Daniel Martin (39 page)

A few minutes later I was being hustled. The snooker table was only half-size, and distinctly dilapidated, down in a long cellar beneath the house, with a central-heating boiler intermittently roaring away somewhere close by. There was a ping-pong table as well and for some reason a fruit-machine. Andrew looked up as he set the frame; a wink.

‘Fiver. Just for mustard?’

‘If you insist.’

‘Always get it back. Just threaten to tell her ladyship.’

I smiled, and chalked my cue. ‘Do you still gamble for serious?’

‘Absolutely not. Lost ten times more money at Oxford than in all the years since. Matter of principle.’ He leant to cue off for first break. ‘Just a hardworking farmer these days, Dan. Behind the airs and graces.’

‘Caro’s told me.’

As we played we got through a little conversation about Caro, and I guessed he had picked the game as a convenient way to say casually, between strokes, what might have been more awkward face-to-face: his liking for Caro, concern for her; which gave me my chance to thank him for having been such an excellent stepfather. He won that first frame rather easily, and though I won the next, I suspect it was only because he let me. By that time Paul and Penny had come down and begun to play ping-pong together. I think they must have been sent down, rather than of their own wills. Paul was evidently rather good at the game, and the overweight schoolgirl opposite him as plainly not. With monotonous regularity he smashed every third or fourth of her amateurish returns. It was very near sadism in the circumstances. He gave her not a chance; and though her constant running to retrieve the little white ball from some corner may have been helping her weight problem, it was almost demoniacally selfish on his part. He refused point blank to accommodate his game to hers. Andrew must have felt the same after we’d watched half a dozen or so of the rallies. We were leaning against the snooker table. Suddenly he decided to join in. ‘Come on, Penny. I’ll thrash him for you.’

She gave up her racket to her father, who showed a brisk game of higher class. He was clowning a bit, but I could see Paul took it very seriously. Then Caro came down; they were ‘getting sloshed’ upstairs and it was time to join them. I went with her, and on the way she asked demurely if we’d had a nice game of snooker.

‘I always rather liked him, Caro. Much more than your mother and Jane did, oddly enough when we were all undergraduates.’

She pulled a face. ‘It’s all universal love upstairs, as well. I feel I don’t know anyone any more.’

‘I expect we’ll manage a good row before we go.’ I gave her a look. ‘Just as long as you aren’t the cause of it.’

‘I’ve made a bedtime appointment.’ She grimaced again. ‘I don’t know what I dread most. Her hating Bernard. Or her wanting to ask him down.’ But she went on quickly. ‘I’m sorry she asked the Fenwicks. Actually he’s quite amusing. A bit of an old rake. It’s his third marriage.’

It turned out Caro had even met the tyro Sam Goldwyn whose Venture I was to advise on. He had been at Eton with Richard; ‘just like him, really, only stupider’. She then rather contemptuously revealed, as if she knew I would be ashamed that she’d even met such people, that he was a lord. Which at least relieved my conscience about not saying the truth.

We had, despite the formal surroundings, an agreeable enough supper. Nell’s Italian housekeeper, who evidently knew how to cook, brought the dishes in, but left us to serve ourselves; and the presence of the three children kept the talk on a safely anodyne level. I talked farming and rural things with Andrew. Jane chatted to Nell about all the people she’d heard from, Caro listened with one ear to them, with another to her half-sister, who was clearly in the full throes of the pony mania she had once suffered from herself. Even Paul was forced to join in a little.

But as always happens when people are being studiously on their best behaviour, there was once again a faint, though not unpleasing air of unreality over the occasion. Perhaps it was partly the house, the deep silence outside, that curious air the traditional English upper classes, in their traditional backgrounds, manage to give of being in a play by someone else of being so used to such surroundings that they no more own them than actors own a theatre set. Rather absurdly give, since no class is in fact more tenacious of its property. Yet in all outward ways the only true member of the upper classes there, Andrew, was the most natural. Exhibiting another trait of the species, he managed to suggest that he supposed we all lived more or less like this.

