A Summer in the Twenties

by Peter Dickinson

  And why not? More than ever now, since he had crossed the chasm and begun to move among the people of the dockland, Tom was convinced that the Bolshevik group in Hull existed and was a menace which should be destroyed. Its individual members might be, as Kate surely was, intelligent and serious people, but collectively they were a disease, and at their centre . . . Not once since Mr. Hutton had whispered it in the smoking-room at Brantingham had Tom heard the name Ricardo, but from certain silences, changes of conversation, reluctances to take some particular decision, particularly on Kate’s part, he thought he could induce the existence of such a figure. In much the same way Wyatt was said to have discovered the Priest’s Hole in the old part of Rokesley from the measurement of other rooms. And if Ricardo really existed, though so far as no more than a solider darkness amid other shadows, he must be found and fought—as Mr. Hutton had said, by Bertie’s methods if no others could be had. Suppose it were possible to explain all this to Ernie Doyle, he might even of his own unbought will agree to join the fight . . .

  But the image of Ernie’s face brought with it other images: Mrs. Barnes—Kate’s Aunt Tess—on her knees blacking her stove as if she were worshipping at her private shrine; Harry Struther—the man Tom had fought in the chapel—coming round in his Sunday best to apologise and despite being almost tongue-tied conducting the interview with dignity; Mr. Barnes hauling up from the allotments a spare sheet of corrugated iron he had found to patch a leak in the roof of his ‘gym’; Kate herself striding through the grid of streets swinging a handbell—the one they used to start the strike meeting—while children streamed from the side-alleys because it was the day of the Withernsee Picnic and the bitterest strike was not enough to interfere with that (indeed the money to pay for the charabancs came from a fund controlled by ‘our’ churches); Kate again, sitting on a drifted tree-trunk on the reeking foreshore with ripples of light playing across her face where the muddy Humber reflected the evening sun; or shaking off one of her fits of depression with a toss of her golliwog head and burst of self-mocking laughter; or wild as a Maenad, drunk with argument . . . And less personal things: five or six men on a pavement, gathered in theory to compare the merits of two racing pigeons but so infected by the inertia of the strike that not one of them moved or spoke for what seemed like minutes on end, a motionlessness that imbued them with the unreal quality of art; a similar group of women by the window of the corner shop (its scant shelf-space already two-thirds empty) nodding their heads to the inaudible chorus—Aye, it was hard. And Aye, it would be harder come next week.

  Who was Tom to feel squeamish at the prospect of buying a spy for Bertie? Had he not, at least in part, been bought himself by Bertie’s promise of help in appeasing Mrs. Tarrant? Of course there was a difference, in that he would be asking Ernie Doyle to betray a world to which he genuinely belonged, whereas it was a sentimental delusion to believe that even Mr. Barnes thought of Tom as anything more than a friendly alien. But though he did not belong to that world Tom had begun to feel that in a mysterious way it had begun to belong to him. If, as Gerald had claimed, Cyril had died for an England which consisted of the few acres you could see from the windows of the Collection Room, Tom’s own version of that view had stealthily enlarged so that now he was almost startled to find that it included—mistily, as if in a mirage—the crammed habitations between the Holderness Road and the brown Humber. It was as if, striding in dreams through the clean moor air, he could smell all the time the reek from the Fish Dock.

  The dining-room at Rokesley, where the dancing was taking place, was always called the Hall, and had indeed been the Great Hall of the old manor-house round which Wyatt had added the vast romantic flummery of Gothico-Tudorbethan. Tom edged round the floor and climbed the twisting stair to the Minstrels’ Gallery where he joined the three or four couples already leaning on the parapet watching the dancers below. One would have thought that Judy’s pearl fedora would flash among the swirling motley like a signal lamp, but it wasn’t there, and though there was no good reason why Judy should not be doing something other than dancing at this moment its absence added to his unease and depression. He saw Lady Belford—very grand indeed though decidedly out of character as Catherine the Great—inspecting the throng from the further door through a hand-held eye-glass which gave her something of the air of Nelson not seeing the signal at Copenhagen. Tom was edging towards the cover of the central pilaster when a hard object poked into his ribs and a voice hissed ‘Just don’t move, mister!’

