The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories

by Oliver, Reggie

  She looked older than Gordon, perhaps because, being fair-skinned and blonde, the wrinkles were more in evidence. A chiffon scarf was elegantly swathed around her neck to conceal the ravages of time, but she still had a good figure. She smoked a cigarette in an amber holder which seemed to me the height of sophistication. She had a low voice with a slight rasp in it, no doubt the product of too many cigarettes. Was she beautiful? She had style and poise which gave an impression of beauty.

  ‘So,’ she said, subjecting me to uncomfortably close scrutiny. ‘Gordon was right. You are a good looker. One of these days you’re going to break all the girls’ hearts. What do you think of that?’ I smiled. I was twelve, an immature twelve at that, and the idea meant nothing to me. She saw that I was confused, so she began to ask me about Stone Court. She had been well informed by her husband about the subject, though the combination of his prejudice and her imagination had distorted the picture somewhat. I was happy to set her right; and she was content to allow me to do so. Presently Gordon came out of the house with two large gins and tonic, which they always called ‘G and T’s’, and a Britvic orange juice for me.

  I remember that we seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time drinking before we set off to the pub for lunch. I remembered that at the pub there was Prawn Cocktail and Duck á l’Orange on the menu, which was quite daring for a country pub in those days. I remember that after lunch we came back to Halton House and that Freda taught me how to play mah-jong. I remember how we left it rather late to drive back to Stone Court, and that Gordon got into some trouble because of it.

  I remember most of all that I was happy with them. Freda and Gordon were childless and had not acquired the parent’s habit of looking on all children as creatures to be kept out of harm’s way and organised. They treated me as a young adult, rather gravely, except when we were all sharing a joke together, which was often. Perhaps it was also the case that by being childless Gordon and Freda had not entirely grown up themselves. I remember thinking how odd it was that I was much more at ease with them than with my parents.

  When, later on in the term, my mother and father paid one of their rare visits to England and to me at school I insisted that they should take Freda and Gordon out to lunch. The four got on well together, though my mother and father, both in their ways highly intelligent as well as intuitive, had their reservations. My mother thought that Gordon was ‘an absolute charmer’, but that Freda was rather ‘brittle’. I asked what she meant by the word, but either she could not explain, or I could not understand. My father’s reactions were different. He found Freda entirely sympathetic, but though he acknowledged Gordon’s charm, he said he felt uneasy about him. ‘I’m not sure you can believe a hundred percent what he says. He told me he was “in Spits mostly” during the war and based at Biggin Hill. All very glamorous. I’m not so sure.’

  ‘He was,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen an old photograph of him in RAF uniform at their home.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean he was in Spitfires though, does it?’ said my father. ‘I think he’s a bit of a romancer.’

  Despite misgivings my mother and father came to an arrangement with Gordon and Freda that they should take me out to lunch on one or two week-ends during term-time. In this way my parents relieved some of their guilt at being so distant; and no doubt my non-driving aunt felt happier too.

  As I got to know Gordon and Freda some things about their life puzzled me. They behaved not as I had seen other married couples behave, but more like friends. They chattered away to each other and laughed and teased, but they very rarely touched. I was surprised to find that Freda and Gordon had separate bedrooms. There was something odd too about Halton House. It seemed only partly furnished, and what furniture there was, with the exception of a few small pieces, was battered and undistinguished. I noticed that several of the rooms in the house were empty. I later discovered that Freda and Gordon were not the owners of Halton House, but merely its tenants.

  One Saturday, on my second or third visit to them from Stone Court, Freda sent me upstairs to her room to fetch some cigarettes. On the dressing table where I had been told her silver cigarette case was to be found were two photographs. One was of a beautiful blonde woman in WAAF uniform, taken obviously in the war. It took me a few moments to realise that it was Freda. The features were hers, but the expression was not one I recognised. It was gentle, wistfully happy, full of quiet joy. Freda could be cheerful and high-spirited, sometimes noisily so when she had had a gin or two, but beatific calm was not one of her moods. There was a restlessness about her even at the best of times.

