Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

‘They’re horrible, overcooked leeks, horrible aren’t they, don’t you think so?’

  ‘Please, Mum, no clutchpaws.’ Mrs Hardress’s hands were already curled into little nests and shaking slightly, a squirrel who couldn’t remember where she hid her nuts.

  As we went into the kitchen, I felt more and more like the intruder from the oversized world, gross and clumsy, who has strayed into a more delicate realm. The kitchen had a low window looking out through the drooping grey-green willow branches to the river, so that we might have been in the entrancing lair of Mole or Ratty. I half-expected to be served elderflower wine and to nibble at raw carrot-tops. But the food was hearty, an aromatic beef stew, a blackberry-and-apple crumble, and a fragrant Rhône wine. The Hardresses all ate and drank hugely, as though their frail exterior was some kind of brilliant trick which they did not have to keep up when they were among themselves.

  ‘What do you think of the BBC?’

  I couldn’t think of anything useful to say on this one either.

  ‘They’re bastards to work for, that I can say with some authority. Total bastards. I’m not sure how much more I can take of being messed about, I’m thinking of going freelance, giving it very serious consideration.’

  ‘Oh don’t start on that, please don’t. I mean it’s mad, do tell him it’s mad, won’t you –’ She couldn’t think of my name or didn’t like to use it and the little squirrel paws went into a clench and began drumming against the edge of the table but lightly like the percussion introduction to some menacing theme tune.

  ‘Don’t, Mum. You don’t know it’s a mistake. I mean lots of people make more money freelance, don’t they, Dad?’

  ‘It’s a gamble, Hel. This isn’t a country for freelances, it’s a country for arse-lickers.’

  ‘Martin, please.’

  ‘Well it is, in the BBC all you have to do is shove your tongue up the nearest available arse and you’re made.’

  Discharging this advice appeared to give him some sort of ease and he passed round the wine with a smile which was on the sly side, as though he had not just offended his wife but also surprised himself, not being the kind of person who talked like that. In fact she did not really seem to mind the language, being more upset about the thought of his giving in his notice.

  ‘I’m sure it can’t be as bad as that,’ she said. ‘I mean when we met that head of personnel or whatever he was at the Christmas party, he seemed quite a mild-mannered man.’

  ‘Oh him, he’s a cipher, it’s the people higher up. They just tear up the rule-book whenever it suits them. Take the new rules on waiting-time, a total travesty.’

  ‘Well, can’t the union stop it then, if they’ve broken the rules?’

  ‘The union, they’re a bunch of complete wankers, worse than the management because they think they’re doing you a favour when they bother to do their job which is about 2 per cent of the time. Come on, let’s go outside while the sun’s still out.’

  We walked across what had been the lawn before the long willow branches had swept the grass off it. We had to draw the branches apart like curtains to thread our way over the bare ground, dodging the yellow and white smears of duckshit. Moorhens and mallard were dabbling in the river. The tide was rising now and the water beginning to lap at the roots of the tall daisies on the bank. The sun came out from behind a tree and flooded the narrow channel with golden light. We stood on the bank transfigured, a little drunk, eyes closed against the sun, letting the light wash over us.

  ‘On an afternoon like this,’ Martin Hardress said, ‘you don’t want to be anywhere else.’

  ‘Really, Dad? I thought I heard you saying this was the last year you were going to spend living like a water-rat.’

  ‘That was February, Hel. Oh that wire’s gone again.’

  Where the bank fell away, a chain-link fence dropped down towards the water. Beside it a floppy sapling had been prevented from collapsing into the water by two wires fastened to the fence. One of the wires had snapped and the flossy-headed tree was yawing away from the fence and bobbing at the river, its bright leaves now sinking below the surface, now splashing and twisting on top of the rising water.

  Helen and I walked with Martin Hardress back towards the far end of the bungalow below the rickety balcony. He opened another blue door into a little room, dark to our sun-dazzled eyes. He switched on the light and we were in the neatest little workshop imaginable, big steel vice gleaming on the workbench, teeth shining on the small circular saw let into the end of it and what looked like a lathe under a protective plastic hood. All along the walls spanners, files, wrenches, hammers, pliers, drills and bits, T-square, pigeon-holes, all purpose-built.

