Phoebe fluttered the map she’d downloaded. ‘Yeah, Mum. This is it. It’s great, it’s really weird. I like it. This is going to be home.’
4
At Feverel Court
‘“Turks’ Noses”? Is that really what you said?’ Hortense was peeping inside the freezer bag that Gramercy Poule had indicated contained part of the coming dinner. Gramercy, whom she’d just met in person for the first time, was crested like a mechanical bird with sparkly clips pinning up her tie-dyed hair.
‘I had this partner, Phil, who, well, he isn’t around any more,’ Gramercy began. But she was chary of striking a wheedling note and playing the maiden all forlorn in front of Kim. So she went on, more brightly, ‘Phil’s in Shiloh, in dotcom land – couldn’t get any work here. Anyhow, he’s a kind of sweet wise child, or a grouchy old wodewose (I once wrote a song about them – on fire). Anyhow, I’ll take you both round to meet some of the animals he went around rescuing. But we’ll have a cup of tea now.’
Monica was busy with the kettle, setting out rough glazed mugs on the big scrubbed table. She’d picked up Kim and Hortense from the nearest station, and they were all now grouped together at a loss what to do and where to go, in the high-ceilinged, cobalt kitchen of Feverel Court, the first room visitors usually came in by, if they skirted the front porch and used the side door. They were standing with their small overnight things on the dark blue glazed flagstones, Kim’s in an old sports holdall, Hortense’s in an ergonomic, strappy leather backpack piece. The terriers were whining from the other side of the door, in disgrace for crouching and snarling at Kim. ‘They can always spot a townee – just don’t show you’re scared,’ Monica explained.
‘It was my mother who started us off with the mushrooms,’ Gramercy was saying now to her newly arrived guests. She was gesticulating, with an echo of stagecraft. ‘She and Hatters used to make omelettes with the tiddly ones like fairy umbrellas that look like nothing but give you quite a high, and when she came down here, she found lots of them. I couldn’t even see them at first, but then I got my eye in.’
Was she gabbling? She had a distinct feeling she was gabbling, and so she broke off and looked over towards Kim, who was leaning back against the table, apparently listening to her intently. His gaze had a funny, strabismic way of seeming to look at you, but at the same time past you. Unsettled, she went on, addressing herself to Hortense, whom Kim had suddenly announced he was bringing.
She wasn’t going to talk about any of this, though, but keep instead to the Turks’ Noses – their awkward nature as a topic making them a fragile refuge for the time being from the real turbulence that was gripping her.
‘Phil learned to sense ‘shroom time, as he called it, and he’d get out before anyone else, and then we’d have these fantastic fricassees of lots of different sorts. He was into native foods, home-grown, organic, from the forest, from the soil: recipes using shavings from cast antlers, moss, hips, as well as fungi. If he hadn’t been veggie he’d have eaten weasels. He was always finding recipes for “Hartshorn flummery” and that kind of weird stuff. I don’t have his confidence. The innocuous sorts of ’shrooms imitate the toadstools, perfectly: or is it the other way round? I wouldn’t want to poison anybody!’ She stopped; Kim was nodding.
‘Never easy to tell friend from foe,’ he chanted, as if quoting. ‘Or to know the lamb in wolf’s clothing.’
Hortense wasn’t listening carefully, but rather admiring, a little grudgingly, the mighty raku platters on the dark oak dresser, the carved rustic furniture, and the signature pictures on the walls – a decisive vibrating lattice of emerald and scarlet over there, a mischievous child tugging a cat’s tail, near her by the window. So, when Gramercy fell silent, she was brought up with a start and realised, with some surprise, that this pop singer, with her flamboyant magenta hair raked with tines’ ebb marks like the sand of a Zen garden, who was sort-of-dressed, in a wisp of puckered canary-coloured silk, who’d invited them – or was it commanded them? – to come to her country spread, and who must be at least accustomed if not impervious to public exposure and attention, had been firing her scattershot prattle at them in evident nervousness. It was because of Kim, Hortense knew. And the knowledge made her feel she was in possession of a delicious secret. She smiled encouragement to their hostess, and said, dryly, ‘I’ll use Kim as my cupbearer. He can taste the dish, and if he doesn’t fall down dead, I’ll try it.’
