The Grandmothers (16 page)

Lunch over, they all piled into cars and drove off some miles to a famous tea-room, where they parked, and everyone went walking again, but Victoria and Mary, who insisted on staying with her mother.

‘Poor Ma,’ said Mary, acutely, and her eyes were full of tears. ‘But I love you always.’

Supper was the same. This time Jessy had cooked stew, which Victoria liked and a big fruit tart had been bought at the tea-room to bring home.

Saturday night. Another night to go. By now Victoria was feeling like a criminal. They knew she was not enjoying herself, though had no idea just how much she was hating it, how she feared it. The spider was back on her wall and it had fled when she stamped her foot at it, into the crack, where it bided its time. She tried to keep her eyes on it, but moths had flown in, before she shut the window tight. A big moth crouched on a wall, making a shadow. She had last seen that hooded shape, a frightening shadow on a wall, in a film about Dracula,

Next morning she went down early, with her suitcase. She did not know how she would get to the station but somehow she would. She found Alice, already up, drinking tea.

‘Do you hate it?’ Alice asked.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘I’m sorry’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No, I wish I could live here for always, never leave.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Victoria feebly.

‘Yes, it’s true. Edward can’t leave London yet but we will buy a house in the country and then we’ll live m it.’

‘A house like this? Victoria looked incredulous.

‘No, bigger. More comfortable.’ She looked kindly at Victoria and said gently, ‘Don’t mind them. I know they are a bit overwhelming.’

‘It’s not them,’ said Victoria. ‘It’s this place.’

Absolute incomprehension: Alice frowned and was perturbed. Victoria seemed about to cry.

‘I wish I could go home,’ said Victoria, like a child. And then, as an adult, said, ‘I would, only I don’t want Mary to be ashamed of me.’

‘She wouldn’t be. She’s a nice little girl, if there ever was one. Samantha adores her. I tell you what. I’ll drive you to the station and I’ll tell them you don’t feel well.’

‘That’s not a lie,’ said Victoria.

And so Victoria got into Edward and Alice’s car and was driven through the early morning countryside to the station.

Victoria had never driven, had never had to, and the skill and speed of Alice was depressing her. She was actually saying to herself, ‘I3 ut there are things I am good at.’

At the station, Alice took the bag and went before to the booking office, bought a ticket, said, ‘There’ll be a train in half an hour.’

The two stood together, waiting. Victoria had understood that this young woman, who so intimidated her, meant her well, but - did that matter? What mattered very much was that she liked Mary.

‘I feel a real fool,’ she said humbly. ‘I know what the Staveney’s will think. I ought to be grateful - and, well, that’s all.’

‘Poor Victoria. I’m sorry. I’ll explain to them.’ And as the train came in she actually kissed Victoria, as if she meant it. ‘It takes all sorts,’ she added, with a little pleased smile at her attempt at definition. ‘I don’t think they’d ever understand you don’t like the country.’

‘I hate it, hate it,’ Victoria said, violently, and got into the train that would carry her away - for ever, if she had her way.

Mary came home a few days later. Victoria saw the child’s bleak look around the little flat, criticising what Victoria had greeted with such relief: a bare sufficiency, and what there was, in its proper place. And then Mary stood at the window looking down, down, into the concrete vistas and Victoria did not have to ask what it was she missed.

Mary kept saying, rushing to embrace her mother ‘You’re my Ma and I’ll love you always.’ Bessie and Victoria exchanged grim-enough smiles, and then Mary forgot about it.

Thomas took Mary to concerts of African music, twice, but she thought they were too loud. Like her mother, she wanted things to be quiet and seemly.

Then Victoria was invited to an evening meal at the Staveney’s, ‘preferably without Mary - and anyway it will be too late for her, won’t it?’ This, from people who had her up to all hours in Dorset. ‘Without Dickson’ could be taken as read. Victoria put on her nicest outfit, and found herself with a full complement of Staveney’s, at the supper table. Undercurrents, some well understood by Victoria, others not at all, flowed about and around Jessy, Lionel, Edward, Alice and Thomas. Lionel at once opened with, ‘I wonder what you’d think if we suggested Mary went to a different school?’

