says, the Third World War is already lost. Just don’t quote me.’

‘I think you’re both being defeatist,’ Adrian said, stoutly. ‘In any case, even if it were true, they’d never dare attack us.’

‘Your trouble, Adrian,’ said Kaye, lifting his glass, ‘is that you’ve given up your sense of history along with your taste for whisky. Think they care about Christmas, six miles from here? They’re for abolishing it for good and ever …’