Читать книгу Moonshine - Victoria Clayton - Страница 15

‘Have a drink.’ Burgo poured me a glass of wine. ‘Fleur’s polishing Stargazer’s hoofs and Dickie asked for twenty minutes’ grace to get his hoses linked up.’

I sat down. The garden had grown dim and my ears were filled with a sound like rushing water. I picked up the glass and took several reviving sips. He was saying something but I could not understand it. I tried to pull myself together and fixed an expression on my face which I hoped was intelligent, or at least sensible.

Burgo’s eyes were Fleur’s shape exactly, slanted, sylphic. But his were darker and sharper. He was wearing a dark blue shirt, the sleeves rolled to the elbows, jeans that had once been khaki and were faded by the sun and scruffy navy espadrilles. The impact of his presence left me in no doubt that I had been deceiving myself if I thought I was interested in him only as Fleur’s brother. He was saying something about England in summer. I forced myself to concentrate.

‘It’s perfect.’ Burgo narrowed his eyes to look across the expanse of lawn down to where a pair of crinkle-crankle hornbeam hedges drew one’s gaze to a statue of Flora and beyond that to where the beechwood began. ‘I’ve longed for this.’

He leaned back in his chair to follow the progress of a house martin as it swooped over the grass, looking for insects. The wisteria’s second flowering, nearly over now, dripped scent over our heads and bees foraged ceaselessly in the collapsing mauve blossoms.

‘Have you?’

‘Now, for a brief while, I can stop thinking,’ said Burgo. He brushed back his hair from his forehead. ‘I can breathe again. Allow myself to feel.’ He turned his head sharply and looked at me.

I dropped my gaze immediately. I wished I could breathe. I drank half my glass of wine in several swallows and stared fiercely at the grey teak of the table, mottled with silvery patches where wasps had tried to chew it.

‘Cat got your tongue?’ he asked.

‘Only on loan. How was Provence?’

‘Hot. Dry. Scorched to dust.’ He glanced at the knot garden, swirls of box, germander and lavender, which surrounded the terrace. ‘I much prefer the sound of blackbirds to cicadas.’

I was conscious of a feeling of gratification. I had no idea then that this was the beginning of a hateful process of keeping a tally. It took me weeks, months even, to recognize that in some secret, shamefaced part of my mind I was reckoning the score between Anna and me.

‘How was Leningrad?’

‘Beautiful but depressing. It confirmed all my assumptions about Communism.’

While he talked I examined a patch of violas flowering in a gap between paving stones at my feet. I came to know intimately the blushes and streaks of lilac on their primrose-coloured faces. Suddenly he was talking about my mother.

‘Oh, it’s kind of you to ask. She’s no better, really. If anything, slightly worse. At least … physically she’s the same but she seems rather confused.’

‘What do you mean confused?’

I related the conversation about the toaster.

‘I’ve known Cabinet Ministers who believed there were fairies at the bottom of the garden.’

‘Lots of people don’t have much grasp of science. I’m one of them. But she’s said other things that bother me. Yesterday she refused to eat her potatoes because she said they were winking at her and it put her off. And when she talks she sometimes growls like a dog. She used to have a light, rather charming voice but these days she sounds like a sailor from Marseilles. In timbre, I mean. Of course, she speaks English.’

‘Perhaps she’s been lying down too long and isn’t getting enough blood to the brain.’

‘Perhaps. I wonder.’ What a relief it would be if the explanation were so simple. These days a thread of anxiety about my mother ran through all my waking hours. Talking about my fears with someone who did not immediately dismiss them as nonsense was comforting. But of course he was being polite. The symptoms of my mother’s illness could not be of interest. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a tedious subject: other people’s sick relations.’

He made a motion with his hand, sweeping this aside. ‘Has a doctor seen her recently?’

‘In desperation I persuaded our GP to call but she shut her eyes and refused to speak to him. He went away very cross.’

‘If the man’s not up to dealing with a mildly difficult patient I’d go over his head and get a specialist in.’

‘Do you think I should? But I don’t know how. I thought one was supposed to ask to be referred.’

