“Actually,” said Martin, “it’s not all that bad, this. Not as good as stock-car racing, but there wasn’t a hope of that…”
There were stalls (home-made sweets, at handsomely reduced prices), an archery competition in which you could have a go with a real cross-bow, a bran-tub with better-than-average loot, guessing the weight of an agitated sheep done up in pink ribbons (oh please, please may I win it, prayed Maria silently, please may I be the only person in our street with their very own Scottish Blackface sheep), coconut shies, and a Refreshment Tent where Mead was on sale only to those over eighteen. They had sandwiches and squash.
The afternoon grew hotter and noisier. There were a great many people, milling around the sweep of drive in front of the house, plunging off down the garden paths in search of Archery in the Kitchen Garden and Jousting First Left after the Stables. The friars had removed their dressing-gowns. Jerkins were peeled off to reveal Marks and Spencer shirts beneath. The lady of the house steamed gently beneath her purple velvet and the milkmaids serving in the Refreshment Tent grew pinker and more harassed. Maria, looking at the great, quiet, stone hulk of the house, longed suddenly for coolness. “Let’s go inside,” she said.
Conducted Tours of the Manor were one of the attractions offered. Martin looked doubtful, and then gave in. They went in through the front door in the wake of a dozen or so other people and the guide, a girl who seemed to live there.
Unencumbered by parents, a member of the Conducted Tour in her own right, Maria found herself looking at things with deep attention. At the Great Hall, from whose high stone walls protruded banners lacy with age; at stone steps dipping in the middle where feet had pattered down them always at the same place; at windows whose stone pillars sliced the Dorset landscape into three sections of greens and golds and blues; at worm-eaten chests and blocked-up arches and tattered silk chair covers.
And at pictures. Lagging at the back of the tour, she studied the dark oil-paintings in some huge room. Sir Henry Hope-Peverell – in tidy grey wig, his hand on a pile of books, a spaniel leaned lovingly against his leg: Lady Charlotte Hope-Peverell – with pearls and a lavish exposure of bosom; a girl in a blue dress, seated in a misty landscape, flowers scattered on her lap.
“You shouldn’t have picked those,” said Maria reprovingly. “They look like orchids to me.”
“Well, what would you do?” said the girl. “Stuck here in a field all day having your picture painted.”
“Nobody’s ever wanted to paint me,” said Maria. “I like the way they’ve done your hair. All those curls.”
“It takes hours – people messing you about and telling you off when you complain. And just you try wearing this dress. Squashed in round the middle till I can hardly breathe. Ever tried climbing a tree in a skirt like this?”
“No,” said Maria. “Did you live here?”
“Stuck here all my life,” said the girl gloomily.
“I should think you’d notice a few changes now. They’ve got a new electric stove in the kitchen. And a telly. I expect you’d have liked that.”
The rest of the party was moving out of the room. “Come on,” said Martin.
“’Bye,” said Maria to the girl.
“Goodbye,” said the girl. “You’re not missing anything, I can tell you. Horrible beastly portraits…”
Leaving the girl, frozen there forever in a gilt frame on a particular day of blue sky and cloud sometime long ago, Maria followed the guide around the rest of the house until finally they reached a door into the garden.
“Well,” said the guide cheerfully, “that’s about it. The bedrooms aren’t very interesting.” One or two members of the tour looked disappointed.
Beyond the door was a small, walled garden. “The herb garden was laid out in the time of Elizabeth I,” said the guide. “I’m afraid it’s a bit of a mess now. We never seem to get around to weeding it.” And, indeed, the outline of once-trim flower-beds and paths was blurred with rampant greenery.
“There’s supposed to be everything,” she added. “All the English herbs. Marjoram and thyme and basil and all that sort of thing. Excuse me, I’ve got to do the next lot.”
They wandered through the garden, pinching leaves that smelt sharp, or sweet, or balmy, each different, a dictionary of smells. They could not put a name to them.
