‘But why can’t she go off on her own if she wants to?’ Sara interposed.
‘I told you, she’s
autistic,
’ Valerie snapped. ‘Come on, Andrew.’
She tugged at Andrew’s arm.
‘You go off,’ Sara said. ‘I’d better go and mingle. Adele doesn’t even know me. Although I still don’t see why she can’t be by herself if she feels like it.’
Andrew allowed himself to be reclaimed for the search and Sara stood watching until he had been drawn out of her sight beyond the trees on the east lawn. Helene and Jim, and one or two others newly enlisted, fanned out down the paths. There was no sound from the cloisters. Voices dropped away. Quiet slowly wrapped itself around hedges, urns and columns, stole over the long grass and came to rest under the trees. The sky was glowing with a heavy indigo, a deeper, northern note that did not belong in a summer sky. Even now as she breathed, Sara sensed something, mingled with the night scents of grass and lavender, that reminded her of cold water. A couple of months from now and up there would be a winter rug of inky sky, weighting the air with the smell of ice. Already the evening’s silence lay over the garden like a fall of snow.
Valerie had been too busy gripping Andrew in her uxorious armlock to bother explaining much about what Adele’s being autistic meant, but Sara knew a little anyway. It still did not seem to her either extreme or serious that the girl might simply have wanted to find some peaceful corner of the garden in which to be by herself, away from the fuss and that rather overbearing mother. If indeed she had managed to hide herself away somewhere, it seemed almost a cruelty that Helene, or someone like Valerie (all right, not
like
Valerie, actually Valerie), would be breaking in upon Adele, blaming her for getting lost, shattering the fragile quiet in which she might be sheltering like a feathery Victorian ornament under a glass dome. Although she had opted out of joining the search Sara wanted suddenly to be the one to find her, so that it would be done respectfully. Looking round the garden, offering all its secret but obvious twisting paths and its charmingly deliberate hiding places, its randomness seemed contrived. If I were Adele, she thought, I should want to get right out of here.
Without thinking further Sara descended the garden, taking the path down the side of the manor past the lily pool and the conservatory. To reach the lane outside, beyond the garden boundary, she had to pass in front of the house and she did so cautiously, knowing that she was expected inside. Even less than usual did the prospect of achieving the precarious balance of plate, glass and polite conversation appeal to her. Through the lighted windows she could see the thickening assembly of people from the audience at their buffet supper, swaying gently. Standing taller than any of them was Herve, now holding forth and waving his fork hand with agile authority to a sea of upturned, mainly female faces, as if conducting their adoration. Guiltily she tiptoed off the gravel and onto the grass under the grove of wisteria in front of the house. Two minutes later she had slipped round the main gates and reached the bridge across the river on the other side of the lane.
In the fading light the river ran like liquefied pewter under the eye of Britannia. To Sara’s left, back across the lane and beyond the roof of Iford Manor, she could see occasional slow-moving figures in the garden, no doubt searching for Adele. Gliding along the top path above the rose garden where earlier, in the sunshine, she had stood looking out, was a figure she recognised as Phil. He was stopping now, pausing and standing alone, allowing himself to be slowed to utter stillness by the sight of the river, the field and the valley, just as she had done. Sara turned and looked directly upstream. On the left bank of the river, between the river itself and the lane which bordered Iford Manor, was a massive high-walled garden. The only entrance to it, as far as Sara could see, was a narrow door on the river side, invisible to anyone who was not either standing on the bridge as she was, or actually walking the riverbank. Another of Peto’s beloved larger than life-sized statues had been placed along the top of the wall just above the doorway. Sara could see that it was a classical male nude who, reclining on one side with one knee raised, was propped on one elbow and leaned down directly over the lintel of the garden door under him. He was incongruous, perched up there; probably a Narcissus plundered by Peto from the reedy edge of some Italian villa’s pool and stuck up on a brick wall in Wiltshire to contemplate, instead of his reflection, the balding head of a bow-legged gardener stooping through the doorway on his way to hoe the brassicas. Without being aware of deciding to do so, Sara found that she was making for the doorway, and that her pace had quickened.
