The Old Jest (2 page)

Laughter and the clink of glasses. For a moment there was a hesitation in the music but by the time Aunt Mary and Harry came out of the house confidence was established once more.

Harry held a bottle of champagne in one hand and struggled with the cork.

‘I gather it's a celebration. Wasn't I lucky to meet Mary in the village?'

Aunt Mary had a bunch of glasses slotted between her fingers.

‘We have very few bottles left. It's pre-war. After all, you're not eighteen every day. I love champagne. Love it. Put a cushion under your behind, dear, or you'll get piles.'

‘No one,' said Nancy, ‘could get piles sitting on this. It's boiling. Positively burning.'

‘Do what you're told.'

Nancy got up to collect a cushion from a deckchair.

Pop.

‘Hurrah!'

Aunt Mary rushed a glass under the bubbles.

‘Ooops! Bridie, come on out. Champagne. Darling father, wake up. Hold it tight, pet.' She pushed a glass into his surprised hand. He opened his eyes.

‘Ah, how joyful!' he whispered.

‘It's Nancy's birthday. A joyful day.'

Bridie appeared around the corner, wrapped in her enormous, startlingly white apron. Harry gave her a glass and for a moment they all stood, arms outstretched, looking at Nancy. Bridie spoke first.

‘God is good.' She knocked back the drink in one fell swoop. Everyone laughed.

‘Happy birthday, Nancy.' Harry advanced towards her. She bent her head and saw his shining shoes moving with purpose in her direction. ‘I shall kiss you.'

She turned her face away so that the kiss landed like a falling petal on her hot cheek.

‘Gosh!' he said, ‘you're boiling. Whatever have you been doing?'

She blushed even more and dipped her head down towards her glass. The bubbles rushed up her nose and she sneezed.

‘I'll give yez ten minutes and then it's lunch,' announced Bridie. She marched away, helping herself to some more wine from the bottle as she passed it.

‘Whose birthday?' asked the old man.

‘That's Maeve playing, isn't it?'

Harry stood close beside her as he asked the question, the sleeve of his cream silk shirt touching her bare arm.

She nodded.

‘Marvellous.'

‘Nancy's birthday, darling. She's eighteen. Nancy!'

‘Nancy!' He took a sip from the glass in his hand. ‘My mother's name was Nancy.'

‘Yes, pet, that's why we called Nancy, Nancy.'

‘Marvellous.'

Just the music dancing. No breath of breeze to blow the sound away.

‘Where is death's sting?' said the old man suddenly.

‘Oh father, really! Be well, be well today.'

He put the glass down on the table beside him and lifted the field glasses to his eyes. On the railway a lone engine and tender puffed its way along the line.

‘That is interesting.' His voice was clear, momentarily almost young.

‘What is?'

He let the glasses fall on to his knees and turned to her.

‘There was something I had to tell you.'

‘Yes, pet?'

She wandered over to the bottle and picked it up.

‘Champagne doesn't go very far.'

She shared out the remains into everyone's glasses.

‘I saw Robert on the line this morning.'

The music had stopped and his words seemed very loud.

‘Who is Robert?' asked Harry, slightly interested.

Aunt Mary moved abruptly to the top of the steps.

‘No, father.' Her voice was exasperated.

‘Or maybe it was yesterday.'

She moved down the steps, the drink in her hand swirling and bubbling with each step she took.

‘There is no Robert.'

‘But I tell you. I tell you.'

He raised a feeble hand and pointed towards the line.

Aunt Mary paid no heed to him. With quick movements of her finger and thumb she was snapping the dead heads off the roses as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered.

‘Who is Robert?' Harry sat down beside Nancy on the step, regardless of piles. She didn't answer. She clasped her hands tight round the cold bowl of her glass. Sparks of light cavorted on the distant sea.

‘Nancy?'

She shook her head.

‘I don't know!'

Robert Gulliver had been her father's name.

‘He's potty,' she muttered.

