‘How did, er …’
‘Because Hugo came to see Gil to sponge money at my flat. He knew better than to go to Dean Close – Violet would have chucked him out straight away.’
‘Does Flack have any relations still alive, do you know?’
Stella made a little moue. ‘Now you’re not telling me you don’t believe me?’
Mark looked determinedly over the top of her head. ‘Simply one has to check and double-check. Everything.’
‘Well, you won’t be able to this time,’ she said petulantly. ‘I shouldn’t think there’s a soul. He never married and God only knows where he came from. From under a stone, I should think. And it’s no good asking Hermione, she doesn’t know a thing.’
A change of subject seemed expeditious. ‘I’ve been spending quite a lot of time at Dean Close,’ said Mark. ‘Miss Summers has a lot of papers down there, it turns out.’
‘Are there any letters of mine?’ asked Stella avidly.
‘Not that I’ve come across so far.’
‘Do tell me if there are. That’ll be Hermione’s girl, of course. I remember seeing her when she was about two. Johnny and I called at Dean Close once after we were married and Hermione was there. Louche as ever. And the child. What’s she like now?’
‘She runs a Garden Centre,’ said Mark.
‘What a shame. Of course Hermione never seemed to have the vaguest connection with Gil either. If Violet hadn’t been the type she was, one would almost have wondered …’
Mark, with distaste, contemplated a rococo cherub dangling its foot above a mirror. Stella chuntered on. He thought about her allegation. Hmn. Possibly. But equally possibly not. Without some other conveniently corroborating piece of evidence, such as the survival of this bloke Flack’s notes among the stuff at Dean Close, it was dubious material. Boredom returned. When Stella paused, momentarily, for breath, he seized his opportunity and rose to leave.
At the door he said, ‘By the way, how did Strong spend the time he was thought to be in the Caucasus?’
She smiled, archly, ‘With me, of course. In the south of France. It was heavenly, the mimosa was out and we had a delicious little villa near Antibes.’
‘He wasn’t totally averse to travel, then?’
‘The south of France wasn’t travel. It was simply the place people like us went to, in those days.’
Mark, released, stopped in the middle of Putney Bridge for a few minutes’ appreciation of the river. Gulls bobbed on the water like bath-toys; a solitary oarsman flashed deftly beneath him; the sky was pale turquoise ribbed with dove-grey cloud. Everything seemed very clean and neat: white buildings and paint-box red buses and seal-black taxis. He found London inexhaustibly satisfying, even in its less agreeable manifestations. He liked Tottenham Court Road and Battersea and the wastelands of St Pancras, for complex reasons that would not have been understood by environmentalists. He shared, fervently, Gilbert Strong’s feeling about travel. On the occasions when Diana succeeded in getting him out of the country a weary longing to get back to normal life conflicted uncomfortably with a dutiful interest in what he was seeing that was more the product of training than the emotions. One ought to know about other places; one didn’t necessarily want to. The difference between him and Strong in this, of course, was that nowadays you could more easily get away with it; Strong, in the age when no self-respecting intellectual could be seen to be untravelled, had had to grit his teeth and put up with it. He had been at one time or another to Morocco and Anatolia and Serbia and Spain. He had turned out his quota of articles that were the required combination of erudition and wit. He could keep his end up with the Harold Nicholsons and the Norman Douglases; indeed, his style in the travel book was a ramshackle marriage of the two. All the same, Mark was not surprised to be told that he didn’t really care for it; that part at least of Stella’s story was probably true. It was borne out by certain cultural complacencies of Strong’s and a detectable fidgetiness, sometimes, in the face of Bloomsbury and others of his contemporaries. He could well have been a closet Georgian, in some respects.
In the tube, these thoughts gave way to others. The others, in fact, had been there all the time, lurking in the background like a toothache. Now, they surfaced with full force and he sat glumly in the Piccadilly Line, confronting them. There was no evading it; self-deception got you nowhere; he knew what had happened to him.
