A Particular Place Read online

  Charles hurried on, ‘It’s about Desmond Treglowan.’

  The Hoaths spoke simultaneously. Michael said, ‘Oh, Desmond!’ and Valentine said, ‘Charles, your cup is empty.’ There was a pause while she replenished all the cups and was as fussy with milk and sugar as if Charles were playing Gwendolen to her Cecily. Eventually, Michael Hoath said, ‘Now, Charles, what is this about Desmond? The lad returned home, I gather.’

  Charles settled back in his chair, confident in the knowledge that he had a good tale to tell. ‘It seems he went to Exeter in the hope of meeting Sir Arnold Bassett, of all people, who was attending a conference there. Not a realistic aim, one would have thought. But as it transpired, as well as the main conference there was a meeting meant to awaken the interest of what I suppose was once the-man- in-the-street but which has become the-man-in-front-of-the-television-screen. Old Bassett was wheeled forward to do his bit.’

  ‘Who is this Bassett?’ Valentine’s expression was one of quite inappropriate betrayal, as though a late suspect had been introduced by Hercule Poirot of whose existence she could not possibly have been aware.

  ‘An anthropologist of some repute – but not so well thought-of nowadays.’ Charles was fussed at being interrupted when he thought he was doing his best to lighten the atmosphere. He went on, ‘Desmond managed to get into this meeting which was rather poorly attended, I gather from a report in The Times. It seems that when questions were invited, Desmond took the opportunity to inform Bassett that he had made one or two mistakes regarding Darwin.’ Charles thought this very funny but neither of the Hoaths did. ‘And he hung on pertinaciously throughout question time, thus earning himself a couple of witty lines in the Guardian and no doubt the undying hatred of the great man.’

  Charles chuckled. The other two were silent. Valentine sat with bowed head – the better, thought Charles, who was beginning to get rather cross, to look superb when she finally raised her chin. ‘And that is all?’

  ‘By no means. The chairman was a younger man who probably hated old Bassett’s guts. It seems that after the meeting he came across Desmond who was hanging about in the hope of further exhilarating exchanges with Bassett. The outcome was that this fellow offered Desmond the chance to go on a dig in Turkey early next year. At his own expense. As he doesn’t go to university until the autumn it would be a possibility provided he can raise the money.’

  ‘And I suppose it is a matter of getting a grant?’ Valentine said crisply. ‘Really, Charles, I can’t see why you have come to us. As a schoolmaster you must know more than we do about such things. And why, by the way, aren’t you in school now?’

  ‘This is the games afternoon.’ Charles felt as if he were explaining his absence to the head master. ‘And it’s not the money which disturbs Desmond’s mother.’ Somehow he could not bring himself to say Shirley. ‘She is afraid the grandparents will fund him on the principle that “it was coming to you anyway so you might as well have it now”. What worries her is that the expedition may compound Desmond’s problem, not solve it; that he will just go to pieces in some lonely place with no one noticing what is happening.’

  Valentine said, ‘Perhaps he just knows what he wants. It was enterprising to go off to Exeter like that.’

  ‘But unrealistic to imagine he could impress old Bassett by a display of adolescent cleverness.’

  Michael Hoath said, ‘A display of adolescent cleverness is not peculiar to Desmond. And he does seem to have impressed the other fellow.’

  ‘But why anthropology? Anthropologists don’t exactly grow on trees. Personally, I think it’s some kind of therapy and she should be glad it isn’t psychology he’s taken up. But she is afraid this is the call of the wild; that he will go off into a desert place and become a recluse. That sort of thing.’

  ‘And what am I supposed to do about it?’ Hoath asked.

  ‘She seemed to think you had an alternative life on offer – the loving Christian community.’

  Michael Hoath looked as if he had been stung and Charles regretted the flippancy of his tone. Hoath said, ‘The desert has always been an alternative way.’

