The Facts of Life (10 page)

And still she could not answer. She felt him lie with a resigned sigh on the rug beside her, smelled the faint tang of his sweat and listened to the soothing rustle of him turning the pages to find his place in a novel. He had read a few pages when Thomas came back. The two of them spoke softly for fear of waking her.

‘I say.’

‘What?’

‘Congratulations. Sally told me the good news. You are a chump to have kept so quiet. Made me feel a fool. I hate surprises.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I’m … I’m very glad,
mein Lieber
.’

‘Thank you, Thomas.’

‘Have you set a date?’

‘Well, Sally’s job finishes in August.’

‘Good. Long engagements are pointless. Where will you live?’

‘We’ll find somewhere. Thomas?’

‘Yes?’

‘Would you – I’m not sure how you say it in English – give me away?’

Thomas gave a soft, affectionate chuckle.

‘Be your best man, you mean, your
Trauzeuge
? I’d be delighted, you fool. You could use the college chapel, if you liked. No-one around in August and anyway, I’m sure you’ve the right. The chaplain’s – er – he’s very sympathetic’

‘I’d better ask Sally.’

‘Yes.’

Edward patted Sally’s hand as he spoke. His touch freed her as from a charm, and she felt able to stretch and sit up. Blinking, she looked at the two men.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Nodded off.’

‘Sleeping Beauty,’ said Thomas and kissed her hand, rather ostentatiously she thought.

‘I suppose we should be getting home,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t the punt have to be back by four?’

On the way home, Thomas suddenly burst out with another round of congratulations.

‘I’ve had an idea,’ he added. ‘I’m going to give you the car as a wedding present. How’s that?’

Amidst their delighted protestations that it was far too generous and surely he used it some time and what about emergencies and so on, Sally had her second revelation of the day. Thomas had insisted they change places going back so that she should have the view. She could see the ever so subtly beseeching way he was watching Edward’s exertions with the punt pole. Tenderness welled up from the base of her spine, bursting out in an almost painful smile. She smiled at the uselessly clever, lonely man before her and thought, ‘You love him.’

She sensed that the sad grin he gave her back expressed the closest approximation he would dare to an affirmation. Thomas, she resolved, should have a place in their married life.

The good weather continued through the week and they found themselves on a second excursion the following weekend. This time Dr Pertwee was the instigator. Sally had sent her a letter, announcing their engagement, and she had responded at once with an invitation to lunch in her rooms on Saturday. Her congratulations were heartfelt, even a little tearful. She gave them sherry then served up a characteristically bitty lunch of Spam, egg salad, pickled beetroot slices and a Stilton so strong it was nearly mobile.

‘I have some news too,’ she announced, handing out frugal third shares of a tinned treacle pudding she had heated inside the kettle. ‘Not,’ she laughed, ‘I hasten to add, another engagement. No. I’m going away. I’ve decided the time has come.’

‘What fun,’ Sally said, ‘A holiday?’

‘In a way,’ Dr Pertwee told her. ‘But a long one. I’m retiring.’

‘Forgive me,’ Edward put in, ‘But I thought you already had.’

‘I’m retiring, young man, from the
world
.’

Neither Sally nor Edward knew quite what to say. Sally stood to take the kettle and set about making them a pot of tea.

‘Properly speaking,’ Dr Pertwee went on, ‘I’m retiring from the vexatious world of men. I’m joining the women at Corry.’

‘The island?’ asked Edward.

‘That’s right. You remember, don’t you, Sally? Off the Dorset coast. That rather saintly woman from St Maud’s went there – Professor Carson. Bridget Carson.’

Sally returned to the table with tea and cups.

‘But I thought you were an agnostic,’ she said, frowning.

