by Ann Swinfen
Gregor became an honorary uncle to the children, although Anya and Nick were adults by then. But it was with the baby, Katya, that a particularly close relationship had grown up. He would have liked a daughter like Katya, awkward though she could sometimes be nowadays.
In the past few years he had found ways of coping with Frances's visits. She, for her part, was courteous but distant, as though she was holding back even from that other kind of friendship they had once had, before the summer of their love affair. Thinking of it now, he felt his hands grip the arms of his chair, and a hot pulse beating in his neck. But he could cope.
Then they had come down for Christmas six months ago, all of them except Giles, who was doing a show in the north.
* * *
It is Christmas Eve 1993, the cooking preparations are all taken care of, and there will be a watch-night service in the village church, to which most of them have decided to go.
Three hours need filling in between their Christmas Eve dinner and the time they must leave for the service, and Tony, Lisa and Katya have put their heads together.
'We're going to play parlour games,' says Lisa, pretty and flushed. She has just announced her pregnancy. 'We have appointed Tony as Master of Ceremonies, so you all have to do what he says.'
They play charades first – very successful, though abilities are mixed.
Then Pelmanism. Mabel is hopeless. Gregor and William, closely matched, have to have a sudden death play-off.
Hide-and-seek – everyone is getting into the spirit of things now. Chrissie wins by climbing inside the grandfather clock (it runs irregularly for weeks afterwards).
Forfeits. Some complicated version Tony has learned at college, which involves the loser having to be kissed by the winner, whatever their age or sex. (Gregor, remembering his own days at art college, suspects this is a watered-down version of the game.)
Mabel loses to Peter.
Bob loses to Tony. ('Yuck,' says Bob.)
Katya loses to Natasha.
Frances loses to Gregor.
He ought to have seen it coming, but there is no escape. He marches her out to the obligatory bunch of mistletoe in the hall and takes her briskly by the shoulders. Then he makes the mistake of looking at her, something he usually manages to avoid doing. She is frightened. And suddenly the anger and pain that he thought he had left behind rises up, blurring his vision. If the others had not been crowded into the drawing-room door, cheering him on, he would have let go of her and fled back to his studio. Instead he kisses her roughly, carelessly, on the mouth. ('It must be on the mouth,' says Tony. 'No good otherwise.') He can feel her under his hands. His old desire for her is still there.
* * *
Gregor picked up his cold cup of coffee, unattractively skinned over, then gathered together his long legs and got up wearily from the chair. He felt bone tired. He poured the coffee down the sink and washed away the residue with a spurt from the cold tap. There was still time to do a little work before he had to put on his public face again.
The new piece stood at the back of the studio, with its damp sacking hiding it from view. As Gregor lifted the sacking and laid it aside, the light from one of the stall doors fell on the figure, making iridescent rainbow pools on the wet clay.
He studied it thoughtfully. It represented an entirely new direction for him, yet it was in a classic tradition, reaching back through Rodin and Michelangelo to the sculptors of the Golden Age of Athens. He dampened his hands, and ran a loving palm over the curves of the figure. That scamp with her mug! 'Sculptors do it in clay.' He laughed out loud.
* * *
Paul had completed the tour of the meadow. Between them the children had managed to find twenty-seven different varieties of wild flower, and proudly filled in their sheets. They had spent even longer at the Ludbrook, looking for sticklebacks (none found), identifying water-loving plants (seven), and analysing the bottom of the stream. Melissa had half fallen in, wetting the unsuitable skirt her mother had forced her to wear, under protest, to the party, and been wrung out by Samira and Chrissie, who had gathered huge untidy bunches of wild flowers for the play scenery. Two other children had got their shoes wet, and one child, wading in barefoot and careless, had stubbed his toe painfully on a large stone. Not too bad a record of injuries, Paul reckoned.
He was hurrying them now through the wood, aware that he was running out of time but wanting to help them complete the sheet on trees. The group had begun to disintegrate since they had left the brook, and he had lost hold of Johnny Dawlish earlier than that – before Melissa had fallen in. About six of them were still grouped close to him, and he could see perhaps ten others dodging about amongst the trees playing tig.
