by Alan Judd
I spent time, too, researching Gerald Coombs’s family, at least as far as I could online. Much of it merely reinforced what I knew already: that Combe was not an uncommon name and that without further research it was impossible to confirm whether Thomas Combe and Gerald Coombs were of the same stock. I could follow Thomas’s family down to near the end of the seventeenth century and Gerald’s back into the late eighteenth but for the intervening century or so I would need to spend time in the National Archives and among parish and graveyard registers. Time, however, was what I felt I did not have; anyway, I knew enough to be sure, or thought I did. The Warwickshire connection and that seventeenth-century portrait of William Combe were sufficient, if not conclusive.
Meanwhile, I plotted. I would have that sword. What I would do with it, I hadn’t decided. The trick was to establish that it was plausibly Shakespeare’s without alerting Gerald Coombs to its value. What would he do if he knew? Probably he’d simply hang on to it. He didn’t seem to need money and didn’t appear to be strongly financially motivated. Certainly, he wouldn’t like to feel he was being ripped off – that was clear from our conversation about the desk – but the fact of possession would probably mean more to him than the prospect of reward. Most of my best customers were like that, though I suspected he differed from them in one respect: he would keep the sword not so much because he valued it, or because he worshipped Shakespeare or was in any way excited or moved by his plays, but through inertia and indifference, and because it was his. I had detected in him no spark of interest in literature or the arts, nor even a wish to feign it in order to seem informed or to keep up with fashion. Probably his friends were like that too, if he had any. I wasn’t sure how Mrs Coombs would react but Gerald, I was convinced, would do no more than grunt at the news that he owned Shakespeare’s sword and go on using it as a poker. Or, in a fit of exasperation at any intrusion arising from the discovery, would throw it into the canal at the foot of the rock on which Winchelsea is built. He didn’t deserve it, I told myself.
That was how I felt then. Already, he and even Mrs Coombs were mere adjuncts to the sword in my mind. I liked her for her apparent diffidence and gentleness of manner, while her looks reminded me of Philip Larkin’s line to the effect that ‘a face, in those days, was enough to start the whole shooting match off’. Perhaps not quite a shooting match at my age but those misty blue eyes and vulnerable expression were enough to provoke an uplifting rattle of musketry. Also, I felt sorry for a woman so obviously bullied and put upon by her boorish husband. But the sword was the thing.
During my first and younger bachelorhood I enjoyed dinner parties, not least as an opportunity for mate-hunting (though I can’t now recall that any significant relationships emerged). Later, as one half of a married couple, the shine gradually wore off and they became wearisomely competitive, an obligatory social ritual for parading as a social unit. Then, when children came along – though not for Amanda and me – they were dominated by middle-class baby talk and school talk, which become even more competitive.
Invitations declined after divorce, then picked up a little when I became useful for gender balance. For a while I was even a prospect for remarriage, until age eased me into that obscure corner of the market that no one looks into until they get there. Surprisingly, in my second bachelorhood, my enjoyment of dinner parties returned. No longer hunting, no longer competing, I took pleasure in an evening out, in being fed and watered and in having amiable, undemanding conversations with people as boring and grateful as myself. It made a change from dining at home with Stephanie who – a hangover from her institutional years – eats contentedly only in front of the television.
Mrs Coombs answered the door wearing a simple pale-blue dress and a sapphire and diamond necklace. I was the first to arrive and my proffered bunch of flowers threw her into consternation as she struggled to express delight and gratitude while finding somewhere to put them and greeting the next guests whose car had just drawn up. After some seconds of fun and fluster I took them from her and cleared a space on the crowded kitchen table, returning to the hall in time to relieve her of an almost identical bunch brought by the next guests. I briefly considered a search for vases but the kitchen was cluttered with crockery, pots, pans, bottles, cooking implements and dainty bowls of chilled green soup that looked unfortunately like urological samples. I gave up and left them on the windowsill. More guests had meanwhile arrived and were being ushered into the drawing room. There was no sign of Gerald Coombs.
One of the banes of middle-class life is that we have inherited from our forebears the assumption that entertaining means three or four courses plus wine, spirits and tea or coffee. It can work but all too often the evening proceeds with the lumbering stateliness of an overladen Spanish galleon, while most of us – already overweight and overfed – would prefer a nimble English frigate of a repast. But no one dares say so and, when it comes to their turn to host, none has the nerve to limit provision to that which nearly all secretly want. We do as we have been done by, condemning ourselves to long processional evenings in perpetuity.
At the same time, it is impossible for most hosts – hostesses especially – to relax and enjoy it. They may bask in the afterglow of everything having gone well, boosted by exaggerated thank-you letters, but at the time and for days before they will have been riven with all the anxiety and tension of a theatrical performance. Added to which, they have to do it all themselves, with no stagehands, scene-shifters, ushers or lighting operators. Their forebears had cooks and servants to sustain these elaborate performances but nowadays the hostess, exhausted before it starts, feels she has to serve and supervise everyone while paying full attention to each guest. This makes it impossible to have a satisfactory conversation with the poor woman because her eyes and mind are on whose glass needs filling, who is merely picking at the food, who hasn’t had the gravy, who is being ignored by the men on either side of her and by her own husband’s flirtation with the actress wife of the drunken lawyer at the end of the table. Not to mention the state of the pudding in the oven.
