‘Yes, we’re like that,’ Dorothea said in the garden after breakfast. ‘We never seem to quarrel.’
She taught me how to play croquet and when we’d finished one game we were joined by her brothers. Adam was the best of the three and he, partnering Dorothea, easily beat Jonathan and myself. Mrs Lysarth brought a tray of drinks to a white table beside the lawn and we sat and sipped in the sunshine, while I was told of other games of croquet there had been, famous occasions when the tempers of visitors had become a little ragged.
‘It’s a perfect training for life,’ Mrs Lysarth said, ‘the game of croquet.’
‘Cunning pays,’ Adam continued. ‘Generosity must know its place.’
‘Not that we are against generosity, Terris,’ Adam said. ‘Not that we’re on the side of cunning.’
‘What a family poor Terris is marrying into!’ Dorothea cried, and on cue her mother smiled and added:
‘Terris is a natural croquet-player. He will one day put you all to shame.’
‘I doubt that very much.’ And as I spoke I felt I said precisely what was expected of me.
‘You must teach the Scandinavians, Dorothea,’ Adam said. ‘Whatever else, you must flatten out a lawn in your little Scandinavian garden.’
‘Oh yes, of course we shall. So there.’
After lunch Dorothea and I went for a walk. We had to say goodbye because the next day I was to go away; when I returned it would almost be the day we’d set for our wedding. We walked slowly through the village and out into the country. We left the road and passed along a track by the side of a cornfield. We rested by a stream which Dorothea had often told me about, a place she’d come to with her brothers as a child. We sat there, our backs against the same ivy-covered tree-stump. We talked about being married, of beginning our life together in Copenhagen. I made love to Dorothea by her stream, and it was afterwards that she told me the story of Agnes Kemp. She began it as we lay there, and continued while we washed and tidied ourselves and began the journey back to Wistaria Lodge.
‘She was twelve at the time, staying with us while her parents were abroad. She fell from the beech tree. Her neck was broken.’
I only nodded because there isn’t much anyone can say when a fact like that is related.
‘I had always wanted to climb that tree, I had been told I never must. “I dare you,” she said. “I dare you, Dorothea.” I was frightened, but when no one was looking we climbed it together, racing one another to the top.’
She spoke of the funeral of Agnes Kemp, how the dead child’s parents had not been present because it had been impossible to contact them in time. ‘We don’t much hear of them now,’ Dorothea said. ‘A card at Christmas. Agnes was an only child.’
We walked a little in silence. Then I said:
‘What was she like?’
‘Oh, she was really awfully spoilt. The kind of person who made you furious.’
I suppose it was that last remark that started everything off, that and the feeling that Wistaria Lodge was a kind of theatre. The remark passed unnoticed at the time, for even as she made it Dorothea turned round, and smiled and kissed me. ‘It’s all forgotten now,’ she said when that was over, ‘but of course I had to tell you.’
It was certainly forgotten, for when we arrived in the garden the white table had been moved beneath the beech tree out of the glare of the sun, and tea with scones and sandwiches and cake was spread all over it. I felt a dryness in my mouth that was not dispelled when I drank. I found it hard to eat, or even to smile in unison with the smiling faces around me. I kept seeing the spoilt child on the grass and Dr Lysarth bending over her, saying she was dead, as no doubt he must have. I kept thinking that the beech tree should have been cut down years ago, no matter how beautiful it was.
‘You’re mad,’ Felicity shouted at me more than once. ‘You’re actually mad.’ Her voice in its endless repetition is always a reminder of my parents’ faces, that worry in their eyes. All I had wanted to know was the truth about ourselves: why did the offices and the warehouses still bear our name, what had my grandfather done? ‘Best just left,’ my mother said. ‘Best not bothered with.’ But in the end they told me because naturally I persisted – at eight and twelve and eighteen: naturally I persisted. My grandfather had been a criminal and that was that: a drunkard and an embezzler, a gambler who had run through a fortune in a handful of years: I’d guessed, of course, by the time they told me. I didn’t know why they’d been so reluctant, or why they’d displayed concern when I persisted about Miss Batchelor: why did she weep when she walked along the promenade? I had to guess again, because all my childhood Miss Batchelor’s tears possessed me so: she wept for the music teacher, who was married arid had a family, and I did not forgive my parents for wishing to keep that covered up. Passionately I did not forgive them, although my mother begged me, saying I made myself unhappy. ‘You sound so noble,’ Felicity snapped at me. ‘Yet what’s so marvellous about exposing a brothel-keeper for peddling drugs? Or a grimy pederast and a government minister?’ Felicity’s mother called her ‘a tricky kind of customer’. Arid tricky was just the word. Tricky, no doubt, with bank tellers and men met idly in bars. Tricky in beds all over the place, when I was so often away, having to be away.
