The Country Life (15 page)

I had sat down on a bench beside the sundial by this time and – perhaps, again, due to the peculiar effect of the sun – all at once found that my daydream had delivered me, as if through a secret tunnel bored beneath a fortress wall, to the outermost, unpatrolled reaches of thought where lately I had forbidden myself to wander. The garden faded and then vanished before my eyes, and in the analgesic white light which followed it I was unexpectedly met by a vision. The vision was of a crowded street seen from high above; not an English street, but a narrow, Continental chasm. Everything was very brown and dusty and noisy. From my vantage point I could see the lacy balustrades of balconies depending high up from the elaborate, crumbling fronts of buildings; and then realized that I, too, was standing on a balcony with my fingers gripping the iron railing. I leaned perilously over the edge and saw far, far below trails of tiny, dusty cars beetling along the floor of the ravine. The sun was hot on the back of my head. I was leaning so far over that the rail dug into my stomach. The weight of a solid but indeterminate misery pressed at my back as I leaned, forcing me further over still. The blare of car horns filled my ears. My heart was thrashing in my chest with terror. Then, all of a sudden, I flipped over and fell; but to my surprise, I did not plummet to the pavement. Instead I floated, my weightless body describing elegant arcs like a fluttering leaf, and as I gently descended I looked about. One or two people stood on the balconies opposite and when they saw me they waved. I waved cheerfully back; and it must have been at around this point that I woke up, or came to, and found myself back in the rose garden.

Perhaps less than a minute had passed since I had exited so importunately from the present moment. When I returned the
loveliness of the quaint garden, momentarily forgotten, struck me with redoubled force. In this instant of recognition – whose constituent parts, memory and perception, were in this case particularly charged – I experienced the magical, elusive flash of certain happiness: something I had not felt for some time and which, arising as it did from a rapid modulation of fear to safety, provided the substance for my first, indelible identification of Franchise Farm as home.

‘What are you doing here, Stel-la?'

Martin was sitting beside me on the gravel path in his chair, his presence so complete and unheralded that it had the flavour of an apparition. His face was screwed into a grimace in the sunlight so that it seemed frozen in an attitude of rigid surprise, as if a door had been slammed on it.

‘I'm thinking,' I said. His question, insinuating as it was, demanded a fuller reply. ‘I was thinking,' I improvised, ‘of how amazing it is that this garden has been here since Elizabethan times. One imagines history to be inorganic, and yet here it is, written into the landscape.'

I was rather proud of this insight, but Martin seemed to find something funny in it.

‘Ha, ha!' he brayed, mouth agape. ‘Ha, ha!'

‘What?'

I fully expected him to repeat my comment, in a voice which would ensure that not one of its nuances was left unmocked. This feeling was not altogether new to me: I find speech a precipitous and exposing business, and often perform it with palpable ‘stage fright'; a feeling which, I don't doubt, has resulted over the years in the formality with which now I am unable to avoid expressing myself.

Martin, meanwhile, having prolonged his hilarity beyond all reasonable limits, finally gave me his reply:

‘The garden isn't
Elizabethan
, you idiot! It's a breed of rose, the Elizabethan rose. Grumps planted them.'

‘Who,' I enquired, ‘is Grumps?'

‘My grandfather,' said Martin primly, as if he were offended that I hadn't heard of him.

‘Well, I can't say I'm not disappointed,' I maintained, after a pause. ‘Although he did a good job of it.'

‘It's open to the public,' said Martin, still apparently affronted. ‘Every Saturday during the summer. It's very well known. People pay to come and look at it.'

I found this information rather surprising, suggesting as it did that the Maddens had been driven by penury to make a going concern of their own garden.

‘I think that's sad,' I said.

‘Why?'

‘Because it's a private place. I liked the thought of it being secret. Knowing that it's an exhibit spoils it.'

‘If one is fortunate enough,' pronounced Martin, ‘to possess something unique, of more than average worth, one has a duty to share it with one's fellow man.'

‘I wouldn't know about that,' I replied. ‘But if all this were mine, I don't think I'd want to share it with anyone.'

