Conversations With Mr. Prain

by Joan Taylor

  He sighed. “Ah Stella, don’t you know that boys from the English upper classes are brought up by their nannies? Mother one is devoted to. One worships, one adores, her. When one becomes a man, she considers it her role to manoeuvre behind one’s back, to block, to whisper, to surprise. And one finds one doesn’t adore her anymore. She is like an old goddess who once commanded a million devotees, but who, in a technological age, is suddenly perceived by everyone to be a sham, an image without substance.”

  “That does sound cynical, you know. She was only human,” I said, awkwardly, noting his “one,” as if every man like him had exactly the same experience.

  He was ruffled, stirred up by memories of his mother and feelings he had long learnt to suppress. He had to attack. “I’m cynical?” he said, smiling. “You ask me direct questions but when I answer directly you immediately pronounce judgement upon me. Very interesting. I’ve always found people like you to be atrociously judgemental.” Still the smile.

  “People like me.”

  “People who espouse grand causes like ‘saving the planet,’ you ‘eco-warriors’ as I believe you call yourselves. Such people are horrendously judgemental of anyone who doesn’t fit into the ‘touchy feely’ rubric. It’s not considered good form to feel nothing for your own mother.” His face was presenting a humorous mode, but his voice was not.

  “But you don’t feel nothing.”

  Oh Christ, I thought. I am not exactly priming him to be nice to me regarding my writing. Say something else, very sweet and non-threatening, for God’s sake, right now. My head was empty.

  And then the phone rang.

  A phone, a phone.

  It was not a mobile. The white phone was attached to the wall near the bar. Mr. Prain looked at it with irritation. He strode over and picked it up as if he was clouting a child over the ear. “Hello, Prain,” he said, with a voice designed to clobber whomsoever had dared to call. He had succeeded in business, I reminded myself. It was no wonder he had such a voice up his sleeve. He listened, but reticently, miffed.

  “Can’t you deal with it?” he snapped.

  I discovered to my amazement that I had already finished half of my martini. I must have been sipping it, unconsciously, as he spoke. Ooops. For all I knew he could have mixed his martini differently from mine to ensure that I fell under the table long before he did. I had to keep my wits about me. No more.

  “I said only emergencies.”

  Only emergencies, he had said. He wanted to be disturbed only if there was a major crisis, not for anything.

  And then some kind of jolt went through me. I realised something I had not thought about before. It was Monday afternoon.

  Monday afternoon. Now meeting someone on Monday afternoon is really not so strange when half the people you know are working nights playing rock music or unemployed, but he was not one of them. He had set aside this afternoon for me. A weekday. A Monday. My day off, not his. He was a busy man. He was chairman and managing director of Coymans Publishing Company. He did not take an afternoon off to entertain young women from Camden for no reason. He did not want to be disturbed, because it was more important to have a few hours of uninterrupted time with this woman than to deal with the concerns of his business when he should have been at the office.

  Jesus Christ. There was more to it than my writing. There was more to it than showing me the photograph, or the sculpture. But I had to bear with him. He had something to ask me.

  “We can do this tomorrow,” he said to the caller. “Tell them I’m considering it.”

  His correspondent clearly felt it could not wait. I went over to the window and looked out through the blinds to the verdant countryside outside the gate. I saw the gardener walk across the driveway below me. Had the lawnmower broken down again?

  “Stella, excuse me.” Mr. Prain was holding down the silencer button and addressing me like a new secretary. I turned to him and raised my eyebrows in expectation. “I have to deal with a business matter, an urgent matter, right away, and it’s rather delicate. Would you mind stepping outside for a moment. This shouldn’t take long.”

  Another problem that required his immediate attention. “No worries,” I said, walking to the mahogany table. I placed my glass down there, beside the chess board, above my black box of typescripts, and paced past the horrible head of Medusa. “I’ll be outside,” I said, as I closed the door behind me. He would think I meant outside the room, in the hallway, but I would be outside the house, in the garden. I could say this is what I had meant all along. He would have to find me there. I needed air, sun, the smell of grass and flowers. Let me out!

