The Last Houseparty (9 page)

“I know,” exclaimed Mrs O'Rourke. “That's what you get in fairgrounds.”

“Right. Just a big turntable to carry the figures round, only this one's got to be the biggest ever made. Thirty-two figures it carries, counting the little animals. Four for the seasons, eight for the dancers, sixteen little animals and four Father Times.”

“Four Father Times!” said Mrs O'Rourke.

“Well, there'd have to be,” said Mr Mason patiently. “I don't see how you could work it otherwise. You could have him coming out on an arm each time, I suppose, but not if he's got to follow the others on round. Much simpler gearing, you see, if there's four of him, only it does mean having this ruddy great turntable …”

“I say!” said Mrs O'Rourke. “I've just had a super thought! Perhaps we could get it in the
Guinness Book of Records
if it's really the biggest in the world!”

“That's the reason for the weights, you follow,” said Mr Mason, uninterested in the possibilities of publicity. “I reckon you'd need getting on for half a ton to pull the carousel round alone. Then some middling ones to drive the figures, and another lot for the other set of figures above, and some for the quarter chimes, and one for the hours, not to mention the going train—that's what we call the part that drives the hands, the going train. Devil of a lot of winding every twenty-four hours.”

“Oh dear,” said Miss Quintain. “Every twenty-four hours? I shall have to think about that … Beryl, dear, did you remember to bring that document for Mr Mason to sign?”

Mrs O'Rourke jumped to her feet, miming guilt.

“Stupid female!” she said. “I've got it all beautifully typed but I've gone and left it in the office. I'll run and get it, shall I? Won't be a tick, honestly.”

She picked up her plates and took them to the sink, but instead of leaving at once she became involved in a conversation with the stouter of the two assistant gardeners, who had taken her plates over at the same time. Miss Quintain watched her for a moment, sighed and shrugged. The other diners were rising, and Miss Quintain was piling her plates together when Mr Mason spoke.

“Excuse me asking,” he said. “I hope you won't take it personal—it's only that Quintain's not that common a name, spelt the way you do, I mean.”

“I've never heard of any others,” said Miss Quintain. “It used to be with an O like everyone else, only my grandfather—my step-grandfather, really—decided to be different.”

“I ran across a Major Quintain during the war. He spelt it your way.”

“You didn't! Major Henry Quintain? Bucks Light Infantry?”

The change of tone was instantaneous and very marked. Explaining about the spelling of her name Miss Quintain had let a trace of amusement mingle with the brisk, sphere-controlling competence of her normal mien. Now her eyes opened wide and she stared at Mr Mason as if he were the bringer of miraculous news.

“He was ‘I' Corps those days,” he said. “Initial H. something, though. H. B. was it?”

“H. P. But it
must
have been Harry. Where was this? When?”

“In the desert. It wasn't the sort of place to have a name. Right at the end of March 1941.”

“But that was when he disappeared! The thirtieth of March!”

“Right. We'd stopped belting along after the Eyeties and we'd just been sitting out in the desert three or four weeks south of Msus. We sort of knew Rommel was coming, but we didn't know when. Major Quintain came down to our unit because of us having a spare Lysander ready to go and went off on a recce flight. I suppose you know he didn't come back, and next morning we were legging it for Alexandria fast as we could run. That's the only time I ever saw him. I'm sorry. I expect I oughtn't have mentioned it. I didn't want to upset you.”

“Oh no,” said Miss Quintain. “It's a bit of a shock, but … anything about Harry, anything at all. Was he happy, Mr Mason?”

“Far as I could see, ma'am. I wasn't in the mess with him, being only an A/c One, but I heard him telling Mr Toller he was enjoying his war.”

“Toller was the pilot?”

“Right. He didn't come back either. Far as I know they never found the Lysander.”

“No. I longed to go and look for it as soon as the war was over—I must have been about sixteen—but my mother wouldn't let me. She'd made up her mind to stop thinking about him as soon as the telegram came. I remember her opening it in the morning room—Purser brought it in—it was almost the end of the holidays—I remember her reading it slowly and folding it up and her whole face seeming to close. All she said was, ‘Well, that's that.' We'd been happy … less than two years, I suppose, before he had to go away for the war … I …”

Miss Quintain smiled suddenly and shook her head.

