Читать книгу The Friendly Ones - Philip Hensher - Страница 11

1.

Aunt Blossom’s house was like a house in a cartoon. The things that Josh had only seen drawn hastily, on the funny pages of Daddy’s newspaper, were here made real. There was the lake with swans, there were guns in the locked cupboard where nobody was allowed, and there were rooms with names from books. Once he had forgotten this, and at school had said that his aunt Blossom had a china pug that sat by the fireplace in her morning room: the class had stared, had half laughed, the teacher, too (Miss Hartley), had stared. Afterwards his friend Andrew had asked him what he had meant: a room for morning. What happened to it in the afternoon? And after that Josh had made sure that Aunt Blossom’s house was confined, in his mind, to the ranks of houses in books, to Netherfield and Thrushcross Grange and Toad’s house and Bludleigh Court: the flushed warm brick of the front before the gravel circle, the azalea-lined drive, the terrace above the lake and the sweep of the lawn down to it. Aunt Blossom ought to be good at inhabiting it, and she did her best, but it seemed to Josh that she was not quite convincing. Her head held up and her shoulders back, she was nevertheless like an actress who was going to play a role in six months’ time, and had decided to live in the part until then. Was that unfair? She was the smallest of them, small as Daddy – even Thomas was almost as tall as her now. She had to make herself felt.

But the house was the real thing. The woods to one side, hiding the houses of the village; the washed-pale stone, the peeling wallpaper that nobody noticed or commented on, the sofas with the torn green silk and the fascinating horsehair bulging out; all this retreated from reality into a fantasy of Josh’s and, by repeating a formula, he could sometimes convince himself he loved it, when enough time had passed since they had gone away, Josh silently screaming in the back of the car. Aunt Blossom’s house had a morning room, a drawing room, a library, a dining room – Granny’s house had a dining room, as well as a conservatory, which Aunt Blossom didn’t have. But Granny’s dining room was not like Aunt Blossom’s, a room from a cartoon, with Aunt Blossom and Uncle Stephen sitting at either end of the long polished table, the cousins in the middle around the silver candelabrum with the Japanese nanny, practising their Japanese and boning their breakfast kippers with two forks. In the middle, too, were Josh and Mummy, both humbly limiting their breakfasts to Coco Pops and toast with strawberry jam. The cousins had told him many times that the Coco Pops and jam were got in especially for him and his mummy, and collected dust in the buttery between their visits. That was another room: buttery.

The food at Aunt Blossom’s was sometimes OK but sometimes frightening – they ate things that had been shot, things that were bleeding, things with bones and innards and eyes still looking at you. Josh didn’t believe that anyone liked these things, plucking lead shot from their teeth or wiping blood from their mouths. They ate them because they thought they ought to. Even at breakfast the food could be frightening. The cousins had finished with their kippers and their kedgeree, a kind of fishy risotto but nastier, and were now piling marmalade onto their plates from a glass bowl with a glass spoon. The Japanese nanny was eating something of her own confection, something white, puréed, babyish; with her other hand she was feeding baby Trevor pieces of toast, cramming it in between the baby’s sneezes and coughs. The two eldest cousins, Tamara, who was Josh’s age, and Tresco, who was two years older, fourteen, old enough to have his own gun, were speaking to each other in Japanese, mostly ignored by the nanny. Their sentences barked and yelped at each other across the silverware; Josh felt pretty sure they were being as rude about him and Mummy as they could manage in Japanese. Underneath the strange no-go-ho-ro-to yelping of their secret language, Josh could hear the usual twittering yawning intonations of his cousins; they didn’t sound like the Japanese nanny at all when they spoke her language. The third cousin, Thomas, gazed at Josh as if not quite sure what he was doing here; when Josh was not there, he was the one they ‘teased’, as they put it, with his prole’s sweet tooth and his grasp of Japanese that was (Tamara said) all that could be expected, frankly, of a seven-year-old. The baby, Trevor, sat dully with toast and marmalade all over her face, waiting for more food, and thought her own thoughts. Josh believed that Trevor was the most evil of all of them.

‘It’s going to be fine today,’ Uncle Stephen was saying. ‘What’s everyone’s plans?’

Josh looked, agonized, at Mummy. Her cereal spoon paused for a moment; she very slightly shook her head. She didn’t want him to say anything. Josh thought of the book he had started reading yesterday, permitted by the heavy rain; he thought of Bevis, running down a hill to build a dam across a stream, to catch frogs and fish for trout with his bare hands. How exciting Bevis was! He longed to stay inside in a quiet quarter and read all about his adventures, and let his cousins rampage around outside, catching trout for real. Beyond the grounds was the Wreck, with the disgusted village children kicking at stones and stomping on frogs. That was more terrifying still.

‘I don’t want to see you children inside until luncheon. It’s far too nice a day to be mouldering about inside,’ Uncle Stephen said, from behind his newspaper. ‘I’m looking particularly at you, Joshua.’

‘Josh doesn’t like mud,’ Tamara said, quoting something Josh had said once, years ago, when he had not wanted to sit down in a water-meadow at her command. ‘He can’t bear it. Thinks it’s awful. He won’t want to come out today.’

‘Nonsense,’ Uncle Stephen said. He lowered his newspaper; looked over his glasses, down his nose at Tamara on the other side of the table. He was talking, nevertheless, to Josh. ‘It’s a beautiful day.’

‘Ho-to-go-so-mo-to Josh,’ Tresco said.