“Thyme,” said Martin, “that’s thyme. I know because it grows on the cliffs.” He rubbed the leaves between his hands and buried his nose in them, gulping the smell. “Nice…”
They can’t be the same plants as in the time of Elizabeth I, thought Maria – whenever that was, which I’m not very sure about – not the same actual plants. Plants don’t last that long. But their great-great-great-grandchildren, perhaps. Seeds of seeds of seeds. She brushed against the dead flower-head of some great bushy thing, and thistledown floated on to the path and grass. More seeds.
“Do you ever think about being other people?” she said to Martin abruptly.
“Not specially. It’s enough bother thinking about me. Let’s have tea again.”
No, thought Maria sadly, I shan’t tell him much about that girl who lived in our holiday house and collected fossils. Which is a pity, because interesting things are even more interesting when you share them with somebody else.
“All right,” she said, “let’s have tea again.”
In the tea-tent they were re-united with the rest of Martin’s family (the younger ones all not lavishly stained with iced lolly, the older ones clamouring for food, drink, money or all three).
“There’s Jousting at four o’clock,” said Mrs Lucas. “We’ll see that and then we’re off. you can go and get a good place, Martin – and mind James for me for a minute while I find the Ladies. Do you want to come, Maria?”
Maria decided that she did. The Ladies (an unappealing arrangement of buckets behind canvas curtains) was in what appeared to be the kitchen garden. Emerging between rows of cabbages Mrs Lucas said, “There’s this church we’ve been forking out for all afternoon. Let’s have a look at it.”
They went through a gate in the garden wall and into the church yard. Mrs Lucas shifted the baby from one hip to the other, trod a cigarette out on the path, and wandered into the church, followed by Maria.
It was much like any other church, as far as she could see, though Mrs Lucas seemed to find something to detain her about the stained-glass windows, and a brass in the floor. Maria fidgeted, and hoped they were not missing the jousting.
Mrs Lucas stopped before a large marble memorial let into one of the walls. “I say, what a horror!”
A lady, much draped in white marble, reclined upon a marble sofa. Across her lap stretched a boy of about ten, with a nightdress on, his eyes closed. He had a lock of marble hair across his forehead and a most angelic expression. The lady, though, on closer inspection, could be seen to be weeping white marble tears. On either side of her were clustered very fat cherubs, also weeping.
“‘Erected by his Grieving Mother’,” read Mrs Lucas, “‘In Ever-Loving Memory…’ What a ghastly piece of work.” She moved away to look at the font.
“I think it’s beautiful,” said Maria very quietly, too quietly for anyone to hear. Her eyes pricked with not unenjoyable tears – the kind of tears prompted by a sad book. She had sometimes thought herself of dying young. In moments of extreme resentment against her parents she had relished the thought of them weeping over a pathetic (but extremely grand) little tomb in some enormous cemetery, feeling sorry that they had been so cruel to her.
Mrs Lucas was going out of the church door now and Maria tore herself away from the white marble lady to follow her. Heading towards sounds of excitement from the field beyond the stables, they found themselves at the Jousting. Martin waved from a place at the front of the crowd. Maria went to stand beside him while Mrs Lucas departed in search of the rest of her family.
Jousting in 1975 did not bear a great deal of resemblance to the real thing. Silver-painted wooden poles t
ook the place of lances, producing a series of dull thwacks as knight met knight, rather than a spirited clash of weapons. What armour there was looked distinctly theatrical and cardboard, though a valiant attempt had been made to give a convincing air to banners and pennants, so that the whole spectacle was at least colourful, though the ponies and horses dragged into service had in one or two cases rather spoiled the effect by eating part of their trappings. But the event was not without drama, the result as much of the knights’ efforts to cope with the molehills in the field as with their opponents. There were some satisfactory falls, at least one requiring medical attention, two broken lances, several loose horses and much exhortation and encouragement from the crowd before it was finally announced that the two winners-on-points would compete for the title.
“Do you suppose he wins the Lady Somebody?” said Maria. “That’s what it would have been in old-fashioned times.”
