He puts down the receiver and stands for a moment, wearing that burdened look. He wipes a hand across his forehead and pads out into the hall.
Discontent, this breakfast-time, is apparent. Not universal, but festering here and there – around the red-haired teacher, who is still mulling over the matter of the duty rota, and around Jean Simpson who is pointing out that there is not enough cereal for all unless people hold back rather more than they are doing. There has been a rush on the only brown loaf, and those who have been unsuccessful are making do with toast from the sliced white loaves hurled into the supermarket trolley by Paula. Paula herself does not appear until most people have left the table; then, she sits in a white towelling bath-robe, drinking tea and looking morose. When someone approaches her to ask about marmalade she gazes at them for a moment blankly, and then sighs. “Oh God,” she says, “there should be more somewhere. Why don’t you have a hunt around in the kitchen.” The questioner, made to feel importunate and mundane, backs away. Paula, washed now by a shaft of sunshine from the window, holds her cup in both hands and closes her eyes; she contrives to look both exotic and deprived, as some goddess rudely prised from her natural setting and forced to suffer in exile.
Keith, coming in at this moment, hovers, but Paula’s eyes remain shut. “Looking for something?” says Jean Simpson. He mutters, and departs.
Nick meets Toby coming from the gun-room. Toby pauses. he smiles – that warm, occasional, engaging smile. “Ah,” he says, “there you are.” He lays an arm across Nick’s shoulder and steers him through into the library. “A word in your ear. Just that a little problem has cropped up …” Nick, his heart thumping, his shoulder alight, allows himself to be steered.
Tessa, up in her room, anxiously consults her diary. By the end of next week she will know if she is or she isn’t. And if she is? Oh God, if she is … She licks her lips and runs through, in her head, the telephone conversation. She picks up the phone and tells all and from the earpiece comes Bob’s friendly relating Yorkshire voice, saying … She stares at the diary and tries to hear what he says. And fails. He does not say anything; the number is unobtainable.
Sue, strategically placed at the long refectory table so that she can see Toby as soon as he comes in, observes Paula. Oddly enough, Paula has not that much interested her, hitherto. Even the question of whether or not she is Toby’s wife has not seemed crucial. Paula, so far as Sue is concerned, is a creature from another planet. Paula does not take the bus every morning from Stivichall into central Coventry; Paula does not stamp books, day in day out, book her holiday in January, wash her hair on Tuesdays and Fridays, worry about whether she has thick ankles. Paula strides around Framleigh all the year long, creates, wears fantastic clothes and, presumably, goes to bed with Toby. All of which is inconceivable, or well-nigh so. Nevertheless, at this moment Sue furtively studies Paula: her handsome face turned to the sun, her thick tawny hair, her long shiny sunburned legs folded one over the other, the bath-robe falling back from them. It isn’t fair, Sue thinks, it darn well isn’t fair; there is absolutely no reason why she should not be Paula, and Paula her. Never before – or never much – has this kind of resentment hit her. She is neither particularly discontented, nor particularly covetous, in the normal way of things. On the whole, she usually feels, things aren’t too bad as they are; life is acceptable, and what else can you expect? But this morning, sitting in the Framleigh refectory (where Kent’s original cornice still runs around the room above the trestle tables and the benches, the Nescafé and the cornflakes, hinting at another ambience) it is not quite like that. One or two adjustments in the scheme of things and she might not be where she is, doing what she does; she might be – well, not Paula but someone not too unlike her. Toby, of course, is a special person and in a sense unapproachable: he really is different. But Paula, over there on the other side of the room, admittedly on the sunny side, does not, suddenly, seem like a person on another planet; actually, in this light you can see that her long brown legs need shaving.
