The Dower House (11 page)

They were funny sort of chicken runs because there were no nesting boxes or places for laying eggs or anything. They ran the full length of the garden wall, about a hundred yards. They were roofed in corrugated iron, about ten foot high where it butted the wall, sloping down to about seven foot in the front, which was ten foot out from the wall. The front was of wire-netting down to knee height, then corrugated iron down to the ground. The floor was all sawdust, brown with age. At least, May hoped it was age. Someone had put up washing lines near the entrance. Two off-white sheets were hanging there, bone dry. May saw that they had been turned sides-to-middle, not very expertly in her view.

They stepped out from behind those sheets and saw at last what they were doing with those planks. An old car chassis had been pushed into these chicken runs at one time and Mr Breit was showing Sam how to get it moving, using them as levers.

‘Don't you!' Sam was pushing the man away. ‘I can do it. You watch.'

Felix rested on his length of wood like a warrior on his spear.

Sam inserted his lever under one of the flat tyres and, crouching beneath it, heaved mightily. Nothing moved.

May was about to cry out that he would hurt himself when he gave a shriek of triumph and rested. ‘It moved!' he shouted. ‘You saw it.'

‘I saw it,' Felix said, ‘but . . .'

‘I did it. On my own. I did it, didn't I?'

‘You did, Sam. But that only makes me wonder – are you sure you want to come and live here? Is this the
right
place for you?'

‘Yes!' the boy shouted, again at the top of his voice. ‘This is the bestest place.'

‘The bestest place,' Hannah called out, slipping from her mother's hand and running to join him. ‘Me! Me!'

May, knowing a fight was about to occur, ran to separate them. But the girl had barely begun to tug at her brother's lever when Felix offered her his own. It was much too heavy for her but he let her wrestle a bit before he stepped behind her to help. Together, while May looked on, the three of them got the chassis to move several inches more.

‘What is this place?' she asked when they tired of it.

‘We use it for hanging up laundry now. It
was
a pheasant run. They grew hundreds of pheasants here – fed them, admired them, smiled at their plumpness. Then shoo! Shoo!' He flapped his hands toward the coppice beyond the walled garden. ‘And . . . bang-bang!'

May knew his story and was embarrassed. ‘The Wilsons and the Palmers . . .' she asked. ‘Are they serious – all this community talk?'

‘It's all still theoretical. We've already given up the idea of a communal kitchen and one communal meal a day.'

‘'Cos that Palmer woman can't abide that Johnson woman?'

‘No flies on you!'

‘It stood out a mile. I asked Mister Wilson if I could take a bit of the walled garden to grow our vegetables in, like an allotment, you know?'

‘We will have a community vegetable garden,' Felix said. ‘All contribute – all take. As you see, it's already dug and manured.'

‘Where?' She stared through the wooden rails of the ornamental oak gate that led into the walled garden. ‘I can't see it.'

‘Precisely,' Felix replied. ‘We have been here a month. The weeds are soon shoulder-high. The potatoes are like forests in all the fields around. And we have not dug a single . . . what d'you call it? A spade's-worth?'

‘A spit.' She laughed. ‘Don't ask me why.'

‘I don't think our “community spirit” will weigh too heavily. On any of us.'

‘We all learned to muck in together during the war,' she said vaguely. ‘I doubt Arthur and me need any lessons.' She turned away from the walled garden and stared out across the fields. ‘Where exactly is the boundary?'

‘The iron railing beyond the line of pine trees. We're allowed to walk wherever we want though. And we can gather wood in the coppice and cut up any of these fallen trees. There's a path to Dormer Green between that line of lindens – you'll probably get to know it well.'

She looked at him sharply.

‘That'll be your childrens' way to school.'

She scanned the landscape with new eyes. ‘I'd like to see that.' She looked dubiously at the ploughed field. ‘Can we?'

‘I'll show you the way. There's a gate somewhere in all that undergrowth.'

May took Hannah on her shoulders. Sam toughed it out for several dozen increasingly arduous paces and then yielded; once on Felix's shoulders he kicked him hard and cried, ‘Giddyup!'

Felix obliged until a hidden vine nearly brought him low; it frightened Sam into behaving sensibly after that.

