They meet, the four of them, at Mary’s car. The time limit for parking is about to expire; at a lamp-post’s distance lurks the traffic warden, whom they have beaten by a minute or two. “What a job …” says Jean. “I ask you …” From the passenger seat, she gazes at the traffic warden, who gazes stonily back. Mary reverses the mini into the square, turns again towards Framleigh, and they travel once more through landscapes that compose and re-compose themselves around them, as relentlessly fluid as days, as thoughts, as moods. They sit side by side; what they say and what they think seldom coincide. Jean and Mary talk about a place they both know in Devon; the girls discuss a film. Jean is deciding to get a new kettle like one she spotted in a window just now; Mary wonders how to paint the flight of shadows across a hillside; Tessa does not so much think of as experience Bob – his hands, his voice, his smell; Sue tells herself a story in which she and this man she is going eventually to meet who is so uncannily like Toby are arriving in the south of France – no, Italy – and buying for themselves this gorgeous old farmhouse place in which they are going to live. And work.
Jason spends the afternoon at Kevin’s house. He watches, with interest, Kevin’s mum make a cake. When the afternoon telly programmes begin he sits, transfixed. Kevin’s dad comes home for his tea and Jason, loitering, gets himself included at the family table. With that chameleon talent of childhood, he takes on the flavour of the background: he sheds Framleigh and assumes the style of the village. The difference, to him, is apparent but not significant: thus also birds live in trees and do one thing and fish in ponds, doing another.
Framleigh, by the early evening, has filled up once more. The doors onto the terrace are open; people wander in and out. Mary Chambers sits by the pond and watches its teeming life; she is thinking still of the tea-table conversation. Keith Harrap sits with her, reading the newspaper he bought in Woodbury. He does not wish to dwell on the afternoon’s events and retreats with a certain relief into an account of political malpractice in Bangladesh. In the kitchen, those responsible for the evening meal are bickering; the initial panache has rather gone out of self-catering. Toby sidles in at one point and murmurs things about what a grand job they are making of it; there is perhaps the very faintest note of resentment in the response of some to this.
Paula has a bath. Greg comes in and talks to her while she has it. His recording session went, apparently, very well; he hit a fantastic creative streak. Paula, hearing this, feels excluded and hence grumpy; personally, she says, she had a hell of a boring bloody afternoon.
And as the shadows lengthen down the prospect people gather again in the studios, and make things.
“Art,” says Greg, “is cathartic. It’s got to be.” He has had a session with the scotch bottle before supper, in celebration of a good day’s work, and is in fluent discourse at his end of the table. Jean Simpson nods sagely. Greg pursues this theme throughout the first course and on into the bread and cheese that follow it.
After supper, a group leaves in the minibus to go to the cinema in Woodbury, where “Midnight Cowboy” is showing. Bob has volunteered to drive them. Of those who are left, several opt for an early night. The rest sit over mugs of Nescafe in the Common Room. Greg, unexpectedly, produces the scotch bottle; morale, after a while, lifts appreciably and Keith, vanishing to his room, returns bearing, somewhat sheepishly, a further bottle – secreted, it is evident to all, against hard times.
After ten minutes or so Paula says, “Let’s do something. I’m fed up with sitting around talking.”
“Let’s play a game,” says Jason hopefully. He is in his pyjamas but shows no inclination to go to bed, nor does anyone propose that he should. His suggestion, though, does not go entirely unheeded. After a few frivolous offers, it is decided that liar dice might be amusing. Greg has dice. The table is cleared of mugs and magazines; Greg, Paula, Keith, Mary Chambers, Nick, Sue and – after a moment – Toby, gather round it. Sue and Mary Chambers do not know how to play. Greg explains. “The scoring is like poker, right?” – both shake their heads regretfully and further explanations are necessary – “… but then the point is that you lie. O. K.? You keep your hand over your dice and you tell the truth about how many you’re throwing but nothing else. You call true or false – whichever you like – and pass on the dice to your neighbour, calling higher than the previous call – only he or she knows if you told the truth or not.”