‘Sometimes you have to cut corners. Leave it to me. I’ve got meetings all day tomorrow but I’ll sort something out. Don’t worry.’

It was as though the clouds had parted and a god had descended on suitable throne-bearing apparatus. But fear of disappointment made me tell myself he would have forgotten all about it even before I left Ladyfield to return to Cutham.

Aloud I said, ‘That would be a greater kindness than I could ever repay.’

Burgo gave me a look I recognized, which seemed to ask if I intended to maintain the fiction that social punctilio had any part to play in our relationship. I felt the blood rush to my face.

‘Here we are!’ Dickie appeared round the corner of the house. ‘Hello, Bobbie.’ He hobbled round the table to kiss my cheek. ‘The pool’s filling nicely and Mrs Harris is setting out the grub. Exciting, isn’t it? Of course Fleur doesn’t care two straws for our little garden and we all know Burgo’s mind is fixed on solving the troubles of the world. But you share my pleasure in our own little Utopia, eh?’

‘I certainly do! I’m longing to see the pool with water in it.’ I kissed Dickie with real affection. He was perhaps the nicest man I knew. And I was thankful to have a third person to ease the tension that continually threatened to take Burgo and me to a point beyond the bulwarks of propriety when we were alone. ‘And I adore picnics.’

‘It won’t be a real picnic,’ said Burgo. ‘I saw Beddows and Billy carrying down a table and chairs. We shan’t have to sit on rugs that smell of dogs, eating disintegrating Scotch eggs and drinking tepid tea.’

‘At my age,’ said Dickie, ‘I like to be comfortable. And the leg doesn’t take kindly to the hard ground. I agree there ought to be something primitive about a real picnic. But Mrs Harris has her standards and it makes her miserable to fall below them.’

‘I once went to a smart entertainment which the hostess called a dîner sur l’herbe,’ said Burgo. ‘We were rowed out to an island in the ancestral lake by uniformed flunkeys. We ate lobster and swan from heirloom porcelain and silver and were entertained by a wind trio of hautboy, serpent and crumhorn. On the return journey the flunkey in charge of the picnic baskets, who had been keeping up his spirits with the lees of the bottles, upset the boat. The male guests had to dive to the bottom of the lake to fetch up priceless Sèvres and dishes hammered by Paul Storr. My dinner jacket shrank to the size of a baby’s vest.’

Dickie and I laughed at this and I felt immediately reassured. What remained of my disquiet dissolved as we walked down to the China House.

‘It’s a funny thing,’ said Dickie. ‘I know so little about the Chinese except unpleasant practices like binding women’s feet and the slow drip, drip of the Chinese water torture.’

‘Don’t forget Chinese burns,’ I said.

‘There you are! How can you reconcile these barbarisms with such a developed sense of beauty?’

‘It’s a question of obedience, perhaps,’ suggested Burgo. ‘A national concept of beauty depends on a conformity of ideas. I believe you can indoctrinate any race to do brutal things by convincing it that they’re not outlandish practices but the norm.’

‘I really don’t think I could be persuaded to push bamboo shoots up anyone’s fingernails,’ Dickie protested. ‘And I’m positive our dear Bobbie’ – he patted me on the arm – ‘is incapable of behaving barbarously.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It would depend on what the pressures were. Supposing the only way you could save your own family from torture was to torture someone else’s? Where would one’s principles be then? It’s easy to lose sight of the unreasonableness of demands when there isn’t any reasonable behaviour to show them up.’

‘Where would politicians be if people were able to resist psychological manipulation?’ said Burgo.

‘Now, you don’t mean that, Burgo,’ said Dickie. ‘You’ll give Bobbie the wrong impression altogether. She’ll think you’re not to be trusted.’

‘She thinks that already.’ He sent me a sideways glance and again I felt an electrifying sense of danger.

‘Nonsense!’ said Dickie.

We had reached the China House so I was saved the necessity of replying. We pushed through the narrow gap in the hedge that led into the little garden. Mrs Harris was laying the table that had been set up on the grass in front of it. The pool contained an inch of water which had captured the hue of a robin’s egg from the sky. Limestone boulders had replaced the rose-beds and already there were fronds of young ferns in the crevices.