Charlotte coped better than most. Although obviously anxious, she had – has – an unobtrusive organisational ability that meant that everything worked. She also deployed her happy knack of getting others to speak about themselves while appearing to listen and saying little herself, so that she could keep an eye on everyone else. She did this without help from Gerald, who appeared only when all the guests had arrived and she had seen to their drinks. He was upstairs, would be down soon, she said when I offered to help. He appeared wearing blazer and golf club tie, unhurried and unsmiling. Only one of the other men wore a tie, a retired judge.
I set myself up as the model guest that night, fetching and carrying, refilling glasses, facilitating conversation, engaging the neglected. In other words, doing everything a hostess might normally expect her husband to do. Gerald took no notice, talking most of the time across the table to the retired judge who, it soon became all too apparent, was another keen golfer. His plump wife, desperate not to be ignored, was happy to talk to anyone about anything, so I paid her special attention. She was well informed about the history of Winchelsea, particularly its late-nineteenth-century difficulties with drainage.
The other couple were farmers from the Romney Marsh, pleasant inoffensive people who gave the impression that they were pleased, if somewhat surprised, to find themselves there. It turned out they knew the Coombses because the wife and Charlotte had sat on the local hospice committee together. The Marsh is famously productive farmland and, since they seemed to own a lot of it, I assumed they were wealthy. ‘Windmills,’ I heard the husband say when asked what was the most profitable crop these days.
The other guest was Eileen, whose gender-balance I assumed I was. A doctor in general practice, she wore no make-up and kept her iron-grey hair tied tightly in a bun. Her plain grey trouser-suit looked like a uniform and she soon made sure we all knew she had been on call that day. She seemed ready to be i
rritated from the moment she crossed the threshold and it was impossible not to suspect that this was a chronic condition. Before we sat at table she had lectured the farming couple on the overuse of chemicals.
It pleased me that she was so aggressively unappealing. I dislike doctors and anyone else who lives by telling us what is good for us. In earlier times I would have hated the clergy but I tolerate them now that their functions have been secularised and they no longer matter. However, I was also pleased with Eileen because she so obviously set out to be unpleasing that I could take her as evidence that people really had given up trying to pair me off. Not that I would object to being paired off, occasionally and briefly, with appealing women who were similarly inclined, but I had no wish to remarry or embroil myself in any form of permanent intimacy. Marriage – at least, in my recollection – is a matter of perpetual manoeuvring and I had lost my appetite for the inconveniences entailed. The idea of online dating, occasionally suggested, filled me with horror.
Having taken against Eileen on sight, therefore, I also took a perverse pleasure in making myself agreeable to her. She had been a neighbour of the Coombses before moving to Hastings following the break-up of her marriage to another doctor. I joined her in extolling the illusory delights of Hastings, a depressing mess of a town that for decades has supposedly been up-and-coming but never quite does; or, if it does, gets there only after everywhere else has been up and gone. We agreed that living in poorer areas was more ‘real’ than living in posh, rarefied Winchelsea, though it then came out that she lived in the newly gentrified Hastings Old Town. I relish such middle-class snobbery, with its assumption that virtue is the prerogative of the (relatively) poor. Sometimes, by seeming to agree, it’s possible to get people close to insisting that the poor are morally superior simply because they are poor. Most shy away at the last jump, but they don’t abandon their assumptions. With Eileen I more or less succeeded.
‘You feel closer to the essentials of life, living where you now do?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘The essentials don’t change, of course, they’re the same for everyone. But if you mean, do I feel that the people I live among are less cushioned and blinkered by wealth and possessions, therefore more aware of deprivation and what it does to people and therefore more likely to sympathise, then, yes, I feel closer to them.’
‘You find them morally more sympathetic?’
‘Morally more aware, certainly.’ She spoke now with a certain wariness, uneasy perhaps at finding herself in agreement with someone who was neither a caring professional nor one of the virtuous poor. Indeed, a man in trade, an antiques dealer, at that; probably on a par with estate agents.
‘More deserving themselves, perhaps? In that they’re less culpable and less blinded to the sufferings of others?’
‘More deserving, yes.’
I nodded sympathetically, forbearing to describe Stephanie’s and my early childhood in a north Kent council estate where enthusiasm for the material things of life and devil take the hindmost left little room for the self-regarding comforts of altruism.
I broke off to help Charlotte – as I was now asked to call her – clear away the main course. Gerald and the retired judge didn’t notice, oblivious of hands removing their plates and of the chorus of compliments on the now-departed sea bass.
In the kitchen Charlotte cleared a space for my stack of dinner plates. ‘You’re being naughty, aren’t you, Simon?’
‘Just trying to be helpful.’
‘With Eileen, I mean. You’re not as nice as you seem, are you? You’re teasing her.’ She smiled. ‘Don’t worry, I’m rather relieved you’re not perfect.’
‘Just seeing how far she would go in that direction. I don’t think she sees I’m teasing.’