May complimented him on his English; she now felt much more comfortable in his company.

He explained about living in America until he was seven.

‘Fortunately you didn't pick up the accent,' she commented, adding hastily, ‘you've got a nice
foreign
accent, instead.'

They negotiated a patch of brambles and calf-high nettles in silence.

‘You were in one of those camps,' she said.

‘Yes. Mauthausen.'

‘My Arthur filmed one of those places on the day they liberated it.'

‘Belsen, probably. That was in the British sector.'

‘Wouldn't it be weird if it was the same one, though!'

‘Doesn't he say?'

‘He won't talk about it. Or can't. I don't . . . I mean I wouldn't press it.'

They arrived at the gate, which was, in fact, a swing-stile that would pass one person at a time.

‘D'you think that's right?' she asked when they were all through.

They were into parkland now, where the grass was cropped by sheep, who gazed at them with placid wariness, and rabbits, whose white scuts and panic-stamping filled the panorama.

‘Everyone must find their own way,' Felix said. ‘If you mean do I refuse to talk about it, no. It's hard to think it was real now – except in dreams. This is the path. It must once have been the family's way to church.'

‘Dreams!' May said. ‘That must be terrible – not being able to wake up from it.'

‘Waking up is like a new liberation, though.' Felix stared across the fields and coppices ahead of them. ‘Dormer Green church,' he said, pointing out the spire. He put Sam down and let him run free. Hannah struggled to be let down and then tottered after him.

May said, ‘It'll be quite a walk in the rain. You don't want to talk about it. I understand.'

‘It's not that,' he assured her. ‘It's trying to explain why it
isn't
terrible. Why it stops being terrible after a few days . . .'

‘This tree's empty!' Sam cried from a little way ahead of them along the path.

‘Hollow,' May said when she came up to it. ‘D'you want to go inside it?'

Felix lifted the boy and set him down inside the trunk, which was, in fact, a cylinder of living wood, about three inches thick and furnished with bark on both sides. Her mother did the same for Hannah.

They stood inside, jostling and giggling until Felix went round the far side and put his lips near a hole where a branch had once sprouted. ‘I'm so old!' he moaned, putting on the quavers and wheezes of an old man.

Hannah screamed in happy fright and cried, ‘Again!'

Sam stared up uncertainly at his mother.

‘It's the tree talking,' she said. ‘Didn't you know some hollow trees can talk.'

‘And I'm bored!' Felix added in the same geriatric tones. ‘Five hundred years! Day and night . . . wind and rain . . . sun and snow . . . I'm so
old
!'

Fascinated, May watched him assume the part, saw him shrivel into himself, saw his knuckles become gnarled and rheumatic . . . and she wanted to fling her arms round him and mother him – or something.

Saturday, 17 May 1947

It was a local train to Hemel Hempstead, fussy, self-important on skirts of steam, and slow. The coaches must have been built back in the twenties – no corridors, just six-a-side compartments, each with its own slammer of a door. The wartime years had left them battered and smutty. Through its grimy window Felix could just make out Faith in the last compartment of the last carriage – Ladies Only, No Smoking.

He whistled and waved.

She sat up with a jolt, grabbed her bag, and made it to the platform just as the guard blew his whistle and leaped aboard the caboose – no . . . the guard's van – at the tail. She laughed across the five or six yards that separated them. ‘That was a bit of luck – spotting you!'

She was wearing a white lace bolero over a pale floral print dress – couture, he felt certain – a cutely angled white beret, and white kid gloves that matched her white leather shoes. No jewelry . . . oh, except for a little brooch above her left breast pocket. She seemed to float up the stairs and across the footbridge; he wondered if she had been schooled as a mannequin before she took that secretarial course.

‘Were you expecting the train on
this
platform?' she asked as she joined him.

‘Steps,' he said, knowing he ought to say more.

‘Oh. Heart . . . or something?'

‘That sort of thing. The pony and trap's just outside.' The porter tore off half her ticket and tipped Felix a wink. ‘Hope this weather holds, sir,' he said.

The brooch was a silver lozenge, set about with small diamonds framing a round glass window behind which a decorative letter
F
was embroidered, in what was surely human hair, on a pale blue silk. ‘F for Felix,' she said, following his eyes. ‘That's why I chose it for today. Actually, it was my Great-Aunt Frederika's.'