She halted just inside the door, on the threshold of a different country. Here was the stronghold of a kingdom of rectangles, squares and straight paths. In this orderly garrison, sections of the parade ground were marked out by red bricks, set into the edges of the earth beds in rows of tight triangles. The pebbles of the gravel paths which intersected the borders seemed not merely raked but counted. Within the borders were ranks of vegetables which appeared to understand that no slacking would be tolerated. There would be none of that pansy stuff here: no meandering or drooping or growing all over the place that might be all very well over the wall there, in that Italian setup. This was the vegetable army. She set off along a path, inspecting the insignia of flower, leaf and pod, all present and correct. It was oddly restful, Sara thought, like being a tourist at a piece of absurd military showing-off. She remembered how a little over a month ago she had taken a baking August afternoon off and gone up to the Presidential Palace overlooking Prague to see the changing of the guard. It had been hilarious in the most relaxing way, scores of men tightly dressed and stamping, stopping, stamping, with hundredweights of weaponry attached to them, bursting with the heat and precision and vanity of it all, while she had wafted about in white muslin eating ice cream. She had now walked down the whole of one side of the garden and at the corner, just past a row of bean tripods of equilateral perfection, she turned the right angle to continue along the second side. Ahead, exactly halfway down the path in front of her, was a bench set back against the wall. It faced down another path directly to the very centre of the garden. Exactly in the middle of the bench sat Adele, gazing straight ahead. She held upright between one thumb and three fingers a cigarette which had burned to the tip.
Sara approached slowly and quietly.
‘May I sit down?’
Without turning, Adele said, with a distrust that reminded Sara of someone speaking into a microphone for the first time, ‘May I sit down? Yes.’
Adele continued her gaze down the path and began to sing, so faintly and obviously to herself alone that Sara did not even smile but half turned and listened, hearing with surprise how clean, constant and true was the soft tone that emerged from Adele’s barely open lips. But what was completely astonishing was that she was singing, over and over again, all four of Herve’s musical notions. She sang them smoothly and unhesitatingly, despite their being atonal and unmelodic, and was also singing exactly the same notes, albeit two octaves higher, that she had heard played on the cello. Over and over again they came, no louder than a hum, but perfectly remembered and faithfully reproduced as if from some unerring machine. The voice was sailing through the unhelpful, alien-sounding intervals like a synthesiser, having clearly no need of the usual melodic reference points of western ‘tunes’, the implied modulations to related keys or the eventual return to the tonic key. Then she stopped. Before Sara could fill the pause with any remark, and she could think of none that would not be inadequate, the gentle sound began again. This time it was different. Another four little tunes, each one different, all a little strange but somehow easier on the ear than Herve’s, and of about the same length. They came again and again, and still Sara could not say anything that would not sound patronising, so matter-of-fact was Adele’s delivery, so
un
performance-like. As the singing went on Sara followed Adele’s gaze down the central path and noticed that the planting here was completely symmetrical. Nearest the edges of the path were corresponding rows of parsley. Next to them on each side was a row of flat-leafed plants which might have been sorrel. Next on both sides was a wide strip of sieved earth where something had already cropped and every trace of it had been removed. Clearly, no late straggling harvests were permitted here. Further out were the next taller rows of peas, which created the soft walls of a tunnel of symmetry which ran down to the point where four paths met in the dead centre of the square garden. Beyond the centre the path continued straight down to the opposite wall where in shadow, facing the one they were sitting on, stood an identical bench. It was weirdly empty, Sara thought, as if their absence from it, because they were looking at it from this one, created an asymmetrical jar on the sensibilities. By means of some metaphysical conceit there should lie, at the end of this knot garden of correspondences, the paradox of beholding yourself.
Just then a movement caught her eye. As Adele’s murmuring went on, a peacock strutted into the intersection of the paths in the last of the light. The singing dropped to a sweet whimper which would have sounded like a charm had not the voice continued to inflect mechanically, communicating neither humanity nor magic. But suddenly magic happened. The peacock turned towards them and stopped. Up swept the blue-green arc of its tail, its light spraying the air with fire as the sun caught the jewels in the half circle of feathered eyes. Adele gasped. The peacock gave a little preening shiver with a sound like a breeze in tall grass. It moved round and a little closer. Now it stood, as if it knew, exactly at the intersection of the paths, in the dead centre of the whole garden. It must have been by chance that it stopped there, so that the mean, black eyes in the crowned head, mantled by the sapphire arch of shot silk feathers, stared back down the broad ribbon of path with its flanking green guard of honour, as if from their own dominion of perfect symmetry. But perhaps, Sara thought, glancing at her, it was not chance at all but some entreaty in Adele’s voice or eyes which had brought the bird and held it here, while Adele stared back, an enrapt courtier, with a look on her face of pure happiness.
