She was too far out for him to discern whether the figure in the boat was a man or a woman. A man, he assumed, and—thinking nothing of it—continued his walk back to his village. Later the same day, in the afternoon, he returned that way with his dog. He saw the boat still drifting; he saw it was empty. Some time, then, between eleven and three: a time when the tides were ebbing.
Frank and I flew to Scotland as soon as the news came. I went to a house I knew only at second hand, from Constance’s journals. We talked to the housekeeper, to the fisherman, to the police, to the men from air-sea rescue. In the afternoon, when we were finally alone, Frank and I walked down the track to the loch.
I looked at the mountains on the farther side, whose peaks were reflected in the water’s black and glassy surface. It was just as Constance had described it: a desolate yet beautiful place, not one to be alone in.
Bravado
and
bravery, don’t you think? I certainly thought so then, and do so still. Frank and I stood for a long time in silence, looking at the surface of that water. Preternaturally still, it would sometimes shift, heave, and then subside, like the flank of a great animal. When it did so, the images of the mountains bent; they fractured before re-forming.
I thought:
Full fathom five thy father lies
—but of course the water was many fathoms deeper than that, and it was a sea-loch. They never found her body.
F
OUR YEARS AGO, FOR
THE FIRST TIME in almost twenty years, I went back to Winterscombe. It was January of 1986; our two children (they are almost grown up now) remained in America. Frank and I went to England. There were two reasons for our visit, which Frank categorized as the major one and the minor one. The minor one was professional: Frank was giving an address to the Royal Society, of which he had recently been made a fellow; the major, he insisted, concerned my uncle Freddie. Freddie had, that previous summer, reached his ninetieth year—a fact of which he was exceedingly proud. Belatedly, we were to celebrate his birthday. But how? Neither Freddie’s nor Winnie’s zest for life had diminished by one iota; it was difficult to plan a birthday treat that would be sufficiently splendid.
Such a great age! A trip to a restaurant or a theater seemed a little tame for a couple who had visited the Amazon at eighty. A party? Freddie, who had outlived almost all his contemporaries, now disliked parties.
The matter was still unresolved when we reached London. It remained unresolved until the night after Frank’s speech, when we returned to our hotel room. I was looking through London listings in some desperation, wondering which musical (they all seemed to be musicals; they were all by the same composer) Freddie might enjoy. Frank was leafing through the glossy brochures for glossy hotels which came supplied with our room. Frank, who rarely stayed in such places if he could avoid them, was fascinated by them nonetheless. That evening, riffling through pages, he gave a sudden exclamation, then brandished the brochure in my face. I looked down, and there was Winterscombe.
I had finally sold Winterscombe, not long after our marriage, to some educational reformers, a husband and wife who had decided that Winterscombe was the perfect base from which to revolutionize British schooling. Their reforms had not caught on; they had later sold, I heard, to a pension fund. The pension fund, I believe, later sold to a computer millionaire, who used the house as his company headquarters. Winterscombe’s capacity to adapt to time and changing circumstances was apparently endless. Now, it seemed, it had been transformed into a fashionable country-house hotel.
I looked at the photographs in disbelief. This was, and was not, Winterscombe. It had been redecorated, lavishly, by an American interior decorator I knew well. He had remade it into a grand Edwardian country house—or, rather, into everyone’s
idea
of such a house—at the same time incorporating every modern luxury and convenience. The cellars had been converted into a swimming pool and gymnasium that might have diverted a Caesar. The ballroom was now the restaurant. My grandfather would have loved the restoration of the billiards room: much grander than it had ever been in his day, every wall was adorned with large, gory depictions of hunting. There was a helicopter landing pad, a jogging track around the lake for jaundiced executives. Not a bedroom was without a four-poster. It was clever, and preposterous. No, no, no, I said—don’t even
suggest
it. We can’t take Freddie and Winnie there—they would hate it.
I was wrong. The next day, in Little Venice, Freddie and Winnie took one look at the brochure, and I knew: They loved it. Silently, I despaired. I was by no means sure I wanted to revisit Winterscombe.
“What a jolly good idea,” said Freddie.
“We’d be tickled pink,” said Winnie.
