by D. J. Taylor
‘Of course they show themselves,’ Mr Brancaster said. He was quiet for a moment and then went on: ‘The chairman of the wine committee is a Cinq Port baron.’
They had been having these birthday lunches for a dozen years: in carvery restaurants in the shadow of Holborn Viaduct; in pasta joints on the south side of Oxford Street; and now in the Terrapin Club. It was hard to know if this was a step up, or a retreat.
‘You’re looking well,’ Patrick said. It was a quarter past one. He would stay until 2.30, but no later.
‘I am well. My leech, never yet suspected of being a humbug, says he has never seen a fitter man of seventy-nine.’ As well as seemly cliché, Mr Brancaster liked professional archaisms. He was probably the last man in England to talk about barristers-at-law and water-bailiffs. Sappy, damson-faced and vigorous, white hair combed back from his forehead, blue-blazered and pink-shirted, he looked like a Butlin’s redcoat or the kind of old-fashioned comedian who strode up and down a line of chorus girls singing ‘Dapper Dan was a very handy man’.
‘And how’s Marjorie?’
Marjorie, as the younger generation of Brancasters never failed to remind each other, was dangerous territory. Without Marjorie there would have been no birthday lunches on neutral ground, and no Mrs Brancaster, still furious at her desertion, mouldering in the divorcée’s bungalow at Firle. But Mr Brancaster took this in his stride.
‘She keeps me young,’ he said, with what to anyone else might have been a glimmer of irony, but which Patrick knew to be absolute seriousness.
There were three or four other Terrapins in the dining room by now: innocuous-looking men in sober suits, who peered respectfully at the wine list and the framed photograph of the Duke of Windsor drinking a cocktail and looking as if he had just stepped in something nasty. A door in the corner opened and shut suddenly and the smell it released – mingled scents of cabbage, gravy and burnt sugar – was so like Patrick’s school canteen that he raised his head from the table and sniffed at it. Mr Brancaster, meanwhile, had summoned the waiter again (‘Waiter! Garçon! Jugend!’) and was putting on a tremendous performance – a really first-class show, even for him – about the lunch menu. Like the stink of the cabbage, this, too, brought back memories: of Mr Brancaster at school open days; at football matches; in saloon bars and on petrol station forecourts. No one, Patrick thought, had ever made such an exhibition of himself or failed to notice that an exhibition was being made.
‘It’s a pity the two of you don’t come and see us more often,’ he said, when the waiter had been sent scurrying away. ‘Marjorie’s often said so.’
But not even kind, tolerant Elaine could be persuaded to visit the house in Pinner where Mr Brancaster sat in state watching antiques programmes on the television more than once a year. ‘It’s not for me to complain,’ she had once said, ‘but people who go around deliberately ruining other people’s lives ought to be called to account every now and again.’
‘It’s a long way on a Sunday afternoon,’ he found himself saying, ‘and besides, the children have their own lives to lead these days.’ That was another effect that time spent in Mr Brancaster’s company had on you: he encouraged you to spout the same evasive language as himself. In fact there was no earthly reason why Patrick’s children could not have been forced to visit their grandfather on Sunday afternoons, other than their not liking him. For Mr Brancaster was an insensitive grandparent, who made bracing remarks about exam results, twitted the boys about non-existent girlfriends and, worse, could not see the damage he was doing. Looking at his father as he sat comfortably in his chair, the white hair so immaculately angled over his scalp that it might have been made of spun sugar – Marjorie was twenty years his junior – Patrick wondered, not for the first time, what he had wanted out of life. To be a success? Well, that depended on how you defined success. To be loved? Well, a fair number of people had, at one time or another, loved, admired, or at any rate tolerated him during the course of that seventy-nine years. No, he decided, what Mr Brancaster had really wanted to do, and showed every sign of continuing to want to do, was to impress his personality on the world around him.
‘I hope it’s not one of those days where the chef pretends he’s feeling under the weather,’ Mr Brancaster said, a bit too loudly for comfort. ‘I once had to go into the kitchen and grill the sardines myself.’