'Come along now,' he called. 'We'll just count up how many varieties we have, then we'd better get back. It's nearly time for more food!'
These magic words enticed most of the children in. They came bearing their leaves and bits of beech mast and sycamore seeds. Paul never went out on a nature walk without counting noses first. He counted quickly again – twenty-one. Drat! He was two short. And one of them was Johnny Dawlish.
'Has any one seen –' he was just beginning, when from deeper in the wood there came the splintering noise of breaking wood, a shriek, a loud thud, and then a mighty howl.
A small boy came breathlessly crashing through the trees towards them.
'Sir, sir,' he cried, school manners automatically reasserting themselves, 'Sir, Johnny Dawlish has fallen out of a tree, and I think he's dead.'
Chapter 11
Of course Johnny Dawlish was not dead. The sound that filled the wood suggested a stuck pig, but a healthy one. Still, it had given Paul a bad moment. He set off at a run in the direction of the noise, the other children following him eager as hounds on the scent. Johnny was sitting at the foot of a beech tree, beside a branch with a torn and shattered end, nursing his right ankle in both hands. As soon as he caught sight of Paul, he redoubled his yells.
The children grouped themselves around him with expressions of detached interest or sympathy, with the exception of Melissa, who did not try to hide her delight. 'See! That's what happens,' she hissed, through the gaps where some of her second teeth were still coming in. 'Serve you right.'
Johnny gave her a look of loathing and continued to yell. The performance was beginning to sound a bit mechanical.
Paul knelt down in the dried leaves of last autumn and felt the ankle. 'Nothing broken, I think, Johnny.'
'Oh, do shut up, Johnny,' said Chrissie in exasperation. 'You are a sissy.'
Johnny transferred his glowering look from Melissa to Chrissie, but he let his yells die away. His throat was getting rather sore.
'Right,' said Paul, standing up and brushing the leaves off the knees of his trousers. 'Time for a little first-aid practice. I'm going to take off Johnny's shoe and sock, in case his foot starts to swell and gets stuck. Then I'm going to make a simple bandage with my handkerchief. It isn't really large enough, but it will give the ankle a bit of support. There may be nothing more than bruising, but we're going to assume it's a sprain.'
This began to look more promising even than the nature trail. Johnny assumed an air of heroic suffering while Paul eased off his shoe and peeled down the grubby sock underneath.
'Pee-uu!' shouted all the other children together, grabbing their noses.
Paul made his handkerchief into a small neat bandage round the ankle – which was showing no sign yet of swelling – and handed Johnny's shoe and sock to one of the other boys to carry. He held it at arm's length, holding his nose ostentatiously with the other hand.
'Right, now, Johnny.' Paul stooped down with his back to the boy. 'Get your arms round my neck and I'll give you a lift back to the house where we can get a proper look at that ankle and decide what to do with you.'
The excited procession started back from the wood, led by the Shoe, with Melissa, Chrissie and Samira bringing up the rear, whispering amongst themselves and giggling.
* * *
Mia, Frances and Muriel reached the kitchen just ahead of the excited party of children from the nature trail. Paul lowered Johnny Dawlish into one of the rush-seated chairs, where he sat with his leg sticking out like Long John Silver's wooden leg.
'Johnny,' said Paul, 'fell out of a tree. I haven't discovered how he came to be up a tree in the first place, when they were all forbidden to do anything so silly, but there you are. I don't think it is anything serious, but I'm no expert.'
Frances and Mia knelt down by Johnny's chair. Frances gave a quick thumbs-up sign to Chrissie and Samira, who were crowded with the other children in the doorway, then unwound Paul's handkerchief.
'I'm not an expert either,' said Frances. 'Only the usual excitements of child-rearing have come my way – broken collarbones, front teeth knocked out, things like that.'
'Perhaps I can help, Mrs Kilworth,' said Mia.
