The Guardians (11 page)

Giving and receiving hospitality was one of the main occupations of the gentry. There had already been several evening functions—for drinks or supper—which he and Mike were left out of on account of age. Garden parties, though, were afternoon occasions, with children present and the beverages nonalcoholic. There would be more than two hundred guests for this one.

It was to be held out of doors if possible. There had been several days of cold cloudiness and intermittent blowing rain but it cleared and the day was fine. A marquee had been set up on the lawn, and carriages began rolling up the drive just before three.

Rob stood with the family and was introduced to guests as they arrived. They were all elegantly dressed. The ladies wore flowing silk and chiffon gowns with big gay fantastic hats, the men tail-jacketed suits, gray top hats, and flowers in their buttonholes. Mrs. Gifford gave him quiet instruction on people as they approached, and he bowed and shook hands with them as he had been taught, and made brief smiling replies to their comments.

After the reception he was released from duty but had to stay and mingle with the crowd. A small gymkhana was held in the paddock, where jumps had been put up, and he watched Mike take fourth place on Captain. He was jumping against men and his round was greeted with applause. He doffed his riding cap in response. Watching, Rob envied him—not the success but the fact of belonging so completely. However much he learned and copied, he knew he would always be outside this world, a stranger.

People drifted away from the paddock in the direction of the refreshment marquee and Rob went with them. There would be other sports later:
archery and canoeing on the river. He was thinking of lemonade, made, unlike that in the Conurbs, with real lemons, when he was hailed.

There were two men, one middle aged, the other quite old. It was the first of these, a squat powerful figure with a curling moustache and a deep cleft in his chin who had called his name, and Rob recognized him. Mrs. Gifford had identified him as Sir Percy Gregory, Lord Lieutenant of the County and an important figure. The other man, taller and white haired, he vaguely remembered as one of a group that had passed down the line. Rob made a small bow, and said, “Did you want me, sir?”

“This is the lad, Harcourt.” Sir Percy nodded to his companion. “Maggie Gifford's cousin's boy.”

Harcourt nodded also. He had small sharp eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles: contact lenses for men was another thing not customary in the County.

“From Nepal, Sir Percy tells me. It's a small world. I lived out there for a time myself as a young man.” He smiled wintrily. “That's a few years ago, of course.”

Rob hoped he was not showing his dismay. He looked for Mrs. Gifford but there was no sign of her. He realized the two men were watching him and tried to smile.

“It's a big country, of course,” Harcourt said. “Over fifty thousand square miles.”

“Yes, sir,” Rob said gratefully.

The relief was short lived.

“Which is your neighborhood?” Harcourt asked.

He thought desperately of the most detailed of the books he had read, unfortunately not the most recent, and said:

“Katmandu.”

“I was a year there,” Harcourt said. “Do you know the Dennings?”

Rob made the swift decision that it was safer to deny than affirm an acquaintance which could lead to more, and more difficult questions. He felt it was the wrong one, though, when Harcourt's brow furrowed and he said, “Odd. They've lived there a couple of hundred years.”

Harcourt went on talking about Katmandu, occasionally putting queries which Rob dealt with
as best he could. He had the sinking feeling that his best was not very good. Harcourt's tone seemed critical, and he thought Sir Percy looked at him in a probing doubtful way. He became confused and stammered over his answers.

“Notice anything about the way he speaks—his accent?” Harcourt said.

“There's something unusual,” Sir Percy replied.

Rob braced himself. It had been foolish to think he could get away with it. He wondered if they would send police to take him now or wait until after the garden party.

“Very unusual,” Harcourt said. He gave a little crow of laughter. “Typical Nepalese settler twang. Old Dumbo Denning spoke just the same way. I suppose he's dead, and that boy of his pushed off somewhere.” He shook his head. “People get forgotten.”

“That's true,” Sir Percy said. He gave Rob a nod of dismissal. “Let's go and see if we can find a cup of tea.”

