The Guardians (10 page)

“That's the washroom where you can tidy yourself up,” Mike said. “I'll leave now. Mother and Father will be along in about half an hour. I'll take the horses and hack home. All right?”

Rob nodded. “Fine.”

The washroom had a white-haired attendant in a gray uniform with silver buttons, who showed him to a cubicle. There was a lot of dark wood and gleaming mirrors, and a marble basin into which water gushed steaming from flaring brass taps. Rob washed and brushed himself. His reflection looked at him from the mirror. The clothes he had been given were a fairly good fit. Drab compared with dress in the Conurb, the only brightness in his case a green bow tie, but the cloth had a richer, more expensive feel to it.

He felt funny giving the attendant the tip Mike had specified, and stranger still when the old man, accepting it, touched his peaked cap. He supposed he would get used to this sort of thing eventually. He went out to wait for the arrival of the Giffords.

•  •  •

The house was even more impressive inside than out. There was so much space, so many rooms, such expanses of polished wood floor. All the furniture looked hundreds of years old and Mike told him that most of it was. There were skilled craftsmen in
the County who made painstaking copies of old styles but much of what there was here had come down in the family from its original period. The walls, instead of being plastisprayed in colored patterns were covered with decorated embossed papers, with surfaces that were silky to the touch. There were displays of flowers in bowls or vases—not synthetic but real, cut in the garden and arranged each morning by Mrs. Gifford. Paintings hung in ornate frames that showed a dull gold, many portraits of men and women in ancient dress. Mike's ancestors, he realized.

There appeared to be an endless number of bedrooms leading off the first-floor landing. He was given one next to Mike's, sharing a bathroom with him. It was pleasantly and simply furnished and looked across the lawns to the river. It had an open grate and a wood fire was burning there when he was shown in by a servant. It crackled, spitting occasionally, and had a tangy smoky smell. He was standing looking at it when Mike knocked and came in.

“Everything all right?” he asked.

“Yes.” Rob pointed to the lumoglobe on the wall above the bed. “I
thought you used oil lamps?”

“We do, downstairs. Not in the bedrooms. Not in the servants' quarters, either.”

“Why?”

“Well . . . everyone does. It's customary.”

“Customary,” Rob was to learn, was a word much used and generally accepted as unquestionable. But now he asked:

“Why the mixture? Why not have everything old-fashioned, or everything modern?”

Mike hesitated. “I've never really thought about it. As I say, it's customary. Some things are used, some not. Take machines. There's the road layer, and farmers use machines in the fields. The servants have electrical gadgets to help with cleaning and all that. My father uses an electric shaver, though some men—most probably—shave with soap and water. There's no hard and fast rule. You just—well, you know what's suitable.”

“What about holovision?”

Mike made a face. “Good God, no!” He put a hand on Rob's shoulder. “You'll soon get the hang of it.”

•  •  •

Mr. Gifford was a taciturn, rather awesome figure. When he spoke it was in a clipped fashion which Rob thought at first indicated disapproval. He tried to keep out of his way as much as possible. This was made easier by the fact that Mr. Gifford spent a great deal of time in the conservatory pursuing his hobby: the growing and cultivation of miniature trees.

About a week after his arrival Rob found the conservatory empty and ventured inside. Mike was with the family doctor who had arrived, his bag strapped to the saddle of a magnificent black horse, to give him a checkup. There were rows of shelves with little trees in pots and also a Lilliputian landscape with a stream running through a forest of oak and fir, maple and beech and elm, to a lake where tiny weeping willows trailed their leaves in the water.

The running stream in particular was fascinating. Rob could hear a faint hum and confirmed his suspicion: the water was being kept in circulation by an electric pump. This must be another of the
cases where technology was permitted to intrude. It was gradually beginning to make a sort of sense. Gadgets must be kept to the bedroom and bathroom and the servants' quarter. Where they were allowed into the house proper they had to be for some special purpose which was regarded as suitable. Such as landscaping in miniature. He heard the door open behind him and turned in alarm to see Mr. Gifford coming in.