'I do wish you'd call me Frances,' she said, without looking up.
'Thank you.' Mia swallowed. 'My name is Mia.'
'What a pretty name!' Frances lifted her head and smiled at her. 'Do you know about this sort of thing?'
'I did a course in first aid,' said Mia shyly. 'When we were living in Bristol.'
'I wish you'd take over, then.'
Within five minutes Mia determined that there was no break, and not even a sprain. Johnny's entire performance had been designed to elicit sympathy and divert attention from his own crime in climbing – and breaking – the beech tree. His shoe and sock were restored to him amidst much mockery from his friends, and the children ran off.
'Thank you, Mia,' said Frances. 'Let's all have a cup of tea before the next round of celebrations. Muriel, tea for you?'
'Oh, Frances,' said Mabel, hurrying in, 'are you making tea? Would you take a cup to Natasha? I'm late with it, and she was wanting to see you. There's something she wants to talk to you about.'
* * *
Hugh's plane was circling over Heathrow. Incoming flights were stacked up, and they had already been waiting twenty minutes.
'If I look out one more time and see Windsor Castle going past underneath again,' said the woman sitting next to Hugh, 'I think I shall scream. This seems to happen to me every time I come into Heathrow.'
She was a university professor from the Midlands, a woman of about his own age, also returning from Russia, where she had been arranging student exchanges with her opposite number at the University of Moscow.
'The problem,' she had explained to Hugh, 'is the imbalance in the numbers. The Russian students all have passable English and would kill to get on to the programme and spread their wings abroad. But our students are such poor linguists. They have perhaps scraped through GCSE French, and immediately forgotten it. Russian is quite beyond them. They fancy a year in Russia, but only if they can take all their classes in English.'
'What is your subject?'
'I'm a historian – and in my day that meant you had to have good Latin and French, and possibly German. Nowadays I'm director of a school of European studies, which we've recently been extending to include Eastern Europe. But during those awful financial cuts of the eighties, the university lost its modern languages department. I ask you! How parochial this country has become!'
'Yes, I had to have Latin and French to get into Cambridge – even for science.' He grinned. 'In my day. But I've always loved languages, and they seem to come to me easily. It's been very useful to me.'
'Yes,' she said briskly, 'I know who you are, but I'm not going to embarrass you by asking for your autograph, like that flirtatious stewardess.'
Hugh laughed. 'Fine. Tell me more about your programme. Why don't you make it a condition that your prospective exchange students attend a crash course in Russian?'
They had had an enjoyable discussion as the landscape unrolled beneath them, but the delay in landing was annoying for them both. Hugh could see that he had now lost his chance of catching the train he had intended. Professor Hughes said that her husband would be cursing at the way the car park charge would be mounting up.
'He didn't need to drive down and meet me, but he's very sweet about it. He never seems to worry about the cost of the petrol, but he becomes quite wild about car park charges, especially at places like airports, where he feels you are a helpless victim of profiteering.'
'Ladies and gentlemen,' said a man's voice over the intercom, 'this is your chief cabin steward speaking. I'm afraid we will be experiencing a few more minutes' delay. We will shortly be serving complimentary drinks from the bar.'
'Trying to buy us off with alcohol,' said Professor Hughes.
The stewardess, whose smile had become as fixed as her lacquered hair, hovered beside them. 'No thank you,' said Hugh. 'Nothing for me.'
'I will have a mineral water,' said Professor Hughes. 'With a slice of lemon. And plenty of ice.'
* * *
Gregor stood back from the figure, considering. Yes. He felt it was finished. He didn't want to over-work it and lose the spontaneity. He laid the damp sacking carefully over it, and carried his tools over to the sink. It was the original china clay sink of the stables, used by grooms and stable-lads in the days when the Devereux family had kept both farm horses and carriage horses in these stables. He often thought of those men and the beasts they cared for when he turned on the same tap as their hands had once held. This whole area in the back corner was just as it had been. There was only a cold tap, no hot water, and the sink rested on four brick legs. At one side was a cupboard once used to hold simple remedies for the horses and the stablemen's gear – saddle soap and linseed oil, thread and bits of spare leather for mending tack. When Gregor and Natasha had cleaned the place out after he returned from California, they had found a rotting ball of oiled thread, and a bottle covered in dust and cobwebs, with a dark purple residue in the bottom.