‘I’m sure she doesn’t. Nothing if not literal-minded, Eileen.’
She clearly saw through me, which meant there was no point in trying to excuse myself, but I couldn’t help trying. ‘It’s just that I think the rich are what the poor would be if they had money and the poor behave just as the rich would if they didn’t.’
She wasn’t interested. ‘If you could get those trays we’ll take one each.’
We loaded the plates and made for the door together, which forced us to pause facing each other, our laden trays between us. ‘You have such beautiful eyes,’ I said, not because she does – though she does – but because it seemed a good time to say it and I wanted to impress her. I also felt an obscure urge to surprise her, as if that would gain me some advantage.
She smiled at me almost pityingly, shook her head and moved on.
The rest of the evening was helped by the fact that we had a little of that rare, ever-to-be-desired thing, a general conversation in which everyone joined. It concerned a local perennial, the ever-threatened, never-enacted bypass. The problem is that there is no room to seaward without disfiguring the coastline and no room inland without despoiling beautiful valleys. Eileen couldn’t see what was wrong with a fourteen-mile tunnel, although she disapproved of anything that encouraged more traffic to damage the environment. The farmer’s wife thought existing roads should be left unrepaired to discourage through traffic, the judge foresaw entire careers in litigation during the appeals process, Gerald grunted and said it would never happen. I agreed with everyone while pondering what Charlotte had meant by saying she was relieved that I wasn’t as nice as I seemed. It was true, of course, and her recognition of it suggested it applied equally to her; it takes one to know one. But I had yet to see whatever was not nice in her.
I helped with the teas and coffees. Gerald and the judge wanted brandies. As I placed Gerald’s before him he acknowledged me for the first time that evening. ‘Good of you –er – very good, very good.’ He had clearly forgotten my name.
As the now tacitly acknowledged unpaid home help, I remained to clear up after the others left. Charlotte tried not very hard to urge me to go, saying I must be exhausted after a week in the shop and that my poor sister must be anxious. But I was determined to stay since there had been no chance either to talk to Gerald about his family or to examine the sword again. Throughout the evening, between every sentence and every mouthful, the thought of it lying in the hearth waiting to be touched, held, sensed, was like the prospect of secret sex.
Gerald disappeared upstairs while Charlotte and I cleared up, reappearing only when we were almost done. He stood motionless by the kitchen table like a great ship moored in harbour while lesser craft plied around it, making no attempt to clear or carry, fill the dishwasher or put things away. Nor did he join our broken conversation as we dodged around him. He seemed completely unaware of us. Eventually, when I was drying some of the things that Charlotte had washed because they wouldn’t fit in the dishwasher, he said, ‘Need two really.’
I looked at him. ‘Two?’
‘Dishwashers. Then you’d have room for everything. Things could go from dishwasher to table to the other dishwasher. More efficient, less shelf space needed.’
I wondered if he was drunk. It was hard to say because, now I thought about it, he usually looked or sounded half-drunk. But what he’d just said made sense. Two dishwashers would indeed be handy.
He turned to face me. ‘Grateful for your help.’
‘More than grateful,’ said Charlotte, stepping round him to wipe the table and giggling again.
‘Nightcap?’ asked Gerald. ‘One for the road? Not supposed to say that now, of course, but you know what I mean.’
‘Do, please, we’ve almost finished,’ said Charlotte.
I hung the damp tea towel on the Aga rail and followed Gerald back into the drawing room. I’d drunk little over dinner and so joined him with a malt whisky. While he poured I again surveyed his ancestors, reckoning there was no harm in showing interest nor in lingering by the seventeenth-century one. With his long hair and plain brown jacket he could easily have been a preacher. If it had been more than head and shoulders it might have shown him carrying something –
a bible, perhaps, or even a sword. Charlotte had shown me that it was entitled ‘William Combe’ but a date would be helpful, especially if it fitted with cousin William to whom Thomas left the bulk of his estate.
Gerald joined me in front of the portrait, holding the whiskies. ‘Miserable old sod.’
Coming from you, that’s something, I thought, searching the two faces for resemblances. Apart from a shared lack of any desire to please, there was nothing. William’s long grey hair was abundant, his lips were thin and his grey-blue eyes looked out with an earnest, unyielding stare. Gerald had fuller, coarser features, much less hair and passive brown eyes conveying nothing of William’s determination.
‘I’m trying to see if it’s dated,’ I said, peering. ‘You don’t happen to know?’
‘Could be something on the back.’
‘May I?’ I put down my whisky, removed the painting and took it over to the standard lamp. The back was blank paper browned with age, the black frame was heavy and certainly old, possibly original. His name was written in small black capitals in the bottom-right corner of the painting but I couldn’t tell whether it was contemporary or a later addition. There was lettering squeezed beneath it, smaller and less distinct. The first word looked like ‘of’ and the second, much longer, began with an ‘A’ but was impossible to decipher thereafter. It was long enough to be Alvechurch, the Worcestershire village where William Combe lived, roughly twenty miles from Stratford and now just south of the M42. There was no sign of the name or initials of the painter. A professional clean and modern dating techniques could doubtless tell us more. I said so to Gerald.