by Bella Pollen
‘Why have you got it in for journalists so badly?’
‘Because they’re unscrupulous and intrusive and they ride roughshod over people’s feelings.’
I eyed him. ‘Funny business to be in for someone who doesn’t like talking to the press.’
He broke into a grin. ‘Touché… It’s a long story.’
‘Which you’re not going to tell me sometime?’
‘Correct.’
‘Even if I ask really nicely?’
‘Are you always this nosy?’
‘Being nosy is my job.’
‘You must get a lot of doors slammed in your face.’
‘Yeah, but the trick is to be on the right side of the door.’
‘And you achieve this how?’
‘My charm, naturally.’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Your charm. How very unobservant of me.’
* * *
See here’s the thing. You pick and choose who you work with on most assignments and you’re careful, because the relationship between a crew can get precarious at the best of times. How much you all need each others’ skill is carefully balanced. But people like Rory, the accidental TV tourist, can be a liability. You need them, so you put up with them. Once in a while you get the clever ones who think you might need more than a guide, a driver, an interpreter, whoever it is they’ve signed on as, and in those situations the only thing you can do is keep as far away as possible, stay professional and on the whole they’re pretty easy to ignore. Or not, as it turned out …
* * *
The Harcourts lived in a breathtakingly pretty Georgian house south of the Wiltshire Downs. The moment they invited us in, had the tea fetched and eagerly began telling us the history of the place: grade II listed, twelve bedrooms, epitomizing the era’s architectural details, pedimented columned entrance porch, well-stocked lake and flight ponds etc. etc. etc., I knew that the sooner we left the better. There was nothing wrong with them as such. The Harcourts failed us by being essentially nice decent people, and nice decent people just don’t make good television. I took the opportunity to waylay Rory’s suspicions by behaving beautifully. Rory took the opportunity to rub my nose in it by telling endless scatological anecdotes. ‘Did you know the King of France used to go to the loo every morning and he would have all his ministers around him to discuss the doings of the country. I mean how many people can hold meetings in the middle of having a crap?’ then even going so far as to present me, in the evening, with a map he’d drawn of the house’s interior, with arrows marking the route from the living room to my bedroom and with every toilet highlighted by red stars.
* * *
We pleaded schedule nightmares to the Harcourts and planned to leave the next morning.
‘So what do you do when you’re not working?’ Rory Jones asked me over breakfast. We were standing in front of a sideboard laden with silver dishes. There were tomato halves (fried), pork sausages (fried), bacon (fried), mushrooms (fried), triangles of bread (fried) and eggs (scrambled).
‘Oh, you know,’ I said airily, ‘see friends, read, eat out … uh … see friends.’
‘You said that already.’
‘What already?’
‘You said “see friends” twice.’
‘Oh. Well the first ones are different to the second ones,’ I said, defensively. Then I thought about the day I was offered the job on Newsline. I’d wanted to celebrate with someone but I hadn’t known who to call. Eventually I got hold of Marnie, my oldest girlfriend and probably the sweetest person I know.
‘Yay, Maggie,’ she’d said, ‘triple yay, the fruits of your labour – or labours of your fruit, can’t remember which – are finally being realized. You are a goddess, of course you should come over, we’ll crack some champagne.’
When she opened the door she was holding a tiny baby on one hip. I just stared and stared. I hadn’t even known she was married.
‘I know what you think I am,’ I said to Rory.
‘What?’ He bit into the fried bread. Grease dripped down his chin.
‘You’re thinking work-obsessed, politically correct, lefty liberal New York neurotic feminist.’
‘Oh no,’ he slapped his hand to his cheek in pantomime horror, ‘you’re not a feminist are you?’
You don’t know the half of it, I wanted to say. At my college, Welsley, people didn’t burn their bras and dance around the Maypole because they considered the Maypole to be a phallic symbol, so instead they dug a hole and danced around the Mayhole …
* * *
Later in the car he asked, ‘So what about boyfriends?’
‘What about them?’
