The Leto Bundle

by Marina Warner

  ‘Kim!’ Hortense called out to him. ‘You’re in a dream.’

  ‘I was listening to the roar.’

  ‘Oh that,’ said Gramercy. ‘The fucking motorway! Built right through a grade one preservation area. My studio’s sound-proofed, but you can’t tape anything outside here any more, not even the wind.’

  ‘I thought it was a waterfall,’ replied Kim. He began walking towards them. ‘Shows how you hear what you expect to hear.’

  Gramercy led them to the aviaries and the duck pens; the drake, sleek and tapered as if he’d been given an expensive metallic paint job, was flip-flopping up it, with his question mark crest bobbing; in the long grass around the coop the ducks had hollowed runs and were teasing him by hunkering down in them, so that he was unsure whether they were watching, and admiring, his ascent.

  Gramercy’s spirits lifted at the idyll of the scene. Nellie’s work. Nellie was more than a treasure, Gramercy thought. From the start Nellie went straight at the filthy work, turned around the diseased chaos of Phil’s legacy with her handling and her dosing, her scrubbing and sluicing; within days of starting work she’d introduced enough cleanliness and godliness that they could call in the vet again, without fear of getting had up in front of the magistrates, or being bitten by a rabid beast or catching bubonic plague. Her hands were amazing, too, the way she touched her made all her knots slip and all her tensions ease; she’d even begun sleeping better, after one of Nellie’s specials – she can’t overdo the asking, though, or Nellie might give her one of her Aztec mask looks. Or that daughter of hers would have words with her – Gramercy was alarmed by Phoebe’s disobligingness.

  Phoebe often helped out her mother, riding pillion on the canary-yellow moped that Gramercy bought Nellie after Monica baulked at picking her up in the car, and Gramercy refused to let Nellie walk there and back in all weathers.

  Mother and daughter worked as if they’d been raised in a circus and had learned animals’ language, even before human speech. But the numbers of animals had dwindled: Nellie and Phoebe showed little fear and less sentiment, and Gramercy felt deep gratitude that she no longer had to worry about every bird in the air and every creeping beast on the face of the earth. They no longer rescued any; Phil’s dream of Feverel Court as the ark moored on the top of Mount Ararat had been put behind her. They’d kept the terriers, of course; but otherwise, there remained the tortoise, roaming the garden, with the Cayuga duck flock, and two little owls rescued as owlets and incapable as a result of going out hunting for themselves. They’d managed to pass on the survivors among the rest, by means of ads and word-of-mouth and the vet’s contacts and Phoebe’s college friends: the hedgehogs returned to the wild, the ferrets were taken by a local youth who’d already been out successfully rabbiting down the lanes (Gramercy was surprised at herself for even considering this outcome, but Nellie didn’t give her space to make her objections). Those rabbits that weren’t so sick they had to be put down went into someone’s pot. Gramercy pondered this revenge on her rival; saw herself fleetingly as the Queen in Snow White pressing her thin crimson lips together, ‘Take this apple, my dear’, and then smiling at the huntsman’s news of the girl’s demise. She’d made a mental note to write a weird song that nobody’d be able to crack but would make her, Gramercy, obtain release from that primal nightmare of Phil jerking off in the shed.

  The geese were placed on a farm three miles off, much to Gramercy’s relief: she’d never overcome her fear of their drumming wings and outstretched bills and tongues. Once the vixen’s trapped paw had healed, they let her go, for she wouldn’t have forgotten her tricks of survival; the exotic ex-pets, the snakes and the chameleon and the spiders were despatched, by courier, to approved zoos further west in time for the school summer holidays.

  The wolf cub was a problem, though. In her case, Nellie seemed attached to the animal. Eventually, she asked if she could keep her. ‘For Phoebe, for company when she come back from school and I not there.’

  ‘But it’s a wild animal,’ Gramercy objected.

  Phoebe frowned. ‘She came from a pet shop, she’s been raised in captivity – she’s no wilder than a guide dog.’

  ‘But your housing – will they let you?’ asked Monica.

  ‘The local authorities know that us refugees are lonely – they’re recommending pets as a way of making home from home – specially for kids, like me, who’ve been uprooted and known nothing except temporary shelter.’

