His courteous air of old-world posh has the effect of embarrassing me in public. He has just used the word ‘splendid’ to the railway steward. He sounds as though he has stepped from the cast of Brief Encounter. Or perhaps he has come to earth in a telephone-box from forty-five years ago?
Yet he is the only one of my peers who genuinely understands the workings of modern life. He has no trouble getting his brain round the electronic revolution and part of the reason for his many phone-calls and visitors is that he is the person everyone comes to when their dissertations have gone missing in the word processor. He can fix outboard motors. He can explain the Stock Exchange. He understands those wiggly lines on the weather report.
Pen seems so much older than he is, that for months I took him for a person whose adolescence had been eaten up while he convalesced from some mysterious long-term illness. I believed he must have made it late to the undergraduate life from which he has, just this week, graduated without the slightest perceptible fuss or flap. The simple fact is that he is just more boringly sensible than the rest of us. Pen is twenty-three. Yet he has such certainty, such apparently relentless stability. He treats all matters short of premature death with a degree of detached jollity, and somewhere he has learned the business of cooking and household management – this while the rest of us have yet to discover that bath-tubs don’t clean themselves. Pen knows about things like bains-marie and French polish. He knows that Swarfega will remove candle-wax from Ellen’s raw silk shirt without leaving a mark. Why is it he comports himself as if he’s been apprenticed at ‘Le Manoir Aux Quat’ Saisons’, or as if he’s done time as a junior trainee at Sotheby’s?
His fine blond hair, already receding at the temples, disguises its ominous thinness by having a pleasing natural lift and a hint of curl. Even through the Edinburgh winter, Pen’s hair looks as if touched by sunlight. It has that greenish patina that settles on the hair of blond professional swimmers. While his features come with an almost pre-pubertal, choirboy delicacy, he has the physical development of a well-nourished male person who takes regular exercise. He is not by any means a bag of bones like Izzy; my little ruthless Izzy, the contemplation of whose narrow gawkiness and sexual magic now bring a wave of nausea to my throat that completely does in the chance of my eating Pen’s prescribed breakfast. I push away the plate and gnaw, like a spoilsport, on a piece of dry toast, which I wash down with a gulp of milkless tea.
The Old Thing is there to meet us at the station in a vehicle the size of a small bus. Its name makes it sound like a Samurai warrior and it has four rows of seats. The Old Thing looks more advanced in years than my mother, but it may be that, like Pen, she is younger than she seems. She is shy and unassertive which, along with her air of distracted tiredness, makes her wholly unintimidating. Like Pen, the Old Thing is slim and tall, with prominent cheekbones and that same skimpy blonde hair that shampoo bottles used to call ‘flyaway’. She wears it uncoiffed and tied up under a scarf. Her clothes are terrible. She has on a sort of shoebag dirndl skirt, which sits disconcertingly on top of a protruding middle-aged tummy, and a little cap-sleeved blouse showing her housemaid’s elbows and vaccination scars. I observe all this with pity, since I’m inclined to make character assessments of people on the basis of their clothes. To wit Grania. So I am in the midst of thinking patronizingly about Pen’s Old Thing when she flashes me the sweetest smile – one of those smiles that shows lots of top gum – and she holds out her hand to me.
‘I’m Felicity,’ she says. Then she looks round a little vaguely for my luggage. Nothing about her prepares me for how incredibly rich Pen’s family is.
In the Samurai warrior, she has Pen’s two youngest siblings – two little girls, both blonde, both screwing up their eyes against the brightness of the sun. Their names are Helen and Agatha. Helen is eight and bossy. Agatha is five and a sweetie-pie. They unbuckle themselves and fall over Pen with enthusiasm. He, having stowed his trunk, seats himself between them in the second row, directly behind where he has placed me, alongside his mother.
The girls are in checked cotton school uniforms and white ankle socks and button-over black school shoes. They are not in school, as they begin to tell Pen, amidst gurgles and shrieks of excitement, because somebody has burned down parts of the building the previous night.
‘But they only burnt the East Wing,’ Helen says, claiming a monopoly on the experience. ‘That’s where my classroom is. Aggie’s hasn’t been affected.’ Then she says, ‘Nutty, our class hamster, got burnt to death in the fire.’ She says this with what sounds like self-importance rather than regret. ‘I’m on the Hamster Committee,’ she adds, ‘so I’ll be involved in choosing a new one.’
