by Brian Aldiss
It was not a promising start to the evening.
Squire talked easily to Noel Roderick Linwood about safe parish matters, such as the imminent closure of the local post office, as they sat in the Linwoods’ drawing-room in St Giles House, from which the Linwood boys had been ushered, Alf resisting every inch of the way. A white square of Lego on the hearthrug marked his passing.
Having forcibly ejected her sons in deference to her father-in-law’s bidding, Jean Linwood moved in and out between drawing-room and kitchen, putting the final touches to dinner, in the scents of which the Tebbutts tried not to seem interested. Teresa Squire sat sideways in her armchair, resting her naked right elbow in her left hand, the better to support her chin as she gazed at the ceiling above her husband. Her body language clearly stated that she was not available at present for conversation. Mike Linwood stood by a window, subdued in the presence of an employer who was also his father’s honoured guest. What he needs, Tebbutt thought, is a set of worry beads.
Tebbutt himself was not in the best of tempers. He answered tersely the low-spoken comments of Ruby, who sat next to him. His mood had not improved when he parked their Hillman next to Squire’s Jaguar. Nor was the sight of Mike – who made no attempt to speak to him – calculated to improve matters.
He turned to the woman on his other side, who sat remote on a stiff-backed chair, occasionally brushing an imaginary hair from her cheek. This scraggy old person was in her eighties, her face as lined as a moorland track. She wore a straggly dark wig, crisp and untidy as bracken after a heath fire, which gave her a wild look; yet she sat on her hands, impaling them under bony buttocks, like a child told to behave. This was Noel’s sister, introduced as Auntie April, over from Blakeney for the evening.
‘This is an interesting house,’ Tebbutt said to her by way of opening a conversation he might later regret.
‘Priests once lived here,’ Auntie April said. ‘I can smell their garments.’
‘I think that’s supper cooking. Rabbit, possibly.’
‘Long ago, young man. Their vestcements. Hidden by centuries. Still visible to those of us who are gifted with second sight.’
Noel Linwood overheard at least a part of this exchange. He broke off his conversation with Squire, to point a finger at his sister and shout a warning to Tebbutt. ‘Barking mad … That’s her. Beware! Barking mad.’ Raising the finger, he attempted to bore a hole into his temple while rolling his eyes, to give some indication of how mad barking mad really was.
Auntie April turned the upper part of her plank-like body towards Tebbutt. ‘My brother spent much of his life in Iraq. Speaking a foreign tongue. Under a curse. Babylonian.’ Her large violet eyes, the pupils of which were ringed by pale moons, looked intensely through Tebbutt without holding any anticipation of a response.
Teresa Squire, overhearing this exchange, broke from her boredom to tender, in a low voice, a sentence across the room. ‘I’ve often speculated about the motivations of people who spend long periods of their lives voluntarily outside their native country: whether it could be an indicator of some specific struggle in their inner make-up. An Oedipal conflict of some kind. It would be interesting to know.’
‘Yes,’ said Ruby. ‘My mother longs to go to the seaside again.’
There that morsel of conversation died. Teresa returned to her impenetrable distance, chin locked in pale be-ringed hand.
Tortured by the aroma from the kitchen, Tebbutt tried to decide whether by refusing to eat he might make Mike Linwood feel guilty. He wondered if such a course of action would retrieve his three hundred pounds. Then he remembered an old Norfolk saying, perhaps first heard in the Bluebell, from whence all wisdom flowed: that when invited out to dine, one should always eat as much as possible. If the host was a friend, he would be flattered to think his wife’s cooking was appreciated; if an enemy, his larder would be the more depleted.
Squire and his wife were in their late fifties. A certain beauty and grandeur hovered about Teresa’s expensively coiffured head. She appeared ready at any moment to have her portrait painted. Ruby was studying her with interest, as the first prosperous woman she had met in a long while.
As for Squire, he still retained the presence that had made him in the seventies a successful presenter of a long series of TV documentaries on contemporary culture. He was now president of a distinguished art gallery in London. This evening, he wore a comfortable pepper-and-salt tweed suit; a heavy digital watch on his left wrist was his only adornment. Tebbutt experienced a surge of envy, regarding him, as they all rose at Jean’s request to move to the dining-room. He saw as they followed Squire and Noel how Noel shadowed his guest, his hand cupped under, but not quite touching, Squire’s elbow.
