The Road to Lichfield

by Penelope Lively

  ‘All right, all right. Tart-traps, they were called, in our youth.’ He winked at Paul.

  ‘Well, we aren’t any more, are we?’ she said ‘Young.’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Annie, What’s up with her?’ he said to the children. ‘Does she always put on this premature senility act?’ They were fascinated by him, Judy blushing scarlet every time he came near her, exuding sexual awareness.

  After lunch he walked with Anne to the shops.

  ‘Did father know you?’ she said.

  ‘Hard to say. On and off, I think.’

  ‘I’ve started sorting things out at the house, papers and that. I’m putting all your stuff in one box.’

  ‘I know. I saw. You could leave it for the time being, surely?’

  ‘I had to see to some bills and letters and then – oh, I don’t know, I just felt I ought to, and I kept coming across things I’d forgotten about, stuff from years ago. I don’t know what to do with it all.’

  ‘Chuck it away,’ said Graham. ‘Anyway, the nursing-home seems not too bad a place, bar the po-faced nurses, but I’m afraid Dad’s rather beyond noticing them, poor old chap. Is it pricey?’

  ‘Fairly, but I went through things with the bank manager – it should be all right. That reminds me – who on earth do you think this Mrs Barron can be? You know – that I told you about on the phone.’

  They were at the corner of the High Street. She turned to him and he said, ‘Where are we going now – over there? Right.’ And took her arm, shepherding her over the road, piloting her between lorries. How odd, she thought, Don never does that, never did, it must be one of those basic differences between men, those that do and those that don’t. Achieving the pavement, almost giggling, she said, ‘Here – what’s all this? Anyone would think I was one of your girls.’

  ‘Critical as ever. Seriously, though, Annie – it’s good to see you.’

  ‘Come down more often, then.’

  ‘You know how things are. One gets so tied up.’

  ‘Hmmn … This Mrs Barron, Graham …?’

  ‘Ah, yes. Look, Annie, don’t fash yourself about that. I’ll have a check myself, next time I go up.’

  ‘There’s no point in us both doing all this.’

  ‘Maybe. What’s this party tonight, then? Good do?’

  ‘Nothing for you, I should imagine, unless you fancy Berkshire housewives.’

  ‘If sufficiently deprived in that direction I can fancy almost anything.’

  ‘Thanks very much. And just you behave yourself.’

  ‘Yes, auntie.’

  Later, pressed into a corner of someone’s sitting-room (Speed and Morden maps of the county on the walls; collection of Victorian souvenir mugs in a cabinet), she watched him across the room, his back to her. His back, she saw, had a slight, as yet very slight, stoop, and there was a hint of pink scalp through his thinning, just perceptibly thinning hair: she felt a lurch of compassion. Him too. Even Graham. ‘Yes,’ she said to the man who was talking to her (a man, she seemed vaguely to remember to be in some way connected with local government). ‘Yes, we’re thinking of going to Scotland this year.’

  When Graham was twenty-four and I two years younger there was that business, that ghastly business, with the pregnant girl. I never, in fact, knew her name. That, he said, was neither here nor there, not really the point. What was very much to the point was the lolly, the cash, the wherewithal. He does not, in fact, still owe me twenty-five pounds (my Post Office savings, all but five quid) because he did, in fact and rather to my surprise, pay it back. Where he got the other seventy-five I’ll never know, or if he paid that back.

  ‘ … get my wife to let you have the name of this place in the Trossachs.’

  And we have never mentioned the subject again to this day, though, of course, it is lodged there for both of us like sediment in a pond. Neither have I ever mentioned it to Don, for one reason or another. What reason? Don wouldn’t actually disapprove of abortion, he doesn’t really disapprove of anything except fuss, bother, demands. Suppose, she thought, suppose I’d got pregnant, that weekend in Broadway, before we got engaged? That would have been a bother all right, even Don couldn’t have quietly slid away from that one. But of course I didn’t; we were luckier.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘there’s such a racket …. Glenelg, did you say?’

