by Bella Pollen
She grinds out the butt on the window sill noticing that the rhododendron bushes need cutting back – and wonders how she will ever manage without Bindey, finally retired aged eighty-nine. Damn, the telephone wire has come loose. She stretches out her hand, gets a finger to the black cabling and prods it back into a crack in the brickwork. But she’s leant out too far. Her hand slips, she loses balance and in an instant I see she will fall.
It’s only a half landing, but I’m terrified it will break her hip. Instead her beloved rhododendrons envelop her in their prickly centre. ‘Bugger,’ she says with feeling. She touches the long tear in her stockings. ‘Bloody bugger.’
‘Ah, here’s Audrey now,’ says my father, rounding the corner just in time to see his wife pick her way out of a bush pulling twigs from her hair. Audrey strides purposefully towards the group trying not to limp. ‘Well done, well done,’ she says with a beatific smile, ‘Directions all right?’
* * *
Alistair thinks they’re very odd. He’s never clapped eyes on a group of people less well equipped for the English countryside. Only the shortish one has brought his own boots but is, bizarrely, dressed straight out of the pages of a Jeeves novel. The girl is wearing gym shoes and a thin coat whilst the Buddha sports a pair of sandals with socks. They seem nice enough, however, so he gives them a tour during which they film the wine cellar, significant only for its lack of wine, the May bedroom, significant for the suicide of a jilted chambermaid who hung herself with my great great-grandmothers pearls. Then they film the dairy where there are no longer cows to milk just as there are no horses to ride in the stableyard.
My father relates the full history of the house for the camera and is gratified that Miss Monroe shows so much interest in his endeavours to keep it afloat.
‘But what were you hoping to do with these?’ She plucks a smooth pebble from a tray by the stone-polishing machine.
‘Make them into toys,’ Alistair says vaguely, ‘arts and crafts, pebble dogs, birds, that sort of thing … made a whole family of rooks once but nobody was interested. People used to eat rook pie around here. They’d shoot the young peeping over the edge of their nests with an air gun. Thought to be a great country delicacy at one time … caught some young boys at it the other day as it happened, gave them a frightful rocket.’
At one point he asks whether she has met his son Robert, and I look forward to a potentially interesting moment. Though it can’t be legitimately classed as six degrees of separation it is a spectacularly fine piece of irony that she’s here, quite oblivious of the connection, and at some point the shit must inevitably hit the fan, as it were, but not right now – because when the question is asked, the entire crew is distracted, quite understandably, by their attempts to frame the buffalo in shot and Maggie treats the question in much the same way as being asked by a London cabby whether she’d ever come across his first cousin who lived in Delaware.
They’re now in the old laboratory where my father is showing them the Heath Robinson contraption of pipes, funnels, bowls, milk and muslins he has erected. The Americans stare into a vat of some indescribably repellent gunk, which sits underneath to catch the drips.
‘From the buffalo milk,’ Alistair explains. ‘Oddly enough this milk, when left to curdle, turns into an interesting cottage cheese texture which when mixed with…?’ He turns to Miss Monroe.
‘Chives?’ she hazards gamely.
‘No, no…’
‘Pepper? Honey?’
‘No, no, you’re entirely on quite the wrong track. Sand! Here try some,’ he passes Maggie a spoonful which she sniffs suspiciously.
‘Go on,’ he says, ‘be brave.’
‘Sand,’ she repeats faintly, raising the spoon to her lips. ‘And you eat this on…?’
‘Don’t be silly.’ he snatches the plastic spoon from her, ‘you can’t eat sand, good Lord, the milk is against every EEC health regulation ever dreamt up.’ He smears the contents of the spoon on his cheek with one finger. ‘It’s for face packs! You see the mozzarella was not a great success,’ he confides and is deep into a colourful description of the creature’s medical problems when Maggie interrupts him.
‘But surely mozzarella doesn’t come from the American buffalo?’
‘Quite right, good for you. Water buffalo’s the one you really want.’ He lowers his voice conspiratorially ‘got one of those on order as a matter of fact.’
But Maggie is now wearing an expression of exhausted confusion as if she’d been asked to memorize the 3,000 components of a nuclear warhead.
