Daniel Martin (40 page)

‘I hope you don’t feel over-organized.’

‘It makes a change.’

‘Vie de campagne!’

Andrew had taken me before lunch on a long tour of the house and the farm buildings in what had once been the stable block. We had discussed Caro’s news. His reaction was, of course, shrewder than Nell had suggested. In his own way he took my view: one could only keep one’s fingers crossed. He had no particular feelings against Barney; ‘can’t stand any of those TV-johnnies, if I’m honest’; and exonerated me from any taint of conspiracy. He said something about the dangers of mollycoddling young animals; then that horses need a fall or two. Although he didn’t openly criticize Nell, I had gained the impression (as in retrospect what she had said to me at breakfast confirmed) that a point he had long argued now stood proven. Our talking did not diminish my respect for him. He had that formidable easygoingness of the landed farmer; half out of knowledge of his social position, perhaps, but also half out of his familiarity with natural process. It was a virtue of privilege that became a privilege of virtue of a kind.

‘You know Caro’s crossed her bridge?’

‘Only too well.’ She looked down at the gravel. ‘I’ve been severely reprimanded for coming between mother and daughter.’

‘She’s an idiot.’

Jane smiled, said nothing. I leant beside her on the balustrade, facing the house, and broke the silence.

‘You forget places like this exist.’

‘If you’re lucky.’

‘You do very well. The hair shirt doesn’t show.’

She smiled again. ‘It’s not the house. What houses like this do to people.’

‘Possess them?’

‘Embalm them, I think.’ She stared up at the bland front. ‘Caro uses a word to me about Nell sometimes. Rather more double-meaning than she realizes. Mummyish.’ Then, ‘I’m being catty.’

‘I can’t quite work out why I mind it all so much less in Andrew.’

‘He was born mummified. At least it’s natural in him.’

‘Steady, comrade.’

Nell kept a faint smile. ‘It’s not politics, Dan. A little matter of free will. Every time I come here I go through a sibling nightmare.’

I glanced at her. ‘Not in a thousand years.’

She shrugged. ‘Oh… not in this form. But there are other kinds of… not escaping what one is.’

‘Your friend in America?’

‘No.’ She shook her head, though the negative had already been firm. ‘I suppose just my years.’

‘Shall I go and fetch you a walking-stick?’

Her lips pressed together.

‘I see Roz has found an ally.’

‘Of course. Tease the poor old thing on every possible occasion.’

‘Like a knot it would be much simpler to cut.’

‘Now you’re being an idiot as well.’

She acknowledged the reproof, but then, as if to administer one of her own and to justify her idiocy, slipped me a gently ambiguous side-look.

‘How wise you were to stay out of all this, Dan.’

‘That’s an odd adjective.’

‘Fortunate.’

‘Not to have had gangrene—merely amputation?’

‘I suppose I meant that in a way.’

She was staring at the gravel, as if my metaphor had frozen something in her, disinterred what she had not meant. Caro and her half-sister appeared, and we stood and strolled to meet them. I said nothing more, but her fortuitous reference to mummification had reminded me of that offer to go to Egypt or to be precise, that I could, if I cared to change my mind, pick up a telephone and in five minutes arrange to go there. Her remark about wisdom, though said without overt malice, held the now familiar warning. I had mummifying privileges as well; remained relegated, in her eyes, to some lower, blinder world. It seemed to me that here was where her real lack of freedom lay: in the incapacity to compromise. It was redeemed only, and only partly, by her incapacity to forgive herself least of all.

It was also related to Nell’s unanswered question: whether it really helped to let the rain in. Somewhere Jane clung to a deep intuitive belief, as she had once in Catholic doctrine, that all, at least in her own life, was determined, predestined; which had led her into the oldest fallacy of all, that any external change was better than no change… a credo no more tenable than her onetime whim for the Rabelaisian dreamland where everything goes. All she had substituted for that and its Catholic successor and perhaps that change of horses had most to do with their common unattainability, so convenient a proof of despair in personal freedom was some egalitarian Utopia in which Compton would overnight become an old persons’ home, a holiday camp for trade union officials, heaven knew what… functions I wouldn’t have disapproved if they had been practicable, but that was not the issue. The only true and real field in which one could test personal freedom was present possibility. Of course we could all lead better, nobler, more socialist lives; but by positing them only in some future perfect state. One could so clearly only move and act from today, this present and flawed world.

