by Patrick Gale
‘Sally, if you don’t mind.’ Dr Pertwee took a large iron key from her bag. ‘The lock’s a little stiff. You may have to jiggle it.’
Sally jumped out, unlocked the gates and Edward drove in. Brambles dragged cruelly along the car’s painted flanks. What had been a steep gravel drive was almost buried beneath weeds and moss. He ground to a halt rather than battle on.
‘When were you last here?’ he asked, astonished.
‘Oh,’ the old woman said airily, waving a hand, ‘Years’ ago, now. It was with Bridget Carson. I remember her car was very new and she was most concerned about it overheating so we drove at a snail’s pace. It must have been at least five years before the war, anyway: Let’s leave the car down here and walk up.’
Sally rejoined them and she and Edward walked up the hillock with Dr Pertwee between them, shielding her from the vicious lashing of thorny stems.
‘You’re right to talk of chapter houses,’ Dr Pertwee said. ‘The chapter house at Wells was said to be the inspiration, along with the Medici chapel in Florence because the designers had recently completed the Grand Tour. Personally I have always subscribed to its complete originality. The architects were women, you see, so people have always been at pains to dismiss the whole project as somehow derivative. My five-times-great aunt and her unmarried niece they were. Women designing buildings was unheard of then. It’s pretty rare now. Men usually build in squares, of course. Assertive squares and self-important rectangles. Domes and circles have always had a suspect, popish and distinctly female air to them – one thinks of the Radcliffe Camera, and the follies at Stowe – all very well, but hardly suitable for home and family. Even the British Library’s circle is contained and mastered by rectangles – and St Paul’s and St Peter’s – like inspiration brought to heel by rationality.’
They climbed up a short flight of steps to reach the front door. This was built into a gothic arch to echo the mossy, gothic windows let into the walls at even intervals. Dr Pertwee produced a second key from her bag and, with a helping push from Edward’s shoulder, let them in.
A small panelled lobby led to a surprising galleried hall which reached up to the second storey’s painted dome. Rooms led off the hall, at equidistant points, like slices of a cake. Their arrangement was echoed in the lower-ceilinged rooms above and by the store-rooms, kitchen and larders in the basement. The circularity was not entirely fanciful. Two single women, who had spent the greater part of their fortune on building costs, could not afford much in the way of staff or fuel. So, the interconnecting rooms followed the course of the sun. A breakfast room led to a morning room to a sitting room to a dining room to a study. Only one fire at a time would have to be made up, its hot coals preceding the inhabitants in a lidded brass bucket on their quiet daily passage through the succession of chambers. Rooms dictated the pattern of their day as strictly as the motions of sun and moon did the hours of worship in a convent. A housemaid’s labour was halved at every turn, with cunningly disguised storage areas for linen, candles, fuel and cleaning equipment. A dumb waiter brought food by the directest route from the kitchen to a tiny servery off the dining room. The enlightened architects had even thought to let large, low windows into the kitchen quarters to give their staff an equal share in the view of the garden.
Dr Pertwee explained that she had not lived in the place for over fifteen years and that some distant cousins had long since made inroads into her stocks of furniture. What remained – some of it beautiful, if battered – was dusty and cobwebbed. There was a sweet smell of damp everywhere and a chill, despite the warmth outside. But the spirit of the place survived; inspired and invigorating.
Edward was enchanted, as he had never been by the grand country houses to which Thomas had taken him in the surrounding counties. Dr Pertwee opened an old steamer trunk that had been left in the hall, and began to lift out the antiquated dresses it contained to show Sally. The women laughed and gasped over the old fabrics, holding up their beaded and glistening surfaces like so many precious relics.