Greg glances into the refectory and passes on through the Common Room and out onto the terrace; he doesn’t feel like breakfast, in any case, or at least not a lousy Framleigh breakfast. There are some things the British do supremely badly. He stares down the prospect; beyond the ha-ha cows wade in the grass and further yet an aeroplane rises diagonally from the hedgerows and climbs into the sky, trailing noise. He is worried; it struck him, waking early and restless, that Framleigh might be affecting his inspirational drive. Community living is, of course, essentially healthy and he has been in favour of it for some time now, but he is disturbed by the thought that his identity might be suffering. He examines his identity as he stands there on the Framleigh terrace: it seems to be in good shape but the piece he recorded yesterday lacked a certain … well, a certain quality of personal commitment. The strength of the self-analysis was shaky at points. He frowns at the receding Warwickshire landscape, bland in the August sunshine; maybe it is time he looked for a new scene.
By the time Toby and Nick come out onto the terrace Greg has gone. They are trailed by Jason and when, after a further minute or two of conversation, Toby disappears in the direction of the studios, Jason latches onto Nick; he has learned some while since that Nick is pliable, you can usually get him to do what you want. Jason wants his bow and arrows fixed. Paula is too busy to fix them and Toby is too busy to fix them and Greg does not know how to and Bob is not to be found. It is a question of clipping notches in the arrows with a knife and adjusting the string to the bow. Nick sits down on the parapet and gets to work. He says, “What are you going to do with them?”
“Kill things,” replies Jason.
Nick flinches, slightly. “What sort of things?”
“Wolves and bears.”
“Ah,” says Nick, relieved, “are there lots of wolves and bears?”
Jason reflects. “No, there aren’t any. So I may kill birds. And rabbits,” he adds, remembering the manly line taken by Kevin’s dad, with which he was secretly impressed.
Nick says sternly, “That’s unkind. They haven’t done anything to you.”
Jason thinks suddenly of blood, which makes him feel funny, but he cannot let on about that, so he is silent for a moment, apparently considering the point. “But they might. If they were big birds. Stab me with their beaks. Or big rabbits might bite.”
Nick slots the string into the notch of an arrow, and picks up a different one. “But it wouldn’t be fair to shoot them if they weren’t actually doing it.”
“They might be just going to,” says Jason, “without telling me.”
Nick hesitates. “If it was another boy you wouldn’t start having a fight with him just because he might have a fight with you.”
“Not if he was bigger,” agrees Jason.
Nick swallows. “Grown-up people …” he begins. And then there come to mind various things, such as the photographs in the gun-room of – of Jason’s grandfather, as it happens. And other difficulties. “When people are grown-up,” he says, “they usually try not to kill animals unless they’ve got to. To eat them. Just the same as they try not to hurt other people.”
“Like not murdering them?” offers Jason.
“That’s right,” says Nick warmly.
“Then why do they shout at each other and make each other cry?” asks Jason. “And call each other rude names and stick knives in each other and drive cars over each other and blow up each other?”
There is a silence. “Most people,” says Nick eventually, “don’t.” After a further moment he adds, “Lots of people”.
Jason, now, is testing the bow-string, which Nick has tightened. “That’s tons better. Actually I’m not going to kill anything really. I’m going to make targets on the trees and shoot at them.”
“Good,” says Nick. “Say thank you,” he adds. Nick has been differently raised.
Jason looks at him in surprise. “Thank you. Why do I have to say thank you?” he continues. Wanting,
evidently, to know.
“You don’t have to,” says Nick. “It’s just that it’s nicer when people do.”
“Even if they don’t specially want to?”
“Particularly,” says Nick, “if they don’t specially want to.” He looks up at the west front of Framleigh, inscrutable and precariously elegant. From within comes Paula’s voice, shouting about something; Toby crosses the Common Room and goes into the hall. “Because the other person might like it. You ought to think about what other people feel like, not just what you feel like.” He slams an arrow into the string, raises the bow and shoots a clump of erigeron.