‘Do you have one?’
‘I hate the word boyfriend.’ My hand closed over the cellphone in my pocket.
‘I see.’ He swung the car into the fast lane of the highway, ‘What about dogs?’
‘What about them?’
‘Do you have one?’
‘No.’
‘Cat?’
‘No.’
‘What about a gerbil?’
‘Nope.’
‘Canary? Potted plant?’
‘I’m not sure I want to stop long enough to have anything land on me.’
‘OK, fine, commendably independent but where do you have to be at Christmas?’
‘Nowhere, thank God.’ Then I saw he was looking horrified. ‘Your point being?’
‘My point being – are you attached to anything apart from that damned mobile phone?’
I switched the cell off. Jay had once surprised me by claiming he didn’t know how I felt about him. I admitted I had never dared let my guard down in case he took aim and fired.
‘What are you so worried I’d hit?’
I told him he’d probably be aiming for my head, but being a senior citizen, might miss and shoot me in the heart by mistake.
‘Think Charlton Heston,’ he’d said dryly.
Rory was still waiting for an answer.
‘I just did a story on child prostitution in Brazil.’
‘Uh huh, that’s nice.’
‘Oh I suppose it’s a new concept for you to care about people you don’t know,’ I said hotly.
‘Perhaps it’s a new concept for you to actually know people you care about,’ Rory retorted.
‘Ouch,’ I said.
* * *
The problem was that Rory was not easy to ignore. He was totally obnoxious and delighted in winding me up. Everywhere we turned, there he was, self-importantly pointing out No Entry signs, frowning if I dared ask a question he considered out of line.
‘Why don’t you just stop telling me how to do my job,’ I had a meltdown after one particularly bad day.
‘Well you’re like a badly behaved dog,’ he said, ‘I don’t want you going off like a loose cannon.’
‘If that isn’t a mixed metaphor, I don’t know what is.’
‘Getting off the leash then. Is that better?’
‘I don’t like being put in a box, if you put me in a box…’
‘Kennel.’
‘What?’
‘Kennel would work better with my dog metaphor,’ he said apologetically.
‘Fine … if you try to put me in a kennel, I will try to get out.’
So we established an uneasy pattern. Rory would deliver us, either stay the whole visit or long enough to gauge whether we were going to make trouble, and if not, would tuck us into the bosom of the aristocracy before driving back to London. He puzzled me. He seemed almost openly contemptuous of what we were doing and I didn’t understand why he was in a job he found so distasteful.
* * *
‘Did you leave the maid a tip?’ Dwight asked pulling his shirt cuff down under the new tweed jacket he was wearing. We were loading up the van, on the move again after a two-day shoot at a house in Oxfordshire.
‘A few dollars,’ Wolf said. He caught the look on Dwight’s face. ‘What? How much was I supposed to leave?’
‘Rory sai
d at least twenty pounds.’
‘I wanted to tip her not fuck her,’ Wolf said mildly.
Dwight’s face turned pink. He flipped open his holdall.
‘Hey,’ I intervened quickly, ‘let’s take a look at the map, Dwight.’ I put my hand on his arm, ‘Where to next?’
Dwight pulled out his maps and methodically began checking houses against locations. ‘Let’s see … if it’s Tuesday it must be…’ he flicked through the Stately Locations list of houses, ‘Bevan,’ he read and looked up for confirmation.
‘You must be looking at an old list,’ Rory appeared over Dwight’s shoulder and took the file from his hands. He tore out the sheet with the photograph of Bevan.
‘Bevan is out of bounds.’
Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing:– ‘Oh how beautiful!’ and sitting in the shade
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel paths with broken dinner knives.
– Rudyard Kipling
daniel
Audrey hangs the telephone back on the kitchen wall.
‘What’s more she’s going to pay us!’
Alistair looks up from his plate. ‘Cash money?’
‘Cash money,’ Audrey repeats in a daze, ‘two thousand pounds.’