CHAPTER
12
B
Y NEXT MORNING
Jim was still feeling wronged and indignant, but as in all such instances, he felt it privately. He clattered quietly down his spiral stairs into the basement kitchen, turned on Radio 4 and made the usual efficient breakfast of coffee and toast with Marmite. No smear of Marmite left in the butter, no thumping of the kettle, it wasn’t his way. Were Helene to telephone at that moment he would pick up the phone and say, ‘Helene, my dear, how are you? All present and correct? I hope Adele’s better now? My dear, I feel I must make amends. I do assure you I meant no harm.’
Mildly, he considered that Helene would probably believe him, but would believe also that her forgiveness would not be worth the having unless she made him work for it a little. So she would say, ‘Well, Jim, I’m getting over it of course, as I must. As I always do. But I’m going to be frank with you and say it has been a blow. Well, a double blow: first to find Adele with cigarettes and then to find out that it was you, Jim, who started her on the dangerous habit. A bitter blow, dear.’ If she telephoned.
He would claim, again mildly, as he had tried to do last night for most of the journey home in the minibus, that he had simply left some cigarettes in his workshop one day and come down in the morning to the smell of burning and the sight of Adele puffing on one. Not that it had been altogether, absolutely, quite like that. But it was so long ago now that even Adele had probably forgotten all about it. He had given her her first cigarette just after the little bit of fun they’d been having. He’d been having, rather, and only up to a point. And only now and then, and now not at all, because she really was on the skinny side and besides, he liked to feel a woman respond under him, not just stare up at him while he got on with it. The fun of it had dwindled pretty rapidly. It was the mother he wanted, really. He supposed it was just that Adele had been there, blonde, compliant and not unwilling, foisted on him by Helene, in fact, soon after Helene had made it clear that she was not looking for a relationship of that sort herself. So perhaps it had been revenge of a kind, but he was a healthy man and the girl hadn’t come to any harm, he’d seen to that. And she was what, twenty-five now, so nineteen the first time, soon after she’d come home to live after her residential school. Hardly a child.
And now all this fuss about a few cigarettes! He smirked at the thought of what Helene would say if she knew that Adele’s first cigarettes had actually been post-coital ones. She was altogether too protective. Of course he had not said as much last night, nor had he spelled out that he had every intention of continuing to leave his packet lying around so that Adele could carry on helping herself to one every morning as soon as she arrived.
‘Dammit, Helene, just an old navy habit, I can’t get down past ten a day. And don’t think I’ve turned her into a chain-smoker; she never had more than one a day. Just a bit of harmless copying, you know. ’Spect she felt grown-up,’ he had said. He was quite sure she did not even smoke them properly; she seemed just to like to hold one and flick the ash. The others in the minibus had backed him up, too, while Adele herself had sat next to Phil at the back, staring out of the window and taking no interest. She had no grasp of how much others did for her. He would be tempted to point all this out, should Helene telephone. But she did not telephone. Jim poured his second cup of coffee.
Adele could get on today with that French chandelier of Mrs Dyson’s. If he was paying her to be in the workshop Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, ten till four, he might as well get some work out of her. The rigid patterns and timetables that ruled Adele’s life helped him too, he acknowledged, and what had started as a favour to her mother had developed a momentum of its own. Business had never been so good. The shop’s performance was still a little modest but steadier now than in all his twelve years of ownership. Because Adele got through so much work in the basement here, he could be at the shop more regularly. He was doing well, even now at the end of the season when he could not rely on Americans paying silly prices for fairly ordinary Clarice Cliff and damaged Staffordshire. If he bought cleverly at the ceramics and glass auction in Salisbury on Friday he could expect an excellent Christmas. Venetian glass necklaces, a lamp or two, wineglasses in pairs, those should go well. But it was the restoration side that was making the difference.
