He would catch the train direct from London, Paddington, he said, while the three of them would leave by train from Surrey. They were to spend the weekend in the Malvern Hills and they would put up at an old coaching inn.
It was evident that he had chanced to read, in one of his most recently acquired travel and food guides, that this idyllically portrayed establishment served the best of traditional English food and kept its cellar stocked with English wines. Christina’s father had immediately become curious to taste its pink-fleshed lamb and its West Country goat cheese rolled in wood ash. Furthermore, he was entertained by the notion of Chiltern hock.
Alice had not responded to the project in quite the right spirit, both because she feared that her mother would be displeased and because her husband had made the arrangement without consulting her. She had, during the course of that year, developed a distinctly sharper edge. Alice had brought to the surface a latent talent for put-down and was wont to spike her marital interaction with compulsive barbs of irony.
‘Irony,’ Christina had recently observed to her sister, ‘is the refuge of the impotent.’ She had borrowed this assertion from the introduction to an eighteenth-century novel, but it seemed to her that it met her mother’s case.
‘She always ends up caving in to him,’ she said. ‘So why does she bother with all the sniping?’
Right then, as she lent an ear to her mother’s proceedings on the telephone, Christina pulled a face at Pam, rather sour, drawing down the corners of her mouth.
‘Bor-ing,’ she said, sing-song-wise, because that was what it was. Boring so you wanted to scream. Boring and irritating. Could anyone else’s parents possibly be that irritating? Take her mother. There she was, embarked upon a pointless repeating ritual, like a dance. The intention was not to move on and get somewhere different, but always merely to return to the starting position. A lobster quadrille in which she and Pam were somehow impelled to take up horribly predictable positions.
Pam would always be pleasing and appeasing. She, Christina, always stoking and provoking. But nothing would ever change. And, if the man irritated the hell out of her mother – as assuredly he had to – then why didn’t she for God’s sake just spit on his face and quit?
‘Joe,’ Alice was saying, ‘but we’ve only just got here. It’s absurd. And frankly, I’d rather day-trip into London and eat moussaka in Greek Street. Why this sudden passion for hunting down toad-in-the-hole and spotted dog?’
‘Pardon me?’ he said.
‘It’s food,’ she said. ‘You know. Brit food. Traditional. Like what you’re suddenly so keen to have us eat.’
‘Alice,’ he said, ‘you’ll love it. This place. It’s beautiful. The countryside is beautiful. It’s Piers Plowman country.’
‘Oh, but that’s gross!’ she said. ‘ “Piers Plowman country”. That’s some cruddy little enticement from the heritage industry. How can you? Really. I wonder they’re not claiming it as the “home of the plowman’s lunch”.’
‘Alice,’ he said, ‘you’ll love it.’
And then he detailed the travel itinerary. ‘Take care now,’ he said, after he had given her the departure times and had impressed upon her the need to change trains at Reading. ‘That’s Great Malvern, okay? That’s not Malvern Link.’
‘So whose country is this, anyway?’ she said.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘it’s possible I’ll be a little delayed. There’s a restaurant right there on the platform. I’d guess it’s pretty nice. The girls will like it. It’s an old railway tea-room. It’s been renovated.’
‘Ah,’ Alice said. ‘The “Romance of Steam”. And meanwhile the British Government is murdering the railways.’
‘Oh, well. Now we’ll definitely go,’ Christina said to her sister. ‘You can always tell when she’s capitulated. It’s when she decides to stop sniping at him and she starts to snipe about politics. What’s the matter with her? Do you suppose there’s something wrong with her sex life?’
‘I expect it’s very beautiful,’ Pam said.
‘Not her sex life, I hope?’ Christina said.
‘Chrissie,’ Pam said. ‘I mean this place. You know. This place up in the hills that Papa wants us to see.’
