She is sitting next to Nick. Opposite is Jason, who has dirt streaked across his face and hands lurid with grass-stains. Mary observes this but it is Nick who says, “Jason, you should have washed yourself before you came to supper”.
Jason gazes at him in surprise. “Why?” he asks, as well he may, since this is not something usually recommended by Nick or indeed anyone else.
“Because,” says Nick, “it’s nicer for other people.”
Jason looks at his hands; there are flecks of cow-pat on one palm. Hand-washing is insisted on, as it happens, in Kevin’s house and Jason has cheerfully conformed; he has assumed this to be merely local practice, though, and it had not occurred to him to mix the customs of elsewhere with those of Framleigh. He decides it is all too late now and returns to the corned beef hash. “Do you like clean people better than dirty people?” he asks. “I don’t.”
“It’s not that I like them or don’t like them,” says Nick, “it’s just that it’s nicer having supper with people whose hands are clean.”
Paula, further down the table, is now attending to the conversation. Whether or not she is offended by the implied criticism of her maternal efficiency is not clear. “God,” she says, “you really are the original little bourgeois, aren’t you, Nick?”
Nick goes crimson. “If you think so.”
Keith, attempting intervention, passes a dish of tinned peas.
“No thanks, quite frankly,” says Paula. “Those have been in the store-cupboard since kingdom come, I happen to know.”
“What’s berjwah?” enquires Jason.
“It’s having a three-piece suite and a mortgage and cutting the grass on Saturday afternoon,” says Paula with a laugh.
This strikes Keith on the raw; he is both offended and defensive. “Frankly I’d have thought it was an attitude of mind.”
“That’s what that is,” says Paula.
Mary Chambers has always believed, rather strongly, in talking to children rather than over or around them. She says, to Jason, “It means people who live in one way rather than in another way. On the whole people who live in houses and aren’t particularly poor.”
Jason, flattered by the attention, nods. He scrubs one hand furtively against his jeans.
Paula opens her mouth to comment, and then thinks better of it. There is an unwritten Framleigh rule that one is nice or as nice as possible to course members and even in her present heightened state she is loth to break it. She starts a conversation with Greg, down the table, to indicate boredom.
Nick, who has thought, too late, of various things he could or should have said to Paula, sits in seething silence. Jason, who has now lost interest in the whole business, looks up and down the table and sees mouths opening and shutting, quack-quack like ducks, or like the tadpoles in the pond gobbling at the waterweed, He mimes this, making a popping noise with his lips.
Toby, who is in any case exhausted, has an unpleasant feeling that things are slipping out of control. There have before now been courses that have become somewhat out of hand; there was the time Bob got plastered and had a fight with a chap whose girl he’d been messing about with, and the time a woman from Liverpool had hysterics and the time people got food-poisoning. But this particular course has about it a sense of impending crisis; perfectly ordinary people are beginning to behave as though they were prima donnas. That red-haired woman collared him before dinner, complaining about the domestic arrangements and hinting darkly at something or other; the girl Sue, who was quite amusing to begin with, is getting beyond a joke. And he is getting damn all support from anyone else – Paula in one of her rages, Nick in an odd mood, Greg sloping around looking smug.
Moreover, Toby suspects that the deal with Harpers is either going to be extremely sticky or will fall through altogether.
Just as he has always preferred evasion to lying, Toby has also favoured pacification to confrontation. He looks round the table, at the various faces on which ill-temper is manifest; some kind of conciliatory move, he decides, is necessary. He clears his throat, treats course members and faculty to his most deprecating smile, taps on the table with a fork, and speaks.
Chapter 11
“Are you mad?” Paula demands of Toby, in the middle of the prospect.
They are in the middle of the prospect because Paula has hissed, dangerously, that she wants a word or two, and the middle of the prospect is the only place Toby can immediately think of where they will not be overheard. Paula’s words, as he knows from experience, are not always all that quiet.
Toby sighs.
“A picnic outing for the kiddies!”
“I am merely,” says Toby coldly, “trying to keep people happy. This course is not one hundred per cent successful. People are restive. I am not blaming anyone in particular; I am simply stating a fact. I am simply trying to maintain what I consider to be Framleigh standards.”