“Some other time,” she said. “I've got the guide rota now. Try and remember anything you can, Mr Mason. Anything. He was only my stepfather. I changed my name to his as soon as I was twenty-one. My mother wouldn't let me before. He was rather important to me, you see.”

VI

1

“… the imaginary landscapes of childhood, the Arabia of the mind,” gabbled Professor Blech, gesturing at the groves and fields below the terraces as though they were that Empty Quarter. Harry, walking beside him, glanced across the line of march to catch Vincent's eye. The twitch at one corner of his mouth might have been a gloss on the Professor's words or gesture, a calling-of attention to meanings unknown to the speaker. Vincent nodded, serious. Neither the Professor nor Brigadier Trotman, walking between the cousins, appeared to notice the exchange. The smoke of their cigars hung above the roses in the still, post-prandial air. There was half an hour before the croquet party could set off for Bullington; the Professor, no doubt, would have been equally happy to stay indoors and expatiate at ever greater length to the Brigadier on the military aspects of the Palestine problem, as well as any other aspects or problems that could in any way be annexed to it; it had been Zena who had told the cousins to “show them the way round the garden”, as if it were possible for visitors to become lost, or even be ambushed by bandit Buckinghamshire-men, among Lord Snailwood's phalanxed roses.

“Far are the shades of Arabia,” continued the Professor, “but taking shades in the sense of ghosts they are very close to the hearts of your ruling caste. Those languid gentlemen in the Foreign Office possess a
Selbstbildnis
, an inward image—as it might be the opening sequences of a motion picture—showing them their true selves, tanned, hawk-eyed, scrawny with travel, speaking impeccable Arabic, as they sit at a fire of camel dung in a circle of Bedouin, accepted as brother of the desert, comrade of immemorial blood loyalties, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Sandy Arbuthnot,” said Harry.

“Knew the fellow he was based on, as a matter of fact,” said the Brigadier.

“Of course you did, of course you did,” said Blech, almost crowing with delight. “Just as every old India hand knows the man on whom Kipling based his Strickland.”

“You seem remarkably
au fait
with our less intellectual writers, Professor,” said Harry. “Have you made a special study of our childish tastes?”

“To a certain extent I share them, Mr Quintain, but it is of course not merely a matter of taste that dictates your choice. Rather it is a celebration of images, the
lares et penates
of your national household, which unlike other nations you keep in a dark corner behind the chimney and do not take out for public worship; indeed as with us Jews and the
teraphim
which appear to have performed a somewhat similar function up to the time of King David, you will often deny that these gods exist or existed or were ever anything more than children's playthings. For other nations such symbols are embodied ideas—Jerusalem, the swastika, the flame on the tomb of
le Soldat Inconnu
—publicly perceived, even in certain cases deliberately invented to perform the function of worship-object …”

“Never cared for any of that,” said the Brigadier. “At least we don't go making bloody fools of ourselves over some sort of intellectual fiddle-faddle.”

“Undoubtedly your notorious distrust of ideation has tended to keep you out of trouble of certain sorts,” said the Professor. “But has it not been at a cost? Does it not for instance strike you that before our young friends here are three years older they will be fighting a war of ideas in a world dominated by the opposing ideas of Communism and National Socialism and Fascism, and yet to guide you through this holocaust you have chosen a Prime Minister, and he himself has chosen a cabinet in which there is not one single man who, despite a certain share of intelligence, could be called a man of ideas—all jurists, administrators, technicians?”

They had reached by now the limit of the normal “stroll round the gardens”. The nature of the whole site of Snailwood precluded more than a few variations on this circuit. The platform, part natural and part artificial, on which the house was built extended towards the river as a paved terrace. To the west of this, running along the slope of the hill, lay the three garden terraces, the outer two quite extensive and the middle one smaller but containing a belvedere dating from before the present house. The levels dropped by several feet between the terraces, and the far steeper slope from north to south meant that in order to achieve those levels retaining walls had had to be built. You went out with one such wall—ancient brick, about twelve feet high—on your right, and came back through the Lower Garden—a rather haphazard series of spaces and enclosures and one or two pools—with the second wall on your left, deep-buttressed and where the ground dipped to the Great Lawn almost thirty feet high.

