by P. D. James
My aunt, delicately stripping the skin from a peach, not raising her eyes: “The boys might like to see Maiden Castle.”
“Not a lot to see at Maiden Castle. Jack Manning could take them out in his boat when he collects the lobsters.”
“I don’t think I trust Manning. There’s a concert tomorrow at Poole which they might enjoy.”
“What kind of concert?”
“I don’t remember, I gave you the programme.”
“They might like a day in London.”
“Not in this lovely weather. They’re much better in the open air.”
When Xan was seventeen and first had the use of his father’s car we would drive into Poole to pick up girls. I found these excursions terrifying and went with him only twice. It was like entering an alien world; the giggles, the girls hunting in pairs, the bold, challenging stares, the apparently inconsequential but obligatory chat. After the second time I said: “We’re not pretending to feel affection. We don’t even like them; they certainly don’t like us. So if both parties only want sex why don’t we just say so and cut out all these embarrassing preliminaries?”
“Oh, they seem to need them. Anyway, the only women you can approach like that want cash payment in advance. We can strike lucky in Poole with one film and a couple of hours’ drinking.”
“I don’t think I’ll come.”
“You’re probably right. I usually feel next morning that it hasn’t been worth the trouble.”
It was typical of him to make it sound as if my reluctance was not, as he must have known, a mixture of embarrassment, fear of failure and shame. I could hardly blame Xan for the fact that I lost my virginity in conditions of acute discomfort in a Poole car park with a redhead who made it plain, both during my fumbling preliminaries and afterwards, that she had known better ways of spending a Saturday evening. And I can hardly claim that the experience adversely affected my sex life. After all, if our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had if only they persevere.
Apart from the cook, I can remember few of the servants. There was a gardener, Hobhouse, with a pathological dislike of roses, particularly when planted with other flowers. They get in everywhere, he would grumble, as if the climbers and standard bushes which he resentfully and skilfully pruned had somehow mysteriously seeded themselves. And there was Scovell, with his pretty, pert face, whose precise function I never understood: chauffeur, gardener’s boy, handyman? Xan either ignored him or was calculatingly offensive. I had never known him to be rude to any other servant and would have asked him why if I hadn’t sensed, alert as always to every nuance of emotion in my cousin, that the question would be unwise.
I didn’t resent it that Xan was our grandparents’ favourite. The preference seemed to me perfectly natural. I can remember one snatch of conversation overheard at the one Christmas when, disastrously, we were all together at Woolcombe.
“I sometimes wonder if Theo won’t go further than Xan in the end.”
“Oh no. Theo is a good-looking, intelligent boy, but Xan is brilliant.”
Xan and I colluded in that judgement. When I got my Oxford entrance they were gratified but surprised. When Xan was accepted at Balliol they took it as his due. When I got my First they said I was lucky. When Xan achieved no more than an upper second they complained, but indulgently, that he hadn’t bothered to work.
He didn’t make demands, never treated me like a poor cousin, annually provided me with food, drink and a free holiday in return for companionship or subservience. If I wanted to be alone, I could be, without complaint or comment. Usually this was in the library, a room which delighted me with its shelves filled with leather-bound books, its pilasters and carved capitals, the great stone fireplace with its carved coat of arms, the marble busts in their niches, the huge map table where I could spread my books and holiday tasks, the deep leather armchairs, the view from the tall windows across the lawn down to the river and the bridge. It was here, browsing in the county histories, that I discovered that a skirmish had been fought on that bridge in the Civil War when five young Cavaliers had held the bridge against the Roundheads until all of them had fallen. Even their names were set out, a roll-call of romantic courage: Ormerod, Freemantle, Cole, Bydder, Fairfax. I went to Xan in great excitement and dragged him into the library.
“Look, the actual date of the fight is next Wednesday, August 16. We ought to celebrate.”
“How? Throw flowers in the water?”
But he was not being either dismissive or contemptuous and he was only slightly amused at my enthusiasm.
“Why not drink to them anyway? Make a ceremony of it.”
We did both. We went to the bridge at sunset with a bottle of his father’s claret, the two pistols, my arms filled with flowers from the walled garden. We drank the bottle between us; then Xan balanced on the parapet, firing both pistols into the air as I shouted out the names. It is one of the moments from my boyhood which have remained with me, an evening of pure joy, unshadowed, untainted by guilt or satiety or regret, immortalized for me in that image of Xan balanced against the sunset, of his flaming hair, of the pale petals of roses floating downstream under the bridge until they were lost to sight.
3
Monday 18 January 2021
I can remember my first holiday at Woolcombe. I followed Xan up a second flight of stairs at the end of the corridor to a room at the top of the house looking out over the terrace and the lawn towards the river and the bridge. At first, sensitive and contaminated by my mother’s resentment, I wondered if I was being put in the servants’ quarters.
Then Xan said: “I’m next door. We have our own bathroom, it’s at the end of the corridor.”