Paula snorts. “And to keep up Framleigh standards we’ve all got to go on a bloody afternoon outing!”
“There is no compulsion,” says Toby, “on anyone. The Framleigh Ideal, as you well know, has always been for people to do their own thing. I had always thought you and I agreed on that. If you prefer not to come …” – he shrugs – “… then it’s my problem. I shall take the course members on my own.”
“They could go without any of us,” snaps Paula.
Toby looks down the prospect, over the seething summer grass and into the elegant distances of the park. “I daresay. But I happen to feel a responsibility.”
“Oh, I know,” says Paula, “you’re so much better brought up than I am. It’s very classy to have a sense of responsibility.”
They glare at each other. Toby says, with the strained patience of one who knows himself to be tried beyond endurance, “That is childish, Paula”.
“Huh!” says Paula. “That’s rich, from you. Who cheats at liar dice? And gets in a paddy when he loses at croquet?”
“I bloody well don’t,” Toby retorts.
Paula laughs. Toby turns and starts to walk off. He says, over his shoulder, that Paula can suit herself, so far as he is concerned: if she is no longer interested in Framleigh or the courses then maybe she had better stay behind.
In the event, Paula decides to go because Greg is going and because anyway she can’t stand being left on her own. Greg goes because he is feeling restless and he certainly doesn’t want to be involved, just now, in a solitary tete-a-tete with Paula. Nick goes because Toby wants him to. Bob goes for the hell of it. The course members go because Toby or Paula or Bob are going or simply because it sounds as though it might be fun. Jason would have liked to go had he known what was afoot, but does not get a chance. He is bundled off to Kevin’s house and told to stay there till later.
Toby’s scheme of a visit to Warwick Castle followed by an outing on the river at Stratford is designed as a measure of pacification; the course has only one more day to run and something like this, he feels, a gesture of goodwill, might put people in a better frame of mind and salvage things. Toby, curiously, has a protective sensitivity about Framleigh’s good name. Also, he is nervous of Greg’s mood and Paula’s mood and the suspicions aroused by Lowther’s visit and wants a diversion of some kind. The landscape, once more, will come in handy.
The minibus, plus one car, will accommodate them all. Greg will drive the minibus and Mary Chambers offers the use of her car. At once, on the weedy gravelled drive, at the foot of the pock-marked Framleigh steps, there is tension. Sue, of course, wants to sit with Toby and Tessa with Bob. Jean Simpson wants to get as far from Tessa as possible and feels herself flushing every time she looks at Bob. People shuffle around, manoeuvring. In the end Sue finds herself beside Nick, with Toby at the other end of the vehicle, and Tessa is forced into the back of Mary’s car with Keith, where both travel in silence: Tessa sulking and Keith in furious irritation with himself, with Karen, with Paula, with life and its inadequacies.
Greg drives fast. Too fast. He drives wit
h one elbow propped on the sill of the open window. Toby sits just behind him, at the end of the minibus bench. There is an interesting reversal of status: Greg, now, is top person. The driver of a vehicle is always top person. “Slow down, for Christ’s sake,” mutters Toby. “You’ll have this thing in the ditch.” Greg, in response, accelerates to overtake. “Yessir,” he says, “right, sir. Anything you say, sir.” Further back in the minibus, someone giggles. Greg grins, stretches, slouches back in the driving-seat.
There is chatter, and banter; people say things that are straightforward and also things that in fact mean quite other things. These are the same people as rode in the same minibus a few days ago. Only up to a point, though – partly because two or three are absent and two or three others present – but more because those present are not precisely the same; they are changed by time and proximity and they are chattering and bantering with people who are similarly changed and towards whom they have feelings and responses, both agreeable and disagreeable. Some people are in love with other people and some people despise other people and some are relatively indifferent and Paula is consumed by a (not unfamiliar) longing to hit Toby on his balding head and Bob is very much in need of a drink and proposing to push off to the nearest pub when they get to Warwick, if by good luck they’re still open, it being now going on two o’clock.