6
A minor irritation of working life at the Garden Centre was the need to pander to popular taste. Bill and Carrie were united in their dislike of French marigolds, calceolarias, berberis, begonias, salvia and most of the varieties of rose requested by their clientele. Nevertheless commercial common sense required that they should supply these. ‘I’d like to infect them all with black spot,’ said Carrie, trundling a new delivery of ‘Peace’ and ‘Queen Elizabeth’ to the rose section.
‘They’d only be back for more, duckie. They know what they like.’
Occasionally they cherished thoughts of retreating into the esoteric world of specialisation. No more bedding plants or peat or bulbs or fibre-glass urns or ranks of forsythia and ‘Frensham’; just a chaste line in irises or hellebores or peonies. It could be done; others did it. But in fact both also took an unstated pride in their own success, the product of efficiency and sheer hard work. Carrie derived, daily, a quiet satisfaction from the sight of the crowded greenhouses, the well-tended stock beds. Bill liked the idea of being able to supply anyone with anything, even if you sometimes despised their requirements. Neither was financially ambitious: indeed as the Centre prospered and they were able to pay themselves higher salaries, they experienced a slight embarrassment. Carrie could never think of anything at all to spend money on. Bill gave a good deal of his to his mother. The point was not the money but to do what you did as well as it could be done.
‘It’s them that balances the books,’ Bill added, ‘not your poncing around with Sedum and Gentiana.’ Carrie, unruffled, continued to heave roses into position. The jibe at her alpines was not all that seriously meant. The great thing about Bill was that he was hardly ever cross – genuinely cross. Carrie was made anxious by disapproval and preferred tranquillity in her relationships. All of which, as she herself vaguely realised, no doubt stemmed from the hurly-burly of her childhood. Hermione was famous for the extravagance of her temper and while Carrie herself had learned to avoid trouble by being as self-effacing as possible, she nevertheless had numerous distasteful memories of Hermione having hysterics at Rome station or in the market at Marrakesh, throwing things at her current lover or indulging in outbursts of maudlin weeping. The merest suggestion of a scene, nowadays, or even raised voices or signs of impending disagreement, sent her racing for cover. Once she had observed a woman pocket a pair of Wilkinson secateurs in the sales office and had cravenly done nothing rather than face the ensuing commotion. When aggressive customers complained about the demise of plants that they had clearly murdered through neglect or ignorance, she hastily gave them replacements, behind Bill’s back.
This inclination to please people if you possibly could and to back away from raised emotional temperatures had, of course, complicated the few more intense relationships she had had. Being obliging had got her into bed with people she hadn’t really wanted to get into bed with, whereas trying to avoid scenes had got her even further embroiled with her boyfriend at the plant nursery. When he asked her if she loved him she went on saying yes (while futilely crossing her fingers) long after she knew she didn’t. Eventually, of course, there had been the most dreadful scene which had raged all over the dwarf conifers (to this day the sight of a juniper gave her a nervous twinge) and ended up with him weeping. Carrie hadn’t realised that men could, or did, and had been appalled. She had resolved never again to get enmeshed in saying things she wasn’t absolutely sure that she meant, and so far this had worked. She didn’t, in fact, have very many relationships; the closest was with Bill and was based on compatibility, mutual interests and the
amiability of both. The emotional temperature had always been comfortably low.
Bill, dumping another insensitively thriving ‘Peace’ alongside its mates, said, ‘When’s your boyfriend coming back?’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Our Mark.’
‘Today, I think. And he’s not my boyfriend. He’s married, anyway.’
Bill laughed.
‘You are silly,’ said Carrie vaguely. ‘Oh dear – we’re out of “Albertine” again. And “Etoile d’Hollande”.’
‘He’s taken a great shine to you, married or not.’
‘Oh, for goodness sake …’ said Carrie. Quite irritably, for her.
When Mark arrived, that afternoon, he parked the car in his usual place slightly to the right of the front door and took his things up to his room. There, everything was just as he had left it, except that a fly had died on the open pages of Strong’s 1937 diary. He put down his briefcase and stood for a moment, looking out of the window. Then he went downstairs again and outside. He walked round into the Garden Centre. The girl who looked after the sales office was talking to a customer; Bill, in the distance, was doing something with plastic sheeting. Mark stood there, chewing his lip.