Edward left them and climbed the narrow flight of stairs that curved up to the floor above. Despite the overgrown shrubs outside, the house was intensely sunny. Light spilled into the hall from a grimy lantern window at the dome’s apex. Clearly rain did too; there were greenish damp patches on the surrounding plasterwork and what appeared to be ferns growing on some of the lantern’s glazing bars. He walked around the gallery, smiling at the crudely painted cherubs and clouds overhead and peering through open doors into sparsely furnished bedrooms. He investigated a bathroom whose massive fittings, including a free-standing, claw-footed bath, appeared to date from before the Great War. He played a few, wheezing bars of a Lutheran chorale on a harmonium that stood, incongruously, on the other side of the room, then he turned to walk around the gallery. He looked down on the women and ran a curious finger along the thick handrail of the balustrade, revealing a rich mahogany gloss beneath the dust.
The last bedroom, the same off-square shape as the others only narrower, contained a spartan child’s bed with a rudimentary cast-iron frame. Edward sat on it. The springs complained and the yellowing ticking of the mattress felt clammily cold beneath his hands. Sally’s voice exclaimed over something, and was followed by Dr Pertwee’s, lower and persistent. He rose and was about to join them again when he saw that the pretty Gothic window had been spoilt by iron bars, rammed into the window frame on the outside.
Suddenly he felt the presence of Miriam, more strongly than he had in years. He stumbled back on to the mattress, oppressed by successive impulses of grief and a bleak unmanning fear. It was as though he could feel his sister’s mind within his own. She was alive. All at once, he knew she was alive somewhere, and he had an overwhelming, hideous sense that she was suffering. He shut his eyes tight as if trying to rid them of painful dust. He forced himself to concentrate on real things, on the chill of the mattress, the undisturbed smell of the room, the clattering of birds in the ivy outside, and gradually the palpable sense of her slipped away from him. He reopened his eyes and, blinking, looked afresh at the room, like a man who had woken with a start but had yet to perceive what had roused him.
Sally’s voice, laughing, was coming along the gallery.
‘Edward? Guess what? Edward? Where are you hiding, silly?’ She appeared in the doorway and saw in an instant that something was wrong.
Her voice quickened, ‘Edward, what is it?’
‘Nothing. I … I just got a bit breathless, that’s all. I think it’s the cold and the dust.’
He stood, taking her offered hands. ‘I’m fine. Honestly Doctor.’ He smiled at her, kissed her worried pout. ‘Let’s go down. This house is bizarre.’
‘This house is ours.’
‘What?’
‘This house is yours.’ Dr Pertwee had climbed the stairs to meet them.
‘Don’t look so shocked, Edward!’ Sally laughed.
‘Or properly speaking, this house is hers,’ Dr Pertwee continued. ‘Shall we go outside and see just how bad the garden’s got? You see, Edward,’ she said as they left the house, ‘The Roundel has always belonged to women. The idea was that it should pass into the hands of the first daughter of each generation, with priority being given to any that remained unmarried. Both my brothers were killed back in 1917, so I’ve no family to leave it to.’
‘You mentioned cousins,’ said Edward, as they passed out through the jungle of tree-high tangles that had once been a rose garden. Dr Pertwee pulled a long face.
‘My aunt had a depressingly respectable son who sired a clutch of depressingly respectable children. They are amply provided for by their father and I feel they are less than kin to me.’ She paused for a moment to dead-head a spray of browning blooms. ‘They live in Surrey,’ she added, as though this explained everything.
‘But it’s yours,’ he said, looking up at the weathered bricks, the cracked windowsills. ‘Surely you still have some need of it?’ What had seemed a charmingly battered folly
was acquiring by the minute a high flavour of onerous responsibility.
‘On the contrary, dear boy, I shall be glad to rid myself of such a heavy burden. Property can make one feel profoundly guilty. This poor garden!’ She tut-tutted and vainly tucked a fistful of clematis back into the branches of an old, dead apple tree. The knotted hank of foliage and dark pink flowers swung back into Edward’s path before he could pass. He ducked beneath it. Dr Pertwee was leading them down the hillock, on the opposite side from the entrance to the house. They emerged from the jungle into long grass. It reached the old woman’s waist but she walked on regardless, trampling a path in which he and Sally could follow.
‘I shall be able to rest content in my retirement in the knowledge that two young, vigorous people are living here. You don’t have to transform the place. You don’t have to become its slaves. Just enjoy it. Love it. I’ve neglected it so.’