‘To-ho-ro-mo-so Josh go,’ Tamara said. The Japanese nanny raised her eyes to heaven, shook her head, whistling in frustration. ‘It will be a little muddy, I think. But mud never killed anyone, not that I heard of.’

‘Josh wants to go out,’ Aunt Blossom said. She was a warm, interested presence at the far end of the table; she was smiley and caressing; she always got everything wrong. ‘Do you think there’s no fresh air in Brighton? Josh probably knows a good deal more about fresh air than you do, living right on the English Channel.’

‘We’ll go into the woods,’ Tresco said. ‘May I take my gun, Papa?’

‘Of course not,’ Uncle Stephen said. ‘Find something else to entertain you.’

‘What a lovely way to spend a morning,’ Mummy said. ‘Just messing about in the woods. I can’t imagine anything more fun. I’m sure you’re going to find something intensely dramatic.’

Uncle Stephen lowered his Daily Telegraph, stared at Mummy. ‘Intensely … dramatic?’ he said. ‘Catherine, what an impressive thing to say. What an awfully … Brighton thing to say. You make it sound like … like …’

‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ Mummy said, in the way she had when she had said the wrong thing. But Josh could not see what she had said wrong. It appeared to him to be about the best thing that anyone could say about what might happen, once he went with his cousins into the gloom of the purple-edged woods; the world that lay beyond the lawn, beyond the ha-ha, at the end of the wilderness, the world in the woods that Uncle Stephen had bought two years ago and was still deciding what he would do with it. He wanted to go back to Brighton, where you could say ‘intensely dramatic’ if you felt like it.

2.

‘What news from Sheffield?’ Stephen said, setting down his paper with a rustle and a sigh.

‘No news,’ Blossom said. ‘I spoke to Daddy last night. He is extraordinary. I asked him about Mummy, and he said just, “Oh, fine, fine,” and then started telling me this immense story about the neighbours. I can’t work out whether we should go up there or not.’

‘Please, let’s not go up there a moment before it’s strictly necessary,’ Stephen said.

‘I love Granny and Grandpa,’ Tamara said. ‘I love dear South Yorkshire, and Sheffield I love best of all.’

‘Oh, shut up, you ghastly little snob,’ Blossom said. ‘You really are the bally limit.’

‘Who are the new neighbours?’ Catherine said.

‘Daddy was telling me all about them,’ Blossom said. ‘They had a party, or something, and, my goodness, somebody nearly died but didn’t.’

They had lived in the house in Devon for seven years now. ‘Made a packet in the City,’ had been Stephen’s explanation for it, ‘always wanted to come down and vegetate in the country’ was his wordage. Where had Stephen grown up? Oh, in the sticks, out in the borderlands, in the Home Counties, in Bedfordshire – the explanation and the wordage here differed. Blossom knew where he’d grown up, in a neat house with half a horseshoe drive and red, upward-pointing gables in Edgbaston; in the upstairs bedroom, blocking the view, was the back of his mother’s dressing-table, blue and gilded. It was a lovely house, where his parents had been happy and where they had still lived when Blossom had married Stephen. It was not clear why an elegant suburb of Birmingham needed to be concealed from view in this way. Nowadays the parents lived in a square white Regency villa just down the road in a sea of brown chippings, like a boiled chicken in a sea of cold Edgbaston gravy. Stephen had bought it for them, and they lived in three rooms out of thirteen. Fewer and fewer people knew or remembered that Stephen had grown up anywhere else.

This house had come seven years ago. It had a satisfying manorial address – Elscombe House, Elscombe, Devon – which suggested the seigneur and the peasants at the gates, the annual garden fête and the squire venturing out on Christmas Eve to commend the church choir. The moment had not, somehow, come for the issuing of invitations to an annual fête; it had been a mistake not to go to church and not to go to the Lamb and Flag in the village; help had been hard to find and, once installed, fast to resign. The children’s rooms were an abandoned disaster area. Soon Blossom was going to start importing help, like builders and groceries, from London, and to hell with what they thought beyond the gates.

The grounds were perfect, wild and grand, as far as they went. That was not so very far. A generation ago, much of the land had been sold and built on. The major-general and his sister Lalage, at the end, had sold rather more, before concluding that they might as well sell the whole lot to some cad in the City. Elscombe House now ran up to a wall dividing it from a new estate in yellow brick of retirement couples and young families. The best that Stephen had been able to do was to repurchase three acres of woodland that had been sold but not built on. Just beyond the newly built low wall at the far end of the copse – more a gesture of separation than an enforcement of it – was a recreation ground. The woods had been the property of the village children, for their own dark games and secret purposes; now it was the property of the four children of the big house. This change was purely legal, enforced by a wall anyone could climb over. Only the most abjectly law-abiding of the village children had stopped going into the woods because of the change of ownership, and if they called it ‘the woods’, older people in the village called it Bastable’s Beeches, after a long-dead gamekeeper. Ownership was not so easily transferred. The older children and Stephen had their guns. That was an important part of living in the country. But the grounds had been trimmed and abbreviated and squared off and sold to such a degree that there were really only one or two directions in which you could point the gun, not into the newer parts of Elscombe village or towards the house itself. It had been open to the public three days a week in season; not any more. Blossom believed the plasterwork in chinoiserie in the long gallery was rather admired by the sorts of bods who admired that sort of thing.

‘Norman said there was a family of adders in the woods,’ Blossom said neutrally. (Norman was the new gardener.) ‘Be a little bit careful for once. Don’t go trying to collect an adder in a jar.’

