Treasures of Time (32 page)

How dare they! They had no business, it really is the limit. Nobody’s touched the croquet things for years, not since… well, not for ages and ages. I never did care for it, a silly game that brings out all the worst in people.

She stood on the terrace. The Hamiltons, Tom, the fair-haired BBC girl – knocking the ball now, inexpertly, turning with a cry of anguish and bumping into Tom so that he has to put a hand up to steady her. And – coming round the side of the house, one hand trundling the chair wheel, the other held up to shade her eyes against the sun which has suddenly blazed out, low in the sky above the garden wall – Nellie.

They are playing croquet: Hugh, Laura, the Sadlers. Laura’s idea. She has been all day in one of those states of heightened animation – vivacity which could topple over any minute into something else. A mood long familiar, to those who know her best, and dreaded. The croquet is unwise; a game for people of steady temperament only.

I stand at the side of the house, watching. It is good to get outside, all week we have been shut up in the study; so much to do, so much sorting, so much writing. Hugh says, ‘God, Nellie, what would I do without you.’ He looks up now, from the lawn, and waves. And Laura, as he does so, misses her shot.

And turns on him. He thinks – we all think – she is going to hit him. His arm comes up across his face. My stomach turns. He says, ‘Laura, what the hell are you…’ Perhaps she did hit him, it is hard to see. And now she is shouting, awful things, frightening things, about me, some of them. Everybody stands there; it is as though time had stopped. I say, ‘Laura…’

And she goes into the house. She looks as pretty as a picture, her pale hair and that blue dress. Her face I cannot see.

‘Sorry,’ said the girl. ‘Was that your foot? And now I suppose I’m going to get clobbered.’ And she yelped as Tom whacked her ball away into the flower-bed. ‘Dreadful game,’ said James Hamilton. ‘Red in tooth and claw. Is it me now?’ Tony, standing on the step to the terrace, restless, called out, ‘We’ll have to put a time-limit on this, I’m afraid – I want these garden shots before we have any more weather disasters.’ And Laura, an edge to her voice, was saying something about could people not send balls into the border, it’s not doing the flowers any good.

Kate said, ‘Aunt Nellie?’

And now they all look across at the wheel-chair, where she is oddly leaning to one side, her head at an angle, as though, everyone thinks for a moment, she has dropped off to sleep.

And then Laura is pelting across the lawn towards her, saying something that no one catches. And the mallets are dropped. And Barbara Hamilton says, ‘Oh
no
…’ And Tony, looking across the lawn at Laura, whose face is turned now away from Nellie with an expression no one, not even Kate, has ever seen before, says ‘Where’s the phone? Not to worry, Laura, it’ll be all right…’

But it is not all right, at all.

Chapter Fourteen

Tony said, ‘Oh, we retrieved a fair amount. Enough, anyway. It won’t be what I’d have liked, but there it is. God, of all five-star disaster weekends… I went to the funeral – it was the least I could do, I felt. Laura was shattered, you know. Completely shattered. Funny – one would never have realized she was so devoted to the sister, it didn’t somehow come across. But she must have been. Like a zombie – we had a bit of a chat but I don’t think she even knew who I was, really. A wretched business. By the way, I gather you and Kate…’

‘Yes.’

‘Permanently?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Well, I’m sorry to hear it. Nice girl. But I daresay in the end… These things happen, anyway. I understand she’s staying down at Danehurst for a bit – prop up Laura and so forth. Look, Tom, there’s something I’d like to have a talk with you about, if you could spare an hour or two one evening.’

The summer, which had so recently, it seemed, begun, was fading into autumn. It was hard to remember, now, those bright green spears of spring that first weekend at Danehurst; the sharpness of the young corn in the downland fields, the vibrancy of the garden. Now even London, more or less impervious to seasons, suggested the onset of other things – withered grass in the parks, heavy, drooping trees. And Stukeley was all tied up, pretty well, bar some final re-writing and chores like index and bibliography. Work, as things had turned out, had been the best antidote to – well, to a great many uncomfortable emotions that lurked, like dormant bacteria, to spring into action when the conditions were right. Guilt and regret and misgivings. And, from time to time, relief and a faint sense of exhilaration. Things move on; not always for the worse.

