Dreaming Iris E-Book

John de Falbe

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 456

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

When Jimmy Hood buys Sweynsend Hall and marries the girl next door, he knows that some tragedy has occurred to make the Carew family want to leave the dilapidated place after generations, but it is no concern of his. Once weekend he brings home Lucas, who has been working for him in St Petersburg, and is surprised to find that he and Teresa know one another. The meeting prompts Teresa to give Jimmy an account of Sweynsend under the Carews and Lucas's friendship with its last owner, William Carew, who was once engaged to her sister. Shadowing Teresa's disclosure of her former love for Lucas is Jimmy's preoccupation with a passion of his own. But how real is it? What happens when dormant love awakes? As secrets are revealed and the love story builds to its terse dénouement, it is far from obvious what choices will emerge. 'Unprecedented... There will be few finer books published this year' Independent on Sunday 'Gripping' Sunday Times 'A subtly engrossing novel... admirable higher literacy' 'A wise and tautly written novel' Literacy Review 'This thoughtful book reveals much about the strength of attachments...' 'De Falbe is a clever writer, who knows how to keep the outcome uncertain.'

Leseprobe

DREAMING IRIS

by the same author

The Glass Night The Bequest

DREAMING IRIS

John de Falbe

First published in 2008 by The Cuckoo Press, 10 Blacklands Terrace, London, SW 3 2SR This electronic edition published in 2012 by Elliott & Thompson, 27 John Street, London, WC1N 2BX

Copyright © 2008 by John de Falbe

John de Falbe has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as author of this work

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by CB editions Cover designed by Shona Andrew Printed in England by Biddles Ltd, Kings Lynn, Norfolk

ISBN: 978–095426–885–5 EPUB ISBN: 978-190873-966-7

‘If you but knew how terrible it is to languish with the thirst of love.’

Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, translated by Vladimir Nabokov

IBRING HOME a business associate for the weekend and it turns out he knows more about the place than I do myself!

It’s not a calamity but I can’t help feeling ‘a little sour’, as Teresa’s father might say.

Just three months married and then this secret pops out. No wonder Teresa is on edge.

When I came back the other evening, midweek, the house was blasting with some outmoded rock music and I found her in her little dressing-room in the corner of the house. She had not heard me coming. She was sitting in the armchair staring at her toes, dark hair long and liquid about her shoulders. She saw me and smiled her gorgeous smile, then up she jumped, put her arms around my neck and said how glad she was to see me.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I mistrust her affections. She was cool towards Lucas when he visited, surprisingly so considering they said they were old friends. Well, my Teresa usually takes a bit to get going with people – I like that about her, it shows that she takes them seriously. But afterwards she was reticent, when it seemed natural to me to talk about him.

You will wonder how it is possible that Lucas never registered the connection until moments after we turned off the motorway. I suppose the explanation lies in the nature of our working relationship. Although I hired him to work for me on this job, there’s no more reason for him to know about my personal life than the next person in the Departure Lounge. Most of the time he lives in Moscow, so asking him to Sweynsend for the weekend when he was in London was a matter of basic hospitality. Of course he knew I had got married, but it was a quiet wedding. There was no question of him being invited. If he knew that I had bought a place in the country, I was never called upon to be more specific. I know it seems odd, but there it is. Like one of those crazy coincidences Peter Aaron goes on about. It’s just the way it is. Life is full of surprises.

Then again, perhaps Lucas knew exactly who I was marrying and which house I had bought. That is a possibility I had not considered.

So there was something obscure in Teresa’s attitude towards Lucas. Although she welcomed me as usual, I could not ignore the oddity of finding her sitting in this calm room with that racket. I expect it’s okay in the right place, but you’d no more sit down and listen to it, without so much as a piece of crochet work to absorb the adrenalin, than you would to ZZ Top.

‘What’s the music?’ I said.

‘The Only Ones. “Another Girl Another Planet”.’

When I looked blank, she added, ‘Lucas always said it was the perfect pop song.’

‘Lucas?’

The song is only two minutes long. Had she been playing it round and round, waiting for me to find her? Or had she in fact heard my return and set the scene up then?

