‘Oh no,’ said Carrie hastily. ‘Anyway, thanks very much for ringing.’
Mark, too, received a call from Diana. The Major summoned him into the hall saying respectfully, as usual, ‘Your good lady.’
Diana delivered a quick run-down on domestic and professional life. ‘Are you all right?’
‘More or less,’ said Mark.
‘What about these letters? Useful?’
‘I’m not sure that useful’s quite the word.’ He pondered; impossible, thus, or indeed perhaps at all, to explain. ‘I had this dream last night in which I was struggling through this enormous field of lettuce. Commercially grown lettuce, you understand. Trying to reach something or someone. Row upon row of crisp green lettuce.’
‘Lettuce?’
‘Word-association. A well-known dream phenomenon, apparently.’
‘Oh,’ said Diana. ‘I’ve never heard of it. By the way, I rang Carrie about that jacket. She sent her love. Have you seen the doctor again and when are you coming back?’
A further dimension of the lettuce dream, not communicable, had been that what Mark had been trying to reach was in fact a girl, a stark naked girl who both was Carrie and in some way was not. He had been stark naked too: a good conventional unimaginative dream, that. He had been forging his way towards this girl, placidly waiting there amid the lettuce, and when he reached her at last the expected processes had got under way, or been just getting under way, when, of course, he woke up.
He went into the sitting-room to join the Major for what had now become the customary glass of sherry before dinner. Mark, embarrassed by his parasitic state, had succeeded in persuading the Major to allow him to make an economic contribution towards the household expenses: it had been a matter of the greatest delicacy, the Major furiously resisting until driven into a position where further protests would seem more ungentlemanly than capitulation. They were both now happier about the sherry indulgence, as well as a few mealtime treats suggested by Mark such as pâté, which the Major had never come across.
‘Too bad, leaving your poor wife on her own all this time.’
Mark said he thought Diana was probably managing quite well and explained that, given the expected further progress to his ankle, he should be able to manage the drive back to London after the weekend, by which time he hoped also to have completed his work on the letters.
‘I suppose you’ll be putting it all into your book?’ said the Major. ‘Irene and everything …’ He fingered his moustache, a gesture of unease that Mark now recognised.
Mark replied, after a moment, that he supposed he would.
The Major nodded. ‘Quite. Not a thing you can leave out, now you know about it. Got to get the record as straight as you can.’ He nodded again, as though to persuade himself.
At which, Mark, to his own surprise, began to describe his doubts and scruples; there were moments, he said, when he wished this chain of deduction and accident had never led him to the letters.
‘Come now,’ interjected the Major, ‘got to put first things first, eh? There’s this book.’
‘Damn the book,’ said Mark.
The Major, looking shocked, suggested another sherry.
‘How much do you remember about her death?’ asked Mark, after a few moments. ‘And did you ever see him afterwards?’
She had been taken ill very suddenly, so far as the Major recollected. One day everything had been normal and the next there had been an atmosphere of alarm and distress and his mother had departed in haste for Porlock to nurse her sister. He had been aware of anxiety and tension, of late-night messages and the continued absence of his mother. And then after that all he could recall was the funeral, and his mother’s silence and anguish for weeks and months.
‘She used to avoid going near this place, you know, because of the cottage. Wouldn’t come to see her friends in Porlock. When I came to live here she always used to come to see me by the back road, so as not to pass the cottage. Dreadful business. Everyone loved her – Irene. Must have been an extraordinarily nice girl. More than that … Full of life, you know. Laughed a lot – that I can remember.’ He sighed. ‘It was spring when she died, I remember that too.’