‘Dear me,’ Pen says. ‘Poor old Nutty.’
‘And I’ll be involved in choosing a new cage as well,’ Helen says. ‘It’s all going to be such hard work.’
‘And how was the fire for you, Aggie?’ Pen says.
‘Her classroom was not affected,’ Helen says, jumping in before Agatha can speak. ‘Her classroom isn’t in the East Wing.’
After a while the Samurai warrior has carried us beyond the suburbs. It travels on past hedges and stone walls and ditches full of wild flowers. Everything is bathed in brilliant sunlight. Then the warrior enters a stretch of woodland, at first so densely shaded that, until my eyes adjust, it is like being in a railway tunnel – except that here and there dappled elliptical discs of light penetrate to dance and flicker. I close my eyes against the optical disturbance, which has been known, in earlier times, to make me pass out, and when I open them again it is to see the odd squashed bunny and pheasant lying on the road ahead. Pen occupies the girls, asking them about their ponies and their roller-blades until we reach the house. He is like one of those favourite, jolly uncles to his own sisters.
Pen’s house, though some distance from the road, is visible from it because the land rises. It has two tall grey stone gateposts with cast-iron gates that now stand open. From the drive, I see that the house is large, grey and forbiddingly plain. It has tall chimneys and, to the right of the main house, an octagonal stone dovecot and a long L-shaped stable area with a hayloft above and rows of doors that open onto a cobbled courtyard. The Old Thing parks the Samurai warrior in the courtyard alongside a couple of shiny cars. I know nothing about cars, but one of them is long, streamlined and black, and the other is snub-nosed, short and brown. There is evidence of building in the courtyard. There is a concrete mixer and a thing like a small tractor, along with some planks and bags of sand.
We get out and walk through an arch made in a tall hedge, onto a lawn with broad, flowery borders. I realize, at this point, that the house has its back to its gateposts, and that we are now at the front, which is newer and more ornate. It has what look like added-on Victorian baronial twiddles and wide, leaded bay windows. There are tall shrubs at the far end of the lawn beyond which I glimpse a sweep of landscaped, wooded park. To the left, I see sections of a high stone wall that, I imagine, runs all around the estate.
The hall we enter is beautiful. It is darkly panelled in oak and is something like seven metres square. It has a large Turkish carpet on grey flagstones and one enormous chunky dark table with heavy old legs and stretchers. Otherwise the hall is empty but for a throne-like, ornately carved chair with barley-sugar legs that has Gott mit uns carved in gothic lettering across the top. There are stone fireplaces to left and right and, at the far right, a wide, shallow staircase that leads to the floor above. To the left is a passage – presumably to the kitchen and the back stairs.
The Old Thing suggests that Pen show me to my room and that I settle in and come down for lunch in twenty minutes. My room is at the end of a passage. It has two casement windows that overlook the park, and a double bed with dark wooden endboards. Above it, on the wall, is a gnarled wooden crucifix with a skinny, Izzy-like Jesus. I have my own little bathroom and a bookcase full of yellow-backed detective stories – a genre which I never read because I can’t seem to
follow the plots. The bedside cabinet has an art deco lamp and a candle in a pretty silver candlestick that comes with a cone-shaped silver snuffer.
‘The electricity supply can be wobbly,’ Pen says, seeing me look at it. ‘We’re very high up here, but it does ensure good views.’
This is true. From my windows I observe that, after the Cotswolds, there is an almost alarming drama in the landscape. I also see that Pen’s park contains a sizeable lake on which ducks are floating their young, and that, at the far end of it, there is a little sandy beach and a charming wooden boathouse with a veranda, like a small, clapboard-gothic cricket pavilion.
Downstairs I find the family large and gruesome. Ironically, it is just like the family I dreamed up for myself in childhood – ranks of fantasy siblings with poncy names like Jocelyn and Georgiana. Yet in the event, the reality is a turn-off. Lunch, which we eat in the kitchen, is a simple matter of potato soup and bread, but I am faced, throughout, with something like nine pairs of eyes. The eyes all stare out from under blond hair, some of it fine and wavy, and some of it thick and straight. I can hardly believe my ears when there is reference to two additional persons who are still away at school. And Pen’s father, too, is mercifully absent since he is off doing boss-work in his factory in Newcastle.
