‘Really?’ said Nick.
‘No. It's gone to pot completely. My sons didn't go there.’
‘Not intellectual types like you and father,’ said Rupert Lavington. ‘Anyone want another slice off the joint? Second helps?’
Mrs Lavington was still fixed on Nick. ‘What do they pay you?’
‘Sorry?’
‘At this magazine. What do they pay you?’
‘Granny!’ said Charlotte.
‘Six thousand a year.’
A ripple of embarrassment ran round the table. ‘I think I will have some more,’ said Charlotte's mother. ‘Come on, Clarissa, keep me company.’
‘God!’ said the youngest male cousin. ‘I don't know how you manage. I'm on eight and a half and I'm always skint.’
Nick considered Mrs Lavington. She made him think of the tortoise he had had when he was ten: the wrinkled neck, the small head on the end of it turning slowly this way and that. He watched her eat and remembered the tortoise (whose name was Fred) – lettuce leaves withdrawn half inch by half inch with each deliberate crunch of horny jaws, occasional glimpses of a grey tongue. He had liked Fred; he did not care for Mrs Lavington at all.
‘Nick's like you, Granny,’ said Charlotte. ‘He's a terrific reader. He's got hundreds of books. All over the floor mostly in his crazy room. Paperbacks, of course.’
The old woman stared down the table at him. ‘I can't stand a paperback. I've got to have a properly bound book. I can't bear to go into a bookshop nowadays, all those garish covers screaming at you. I always ordered everything from Bumpus. I don't expect you've ever heard of Bumpus?’
‘No.’
‘It's gone now. When my mother went there they used to put out the red carpet. Old Mr Bumpus always served her himself.’
‘Aren't books a price nowadays!’ said one of the daughters-in-law. ‘Proper books. I got that David Attenborough wild life thing the other day for Timmie. Fifteen pounds!’
Mrs Lavington's reptilean head swung round. ‘I was talking about my mother, Clarissa.’
The daughter-in-law, rebuked, patted her mouth with her napkin.
‘Galsworthy once told my mother that her collection was one of the finest he'd seen. There is a Nonsuch Shakespeare. I don't imagine you've ever seen a Nonsuch Shakespeare?’
‘No,’ said Nick. ‘I haven't.’
‘And of course a large number of first editions. My mother was interested in modern writing also. Arnold Bennett always asked her to read his work before publication.’
‘And Tennyson?’ enquired Nick.
Mrs Lavington, who had just put a forkful of food into her mouth, chewed, eyeing him. Around the table, there were rustlings; people cleared their throats, applied themselves to food, embarked on new conversations. Mrs Lavington, her mouth finally empty, said, ‘Growing up in a house with an outstanding collection makes all the difference. Books are one's world.’
‘Are your people frightfully bookish, Nick?’ asked Charlotte's mother.
He reflected. Mrs Lavington's cold eye was still on him. He said, ‘They don't have all that many books. We always used the public library a lot.’
Mrs Lavington glittered; she almost smiled. ‘I have never been into a public library.’
Plates were cleared. An apple tart with cream was served. The conversation turned to choice of holiday destinations, the wedding of a relative, the price of stereo equipment. The format appeared to be not so much an exchange of views and information, or a process whereby someone said something which prompted an addition or comment from someone else, but everyone saying whatever came into their head. The dog-leg effect was peculiarly disorienting. From time to time Mrs Lavington would slice into the middle of someone's statement with a pronouncement, not relevant. Nick sat silent; he could see no point in adding to all this. When, at last, everyone had finished eating, Mrs Lavington said, ‘Tell those girls to serve coffee in the library,’ and began to grind her chair backwards; sons, again, leapt to her aid and were waved away.
Out in the hall, the women trooped upstairs, chatting. The men stood about, lighting cigars. They were all large and extremely clean; Nick had been noticing, during the meal, the manicured hands around him, nails cut level and scrubbed. Charlotte often picked his hands up and made a little face.
She was waiting now at the foot of the stairs. ‘Just going up to powder our noses. The men's loo is that door there. What do you think of Granny – isn't she a character!’ The others had gone through the open double doors at the end of the hall. Charlotte leaned up against him and nuzzled his neck. ‘Mmn … Enjoying yourself?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I rather think I might be.’ She was still nuzzling; interestingly, he found himself once more inert.