‘But surely,’ Edward called after her from the rear. ‘Surely you could sell it? A place of such historic interest … It must be valuable.’
‘I don’t want to sell it,’ Dr Pertwee countered. ‘Property out here is worth nothing and besides, I think there was something in the term of my unmarried aunt’s will that forbade me to put the place on the market. My solicitor could tell you.’ She stopped and turned to face him. ‘Don’t you want Sally to inherit all this? And your daughters?’ she asked, waving a hand at the garden as she fixed him with her quizzical stare.
‘Oh yes. Of course,’ he stammered. ‘It’s only that your kindness … I should say … I’m most embarrassed, Doctor.’
A bewitching smile broke out on her wrinkled face. She told him, as though it were the easiest thing in the world, “Well don’t be.’
As they walked on, Sally reached blindly behind her, took his hand and squeezed it with controlled excitement.
The garden was not circular, as had at first appeared. At the road side it was rounded, following the line of the hillock and the house, but to the rear it stretched away to meet a stream that ran beneath a group of trees; rustling poplar and trailing willow. Beneath the surface, wigs of emerald weed shook in the current. Sally sighed with open pleasure and sat on the bank. Edward spread his jacket, inside-out, on the grass and helped Dr Pertwee lower herself to sit on it. He sat a few feet from them both, his back against a willow trunk. On the other side of the stream a few more trees clustered, then the garden gave way to drifting acres of fenland crops. The first two fields, Dr Pertwee explained, belonged to The Roundel and were let out to a local farmer for a nominal rent. The view would never be spoilt.
‘Of course, I shall have to go through the motions of adopting you,’ she told Sally. ‘In the event of the cousins kicking up a stink. I don’t think they will, though. As I say, they live in Surrey. A place like this would be anathema to them. Too many draughts. Too much dust. Too old too, probably.’
‘What would your parents say to that, Sally?’ Edward asked.
Sally had taken off her shoes and was dipping her white feet in the water. Roused from her child-like absorption, she turned, wrinkling her eyes against the sunlight.
‘Mum would understand. She’s a realistic soul.’
‘And your father?’ Dr Pertwee asked.
‘He’d do as she told him.’
‘So,’ Dr Pertwee told Edward, after a thoughtful pause, ‘you’ll be gaining not one mother, but two.’
On the drive back into town, there was little conversation, but occasionally Edward would look at Dr Pertwee or catch Sally’s eye in the rear-view mirror and would be given a comfortable smile in return. It was as though they both felt the need to reassure him.
‘All will be well now,’ their smiles told him. ‘We have everything under control.’
When they arrived back at Dr Pertwee’s rooms, he stepped out to open the car door but sensed that Sally wanted to lead her back inside without him, so as to enjoy a moment of private thanks.
As Edward drove her back to Wenborough, he asked, ‘How will we manage to live?’
‘Way out there, you mean?’ She laughed at his simplicity.
‘Yes.’
‘Oh. I’ll find something. I’ve convinced Bastard Graeme to do the decent thing and make enquiries among his GP contacts. There should be several out there somewhere. If we’re lucky there’ll be an old one with a comfy rural practice, looking to retire.’
‘But what about me?’
‘You?’ She laughed again. ‘Well you, mein Lieber, are going to leave your bookshop and beaver away in perfect peace at becoming a celebrated composer.’
10
Their wedding day dawned to thundery showers and proved just as awkward as Edward had secretly feared. Sally’s mother had her way, predictably. The marriage was in church and the bride wore dazzling white. The complication even fastidious Thomas had overlooked was Edward’s being a Jew. Thomas had successfully wangled them a wedding in Tompion college chapel and the chaplain insisted on having the couple in for some religious instruction. Once he discovered that Sally was a doctor of medicine, not a specialist in botany or Old Norse, he evidently thought better of issuing the groom with his usual pamphlet on godly procreation. Sally and Edward had already laughed over a copy lent them by one of Edward’s contemporaries who had married while still a student. The chaplain got his own back, however, when Edward mentioned his Jewishness, first by urging Edward to be baptised and when that failed, prompting him to admit that his Jewishness meant little to him in religious terms and that he no longer practised. It was all one to Edward, or so he thought; but, after a boisterous evening on the town, he spent his last night under Thomas’s roof tossing and turning through drunken, morbid dreams in which long-faced relatives accused him of denouncing faith and family.
