by Jane Gardam
‘And it is impossible,’ she said in the Green Man’s bed, ‘for I am to be married on Saturday to Jackson, your next-door farmer.’
And she was. The bells of the steeple rang out for her (a quiet bride) on the Saturday afternoon.
Earlier that week, one bright and frosty day, they had begun to toll for many hours, a peal for each year of the Green Man’s life. The mice heard the knell in the pockets of the old mackintosh on the back of his kitchen door. The water voles and the swans heard it in the dykes. The geese heard it, flying south. The seagulls heard it. (They think they are nobody’s fool and guessed what it was.) Sadie and Billy and Patsy and their grandchildren heard it on the farms around and said, ‘How endlessly it tolls. It must be for the Green Man.’
Deep in the winter sea the mermaids heard it, and didn’t much care. The twelve sons didn’t hear it because they were all at foreign conferences, but the four daughters on a cold beach in France heard it in their hearts. A shiver passed among them and they looked at one another sadly. Lady Serena Transept and her cousin and the dog heard it and went specially to sit in the Manor pew to listen; and occasionally the dog howled. Above them the head on the stone corbel peered through its leaves to watch the ringers and Lord Transept, who had asked particularly to toll the final knell.
In the high street of the market town the corn chandler heard it and he smiled. He knew the future, being a reading man.
And was unsurprised, therefore, some years later, a green-eyed grandson on his knee, to hear that somebody going through the lanes towards the tip to dump his Christmas tree had seen a shadow standing in the fields.
SOUL MATES
When Francis Phipps retired, he and his wife, Patricia, took a week’s holiday on the Isles of Scilly. They were a prudent pair and had booked the best room in the hotel the previous summer. It had always been summer when they holidayed on the Scillies long ago, with their young children, all now successfully scattered about the world.
Patricia Phipps had been uncertain about this return visit (and the long motorway journey à deux). She thought it might be sad. But Francis said, ‘What nonsense! How delightful to be going back again with enough money for a luxurious hotel instead of the sandy-floored pub with its one bathroom.’
‘We shall take plenty of books,’ he said. ‘The daffodils will be at their best. We shall walk. The food should be marvellous and with luck there’ll be very few people.’
But it was cold. Their room was glorious, but stood at the end of several blustery corridors and three of its walls were windows on to the sea. The sea sucked and roared and ground and slapped against the very foundations of the single-storey hotel and seemed, in some way, to tower over them in their beds. Beyond the spraying breakers they could see the shine and dazzle of it to the far horizon. The Phippses seemed to swing with the sea when they closed their eyes.
Each day they walked in the salty wind, along lanes lined with chill, flattened daffodils that ran in trickles and eddies and torrents. Their shouting yellow was round every red boulder, every stiff, black escallonia hedge.
After luncheon they slept. After dinner they read their books. It was a hotel of great discretion and, although always full, seemed empty. There were a few couples of the Phippses’ age, a tense little writer person with frizzy, iron-grey hair, a desolate-looking woman in a wonderful beaded dress of bright-blue wool, and a Yorkshire couple, she fat and amiable, he gaunt and glum. The wife smiled eagerly across the restaurant at the Phippses.
‘Bit ominous, the wife,’ said Francis. ‘She looks as if she might divulge.’
‘We can keep her at bay,’ said Patricia.
Patricia was tired. The past few months of small, decorous but nevertheless emotional retirement parties for Francis had drained them both. Since the university, where they had met forty years ago, Francis had served his country and his Department and Pat had served him. Her achievement had been to create his setting, which was a tranquil house in Dulwich and dignified hospitality. In its long green garden there hung a pink hammock between a walnut tree and a pear.
Two nights before the end of their holiday, Pat felt a great longing to be back in this garden, and Francis, at the same moment, holding the door for her to pass into the long corridors en route for dinner, said, ‘I’d say that a week was about long enough here, Patricia. Wouldn’t you?’