‘Oh come on Nancy …'

‘He's always seeing things. It gets awfully boring. And singing hymns and …'

‘He's old.'

Aunt Mary came towards them across the grass. In the summer she always wore a large straw hat to protect her tender northern skin from the sun. When she became either hot or fussed, little pears of sweat clung to the side of her nose like dew. She waved her empty glass gaily at them as if she'd been away for a very long time.

‘Happy day …'

‘Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes …'

‘There are so many jolly hymns and he has to choose the gloomy ones. Always the gloomy ones.'

‘He's old.'

Aunt Mary panted slightly as she came up the steps. Soon, thought Nancy, she would start to become old, tremble as she picked up her knife and fork, falter on the stairs, fidget. She moved slowly across the terrace and put her glass on the table, then she touched the old man's shoulder. Her hand, like her face, was pale and there were deep shadowy clefts between the bones.

‘Robert is dead,' she said.

They both remained quite still, remembering, and then with an abrupt gesture she took off her hat and dropped it on the table beside the glass. At this moment Maeve began to play again. A mazurka, almost strident.

‘Ah!' sighed Harry.

‘If yez want your food hot, yez had better come in and get it.' Bridie's voice called out through the window.

She lacks a certain old world elegance, thought Nancy, getting up from her cushion.

Harry stretched his hand out towards Aunt Mary.

‘Madame …'

She took it with a little bow.

‘One and two and three and …'

They danced along the terrace.

‘Damn!' said Nancy under her breath.

She took hold of the old man's chair and pushed him after the dancers.

From the village to the point the beach stretched for about two miles. It was a narrow strip of grey stones and coarse sand which shelved fairly steeply into the sea. The movement of the waves threw a million pebbles inwards and then pulled them away again from the land, eternally grinding, polishing, sucking and spewing. There was never silence, even on the calmest day. The railway line rose severely behind the beach, protecting the fields from the frequently angry sea, decorated only by the singing poles that carried the telegraph wires down the coast. Below the line, at the back of the beach, piles of huge granite blocks were tumbled in what seemed to be a haphazard fashion. In the winter the sea pounded against them, sending fountains of spray high into the air, and in the summer they sparkled like diamonds when the sun shone. If you managed to reach the point, you could see as far as your eyes would let you the curves of sand and rock, and the poles, and the charming low hills, which graduated in the distance to blue mountains. No one ever walked as far as the point, though; it was not a very rewarding walk unless you enjoyed solitude and the company of the great white birds, who sat like ancient kings on the granite blocks staring inimicably into space. About halfway between the village and the point there was a solitary black bathing box, which had been put there by the convent for the convenience and privacy of the few nuns who liked to bathe. On summer days there were sometimes three or four of them there, looking like strange sea birds in their habits, their heads bent over their books, or towards each other in conversation. Nancy had seen them running in their long robes, laughing, or giving little breathless calls, into the sea. She would have liked to stop and watch them at times, but was afraid that her curiosity might offend them.

The hut was about half a mile beyond the point. It must have been built by some railway workers many years before, and was cleverly hidden in among the granite blocks, which protected it from the sea wind. It was a rectangular wooden hut with a sloping roof. The day she had found it had been a wild spring day. The waves tore at the shore and the wind sang gloriously in the telegraph wires. She had spent the best part of two hours scraping away the sand with her hands before the door would open enough to let her peer in. Then she knew that for all those years the hut had been waiting for her. She pushed the door shut again and climbed up on to the line. She walked along the sleepers until she came to the spot that she had always considered to be almost in range of Grandfather and his glasses, then she slithered down the grassy bank into the field and went up through the trees towards the house. Now she had a secret. She had always found it very difficult to keep secrets. She would have to be careful.