This was Lionel, who had insisted on both his sons going through the ordeal of that bad school, Beowulf.

Victoria was not afraid of Lionel - she was of Jessy - and did not find it hard to enquire, ‘Then, you’ve changed your mind about schools, is that it?’

At this Jessy let out a snort, of a connubial kind, meant to be noted, like putting up your hand at a meeting to register Nay.

‘You could say our father has changed his mind,’ said Thomas.

‘Yes, you could say that.’ said Edward.

‘I’m not saying I was wrong about you two,’ pronounced Lionel, flinging his silvery mane about while he speared roast potatoes judiciously on to his plate,

‘You wouldn’t ever admit it,’ said Jessy, confronting him, while the concentrated exasperation of years of disputation flared her nostrils. ‘When have you ever admitted you were wrong about anything?’

“Isn’t it a bit late for this altercation?’ enquired Edward.

‘For better or worse,’ said Thomas. ‘But the birds in your nest couldn’t agree.’

‘Oh, worse, worse,’ said Jessy at once, ‘of course worse.’ But from her look at Thomas it could be seen that what she meant was her bitter acknowledgement that his highest ambition was to manage a pop group. ‘As for agreeing, no, we never agreed about that, never, never.’

‘Okay,’ said Thomas, ‘I’ll accept your verdict. I am the worse and Edward is the better,”

‘At least the gap between you two was wide enough for you not to quarrel - that really would have been the last straw.’

This spat ended here, because Edward was pouring wine for Victoria, which she didn’t much like. She put her hand over the glass, and then, since a few drops had splashed, licked the back of her hand.

‘There,’ said Lionel. ‘You do like wine.’

‘You should have some, it does you good,’ said Jessy. ‘The Victorians knew their stuff. At the slightest hint of wasting away or brain fever or any of their ghastly diseases, out came the claret.’

‘Port,’ said Lionel.

‘Best Burgundy,’ said Edward. ‘Like this. Best is always best. If I had been asked - for after all I wasn’t given a choice, was I, father? - I’d have said no. I do not have pleasant memories of that school. It was your school, Victoria, I know …’

At this reminder to her that he did not remember the event which was so present and alive in her mind, tears came into Victoria’s eyes.

She made her voice steady, and said, ‘Yes, it’s not a good place. And it’s worse since I was there. Since we were there,’ she addressed Thomas.

‘There was a stabbing there last week,’ remarked Jessy, aiming this at her ex.

‘Which brings me to my point again,’ said Lionel, addressing Victoria. ‘Suppose we send Mary to a good school? I have to say that there is disagreement in the ranks . .’

‘When is there not?’ said Jessy,

‘Some of us think - I, for one - that Mary could go to a boarding school.’

‘A boarding school?’ And now Victoria was shocked. She knew that people like the Staveney’s did send their children, when they were still little, to boarding school. She thought it heartless.

‘I told you,’ said Thomas. ‘Of course Victoria says no to a boarding school.’

‘Yes,’ Victoria bravely said, smiling gratefully at Thomas, who smiled back, ‘I say no to a boarding school.’ For a tiny moment the current between them was sweet and deep, and they remembered that for a whole summer they had felt two against the world.

Alice broke in with, ‘I was at boarding school and I loved it.’

‘Yes, but you were thirteen,’ said Edward.

Who then of the Staveney’s, would agree to Mary being sent off to the cold exile of hoarding school? Alice and Lionel.

‘Very well, then,’ said Edward. ‘No boarding school. Well, not yet. Meanwhile there’s a good girls’ school, not far, it would be a few stops on the Tube and a short walk.’

Victoria was thinking, She’ll have a bad time. She’ll be with girls who have money and the things the Staveney’s have, and she’ll come home to … it would certainly ask a lot of Mary’s kind heart: two worlds, and she would have to fit in to both of them.

