England's Lane (14 page)

I have, of course, to gamble upon the supposition that the pig person had neither the time nor motivation to pass on details of my whereabouts. After considerable reflection, I now am quite convinced that this distastefully oleaginous and slack-minded attempt at
blackmail was a thing of his own creation. A hastily arrived at piece of personal business—a bonus, as it were, riding on the back of his doubtless bountiful recompense for having located me, which I am positive is all that he was charged with. For here was no louche and professional executioner—though that particular swift and silent ghost, he would soon enough have manifested himself in order to slickly deal with me. And so with regard to the pig man, I have deduced that a confrontation could hardly have figured within the remit of his instruction: for why would it be desirable for my senses to be pricked by such an odor? The swinish scent of imminent catastrophe. So one must, I suppose, come grudgingly to admire this pig person's spirit of enterprise: really too too sad that it couldn't have turned out more positively for him, one might even come to think—should ever one find oneself in so preposterously generous a frame of mind as to be teetering upon the cusp of losing it altogether. But you see, if one is to be a successful criminal, then brains and determination can never be permitted to flag, no not even for a moment: one must always be devotedly committed to seeing the thing through, no matter how appalling that thing might well turn out to be. As I was, in the case of John Somerset, all those many years ago … but for that one single and really very vital element: I should have quickly killed him. I must say that now, it really does appear quite terribly obvious to me. And yet I hesitated. I cannot even take succor in the milky protestation that I was done and gone, that all now was finished and over, before such an idea could even have begun to flower. For no. Always it was at the forefront of my mind. And yet I hesitated. A thing that I so extremely rarely have done in my life as to render it virtually without precedent. Such shilly-shally, this lack of action, that now could easily evolve into the weapon of my undoing. For two things now are very plain to me: Mr. Somerset, following all those years of enforced absence
from society, finds himself once again at large, while demonstrating—quite as I might have foretold—no sign whatever of eventually having succumbed to any state even approaching that of surrender. He has not seen fit to absorb all the happenings of the past into the core of his bones. On the contrary—he has been avidly feeding the avenging fire. And how, sanely, could ever I have imagined anything other? He remains quite wholly determined to find me, to deal with me … to deal with me, yes, and in a manner—aware as I am of his mighty resources, not to say the depth and solidity of his hatred—I hardly would care, or dare now, even to dwell upon.

Long ago though, we were friends. I think it axiomatic that any bitter enemy will once have been a friend: for surely no one other could come to care so very deeply. Fiona and I had recently removed to Henley when first I encountered John Somerset. Amanda in those days was terribly young—the prettiest and sweetest little thing in my life by far, and so very tender. Henley was, and I am sure remains, a highly agreeable little town, though I found myself living there solely by way of happenstance. My father, who had always been a very keen boating man ever since his balmy and golden days at Cambridge, over which he seldom ceased to rhapsodize, had resided there for many years, and quite recently had become a widower. For some quite unfathomable reason, he had been, throughout his marriage, perfectly devoted to my mother. On one occasion, I recall, I even made a point of pleading with him to explain to me how this could possibly be—for he seemed on the face of it a sensible man, an educated man, and even something of an intellectual, in an admittedly minor sort of a way (he had published several papers on various arcane matters—uniformly abstruse and punishingly dull, though doubtless academically worthy). His discernment in such as literature, music, wine, epicureanism, art and tailoring were immediately and strikingly apparent to all, and commensurately admired.
For prior to the barbarian age in which now we are each of us compelled to dwell, all such attributes bestowed upon a gentleman a notable distinction among his peers, and also the sort of well-intentioned though rather grimy and besotted uncomprehending affection that arose like steam from the heated flanks of the common herd. They would metaphorically clamber in jostling huddles in the winter snow to eagerly take turns in hoisting one another to scrabble at a windowsill, this in order to catch even so fleeting a glimpse through the lit-up mullion of the warmth, erudition and munificence within.