  He raised his arms and turned slowly. She held a toy pistol and had the brim of her hat pulled so far down that he could barely see her chin.

  ‘Is that thing loaded?’ he said.

  ‘Only with champagne. It doesn’t squirt as well as water. Look.’

  She aimed out over the parapet and shot a jet into space. It dispersed into mist as it fell so that none of the dancers seemed to notice.

  ‘It’s the bubbles, I think,’ she said, as if announcing a scientific hypothesis that awaited further experiment.

  There was no one with her.

  ‘How have you been getting on?’ he said. ‘All my Gorringes have melted into thin air.’

  ‘Oh, yes. That’s what they do.’

  ‘Magic?’

  ‘No. Daisy smuggles a jigsaw in under her skirt and when they’ve done their duty dances they sneak off somewhere and put it together until they can decently go home.’

  ‘Lucky it didn’t burst while I was dancing with her. She was pretty vigorous. I wonder where they’ve got to.’

  ‘Woffles’s old nursery, I should think.’

  ‘Clever of them to find it.’

  ‘Oh, I told Puffy where it was.’

  ‘That was friendly of you.’

  ‘Yes. Shall we go and see how they’re getting on?’

  ‘You wouldn’t rather dance? If you’re free?’

  ‘I’m not free, so I wouldn’t rather,’ she said with a sly glance over the parapet.

  ‘We’ll still have to cross the floor.’

  ‘Don’t forget Woffles is my cousin. I wasn’t quite born at Rokesley, but . . .’

  She moved down the gallery and pulled aside one of those unsittable gaunt chairs one finds in such places. Behind it was what looked like a cupboard door in the panelling, but when she opened it he saw a flight of stone stairs spiralling up. Tom tapped the nearest man on the shoulder.

  ‘Put the chair back, will you?’ he said, then followed her up.

  The stair emerged after less than one full turn into a quite ordinary passage smelling strongly of floor-polish and more faintly of bath-soap and the fluffy scents that linger where women have dressed for evening parties. The central strip of red carpet and the row of bedroom doors down either side were typical of an upper floor in any large country house; only the vista stretched into such distance, under a series of ogive arches, that at first Tom thought he must be seeing part of the view reflected in a large mirror. Though he had visited Rokesley several times, he had never been upstairs.

  ‘Gosh, it’s vast,’ he said.

  ‘Isn’t it? Uncle Duff used to organise a special sort of bicycle race down here in wet weather, with handicaps like having to push a golf ball along the floor with a croquet mallet. Sh, now. I want to sneak up on them.’

  She stopped at a door that seemed like any of the others, turned the handle and opened it very gently. Beyond her Tom saw a ring of light under which the circle of girls sat, like peasants round a fire, absorbed in their game. Behind them, just visible in the shadowy fringes of the lit space, were the up-curving rockers of a proper rocking-horse, identical with the one at Sillerby. Judy motioned him out of sight then stepped into the room.

  ‘This is a stick-up,’ she said.

  The murmur of welcome mingled with shushing noises, changed by the hiss of Judy’s pistol into a squeak of protest and more shushing.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘There’s no one around. I just wanted to make sure you’d foun
d the way and tell you not to be too clever at the jig-saw.’

  More murmurs. She came out and closed the door, but instead of turning back up the corridor led the way on.

  ‘Do you think they’ll ever grow up?’ said Tom.

  ‘Oh, they’re very grown up in their own way—much more than most of us.’

  ‘Jig-saws . . . and running away like that? Who on earth’s going to marry any of them?’

  She shook her head as if agreeing that that was a problem, but stopped after a few more paces and laid her gloved hand on his arm.

  ‘Tom, if I tell you something, will you keep it an absolute secret? Not tell anyone?’

  ‘Yes, of course. But you don’t have to. I mean, if it’s a secret . . .’