Victoria said to Lionel, who was the author of this plan, which in fact fulfilled her dreams for Mary, ‘I couldn’t say no, how could I? It will be such a big thing for Mary’ And now she dared to turn to Thomas, reminding them all that he was after all the child’s father. ‘What do you say, Thomas? It’s for you to say, too.’

‘Yeah,’ said Thomas. ‘Yeah. That’s exactly right.’ Here his belligerent look at his father, and his brother, told them that he was feeling - as usual - belittled. ‘Yeah, it is for me to say too. And I say, Victoria should have the deciding vote. Providing Mary doesn’t go to Beowulf, that’s the main thing.’

Victoria said, ‘If I say no, I could never forgive myself. Hut I’d like to talk it all over with - she’s not my sister, but I think of her as.’

Bessie heard what Victoria had to tell her, nodding and smiling
told you so. She said, ‘They’ll get Mary away from you, but that’s not how they’ll see it.’p>

A central fact was there, out in the open, still unvoiced, with its potentialities for pain and gain. Mary had spent a month with the Staveney’s, and that experience had made it urgent for her to be rescued from her environment and be sent to a good school.

‘Well,’ said Bessie, ‘she’s going to come out the other end educated. Which is more than can be said about Beowulf

‘You went there and you do well enough,’ said Victoria.

‘You know what I mean.’

They were back at what was not being said. For one thing, it was Mary’s way of speaking, which was very far from the Staveney’s. Thomas might speak badly, bis phoney American, or his cockney, as he called it, but she had never heard a cockney - who were they when they were at home? - talk like that. And the Staveney’s spoke posh, and Thomas too, most of the time. Mary’s voice was ugly compared to theirs.

‘She’ll have a hard time of it,’ said Bessie. ‘There’s no pretending she won’t.’

‘I know,’ said Victoria, thinking that she had had a long hard time of it, and yet here she was, she had survived it. Bessie had had a better time, because of Phyllis being her mother, but she was having a hard enough time now - and she would survive it too.

She wrote to Thomas, asserting his rights, ‘Dear Thomas, I agree to your kind suggestion. Please tell your father and your mother thank you for me. It won’t be easy for Mary but I’ll try and explain it all to her.’

Explain what, exactly? And how?

Mary must be thinking many things already that she might not want to say to her mother. She was kind - that was her best quality: she had a good nature. And she wasn’t stupid. Victoria could easily put herself back into herself at Mary’s age. Kids always know more than adults think, even if they know it the wrong way around, sometimes.

And Victoria knew more than the Staveney’s about the future.

Mary would go to that good school where most girls were white. She would have many battles to fight, of a different sort from the tough-housing of Beowulf. The Staveney’s would be Mary’s best support. Probably when the girl was about thirteen, the Staveney’s would ask if she, Victoria, could consider Mary going to boarding school. Neither they nor Mary would have to spell out the reasons why Mary must find things easier, for she would no longer have to fit herself into two different worlds, every day. Victoria would say yes, and that would be that.

There was another factor, which Bessie was reminding her of. Victoria was an attractive woman, not yet thirty. She was going now every Sunday to church, because Bessie did, and there she enjoyed the singing. She had been noticed. She took the lead in some hymns, was no longer just one of the congregation. The Reverend Amos Johnson had taken a fancy to her. Her dead Sam, who with every year became more of a perfect man in her memory, could not be compared with Amos Johnson, who was twenty years older than she was. The incomparable lustre of Sam made it possible for her to consider Amos, She had visited his home, full of God-fearing and sober people, and while she was not particularly religious, liked the atmosphere. She had always been a good girl, Victoria had - like Mary now.

If she married Amos she would have more children. Little Dickson, the child from hell, as he was known generally around and about the estate, would calm down, with brothers and sisters.

And Mary? To match the Staveney world with the world of Amos Johnson - she even laughed about it despairingly, with Bessie.