“I haven't touched anything, sir. I was just looking,” Rob explained.

“Are you interested in bonsai?” Mr. Gifford asked.

“Do you mean these trees? Yes, but I've never seen anything like them before.”

It was enough to set Mr. Gifford off. Reticence disappeared; his speech was clipped still but tumbling over itself in explanation and demonstration. It had not, Rob realized, been disapproval so much as shyness. He showed him the different methods of propagation: from seed, from cuttings, or by layering. Seeding was the best method, but the slowest. You never got the same elegance of root shape with
the other forms. The root was the key to good bonsai. You had to trim them with great care in winter when you repotted the tree. Then there was pinching and pruning—always the former for preference rather than the latter. A bud pinched out gently by thumb and forefinger or with small blunt forceps left no mark. When you pruned there was a stump which marred the natural elegance of the tree.

Then there was training. When the sap was running you could either bend or straighten the branches or the trunk by staking or weighting them, or by anchoring them to stiff wires. When you put weight on to depress a branch, you needed a counterweight on the other side of the trunk to prevent the roots from lifting. He showed Rob an oak with a split trunk, dropping down on either side of its pot.

“Only five years old.” He shook his head. “I don't do much of that sort of thing—forced trailing. Unnatural, I always think. Now, this is different.”

He led the way across the room. Mr. Gifford pointed to the artificial landscape. “See the brow of the hill? I've assumed a prevailing wind. Westerly. Catches the trees just there. You see they're all windswept? All leaning the same way. Of course they've
never been in a wind, a breeze even. That's all done by pot training.”

“It's very realistic.”

“Isn't it! Isn't it? I'm glad you're so interested. Come in here whenever you like. You can do some of your own if you want to.”

Rob thanked him.

“Layering's best if you want something to show early,” Mr. Gifford said. “You young people are all impatient. Chinese layering's very easy. Instead of taking the branch down to the soil you take the soil up to the branch. Find a shapely tip of tree, cut a strip of bark all around where you want it to root, and tie a pack of wet sphagnum moss and compost around it. May take a year or two for roots to form, but you'll get a tree which would take ten or more to raise from seed. This one here . . .”

•  •  •

There was no difficulty in getting on with Mike's sister, Cecily. She was eleven, a slim dark girl, resembling Mike only in the blueness of her eyes. She was a great talker—to the family, the servants,
the various cats and dogs that wandered in and out of the house. She had a pleasant voice, high and musical. It was her curiosity Rob found a bit trying. She was delighted with her new cousin but also intrigued. She wanted to know everything about him. Mrs. Gifford chided her for asking personal questions but Rob could see, from the rebellious look in her eyes, that this was not going to have any permanent effect. Eventually she would get him on his own and try again.

He found help in the library. This was a room about fifteen feet by twenty-five, its walls almost completely lined with glass-fronted cases that reached up nearly to the high ceiling patterned with rosettes. The cases were full of books, nearly all bound in leather. There were thousands—more than the entire stock of the Public Library, and all for the use of one small family.

At the moment, he realized with a mixture of surprise and satisfaction, for his own personal use. None of the family seemed to go there and he could browse without interruption. He did this particularly when Mike was occupied with his tutor, and
sat for hours reading in an armchair by one of the tall pointed-arch windows.

The books were various but had one thing in common: none had been published within the last thirty or forty years. There was a great emphasis on country sports and activities—volume after volume on fly-fishing, hunting, and all aspects of the care and riding of horses. There was also a good concentration of ancient biography—memoirs of the landed gentry and of those who had lived abroad in the days of the colonies. This gave Rob an idea and he searched for works dealing with Nepal. He found several and read them carefully, making mental notes. When Cecily cornered him, he was ready for her.