Carrie came out of one of the greenhouses, caught sight of him, waved, and went into the other greenhouse.
Mark returned to his room and worked. Several times he ceased to read or take notes but sat staring at the line of trees beyond the window, which were shaggy with rooks’ nests. Strong, in fact, had had a thing or two to say about rooks in his time; the noise they made woke him in the mornings. Mark, though, was not at these points thinking either about Strong or about the rooks.
At six o’clock he came downstairs and went through into the kitchen. Bill was doing a fry-up; Carrie was laying the table, an uncomplicated process. Everyone said ‘Hello’ at the same moment. Bill added, ‘Two eggs or three?’
‘One, please.’
‘We manual workers,’ said Bill, ‘see things different.’ Mark smiled, half-heartedly.
They ate. Mark and Bill had a conversation about dentists. Bill and Carrie discussed, in a desultory way, the terms offered by a new supplier of fertiliser. Mark asked Carrie what he should put in the window boxes of his London house. Someone telephoned. Bill said he’d push off over to see Ron for an hour or two. Mark and Carrie began to wash up.
Mark said, ‘What are you going to do now?’
‘Do things outside, I s’pose,’ said Carrie, glancing at the window. It was a fine, warm evening.
‘Can I help?’
‘Well …’ Carrie, who was heading for the greenhouses, hesitated. There wasn’t, to be frank, a thing he could do without getting in the way. Charity prevailed: ‘O.K.’
In the event, he sat down on the low stone wall by the stock beds while Carrie inspected plants and hoed.
‘What are they?’
‘Syringa and viburnum, mostly.’
‘Why are they in those tormented attitudes?’
‘It’s called layering,’ said Carrie patiently. ‘It’s the way you propagate them. There, that’ll do. I’m going to the compost shed now.’
‘Could you come and sit down for a moment,’ said Mark. ‘There’s something I want to say.’
Carrie looked at him in surprise.
‘It won’t take all that long.’ He sounded somewhat terse. She wondered if she’d done something wrong. Placatingly, she sat.
He turned and looked at her. ‘I’m afraid I’ve fallen in love with you.’
There was a long silence, during which he continued to gaze at her and Carrie looked first down at her feet and then began to nibble at a finger-nail. Eventually she said, ‘Oh dear.’ Then she added, ‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure. I’d hardly be saying it if I wasn’t, would I?’
Carrie abandoned the finger-nail and took her boot off. She shook out a pebble and set the boot down on the path. She was wearing bright orange socks into which her dungarees were tucked. She said. ‘I shouldn’t think Diana’s awfully pleased, is she?’
‘Diana doesn’t know,’ replied Mark violently.
‘Oh.’ There was a further silence. At last Carrie continued, in a rather bright voice, ‘Some people fall in love a lot, don’t they? I expect you’re one of them. I knew someone once like that. She said it was the most awful bother.’
‘I am not,’ said Mark, ‘like that.’ He took her hand and sat looking at it, stroking the fingers. Carrie too stared down. She said, ‘I’m afraid my nails are filthy. They always are, however much I try to remember to clean them.’
Exasperation and passion were now so fused that Mark felt as though he might explode. He let go of Carrie’s hand and she slipped it hastily under her thigh. He said, ‘What do you feel about me?’
‘Oh, I’m awfully glad you came. I don’t meet people all that much or at least only people to do with gardening. The only thing is you being so much better educated than me and all that.’
‘Don’t be so damned humble.’
‘Sorry. I didn’t exactly mean you’re better than me. Just different. Good at different things. I mean, I don’t read books. I’ve really hardly read anything very much.’
‘You don’t fall in love with people because of what they’ve read.’ Unfortunately, he thought with bitterness.
‘I s’pose not,’ said Carrie. She put her boots on again. ‘I should think Diana must have lots of people in love with her, hasn’t she? I mean before she married you. She’s so beautiful and good at conversation.’
‘I’d really rather not talk about Diana.’