“Not nowadays,” said Martin. “Bottle of whisky, more like. I don’t expect he’d want her, really.”
The opposing knights lined up at the far ends of the field. The system was for the jousters to ride at each other, gathering speed as they went, much like (allowing for the detours made necessary by the molehills) two trains approaching each other along the same track, the object being to be the knight managing the first thwack with the lance which, with any luck, would unseat your opponent and make you the winner. Several encounters had ended inconclusively, with both contestants missing the target entirely, or being carried off at a tangent by uncooperative horses. This was disappointing to the spectators.
“I’m having the red one,” said Martin. “His horse went in a straight line last time. Oh, James, stop fussing…”
“I want my mum.”
“Go and find her then.”
“I feel sick.”
“Go to Mum, then.”
“I can’t find her. You find her.”
“In a minute.”
James began to wail. Distantly, the knights began their charge, with a determined trot that picked up slowly to a canter. The crowd settled contentedly to watch.
“I want my mum…”
“Oh, shut up…” said Martin through clenched teeth. “Look, James, look at the horses…”
They were twenty or thirty yards apart now, approaching in a satisfactorily straight line, lances nicely at the ready. It had all the makings of a most promising joust. Oh please, prayed Maria, may nobody get hurt specially not the horses but if somebody could fall off without getting hurt because that’s exciting…
“There’s my mum,” said James, pointing. And there, indeed, she was, on the opposite side of the field, separated from them by the width of the jousting course and the two lines of rope to keep the spectators off it.
“Ssh…” said Martin. “Cor – this is going to be good…” Both horses were at a steady gallop now.
“Mum!” said James, breaking away.
People of only four can move faster than you think, when they have a mind for it. He had ducked under the rope and was in the middle of the course, at roughly the point where the two horses would meet, before either Martin or Maria realised what he was going to do.
“Oh, no… that child…” said somebody beside them.
Martin was shouting, and then ducking under the ropes after James.
Maria closed her eyes, and there swam before the closed lids things as horrible as what she must surely see if she opened them. She stood there with shut eyes and heard commotion around her, and thudding hooves, and felt sick in her stomach and thought that this could not really be happening. It was a dream – no, a nightmare – and she would wake up.
She opened her eyes.
There were people, milling about in the middle of the field, and there was a man on a horse, some way away, yanking at the reins, and there was the other horse, wedged somehow against one of the posts from which the ropes were slung. And there was Martin. And there was his mother, running from the other side of the field.
And there was James, holding someone’s hand, looking around in surprise at all the fuss.
It was not until later, as they were all once more in the car, on the way home, after the exclaiming and blaming and forgiving and the replay of the final joust and the presentation to the victor (on points, since no one either scored a hit or fell off) of a ticket to the Cup Final, that what had happened – or rather, what hadn’t happened – hit Maria with full force.
It nearly wasn’t like this at all. It nearly wasn’t everybody going back after a nice day and thinking about what’s for supper and I wonder what’s on telly. It was almost absolutely awful. But because it wasn’t, you don’t think about it any more. About what we might have been doing now instead of just going back, all squashed up in the car and everybody talking at once.
She looked at James, at his face (blotched pink with iced lolly), gazing serenely out of the window, and his plump tummy bulging over the waist of his jeans, and then at Martin, locked in ferocious argument with one of his sisters. It nearly wasn’t like this at all. It nearly ended up as a quite different kind of day.
Later, muddled and sleepy, she could not tell her parents what she meant.
“But if he was all right – the little boy – then everything was fine. Presumably the horses dodged him, or someone pulled him out of the way.”
“It’s just everything nearly being quite different,” said Maria.
“He shouldn’t have been allowed to wander off, at that age,” Mrs Foster went on, with a hint of criticism.
“Why does one thing happen and not another?”
