by Brian Aldiss
‘Yes, that’s quite clear.’ Jarvis smiled at him.
Driving away a few minutes later, Squire saw Jarvis and Teresa by the window of the morning room, deep in discussion. She was leaning against her desk, and did not even look up at the sound of the car. Poor dear, he thought. As if she hadn’t trouble enough without having that young oik to deal with.
The sudden death of her father, Ernest Davies, had shaken her. Ernest had been walking home from a friend’s house in Grantham one evening, when a car bore down on him as he crossed the road, and knocked him over. He had died in hospital a few days later. The car had been driven by his doctor, heavily under the influence of drink. Astrology had closed over Teresa’s head almost immediately.
He switched on the car radio.
He recognized the music at once. The Tom Robinson Band playing ‘Long Hot Summer’. He smiled.
Saturday morning traffic into town was heavy. It took him an hour to reach Norwich, but he was in no hurry.
The conversation had come back to him. Jarvis’s brother hoped to run for Britain in the four-hundred metres of the Moscow Olympics. Squire, as a member of the board of anti-Moscow campaigners, tried to explain to Jarvis that the occasion would inevitably be used for propaganda purposes, like the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
‘No, no, Mr Squire, honest, you don’t see, neither my brother nor me are at all political. This is purely and simply a sporting event.’
‘Things aren’t so simple. It’s not what you are, Mr Jarvis, but what you lend yourself to.’
‘No, you’ve got it all wrong, Mr Squire. I know you like politics, but, see, I’m just a businessman, pure and simple, out to make an honest penny, and I hate politics. So does my brother.’
After a drive round, Squire found a parking place in Mancroft Street. Locking the Jag, he walked slowly through Tombland, enjoying the sunshine, stopping occasionally to glance in a shop window. At the bookshop, he walked in and gazed at the books, but saw nothing he wished to buy.
The offices of Challenor, Squire, and Challenor, of which William Squire was senior partner, were built of mellow Georgian red bricks, very similar to the bricks of Pippet Hall. The facade of the building was covered by a venerable Virginia creeper, the leaves and suckers of which lapped at William Squire’s office window. William had officially retired the previous year, but still worked every morning, looking after old clients of many years’ standing, who refused to transfer their business to the brisk young partners who occupied the lower floors.
Uncle Willie’s office was at the top of the building. The floors below had been modernized, their small rooms broken down into an open-plan scheme which let in more air and custom, rather in the same way that the fields beyond Norwich — the title deeds to which reposed, in many cases, in the archives of Challenor, Squire, and Challenor — had been stripped of their hedges to let in more air and agricultural machinery. Squire made his way past empty desks and silent computer screens to the third floor.
Uncle Willie’s office was a small room on the side of the building, with a window from which the cathedral could almost be seen. Uncle Willie was pottering round smoking his pipe, with the rather sulky-looking Nicholas Dobson in attendance. Dobson was a nephew who had high hopes in the firm. He lived nearby. His expression suggested that he would rather be elsewhere on a hot summer Saturday morning, but he greeted Squire cheerfully enough.
Coughing, Uncle Willie rested his pipe in a marble ashtray and came round the desk to shake hands formally with his nephew.
‘You’re looking fit, Tom. Gallivanting round the world has been good for you. We’re heading for a drought, could be worse than last year, and that won’t please most of my clients.’ Willie bore a strong resemblance to his dead brother John, Tom Squire’s father. He too had a high-bridged nose and a pugnacious set to his jaw. The deep-set lines of the family face had visited him too. So had the clear skin. Although his hair was white, it remained thick.
Thomas thanked his uncle for seeing him on Saturday, although he knew that the old man, a widower for many years, often visited his office on Saturday mornings in order to keep the lethargy of old age staunchly at bay.
The years had hunched his shoulders. He regarded his nephew with a vaguely aggressive air, and then transferred his gaze to the open window.
‘How’s Teresa?’
‘She’s fine, Uncle. How are the cats?’