She sounds incredulous, as well she might. The last time either of my parents saw a windfall this large was when they put five pounds to win on Sore in the Saddle, a 300–1 outsider running in the Grand National.
‘Not Sore in the Saddle,’ Alistair said when Audrey returned from the betting shop in Skimpton. ‘Sawsally, you silly fool.’ He examined the betting slip. ‘If this Sore in the Saddle is 300–1, it’s more likely a goat than a horse.’ When the goat had romped in first, Alistair bought shares in a company that intended to reproduce old master paintings in Braille.
‘Bound to make a fortune,’ he remarked at the time.
‘Just wait and see. Robert will be awfully pleased with us, you know.’
‘Can’t count on it, he’s so bloody bolshy these days. Anyway, what do they want with us?’ Alistair says, having just identified the flaw in this otherwise perfect plan. ‘What are they filming?’
‘You know … old houses … English grandeur…’ Audrey says vaguely.
‘There’s nothing grand left here.’
‘Never mind, we could always show them the cellar. Pretend it was used for medieval torture.’
‘We’ll lock them in the cellar if they’re tiresome.’
‘They’ll expect servants.’
‘We could always dress Grandpa up as a butler.’
‘Oh don’t be so silly,’ Audrey says fondly. ‘Besides, he’s at the chess club for the day.’
Few people who stayed at Bevan realized that there were no staff. They assumed that in a house this size, despite the ruined wing, there would be at least one or two people and Audrey and Alistair never disillusioned them. Instead they did everything themselves and when guests left a little something, they simply pocketed it. Being tipped by friends and relations, most substantially better off than they were, had been something of an eye-opener.
‘What’ll we feed them?’ asks Alistair.
‘I’ll think of something.’
‘Talking of which, what is this, darling?’ Alistair says curiously. The slab of meat on his plate is the standard grey that all meat becomes following my mother’s infallible recipe for ‘safe’ cooking.
Once upon a time there’d been a cook at Bevan. Mrs Preston used to dish up proper old-fashioned English fare. Suet pudding; jugged hare; chicken croquettes; treacle tart; rice pudding, always with a thick skin; summer pudding; roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, soft in the centre, its edges curling and crispy. When Mrs Preston finally died, eighty-two and no change out of nineteen stone, Audrey, who’d scarcely boiled an egg in her entire life, decided she’d have to make do. Alistair shot for the pot, Audrey made the pies and thus began her fateful love affair with the deep freeze.
In the beginning, Rory and I tried bringing down emergency rations. Fresh bread, the smelliest of cheeses, cod’s roe, smoked fish. Instead of feeding us, these things fulfilled my mother’s seeming pact with God to keep a well-stocked freezer. In went the fresh food, out came the frozen pie, that dreadful, dreaded, stringy mystery-meat dish.
Audrey takes another bite, giving the matter some consideration. ‘Found it at the bottom of the deep freeze,’ she says. ‘We could have the leftovers tomorrow. We’ll just say it’s grouse or pigeon, they’ll never know the difference.’
‘Is it not grouse or pigeon?’ asks Alistair.
‘No,’ says Audrey, ‘I think it’s badger.’
Oh … Oh … Aaaaaaaargh. I bloody well knew it.
‘Frightfully good,’ is all my father says.
maggie
Maybe it was the way he’d said it, maybe it was the expression on Rory’s face – too set, too considered – or maybe the reason why this house had become compulsory viewing was because we’d been warned off. For the second time that trip. Bevan. The name had come up again and again. The only reason I’d added it to the original Newsline list was because the morning I arrived at the Cadogan Hotel, I’d found myself eavesdropping on two old ladies who were breakfasting at the table next to mine.
I’d noticed them because they looked like sisters, one with white hair coiled up in bun, the other’s neatly waved over her ears but dressed identically in pleated skirts, shirts, cardigans and pearls.
‘Always was of course. Even as a little boy.’
‘Do you remember at picnics, his mother, old Lady Bevan—’
‘The one with the dreadful Catholic hair?’ One kept interrupting the other.