He received in the post one day a large envelope from Japan. Inside was a stilted note – from which of Mr Tsuzuki’s group he could not make out – and three coloured photographs. In one, he stood outside the Cornmarket branch of Marks and Spencer, flanked by two beaming Japanese girls, against a window display of red, white and blue beachwear ingeniously arranged to form the cross and diagonals of the Union Jack. In the second, he was posed alone outside a petrol station near Burford. Framing his head was a sign, lettered in glowing orange, drawing attention to cut-price petrol: the words ‘Four Star Reduced’ hung around his right ear. The petrol station itself, gaily flagged, was moored like a giant pleasure-steamer between thatched and mullioned stone cottages. The third photograph showed himself and Mr Tsuzuki, both grave-faced, watching the morris dancers. Tom was holding Mr Tsuzuki’s raincoat and some photographical equipment and looked like a priestly acolyte in attendance at some bizarre religious ritual.

His days in the British Museum were numbered now; wasting away like the meagre remains of his grant in the Midland Bank. The expiry of both, one felt, merited some kind of celebration – an initiation ceremony perhaps, the emergence of economic man after his long and expensive apprenticeship. Other cultures do these things better.

As it was, the events were marked by nothing more notable than a large bill from the lady who had typed the thesis, and a letter from the Bank in which a faint tone of threat was veiled by the deference due to a client of no account (in every sense) but incalculable potential. Tom wrote to his mother to expect him home for a prolonged autumn holiday, to the employment exchange in his home town, and to the Lakers.

‘You never did tell me about your Jap friends.’

‘It would take too long.’

‘Cherry was asking after you.’

‘Ah. Give her my love. I thought I’d look her up at some point.’

Martin was engaged in the restoration of a derelict manor house in one of the more picturesque villages. The house, formerly the property of a landowning family who had gone to seed in the thirties, converting estates and valuables into cash and yachts, was a mere shell with hints of its vanished charms. The village had decayed with it, due to some legal tangle preventing the family from selling cottages, which in consequence were rented and unrepaired. The legal problems were now cleared up, but galloping disintegration had put off buyers for several years. Now, apparently, the whole lot had been acquired by a Dutch businessman, and was to be painstakingly restored. Tom, for a week or so, joined Martin on the site, helping out with the more unskilled tasks. Once, the new owner arrived to see how things were going. The stereotyped vulgar tycoon that Tom had expected turned out to be a slight, diffident man, deeply concerned with craftmanship and deferential towards Martin. They toured the building, locked in discussion of stone and timbers: no expense was to be spared, no trouble was too great. The Dutchman’s fortune, apparently, came from the manufacture of a new kind of aluminium alloy used in aircraft construction.

‘Stay on a bit,’ said Martin at the end of a week, ‘since you’re at a loose end. You’re just beginning to pick things up – that paving wasn’t half bad.’

‘It’s tempting. But I think I’ll push off home.’

‘Anything in the offing?’

‘Not a lot. There is one thing. I’ll have to think about it.’

A period of reflection, he had thought. A time for taking stock. He walked about the town – saw it with eyes that were both of now and of then. Accompanied by other, younger Toms, he observed and remembered: the cinema, scheduled for demolition, had acquired a certain period interest (if there wasn’t already, there presumably would be, a Thirties Society); it was also the place where he had brazened his way into his first X certificate film. The enormous Batts Road primary school playground was not so at all: a small puddled area of grey tarmac, merely. The heroes of yore, the wits and blades of the second year sixth, were men with mortgages and life insurance and evenings spent in front of the telly. Observation of how things are was contradicted by knowledge of how things once appeared to be: where, in that case, did the truth lie? Is the world as we see it, or as we have known it? A confusing point, he thought, and one that presumably perplexes others too.