‘I wish Bobbie would come and live here with us,’ said Fleur to Burgo as we ate lovage soufflé followed by turbot, then camembert and figs. ‘We adore having her but she insists on going home, even though her parents are monsters of stinginess and selfishness.’

‘Fleur!’ protested Dickie. ‘It’s extremely rude to criticize Bobbie’s parents.’

‘I don’t think they’re as bad as that,’ I said. ‘If that’s the impression I’ve given I was probably exaggerating in a bid for sympathy. The truth is, they should never have married. They’re quite unsuited.’

‘I can’t think of many marriages that make the people in them feel better rather than worse,’ said Fleur.

‘Mine makes me feel heaps better,’ Dickie said at once. ‘It’s the very best thing in my life.’

Fleur’s cheeks took on a bright colour. Her eyes grew soft. ‘That’s kinder than I deserve.’

I was pleased by this evidence of Fleur’s fondness for Dickie. Though I loved being with them I was often wounded on his behalf by Fleur’s careless attitude. Particularly when I saw her with Billy.

‘Marriage is a means to an end. One marries to have children, to secure property, continue a line, to simplify taxation,’ said Burgo. ‘Why people should yoke themselves together fiscally and expect to relish each other’s maddening inconsistencies is more than I can understand.’

‘There you go again, pretending to be cynical,’ protested Dickie. ‘It’s learning to like people’s maddening little ways because they’re part of them that makes for love. The rest, fancying the cut of their jib, wanting to kiss them, is all very enjoyable but nothing to do with real love.’

Fleur dropped her head back and crammed a fig whole into her mouth. A trickle of juice ran down her chin. With her dark curling hair and slanting eyes she looked like a bacchante.

Poor Dickie. I had several times been up to Fleur’s bedroom. It contained a double bed but the single pillow and the solitary bedside lamp beside a large photograph of Burgo confirmed the fact that Fleur slept alone. Bowls of water and biscuits and baskets took up much of the floor space. The counterpane was marked by fur-lined depressions, the furniture was scored with claw-marks and there was a distinct smell of tom-cat. It was hardly surprising that Dickie was keen to play down the importance of the physical side of marriage.

‘I disagree.’ Burgo spoke rapidly and waved a hand for emphasis, an elegant hand with long fingers like Fleur’s, though cleaner and without bitten nails. ‘It isn’t cynical at all. I don’t say there’s no such thing as love. Of course there is, and it includes finding other people’s idiosyncrasies enthralling, besides desiring them physically. It may even co-exist with marriage. But marriage is for other purposes and you shouldn’t ask too much of it. It’s like being disappointed that an aeroplane isn’t a time machine. A plane is a superbly efficient method of getting about the globe fast. But to expect it to take you to the fourteenth century is unreasonable.’

‘I don’t see how you can separate things into different compartments like that,’ Dickie objected. ‘Marriage, if you spend any time together, can’t be just a contract to give the income-tax man one in the eye. You’d be bound to have some pretty strong feelings about your spouse – though not necessarily all affirmative, I grant. Eskimos, Maoris, Choctaws; they all have ceremonies of some kind. It’s human nature for men and women to want to get together beside their very own cooking-pot in some sort of exclusive arrangement to keep the world at bay. And it’s just what the doctor ordered when you’re past your first youth: swapping the hurly-burly of the what’s-it for the deep peace of the double bed and all that. Darby and Joan, Jack Sprat and his wife.’ He stared up at the deepening sky seeking further illustration. ‘Adam and Eve, you know.’

‘They didn’t have much choice.’ Burgo smiled. ‘As far as I remember they were the only two people there.’

Dickie laughed good-naturedly. ‘You know what I mean. I’m no good at arguing. What do you think, Bobbie?’

‘As the only unmarried person present obviously I can’t speak from experience. I think probably my own idea of marriage is much more exacting than wanting to be taken to the fourteenth century. But if those hopes weren’t fulfilled I suppose I’d try to persuade myself that a good marriage was whatever I had.’