‘I’ve had Nickie spayed. She was turning into a regular kitten-factory. Madge, is she all right? Still staying with you? Terrible about Ernest. Madge makes a pretty widow, poor lady. How’s she taking it?’ As he spoke of Mrs Davies, he walked over to the window and looked out.
‘She seems cheerful enough. It’s Teresa who’s upset.’
‘In my experience,’ said Uncle Willie, still gazing out of the window, ‘widows are not too unhappy when they are left to pursue their own lives, though they may make a polite show of grief. It’s different for widowers.’
He turned and inspected his nephew, to see how the remark had registered.
‘Teresa’s having a series of nightmares. Always the same, though details differ. Sometimes it seems to be day, sometimes night. She is sitting or lying down when she sees a dark male figure outlined against the window. Someone is trying to break in. Sometimes she tries to scare him away, sometimes she runs from him, sometimes she wakes to the sound of smashing glass.’
‘Oh, she’s afraid of burglars while you’re away.’ He went over and picked his pipe up, as if the matter was disposed of.
‘There might be another explanation. She complains of back pain. She keeps talking about — well, cancer. She goes to Dr Bell. He gives her analgesics, and she’s gone to the Norfolk and Norwich for check-ups. All reports are negative to date.’
From the other side of the room, Dobson said, ‘They say cancer’s psychosomatic.’
‘Nicholas thinks everything’s psychosomatic, including taxes,’ Uncle Willie said. ‘Do you think she’s got cancer, Tom? Eh?’
‘No, I don’t...I’m anxious, of course, but the tests, as I say, are negative. People do get these ideas, and I wonder if the dream doesn’t indicate something of the force of Tess’s obsession.’
‘Well.’ Uncle Willie shuffled with some papers on his desk, as though he had lost interest in Teresa. ‘I hope that now you’re back home you’ll both settle down, you and Teresa. She’s a good girl but she needs a bit of looking after, don’t forget that.’
Squire considered saying more on the matter, caught Dobson’s eye, and decided against it. He turned to other things.
His London firm had been understanding, and had allowed him maximum freedom during the planning and filming of ‘Frankenstein Among the Arts’; now he had to notify them that he would be away longer than anticipated. He wanted his uncle to draft a proper letter, waiving his salary. There were also some long-standing matters which needed attention, such as a protracted argument with the local authorities over a right-of-way across Pippet land. Dobson brought out his file, and they talked for thirty minutes.
‘Business over,’ Willie said at last. ‘Nicholas, leave the file out and we’ll go and have a coffee.’
Downstairs, at the side door, he made a great business of seeing that the security bolt was functional. Dobson directed a pitying look over his bent back at Squire. Then they sauntered over to a coffee shop almost opposite St Ephraim’s Gate, Dobson walking smartly ahead.
‘They’re still talking about putting a motorway through to Bury and Chelmsford,’ Uncle Willie said, as they selected a table, looking with some dislike at the holiday-makers who surrounded them. ‘Then they’ll continue it up here. It’ll mean the end of East Anglia’s isolation, and the end of Norwich and Norfolk as they have been for centuries.’
‘Don’t worry, Uncle,’ Dobson said. ‘In the present state of the country’s finances, they’ve stopped building roads. Norwich will be safe for this century.’
‘I’m not so sure.’ He picked up the menu with
contempt. ‘Once a planner has planned, and lodged his plans in Whitehall, the abstraction seems to acquire an existence of its own...Well, you offer some consolation for our bad trade figures, if they help to protect tradition.’
As the waitress came up, he smiled at her and said, ‘I suppose you’re still making coffee here in the traditional way — with instant coffee?’
She was young and pleasant-faced. She leaned forward, smiling, and supported her weight by resting one hand on the table. ‘I know you’re very fond of our coffee, Mr Squire, and it hasn’t gone up this week.’
‘In that case, we’ll treat ourselves to a cup each,’ he said, looking up at her in a sprightly way. When the girl had gone, he shook his head and said to his nephews, ‘When I was a young man, you were not supposed to address remarks to the waitress. It was bad form. Rigid class structure. I prefer the way things are today. I discovered at quite an advanced age that I enjoy flirting with waitresses. They don’t seem to mind, so why not?’ He blew his nose on a large white handkerchief. ‘The war changed things. Changed everything. Of course, no one knows exactly what waitresses think, doing the job they do.’