I can remember every detail of that room. It was the one I was to have every summer holiday throughout my schooldays and until I left Oxford. I changed, but the room never changed, and I see in imagination a succession of schoolboys and undergraduates, each one bearing an uncanny resemblance to myself, opening that door summer after summer and entering by right into that inheritance. I haven’t been back to Woolcombe since my mother died eight years ago and I shall never go back now. Sometimes I have a fantasy that I shall return to Woolcombe as an old man and die in that room, pushing open the door for the last time and seeing again the single four-poster bed with its carved bedposts, the cover of faded silk patchwork; the bentwood rocking-chair with its cushion embroidered by some long-dead female Lyppiatt; the patina of the Georgian desk, a little battered but firm, steady, usable; the bookcase with the editions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century boys’ books: Henty, Fenimore Cooper, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Sapper, John Buchan; the bow-fronted chest of drawers with the flyblown mirror above it; and the old prints of battle scenes, terrified horses rearing before the cannons, wild-eyed cavalry officers, the dying Nelson. And I can remember best of all that day when I first entered it and, walking over to the window, looked out over the terrace, the sloping lawn, the oak trees, the sheen of the river and the small hump-backed bridge.
Xan stood at the door. He said: “We can go off somewhere tomorrow, if you like, cycling. The Bart has bought you a bicycle.”
I was to learn that he seldom spoke of his father in any other way. I said: “That’s kind of him.”
“Not really. He had to—hadn’t he?—if he wanted us to be together.”
“I’ve got a bicycle. I always cycle to school, I could have brought it.”
“The Bart thought it would be less trouble to keep one here. You don’t have to use it. I like to go off for the day but you don’t have to come if you don’t want to. Cycling isn’t compulsory. Nothing is compulsory at Woolcombe, except unhappiness.”
I was to discover later that this was the kind of sardonic quasi-adult remark he liked to make. It was intended to impress me and it did. But I didn’t believe him. On that first visit, inn
ocently enchanted, it was impossible to imagine anyone suffering unhappiness in such a house. And he couldn’t surely have meant himself.
I said: “I’d like to see round the house sometime.” Then I blushed, afraid that I sounded like a prospective purchaser or a tourist.
“We can do that, of course. If you can wait until Saturday, Miss Maskell from the vicarage will do the honours. It’ll cost you a pound but that includes the garden. It’s open every other Saturday in aid of church funds. What Molly Maskell lacks in historical and artistic knowledge she makes up in imagination.”
“I’d rather you showed it.”
He didn’t reply to that, but watched while I humped my case on to the bed and began to unpack. My mother had bought me a new case for this first visit. Miserably aware that it was too large, too smart, too heavy, I wished that I had brought my old canvas grip. I had, of course, packed too many clothes, and the wrong clothes, but he didn’t comment, I don’t know whether out of delicacy or tact or because he simply didn’t notice. Stuffing them quickly into one of the drawers, I asked: “Isn’t it strange living here?”
“It’s inconvenient and it’s sometimes boring, but it isn’t strange. My ancestors have lived here for three hundred years.” He added: “It’s quite a small house.”
He sounded as if he was trying to put me at ease by belittling his inheritance but when I looked at him I saw, for the first time, the look that was to become familiar to me, of a secret inner amusement which reached eyes and mouth but never broke into an open smile. I didn’t know then and still don’t know how much he cared for Woolcombe. It’s still used as a nursing-and-retirement home for the privileged few—relations and friends of the Council, members of the Regional, District and Local Councils, people who are considered to have given some service to the State. Until my mother died Helena and I made our regular duty visits. I can still picture the two sisters sitting together on the terrace, well wrapped up against the chill, one with her terminal cancer, the other with her cardiac asthma and arthritis, envy and resentment forgotten as they faced the great equalizer of death. When I imagine the world without a living human being, I can picture—who doesn’t?—the great cathedrals and temples, the palaces and the castles, existing through the uninhabited centuries, the British Library, opened just before Omega, with its carefully preserved manuscripts and books which no one will ever again open or read. But at heart I am touched only by the thought of Woolcombe; the imagined smell of its musty deserted rooms, the rotting panels in the library, the ivy creeping over its crumbling walls, a wilderness of grass and weeds obscuring the gravel, the tennis court, the formal garden; by the memory of that small back bedroom, unvisited and unchanged until the coverlet rots at last, the books turn to dust and the final picture drops from the wall.