‘You’d risk settling for something thoroughly inferior by doing that,’ said Burgo. ‘But you might be right. Perhaps self-delusion is necessary for happiness.’

‘Strike me purple and knock me down with an express train,’ said Fleur. (This was one of Billy’s favourite expressions.) ‘I don’t ever remember you agreeing with anyone before. You always say that unanimity makes for dull conversation.’

‘On this occasion I reserve the right to contradict myself. Must you do that?’

Fleur was tossing scraps from our plates to Lancelot, her red setter, who was leaping to catch them, knocking against the table and making the knifes and forks rattle. She stopped at once.

‘I like agreement,’ said Dickie. ‘It’s pleasant and restful. I hate quarrelling.’

‘Not agreeing with someone isn’t the same as quarrelling.’ Burgo leaned across the table to pour me a glass of red wine to accompany the camembert. ‘Discussion – or argument if you like – is the proper way to get to the truth.’

‘I don’t know that I care about truth as much as all that.’ Dickie cut himself a piece of camembert. ‘I’d rather be comfortable and jolly any day. What do you say, Bobbie?’

I had the sensation – probably due to the heat and the wine and the pleasure of being in the garden – of having reached some plateau of happiness and the idea that if I remained exactly as I was and made no conscious mental effort in any direction I should be able to retain this for a while longer.

‘I want … I want everything. Truth, beauty, comfort, jollity – I don’t want to have to choose between things.’

‘I agree.’ Burgo took a fig and quartered it, exposing crimson flesh, crammed with pips. ‘It’s too perfect an evening to be serious about anything.’

Fleur began to laugh, though at what she would not say.

‘I see now,’ said Kit. ‘It was the Garden of Eden. Ripeness and plenitude. Beauty and deceit. Fleur and Billy munching happily away at the fruits of the tree of knowledge without retribution. And slowly, steadily, resolutely the serpent was gliding towards you.’

‘That makes it sound as though I couldn’t help myself. I’m afraid that isn’t true.’

‘Well. We shall see. Go on.’

‘I think I’ll turn in.’ Dickie groped for his stick and stood up. ‘You’ll forgive me, Bobbie, if I leave Burgo to do the honours. I was up at six watering the strawberries. Beddows always forgets.’

Moths dithered around the candles, repeatedly flopping down to the table as though scorched to death, only to revive minutes later to dash back into the flames. My head was spinning with the combination of wine and the scent of flowers and grass, intensified by night.

‘I’ll go home now,’ I said as Dickie bent to kiss me. ‘Thank you for a wonderful evening.’

‘You can’t go,’ Fleur said to me. ‘We’re so happy. You’ll spoil everything if you leave now. Remember that poem about the strawberries you used to tell me when I was little?’ Fleur offered her cheek to Dickie but looked at Burgo. ‘Something about a wood. Do say it again.’

‘If I can remember it.

‘The man in the wilderness asked of me,

How many strawberries grow in the sea?

I answered him as I thought good,

As many red herrings as grow in the wood.’

‘What a relief!’ said Fleur. ‘It isn’t meant to make sense. As a child I thought I must be stupid because I didn’t understand it. There are some advantages to being grown up. I used to feel confused, like watching a film or a play in a foreign language. Now, though I don’t often feel the same, I’ve some idea what the plot’s supposed to be.’

‘Ah, but then something extraordinary happens that turns logic on its head and again you’re floundering.’ Burgo’s face was hidden in shadow. ‘You think you know where you’re going, what you want, what other people want of you. But then you read something, or see something, or meet someone who startles you out of your preconceptions and you’re left bewildered.’

I got up. ‘I really think I will go home.’

‘We’ll walk back to the house with you.’ Burgo stood and began to put coffee cups and brandy glasses on to a tray.