  There was another dreadful silence. The idea recurred to Charles that at some time he must have offended Hoath. Certainly a great air of offence hung over the sitting-room. He said, ‘Anyway, perhaps you might care to have a word with Desmond. I leave it to you. But before I go – and I have taken up far too much of your time as it is.’ Things were so bad he almost said, ‘and that of your good lady.’ He pulled himself together and tried to inject genuine feeling into his voice, which was always a mistake as it made him sound odiously insincere. ‘Before I go may I say how much I, as an outsider, have appreciated the masterly way in which you have transformed the church services?’ He hoped this was not going at it a bit too strongly, but Hoath’s reaction was to look at him so tragically that he thought, dear me, perhaps the man is losing heart? Silence threatened again and Charles found himself forced to drum up more praise. ‘Speaking as one who has never been able to take what your predecessor was pleased to call “the leap of faith” I nevertheless need the enrichment of the language and the ritual . . .’ He went on to praise the music, the art of which the Church had been both inspiration and custodian, and even acknowledged his own debt to the Christian culture in which he had been reared.

  The words “leap of faith” sounded like a cry in Michael Hoath’s ears, a cry which he had heard all his adult life and about which he had been able to do nothing. Many unbelievers seemed to him like lapsed fundamentalists, people for whom every statement, doctrine, miracle must be examined in detail and proved irrefutably. Once doubt entered in they were finished because above all else they needed absolute certainty. And he could not answer them. They had cried out and he had been dumb, unable to deal with their arguments or adequately to explain his own belief. The great mysteries were not for him a matter for argument, they were jewels cast about his life’s landscape, some of which he seemed to hold in the palm of his hand, others which his fingers would never touch; he watched and meditated on their richness and radiance and felt them sometimes closer than hand to face, at others remote as a star. Now, at a time when his emotions were so charged, he felt the agony of the tension between himself and Charles to be quite unbearable.

  Charles had the feeling that Hoath was listening to very little of what he said. When finally praise petered out, Hoath got abruptly to his feet, muttered, ‘Well, thank you for telling me about Desmond. I will speak to him,’ and left the room.

  ‘I do hope he believed me,’ Charles said weakly.

  ‘You were very patronizing,’ Valentine said.

  A faint colour tipped Charles’s cheeks; it was not a description he liked. ‘I trust not.’

  ‘Surely you can’t be so unaware when you mock.’

  ‘No, no,’ he protested. ‘It means a great deal to me, I do assure you . . .’

  ‘The music and the fan-vaulting and the language of the prayer book, but not, of course, the unambiguity of the crucifix which you probably think is in rather bad taste and which my poor benighted husband has tormented himself trying to preach, to live . . .’

  Involuntarily Charles’s lips moved in the slightest pucker of distaste. She said acidly, ‘Exactly.’

  She was angry that he had patronized Michael and even more angry that she herself had been included in his patronage. She saw herself as the outsider in all matters including her religion.

  Charles was enchanted that anger so became her, a phenomenon much noted in fiction but rare in his experience. He would pay no heed to her words, but would treasure the memory of the impeccable line of the jaw, the icy fire in the eyes.

  ‘You are most handsome,’ he said.

  ‘Are you never concerned with the guts of the matter?’ Valentine surprised herself by the use of the word guts which was not a word she would normally have applied to religion let alone to anything pertaining to herself.

  Charles raised his eyebrows, distressed
by the realization that she meant him to take her anger seriously. Did he sense a whiff of feminism here? he wondered.

  ‘You are so civilized you have become quite unrooted.’

  Nothing he had said justified the way in which she was behaving and she was aware of this. She was angry with him because she saw something of herself in him. She, too, had a revulsion for the guts of life. But she was not a natural aesthete. He at least genuinely cared about the music of Bach. In a sense perhaps he did know where his roots were buried and searched for them in the hidden streams beside which Langland’s peasants had ploughed their half-acre.

  Charles left soon after this exchange. He was less at ease in his attitude to feminism than to Christianity, which he regarded as a spent force. Feminism was a force to be reckoned with. The liberation of women seemed to Charles something akin to the release of one of those deadly germs said to be immobilized in the frozen waters of the Arctic. On his way home he called at the florist’s and ordered flowers for Valentine, writing a brief note of apology to accompany them. It was not a gesture which would normally have occurred to him, but he had heard that men sometimes did this at the end of an affair. For some reason, this seemed appropriate.