Jason, who is to play in tandem with Paula, grasps this principle with ease; Mary and Sue are bewildered for the first couple of hands and inclined to run scared. Mary, passed by Paula two jacks and assorted rubbish which are alleged to be a full house kings high, panics, claims four aces which are challenged by Greg and is eliminated. She experiences a small gush of irritation.
The hand continues until only Paula and Toby are left. Paula takes a swig of her whisky, gazes at Toby with an expression of exaggerated innocence, “Four queens, my love. Four beautiful queens. Look, there’s two of them.”
“I’ll see them all,” says Toby, expressionless.
Paula sweeps the dice together. “Blast you.”
“Trial round,” says Greg. “The kitty stays.” Two pence is the agreed stake. Toby’s face flickers.
Toby wins the next round also. He continues to play impassively, curving his hand tightly over the dice and frowning down at them.
Jason enters into the spirit of the thing with enthusiasm. A daring hand starting at full house, unspecified, proffered by Paula travels the table until it founders at Sue. “We’re best at lying,” says Jason proudly. “We’re gooder at it than anybody.”
Toby wins again. Coins accumulate, now, on the table.
Sue is pink with the excitement of it all. She is so close to Toby that their knees collide, from time to time, under the table.
Greg turns to Keith with narrowed eyes. “I’m giving you three kings, jack and nine. Take it or leave it.”
Keith has so far been eliminated with his first call, each round. Last time, Paula said “Oh, ducky, you’ve got to play rougher than that.” He considers, says “O.K.” and receives a fistfull of junk. His attempt to pass on full house, kings on nines, fails.
Greg wins the hand.
Paula peers down at the dice. “I’ve got two queens and, um, two tens and an ace. No I haven’t – I’ve got three queens and a ten and an ace.” She gazes blandly at Nick.
Nick hates liar dice. The game is often played at Framleigh. He always loses. Losing he does not mind; it is the curious implication of failure that goes with it. To be good at liar dice is an odd skill. Toby is very good at liar dice.
“No,” he says, after a moment. Paula lifts her hand triumphantly.
Toby wins another round.
Sue looks archly at Toby. “You’ll never believe this, but I’ve got three tens. And a queen and an ace.”
“I’ll take them,” says Toby. She watches his face as he receives just that; there is not a flicker. He studies the dice and Sue sees to her astonishment the cushion of his little finger move ever so slightly, tipping one over. She wonders at first if he has not himself noticed what he did, and then if this is a refinement of the game that has escaped her. After a moment she realizes that it is not; she blinks uncertainly. Toby passes on, according to him, three tens and two queens, and that indeed is what he has, as Nick discovers.
Coins have accumulated. Toby has lots, Greg a few and no one else any.
“Liar! Liar! Liar!” chants Jason.
Mary Chambers is getting better at the game; she is aware of this and, like Nick, of the curious concept that better at it is what you get. Worse would seem the more correct term. She wins a hand.
Greg wins the next, and in the ensuing one he and Toby are left in confrontation, Toby claiming four kings which on the face of it looks improbable; Greg declines this but before Toby can reveal the truth or otherwise someone’s unwary movement tilts the table and the dice slither to the floor. “Damn,” says Toby, retrieving them, “have to scru
b that one.” “Ooh,” says Jason, “who kicked the table accidentally on purpose?” “Yes, quite” says Paula. “What a pity.”
Greg says nothing. He gives himself another tot of whisky.
Nick now has a nasty feeling in his stomach. When first he started coming to Framleigh there was a craze for croquet; one of his earliest memories of Paula is a snapshot of her croquet mallet raised to hit Toby after Toby had swiped her ball into the undergrowth at the side of the prospect. Toby usually won the croquet games; on the occasions he didn’t he would contrive to bring things to a premature end, loping back to the house on unspecified errands. Toby prefers winning things to not winning things; so do most people – the difference being that Toby seems to mind awfully, which is odd when you think what sort of person he is really. It has always worried Nick just a bit, this. Once, he and Toby played Junior Scrabble with Jason and Toby got in a temper because Nick played the sort of concessionary game that would allow Jason to win; Toby did not.