‘There you are.' Martin folded his arms with satisfaction. ‘That's why things are better off in our hands. We know how these things ought to be done.'

‘Who is “we”?' I enquired.

‘The upper classes,' said Martin, his face crumpled and white, like something botched and screwed into a ball. I caught a glimpse of the cavity of his mouth, dark and moist.

‘I do apologize,' I said sarcastically. ‘I didn't realize that was who you were.'

‘Our family,' intoned Martin, ‘has lived in this house since the seventeenth century, and in this area since long before that.'

‘Does that make you upper class?' I was becoming quite irritated, in a desultory fashion. ‘I'd have thought it just makes you
local
Anyway,' I closed my eyes and leaned back against the elaborate grid of the bench, and as it pressed into my flesh the taste of my vision lingered briefly on my tongue, ‘aren't
you a bit old to be boasting about your family? There used to be girls who did that at school. If they weren't comparing how much money their parents had, they were droning on about some old relative of theirs in a bearskin who'd got his name in the Domesday Book.'

‘My—' Through the crack of my eyelid I saw Martin's mouth, flapping like an open door in the wind. I guessed that he had been about to tell me that his ancestors were in the Domesday Book. ‘Bearskins were earlier,' he said finally. ‘Don't you know anything?'

I sat up again and opened my eyes. I knew that I had to get out of the sun immediately. My sunburn was proving to be very inconvenient, a form of incontinence. I glimpsed a wedge of shadow on the sundial in front of me, and for no reason other than idle curiosity peered at it more closely. There were numbers engraved all around its circumference, and the shadow fell exactly between a twelve and a one. It then dawned on me that this was the time. I was about to remark on what a clever thing the sundial was when I thought that Martin might laugh at me for it, my logic having a backward flavour.

‘Goodness, look at the time!' I exclaimed instead. ‘We'd better be getting back.'

‘Do we have to?' complained Martin. ‘I was having fun.'

‘I'll take that as a compliment,' I replied, getting to my feet. My head swam for an instant. ‘Personally, I always prefer to quit while I'm ahead. How do we get back to the house?'

I grasped the handles of Martin's chair and wheeled it around on its axis. Much as I pitied him for having to submit, physically at least, to my authority, there were advantages to having him chair-bound. I imagined running around the rose garden trying to catch him as he scampered off on his little legs, and almost laughed aloud. I had certainly been in the sun for far too long.

‘That way,' said Martin, pointing directly ahead.

We set off in the opposite direction to that from which we had entered the rose garden and before long came to a gate
identical to the first. I tried to work out where this would lead us, and figured that it would be somewhere to the side of the house. Martin leaned forward and opened the latch; and when I propelled him through I was surprised to see that we had entered directly what was evidently the bottom of the back garden. Turning around, I realized that the side wall of the rose garden was also the side boundary of the back garden. To our left was a queue of trees, evergreens, so dense that it was difficult to see what lay beyond them. In front and to our right was a great lawn, at the top of which was the back of the house.

‘Come on,' said Martin, jiggling up and down as if he were spurring on a horse.

I braced my back and began to push.

The back of the house was quite different from the front; although like a revolving door, some frustration in its design made it impossible to get a sense of both sides at once. Indeed, for some time as we made our slow progress up the lawn I was unable to articulate what constituted this difference, great though it was. The rear of the house seemed far older and more frail, and gave the impression of being ignorant of the monolithic grandeur of its façade, like a rich old aunt tucked out of view. It had a number of flowering vines and other greenery creeping up its walls in patterns of invasion, giving it that sprawling, colonized look which constitutes rusticity: an air of monitored decomposition, as if the house were being held on the brink of an elegant faint before it sank into the garden's arms. At the very centre of the back wall was a glass appendage, like a prosthetic ear, in the shape of a beehive; a conservatory, I soon realized, within which I could discern a muffled profusion of fronds.

