Unclouded Summer (25 page)

“Trap's not a pretty word.”

“It's the correct one, isn't it? What other word could you find for it? You sent that car for me, you …”

“I sent that car for you because I didn't agree with your alternatives. I sent that car because I wanted to see you, because I believed that I could make you happy here. I am sorry if I was wrong in thinking that. I am now going to my bed. Good night.”

The door closed behind her. The intimate cosiness of the room accentuated his sense of loss. He switched on the top center light. That was better. Its harsh glare depoetized the room, made it in keeping with his mood. Twenty-four hours earlier in the ship, he had pictured himself this night in London at the Savoy, either embarking with Judy on the supreme adventure of his life or else alone, trying to adjust himself to the vacuum, the desert that life was to be without her. Yet here he was now at Charlton, in the one place where he had vowed he would never be, a guest in Sir Henry's house; not only in an impossible situation, but at outs with Judy. The one thing he had never thought to be. He felt trapped and tricked and angry.

He woke up to the tinkle of crockery, followed by the rattle of curtain rings. A pot of tea was beside his bed, and a plate with three thin slices of bread and butter. Parker was standing in silhouette against the window. Francis looked at his watch. It was eight o'clock.

“What kind of day is it?” he asked.

“It's not actually raining, sir. That's about all that you can say for it.”

He leaned sideways to the tea tray. He shivered as his arm came from beneath the bedclothes. It was cold all right.

“Chuck me across my dressing gown, there's a good chap,” he said.

It was a thin silk gown, that was amply adequate for the centrally heated rooms of home, but he could have done here with camel's hair. Cowered back, under the blankets, he watched Parker arrange his clothes, take out his studs and links, tuck in the toes of his socks. It was the first time he had been valeted.

“How many others do you do this for?” he asked.

“Only yourself, sir, at the moment.”

“What about Mr. Eckersley?”

“He's brought his own man with him.”

So one arrived with a retinue, like King Lear.

“Which suit will you be wearing, sir?” asked Parker.

“Which would you recommend?”

There was not indeed a great variety. Francis had a small wardrobe and he traveled light. He had a dark lounge suit, there was a gray flannel suit, there were his golf clothes and his tweeds.

“It's going to be a bit cold for flannels, isn't it?”

“I'm afraid it is, sir.”

“There's not much alternative to the tweeds in fact.”

“I suppose there isn't, sir.”

There was a doubtful quality to Parker's voice.

“You're not quite happy about those tweeds.”

“I wouldn't say that, sir, they're very sound material.”

“They look a bit new though, don't they?”

“Well sir, you do know what they say about tweeds and about brown leather: they're better old.”

“But there's nothing I can do about it, except get them old.”

“No, sir, unless …”

“Yes, Parker, yes.”

“Well, sir, if I might suggest while they are so new, if you didn't wear the trousers and the coat together. If you wore gray flannel trousers with the coat.”

“Then what about the trousers, they're going to look new when the coat's old?”

“Perhaps, sir, you could find other occasions to wear the trousers: when you were playing golf for instance. Those trousers would go very well with that leather jerkin.”

Francis smiled. It was very clear that Parker was not happy about those plus twos. “O.K.,” he said, “the tweed coat and gray flannel trousers.”

“And what time would you like your shaving water, sir?”

“What time is breakfast?”

“Any time after nine.”

“At half-past eight then.”

“And your bath ten minutes later. By the way, sir, what time would you like your bath tonight?”

“My dear Parker, how on earth can I tell that at this hour?”

“Perhaps, sir, you could give me a rough idea. There'll be a large house party. You'll be sharing a bathroom with two other gentlemen.”

“Sharing a bathroom?”

“Why, of course, sir, naturally.”

“That's usual you mean – to share a bathroom?”

“Well, sir, you'd hardly expect each guest to have one to himself.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn't.”

Valets and freezing bedrooms, butlers and sharing bathrooms. He supposed that he'd get the hang of it all some day.