‘Plenty of little toads,’ Stephen said. ‘Bring those back. Make friends with them. See an underlying affinity. Is it tomorrow you have to be off, Catherine?’

‘I was supposed to hand Josh over to Leo. But he’s in Sheffield.’

‘I would just go straight up the M25,’ Stephen said. ‘It used to be hell, having to cross London, take half the time getting to Cricklewood. Just go straight across to the M25 down the Great West Road, up and over, Bob’s your uncle. The Bristol motorway, the London circular in a clockwise direction, the Leeds motorway northwards. Robert,’ Stephen said, entering a whole new world of sonorousness, ‘is your father’s beloved brother.’

‘Catherine’s not going to Sheffield, darling,’ Blossom said. ‘Enough of the walking road map. We’re talking about –’

‘Oh, I see,’ Stephen said, then pulled a funny, told-off face for the benefit of the children.

‘‒ wretched Leo, my wretched brother.’

‘It won’t be so bad,’ Catherine said. ‘I don’t mind a bit of a drive.’

‘Please may we get down?’ Tamara said. ‘Josh has finished his Coco Pops, so may he get down as well?’

‘Yes, you may,’ Uncle Stephen said. ‘I don’t want to see any of you until luncheon. My God,’ he said, ‘there’s no danger to England. As long as there’s been boys in England, there’s been woods and mischief and mornings spent getting muddy. And houses like this. Look out there, Catherine. I don’t suppose much has changed in that view since 1600. And the boys and girls getting out there to shoot and trap and run and hide and make battles in the mud. My children, doing what I did, doing what their children are going to do, in the same house, on the same land. Nothing’s ever going to change.’

The motorway ran against the purple hills, twenty miles off; the grazing was let; a small kiln and workshops against the river lay half empty, a sign permanently up on the B road. In the breakfast room of the house, a man stood, explaining about Englishness. He went on speaking, jingling his change in his pocket, like a trotting horse, and behind him the children stood one by one and left; their mother left; Catherine left; and the Japanese nanny, finally, stood up and went. Stephen let his peroration go on, though he could sense that the room was now empty. It didn’t matter. After a while he stopped jingling, fell silent, content. Soon the New York markets would open.

3.

It had been just like this when she had been married to Leo. Blossom, Leo’s sister, had descended from the start with cries of incredulity about what Catherine was proposing to do – to have two rather than three tiers on the wedding cake, to do without a honeymoon, to take a job in the local council answering the phone, to work in the private library in St James’s Square. Catherine and Leo had taken the firm decision not to tell Blossom about her pregnancy for as long as possible – it was only that it meant keeping the news from the rest of the family, and especially from Leo’s mother, that made them tell her five months in, to a torrent of smiling advice, offered with a shaking head and a gesture towards her own successes. That torrent had never yet dried up. The one thing that Blossom never tried to set Catherine right about was her divorce. Over the phone, there had been a full, satisfied silence before cries of joyous pity rang out; the news confirmed her nosy enquiry of a month before. Blossom was her great friend, of course, but she and Josh came to stay mostly for Josh’s sake: his friends in Brighton were timid, bookish, quiet, and his cousins would surely be good for him. This was their third weekend at Josh’s Uncle Stephen’s. She hoped he would not pick up an adder. She believed they were mildly poisonous.

Catherine felt that she was always resting in the interstices here at her sister-in-law’s house. In much the same way that, since her divorce and the so-surprising, pressing invitation – the first of five – from Blossom to come and stay, not any time but on a particular date, and to bring the little one too, there was always something intermediate and uncertain about the positions she found herself in. Was she a guest that Blossom and Stephen longed for, found excellent company, enjoyed being in the house? Or was there some underhand and contemptuous motive, unknown to and unspoken by even them? She had felt like discussing it with Leo on the phone or at those sad handovers, asking him what place he thought she occupied in Blossom’s life. She had a good idea, however: she knew that he would think she was invited for the sake of the retelling, so that Blossom could subsequently say to Leo, just in passing, ‘Oh, we had your ex-wife and little boy to stay last week. They are so charming, I must say.’ The pleasure of causing pain and rendering Leo’s life inadequate quite outweighed the difficulty and tedium of having Catherine and Josh as awkward presences in the house for four or five days. At some future but not at all remote point Catherine and Josh would surely be evicted from Elscombe House by her sometime sister-in-law’s husband and her sometime nephews and nieces, bearing shotguns and laughing as the sometime relations stumbled, suitcases in hand, down the gravel drive.

Breakfast finished, and the children were shooed off, going upstairs – Tresco said, over his shoulder, in a dismissive way – to dress for the woods; the Japanese nanny followed, carrying the now rather large Trevor (a girl) and puffing up the stairs towards the nursery. Catherine stood at the foot of the wooden stairs, resting her hand on the carved heraldic beasts forming the stop at the bottom of the banisters. She had been here too long: she wondered, as her mind formed the word, whether ‘banisters’ was not a word Blossom would consider common in some way. The bedroom was forbidden during the day, apart from moments when it was necessary to change clothes and quietly to drink a little vodka from the bottle she had brought; in any case, there was nowhere to sit, apart from a hard cane chair. She could read her book, but she had already finished it; there was nothing to read in the house, apart from the dutiful books the children ought to read and the forbidding leather-bound antiquities that had gone to make the library, bought with the house by Stephen. What did people like her read in a house like this? There was no place for a person like her in a house like this. She stood at the foot of the stairs, wondering whether she could justify going out for a walk to the village. The pub would not be open yet.