And then it all came out, how once upon a time she had fallen head over heels for him and he wanted nothing to do with her. More followed, tied up with the death of poor young William Carew, the previous owner, whose family were here for generations. I thought I knew about that – her father had explained it to me as soon as I came here – but as Teresa’s story unfolded I discovered I knew nothing. It was like seeing a carpet pulled aside and realising that I stood on the floor of a glass-bottomed boat, not the solid ground I had supposed. And if in Teresa’s story there was an echo of an episode in my own past in the US, which I have struggled to turn away from because it is useless – well, that only made me feel more sympathetic towards her, while knowing too that such a futile love is never quite so vanished as you might assume or wish it to be.

We were still in Teresa’s little room. The rim of the sun was dipping below the yew hedge at the far end of the lawn. The music had long ago stopped. Teresa was sitting across my lap with her right arm about my shoulder, and the golden light from outside burnished her hair. I thought back to when I first set eyes on her. It was after I bought the place. I was going to have a drink with her parents one Friday evening. As I passed the old School House where they still kept chickens, I heard an unfamiliar voice inside. I pushed the creaky door and there was this ravishing girl against the light, who looked up as if she had been caught in the act of something shameful. In fact she was talking to the chickens as she fed them, saying whatever it is that people say when they talk to chickens, and she was embarrassed at being overheard. I had the impression of long lashes and big eyes as she said, ‘Oh dear, you caught me talking to the chickens. I’m Teresa Fairfax. You must be Mr Hood.’ Her jet hair gleamed in the diffuse light from the filthy window behind. ‘Jimmy. Don’t apologise,’ I said. ‘I’m sure they need to be fed. I was on my way to have a drink with your parents. You gonna join us?’

And she did.

It turned out she was a solicitor in London. She was working on some fraud case that meant she had to travel a lot to Prague and Vienna. She’d just come home for the weekend. It was like having Juliet Binoche walk into your back yard. I knew this was an event that would continue to unfold.

‘Why are you telling me all this, sweetheart?’ I said.

She gestured with her free arm to take in our surroundings, this light room under the eaves of our house, Sweynsend Hall. ‘What was the point of it all, if it is only to be forgotten?’

Teresa did not know of the room’s existence in the old days. The only access to it is through a door in what is now our bedroom. ‘I always thought it was the door to a cupboard,’ she once said – I think it was when she was deciding how to redecorate it – ‘until, exploring the house with William, it opened into the tiny lobby.’ One wall of the lobby was the side of the bedroom chimney; opposite was a recessed cupboard containing Major Carew’s tatty suits. Another door stood ahead. Tucked behind the chimney on the corner of the house was this sloping sliver of a room containing a leather trunk-armoire, a chest of drawers, a miniature wardrobe and a single mahogany bed. ‘There was a hat box with the Major’s top hat, an old Balliol tie, a photograph of his uncle who had rowed for Oxford sometime in the 1880s; another picture of his brother Arthur, aged ten or so, with a stiff collar and a tennis racket; and various others, George Dick John Henry, most of them cannon fodder. Jasper cufflinks and studs in a leather box with someone else’s monogram on it, a copy of Nollekens and His Times, of de Quincey’s Confessions unopened for fifty years, of Hardy’s Love Poems, and a recent Penguin of Geoffrey Hill. It was a very male room. A book by a woman would have seemed out of place, a tulip among bulrushes. The place smelled of leather. It was the Major’s private lair and no one else had disturbed it, not even his wife. It was too threadbare for her, too obvious even, a grown-up little boy’s room.’

I bought the house empty, but each room was impregnated with its own particular smell. This one retained the leathery tang of an Edwardian man’s dressing-room until Teresa occupied it. Now, with her belongings, it is a feminine room.