“Is there anything else, sir, you'll be requiring?”

“No, thank you. I don't think so. Oh yes, there is.”

The sight of his hip flask on the dressing table had given him an idea. “I'd like some whiskey.”

“Certainly, sir. I'll see Mr. Blore about it: you'd like a whiskey and soda with your tea each morning?”

Francis burst out laughing. No greater tribute could, he felt, have been paid to the English feudal system than the immobility of Parker's features. Parker had barely paused before he replied.

“Heavens no, that isn't what I meant. I just had a feeling that I might at odd moments of the day feel the need of a strong shot, that I'd like to feel there was a full flask up here. I don't say that I shall need it but I'd like to know that it was here.”

“Certainly, sir. I'll take down your flask to Mr. Blore.”

Francis shook his head.

“No, no, I couldn't have that. There are some limits. But if I were to give you the money I suppose you could buy me a bottle in the village.”

“I suppose I could, sir.”

“You do it then, because I can't myself. Just make it your job to see that that flask's kept filled. And if it all seems rather odd, you just remind yourself that that's just how we are on my side.”

“I see, sir. Very good, sir, yes I see.”

At one minute past nine Francis came downstairs. The
house was silent. The passage under the gallery was cold. He put his hand over the grating. The air that rose from it was barely warm. He looked into the drawing room. There was no one there. From a black pile of coals a single thin stream of smoke was rising to the chimney. The room would not be habitable for an hour. The cushions on the sofa had recently been punched out. Everything looked very orderly. No one had been in here yet. He supposed that they were all at breakfast.

There was no one in the dining room however. At one end of the table had been laid six places. At the other end was a pile of newspapers, neatly set out with one title below the other. On the sideboard were two large urns; beside them was an aluminium plate warmer, on which was a shining row of dishes. A fire was blazing in the grate. An electric fire had been switched on. He wondered if he ought to start. He walked over to the window and looked out. The room faced onto a courtyard off which the stables opened. The stables, in contrast to the remainder of the house which in the course of alterations had been stuccoed over, were of red-brown brick. They had a unity and a dignity which the house as a whole, from what he had seen of it, appeared to lack. The stables were surmounted by a clock, black-faced with bright brass hands. “I'll make a picture of that some time,” he thought. He would paint it from the other side: the modernized stucco contrasting with the older brick, the empty stalls symbolizing the change of living, the substitution of cars for carriages. It would make a good picture; if he could ever get the peace of mind to work here, that was to say.

He turned back into the room. He glanced at the row of papers. He picked up the
Daily Mail.
It had big black headlines. It looked like a newspaper.

England's fate at stake
, he read. It referred, he discovered, to a football match.

I'm in a foreign country right enough, he thought.

He looked over at the sideboard. The food must be spoiling. He lifted the lids of the dishes one by one. There was haddock, and kidneys and bacon and fried potatoes and kedgeree. There was a big bowl of porridge, and in a small bowl, wrapped round in flannel five soft-boiled eggs. There was also a large half-cut ham. It was astonishing how much the English ate or anyhow were given an opportunity of eating.

He poured himself out a cup of coffee and took an egg. To his surprise the coffee, though unlike American coffee, was
extremely good. He ate slowly, reading the paper, as he did so, expecting at any moment that some other member of the party would arrive. None did however. The butler came in once, lifted the covers of the various dishes, appeared to be satisfied, and went away. No sound of voices, no footsteps, no banging of doors, no barking of dogs disturbed the silence. It was quarter to ten before he left the room. He went upstairs to brush his teeth. Down the passage came the sound of running water. At any rate they weren't all dead. His room had been tidied in his absence, and the fire laid. The wheels of service were revolving, clearly. The fire in the drawing room was now blazing brightly. But the cushions were still undented. Where was everyone? He looked out of the window; no signs of life there either. Beyond the formal pattern of the small Dutch garden, the lawns curved green and damp towards the paddocks. I'd better go outside, he thought.