‘So I am, dear. And so I shall continue, barring miracles. But that doesn’t seem to be a problem with them. Corry is a very unorthodox community – not like a nunnery at all. One of their number penned a tract prescribing division by gender as the cure for all society’s modern ills. And they house a Buddhist and a Communist vegetarian. Not in the same room, though,’ she chuckled. ‘No, I shan’t be becoming a Bride of Christ at my great age. The Mother Superior, Lady Agnes Bowers, wrote to me out of the blue this week. One of the sisters has been gathered, it seems, to the Great Dormitory in the Sky, so they now have a rather nice vacant room with a view of the sea. My name was put forward by several of the women, including the saintly Professor Carson.’

‘Will you be happy there?’ Sally asked, still uncertain.

‘Could you pour, dear?’ their hostess asked Edward. ‘My old wrists can’t handle that pot when it’s full.’ She turned her face towards Sally, although concentrating her gaze on a crumb she was chasing off the tablecloth with the side of her palm. ‘Well happiness was ever a moot point. I should certainly be happier there than in some ghastly rest home. I know I could crumble away contentedly on my own – plenty of people here seem to – but the peace would be most beneficial and I could learn to keep bees, which is something that has always fascinated me. Apiculture is the island’s principal source of income, you know,’ she told Edward, like some benign geography tutor. ‘There’ll be a kind of liberation in leaving all my books and business behind and making a late, fresh start in a new, more practical world. I suppose the communal meals with some pious creature reading aloud from improving texts might take a little getting used to, but I usually read when I eat alone and it would be better than the din of everyone chattering at once, the way I fear a group of educated women might tend to. So,’ she sipped her tea, ‘I’ve told them yes and I shall be taking up residence – bag and baggage – at the end of August. Which sadly means I shall have to miss witnessing your first months of wedded bliss.’ She pulled a comical-sad face at Edward, who smiled back at her.

‘I’ll miss you,’ Sally said slowly. ‘I’ve always thought of you as my second mother.’

Edward glanced at her, wanting to take her hand. He wished, guiltily, it were her real mother who was moving away so completely.

‘I would hope that by now, I’d become a sort of friend as well,’ Dr Pertwee replied.

Too moved to speak, Sally merely smiled and kissed her cheek. Her eyes were large with tears. He saw that Dr Pertwee was determined not to let Sally make her mawkish. Her tone was bracing.

‘Anyway, you can come and
see
me.’ She patted Sally’s hand then thought to reach out and touch Edward’s arm as well. ‘You can
both
come and see me, you poor, untried young people. We have an open day once a year, or twice. I forget. Now, Edward, were you serious in your offer of taking the old crone for an outing in your marital motor?’

‘I certainly was. Where would you like to go?’ he asked.

‘Ely?’ Sally suggested.

‘That would be nice, dear, but then we’d be forced to endure evensong and I was rather thinking I might pay my last respects to The Roundel.’

‘But of course,’ Edward told her. ‘Where is it?’

‘You drive out past Mildenhall towards Methwold. It’s near St Oswald’s church. Down some tiny roads. I’ll know the way when I see it.’

In the Wolseley, Dr Pertwee sat up in front beside Edward, fluttering her hands in excitement as they passed old, familiar sights or new, surprising ones, and calling out comments to Sally in her soft tones.

The house was unlike anything Edward had ever seen, though he said at once that it reminded him of a cathedral chapter house. Its twelve sides gave it an almost circular appearance. Its small red bricks and pantiled roof were the only concessions to vernacular fenland style. A small hillock raised it slightly above the astonishing flatness round about, and a thickly overgrown walled garden shielded its lower windows from public gaze and winter winds. Not that there could ever be much public in such an eerie, isolated spot. The nearby village comprised no more than six houses and a church. The nearest building was a huge brick barn which looked older than anything else there.

‘Sally, if you don’t mind.’ Dr Pertwee took a large iron key from her bag. ‘The lock’s a little stiff. You may have to jiggle it.’

Sally jumped out, unlocked the gates and Edward drove in. Brambles dragged cruelly along the car’s painted flanks. What had been a steep gravel drive was almost buried beneath weeds and moss. He ground to a halt rather than battle on.

‘When were you last here?’ he asked, astonished.