  ‘No. You see you’re wrong about the Gorringes and Puffy’s my best friend so I want you to understand.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Well, Susan is married and Daisy’s engaged.’

  ‘But . . . I had dinner at Wiverham. There wasn’t anybody.’

  ‘Of course not. Susan’s husband is the head groom. He’s a widower, about fifty-five. She had a baby last Christmas.’

  ‘Great Scott! Does Sir Oswald know? And Lady Gorringe?’

  ‘Of course they do. Uncle Ozzy absolutely dotes on the baby. Of course they weren’t very keen at first, but Uncle Ozzy didn’t want to lose Trenchard which he’d certainly have done if he’d kicked up a row because Susan would have run off with him, but they’ve got used to it now. They’re quite pleased about Daisy’s fiancé. He’s the son of one of their tenant farmers. It wouldn’t work, bringing him to something like this, though.’

  ‘But keeping it all so quiet.’

  By now she had moved on and they had reached the top of a precipitous stair going down into dimness. The smells had changed—floor-polish still, but soap of a different kind, the coarse yellow bar used to scrub stone flooring. Somewhere below must lie the service areas of the house, beyond even the kitchens—sculleries, larders, bottle-rooms, laundry and such. Judy pattered down the flights, her feet apparently so familiar with them that she could talk over her shoulder as she did so.

  ‘They’re an extraordinary family,’ she said.

  ‘So it seems.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean that. They never seem to need to discuss anything. They know what they’re all thinking, so they just agree without talking about it. Like twins. Anyway, they decided that if the county found out about Susan and Trenchard it would ruin the other four’s chances, so they’re going to pretend it hasn’t happened until Babs is twenty-one.’

  ‘So if a rich and dashing duke picks up Puffy he won’t find he’s got a stable-hand for a brother-in-law until he’s signed the marriage lines.’

  ‘Oh, tosh. Of course they’d tell him before that. But you know what I mean.’

  Tom did. From childhood he had been aware that certain families were classed as ‘odd’. Even now he seldom knew in all cases what the ‘oddness’ consisted in. But there were degrees, and these did not necessarily correlate with the apparently similar gradient from eccentricity to rabidly anti-social behaviour. Indeed the Hankeys themselves were mildly ‘odd’, and more because of Father than because of Gerald; quite likely Gerald’s difficulties were traced back to Father’s ‘oddness’ by the county experts in this field. The Gorringes would occupy about the same place in the spectrum as the Hankeys, as things stood; but if they were to make any kind of parade of Susan’s marriage, or even let it become widely known (no doubt Judy wasn’t the only outsider in the secret) then they would be moved many notches down the scale and the younger girls’ selection of possible husbands (if you took ‘possible’ not to include head grooms and the sons of tenants), which were already fairly restricted by their behaviour, would dwindle to almost nothing.

  Two floors down Judy turned left. The stairs continued into darkness, and presumably cellars, but this corridor was lit by dim and wide-spaced bulbs under white enamel shades. Its floor was stone slabs, irregularly yellow and grey and worn into hummocks and hollows by passing generations of servants. Though it seemed already to be the very back of the back regions of Rokesley it too reached on into dwindling distance, but half way along it Judy stopped and studied a large board hung with innumerable keys on wooden pegs. The nearest light was well beyond her and she stood outlined against its yellowish stingy glow, posed in her double-breasted black jacket, flared trousers and ridiculous hat. The effect was piercingly feminine, so that memory made an almost startled contrast with her boyish look in the frock she had worn in the hills above Hendaye. Tom’s gloom was gone, but had left as it were an aftertaste. He was tingling with the exhilaration of her company and yet there was an edge of danger to the excitement, as though things might still go badly wrong. She had moved the game on another stage by telling him about Susan Gorringe’s marriage—acknowledging that he and not anyone else was close enough to her to know—but at the same time it seemed a curious move, in that she had made it before extracting all the amusement that was still to be had in the state of the game as it had stood.

