Spiderweb

by Penelope Lively

  ‘Isn’t it odd?’ says Stella. ‘Here we are, theoretically stuck into the Wars of the Roses and Rousseau, and most of the time we’re thinking about sex.’

  Nadine corrects her. ‘Men. Specific men.’

  ‘Same thing.’

  ‘Not entirely. There’s what’s to happen in the long run. One is getting in some practice. Marriage. I intend to get married when I’m twenty-three.’

  ‘Is that what you’re going to say to John Hobhouse in the Kemp?’

  Nadine giggles. ‘Don’t be an idiot. Magdalen Commem is all that matters at the moment.’ She adjusts the bodice of the cherry dress, twitches the skirt. ‘Come on.’

  They climb the stairs to the coffee shop. The room is a jabbering mass of undergraduates, peppered with a few stoical Oxford citizens, all of them obscured by a blue haze of cigarette smoke. Nadine pauses, searches, identifies the target. ‘There … over in the far corner. You go in front. Look conspicuous.’

  They weave their way through the tables, Vénus tout entière …

  ‘I thought we might eat outside,’ said Richard. He led Stella through French windows on to a paved area overlooking a garden as manicured as the house. The paved area was skirted by ornamental pots brimming with flowers that Stella could not identify. A table was laid and chairs drawn up.

  ‘Admire my garden while I bring things out.’ He vanished and Stella admired, or, rather, decided that this paved bit could only be called a patio, that the farmhouse was indeed well and truly deracinated, and that she rather liked this plant with cascading pink flowers.

  Richard returned carrying a tray. Some cold salmon. Potato salad. A green salad. A bottle of Chardonnay in a wine cooler.

  ‘You have the advantage of me,’ said Stella. ‘I’m no gardener, I have discovered. What’s that pink thing called?’

  ‘Diascia. I have a spare, if you’d like one.’

  ‘No. I’d kill it. I seem to be some sort of sport. Horticulture is traditionally women’s work, the world over. Not in my case. I am the kiss of death, it seems. Never mind, I quite enjoy the slash and burn aspect.’

  ‘You are not unique. Nadine was only a dilettante gardener. I have come to it late and do it with method and application because that is the sort of person I am. Trained thus. Give me a brief and I master it.’ He finished arranging the food and sat down. ‘You have been very unobtainable. Were you away?’

  Actually, I have been doing some work.’ Stella outlined her article.

  ‘I’d like to read it at some point if I may.’

  ‘By all means.’

  Richard began to describe a walk he had taken across the moor. Yes, Stella thought, he is a man who deals with what comes his way, whatever it is. Civil Service tasks. Family life. Retirement. He would get on and make a good job of it.

  Grimly, perhaps, but he’d buckle to. No pointless keening when the fates turn nasty. Nadine’s death. No raking over the ashes and staring out of windows. Roll the lawn. Plant out the pink things. Diascias.

  ‘When I feel particularly lonely,’ said Richard, ‘a long walk is strangely therapeutic. Dear me – I forgot to give us any napkins. Excuse me …’

  She stared after him, startled. Chastened, even. Never think that surface appearance is the whole story. To tell the truth, she thought, I have never taken much notice of him. Nadine’s husband, simply. She realized that she could barely remember the first time she met him. Nadine saying, ‘This is Richard.’ A shadowy figure with whom she had exchanged silent inspection which confirmed that neither was much interested in the other. After that, the token friendship of those united by a third person.

  Richard returned and resumed eating. ‘So what is the difference between men and women – did you come to any conclusion? Men and women anthropologists, that is to say.’

  ‘Much the same things as in real life, I eventually decided. Women are more easily defeated by machinery. Which is why you have this green sward and I do not. The lawnmower splutters and dies as soon as I touch it. On the other hand, women relate to one another, the world over. Possibly more readily than men do.’

  ‘If you would like me to come and deal with the lawnmower, please let me know. I take your point about women relating. I used to envy Nadine that capacity. Her friendships were always more effortless than mine. But that may have been a personal failing. Many men are distinctly tribal – in a gender sense.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Stella. ‘You see it in action on all sides.