  Beside this, in an identical silver frame and taken by the same photographer, was the picture of a man in RAF uniform. It was not Gordon. This man had crinkly fair hair and the slightly soft good looks of a 1930s matinee idol. His expression was similar to Freda’s, but something was lacking. The wistful romance was there, but not the joy. He seemed to be staring out of his golden youth into a very uncertain future.

  I wondered whether the man might be her brother, but the kinship of those two faces had nothing to do with physical resemblance. I stored the two images in my imagination and went downstairs with the silver cigarette case. An elegant thing, made by Cartier, with Freda’s monogram on the lid picked out in diamonds, it evoked for me an entire vanished world of cocktail bars, luxury liners and Hispano Suiza limousines.

  At the end of that Summer term Mr Capstick suggested to my parents that I was clever enough to sit for the scholarship exam to Winchester, my father’s old school. This idea found favour. The ambitions of a father for his only son and of Stone Court to improve their honours board coincided. I was bewildered as I had no sense of being more than slightly above average intelligence. Moreover I had no desire to be, because I was aware that exceptional gifts carried their own burden of responsibilities which included the obligation to work hard. But I was also timid and pliable, so I fell in with their plans.

  The idea was that I should sit the scholarship exam the following Summer and, with this in mind, my parents decided that I should have some extra coaching for the last four weeks of the Summer holidays. They proposed that I should stay with Freda and Gordon and that I should go over to Stone Court on two days a week for Latin and Greek with Mr Capstick. The rest of my studies were to be supervised by Gordon.

  Before this was settled Mr Capstick wrote to my father saying that Gordon Barrymore was a quite unsuitable person for me to stay with and that I should stay with him and Mrs Capstick at Stone Court. Though not by nature strong-willed, I expressed an adamant opposition to this suggestion, and my parents were neither able nor really inclined to overrule me. My father said that it was impertinent of Mr Capstick to interfere with his plans, while my mother murmured something about the Barrymores needing the money. This surprised me. I had always assumed that because Gordon and Freda had two cars (hers was a mini), lived in a splendid house and ate out at good restaurants they must be very rich. My parents lived well within their means, and so, I thought, did everyone we knew.

  I arrived back in England after my truncated Summer holiday with a sense of anticipation and adventure. I was going to be with friends; the educational aspect of my stay did not bother me much. I suppose I must have done some academic work that Summer at Halton House, but it is all erased from my memory. On the other hand, I did get to know the Barrymores very well, and that knowledge has stayed with me. The better I came to know them, the stranger their life seemed.

  For such apparently gregarious people they lived a curiously isolated life with few friends. The only ones I met more than once were the Trantings with whom Gordon and Freda played Bridge once a week. I enjoyed these evenings and was allowed to take an intelligent interest in the proceedings with the result that Bridge is the only card game at which I have any proficiency. Tom Tranting was a retired naval Commander, one of those apparently straightforward types who have hidden depths. His wife Venetia, a faded beauty, wrote dull children’s books. Gordon and Freda use
d to apologise to me for them and say that they were ‘a bit of a bore’, but I did not find them boring.

  Once, when we were at their house, I found myself walking in the garden with the Commander. His lawns were immaculate. A characteristic naval neatness determined everything about his domestic arrangements, except his wife, whose occasional waywardness he tolerated with uncomprehending good humour. He asked me several questions about myself to which I gave the shortest answers that courtesy would allow. He did not seem to mind my brevity, but merely nodded, as if he now understood that I was one of those people who did not like to talk about themselves. When he stopped questioning me I had the opportunity to ask him how long he had known the Barrymores.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘So you want to know about your hosts. Well, we got to know them when they took Halton House about six months ago. Apparently they’ve moved about a bit. I like them, but they haven’t made themselves universally popular in the locality.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘This is strictly under your hat, you understand? They don’t fit in. People are terribly stupid about that sort of thing, especially round here. I personally don’t give a damn, but Gordon and Freda sometimes send out the wrong signals. They’re not terribly good at paying their bills sometimes. People don’t like it if you’re a bad payer, and then they see you swanning around in your Jaguar and having expensive meals in restaurants. I suppose that’s unwise, but don’t judge them too harshly. They had a tough war, both of them. I’ll let them tell you about that themselves.’