  I walked quickly along the hallway and down a narrow flight of steps, whisked along the first floor corridor to the grand sweep of stairs which led up from the entrance hall, ran down, opened the front doors and was at last breathing the country air and feeling the warm sun on my skin. In case he should see me immediately, I kept close to the house until I turned the corner around the west wall. I paced to the back grounds.

  An expanse of lawns descended towards the wood, which lined the gardens on three sides, forming a kind of frame. There was the abandoned tractor lawnmower, silent. Crickets chirped and birds twittered, and the air was scented with roses.

  Liberation, I thought. I am free.

  Then there was a memory of such a time as a teenager. I went to a private church school in Wellington, Marsden Collegiate, which prided itself on turning out nice girls. It was the sort of school in which you had Anglican priests visiting to tell you how to achieve this goal by hard work and perfect manners. During one of these talks, I had made an excuse, said I didn’t feel well, and asked if I could go to the sick room to lie down. Yes. My teacher understood such things. Girls have periods. You could use that. Cramps. Let me go. I walked out of the classroom, along the hushed corridor, past school staff who did not see me, through the door, down the concrete steps, through the school gate, and along the road to a small park. There I lay on the grass under the summer sky. In my green uniform, camouflaged against the vegetation and hidden by trees, surrounded by buttercups, daisies and clover, I day-dreamed, made up a story of love and passion, kissed my beloved, went through a perilous adventure in Africa, fought bravely in a revolution, and returned in time for French.

  chapter four | the garden

  The August afternoon was past its prime and fading. The days were contracting and the late, light evenings of summer were being snipped away. All around, the leaves of the trees were mature and dark, and had a heaviness that would soon become too great. With the frost of autumn, all this vegetal clothing would fall, leaving the branches bare. There was a whiff of it even now.

  The shadow of the old house darkened the closest part of the garden, beyond the terrace and the steps flanked by urns, and, as the evening descended, the shade would progress to dull the colours of the flowers and the grass. I walked along a gravel path. Small butterflies danced around the flower-beds. I breathed the warm, perfumed air. Had I been sure of not being seen, I would have sat down on the lawn to bask in the glory of the day. Instead, I kept to the designated tracks, wondering when Mr. Prain would find me. It was rude, of course, to dash away like this, to make him have to search. It was not the proper thing to do at all. But I could not tolerate being indoors any longer. I felt sure now that discussion of my writing was imminent. Now I could afford to get lost.

  I looked at the shaded back part of the great house, with ivy creeping up its walls like algae. I identified the window of the room where we had been sitting at the tea table, and the bedroom window at the top. Somewhere around the other side Mr. Prain was speaking on the telephone.

  Then I caught sight of Monique. She came through a doorway downstairs, which I presumed belonged to the kitchen, went down some steps, then turned right towards the outbuildings. I froze and stood as motionless as the bird-bath nearby. She did not see me. She opened one of the shed doors and disappeared within. Again, I noted the graceful way she carried h
erself. She was an attractive woman. He must see that, I thought. What was their relationship? Could they have been using vous for my benefit alone?

  But what was my relationship with him? I looked up at the house once more, the house in which my typescripts were still held captive. Was I not being just a little too accommodating in permitting him to dictate the pace of this afternoon? Why did I not pick up the black box and demand a decision: yes or no? Why did I myself undertake a detour? Was I afraid of rejection? Or was I entranced by being taken for a ride? Was I somehow enthralled by a kind of unusual story he was revealing about himself? He let me have it in dribs and drabs, and I was afraid that confrontation would silence him. He interested me.