From time to time I caught Caro giving me looks, trying to guess what I was thinking; and more surprisingly, though more discreetly, Jane as well… as if she were speculating about whose side I was really on; who I really was, after all these years. I even suspected she hid an inward amusement, to see the grasshopper brought to bay like this, made to do his duty. Yet however convincingly she played the familiar guest in her sister’s house, there remained something intensely guarded about her, not natural in itself, and not natural in regard to her own old nature. It wasn’t quite the usual Oxford guardedness, of a fundamentally sceptical mind dissembling behind obedience to the conventions of circumstance; but something deeper, more fraught, perhaps really the reverse, what Roz had suggested, a faith dissembling behind scepticism. It was enhanced by Nell, never one to let silences grow. Jane said less as the meal wore on, and that did recall one still-centred aspect of her old self. She continued to intrigue me; and to repel as well… I glimpsed that other less attractive aspect, of a superior moral judgment, of eternally denying her real self to lesser mortals. It underlay her new dogma, and her old, was far more perennial than them, was perhaps what she unconsciously sought in them… a justification for something not very far removed from the Oxford Movement’s theory of reserve, in fact. Their value as dogmas was less intrinsic than that their abstruseness, their mysteries, their esoteric jargon, kept the ordinary herd conveniently at bay.

But she remained different; she reminded me slightly of one or two women writers I had known of a withholding, not exactly male, but springing from an independence of feeling that was also not female; that came perhaps in their case from the experience of the retreat into the imagination, but which in isolating them from the commonalty of their sex, isolated them too from the other. I felt confirmed in seeking some clue in Jane that might be central to what I wanted to write myself; but less and less sanguine of success. She had evidently ended by baffling Anthony. She was not the sort of woman ever to be understood empirically, logically—indeed that was part of the problem, that she could discuss herself lucidly and frankly, and yet still live in a darkness… not merely inscrutable, but almost calculatedly twofaced; although that suggests hypocrisy, and this was perhaps simply a matter of self-preservation, of knowing the feelings of the ‘dark’ self would destroy too much if allowed to show. This interpretation was backed by something more concrete I noticed about her: how everything she said, at least that evening, seemed to be in inverted commas, in some subtle way distinguished from some hypothetical sentence she might have more truthfully said. I knew she must be making an effort, like all the rest of us, so in a sense this was unkind. But I was left with a strange impression, denying the parallel with a woman writer, of someone with a profound mistrust of words; who waited for something better.

I found Nell alone when I came down to breakfast. Apparently Penny was already out in the stables, Andrew was amusing his son for an hour, Jane and Caro were not yet up, and Paul was off somewhere on his solitary own. The sky had cleared overnight, there was sunlight outside, and a gracious vista. That was hardly the adjective for Nell’s eyes when she had poured me coffee.

‘It’s lucky I’ve sworn to be all smiles this weekend. Even if it kills me.’

‘Caro?’

‘When you’d gone to bed.’

I tried to look contrite.

‘I have been going at her to tell you, Nell.’

‘Don’t worry. You’ve been cleared.’

‘I was presented with a fait accompli. That night I came back.’

‘It’s not your fault.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘Or both our faults.’

‘I think she also has some of our virtues.’

She breathed smoke down her nostrils; there was an old glint of aggression in her eyes, a challenge.

‘We are getting soft in our old age.’

‘More honest.’

‘And as a matter of academic interest…?’

‘I think she’ll survive. As we have.’

‘In our fashion.’

I glanced drily round the elegant dining-room, but she refused the invitation to take herself more lightly, and stared down at the polished rosewood of the table between us.

‘I know you think I’ve tried to turn her into a daft deb.’

‘That’s selling yourself short. And over Barney I’m at least equally to blame.’