… And into an inexpressibly tedious day – hours with Napoleon and lunch with an awful man who dispenses patronage by way of reviewing – there comes your letter, to tantalise and lift me up. And oh indeed yes I shall be in Porlock for the first week in April, and yes, yes you should investigate Vellacott’s pony-trap and the hire thereof. Because after April there is May and May is followed by June and if I sweat hard now I can read what should be read and hole up with you there to write for months on end. I shall shake off London and libraries for spring and summer and maybe autumn too …
This is for your birthday – which we shall celebrate in full next week. But in the meantime I kiss you – all over, from the top of your beloved head to the soles of your equally beloved feet. Are you really twenty-six? Gracious – what a very great age. When you are thirty-six we shall mark the occasion with a visit to Siena which of all the Italian cities you have not seen is the most incomparable and the one which would almost persuade me to run away from England. Our daughter, devoted as we shall be to her, will be left at home since I do not fancy travel with children. But when you are forty-six (and my darling I very much look forward to knowing you when you are forty-six – you are one of those women who will be at their finest then), she will be allowed to come with us on a brief trip to Venice, because we shall like to watch her enjoy it …
The weekend passed. Mark’s ankle was tender but usable. The letters had been read, transcribed and returned to the shoe-box in the cupboard; Mark had suggested depositing them with the rest of the Strong manuscripts but the Major, violently tugging his moustache, had demurred – ‘Fair enough when I kick the bucket … But I may as well hang onto them till then, eh?’
There was nothing left but to say goodbye. Mark knew that any excessive display of gratitude or emotion would be quite out of place. The two men shook hands on the doorstep. The Major’s grip was slightly prolonged, the nearest he was going to allow himself to a show of feeling.
‘All the best, then, my dear chap.’
‘There is just one thing,’ said Mark. ‘I was wondering if you might think of taking part in a radio programme about Strong I’m getting together. It would probably mean coming up to London – so I’ll quite understand if you’d prefer not to.’
The Major looked alarmed. ‘Talking on the wireless? Not really my line, you know – never done it in my life.’
‘There’s nothing to it, I promise you. It would just be a question of saying how you remember him. And Irene, I suppose.’
The Major pondered. ‘London, eh? Long time since I’ve been up to town. Well … I don’t see why not. But you’d have to put me in the picture – I wouldn’t want to let you down.’
Mark got into the car. He lowered the window to wave. The Major was standing at his garden gate, very upright, furiously punishing a moustache. The dog – the apocalyptic dog – lay slumped at his side. It was beginning to rain.
Beyond the bedroom window, Ealing rumbled into life. Diana was still asleep. He contemplated the nape of her neck, a landscape as familiar to him as – no, more familiar than – the back of his own hand. Very deliberately, he set about substituting, in the mind’s eye, Carrie – to see what happened. This prompted various responses, but none of them were quite as intense as he might have expected. Could it be that one was on the road to recovery? And, if so, what did one feel about that?
Relief, undoubtedly. Intensity of emotion is all very well, he thought, but there is a great deal to be said – oh, there is indeed a great deal to be said – for tranquillity of mind. He conjured up France, to see what that would do. What that did was induce a certain melancholy – painful, guilty and faintly enjoyable all at once. Did he wish he were back in those three days, in the Auberge des Fleurs and the château whatever it was? Not really. He ran hi
s finger down the back of Diana’s neck and between her shoulder-blades; she wriggled irritably and drew the bedclothes around her. He dismissed the shade of Carrie, firmly but kindly. It would return, he suspected, at untimely moments and might well cause distress, but he believed he might now be able to cope with it.
He got out of bed, drew the curtains and got back in again. Diana sat up and said, ‘Christ – what time is it?’
‘Half-past seven.’
She subsided. ‘I thought it must be later. You bustling around like that. What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. I thought it would be a good idea to get the day on the road, as it were.’
She gave him a cautious look. ‘You sound very energetic all of a sudden.’
‘Lassitude,’ said Mark, ‘will get us nowhere.’ He stroked her bottom, under the bedclothes.
‘Porlock seems to have been therapeutic. Despite falling off stepladders.’
‘A chair, in fact.’
‘What I still don’t understand is why you stayed with this peculiar old boy.’
