Treasures of Time (3 page)

An Edwardian house, not the beguiling affair of stone and thatch he had imagined. A large, faintly inappropriate house in a pleasant enough setting of hamlet, church, small schoolhouse, village pond. There was a big garden; beyond it, the downs opened up abruptly to a skyline swept by long skeins of cloud. He could see the green blister of a round barrow on the crest of the hill; round the corner, up the road, was Silbury. No wonder Paxton picked the place: his livelihood on the doorstep. He turned to ask Kate when they had bought the house, and saw her sitting at the wheel, knuckles clenched, the expression of rigid obstinacy on her face that indicated extreme anxiety. Thus, he had seen her stand waiting for him once at Green Park Underground station at the reunion after a tiff; she had thought he would not turn up: he had realized, with amused affection, that she minded. After that he had moved into her flat.

He said, ‘Come on, you don’t have to be that ashamed of me.’

She gave him a look that mixed rage and entreaty.

Laura Paxton sat in a faded chintz armchair beside a log fire and handled glasses on a table beside her. She said, ‘Sherry, darling? And Tom? No gin or anything I’m afraid. Vermouth, I think.’ She wore a silk dress that looked too thin for the weather, high-heeled shoes. She filled glasses, handed them, took a sip from her own and said, ‘Well, so here’s the famous fiancé at last.’ She considered Tom, smiling.

He did not see how anyone could have so extraordinary a knack of instantly putting everyone else at a disadvantage. It is amazing, he thought, how is it done? You could go far, with a talent like that. He wanted to say to Kate: I see now, I do absolutely see, you need say no more. No wonder.

She was beautiful, he supposed. Her physical presence held the attention; when she was in the room you kept looking towards her, as towards a handsome piece of furniture, an intriguing picture. Her eyes, in an oval, rather flat face, were large and blue, with only a hint of wrinkling around them; she did not look her age. Her hair, fair and thin like a child’s, worn in a straight schoolgirlish bob, showed no grey. She moved quickly. Her hands were long and thin; she used them in conversation, very deliberately, as though someone, once, had pointed out their charms and she had borne it in mind.

He was transfixed, not so much by her, as by the lurking, distorted Kate he saw in her. It was grotesque – the physical presence of Kate in this stranger. They were quite unalike – yet in that first half hour he was aware of Kate half a dozen times, so keenly that it seemed the recognition must be shared. As though, with incestuous knowledge, Mrs Paxton, pouring the sherry and offering it to him with, for a flash, Kate’s glance, knew him in Kate’s way: at all times, in all circumstances, naked, all reserves gone, all defences down.

With discomfort, he took the sherry and, in response to a question, began to talk about his work, his aspirations, in a tone and with a manner that were not his at all: brittle, self-conscious. It was as though his language were bewitched, like the girl in the fairy story, spewed forth as toads or diamonds, willy nilly. Laura Paxton laughed appreciatively; he suited her well enough, like that, it seemed. He saw Kate looking at him bleakly, as though to say: you too, one might have known. She sat hunched on a footstool, chewing a fingernail; the thought crossed his mind – surprising him – that he wished she would bother a bit more about what she wore. Not treat herself with such disregard; those jeans looked awful.

He thought this, and took a gulp of sherry that made him choke, and heard himself tell Laura Paxton in language that he did not recognize of opinions that he did not acknowledge. He was filled with self-disgust, as though tricked into laughter at a joke that did not amuse. He did not know if she was very stupid or very clever.

Laura thought, he is better looking than Kate, really – they will look a bit odd, going up the aisle, if it gets that far. I shall splurge on something really good, and a hat – a Jaeger dress and coat, maybe. Nellie will be a problem, she will have to be there, Mrs Lucas can come and help. It will be a bit boring in the end, anyway, Kate will want to ask her friends I suppose and they are all too young to be interesting and Tom obviously doesn’t have the kind of family who know people. And it will be very expensive, let’s hope Nellie offers to help. ‘What, darling?’

Kate said, ‘Where is Aunt Nellie?’

‘Oh, coming through for lunch, you can go and give her a hand in a few minutes. We’ve made the old dining room into a room for her now, you know, so much easier all on the ground floor.’ She sighed. ‘The outlook isn’t very good, I’m afraid, things aren’t getting much better, it’s quite a problem, I can tell you. Though she’s talking more easily now. Poor darling, she does sound a bit pickled all the time – which is specially hard when she’s always been rather averse to drink. Oh, it’s a wretched business.’ She spread long thin hands to the fire, thought: I am bored, I have been bored for weeks, I must go up to London for a day or two, have lunch with someone, buy some things… There was a bumping sound in the passage outside the door. Laura said, ‘Oh, here’s Nellie making her own way. Open the door for her, one of you, could you?’

Tom, embarrassedly holding the door for the wheelchair, thought: well,
she
doesn’t have anything of Kate, thank God, two of them making you feel creepily as though you might have been in bed with them would have been too much, and she’s years older too. Christ, are people who’ve had a stroke deaf? I’ve no idea, is she
compos mentis
or not, how ignorant one is, it’s appalling.