My mother, by contrast, I could not possibly love because she was the one thing for which I could never forgive anybody, and least of all her: she was, you see, irredeemably ordinary. There was nothing to openly despise—no single act of cruelty on her part had been perpetrated that would have justified any abiding resentment, let alone a lifelong grudge. Though equally nor was there anything that struck me as being even within the broadest vicinity of fine or laudable. My father had told me that in her youth she had been a considerable beauty, and despite how she seemed to me now, I had no reason to doubt his word (while noting in passing with a withered cynicism that never within my hearing had an old man recalled his boyhood bride in any other terms). But it was this one particular man who exercised me, and I found it so puzzling as a boy—it gnawed at me, I wrestled with it daily—for surely a man such as this, I earnestly reasoned, must so in his heart have needed to be with a woman who was quite thoroughly bedazzling: a woman whose smile and wisdom, whose style and demeanor (her laugh, her grace, her beauteous eyes filled with the sparkle of private amusement while very nearly veiling such maddeningly tantalizing secrets) would have rendered her as a goddess to all who were fortunate enough to have basked within the sphere of her radiance: the one
true shining star at any gathering, no matter how grand, the cause of heartbreak to legions of forlorn and listless suitors, all now quite bereft of hope. And then amid the hot thick velvet of the night, she would inspire and impel the scribbling by candlelight of all such breathless stuff in fevered diaries, their scribble quickly degenerating into a panicked and impassioned scrawl, and accompanied by a howl of longing for the thrill and glamour already now waving its final farewell, before seeping away into the encroaching dark—though desperately still clutched at like the very most gorgeous dream, on reluctant awakening.

But my mother, she was possessed of none of this. I might be able to go so far as to say she was “kindly,” while often she was not at all. On one morning only, I saw her but briefly before she had attended to her toilet (I believe the reason for this unprecedented state of déshabillé was that she had been taken unwell during the course of the night). The face was of the palest bisque, an unglazed white and stark Venetian mask, awaiting cosmetic decoration, a carefully drawn personality—spurious and daubed-on characteristics. But for now, there was nothing for me to see there, nothing at all. When she died, my father was inexplicably broken: all means of expression were quite lost to him. And in silence, he set to wandering among the catacombs, the corridors of death: you could observe and only wonder at his meandering progress day by day—all life leached out of him, a pained and insidiously gradual process that stole from his eyes their shine and alacrity, leaving just a blankness without inquiry; his skin translucent, his heavy limbs just simply hanging there. No blood, you see: there was no blood. Within less than a year, he was gone—guttered for so very long, and now snuffed out.

And this, I own, was sad, though timely—for I, as the only child, inherited the house at Henley. Fiona, Amanda and myself had hitherto been living in no style at all in an exceedingly nasty two-bedroomed
flat in the Charing Cross Road. Her annuity had never been bounteous, and I was struggling ever harder in order to have published fewer and fewer poems. For this is what I did, this is who I was: I wrote verse. Elegiac. Romantic. Pastoral. Metaphysical. I was the poet. And yes, there still was then an abundance of little magazines, this is true, but you were seen to be prospering should you manage to secure for yourself half-a-guinea for a sonnet that had been quarried with a pick and bloodied senses from within a golden seam at the depths of your soul. Fiona on more than one occasion suggested I should try my hand at the novel, and of course I simply laughed at her, not to say the very idea. The novel, I did my utmost to explain to her, is no more than a baggy contrivance, a ramshackle edifice without foundation—alluring only as is a tawdry bauble, a bright-painted Jezebel jammed and caked with gimcrack coincidence so as to insult the intellect, while peopled by the flimsiest shades that defy all absorption or credulity. Poetry, however, is water and air: fire, as well. Pure, yes. It is clean, it has no smell—and yet it lingers within and around you forever and ever.

It is difficult to project … quite what might have happened, had it not been for the fortuitousness of my father's legacy. I was feeling as caged as ever I have done in that perfectly wretched little flat in the Charing Cross Road—a dangerous sensation, if you happen to be me. But now, liberation had come.

“New around these parts, aren't you?”

I had been strolling on the towpath hard by the arch of Henley bridge, I recall it well, and doubtless grappling with the peculiar nuance of an elusive iambic pentameter—for such then was the extent of my inner contemplation. The man was sitting on a bench, the ferrule of his cane gently disturbing the earth at his feet.

“Name's Somerset,” he continued, with rather a beguiling and languid grace. “John Somerset. Do please call me John.”

He was standing now, and extending a hand. A man rather older than myself—here was my initial observation—though devilish hard to put an age to him. The defiant and aristocratic curvature of a proudly prominent nose was dapplingly encrimsoned by crazed and hectic lattices of detonated veins. He still was strong and vital, while carrying easily the heft of experience. Educated, supremely confident, and not without an undertow of danger.

