Читать книгу The Chapter of St Cloud - Marcus Attwater - Страница 12

On her first morning, after a long lie-in, Simon announced he was taking her for a ride through the park. Not having come near a horse since a brief crush at age eleven, Claire reluctantly agreed to try out the mildest mare in the stables.

'You'll love it,' Simon said confidently, 'We can go along with dad and aunt Esther as far as Drovers' Lane, and leave them to have a proper ride while we go back the easy way.'

'Oh, your father's back, then?'

'Yes, he came home last night. And I think he's pleased you're here,' Simon replied with a grin.

Once she got used to all the things one had to pay attention to when sitting on a horse, Claire had to admit that it was lovely. And just wait till she told Julia, her friend would be green with envy - their own stables!

'I suppose most of the surrounding land belonged to the house at one time or another?' she asked Simon's father - calling him Simon as well didn't come easily, and he insisted she should not be formal, so in practice she didn't call him anything much.

'Yes, all the farms and the fields once belonged to the house. Not for years now, of course. Even my grandfather hardly remembers the time when tenants came up to the house at Michaelmas to pay the rent.'

It sounded like he was talking about an impossibly remote past, but of course his grandfather was the spry old gentleman Claire had said hello to only this morning. It always surprised her what people would and would not call a long time ago. To her it seemed amazing that old tenancy customs had persisted to within living memory. It was practically yesterday.

The cottages they were now riding towards had stood there longer than that, though. White-washed prettily, sporting faded hanging baskets, no doubt extensively converted inside, but still, Claire thought, three-hundred years old if a day. Julia and her husband had recently bought something like that, for weekends away from London. Was she any different, wanting to spend her days in that big house behind them? Maybe not.

'Is that the kind of history you are interested in? Social history?' Simon's aunt asked.

'Not exactly. I'm interested in the gendered experience of history, and so also in the social structures that frame those experiences. But of those it is religion which interests me most.'

She realised Simon's father, riding beside her now, was watching her intently. She assumed he was taking her measure, seeing if she was going to fit in. But not in the nothing-but-the-best-for-our-son way Simon Peter had yesterday at dinner. There was something else, a sense that what she answered now might actually be very important.

'So you believe past experiences can be recovered?' he asked abruptly.

'I hope my words have not suggested that,' Claire replied carefully, 'Certainly not in any crude sense. The past is not just the present in a longer dress. But I think we may at least find where past experience differs from present, even if we cannot know exactly what constitutes the difference.'

He nodded. 'A realistic aim.'

'No more than that, Claire? Really?' Simon asked. He seemed disappointed.

She understood. It was often like that with people who weren't professional historians. The kind of history everyone was taught at school gave a deceptively confident front to a mass of questions and intelligent guesswork.

'I'm afraid so. The next time you read a narrative history, try asking 'how do we know that?' at every turn. The answer is usually that we don't, we just assume.'

'Surely historians could not proceed otherwise?' Esther said.

'No, of course they couldn't. I'm not saying it's wrong. Just that I'm one of the askers of questions.'

They had passed the cottages, and here the lane forked. Past the tidy gardens into the open fields beyond, or looping back towards the park.

'We'll let you go here,' Simon told his father, 'I'll give Claire a tour of the park.'

'You know,' Claire said, when she had convinced the placid but stubborn mare that they really were going the other way, 'Usually when I say 'the social structures that frame the gendered experience of history' people go 'what?' No one in your family has done that yet.'

'Well, that could mean one of two, no, three things.'

'Being?'

'We're all incredibly clever, we were raised too politely to show we're stupid, or we've all secretly been reading up on the subject.'

'And which is it?'

'That's for you to decide. Ready to try a bit of a trot?'

After lunch, Claire meant to settle down in the garden with a book, but instead she found herself wandering through the house. When Simon had said he was going to help his aunt get in the weekly shopping, she had grabbed her book and sunscreen and said, 'You go, I'll just find a quiet corner to work on my tan.' After a pretty dismal summer the weather had turned hot and sunny, and she intended to make the most of it. But on her way to the garden she passed a corridor she hadn't been down yet, and she thought she might as well take the long way around. She felt strangely privileged, to be left alone in a house like this, to wander at will. It was a place of browns and goldens, of deep shadows alternating with blocks of yellow sunlight. The passage led to the long gallery, which she had seen before. Rooms opened off this on one side, while the windows looked down on the open-sided quadrangle which it formed with the two long wings.

Snatches of conversation held her briefly as she passed, bits of music drifting from doors and windows, lingering on the still air.

'All right Titus, just this once.'

...tu rondine ca rundini lu mare…

'I am sure nobody saw me.'

'Oh, come on, Judy, don't be a spoilsport.'

It was a time, when silly bees would speak…

Dreamily, Claire rounded a corner and made her way down the corridor of the east wing. Some voices she recognised, but most were just disembodied fragments, and she rather liked that.

'Have you seen young Simon today?'

'… might have been better with a few peppers.'

'I'll speak to Solly, just in case.'

'Claire, are you lost?'

She snapped out of her reverie and focused on the man standing in front of her. Simon, as near as dammit, only at least twenty years older.

'No, no,' she told Simon's father hurriedly, 'I thought I'd go out by the garden doors at the end of the passage.' She hoped she had remembered right, and there were garden doors at the end of the passage. She waved The Sense of an Ending, to show she had a serious purpose.

'It's good to have you with us again, Claire. Our Simon is a lucky man.'

'I'm a lucky woman,' she said awkwardly. She felt acutely conscious of the fact that she was dressed only in a skimpily cut top and shorts. It would have been all right in the garden, in a deckchair with her sunglasses on, but here in the shadowy corridor she felt exposed. Not that he was ogling her, or anything, he just looked intently at her face.

'Did you have a good journey from France?' she blurted. She never thought to ask the question this morning. Why did this man make her so uneasy?

'What? Oh yes, fine, fine.'

He walked with her to the end of the passage in silence.

'Do you like it here?' he asked, as she reached the doorway that was her escape into the sunny, outside world. It sounded like a real question, not just politeness.

'Very much.'

Why did everyone ask that question so insistently? she wondered, as she found her deckchair and settled down. Were they really vetting her for the position of daughter-in-law? And did it really matter so much? Yes, she had entertained the fantasy of coming to live in this wonderful house, and it must have shown. But she would think very carefully indeed before she ever gave up her London flat. For now, this just looked to her like the perfect place for a holiday. Especially in such glorious weather…

'Enjoying yourself?'

She opened her eyes. How long had he been standing there? Not as long as she had been asleep, probably.

'You seem to be.'

'You look lovely.' Simon settled boyishly in the grass at her feet and ran a finger down her bare leg. It set off goosebumpy tingles in quite unrelated places.

'Hmm, I could lie here forever.'

'You can, if you want. But I suppose it gets boring after a century or two,' he said.

'You've been here for centuries, haven't you? So tell me some family history,' she asked him, 'There must be lots of it. Did you come over with the conqueror?'

He rested his head against her knee. 'Not quite. And we never did anything spectacular, really.'

'No?' she teased, running her fingers through his hair, 'Not one of your ancestors captured a Spanish galleon for Elizabeth? Or discussed strategy with Wellington before Waterloo?'

'You're winding me up,' he grinned, 'You're always telling me things like that do not make history.'

'You're learning. But I am interested, you know. I'm interested in your family.'

And I think your family is just a bit too interested in me. But that could wait.