  ‘This is the centre of Dad’s universe.’

  ‘Don’t be so patronising, I scarcely get a moment to myself in here these days. Now where’s that wire?’ He went through a pantomime of searching, but he could have found the wire blindfold and the clippers too. While he fussed around gathering staples and rubber treeguards, we wandered out of the workshop and into the bright afternoon. I looked back through the open door: the bent figure scrabbling around under the hot artificial light seemed like the creation of a fevered mind, a goblin blacksmith in some intricate myth of virtue and struggle. The willow branches waving across the low clapboard made it hard to estimate the size of the house. Like burrows in children’s stories or adults’ dreams, the Hardress house was both minute and endless, each room opening into another with a glimpse of another one beyond that. And although the rooms were small, they were not as small as they first looked and each one contained a surprising amount of furniture and implements. I had a sudden longing to see the field telephones properly.

  ‘You’re extracting the michael. Nobody’s ever wanted to look at them.’

  ‘No really, I really do.’

  ‘Oh all right then. I mean I’m happy to.’

  He looked at me with gratitude still laced with suspicion.

  We went back through the house, on the way passing through another unsuspected room, a little sitting-room full of chintz and books and tapestry pictures of things you wouldn’t have thought of making tapestry pictures of, like the winding-gear of a mine and the New York skyline, all in vivid colours, especially red in unexpected places. Min’s sideline, he said. In the corner, there was a tapestry frame and some shelves with assorted wools laid out on them. The picture on the frame was half-finished and looked to be of some power station of the heroic age, Bankside possibly or Battersea.

  ‘She won’t sell them, could make a mint.’

  ‘Aren’t they horrible?’ Helen said. ‘Actually I rather like them, to be honest. I always take one back to college, reminds me of home.’

  ‘You’d call it kitsch, wouldn’t you?’ He looked at me, the suspicion fully operational again.

  ‘Umm. No I wouldn’t, I don’t think. I mean, kitsch means sentimental, doesn’t it, and they aren’t sentimental at all.’

  ‘Does it? Is that what it means?’

  ‘It’s not a word I use really.’

  ‘Gone out of style has it? I suppose to say kitsch nowadays is probably a kitsch thing to do. You just can’t keep up.’

  I cannot now recall the technical details of the lecture he gave me on field telephones, how the device had evolved from a simple echo chamber linked by wire, to a wind-up transmitter using electric current along the line, then to real telephony and increasingly sophisticated techniques for finding frequencies, the introduction of bakelite in the late 1920s, then scrambling, then miniaturising, and all the various improvements in making them transportable and packable and even elegant. It was his technological exuberance that was utterly seductive. His enthusiasm communicated more than was in his actual words, so that as he was describing, in dry enough terms, how the Boer War had accelerated certain technical improvements, I visualised men with sunburnt legs and puttees covered with veld-dust lying behind some kopje and barking panic-strewn instructions into the primitive lacquered wooden mo
uthpiece, the sweat running down through their Kitchener moustaches.

  ‘People take things for granted, don’t they? Forget all the effort, all the brilliance that went into each little step forward, all they remember is the upper-class twits who got shot up the arse because they went the wrong way. I bet you can tell me half a dozen names of guys who copped it at Rorke’s Drift or Ladysmith and you can’t remember a single important figure in modern military technology. Probably your grandpa won the VC.’

  ‘Da-ad.’

  ‘Marconi,’ I said.

  ‘Except Marconi, anyway he was a con artist.’

  ‘Maxim, Gatling, and was Sten a person?’

  ‘Guns are easy. It’s all on the same principle. I’m talking about communications, about something difficult, something which requires imagination. Organised violence is so childish, childishly simple. You ever read military strategy, it’s about as complicated as six-year-olds playing tag. Then Sir Marmaduke brought up his left wing – kids’ stuff. No, I’m not a pacifist. They’re all hypocrites because they’re so bloody aggressive and bad-tempered.’

