I stacked the crockery and cutlery and looked out at the garden as the water ran. All that blossom. It was perfect. For a minute I propped myself there, my hands resting on the edge of the sink, and gazed out longingly, trying to take in every detail, imprint it clearly for all time, down to the robin on the branch of one of the cherry trees, the celandines and daisies beneath it, the Solomon’s seal with its clusters of white flowers, the neighbours’ black cat already basking on our brick wall. Seeing it on a postcard, or on the lid of a chocolate box, you might wonder if it hadn’t been retouched.
Then I began the washing up. Even apart from the view, I enjoyed the sensual warmth of the sudsy water—as well as, before long, the recollection, which I often had at times like this (well, chiefly in the bath), of sailing my yacht across a pond in the park, on holiday with my parents in Torquay. Sometimes as I grew older I seemed to miss my mother more—I mean, more at thirty-six than at thirty. But this didn’t seriously induce a feeling of melancholy, I simply wished I had more photographs and that I still possessed that little yacht, which, oddly, I could never remember having sailed on any pond in Deal.
My eyes misted, however—which struck me as perverse. Why on earth this morning, why today of all possible days? But after a moment it made me smile.
Sorry, Dad. I haven’t forgotten. Big boys don’t cry.
When I’d cleared up I shaved and dressed: a short-sleeved shirt today, first of the year. I recalled how yesterday, seeing that woman in her summer frock, I’d considered short sleeves premature. Now I apologized to that woman in her summer frock. Caution was for the timid, the untrusting. Caution wasn’t for the treasure seekers.
Then I performed my regular Sunday chore: took a shovel round the garden, a shovel and a stick, collecting Susie’s poos. Normally, during those five or ten minutes, my expression might have been one of mild distaste—particularly if the poor thing had been suffering from diarrhoea—even if such distaste was greatly leavened by self-protective humour. This morning I actually sang. Actually executed several dance steps, fairly lively ones, though not, I hasten to add, after the shovel had become well-filled.
Matt was in the garden, feeding the fish, putting out more nuts for the squirrels, replenishing the bird food; fortunately the neighbours’ cat was elderly and somnolent.
My son looked at me in some wonder, shook his head and tapped his temple. I would have sung whether he’d been there or not, have gone in for all those silly, clownish antics. But it was good to have an audience.
8
We left the house at half-past-eleven; for some reason later than usual; on Sundays we almost invariably went to Jalna. (Jalna was the only place I knew which had a double-barrelled name: Jalna—the Dovecote: always scrupulously observed on envelopes by close friends and members of the family. Most members of the family.) Sometimes I would moan like hell about having to go. Sunday is my one day off, I would say—or, rather, shout—to Junie and the children; why can’t I have the freedom to enjoy it? This is worse than going to church, I’d shout. This is worse than going to prison. (This is exactly the same as going to prison!) I’ll join a potholers’ association! Ramblers’ club! Witches’ coven! Anything…so long as its meetings unfailingly fall on a Sunday! Exclamation marks appeared to fly thicker than arrows over Agincourt; or over one of Junie’s uncorrected letters.
Usually, the kids would either giggle or do their best to suppress their giggles; depending less on me than on their mother. Junie could be bent to my will in nearly anything that hadn’t to do with her family but now she’d assume an indulgent smile which was infuriating (relegating me to position of third child, whom she must patiently seek to propitiate) yet which could generally coax me back towards a sheepishly grinning—if residually grumbling—form of acceptance. Until the next time.
Yet occasionally I’d take a real stand: sweep the children off to ride on a steam railway or see some distant castle or visit the Tower of London. To a degree, Junie could sympathize, but would mostly decline to accompany us; and her sympathy was intellectual, not of the heart. Occasionally too (for this was happening over many years) I’d insist I needed to get on with the decorating or needed to go to clear the contents of some house. Once, when I was feeling outstandingly bolshie, I’d declared I should like simply to spend the day in bed and take a little holiday, inaugurate a Samuel Groves Day, to be celebrated at least biannually, with fireworks and bacchanalia and a service of thanksgiving. I don’t know—being much too grand even to inquire—in what form the message finally got through, but I remember they sent me back a cakebox filled with iced fancies and cheese straws and sausage rolls. (However, I refused to be touched…let alone humbled. I gave them to the children.) I thought how marvellous it would be just to pass the day like any normal family, reading the paper, popping out to the pub, watching TV, dispatching the children to Crusaders and spending the afternoon in bed.