They were never any good, these birthday lunches, whether at the Holborn carveries, the Soho pasta joints or anywhere else. They were never any good because their effect was to focus attention on the past: a past in which Mr Brancaster, though conspicuous, would always be found wanting. Had he ever, Patrick wondered, made an original remark? Had he ever got beyond that fervently held first principle of pleasing yourself? And this was to ignore the spectre of Marjorie, which hung over everything the younger Brancasters had done, said, or plotted, in the past ten years like a giant bat. ‘It’s very hard,’ Mrs Brancaster had said, rather humbly and matter-of-factly, when the fact of Marjorie’s existence had first been drawn to her attention. There was no getting away from this, none. It was hard. And Mr Brancaster had made it harder still. It was not, Patrick thought, that you could excuse the things he did – had done – would continue to do – on grounds of increasing age. After all, you accepted that your parents’ behaviour would become more stylised as they grew older. Even his mother had adopted a high-pitched little-girl-lost voice and was keener than ever to talk about some quasi-aristocratic relatives whom they barely knew. It was just that his father’s behaviour – whether young, middle aged, or grandly decaying – had always been exactly the same.
‘Cyril! Kenneth! Derek!’ Mr Brancaster was calling out greetings to the other Terrapins, who stirred uncomfortably in the breeze of his salutations, like anguished dreamers. There was something terrifying about his bonhomie, Patrick thought, terrifying and somehow meaningless.
‘Happy birthday, dad,’ he said, remembering why he was there, still guilty despite all the evidence piled up in his favour.
‘Better than some,’ Mr Brancaster said. ‘Do you know there was a time in the RAF when they tried to serve me up with a plate of celery?’
The food began to arrive and they ate it: potted shrimps, which Mr Brancaster gnashed into fragments, like a lawnmower tearing up twigs; some bread rolls, which he tweaked out of their basket with his finger-ends and laid, one by one, on his plate like an oysterman displaying his catch. And then something odd happened. Caught in the wash of Mr Brancaster’s personality, and either anxious either to conciliate it or simply make some half-ironic comment, the waiter set down the next course – an outsize chunk of cod garnished with mange-tout – with what, in the context of the Terrapin Club, its dingy backdrops and dust-strewn carpet, amounted to a flourish. Something in the gesture struck home at Mr Brancaster. He said, suddenly and unselfconsciously:
‘This reminds me of the fish.’
‘Which fish?’ Patrick asked.
‘The fish. You, of all people, ought to remember the fish.’
Mr Brancaster had always been a high-grade exponent of private codes, crosswords solved by clues that only he had access to. This must be another one of them.
‘I remember all kinds of fish,’ Patrick said, a bit irritably. It was ten to two now: soon he would be gone.
‘No, the fish we caught that time at Happisburgh. On the beach. When the sea had gone out. And then we took it home and your mother cooked it.’
And, curiously enough, against all expectation, he did remember. Slowly, like a priceless carpet, the scene rolled out to fill his head. Long leagues of unmarked sand. The sea a distant, blue-white line. A commotion in a rock-pool, which turned out to be not, as they first thought, a cat but a three-pound cod left stranded by the departing tide. His father expertly despatching it with a rock-end to the head. He would have been seven, he supposed.
‘I do remember it,’ he said.
‘I knew you would,’ Mr Brancaster said. Vindicated, he grew quieter, less sel
f-assertive. It would have been possible, had Patrick thought any of these things desirable, to borrow money from him, tell him a few home truths, even pass on a message from his wife. Outside the window the noise of Covent Garden boiled up from the street. A kind of calm settled on the proceedings. ‘All a long time ago,’ Mr Brancaster said, like a headmaster deciding for once to lay the imposition book aside. ‘Didn’t your mother say – didn’t she say it was the maddest thing I’d done in a long while?’
‘I expect she did,’ Patrick said. His mother, he remembered, had made the best of things, put her supper-plans aside and boiled up the cod in pint of milk.
‘All a long time ago,’ Mr Brancaster repeated, upping the level of his voice to a resonant, head-hunter’s chant.
After a while more food came, and Mr Brancaster attacked it with the same attritional fury. Patrick sat silent in his chair, his own meal untouched, oblivious to the Terrapins and their modest chatter, lost in this world of rolling sand, his father’s taut, eager, face, that blissful anaesthetic of endless skies, yachts dancing in the distance, time, for once, stood still, waiting for him to do whatever he wanted with it, and make it whole.