I crossed the bedroom to the window. The beech tree was lit by moonlight now. Gazing at it, I heard the voices that had haunted me ever since Dorothea told me the story.
‘Then I dare you to,’ Dorothea angrily shouts, stopping suddenly and confronting the other girl.
‘You’re frightened of it, Dorothea. You’re frightened of a tree.’
‘Of course I’m not.’
‘Then I dare you to.’
In the garden the boys, delighted, listen. Their sister’s cheeks have reddened. Agnes Kemp is standing on one foot and then the other, balancing in a way she has, a way that infuriates Dorothea.
‘You’re a horrid person,’ Dorothea says. ‘You aren’t even pretty. You’re stupid and spoilt arid greedy. You always have two helpings. There’s something the matter with your eyes.’
‘There isn’t, Dorothea Lysarth. You’re jealous, that’s all.’
‘They’re pig’s eyes.’
‘You’re just afraid of a tree, Dorothea.’
They climb it, both at the same time, from different sides. There’s a forked branch near the top, a sprawling knobbly crutch, easily distinguishable from the ground: they race to that.
The boys watch, expecting any moment that an adult voice will cry out in horror from the house, but no voice does. The blue dress of Agnes Kemp and the white one of Dorothea disappear into a mass of leaves, the boys stand further back, the dresses reappear. Agnes Kemp is in front, but their sister has chosen a different route to the top, a shorter one it seems. The boys long for their sister to win because if she does Agnes Kemp will at least be quiet for a day or two. They don’t call out, although they want to: they want to advise Dorothea that in a moment she will have overtaken her challenger; they don’t because their voices might attract attention from the house. From where they stand they can hear the grandfather clock in the hall striking ten. Most of the windows are open.
Dorothea slips and almost falls. Her shoes aren’t right for climbing and when she glances to her left she can see that Agnes’s are: Agnes has put on tennis shoes, knowing she will succeed that morning in goading Dorothea. This is typical of her, and when it is all over Dorothea will be blamed because of course Agnes will blurt it out, in triumph if she wins, in revenge if she doesn’t.
The blue dress reaches the fork and then advances along one of its prongs, further than is necessary. Dorothea is a yard behind. She waits, crouched at the knobbly juncture, for Agnes Kemp’s return. The boys don’t understand that. They stare, wondering why their sister doesn’t climb down again so that they can all three run away from Agnes Kemp, since it is running away from her that has been in their minds since breakfast-time. They watch while Agnes Kemp reaches a point at which to pose tri
umphantly. They watch while slowly she creeps backwards along the branch. Their sister’s hand reaches out, pulling at the blue dress, at the child who has been such a nuisance all summer, who’ll be worse than ever after her victory. There is a clattering among the leaves and branches. Like a stone, the body strikes the ground.
‘Now what did anyone dream?’ Mrs Lysarth inquired at breakfast. Knives rattled on plates, toast crackled, Dr Lysarth read The Times. It was a family thing to talk about dreams. I had been told that there were dreaming seasons, a period when dreams could be remembered easily and a time when they could not be. It was all another Lysarth game.
‘I’ been skipping French classes again,’ Adam said. ‘For a year or even longer I’d been keeping so low a profile that Monsieur Bertain didn’t even know I existed. And then some examination or other loomed.’
‘Adam often has that dream,’ Dorothea confided to me.
‘I was in Istanbul,’ Jonathan said, ‘Or at least it seemed like Istanbul. A man was selling me a stolen picture. A kind of goat, by Marc Chagall.’
‘I had only a wisp of a thing,’ Mrs Lysarth contributed. ‘A bit out of Dorothea’s birth.’