The references were all at least half a century out of date, some twice that, but according to Mrs. Gifford it was a part of the world whose rulers had chosen to keep primitive so one could hope that there had been not much change. Rob told her about the villages clinging to the sides of hills, themselves overshadowed by the snowy majesty of the peaks of the Himalayas. He spoke of oxen
ploughing the stony fields and the shaggy yak which really came from Tibet, of spring when all manner of flowers—scarlet poinsettia, mauve ageratum, trumpet-flowered datura—burst forth from the earth and bloomed, of the burning summers and the freezing winters.

Cecily clapped her hands in delight. “How wonderful!” she said. “How could you bear to leave it?”

Later Mike said, grinning, “That must have been a very impressive account you gave Ciss of life in the East. She insisted on telling it all to me—what she could remember.”

“I may have overdone it a bit.”

“You convinced her, anyway. Did you make it all up?”

He told him about the books he had found. Mike nodded. “A good idea, that.”

“Why aren't there any recent books?” Rob asked. “I know books are no longer printed in the Conurbs, but surely it's different here? I mean, you have private libraries.”

“I should think enough have been published already. You'd need a lifetime to read them. And
there are so many other things to do. We probably don't want any more.”

“Does no one write books now?”

“Not books as such. Some people write essays, poems, that sort of thing.” He spoke with tolerant lack of interest. “They produce them privately, just a few copies for friends. Handwritten, a lot of them. Very pretty to look at.”

•  •  •

He got on all right with Mr. Gifford and Cecily and of course Mike, less well with Mrs. Gifford and the servants. In some ways the servants made him more uneasy than she did. He could not come to terms with their deference and had the feeling that they were laughing at him behind his back, even that they guessed the truth and were biding their time before reporting him.

There was Harry, for instance, the head groom. He had taken charge of Rob's lessons in horse riding, accepting his complete lack of ability without a query or demur. He was a harsh taskmaster, relentlessly drawing attention to faults and weaknesses. His tone in the paddock was stern and sometimes
angry. Rob resented it even when he knew it was justified. And he was baffled by the change which took place outside, by being called “Master Rob” and saluted with hand to forelock by this little bandy-legged man who was older than his father had been. Mike obviously saw nothing strange, no conflict between the two attitudes, but Rob could not understand it.

Mrs. Gifford, too, was a formidable proposition. She treated him with every sign of kindness but he could not be sure of her. He had come to realize that hers was the really important influence—respect was paid to Mr. Gifford as head of the house but he left all decisions in her hands—and he did not know what she would eventually decide about him. What perhaps she already had decided, but kept concealed behind the unbroken facade of calm good manners.

She gave him a part of her time every day to coach him in the way he was required to behave. There was an awful lot of this—how to address ladies, how to enter a room, how to walk or stand or bow, how to eat and drink, what sort of things
to say in polite conversation and what must not be said. She corrected his mistakes and pointed out things he had done wrong during the previous day, not with the roughness and anger of the groom but with a cool decisiveness that could be even more disconcerting. At times, when she smiled and praised him for something, he thought she liked him; at others he was sure she detested him as a nuisance. He came to dread the visits to the little parlor where she sat over her embroidery, yet also in an odd way to look forward to them. When she did praise him it was exhilarating.

She told him one evening that he had been accepted for entry to the school to which Mike also would return in the autumn.

“Do I have to go, Aunt Margaret?”

“Of course. That is the reason we have given for your being sent back from Nepal.”

He had forgotten that. He was silent, thinking about it. Another way of life to get used to: more and more problems. There was no end to them.

As though reading his thoughts, Mrs. Gifford said, “You must not expect it to be easy, Rob. If
you are to pass as one of us you are going to have to work very hard at it. Very hard indeed.”

•  •  •

He had been introduced to a number of people—neighbors, the family doctor, the vet when he called to see a lame horse—and had got by. He had been nervous, but either Mike or Mrs. Gifford had been at hand to help him. There was a more severe ordeal when he had been with the family three weeks: the Giffords gave a garden party.