‘Oh,’ the old woman said airily, waving a hand, ‘Years’ ago, now. It was with Bridget Carson. I remember her car was very new and she was most concerned about it overheating so we drove at a snail’s pace. It must have been at least five years before the war, anyway: Let’s leave the car down here and walk up.’

Sally rejoined them and she and Edward walked up the hillock with Dr Pertwee between them, shielding her from the vicious lashing of thorny stems.

‘You’re right to talk of chapter houses,’ Dr Pertwee said. ‘The chapter house at Wells was said to be the inspiration, along with the Medici chapel in Florence because the designers had recently completed the Grand Tour. Personally I have always subscribed to its complete originality. The architects were women, you see, so people have always been at pains to dismiss the whole project as somehow derivative. My five-times-great aunt and her unmarried niece they were. Women designing buildings was unheard of then. It’s pretty rare now. Men usually build in squares, of course. Assertive squares and self-important rectangles. Domes and circles have always had a suspect, popish and distinctly female air to them – one thinks of the Radcliffe Camera, and the follies at Stowe – all very well, but hardly suitable for home and family. Even the British Library’s circle is contained and mastered by rectangles – and St Paul’s
and
St Peter’s – like inspiration brought to heel by rationality.’

They climbed up a short flight of steps to reach the front door. This was built into a gothic arch to echo the mossy, gothic windows let into the walls at even intervals. Dr Pertwee produced a second key from her bag and, with a helping push from Edward’s shoulder, let them in.

A small panelled lobby led to a surprising galleried hall which reached up to the second storey’s painted dome. Rooms led off the hall, at equidistant points, like slices of a cake. Their arrangement was echoed in the lower-ceilinged rooms above and by the store-rooms, kitchen and larders in the basement. The circularity was not entirely fanciful. Two single women, who had spent the greater part of their fortune on building costs, could not afford much in the way of staff or fuel. So, the interconnecting rooms followed the course of the sun. A breakfast room led to a morning room to a sitting room to a dining room to a study. Only one fire at a time would have to be made up, its hot coals preceding the inhabitants in a lidded brass bucket on their quiet daily passage through the succession of chambers. Rooms dictated the pattern of their day as strictly as the motions of sun and moon did the hours of worship in a convent. A housemaid’s labour was halved at every turn, with cunningly disguised storage areas for linen, candles, fuel and cleaning equipment. A dumb waiter brought food by the directest route from the kitchen to a tiny servery off the dining room. The enlightened architects had even thought to let large, low windows into the kitchen quarters to give their staff an equal share in the view of the garden.

Dr Pertwee explained that she had not lived in the place for over fifteen years and that some distant cousins had long since made inroads into her stocks of furniture. What remained – some of it beautiful, if battered – was dusty and cobwebbed. There was a sweet smell of damp everywhere and a chill, despite the warmth outside. But the spirit of the place survived; inspired and invigorating.

Edward was enchanted, as he had never been by the grand country houses to which Thomas had taken him in the surrounding counties. Dr Pertwee opened an old steamer trunk that had been left in the hall, and began to lift out the antiquated dresses it contained to show Sally. The women laughed and gasped over the old fabrics, holding up their beaded and glistening surfaces like so many precious relics.

Edward left them and climbed the narrow flight of stairs that curved up to the floor above. Despite the overgrown shrubs outside, the house was intensely sunny. Light spilled into the hall from a grimy lantern window at the dome’s apex. Clearly rain did too; there were greenish damp patches on the surrounding plasterwork and what appeared to be ferns growing on some of the lantern’s glazing bars. He walked around the gallery, smiling at the crudely painted cherubs and clouds overhead and peering through open doors into sparsely furnished bedrooms. He investigated a bathroom whose massive fittings, including a free-standing, claw-footed bath, appeared to date from before the Great War. He played a few, wheezing bars of a Lutheran chorale on a harmonium that stood, incongruously, on the other side of the room, then he turned to walk around the gallery. He looked down on the women and ran a curious finger along the thick handrail of the balustrade, revealing a rich mahogany gloss beneath the dust.