  From football terraces to warrior dances. But that’s doing. It’s other kinds of empathy I had in mind. Feelings. Responses.’

  ‘The football fan would no doubt claim he is feeling and responding. Warriors, too, I fear. Have you had professional dealings with any of these?’

  ‘No. My area was rather tamer. Lineage and kinship. Community life.’

  A pall of grey cloud which had tilted across the sky while they were eating now began to spit warm rain. Stella helped Richard to move the remains of the meal into the kitchen and then wandered into the sitting-room while he made coffee. She stood in front of the bookcase, searching for a work on local history that he had mentioned. Sets of the classics. Poetry. Prominent biographies of recent years. A scatter of contemporary fiction. A shelf of history with, tucked away at the end, the familiar dark-blue, gold-lettered spines of the volumes of The Oxford History of England. Nadine’s, of course. Just as I still have mine, thought Stella. But we alternated volumes. Swopped. She never had Collingwood & Myres. I never had Stenton. ‘Can I borrow your Anglo-Saxon England?’

  ‘It’s all very well for you,’ wails Nadine. ‘You’ve worked. I haven’t. This is where I get found out. It’s like dying and discovering God exists after all and there He is at the gates of Heaven saying, No, not you, scram, you didn’t believe in Me.’

  ‘It would be St Peter,’ says Stella. ‘It’s he who does turnstile duty.’

  It is early on a fine May morning. They are part of a sombre stream of black-clad youth heading for the Examination Schools. Although, on closer inspection, the sobriety of dress is nicely manipulated, not least by Nadine and Stella. The regulations state merely that subfusc apparel for examination wear must be black and white. Men wear black suits and white shirts. Nadine wears a full black skirt, wide belt to accentuate the waist and frothy white nylon blouse at the neck of which is the required black tie – a great pussy-cat bow of black taffeta. Stella wears a black pencil skirt which is as short as she dares, exposing a lot of fetching leg in black nylons. Her shirt is crisp white pique, her tie a shoestring velvet ribbon.

  ‘Trust you to know that,’ says Nadine. ‘You know your Stubbs Charters too, don’t you? And your Civil War and your Industrial Revolution and your Slavery and Secession and your European History Part Two.’

  ‘Only up to a point.’

  ‘You’ll get a First, blast you. I feel sick. Maybe I’ll just faint when I see the paper. Do you get an aegrotat if you faint?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Perhaps it’ll be that heavenly man from Christ Church invigilating. I went to all his lectures just to look at him. Hang on a minute, your seams are crooked.’

  They step into the porch of St Mary’s to make adjustments to their stockings. ‘I’ve even got a black suspender belt on,’ says Nadine. ‘I thought it might bring me luck. And don’t tell me luck doesn’t come into it. This is the worst moment of my life, it’s worth trying anything.’

  They complete the last few hundred yards. They climb the steps of the fateful building. They search for their names on the list. The seating is in alphabetical order; they will not be in the same room. Nadine rolls her eyes, clutches Stella’s arm for a moment and is swallowed by the crowd.

  Sitting at her desk, Stella sees that she is surrounded by men. One or two are acquaintances, others she knows by sight. All they have in common is that their surname begins with B and they have been exposed to the same information for the last three years. Men outnumber women by ten to one.
However, it is not this fact that engages her attention but a strange detached perception of the whole scene, as though she were no longer a participant. She sees it suddenly as a ritual, entirely baffling to anyone who did not know what was going on (thus perhaps is the anthropologist born). It is as though she rises and floats up to the top of the great room with its high windows and stares down at this ceremonially clad throng of initiates. The ranks of desks, the bent heads, the sense of portent. The priestly figure who walks between the rows, bestowing sheets of printed paper. The small defiant gestures – the men who wear a buttonhole, a carnation or a rose, the girls with their manipulations of the dress code. The scene becomes ripe for exegesis and deconstruction, like some inscrutable practice of another age. What are these people about to do? Why are there so many men and so few women? What is the significance of their apparel, their silence, their air of resignation?