I
T WAS A GOOD SUMMER
. Day after day came blue and hot, the mornings occasionally misty but the sun breaking clear after an hour or two and scorching through the afternoon to a calm warm sunset. Once or twice clouds built up and there was rolling thunder, brief torrential rain, and the land washed clean and brilliant. No one under fifty could remember a season as fine, and even the older ones admitted it compared well with the dazzling summers of their youth.

There were plenty of things to do. Rob had a horse of his own, a dapple-gray mare called Sonnet,
and he ranged the countryside on it with Mike. Almost every week there was a show somewhere, with flowers, fruit and vegetables, all carefully hand grown, arranged for judging in long tents heavy with the mixture of their fragrances. There was always a riding event, as well. Rob did not enter for these—he had learned to ride adequately but with no special skill—but watched Mike carry off several prizes. Then there was a regatta, held on the river near Oxford, with individual sculling and various team events including the bump races in which boats started at timed intervals and eliminated each other by closing the gap in front. There was cricket, a game forgotten in the Conurb but whose slowness and formality and restfulness seemed well suited to the life of the County and to the succession of hot summer days. There were fairs and parties.

One party centered on the major archery contest of the year. It was held nearly twenty miles from Gifford House, and Mike and Rob rode over the day before and slept in a tented camp that had been put up in the park of Old Hall. This was the home of the Lord Lieutenant, Sir Percy Gregory, the sponsor of the contest, himself a keen archer.

It was a sport that Rob found he particularly enjoyed. Mike beat him, as he did in everything, but the margin was not so great. Rob said, in the morning, that he thought of entering in their age group. Mike looked surprised but said, “Why not? A good idea, really.”

The suggestion had been made on impulse and Rob later was inclined to withdraw it. Quite apart from his lack of skill, it seemed wiser to keep in the background. He was accepted as Mike's cousin from the East but there was no point in drawing attention to himself unnecessarily. He voiced his doubts to Mike, who disagreed.

“More conspicuous if you don't go in for anything, I should think. There'll be a whole mob competing.”

There were six heats before the final and Mike and Rob were not drawn together. Mike came in second in his heat, Rob third in his, barely qualifying by a single point over the boy in fourth place.

But he had been improving all the time. In the final his eye was in and he felt relaxed. He wound
up with a couple of golds, which raised applause. He finished third in the event. Mike, shooting later, was erratic and came eleventh.

Sir Percy presented Rob with a small silver medal.

“Nice shooting, boy,” he said. “You stand well. I suppose you've done quite a bit of archery out in Nepal?”

It would have been nice to be able to say that he had never seen a bow or arrows until three months ago.

“A bit, sir.”

“Keep it up. You've the makings of a bowman.”

Mike congratulated him heartily enough. Later, though, he returned to the subject in a slightly different mood. He was not carping or resentful, more bewildered. He did not put it like that but he was plainly surprised that Rob should have beaten him—should beat him in anything. The pupil had surpassed the instructor and it puzzled him. It occurred to Rob that the whole enterprise—of taking in the fugitive boy from the Conurb and passing him off as gentry—had been a sort of sport to
Mike; and he had thought of Rob as an object in the sport rather than as a person in his own right. Now, through having to give best to him in this one small thing, he was being forced to look at him differently, with respect even.

Rob resented this a bit. If he had thought about it he would have expected Mike to regard himself as superior, but it was not something he had thought about. Nor wanted to now. And yet it was better in the open—and he
had
beaten him at archery. He had shown he was not just someone to be helped, on a whim.

•  •  •

That evening, as they lay in their tent in the dusk, watching the bats swoop across the sky outside, Mike asked Rob questions. They were questions about his earlier life, about the Conurb. It was something he had not done before. Like everyone else in the County he knew a little about the Conurb: enough to be contemptuous of it. It was the place of the mob, where people dashed around in electrocars, crowded together like sardines, listened to raucous pop music, watched holovision
and the bloodthirsty Games—for the most part watched the Games
on
holovision. It was the place where everyone ate processed foods and liked them, where there were riots and civil disturbances, where no one knew how to behave properly, how to dress or exchange courtesies, how to speak English even. It was the place one knew existed and, apart from thanking God one did not have to live there, preferred to forget.