‘I’ve got some dull letters to write,’ Blossom said, having followed the girl clearing the breakfast table out into the hall, berating her all the while. ‘It’s no pleasure. Come and sit with me and we’ll chat. Stephen’s in his study all day, manipulating investments, I suppose.’

Without waiting for an answer, Blossom continued on her way, following the skivvy through the green baize door underneath the stairs that led to the old kitchen. There were meals to order, tasks to assign, purposes to fulfil. Catherine tried to remember which was the morning room – the little square yellow one, she thought, at the back of the house with the ugly china pug in it.

There was a rumpus from the first floor, and down the double staircase, proceeding underneath the Burne-Jones stained-glass window, the children thunderously came. The two middle ones, Tamara and Thomas, were first, and dressed unexpectedly, Tamara in a full-length white lace ball-gown, a First Communion frock in a Roman Catholic country. She had pink ribbons in her hair. Her brother Thomas was dressed for the same occasion, in blue velvet knickerbockers and a foaming white shirt to match his gleaming white stockings; he was wearing a pink bow-tie, not very expertly tied. But Tresco and Josh, behind, confident and shamefaced by turn, they were dressed just as they had been at the breakfast table.

‘Going somewhere?’ Catherine asked Tamara.

‘Don’t tell Mummy,’ Tamara said. ‘There’s a good Aunty Catherine.’

‘We’re just going to the Wreck,’ Tresco said. ‘Goading the proles.’

‘I see,’ Catherine said. ‘Well, don’t shoot any of them. You won’t be popular if you wade through the woods in that dress, Tamara.’

‘There’s something called a dry-cleaner’s,’ Tamara said. ‘Poor little Thomas. He hates his Faunties ‒ he simply loathes them.’

‘They made me,’ Thomas said, his face screwed up with rage as they processed past their aunt; their usual way into the grounds was through the drawing room and its French windows. Catherine caught her son’s head and rumpled it as it passed. He looked back: shame, fright, secrecy all melded in his look. They would find an excuse not to come next time they were asked.

‘It’s rather nice to see them all getting on, the cousins,’ Blossom said, emerging from the servants’ quarters. ‘There’s no accounting for children and whether they’ll get on with each other. I always tell my children it’s just not on to be fussy about food, to like this food or that food, and it’s not on to like some people and think you don’t like others.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Catherine said, following Blossom towards the morning room. ‘I think you’re allowed to like some people more than others.’

‘If you’re grown-up you are,’ Blossom said. ‘Good morning, Mrs Bates. Everything all right? Good, good. If you’re grown-up you’re perfectly permitted to have likes and dislikes about people or food or anything else. I’ll make a confession to you – I absolutely can’t bear desiccated coconut. I can’t bear it. But I’m sure that I wasn’t allowed to say that I wouldn’t have this or I wouldn’t have that when I was a child. And it was exactly the same with people. Get on with everyone and the world will be a much easier place. That’s my motto.’

‘Leo’s absolutely stiff with likes and dislikes, what he won’t eat, and who he gets on with at work and who he can’t abide.’

‘Well, there you are, then,’ Blossom said illogically. As so often, when she talked grandly but vaguely about her past, she seemed to have an invented, imaginary life in mind, one with ponies and acres and grandparents with Victorian principles. She had forgotten, perhaps, that Catherine had been married to her brother, and knew all about the reality of the doctor in the suburb of Sheffield and his self-pitying, indulgent wife with the hands fluttering as she spoke. ‘We’re all so fond of Josh – he’s such a nice little boy. And so fair-minded, as you say. How is he at school?’ She plumped herself down behind the writing table. On it were any number of curiosa: a set of miniature furled flags, a miniature reproduction Buddha in marble, some Japanese porcelain dishes ‒ corporate gifts that had ended up here. The better ones were in Stephen’s study. Catherine pulled the armchair out of the direct sunlight. It was still a little bit like a job interview, the way Blossom had situated herself.

‘He likes it,’ Catherine said. ‘He seems to be thriving there. It’s a lovely atmosphere – you can’t help feeling how friendly everyone is. There’s a proper feeling of helping out and thinking of everyone.’

‘Oh, Brighton,’ Blossom said. ‘I can well imagine. It sounds absolutely lovely. I know those schools, putting everyone’s welfare first, making sure no one’s left behind … I sometimes wonder, though.’

‘I know it’s not much like the sort of schools we went to,’ Catherine said.

‘Or Tresco’s school,’ Blossom said. ‘To be honest. It’s a terrific school, you know. They’re introducing Mandarin as an option. Have you ever thought about what Josh could be doing? My children can be little swine, I know, but they’re constantly vying to outdo each other, speak better Japanese than each other, run faster, survive a day in the woods without anything to eat or drink. Do they have sports day at Josh’s school?’

‘Well, sort of,’ Catherine said. ‘It’s called the Summer Festival. There are races, or there were last year, but they arranged it so there were all sorts of things that the kids could be good at in their own way. Someone won a prize for the happiest smile of the year.’

Blossom lowered her head. The sound she made could have been a cough or a suppressed snort. She concentrated for a moment on the papers on the desk – letters, mostly. She shuffled them, squared them off, plucked one from the pile and placed it on top, squared the pile again. She looked up and gave Catherine a brave, watery smile, as if beginning all over again. ‘I should have done all this yesterday, I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking and thinking about the kitchen garden – I just can’t make up my mind.’