'Gentian violet,' said Natasha. 'I remember the grooms using it when I was a girl. They painted it on small wounds, where one horse had kicked another, or a horse had knocked himself on a gate. When I was little I used to be very frightened of it – the treatment looked much worse than the wound! But old Sergei swore by it.'
On the other side of the sink was a wooden draining board. This had been thick with sticky dirt when Gregor had moved in, but he had sanded it down carefully and then rubbed it over several times with oil. The wood had warmed to a beautiful dark red, probably pitch pine. He kept it regularly oiled now, and cleaned his tools meticulously. Although he cared little for his clothes, preferring the comfort of shapeless trousers and old baggy jerseys, he could not bear untidiness in his work.
* * *
'You can't go off looking like that!' said Frances. They were all three at Hereford railway station. Frances and Hugh had their bicycles, strapped all around with gear for the two weeks they were going to spend cycling from Cheltenham through the Cotswolds, and on as far as Stratford-upon-Avon.
'Why not?' said Gregor aggressively. They always seemed to be quarrelling this summer, he and Frances. She had begun to find fault with everything he did or said, and he reacted like a sleepy bear suddenly prodded beyond endurance with a stick. He saw himself that way – a clumsy hibernating Polish bear, who had been poked out of his dreams by vicious little boys.
'You have perfectly respectable clothes to wear to your course in London,' she said. 'You don't have to shame us all by turning up in down-at-heel shoes and a threadbare duffelcoat. Honestly, Gregor – can't you make a little effort?'
'Leave off, Franny,' said Hugh in a pacifying voice. He didn't know what was the matter with the other two this summer. Last year, the summer before Frances went up to Oxford, they had wanted to be together every minute, and he had taken himself off discreetly on several occasions so they could be alone. Now, for the first time ever, Gregor had refused to come with them on their cycle tour. He was going to spend a month at his college in London, getting some extra tuition himself and paying for it by teaching on a summer course for amateur
s.
'It's different at art school,' said Gregor patiently, trying to keep his tone level. He had explained all this before. 'People don't expect you to dress up. In fact, they'd despise you if you did.' He drew a deep breath. 'Not like your swanky Oxford friends.' He couldn't hold it back.
'Don't you dare speak about Oxford like that! It just shows how ignorant you are – your ideas haven't moved on since the nineteenth century. Nowadays people have to work to get in. They don't get in because they're rich or titled.'
'It helps if you've been at an expensive school,' Hugh put in mildly.
'For the men, perhaps,' Frances flashed at him. 'Not the women.'
'OK, OK!' Hugh held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. 'I think Gregor was talking about the men – your London friends. And, if it comes to that,' he grinned wickedly, 'Gregor has a title.'
'Don't be daft,' said Gregor crossly.
Frances bit her lips. There were tears on her eyelashes. 'I'm sorry, Gregor. I suppose you know best how things are at your college. It's just . . .'
'Leave it,' said Hugh. 'Here's our train. We'll see you in a month, Gregor, when you've finished beating your sculpture students over the head with a mallet. I hope they know what they are letting themselves in for.'
'Don't get blisters on your bum,' Gregor rejoined. He was cheered by Frances's change of tone. 'You've been getting soft all winter.'
Hugh began loading the bicycles into the guard's van. Frances and Gregor stood uncertainly, looking at each other.
'I'd better go and check the platform for my train,' said Gregor. They both knew it would be leaving from this same one. 'Well, goodbye, then. Have a good time.' He held out his hand formally.
Frances made a sudden, suppressed noise, then she leaned forward and kissed him quickly on the lips. 'Goodbye,' she said in a small voice.