  Now, when Nellie rode to Feverel on the canary-yellow moped, the wolf was leashed to the handlebars on a long lead and galloped along on the inside of the lanes. Sometimes, when Phoebe was riding pillion, her legs dangling to the side, she crowed with delight at the lolloping of the thin-flanked grey creature whom everyone mostly took for a half-breed collie.

  There wasn’t much left any more for Nellie to do in that department, Monica had pointed out, except routine maintenance, and they could reduce her hours. (Monica’s job was to keep an eye on the bottom line.) But Monica would also like to concentrate on managing Gramercy’s business, and let go all the domestic duties that had accrued since Phil’s departure. She’d had to take on housekeeping and housesitting – and night-nursing. Gramercy couldn’t be left alone in this big house, even with those three nippy and wakeful dogs. Bobby Grace had come to stay, of course, but she had her own life to lead, houses to mind, and child-minding a daughter in her thirties on a long-term basis didn’t appeal. So Monica proposed that Nellie should come and live at Feverel: ‘You love Nellie, or you think you do,’ she said, with not a little bitterness, as she didn’t like the dependency she observed. She could see no other quick term solution, however, so Gramercy was trying to persuade Nellie to come and live with her; she wanted to do right by her. Nellie made her feel she was doing something about . . . the world and its problems.

  ‘Nellie’s responsible for all this—’ Gramercy swept a hand over the visible order of cages and pens. ‘I don’t know what we’d do without her.’ She began to tell Kim about the refugee cluster in the nearby town, about the animals Phil abandoned, about the massage in Pontona, about Phoebe’s new skin. She was proud of having Nellie working for her, but she was careful not to play Lady Bountiful to Kim. She couldn’t help hugging her magnanimity to herself, though, when she remembered how Nellie pilfered her best concert slingbacks that night. The knowledge lay between them like a low gas cloud over an exercise ground after a detonation, seeping through the air and tingeing it with tension: there was a huge question mark lingering over Nellie’s status as refugee/asylum seeker. Mother and daughter still hadn’t been granted full permission to stay in the country and Gramercy had offered to go to the tribunal as a character witness and sponsor.

  She knew she couldn’t communicate any of this intricate relationship to Kim, how sharply someone like him turned against condescension, patronage. Such imbalance of power relations was repellent to her, too, and she was struggling to trace and shape another exchange from which they could both draw benefit. But what? And she feared that if Nellie were to become her full-time housekeeper it would spoil things between them.

  ‘Nellie’s someone I really want you to meet – she came from Tirzah, like you, though where she comes from originally was somewhere else – she was already on the move when she got there.’

  ‘I don’t remember much about Tirzah,’ says Kim. ‘Just a few flashes of this and that – a kind of white noise in the back of my head.’

  ‘Nellie really is the genuine article,’ she appealed to Kim. ‘One of our tribe—’

  ‘Don’t say “tribe” to Kim,’ Hortense cut in. ‘He’s allergic to the word, the principle, all that it entails. It’s the root of all evil.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Gramercy stammered, miserably. She was now beginning to hate Hortense, who seemed to be able to dip the switch on Feverel’s glow and squash her giving of it – temporarily – to these guests she wanted to enfold, to claim.

  Kim came in, ‘I really don’t f
eel at all like a Tirzahner, you know, and I don’t know what it’d mean to be one, not now. National songs and what – those cross garters? A taste for bitter black coffee downed with a shot of applejack at breakfast and a hearty slap to my thigh? My language, my internal map, my attachments, my set of beliefs – they’re here, not there. I – that is, my mind – can’t ever return home. So, my mother abandoned me. That’s no reason for to go around feeling like little Orphan Annie. I was lucky to get out. But that doesn’t mean that I’m cheering Albion on the home side either. The whole point of HSWU is—’ he spread his hands, ‘the past is another country. Now matters now, not then.’

  Hortense said, ‘But you’re fascinated by the past. You’re obsessed, even.’

  Kim came back quickly: ‘Only so we can understand more. We’ve so many prejudices and preconceptions that history washes down on us like soil erosion. I want to build meanders and dams to prevent the mud sliding down on us and burying the present.’