Not that you couldn’t do all those things at Jalna (the Dovecote) save perhaps the last. And not that I didn’t generally have a pretty good time there—a better one than I might well have had at home. It was just its inexorability which I complained of. Its claustrophobia.
Its in-breeding.
And yet, before Junie and I had got engaged, it was precisely this close-knit quality which had most appealed to me; one of the factors, even, which may have influenced my hesitant proposal. I’d no longer had a family of my own, except for my grandmother, and had always longed for a sibling—ideally, for several. Junie was the youngest of five sisters; and the others, despite being married, still lived in the locality. I suddenly found myself drawn into a mainly young, charming, good-looking group whose members were full of fun, mutually devoted, and around whom existed an aura of almost storybook enchantment, of Bright Day exclusiveness. I had of course met Junie’s parents on countless occasions—and all of their daughters and their daughters’ husbands at least once—but although Mr and Mrs Fletcher were ostensibly the most hospitable couple I had ever known, and were obviously fond of me, even hopeful of me, their hospitality didn’t truly extend beyond their own children and their own children’s families; for whom Sundays were kept sacrosanct and unadulterated. Only following my engagement to Junie did the sabbath walls of Jalna finally fall before me. The outsider put away his trumpet and belonged.
But after a few years, when most of the initial glamour had worn off, though not without leaving a pool of variable affection, I’d once asked Junie if there weren’t some unpublished list (or maybe even published—why not?) outlining the requisites for the perfect Fletcher son-in-law: a willingness, say, to remain forever within easy reach of Deal; to subscribe seventy-five percent of his Sundays, Christmases and other bank holidays (subject, of course, to rotas: only one family missing at a time) along with an equal percentage of his annual vacation…naturally to be subsumed into the Fletcher summer booking on the Continent? I’d acknowledged that Saturdays, at present, might be optional, but had ventured that all birthdays and wedding anniversaries were inalienably the property of Jalna. Junie had laughed and admitted, in a tone of faintly clannish pride, that I maybe hadn’t got it all that wrong. I’d suggested with a degree of self-congratulation and mordant black humour that the son-in-law who really wished to make it big should have disposed of both his parents.
But today I neither moaned nor meant to wax satirical. Instead, as we drove towards Jalna, I thought about the diary I was going to keep. I must have been to Junie’s childhood home nearly a thousand times but I decided I would try to look upon this as my very first visit—or else, on the theory that you should live each day as though you would be dead tomorrow, as my very last—and attempt to catch it through the viewfinder of my opening entry. “What’s the date?” I asked.
Junie wasn’t sure; and Matt said nothing.
“April the twenty-seventh…or possibly the twenty-eighth,” I repeated slowly, taking my hand off the steering wheel and laying it briefly on my wife’s. “Nineteen hundred and ninety-s
even or ninety-eight or thereabouts?”
“You didn’t know it, either. There’s really no call to mock.”
“In any case, a day to conjure with. Momentous. Uniquely historic.”
“Why?”
“Simply because it is.”
“Oh, Mum,” cautioned Matt, wearily, from the back seat. “He’s going to say that this particular day will never come again—not ever—ever. That’s why we’ve got to savour it. He’s going to inform us that history is being made today…just like on any other day which we can read about with bated breath. Dad’s in one of his improving moods. Can’t you tell? Don’t you know your husband yet?”
“Ah… Does anyone ever know anyone?” I inquired—improvingly.
But that was purely to point up a general truth. I certainly knew his mother. I knew his mother probably as well as I knew myself.