‘Something wrong?’ asks my father.
‘No, not at all,’ she says puzzled, ‘it’s just that I was wondering … well … are you sure it’s a water buffalo? Isn’t it an Italian buffalo you need?’
maggie
Another reason I love living in New York is the fact that it’s a functional city. Obviously not in the psychological sense – I mean as a collection of people we’re as psychotically challenged as anyone else – but in a practical sense, New York functions like nowhere else on earth. Everybody does something, provides some service, everyone, everything, has a purpose. The Bowery, for example, where I live, is not just a residential area, it’s also the stainless steel headquarters of the city. For five blocks square all you can buy anywhere is kitchen equipment. Industrial stuff mostly: stoves, hoods, griddles, broilers as big as my sofa all hoisted onto the sidewalks by the guys who run the shops. In winter you see them standing outside clapping their hands for warmth and chatting to locals, blowing hot air out of their mouths. From my window their breath looks like cooking steam. I keep telling them they should cook on their stoves, sell a little chicken noodle soup to warm the souls of passers-by.
Outside stainless steel, you get plumbing. Sprayed on shop fronts are enticing offers. Ball caps! Filigree end scrolls! 45-inch elbows! The exclamation marks making them sound like new and exciting sex toys. Lighting lives beyond the plumbing and then you get to the thrift shops of SoHo – it’s as I said – everything has a purpose whether it’s buying, selling or recycling. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Nothing stays around long enough to gather dust.
This was not the case with Bevan. The house was extraordinary and tragic and unlike any place I had ever come across. Rooms led one to the other through panelled doors, each a degree colder than the previous; each in a progressively worse state of disrepair, boasting a different shade of gloom, a more marked degree of fade. Most depressing of all was the sheer quantity of useless stuff crammed high on every surface, but whether this stuff was tokens of love or just garbage, it was impossible to tell. Wolf slowly panned the camera over surfaces as we passed through. Newspapers, brittle and yellowing, piles of matchboxes, rusted hunting knives, old bits of guns, shelves of dried-up magazines – you had to struggle to get your head round it – if in another part of the world human tissue was being cloned and emails were flying through space, what were people doing living this way in the twenty-first century? Why did they need this house? Why not sell up? Was it fear or stubbornness or just plain stupidity.
* * *
The Earl conducted the entire tour in his dirty boots, insisting we did the same. So we tramped through leaving our own streaks of mud and I imagined them melting into the general brownness of the floor, gluing together the fray of the carpet, hardening in holes left by woodworm. As the house merged together into the murky colours of neglect I began to feel wildly claustrophobic. I longed for the emptiness of my loft, for its clean, uncluttered space. I wanted to lie on the floorboards with nothing better to do than listen to the whirr of sewing machines immediately below in the Chinese sweatshop and wonder at the irony of the twenty-seven immigrants who spend their miserable days sweating, running up tracksuits in which others will run in order to sweat for pleasure.
Still, the Earl himself was pure Newsline Gold. Apart from who he was (cousin of the queen, peer of the realm, with one of the oldest family seats in Britain and God only kn
ew how many titles) he surely epitomized the pointlessness of the aristocracy. He was a total anachronism, a twenty-first-century dinosaur, and I wanted to get him to admit it on camera.
‘Well, since the House of Lords has lost most of its hereditary peers,’ I asked, ‘what relevance has the aristocracy in today’s Britain?’
‘Absolutely none.’
I was a little wrong-footed by such frankness.
‘Er, so … what would you say was left of the so-called “playing fields of Eton”.’
‘Bugger all,’ he replied in much the same tone of voice. Wolf caught my eye and winked. I floundered on. ‘Um, well if that’s true … what would you say your role was now?’
He took pity on me. ‘If you’re suggesting we have outlived our usefulness,’ he said gently, ‘I would have to agree with you, we are, in the words of the Duke of Devonshire, “a spent force”.’
‘Do you think that the hereditary peers should have been expelled from the House of Lords?’
‘It was entirely undemocratic, so I understood, of course, but in a curious way the system worked very well.’
‘You don’t think people should be chosen for that position on merit.’