There was a slight easing-up, though, tonight in the dining room. Somebody was laughing softly as they went in, and the grizzled novelist, wearing a black velvet suit, was drinking her coffee at the table of the wronged woman in the couture dress. The Yorkshire wife, rosy from the weather, was now looking hungrier than ever for conversation, and at last called shamelessly across from her table to the Phippses that her holiday was nearly over, and was theirs? She had to be back in Boroughbridge on Saturday, for her results.
‘Oh,’ said Pat. ‘Examination results?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so. I’ve had a medical examination. We’re rather wondering What They Will Have Found.’
Francis picked up his napkin and Pat picked up the menu. As she looked up from it, she met the glance of one of the other couples, sitting across from them, rather in the shadow of the staircase. The woman smiled at her like a sister. Pat thought for a second that she was looking in a glass.
When the pair left their table, the man came over and smiled at Francis. ‘Good evening.’
‘Good evening.’
The woman said to Patricia, ‘I’m afraid things tend to get rather chatty by Thursday. Beware of people with operations!’
Later the four found themselves together in the television room, waiting for the News, and the other man (‘Phillips—Jocelyn Phillips. My wife—Evelyn’) said that nowadays he hated the News.
‘We sit in horror,’ said Francis. ‘We fear for our young.’
‘You sound exactly like Jocelyn,’ said the wife. ‘Now—let me guess. You are at the Bar? A judge?’
‘A civil servant. I have just retired.’
‘Me, too,’ said Phillips. ‘Foreign Office. I went last year.’
The men bought brandy for each other and the women drank liqueurs. Conversation flowered. They were like old friends.
The next day they all walked together to the tropical gardens and Evelyn and Pat found a mutual interest in lilies. Automatically the four met up again after dinner, and at bedtime Jocelyn Phillips said how much they had enjoyed the day. Francis, for years considered to be the coldest of fish, said, ‘It has been delightful to meet you.’
Coming over to the Phippses’ table at breakfast next day, Evelyn said, ‘Now—look. I do hope you don’t think us quite extraordinary, but we wondered if you’d come and stay with us tonight, on your way home? We’re hardly off your route and it would break up the awful motorway journey a bit.’
Francis, standing, clutching his napkin, said, ‘But how very kind.’
‘Excellent idea,’ Jocelyn called across.
At the reception desk, as they paid their bills, all four turned to one another.
‘D’you know—’ said Francis. ‘If you really mean it—?’
‘Of course we do. Give us an hour’s start to make things ready.’
‘Well, this is most friendly . . . Pat—?’
‘But I should love to.’
Address and directions given, everybody climbed into the helicopter for the mainland and their parked cars. Pat was surprised to see the woman in the couture dress and the writer saying affectionate goodbyes to the Yorkshire couple. She and Francis waved off the Phillipses and went to the nearby village for coffee and to look for a potted plant to take as a present.
‘What an extraordinary thing we’re doing,’ she said. ‘Whatever would the children say? They may be anyone. Serial killers. Somehow—did you think they looked rather . . . cold, when they went off? Remote?’
‘Nonsense
,’ he said. ‘They’re exactly like us. It’s great luck. You hardly ever meet your own sort these days.’
Pat thought of the novelist and the rich woman and the Yorkshire pair. None of them had said goodbye to her. She felt suddenly miserable. Cut off.
Miles further on, deep into Devonshire, Francis said at last, ‘Oh, well . . . It is a slight risk, I suppose. “Never take up with people you meet on holiday”, and so on. But we’ve not met people we’ve felt so at home with for years. We must be almost at their turning, are we not?’
The motorway exit was just ahead and he swung towards it much too fast. As always she said, ‘I hate the way you do that. You should let me drive.’ Usually he didn’t answer, but today he said, ‘Wrist a bit wonky. Traffic’s much worse these days. I must say I don’t enjoy driving any more. Train next time.’
They reached the A-road, then the roundabout for the byroad, and then—yes, here it was—the turning for the house (no signpost) and the little lane.