She peered at him. ‘Well, that's a funny way of putting it.’
He moved away. ‘I think I'll have a pee.’
He came out of the lavatory and washed his hands in a washroom liberally equipped with fluffy towels and new pieces of soap. Charlotte's father came in. ‘Ah, Nick … Excellent. Coffee on offer in the library when you're ready. Chance for you to take a look at the famous collection.’
The library was as large as the drawing-room; the walls were panelled, and lined with glass-fronted bookcases. They were all there, sitting about on leather sofas or perched on the arms of the chairs. As he came in Charlotte's mother was saying to one of the other women, ‘Oh no, not serious we hope. You know Charlotte – always prone to passing fancies …’ She looked up, broke off and flashed a smile: ‘Coffee on the side, Nick, we just help ourselves.’
He poured a cup of coffee and began to move along in front of the bookcases. Everything in sets – leather-bound, gold-tooled. Complete works of everyone. The Nonsuch Shakespeare. Nothing antiquarian. Everything circa 1910, by the look of it. He tried to open a glass door; it was locked. One of the uncles came forward; ‘Having a look at the books? Quite an impressive sight.’
‘I was trying to open the case,’ said Nick. ‘It seems to be locked.’
‘Oh, I imagine it would be, yes. Mother'll know where the keys are. Mother! Nick here wanted to have a squint at some of the books.’
Mrs Lavington, sunk into the depths of an armchair, glared across the room. ‘Why?’
‘I wondered if the Dickens was Phiz or Cruikshank.’
‘I can't look out the keys just at this moment. Those cases over there are open.’
He crossed the room. Here, the glass was of the lift-up kind – raise the panel and slide it back into the groove above the shelf; a cumbersome process not conducive to easy browsing. He put his coffee down and began to investigate. Kipling, red morocco edition, 1920. He took out Plain Tales from the Hills; the spine had the stiffness of a new book, the flimsy India paper pages clung together. He put it back and tried Kim; again, the creaking spine and tacky edges of an unopened book. He moved from shelf to shelf, sampled Trollope, Hardy, Meredith, Tennyson (aha! Tennyson … stout brown calf gilt Gothic-lettered definitely virgin Tennyson); an invoice for ten shillings and sixpence (Bumpus, Booksellers, Oxford Street) fell out of A Passage to India. The books, in their undisturbed, airless ranks, were arranged according to size; there were no unseemly gaps, no volume slumped against another.
He heard Mrs Lavington say, ‘Mind you put things back in the right places.’
He took out The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, sat down on the arm of a leather chair and began to read. He became aware that the room was falling silent around him. He felt Charlotte standing over him; ‘Nick! You can't just sit there reading the books!’
He looked up. ‘Why not? It's about time someone did.’
She flung a glance towards the old woman. ‘Nick … Honestly!’
Mrs Lavington said, ‘What did he say?’
Nick closed The Seven Pillars and returned it to the shelf. ‘I said it's high time someone read these books. But I don't think it's going to be me. Thanks for the lunch – it was very good. Lots of it, too.’
He walke
d out of the room. None of them spoke. He caught, for an instant, the old woman's stare, stupid with disbelief; he could feel all those other incredulous eyes upon him, coffee cups halted half-way to lips, cigar smoke trembling in shafts of sunlight. It was as though he had snapped his fingers and frozen them all to a tableau. He knew at once what it made him think of and as he went out through the front door he said it aloud, and began to laugh: ‘You're nothing but a pack of cards!’
He walked across the gravel and into the drive. He heard Charlotte shouting something. He looked back and waved. She was standing at the top of the flight of steps, as bright and glossy as some handsome animal, an antelope, perhaps, and she aroused, he noted with satisfaction, just about as much lust as would an antelope. He waved again and walked on, down the drive, on and on – he didn't recall it being so long – past an open five-barred white gate that said PRIVATE, NO ENTRY and out on to the road. He went along the verge for twenty yards or so and then settled himself comfortably at an angle to the traffic, with his thumb stuck out high into the spring wind.
