The Anniversary

by Ann Swinfen

  But having survived Anya's birth, she knew that she could manage any physical pain life chose to throw at her afterwards. When Nicholas was born two years later, she was prepared. It was an easier birth, perhaps because she was more relaxed, but took almost as long. With Tony and Lisa, it was each time a little easier.

  Now she is floating above the cloud of pain, in her own childhood bed in St Martins. That is somehow fitting. She feels she has come full circle from the time she first slept in this room, during the last year of the war, amazed at being given a full sized, grown-up bed and a room to herself. The room has never been redecorated since, for money is always tight at St Martins. Along the wall under the window are the Peter Rabbit pictures she cut out and glued up without permission. Over the fireplace, rather faded from the sun, is the poster of Monet's water-lilies given to her by Gregor and pinned up in her Impressionist phase. The drawing-pins are still in place, pushed in by her seventeen-year-old fingers, more than half her lifetime ago.

  It is curious the way she is outside her own body. It has never felt like this before, giving birth. Somewhere she read about a near-death experience, where a man described floating above his body and looking down. And there she can see herself, lying on the bed, with the doctor and the midwife bending over her. That is myself, thinks Frances, down there. And yet I am here. And the pain is quite separate from the me who is here. The pain is outside me, down there. I can feel it, and yet I do not suffer it. How strange, and fascinating.

  She smiles.

  There is a sudden thin cry, like a cat.

  This, she knows, will be a special baby.

  * * *

  Katya and Gregor sat companionably side by side on the ha-ha, with their legs dangling over into the rough grass verges beyond. Gregor had spent an hour being polite to the guests, which was as long as he felt he could cope with at one stretch. He had also managed to speak to Keith, who was still physically recognisable as the terrified child who had turned up on the doorstep all those years ago, when Gregor was about fifteen. He was as tall as Gregor now, but painfully thin, as though that childhood deprivation had left its permanent mark on him. Otherwise, he had blossomed into a warm, confident man, with a shaggy bush of badly cut hair, and such a consuming passion still for his music that he could hardly bear to speak of anything else. Germany suited him quite well, he said. He had no worries over funding, and the quality of the orchestra was outstanding. But he thought that when this contract came to an end, he would not stay on. He wanted to bring music to the countries struggling to find their feet after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.

  'They've no money, of course,' he said to Gregor. 'And so many of the opera houses and concert halls are in a terrible state of repair. But at least they haven't been pulled down to make way for office blocks or inner ring roads. I don't need any money for myself. I have more than I know what to do with already. I don't want anything.'

  Gregor observed that Keith's suit was as worn and baggy as the one suit he himself possessed, hanging in solitary state in his wardrobe.

  'What about the orchestras?'

  'Well, there are problems, of course. With the collapse of the centralised bureaucracy, there's often no one to pay their salaries, and some of the players – with dependants to support – have drifted away. And inflation just shoots through the roof. But I'll think of something. I'd like to start with an orchestra that still has a core of good people and build it up. Do some foreign tours to earn the hard currency, say six months in every year, then spend the rest of the time giving concerts in small towns – or villages, even – for tiny prices. Not free – people tend to despise what is free, or in that part of the world, distrust it. But, say, for the price of a couple of glasses of beer.'

  'It sounds a great idea, if you can pull it off.'

  'Oh, I will,' said Keith with conviction. 'I will.'

  Someone else had claimed Sir Keith then, and Gregor had found himself waylaid by a terrible woman, all clanking bracelets and thick lipstick, who had cornered him in the herb garden.

  'Oh, Mr Baranowski – is that how you pronounce it? – I'm so thrilled to meet you at last! We've been in the village for over a year now, and I've never been so close.'

  She stepped a little nearer. Gregor tried to retreat, but found he was backed up against the box hedge.

  'I'm Emileen Frobisher,' she said, giving him her hand, which he felt obliged to take and then found difficult to get rid of. She leaned against him.

  'I've seen you driving past, of course, but never thought I'd get the chance to meet you. Then when we got the Princess's invitation, I was so thrilled, you have no idea!'