  ‘And you’re so sweet-tempered and nice?’

  ‘Just impatient, Hel. There’s a difference. Impatience is a virtue.’

  ‘Alexander Graham Bell,’ I said.

  ‘Took you quite a time, didn’t it?’

  He looked at me with his bright dark eyes and his mouth twitched in a grim smile, instantly suppressed as though it might damage his reputation.

  ‘Well then, what did you think?’ She walked with me back to the station.

  ‘Of them, your parents? Oh they were –’ I paused before the word, not because I couldn’t think of it (it had come straight to mind) but because I didn’t quite like to use it – ‘impressive.’

  ‘That’s an odd word to use.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Like you might say of a flower display.’

  ‘Yes I know, but they were.’

  ‘You’re not being –’

  ‘Patronising, no, I thought you’d think that.’

  ‘Well then, say what you mean by impressive.’

  ‘It’s as though they were trying harder than most people.’

  ‘And that impresses you?’

  ‘Yes it does,’ I said.

  ‘It doesn’t make them easy to live with.’

  ‘Didn’t say it did.’

  ‘In any case, you hardly saw my mum and she was in a cooking panic most of the time, and Dad was moaning on about the Beeb.’

  ‘Yes but even so you –’

  ‘No, I think you’re right. I’ve always been kind of aware of it, I suppose, I was mystified by other girls’ parents just seeming to take life as it came and not minding about things.’

  ‘And you minded too?’

  ‘Still mind. I don’t see any point otherwise. If you just adjust to things as they are, you might as well not be there. Oh there’s the train. See you. ’Bye.’

  The kiss she gave me was quick and light, a moth grazing my cheek. Her greetings and goodbyes seemed to be abrupt, almost brusque. I might have flattered myself that it was because she was brimming with emotion which she was scared of spilling, but I only had to watch her walking down the platform and out through the side door of the little station to see that she was quite calm.

  That winter it often came back to me, the golden afternoon by the river and the field telephones and Mrs Hardress’s tapestries and the inturned intensity of their lives, which seemed neither happy nor unhappy but simply thoroughly lived – though how could I presume to imagine that on the basis of a single afternoon and several glasses of Rhône wine? But there was no doubt about my own feeling which was a sort of puzzled envy. It came upon me strongly when I squeezed into an armchair in somebody’s small sitting-room with two people I didn’t really know and others I didn’t know at all crouched on the floor. We were watching the Boat Race in an apologetic haze. Nobody had anything better to do on a chilly March afternoon. Then I heard the commentator saying, ‘And Oxford have won the toss and chosen the Middlesex station.’ The magic phrase had an extraordinary effect on me. I shivered and then blushed too, so that the good-natured girl on one arm of the chair asked was I all right and perhaps I was sickening for the flu.

  The afternoon on Minnow Island came back again a few months later when an elderly barrister said ‘I’ll tell you something’ in tones which meant here comes a piece of sage advice. ‘The truth is,’ he said, ‘nothing matters very much and most things don’t matter at all.’ Depends who you are doesn’t it, I could hear Martin Hardress saying, it only comes to the same thing if you’re all right to start with.

  The barrister – Pettifer, Pettigrew, some suitable name like that – had been standing just inside the door of the reception room at a hotel, a frowsty room down a side passage with SHERIDAN SUITE on the door. It was Jane Stilwell who had said to me, ‘Oh you must know Petty, he’s so charming, everyone says he’s the most charming man in London.’ I didn’t know him, but this turned out to be unimportant, since his charm turned itself on without outside assistance. If there had been a contest for Best Use of Two Cubic Metres of Hotel Space, he would have walked it. And until he blew his cover with the mot about nothing mattering much, he was helping to put off the awkward moment in a fashion that was better than painless.

  The awkward moment came up, though, soon enough.

  ‘Oh so you have met, isn’t that great?’ Mrs Stilwell looked first at the two of us together with a hostess’s impersonal pride, then at me.