Which was the lawn, crossing a ha-ha, the parkland beyond, blue and grey distances over the green, the two setters bounding and racing about, the casual train of us: Jane walked ahead between Caro and Penny, then Paul and Nell the latter perhaps determined to prove that two could play at sympathetic aunt, but the boy did seem a shade more amenable now with Andrew and myself bringing up the rear. Figures in a landscape, his landscape; the first of his line had ‘grabbed’ it, his word, we had talked about it during the tour after the Restoration. The baronetcy itself had come for staying true to the monarchy during the Commonwealth. Of course, in the manner of his kind, Andrew played all this down, as if his three centuries of ancestors, this same prospect, earth, trees his grandsires planted, meant nothing to him… that ultimate vulgar modesty of the very rooted and assured. I wondered how deep a hold it had on him, beneath the bland, dismissive surface, the man who talked with very clearly signalled inverted commas of ‘the peasantry’ and ‘playing squire’ and ‘her ladyship’.

By chance, later that afternoon, I was given some clue. We had walked a mile or so to a hill, where some forebear of Andrew had built a folly, a rather gloomy stone tower with pointed Gothic windows, but with a nice view over the gentle Gloucestershire valley south and the village. Nell had wanted to go back then, to get the dinner organized, but Andrew had a sick ewe, we could see the flock in a field below us, and the party split. I went on alone with him while the others returned to the house.

His shepherd had put the ewe in a little pen of hurdles beside a green-and-white caravan which had been rather a conspicuous eyesore when we looked down from the folly, Nell had even complained about it, but it was needed for the March lambing. A rough shelter of corrugated iron had been rigged in one corner of the pen, and the animal stood weakly off a litter of straw inside it when Andrew arrived. He asked me to stay outside, and I watched him catch and then expertly turn the invalid on her back and examine her. One or two of the rest of the flock watched from a hundred yards away, then went on with their grazing. After a minute he came back.

‘Any luck?’

He shook his head as he retied the binder twine round the hurdle he had opened to get in. ‘Looks like a goner. I think it’s pneumonia, but I’d better get the horse-doctor in. Damn things invent a new disease every winter.’ He saw me looking at the caravan, as we turned away. ‘Sorry about that. But you can’t turn off good shepherds for bad taste.’

‘They’re hard to come by now?’

‘Like gold. And they know it.’ He went behind the caravan and came out with a crook, and we began to walk towards the rest of the flock. ‘Ought to jack ‘em in, really. Sheep. Bit of an economic luxury these days.’

‘Then why not?’

‘Like so much else. If the dear old commissars are going to take over…’

‘I can’t believe that’s a serious reason.’

‘No? I wouldn’t like to bet on the Runt being able to take over when I’m gone. The way things are going.’

‘That must sadden you.’

‘Sometimes.’ He shrugged. ‘Has its pleasures, Dan. We’re the foxes now.’

‘But surely not quite yet run to ground?’

He grinned. ‘While it lasts.’ We stopped to survey the flock, but he went on talking. ‘Years ago, when I started, just after the governor died, I hired a bad egg. Good ploughman, but Union up to here.’ He levelled a hand to his chin. ‘He started to preach the gospel, I had a spy down at the pub, I knew all about it. Could have chucked him his cards, but I didn’t. Decided I’d sit it out. Then one day he said he was leaving, an uncle had left his wife a bit of money and he was going in for pigs. Come his last payday we had quite a set-to. I pulled his leg a bit, about getting to know the other side of the picture. Not a fool, he knew his stuff: History, statistics, all that. And that was the final thing he said to me. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”‘ Andrew left a pause. ‘Always remembered that.’

‘Did he gain any disciples?’