‘That’s right, she always made the butler sit twenty feet away with jam smeared on his head to keep the wasps off the food.’
‘Wasn’t she the one that kept a lion?’
‘Indeed, bit the arm off the customs official at Heathrow.’
They were both amazed when I confessed I had never heard of Bevan. ‘Oh my dear, but you must have. It’s one of the great English houses.’
* * *
Judging from it’s two-mile-long drive, however, there was no way you’d know it. The road was in a terrible state of neglect, the surface all torn up and pockmarked by giant craters of muddy water. In contrast, young trees on either side were painstakingly fenced out in small wooden crates and in the parklands beyond, a tractor stood stationary while activity in the form of several figures with chainsaws hummed around it.
‘So how did you swing this by Rory?’ Wolf asked.
‘I didn’t. I told him we were taking a “personal day”. I don’t think he knew what that was,’ I grinned, ‘but I must admit, he looked pretty embarrassed.’
‘Aren’t these the people that are supposed to be in the nut house?’ Dwight said.
‘Yeah. What was the deal with that anyway?’ Wolf added.
‘Beats me.’ The drive had looped on itself and I could now see what was going on next to the tractor. An immense bonfire was in the process of being built. Shaped like a witch’s hat it was already a good 12 feet high. Alongside it, several men were laying into a fallen tree with saws and axes then heaving branches up to another guy on the bonfire’s summit.
‘Beats me too…’ Dwight stomped on the brake as sheep wandered across the road. More sheep were dotted around and a buffalo was grazing amongst the trees. Jesus, a what? I did an enormous double take.
‘Because they sounded perfectly normal on the phone,’ Dwight finished.
daniel
Upstairs in the first-floor corridor, Alistair rifles through Nanny’s handbag. He gives it a quick sniff.
‘What are you doing?’ Audrey hisses.
‘Smelling it.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Alistair much struck. ‘Comfort I suppose.’
‘Well be qui
ck,’ Audrey beseeches him, ‘or we’ll be caught.’
‘Check the door then.’
Audrey peers through the keyhole of Nanny’s bedroom as Alistair extracts a clip purse from her bag. ‘One bottle of whisky, or should we risk enough for two?’
Audrey glances plaintively at the bulging purse. ‘Why is Nanny so much better off than we are?’
‘Because in fifty odd years,’ Alistair folds the twenty-pound note into his pocket, ‘Nanny has only ever spent her wages on Basildon Bond writing paper and blue hats from the Army and Navy store. She’s probably amassed a small fortune by now.’
‘Do you think she keeps accounts?’ Audrey says. And she might well be worried. When Nanny discovered Rory and I had stolen a pack of Wrigley’s gum from the milkman’s float there’d been hell to pay. I think our poor mother was more traumatized than we were by the dire threats of Borstal that followed. She has a sudden flash of us standing, knees grimy, heads hanging, and at the memory her eyes cloud.
‘Shhh,’ says Alistair.
‘What?’
‘Hear that?’
‘What?’
‘Car.’
‘No.’
‘Yes, listen.’
‘What?’
‘Will you be quiet,’ he says creeping to the window. ‘It’s them. They’re here.’
* * *
Out of habit Audrey breathes the smoke out of the window. Alistair made her give up when they were first married and she never lost the habit of hiding it from him. She can hear him below. ‘Well done, well done, directions all right?’ She leans out of the window. Good God, look at the equipment they were carrying. The girl was in front with the two men behind. One of the men was Chinese or Japanese, but enormous! A Buddha! The girl was younger than she’d imagined. Dark, pretty, but dressed in the sort of ubiquitous army gear of the young. She herself had never taken much care with her appearance. You couldn’t very well grow up vain in Ireland. In the sixties when she moved to London, she felt horribly out of place. Her legs were too stocky for miniskirts. When she’d cut her hair short she hadn’t looked gamine or pixieish at all – in fact, not long after it had grown out, Alistair told her she’d looked like Henry VIII.