Sipping his coffee at the kitchen table, his mind went back to March, six years ago. The daffodils had been in flower under the trees in the Circus and the sun shining when he had set off with Helene on his arm and Adele doing her shuffle walk in front. Helene had worn gloves and what she called a spring hat. He had been rightly proud of the work he had put into that chandelier. It had occupied the whole workshop for weeks. Every single one of its thousands of crystals had been taken off, cleaned in soapy water and put back in its place among hundreds of loops and swags of glittering icicles. The day before, he had watched as the whole wondrous thing was reattached to its ceiling chains and swung up gently into place above the tables in the Pump Room. A proud moment for an ex-navy, self-taught antique ceramics and glass restorer. So it was to be a celebration, treating Helene to tea and showing the chandelier to her. Helene loved the Pump Room teas, so it should have been perfect. But Adele, back from school and now living permanently with Helene, had to come too, of course.
As soon as they got to their table she had become distressed. Staring up at the chandelier, she had whimpered like an animal and stretched out her arms as if she were trying to reach it. Then she had begun to screech, and then she climbed up on the table to get nearer. Flowers, vase, cutlery and the beautiful white cloth all ended up on the floor. People stared. The screeching had grown louder and she had proved quite handy with her fists when he had tried to get her down. Eventually, with her hat knocked sideways, Helene had got her arms right round her—it was fortunate she was so much bigger than Adele—and got her out of the place. She had calmed down eventually in the Ladies, away from the chandelier.
One little crystal. One little crystal facing the wrong way, just one that he had put back the wrong way round during the reassembly. Adele had been aware of it immediately because, as Helene later explained, Adele had an extraordinary eye for anything symmetrical, but let it be wrong in any detail and she would spot it at once and become very upset.
He didn’t understand it, the autism. It certainly brought more problems with it than benefits, but Adele’s ability to tell if the symmetry of an object or pattern was disturbed was remarkable, he could see that. And it was an ability for which Helene, that day, had suddenly seen a practical application. Adele’s thing with the chandeliers suddenly became what Helene termed ‘such a blessing’ because dear Jim had been persuaded (coerced rather) to employ her as an assistant in the workshop.
The restoration side of Jim’s weedy antiques business grew buoyant. And he realised that, while paying Adele less than the rate for the job, he could still glow in the warmth of Helene’s gratitude for the bit of extra time to herself, she being too genteel to refer specifically to the poor wages. Adele herself, as far as anyone could tell, seemed to like going out to work even though it was only seven doors along in the Circus. She seemed to like the dismantling and cleaning of the crystals, manipulating the shiny pieces and reassembling them effortlessly from her perfect recall of their arrangement. And she had seemed, if not to like, then not to mind Jim’s skirmishes under her clothes and his short-lived pumpings between her legs on the workshop couch, and also neither to like it nor mind when they ceased. It seemed that on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from ten until four Adele entered a world that was tolerably understandable and within her control.
But still, this morning, he was a little indignant. After all, Phil smoked too and it was one of his Adele had been lighting when Helene burst in on everything. Still less was it Jim’s fault that Adele had run off and got lost, and in any case he did not see that the frenzied search for her had been necessary. The woman who had been playing the cello had come across her, apparently. Then Phil had turned up after some lucky guess about where she’d gone, and the three of them had taken a stroll round the vegetable garden and sauntered back as calm as you please. Adele had not been upset in the least.
Recalling how he, wearing contrition like the imprint of a hand on a slapped face, had let Helene go on at him all the way home about how Adele was a constant worry to her and how she had thought he understood, Jim felt a Marmitey burp of anger. My God, did he understand. He understood that his courtship of Helene was a campaign that he would win only by attrition, as long as Adele stood in the path of victory. He remembered with strictly private resentment his first whispered suggestion that he and Helene might enjoy more ‘intimacy’, late one evening, after endless shared late suppers à deux. All evening she had been particularly open and relaxed, even affectionate, inviting. She had been warm, ample, delicious, at least in prospect, but at the suggestion of bed she had been suddenly overcome with self-denial. There was Adele to consider. ‘But she’s been upstairs asleep for three hours!’ Jim had almost squawked, but neither that evening nor subsequently had Helene changed her mind.
He was probably an old-fashioned fool, but he had not given up hope that his cheerful loyalty, not to mention his tolerance of Adele, would eventually wear Helene down. After all, he was well preserved and straight-backed, still had plenty of hair and looked better than many in a camel lamb’s-wool polo neck and a tweed jacket. Only sometimes, on days like today, he wondered how much longer Adele was going to provide Helene with an excuse to keep him at a distance. Lately, he had begun to wonder if, at sixty-two, he was perhaps a little long in the tooth to be trusting so much to patience, persistence and the allure of Austin Reed.