And they went – of course – though Granny P took umbrage at their going, just as Christina ground her teeth. She had come to regard these family excursions as inexcusable exercises in pseudo-togetherness; tyrannical demonstrations of coercive cohesion scarcely to be endured. There were times when she dreamed of running away. Would she survive ‘out there’? Would she make out? She envisaged herself as one of those forlorn little faces that stared out from occasional milk cartons back home, or from the posters in Grand Central Station.
Have you seen this child?
Christina Rosalia Angeletti.
Twelve years, eleven months.
Last seen changing trains in Reading, UK.
Eyes: blue. Hair: blonde.
Bermudas and sneakers screaming green.
(Purchased with satisfaction in defiance of parental taste.)
Small gristly lump on left earlobe.
Parents: irritating.
Mother: ineffectual.
Father: culture-fiend.
Also, Professional Guardian of Traditional Family Values.
Yet, in the event, there was something unexpected about the Renovated Railway Tea-room. It was offering an unscheduled extra. Something was there, along with the pretty iron chairs and tables that had spilled out on to the platform in the July sunshine. Something marvellous was there along with the big brass bell over the doorway and the rows of cakes on the counter sitting fatly under their glass domes. Something uplifting and beautiful was there and it was making the dark oak varnish of the wainscoting take on colour and sing to her.
The beautiful thing was Jago.
Jago Rutherford
Iago
Jago
Jerome
James George Rutherford
James the Son of Zebedee
James the Son of Thunder
James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree.
Jago Rutherford, thirteen the previous day, had not yet fallen out with Peter. He had spent the few days since school had broken up in Peter’s parents’ house. He was, without doubt, a beautiful dark boy. He was the most beautiful boy in the world. He was tall, slim and olive-skinned – an exquisite schoolboy with white teeth and hazel eyes fringed with thick, dark lashes. His hair, which was raven-black and curly, had been cut severely in the style of the 14–18 War, but was struggling to get out of line. His features were not only bold and striking in themselves. They were much enhanced by the ease with which top-doggery had chosen to sit on him.
Christina found something Moorish in his looks – something that allowed her at once to transpose him to a scene in which, turbaned in bright silk, his djellaba doused in the sea-spray, he was managing wild, white stallions on a beach somewhere in North Africa. And as her adoring eye travelled from the perfect arc of his brow, to the wing shape of his shoulder-blade, to the jut of his exquisite, angular hip, she was struck by an unfamiliar but none the less powerful emotion whose cause was instantly definable as the piercing dart of love.
I am in love, Christina sang to the inside of her head. I am in love. I am in love. I am nearly thirteen and I am in love.
Forever.
Like Clara Schumann.
There were in fact two boys in front of her and both were dressed for cricket. The smaller boy had at first been invisible to her, both because Jago had so captured her attention and because the boy himself was somehow curiously insubstantial. He was blond and not quite opaque. The only colour about him was in the two bright green grass-stains that besmirched both knees of his white flannels. These, as if by compensation, were peculiarly vivid. They were not so much the colour of moss; more the colour of crystallized angelica – but then, English grass, after a rainy July, could be very green indeed
. And he stood there beside the beautiful dark boy, his mouth slightly ajar, insubstantial as an elf, or as a small, androgynous angel beside a Barbary pirate.
The beautiful dark boy did not have grass-stains on his knees. What he had, instead, was an intriguing streak of wine-red dye that ran along the top of his right thigh from a source so close to his crotch that it was difficult for Christina to examine it without self-consciousness.
The boys were in the company of an amiable, middle-aged adult whose large, loose frame had been bundled into a comfortably old, flecked hiking jumper and faded corduroy bags. It was apparent that he had begun to stare hard at the girls’ mother.
‘Good Lord!’ he said. ‘No, it can’t be!’
‘I don’t believe this!’ said the girls’ mother, colouring slightly. They followed up these exclamations with short bursts of laughter and long embraces and kisses.
‘But what on earth are you doing here?’ she said. ‘This is completely ridiculous. Gosh . . . well, now . . . it must be thirteen years.’