  ‘I think that’s the one,’ she said, taking down a large, intricate iron key. ‘Bother, there used to be a torch on the shelf here.’

  ‘Are we going outside? There’s little lamps in glass pots all across the courtyard.’

  ‘That’ll do. This door here. No, it won’t be locked.’

  He had been standing waiting for her to give him the key she had taken, but apparently that was for something else. He pulled the heavy door open and the night air came lazily through, an odour of summer woods and gardens laced faintly with petrol. They came out into the wide cobbled courtyard round which Rokesley was built. There was no moon, so the contorted chimneys and pinnacles of Wyatt’s roofline stood very black against innumerable stars. A double line of small lamps, green, orange and violet according to the colour of the glass, marked the path from the back entrance of the main house to the archway beyond which most of the cars were parked. Judy led him across to this and picked up one of the lamps, but instead of turning along the path she slanted off towards the further side of the courtyard, which he remembered consisted mainly of old coach-houses, converted to garages, with the stables at the western end. (Generations of Belfords had treated horses at least as companionably as humans.) Judy led the way to a pair of doors higher and wider than any of the others.

  ‘Hold the light, pal,’ she said in her utterly unconvincing gangster accent. ‘This is a break-in. Oh, Tom, do you know, I used to have to bring a stool to stand on and I needed both hands to turn the key! There. Mind the bottom bit.’

  He followed her through the dark slot she had opened, a human-sized wicket set in the enormous doors.

  ‘Just pull it to,’ she said. ‘Ah . . . doesn’t it smell marvellous!’

  Tom closed out the far noises of the dance and sniffed. It seemed to him a quite ordinary set of smells for such a place, cold stone and old leather and wormy timber. The only difference from the coach house at Sillerby was that there Pennycuick used it to store the mowers, so there was an extra smell of machine oil and cheesy rotting grass which was missing here. He held the lamp high, and though its minimal light penetrated only a few feet into the darkness he was aware that the space around them was larger even than a normal coach-house. At floor-level the shafts of a pony trap projected into the circle of light.

  As he followed Judy down the gap between two such traps larger shapes started to loom beyond them, landaus and other old conveyances. He felt oddly disturbed. All this seemed too obvious. Though half an hour ago he had been wondering whether to explore the house for some secluded niche where they could be alone together for a while, he found he now didn’t want it to happen like this, in a series of planned manoeuvres with the luck-God given no chance to add his blessing. Why, Judy must even have organised that he should be Gorringe-fodder, because she had known that they were going to do their Cinderella trick at midnight. She had actually helped them vanish. The reali
sation came so suddenly that he snorted.

  ‘Yes, it’s a surprise, isn’t it?’ said Judy.

  He stared at her, then saw that she was looking not at him but at a curving arc of bright yellow with spokes running off towards a dim-seen hub, a great iron-rimmed wheel, bearing a contraption twice the size of any they had passed. The body seemed to sag beyond it, glossy brown paint picked out in red. She ran her fingers along it, lovingly, as she moved down its length. Now he could see that it was a huge old family coach. She stopped at its door, on which was the Belford rebus, the bell in the river.

  ‘Good Lord!’ said Tom, ‘I never thought I’d see one of those except in the movies. I suppose they used it to go to London before the railways were built.’

  ‘Oh, much longer than that. Uncle Duff’s father had a row with one of the companies. They got an act through Parliament letting them buy a bit off one of his farms where hounds had ended a famous run, and he’d promised his father he’d never sell. Until he died he never allowed any of his family or any of the servants to travel on a railway.’

  ‘I see. That’s why it’s in such good condition.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She lingered on the syllable, nudging it towards being a question.

  ‘There’s something else,’ he guessed. ‘Is it one of your between-places?’

  ‘The very first,’ she whispered.

  (. . . you wouldn’t understand at all . . . they aren’t like that . . . They’re small and secret and nobody knows you’re there.) Some of Tom’s unease lifted.

  ‘Ah, I see,’ he said.

  She climbed onto the high step to reach the handle and deftly swung herself round the door as it opened, then turned on the step.