  One day, she thinks, I shall look back at this moment and it will be neither here nor there. Except that it will, because what sort of degree I get may well decide which way I go next.

  ‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘You’re looking for the book on the mineral line.’

  ‘I was. But then I started thinking about Schools. That traumatic business. Did you know that Nadine wore a black suspender belt, for luck?’

  ‘No, but it sounds entirely in character. Though I fear it didn’t help. She got a Third, whereas you or course got the anticipated First. Not that she held it against you – she saw both results as perfectly appropriate.’

  And so that time is inextricably wound into everything that has happened to me since, thought Stella. The First meant I could go ahead and do the diploma and thus I ended up as I have. Hence the rest of life, or at least the framework thereof.

  Richard had by now found the required book. ‘Here we are. Borrow it.’

  ‘Thank you. It’s a daunting thought – the way in which your fate is largely fixed by what happens to you when barely out of adolescence.’

  ‘Do you feel that yours went awry, then?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Stella. ‘I meant simply that you point in a particular direction when still in a state of confusion.’ It occurred to her as she spoke that Richard was a man who had very likely never been in such a condition. But does anyone decide to become a civil servant at the age of twenty? Well, yes – plenty do, or the country would have long since ground to a halt.

  ‘Black coffee or white?’ said Richard. ‘What I really wanted to be was an opera singer.’

  ‘Black, please.’ So there you go – civil servant is faute demieux, as is right and proper.

  ‘But the Bach Choir was as far as I ever got in that direction. A run-of-the-mill tenor, that’s all I was.’

  It occurred to Stella as they talked that Nadine had referred little to her husband, over the years. Seminal events, from time to time – a promotion, some professional coup. The children got more of a showing. The impression given of Richard was that of an essential backdrop. What he said or thought was not part of Nadine’s periodic accounts of family life. The letters and cards. Those occasions, decreasing over the years, when she and Stella met for a meal or an outing. Richard was simply there, one understood, a crucial continuity, the basic accessory to the life that Nadine had always planned. And Stella herself had come to think of him thus. Or, rather, had barely thought of him at all. No wonder, then, that he now proved occasionally unpredictable.

  He stood at the window of her car as she was leaving. ‘Bear in mind my offer to sort out your recalcitrant machine.’

  No, she thought as she drove away, I can’t sink so low. That it should come to this – Nadine’s husband offering to mend my lawnmower.

  When she turned off the main road into the lane she saw in the distance that the Hiscox boys were loitering outside the cottage, wheeling bicycles. Up to some mischief while she had been gone? She speeded up, suspicious, and they at once rode off in the direction of the bungalow. Back at the cottage, she made a tour of inspection but could find nothing amiss. Everything seemed normal, Bracken ecstatic in welcome.

  The old woman’s car wasn’t there so the boys went round the back of the cottage and rattled on the windows a bit to start the stupid dog barking. They nosed around for a while and then they came back round the cottage on to the lane – dog barking and barking still – and the woman’s car was turning in off the main road so they pushed off back home.

  Chapter Thirteen

  She was waiting on the doorstep when they got back from school. Hands on her hips. That look on her face. ‘So where’ve you been?’

  School bus was late.

  ‘The school bus wasn’t late. I phoned. I wasn’t born yesterday. I’ve been on to the school and the bus left dead on time. And you’re twenty minutes late. So where’ve you been, I’d like to know? You’ve been off somewhere buying cigarettes, haven’t you? Right, then, that’s no cash for either of you for as long as I decide and don’t bother to ask how long that’s going to be …’

  And so on. She’d got it in for them, for days and days now, not letting up. It had begun with catching them smoking and then them saying that about needing new bikes and now she was on a roll, letting rip half a dozen times a day, jumping on them as soon as they were back from school. But she was letting their father have it too, just as much. Winding him up till he burst out and then sticking her fingers in her ears. ‘Can’t hear a word you’re saying. I’m not interested. Tra-la, tra-la, tra-la.’