‘I’m afraid so,’ he said. He had smiling brown eyes that were at that moment beaming pleasure down on to her face. ‘As a matter of fact, I live here,’ he said. ‘Fifteen miles as the crow flies. We’re in town because the boys have been lending their services to the local Under-Sixteens.’
His eyes then ranged over the whole of her person, after which he glanced with interest at the two girls.
‘But what about you, Alice?’ he said. ‘You are the one of us who is out of context, my dear.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Still living in America?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’re here on holiday. I am waiting for my husband.’
‘Ah,’ he said.
In the pause that followed, Alice took stock of the boys. They were just as different to look at as her own two girls. One so tall and dark; one so small and fair. Strangely, even the colours of their clothing correlated after a fashion. The green grass-stains with Chrissie’s ferocious green shorts; the wine-red dye stain with the deep burgundy lamb’s-wool of Pam’s new sweater.
‘And these are your boys?’ she said.
‘One of them,’ he said. ‘Peter here is my step-son.’ He indicated the small blond boy. ‘James is his great friend.’
‘Ah,’ she said.
‘And one of these young ladies,’ he said, ‘would be the infant I once encountered in a rush basket?’
‘Why, so you did,’ Alice said. ‘Yes. And that was Pam. And now you must meet Christina, who is my younger daughter. Girls,’ she said, ‘this is my dear friend Mr Dent, from long ago, before either of you was born.’
Christina shook hands with the stranger and surprised herself by assessing him as inescapably nice. But then this ought not to have surprised her, since here was no ordinary adult. It came to her in a moment that she was shaking hands with none other than Mummy’s Nice Young Man.
Having been so suddenly wooed from adolescent ill-humour by the unexpected appearance of Jago, Christina was disposed, now, to exercise benign judgment upon the Nice Young Man. It seemed to her that her mother’s friend was far more nice than merely ‘nice’. There was something about him that she could savour and relish; something avuncular and reassuring. It was as if he had come trailing a bag of blessings from a calmer, kinder world. A world of wood fires and skillet bread and lilac trees. A world in which men would knock out pipes on the soles of their boots and put their feet on the fender.
She observed, thereafter, with a glow of pleasure, how courteously he bestirred himself for them and with so much easy, unofficious aptitude, gathering extra chairs around a table for their comfort, insisting firmly on the need for some refreshment while they waited for her father’s train.
And there was the sun, shining so brilliantly, slanting across the platform and catching the polished brass of the bell. And there was the beautiful dark boy, who had seated himself beside her, just as she knew it was ordained that he should.
‘Pimms, Alice?’ her mother’s friend said, addressing her as though he were involving her, lightly, in some nostalgic reference to their own past. ‘Now, how does that strike you?’
It seemed to Christina that her mother’s layers of barbed irony had suddenly fallen away.
‘As heaven itself, Roland,’ she said. ‘Oh, I say. What fun this is! What a coincidence. What luck!’
The children drank ginger beer and ate hot chicken sandwiches – all except Christina, who picked happily at the soft, sweet inside of a large, vanilla-flavoured cup-cake that the management had been pleased to call a ‘muffin’, but who cared? Everything was so perfect. Her mother’s drink came clinking with ice cubes and coloured like amber; floating with mint leaves and wedges of citrus fruit and apple. It was a drink like a distilled orchard. It was the summer contained in a goblet. And then there was her mother, prettily flushed with surprise, as she sat beside her charming, well-mannered man friend from all those years long ago.
‘And then there is my father,’ Christina thought. ‘Who is blissfully not here.’
For Christina to be wooed by an adult that year, and an adult who was in any way associated with her parents, was really most unusual. She had been finding her parents and all their acquaintances increasingly difficult to stomach. In the case of her father, these negative feelings had come accompanied by a particularly strong sense of physical revulsion.
Her antipathy had struck with the onset of puberty and had been exacerbated by events surrounding Grandpa Bernardo’s death. It was, at times, so profound that she found it necessary to leave a room if either of her parents entered it. Mealtimes had become a penance; an unavoidable and protracted source of contact. The style of her parents’ interaction made her want to scream. Their voices drove her mad. The manner in which they forked up their food, or smiled, or sniffed, induced murderous intent. She could not but squirm uncomfortably if either one of them touched her and, while her mother seemed half-way sensitive to this particular new difficulty, her father patently was not.