He helped her up into the trap and said he'd walk with the pony to the top of the hill. ‘I can't imagine having a great-aunt,' he said. ‘My father had a brother – Tony Bright, b, r, i, g, h, t – born Anton but he Americanized it. We lived near him in New Jersey, when I was about four.'

After a pause she said, ‘One hesitates to ask any European
DP
about their family. Have you tried getting in touch with him over there?'

‘Like – Hey Uncle Tony . . . remember me? Here I am – penniless and in need of some pretty expensive hunks of stone . . .'

‘Penniless!' she sneered. ‘Anyway, he might be a millionaire. Aren't you even curious about him?'

How to explain? Explain that his grandfather, an anti-Semitic Jew-turned-Protestant, to whom Hitler had been a god, was dead . . . that his mother was dead and his father was almost certainly dead, too . . . that he, Felix, had walked out on his father – his only known relative in the whole of Europe – in 1937 and had completely and wilfully lost touch with him from that day on? He said, ‘We are not . . . or I probably should say
were not
a loving family. My father quarrelled with my grandfather and I, in turn, fell out with him. Hitler did the rest.'

‘I'm sorry. I shouldn't pry. But I do want to know a lot more about you than I know now. God, I'm gasping for a fag – will that pony mind if I smoke?'

He laughed. ‘Feel free.'

‘You don't?'

‘I used to – before I got
TB
.'

‘You've had
TB
?' she asked excitedly as she extracted a Balkan Sobranie from a gold cigarette case lacquered coral red. ‘Are you cured?'

‘They said yes, but it leaves its mark behind. Why the sudden interest?'

‘Well!' She took out a red-lacquered lighter and puffed her cigarette into life. ‘They're bringing in a new law saying that every employer of a certain size must also employ a cripple or someone with a handicap. We're close to that limit now. Fogel's already got his eye on a sweet little dwarf who could be put on the switchboard but if your
TB
would count, we could postpone the evil day at least until the Modern Art Series is over.'

‘It would be doubly nice to be
doubly
useful,' Felix said solemnly.

‘You're not useful at all yet. Have you come up with an idea for your sculpture?'

‘Is he getting impatient, then?' They had reached the top of the hill and Felix swung himself up beside her. ‘Keep the reins if you like – you obviously know what you're doing. Why d'you smile?'

‘I've had ponies since before I could walk. I have a magnificent hunter now – Jupiter – who's getting fed up with Rotten Row.'

‘How often d'you ride him there?'

‘Every morning before breakfast, every evening after work. I used to hunt him with the Badminton . . . still do on the odd weekend in the season. But he wants more. He deserves more.' She gazed right and left. ‘This country looks very promising. What's the local hunt like?'

‘I haven't the foggiest. You must be quite well off.'

‘Ha!' The note was half-angry, half-resigned. ‘You haven't made a single inquiry about me at all, have you!'

‘I've wondered about you,' he replied calmly. ‘And I have a stack of questions I'm going to ask of my future colleagues at Manutius – whenever I dare show my face there again . . . when I have my sculpture planned.'

She was instantly placated. ‘Well, we can short-circuit all
that
here and now.'

‘This is Barwick Green,' he said.

‘Yes, it's lovely, I'm sure! Fire away.'

‘What d'you really want out of life? Surely not to play Crito to Fogel's Socrates for ever?'

‘
Whoooew!
Ask me an easier one first. Like – why don't I bring Jupiter out to the Dower House occasionally and ride around our park?'

‘Riding . . .' he murmured. ‘Riding is good.'

Their eyes dwelled in each other's for one long moment of full-scale audit, after which he knew that his most urgent question of the day (and, he suspected, her most urgent question, too) had been satisfactorily answered. Her eyes danced and a new glow seemed to suffuse her skin. ‘What do I really-really-really want to do in life?' she mused. ‘I want to shape something. I want to
make
something . . . and I want to control it. If I stay in publishing, I want to start something absolutely new, something no one has ever thought of before but which, when they see it being done, they'll say, “Why didn't I think of that?”'