  At this exchange, with its ripples of tension, Gramercy rallied, laughing at one of the ducks peeping out, periscope-style, from her tunnel in the tall grass as the bird ascertained the effect of her flirtatiousness on the drake. ‘You’ll see Nellie in the morning. She comes in early to do the feeds. But our main problem here now,’ Gramercy remarked, watching this game, ‘is that the ducks will take off with wild mallards who come by on raids. Plus ça change.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to catch the fast train,’ says Hortense.

  ‘Do you have to go? Why don’t you stay a few days?’

  If only Kim would agree, Gramercy would accept this prickly woman, too, for as long as he wished.

  They were wandering back to the house, past the part of the kitchen garden where the wreckage of Phil’s organic plot still sprouted long canes of raspberry and bolted artichokes. Feverel’s front elevation came into view, for the first time. The long light of a midsummer evening turned its stone buttery, its buff and russet tiles soft as fledgling feathers, the roses and creepers and trees taking the house’s bathed rose body in their arms.

  Hortense couldn’t help herself. She exclaimed at the perfection of the scene.

  For his part, Kim couldn’t believe Gramercy was living in such a vast place – and on her own. He had an odd impulse to bring his mother Minta here, to the country, to see this mansion. After his father’s third stroke finally killed him, Kim watched his mother deteriorate daily as she mourned; he’d come back from school to find her unkempt, vacant and starving, and they’d sit together watching the telly with a tray before she fell asleep on the sofa. At first he couldn’t undress her; it seemed indecent. But then it seemed more indecent not to, so he’d begun washing her and lifting her to bed until the social services recommended transfer to Close Care housing where she now sat, day by day, vacantly watching the crows that flapped down on the parking lots outside her window to claw and peck at blowing packets of pork scratchings. Like a phantom at the window in a picture of a haunted grange, she stared out of the still neat house of her body, and did not know who Kim was any longer.

  He must get on with selling his parents’ semi, he was thinking as he took in the view of Feverel. He must tidy away all Gerald’s belongings and find himself somewhere of his own to live. But he was too busy, and he hadn’t any idea where he might look, where he could afford to live within reach of his work. Where indeed he might feel at home.

  ‘It wasn’t the plan,’ Gramercy responded, making an effort to control her voice. ‘That’s why I’m moving into new work, going into films, producing stuff that’s not just mine. Bringing people like you to Feverel, using it as a base to brainstorm, to seed new ideas, to make something, to bring life to this place. It deserves it.’

  Dinner reached the table late; it was half past nine before the casserole of soup, smelling of damp mulch, was lifted off the stove. Kim had already consumed a bowlful of black olives, and half a sunflower-seed-and-honey loaf, for he was used to eating at six-thirty or seven, as soon as he got back to his childhood home after work. He didn’t care for the rubbery mushrooms, they reminded him of surgical gloves. But many more dishes were on their way, he noticed with relief, though no smell of roasting meat, he also noted, with disappointment.

  The man from Channel Y who was putting up the money for Gramercy’s film project had driven down to Feverel, and arrived around nine. His linen clothes wafted plumply against his much-lunched body, and, when Kim shook his hand, it was moist from holding the wheel.

  This commissioning editor, introduced by Gramercy simply as Taffy, roared with delight as he kissed her, ‘My stellar friend!’ he shouted, then clasped Kim’s hand in a strenuous shake and flushed with boisterous high spirits as he met first Hortense, then Monica, all the while deploring at staccato speed and at the top of his voice the condition of the roads, the multitudes of cones, the heavy goods vehicles that might as well be freight trains and run on tracks, the hay carts and combine harvesters and the flocks of dim sheep that prevented him arriving several precious minutes before for this meeting that was a pure tonic after what he’d endured at work that day in town.

  He lifted their mood, with his noisiness; his guffaws at Gramercy’s soup, his excitement about their joint project, his mock-furious laments at the money he’d stumped up already without anything to show for it.

  ‘What one’ll do for a better world! Sing, girl, c’m’on! I want to hear this Leto stuff!’ he cried, and Gramercy felt the colour rise to her temples.