The out and the return circuits were connected at a few points by almost ladder-like flights of steep stone steps running down the retaining wall, but a much grander marble stair at each end made it natural to walk the full round. The western stair, which the party had now reached, was flanked on its further side by several old holm oaks, whose sombre glittering leaves composed a screen and finish to the vista as effective and apparently impenetrable as a cliff. The strollers were half-way down—the Professor had in fact halted on the platform at that point as if to emphasise by inaction the superiority of the idea to the deed—when the leaves by the balustrade at the bottom of the stair began to heave and rustle as if a large animal were fighting free of them, or as if the ambush which Zena had feared were about to be sprung.

For a moment it seemed that the animal was the likelier explanation. Through the outer leaves a form emerged, roundish, grey, hindquarters rather than head, not any known specimen of British fauna but just possibly an escaper from Whipsnade. The illusion lasted a couple of seconds until the figure had fought clear of the branches, turned and straightened to become Sally's nurse, pink-faced, clutching her hat to her head, and additionally flustered to see four gentlemen advancing on her line abreast down the stair, giving her no chance to erase the impression of maenad struggling from the clutches of an oak spirit.

“Something wrong?” called the Brigadier.

“Oh, please could one of the young gentlemen help?” said the nurse. “She's gone and got herself stuck up a tree.”

“Long way up?” snapped the Brigadier.

“Out of my reach. If only …”

“Fort Two,” murmured Vincent to Harry, running back up the steps.

“Ladder,” said the Brigadier, like a magician commanding an object to appear out of thin air. Perhaps in his own mind he was telling one of the cousins to fetch one, but Harry was already half-way up the stair and Vincent had reached the top, where he pulled a branch aside and disappeared as neatly as a ghost walking through a panelled wall. A moment later Harry did the same trick. Deprived of suitable subordinates the Brigadier strode up the steps two at a time and made off along the terrace.

Professor Blech smiled at the nurse, who seemed on the verge of weeping, more likely with irritation than worry or fear. He too climbed the steps and pulled the branch aside, holding it for her as if it had been a door.

“That's where the dratted thing is,” she sniffed as she went through.

Inside the wall of leaves was a cavernous space raftered with long dark branches like the necks of dragons. Some yards down the steep slope Vincent and Harry were standing, looking up into the next tree. The child was almost on a level with Blech and the nurse. She was lying on her chest with arms and legs clenched round a horizontal branch and her face pressed against the bark. Though her body might have been in a coma with the terror of height, her eyes were fixed on the cousins, staring as if they had been predators rather than rescuers.

“She can be ever so wilful,” said the nurse. “I did tell her she wasn't to.”

Blech remained silent. No doubt he had opinions on the role of will in the development of the psyche, and on acrophobia, and the instinct to climb trees in despite of it, but he seemed aware that he was now in the sphere of action, rather than what he chose to call ideation.

“It's your fort, dash it,” said Harry.

Vincent laughed and walked to the trunk of the tree, still further in from the steps. The branch to which the girl was clinging rose from the main boll only just above the ground, running out at an angle until it was ten or twelve feet high, and then flattening out for a while before arching down to spread its weight of leaves into the sunlight. Along this inner length there was only one large bifurcation, and no other branches ran near it.

Vincent leaned against the trunk to remove his shoes, then climbed in stockinged feet on to the branch, stood, steadied himself and walked up the slope with small and careful steps, arms spread for balance. As he moved further from the centre the branch swayed with his weight, rustling its lowest leaves against the marble of the balustrade. Sally whimpered, craning past her shoulder to watch him come. Once on the level he moved faster, reaching her in four or five ballet-like steps. He steadied himself, bent his knees, laid his palms on the branch, took his weight on his arms and slid his legs clear so that he could sit beside her.

“Come on, Sally,” he said softly. “I told you not to try it without me to help, but you're a brave girl to get so far.”

Gently he put his hands round her rib-cage to lift her but she tightened her arms round the branch and screwed her eyes shut.