‘Come on, Uncle,’ Dobson said. ‘No one knows what solicitors think about.’
‘Increasingly, waitresses,’ said Uncle Willie, with a laugh. ‘This place used to be a Red Cross shop during the war. Did I ever tell you that? Then it became an antique shop. That didn’t last.’
‘I remember the antique shop,’ Squire said. ‘I bought about ten garage signs from the dealer, including a Redline Glyco and a Pratt’s High Test, enamel on tin. We used them in the Pop Expo.’
‘Your father used to chase waitresses,’ Uncle Willie said, ignoring Squire’s remark. ‘There’s always been a sort of naughty streak in the Squire family, I’m sorry to say. That is why we don’t get on with the branch of the family at King’s Lynn — the Decent Dobsons. Except you, Nick. Do you take after your father, Tom?’
John Matthew Squire, his father, had been a countryman, like most of the family in that generation, involved in the affairs of the village and the county. John Squire seldom moved beyond those self-imposed boundaries except when, following the steps of the ancestor whose name he bore, he joined the Royal Norfolk Regiment and went to fight for four years in the assorted muds of Europe, returning home to Hartisham with the rank of major, saying, ‘It was quite a good scrap while it lasted.’
Somewhere along the way, John Squire acquired several tastes which led to his downfall. He acquired a taste for art. To the dogs and horses which were his life, he added the Norwich School of painters. They were local men, they painted local things and were faithful to them, not prettifying too much. With his favourite mastiffs at his heels, John Squire became a notable figure as he toured the country, attending markets and, just as assiduously, dusty old shops and attics. Where he went, his son Tom also went. Together, while the dogs prowled round them, father and son acquired a commendable gallery of watercolours and oils by Old Crome, Stoddart, the incomparable Cotman, and others.
‘Tractors may drive out Shire horses,’ John said, ‘but Cotman is permanent.’
Pippet Hall estate, in financial difficulties after the Great War, became more neglected as the art excursions ranged further afield. John’s red-haired wife, Patricia, was left to supervise the farm and bring up her other two children, Adrian and Deirdre.
John and his son Tom stayed overnight in country inns as they went on what John called their ‘Grand Tours’. The Morris and the mastiffs would be housed in the stables — very few Norfolk inns expected motor cars in the thirties. Tom would often be tucked into a wooden bed in some attic room; his cheek was scoured by a stiff military moustache as his father kissed him good-night, before disappearing below to join whatever company the bar offered; he disappeared with particular promptness if there were women downstairs.
Sometimes the boy would wake in the summer mornings early and run to the window of the strange room, to gaze out at a panorama of rushes and broads, busy bird life, and little boats already launching into the early golden haze over the waters. He always remembered an inn on Hickling Broad, where there was a tame magpie, and he and his father swam naked in the broad before breakfast.
John Squire had a taste also for jazz and popular dance music.
Gramophone records began to accumulate at Pippet Hall. Patricia liked that. The records were played on a wind-up gramophone with a huge horn. When Tom and his brother and sister were small, many visitors came to the Hall, attracted by the happy-go-lucky nature of their parents. The visitors sometimes danced to the music of the gramophone, which Tom was allowed to wind. He watched his father as he took his beautiful wife about the waist and whirled her round the entrance hall, where the floor was good for fox-trots.
There was another taste, and one which slowly mastered the master of Pippet Hall. John progressed from being a heavy social drinker to being a heavy drinker. It was that habit which brought about his death, one rainy day in March 1937, when the rest of the family was out of the house.
Tom returned home in the afternoon. The solemn ticking silence warned him that something was wrong. He flung his cap down and ran straight to his father’s study. His father lay in one corner of the study, against a smashed picture frame, the glass of which littered the carpet. It was established later that he must have fallen over on the mastiffs while the worse for drink. Both dogs had attacked him. They lurked in the opposite corner of the room, chops still bloody. Their master’s throat had been ripped away, and the flesh of his face torn off.