  Gregor was temporarily baffled by this. He could not, for the moment, think who she was referring to. The woman reminded him powerfully of certain Californian matrons who had the same habit of backing him into a corner and then standing too close to him. He looked around, slightly panic-stricken, for a means of escape.

  'Gregor!' Katya was shouting to him from the other side of the herb garden. 'Can you come and lend a hand?'

  'If you would just excuse me,' he muttered to the woman, giving her back her hand, which fluttered for a moment on his arm, causing more panic. 'I must go.'

  As he dived along the camomile path to Katya he heard Emileen Frobisher saying in a loud stage whisper to another woman, 'Of course he's a genius, you know. He has works in the Metropolitan and the Getty.'

  'Thank God, Katya,' he said on reaching her. 'Who sent you?'

  'Personal rescue mission,' she laughed, grabbing his hand and dragging him away to the wilder end of the garden. 'I could see that woman had her talons into you, so I thought I'd better beam you out.'

  They ensconced themselves beyond the orchard, above the rough ground turned over to the younger children. Katya had some cake wrapped up in a paper napkin, which she shared with him. 'Made it myself,' she said carelessly.

  'We ought to be back there, being polite,' said Gregor, without much guilt, as they sat on the ha-ha, picking the bits of fruit out of the cake.

  'Phooey,' said Katya. 'I've done my bit for the moment. Helped cook the food. Helped serve the food for nearly two hours. Mopped up the messes the kids have spilt on the tables all round the garden. Mopped up the kids. Taken a zillion of them to the loo when they've drunk themselves silly on orange juice. I deserve a break. So do you. We can't have our resident genius wearing himself out.' She imitated Emileen Frobisher and then dissolved into giggles.

  'You mind your manners, young woman,' he said, punching her on the shoulder. 'I'll genius you.'

  She punched him in return, then leaned back and plucked a juicy grass stem to chew. 'You are a lucky beast, Gregor. I wish I could live here, and do what I please, and be totally happy and contented.'

  'I do work, you know,' he said equably, selecting a piece of flat grass and whistling through it.

  'Yeah, but it's fun work. I loathe everything I have to do. I loathe school. I loathe Reading. I loathe Mum and Dad.'

  'You don't really, you know. That's all just part of being a teenager. Happens to all of us.'

  'Yes, but you didn't have any parents when you were a teenager.' She rolled over on her stomach, suddenly appalled and contrite. 'Oh, I'm sorry, Gregor. I didn't mean it. That was a stupid thing to say.'

  'It's all right. I do understand the point you're trying to make. Because I lost my parents while I was still a child, I never went through this period of stress with them that you're going through. Trying to make them see that you are growing up, that you're a separate person, with a separate life.'

  'You sound as though you do understand. I wish Mum did.'

  'Oh, I think she does. She was just the same. Only, of course she had to rebel against St Martins, to get away from here,' he plucked thoughtfully at the grass. 'Which was not, in the long run, the best thing she could have done.'

  'But you didn't have anyone to rebel against, did you?'

  'Oh, yes, I did! I had lots of substitute pa
rents, you see. Natasha and Irina and William and Mabel and Birgit and Peter, all trying to make it up to me that I had lost my own parents – and what made it worse was that I couldn't ever forget how grateful I was to be here at all. I was very mixed up, I promise you.'

  'But your life is great now. You've had everything. All that time you spent going round the world, living in Europe and Australia and California. And being famous. And now living here. You're so lucky. And you're the most peaceful person I know, next to Natasha.'

  'Am I?' said Gregor, sadly. 'There are a lot of things missing in my life, you know. I'm not a very complete person.'

  'What's missing, for heaven's sake? You've got it all.'

  At first Katya thought he was not going to answer her. He was pulling the seed heads off the long grass in a distracted way, then he turned to her.

  'What's missing?'

  He began to lay the seed heads in a line on the ground between them.

  'Wife,' he said, counting on the seed heads. 'Sons. Daughters. Posterity. Someone to talk to in the long cold hours of the night.'

