‘What was he, then?’
‘He was somebody doing research on something.’
Diana looked for a moment as though about to argue and then said, ‘What did you talk to Rosburg about?’
‘Pictures.’
Diana, familiar with the kind of reply that is an evasion while being at the same time superficially true, gave her husband a sharp look. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘At least you came. Did you get much done today?’
‘Not too bad.’
They surfaced, into the leafier and less prosperous part of London in which they lived. People were walking dogs on the common in the twilight; aeroplanes twinkled downwards to Heathrow; a covey of youths on motorbikes crashed past. Mark, reflecting on the ten years that they had lived here, thought of the innumerable small and barely perceived changes that fuse together into galloping reconstructions of landscape. That block of flats, for instance, had not existed when they came; the row of shops had been a derelict warehouse; the pub had undergone a face-lift. And above and beyond all that, governments had fallen, unknown politicians had become familiar faces, issues undreamed of had become matters of discussion. One’s own life, running parallel to public matters, became – even for a person living out, so far, his adult life in a politically and socially stable country in peacetime – hitched at points to these things. So that, forever, Vietnam would be the nagging background to the years spent working on Wilkie Collins, and Strong would be inappropriately associated with the predatory profile of Mrs Thatcher rearing from the front pages of newspapers. Your own doings were interwoven with the coarser and more indestructible fabric of history, to give the movement of time a grander name than it seems to deserve when one is part of it.
And yet how unspeakably much more so it might be – had been indeed for countless millions of people in this century. Mark, like any normally imaginative person with a grasp of world events, was frequently humbled by the fact that few demands of any significance had ever been made on him. He had never been required to fight in a war, suffer for his beliefs, suffer for the beliefs of others, or show the courage of his convictions. He had lived an essentially private life. Things might have been very different had one been South African, Argentinian, Vietnamese or a resident of Belfast. As it was, you could only feel a curious and humbling mixture of gratitude and inadequacy.
Feelings which extended now to contemplation of Strong’s life. There were times when, deep as was Mark’s commitment to books and all they stood for, he wished he was writing this time about someone whose occupation had been quite otherwise. A man of action: a soldier, a politician. Strong’s lifetime covered the most cataclysmic years of the century and he had stood on the side-lines, commenting. He had fought in neither war – exonerated by age from the second and by his recurrent glandular fever from the first. No action or decision of his had ever, in any practical sense, affected the course of history. Which of course was precisely Mark’s own situation. He was, he considered, probably more deficient than most people in what you might call a power lust but nevertheless he did sometimes feel a twinge of envy for friends of his who had entered the Civil Service or vast industrial concerns and whose judgements and opinions could be said, in however small a way, to make a difference to what happened in the world. The influence of books is a great deal more sluggish and less easily perceived.
They had arrived at their front door; Diana was rummaging in her bag for the key. The house was one of a terrace of two up and two down cottages in a cul-de-sac that still retained hints of the rural cosiness it must have had when built in the late eighteenth century. There were picket fences to the little front gardens and roses over every porch. The thunder of traffic from the main arterial road at the end was not as evident as you would expect; the bingo hall on the corner was out of view and only suggested by the glimmer of its neon sign, pulsing over the roof-tops.
Mark said, ‘What’s our rose called?’
‘What do you mean, what’s it called? It’s a yellow climbing rose. It came from Woolworth’s.’
‘Roses all have different names. They’re called Madam something or other, or Glory of something.’
‘Well, this one wasn’t.’ Diana, now, was in the tiny hall of the cottage. ‘I’ll do us an omelette. O.K.?’
‘Fine.’
The rose, Mark saw, had brown spots all over its leaves which looked as though they shouldn’t be there. He closed the front door and went through into the kitchen.
‘Anything I can do?’
‘Table,’ said Diana. ‘And you could wash the lettuce.’