‘I dreamed that Terris’s wife was picking scallions in the garden,’ Dorothea said. ‘ “You’re wrong to think there’s been a divorce,” she said.’
‘Did you dream, Terris?’ Mrs Lysarth asked, buttering toast, but I was so confused about the night that had passed that I thought it better to say I hadn’t.
‘What’s the criterion for As You Like It, ten letters, beginning with “T”?’ Dr Lysarth asked.
‘Touchstone,’ Dorothea said, and another Lysarth game began. ‘Lord of Eden End’ was ‘North’, ‘poet’s black tie ruined by vulcanized rubber’ was ‘ebonite’. Within ten minutes the crossword puzzle was complete.
The faces laughed and smiled around the breakfast table, the conversation ran about. Especially for my benefit a description of Monsieur Bertain, Adam’s French master, was engaged upon. His accent was imitated, his war wound designated as the cause of his short temper. Dr Lysarth looked forward to a dig in Derbyshire in the autumn; his wife was to accompany him and would, as always on archaeological occasions, spend her time walking and reading. Jonathan said he intended to visit us in Scandinavia. Dorothea pressed him and I found myself doing the same.
In the sunny room, while marmalade was passed and the flowered china had all the prettiness of a cottage garden, the horror was nonsensical. Mrs Lysarth’s elegance, her perfect features and her burnished hair, would surely not be as they were. No wrinkles creased her face; the doctor’s eyes were honestly untroubled, forget-me-not blue, a darker shade than Dorothea’s. And Dorothea’s hands would surely be less beautiful? The fingers clawing at the blue dress would have acquired some sign, a joint arthritic, a single bitten nail. The faces of the boys could not have shed all traces of the awful ugliness. ‘Dear, it isn’t our affair, why Miss Batchelor is troubled,’ my mother agitatedly protested. ‘senseless,’ Felicity shouted. ‘You frighten me with your senseless talk.’
On Tuesday afternoon, three days away, we would marry and the car would take us to the station at Bath after the champagne on the lawn. Our flight to Paris was at five past seven, we would have dinner in the Chez les Anges. We would visit Versailles and Rouen, and the Jeu de Paume because Dorothea had never been there. I may for a moment have closed my eyes at the breakfast table, so lost was I in speculation and imaginings.
‘Well, I have a surgery,’ Dr Lysarth announced, folding the newspaper as he rose from the table.
‘And I have Castlereagh to wonder about,’ Adam said. ‘That fascinating figure.’
For a moment in the sunny room the brothers again stood by Dorothea, an accidental conjunction or perhaps telepathy came into play: perhaps they guessed the contents of my mind. There was defiance in their stance, or so I thought, a reason for it now.
‘When I was little I used to ride here on my ponies. On Jess first. Later on Adonis.’
We walked as we had on the day we’d made love, through a spinney, along the track by the cornfield. Poppies, not in bloom before, were everywhere now, cow-parsley whitened the hedges.
‘The first thing I remember,’ Dorothea said, ‘is that bits of grass had got into my pram.’
I told myself that I should mention Agnes Kemp, but I did not do so. And when we reached the stream I did not embrace the girl who was to be my bride in a few days’ time. We sat with our backs against the tree-trunk, watching the ripple of the water.
‘I was lifted up,’ Dorothea said, ‘and there was a great tutting while the grass cuttings were removed. Years went by before I can remember anything else.’
Murder was not like stealing a pencil-sharpener at school, or spilling something. Agnes Kemp had been detested, a secret had afterwards become a way of life. Few words had perhaps been spoken within the family, Dr Lysarth’s giving the cause of death as a broken neck being perhaps the only announcement as to how the future was to be. The faces of the boys on the lawn returned to me, and Dorothea’s face as she looked down at the still body. Had she afterwards ridden her pony, Jess or Adonis, whichever it happened to be, by the cornfield and the poppies? ‘I dreamed of Agnes,’ was what she didn’t say at breakfast any more, because the family had exorcised the ghost.
