Ashenden (34 page)

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “There is no business now. The factory was bombed, my parents’ house also.”

The child bashed the wagon against the skirting boards and all the blocks tumbled out. For a second his face trembled; then he bent down and began to put the blocks back into the wagon one by one.

Walter watched him and smiled. “He is so solemn. Solemn. Is that the right word?”

“He’s a bit of a fusser, if that’s what you mean,” said her father. “They do go through these stages, of course.”

“He’s teething,” said Alison. “But you’re right”—she nodded at Walter—“there is something solemn about him. I’ve always thought so.”

“Peaches,” said her mother, pointing, “blackberries, and cake.”

“Yes, please,” said Mr. Drummond. “I’ll have the lot.”

“Let’s go mad,” said Mrs. Drummond. “A little of each for me, too.”

“Blackberries, please,” said Alison.

“Do try the peaches, Alison, dear,” said Mrs. Drummond. “Plenty to go round. They taste of
pure sunshine,
I always say.”

“I’m sorry,” said Alison, winking at her father, “but I’m awfully allergic to them.”

“Really?” said Mrs. Drummond. “I knew an elderly lady once who was allergic to strawberries. She couldn’t eat a single one without coming out in the most dreadful itchy hives all up her arms. But I’ve never heard of tinned peaches causing such a reaction.”

“Runs in the family, I’m afraid,” said her father. “Peaches have much the same effect on me. I’ll have the blackberries and a slice of that delicious-looking cake.”

“I will have the blackberries also,” said Walter, glancing around
the table, the quizzical look back on his face. “And some cake, Mrs. Milner, please.”

“Well, it just goes to show,” said Mrs. Drummond. “No matter how well you think you know people, there’s always something new to discover.”

Around the table was the scrape of dessert spoons. Around the room the wagon crashed and the blocks tumbled.

“You haven’t said when you are going back, Walter,” said Mrs. Drummond.

“No.” Walter paused a moment. “To answer your question, I am not going back.”

“Oh?” said Mr. Drummond.

“I didn’t know that was an option,” said Mrs. Drummond.

Alison bent her head to her plate to avoid the look on her mother’s face, a look that was trying very hard not to be a look.

“Naturally there are difficulties.”

Mr. Drummond cleared his throat. “I imagine there blooming well are.”

“It helps if you have employment.”

Her father said, “And do you have work?”

“Yes,” said Walter. “Freeman’s have asked me to stay on.”

“Have they?” said her father.

“Freeman’s the builders?” said Mr. Drummond.

“Walter was one of the prisoners they hired when the war ended,” said her father.

“I find construction satisfying,” said Walter. “To make something for the future is a good thing, I think.”

“Surely there’s a great need for construction in your own country, Walter?” said Mrs. Drummond, tapping ash into a souvenir of Weston-super-Mare.

“Perhaps he’d rather build here,” said Alison.

Her parents glanced at her, then at each other.

“Alison,” said her father. “Shall we clear away?”

Her mother handed him the teapot. “I think we could all do with another cup.”

*  *  *

Her father put the plates in the sink, which was always the extent of his efforts at washing up. Beyond the window, the garden darkened and you could no longer see the river.

“Those blocks must have taken him weeks to make.”

Alison set the kettle to boil. “He’s fond of Thomas.”

“I’m not blind,” said her father. “Even I can recognize a labor of love when I see one.”

She was tempted to ask him what he meant, but it was obvious what he meant and to pretend otherwise would be rude and dismissive as well as pointless.

“You’re a grown woman. I can’t tell you what to do. But the two of you need to know what you’d be letting yourself in for,” he said. “It wouldn’t be easy.”

She shredded the skin on the side of her thumbnail. “I don’t care what other people think.”

“Even so, you’d have to live with the consequences.” Her father lit a cigarette and stared out of the window.

“If this is about Geoffrey,” she said. But she knew it was not about Geoffrey.

Her father said, “Remember the fuss in the village when people found out the POWs were getting the same rations as our lads in the forces? That they were getting more to eat than we were?”