It is a curious family, its members being either pushy and overconfident, or polite and amiable to a fault. The children come off one or other of two conveyor belts, I note. Conveyor belt A makes Old Thing people, like Pen and little Agatha whom I got to know in the car. These have high foreheads, prominent cheekbones, small features and thin, slightly wafty blond hair. Conveyor belt B makes more fleshy-faced, chunkier people with lower brows, bigger eyes and thicker, straighter blond hair. Of the latter, there is one male person called Ambrose who impinges in particular. He is an odious smart-arse and rugger hearty who has just done his A levels at Ampleforth and is clearly confident of having done brilliantly. He is one of those handsome, robust, loud-voiced men who doesn’t realize that his good looks make him physically repulsive. Ambrose, who presumes to give me his biographical details, is off to read divinity at Oxford, he says, and he talks importantly about his ‘vocation’ – by which he means the priesthood. While I find this both embarrassing and repellent, the rest of the company, including Pen and the Old Thing, appear to take it on board as simple fact. There is a pleasant sort of boy of about my age, who is currently lobbying the Old Thing for the go-ahead to breed barn owls in the hayloft and says couldn’t ‘Dominic’ and ‘Joseph’ please be made to move their drumkits and amplifiers elsewhere.
It is when the Old Thing rises from the table to replenish our soup bowls from her outsize cauldron on the Aga that I realize she is not pot-bellied but pregnant. The bulge is too high for middle-aged spread. I wonder for a moment if the woman is mad. Am I being fed and watered, I wonder, by a haggard, floaty mad-woman who smiles at me too often and with far too much visible top gum?
I feel more strongly repelled by her pregnancy when I finally encounter Pen’s father, who appears in time for dinner – an event which takes place in the dining-room, with Mrs Ball to assist. Mrs Ball lives on the premises with her husband, who oversees things to do with the fabric and the garden. Pen’s father hails from conveyor belt B. He is of medium height, shorter than Pen and the Old Thing. He looks a lot like Ambrose, but with a thirty-year head start for putting on extra weight. He is plumply cushioned, pebble-smooth, ruddy of complexion, and pin-striped. He is clever, scary and self-important. He has Ambrose’s hair gone silver, without any sign of thinning, so that its thickness has the effect of making it look like a toupee, even though it grows from his head. It is that horrible hair that you see on men of power in American daytime soaps. He wears it rigorously parted and brushed backwards off the brow. He oozes a menacing good humour and he has smug, right-wing views. These he airs with a smoothie confidence, assuming he has consensus – and certainly no one contradicts him. No one can, because he pauses in the middle of all his sentences rather than at the end, to ensure no gap for interjection. Five minutes into watching him and I’m thinking, ‘Opus Dei’.
I get this from my father, who gets it from his father – though both of them married out – this Jewish lefty paranoia about right-wing Catholic intrigue. So I’m watching him and envisaging a scenario of secret handshakes and plots to stamp on liberation theologists and Third World peasants. I’m thinking undercover educational projects and gravel in the shoes.
Occasionally, to underline a point, the Opus Dei wafts a smooth plump hand over his plate. On his left hand he wears a broad gold wedding ring and, on the right, a ring with little silver balls the size of peppercorns. While the Old Thing sits at the lesser end of the table, the Opus Dei sits at the head under a huge, spooky oil painting of The Last Supper in which the Paschal lamb is placed before Jesus looking like a flayed cat with a greenish mould.
The Opus Dei starts to say grace in Latin, just as I commit the faux pas of raising my fork to my mouth, spiked with a tiger prawn. I hastily lower it to my plate and cast my eyes downwards. We eat without Helen and Agatha, who are attended to by Tiffany, their nanny, in the nursery – their presence, I deduce, being too lacking in grown-up-dom for the Opus Dei to tolerate after a hard day’s toil.