Gramercy gave a brief giggle.
Hortense didn’t want to think of Daniel, but as she made this proprietorial joke about Kim, she felt the cold breath of betrayal pass her lips. She’d spoken to Daniel when she’d flown to Shiloh to escort the Leto Bundle back home, but it had been a quick trip, in and out, and he was a thousand miles away in the Midwest, all taken up with grading exams and preparing his end-of-the year yard sale on leaving his college accommodation. They were to be reunited anyway very soon for the whole summer, he’d pointed out, and they’d discussed for a few minutes where they might go together; they’d learned through experience that re-entry needed easing. But Hortense accumulated so many airmiles in the course of a year, they could choose almost anywhere. ‘What about Lycania?’ she’d proposed. ‘I feel like going back there, just to soak in the atmosphere.’ ‘Naw,’ said Daniel, who was gradually acquiring a native’s intonation. ‘Busman’s holiday. You don’t need that.’
Kim edged over to the door leading off the kitchen into the office.
‘So there’s your set-up,’ he said with evident relief at the sight of the familiar slate-grey calyx of a nineteen-inch monitor, swimmingly pulsing greeny-blue with an Escher eyetwister for a screensaver. ‘For a moment there, I panicked – perhaps we’re so cut off from the world here she isn’t even on-line.’
Monica laughed. ‘Didn’t you get any of our messages on your website, then?’
‘What messages?’
She shook her head. ‘We paid you several visits, suggesting that there was a striking resemblance between your Leto’s lines – such as, for example, “I am the angel of the present time” and certain song lyrics written by our very own Gramercy Poule. No? You’re not twigging?’ She began pouring, murmuring about milk and sugar, and handing Hortense and Kim their mugs of tea.
Kim looked calmly at Monica, shook his head, and replied, ‘I can’t keep up, you see. It’s now five hundred hits a week – I can’t read them all. But we can talk about it. Of course.’
‘It’s water under the bridge,’ said Monica. ‘Or at least that’s what Gramercy has decided.’
Gramercy shot Monica a confused and bitter look. ‘Please don’t bring that up again, ever.’ She turned to her guests. ‘Sit down, do.’
‘I like standing,’ Kim answered. ‘Been sitting on the train for hours.’
But Hortense pulled out a Windsor chair and pointed to the freezer bag by the sink: a few involuted, dry brown curls were spilling from its open mouth.
‘So, dinner. You were saying?’
‘Turks’ Noses, really easy to identify. Safe. Not like anything else and they’re what’s called host-specific,’ Gramercy pulled a fungus out of the bag and handed it to Hortense; she took it gingerly, cupping it in the palm of her hand as if trying not to touch it and then snuffed up its savour.
She made a noise in her throat, ‘Hmmm.’ Gramercy didn’t know her well enough to understand this as approval or disapproval but she heard Kim chuckle.
She went on, ‘They only grow on dead elder trees, and there are clumps of them in the hedgerows all round here.’
‘Bottled smell of damp woods, I’d say. Authentic odour of countryside.’ Hortense reached across the table to coax Kim to have a sniff, but he waved away the crinkled, mummified mushroom with distaste.
‘So why the name?’ he asked.
Gramercy laughed, with a certain embarrassment.
‘They’re delicious, I promise – I make a soup. It’s the Feverel high summer special, which you’d never get – not even in Enoch with all those restaurants fro
m all over. And I wanted you to . . .’ she faltered, ‘have something different.’
‘Isn’t there another name you could use?’ Kim seemed to be looking down his own nose.
‘Even in Latin they’re called something like Naso turkensis.’
‘Could be a ghastly rustic joke, I suppose,’ said Hortense.
‘I’ve hardly ever been to the country before,’ Kim went on. ‘I’m an urban specimen, through and through. Didn’t know what to expect.’ But he sounded less forbidding than his words, and went over to the window. ‘There’s a wilderness near the school where we take the kids now and then: we show them sycamore seedlings and buddleia. Evening primrose’ll go wild in scrap yards, too. But buddleia’s the one. It’ll take root anywhere, grow really big, out of the wall of an abandoned warehouse, out of the cracks in a garage forecourt. It doesn’t seem to need anything to thrive. Not even – what was it – some particular sort of dead tree. That’s being much too particular.’
