I am not to be fooled, he said, or at least only up to a point. Gilbert Strong’s house creaked around him. Downstairs Gilbert Strong’s granddaughter would be making (and probably burning) the breakfast toast.
Carrie was doing her best to put the matter of Mark and his condition out of her mind, in the hope that it would thus disappear. This had worked occasionally in the past with unwelcome situations. If she pretended it hadn’t happened and wasn’t happening, then perhaps that would turn out to be the case. She found it rather hard to believe in anyway, especially on seeing Diana again, who was so obviously more interesting in every respect to a person like Mark. She felt uncomfortable with Diana, but that was nothing to do with what Mark had said; it was simply that Diana was everything that she wasn’t, and she really couldn’t find anything to say to her. Not that that mattered all that much, since Diana did the talking in any case. Mark, on the other hand, was quite easy to talk to; she wasn’t uncomfortable with him, even now, though she was beginning to have this feeling of guilt. You really couldn’t be unpleasant to someone who liked you; if a person announced that they were in love with you it was even more difficult. They acquired, like it or not, a claim on you.
She chewed her lip, unwillingly pondering this. The click of Diana’s heels could be heard in the stone passage beyond the kitchen door. Carrie jumped up. Blue smoke fumed from the toaster.
Diana said, ‘Good morning. Mark’s on his way.’ She reached for the toaster and switched it off. ‘And I think we all deserve an outing tomorrow.’ Carrie looked at her in alarm.
The car park was crowded. Diana had laddered her tights and wished she had brought a sweater as well as her jacket. It was freezing. Typical English summer day – well, early summer. May. She thought fleetingly of her holiday scheme: Tunisia would be lovely, if Mark could be persuaded. She said, ‘There are hundreds of people. Pity. I suppose we climb this thing? What did you say it was, darling?’
Two Frenchmen, in pointedly English clothes, stood at the start of the track, looking up the hill. Diana said, ‘Excuse me,’ swinging past them. She glanced back; Mark was just behind, looking morose. Carrie had paused and was staring at something in the grass. She had taken off the denim jacket that Diana had persuaded her to buy from the boutique in Dorchester and left it in the car; her T-shirt was frayed at the neck and the colour clashed with her dungarees. Well, Diana thought, I’ve tried. That jacket did something for her. One of these days, by hook or by crook, I’ll get her to a hairdresser.
The path was coated with thin creamy mud. She picked her way from one dry place to another. This camp or fortress or whatever was a series of turfy hillsides enfolding one another. Diana began determinedly to climb the first ridge. From there you could see the next, and then a plateau dotted with people. She went on. When she got to the top of the second ridge, she saw that Mark had sat down and was staring out into the landscape. Carrie drew level with him and paused. It had taken quite a bit of persuasion to get her to come – presumably shy or diffident or feeling she’d be in the way. And now she trailed rather like a child: biddable but not contributing much. Nevertheless, Diana thought, it’s what she needs – some company a bit more stimulating than the live-in gay, not that he isn’t nice enough but far from one of the world’s most scintillating characters, and what an odd set-up, incidentally, if they weren’t the types they are you’d think it distinctly liberated. She looked at her watch, and waved. If all was to be done that apparently Mark wished done then they must get on. Mark had stood up. He gestured at the interior of the camp or fortress or whatever; Carrie gazed in response. Diana, faintly unsettled, thought: it’s funny, he’s not as irritated by her as he ought to be by a girl like that. As he normally is.
In the car she saw to her hair, with the aid of the driving-mirror. ‘They certainly picked windy residential sites, in the Stone Age. I’m borrowing your sweater, Mark, I’m perished.’ She caught Carrie’s eye in the mirror, and smiled. ‘All right, back there?’ Carrie said, ‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Iron, not Stone. And it was a defensive site rather than somewhere they lived.’ He put up his hand to straighten the mirror.
‘Don’t. I haven’t finished. He hustles one,’ she said to Carrie. ‘You have to resist. All right, now we’ll go to this museum of yours. And then I want a cup of tea. Does Dorchester rise to your good old-fashioned tea shop?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Carrie. ‘I’ve never looked.’
‘Then we shall find out.’
They stood and gazed into Hardy’s petrified study: book-lined walls, desk, chair, lamp. Diana said, ‘Now that I find quite extraordinarily creepy.’ She looked at Carrie. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Is he the one who … ?’
‘Yes,’ said Mark abruptly. ‘He is.’
‘Is what?’ enquired Diana.
‘Wrote Tess.’
‘The one that got hanged?’ said Carrie.
‘Mmn.’
Diana looked from one to the other of them. She said to Carrie, ‘You’ve been given his Hardy lecture, have you?’
Carrie went bright pink.
‘Not at all,’ said Mark. ‘I merely …’
Carrie broke in. ‘Why,’ – brightly – ‘is it creepy?’