‘The kitchen garden?’ Catherine said. Around the unpicturesque back of the house there was half an acre or so where, once, vegetables had been grown. The half-acre had been abandoned to its fate long before Stephen had bought the house. The major-general and his sister Lalage, the twin white mice to which the family had been reduced, had retained the kitchen garden, which in an Edwardian heyday had fed a family a dozen strong and a small army of helpers, carers, serfs and labourers with asparagus, beans, potatoes of waxy salad varieties as well as the floury mashing kind, tomatoes, turnips, lacy clouds of carrot tops, cucumber and lettuce; there had been a long, crumbling brick wall of soft fruit, raspberries, blackcurrants, whitecurrants, redcurrants, apricots trained against it, a full half-acre of once beautifully tended vitamin C, running up to orchards of apple and pear and plum, and the hothouses where grapes had once been grown. All that had been abandoned by the time of the major-general’s withdrawal, and that of his mouse-like sister Lalage. (How had he ever commanded anyone, with his bright, inquisitive eye, his neat and fey, almost girly moustache?) The shape of the garden remained, but the major-general and Lalage had cleared a couple of beds, and grown a few sad roots and a couple of tomato plants and lettuces. Beyond that, the tendrils and shoots and wild-flowering mass of vegetation climbed and clambered, untrimmed and unprotected; the vines pressed against the glass of the greenhouse, many panes now smashed. Stephen had instructed the gardener, Norman’s predecessor-but-seven, to get it in order, but he had taken most of an autumn to do nothing but strip it bare, or almost bare: the apricot tree had survived, espaliered against the wall, and now spread there, its branches unfurling over the blank domain. The flowerbeds in the front had been more urgent, and their care had proved a nearly full-time occupation for Norman, the new gardener, and his seven predecessors. ‘Really,’ Blossom was practised in saying, ‘we ought to have three or four gardeners, not just one. We’re never going to get anywhere. Now, the kitchen garden … I would love to do something with it. I can’t think what.’

‘You could do exactly what it was meant for and grow vegetables in it,’ Catherine said. ‘I always think there’s something so lovely about a really well-kept allotment, even, with neat rows of things. And you could have a lot of exotics. Plant an olive grove. Make English olive oil.’

‘The children are using it as an awful sort of pet cemetery. I found a little array of crosses down there next to Moppet’s grave – it turns out to be Thomas’s gerbils and some dead birds that they found in the woods and christened posthumously for the sake of the burial service. I hate to think how the gerbils met their end. Olives wouldn’t grow down here. The trees might, not the olives themselves. What about a rose garden?’

‘So much work,’ Catherine said. She had had the bright idea, when they moved into the house in Brighton, of growing yellow roses up the back wall. The pruning and trimming, and the array of murderous insect life that had to be fended off with sprays and drips and feed had been exhausting. Jasmine grew there now, which nothing much killed.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Blossom said. ‘I do think the children – they’re growing up wild, I know, but they have a sort of confidence. I worry about Josh.’

‘Josh?’ Catherine said, taken by surprise.

‘He’s so charming and delightful, but he’s just so – what’s the word I want? – different. No. Diffident. He doesn’t put himself forward, he goes along with things. It does him so much good, being in a gang of ruffians, running riot through the woods instead of being alone with a book. I really wonder …’

Blossom set down her pen and looked, with a frank, open, rehearsed expression, at her sister-in-law. Catherine had experienced this expression before when, for instance, Blossom had asked her whether things were quite all right between her and her brother, whether she might like to come and spend time with them in the country, whether Josh might have any idea at all (the gaze still fixed on Catherine, quelling any motherly gesture of defence) who it might be who had spilt most of a bottle of ink on the Turkey carpet in the sitting room. It was an expression that got its own way. Catherine looked instead at the life-sized china pug that sat by the fireplace, impertinently quizzing the world.

‘I really wonder, and I think Stephen wonders, too, whether we could do a little bit more for Josh.’

‘You do so much for Josh,’ Catherine said. ‘And for me, too.’

‘Let me explain,’ Blossom said. She placed the cap on her Mont Blanc pen, a present from Stephen two Christmases ago. He had got it from Harrods for a four-figure sum. There was a diamond set in the top of it. In time it would become the pen that Blossom had written all her essays with, the pen she would have inherited from some namelessly patrician great-aunt, the sort of pen that the family who owned Elscombe House had always had to write bread-and-butter letters of thanks and instructions in the morning room before luncheon. Now Blossom set it down. She clasped her hands between her knees. She began to explain.

4.

‘We shan’t shoot the proles,’ Tresco said. ‘We’ve promised Aunty Catherine – we’ve promised your mummy, Josh.’

They paraded across the lawn in front of the house. Tresco first, Tamara second, lifting up the skirts of her ball-gown. She had her Dr Martens boots on underneath, and tripped delicately, as if to a minuet in her head. Thomas came third, disconsolate in his Faunties, and finally Josh. No one had suggested that Josh wear anything in particular; he had been spared the full knickerbockers-and-frilly-shirt treatment inflicted on Thomas. He felt there was something sinister about this neglect, not kindness. They were heading to the woods, where in practice the worst things happened. Tamara had once crucified a vole there, using an industrial stapler, and left it hanging on the tree as a warning, she said, to the village not to come into their private domain. Last summer they had fetched out their catapults, a gift from Uncle Stephen’s father, and had tied Josh to a tree. They had said they were going to play Cowboys and Indians. It was a game Josh had never heard of anyone playing outside books, and he had known something dreadful was going to happen. For half an hour, they had fired acorns at Josh’s face, in silence broken only by knowledgeable, acute advice on catapult technique from Tresco. He had thought it would never end. Then, on some kind of agreed signal, Tamara had freed him and roughly wiped his grazed face of tears, mud and leaves, then announced that he, Josh, had passed the initiation with flying colours. Josh had not regarded this with much excitement. The initiation had made no difference. The cousins went on thinking up more and more events that might count as initiation ceremonies, and when knowledge was shared out between them, Josh was not often included. For the rest of time, he was going to be forced by his cousins to squat on the edge of a pit and told to shit into it, to prove something or other. He had no idea why Tamara and Thomas were wearing their party clothes into the wood, or what was about to happen there.