4
Thursday 21 January 2021
My mother had artistic pretensions. No, that is arrogant and not even true. She had no pretensions to anything except a desperate respectability. But she did have some artistic talent, although I never saw her produce an original drawing. Her hobby was painting old prints, usually Victorian scenes taken from damaged bound volumes of the Girls’ Own Paper or the Illustrated London News. I don’t suppose it was difficult, but she did it with some skill, taking care, as she told me, to get the colours historically correct, although I don’t see how she could have been sure of that. I think the nearest she got to happiness was when she was sitting at the kitchen table with her paint box and two jam jars, the angled lamp precisely focused on the print spread out on a newspaper in front of her. I used to watch her working away, the delicacy with which she dipped the finer brush into the water, the swirl of coalescing blues, yellows and whites as she mixed them on the palette. The kitchen table was large enough, if not for me to spread out all my homework, at least for me to read or write my weekly essay. I liked to look up, my brief scrutiny unresented, and watch the bright colours edging across the print, the transformation of the drab grey of the microdots into a living scene; a crowded railway terminus with bonneted women seeing off their men to the Crimean War; a Victorian family, the women in furs and bustles, decorating the church for Christmas; Queen Victoria escorted by her consort, surrounded by crinolined children, opening the Great Exhibition; boating scenes on the Isis with long-defunct college barges in the background, the moustached men in their blazers, the full-bosomed, small-waisted girls in jackets and straw hats; village churches with a straggling procession of worshippers, the squire and his lady in the foreground entering for the Easter service against a background of graves made festive with spring flowers. Perhaps it was my early fascination with these scenes which came to direct my interest as a historian to the nineteenth century, that age which now, as when I first studied it, seems like a world seen through a telescope at once so close and yet infinitely remote, fascinating in its energy, its moral seriousness, its brilliance and squalor.
My mother’s hobby was not unlucrative. She would frame the finished pictures with the help of Mr. Greenstreet, the vicar’s warden from the local church they both regularly, and I reluctantly, attended, and would sell them to antique shops. I shall never now know what part Mr. Greenstreet played in her life, apart from his neat-fingered facility with wood and glue, or might have played except for my ubiquitous presence, any more than I can know how much my mother was paid for the pictures and whether, as I now suspect, it was this extra income which provided me with the school trips, the cricket bats, the extra books which I was never grudged. I did my bit to contribute; it was I who found the prints. I would rummage through boxes in junk shops in Kingston and further afield on my way home from school or on Saturdays, sometimes cycling fifteen or twenty miles to a shop which yielded the best spoils. Most were cheap and I bought them from my pocket money. The best I stole, becoming adept at removing centrepieces from bound books without damage, extracting prints from their mounts and slipping them into my school atlas. I needed these acts of vandalism, as I suspect most young boys needed their minor delinquencies. I was never suspected, I the uniformed, respectful, grammar-school boy who took his lesser findings to the till and paid without hurry or apparent anxiety and who occasionally bought the cheaper second-hand books from the boxes of miscellanea outside the shop door. I enjoyed these solitary excursions, the risk, the thrill of discovering a treasure, the triumph of returning with my spoils. My mother said little except to ask what I had spent and to reimburse me. If she suspected that some of the prints were worth more than I told her I had paid, she never questioned, but I knew that she was pleased. I didn’t love her but I did steal for her. I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.
I know, or think I know, when my terror of taking responsibility for other people’s lives or happiness began, although I may be deceiving myself; I have always been clever at devising excuses for my personal shortcomings. I like to trace its roots to 1983, the year my father lost his fight against cancer of the stomach. That was how, listening to the grown-ups, I heard it described. “He’s lost his fight,” they said. And I can see now that it was a fight, carried on with some courage even if he hadn’t much option. My parents tried to spare me the worst of knowledge. “We try to keep things from the boy” was another frequently overheard phrase. But keeping things from the boy meant telling me nothing except that my father was ill, would have to see a specialist, would go into hospital for an operation, would soon be home again, would have to go back into hospital. Sometimes I wasn’t even told that; I would return from school to find him no longer there and my mother feverishly cleaning the house, with a face set like stone. Keeping things from the boy meant that I lived without siblings in an atmosphere of uncomprehended menace in which the three of us were moving inexorably forward to some unimagined disaster which, when it came, would be my fault. Children are always ready to believe that adult catastrophes are their fault. My mother never spoke the word “cancer” to me, never referred to his illn
ess except incidentally. “Your father’s a little tired this morning.” “Your father has to go back into hospital today.” “Get those schoolbooks out of the sitting-room and go upstairs before the doctor comes. He’ll be wanting to talk to me.”
She would speak with eyes averted, as if there was something embarrassing, even indecent, about the disease, which made it an unsuitable subject for a child. Or was this a deeper secrecy, a shared suffering, which had become an essential part of their marriage and from which I was as rightly excluded as I was from their marriage bed? I wonder now whether my father’s silence, which seemed at the time a rejection, was deliberate. Were we alienated less by pain and weariness, the slow draining away of hope, than by his wish not to increase the anguish of separation? But he can’t have been so very fond of me. I wasn’t an easy child to love. And how could we have communicated? The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.
I can’t now remember the day he died except for one incident: my mother sitting at the kitchen table, weeping at last tears of anger and frustration. When, clumsy and embarrassed, I tried to put my arms round her, she wailed: “Why do I always have such rotten luck?” It seemed then to that twelve-year-old, as it seems now, an inadequate response to personal tragedy, and its banality influenced my attitude to my mother for the rest of my childhood. That was unjust and judgemental, but children are unjust and judgemental to their parents.