She nodded. The “fuss” had gone on for weeks and a couple of the prisoners detailed to help bring in the harvest at Grange Farm were badly beaten up.

“Then you’ve got to think what it’s going to be like when they start coming home and find Germans in their old jobs being paid union rates. People will put up with it for now, because everyone can see there’s work to be done and not enough men to do it. But that’s not always going to be the case.”

“I know,” she said.

He drew on his cigarette and opened the window to let the smoke out. “Did you know he’d decided to stay?”

“He’s been talking about it for a while.”

“And the job?”

“He told me this morning.”

Her father smiled to himself. “So that’s where you popped out to.”

The kettle boiled and she spooned tea out of the caddy and into the rose-patterned teapot.

“Tell me,” said her father, still staring out of the window, “what would you have done if he’d decided to go back?”

“Gone with him.”

He nodded. “That’s what your mother’s been afraid of.”

She knew, without him saying, that he’d been afraid of it too. “Dad?”

He turned, his eyes resting upon her. “I should never have made you take him that glass of water.” Then he patted her hand. “You do what you think’s best. So long as you’re both happy.”

She brushed off the tears that threatened to fall. “Thank you.”

“Tea’s brewed, I expect.” He put out his cigarette. “You realize, I suppose,” he said with a smile, “that neither of us is going to be able to eat a peach in this village ever again. I don’t know how your mother kept a straight face.”

“Practice,” she said.

T
here are many ways of killing a house. You can set fire to it, you can flood it, you can tear it down to get your hands on the land where it stands. Or you can pulverize it with bombs, which is how two million homes have been lost in the Blitz. These are quick methods.

Slower methods work just as well in the long term and require absolutely no effort. Nothing: that’s all you have to do. Let nature take its course. It will. Nature is strong enough to topple stone, given time.

All around the country, the great houses are dying. Four or five a week and their deaths are slow and lingering.

*  *  *

Reggie Lyell turned over the pages of
Country Life
while rain streamed down the windows. A nurse wearing a white uniform, white stockings, and white shoes came into the waiting room on hushed feet, straightened the magazines on the circular rosewood table, and said, “Mr. Collins sends his apologies, but he is running a little late.”

“Not to worry.”

The war had left 91 Harley Street more or less unscathed. Unlike the bombsite a few streets away where buddleia, purple loosestrife, and rosebay willow herb grew, its Georgian frontage and fanlight
with delicate glazing bars were unmarked save for some pocks and gouges in the brickwork, which might have been shrapnel damage. Earlier, when she had pressed the bell set in the polished brass nameplate, smelling coal dust and cooking odors that rose from the basement to the damp pavement, she remembered the faint astringency of surgical spirit that would greet her inside. By now she was more than familiar with the back copies of
Punch,
the hunting prints, and the oatmeal-colored wallpaper of these consulting rooms, where women in hats suspended in their own predicaments avoided each other’s eyes. Today the waiting room, although empty, retained a presence of their quiet desperation.

Her sister had recommended the doctor. Royalty went to him to be treated for the consequences of their indiscretions, she had said, but she shouldn’t let that put her off. “He’s the best gynecologist in London.”

Murmurs and footfalls came from the corridor, and it was only by craning her neck to stare out of the window, through the obscuring gauze of its drapery, that she spotted the departing umbrella of the previous appointment. One paid to be so anonymous. She reread an article deploring the numbers of great country houses that were being lost to the nation every week without taking a word of it in.

The door of the waiting room opened and the nurse said Mr. Collins would see her now. Reggie replaced the magazine on the table and tried to disguise the fact that her gloved hands were trembling.

This morning the best gynecologist in London was dressed in a chalk-stripe suit, a scarlet silk handkerchief blooming in his breast pocket, his silver hair swept back from his forehead and curling a little over his stiff white collar. When the nurse with the hushed feet showed her into the wainscoted room, he rose from behind his kneehole desk, which would not have been out of place in a solicitor’s office, and shook her hand.

“Do have a seat, Mrs. Lyell,” he said, pulling out a chair for her. She noticed, as she always did, how clean his nails were.