Her first essential act of severance was a decisive break with God. This had become not only rational but imperative, given her need to avoid all possible occasions for touch. It was absolutely necessary to ensure that she would not find herself alongside her parents during the iniquitous ‘sign of peace’. She knew that, inexorably, there would come that point where the priest would say, ‘Let us offer each other the sign of peace’, and her parents – both of them, one after the other – would take her hand in theirs. Or her father, God forbid – but all things were possible to him who had no inhibition at such times about crossing the aisle to embrace Pam’s antique, retired piano teacher – her father would clasp his daughters, one by one, in a brief embrace and plant affectionate kisses on their cheeks.
Peace be with you.
Her diaphragm had begun to tense against the prospect from the start of the Lord’s Prayer.
Now she had shaken the whole thing off with a most surprising ease. Because to lose what you have never properly possessed, she realized, is no real loss at all. Merely a burden lifted. The only noticeable effect upon her was the absence of fuzziness in the channels of the ears. The messages, she realized, had been reaching her since before Mrs del Nevo’s intersecting circles, or the Sunday Polo mints.
Her lapse was the only feature of her present life that had occurred like a stepping out of grave clothes. Yet it had done very little to relieve the bugbear of parental contact.
Christina could not have explained these feelings to her parents any more than she could have given coherent account of them to herself. All she knew was that, in order to breathe and to hold on to her own self, it had become imperative for her to despise her father and, more than ever, to hold contrary opinions and contrary tastes. And it was equally necessary, in lesser degree, to despise and pity her mother, who was his helpmate and collaborator.
Christina found that she could no longer call her parents by the names she had always used. Sh
e resolved this difficulty by ceasing to call them anything at all when addressing them face to face, and by avoiding almost all situations where reference in the third person might possibly have become necessary. Where it was unavoidable, they became ‘he’ and ‘she’ – pronouns which she endowed with so peculiarly disdainful an emphasis as to make their application to specific persons unambiguously clear.
Family holidays had become events to be avoided whenever possible. This one, to Granny P’s, while unavoidable, was definitely less appalling than most. She had retained a qualified fondness for her grandmother and, added to that, her father habitually spent the weekdays working in London where he put up in a hotel. None the less, the eight hours trapped on the plane that summer had been little short of agonizing. Christina had breathed relief when at last the Fasten Seat-belt and the No Smoking signs had come on and the plane had begun its slow descent upon London.
It made her sad to realize that a fortnight in the company of her maternal grandmother was no longer, to be honest, her idea of heaven. She had reluctantly come to the conclusion that Granny P could be a little stultifying. She was a predictable and limited woman, whose persistently partisan indulgence towards Christina – and equally persistent coolness towards Pam – was an embarrassment rather than a triumph. Moreover, there was not the previous thrill to be got from shopping trips alone with Granny P, since the two of them no longer shared a passion for shiny shoes. Christina’s father, with his own wholehearted and conspicuous enthusiasm for stylish personal adornment, had had the effect of driving his younger daughter towards intransigent indifference.
It was also no longer appropriate or rewarding for Christina to exercise her talent for raising the temperature among uneasy in-laws. Her need was now to escape them all, not to become the focus of their intensified attention.
There was one thing and one only, one pleasure that had remained with her through all those summers past, and that was the pleasure she had always taken in tending her grandmother’s garden. Even now, as the aircraft began its descent, she applied her mind determinedly to aphids and apple trees and manure on spiraea. She wondered, would the sweet williams and the foxgloves have finished their flowering? Would she be in time to see the last of the roses that rambled so profusely over the roof of her grandmother’s porch? And then there was that scent that she, in childhood, had attributed to her grandmother’s own person. She knew it now as a benign accessory of jasmine flowers in July.
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