September (1990) (56 page)

"I must wish you a happy birthday. We've a box of presents for you."

"Bring them inside. I'll open them later."

He returned to the car, opened the doors, calmed the dogs, retrieved the birthday box, closed the doors again. By the time he had achieved all this, Alexa and her grandmother had disappeared into the house, and Noel followed them into a small hallway, and so through to an airy sitting-room filled with light, and with a glassed door giving out onto the old lady's delectable garden.

"Put the box down there! I won't open them yet, because I want to hear all your news. Alexa, the coffee and the cups are in the kitchen. Would you fetch the tray in for me?" Alexa disappeared to do this. "Now, Noel ... I can't call you Mr. Keeling because nobody does these days, and you must call me Violet . . . where would you like to sit?"

But he did not want to sit. As always in new surroundings, he wanted to prowl, nose, get the feel of things. It was a charming room, with pale-yellow walls, bright rose-chintzed curtains, and cream carpets, fitted snug to the wainscot. Violet Aird had not lived here for many years, he knew, and there was a freshness and a lightness about everything, evidence of recent refurbishment; but her furniture, her pictures, her bibelots, her books, and her china had obviously all moved with her from some previous abode, presumably Balnaid. The chairs and sofa were loose-covered in coral linen
,
and an ebony cabinet, its doors standing open, was lined in that same coral, and contained a collection of Famille Rose porcelain. Everywhere he looked, Noel's eye fell upon a clutter of either enviable or practical objects, the squirrel hoard of an elderly lady, gathering about her, like a store of nuts, the comforting possessions of a lifetime. Here were hand-worked cushions, a wicker basket filled with logs, a brass fender, a pair of bellows, her sewing box, her little television set, stacks of magazines, bowls of pot-pourri. As well, every horizontal surface was cluttered with small and decorative objects. Enamel boxes, jugs of fresh flowers, a copper bowl filled with purple heather, silver-framed photographs, small arrangements of Dresden china.

She was watching him. He looked at her and smiled. He said, "You follow the rules of William Morris."

"And what do you mean by that?"

"You have nothing in your house that you don't know to be useful nor think to be beautiful."

She was amused. "Who taught you that?"

"My mother."

"It's an outmoded concept."

"But still viable."

In her grate, she had lighted a little fire. On the mantelshelf were a pair of Staffordshire dogs, and over the mantelpiece . . .

He frowned, moving to inspect the picture more closely. It was an oil-painting of a child in a field of buttercups. The field was in shadow, but, beyond the field, the sun shone on rocks and sea and the distant figures of two older girls. The illusionary effect of light and colour had caught his attention, not simply because it hummed with warmth but because the technique, the factual rendering of the three-dimensional form, sprang at him with all the familiarity of a face remembered from childhood.

It had to be. Noel scarcely needed to read the signature to know who it was.

He said, in wonder, "This is a Lawrence Stern."

"How clever of you to know. I love it more than anything."

He turned to face her. "How did you come to possess it?"

"You seem astonished."

"I am. There are so few about."

"My husband gave it to me many years ago. He was in London. He saw it in the window of a gallery, and went in and bought it for me, not minding that he had to pay a great deal more than he could afford."

Noel said, "Lawrence Stern was my grandfather."

She frowned. "Your grandfather?"

"Yes. My mother's father."

"Your mother's . . . ?" She paused, still frowning, and then all at once smiled, the puzzlement gone, and her face filled with pleasure. "So that is how I knew your name! Noel Keeling. But I knew her ... I met her. . . . Oh, what has happened to Penelope?"

"She died about four years ago."

"I can't bear it. Such a lovely person. We only met once, but ..."

They were interrupted by Alexa's reappearance from Violet's kitchen, bearing the tray with the coffee jug and cups and saucers upon it.

"Alexa, this is the most extraordinary thing! Just imagine, Noel isn't a stranger at all to me, because I once met his mother . . . and we made such friends. And I always hoped so much that we would meet again, but somehow we never did. . . ."

This discovery, this revelation, the extraordinary small
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world coincidence, claimed all attention. The picnic and the birthday were, for the moment, forgotten, and Alexa and Noel sat and drank scalding coffee and listened with fascination to Vi's story.