The Crimean Hotel
CAROLINE OAKLEY had taken to foreign travel after the death of her husband, who preferred to spend holidays on the Cornish coast or in the western Highlands.
Caroline had had no complaints at the time, but after the first two or three searing years of widowhood she began to feel that she must take herself in hand and make a determined effort to live more positively. Travel was one of the tasks she set herself. She visited Italy and Greece, on group excursions with friends, and then became more ambitious. She joined the local Literary and Philosophical Society not for intellectual reasons but because she learned that it organised annual foreign tours; the trip for this year was to Yalta, on the Black Sea, to visit Chekhov's house. Caroline had seen The Cherry Orchard several years ago and had once had a collection of the short stories out of the library. One of them, she remembered, was set in Yalta – something about a lady and a dog; at the time she had been baffled and faintly irritated by it, the dog seeming in the event irrelevant.
But Chekhov, in a way, was neither here nor there. The interesting thing would be to go to the Black Sea, a place that had almost fabulous overtones, like Shangri-La or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. And it was in Russia, which was of course intriguing and then there were other associations – Florence Nightingale, the Charge of the Light Brigade. It would be well worth the subscription to the Lit. and Phil. and the enforced company of some of its members. In any case Caroline was by temperament a passive traveller, preferring to have arrangements made for her and thus be able to sit back and experience without the bother of decision and negotiation.
It was early September when the eighteen-strong group from Middleton Lit. and Phil. arrived at Simferapol airport in an Aeroflot Ilyushin. The inside of the Ilyushin had been exactly the same as the inside of any other large jet aircraft, down to the piped Muzak and the nets on the backs of seats for advertising material (though these were empty). The air hostesses had been dumpier than usual. Nothing felt, yet, at all alien. The group stood around on the tarmac commenting on the balmy sunshine and were processed through immigration and customs and eventually into an Intourist coach, carefully counted and recounted by the Intourist girl. Caroline, tired after the flight and disinclined for conversation, found herself a seat alone at the back and watched the landscape roll past: enormous harvested fields which presently gave way to mountainous country with vineyards and plots of sweetcorn. She felt melancholy and a little bleak and thought continuously of her husband. The first days of a holiday usually had this effect on her; Florence or Athens were overlaid by St Ives or Glenelg and she would move around within a capsule of recollection, staring out through the glass at the unreal world beyond.
The rest of the party were somewhat dismayed, upon arrival in Yalta, to find that their hotel was an immense cliff-like structure, commanding impressive views of the sea and the coast but fourteen storeys high and with a thousand rooms. The entrance lobby was a vast shiny-floored concourse in which scores of people milled about talking German and the languages of eastern Europe and looking like the holiday crowds of any other resort. The Middleton party gathered around their luggage while the Intourist girl went to claim the room keys; the county librarian, the only member of the Lit. and Phil. to have read carefully the information on the brochures they had been given, kept pointing out that they had in fact been told about the hotel. Most people, though, distracted by photographs of palms and bougainvillaea and nineteenth-century villas, had skipped the less evocative stuff about modern touristic facilities and formed a picture of some pleasant local pension with bosky courtyard. Still, as they kept saying to each other, there's a lot to be said for mod. cons. and reliable food.
Caroline Oakley, before she went to bed, stood on her balcony (a rather sickening drop below, at which she was careful not to look) and watched the light fade from the sky above the dark shapes of the mountains that rose so sharply from the sea. One of these mountains, seen from the coach, had had a bare rock surface towards its summit on which was a just-visible inscription in red paint; this had been translated by the guide – it said, apparently, ‘Glory to the Party’. The Lit. and Phil. had joked about this; ‘Catch me climbing Snowdon to write “Vote for Thatcher!”’ said someone. The county librarian observed tartly that that was hardly an appropriate parallel. Caroline, in her capsule, had paid little attention; now, in the soft warm night air, she was filled for the first time with the sense of being in another country. On the next balcony, a deckchair scraped and someone said something in a tongue she did not recognise; music seeped up from far beneath; lights twinkled along the coast. The sea was quite flat and still, a shade darker than the sky, and split by a wide shimmering belt of reflected light from a huge yellow moon.