—2011
Cranked Up Really High
Beyond the kitchen door the lawn descended into sunlight. Coming from twenty feet away still deep within the house, the fat man’s voice – was his name Roger? Or Jeremy? – seemed curiously disembodied, hanging in the air above the trails of Virginia creeper and the outsize plant pots.
‘Of course there are things we ought to have done to the place, I don’t deny… But when it comes down to it, I mean, in the end you’ve got to live in a house haven’t you?’
Ignoring the voice, to the extent that its brisk, man-to-man bark was ignorable, Julian stared critically across the grass. A hundred feet, perhaps, or a hundred and twenty. Where the lawn ended there was a cluster of miniature outbuildings: two sheds, a ramshackle summerhouse, what looked like a compost heap trammelled behind wooden bars.
The voice was drawing nearer again. Close up it seemed less substantial, somehow ghost-ridden. ‘As to the garden, there’s a bit of a stench first thing in the morning. Down-wind of the local pig farm, I’m afraid. But if you want to live in the country, then really that’s the kind of thing that…’
Turning back on his heel Julian watched the fat man come lumbering through the doorway two coffee mugs sunk into the red flesh of his fists, half-smoked cheroot still dangling from the fingers of his right hand. The fat man’s name, he now remembered – and this kind of confusion was endemic to serial house inspection – was Hugo. Despite the open-necked shirt and the bare, plump feet crammed into espadrilles, the adjective that suggested itself was ‘soldierly’. You could visualise Hugo in battledress commanding the prow of a tank, giving orders to Gurkha riflemen.
They set off across the lawn – Hugo determinedly, as if he was shouldering his way through bracken – past an apple tree and an oak bench lightly dusted with powdery green lichen. Here the small, red-haired girl that Hugo had shooed briskly out of the hall when they arrived was sitting with a pile of windfalls in her lap. Hugo’s expression, which had been proprietorial in the dining room and bored in the kitchen, now registered simple annoyance.
‘I don’t think,’ he said solemnly, ‘that we want any of that.’
‘Sorry, daddy.’
‘You know you’re not supposed to eat the windfalls, darling. Now, go and put them in the box in the scullery so that mummy knows where they are.’
‘All right.’
‘Otherwise there won’t be any to make into preserve, will there?’
‘I suppose there won’t.’
Julian watched the girl skidding back across the grass, apples gathered in the crooked knot of her arms. Hugo was looking at the cluster of outbuildings, momentarily baffled, like an actor robbed of a vital cue. Then his face brightened.
‘Now, if you’re a gardening man, well, here’s something that really, I mean…’
The something turned out to be a motorised lawn-mower with a defective rotor blade that Hugo proposed to ‘throw in with the house’. Standing by the doorway of the shed, in the shade of the mighty cypress trees that bordered the fence (‘Cost you three hundred a year to trim, of course, but there’s a chap two doors down who, I mean…’) Julian wondered, as he usually did on these real estate tours, what Hugo did for a living. Even with people called Hugo, who lived in moss-covered rectories out in the Norfolk wild, it was sometimes difficult to tell. There had been a mass of sailing charts strewn over the deal table in the study, but that didn’t prove anything. Remembering the black stuff gown that meekeyed Mrs Hugo had been commanded to carry away out of the lobby along with other weekend detritus, he marked him down as a barrister.
‘Good solid pinewood, that fence,’ Hugo chipped in, taking this moment of reflection as waning interest. ‘So if you wanted to prune back the hedge, you could…’
Two months into the search for a house Julian was familiar with this kind of language: the language of uplift, exhortation, limitless possibility. Rock gardens just waiting to be turned into swimming pools. Dowdy attics craving the coat of paint that would transform them into playrooms, studies and guest annexes. Somewhere in this world of ritualised embellishment, moral obligation lurked.