  Or more careful. Don was always dead careful; he knew more about my periods than I did. He’d never have got into that kind of trouble. Graham, of course, didn’t see it as trouble; just a passing difficulty. I felt sorry for the girl, the girl whose name I never knew. I wondered if she loved him. I thought a great deal about love then.

  ‘ … warn you against the west coast route.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘I can see my brother making signals.’

  Only very subdued ones, in fact; a catching of the eye, a lift of the eyebrow. He’s got stuck with the retired general, he won’t like that. And here’s Sandra, doing the rounds. Has she spotted Graham, I wonder?

  ‘Anne dear just a quick word … I’m told the chap to get onto on the R.D.C. about Splatt’s Cottage is a Mr Jewkes. He’s apparently really quite enlightened and prepared to listen, so long as we can make out a good case we can get him on our side.’

  ‘Yes, I see. I went down there yesterday – to the cottage It is in a mess, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’d see him myself, of course, only just now I haven’t a moment. Is that your brother over there?’

  ‘Yes. Sandra, do you think one should preserve any old building?’

  ‘Well, for goodness sake one has some responsibility to future generations.’

  ‘Yes, of course. But carried to extremes you could get a situation where …’

  ‘I thought,’ said Sandra, ‘you were a preservationist.’

  ‘Up to a point. Well, yes, naturally I am. But if you take age as a virtue in itself – if you sanctify the past just for its own sake …’

  ‘Your sister,’ said Sandra, ‘is using the most frightfully long words. It comes of all that education, I suppose – very confusing for homely girls like me.’

  ‘Homely?’ said Graham. ‘What absolute nonsense. Let me get you another drink? Annie?’

  ‘We met once at some ghastly children’s beano. You won’t remember.’

  ‘But of course I remember. Are you drinking red or white?’

  Liar. And that expression could almost – most certainly will in ten years’ time – be called a leer. Sandra’s, I suppose, is a simper.

  ‘Share the joke, Anne?’

  She worked her way to the window and stood looking over the lawn that ran down to the trim banks of the Thames. It must be an expensive house, this, all that river-frontage. Boats, as spruce and painty as toys, were moored at intervals; small craft with outboard motors and here and there a canal narrow-boat meticulously restored in traditional colours and patterns. They had roses and pictures of castles painted on their sides. Anne remembered visiting once, with the children, a waterways museum where this vanished life-style was lovingly enshrined, pots and pans and plates and faded sepia photographs of coal-blackened bargees. Now, down there on a leisure-time river, a girl emerged from the cabin of her boat and stood in the spring evening sunshine, wearing jeans and sweater, a can swagged with painted roses in one hand and a transistor radio in the other.

  ‘Thinking of a boating holiday?’ said Don, appearing at Anne’s side.

  She slipped her arm through his, feeling slightly tipsy. ‘Not on your life. Shall we go? Where’s Graham?’

  ‘Somewhere around. Nice house, though.’

  ‘Is’pose so.’ She couldn’t remember who their host was. Someone she’d barely met, someone Don knew through work.

  ‘We might think of moving somewhere like this when I take over from Thwaites.’

  ‘Why?’ She stared at him in amazement.

  ‘More garden. Quieter. Good investment.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘But I like our hous
e, we’ve been there so long now, what’s the point of moving? Such a bother,’ she added, with craft, ‘all that fuss.’

  ‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘Just a thought.’ But if she had not been just a little drunk (and looking round now for Graham) she would have seen the insincerity of this, not giving in but postponing.

  ‘Good,’ she said, her arm still through his, Graham contacted now, by eye, the host located, there by the door. ‘Good, now we can go.’

  They drove home on a tide of good spirits induced by drink and a united front against people they had talked to at the party.

  ‘What a bunch! Sorry we wished that on you, Graham.’

  ‘Don’t mention it – a laugh a minute, I assure you. I particularly relished the military bloke.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Don, ‘the general. He’s one of my favourite characters, too. Strictly after the event, mind.’

  ‘Pull in here a minute, Anne, will you.’