‘A study in a glass case?’ said Diana. ‘Like a doll’s house. Of course it’s creepy.’ She turned away. ‘Come on. Time to look for this tea shop.’
She strode off through the museum, past the fossils and the displays of agricultural implements and the stuffed animals, without looking to see if they were following. They would be. Presumably.
He stood beside the car staring up at Maiden Castle and shed, for a few moments, the presences of both Diana and Carrie. It was larger than you expected, billowing away there, and somehow wilder despite the trail of people on the path and climbing the turf ramparts. He kept seeing, also, some eighteenth-century print of it, neater and tamer with statutory gesticulating frock-coated picturesque figure in the foreground. Since then, the Ministry of the Environment had done its stuff with fences and notices and the cars glittered in the sun and there was a strident ice-cream van doing good business, but even so …
Diana said, ‘There are hundreds of people. Well, I warned you. Tourist site on a Saturday afternoon.’ She marched off up the path. Mark locked the car and looked round for Carrie: ‘All right?’ She nodded. He wasn’t sure if she was hating the afternoon or not. Diana had bulldozed her into coming, disregarding her excuses; he had stood by, embarrassed, both wanting her to come and not wanting her to. Wanting her to, on the whole. And then there had been a business of Diana hauling her into a shop and making her buy a coat thing which admittedly suited her rather well but with which she was clearly uncomfortable. She had taken it off again now, he noticed.
They passed two Frenchmen, one saying to the other with precise, upper-class diction, ‘Voilà – le ciel tourmenté des peintres anglais …’ Mark looked up and there indeed was a Constable sky with great swags of pewter-bellied clouds sweeping down to the tops of the hills. And below, in a shaft of light, were feathery grey splodges of Cotman trees and a great glowing Constable cornfield and a sweep of Paul Nash plough and the distant silvery white tower of a John Piper church. He stood for a moment, concurrent speculations showering through the mind: did the pleasure derived from landscape come from what you saw or what was prompted by what you saw? Did children find the world beautiful before people told them it was, or only after? Was it ever possible to look at anything, after the age of about four, without what you knew interfering with what you saw?
He glanced back. Carrie appeared to be investigating a discarded cigarette packet beside the path. He loitered for a moment, and went on. When he reached the top of the first rampart he sat down. Diana was now in the central enclosure. Carrie, dawdling, was on her way up. When she drew level he said, ‘It’s odd you’ve never been here before.’ He pointed out the concealed entrance and told her what he could remember of the last Celtic stand against the Rom
ans; he thought she seemed interested, but you couldn’t be sure. Above them, Diana was waving impatiently.
In the museum, he was beset by the gloom such places sometimes engendered. All this information, all this evidence of the past, labelled and pinned down and marshalled into glass cases. How much more interesting, in the last resort, was that small child swinging on a balustrade, having discovered suddenly the charms of centrifugal force, or that man and woman in the doorway, frozen in a moment’s unheard talk, both faces dark with anger. Discontentedly, he moved past medieval pottery and indigenous reptiles; maybe I am not at heart a fact man, he thought; maybe I have spent my life doing the wrong thing. Sometimes I don’t give a damn about truth.
And then there was the ultimate mockery of Hardy’s enshrined study. He stood alongside Diana and Carrie and inspected it. One was viewing, he supposed, one of those interesting points at which history ceases and mythology is born. Certainly the effect of this curious construction was to make you wonder if Hardy ever actually existed. Diana was going on about something. She said to Carrie, ‘You’ve been given his Hardy lecture, have you?’ Carrie went bright pink and he felt simultaneously protective and defensive; the orchid evening came sweeping back, and with it his present adolescently diseased state. ‘Not at all,’ he protested, and then Diana was waving a dismissive hand at the displayed study and comparing it to a doll’s house. And marching off.
They followed, he and Carrie. He said, ‘I hope this hasn’t been an awful afternoon for you. I didn’t know if you really wanted to come or not.’
Carrie considered. ‘I didn’t, really. But it’s been quite nice. There’ve been … things.’
‘What things?’
‘Oh – just things.’
I am temporarily unbalanced, he thought, that is how I shall have to look at it. I am having a middle-aged literary hallucination. Company executives get coronaries; those of us who are in the book business get a bad attack of life.
As soon as Diana turned her back Carrie wriggled out of the denim jacket and left it on the seat. She felt all wrong in it and anyway it was a hot afternoon. She had had to wait until Diana wasn’t looking before she could do this because, as she now realised, she was definitely somewhat frightened of Diana. It was fear combined with her usual tendency to oblige that had forced her to buy the jacket in the first place; it seemed so much simpler than annoying Diana.