‘Sometime I’ll try to explain.’ He paused. ‘On another question, I’m afraid I’ve been somewhat – irrational – over the last few months.’
Diana propped herself up on one elbow and looked at him. ‘What’s all this?’
‘Inconsiderate – not to put too fine a point on it.’
‘What is the matter?’ demanded Diana.
‘I’m trying,’ said Mark stiffly, ‘to say I’m sorry.’
‘Oh. Well.’ She lay back. ‘So long as it’s not going to happen again.’
‘I should think that’s quite extraordinarily unlikely.’
‘It had better be.’
‘I can vouch for it,’ said Mark. ‘In so far,’ he added, ‘as anything in this life is to be vouched for.’
Diana grunted. She turned sideways and shot him a look of inspection. ‘Well. I’m getting up. The new exhibition opens on Tuesday.’
‘No great rush,’ said Mark. He slid a hand over her thigh.
‘I thought you had this cracked rib?’
‘I’m hoping,’ he said, ‘and indeed assuming that lust will triumph over infirmity.’
He filed away the transcripts of the Porlock letters. His study, now, was full of other people’s lives. Did examination and contemplation of the experiences of others have a salutary effect on the management of one’s own affairs? Patently not. Did the search for a complete view of another life enable you to stand back and thus consider your own? Not that either, really. Diana’s account of the summer, or Carrie’s, would presumably be significantly different from his; nevertheless he was pretty firmly persuaded that his was the correct version. It takes staggering powers of detachment to accept that other people’s view of you might be more reliable than your own.
His professional acquaintance telephoned, in search of a reference.
‘I gather you’ve been laid up in the West Country. Poor you. Was it worth it?’
‘Definitely. I found a cache of letters.’
‘You lucky so-and-so. Useful?’
‘Useful all right. Disturbing, in a way. Tell me … Do you ever … Have you ever had a feeling of prurience, in our line of business?’
There was a brief hesitation. ‘No.’
There speaks, thought Mark, a hardened old literary battleaxe.
‘Do you?’ she enquired.
‘Well. The odd twinge, I suppose.’
‘These people, my dear, are dead.’
‘True. True.’
‘I’ve begun to suspect my woman of lesbian tendencies, by the way. I always thought it was there in the poetry and now I’ve come across one or two other pointers.’
‘Fancy that. So do you still insist on the carnal weekend with Strong?’
‘It would by no means rule that out.’
‘We shall never know,’ said Mark.
‘There are plenty of things,’ replied the lady crisply, ‘we shall never know. One ploughs on. In the pursuit of truth, or whatever.’ Mark suppressed a comment about that ‘whatever’, which might have been taken amiss. ‘It’s enough to drive a person to fiction. Have you ever tried that, incidentally?’
‘Oh yes,’ said the lady, ‘I’ve written me novel. Long ago. Haven’t we all? Piece of cake, by comparison.’
They parted, cordially enough. Mark returned to his index boxes. The Porlock letters were entered under various headings. If I could sit down now, Mark thought, and write a novel based on the life of Gilbert Strong, I would be very well equipped. The silences and rejected matter would be the appropriate silences and rejections of the novel, as so aptly defined by Strong himself in that oft-quoted essay of his. And my evidently over-delicate attitude towards prying into the affairs of others would not apply, since fictional characters have no feelings. Nor, of course, do the dead, as my colleague rightly points out. In fact, the only feelings in questions are one’s own, and all that they demonstrate is perhaps some Pavlovian response about the indecency of reading other people’s letters. A taboo of one’s youth, along with listening at doors and asking impertinent questions. Biographers are much impeded by a genteel upbringing.
He telephoned Dean Close and left a message with Bill that he would come down the following week. Time, now, to get back to the attic.
It was October. The trees around the house, which he remembered in brilliant leaf when first he saw them, were now tinged with brown and yellow. The Garden Centre sales office was full of wire racks crammed with bulbs and sporting gaudy illustrations of the joys to come. Mark, who had gone there in search of Carrie, stood looking at shocks of daffodils and crocuses. Bill, entering, said, ‘Half a dozen “King Alfred”? You don’t want any of those, mate – bad taste gardening for the undiscriminating, this is. The good stuff is round the back, for our favoured clients.’