  She stared at him, then looked down at the grass heads. 'But you chose that,' she mumbled uncertainly. 'You chose not to marry or have children. You chose your art instead. Didn't you?'

  'Did I?' he said.

  He gathered the seed heads up into his hand and looked at them. Then he crushed them together in his fist and threw them into the long grass verge.

  * * *

  Frances climbed slowly up the spiral stone staircase to her old room, which was located at the top of the square tower tacked on to one end of the house. There was an unresolved scholarly dispute about this tower. Some experts argued that it had been added when St Martins had fallen into the hands of a minor landowner after the seizure of church lands, at the time of the Reformation. Others, having more recently examined the building in detail, maintained that it was part of the original monastic structure. Although its purpose was clearly defensive, they assured Natasha that this was perfectly in accord with the fact that St Martins was only two miles from the Welsh border and vulnerable to attack in the late Norman period. Even religious houses needed to be defended.

  Whatever the truth of the matter, the tower had always seemed ancient to Frances. When she had first come here as a small child, she had been too young to have any true conception of time, but as she had grown older the tower – with its staircase worn hollow by passing feet and its narrow window slots at the lower levels – had conveyed to her a sense of generations of former inhabitants, stretching back deep into time. The top room, her room (and the only tower room regularly used), was quite spacious, filling the whole of the highest floor. Its windows too had been enlarged at some time several centuries before, so that they afforded views in all four directions. Whatever the time of day, it was filled with light. It also caught the wind and rain when a storm was blowing. It had given her a special delight to sit up here alone on a stormy night, feeling as though she were at sea in a tall ship. Hugh used to tease her about it, calling it her crow's nest.

  This morning she had only had time to leave her small suitcase and run a quick brush through her hair before she was caught up in the preparations for the anniversary. But now, after seeing Paul and Lisa off on their way to Hereford, she was suddenly overcome by fatigue, and had escaped here for a brief rest before the village school children gave their concert on the lawn by the sunken garden. It was only natural she should feel tired, she argued with herself, after her early start, her car journey, and the party preparations, but the weariness seemed to go deeper than that.

  'Mum,' Lisa had said, clinging to her briefly. 'Oh, Mum.'

  'Let me come with you, darling.'

  'No,' Lisa said firmly, getting into the car. 'I'll be fine. It's probably nothing. I'll send Paul back to report. You must stay here for the party.'

  Paul had driven away, with infinitely slow care, followed by Jim Porter, who leaned out of the window calling, 'Don't worry. Everything's under control.' He disappeared around the bend in the drive, waving his hand above the roof of the car.

  Frances sat on her bed, on the old Amish quilt Natasha had brought back to her flat in Chelsea after an exhibition of her paintings in Philadelphia in 1932, before the modern passion for patchwork had pushed the price of antique quilts so high. Natasha had told Frances once that she had given $5 for the quilt in a little back-street shop. 'That was equivalent to about £1 in those days.'

  The quilt was a modest one, in decent pieces of navy print on white, white print on scarlet, and scarlet on navy. The interlocked loops formed a traditional pattern which was called 'Wedding Ring', she remembered. She traced the curved shapes, so painstakingly fitted together with tiny, nineteenth-century stitches, and wondered whose wedding trousseau it had once belonged to. She gazed round the room fondly. The well loved Beatrix Potter pictures were still stuck below the window, their edges frayed with age and some of their corners curling away from the dried-up glue. What a monster I was, she thought, cutting up those beautiful books. What can have possessed me? She could not now remember a time when she had not respected, even revered, the integrity of books. The Monet poster had faded to an almost uniform blue-green shade, with the original picture looming out of it like a ghostly face seen through mist.

  She kicked off her shoes and drew her feet up on to the bed, wrapping her arms around her legs and laying her forehead on her knees.

  I am so disorientated, she thought. I don't seem to belong anywhere any longer. I'm sure, I'm almost sure, that if I'm ever going to sort myself out I must leave Giles.