Yet if she married Amos she would be binding the two worlds together, even if both were careful never to get too close. And Mary, poor Mary, in the middle there. Yes, thought Victoria, she will be pleased to get out of it and into boarding school: she’ll want to be a Staveney. Yes, I have to face it. That is what will happen.

THE REASON FOR IT

Yesterday we buried Eleven, and now I am the only one left of The Twelve. Between Eleven and One in our burial place is an empty site, waiting for me, Twelve. All gone now, one by one. The night Eleven died I was with him. He said to mc, ‘While The Twelve have been dying the truth has been dying. When you come to join us no one will be left to tell our story.’ He grasped mc by the arm, pulling all his strength back into him to do it. ‘Tell it. Call The Cities together and tell it. Then it will be in all their minds and cannot disappear.” And with that he fell back into dark and the Silence.

His mind had gone, otherwise he could not have said, ‘Call The Cities.’ It is a long time since that has been possible, But the substance of his message has been burning inside me. Not that it is a new message. What else have we Twelve been talking about these very many years, always fewer of us. How long is it since we could have said: Let us call The Cities together? Nearly half my lifetime, at least. When I left Eleven I came home here and sat where the scents and sounds of a warm starry night could come wafting over me from the gardens and splashing waters, and I was challenging the indolence in myself, which I have always known was my worst enemy. You could call it - I have called it - many more flattering names, prudence, caution, the judiciousness of experience, even my well-known (once well-known) Wisdom: they call me they used to call me -The Sage Twelve. The truth is it is hard for me to act, to gather up my energies behind a single focus and simply do. I see too many aspects of a situation. For every Yes there is a No, and so, through the long years, while The Twelve have one by one vanished away, I have thought, Is this the time to do it? I have never known, we, The Twelve have not known. We always ended by sending DeRod, our Ruler, yet another message. I remember right at the very beginning of his rule we jokingly called him by our nickname for him, The Beneficent Whip. Long thought, worry, have always ended in the same thing: a message. This was correct, was protocol, no one could criticise us, criticise me. At first casual, almost insultingly casual, messages came back. And then silence. It has been years since he replied, either to me, who am after all a relative, or to The Twelve.

The Ruler he might be, but he has a Council, and in theory at least it is a collective responsibility. Hut so much has been theory that was meant to be substance and reality. Many tunes our cautious approaches to DeRod have seemed to me cowardice, but there was more: to feel the conviction that leads to good action means you must first believe in your efficacy, that good results may come from what you do. As the silence from DeRod persisted, and things went from bad to worse, there was a deadening of hope, of our hopes, which I secretly matched with the darkening mind of The Cities. A paralysis of the Will, I remember we called it in one of our gatherings. But we have met in the ones and twos of special friendship, as well as in the collective, we have met constantly - after all, we have known each other since we were born - and what have we always discussed, if not something which we refer to simply as The Situation. What we have slowly come to see as a kind of poisoning. What has been the constant theme of our talk, our speculation? We have not understood what was happening. Why? I suppose that word sums up our years-long, our decades-long preoccupation. Why? What is the reason for it? Why was it we could never grasp something tangible, get hold of fact, a cause? It is easy to characterise what has been happening. There has been a worsening of everything, and we have seen it as a deliberate, even planned, intention.

That word, analyze … one of our sobriquets (The Twelve) was The Analysers. It is some time since we would have dared use it, for fear of mockery And so much have I (until so recently I could have said we) become infected by the time, that I confess that to me now the wort! has a ridiculous ring to it.

Yet what have we always done, except try to analyze, understand? And since I wrote the above that is what I have been doing and as always coming up with a blank. My instinct is to send another message to DeRod. What is the use?

Something must be done. And by me …

When Koon, or Eleven, spoke last he said soon no one will be left to tell our story. That is how it seemed to him as he died. A story has an end. To him the story was finished. The story: well, our history was something told and retold - when we were still telling our history. And now as the familiar disinclination to do anything invades me I wonder if it is only a symptom of the poisoning. Poison? That was only one of the words we have used. But has our history all been for nothing? The excellence? The high standards? The assumption once shared by everyone in The Cities that the best was what we aimed for?