  ‘To think I prided myself on being the one who introduced them,’ Lois Drury said to Hester. She was looking through the sitting- room window on to the lawn where Hesketh was engaged in maniacal struggle to dismantle a maypole-like device for drying clothes. Her husband Jack was in the front drive changing a tyre. It seemed not to have occurred to either man to co-ordinate their labours. Lois said, ‘It’s going to be a very bad-tempered lunch.’

  Lois was a dark, angular woman, comfortably lacking in charm. Hester thought that she could be relied on not to make matters worse by a flow of idle chatter. She looked at her wrist watch and said, ‘And a late one.’ She sipped her drink. The glass bore the floured imprints of Norah’s fingers. ‘Do you think we should offer to help in the kitchen? I was left in little doubt that that was why I was invited.’

  Lois shook her head decidedly. ‘She’s not doing at all badly and we should only fluster her – or, worse still, she would opt out and we should have to prepare the meal. Norah can’t work in tandem. Once someone starts to help, she sits back, as you must know.’

  A young woman attired in a G-string strolled past the window. They watched as Hesketh desisted from his battle with the maypole and turned in slow motion to watch his daughter’s progress across the lawn. She threw down a bathing towel and stretched out on it, her body smooth as marzipan save for two little eminences topped by glace cherries. Hesketh came and stood over her, looking as if he might take a bite at any minute.

  ‘Do you propose to join us at lunch in that condition?’

  Her voice was not as resonant as his and the reply was inaudible. Hesketh conveyed its substance to them. ‘Of course we are having lunch, that is why we have guests.’ And after another inaudible remark, ‘I don’t want to hear you speak like that about your stepmother.’

  ‘How has Norah taken her arrival?’ Hester asked Lois.

  ‘I have only had a few minutes with her, but she seemed in a surprisingly buoyant mood. Perhaps that is how people respond when something they dread actually happens.’ Lois did not sound convinced of this.

  Hester was doubtful, too. ‘I can’t see Samantha’s arrival being a relief to Norah in any sense.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have said it was relief. She just seemed dissociated – as if she had been swigging the cooking sherry.’

  At this point Hesketh broke away from Samantha and strode over to the maypole which he grasped by the stem and shook as if to throttle it. One of the wire spokes came adrift and hit him on the side of the head. He gave a roar of fury and rushing to the bank hurled the contraption into the river. Samantha got up, folded the towel and walked into the sitting-room.

  ‘Do you mind about this?’ she asked, presenting a honey-brown torso for Hester’s inspection. ‘My father thinks you will be affronted.’

  ‘I’m not all that keen, since you ask.’ Hester refused to be shamed into acceptance. ‘You’re shocked,’ Samantha said disdainfully.

  ‘Being shockproof isn’t high on my list of priorities.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Now you are shocked.’

  ‘You’re quite formidable, aren’t you?’ Samantha drew the towel around her shoulders. ‘You make me feel self-conscious.’

  Hester doubted that she ever felt anything else. Then she became guilty. The young often made her feel guilty – her own youth was so far away. Perhaps Samantha had really hoped that she might regain lost Eden in the secluded garden. Many pitfalls opened up when one tried to identify with the young, sentimentality not least among them.

  Lois said practically, ‘Anyway, what really matters is that your father is shocked.’

  ‘My father is like all men, he sees women as dolls for him to dress up.’ Samantha went out of the room and returned shortly in a tangerine shift which subtly outlined erogenous zones.

  Hester, who had only met her once before, studied her with a writer’s eye. She had coppery hair shaped to an elfin face, a tip-tilted nose and slanting eyes which never seemed to look straight at anything. She poured herself a glass of Perrier water and stood looking into the garden where her father, anger now a little abated, was trying to rescue the maypole without getting his trousers wet.