Three steps climb to a dark roof space, which was thick with dust when Teresa first went in there. There were a few split suitcases; washing bowls and jugs, chamber pots; a couple of packing cases full of letters, a portfolio. With William she had seen glimmers of light through cracks between the tiles. Straw was everywhere; it had been used to insulate the roof. It spooked her sister Elizabeth, but Teresa’s greater familiarity with the chaos purged it of any menace. She knew that the bundles of letters were actually household accounts for the late nineteenth century, and that the death mask on top was made for the Major’s uncle Robert, who was killed in the 1870s by a fall from a roof in Oxford when he was climbing into a college after lock-up. She knew that the portfolio held engravings collected by the Major’s unmarried older half-sister Edith, because several of them depicted scenes on Greek islands around the 1890s (The City of Ermoupolis, Syros, Looking Towards Ano Syros). Edith was engaged at one time to a man who helped design the harbour at Piraeus. He died in mysterious circumstances somewhere near Corinth, but she remained devoted to his memory throughout her long life and hoarded any sentimental reminders. ‘I sometimes wonder,’ said Teresa, ‘whether Edith’s devotion was a fantasy necessary to her sense of herself, or whether it was an unselfish, unsought passion that arrived from nowhere to ruin her life.’

I wonder if there is a distinction – and if there is, whether it matters. You try so hard to forget things, because you must, and it feels like an honourable thing to do. Then years later something happens and the memories awake; or else nothing happens and you wake one morning remembering anyway, as you remembered yesterday and twice the week before that, and again twice the week before that, and you are weary of this pattern. You understand that if you have not forgotten by now then you will never forget and you could not forget: these memories are not trivial but your very heart and soul, burned into your being. Easier to chop off your leg than rid yourself of them. Somehow you have to accommodate them into your sense of who you are now, and who you will be, or you will become a stranger to yourself.

‘The point,’ I repeated. ‘If only –’

‘Jimmy, it’s not just a question of reassuring you about what happened between me and Lucas, it’s to do with the Carews and this house. . . Don’t you ever feel overwhelmed by the futility of other people’s lives, especially if they are more dramatic, and less futile, than your own?’

‘Why are you upset?’

Instead of just telling me about Lucas, she wanted to embark on the whole story of the Carews. Apparently it was not possible to tell me about the one without first going into the other. And I cannot say I was not interested. You can’t buy a place like this and profess indifference to what has gone before: continuity is its whole point. I say that even though I am the interloper, although I do not quite see it like that myself because the rupture had already occurred, the end had come for the Carews of Sweynsend. I have not examined my motives – perhaps I should? – but when I purchased the place four years ago it was with a view to maintaining it intact; restoring and modernising as necessary but essentially preserving what continuity I could. My belief is that the Carews, and now I, are part of the history of the place, not the other way round. After all, the house is older than the Carews and will presumably survive me and any descendants I may chance to have. Since first meeting Teresa, who grew up next door, and her parents, I have often heard stories about how things used to be. I have always asked questions, and understood the answers according to the limits of my knowledge: but my information has been disjointed, a collection of anecdotes and facts revealed as circumstance offered them. In the days following Lucas’s visit it emerged that Teresa wished to give a coherent picture, as it were a background to whatever it was she had to tell me about Lucas. I was due to work at home for the rest of the week, which may have weighed in her decision to relate these events to me now, anticipating that she might win my attention from the report I was supposed to be writing.

I myself was once in love – I mean in America, before I came to England and married Teresa. Unfortunately Iris never loved me. I always knew this, though she was kind. Rather than impose my miserable advances on her – well, never mind: here I am; I do not wish to write about myself other than to state that one of the hardest things to bear of all that fiasco was the sense not just of time and energy disappearing but, more to the point, a part of myself. Nobody knew about it, but it was intrinsic to me. Had I succeeded in winning her I would have been justified, I mean my longing for her would have become part of our story. As it was, I turned my back on it in order to have some kind of life. But it was like turning away from a part of myself. Knowing that nobody knew anything about it was a kind of death. So you see, I can understand that the overt tragedy in this business at Sweynsend is shadowed by another, subtler grief for all that has been and will be lost. I feel a sort of obligation to myself to write down what happened as much as to anyone else, because if I do not then it will disappear. You might say that would not matter, but I say it does, because allowing that to disappear would be to allow so much else to slip away – a kind of suicide by neglect. Those of us who cannot depend on God for meaning in our lives, and in the lives of those we love, must find it ourselves, or we might as well have never been. Without narrative and understanding, dust truly returns to dust. And so it is with what happened here at Sweynsend: the story, in all its sadness, must be told.