  Now that I was fully aware of their financial difficulties I began to understand their listless, haphazard approach to household management; their irritation with telephone calls; their frequent nervousness when they saw someone coming up the drive. I also appreciated the tact with which they shielded me from their troubles. As to their ‘tough war’, I learned about that the day after my talk with the Commander.

  On the afternoon of the following day Gordon had to go into Canterbury on some mysterious ‘business’. The sun shone and I was deputised to ‘help Freda with the garden’. Freda’s idea of gardening was to wander about in a large hat, occasionally snipping off dead heads and blowing cigarette smoke at greenfly. There was a gardener who came once a week, but his visits invariably coincided with Gordon and my going out on some ostensibly educational expedition, to Richborough, say, or Walmer Castle.

  This afternoon, Freda’s attempts at gardening were even vaguer than usual. We had had a rather scrappy lunch ‘in’ during which Freda had begun drinking gin and she still had a glass in her hand when we went out into the garden. She was not drunk in the sense of being unsteady on her feet or in speech, but her manner was more than usually distracted. She snipped savagely at a rose bush.

  ‘I don’t really like roses,’ she said. ‘I mean in the raw like this. I only really like them when they arrive at your door wrapped in cellophane. I suppose you think that’s horribly superficial of me. I suppose it is. . . . You always get rose bushes in cemeteries. Nasty little groups of them in beds with crazy paving all around. They remind me of death. . . . Never get old. Never live longer than you want to. The lucky ones were the ones that died. I saw that even at the time. Oh, God, I’m exhausted; let’s sit down.’

  We sat down on a teak bench side by side and Freda lit a cigarette. The view across the lawn to a belt of tall trees was peacefully idyllic. I looked at Freda and saw that tears were rolling down her cheeks. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief.

  ‘Sorry, darling,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me today. Must be the booze. Ought to cut down. My mind goes back. What did your father do in the war?’

  I told her that he had been captured by the Japanese at Singapore and had worked on the Railway. Freda drained her glass.

  ‘How ghastly. How simply ghastly. It was all ghastly. Don’t let anyone tell you it wasn’t. All that smiling through, Dunkirk spirit stuff. It’s rubbish. It was sheer bloody hell. That bloody man Hitler. What a shit he was. Excuse my French. No, but he was. An absolute château-bottled shit. I was a WAAF. You’ve seen that photo in my room, haven’t you? I was a stunner, wasn’t I?’ I nodded. ‘Yes. You noticed. You’re not as innocent as you look. Well, I was. I was in the ops room at Duxford, and of course one got to know the boys. That’s where I met Gordon and Michael. You saw that picture on the dressing table next to mine. That was Michael. You’ve got a look of Michael sometimes. He was a lamb, an absolute darling. I can’t tell you. . . . He and Gordon had been at school together. Best buddies and all that. Inseparable. They were both pilots, in Hurricanes. We used to go round as a threesome, but Michael was the one for me. . . . Michael and I got engaged. Next leave we were going to get married with Gordon as our best man. Then one day I was in the ops room and the news came through that Michael’s plane was down and he was killed. It was the most ghastly moment of my life. It broke Gordon up as well. I think Michael was the love of his life too. He couldn’t fly solo again after that and it caused no end of trouble. But that’s another story. After Michael had gone I thought my life was finished. Perhaps it was. . . . Well, when the bloody war was over, Gordon and I met up again and sort of got together. We married in forty-six. Gordon’s terribly sweet, but I wasn’t in love with him. He knew that and he didn’t seem to mind, as long as I wasn’t in love with anyone else which after Michael I couldn’t be. Well, we decided we were going to have a good time because we’d earned it, and we jolly well did. Gordon had inherited quite a lot of money and we had a lovely time spending it. We went everywhere: South of France, Monte, Capri, Portofino. Gstaad for the skiing, come the Winter. Great larks. Then the money started to run out, so we came back here and Gordon went into business with a RAF chum who turned out to be a complete swine. Left us practically broke. We still had a bit left and so we came here and Gordon got this funny job at Stone Court, and we met you, so it’s not all bad, is it?’