"It was all through Roger Wimbush, the portrait painter. When Geordie came back from the war, fro
m p
rison camp, and went back to Relkirk to work, it was decided that, as chairman of the firm, he should have his portrait painted for posterity. And Roger Wimbush was given the commission. He came to Balnaid and stayed with us, and the portrait was accomplished in the conservatory, and duly hung, with some ceremony, in the Board Room at the office. As far as I know, it's still there. We made great friends, and when Geordie died, Roger wrote me such a dear letter, and sent me an invitation to the Portrait Painters' Exhibition at Burlington House. I didn't very often travel to London, but I felt the occasion deserved the long journey, so I went, and Roger met me there and showed me around. And all at once, he spied these two ladies. One was your mother, Noel, and the other, I think, an old aunt of hers whom she had brought to the exhibition as a little treat. A very old lady; tiny and wrinkled, but humming with vitality. . . ."

"Great-Aunt Ethel," said Noel, because it could have been no one else.

"That's it. Of course. Ethel Stern, and Lawrence Stern's sister."

"She died some years ago, but while she was alive she afforded us all an enormous amount of amusement."

"I can imagine it. Anyway, Roger and your mother were obviously old friends of long standing. I think she had taken him in as a lodger years before when he was a penniless young student, struggling to make his way. There was a great reunion between them, and then introductions, and I was told about the relationship with Lawrence Stern, and I was able to tell your mother about that picture. By now we were all on the best of terms, and we'd all seen all the portraits anyway, so we decided that we would have lunch together. I had a restaurant in mind, but your mother insisted that we all go back to her house and have lunch with her."

"Oakley Street."

"Absolutely. Oakley Street. We made noises about it being too much trouble, but she overrode all our objections, and the next thing we knew, all four of us were in a taxi and on our way to Chelsea. It was a beautiful day. I remember it so clearly. Very warm and sunny, and you know how pretty London can be on an early-summer day. And we had lunch in the garden, and the garden was big, and so leafy, and so sweet with the scent of lilac that it felt like being in another country, the south pf France perhaps, or Paris, with the city sound of traffic muffled by trees, and everything spattered with sunlight and shadow. There was a terrace, nicely shaded, with a table and garden chairs, and we all sat and drank chilled wine, while your mother busied herself in that big basement kitchen, from time to time appearing to chat or pour more wine, or lay a cloth on the table, and set out the knives and forks."

"What did you eat?" asked Alexa, fascinated by the picture that Vi drew for them.

"Let me see. I have to think. It was delicious, I remember that. It was exactly right, and delicious. Cold soup-gazpacho, I think-and crusty home-made bread. And a salad. And pate. And French cheese. And there was a bowl of peaches, which she had picked that morning from the tree that grew against the wall at the far end of the garden. We stayed all afternoon. We had no other engagement, or if we did, we forgot it. The hours just slid away, like an afternoon in a hazy, delicious dream. And then, I remember, Penelope and I left Ethel and Roger at the table, drinking coffee and cognac and smoking Gauloise cigarettes, and your mother took me around the garden and showed me all its delights. And as we walked, we talked, and never drew breath, and yet it is difficult to tell you what we talked about. I think she told me about Cornwall and her childhood there, and the house that they used to own, and the life that they led before the war. And it all sounded so different to my own. And when the tim
e c
ame to leave at last, I didn't want it to end. I didn't want to say goodbye. But when I finally came home again, back to Balnaid and Strathcroy, that picture, which I always loved, took on an even deeper meaning, because once I had met Lawrence Stern's daughter."

"Didn't you ever see her again?" Alexa asked.

"No. So sad. I so seldom went to London, and then, I believe, she moved to the country. We lost touch. So silly and careless of me to lose touch with someone I liked so much, felt so close to."

"What did she look like?" Alexa, naturally fascinated by this unexpected insight into Noel's family life, was avid for detail. Vi looked at Noel. "You tell her," she said.