He wanted to see the house. He had not had a chance of seeing it the day before. He had tried so often to imagine it, looking at the pictures that he had hung over the desk at Mougins, reading between the lines of Judy's letters. It was not at all as he had expected. It was larger, less intimate. He stood in front of it, thirty or so yards away. Had he been brought here blindfolded, not knowing where he was being led, he did not know if he would have recognized it. It had a gray barrack look.

“Admiring the mausoleum?” a voice said behind him. He started, turned, and there was Marion. She had come across the grass and he had not heard her. She was bareheaded. She was wearing a mackintosh. She was carrying an armful of ferns and branches.

“What on earth's all that for?”

“The church. I do it up every Saturday. I'm just going to raid the greenhouses. Well, what do you think of Charlton?”

She stood at his side, looking up at the gray expanse of stucco. He did not know how to answer her, he did not know what kind of an answer she expected. He was grateful to her for giving him the cue.

“Daddy's always making cracks about it, but then Daddy can't feel personally about it in the way that I can.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“My grandmother was born here, the house had been in her family for five generations, even before that we'd lived here. It was her grandfather's great-grandfather who built it. My grandmother was the heir to it. But Daddy wasn't even
born here. He didn't come to live here, till his mother's father died; he was fourteen then. The house isn't bound up with him, in the way it is with me. Being a man he thinks of himself in terms of being a Marriott. It's different for a girl who expects to change her name anyhow, if you follow me.”

It was a complicated argument but he could follow it.

“I think Daddy's a little jealous of it really because he's not bound up with it. He's always making fun of its absurdities. But I don't feel like that. I like to think that an eccentric great-great-grandfather of mine suddenly decided that he'd like to build a big bow-windowed room where he could entertain the Prince Regent with theatricals, and that another one went on a holiday to Spain and thought he'd like to have a gallery inside his hall and then suddenly changed the plans when they were halfway through, with the result you saw. It makes it all very personal and English.”

“You mean to say that the Prince Regent actually acted in that drawing room?”

“No. In the end he didn't. But the room was built in the belief that he was going to and I think that's fun. I think it's much more fun to have a house like this, than a museum piece.”

She paused. She looked fondly at it. “There it was, you see, two hundred and twenty years ago, a good straightforward Queen Anne house, red-bricked, rectangular, facing northeast, because at that time architects considered the sun unhealthy: it faded curtains and carpets and it bred disease, they said, which it probably did as they never opened windows. There are a hundred and one houses like that, scattered up and down the country but there's no house quite like this. Of course it's been spoiled with that absurd portico, and that stuccoed front and all those bays and bow windows at the back flung out to catch the sun, but it's much more fun the way it is, and much, much cosier to live in. You could paint a whole series of pictures of it. I hope you will.”

He told her about the picture he had planned that morning. She nodded as she listened.

“That should be good. And there's so much here that'll be new for you. There's the church for instance. Why not come over with me now?”

“I'd love to.”

“Fine: it won't take long. Let's plunder the greenhouses first.”

The greenhouses were beyond the stables. They were heavy with heat and scent, and rich with color; brick-dark geranium, pale watery blue plumbago, hyacinth white and mauve and scarlet, begonia and Canterbury bells and bright-red fuchsia.

“Do you mind carrying a pot or two? It isn't far,” she said.

It was a bare half-mile across the paddock. As they turned out of the garden he could see its square tower showing between the trees. To the right of it was the tiled roof of the rectory.

“The village is just beyond,” she said, “you haven't seen it yet. It's very cosy, half a street and two public houses and one shop. They're all people who work for us.”

The Church was cosy too. It was small and Norman. It was rather dark with its low rounded stained-glass windows, but at the same time the brasses on the walls, the polished woodwork of the pews, the faded hatchments, the rich reds and purples of the windows, gave it a sense of color.