‘I’m ravenous,’ Teresa said companionably to Ruby. ‘It smells gorgeous.’
‘Animals had to be made dead by shotgun and chopper,’ said Auntie April. ‘God’s will, mighty inventor of shotgun and chopper.’
Noel’s head whipped round angrily. ‘Barking mad,’ he said.
‘Arab boys,’ Auntie April replied. ‘Roderick Randy.’
As Jean indicated their places, Tebbutt observed that the portrait of Noel Roderick Linwood which had previously hung in the kitchen was now installed over the mantelpiece; his heavy painted countenance peered down at the table. The narrow room faced north over a stretch of lawn on which light was rapidly fading, to sheds beyond and the Hartisham almshouses in the distance. It was cold and stuffy in the room, as if it had not been used for a while. A dim electric fire, with two orange bars stretched under a curved hood, glowed in the grate. Tall white candles created a sparkle on the table. The dog, Thelonius, was shooed out of his hiding-place.
‘No mercy to those of lesser breed,’ commented Auntie April. ‘Dogs. Wogs.’
As soon as they were settled at table, Mike circulated, pouring wine.
This is going to be hell, Ray told himself, nudging Ruby not to drink too much. She turned pointedly to Noel and asked him if he liked goats.
‘There are enough difficulties and annoyances, inextricably part of normal life, without encumbering oneself with goats,’ Noel said, lifting his hands to sketch two horns on his forehead, while making a moue of dislike.
‘Particularly,’ Mike said, pausing by his father’s side, ‘if those difficulties and annoyances are self-created, eh, Father?’
‘Goats are great destroyers of the Middle East environment, dear boy.’
Without replying, Mike made his round of the table, pouring no wine into his own glass. When Jean entered with a samphire appetizer – ‘spécialité de la région,’ intoned Noel – Mike said grace.
‘May the Lord make us truly grateful,’ repeated Auntie April in a stage whisper. She gave a cackle. ‘What’s truly? We’d die first.’
‘She’s woofing mad,’ Noel told Squire, confidentially.
After the samphire, Jean brought in a grand tureen, apologizing as she ladled out the soup. ‘It’s an old Norfolk recipe I got from Mrs Price down at the cottages. Terribly simple, but I hope you’ll like it, Lady Teresa.’
‘Mm, and simples in it,’ said Teresa, sampling.
‘What’s it called?’ Noel asked. He was generally on bad terms with his daughter-in-law, but the hatchet had been buried for the occasion.
‘“Cottage Soup”.’ Jean’s dark hair, swept up in horns on either side of a central parting, curled down over her cheeks, almost concealing both eyes as she glanced swiftly at Noel.
Noel roared with laughter at her answer. For a moment Jean caught Ray’s eye through her ambush of hair. It was her first acknowledgement of his presence since the Tebbutts’ arrival.
‘These wholesome old country traditions cling on despite what we call progress,’ Noel said, sipping at the herby mixture. ‘There’s a treasury of wisdom stored up in cottages round here.’
He addressed this remark, like most of his remarks, to Squire, who asked, ‘What sort of things are you thinking of, Noel, apart from recipes for excellent soup? F
ennel in here somewhere, I believe.’
‘Oh, I don’t know … Well, even in quite humble homes you’ll see as you pass by little racks of books standing on the window-ledge. While the rest of the country’s turning more and more to videos of sex and violence, in cottages up and down the land people are still enjoying a good read.’ He dropped his spoon to gesture grandly with his right hand, perhaps in unconscious imitation of Shakespeare or Milton holding forth.
‘Harms the books,’ said silent Auntie April. ‘Sunlight. Bad for them. Yellow. Deterioration. Decay.’
‘Mad as a hatter …’
‘Those books you praise are often nothing but trash, Father,’ Mike said. ‘Nothing at all worth reading. Perhaps an old San Michele here or there, mainly trash. Agatha Christie.’