She tried to remember exactly when the Crimean War had been and what it had been about. Who was against whom, and who won? All she could recall was Florence Nightingale and the Light Brigade. She had read a book on Florence Nightingale fairly recently. Written from a feminist position, it had left Caroline rather more affected by the unenviable situation of men at that time. The descriptions of the sufferings of the soldiers were something you could not forget – typhus, cholera, gangrene, those hideous suppurating wounds. The mud and the cold; the sick and wounded laid out in rows like corpses; the operations without anaesthetic. As you read of all that, it was no wonder that you ended up paying little attention to what it had been all about or who won. Now, that seemed irrelevant – like the dog in Chekhov's story.
She looked down, gingerly, at the forecourt of the hotel, where Intourist buses roosted under a floodlight. Sevastopol, she supposed, must be somewhere further along the coast. Perhaps they would be taken there.
They were not to be, as it turned out. The Intourist girl said it would not be interesting. They would visit, on various days, the Livadia Palace where the famous conference took place, a vineyard, the Botanical Gardens and, of course, Chekhov's house. They were urged to take full advantage of the hotel's facilities – the saunas and massage rooms, the theatre in which there would be concerts of Ukrainian folk music, and the private beach accessible by lift.
Caroline went to the beach with other members of the party on the first morning. The lift, plunging precipitately down through the cliff, disgorged them into a tunnel just like the approach to a tube station – a curious way in which to go bathing. Once outside, the prospect was uninviting: narrow concrete promenades with rows of changing cubicles and shower-rooms, from which steps led down to a strip of shingle beach on which many people sat or lay upon wooden boards. The Lit. and Phil. party changed into swimming costumes and descended to the shingle, where they equipped themselves with boards and sat in the sunshine.
The sea, flat and motionless, was studded with heads and torsos. People swam round in circles or simply stood, chest deep. Beyond them the smooth grey expanse reached away to the horizon, quite empty – no white sails, no power boats. The Int
ourist girl, now wearing a flowered bikini, reiterated facts and figures about the development of the coast as a place of rest and recreation for the Soviet people. Caroline, gazing at that bare inactive sea, said, ‘People don't go sailing?’ The Intourist girl replied that Russian people were not very interested in boats.
‘How odd,’ said Caroline.
‘No. Not odd. Just they are not interested.’
Caroline got up and made her way down to the water. The function of the wooden boards became apparent; the pebbles were quite excruciatingly painful to the feet, like walking on blunt knives. Lurching from side to side she achieved the water, which was tepid and full of very small inoffensive jellyfish that brushed against her thighs as she waded out. The sea slopped around her, lethargically; she sank into it, swam for a little and then trod water. All around her other heads stuck up. She turned away from the beach and stared out across the empty sea, the horizon now seeming very close, as though you could reach out and touch it. She wondered how far away Turkey was.
The afternoon was devoted to Yalta itself – a tour of the town on foot to be followed by the visit to Chekhov's villa. Shepherded by the Intourist girl, they walked slowly along the front amid decorous crowds, noting the absence of transistor radios, litter and hooliganism. People patiently queued at a funfair for dodgems and the big wheel; rows of teenagers sat on a wall, looking at the sea. They seemed to walk for a long time; the sea-front was more extensive than anyone had realised.
Caroline, falling behind the others at one point, and separated from them by the crowd – there really were a great many people – found a man alongside and was startled to realise that he was speaking to her: ‘American?’
‘English.’
There was a pause. ‘I like very much England,’ he said.
‘Really?’ said Caroline with interest. ‘You've been there, then?’
He was a big burly man, balding, tanned, neatly dressed in clean white shirt and drill trousers. A large chrome watch glittered on a hairy arm; he evoked, for some indefinable reason, the sea. And indeed it emerged that he had worked as engineer on a refrigerator container ship plying the North Sea and frequently calling in at Hull, which accounted for his knowledge of England. He was recently retired and lived near Gorky. Still walking side by side, jostled by the thickening crowd (they were approaching the central square) they talked of Hull (‘Very nice people – very kind – I am visiting in many houses of friends’), of the circumstances of Caroline's visit to the Crimea, of the man's situation, which perturbed her a little – an inadequate pension, food shortages, problems about accommodation which he had to share with a sister (‘We are not always liking each other very much, I am afraid’). His openness surprised her.
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