The lane was long. It turned at sharp angles, like the corridors at the hotel. It narrowed and became unkempt. Grass grew down a central ridge. Hedges gave way to a long, metal field-fence and through it could be seen a red-brick house with lattice windows, standing well back from the road and surrounded by grass. Its front and back doors were standing wide open so that you could see down a flagstoned passage to more green fields behind.
‘Is it genuine?’ asked Pat. ‘Or pseudo-Tudo?’
‘Can’t tell,’ he said. ‘Very cunning if it’s pseudo.’
They stepped from the car into total silence. Crocuses along the front of the house looked like flowers painted on a calendar.
‘It’s empty,’ she said. ‘They can’t have arrived.’
‘It can’t be,’ said Francis: ‘the doors are open.’ He knocked. ‘Hello there? Hello?’
Not liking to walk in, they went round the side of the house to the back. A barn. A double garage. A shed or stable far across the field. No life.
‘Maybe it’s the wrong house,’ said Francis. ‘Hello?’
Suddenly, there were the Phillipses far away beside the shed, standing quite still. And then, as if a pause-button had been released, they began to move forward over the grass. They looked graver sort of people than those in the hotel.
But this passed at once. The Phippses were welcomed warmly and the men went off to get the luggage from the car. Evelyn took Pat into the house and the green spring day went in with them. There were books everywhere, an open log fire, photographs of exemplary children on a grand piano, a nice old overhead clothes-airer on the ceiling of the red-and-yellow tiled kitchen.
‘I feel I’ve known this house all my life,’ said Pat. ‘It’s like my old home.’
‘The four of us are so alike,’ said Evelyn. ‘Have you noticed that we all have androgynous names?’
Pat looked away and said she hoped that Evelyn didn’t think that she and Francis were androgynous.
Evelyn laughed brightly and said she had really meant genderless. ‘All our names are genderless. It’s so good to be genderless now.’
‘What did you do as a young woman, Pat?’ she asked later, washing salad in cold water.
‘Well, nothing, I suppose. After I left Oxford.’
Evelyn, amazed, cried, ‘But neither did I! I married straight from Cambridge. I thought there was nobody left like us.’
Dinner was perfect. Duck and green peas and a crème brûlée.
‘But however did you spirit it all up in an hour?’ asked Francis.
Jocelyn produced a second bottle of superb wine.
Their bedroom was old-rose chintz and a four-poster. There were flowers, and hot-water bottles.
‘It is heaven!’ said Pat. She wondered whether to kiss Evelyn’s cheek, or even Jocelyn’s. She let it go.
Francis, flushed with duck and claret, said, ‘Yes. Heaven.’ He paused. ‘The hotel was good,’ he said, ‘but we were restless there. It was the sea.’
‘Ah, the sea,’ said Jocelyn Phillips.
‘We shall sleep tonight,’ said Pat. ‘Utterly.’
And they did sleep. They slept until nearly ten o’clock the following morning, and could not believe it.
They awoke to silence.
‘My God,’ said Francis, ‘we’d better get on if we’re to be home before we hit the rush hour. Better miss a bath.’
‘Hello?’ Pat called on the stairs. In the hall. ‘We’re thoroughly ashamed of ourselves. Hello?’
No sound.
They looked in kitchen, dining room, drawing room, study. There was no trace of last night’s dinner or sign of today’s breakfast. Front and back doors stood open.
‘D’you think we could look in the bedrooms?’
There was nobody there.
In the Phillipses’ bedroom not a thing was out of place. No clothes over chairs, no holiday unpacking, not a hair in a comb. The beds were carefully made up.
The Phippses went outside. Barn, garage and shed watched them, but there was nobody. Pat pointed. ‘Was that there last night?’ Across the garden a large, lazy pink hammock was slung between trees.
‘Well, look here,’ Francis said, ‘we have to go. This is ridiculous. I’ll leave a note. It’s very upsetting.’
He wrote the note and propped it against the kitchen telephone, where the red message-light flashed.
‘D’you think we should press it?’ he said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No. Don’t,’ and grabbed his arm.
‘Why not?’
‘No!’