  I looked up at the house, and Mr. Prain became a real lord, a friend of the king, a man of power. I became his mistress, a peasant girl he had dressed up and placed in his bedroom. Ah yes, I was bound to him for fear of what he might do to me or my family if I did not allow him to take advantage. There I was, walking alone in the garden, dressed in fine fabrics of the sixteenth century, my hair coiffured, my limbs swathed in fragrance, while my mother and father, sisters and brothers, ploughed his land in rags. Now I had slipped out of the house, while he attended to some business, but there was no escape, not really. He owned me. When I no longer pleased him would he release me to an uncertain fate in the world outside, perhaps with a child to protect, or perhaps the child would be kept as his own? And what did I feel for him? What does a toy feel? He was playing with me, entertaining himself, and what good were feelings in such circumstances? I was a lapdog who was well-groomed and fed, but only as long as I was amusing.

  Then I stopped, and saw us both standing close by on the path. He pulled me slowly to him and lightly bit my neck.

  Quickly, I turned away from the image, rubbing that part of my neck. Stop it, I told myself. I should not think of such silly things. I should not let imagination intrude.

  And then I saw something else. A musical group was playing in the shade of the house, and around it sat pale-skinned, elegant ladies and gentlemen. Lutes and flutes. Was this appropriate for the time? He was there among them, listening, but I sat alone, away, on a garden bench, looking towards the woods, batting my fan on my knee. Discreetly, he would show me off to his friends, this flower he had plucked from the ditch. They would look at me covetously, knowingly, waiting for the moment he would grow bored. Their wives saw nothing. For them, I would not exist.

  I shook myself from this fantasy, loaded as it was with sexual interactions and surrender to powerlessness. Why did I find it erotic? This was so not p.c.

  I tried to determine what was happening. Did I like the way he was in control? No, that could not be it. Was I infatuated with him? I had never believed myself to be particularly attracted to Mr. Prain. He was not my type at all. But then why the fantasy, the stickiness of this image of concubine to him, the master? Why, earlier, the image of us making love on his great green bed?

  What if, after all this, he really did want me, crudely, for my body? Maybe this was all a web of sexual harassment that I was willingly accepting. What if he suggested that he would see to it that my novel would be published if I granted him sexual favours? Did that really happen these days, in publishing? No. Movies, maybe; theatre, maybe, but not in books! Oh no, no, no.

  Or would he just lead me on and pretend he would publish something, when that was the last thing on his mind? He had explicitly stated that his intentions were not dishonourable, but should I have believed that? Why trust him at all, in anything?

  What did he want? Did he know? What a shock it must have been to see the woman in the photograph made flesh. No wonder he had stared at me in that way. He would not have believed his eyes. It would have seemed as if someone had worked witchcraft. I had thought he liked to talk with me, but he was drawn to an image, my physical form.

  Did he hope I might be similarly drawn to him? No. It seemed not to have entered his head that I could possibly be interested in him in the same way. He seemed detached from his own body. When he spoke of his brother as a “sporty type” his expression held a sense of loss, of apology. It was as if he understood that his brother had monopolised all the benefits of physical prowess between them. Edward Prain had retired to interiors, to libraries and drawing rooms, to offices where he could use his superior intelligence and gain a different kind of power. Yet he was still a man, and a man who had relationships. He had been engaged twice. He did not give the impression of being gauche; quite the opposite. I had the feeling he could charm, though this was perhaps superficial, part of his good breeding. I sensed he expected to manage a woman, but that he felt women could be either difficult or inadequate in numerous ways.

  But what did I know for sure? It was all intuition and guesswork. I began walking again, engrossed in fathoming out the causes of Mr. Prain’s strange behaviour and my own, perhaps stranger, responses, until, after turning around a box tree cut into the shape of a cone, I encountered the gardener. He was carrying a spanner and smelled strongly of oil and human perspiration. His grey overalls were soiled with the same, as well as paint and dried bits of mud.

  I had startled him. He looked at me without friendliness, with pale grey eyes. “Good afternoon,” I said.

  “Afternoon,” he replied. “You a guest of the governor?”