  ‘Maybe she’ll play you the tape, later,’ said Monica, adding to the blaze of coloured vessels on the table and standing bottles beside them. ‘Red wine, white, cider. And liquid vitamins – for Gramercy,’ she added, positioning a flask of something orangey-crimson near the hostess, who was smoking a joint made with a herbal tobacco that smelled like Guy Fawkes Night. Gramercy had been preparing food with the fervour of one who never ate herself but found satisfaction in seeing others feed; picky, mostly off her food, and quick to feel queasy, she exulted in watching others cram themselves at her kitchen table.

  Taffy was a trencherman; Hortense, too, had heaped her plate with approving sounds and was accepting Taffy’s offer to refill her glass.

  ‘So, where’re we at with this idea?’ began Taffy. Hortense started in, laying out the plans for the Leto’s reinstallation (she’d brought with her photocopies of architects’ drawings, publicity material, print-outs of computer realisations); Kim joined in, speaking softly, in his grave public persona, to deliver his start-of-history speech, which Taffy challenged, but good-humouredly, like an affable teacher goading a student to express himself more vigorously, to tighten his position.

  ‘That’s great, great,’ he muttered, as Kim launched into tough tolerance, double identity, the present time when all post-this and post-that perspectives must end. There was to be no more belatedness, no more looking back.

  Taffy listened on, with effusive interest. After Kim had first begun to be interviewed and featured and discussed in the media, the commissioning editor had taken the extent and degree of attention to the schoolteacher as insincere and opportunistic, a kind of hostility inverted, a symptom of host embarrassment or reverse racism. But he now realised that Kim had become more than a token marginal, or an object of curiosity. He’d become bankable – perhaps.

  But they were having difficulty keeping strictly to the topic, for the wine was launching Gramercy’s guests adrift on a winking, dancing, whitewater current into which they leapt, now going where it took them, now forging upstream, flying in the face of its force. Some well-worn landmarks guided the conversation’s passage: the globalised economy, telly chefs, ways of giving up smoking (gum? patches? laser treatment? hypnosis?), the forthcoming alignment of the sun, the moon and the seven planets, and the incontrovertibly predicted end-of-the-world that would follow. They passed on to new plagues, catastrophes and autoimmune diseases, remote control medical diagnosis and treatment by computer menus. Taffy: ‘Click on the icon that best describ
es your condition? Do you have flashing lights behind your eyes? Your turn!’ (To Hortense) Hortense: ‘Do your piercings ooze?’ Kim considered, then offered: ‘How about those moles? How much time in your life have you spent sunbathing?’ Monica: ‘Does your heart ever skip a beat?’ Gramercy: ‘Do you feel inadequate?’ And Taffy roared in response: ‘Select one of the following options: Viagra! Prozac! St John’s Wort! Garlic!’

  Glasses brimmed over, plates emptied, smoke rose around the five of them as the dusk in the midsummer garden deepened, leaving the mica glint of a lopsided moon through the window.

  The talk began to break up between them. Gramercy wanted to know what Kim thought about altruism in nature: ‘Nellie says that animals start pining if you leave them alone, and that was one of the problems with Phil’s arrangements. Overcrowding and loneliness, at the same time. If you put a donkey in a field on its own, it’ll pine. But it only needs a duck to keep it company, and they both perk up. So it’s a kind of mutual aid.’ When she leant across the table and put a hand on Kim’s arm, almost imploring him to crack the secrets of survival for her, Hortense realised how profoundly irritated she’d been ever since they’d arrived in this flaky singer’s ridiculous pile, and even more so now that she’d been drinking.

  She drained her glass, again. She hadn’t wanted to come; Kim had made her, and now she was trapped here, and Gramercy’s little girl eyes seemed to have grown larger in her face and to be dripping dew on Kim. Abruptly, Hortense stood up.

  Monica got to her feet too, and showed Hortense the downstairs bootroom with the Victorian patterned enamel water closet with a royal coat of arms, Sanitation Engineers by Appointment. The wine fizzed out of her, and she felt lightened when she returned to the strewn table, where Monica was now placing baskets of fruit, a cheese board, a huge bowl of salad.