  They watched him vanish into the White Hart. Anne said, ‘For goodness sake, couldn’t he wait till we get home for a pee?’ She felt restless, edgy, for two pins she would go trotting in there after him, like a wife chasing up a roaming husband: she put her hand suddenly on Don’s thigh. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘what’s up with you? Here’s Graham, anyway.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Look, he’s got a bottle, bless him. Champagne, at that, if you please!’

  She glanced at Don, to see how he took that. Time was, that would have got his hackles up, so far as anything did. When they were young, he’d resented Graham’s affluence – Graham’s illusory affluence, as it in fact was, his conspicuous expenditure of money he did not in fact have. ‘He’s a spiritual Scot, your bloke,’ Graham had said, when Anne and Don were engaged. ‘You’ll never catch him buying a drink out of turn. Better watch it, Annie – don’t you know what they say?’ And gullibly she’d said no, she didn’t, and Graham had produced these saloon bar analogies between tightfistedness and sexual restraint. She’d flown at him (and quite right too, she thought now, indignantly), and she’d flown at him again when he laughed at Don’s building society savings account – his pre-marital building society savings account. It’s very sensible, she said, and anyway it’s none of your business. Oh yes, said Graham, it’s sensible all right, all too bloody sensible. Christ! And went on laughing. And of course they never got on, he and Don, or at least they never overtly quarrelled (because, she thought with surprise, come to that you can’t have a row with Graham any more than you can with Don, he backs away too, slips out of the room, changes the subject, only he’s usually laughing at you while he does it) but they avoided one another, or exchanged platitudes. How many brothers-in-law, though, could do better, she wondered. It’s an impossible relationship in any case – unsought by either party, without the rival love for the person in between that makes some kind of getting-on-together effort unavoidable between children and parents-in-law. You aren’t exactly loved by a brother. Attached to, though, yes.

  Graham insisted on the children being given champagne also. They were both a little frenzied by it; Paul apeing sophistication, showing off, Judy incandescent and eventually somnolent, pecking at her glass like a wary bird. Graham entertained (the professional guest, Anne thought, the bachelor singing for his supper, he must do this a lot). He told stories that became more and more indiscreet; in sudden alarm she packed the children off upstairs, and came back into the room to find a tension between the men. Graham said, ‘Don reckons I’ve been corrupting your young.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it that strongly,’ said Don.

  ‘Judy’s only thirteen, remember – it’s bewildering, that kind of grown-up talk.’ She plumped a cushion, sat on the floor by the fire, looking for a diversion, thinking, I don’t want an argument, it’s been a nice evening. And Graham as though in agreement began to talk to Don about inflation. A good safe subject, she thought, like the weather, the rain it rains upon us all, and no two ways about it. Thank God for the course of history. How many fragile family occasions, back in Starbridge, had been saved by recourse to such matters? We all of us deplore – deplored – the Cold War, the H-bomb, the housing shortage, air pollution, sliced bread, muzak. But for God’s sake keep off all those things whereby people define themselves. She remembered a friend of hers who claimed that disagreement with her parents had extended to so many areas that they had been obliged to spend the whole of one Christmas talking about new species of rose. But why, when between friends discussion is the very stuff of life, should it have such potential danger within families? Harmony between relations, she thought, has to be built up of evasions – the deft avoidance of all those rogue subjects that can shatter the smooth passage of a meal, an outing, the three days of Christmas. By the collusion of all parties, they have to be smothered for the sake of appearances (or, when no one can stand it any longer, invoked so that everyone can hang onto their self-respect). At Starbridge, they might as well have been inscribed upon the kitchen wall: Modern Art (except Lowry and Augustus John), artificial fertilizers, birth control (except in mother’s absence), phonetic spelling, Aneurin Bevan, D. H. Lawrence, the Trent River Board, Coventry Cathedral.

  ‘Do you remember,’ she said suddenly, ‘going to Coventry that time? Soon after it was built – some Christmas.’

  ‘You and Dad having an argument about stained glass and stuff? I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.’

  ‘Tastes.’

  ‘Never worth a barney,’ said Graham with a yawn. Don said he’d better see about the boiler and went out of the room.

  ‘I don’t agree. But that’s not worth an argument now.’ They grinned at each other. Outside in the kitchen Don clattered with coal hods.