‘Some of the younger ones. Didn’t last. One thing about the land, the guv’nor doesn’t work, they all know it. That’s why I’ll still do a day or two’s ploughing, whatever.’ He winked at me. ‘Very simple fellow, your average peasant.’

I said, ‘You’re not fooling me, Andrew.’

‘Just my dear sister-in-law.’

‘Not even her, I suspect.’

‘Clever girl. Lot of bottom in her yet. Do hope she gets over.’ I wasn’t quite sure if he meant Anthony’s death or her contempt for his way of life; and wasn’t to find out, because he had spotted a ewe with a limping hind-leg and had a small chase before he could crook her over… and then we moved on to the problems of foot-rot.

We did return slightly to the subject on our way back to the house, because he told me about his old ‘chum’ Mark, from that long-ago day of the woman in the reeds. I had asked after him. He had apparently sold his Hampshire farm in the late 1950s, and now farmed in New Zealand; had tried, was still trying to persuade Andrew to follow his example. But Andrew felt he had left it too late, and anyway ‘her ladyship wouldn’t stand for it’.

All of this was as we were coming up through what was left of the park to the house, and I began to see he would be separated from it only by a new Cromwell and Commonwealth; that the tenacity, and the courage that went with it, existed and at the same time a blindness, a need to turn everything into a game, a playing of hare-and-hounds, a gamble. His now harmless love of betting, his little ‘matter of principle’, was a good deal deeper than a quirk of independence, a mere atavism; but a life-principle. He knew the odds were hopelessly against him, but history, the overwhelming new awareness of personal rights that had followed universal education and the universal publicity of the new media (let alone their political embodiment), must win now. There was no real argument between Jane and himself, since the matter was effectively decided. In a few decades at most, her side must have their way. He would double and double, but never escape; the tail of a species, of a failure to adapt; and as we came up the steps to the gravel in front of the house I did finally see a justice in Jane’s remark about being born mummified, since his failure to adapt was a result of the huge superstructure of land, house, tradition, family he had to carry; but the analogy was better made with the last of the brontosaurs, whose armour dragged them down.

Monsters… and curiously, a quite literal one delayed us a minute from going indoors. I had been aware as we approached the house of a low jet somewhere in the distance behind us, but as we went up the steps its distant roar became anomalous and I looked back. I could see the plane four or five miles away, on a downward path.

Andrew said, ‘Concorde. They’re testing the damn thing at Fairford.’

‘My God. It’s the first time I’ve heard it.’

‘Wish I could say the same.’

The roar was strange, sky-filling despite the distance of the aircraft, seemingly too all-invasive to emanate from that tiny sliver of machinery in the dimming winter sky. I heard a voice from the house: Caro and Jane, and the two children, stood by the front door, watching with us. Andrew took a breath.

‘Had a great protest meeting soon after it started. Down at Lechlade. Absolute shambles. Local Bolshies screaming at each other—the Fairford union men were all out in force. Our lot no better. All our would-be politicos trying to sit on the fence in case they lost votes. Just about summed it all up, really.’

‘Three blind mice?’

‘Sixty million of them, dear boy. If you ask me.’

And with that comprehensive judgment on his nation, he turned his back on the future.

Only two nights before, in the flat, I had pulled down that old copy of the Shirburn Ballads inherited from my father.

Why dost thow put thy confidence in stronge and stately Towres?

Why takest thow such pleasure in building sumptuous bowers, Reioycinge in thy pastures, and Parke of fallow deere?

Repent therfore, oh England the judgment day is nye.

The anonymous Jeremiah of the broadsheet ballad might well have got a certain masochistic enjoyment from our evening, as it turned out. I had been told more of our guests before they arrived. Fenwick was a highly successful barrister as well as a politician; he had a safe Tory seat ‘just over the border’; but wasn’t at all, I was assured, ‘countrified’. He had acted ‘brilliantly’ at least successfully for Andrew in some planning dispute that had gone to public enquiry. Rather a gay old dog out of his chambers, his present, third, and much younger, wife was American; I’d like her.