But he couldn't. Features, eyes, lips, smile, hair eluded him. He could not have drawn them had some man put a gun to his head. What stayed, and remained with him, after four years of living without his 'mother, was her presence, her warmth, her laughter, her generosity, her contrariness, and her maddening ways, her endless cornucopia of hospitality and giving. Vi's recalling of that long-ago luncheon party, spontaneous and informal but infused with such style that she had not forgotten a single detail of the occasion, brought back the old days at Oakley Street so vividly that he found himself pierced with nostalgia for everything that he had taken so for granted and never found time to appreciate.

He shook his head. "I can't."

Vi met his eyes. And then, as though accepting and acknowledging his dilemma, did not press him further. She turned to Alexa. "She was tall and very good-looking-I thought beautiful. She had dark-grey hair, drawn back from her face into a chignon pierced with tortoise
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shell pins. Her eyes were dark, very large and lustrous, and her skin smooth and brown, as though she had always lived out of doors, like a gypsy. She wasn't in the least fashionable or chic, but she held herself s
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roudly, and that endowed her with a great elegance. She gave off an enormous charge of . . . enjoyment. An unforgettable woman." She turned back to Noel. "And you are her son. Imagine it. How strange life can be. At seventy-eight, you'd think that you'd stop being surprised, and something like this happens, and it's as though the world had only just begun."

The loch at Croy lay hidden in the hills, three miles north of the house, and accessible only by a primitive track of great steepness that wound up onto the moor in a series of precipitous hairpin bends.

It was not a natural stretch of water. Long ago, this glen, encircled by the northern hills and the towering hulk of Creagan Dubh, had been a place of remote solitude, the habitat of eagles and deer, wild cat, grouse and curlew. At Croy, there were still to be seen old sepia photographs of the glen the way it had once looked, with a burn running through it, flanked by steep banks where the rushes grew, and by the burnside the ruins of a small dwelling-house, with byres and sheep-folds reduced to roofless desolation and tumbled granite walls. But then the first Lord Balmerino, Archie's grandfather, with a fortune to spend and trout fishing in mind, decided to create for himself a loch. Accordingly, a dam was built, sturdy as a bastion, twelve feet high or more, and wide enough to allow passage for a carriage to drive along the top of it. Sluice-gates were integrated to deal with any overflow, and when the dam was completed, these sluice-gates were closed, and the burn was trapped. Slowly, the waters rose, and the abandoned croft was drowned forever. Because of the bulk of the dam wall, any person approaching it for the first time did not see the water until the last rise was crested, when the huge expanse of the loch-two miles long and a mile wide-all at once was there. Depending on the hour and the season, it glittered blue in sunshine, was tossed with leaded gre
y w
aves, or lay still as glass in the evening light, with a pale moon reflected in its mirror surface, broken from time to time by the disturbance of rising fish.

A boat-house was built, strongly constructed, and large enough to shelter two boats, with an extra apartment to one side where picnics could be enjoyed in inclement weather. But it was not only fishermen who made their way to the loch. Generations of children had claimed it as their special place. Sheep grazed on the surrounding hills, and the closely cropped grass that sloped to the water's edge made splendid places for setting up tents, playing ball games, organizing cricket matches. Blairs and Airds, with attendant young friends, had learned to cast for trout from the shores of the loch, and mastered their first swimming strokes in its icy waters; and long happy days had been spent in building rafts, or makeshift canoes, which, paddled intrepidly out into the deep water, inevitably sank.

The overloaded Subaru, in four-wheel drive, and with Virginia at the wheel, thumped and bumped up the last stretch of the track, its bonnet pointing skywards. Noel, after half an hour of total discomfort, decided that, going back, he would make the journey on foot, Virginia had opted to drive because she said, quite rightly, that she knew the way, which he did not, and Violet-also quite rightly-had been given the seat next to Virginia, with her birthday cake, in its large box, to hold on her knee. In the back, things were not so easy. Edie Findhorn, about whom Noel had heard so much, proved to be a lady of ample girth, and took up so much space that Noel was forced to take Alexa upon his knee. There she crouched, her weight growing heavier by the moment and threatening his thighs with incipient cramp, but as every bump in the road caused her to clout her head on the roof of the car, he felt that it would be churlish to add his complaints to hers.