  She smiled at me cheerfully and ruffled my hair, but I could tell that she was still upset. Once she had told me her story that afternoon a new level of intimacy grew up between Freda and myself, an intimacy with which I was not entirely comfortable. Whenever Gordon was away she would confide in me, and it was always the same story that she had told me in the garden that day, but with variations and embellishments. I was possessed by its melancholy; my whole idea of the war became suffused with tragedy. Previously I had taken my unthinkingly heroic concept of it from forbidden comics and the War Picture Library because, though my father had had a bad war, he never mentioned it.

  Gordon took no part in these reminiscences. Once he came in unexpectedly while Freda was giving me a particularly maudlin and gin-sodden recital. She stopped abruptly. He looked at her angrily and his manner was unusually abrupt for the rest of the evening. Later he apologised to me, adding that I was not to pay too much attention to what Freda said, ‘especially when she’s had a G and T or two.’

  The tensions in Gordon and Freda’s relationship which had been revealed made my last week at Halton House an uneasy one. This uneasiness came to a head in a strange way three days before I went back to Stone Court. That afternoon I had gone for a bicycle ride in the woods around Halton and was returning rather late. It was hot and sultry and the sun was beginning to set in a yellow haze behind Halton House. As I approached along the gravel drive I caught sight of something white behind one of the windows on the first floor. The first floor windows lined a gallery which ran the length of the façade. Gordon and Freda’s bedrooms opened off the gallery and their windows looked over the back of the house. I had never much liked that bare, dusty gallery for some reason, and was glad that I had been given a bedroom on the ground floor.

  I wondered why my attention had been drawn to the object in the window. Perhaps it was because I knew that the gallery was always empty and that it was unusual for something to be there. As I approached the house I kept my eyes on the white thing which did not move. Some mysterious conflict of feelings in me both wanted and
did not want me to know what it was. I moved off the drive onto the lawn to a point where I thought I could see it better.

  It was a white, roughly oval object wrapped in a sheet which acted as a crude hood. The white oval had three black holes in it shaped like two eyes and a mouth. A faint shadow in the middle indicated a flat misshapen nose. It was unpleasantly both like and unlike a face. The thing was a mask, I concluded; but who would want to wrap a mask in a sheet and put it in a window? Were Freda and Gordon playing some sort of joke on me? They could be childish, but that kind of childishness was beneath them.

  The two black holes at the top of the triangle seemed more like eyes the longer I looked at them. I had the feeling that, for all their emptiness, they were staring at me, not in a hostile or friendly way, but simply trying to absorb some part of me into their black depths. I thought I saw something glint in the empty sockets, but this may have been a trick of the light. The hole at the bottom seemed more like a mouth the longer I looked at it. It was elongated and, though lipless, it was surrounded by wrinkles that curved inwards towards the maw. It gaped, like a very old creature trying to catch its breath. The mouth began to work slowly up and down in a gumless chewing movement.

  At that moment I managed to wrench my eyes away from the mask. Leaving my bicycle on the lawn, I ran indoors and upstairs to the long gallery. Anger had superseded fear. I wanted to expose the thing for the nasty fraud that it was.

  But there was nothing in the long gallery: nothing to be seen or heard except a faint dry rustling sound that could have been a rat under the floorboards. I walked back down the stairs shaking and met Freda coming out of the drawing room. She had a gin and tonic in her hand.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ she said. ‘You look a bit green about the gills. Anything the matter?’ I told her what I had seen. ‘Oh that!’ she said casually. ‘You must have seen the ghost.’ What ghost? Whose? ‘Just the ghost. That’s all I know. It lives here. Only in the long gallery; that’s why we made you up a bedroom downstairs. I haven’t seen it myself, but plenty of people have. I believe it’s rather nasty.’ She seemed to find my further enquiries tedious. ‘Don’t be a bore, darling; I really don’t know any more than that. Now, what do you say to a slice of old Mrs Thing’s lemon sponge and a touch of the mah-jongs?’