Frank telephoned, there and then: bookings were made for the coming weekend. Winnie crossed to her neat desk; in her methodical way she entered this event in her calendar. As she did so, she showed signs of new excitement. Her cheeks became pink.
“Freddie!” she said. (She shouted, in fact; Uncle Freddie had become rather deaf.) Winnie brandished the calendar; Freddie twiddled with his hearing aid.
“Freddie—imagine this! We’ll be able to watch it from Winterscombe. How
splendid
! That weekend. It’s visible then. It was in
The Times.
I made
particular
note of it.”
“What? What?” said Freddie. The hearing aid gave a piercing squeak.
“The comet!” Winnie replied, on a note of triumph. “Halley’s comet. That weekend is one of the times it’s visible. We’ll be able to watch it. How exciting! I missed it last time. I was with my Papa. In Peking, I think.”
“Fancy that,” said Freddie, when this information sank in. He beamed. “Twice in one lifetime. And from the same spot too. I bet there’s not many people who can say
that
.”
So, the next weekend, we returned to Winterscombe. Freddie and Winnie had last been there for Steenie’s funeral. Frank and I had last seen it more than seventeen years before, when we left to live in America.
The landscape had changed in Wiltshire, as it had in so many parts of England. The long lines of elm trees had gone; hedgerows had been plowed up; the nearest town, once thirty miles away, now encroached to within six miles of Winterscombe.
We drove through high gates, and for a moment—looking out over the lake and the bowl of the valley, seeing the house and the gardens in the soft light of a late winter afternoon—I thought little had changed. Then I saw this was an illusion. Winterscombe was
managed
now. The drive was freshly raked; all bumps and ruts had been removed; it smelled faintly of weedkiller. An attempt was being made, I think, to convey the impression that the hotel staff were old family retainers: At the house, our luggage was taken by a man wearing a garment I had not seen in forty years. He was young and zippy; he wore a green baize apron.
A man dressed in the manner of a butler greeted us distantly at reception. Reception consisted of an Edwardian partners’ desk. To check in, you signed a leather visitors’ book; the room keys bore names, not numbers. Presumably there were computers somewhere, and other technological aids, but if so they were well hidden. Rugs had been replaced upstairs by thick pile carpets. A man passed us carrying a fishing rod and complaining that the river was polluted. (It was out of season for fishing.) Another passed carrying a portable telephone. Freddie and Winnie seemed to be the only English guests; all the other accents we heard, like Frank’s and mine, were foreign.
Once we were in our bedroom and the man in the green baize apron had departed, Frank and I looked at each other.
The room, a former guest room, was huge. It was dominated by one of the reproduction four-posters. The windows were double-glazed, the radiators red-hot, the room temperature about seventy-five degrees. There were carefully chosen homogenous antiques. The pictures on the walls were safe and irreproachable. The covers on the chairs matched the quilt and the curtains. On one of the chests, arranged symmetrically, were two small bottles of complimentary sherry, a basket containing fruit under cling-wrap, some overarranged dried flowers, and a twenty-four-hour room service menu. Frank and I began to laugh.
“What would Maud say?” Frank asked. “Oh, what would Maud say?”
“I know exactly what Maud would say—and do. Maud could be the most terrific snob, but always about the oddest things. If she were here, if she came in now—you know the very first thing she’d do?”
“What?”
“This.” I pulled back the quilt on the bed and laid my hand on the pillowcase. “She’d say: ‘Oh, Victoria, this
won’t
do. It’s cotton, not linen.’”
We were a little delayed that evening, calling America—our son, Max, and our daughter, Hannah. When we went down to dinner that night, Freddie and Winnie were there in the hotel lounge (once the drawing room) awaiting us. They were sitting on a red velvet chesterfield, by a large log fire, attracting a number of curious stares.
Freddie was wearing a very ancient and slightly greenish dinner jacket, which had seen better days. Winnie was wearing a full-length dress that could never have been fashionable, but which had come closest to fashionability around 1940. Pinned to the front of her battleship bosom was a jet brooch the size of a coffee-cup saucer. She was wearing lipstick, which she did only on the most important occasions.
Both of them wore a look of happy and bemused expectation.