  She had thought this before, more than once, but she had always before been racked with feelings of guilt and pity. What was different this time, what she found so disconcerting, was that she no longer seemed to feel anything. She could take out the image of Giles in her mind – Giles as he was now, and the many facets of him over the years – and he seemed to be totally disconnected from her. Worse than a stranger. With a stranger she might feel interest, a need to explore a new personality. But for Giles she had no sense of anything but a massive indifference, a paralysing boredom.

  There must be something different about me, she thought. For Giles is unchanged. He is older, heavier, less discreet than he once was about his affairs, but not changed in essentials since we were first married. He is more pleased with his career than he has been for a long time, I suppose. Perhaps that is why I no longer feel the need to sustain him.

  She was filled with an undefined yearning for something. Tears pricked in her eyes, but she had no reason to cry. Except that her life was so empty. She wanted to shout out, in a great rage, Is this all there is? All my life is ever going to amount to? She had her children and grandchildren, but her life stretched ahead and behind like a grey wasteland.

  I hate people who indulge in self-pity, she thought with loathing. It is one of the areas of Giles's character which has undermined our relationship over the years. And yet here am I, no better than he, wallowing in it. I wish I were Katya's age again. I wish I could start all over, with the experience and clarity of sight I have now, and make a better job of things.

  'Life is not a dress rehearsal.'

  She had read that somewhere recently, and it haunted her. Most of her life she had behaved as if it were.

  * * *

  Nicholas hesitated outside Frances's door. It was closed. This was so unlike her that he considered going back down the stairs without knocking. All through his childhood he remembered open doors. At night, padding across the landing after a bad dream, he would know he could walk straight in and be reassured. Or in the daytime, even when she was marking essays on a corner of the dining-room table, she would always stop to comfort an injury or adjudicate a quarrel. The only time he could remember closed doors was when she was occasionally crippled with migraines and lay utterly silent in a darkened room, which had always rather scared him. He had wanted to go in and shake her, make her come out and be her usual steady self. He had
never done so, of course, being a quiet, responsible boy, the eldest after Anya, the eldest son, the man of the family, as he felt himself to be from the age of about ten.

  He had followed her now across the garden and up to her room, thinking she had only gone to fetch something. Up in her room at the top of the tower, he hoped he would be able to see her quietly alone for a little while. There were things he needed to speak to her about, away from the others.

  There was a sound of movement from inside the room. He heard the creak of the bed, and then the pad of stockinged feet across towards the south window. No migraine, then. Curiously shy, he lifted his hand and knocked.

  'Come in,' Frances called, in a subdued voice.

  'Mum?' Nicholas put his head round the door. 'I'm not disturbing you, am I?'

  'No, of course not, darling. I was just a little tired. It's already been a long day, and I felt like a break from the crowds.'

  She looked pale, he thought.

  'Could you spare me a few minutes? For a quick chat?'

  'Of course. You take the chair.' She indicated the old Lloyd Loom chair, padded with two large and faded cushions. She crossed back from the window, and perched on the bed, gathering her skirts about her drawn-up knees. Nicholas was disconcerted by how young she suddenly looked, curled up on the bed of her childhood room.

  'How is Lisa?' he asked. 'I didn't realise what was going on until Tony found me just now. Is she all right?'

  'Jim Porter seems to think so. It may just be a false alarm, but he's taken her into the hospital, just in case. I wasn't surprised, really. You arrived as early as this – four weeks ahead of time.'

  'Did I? I didn't realise. All of our three have been late.'

  'Was it Lisa you wanted to talk about?' she asked, steering him, as she had so often done in the past, back to the point. Nicholas's mind would so often wander off into by-ways. Homework that should have lasted half an hour would be unfinished two hours later as he lay on his stomach in the crowded sitting room in Reading, following up intriguing sidelines in encyclopaedias and textbooks. 'Learn to focus yourself, Nick, or you will never get anywhere.' But she would laugh, too, and say: But what is it that is so fascinating about conger eels? Or the internal combustion engine, or the origins of the signs of the zodiac, or whatever hare he was pursuing.