Over the next few weeks she had appropriated from around the place an old sweeping brush, worn down very low on one side, a hammer and nails, a couple of almost threadbare blankets, and two cushions out of which long white feathers constantly pricked their way. She had scrubbed at the floor with sea water until the planks had become the colour of old bones. She had hammered up shelves on which she kept a selection of books, an excellent tin with some ginger biscuits for eating after bathing, and a glass sweet jar filled with curious shells and stones that she had collected from time to time on the beach. She had moved the sand from round the door, oiled the rusted hinges, and screwed a hook into the cross beam inside on which to hang her towel. She had wondered about painting the walls, but decided against it. Gentility was not her aim.

No one seemed to notice the fact that she wasn't hovering uneasily around the house as she had always done before during school holidays. Aunt Mary was always preoccupied with her own routines: her chores routine, her reading routine, her golf routine, bridge, friends, racing routines, minding Grandfather and worrying inside herself. Not much time left in her day for wondering what Nancy was up to.

Nancy knew what would happen as soon as lunch was over; birthday or no birthday, Aunt Mary would drift away from the dining room and shut herself away in the study. It was her reading time, and, after she had read and digested for an hour, it would be gardening time. She would trim and clip and weed, tie back the climbing roses and the clematis, prune and snip in the greenhouse, collect dead heads into a large chip basket, and remove any snails she might come across from the flowerbeds and leave them in rows on the gravel for someone less squeamish than herself to exterminate. The old man, back once more by the drawing-room window, would let his head loll on to his chest and snores would bubble gently from his throat. Harry would fidget and chat and wonder in his head what excuse he could make to go and visit Maeve.

Nancy slipped out of the room while they were sitting round the table stirring their coffee lethargically with tiny silver spoons.

As she crossed the avenue and skirted the little wood below the house, a warm breeze sighed through the trees. For the first time for weeks the leaves stirred, almost imperceptibly, like sleepers about to wake. The movement came from the south-west. Soon the weather would change – perhaps not today, but soon. She could smell the sea as she crossed the field. A gull drifted gently above her, fully stretched on the lifting wind. She took off her shoes and scrambled up the bank on to the rails. Under her bare feet the sleepers were warm and ridged, comfortable.

‘Robert is dead.'

Aunt Mary's voice had been neither sad nor glad when she had spoken the words. Matter of fact. We will have no more of this nonsense. Robert is dead, no carry on, father dear. Who? Whom then had he seen? Who had moved him to remember?

No one. Probably some figure in his mind, out of the mist of the past. Peering through time. Anyway he was potty. If one had to choose a name for a father, one wouldn't choose Robert. Oh no. Something a little more exotic perhaps. Constantine or Artemis, or heroic, like Alexander. Why should he be dead? I don't see it like that.

She bathed when she reached the hut. The coarse sand was burning hot and her feet arched with shock as she ran to the edge of the sea. The sea itself, in spite of this, was almost ice cold. There were no concessions made here to the dabbler or paddler; the beach shelved deeply and within a few yards of the shore you were out of your depth and being tugged gently down the coast, heading, unless you were careful, for some unknown destination. She lay on her towel afterwards to dry in the sun, and stared at the clouds that were now beginning to build up round the rim of the horizon. It must have been almost four when she remembered Bridie's cake. She stood up and began to brush the sand from her shoulders and the backs of her legs. Suddenly she felt as if she were being watched.

‘Hello.'

No one was on the line or the beach. No one moved. A drop of rain burst on her cheek.

‘Damn!' She glared up at the sky, innocent and empty above her. The sand stirred cautiously. She moved up to the hut. At the door she paused for a moment and looked round again.

‘Hello.'

She went in and dressed. Several more drops landed on the roof.

She shook the towel out of the door.

‘Hellooo … ooo.'

A gull on one of the granite blocks looked sideways at her with one of its mean eyes.

‘Why shouldn't there be someone here?' she asked it reasonably. ‘After all, it's supposed to be a free country, and don't stare at me like that.'

The bird turned its back on her. Its claws clamping impatiently on the stone. It looked too relaxed for there to be lurkers around. She hung the towel on the back of the door. Rain was now scattering itself on the roof and sand. She shut the door carefully so that the rain couldn't blow in and rot the floor, then she climbed up on to the track and ran most of the way home.