Gramercy had a sudden sight of herself in the promo for their project, traipsing through urban contamination, now diminutive, now teetering skywards, singing to weeds that clung to her legs. The amplification was thrumming through her guts, her mouth was opening as wide as it would go, into that picture of a scream, till her jaw felt it might click off its hinges. She was so disconnected from the self that had acquired all this, she felt she had divided, like some single cell, and left behind her that other life form, far down in the fossil record of her existence.
She shook herself, beckoned to her new friends, ‘Come on, let’s go out – I’ll take you round Feverel. I’ll show you my home.’ For an insane moment, she wanted to add, ‘You can make it yours too if you like.’ Since Phil had gone, she was flowing with all these longings to give to others the way she thought Kim gave, to do something good, like he did, to stop the horizon-to-horizon suffocating atmosphere of her easy-gotten gains (Phil was accusing her, in her ringing memory, of living with her head up her arse). She felt herself turning into vapour, when she wanted with all her heart and gut to become a solid rock, a hard, packed concentrate; she found herself suspended in a weak and frictionless solution, and wanted to be precipitated, by Kim’s alchemical vision, into the kind of defined, crystalline structure that he inhabited, knowing what he thought about everything, planning and scheming how to achieve it.
But of course she didn’t propose anything to Kim, not yet.
Kim was again wearing a suit, an off-the-peg number with a short jacket; a white shirt fitted snugly to his neck, with a perfectly dull tie. He was, Gramercy realised, the first person dressed like that ever to visit Feverel Court, if you excepted the tax inspectors who had once descended on her to find fault with her accounts. It made her want to laugh; she was touched and intrigued – by his formality, by his social difference. That sharp-tongued art historian in contrast clearly understood what to expect from a visit to the moors: Hortense was wearing well-cut dark trousers and a long slim plum-coloured cardigan, and had caught up her wavy hair with a tortoiseshell hair slide. She looked so composed, so lady-like, that random rhymes skipped into Gramercy’s head, ‘Thou shalt not wash dishes,/Nor yet feed the swine,/But sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam./And feed upon strawberries, sugar and cream.’
Gramercy was still babbling excitedly the while so as not to appear to be observing them: Hortense was a lot older than Kim, and conventional in a different way, in a straightforward professional manner. Yet they’d travelled down together, and, from the way they didn’t seem to need to make polite conversation together, Gramercy sensed intimacy.
She quelled the suspicion; for the last three nights, waiting for him to turn up to talk about the film, she’d been seducing Kim McQuy with ever more energy and ardour – in the kitchen, in the garden, in the orangery, in the music studio, in the animal sheds, on the moor under the stars, in her bedroom, in the guest room where she was putting him for the night. Not for a long time had she so wanted to fuck someone and be fucked by him; was it his priestliness that had stirred up her hunger to this pitch, his seeming absentedness in another world, the distance his trimness put between her messy day-to-day bewilderment and his uncanny purposefulness, the odd choppy rhythms of his talk, as he alternated impassioned speeches with taciturnity?
But maybe he’d made some alliance with Hortense that would be impregnable. A worm of fear, that she wouldn’t be getting what she wanted, crawled through her gut.
‘Doctor Fernly?’ asked Kim, with a hint of raillery. ‘Coming?’
They started down the garden, leaving Monica in the kitchen looking busy with something in the larder.
‘It’s so excellent you both made it down here.’ Gramercy bent down to fondle one of the three terriers, who’d appeared, gambolling and jumping over one another, from somewhere in the garden.
They were making their way down a path by the side of the lawn – which wasn’t a lawn, but a meadow sown with wild flowers bought mail order from a nursery in the southeast that produced them specially. It was a little late in the season, but love-in-a-mist was showing its feathery crowns, and campion sewing the greenery with small pink stars. Gramercy pulled up a swathe of the long grass, shot through with spears and tassels, and twisted it into a garland.
‘There’, she said, putting it on her head, and, quickly winding another hank of flowers and grasses, gestured to Hortense.
Hortense shook her head. ‘Not quite me, I think.’