‘Just because a man has risen to the top of his profession through drive and ambition does not necessarily make him a suitable public servant. Indeed there may well come a day when a man whose sense of public duty is motivated purely by his obligation to society will be sorely missed.’
I told him this sounded like a warning, and he agreed perhaps it was. When I quoted him Lloyd George’s ‘by what right are 10,000 people owners of the soil in this country and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth’, he said, ‘Oh but you see I’m not really the owner of the soil. I am a keeper of the soil, and in answer to your earlier question my “role” now is no more than guardian, curator of this house if you like. The only thing we’re expected to do is keep things going for the next generation.’
‘Expected by whom?’
‘Good question,’ he said.
I liked him. He made no attempt to wriggle out of tough questions and his wasn’t the practised seductiveness people sometimes turned on for the camera. The Earl was totally genuine.
‘Was there ever anything you wanted to do?’ I asked him curiously.
He frowned and I realized he hadn’t understood the question.
‘You know, when you were young?’
‘You mean what did I want to be when I grew up?’
I nodded. He thought for a while then he said, ‘Yes. Not the eldest son.’
daniel
There is an image people have of alcoholic parents. It’s an image that conjures up violence, wife beating, child abuse, self-destruction, family secrets, broken childhoods and it’s not a pretty picture.
Benj’s father is an alcoholic like this, effete, sneering, racist, sexist. When we were boys, home from school, he would hold court at the dining table demanding everyone’s attention as his poisonous diatribe flowed against the world. He was certainly amusing, but amusing at everybody else’s expense and the drunker he got the meaner he became. During those interminable meals, he would unaccountably cease from holding anecdotally forth, turn to Benj and rasp, ‘Your turn to say something clever, Benjamin,’ and a terrible silence would fall. If Benj failed to amuse the assembled company, his father would accuse him of being unspeakably dull and send him to eat in another room while guests and relations shifted uncomfortably in their chairs.
We were lucky. Our parents were not like that. We were also fortunate – or rather Alistair and Audrey were fortunate – in that they were entirely complicit in their drinking. If this had the result of closing them off from us, at least they were not closed off from each other. Our childhood was not overshadowed by cruelty or violence, it was instead governed by lack of focus, near misses, and yes, of course, there were family secrets. Our childhood was defined by omissions, places we didn’t go, conversations we couldn’t have, cousins we were no longer allowed to see.
But family secrets were not our biggest problem in those days. Our immediate task was to stuff our thumbs in the leaking dyke. Our most pressing concern was damage limitation – to keep the smouldering embers off the carpet, to lift my mother back into her chair, and always, always to prevent others from knowing. Then there was Alistair and Audrey’s propensity for foot in mouth, their talent for causing embarrassment by simply being themselves. It wasn’t just contained at home; it followed us to school. Cheques were bounced, forms were left unfilled. Rory and I, standing with our trunks at the school gates, forgotten and uncollected at the end of term. Our skill became the cover-up, the manufacturing of excuses. There are no places to hide from extreme behaviour. You deal with it by adopting extremes yourself.
Rory succeeded no better than I did in the impossible task of attracting our parents’ attention and keeping it. What tools can you develop to turn the beam of somebody’s spotlight onto you? ‘Dad, I’m an alcoholic, a drug addict, Dad, perhaps you haven’t noticed, but I’m actually black.’ This is where our paths began to split. Rory retreated, I attacked. We embraced different religions. Rory drank the water, I took care of the wine. To me it’s so simple. You drink, snort, take pills, it’s only ever about trying to find a place where you can be happy – but here is the nub, I suppose, of Rory’s resentment. Double abandonment. First by them, then by me. He does not forgive my parents for who I turned out to be; his tragedy is he can’t accept that I would never dream of blaming them in the first place.
Something happens to a man when he realizes he has no choice, when he realizes he’s lost a freedom he never had any rights to. Something drains out of him. It doesn’t matter how big your Estate, how tall your trees, how smartly dressed your gardeners – nothing can compensate a human being for feeling absolutely worthless. I often wondered who or what my father dreamed of becoming when he was young, but he once told me in an unguarded moment that the day he inherited Bevan it felt as though his life was over before it had begun. But Alistair was an optimist. He loved Bevan. To him it was an enchanted land beyond whose boundaries the outside world barely existed – and Bevan, when he inherited it, had not seemed like the impossible task it does today.