It is now seven days since Eleven died. I might die in any breath I take. So much I can do: record, at least in outline, our story.

Six lives ago we were conquered by The Roddites, from the East. We. But that has changed. Who were we before the Roddites? Along this shore were scattered villages, of poor dwellings, each thinking of itself as a town, lint they had no proper sanitation, or paved streets, or public amenities, had nothing of what we (we of after The Roddites) take for granted. They were fisherfolk, and the fishing is good, and a great many coveted our fishing shores. The Roddites were desert people, strong, hardy, disciplined, with bodies like whips, and their horses were feared almost as much as the people who rude them. They were taught to trample with their hooves and bite flesh from whatever enemy was before them. Their neighing and roaring and screaming was louder than the shouting of the soldiers or the sound of the trumpets. The Roddites and their horses swept easily over the sea villages, and soon had the fishing and the shore and the boats.

The leader we called Rod, but that was because their system of nomenclature was so convoluted and difficult for us. No one was simply Rod, or Ren, or Blok, or Marr, but to the core name was attached a multitude of suffixes and prefixes: To the Rod, of the Rod, by the Rod, with the Rod, from the Rod; and Rod with its start-sounds and endings could mean ‘Rod who is the third son of so and so has just arrived and is all powerful and commands …” It seems that the first Rod’s names, with its history and his situation and the honorifics, took a day to recite - so the old joke went. Whatever else, that Rod was a strategist of genius. Not that u needed much more than strength and will - and the horses - to make short work of the shallow little towns, but then he used his victories to build them into a whole, and call them The Cities. Flattery served him well. He made bis wild desert raiders into an army that was feared by all the lands we had heard of, and many that we hadn’t, and so, where once we had been at the mercy of every raider or band of thieves, The Cities were safe. This Rod was more than a conqueror. He created a rough but adequate system of laws. An Eye for an Eye and a Tooth for a Tooth was the spirit of it. If The Roddites learned from their defeated enemies how to catch fish, prepare it and eat it, The Cities who before then had owned a few goats, now learned the care and the breeding and uses of sheep, cattle, asses and horses.

So that was the first of the Roddite dynasty, Rod, and his son EnRod succeeded. He lacked his father’s wild energies. He was a consolidator, a preserver, one who sees a potential and develops it. He did away with nothing of his fathers rule, but he made vital changes. The law became gentler, and women were given the same property rights as men. The Cities, which so recently had been crude and primitive, an assembly of villages, were spreading, joining, and by then it would have been more accurate to call them The City. It was felt a mistake - EnRod did - to abolish the identity of places, when each prided itself on an individuality. The old names were kept and the idea of a multiplicity of cities was preserved. It was learned that the nearest city over the mountains, which we heard tales about from travellers, was smaller in area than our city, The Cities. Which was governed as if it were a whole, single, of a piece. You could walk half a day and never leave our streets, while crossing streets that announced, ‘Here begins the village of Ogon.’ Or Astrante. Or Ketasos. Whichever fishing village it once had been.

The rule of EnRod was beneficent. Already people were saying, My father, my grandfather, came with the Roddite invasion.

EnRod’s son was almost at once called by the populace, The Whip, and that characterised him well. He was cruel, easily enraged, arbitrary, and would have destroyed everything made by his father and grandfather. The Cities were saved by his bride, who came from the East, from a tribe kin to The Roddites, a beautiful girl who it was said had not wanted to leave the life of horses and desert and the songs for which they were famous, but it seemed that it had been put to her that it was her duty to marry a savage, The Whip, and civilise him. But in fact that would have been beyond her. The Whip was mad. He died. How fortuitous. Not really, she had him poisoned. The arts of the desert people in poisons and medicine were and are famous. The populace rejoiced. Of course there were mutters and threats, but as the rumours flew about that this smiling gentle beauty was a murderess, the people applauded. F very bod y knew what they had been saved from. There were tyrants in other towns in the peninsula and we heard news of them. Because of the laws introduced by En Rod, she could assume the throne on The Whip’s death and she did so. Soon The Whip was remembered only in tales and songs. The rule of Rod was remembered in epic style, thundering verses like horses’ hoof beats, all bravery and fine deeds, while his son’s reign, so salubrious, good for everyone and for peace, for progress, was less celebrated. Unfortunately a quiet competence is not as attractive a subject for a story or a song as conquest and heroism. Stories about The Whip gave rise to some uneasiness, for in those wiser days it was known that tales and songs could change minds and hearts.