The Lammings, presently, sat at either side of the round table that just fitted into the dining end of the living-room and ate their supper. They ate it to the accompaniment of that spasmodic conversation which is a feature of marriage and curiously restful: interludes imply not uneasiness or tension or inability to think of something to say but merely retreats into privacy. Mark thought about Dean Close, about his income tax return, and about an article on Conrad he had been reading. There flickered in his head, as a backdrop, images of Strong’s study – its murky furnishings, the ghost of his handwriting on the blotter – and of Carrie.
Diana thought of things she had to do over the next few days and of various arrangements she intended to make, some of which would require Mark’s co-operation. Mark disliked forward planning; Diana was addicted to it. She had learned, accordingly, to employ strategies of great subtlety. Reaching a decision to postpone discussion of a possible summer holiday until the weekend, she sat observing her husband. She had caught sight of him earlier, at the gallery, in an unguarded moment across the roomful of strangers and been struck by the curious way in which the sight of those known intimately induces a mixture of tenderness and faint irritation. She had wanted to signal affection but had also wanted to smooth that strand of hair that hung backwards from the parting that he always put too low. When they had first met and set about the interesting and provoking process of courtship, Diana had recognised a person who required management. Since she was herself perfectly prepared to offer this, the recognition was stimulating, rather than daunting. The only difficulty, since, had been definitions of areas within which Mark was prepared and even willing to be managed and those in which he was not. Mistakes – or deliberate transgressions – prompted their dissensions. She, too, thought about Dean Close, which she intended, before very long, to visit.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she said.
‘Nothing, really.’
Diana rose, and began to clear the table.
‘And you?’ enquired Mark.
‘Ditto,’ she replied, promptly.
3
Carrie Summers and Bill Stevenson ate their breakfast while listening to the farming news on the radio. This, of course, was because they needed to know the more technical and precise weather forecast that is provided for those seriously involved with the outdoor world. They ate bacon and eggs and the fried-up remains of last night’s potatoes, with a great deal of tea. They, too, enjoyed conversation laced with silences: the fruit of long intimacy. The intimacy in their case, though, was not sexual since Bill was homosexual and had a more potent relationship with a man in the nearby market town, whom he saw at weekends. It was based, rather, on shared interests – both actual and economic – and a basic amiability on both sides. They had never, or hardly ever, exchanged a cross word.
Bill said, ‘That delivery of conifers is due today. I’ll deal with it if you get on with the geraniums, O.K.?’
‘O.K.,’ said Carrie. ‘That man’s coming back, by the way.’
‘Man?’
‘The one who’s writing a book about grandfather. With long legs and specs. Mark something.’
‘Yup. I remember.’
‘He’s going to stay two or three nights.’
‘Poor guy,’ said Bill, rising. ‘It’s fish fingers tonight. I’m off. See you later.’
Household management, in so far as there was any, was shared between
them. Since neither particularly cared what they ate and in what manner, no problems arose over catering. Equally, cleaning was a simple matter since they lived entirely in the kitchen. The main part of the house was looked after by a woman from the village who came in twice a week. Carrie, when she remembered, went through and had a look round to see that all was well; the house was still technically administered by the Strong Society but Carrie, since her occupancy of it six years ago, had taken over the office of caretaker.
It had all happened when she was twenty-six. She had woken up one morning and the whole impossible adventurous idea had come into her head complete and impregnable. She had gone to the lawyers the very next day and laid it all before them and they had considered and consulted and within six months she had moved in to Dean Close, taken Bill, whom she had known at Pershore College of Horticulture, into partnership and set about mastering the intricacies of stock-taking, invoicing, tax and VAT. The actual stock was no problem at all. They grew the annuals and the greenhouse stuff, most of the shrubs and herbaceous, and bought in what it was not possible to grow themselves.