Reggie was not easily embarrassed or a prude, and she was comfortable enough in her own skin and with the functions of her body not to find physical examinations by well-qualified strangers especially revolting. Even so, she was pleased that today there would be no need to “slip off her underthings” and lie on the examination table with her feet in stirrups while the consultant penetrated her with his cold speculum or pressed her abdomen with his manicured hands. If there was anything unpleasant about the procedure, it was her nagging suspicion that he enjoyed it more than professionally speaking he ought to have done, and she wondered if this was true of other gynecologists or only those at the top of their profession. This did not mean that what would follow would be anything less than an ordeal and, as she sat in the chair, she steeled herself against it.

“You will be anxious to know the results of the tests,” said Mr. Collins, seating himself on the other side of his desk and drawing a buff folder in front of him. He put on a pair of half-moon spectacles, opened the folder, and ran his finger down the first page. Then he pulled the spectacles down his nose, peered over the top of them, and smiled. “Good news, Mrs. Lyell. I am pleased to say that there appears to be nothing wrong with you whatsoever. All is in working order, so far as we can tell.”

The words fell on her ears and she didn’t know how to respond.

He turned over the notes. “We have already established that your husband is capable of fathering children . . .”

She nodded quickly to stop him from saying any more. The worst part of the whole exercise had been divulging that particular piece of information, so personal to them both and which, although it concerned an event that had predated her meeting Hugo and their marriage, was something that had grown more painful to her over the years, not less. Hugo had been at university, the girl had miscarried; now this temporary calamity was part of her own medical history.

“Which means,” said Mr. Collins, taking off his spectacles and laying them on the desk, “that it is simply a question of time. You are not in the first flush of youth, that’s true, but even so you are
only thirty-six and I have known women over forty to conceive and bring their babies to term. War takes its toll—rationing, separations, anxiety, and so on—and I have no doubt that you will be writing to me very soon to announce a happy event.”

Out in the cold, rainy street, Reggie, awash with a mixture of emotions, one of which was relief, thought about canceling her lunch. She found a phone box and put a call through to Hugo, who was in a board meeting and unavailable. Then she hailed a cab and asked to be taken to Paddington. The Reading train was departing from platform 11 and she caught it with only a few minutes to spare, wondering if she was doing the right thing.

*  *  *

Bunny Anstis was waiting at the station in his little car and, as soon as Reggie got in, he turned the key in the ignition and began complaining about Kenneth, in a way that was more acerbic and less diverting than usual. Kenneth wouldn’t be joining them for lunch, he had got much too grand for his friends, was sitting on some Festival committee and never home, and any moment now their cottage would be full of tubular furniture and hideous Scandinavian earthenware and they would have to entertain socialists at the weekend.

“The Swan do you, darling?”

“Perfectly, thank you.”

“Goring,” said Bunny, as they drove through the village. “It always makes me think of bulls.”

Bunny was a thin, wiry man with a beaky nose and a lock of hair that persisted in falling over his forehead no matter what he did to tame it. He was working in publishing when Reggie first met him; since then he’d tried his hand at selling antiques and at interior decoration, and from time to time he talked about opening a restaurant. “I’m a natural-born dabbler, darling,” was how he explained it. “Can’t be helped.”

They had a table by the waterside, with a view of the weir and the lock.

“Lovely weather for ducks,” said Bunny. “Or swans. Raining in London, was it?”

“Yes,” she said, “quite heavily.”

“Good,” said Bunny. “Kenneth forgot his umbrella. With luck, he’ll catch pneumonia.”

Reggie watched rain drip, drip, drip into the river while Bunny ordered the drinks, a gin and tonic for himself and a sherry for her, which gave her an excuse to ignore the unspoken conversation he was having with the waiter and the looks they flicked between them.

Halfway down the gin, Bunny remembered his manners and said how well she was looking. “Austerity agrees with you.”

“Thank you,” she said, gazing round the room at the pink tablecloths and the dessert trolley, which thanks to rationing had few desserts on it.