‘Sorry.’
Mark said, ‘I don’t know at all what you feel about me. I don’t know if you even like me.’
Carrie looked desperately towards the house, as though willing it to burst into flames. ‘Is that the phone ringing?’
‘No.’
‘Oh. Sometimes you can’t quite hear it out here.’
‘Do you like me, Carrie?’
She stared firmly down at the boots. ‘Oh goodness yes, I like you very much.’
‘Good,’ said Mark grimly.
‘You know,’ said Carrie with a rush, ‘I expect it must be to do with me being his granddaughter, don’t you?’
‘Frankly, no. I don’t think that’s got anything to do with it.’
‘Oh, well … People don’t usually fall in love with me, that’s all.’
‘And I don’t make a practice of falling in love.’
‘Then it really isn’t anyone’s fault, is it?’ she said brightly.
Mark sighed. ‘Such situations seldom are. It doesn’t improve matters.’
‘Perhaps it’ll sort of go away when you get to know me better.’
‘Perhaps. Or equally well perhaps not. In the meantime it’s generally agreed to be one of the more exacting experiences in life.’ He looked at her. Carrie looked back – with a small propitiating smile. Mark yanked the hand from under her thigh and took it firmly in his. At that moment the telephone, unmistakably, began to ring from within the house. Carrie leaped to her feet. ‘Oh dear – I’d better dash …’ She raced away.
Mark, pole-axed by emotion, stared after her. What he was going through or enduring or enjoying or whatever it might be was, he realised, something entirely new to him. The process of becoming involved with Diana had not been at all the same; there had been initial attraction which had bloomed into very definite desire and alongside that a gathering compatibility stemming from shared opinions and tastes and acquaintances, all of which had ultimately coalesced into what was apparently love. Yes, what was definitely love. This Carrie business was another matter altogether: some kind of awful involuntary seizure. Compatibility and all that simply did not come into it. Desire most certainly did. As did exasperation and something like despair and also the most extraordinary elation.
He took his glasses off and scrubbed them furiously with his handkerchief. Last month, time before Dean Close
, seemed now like another era, as glassy and detached as the various decades through which Strong had tramped: irretrievable and vaguely nostalgic.
Thus passed Monday. Mark, waking on Tuesday, was aware first of the steely inhospitality of the mattress on the Dean Close spare bed, then of rooks, raucously clamouring, and finally of the events of yesterday. He travelled over exactly what had been said, by him and by her; it didn’t help much.
When he got down to the kitchen neither Bill nor Carrie was there – already out at work, presumably. He made himself tea and toast and withdrew to his room, where he worked steadily through until lunch-time. He was reading a batch of Strong’s diaries, a curious hotch-potch of jottings which combined a record – clearly incomplete – of what he had been doing and who he had been seeing with random reflections on this and that and occasional drafts of future works, in this case, notably, the ‘Essay on Fiction’. One had to assume that the diaries were intended for eventual publication – Strong was far too professional a writer to put pen to paper on any scale without purpose – though in fact none had ever appeared. Nevertheless much of the material they included had, in the form of essays, articles and so forth; Strong had clearly pillaged them whenever short of an idea. It was the tone, and the extent of the omissions, that convinced Mark that they were meant for the general reader: all mention of Strong’s private life, except for suitably uxorious or fatherly references, was left out and there was a great deal of genial reflection larded with the kind of gentle self-deprecation that is meant to indicate to the reader what an honest, unassuming chap the writer is. There were deliberately literary passages from time to time, dealing with places seen or people discussed, and these periodic excursions into a draft of some kind, usually unheralded, so that you lurched from a run-of-the-mill account of a dinner with Shaw at the Garrick to a passage like this: ‘In life, the nature of a relationship is known only to two people: those at either end of it. All else is idle speculation, however much you and I may pride ourselves on our unerring perception and judgement of the feelings of others. The novelist is another matter; he or she really is omniscient. The relationship now is three-sided; there are the participants and there is also this god-like figure who knows it in its entirety, knows it indeed even better than those involved, who can slip from the one skin into the other.’