‘Any particular reason why you’re selling?’ he wondered as they trekked back uphill over the scree of windfalls. Hugo, looking slightly more affronted than most vendors allowed themselves to be by questions of this sort, muttered something about schools, wives and proximity to work. It was eleven in the morning now, and hot. Looking up at the house (a highly desirable rectory conversion on the edge of this much-loved village) he saw his own wife silhouetted against one of the upstairs windows, the agents’ brochure fanned out beneath her gaze. Mary would be half-way through her check-list by now: roof; drains; village school’s position in the OFSTED table; bus service; danger of flooding; local burglary statistics; neighbours. Curiously, people answered these questions with an unfailing patience. The protocols and assumptions of house purchase – common ground, inches offered and received – appealed to them. Watching Mary bob her head in answer to some response from Mrs Hugo – invisible behind curtains – reminded him that starker realities lay at hand. ‘If we don’t get this one,’ she had said in the car earlier that morning, hand poised over the mobile phone in her lap, ‘it’ll mean another six-month let. Five thousand out of the capital. Just think about it.’
Julian thought about it, as they wandered back inside. Hugo was staring suspiciously at the corpse of a gigantic slug that lay suppurating on the mat. ‘Bloody cats,’ he pronounced. ‘They just bring every bit of wildlife they can find indoors, and, I mean, it’s not as if…’Julian wondered if he left his sentences unfinished in court. ‘Last week I found a dead weasel on the landing,’ Hugo went on. From the tail of his eye Julian saw the red-haired girl issuing secretively through the hall and heading towards the staircase. ‘Look,’ said Hugo. Julian saw that he had straightened up from the mat and resumed the demeanour of someone who seriously wants to sell his house. ‘This is rather fun.’
Julian examined the miniature pulley system suspended above their heads, from which various hooks and wires hung down.
‘What does it do?’
‘What does it do? Well, you stick something on one of these hooks – like this, see? – and then you just, I mean…’
Some way above, footsteps could be heard moving over an uncarpeted floor. With elephantine precision Hugo put an ashtray onto the wire cradle and sent it chugging over to the other side of the ceiling. Julian had a sudden vision of him as a serious-minded boy unpacking train sets, whisking toy cars round their circles of track. ‘I’d very much like to see upstairs,’ he said, ‘see if Mary’s come up with anything.’ ‘Actually,’ Hugo riposted, flipping the ashtray neatly out of its cage, ‘we’ll probably be taking this with us, that and the, I mean…’ By degrees, and by way of an inspection of the scull
ery damp course, they beat a path back to the dining room, where there was a sideboard supporting decanters and a line of family photographs: a younger Hugo with slightly longer hair in rugby kit; Mr and Mrs Hugo on their wedding day; a recent Hugo staring peevishly at something feathery and dead sticking out of a Labrador’s muzzle. Beyond the door, at the foot of the staircase, the red-haired girl was sitting on the bottom-most step crooning softly to herself and plucking clothes pegs one by one out of a vermilion bag.
‘Darling. Annabel. Darling. We’ve had this conversation before.’
‘What conversation daddy?’
‘The conversation about not leaving things on the staircase. About what would happen if anyone fell over them.’
‘Yes.’
Halfway along the upstairs landing, dwarfed by a giant representation of some Monet waterlilies, Mary and Mrs Hugo were huddled over a sheaf of architect’s drawings. As he approached to greet them Julian thought he heard the words ‘extension over the garage roof’. Seeing her husband, Mrs Hugo announced, not without all signs of trepidation, ‘They want to see the loft.’
‘The loft?’
That’s right, you see…’
‘No. That’s fine. That’s absolutely fine. Darling. I’ll just get the, I mean, and they can…’
Unhooked by means of a long silver pole, the loft trap-door fell open. Further tugging realised a patent ladder that Hugo managed to unfurl to within an inch or two of the carpet. Silently they clambered up, the small red-haired girl leading the way. It was a spacious loft, Julian divined, the best they had seen: fifty feet long, boarded, with storage cupboards, and capable of fulfilling his solitary criterion for house purchase, which was a study-cum-bookroom. They hovered about for a moment while Mary got out her tape measure and Julian tried not to notice, or to be seen to have noticed, that one of the books in the pile of paperbacks spilled over the floor was called High Jinks in a Women’s Prison. Hugo, he saw, was looking pleased, like some schoolteacher whose most backward pupil has, against all odds, managed to recite a poem or conjugate a French verb.