‘I’m not sure I agree with what I take to be your basic thesis,’ Squire said, addressing Noel. ‘That is, that the cottages of England – rather a miscellaneous lot, when you think about it – are not repositories of anything but a trivializing culture. Visit car-boot sales hereabouts and see if you can find anything but old LPs of sixties pops, or Edmundo Ross on shellac, or paperbacks of the frothiest of romantic novelists. It’s a sad feature of lower culture that it does not develop and reject, clinging only to what it first came to enjoy.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t exactly expect Henry James in your average council house, would you now?’ Noel said, giving a bark of laughter. ‘Nor would I buy James if I saw him. Can’t stand his stuff. Personally, I don’t frequent car-boot sales. Sorry. You know what Rebecca West said about James. “With sentences as immense as the granite blocks of the pyramids, he sets about telling a story the size of a henhouse …” Words to that effect.’
‘Reading M. R. James,’ Auntie April said, half-turning her corpse-like torso in Tebbutt’s direction. ‘Creepy stories. Makes your flesh creep. Runes. Ruins. As things are.’
‘Madwoman at the table,’ Noel said. ‘Apologies. Barking mad.’
‘Circumcision,’ Auntie April said. ‘The back entrance.’
‘The great intellectual movements of the last two centuries were hardly generated in cottages,’ Squire said. ‘Hardly even filtered down there.’
Mike said, in a timorous voice, ‘But who causes it “to rain on the earth where no man is, on the wilderness wherein there is no man”? That’s how God sees the poor …’
His bid to enter the conversation was unsuccessful, although his wife smiled down the table at him, nodding in a kindly way.
Having finished his soup, Ray felt bold enough to say, ‘People in cottages are too hard-pressed to earn a crust to bother about anything else.’
He was surprised at how warmly Squire agreed. ‘Exactly so. The poor people of England have always existed on the breadline, often in acute distress. Moreover, my belief is that the poor in this country were never worse off than when the great ideas that have formed our times were being enunciated – over their lice-infested heads, as it were.’
Ray was unsure what ideas Squire was talking about. Perhaps this showed in his face. Perhaps Squire was glad to speak to someone other than Noel, currently crumbling his bread over a wide area of table.
‘You need idleness in order to formulate new ideas. Of course, idleness is a naughty word today; we associate it with the even naughtier word, unemployment. Nor am I sure that new ideas are exactly what are required at present. We need time to recover from a bombardment of ideas.’ He spoke lightly and amusedly, looking from face to face as Jean collected up their soup bowls.
‘It was only in the eighteenth century that men and women ceased to hark back to previous civilizations for models for their own. Such men as Gibbon, and Montesquieu, in whom Gibbon found inspiration, came to regard their world as not being in decline – a new idea in itself. Far from being in decline, the Enlightenment was seen as at least the equal of the past. Indeed, wealth and knowledge were on the increase, according to Gibbon.’
‘Monk Gibbon. Very creepy. The Nun,’ said Auntie April, shivering. ‘Something grindling in the woodwork.’
‘Crackers!’
‘This is another Gibbon, Auntie April. Edward Gibbon,’ Squire said. ‘The old prevailing notion of a past Golden Age was banished at last, though it’s true the French court had its cult of simpering shepherds and shepherdesses. The myth that the past is always better – “There were giants in the Earth in those days” – still lingers among the uneducated. A fallacy, particularly where the rural poor are concerned.
‘Progress, to the élite of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, meant simply that such increased benefits as wealth and knowledge should be controlled by rational minds. You see the idea cropping up in Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, for instance. That was the belief, the vision, powering the Enlightenment and such manifestations of it as Diderot’s great Encyclopédie.’
Lady Teresa, who wore a short-sleeved dress in a twenties style, leaned a bare elbow on the table and said, ‘Of course, Diderot also wrote novels once regarded as naughty. He wrote a book called The Nun, Auntie April, La Religieuse.’
‘Terribly creepy,’ Auntie April said, brushing the imaginary hair from her cheek. ‘Terrified of nuns. Dormitories, the vestibule of life. Chastity departs from there.’
‘Dumb and daft. Have to excuse her.’
‘Paediatry and puggaree,’ his sister muttered, looking down at her lap. ‘Foreign bodies. Ishtar and dusky bewitching hags …’
Jean entered bearing a large rabbit pie, sweltering under a bronzed pastry crust with a fluted edge, and set it before her husband to serve. Everyone admired it.
‘You’ll like this, Sir Thomas,’ Noel said genially. ‘Jean’s rabbit pie takes a lot of beating. Michael, let’s have more wine. Wake up.’ Noticing Ray taking a deep gulp at his glass, he observed, ‘I see you Muslims have adapted to alcohol. Well done.’