  Anne said, ‘You ought to get married.’

  ‘Why, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. One thing and another.’

  ‘Someone to look after me in my old age.’

  ‘That, even.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Graham, ‘I haven’t come to that yet.’ He slumped in the chair, a glass in his hand, watching Don go past the window to the coal shed. ‘How’s it worked out for you, then, Annie?’

  ‘How’s what worked out?’

  ‘Twenty years with old Don.’

  ‘Seventeen as it happens. Fine. Just fine.’

  ‘All right, then, don’t say. I’ll tell you one thing, though, I thought he was doing pretty well for himself at the time.’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot. I wasn’t your type of girl at all.’

  ‘Oh, that’s true enough – you’d been ruined by education. I like my women pure and uncorrupted. I still thought Don was onto a good thing, though.’

  ‘Hmmn. Well, I don’t know how you find these uncorrupted women now, after twenty years of university expansion. Even in your murky world.’

  ‘I must admit, it’s getting harder. They do tend to mellow, of course. Like you, if I may say so – you’ve mellowed. Not quite so many principles around. Less inclined to leap into the breach.’

  ‘Thanks very much,’ said Anne crossly. What about Splatt’s Cottage? she was going to say, and then thought: no, dammit, I’m not embarking on that, it’s too late and I can’t be bothered. But that, of course, is precisely what Graham means.

  ‘And so,’ he went on, ‘have I. I’ll save you the trouble of saying it. Truth to tell, I get a bit whacked these days. O.K. if I help myself?’ He waved towards the whisky bottle.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘It’s a bit disconcerting when you look round a table, at a script conference or something, and realize you’re about the oldest person there. Or you find yourself working with some director young enough to be your son.’ He kicked a log back onto the fire. ‘Not of course that it matters. You just feel a bit – crept up on, I suppose. And I get these bloody stomach aches.’

  ‘You should see someone about that.’

  ‘Will do. Sometime.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I like you better a bit mellowed, myself. Except fo
r that ludicrous car. Good thing father was spared that. That reminds me, Graham – this Mrs Barron. I really do have to sort this bank account out, you know.’

  Graham put his glass down. He swirled its base in the circle of damp it had left on the table. Outside in the kitchen, coke cascaded into the boiler. Graham took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the wet patch and the base of the glass. He put the handkerchief away and the glass down and said, ‘Yes. The fact is …. Look, Anne, I always imagined you had some idea.’

  ‘Some idea of what?’ More coke pouring. Diffused spatter of an overspill.

  ‘Well, clearly you didn’t. Look, Annie, you aren’t going to like this, but the fact is Dad had a lady off-stage for a long time. In Gloucester or some such place.’

  The lid of the boiler clunked shut. The hod was dumped down on the floor. Now Don was washing his hands.

  Anne said, ‘You cannot, you simply cannot be telling me he had a mistress.’

  ‘Oh, Annie, be your age. It does happen, you know.’

  Don put his head round the door and said, ‘I’ll just put the car away. Did you leave the keys in it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Keys. Car keys.’

  ‘Oh – yes, they’re in it.’

  After a moment she said, ‘You knew. Since when?’

  ‘Only kind of vaguely. I rather stumbled across it once – years ago, I really can’t remember now – and just filed it away as one of those things. A fact of life.’

  ‘Did father know you knew?’

  ‘I imagine not.’

  ‘And this Mrs Barron …?’

  ‘Oh, good lord, no,’ said Graham, ‘she’s not her. She died sometime ago. Before Mum in fact. This is her daughter.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Oh, not their daughter. Christ, no. Nothing to do with us. This is a daughter she had already.’

  Outside, headlights swept the drive, washed across the window, went away. ‘Well,’ said Anne, ‘that’s something to be grateful for. At least one thing stays the same. There’s only the two of us.’

  ‘I know it’s a bit of a shock. Truth to tell, I’d almost forgotten about it myself. I was surprised when I first realized about it, way back – it just didn’t seem Dad’s line of country at all – but there you are. It wasn’t any of my business, our business, I thought, best to leave well alone. Mum never knew, I can tell you that.’