The food is awful, yet Pen, who, in Edinburgh, night after night, concocted lovely cheap soups and risottos for us, says nothing. But I am a picky eater, and before me is the dread ‘seafood cocktail’ – a yukky pinkish mess of watery, thawed shellfish and supermarket mayonnaise dyed with ketchup. It’s even got those shreddy bits of crab in it, that come like squashed-up sections of celery. I try not to look at the dead cat as I eat. I muse about why Jesus and the disciples are usually shown eating only dry bread and wine for their Passover feast – except in some of those Venetian paintings where they have lobsters and grapes and Afro serving maids and acrobats and foreign emissaries and monkeys and golden goblets and doggies chewing bones under the table.
In the interim between pudding and coffee, which is served in the drawing-room, the younger generation plays a terrifying form of table-tennis at the large table in the hall. This exercise, into which I have been incorporated, requires that we be constantly on the move around the table. We have to run to hitting position, grab the bat and hit the ball on the wing, then leave it for the next person to grab before the ball comes back. In my pathetic, crawly efforts not to miss the ball at every turn, I swipe out in panic, causing it to shy rightwards off the table onto the carpet and then bounce its way across the stone flags, ending with a dying fall of little demi-semi-quavers. This happens repeatedly, to the accompaniment of rude groans from a sixteenish, female Ambrose lookalike whose name I can’t remember.
‘Buck up, Stella,’ Ambrose says, smirking at me in a manner intended to be masterful.
Throughout the duration of this torture-game the Opus Dei, who has changed his suit jacket for – I kid you not – a quilted black silk smoking-jacket with orange corded piping and orange lining – sits on the carved barley-sugar throne under Gott mit uns and swivels a goblet of brandy, at which he sniffs with his puggy little nose, in between observing us all with fatherly pride.
As we proceed to coffee, the Opus Dei pats the cushion of the ample forest-green sofa on which he sits, indicating that I should place myself beside him.
‘Take a seat, young lady,’ he says. ‘Come and tell me all about yourself.’ In my wimpishness, I squirm away, pleading that I am very tired.
‘Poor old Stella was up all night on the train from Euston to Edinburgh,’ Pen says, coming to my rescue.
‘Pish,’ says the Opus Dei. ‘You people are young and strong.’
I almost burst into tears. I almost tell him that I am not young and strong. I am young and weak. Fragile Stella. Precious Girl. Daddy’s Butter Melon. I want to snivel that I’m having a hard time; that I’m convulsive, asthmatic and dyslexic; that I’ve had grommets in my ears; that I’ve had my tonsils out; that I’ve had three lumbar punctures
before I was two and a half, and a pirate patch over my eye to help me read. I want to tell him that I can’t swim because the chlorine in the pool always gives me rashes and that I’m allergic to penicillin. I want to tell him that Nutrasweet in lemonade gives me migraine headaches and that my mother isn’t accessible to write me a note. ‘Please may Stella be excused.’ Furthermore, I want to tell him that my boyfriend has cast me aside without being decent enough to tell me to my face, and that my father, too, is cheating on me. On my mother, admittedly, but also on me. Me, me, me. I, Stella. Best Girl. Melodious exponent of ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’.
Meanwhile, I stand in the doorway dithering while the Opus Dei susses me for a total weed. ‘Off with you then. Run along,’ he says. ‘Nothing that a good night’s rest won’t cure, eh? What?’
As I flee, I reflect, with loathing, that the Old Thing is With Child because the Opus Dei, in his deluded state of self-importance, will imagine that the deity gives two beans for whether or not he clothes his prick in bits of rubber before he presses his plumpness upon her. Then I think of the pregnancy testing kit that I will need to confront in the morning.
The sound of my foot upon a floorboard upstairs draws Helen and Agatha almost instantly to my door. They are both in pyjamas. Agatha is clutching a weird, knitted creature with long skinny legs. The thing is pink, with yellow wool hair like an albino golliwog, its face chain-stitched with a fixed, linear smile.
‘Please can we jump on your bed?’ Agatha says. ‘Because it’s bouncier than ours.’
‘Well, just for a bit, if you’re allowed,’ I say. I suspect that Helen has coerced Agatha into playing spokesperson, since it is Helen who is first to board the white wafflecloth bedcover and she’s making vigorous trampoline leaps before Agatha has managed to clamber up. I reach to rescue the contents of my Kenyan basket, causing the girls to collapse beside me with interest.
The Travelling Hornplayer Page 14