“He’ll now go on to mention that today marks the very beginning of the rest of our lives,” said Matt, in the same tone of quietly tolerant resignation.
“Newborn like the spring,” I added.
“Newborn like the spring,” he explained.
“Well, I can’t help it. You blasé wretch. I feel newborn.”
“Yeah. May you lead a long and happy life.”
“Thank you, Matthias—my precious sweet love. I really do intend to.”
“I give you till about lunchtime.”
“As long as that?”
“Going on past experience.”
“Ah, but today’s different,” I assured him.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Today is different, I am different.”
“How different?”
“As different as possibly can be. You’ll find out.”
“All right, then. Let’s put it to the test. Please, Dad, will you make me a present of five pounds?”
I chuckled…and pulled the car over. “What are you doing?” Junie asked.
“Looking to see how much money I’ve brought.” In fact I knew perfectly well. I’d again left my wallet in the bedroom but had neatly folded a couple of notes and placed them in a pocket of my jeans. Now I fished one out. “Yes, you’re in luck,” I said. “Except we’ll have to make it ten.”
“Darling, you’re crazy!” And although Junie was smiling she honestly did sound a bit appalled. “I think you may have gone out of your little mind.”
“Well, I think I may have just come into it.” I started up the car.
“Come on, Dad. You’d better take it back.” Matt prodded me on the shoulder. The folded note was in his hand.
“No, Mattie, it’s yours.”
“D’you mean that?”
“Yes, I do. It’s for your being so intuitive and clever and mature. For expressing yourself so well. For remembering all my tiny pearls of wisdom.”
“If it goes on like this,” he said, “I may start writing them down and learning them for homework.”
“Wise fellow. Just tell me, though. Who’s the spiffiest father in the whole wide world?”
Matt had pocketed his ten pounds.
“Ask me again in another week.”
I laughed. So did Junie.
“But I’ve got to admit it, Pop. Since last night you do appear different. Somehow.” (I didn’t say so but I found this tribute the most gratifying he could have made.) “Is it going to be okay, Mum, d’you think…for me to keep this loot?”
“Why ask me? It’s your father’s money. I’ve got nothing to do with it.”
Yet Matt still seemed unbelieving.
“Dad, I’ll get it changed at some point and give you back your five. That would be fair, wouldn’t it? After all, I only asked for five.”
“Perhaps, then, this will have taught you not to set your sights too low? Not to ask too little out of life? In any case, my darling, I want you to hold onto it.”
I added: “And let me say that I admire you for your integrity; for your reluctance to exploit the situation.”
He leant forward and kissed the back of my neck.
Already, I thought. Already three small items for the diary. Cooked breakfasts. Ten-pound note. Demonstrative affection. I smiled at him in the mirror.
And a fourth one: acknowledgement of difference.
Unsolicited, to boot.
We turned into the drive, drew up by the front door. There were two other cars parked along the verge and a further two behind those—first-comers always left space for later brethren. Jalna was in a quiet and tree-lined cul-de-sac; a fifteen-minute drive from us, from Cowper Road. It was a fairly attractive house, Tudor style, built during the nineteen-thirties. Relatively imposing…but in no way as beautiful as ours. I’d never have considered swopping.
Ella came to meet us. She’d been sitting on the swing in the front garden, awaiting our arrival. “You’re late!” she announced, moodily.
“Hello, darling,” cried Junie, through the open window. “Have you been having a good time?”
“Hello, Mum. Oh, not bad, I suppose. Hello, Dad. Hello, Susie.”
“Hello, Matt,” said Matt.
I walked round the car, lifted my daughter and gave her a big hug. She seemed to have grown heavier since the last time I had done this. Nothing daunted—indeed, responding to the challenge—I then hoist her well above my head and swung myself around a couple of times, laughing up at her. “Hey, why so physical?” she asked, when I had set her down.
“Because you’re my little girl and because you always used to like my doing that. I remember when you couldn’t get enough of it. Again, you’d say, again!”