“C-come on,” he said. “Show us how brave you are. Up with you.”

He had to reach down and pull her left arm free, much as her mother had done to loosen her embrace the previous afternoon. There was a slight struggle before he dragged her up and set her, rigid as a doll, on his lap.

“There you are, you see,” he said. “Now do you want to sit on the lookout seat like I did, or would you rather c-climb straight down?”

“Down,” she whispered.

Vincent looked back along the branch and shrugged.

“Easier if I go on out,” he said, speaking downward to Harry. “If you went up on the bank there, ready to take her …”

“Right-oh.”

“Put your arms round my neck, Sally, and don't wriggle.”

Vincent had to move her arms, one by one, to the position he wanted. Then on his palms and the seat of his trousers he worked his way sidelong to the start of the downward slope, where he swivelled and half-climbed, half-slithered down the limb, now dividing into a rough fan of branchlets. His weight had the leverage to depress the whole branch so that a ragged slot appeared in the wall of leaves, letting in brightness. A little above his head a section of another sideways-running branch was worn smooth on its upper surface, the last trace of Fort Two, whose master used to sit there, peering unseen across the silent gardens.

Harry reached up. The child looked at him with her usual half-sullen stare but then, before Vincent had quite settled himself to cope with the problems of transferring her weight out and down, she loosed her hold, wriggled, slid, and would have fallen if he had not grabbed her upper arm. She continued to wriggle, more violently now.

“Catch, then,” said Vincent, heaving her outwards and letting go.

She dropped the eighteen inches into Harry's arms and the moment he lowered her to his chest she buried her head in his shoulder and clung to him with her customary ferocity of embrace. Harry laughed and strummed the fingers of his free hand along her spine. Vincent sat looking at them, unsmiling, then swung himself to the ground and went over to collect his shoes. All five moved out into the sunlight.

“Thank you ever so much,” said the nurse. “Now let go of the gentleman, Sally. We've got to go and find your mummy, haven't we? Mrs Dubigny's going to be ever so busy later, seeing to everything for the party, so she said she'll have Sally now, 'stead of after tea which is her usual time. Now, Sally, you mustn't be a naughty girl or Mummy won't be pleased.”

She spoke in exactly the same brisk, fretful tone to both child and adults, as if not expecting to be understood or obeyed by either. Sally's response was to hide her face in Harry's shoulder.

“Tell you what,” said Harry. “I'm not going over to Bullington. I was proposing to take the Jowett out for a spin and see what Vince has done to her. I could take Mrs Dubigny and Sally along. Would you like that, Sally? You can sit in the dicky and let the wind blow your hair about.”

At last Sally straightened up. Her nod was firm, almost commanding.

“Right you are,” said Harry. “Come along, Nanny—we mustn't waste any of Mrs Dubigny's precious time. Sorry to leave you, Professor—I could listen to you till Doomsday. Have fun, Vince. Knock spots off old Dibs for me. If I meet the Brig I'll send him round the other way.”

Hefting Sally on to his hip he marched off along the terrace with the nurse at his side, the pace he set making her walk seem more flustered than ever. Professor Blech, blinking in the sunlight, smiled at Vincent.

“A peculiarly English episode,” he said. “I wonder whether it would have been improved had the creature to be rescued been perhaps a cat … You no doubt noticed the appropriateness of the Brigadier imposing a military solution wholly inappropriate to the circumstances?”

“He c-c-couldn't have known, sir.”

“Exactly. It is often supposed that intellectuality by its search for the unifying theory imposes a strait-jacket upon action, whereas the pragmatic approach allows flexibility uninhibited by preconceived notions. But such pragmatism is the slave of history. Whatever worked last time will always be tried again and not be discarded until it has been proved to work no longer. This is the rationale of your notorious muddling through—to suffer a series of defeats at the hands of enemies who during the period of peace have made innovations based more or less on theoretical concepts—for it is the function of theory, after all, to provide as it were a map of the future, or in the case of more sophisticated theorisms a series of maps of possible futures, interlocking, cognisant of the moral, political, cultural dimensions, et cetera, et cetera of what may seem on the surface purely military problems—you follow me?”