When they are all disembarked, in the car park, it becomes clear that unity will be difficult to achieve. Paula announces that she has seen the wretched place anyway and is going to sit on the castle lawns. Bob, glancing at his watch, says he’ll join them presently; Tessa watches his departing back and her face sags. Keith thinks maybe he’ll pass up the guided tour, too, and hang around outside. In the end it is Toby and Greg who lead away the depleted party, to peruse the Van Dycks and the suits of armour and the triptych segments of the Avon displayed in mullioned frames.
In the pub, Bob chats up the girl behind the bar and manages to extend opening time by five minutes or so. Keith follows Paula onto the castle lawn where to his fury they are joined by Jean Simpson. Jean, also, has seen the castle; she and her husband brought the kids here once. She recalls the occasion, at length; Paula, not bothering to conceal a yawn, moves off a few yards and stretches out on the grass. Keith sits sullenly on a bench with Jean, not responding to her narrative or to any subsequent conversational moves. He wonders if he really likes women as much as he has always thought he did; he tries to think of any men as awful as some of the women he has come across, or as maddening as some of those he has known well. Jean, who is able to talk about one thing while thinking another, eyes his jeans and denim jacket and congratulates herself on being married to someone who still knows how to dress decently for a fellow of forty plus.
Paula, apparently, sleeps.
The castle party emerges. Sue is pink and smiling: plunging, at one point, down a narrow flight of stairs, she found herself next to Toby who placed a solicitous and, she feels sure, meaningful, hand under her elbow. “All right, love?” he asked. The word repeats itself in her head.
Greg is bored and becoming fretful. It bugs him that he cannot think how to exploit his conversation with Lowther. Here he is, in interesting possession of the sure fact that old Toby is planning to sell the place behind everyone’s backs, and when he passes this on to the others all they do is whine like a lot of kids. At least, Paula makes it an occasion to have a row with Toby which she would do anyway, and Nick goes into a lot of introspective stuff about relationships. Only Bob there looks like having an adequate sense of self-preservation.
Bob reappears. Genial, now.
They re-embark, after further manoeuvrings on the part of those for whom the success or failure of the whole afternoon depends on desired proximities. Toby, this time, gets into the back of Mary’s car and Sue beats Nick to the other door, in an unseemly scurry that has them treading on each other’s feet. Toby, from the car, slightly smiles.
Stratford, of course, is awash with people. Paula looks round, through the enormous sunglasses that swamp her face, and sighs theatrically. “Well,” she says, to Toby “you brought us here, now what?”
But Toby can trump this. He knows one of the people who hire out boats and has telephoned ahead. There are punts ready and waiting: the right number of punts, lined up at the river bank. “Oh, how gorgeous!” cries Sue. All the women become, for some reason, girlish. Water and boats have an odd effect on people.
There is question, now, of who is to do the punting. Bob has already rolled up his shirt-sleeves. Keith remarks casually that he doesn’t mind driving. The third punt, it seems, must fall to either Toby or Greg. The other men – Nick and a television cameraman called Sam – are both unassertive and physically slight. It seems right that the manipulator of a punt-pole should be a dominant figure.
Toby says, “Greg, will you get in with Keith and the girls. I’ll take this one.”
All, now, are placed; hardly anyone is where they would wish to be, except for Paula, who has established herself in the punt with the most cushions, which happens to be the one managed by Bob. She has made herself as comfortable as possible, and looks strikingly more handsome than anyone else, and also as though she were only fortuitously of the party. Strangers eye her.
It turns out that Toby is very good at punting. Keith and Bob are adequate, but Toby’s craft sweeps ahead down the river; he is stylish, and effortless. Sue is in a terrible state, twenty yards behind.
Mary Chambers is in an odd state of mind. Since she is as good at observing herself as she is at observing others, she knows this, and is the more disconcerted. She is having various unfamiliar feelings. For example, she is very aware of Paula: she finds herself wishing she looked like Paula. She has not felt like this about another woman since she was about sixteen and envied her best friend’s blonde curls. She feels piqued because Bob has not addressed a word to her all afternoon, and she rather likes Bob. She was jealous of Jean Simpson, this morning, because during Toby’s studio session Toby made much of Jean’s drawing and hardly glanced at hers, which was manifestly better. Neither envy, pique or jealousy are, in the normal way of things, part of her repertoire. She is perhaps unusual. Fermenting with all this, she sits silent at one end of Keith’s punt.