Keith and Greg each win a round. Jason counts the coins on the table and announces that Toby no longer has more than anyone else. Jason is much enjoying himself; he circles the table looking over people’s shoulders.
Greg plays a really dirty game, Keith thinks; an odd reflection, on the face of it, given that that is the general idea.
Paula is becoming snappy.
Mary Chambers finds to her surprise that she too is getting cross when foiled; particularly, for some reason, when foiled by Paula or Greg. She is playing, now, to win.
Toby and Paula are left confronting one another. Toby accepts from Paula three kings, ace and jack. Paula stares at him in triumph; “Gotcha,” she says. “Possibly,” Toby replies politely. He studies the dice. His other hand holds his whisky glass, empty; “I wonder …” he says, to Keith. “Oh, sure” says Keith. He gets up; people shift their chairs to let him out of the circle. Toby’s finger once again, Sue sees, nudges over one of the dice.
Jason surfaces suddenly behind Toby’s chair. “Ooh!” he cries happily, “he knocked his dice over. Now he’s got two aces. He’s not allowed to do that, is he?”
“I’ll say he isn’t,” snaps Greg. “Hey …”
Toby’s face remains inscrutable. “Isn’t it,” he remarks, to the table at large, “about time that child went to bed?”
“Did he honestly?” says Paula to Jason.
“Yes,” says Jason blissfully. He skips from foot to foot. “Toby cheated! Toby cheated! People oughtn’t to cheat, ought they?”
Sue, now, is crimson, but no one notices. Nick, too, is in a lather; he did not quite see what happened, but experience of Framleigh has given him an intuition as to truth and falsehood. He thinks Jason, who frequently does not, was probably telling the truth.
“Christ,” says Paula conversationally, “how childish can you get …”
The side of Toby’s face twitches: a dangerous sign, to those who know.
“Well,” says Greg, “frankly that’s the last time I …”
Keith, returning to the table with two filled glasses, stumbles over a leg shot out in his path by, in fact, Nick. The whisky goes everywhere. “What the hell …” says Keith angrily. “Oh, gosh, sorry,” says Nick. “I didn’t see you …” He mops the table feverishly with a wad of Kleenex; the dice, now, go everywhere. “Oh, for heaven’s sake …” says Toby. “This is becoming a shambles.”
The cinema party, returning at this moment, come into the Common Room to find the place reeking of whisky and everyone either sullenly silent or snapping at one another over a heap of two pence pieces. In front of the fireplace, benignly observed by Paula’s appliqué-work Adam and Eve, Jason squats on the floor throwing dice. “Five aces,” he cries. “Cut my throat and hope to die. Five lovely aces, take them or leave them.”
Chapter 8
Mary Chambers lies awake. She has not, tonight, telephoned her husband. Her last call was unsatisfactory: “Power failure?” he said. “Richard what? Who? I’m sorry, Mary, I don’t quite follow who all these people are.” And she found herself, irrationally, snapping: he should know, it shouldn’t be necessary to give laboured explanations, he should take things in. “I don’t know,” she said, “where the spare fluorescent tube for the kitchen light fitting is. If Steven has lost his cricket sweater I don’t see what I can do about it from here. And I can’t tell yet if I am getting something out of the course or not. No, I am not irritable, I am just saying I can’t tell. No, dear, there isn’t anything wrong and yes, the other people are nice. Most of them are nice. Some of them are nice. There is a rather nice little boy.”
The truth is, she has realized, that no one at Framleigh can teach for toffee. Bob can get you to make a pot that is reasonably functional, if not a work of art. The others have strong opinions, but that is not enough, in a teacher; teaching requires a certain personal detachment, and that quality is not in good supply at Framleigh.