‘I was just wondering where you all were,’ said Mark.
‘I’m here, knackered after an hour with a bloody cultivator that keeps packing up on me. Carrie’s in the big greenhouse, mooning over the alpines. Very distracted these days, our lass.’
‘Distracted?’
‘Love. That old uncertain feeling. And not before time too.’
‘I see,’ said Mark. Somewhere within him something twinged; a little icy finger prodded.
‘Bloke she met in Paris. As far as I can see something might well come of it. She hasn’t mentioned him?’
‘No. No, she hasn’t.’ The icy finger was now quiescent – gone more quickly than one might perhaps have expected. Just a slight ache left.
‘Bound to come at some point.’ Bill, intent with a pile of invoices, looked up at Mark. ‘I always thought you had rather a soft spot for our girl yourself, perhaps.’
‘Me?’ said Mark. He contemplated a display of seed packets. ‘Come now, I’m a married man.’
‘So you are,’ said Bill. ‘So you are. It had slipped my mind. Well, back to the grindstone. Or to the blasted Massey Ferguson.’
Carrie was indeed in the big greenhouse. She was at the far end, a small figure amid ranks of pots, much as when Mark had first seen her six months ago. Now, as then, she did not hear him come in and went on with what she was doing. Then she looked up, startled.
‘I won’t interrupt. I just thought I’d say hello before I get started on the papers. I’m taking more stuff up to London, if that’s all right by you.’
‘Oh – yes, do. Is your ankle better?’
‘Pretty well.’
Dungarees. Orange socks. A smudge of dirt on her cheek. ‘Oh good,’ she said. And then, ‘I talked to Diana. She rang up.’
‘I know.’
‘She doesn’t seem to be cross with me,’ Carrie explained. ‘I thought she might be.’
‘No, she isn’t.’
There was a silence. Carrie tweaked a shoot off a plant, looked at Mark and then away again.
‘I stayed with a very nice old man in Somerset whose aunt was the great love of your grandfather’s life. Before
he married Violet.’
Carrie’s eyes flickered. She tweaked another shoot. ‘Why didn’t he marry her?’
‘She died.’
Carrie’s response to this, oddly, seemed to be one of relief. She said, insincerely, ‘How sad.’
‘As a matter of fact it was. Very. I think possibly he never quite got over it.’
‘Are you going to put it in your book?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Mark.
The sun had gone in so that the ripe yellow glow under the glass drained rapidly away and it became shadowy and greenish, as though under water. It smelled warm and damp; Carrie, it occurred to Mark, had always smelled faintly of earth – clean, woodland earth – even in France. He thought of France; it distressed, but not quite as much as he would have expected.
‘I hear you’ve got a boyfriend.’
She gave him a look of alarm. ‘Well, it’s not exactly … I mean …’
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to go out and shoot myself. Are you going to marry him?’
She was silent for a moment. ‘We haven’t talked about that yet.’
‘Then raise the matter. If it’s what you want. This is the age of The Woman, after all.’
She stared into a flowerpot. ‘It isn’t something to make jokes about.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I think it may work out all right.’
‘Good.’
‘It would serve me right if it doesn’t.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Mark. ‘For one thing retribution is the myth of the religious or the credulous and for another you don’t deserve it.’
She grinned.
‘I dislike him intensely, mind. Don’t let me ever set eyes on him.’
‘Actually, you’d like him, I think.’
‘I doubt that. But in any case we’ll be spared the experiment. I shan’t be coming down much more.’
‘Oh. But … we’ll see each other sometimes? I mean, I don’t want to …’
‘I’ll make sure you get a large embossed invitation to the book’s launch party.’
‘I didn’t mean that kind of thing. I hate parties.’