Alistair didn’t care if the house wasn’t grand, he didn’t care if it wasn’t warm – as long as it functioned, and it did. The decay was gentle but probably not on a dissimilar time schedule to his own. Then came the fire. It decimated the east wing and nobody was sure how it had started. Maybe it was faulty wiring, maybe Alistair had been sloshed before it began. Certainly he was a lot more sloshed after they’d finished clearing away those great piles of blackened ash and bricks.
A year after the fire, the estate was ravaged by Dutch elm disease. It was 1976. Britain lost more than twenty million trees, thousands of which were on our land. Elms are one of the most romantic of trees, their apple-core silhouettes responsible for much of this country’s graceful landscape. Dead elm was primarily used for coffins but there was such a glut you had to pay to have them taken away. Alistair, along with every other poor sod, was swindled blind by the timber merchants who claimed there was no market for the wood. The drive at Bevan had been lined with elms. Four hundred full grown trees, 100 feet high, 200 years old. Alistair refused to cut them down, thought they might survive. He spent a small fortune injecting them, but it didn’t work. When they died, Alistair cut them down himself, every single one. Ten years of bonfires, maybe fifteen. I can see Bindey, grasping one side of the double-handed saw. I can see my father shirtless, sweating, leaning on the axe. I can still remember his face as he watched those trees fall. Over two centuries of growth and majesty reduced to stumps and I think it was the first time I ever saw a grown man cry.
maggie
Nanny, as the Earl and his wife called her, was a tiny, white-haired woman of extreme old age. She sat in front of the television, feet resting on a petit point stool. She presented a neat figure in tartan skirt and green cable cardi
gan. A cameo brooch pinned to the neck of her blouse kept in place, not just the peter pan collar, but also the strands of wrinkled skin that stretched from her throat to her chin and swayed gently as she spoke.
‘I do watch Friends, yes, dear,’ she said. ‘I don’t always understand the jokes but I do like to see nice young people enjoying themselves.’ She poured another cup of tea and held it out to Wolf.
The old lady’s quarters were a virtual shrine to the royal family. Walls were decorated with framed tea towels of the queen mother, and the engagement of Charles and Diana. The mantelpiece was home to a dozen or so commemorative mugs and there were even pictures of the two little princes, Harry and William, in silver frames. The other thing about the room was that, unlike the rest of the house, it was warm – in fact not warm, boiling. Wolf poured with sweat as he angled the camera through the door to Nanny’s bedroom, picking out the headboard of her single bed. A large old-fashioned watch was pinned to its oyster-coloured satin and a bottle of lemon barley water stood on the bedside table.
‘And you’ve been Nanny to all the family?’ I asked her. I was about to pass out with the heat but the old lady was unruffled.
‘I was employed by Master Alistair’s mother, aye,’ Nanny, like the Earl, maintained perfect composure in front of the camera. My bet was this was because she couldn’t see it. She was ninety-five years old and held an incredible scorn for old people, proudly telling us of her disgust at younger generations taking to their beds.
‘Nothing makes Nanny happier than doling out meals on wheels to decrepit pensioners twenty years her junior,’ said the Earl wryly.
‘I’ve kept myself busy, dear, and that’s why I’m so healthy today.’
She was shocked when I asked her if she was resentful always living in somebody else’s house. ‘I’ve been in service all my life,’ she said. ‘My father was a policeman. As a family, we have always been of use.’ She prided herself on never turning out a bad child, dismissing the notion of bad genes as nonsense. ‘Bad breeding is cured by good upbringing,’ she announced emphatically, ‘not that his lordship wasn’t a rascal because he was, I can tell you, eighteen years I wiped his nose,’ she glanced fondly in the Earl’s direction, then rapped, ‘Alistair, must I tell you again not to lean against the fireguard.’ She turned back to camera without missing a beat. ‘As I was saying, Alistair was my pet, then after he was married there were the boys and now … well and now there’s just the baby left,’ her face softened, ‘but he himself needs quite some looking after,’ she sniffed. ‘Quite a handful let me assure you.’