“My dear, you’ll never guess where they’ve put us,” said Winnie, in a lowered voice that could have been heard at the far end of the gardens. “The King’s bedroom, Vicky! Imagine that!”
“That’s not the best part.” Freddie was rocking with delight. “In the bathroom—in the bathroom there’s this absolutely incredible machine. You put the water in, then some of that bubble-bath stuff—”
“Which is there in the room. Free!” Winnie put in. “In sachets!”
“And then you press this switch, and
whoosh!
It turns into a kind of whirlpool.”
“It’s a Jacuzzi, Freddie,” I said.
“Is it?” Freddie looked very interested at this. “They have that sort of thing now, do they, in hotels? Quite extraordinary. There’s a carpet, too—in a bathroom! Well, well, well.” He paused. “Can you buy them—those Jack things? I wouldn’t mind having one at home. I said to Winnie, what a place for a murder! What would Inspector Coote make of that?”
Freddie was still talking about the Jacuzzi, to the considerable mirth of the other guests, when we went in to dinner. There, in the former ballroom, Freddie and Winnie encountered for the first time the delights of
nouvelle cuisine.
These impressed them rather less than the Jacuzzi.
“My goodness me,” said Freddie when he was presented with a small artwork of three different-colored mousses in the middle of a large white plate. “Is this all you get? It looks a bit like baby food. What do you think, Winnie? I seem to have a rose on my plate. Can it be a rose? Good Lord, well I’m jiggered—it’s a tomato.”
The food, in fact, was excellent, and Freddie became more converted as course succeeded course, though he still lamented the absence of what he called “proper” food, such as steak-and-kidney pudding.
At half past nine, which was the time when he and Winnie always retired to bed, Uncle Freddie downed his regulation whisky. He patted his tummy—a firm and rounded one—with the air of a man greeting a familiar friend.
“Do you know,” he said to Frank in a confiding way, “during the war—the Great War, that is—my mother took me to see a doctor, a most eminent man, and he said I had a weak heart. Something a bit iffy about the valves—I forget now. Well, I think, considering, that I haven’t done too badly—ninety years old. What do you think, Frank?”
“I think,” Frank replied, “that we will bring you and Winnie here again. But that time it will be for your one hundredth birthday, Freddie.”
This made Freddie very pink in the face. He pressed Frank’s hands, then, recovering himself, shook hands energetically.
“You have a very nice husband, Vicky,” Winnie said as I followed them out to the foot of the stairs. “A very nice husband
indeed.
Freddie and I chose very well for you—didn’t we, Freddie?”
They began to mount the stairs to their room, with the firm intention—Winnie said—of watching for the comet from their bedroom window. The fact that it was a cloudy night, with poor visibility, made no difference to Winnie, who remained a woman of undaunted spirit. She expected the comet, I think, to oblige her by passing directly outside her window at a slow, highly visible pace.
“Will there be sparks, Freddie?” she said when they were halfway up.
“I can’t remember, Winnie. I don’t
think
there are sparks.”
“Oh, I do hope there will be.” Winnie sounded wistful. “Lots of sparks, and a big tail. Do you know what I think, Freddie? I think it will look exactly like a flying bomb—yes, that’s it! Like a doodlebug, Freddie …”
“We won’t see it, you know,” Frank said in a regretful voice some while later. We had put on coats; we were on the terrace.
Frank looked up at the sky in a melancholy way.
“You can hardly see the moon. I can’t see a single star. The only way anyone is going to see that comet tonight is with a radiotelescope.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s there. We know it’s there, even if we can’t see it.”
“I suppose so.” Frank, the scientist, did not seem convinced by this. “I’d like to have seen it once. Just once. After all—every seventy-six years. We shall never be able to see it again.”
“Max and Hannah may—they can watch it for us.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I half believe it. Yes. I feel as if, tonight, I’m watching for all the people who saw it here last time. For my mother and father, my grandparents. For Maud, Montague Stern and Constance, Steenie and Boy, Jenna. All of them.” I looked around the empty terrace. “Yes. I do feel that.”
“Let’s walk.” Frank took my hand. “Shall we? Shall we walk—oh, a long way? I’d like to do that. I don’t want to go back in there.”