It is from The Whip’s short reign that a whole genre of stories tame, and songs too, of cruelty for cruelty’s sake, of torture, of the screams of people from pits deep under the earth, the screams of horses, of animals, of demons whose task it is to torment people, of witches and witchcraft.

The new ruler was Destra, and it was she who first tried to ban these cruel and perverted tales and songs which created cults among the populace, who used them as a justification for wrongdoing. So I heard, so I was told: Destra was old by the time I was born. I can testify to the power of storytelling: I could never see her as anything but a young and beautiful and kind princess from the desert, because of the tales about her, in her youth. Destra soon put right what had been made bad by her husband. She reinstituted EnRod’s laws. She did not change the management of the army, which The Whip had made strong. She merely gave the soldiers long leaves, very long, she said for the benefit of their families. The army remained a worry to her. She had to have one. Rival cities after all flourished, and wars did go on: The Cities were covetable. But during the reigns of Rod, EnRod, The Whip and then Destra there had been no actual fighting. Marches, manoeuvres, rallies, all kinds of parades and shows of strength, but no actual fighting. There were jokes that if we were invaded our soldiers would scarcely know how to act.

Destra created a College of Storytellers and another of Songmakers.

There were already stories and songs, but she wanted something specific, the story of our people, from the time we became one, under the first Rod, Rod the Progenitor. You can imagine that there was plenty of material, opportunities for every kind of tale, legend, song. Many were, frankly, instructional. Destra wanted what she called an instructed and informed people, and a good part of the songs and tales were for the purpose of teaching. The reign of EnRod, which had been so little of an inspiration, now became a source of all kinds of instructional material about peacetime arts. For instance, the management of herds, or building, of the new practice of crop rotation, and how to control rivers, springs, water generally. From the ruler least used by the tale-makers and the singers, he was the best. EnRod became a synonym for good government, just as The Whip was execrated.

In this short summary of Destra’s encouragement of the arts, I can give no idea of the wealth and complexity of our treasury of songs and tales, but I hope to amplify it all, before I die.

Destra was already old when she called us The Guardians of the people. That was our first and primary name, and afterwards came The Analysers, The Watchers, The Recorders, and so on. I was among them because my mother was a friend of Destra, from one of the families from which Destra chose administrators, governors, generals. There were then twelve or so families. Who knows, now? Then, it was easy to say, Those are the governing people, but now? Families that were famous for their probity and their good sense are now dissolute and their offspring are worthless. The Twelve were at first in fact thirteen, because one of us would succeed Destra. DeRod of course, as Destra’s son, was among the thirteen. We used to call him The Beneficent Whip, as a joke, when he showed signs of petulance and wilfulness and might sulk. But we all had nicknames. When my comrades laughed at me, it was The Sage.

But I am getting in advance of my tale. I am telling it as if it is a tale, just that, and the fact I am makes me uneasy as if I were rolling something up into a ball and throwing it from me. Done. Finished. I want to leave a record. I must. How quickly things do change. Anybody would have thought that the Rule Destra set up must last: it seemed so solid, so efficient, so easily built upon and extended. How easily and well things happened. For instance, it was then enough to say to one of our talented storytellers: make a good song about the terrible horses of the first Rod’, and you would soon hear the song in the inns and the guard houses and the public gardens where the festivals were held. Or Destra would say, ‘Some travellers brought this grain to sell us, they knew we don’t grow it. Take it out to the gardeners and get them to make a trial plot. We must have it here, too.’