  ‘What has come over him?’ There was genuine dismay in her voice. ‘He never used to be clumsy.’ She turned to look at Lois and Hester noted a slight cast in one of the blue eyes which gave a permanently bad-tempered look to the face and reminded one that not all elfin mischief is harmless. ‘Do you think he’s got Parkinson’s or something? He doesn’t seem to co-ordinate properly. You saw how he was with that clothes thing. It’s the same with door handles. You’d think he’d no idea of how they operate – he goes to work on them as if they were a new version of the Rubik cube and he couldn’t get the combination.’

  Hesketh came past the window, trousers clinging to his legs, the maypole trailing behind him. One felt he would have liked it to be a bull so that he could have been awarded its ears. He went into the kitchen and they could hear him shouting ‘that infernal thing fell in the river.’ The kitchen door slammed.

  It did seem that Samantha had a point, Hester thought. Surely stairs must be unfamiliar to him, why else would he make such a foundation-shaking business of ascending them? A few minutes later, however, he had recovered himself. Urbane and in his right mind, he came into the sitting-room and immediately took control. ‘I’m sorry you find us in such disarray,’ he said, replenishing glasses and, in Hester’s case, deflouring the glass itself.

  Samantha walked out on to the lawn. Hesketh shrugged his shoulders in huge bewilderment and looked at Lois. She patted the seat beside her. He took her hand and lowered himself slowly as if his limbs were stiff. ‘I’m making a pretty poor fist of this, old dear.’

  Hester said, ‘I think perhaps, if you don’t mind . . .’ and contrived to leave the room without drawing undue attention to her departure.

  She sat on the stairs for a few minutes, watching Jack putting his tools away very slowly and methodically. Something about that narrow, impatient face suggested he was not usually so careful. He noticed her and came to the window. ‘How are things in there?’

  ‘I think your wife is exerting a soothing influence on Hesketh at this moment.’

  ‘God, but it’s needed! We arrived before you. It was terrible. I’ve never been so grateful for a puncture. He and Samantha were having the most almighty row because he had decided he must have a study on the ground floor and the only room which suited him – light and sunny – was the one which leads into the conservatory. So no one would be able to use the conservatory without disturbing him which, as Samantha pointed out, would mean asking his permission to come within a mile of it.’

  ‘Does that mean that Samantha was trying to support Norah?’

  ‘No. It meant s
he wanted it for her bedroom because it is light and sunny.’ He wiped his fingers on a rag. ‘I wouldn’t believe it could happen. When I first knew Hesketh he always seemed to be on top of things. Never a hint of strain or effort. He used to ridicule people who “make a meal of life”. As far as he was concerned it was a banquet and he was the guest of honour.’ He squinted through the window at the half-open door of the dining-room. ‘Look, I don’t want to interrupt what good work Lois may be doing, but I am in great need of alcohol of any kind.’

  ‘I’ll make enquiries.’ Hester disappeared into the kitchen and after some delay Norah came out.

  ‘I think there’s whisky in the dining-room. Will that do?’

  ‘It will indeed.’

  She was unfamiliar with spirits and poured as if it were vermouth. He looked at the glass reverently when she handed it to him. ‘I’ll sit out here for a while if no one minds.’

  Hester followed Norah into the kitchen. She had stipulated that she could not leave her work until one o’clock and Norah had said, ‘Come at one-fifteen, then. We’ll eat about one-thirty and you can help with final preparations when everything comes to the boil at the same time.’ It was now two-fifteen. Hester was glad to note that order had been restored since she last glimpsed the kitchen and encouraging smells were coming from all the right utensils.

  ‘Gravy?’ she suggested.

  ‘Bless you.’ Norah, who was sitting on a stool, made no move. Hester thought she looked very tired but not so strained as might have been expected. ‘It’s the first time I have ever cooked for so many.’ She sounded satisfied, as though now that Hester had arrived her part was concluded.

  Hester said, ‘Shall I make the gravy?’

  While she did this Norah sat on the stool, head bent over the kitchen table, tracing some design of her fancy with a finger. From time to time an involuntary smile lit up her face and Hester, looking at her, experienced a sudden fugitive joy, a shaft lodged long ago within her own being whose sharpness she had not felt for many years.