He carried his breakfast dishes to the sink and paused, looking up through the low window. He could not see much, of course, just the wall and dustbin, the iron steps in front leading up from the area to the pavement and the two doors on the left at right angles to his window, one leading straight into his kitchen, the other one on the far side leading down the passage to the workshop at the back. He had taken in his pelargoniums already and the bare area was bleakened by their absence. Helene’s advice, some weeks ago, had been to cheer it up with something evergreen, a myrtle or a miniature bay. She had even promised him a cutting of something. If he got a pot ready with compost and put it where she might notice it walking past, it might jog her memory. He had always been sentimental about flowers. It would be a particular joy to grow something she had given him, to water and feed it and keep the snails and the frost off it. He did not think she had said anything about its being a flowering plant, but somehow he could not imagine its not being. From Helene’s little cutting he would grow a wondrous flowering bush and amaze her. People passing on the open-top buses would gape at it, forgetting architecture. He would nurture such blooms for her: huge, pollen-laden, jungle-hued, soft, petal-dripping blossoms like babies’ heads in Lalique bonnets. He found himself hoping that she would ring so that with understanding words he could bathe her in his loyal adoration. So like dear Helene to offer him a cutting. She was so giving.
S
ARA HAD
slept badly. At half past eight she woke up and debated whether to lie in bed a bit longer and then slop around in a bathrobe eating too many croissants, or to get up now, pull on her running kit and take herself off round the lanes for a few miles. Each felt like a kind of punishment, depending on which side of her nature—the infantile or the grown-up—was being consulted. Her baby voice complained that on top of her tiredness, she felt unloved and confused. She was being made to do things she didn’t want to do (Herve) and not being allowed to do things that she did (Andrew). She was not in control; a state which left her petulant and inclined towards pleasure-seeking of a mildly self-destructive kind.
Alternatively she could summon her inner adult, who ceded that, all right, she was indeed tired and felt unloved and confused. Did that make her a victim? Would four croissants leave her feeling any more in control, or better able to withstand this unfamiliar feeling of not getting precisely what she wanted with either of these two men who, in different ways but equally irritatingly, exerted such power over her well-being? All right, four miles that she did not feel quite up to might not either, but she put on her running clothes and set off from the front door of Medlar Cottage before her Poor Me voice could raise a protest.
For the first few moments’ trotting along the lane which ran below Medlar Cottage and through the valley Sara’s body yelled for its bathrobe and croissants. She ignored it. She could just see across the top of the hedgerow towards the farms and meadows on the far side. There was a dank ground mist on the lower reaches of the valley this morning, all but hiding the straggly line of willows which bordered the stream at the bottom. Higher up, the six lime trees stood out like giant golden bushes, the black trunks masked in mist. In the fields around, other trees, a stone barn and a little copse where cattle had gathered, appeared through the mist like smudges done in faint pencil on foggy, soft paper, floating worlds as if from a Japanese drawing of a damp English morning. As she ran, Phil came to mind although he was, she knew, not Japanese but Chinese. Yet talking with Phil, she imagined, would be halting and difficult, in its own way like one of those drawings: tottering from tiny floating world to floating world of speech, crossing the deep mists of silence in between by means of increasingly frail and desperate bridges of conversation. It was easier to establish a little duet of smiles and nods and venture no further. She supposed it was lazy but she didn’t care.
Her body warming in the steady rhythm of her running, Sara’s mind slipped into an easeful unthinking of the kind usually felt just before sleep. Past Radford Farm, Ivan’s gun-dog kennels and Upper Northend Farm and still she was conscious only of the regular footfall of running, her plodding like the therapeutic push of kneading dough or the drubbing of clothes against a washboard. After half a mile she took the right-hand fork down to Oakford Farm and across to Marshfield on the other side of the valley, where the lane fell steeply past Wessex Water’s high-fenced brick building, like a dolls’ penitentiary, on the left. At the bottom of the hill, on the stone bridge over the stream, she stopped, flapping her arms and running on the spot. Not pausing to observe how rapidly the clear brown water spilled under the bridge after nearly two weeks of rain, she set off again, feeling now her body and mind wake up together with an exhilarating burst of energy as if an unexpected wave of laughter from somewhere inside her was gathering into a huge, tidal roll.