‘Is this another cottage recipe?’ Teresa asked Jean.
‘Rabbit pie is traditional in these parts,’ Jean said. ‘But this recipe owes more to Mrs Beeton. As well as rabbit, it contains chunks of pork, bacon, and forcemeat.’
‘We have an old receipt at Pippet Hall. A delicious pie. It includes onion, some chopped steak, and I don’t know what else. Very fattening.’
‘You’ve had trouble at Pippet Hall,’ Noel said. ‘Several sackings and a suicide, I hear, yes?’
Mike Linwood spoke up. ‘Yes, poor Billy Lamb killed himself, rest his soul. I knew him quite well – worked with him in fact. I phoned Jean directly I heard the dreadful news.’
Helpings of the rabbit pie were passed down the table. Auntie April took hers and stared at it as if transfixed before prodding it with a finger.
Squire proceeded to explain that the vegetable-and fruit-packing business he had established in his grounds on the Wells road had been losing money for some while. Early profit had turned to loss following the import of cheap fruit from the European Community. He had had to give five men a golden handshake. For two more he had found other work about the estate. Billy Lamb was one of those receiving a golden handshake.
‘He had another job in prospect,’ Squire said. ‘Unfortunately, he also had problems with his lady friend.’
‘That was Margy Sulston, who once worked at the Ostrich,’ Tebbutt said knowingly, remembering what he had been told.
‘What was the problem?’ Ruby asked, looking at her husband with raised eyebrows, suspicious of where this information had come from. She signalled to him to drink less. He passed her the potatoes.
It was Teresa Squire who answered Ruby. ‘After Billy’s death, I drove over to see the girl’s mother. Well, Margy is scarcely a girl any more. Twenty-nine, I believe. According to the mother, Margy was desperately in love with Billy. She found love poems in her room. However, poor Margy faced Billy with a psychological dilemma. She had no taste for the mechanics of love-making.’
‘What are they, for heaven’s sake?’ Ruby said, over a forkful of rabbit. ‘You mean vibrators?’
&nb
sp; ‘I mean the sort of condition from which Frederic Chopin suffered. Cold when it came to the actual physical transactions of sex. The ups and downs of the business.’
Her quick eyes caught – as did Ray’s – the glance Jean gave Mike. As if aware her look had been intercepted, Jean asked how the pie was. All agreed on its excellence, and of the succulence of the meat.
After a moment, Teresa continued, evidently fascinated by the case. ‘Some took Billy’s side, some Margy’s. I believe he was rough with her on occasions, calling her frigid. The engagement was twice broken off.’
‘How did she take the news?’
‘Very badly. Margy’s run away to a relation in Coventry. Her mother cried a lot. She said that Margy had had treatment from an old gypsy woman in Swaffham market. I dread to think what.’ She paused. ‘The mother was hiding something. My belief is Margy was possibly the victim of incest as a small girl. Her father’s a known bad lot.’
‘Common as crosswords,’ said Auntie April, croakingly sotto voce. ‘Iceni insects. I could tell you …’
‘Perhaps it’s as well that people like that don’t breed, tragic though the death may be,’ Noel Linwood said grandly, with another of his gestures.
‘Presumably Margy will abstain from “breeding”, as you call it, on a voluntary basis,’ Teresa said. ‘I would prefer to see the poor woman receive proper psychiatric assistance. Tom and I are trying to get in touch with her.’
A communication of agreements flowed between the Squires, both of whom had now given a polite snub to Noel Linwood’s opinions.
Watching them opposite him, tackling their full plates with relish, Tebbutt was torn between wishing to attack Squire and wishing to fawn on him, this embodiment of wealth and knowledge, the qualities on which he had been eloquent. Possibly people had always felt so divided when confronted by the lord of the manor.
He hoped in some way to challenge Squire so that he betrayed himself. Squire had expressed little sorrow over the death of Billy Lamb; on the other hand, to his credit, he had made no display of false remorse. And Lady Teresa, the gilded hussy with her bare elbows, she had at least driven over to see Billy’s girlfriend and was trying to help her. Do-gooders. They could bloody afford to do good. He wanted to hear Squire speak again, though he felt himself too ignorant to argue with the man.