Artists, Mary supposes, have heightened perceptions; they are like the rest of us but more so. They see more; they feel more; they have the gift of expression. Certainly feeling and expressing are done at Framleigh, but whether feeling and expressing of a different order than in the world beyond is a matter of opinion …
Admittedly these are not great artists; no one is saying that. And how they go on goodness only knows since one has never met any, nor likely to. In fact, Mary reflects, there is a sense in which you could expect a real artist to behave better than other people rather than the same or worse. If there’s any truth in the idea that artists are different – that they are capable of things the rest of us aren’t capable of, in seeing and understanding and being able to make other people see and understand. But just like creative people are expected to look different – though nowadays everyone looks like that, what with long hair for men and long dresses for girls – so they are expected to behave like creative people too. It is as though people couldn’t be sure they were artistic otherwise.
She is feeling, she realizes, at odds with herself. Which is why she cannot sleep. Four days at Framleigh have caused internal displacement of some kind; a sprain in the mind.
Others, too, rest unsatisfactorily. Nick, who would have wished to offer comfort to Toby who is in a foul temper, is rebuffed and mortified. Keith is suffering intense sexual frustration compounded with other discontents. A number of people have indigestion brought on by the inadequately cooked spaghetti that was had for supper. Sue keeps reviewing, in perplexity, the liar dice game. Greg and Paula quietly wrangle: “Kiss me,” instructs Paula. “No, not there … Here …” Greg responds with a list of his own requirements. “Oh, all right” says Paula, “but fair’s fair …” Greg tells her that she is not always into participation, in bed. “That’s rich!” says Paula indignantly, “coming from you.”
Jason, out cold, wrong end up amid a swirl of bedclothes, roams the forests of the night, at large in a mythic world of sensation. He pursues, and is pursued; he flies; he swims; he is the centre of the universe; only he is real.
Various people, waking, resolve that this is to be a day of decision.
“Look,” says the red-haired teacher, thumping the Common Room notice-board. “One, two, three, four, five. I have done one duty more than almost everyone. I did supper last night and I’m on again for lunch washing-up. I don’t know who worked this out but I don’t call it right.”
Keith, defensive, points out that the number of course members is not conveniently divisible; a few people (including himself) have to do extra turns.
“What I don’t get,” says someone else “is why the faculty aren’t on. I mean, I don’t really see why they shouldn’t be there too.”
Opinion, now, divides. There are those who still feel that you can’t really expect this and others who have come to think differently, in some cases rather strongly. Keith himself sees no reason why that jerk Greg shouldn’t turn a hand. He hesitates. At this moment the telephone rings in the gun-room and, since it continues to ring and there is no sign of a
ny Framleigh people coming to answer it, he goes. A crisp-toned man is asking for Toby; he leaves a number.
None of the course members like one another quite as much as they thought they did on first arrival. The friendship that looked about to blossom between Jean Simpson and the red-haired teacher has foundered over use of the shared bathroom on the first floor. Sue is suspicious of Tessa because once Toby laid a hand upon her arm. There are creative rivalries; people look over other people’s shoulders not just to see how others are getting on but also to see how they are getting on themselves. This is actually part of the Framleigh Ideal and is called community interaction but it doesn’t entirely work like that. Keith, although he has no objection to Mary Chambers, is privately humiliated because he sees that her rendering of the exterior of the house, done during Paula’s sketch class the other afternoon, is greatly superior to his own. This shouldn’t be the case: Mary is a pleasant enough woman but not, frankly, someone you’d take for artistic. She doesn’t often open her mouth, apart from anything else.
Most people do not analyse all this but simply have a vague and slightly discontented feeling that they have not been as thoroughly detached from ordinary life as they would have wished.
Keith, fretfully waiting for a go at the bathroom, records that he has so far experienced irritation, lust, frustration, dislike, contention, jealousy and boredom. He could get all that at home. Curiously, though, he does not feel that this reflects on Framleigh so much as on him. He is basically loused up in some way. He sits on the edge of the bed, intently firming the decision that he made during the night. So much so that he does not hear the bathroom door open, and allows someone else to get in.
Toby, in the gun-room, dials the number on the slip of paper handed him by Keith. The number is, in any case, familiar. “Toby Standish here,” he says, and, after a few moments, “By all means. No, quite convenient. No – absolutely no trouble.”