The questions were particular rather than general—about Rob's family, people he had known, the boys at school. Of Rob's father, he said, “After your mother died, he must have been lonely.”

“I suppose so.”

“I wonder if he ever wanted to come over to the County? He had been here, when he met your mother.”

It was something that had not occurred to Rob. It could be true. He had imagined his mother pining for the life she had known as a girl, but his father had experienced it too, even though briefly. When she died, and afterward, he must have thought about those days, and wished them back.

“There's
no interchange at all now,” Mike said, “apart from the Commuters. Conurbans are not allowed to come into the County. Why is that?”

“They don't want to come.”

“You did.”

Rob could hardly say he was different from the rest. Immodesty, by the standards of the County, was one of the deadlier sins. “If they did come they would make a pretty unpleasant mess of things, wouldn't they? Sixty millions of them . . . with holiday camps and electrocars and community singing and riots when they got drunk . . .”

“Not all of them, of course. A few, perhaps.”

“There's no such thing as a few in the Conurbs,” Rob said. “They aren't happy unless they're all doing the same thing at the same time.”

He surprised himself by the intensity with which he said that. He reminded himself that he had lived in the Conurb and had not been, until his father's death, unhappy there. He had not realized how accustomed he had grown to this easier and more luxurious life until Mike's questions recalled the old one.

“That's what I've always thought,” Mike said, “but is it true? The people you've been talking about—they don't sound all that different from people here. Might there not be some who would like to live in another way but don't know how to set about it? Like your father, perhaps.”

Rob rolled over in the sleeping bag which had been bought for him for this trip. It was identical with the one Mike had. The glow of satisfaction that remained from his archery success was mixed with a pleasant tiredness.

“Nothing anyone can do about it, anyway,” he said, yawning.

“I suppose not,” Mike replied. “All the same . . .”

Rob drifted into sleep.

•  •  •

They went to school together in September. It centered around an ancient abbey which had ceased to be a religious foundation at the time of Henry VIII but kept many of the original features including a Gothic chapel with very old stained glass in the windows. Boarding houses and other necessary departments which had been built nearby harmonized with it.
They were no more than fifty years old but looked five hundred. The group stood in a quiet valley in green rolling country, with a view on clear days of the distant Welsh mountains.

The school had come to its present position from what was now a part of the Conurb, and boarding houses were named after landmarks in the old city. There were Cathedral, Westgate, Itchen, St. Cross, Chesil, and one simply called College in which Rob joined Mike.

He was apprehensive and uneasy at the beginning, but it was not as bad as he had expected. Life was arduous, but tolerable and in some ways enjoyable. They were awakened even earlier than at the boarding school and went out, in all weathers, for a two-mile run, dressed only in shorts and running shoes. Returning, they showered in stinging cold water. This was followed by an hour and a half of lessons before breakfast, by which time they were all ravenously hungry.

The day was filled with lessons and duties, and infringements of discipline were sharply punished, often by beating with canes. In some ways discipline
was more severe here because there were a thousand minor rules you could break, not always realizing you were doing so. There were certain liberties of dress and behavior which went by seniority. At the junior level life followed complicated paths and patterns.

The difference between the two places was not easy to grasp at first, but it was distinct. Gradually Rob worked it out as having to do with pride and self-respect. At the boarding school there had been nothing to make up for the hardships. The whole aim had been to grind you down to submissiveness. Here there was a sense of being trained, and trained for eventual authority. This was shown over meals, for example. When, after the run and the cold shower and the early morning lessons, the boys went into the dining room for breakfast they had to sit on hard wooden benches. The food, though ample and well cooked, was plain. But it was brought to the tables by servant girls. They belonged to a special, privileged group, and this was never allowed to be forgotten.