Alone, Miss Batchelor walks; the winter waves tumble about. ‘Sea-spray,’ my mother lies. ‘Sea-spray on her cheeks, dear.’ How can my father, morning after morning, leave our gaunt house in order to perform his ignominious work, pretending it is work like any other? How can he hope that I will not scratch away the falsehoods they tell? My father is caught like a creature in a trap, for ever paying back the debts his own father has incurred. It isn’t nice, Miss Batchelor and a music teacher; it isn’t nice, the truth in Northern Ireland. None of it is nice. ‘No, no,’ they tell me, ‘you must be quiet, Terris.’ But I am always quiet. I make no noise in the small grey room where I have to be alone because, so they say, it is better so. The room is full of falseness: then I must write it down, they tell me, quite triumphantly; it will be easier if I write it down.
Americans give arms away, Russians promise tanks. I stand again in the cathedral at Vézelay, pleased that Pope Boniface exposed the pretence about Mary Magdalene. Felicity passes me a drink, smiling with ersatz affection. Our fingers touch, I know how she has spent that afternoon. ‘Poor Dorothea,’ Mrs Lysarth comforts, and the boys are angry because Dorothea has always needed looking after, ever since the day of the accident, the wretched death of a nuisance. I know I am right, as that Pope knew also. They hold me and buckle the thing on to me, but still I know I am right. Flowers are arranged in vases, croquet played beneath the beech tree. Ruairi O Baoill adopts a hero’s voice to proclaim his pretence of a cause, Major Trubstall’s smile is loaded with hypocrisy. The blue dress flutters and is still, telling me again that I am right.
The Teddy-bears’ Picnic
‘I simply don’t believe it,’ Edwin said. ‘Grown-up people?’
‘Well, grown-up now, darling. We weren’t always grown-up.’
‘But teddy-bears, Deborah?’
‘I’m sure I’ve told you dozens of times before.’
Edwin shook his head, frowning and staring at his wife. They’d been married six months: he was twenty-nine, swiftly making his way in a stockbroker’s office, Deborah was twenty-six and intended to continue being Mr Harridance’s secretary until a family began to come along. They lived in Wimbledon, in a block of flats called The Zodiac. 23 The Zodiac their address was and friends thought the title amusing and lively, making jokes about Gemini and Taurus and Capricorn when they came to drinks. A Dane had designed The Zodiac in 1968.
‘I’ll absolutely tell you this,’ Edwin said, ‘I’m not attending this thing.’
‘But darling –’
‘Oh, don’t be bloody silly, Deborah.’
Edwin’s mother had called Deborah ‘a pretty little thing’, implying for those who cared to be p
erceptive a certain reservation. She’d been more direct with Edwin himself, in a private conversation they’d had after Edwin had said he and Deborah wanted to get married. ‘Remember, dear,’ was how Mrs Chalm had put it then, ‘she’s not always going to be a pretty little thing. This really isn’t a very sensible marriage, Edwin.’ Mrs Chalm was known to be a woman who didn’t go in for cant when dealing with the lives of the children she had borne and brought up; she made no bones about it and often said so. Her husband, on the other hand, kept out of things.
Yet in the end Edwin and Deborah had married, one Tuesday afternoon in December, and Mrs Chalm resolved to make the best of it. She advised Deborah about this and that, she gave her potted plants for 23 The Zodiac, and in fact was kind. If Deborah had known about her mother-in-law’s doubts she’d have been surprised.
‘But we’ve always done it, Edwin. All of us.’
‘All of who, for heaven’s sake?’
‘Well, Angela for one. And Holly and Jeremy of course.’
‘Jeremy? My God!’
‘And Peter. And Enid and Pansy and Harriet.’
‘You’ve never told me a word about this, Deborah.’
‘I’m really sure I have.’
The sitting-room where this argument took place had a single huge window with a distant view of Wimbledon Common. The walls were covered with plum-coloured hessian, the floor with a plum-coloured carpet. The Chalms were still acquiring furniture: what there was, reflecting the style of The Zodiac’s architecture, was in bent steel and glass. There was a single picture, of a field of thistles, revealed to be a photograph on closer examination. Bottles of alcohol stood on a glass-topped table, their colourful labels cheering that corner up. Had the Chalms lived in a Victorian flat, or a cottage in a mews, their sitting-room would have been different, fussier and more ornate, dictated by the architectural environment. Their choice of decor and furniture was the choice of newlyweds who hadn’t yet discovered a confidence of their own.
The Collected Stories Page 106