Toby tours the place, making a few unobtrusive adjustments. If he is agitated, this does not show; he moves unhurriedly and stops for a word here and there. He hopes that Mary Chambers feels she is getting something out of the course, and comments warmly on her sketches; he pats Sue on the arm and suggests she has a go at some lino-cutting today. In the gun-room, he removes the notice about phone call charges to guests; he takes, from a cupboard, a selection of family photographs including one of his mother as a debutante in court dress, with tiara, and sticks them up on the mantelpiece. In the former breakfast-room in the east wing, now used as his study, he sweeps from the desk a heap of bills and other papers, some of them menacingly spattered with red type, and stuffs them into a drawer. He gets out a decanter of sherry and some glasses and arranges them on the desk. After some further rummaging around he comes up with an engraved silver salver which he polishes up vigorously on the cushion from the desk chair. Then he goes out through the garden door at the side of the house and crosses the stable-yard to his studio, where he shuffles quickly through a pile of his lithographs and spreads them out on such surfaces as are not already occupied. He glances into Paula’s studio and then into the barn, where Bob is mixing clay. He has a word or two with Bob about the extent to which future courses are booked and then goes out once more into the stable-yard, where butterflies are sipping the camomile flowers. Here, Toby pauses: he has spotted a red admiral among the tortoiseshells and peacocks.
Toby’s interest in and knowledge of nature is a legacy of his boyhood; like Jason, he roamed the place, observed and, in the fullness of time, put names to things. Rather curiously, though, Framleigh and its surroundings have never featured in his painting; during the fifties and sixties he spent as much time as he could in such places as Greece, Tunisia, Spain and southern France. The flora and fauna that feature in his pictures are the flora and fauna of such places; similarly the landscapes. The shores of the Mediterranean were littered, then, with Toby’s friends and colleagues; the light and the inspiration were so much better abroad. Also, it was cheaper. More recently, though, funny things have been happening: the Sunday newspapers run travel articles on places like Wales and the Cotswolds and the Yorkshire Dales. Quite a few of Toby’s friends and colleagues have come back and settled in East Anglia or Herefordshire or Barnes or Greenwich. And suddenly it is interesting to know about plants and trees – English ones, too – and admirable to be concerned about the environment. Toby, who is not so much observant as osmotic, has responded to this with alacrity; he has brought out and made public that knowledge acquired in his schooldays, done a suite of lithographs called “Warwickshire Seasons” and tried – unsuccessfully – to put his own immediate bit of the environment to good use. It is not altogether his fault that the Framleigh Field Centre foundered.
Toby is one of those fortunate people who are in accord with their times; he is moving very comfortably through the decade, they suit one another. The same could be said of various of his ancestors: Fox’s crony in the late eighteenth century, and the Standish responsible for that section of the former Great Western Railway that now slices through part of the Framleigh estate. Opportunism is of course a quality that the English landed gentry has always had in good measure; such opportunism, though, has usually had a certain chronological motivation: self-interest has been allied with tribal interest, the idea is for things to go on and get better still. Toby’s opportunism is different in that it ends with Toby; Jason, who might be supposed to be involved – chronologically – is not, so far as Toby is concerned. He will see that Jason is all right, of course, but he assumes that Jason when mature will wish to do his own thing, just as Toby is doing his own thing.
The butterfly, similarly engaged, moves to a different clump of camomile. Toby looks round the stable-yard; there is nothing further that he can do, indeed his efforts so far seem, as he is well aware, puny. Age and decay are not to be veiled; on the other hand, they have certain acknowledged values.
Chapter 9
John Lowther, a director of Harpers Bank, pulls into a layby and consults the map. He is heading south from Birmingham, where he had a couple of business meetings, and reckons he must be somewhere near Framleigh by now. Ah yes – there it is, discreetly marked off to the right, only a couple of miles on. He takes his jacket from the hook behind his head, puts it on, glances quickly at himself in the driving mirror, and swings the Rover out onto the road again. A cassette is playing Bach harpsichord arrangements; beyond the tinted windows Warwickshire rolls greenly past – lovely bit of the world, relatively unspoiled round here. Lowther is in a state of comfortable accord with life; his Birmingham engagements went well, now he looks forward to going over this possible site for the Bank’s new employee training centre. Fine old house, by all accounts. Run as some kind of art school; amusing people, no doubt.