  “Yes,” I said brightly.

  “Makes a change.”

  “Does it?” I said, keenly interested. “You mean, he doesn’t have many guests?”

  “Not that I’ve seen,” he replied, “but then it’s not like he’s around much neither. He’s in London, isn’t he.” The last statement was not a question but a matter of fact.

  “In London,” I repeated blankly. “He works there.”

  “He lives there in his flat in Chelsea. Up here in the summer for the weekends if we’re lucky. Whole house opened up every May but fat chance if he cares. He’s got his business to attend to and his social life and he’s not interested in Walton, not like his mother and father. The farm manager looks after the farm, but there’s more to life here than that. If he wants a garden, it needs work and resources.” The gardener flailed his hand holding the spanner around as he spoke, and looked explosive. He was clearly not one to hide his feelings.

  It struck me that I should have realised quite some time ago that Mr. Prain had an apartment in London, but he had spoken only of Walton Hall, and I had not taken the time to question whether or not it was probable that he drove down from Northamptonshire on the M1 every day or commuted from Banbury railway station. I had heard of people who did precisely this, and had presumed that Mr. Prain was one of their number. Admittedly, he did not say he dwelt in this house. He must have calculated that, since I come from a slightly more egalitarian land in which even rich people would rarely have several residences, apart from a holiday home, I would assume he lived in his house and make no objection.

  When he had asked me if I wanted to come to tea, he had made it sound as if it was no problem at all to take a Monday off and have me visit in the afternoon. But, according to the new information I had learnt, he had requested that no telephone calls disturb our time together. He had said that he was a very busy man, and yet he had set aside all these hours to have me come to his country house, not to his usual city apartment, which would have been easier for both of us. Or was tea at his flat in Chelsea not proper?

  “How often does Mr. Prain come here?” I asked the gardener bluntly. He did not seem to mind. He seemed to enjoy the opportunity to let off steam to someone.

  “Oh … once or twice a month, I’d say, during the summer. On a weekend. Used to be every weekend, but not this year. Never on a Monday, not like this.” He looked at me with suspicion, expecting me to furnish a reason. “You visiting England then? You’re Australian, aren’t you?” The gardener looked as if he did not care much for foreigners.

  “I’m a New Zealander.”

  “In publishing are you?”

  “Well, in a wa
y. I’m a second-hand book-seller. Mr. Prain just wanted to show me some of his collection here,” I said, thinking that was partly true, and trying to sound nonchalant, as if I knew what was going on.

  The gardener nodded ponderously, sizing me up. I could see now why Mr. Prain and he would not get on. Mr. Prain would turn up irregularly to deal with the business of his family estate in the country, when time permitted. The gardener was the person who really kept things in order. He put in requests for new machinery, while Mr. Prain had little idea about these operations and could not understand why anything needed replacing if it still looked new. He was out of touch with the day to day running of the place.

  “I saw you were having trouble with the lawnmower,” I said.

  The gardener sighed and lifted his eyebrows in an if-you-only-knew manner. “It’s the straw that broke the camel’s back, I tell you. He thinks it should have lasted twenty years but he doesn’t have the wink of an idea the kind of use it’s put to and, you can tell him, she’s been nicking things. I fixed it two weeks ago, and it was working all right, good as gold, just like it was new. Then when I looked at it today there were screws gone right, left and centre.”

  She? Monique? I realised there was an anomaly. If Mr. Prain was in London most of the time, why would he need a cook and housekeeper? He did not entertain here, obviously. He did not have many guests, if any. She would have to keep the place in order, and supervise cleaners from time to time, but then, if the house was only opened up in May, it would be closed up in September. And why on earth would she be taking screws from the lawnmower? I remembered what Mr. Prain had said. The gardener was saying this “out of spite”?

  “Who do you mean by ‘she?’ ” I asked.

  “Her.” He pointed towards the outbuildings. “That French female he’s got in.”