The dogs skulked behind John Squire’s armchair, knowing their crime. John’s son, aged eight, took down one of his father’s double-barrelled shotguns from the rack by the door, loaded it, and shot both animals through their skulls at close range. Blood and brains spattered in parabolas across the wallpaper. Then he dropped the gun and ran away into the plantation, where he huddled at the foot of a young oak until one of the farm labourers found him after dusk.
It was hard to tell where Uncle Willie’s remarks led, or indeed if they were intended to lead anywhere. He rambled as they drank their coffee, mainly about the ‘naughty streak’ in the family.
‘I don’t think I chase waitresses obsessively, Uncle Willie,’ Squire said.
‘Well, you enjoy a busy life, that I know. When success carries a man beyond family and native heath, he loses his sense of reality. I always say it. A protective sense of reality. A man’s achievements in the material world are often seen to be counterbalanced by deterioration in his personal happiness. Supposing our waitress to marry the Prince of Wales tomorrow, she would undoubtedly come to look back on her humble days in this coffee shop as a time of security and happiness. However she may see the matter now.’
‘It’s not like you to recommend a dull way of life as a paradigm of better things.’
Nicholas Dobson snorted, as if he knew his uncle better, but Willie ignored him.
The old man wiped his lips on the white handkerchief.’ Don’t be angry, Tom, I’m only offering a warning.’
‘I’ve managed to look after my own affairs fairly well so far. Why don’t you approve?’
Willie looked offended. ‘You are making connections between things I did not intend. That’s always your clever habit of thought, I understand that.’
‘What are you accusing me of?’
Uncle Willie stuck his pipe in his mouth and began lighting it. He said, behind a cloud of smoke, ‘You want to stay home a bit more — that was your father’s mistake.’
Squire leaned forward so that the people sitting at the next table did not hear what he said.’ Father would have approved strongly of my present work. I care deeply about it, I wouldn’t care if I never went back to the firm. It’s little enough, but I’m good at it, I think. In me there’s a lot of the family’s romanticism. I want to make a contribution to the thought of our country, I want to produce a cultural statement which I believe will help England, and maybe the rest of the worl
d, to live more fully despite its present difficulties. I want to make everyone aware of the immense riches round about them in everyday life.’
‘Through TV? Through television? What can you do for television viewers? You can’t make them switch the set off, can you? I’ve no time for it. Fat lot it has to do with individual life. Paralysis, more to the point.’
With spirit, Squire said, ‘I believe that television has much to do with individual life. Continual box-watching is sad, I agree, sad because it shows you how lacking in opportunities is the average life. But television touches everyone as no art medium has ever done; it represents the triumph of photography, and the wonder is that it’s as good as it is. It must be respected. Why not respect it, develop it, now, rather than mourn for it when it is superceded, as no doubt it will be?’
The waitress had brought the bill on a saucer. Squire brushed away his uncle’s hand and produced some money.
Willie shook his head. ‘I’ve got a set in my flat. Never switch it on, except for the news. Give me a good book any day. Harrison Ainsworth, he’s a good author. I’m just rereading The Tower of London. It’s full of incident and good description.’
‘Very pleasant, I’m sure, Uncle.’ He signalled impatiently to the waitress. ‘You do not refute, you illustrate what I was saying. Carlyle said people always loved the past and the things of the past because it was safe, whereas the future was dangerous, since it had still to be negotiated.’
‘Carlyle was a sensible chap.’
They parted outside the shop, shaking hands. Squire walked briskly in the direction of the Castle. He was angry with himself, he hardly knew why; he had been harsher than he intended with his revered relation.
Nicholas Dobson came hurrying up and fell into step with him. ‘You are upset, and I don’t blame you. I have to say to you that some of us at least support you. You add lustre to the family, Tom, and God knows it could do with it. We’re a miserable lot, the Dobsons even worse than the Squires. We’ve just lived lives of dull Norfolk monotony for centuries. As for Uncle Willie’s moans about TV, he’s just a disappointed old man. He doesn’t — ’