The garden which surrounded this fragrant heap consisted mostly of a large expanse of lawn, although to one side I could see the municipal architecture of the swimming pool, its undisturbed, unnatural blue lying flat on the grass like a fallen
piece of sky. The lawn itself curiously sported a pattern of stripes – a piece of horticultural frivolity, I guessed, related to the cutting of hedges into the shapes of chickens or dogs – which rolled out towards us in a fan from the distant point of the conservatory. At the far end of the lawn was an arrangement of tables and chairs, upon one of which I could just make out the familiar form of Pamela. On another of the chairs sat a woman I did not recognize. From that distance the scene appeared very small, and the oppressive heat gave it an atmosphere of calcification which reminded me of the little plaster figurines which had populated my doll's house when I was a child. It was odd and not entirely pleasant to remember this object, having not thought about it for years. The feeling that one's own memories have become unfamiliar can give rise to the suspicion that one's identity is malfunctioning and inefficient, like a badly run office. I had a sudden picture of pink plaster hams, and tiny plates to which coloured food was glued. Mr Madden appeared from the side of the house, as elliptical as a butler. Roy trotted heavily behind him. He was carrying a tray and when he reached the table he bent stiffly with it from the waist, distributing glasses which winked in the sunlight.

‘Look who's here,' said Martin from below. I was surprised to hear his voice, for although I had been pushing him along all of this time, I had grown so used to the action that the wheelchair, and to some degree Martin's presence, seemed to have become a part of my own physical remit.

‘Who?' I said, my voice lower than his, for we were now within fifty yards or so of the group.

‘My fucking sister,' Martin volubly replied. ‘Come to see her mummy. Can't keep her away.'

‘Does she live far?' I enquired, toiling up a slight rise in the lawn.

‘Just a stone's throw,' said Martin in a fluting voice. ‘She wanted to stay near her
mummy.
I had hoped Dewek would
take her away to Papua New Guinea so that they'd both be eaten by savages. Or at least as far as Tonbridge.'

‘Who's Derek?'

‘Dewek,' amended Martin. ‘Dewek is Caroline's damp face flannel of a husband.'

‘There's no need to be unkind,' I said.

‘What do you know, anyway?' said Martin, drumming his hands abstractedly on the arms of his chair. ‘Stel-la.'

Pamela had caught us in her sights and raised her hand in a salute of acknowledgement, using the other hand to shield her eyes, as if we were travellers sighted across a lonely reach of desert.

‘Hi-i!' she called from afar, stretching the word in her customary fashion, her face split by a smile.

‘Hi!' I called back.

Pamela was wearing a pea-green bikini and a pair of gold sandals. Around her neck glittered a thick gold chain, like a rope. The effect, as she sat glass in hand, was odd, as if she were at a party but had forgetfully come out in her underwear. The other woman – Martin's sister, as I now knew, although she did not resemble him at all – was wearing a dress patterned with vivid tropical flowers. She was fairly plump, not in the dense, landscaped fashion of Mrs Barker, but rather as if she had been filled too full and had spilled over. She had straight fair hair cut in a kind of thatch above her forehead, the colour, if nothing else about her appearance, favouring Pamela. She watched our approach closely through dark glasses, like a secret agent. Even from a distance I took a more or less instant dislike to her. There was something despotic about her solid, suspicious face and bulk. I was beset by an image of her in army uniform, setting about some cringing cadet with a truncheon.

‘How did you get on?' said Pamela, as we drew up to the table. The skin about her eyes looked very wrinkled in the sun, and her pupils glinted like tiny jewels kept in a crumpled handkerchief.

‘Fine,' I said.

‘Mar-Mar?' Pamela leaned forward slightly and concentrated her gaze on Martin. She was not, I decided, speaking in some alien dialect, but rather was deploying, or even inventing, a nickname. I was irritated by her concern, implying as it did a certain untrustworthiness or even outright menace on my part. ‘How about you?'

‘I'm
fine
,' said Martin crossly, screwing up his face at her. He looked unwell in the strong light, his face as bleached and savage as a piece of rock.

‘Hello, Martin,' said Caroline deliberately. Her voice startled me, for despite her looming presence her inertia had caused me to forget her, as one could forget a large mountain. ‘How are you? I'm fine, how are you, Caroline? Oh, fine, thank you, kind of you to ask.'