Читать книгу The Chapter of St Cloud - Marcus Attwater - Страница 4

Claire sang as she drove away from London. It was a perfect late-August day, with sunshine and clouds chasing each other across a big sky, but Claire would have been just as happy if the weather had been dismal. She was on her way to see Simon, and that was enough to make her sing. She would be staying with his family for a week, a good end to her holidays. Next year they would travel, they had promised each other, have three or four weeks in Italy. Simon wanted to show her Florence and Siena, show her the country that gave life to the art he loved. In preparation for this far-off prospect, Claire's luggage contained a teach-yourself-Italian course and a brand-new dictionary. She had even, schoolgirlishly, bought a new pen and a bright green exercise book. If she got bored during her week in the country she would know what to do. She couldn't stand it that Simon spoke a language she didn't, and she was determined to catch up with him.

She had met him at her best friend's wedding. Such a cliché, really, but one she was happy to embrace. Only last June, it was, and she'd been feeling old and left-over and not very generous towards her friend, who was trying to outdo the Duchess of Cambridge in radiance. Bryony had been the third of four friends to hook up. Gina was living with her boyfriend, and Julia was married ages ago. Only Claire was still single, and she was two years older than Bry. She'd been reflecting on this, watching the chattering couples around her - and they had all seemed to be couples - with a jaundiced eye, when a good-looking young man materialised beside her and started talking about the architecture of the church, of all things. They had introduced themselves: Simon, art historian; Claire, medievalist. She noticed he had the same combination of dark hair and blue eyes she had herself, but although she did not consider herself particularly striking, in him it was startling and attractive. They had continued talking until Bryony broke them up, clearly feeling that one of her husband's guests was monopolising her friend. 'Who is he, Bry?' Claire had asked, but the bride just shook her head. 'Must be one of Paul's friends, I don't know half the people here.' Claire resolved on the spot that when she got married, they would have just a small party for people they really knew. Suddenly, it hadn't seemed such a strange thought. Especially not when Simon sought her out again after the best man's speech. She found herself telling him all about her research, her ideas for a book. He was the first man she'd ever met who didn't glaze over at the phrase 'feminine theologies'.

They continued to meet in the weeks that followed, until he was spending almost as much time at her flat as she was. Her friends were doubtful, but she ignored them. All right, he was younger than she was, but so what? There were horrible men of all ages, why discriminate against the nice ones? And sometimes they were just being silly.

'You're not going to marry one of Paul's posh friends, are you?' Gina had said, 'One public schoolboy among one's acquaintance is enough, thank you very much.'

'Simon's not like that at all,' Claire had protested, wondering what this implied about her opinion of Bry's new husband. Still, for all her casual reply, she was glad she hadn't told the others precisely where he lived. The first time he had taken her home she'd thought 'you have got to be kidding me'. Maybe she had even said it aloud, as they had approached his parents' house on the long drive.

'It's a former bishop's palace, built in the early seventeenth century,' Simon had explained, with art-historical detachment, 'It's been our family home for a long time.' If she hadn't been apprehensive about meeting his family already, she would have been then. But her fears were groundless. They were the most welcoming family in the world, and she felt at ease almost at once. And there was a lot to feel at ease with. When Simon said 'family home' he didn't just mean his family had been living there for generations, he meant that most of it was living there right now.

Claire grew up the eldest of two daughters, the gap between her and her sister just too big for them to be company. Her grandparents died early, her only set of cousins had lived too far away to visit often. She had dreamed of a large family as a girl, she wanted aunts and uncles and lots of cousins like other children had. Later she thought she would have a large family herself, she would have four children at least. That was pushing it a bit by now, half a year after her thirty-first birthday. She'd settle for two, if she had to. But arriving at Simon's parents' for the first time, she thought she had found her large family.

'It would be a wicked waste, for just one couple and their children to live in a house like this,' Simon's ridiculously young-looking mother Anna had explained to Claire, while giving her the tour. 'And each, um, sub-family I suppose you could say, has their own space, we don't have to be in each other's pockets all the time if we don't want to.' All this while ascending a staircase that would have made a comfortable house on its own. There were portraits on the walls, and some of them looked like Simon.

'So how many of you are there?' Claire had asked. She'd only met Simon's parents and his great-grandfather as yet, though she had been promised brothers and sisters at supper. Anna had counted on her fingers, she had actually counted on her fingers. 'Twenty, give or take.'

'You're not sure?'

Anna had laughed at her astonishment, 'Oh, it varies a bit with the seasons. We home-school the children, you see, until they are eleven, and in term time we have some nieces and nephews staying who live away with their parents in the holidays.'

Now, on her way to visit the house for the second time, Claire still wasn't sure she'd met all twenty of them. Simon would keep saying things like: 'Oh that's Ezra, my cousin' or 'my aunt Martha' or 'Abby' or 'Luke' or 'Joshua' or… she despaired of ever getting to know them all. But they were certainly worth knowing. She had been impressed with how unashamedly intellectual they were, the wide array of professions they had chosen. It was so different from her own family home, where watching University Challenge on the telly was considered suspiciously highbrow. Here the children were precocious, growing up as they did amidst a bunch of incredibly knowledgeable adults. Maybe that was why Simon sounded so wise for his age. He was younger than she was, yes, but she often felt he had somehow managed to squeeze a lot more wisdom into his years than she had into hers.

'So you're in love with his beautiful mind, then?' Julia had asked, when she tried to explain this.

'Not just that,' Claire had said, 'But you know what I mean, don't you? It's a relief to meet a man who knows how to talk about other things than the footie and the property market. I've never met anyone who wasn't a colleague who could challenge me in my own field. There aren't that many people who know enough about medieval Christianity to try.'

'Okay, with me it's more the cricket and the stock exchange,' Julia had conceded, 'But I see what you mean. Good for you, Claire.'

She got off the motorway after she passed Oxford and continued her journey on the friendlier country roads. The place names of tiny villages peeled off at either side, and her historian's mind automatically set them in their proper place in time. All those names recalling ancient fords and woods and settlements. No thorpes or bys here, this was pure Anglo-Norman, Domesday country. Well not 'pure' obviously, she corrected herself, Anglo-Norman already being a mixed breed. Away to her left, the square tower of the cathedral marked the presence of a town that had sat in this valley for ten centuries at least. The cathedral whose bishop had once seen fit to build his splendid residence in the next village along. She was getting near now. From the next bend, she caught her first sight of the house, deceptively close. She knew it would be nearly twenty minutes yet on the winding lanes, but already she felt she was coming home.