Tresco observed that there was nobody about. The woods had belonged so recently to the village – to the proles, Josh practised in his head – that it still possessed an old name. Bastable’s Beeches, like the children in The Treasure Seekers. He did not share this association. And then they started to have a lovely time. They ran off after Tresco into the little hollow, and poked sticks into the burrow where the badgers might be bringing up their babies. They went to the muddy bit where there was still a good four-inch-deep puddle, and took turns jumping into it from the tussock, Tamara’s ball-gown flying into the air, the mud splashing all over her skirts. They looked for the adder using Thomas’s head in the undergrowth, like a battering ram. They weed against an old oak, Tamara bending over almost into a crab position, pissing into her skirts more than on the ground. They dared each other to eat a toadstool still hanging around from last winter, and they threw stones at the old hut with the roof falling down. They managed to smash one of the remaining panes of glass in its one window.

It was a lovely time, Josh told himself. They hadn’t seen any wildlife at all and they hadn’t made him eat anything and they hadn’t tied him up. An expression of seraphic calm was on the faces of Tresco and Tamara, as of the desires of little drunks being fulfilled. It counted as a lovely day, even to Josh. They hadn’t been near the Pit at the far end of the wood, the one that Tresco and Tamara had last had a shit in two days ago, squatting over its lip, the one where everything lay in black confusion, of rubbish and poo and what dead animals they could find. The bodies were thrown here, though their burial took place somewhere else – the respectable theatre of the adult ceremonial took place under the approving look of the adult windows, in the kitchen garden with empty boxes as coffins. He dreaded the Pit most of all, but today, after all, was a lovely day, not like one of the bad days so far: they had not gone anywhere near it.

The suburb ran right up to the edge of the forest, and a sad concrete and tattered grass expanse opened up beyond the wall that Uncle Stephen had built. It was the Wreck. Only recently had he understood that it was not a Wreck like a disaster, but short for Recreation Ground. ‘Recreation’ was one of those words like ‘Amusements’ over the door of a dark seaside hell of blinking machines and staring old people feeding coins into empty upper sockets, pressing buttons and pulling levers; it described what wasn’t there. What was there was duty and miserable escape, sodden carpet and torn grass. He wanted to be on this side of the wall, in fact, in Uncle Stephen’s woods that he’d paid for and deprived of a name at all.

Something struck the side of his head with a blow; a cold wet thwack, a torn lump of soil and grass. ‘You berk,’ Tamara said. Her face was flushed pink, her eyes wide with excitement. ‘You unutterable berk. Standing there staring into space. I bet you were writing a poem in your head, weren’t you, about the forest and the babbling brook and the fucking wood sprites?’

‘We’ve got loads of fucking wood sprites in the fucking forest,’ Thomas said, plucking at his Faunties with gross, clutching abandon.

‘Or we did before Tresco shot them with his fucking rifle,’ Tamara said, gambolling off, lifting her skirts and skipping with fury. ‘Ow – I’ve hurt my ankle. No, I’m all right. I’m not going to sprain my ankle, not today, no fucking way.’ She ran off in the direction of the wall.

‘She’s such a fucking moron,’ Tresco said. ‘She’s no idea what wood sprites even are. I swear to God she thought we were talking about jays or magpies of something. They’re mythological fucking beasts,’ he called after her. ‘Before she starts asking Mrs Arsehole if she can make a wood-sprite pie or something. Well, go on, do your stuff.’

Thomas’s face took on an evil, set expression. He ran off after his sister. His white tights were falling down; the froth of shirt and the front of his Cambridge-blue velvet jacket were thick with mud where Tamara had pushed him into the puddle, twenty minutes before.

‘Here we go,’ Tresco said, his voice lowered and intense, egging himself on. ‘Here we go. Here we go. They go first, then we come as a lovely surprise. Yeah?’

Josh said nothing, but Tresco must have seen that he didn’t know which way was up, as they said.

‘Today’s fun and games. You’ll like this, Josh. It’s called Get the Proles. You watch. It’s going to be fun.’

There was nobody about but, fifty yards away, Tamara and Thomas, their spattered white and blue garments winking through the trees, but Tresco now hurled himself behind an oak like a commando and, squatting down, ran to the next one. He pulled a woolly hat out from his pocket and stuffed it over his shock of white-blond hair. He might have been concealing himself from a sniper. They dashed from tree to tree, Josh following. Ahead, Tamara and Thomas had reached the wall. Were there kids playing in the Wreck? It looked as if there might be. The proles. Tamara and Thomas paused, faced each other, and Tamara gave Thomas a sweet smile, raised the skirts of her ball-gown with a pinch of either hand. Thomas scowled, then made an effort and gave a smile that lasted no more than two seconds. He had been instructed. Tamara began. She gave a dainty skip, then another, then a twirl, a bow. Thomas said something – perhaps ‘Do I fucking have to?’ – then gave in, and made his own dainty skip, a second, a twirl, a bow.