The day is perfect: there is sun and a warm breeze. Chips of light sparkle on the water; the banks are soft with shifting flowing grasses; the air is full of the sound of birds, of the summer wind in the trees. From somewhere there is a smell of mown grass.
Jean Simpson says, “That’s better. Now we’re away from all those people”. Paula, at the other end of the punt, makes a spluttering sound that might be derisive or might be accidental; Jean, alert, looks at her suspiciously and then away at the river. “Gorgeous afternoon,” she adds. Jean needs to talk when ill at ease.
They are approaching, now, a point where the river narrows and is swept for two-thirds of its width by low-hanging trees. Toby is forced by an oncoming canoe to pull in towards the trees: tails of willow sweep his head and arms and as he turns sideways to manoeuvre away from the canoe four people see that the harmless leaves conceal also a hefty branch, which if Toby does not quickly duck will …
Paula, in the following punt, sees and watches with interest. Greg, also, sees and sits up a little more alertly. Mary Chambers sees, opens her mouth and then for some extraordinary reason closes it again. She sits frozen by her own inaction and by what is about to …
Sue sees and shouts, “Toby, look out!”
Toby turns his head and ducks. Too late to prevent the branch swiping him but in time to have it send him sprawling not into the river but on top of the other occupants of the punt. There are cries and protests and some laughter and the punt swings sideways into the bank. “Great stuff!” calls Greg. “Let’s have it again.”
The punts drift together. Toby gets up, blank-faced. Nick says, “Are you O.K.?”
Toby holds his hand to his back. “I think,” he says, “someone else may have to take over for a bit.??
?
Paula lowers her sunglasses and stares over the top of them. “Oh for heaven’s sake, you can’t have hurt yourself!”
Toby hands the punt-pole to Greg; he wears the martyred expression of a man riding out intense physical discomfort. He sits, stiffly. “Shall we go on?”
After a couple of minutes Toby says, “Greg, you’d do better if you didn’t climb up the pole. Lift and drop.”
“O.K., O.K.,” snaps Greg. Water sprays the occupants of the punt. “Oops!” says Tessa, wiping her arms.
The punt lurches. Greg has all but lost the pole; he grabs, just in time.
“That,” says Toby, “is the classic boob. Don’t run up and down the punt like that.”
Greg slams the pole down into the water. “I guess you have to be born to this kind of thing. Like one or two other features of life around here.”
“And what exactly do you mean by that?” asks Toby.
“Oh, cut it out!” says Keith.
Heads turn, in all three punts. “What?” says Toby, startled into genuine enquiry.
“I said cut it out. The both of you.”
“Well,” says Jean Simpson, to the willows and the sparkling water and the mallard upended by the bank, “temper temper …”
Nick is now suffering the curious form of distress induced by the humiliation of a person with whom one is infatuated: a compound of embarrassment and sympathy. Mary Chambers is still contemplating her own response with amazement: she rather wanted, she realizes, to see Toby fall in the river.
The punts proceed downstream. Greg’s style does not improve; his punt swings from one side of the river to the other and Toby sits at its end with folded arms, loudly saying nothing. Bob shouts, “Move over!” and takes his party past. At once Keith, behind, speeds up. “Hey!” cries Sue. “You’re soaking me! This isn’t a race.” Paula trails her hand in the water; she looks down the river at Keith and, he is sure, smiles conspiratorially. Unless, of course, it is a trick of the light. He is exasperated, suddenly, by the way Bob is hogging the river, ahead. He points out that the rules of the road apply on water just as much as on land and suggests that Bob keep left. Bob, grinning, flicks water with the end of his punt-pole. The spray misses Keith and catches Jean Simpson, who dries herself ostentatiously. “Actually,” she says, “I don’t call that funny.”