  There had been a formal goodbye before I left the Ville, refereed by Mr Stilwell. Jane had been wearing a dark-green ribbed jersey and had looked even whiter in the face than she usually did. She had kissed me on the cheek maternally, and we had shaken hands which made it seem even more like the end of a bout which it wasn’t clear who had won. She had written me a letter:

  This is the only letter I’m going to write to you, although I’d like to write every day ’cos [I wish she hadn’t written ’cos] that’s the next best thing to seeing you. But I’ve made a mess of my life and I don’t want to make a mess of yours too. You have such wonderful things ahead of you, such a brilliant future. Besides I owe John a hell of a lot and he owes me nothing and I don’t want to go deeper into debt from the emotional point of view. You know how much I love you and will always love you. And you know how I could go on for pages, because you know how I can go on. But I won’t. Jane. X

  The letter was on paper of a thick creamy weave and stood up to being carried around in my wallet for weeks.

  Then, contrary to her promise, a second letter arrived, also short (perhaps she was one of those people who found it a struggle to get over the page).

  Darling, I said I wouldn’t, but I’m so miserable without you. Our four days together were the greatest days of my life and it eases my heartache a little to be able to say that to you. I know it had to end, but the way I ended it was wretched and foolish, and so awful for you that I am ashamed every time I think of it. I didn’t mean to upset you darling, not for all the world. And I just want you to know that I shall never forget and hope that now and then you will think of your Jane.

  Now here she was in a little black dress and a swirly gold brooch pinned to her breast. She glowed in that pale alabaster way she glowed after we lay in the abandoned villa.

  ‘Oh you do look well.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘That’s great. It’s wonderful to see you.’

  There was a danger that we would go on batting these stilted greetings back and forth without ever thinking of anything more substantial to say, but an interruption diverted us.

  ‘Well there you are. Jane said she might get you along. Dodo Wilmot. Blast from the past.’

  He did not seem quite so huge now a couple of years later – perhaps memory had inflated him. And the look on his babyface was keener, less bemused. In his dinner jacket, the only one there, he had a certain massive authority.

  ‘Not
quite the old Boudin, is it? Don’t worry, I’m on my best behaviour, isn’t that right, Jane? She’s so lovely, isn’t she, I bet she looked just the same in high school. Did you ever see Vivien Leigh in That Hamilton Woman? I saw that film five times, it was Winston’s favourite film, she could have been Jane’s sister though the colouring was different than Jane’s. Time for a little music.’

  He waddled over to the piano in the corner of the room, sat down and riffled a few chords to attract attention, then ambled into ‘You’re the Top’ and two or three other Cole Porter songs, singing in his surprisingly light Burl Ives tenor.

  ‘He’s awful, Dodo, he will flirt and with Tucker not here he insists on pretending he’s my beau. But what can you do, he’s our oldest friend.’ Jane patted my hand, a light cool pat like a cook testing whether a mousse has set. ‘It’s so great to see you and say sorry in person.’

  I couldn’t say anything. My throat seemed choked and I tried not to cry, at the same time annoyed with myself for being so soft. Only then was it clear how dry and solitary my life had been up to that point, and although this episode (you could scarcely call it a relationship) was over, it had been not an initiation so much as a release.

  ‘Night and day you are the one. Under the moon or under the sun,’ sang Dodo Wilmot.

  ‘Met Cole a couple of times at Eden Roc, years ago,’ the charming barrister, Pettifer/Pettigrew, said in my ear, in a front-row-of-the-stalls whisper. ‘You’d be amazed how modest he was, awfully amusing too. Delightful fellow. Basically queer of course.’

  ‘Night and da-ay . . .’

  ‘I think that is enough,’ Jane said. She went over to the piano and whispered in Dodo’s ear, but he caught her by the hand and with his other hand launched into ‘We’re a Couple of Swells’, and so she had to join in, which she did, cracked, out of tune, hopeless. And I stood beside Pettifer/Pettigrew with my eyes watering.

  ‘You all right, old chap?’

  ‘Must be getting a cold.’

  ‘Redoxon, that’s the only thing, always works. Redoxon, or Vitamin C, same thing. Pills or powder, they both work.’