Tresco and Josh had reached the edge of the woods. They would not be seen by the kids in the Wreck; only Tamara and Thomas, giving their courtly dance behind a wall in ball-gown and Faunties, only they would be seen by the proles. It occurred to Josh that in this part of the wood, they were quite close to the Pit. Tamara and Thomas bowed at the same time, advanced, took each other by the crook of the elbow and rotated; Tamara’s left hand rose above her head and twiddled, as if at a magnificent and embarrassingly beribboned tambourine. Over there, the kids sitting around on the swings and the slide weren’t playing any more, if they ever had been. They had noticed the palaver the kids from the big house were kicking up. They had seen something maddening: two posh kids, one wearing a big posh gown like a wedding dress, the other wearing frills and fucking knickerbockers, prancing like shit. Tamara lifted her ankles, delicately waggled her feet. Thomas’s knees leapt up almost to the foaming linen of his chest. The proles had seen them. They were watching.

5.

Blossom’s hand, its ring with the ruby as big as a pomegranate seed, went across the desk, spinning the Rolodex, as if thinking on its own. Blossom looked, open, sincere, happy, at her ex-sister-in-law.

‘What would you think,’ she said, ‘if we made the arrangement with Josh a touch more permanent? Do you know anything about Apford? The school? Tresco’s school?’

There must have been something that Catherine gave out, some physical withdrawal, some veiling of the eyes, because Blossom in a moment said, ‘I’m really only thinking of Josh’s welfare,’ in a mildly reproving way.

‘And in the holidays?’ Catherine said lightly.

‘Of course we would take care of the fees,’ Blossom said.

‘Yes,’ Catherine said. ‘It’s incredibly kind of you, it really is. I can see that. I need to think it over.’

‘Well, don’t take too long,’ Blossom said. She turned to her desk. ‘It’s a complete waste of time, writing letters, and three-quarters of them are nothing but thank-you letters, but there you are.’

For five minutes Blossom wrote steadily. Catherine could feel her face was flushed. Nothing that she wanted to say could be said. Blossom was thinking of Josh’s best interests. Catherine was thinking only of her own. After a while, Blossom looked up and, as if surprised that Catherine was still there, said, ‘It’s a lovely day – don’t let me be selfish and trap you inside like this.’

‘I might go and read a book,’ Catherine said despairingly, thinking of vodka.

6.

There were seven proles in the Wreck. It was school holidays for them as well. They were three girls and four boys, one quite small. They were wearing the sort of clothes that proles wore. They weren’t shiny shell suits, but jeans and T-shirts with some sort of writing on them. One was wearing the top of a tracksuit, a red one with stripes, as if they were ever going to do any exercise. There was another who had a pair of cream chinos on and a blue polo shirt. That was quite like what Josh was wearing. That was the funniest thing, really – that the proles in the village would look at Josh and think he was posh, that they wanted to dress like him.

The proles were sitting on the kids’ roundabout and chatting, about a hundred and fifty yards away. Another was on the swings, swaying gently back and forth. They were deep in conversation. A bark of a laugh came from one of them. Tamara and Thomas skipped to and fro, but they hadn’t seen them; the power of a ball-gown and Faunties and pastoral frolicking went over their heads. Or perhaps they had seen their wealthy neighbours and had no interest in it – that would be too bad.

‘What’s going on?’ Tresco said, squatting behind the tree where he couldn’t be seen. ‘Hey – you need to put a bit more welly into it. Go on. Up and over, dosie do –’

‘I’m doing the best I fucking can,’ Tamara said, out of the corner of her mouth.

The proles had noticed Tamara and Thomas, skipping and dancing around each other. They had stopped where they were, and were casting looks at the edge of the forest. But in a moment they turned away again, definite that the posh rich kids weren’t worth their attention. Perhaps it was a decision; perhaps they were unable to see the spectacle behind the wall, remote from jeans and Wreck and trainers and semi-detached houses in yellow brick. ‘Not working,’ Tresco said. ‘Wish I’d brought my gun.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ Tamara said, pausing and puffing with breathlessness.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ Tresco said. ‘They’ve not seen Josh, have they?’

‘I don’t want to,’ Josh said. ‘I won’t make them do anything. I’m not putting on Faunties or anything.’

Tresco took his branch – a two-foot club – and poked Josh hard. Josh stumbled upright so as not to fall into the mud. ‘Go on,’ Tresco said. ‘Just go and wave at them or something. No one expects you to do anything intensely dramatic.’

Tamara and Thomas started laughing. Josh felt tearful; he had forgotten that, sooner or later, the cousins would move on from being vile to him to being vile about Mummy.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Tamara said. ‘If you don’t come up here now, this second, I’m going to come and drag you out.’

It would not work, Josh was sure; all he had to do was go and stand at the wall and be ignored in the same way that the proles were ignoring his cousins. It was as easy as that, and then the cousins would get bored and go and find something else to do. He stood up properly, and went to the wall where Tamara and Thomas had been dancing. Tamara, a firm look on her face, took him with a solid grip and pushed him forward. She raised her arm and pointed at him, grinning like a mud-spattered loon in a ball-gown. By their side, Thomas continued to caper.