And then she spotted the harebell at the side of the path and forgot for an instant both Diana and the jacket. And Mark. And there were clumps of eyebright, too, and a kind of saxifrage that she would have to look up later on. She squatted down to study it. Then she got up and moved on, eyes down so as not to miss anything. She could still experience that heady feeling of discovery that she used to get as a child, finding different plants, poring over French meadows or scratchy Spanish hillsides, isolating a tendril or a seed-pod. She was so intent on scanning the turf that she almost walked past Mark, sitting on the crest of a ridge. He said something about her not having been here before so she had to ask what the place had been for and he began to tell her; she could not follow, though, who had been fighting whom and over what and when it had all been and didn’t like to ask. Diana was waving, higher up, and she said nervously, ‘Hadn’t we better go on?’ Diana was beginning to have much the same effect on her as a sharp-eyed and hyper-critical French governess whom Hermione had once hired for a few weeks until the woman’s horror at the ménage had made her hand in her notice, tight-lipped. As then, Carrie found herself trying to anticipate what you might be about to do wrong, and keep as unobtrusive as possible.
When they were in the car again she folded the jacket and stuffed it into the corner of the seat, twitching guiltily when she suddenly caught Diana’s eye in the driving-mirror. They were to go to Dorchester now, apparently. She felt uncomfortably trapped, sitting there in the back seat behind them, without even a door through which you could leap if desperate. She retreated, as she had so often done in youth, into the privacy of her own concerns; she thought of the greenhouses and the stock beds, where she would much rather have been, pottering around cherishing and observing. (‘You can’t work all the time,’ Diana had said, sweepingly. ‘It’s frightfully bad for people, they get atrophy of the soul. Of course you must come.’) Indeed, she became so absorbed by this (the question of Trillium and low germination, whether or not to persist with some of the more flighty Primula species or concentrate on the obliging ones) that without having noticed how they had got there she found they were standing in the museum in front of what seemed to be somebody’s study set up inside a glass case. She looked, obediently; it reminded her somewhat of the study at Dean Close, at which people also respectfully gazed. If you took the glass away it would probably have that same peculiar smell – ‘The actual smell of the 1930s’ she had once heard a visitor to Dean Close declare. She remembered suddenly her conversation with Mark the other evening. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Is he the one who …’
‘Yes,’ said Mark abruptly. ‘He is.’ He sounded cross. With her, she wondered, or with Diana? Married people, she knew, got extremely cross with each other, that one couldn’t fail to observe; it had always seemed one very good reason for not being married.
And then Diana said something sharp about giving people lectures and it did sound as though they might be about to have an argument so she asked Mark a question hastily to try to stop it developing. Diana walked off and she followed with Mark. He said, ‘I hope this hasn’t been an awful afternoon for you. I didn’t know if you really wanted to come or not.’
She wished he wouldn’t ask things like that. She had never been any good at telling lies, even innocent little lies; people always knew, at once; she could see them knowing, staring at her. So she told the truth, and felt bad because he looked even more despondent.
It hadn’t been a good afternoon at all, really. Except for the saxifrage.
8
Carrie turned on Mark in horror. ‘I couldn’t possibly. I don’t have to, do I?’
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Of course not. Not if you don’t want to. I just thought you might think it fun.’
‘I wouldn’t. Anyway I wouldn’t have anything to say.’
‘Forget it. It was a thought, that’s all.’ A somewhat inept one, clearly. No, you couldn’t really see Carrie in a BBC studio chatting to a microphone about her grandfather in response to the tactful promptings of an interviewer. There were plenty of other people he could suggest for the Strong section of the ‘Writers Recollected’ series. Stella Bruce would love it. Or …
‘My mother,’ said Carrie, ‘would like that kind of thing. But she isn’t here, of course.’
Hermione had not occurred to him. He considered. He didn’t much care for the sound of her, frankly, but she might come up with something interesting. ‘The programmes don’t go out until the winter. She could be recorded, I suppose, if someone went down there.’ An idea unfurled itself, put out a tentative green shoot … ‘It’s worth bearing in mind.’
They were in the kitchen. It was Monday morning. Diana was upstairs packing.
‘I’ve got to be in London all this week,’ he said.
‘Yes. You told me.’
‘I can’t get down again till next Wednesday.’
‘No.’
‘So I won’t see you till then.’
Carrie avoided his eye. ‘No.’
‘I hope,’ said Mark bitterly, ‘that one day you fall irrevocably for some unresponsive … manufacturer of plastic ferns.’ He slammed through the green baize door and immediately returned. ‘I don’t mean that.’
Carrie beamed. ‘Oh good.’
The Lammings, back in London, went about their respective business. Diana left for the gallery and Mark shut himself in his study where he contemplated moodily the filing-cabinets and card-index boxes for a few minutes and then set about putting in the right places the notes he had taken at Dean Close. Where work was concerned, his habits were tidy and methodical; it
was the one weapon you had against the disorderliness of the subject matter. He then set off for the wine bar at which he was to meet the editor of a journal for which he occasionally wrote articles.