It was, everyone had agreed, something of a solution. There Dean Close had been, for over twenty years, empty, ravenous of upkeep, with its grounds mouldering away. The house was managed in a somewhat haphazard manner by the committee of the Strong Society, who arranged and administered the opening days. If Carrie moved in, the caretaker would no longer be necessary. The house could still be opened, and the grounds would become fruitful instead of unkempt. The lawyers, without much hesitation, agreed to release sufficient capital from the Trust to set up the Garden Centre. Carrie’s mother, Hermione, said she didn’t give a damn who lived there so long as she didn’t have to. One or two of the Strong Society, on respectful annual pilgrimages, winced a little as they made their way past the piled sacks of peat and fertiliser, the garden fencing and the displays of fibre-glass urns that were a necessary side-line to the main business of the Centre but cheered up when they got inside the house and found everything as it had been: Strong’s pipe-rack still in the study, his hat hanging in the hall, his books on the shelves. Carrie and Bill lived cosily in the old servants’ quarters and on the rare occasions when she received visitors Carrie opened up the old guest room. In what little spare time they had she and Bill rescued the rose garden at the back of the house and retained it as a private area where Carrie indulged a penchant for lilies: the rest of the grounds – the long walk and the huge herbaceous borders and the tennis court and the wild garden and the canal garden – were taken over by the Garden Centre. ‘Ruined,’ said ageing members of the Strong Society. ‘Tragic, really.’ But in truth they had vanished long before, weeded over in the long years of non-occupancy.
The house, with its veranda and rustic stone pillars and gables and silvery shingling had a flavour that made people who were architecturally well-informed assume it to be by Lutyens. In fact it was not, any more than the garden had owed anything to Gertrude Jekyll beyond a tendency towards paving and masses of lavender and senecio and Cineraria maritima. Both were simply tethered to a period, doggedly reflecting it thereafter. These cognoscenti, meeting Bill in the rose garden on open days and passing informed comments, were liable to find themselves genially put down: ‘Gertrude flipping Jekyll, love, is out nowadays: we’re into the nouvelle gardening down here. Like the nouvelle cuisine, right? Simplicity and prime ingredients.’ The visitors, who had probably taken Bill, in his jeans and lumber-jacket, for one of the Centre’s workers (which of course he was), would move onwards, disconcerted.
The old stable block had become the sales area and three huge glasshouses had been built where once had been the kitchen garden. The rest was filled with aisle upon aisle of container-grown plants and trees, each area labelled with markers in elegant lettering designed by an art-school friend of Bill’s: Shrub Roses, Fuchsias, Fruit Trees, Buddleias and so forth. Carrie, sometimes, would stand gazing with wordless pride at this landscape of her creation, these ranks of healthy growth that would root and bloom and furnish the gardens for forty miles around. Both Bill and Carrie would have preferred plant nursery to dominate over Garden Centre, but economic considerations forced them into buying in most of their produce. Nevertheless, they did as much growing as they could, both in the greenhouses and the two acres of stock beds beyond. This primary production was Carrie’s especial pride.
She was profoundly content, being a person capable of contentment but for many years denied it. She had, during her childhood, come to realise with a glum and silent precocity that she was disastrously misplaced. Trailed by Hermione from Tossa to Spetsai to Marrakesh to Gozo, she had grown from infancy to adolescence in a state of perplexity that gave way to resignation. When for brief spells she attended schools, she plunged blissfully into this halcyon world of predictability, conformity and instruction. Even now the smell of chalk and poor-quality soap induced a frisson – a whiff of tantalising paradises from which she had been plucked each time Hermione got bored with Spain or Greece or France or her current gang of associates and decided to move on. Carrie became a silent docile little girl occupying herself with elaborately constructed private gardens made out of driftwood, gravel, prickly pears or whatever the local landscape provided. She did not do amusing and precocious paintings like the children of Hermione’s artist friends; she was freckled and victim to appalling sunburn and insect bites and not at all pretty. Since Hermione was only intermittently aware of her, this last point did not matter all that much. When she was small she was looked after by a succession of slatternly Greek, Spanish and French girls and when she was older she remained roughly in Hermione’s vicinity and put up with having lunch at three or four o’clock or whenever Hermione and her friends had finished their morning drink. She went to bed every night at eight, not because Hermione told her to but because she thought this sensible. When she was nine she still could not read; eventually an amiable out-of-work actor who was part of Hermione’s entourage at the time noticed this and taught her.
At fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, she perceived that not everyone lived in this way. When Hermione made forays to England to have rows with the lawyers about money, Carrie gazed longingly at suburban streets and school playgrounds and the purposeful disciplined English-speaking crowds at Victoria and Charing Cross. Hermione huddled under layers of woollies and moaned about the cold and the damp and the beastly drabness. Carrie wandered fascinated around Woolworth’s and Marks and Spencer’s; she ate chips in cafés and furtively bought copies of Woman’s Own. And finally, when she was eighteen, on one of these trips she walked out of the Bayswater Hotel at nine o’clock one morning while Hermione was still asleep, took herself to the office of an educational advisory establishment whose advertisement she had seen in the Evening Standard and returned at lunch-time with the prospectuses of three colleges of horticulture. Hermione was too astounded to produce much by way of protest. She said, ‘But, darling, if you want to learn about flowers and things we could have found some heavenly place in Tuscany or somewhere.’ Carrie, wearing under her French raincoat an Aertex shirt and Harris tweed skirt she had bought from Selfridges, gazed at her mother without expression: ‘I’ll need some money for the fees.’ ‘Ring up Weatherby’s,’ said Hermione petulantly. ‘Tell them to take it out of the Trust.’ She flew back to Corfu the next week and Carrie took the train to Worcestershire; she was not to cross the Channel again for ten years. She and Hermione met for tea at Harvey Nichols on Hermione’s visits to London, and found less to say each time.
Carrie was the product of Hermione’s brief and only marriage to an American painter called Jim Summers. The marriage disintegrated when Carrie was eighteen months old and Summers returned to California, whence he sent Carrie Christmas and birthday cards, which, when she was older, said, ‘We must get together one of these days.’ Recently he had sent a photograph of himself, grey-bearded and naked except for a pair of faded shorts, standing outside a low-slung house that curiously combined echoes of Se
ville, log cabins and cuckoo clocks all at once. The accompanying card said, ‘Be sure to stop by and visit whenever you’re in LA.’ Carrie put the photograph on the kitchen dresser, where it remained until she was obliged to use the back of it to take down an order over the phone, after which she threw it away.
When Mark arrived at midday Carrie had forgotten all about him. She was in the big greenhouse, potting up fuchsia cuttings, a transistor radio contentedly buzzing so that she did not hear him until he was standing beside her. She jumped and went pink. ‘Oh!’ she said. And then, ‘Goodness, I’d … No, I haven’t. I did make up the spare bed last night.’
‘Look,’ said Mark. ‘I don’t want any kind of bother. I just thought I’d better let you know I’d come. I’ll go in and get to work. I wonder … Is there a table I could use to spread things out on?’ He had to raise his voice slightly; the transistor, bubbling Radio One, seemed to have turned itself up a notch. He thought of Strong’s fastidious musical tastes – the essay on Mozart, the interest in Bartok.
Carrie switched it off. ‘Sorry. Yes, there’s a sort of collapsible table somewhere, I know. You could put it up in your room. I’ll come in and find it.’
‘I’m being a nuisance, I’m afraid.’
She brushed dirt off her hands. ‘It’s O.K. – I was coming in soon anyway to have something to eat. Bill’s gone to Stanwick to get some plastic sheeting.’
The table, when eventually located in a cavernous cupboard beneath the stairs, turned out to be a card-table, its baize top faded to a light ochre colour and ravaged by moths. Mark, delighted, exclaimed, ‘This is the one that crops up in letters.’ He opened it up. ‘Yes, it’s got a wonky leg. He and Susan used to play bezique on it in the evenings by the fire. I can’t think of anything I’d rather work on.’ They carried it to the guest room and set it up under the window. ‘D’you want something to eat?’ enquired Carrie.