Gramercy tossed the wreath on to Hook’s bright, cocked head, and laughed as the dog threw it off, and growlingly worried at it on the ground.
They passed on to a mown path through the crooked orchard, where the old apple trees were wearing lacy sleeves of lichen. By the bench, sunk in the tall greenery, Gramercy told them: ‘I sit here sometimes, to think. Try it. It’s magic, you feel all kinds of presences who once were here – and still are.’ She wanted Kim to respond, to talk to her about what he saw and heard.
But when he said nothing, she couldn’t put up with the emptiness, so she started in again: ‘I’ve been writing a song about one of the Feverel ghosts: Lady Agnes, stabbed by her husband for adultery – with a groom. She’s cursed to walk the third Friday of every month. She walks here. She has to pick a single blade of grass in the meadow.
‘I sort of get her mixed up in my mind with Emily Dickinson, wafting about in white in Amherst, writing and writing, cancelling the blankness, picking at the lines one word at a time, one dash at a time, like a rest mark, like a dot on a note. I think of them both when I’m at the piano: change a note and the whole song changes. Anyhow, Lady Agnes will never rest in peace – she can only stop when there’s not a single blade of grass left to pick.’
‘You could have it paved – or put in a swimming pool, if you’re so worried about her.’ Hortense sounded in earnest, but Gramercy knew she was being mocked. So she didn’t reply directly, but suggested instead: ‘Maybe Lady Agnes likes coming up for air and haunting the world. “This must be better than staying down in hell” – that’s one of the lines she sings in my song.’
Kim responded for the first time, quietly: ‘For this is all there is and it will have to be enough.’
‘How can you say that?’ Hortense came in, impatiently. ‘You sound like a stoic – how can you start on about this world being the only world we can know, when half the time you’re waxing strong about how there’s so much more to it than that – visions, presences, ghosts talking to you. I’ve no idea how you square what you just said with your Leto ideas.’
Kim answered her, still quietly, spreading his hands, ‘I thought you understood.’
Gramercy interrupted them; their edginess made her anxious. ‘I’ve never seen Agnes Feverel. But I feel her, with my other senses. I’m like Jonty and Hook and Bonny in that way. They snarl when a storm’s coming, long before you hear the thunder. They whine and paw at the door and then leap out into the drive long before anybody else knows you’re coming home.’ She was playing to Kim’s propensit
ies, she hoped.
‘Yes,’ he said, and she felt a rush of pleasure that he was rewarding her for her belief. ‘In an old place like this, there are stirrings, glimpses, little leaps and eddies in the air, like trembling rings on the surface of the water from something invisible or very far away.’
They’d reached the gate in the tangle of old fruit trees and drifts of clematis and roses on the wall of the kitchen garden beyond the orchard. Gramercy opened it for them. As Hortense passed through, she said, ‘I must say, I never thought, after meeting your . . . road manager . . . at the airport that day . . .’
‘Yeah, TB! You met TB – that was weird.’
‘I didn’t imagine then that our paths would cross in this way.’
‘It’s karma,’ replied Gramercy. ‘It was meant to be.’
‘Was it now?’ Hortense smiled. ‘It seems more like you’ve a good nose . . . you like success and success likes you. You see the possibilities of a situation, no?’ She glanced back at Kim, who was still standing on the path in the orchard, intent on the emptiness under the trees, with his jacket now over his arm, as the July evening was muggy. ‘The film suits all our purposes – Kim’s political ambitions, my museum’s falling figures, threatened insolvency – and your audience. The Museum director’s actually complimentary, for once: this is “quality inner city outreach” which means departmental money. You can’t get it for scholarship about antiquity any more, but you can get it for “relevance” “service to the community” and for – children, the younger the better. The film should go out just after the beginning of the next school year, to maximise the interaction.’
Gramercy chose not to take offence at Hortense’s tone; she wanted, above all, the evening to be a success. ‘This September then? Wow, that means turning it round pretty fast.’
‘Yes.’
Both women stood waiting by the gate for Kim to catch up with them. As he continued to watch in the orchard, they exchanged a quick look between themselves, full of curiosity, touched by complicity, followed by a fleet shadow of rivalry.
The Leto Bundle Page 38