Susie jumped up at her as though the two of them had been apart for weeks and while Ella stroked and patted her, and Junie was taking her fruit pies out of the boot and handing three of them to me, Matt said to his sister: “He’s acting pretty weird today. If only I cared for you a bit more I’d pass on a tip which could definitely prove useful.”
“Like what?”
“Like, for instance, see what happens if you ask him for a piggyback or something.”
“You must be nuts. Why should I want a piggyback?”
“Or something,” he repeated, almost spitting out the word. “Anything.”
“I don’t get you,” she said.
“You’re so thick,” Matt told her, dispassionately.
Though neither of my own children wanted piggybacks or to ride upon my shoulders, or to be whirled around like aeroplanes—as Ella had so lately been—there were plenty of other children who did; and some of them not a whole lot younger. “Oh, poor Uncle Sam,” was a cry heard many times during the course of the afternoon, “now, won’t you please take pity on him, you monsters?” But this wasn’t only because of piggybacks and the like. For who was it who, while the rest of the fathers dozed in their deckchairs, organized a crude treasure hunt around the garden and, after that, a game of hide-and-seek in some nearby woods (with Susie proving so much of a liability, poor excited thing, she had to be shut away inside the house; I would somehow make it up to her) and, after that, played several bouts of tag—even having to throw off his shirt and wipe himself down with it? “Well, truly, doesn’t that put you four sluggards to shame?” asked Octavia, whose husband was pasty-faced and stolid and looked fifty although he wasn’t yet forty-five.
“Oh, he’s only making up for lost time,” he answered good-humouredly; Raymond’s glamour might have gone but not his geniality. “He’s feeling bad he didn’t get here soon enough to help mark out the tennis court. We’ve got to be nice to him.”
(And here, with an early diary entry in view, I Capture the Dovecot, I was already thinking that, for the sake of avoiding complexity—always an aspiration—I should have to make these characters pipe up in turn.)
“Yes, indeed,” agreed Ted, who also wouldn’t have looked any great shakes these days without his shirt. “The least we can do is give him this chance to salve his conscience. Life doesn’t always provide us with a second opportunity. We urge you to go for it, Sam. Just go for
it!”
Unlike these other two, who were businessmen, Robert was a librarian. The poor chap suffered from anaemia and ought by rights to have found each Sunday’s get-together more wearing than anybody; but either he drew strength from togetherness or else was seriously well trained.
“Sammy, I get scared,” he said, “so painfully worried that you might simply burn yourself out—too much, too soon, too fast! Then who’s going to creosote the fence and paint the greenhouse and build the rockery and attend to all the other little things that no doubt Mimsy and Pim have already lined up to keep us entertained throughout the summer?” He shook his head, sadly.
“Listen,” said Jake, who was the most intellectual of my brothers-in-law and actually had a thick book of poetry open on his lap. “Why are you standing there as though you had nothing better to do—just blocking out the sun? You can take the children on a long hike or something.” He added graciously, “That way you can atone for the disturbance you created a short while ago, with all that screaming and running about in the wood.”
I said: “You’re like a bloody barbershop quartet. You’re like a troupe of performing seals. Hasn’t anyone ever told you?”
“Yes, they’re a thoroughly smirky lot,” Yvonne confirmed, with grudging laughter. She was next up in line from Junie and like all the Fletcher girls was short and bouncy and big-chested. “Well, I wouldn’t take it. You’re larger than they are, Sam. For my part I give you full leave to grab Ted and teach him a good lesson.”
Rose and April also granted me permission to educate—respectively—Jake and Robert. Octavia chipped in, as well.
“But I thought they were my friends,” I opined piteously, hanging my head.
“Well, of course we are,” crooned Raymond. “Now, if we weren’t, we’d hardly be putting you forward for Uncle of the Year. Would we, guys?”
“Uncle of the Year! Would you really do that for me?”
“You have our word on it.”
“Oh, shucks! I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything, Samuel. Just run along now. Perhaps to Sandwich and back. No—forget about and back. Jake will get the kids lined up in pairs.”
New World in the Morning Page 5