‘Do you know what Josh does?’ Tresco said. He was talking half to Tamara and Thomas, and half for Josh’s benefit. Over their heads, the music of disdain in what Tresco was saying floated, across the Wreck, to be caught by the proles. ‘Josh touches things. He’s always touching things. Have you seen that? When he comes into a room, he can’t stop and sit down, like a Christian, until he’s been right round, picking up this and that, putting his hand on the Staffordshire dogs and the photos on the piano. Do you reckon he does that at home? Or is it just when he’s taken out? Do you think it’s a Brighton thing? They can’t stand it, the seniors. They bite their lips. They try not to say anything about Josh having to touch everything. I saw him once bend down and touch the tassels on the Turkey carpet in the drawing room. I bet they think he’s bringing his Brighton ways into the house.’

‘Stand there,’ Tamara said to Josh. ‘Just like that.’ She took Thomas by the hand, firmly, and walked back a few paces. The proles were standing now. They had seen Josh. One of them shouted something, and then the biggest of them was sprinting towards the wood, maddened, leading a ragged troop. They had endured and accepted Tamara in her ball-gown, Thomas prancing in his Faunties, but the sight of Josh, dressed just as they were, standing behind the stone wall within the purchased woodland acres, had been too much to bear. Their howls were terrible.

‘Run,’ Tresco said. ‘Fucking run!’

They ran, Josh jumping after Tamara, her skirts clutched in her fists. She was going towards the end of the woods where the Pit was. Thomas was already far ahead of them; Tresco had not moved an inch. The proles were over the stone wall now, and their howls within the estate. Somewhere behind them, through the trees, there was a confusion of movement and stumbling; somewhere behind that was Tresco. He must have armed himself somehow because quite suddenly there were shrieks of alarm within the roar of rage – a pitchfork, a gun? Josh stumbled, was grabbed by Tamara. He had almost fallen into the Pit. And here came the proles, with Tresco behind; he had smeared his face with mud, was clutching a terrible weapon; a glint of metal on the end of a pole, a kitchen knife. The littlest of the proles turned as he ran, placating with his hands, screaming, and one of the others seized him – was it the child’s sister? She tripped, stumbled, and two, three of them fell exactly as Tresco had wanted them to, into the mud and shit and filth of the Pit. As if nothing at all had happened, Tresco slowed to a walk, hoicked the pole underneath his arm and turned away. At the same moment, Josh found himself seized from behind, by Tamara. She had a plan for him. It was Thomas who started to bind his wrists; Josh surrendered himself to it. It would be easier. The morning’s task was over. Behind them, as they started to make their way to the house, the sound of some prole puking, or so Tamara jauntily observed. It was the sight of Josh they couldn’t stand, in the end.

7.

‘You won’t believe this,’ Blossom’s voice called from the great hall.

She was trying to find out where Catherine was, and Catherine called back, ‘Yes?’ from where she had removed herself to, the dining room. She had worked out that nobody came here in the mornings. It had a pleasant view out towards the woods that divided the house’s grounds from the village.

‘You won’t believe this,’ Blossom said, coming in, papers in one hand, her glasses in the other. ‘I’ve been tracking down my brother. He’s definitely in Sheffield. In the meantime, the arrangement about meeting you and poor little Josh – he’d never heard of it. But listen. When I tracked him down in Sheffield he was full of such alarming news I really think I’m going to hotfoot it up there. I could perfectly well take Josh with me.’

‘It’s not your mother, is it?’

‘It’s always Mummy,’ Blossom said briefly. ‘She’s not dying, or not imminently. Gracious heavens, what on earth have those awful children of mine been up to?’

A scene of apocalypse was approaching the house across the lawn. Their faces were smeared with mud and filth; their clothes, once party clothes, wedding uniforms, pageboy and miniature princess, were torn and smeared with earth or worse. They wore expressions of sheer joy, waving sticks that might have been meant for spears in a celebratory greeting. It was not directed at them, but at someone fifty feet to the left. Stephen must have seen them and opened the study window to call to them. Only at the back, trailing in his ordinary clothes, was there a dissentient presence; behind Thomas Josh came, his shoulders shrunk and beaten. Catherine saw with a shock that he was being pulled by the others; his wrists were bound together and he was being dragged along by a rope, or perhaps merely a thick string.

‘How adorable,’ Blossom said. ‘They’ve been playing captives, and Josh is on the losing side. He’ll be the pirate king or something. Conquered by the imperial forces, or by savage natives, one of the two. It’ll be his turn to rule and conquer next.’

‘Poor old Josh,’ Catherine said, attempting lightness in her tone. But something in the way she said it made Blossom turn to her, a half-smile of amused dismissal quickly forming. Poor old Josh, she was clearly thinking. A little bit less of that, a little bit less encouragement of Josh to stick in his ways and run from ordinary little-man savage pursuits that any child, surely, would like.

‘I have no idea,’ Blossom said, with dry amusement, ‘how – or if it’s even possible – to get mud and blood out of pale-blue velvet Faunties. I could simply kill Thomas for putting it on to romp around in the woods. They were for the Atwood wedding, those Faunties. They very sweetly asked Thomas if he’d be a pageboy.’

Across the lawn, like a cavalcade of shame, misery and death, came the children, panting, filthy and prancing. Their teeth glittered like those of carnivores, fresh from a pile of flesh and blood. They waved to the man upstairs, the father of three of them. He was yowling into the end of the morning over the lawns, lands, woods and gardens he had made the money to possess, singing his children home from a triumph, somewhere out there in the shadows of the woods.