‘Do we mean so little to you?’ his mother asked. ‘It’s not the religion, it’s the principle.’
‘The boy throws us out with the garbage,’ his grandmother spat, ‘to marry what? A penniless Schickse. A bloodletter in petticoats!’
That the figures in his dreams were all now dead did little to comfort him.
Having feared the congregation would all be on Sally’s side he was surprised to see, through the painful mist of his hangover, how many friends turned out to support him. He and Sally had not sent out formal invitations, but Thomas had taken his position as best man seriously and been busy on Edward’s behalf.
The social gulf was all too visible. With his foreign ear, Edward could hear all the more acutely the difference in accents. On one side, the women wore larger, louder hats, made larger, louder gestures to catch one another’s attention and necks were craned to peer at unfamiliar fan vaulting and stained glass. The professors’ wives and recent graduates on the other side contented themselves with quiet smiles and the occasional discreet murmur as they peered over prayerbooks, and out of eye-corners at the bride’s people.
Deprived of the chance to impose a humiliating baptism on the groom, the chaplain had pointedly chosen as his lesson a passage from St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, concerning the spiritual problems posed by marriage to a heathen. Glancing sideways, Sally caught an unmistakable smirk of triumph on her mother’s face. When at last they were taking their vows and she was in a position to meet Edward’s eye, she tried to communicate the aching urge she felt to take him far away. Unbeknown to her, he felt exactly the same, seeing her serious and uncomfortable in the virginal white that had been forced upon her by older, cynical hands.
At the reception – tea, sandwiches and starchy wedding cake in a large, first floor room across the quadrangle from the chapel – social divisions were crudely emphasised again. Sally introduced her mother to Thomas, her father to the Master of Tompion, her cousin who had once played the violin to a friend of Edward’s who still did; but conversation froze in each instance. Her mother, father and cousin soon scurried back to the rowdy camp her family had established around a great aunt on a window seat. Hip flasks circulated. Cups of tea acquired an oily sheen of bra
ndy. Dr Pertwee effectively established a rival court from an armchair on the other side of the room, following a painfully awkward discussion with Sally’s parents, in which she said, with disarming candour, that she hoped they didn’t think her wedding present of The Roundel was intended to upstage any of their own gifts.
‘It’s all right,’ Edward murmured, squeezing Sally’s hand. ‘Just think, it’s your last day as theirs. Tomorrow’s your first day as mine!’
She felt obscurely disappointed at this fleeting reference to her as property but grinned it off. She had been to numerous weddings over the last fifteen years – everything from formal village church affairs with page boy and bridesmaids, to hastily witnessed unions in registry offices and shipboard hospitals, but only now did she understand. The reception speech saw about gaining sons and daughters was a lie as well as a cliché. The wedding ceremony isolated the new couple, excluding the families and social baggage they had spent their young lives acquiring. We are sufficient to ourselves, the vows implied, we will thrive without any of you. But the slow sentimentality of the parting irked her. In China, Thomas had told her, the bride’s family went into mourning. She became dead to them as soon she entered a different household. That was calling a spade a spade.
‘I want to run away,’ she thought. ‘Now,’ as Edward steered an old woman towards her. She was wearing black, and an unseasonal fur collar that matched her heavy, unplucked eyebrows. Her hand, when Sally took it, was all bone and loose skin. She gave off a strange sweet smell, an unhappy blend of mothball and tuberose.
‘Darling, this is Rosa. Rosa Holzer. A cousin of my mother’s, you remember? She and Isaac used to have me to stay in London during the school holidays.’
‘My dear,’ said Rosa. Behind her smile, her gimlet eyes searched Sally’s face as they might look for cracks in cut-price porcelain.
‘Hello. How kind of you to come all this way.’