A few minutes later he turns into the Framleigh drive (passing, incidentally, Jason and Kevin who are up to nefarious, business of their own in a ditch beside the road). Appreciatively, he drives through the park which makes him think vaguely of the National Gallery: all those drooping trees and cows in groups and lavish blue distances. Very pleasant. He rounds the bend in the avenue and sees the house, which impresses in other ways. It suggests such things as good taste and continuity and stability and (oddly enough) prosperity. Lowther’s own house, which was built in nineteen sixty-seven is, as it happens, in flattering descent from Framleigh: it too (five-bedroomed detached with two bathrooms, double garage and landscaped garden in exclusive Executive Development) has pillared porch and facade with symmetrical sashed windows; there, though, the similarity ends. Nevertheless, Lowther feels, seeing Framleigh, subtly reassured: the world is orderly, certain things are solid and desirable, he personally is able to recognize which things.
Swinging the car round the gravelled semi-circle in front of the steps, though, on thin weed-infested gravel which does not have the prosperous scrunch that gravel ought to have, he sees that much is awry here, and tuts sadly. One would very much like to be instrumental in giving a helping hand to a place like this; he feels, now, benevolent and influential. Admittedly, Jacobson and other members of the Board seem to have grave doubts about its potential and apparently the asking price at the moment is unrealistic. Well, one will have to take a shrewd look, and form one’s own opinion.
It is, now, mid-morning. The various studios are in session. Nick, though, who is hanging around as instructed, sees Lowther’s car through the open front door, realizes that the man Toby is expecting has arrived – a little early – and goes quickly over to the stable-yard to alert Toby. Nick is rather vague, as Toby was, about who the man is: a person from a Ministry or something who may be able to help Framleigh financially in some unspecified way. Nick is aware that Toby has the most awful hassles about money and is doing miracles keeping Framleigh going at all.
Nick helps Jean Simpson with a paint problem and then follows Toby back to the house, where he finds him in the process of greeting the visitor. In fact, Toby and John Lowther have just realized, simultaneously, that they were at school together; both have decided to pretend to be unaware of this. They were nine years old at the time; absence of recall would be perfectly understandable. Both, though, have stored the observation as of potential use or interest. John Lowther remembers that Toby was once sick in chapel, had a reputation for unreliabi
lity, and always came bottom in maths. Toby remembers that Lowther was fat, sucked up to the masters, had a mother who wore the wrong sort of clothes at Sports Days. Blandly smiling, they shake hands. “You found your way all right?” asks Toby. “What about some coffee?” “Love some,” says Lowther. “Bit of a tangle at Redditch, but otherwise no problem. Glorious weather …” Nick is despatched to make coffee; the two men move onto the terrace where John Lowther is, as intended, silenced by the prospect, the billowing acreage of trees, the impervious greedy spread of Framleigh’s surroundings. “Ah,” he says at last, “the famous garden.” The final word does not sound appropriate, at all.
Toby learned long ago – as a child, perhaps – that it is seldom necessary to lie. Truth is so easily concealed in other ways. When there are things you would prefer other people not to know, you simply evade discussion of the things: what is omitted is rarely missed. People notice what is said, not what is left out. Accordingly, he has simply murmured a word or two about Lowther’s visit to Paula, Greg, Nick and Bob without further elaboration; they will elaborate for themselves, inaccurately no doubt.
“A man about what?” said Paula, but by that time Toby was halfway out of the room and in any case she wasn’t all that interested. Now, seeing Toby approach across the stable yard with a man in a dark suit, a dapper well-shaven man from an alien world, the world she prefers not to inhabit and indeed roundly despises, she sighs theatrically, remarks to her class that they are about to be inspected and to pay no attention, and prepares to receive the visitor.
Lowther sees a fine-looking woman in some sort of long flowing flimsy garment, rather becoming actually. She is surrounded by people fiddling around with bits of mirror and beads and putty. He smiles indulgently. Paula says, hello, do come and look round, hey – mind yourself on that chicken wire … She also smiles, and lays a restraining hand on the expensively-suited arm. It has suddenly occurred to her that Toby said something not long ago about a bloke from the Arts Council who might cough up a grant of some kind. Paula is not too clear exactly what the Arts Council is or does except what is evident from its title: it is in her line of business. And it apparently has money, which is something Paula cannot waste time bothering about but – tiresomely – is always needing. So it might be a good idea to be nice.