Nellie Peters gave the wheel an extra shove with her good hand to help it over the edge of the carpet where it always stuck. She looked across the room at her niece, with love, and thought: she has been having a frightful half-hour, she is just about at the end of her tether, poor dear, and it never gets any better for her, there is nothing to be done, there never was much, even when she was a child. Well, let’s have a look at him, will he do? Is he going to help her, be the best thing that has ever happened for her, is there any hope of that? She began to say, in that slow, slurred voice that gave her a shock of detached indignation every time she heard it, ‘It’s lovely to see you, Kate, I…’

Laura chopped her off in mid-word. ‘Nellie I told you not to struggle through on your own, absolutely no need for that, there’s always someone to give you a hand.’ She manoeuvred the wheelchair sharply into position beside the sofa, where it was awkwardly placed a little apart from the rest of them. ‘All right? Yell if there’s anything you want, darling. No sherry, I imagine.’ She turned to Tom, ‘Sorry – I’m being so rude. My sister Eleanor, of course – poor Nellie has had the most beastly luck, as I was saying, but there is a faint chance that things may improve with time’ – this last in tones just very slightly lowered.

In the hall, a clock chimed and struck; a cat, hitherto unseen, strolled into the middle of the room, and stood swishing its tail before slumping down in a bar of sunlight on the carpet. Kate and her aunt kissed with the ineptitude of people who find it an embarrassment, but necessary.

And Tom, for whom the weekend stretched oppressively ahead, thought with sudden resolution that he was going to have to cope with this, not just now but for always, given Kate and the state of his feelings and also, dammit, that a woman like that cannot be allowed to do what she clearly does do.

He said to Kate, cutting suddenly into her reluctant answers to some probing by her mother, ‘Are you going to take me for a walk this afternoon – I’m feeling energetic – a nice long instructive windy walk, how about that?’

‘Oh dear,’ said Laura, ‘are you that kind of person? Outdoor and long walks and so forth. Hugh was, of course. It does rather run in the family.’

Kate said, ‘Well, he could hardly have been an archaeologist and not been, could he, Ma?’

Laura turned to Tom. ‘And by the way, do say Laura, won’t you, not Mrs Paxton. I wish Kate would do the same but not a hope – she dropped Mummy for reasons best known to herself and now it’s this horrid “Ma”, I must say I do think that at this point in time Laura would be nicer, but there it is. She’s a stubborn girl, my Kate.’

‘Isn’t calling parents by their Christian names rather out of date?’ said Tom. ‘I thought it was a thirties sort of thing. Like vegetarianism and progressive schools.’

Laura gave a him a look of dislike. ‘Oh, I daresay one is very out of touch,’ she said. ‘It’s just a matter of what one personally prefers. Is something wrong, Nellie?’

She was laughing, Tom realised, the aunt. You could be forgiven for thinking that odd strangled sound was one of distress, not pleasure. And Kate was grinning at her, a different, normal, relaxed Kate; his Kate, come to that.

‘Well,’ said Laura, ‘let’s eat. I’ve spent a lot of time making something rather nice. Kate, will you see to Aunt Nellie while I pop through to the kitchen – Tom my dear, perhaps you’d give me a hand with plates and whatnot.’

‘Oh,’ she said, at lunch, ‘I quite forgot to tell you. I had a letter from some television man, a producer of something, Tony someone – they want to do a programme about Hugh. Film it here, and at some of his old digs. Isn’t that fun?’

Kate put her knife and fork down with a clatter. ‘You never told me.’

‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said Laura impatiently. ‘It went out of my head – God knows why, it’s not as though that much ever happens these days.’

‘What did you say to him?’

‘I said yes, of course. I’d help as much as I can and so forth. P’raps we’ll all be in it, that would be amusing.’

Kate said nothing; her neck glowed. Tom said to Laura, ‘What’s the programme?’

‘Oh, some cultural thing. It’s a series they’re doing on kind of intellectual people of the recent past – people who influenced the way different subjects are thought about. There’s one on that economist person – what’s his name?’

‘Keynes?’

‘I think so,’ said Laura vaguely. ‘And a poet – Auden, is it? Someone like that. And Hugh, and what’s that person who taught English at Cambridge that nobody liked? Those kind of people.’

‘Well, I wish they wouldn’t,’ said Kate with violence. ‘Dad would have loathed it, anyway.’

Nellie had been silent for a lot of the meal, excluded often by the pace of conversation, though both Kate and Tom had made efforts to bring her in. Now she said, ‘One wonders what it is they are trying to show – something about the man or something about the subject. Quite different things, possibly.’

There was a silence. Laura said, ‘Oh well, anyway it’s not that important but it will be a diversion, I daresay. Do you want coffee?’

It was a warm afternoon of late spring. Out of the house, with the great blowy bowl of the landscape around him, Tom felt exhilarated. He took Kate’s hand and said, ‘Where are we going, can you walk to Avebury from here? Let’s go miles, I feel cooped up.’ And then a look at her clamped, dejected face reminded him that this might be less than tactful, and he put an arm round her and hugged her. ‘I don’t mean lunch, and your mum, though I do see what you’re on about now, love – I truly do. I just mean I want air – I’ve got deposits of B.M. grime in my lungs.’ She thawed, and smiled, and they walked away up over the fields with arms round each other.