Mr and Mrs Foster were people who believed in questions being given a proper answer. Mr Foster in particular. His answers were long and detailed and by the end of them Maria had sometimes forgotten what the question was. She knew a great deal about what the Houses of Parliament are for and why it is necessary to go to school and the difference between Labour and Conservative people.
“Well…” said her father. He looked at Maria across the kitchen table, and then out of the window, and then back at Maria again. “Religious people think…” he began, and then, “It’s a complicated sort of question…” and then, “Not entirely easy to explain…” and finally, “I don’t know.” He picked up the newspaper and vanished behind it.
“Isn’t it time you were off to bed?” said Mrs Foster.
Maria went upstairs to her room, in the tail-end of a day that might have been an entirely different one. Although, she thought, you could say that about every single day, which is unsettling. She got into bed, and during that shadowy period between being awake and falling asleep, images floated through her head: a marble boy wept over by a marble lady, thistledown and fossils and a prancing black dog. And, most persistent of all, the presence of a girl her own age, called Harriet, who had gone to sleep in this house on other August nights, hearing the sea outside the window.
Chapter Six
HARRIET
“HOW LONG DO trees live,” said Maria. “Longer than people? Or not as long?”
“Depends,” said Martin.
That, she had discovered, was what he said when he did not know the answer to something. It was a little like the kind of thing her father said under the same circumstances. She looked speculatively at Martin, adding, in her imagination, two feet to his height, and clothing him in a dark office suit and white shirt like her father’s.
“Why are you staring at me?”
“I was wondering,” said Maria, “what you were going to grow up into.”
“A person, presumably.”
“But what kind of person…”
“Like I am now, but bigger.”
“No,” said Maria, “I don’t think it works like that.” She had once seen a photograph of her father when six years old, squatting with a shrimping-net over a rock-pool: that remote figure bore little relation to the person with whom she now lived. Quite apart from the fact that he was no longer interested in shrimping.
&
nbsp; “It would be good to change into something else,” said Martin with interest. “Like Stomechinus ending up as a sea-urchin. I’ll be a race-horse. No, a jaguar.”
“It took Stomechinus millions and millions of years. And even then it didn’t change all that much.”
“But we’re cleverer. We should be able to find out how to speed it up.”
They were coming back from the beach, alone, after an unsuccessful fossil-hunt. They had rivals, they discovered. The beach echoed with discreet tappings as other addicts interfered with the blue lias. There were even apparent professionals with small sacks and geological hammers, collecting on an industrial scale: these they stalked resentfully, hating them.
“Actually,” Martin went on, “it wouldn’t work, of course, because jaguars only became jaguars because they had to run faster than anything else so as to catch things to eat.”
“P’raps,” said Maria, “they turn into the kind of people they are because the things that happen to them make them like that.” Which sounds a bit muddled, she thought, but I know what I mean. Like I’m shy and I talk to myself because of the sort of family I live with and Martin’s like he is because he’s got a different kind of family.
“I don’t know what you’re on about,” said Martin. “You know something?” he added. “You are a bit peculiar sometimes. You were talking to that tree yesterday. I heard. You were sitting in it and you suddenly said ‘Oh, Quercus ilex…’”
Maria went scarlet.
“I don’t expect there’s anything much you can do about it,” said Martin kindly. “It doesn’t bother me, anyway… Why did you want to know how long trees live?”
“I just wondered. I wondered how old my tree – our tree – is. The ilex tree.”
They reached their own road, stopping at the newsagent on the corner to buy sweets. They were now regulars here. It was that kind of convenient and all-providing shop that sells everything from fishing-rods and beach-hats to biscuits and brown envelopes. And, Maria noticed for the first time, as the assistant shovelled pear-drops into the scales, postcards of the town of a kind that she had not seen before – not photographs but black and white pictures with people in old-fashioned clothes walking along the Cobb. In one, a group gazed shore-wards to a reduced version of today’s town, in which the front looked much the same but the cliffs were not spread with houses. Sailing boats like butterflies stood in a glassy sea. She tried to pick the point where their house should be, roughly, and found only fields.