Fleur put her hand on his sleeve. ‘But you haven’t seen inside the China House yet. He must, mustn’t he, Bobbie?’ She took a candlestick and went across the grass to the little pavilion. ‘Look at the bells hanging from the roof.’ Fleur tapped one so that it rang with a sweet shivering chime. ‘Bobbie did drawings of them and Dickie got the blacksmith to make them. But come inside. That’s the best bit, though it isn’t finished yet.’ She tried to open the door. ‘Help me, will you? It still sticks a bit.’

Burgo applied pressure and opened it.

‘See!’ Fleur held the candlestick up high. ‘There’s the Chinese daybed. Bobbie designed it. Don’t you love its little curly roof like an hysterical four-poster? It isn’t finished yet. It’s to have silk curtains and cushions embroidered with dragons. Someone Bobbie knows in London’s making them. It’s costing a fortune but Dickie’s adoring doing it—’

‘’Scuse me for butting in.’ Billy’s head and shoulders appeared round the door. ‘Evening, all.’ He nodded at me. ‘Sorry to bother you, Mrs Sudborough, but Stargazer’s leg is troubling him, like, and I was wondering if a bran poultice might do the trick.’

‘I’ll come at once.’ Fleur was at the door in an instant. ‘Bye, Bobbie.’ She kissed me briefly. ‘Burgo’ll see you off. I’ll ring.’

We were alone.

‘We’ve had a lot of fun,’ I said. ‘Isn’t the lantern a success?’ I pointed to the wood and glass lamp in the shape of a pineapple. ‘It’s charming, isn’t it?’

‘Oh yes.’ Burgo ignored the lantern.

‘Don’t you think Fleur’s looking well?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m so grateful to you for introducing me to them. I’m feeling enormously cheered up.’

‘Good.’ I thought I saw a suspicion of a smile.

‘It must have been marvellous in Provence. I haven’t been for ages. I once spent a month in a villa near St Rémy. We were students so we could barely afford to eat.’

‘Really.’

‘We had fish soup every day at a little café. I can still remember the taste of the rouille – you know, the hot peppery sauce that goes with it.’

‘I know what rouille is.’

‘Of course.’ I felt a complete fool. A silence fell which I felt I must break at the cost of making more of an idiot of myself. ‘Your wife must have been so pleased to have you to herself for a while.’

‘We had people staying all the time.’

‘Oh. Oh, how sad.’

‘Why?’

‘Well … because … I mean, you must miss each other and … and you know that saying about absence – La Rochefoucauld, wasn’t it?’ I laughed unnaturally. ‘It usually is.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Oh, something about absence extinguishing little passions and increasing great ones, like the wind that blows out a candle but blows up a fire.’ Another pause. ‘So obviously, in your case, absence must be a good thing …’ What on earth was I doing, talking about his marriage? It was an extraordinary impertinence.

‘A good thing for us to live apart?’

‘Yes … no … I don’t know.’

I stared at him in hopeless confusion. He did nothing to help me. If he’d made the least attempt to flirt I could have made it quite clear that there was no possibility of anything between us. As it was, he was entirely cool and collected while I stammered and stuttered like a schoolgirl.

After a pause, Burgo said with a solemnity that might have concealed annoyance, or possibly amusement, ‘It’s kind of you to be concerned.’

‘It’s late. I’d better go home.’

‘I’ll see you to your car.’

‘Don’t bother, really. It’d be a bore for you. I can manage. Goodnight.’

In a moment I was through the door and the gap in the hedge and running along the path that led back to the house. Tricked by fitful beams of moonlight, I stumbled into flowerbeds, twisting my ankles and scratching myself on thorns and twigs. When I arrived, panting, within the area that was lit by the lamps each side of the garden door, I wondered what on earth I was doing, behaving like a child frightened by my own imagination. I walked round to the Wolseley, feeling indescribably foolish, and drove back to Cutham, thoroughly out of humour with myself.

The silent house welcomed me into its chill embrace with an exudation of floor-polish and damp. By the light of the dim bulb in the hall I saw there was a message by the telephone in Oliver’s hand.

Jasmine rang. She says to call her the minute you get in no matter how late as she won’t be able to sleep a wink until she has spoken to you. Is she as pretty as she is crazy?