‘Except that she doesn’t apparently think so.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘She seems to adore the job. London. I had to bear the full brunt of that last night. As if all I’d ever been was some kind of prison governess.’

‘She knows she’s been naughty. I’ve had the same treatment. Been reminded of all my sins.’

‘Which are they?’

‘Still treating her as a child. Not being frank with her.’

She left a silence, then spoke with a candour that took me by surprise.

‘What infuriates me is that she told Jane first.’

‘I gather Jane’s long been the person she goes to to discuss what she feels about us both.’

‘I am her mother.’

‘I’m not trying to excuse her over this, Nell.’

‘Is it so unreasonable?’

‘Of course not.’ I felt tempted to remind her that she had hardly told her own mother ‘all’ before we married; but held my tongue.

‘I just don’t understand what goes on with her generation.’

‘You’ve told Andrew?’

She mimicked his voice. ‘Living it up a bit, isn’t she?’ I smiled, but she did not smile back. ‘I feel conspired against.’

‘Not by me.’

‘I have done my best.’

‘I know.’ Her eyes remained doubting. ‘Look, Nell, for God’s sake, I can’t stand the man… she told you I had lunch with him the other day? At his request?’

‘She mentioned it.’

‘At least he convinced me it’s not just a cold-blooded seduction. He’s become a jaundiced TV idol who knows his world is sick and that he’s trapped in it… you know. But I think we have to believe he has something she needs. Unlikely as it may seem.’

‘She says there’s no question of marrying.’

‘I got that from him as well.’

I told her more of what he had said to me about his own marriage. Through the window behind Nell I saw Paul walking across the gravel, head down. She stubbed out her cigarette, and then I received her wide-eyed look: ‘I can face anything.’

‘Do you blame me?’

‘For what?’

‘Letting you have so little say in her education.’

‘That’s got nothing to do with what’s just happened.’

‘But it was a mistake?’

‘I plead the fifth amendment.’

She retreated into dryness. ‘I was simply trying to work out if I have one Bolshie in the house, or two.’ She added, ‘Your daughter’s always been rather silent about that.’

‘I try to believe in simplicity, Nell. Rather as lapsed Catholics try to regain faith It’s more a longing than a reality.’

‘Do you think I don’t miss it too sometimes?’

‘There are always prices.’

‘I know what Jane thinks of me. The way we live.’

‘My impression is she’s not too sure of what she thinks of anything.’

She got up and turned away to a window; there was an elaborate Victorian wire plant-holder there, and she fiddled a moment with one of the houseplants it contained.

‘I know she’s been useful as a sort of family ombudsman. It’s just the way she plays Minerva to us ordinary mortals.’ She began rather petulantly snipping away the browning flowers from some succulent. It was a childishly revealing fragment of behaviour; chopping off awkward heads, trying to suggest she was a harassed housewife; but finally, and absurdly, suggesting the mind of the lady who once thought brioches and bread were the same thing. ‘I sometimes think she takes us at the silliest face value. As if we didn’t have constant anxieties about keeping this place up. All of that.’

‘It’s an old illusion of people who live outside palaces.’

‘Palaces!’ She gave the embittered sniff of inside knowledge. ‘You ought to see the estimate we’ve just had for repairing the roof.’ I smiled, but she turned from her flowers and caught my expression. ‘All right. But what is the answer, Dan? To let the rain in?’

I was saved the trouble of finding a reply, for Jane appeared with Caro. I didn’t know till afterwards that Caro had placed a ban on all public discussion of the matter; which lost Nell the good point I gave her for changing the subject when they came in.

I wasn’t alone with Jane, and then only briefly, till after lunch. We were all to go for a walk, and she and I were waiting outside and ready before the others. She leant in the weak sunshine against the stone balustrade in front of the house, in a pair of borrowed gumboots; she had never been much of a countrywoman, and she somehow contrived to make it clear that in that she had not changed. She smiled as I came up to her.