“Frost,” I told him—for this, I should say, is indeed my name. Barton, well … such a coining … that, perforce, came after, really quite a good time after: initially in the form of a capricious and momentary improvisation, and then later as a means to my continued survival—a quickly rigged-up guise, an attempted baffle, tightly bound into the intention to temporarily elude, if never quite ultimately escape, the eternal tenacity of the very gentleman whom now, and for the very first time, I found myself to be so very casually addressing. “Jonathan. Yes—quite new, I suppose. We've been here for, oh—no more than a couple of months now, I daresay.”

He looked at me narrowly, the smile on his lips considerably kinder than the light in his eyes.

“Frost …” he said with care, and very thoughtfully. “Frost … Anything by any chance to do with, um …?”

“Indeed. He was my father.”

“Ah. Your father, yes of course. My sincere condolences. He was much admired, your father. Fine man.”

I nodded and lowered my head. “He was,” I said. “He was.”

Later in the conversation—and by way of an unwontedly extravagant flourish of his arm, the gleam in his eyes now wholly determined—he invited Fiona and myself to dinner the following weekend, as I knew he was bound to. Not simply as a result of manners—the common courtesy extended to a newcomer with strong and respectable local connections: I just knew he was bound to. His
house, The Grange, was well known in Henley, I soon was to discover: the grandest, the smartest—although, being early Georgian, by no means the oldest. During the interim before we dined there, I learned from several quarters that such an invitation was to be highly prized. For this is how people in a provincial town—no matter how ostensibly sophisticated—will habitually evaluate any given situation. Almost achingly parochial, but there it is—what can be done about it? A readily defined hierarchy is always required in England—others by whom to divine denominators, measure the necessary degree of distance and—quite paramount—make evident the wink of complicity, to subtly acknowledge the perception of parity, whether true or fantastical.

In addition to the house, my dear father also bequeathed to me a smallish though still unexpected amount of assets. His current account, something in a building society, a modest portfolio of shares made up of shrinking, cheaply acquired oddments and too few gilts. There is also the Constable oil sketch in the drawing room of which he was inordinately fond, but that is worth hardly more than a hundred pounds. He had earlier alerted me to the existence of a brass-bound strongbox behind the sprung secret panel in that venerable green leather-topped pedestal desk whose rich mahogany is partially faded to ginger, due to the early morning sunlight that comes in shafts through the study's big bay window: it would catch from the side his unlined forehead and the softness of his hair, rendering it then into a fine-spun and silvery floss. Within the box were my mother's wedding and engagement rings in addition to a bracelet or so, pearl studs, a locket she habitually wore on a thin gold chain (and within which I was surprised though unmoved to find the tiniest oval and sepia photograph of myself as an infant) together with the platinum choker that so ill became her. And two rolled-up bundles of five-pound notes, tied in pink ribbon. Of which,
rather fortunately, I had, by the time of my initial encounter with John Somerset, already invested a rather large proportion in much-needed clothing for Fiona and myself—for oh dear me, I simply cannot tell you: the state of our attire hitherto had been very shamingly little short of threadbare (we sometimes laughed about it, though often we did not). And so we had taken the train up to London by way of something of a rather joyous spree, staying for just the one night at The Strand Palace Hotel, and dining at Gennaro's—an abiding ambition of Fiona's, and one I was pleased to at last be in a position to satisfy. She acquired some very fetching costumes, blouses, gowns and tea frocks from Liberty and Harrods, while I had repaired with quite boyish excitement, I freely admit it, to Hilditch & Key in Jermyn Street to stock up on a goodly selection of shirts, ties, cravats, nightwear, hosiery, underthings, and so forth. I commissioned Anderson & Sheppard in Savile Row to kit me out with three day suits, a couple of decent tweed sportscoats, a flannel blazer, various pairs of bags, and of course black tie. This last, very happily, having been delivered just the very week before Fiona and I were to attend this much-vaunted dinner at The Grange, courtesy of Mr. John Somerset, and his lovely wife. Ah yes—his lovely wife … Anna, by name. Who soon, but naturally, was to be conspiratorially instrumental in the weaving together of yet another colored and intrinsic strand into what was destined to become—and really quite frighteningly quickly—a narrative tapestry of extraordinary scale, and very telling detail.