  You’d have thought they could get together – the two of them and their father. But it didn’t work that way. Their father just boxed himself off when things were like this. Didn’t open his mouth. Slammed out of the house and worked in the sheds. You did best to keep away from him.

  At meal times she banged food down in front of them. Things she knew they didn’t like. Disgusting fish. Muck worse than school dinners. She didn’t eat it herself. Maybe she didn’t eat. Maybe it was something else that kept her going – kept her revved up like that. Not drink, though, nor smoking. Something inside her, it was. Something that gave her a charge.

  Something that made her not like anyone else. Mad, they’d heard someone say once. That woman’s mad. They hadn’t been supposed to hear.

  They’d talked about this, afterwards. But she couldn’t be mad, because mad people can’t cope, can they? Gran was mad, pretty well, because she didn’t know her own name half the time and forgot anything she was told. Their mother could cope all right. She coped everyone else into the ground. She coped them out of her way.

  That was how to get on top, no question. You had to sort people out before they had time to mess you up, like she did. They’d watched her to see how it was done, they’d been watching her at it since before they could remember. They’d tried it, too. At school. And it worked – people left them alone. They didn’t have any mates, but they didn’t care about that. Nor did she, and she didn’t care either. I don’t give a damn about anyone, she’d say – got that?

  So nor did they. Except for her. They hated her but she was the only person they wanted to please. They felt as though they were split in half. Often they wanted to kill her, always they’d do anything – bloody anything – to have her take notice of them, be in a good mood with them.

  When there was no chance or that, like now, they went around looking for something to smash up.

  Hi! says Judith. I’m back. Been back for some while, in fact, but I couldn’t ring before because I’ve been busy, believe it or not. There’s a turn up for the books! Busy! I’ve got a job -would you credit it? A small job, a tiddly job as they go, and it won’t last long, but, by gosh, it’s work! I’m getting my hands dirty again. So come and see me on site, soon as you can. Where? Ah – Langley Manor. What’s Langley Manor? you ask. Langley Manor, my dear Stella, is the National Staff Training Centre for the Southwest Building Society. And what does the Southwest Building Society have to do with rescue archaeology? Ah, well – what has happened is that most inconveniently
for the Southwest Building Society the excavation for the foundations of the squash court in the grounds, which is apparently essential to the well-being of the trainees at Langley Manor, has turned up some medieval tiles and what looks like the foundations of an early chapel. And since the Southwest Building Society cannot afford to do what it would prefer to do and quietly immolate this tiresome evidence, for fear of adverse publicity, it has agreed to halt its building programme – grudgingly and with much talk of the appalling costs incurred – while rescue archaeology moves in to find out just what it is we have here. Come – it’s good.

  Stella located Langley Manor on her large-scale atlas of southwestern England – a significant black blob, complemented by similar blobs elsewhere, the Houses and Courts and Parks. There they were, the great houses of the county, each presiding over its neighbourhood, an extinguished social structure preserved thus on the page. For none of these Tudor, Georgian or Victorian piles was any longer the focus of local power and prestige. Many were still large-scale employers, but reborn as nursing homes, conference centres or country house hotels. Defrocked, they sat there in the landscape as architectural incongruities, out of scale and out of step. It was only on the map that they came back into perspective, each of them seen to be at the hub of its neighbourhood, lording it over the attendant villages and hamlets. A few were serving the heritage industry and raking in the shekels, tricked out with some zebras and buffalo or a miniature railway. All still in business, one way or another, but a far cry from their original purpose as social indicators.

  Langley Manor was approached through parkland, the winding road allowing the visitor to appreciate stands of fine trees and grazing cattle before it straightened out into an avenue lined with chestnuts, displaying the distant façade of a Jacobean mansion. An array of signs indicated car-parks for Visitors, for Staff, Coffee Shop, Restaurant, Tennis Courts, Putting Green. The logo of the building society was prominent. Geraniums blazed in geometrical beds. The lawns were shaven carpets.