They closed the back door and the front door. It was some sort of a gesture. It had to be done. They drove away down the drive.
‘I don’t like doing this,’ he said. ‘I don’t like it at all. I should have pressed that button. Well . . . we’ll ring them up tonight. Naturally—’
‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I want to. I’m not sure we shall be able to. Oh, Francis, I’m not sure we’ll get home.’
He took her hand and held it as he drove. Steering one-handed along the lane beside the wire fence, they both looked together at the house as they passed it by.
The front door and the back stood wide open again. They could see clearly to the green fields beyond.
THE PEOPLE ON PRIVILEGE HILL
Drenching, soaking, relentless rain. Black cold rain for black cold winter Dorsetshire. Edward Feathers loved rain but warm rain, falling through oriental air, steam rising from sweating earth, dripping, glistening drops that rolled across banana leaves, rain that wetted the pelts of monkeys. Bloody Dorset, his retirement home. He was cold and old. He was cold and old and going out to lunch with a woman called Dulcie he’d never much liked. His wife Betty had been dead some years.
‘I am rich,’ announced Feathers—Sir Edward Feathers QC—to his affluent surroundings. On the walls of the vestibule of his house hung watercolours of Bengal and Malaya painted a hundred years ago by English memsahibs under parasols, sitting at their easels out of doors in long petticoats and cotton skirts with tulle and ribbons and painting aprons made of something called ‘crash’.
‘Very good, too, those paintings,’ he thought. ‘Worth a lot of money now.’
Under his button-booted feet was a rug from Tashkent. Nearby stood a throne of rose-coloured silk, very tattered. Betty had fallen in love with it once, in Dacca. Nearby was a brass and ironwood umbrella stand with many spikes sticking out of it. Feathers turned to the umbrella stand, chose an umbrella, shook it loose: a fine black silk with a malacca handle and initialled gold band. He did not open it in the house on account of the bad luck this would unleash. A fresh wave of rain lashed at the windows. ‘I could order a cab,’ he said aloud. He had been a famous barrister and the sound of his voice had been part of his fortune. The old ‘Oxford accent’, now very rare, comforted him sometim
es. ‘I am rich. It’s only a few minutes away. The fare is not the issue. It is a matter of legs. If I lose the use of my legs,’ he said, for he was far into his eighties, ‘I’m finished. I shall walk.’
Rain beat against the fanlight above the front door. There was a long ring on the bell and a battering at the knocker. His neighbour stood there in a dreadful anorak and without an umbrella.
‘Oh yes, Veneering,’ said Feathers, unenthusiastic. ‘You’d better come in. But I’m just going out.’
‘May I share your car?’ asked Veneering. ‘To Dulcie’s?’
‘I’m not taking the car.’ (Veneering was the meanest man ever to make a fortune at the Bar except for old what’s-his-name, Fiscal-Smith, in the north.) ‘By the time I’ve got it out of the garage and turned it round I could be there. I didn’t know you were going to Dulcie’s.’
‘Oh yes. Big do,’ said Veneering. ‘Party for some cousin. We’ll walk together, then. Are you ready?’
Feathers was wearing a magnificent twenty-year-old double-breasted three-piece suit. All his working life he had been called Filth not only because of the old joke (Failed In London Try Hong Kong) but because nobody had ever seen him other than immaculate: scrubbed, polished, barbered, manicured, brushed, combed, perfect. At any moment of his life Feathers could have been presented to the Queen.
‘Are you ready?’ he asked.
‘I’ll take the anorak off,’ said Veneering, his scruffy old rival who now lived next door, ‘when we get there. Don’t you need a coat?’
‘I have my umbrella,’ said Feathers.
‘Oh yes, I could borrow one of your umbrellas. Thanks.’ And Veneering stepped in from the downpour bringing some of it with him. He squelched over to the Benares pillar and started poking about, coming up with a delicate pink parasol with a black tassel.
Both men regarded it.
‘No,’ said Feathers. ‘That’s a lady’s parasol. Betty’s.’