Chapter One

TOM FAIRFAX, Teresa’s father, was a dentist and a Catholic convert. After qualifying, he joined a practice in Rugby where he soon became a partner; he remained there until his retirement thirty-five years later. At first he lived in a tiny flat above an ironmonger’s in Tullworth. Then he married, and when his wife soon afterwards became pregnant, the need to find somewhere larger became urgent. Luck brought them to Sweynsend.

Teresa never quite understood how her mother, a nineteen-year-old French girl, happened to be in Tullworth. She had joined a scheme whereby she would get English lessons as part payment for work on a production line. ‘Learn English In Just Three Months! And Be Paid! All You Have To Do Is . . .’ Of course it turned out to be a ruse to lure cheap labour. Credulous Marie Quercy came to meet her destiny as little more than a slave. The company provided cheap accommodation in a hostel but Marie was paid so badly that its cheapness was illusory and she found herself much worse off than if she had stayed at home in France. Nor was she learning any English to compensate.

Then she met Tom Fairfax and – so Teresa and Elizabeth imagined – they fell in love. For both broke utterly from their former lives and never looked beyond one another. The girls knew that their paternal grandfather had been captured at the Fall of Singapore and spent the following three years in a camp on the Burma Railway. On his return to England, finding nobody at home in Ealing, he went first to his parents in Weybridge. The father, a retired brigadier, inspected his son with the watery eye of the dispossessed and said, ‘Participating in the greatest disgrace to British arms in the history of the Empire – that would knock any fellow’s pride, I expect.’ With dour satisfaction, he added, ‘Your wife has found consolation with a doctor chappie in Maidenhead.’

When Tom’s father presented himself in Maidenhead, his stunned wife, who had believed him dead, agreed to return home. Everything might have come right had it not been for the pitiful and evident fact that Tom, their thirteen-year-old son, was reluctant to transfer his affections from the kind doctor back to his ruined father. It was the doctor who encouraged Tom to continue his studies, and the memory of him – he was killed by a van while crossing a road – that sustained his protégé through medical school. Tom’s father, meanwhile, became a drinker and inflicted twenty years of misery on his wife before she died of cancer. He was dead two months later. On the face of it, Tom rejected his parents outright: he moved to Rugby when he was twenty-six and only saw them again a handful of times. But Teresa, who dimly recalls two or three tortuous visits which she believes were arranged by her mother, insists that the truth is more complicated. She says that her father suffers from an acute sense of having betrayed both his mother and his father, that it is his driving force. I do not know how she reaches this judgement since the opposite seems to be true and he never talks about such matters. I have a feeling that it has to do with the notion that she and her sister have of their parents’ love for one another; that he could not allow his tainted parents close to his marriage for fear that the ambiguity of his feelings for them would in some way sully the love he bore his wife. The guilt he still feels for neglecting his parents, Teresa says, was always expressed as care for his own immediate family; but also, more deviously, in his care for the Carews and Sweynsend, as if his improbable devotion to them in some way cancelled out his failure as a son.

The girls believe that their parents chose their isolation. They never heard their mother express regret that she wasn’t in France, and Tom always seemed to be content in his life as a provincial dentist. They did not choose this isolation because they were antisocial, or not primarily because of this. It was more of a retreat to a territory on which they could be equals: because Marie was foreign, they needed a private world where his ease and greater familiarity with their surroundings wouldn’t tend to exclude her. And the obvious explanation for electing to live like this is that they fell – and remained – in love. Well, it can happen.

This is all very charming in retrospect, but in the autumn of 1962 they didn’t know that their marriage would remain happy for thirty years and more, nor that they would find somewhere to live which suited them so well. They married two months after getting engaged, having met scarcely six weeks before that. She left her sweatshop, where at least there were other French girls, for a two-room flat that felt as if it was encased in permafrost, and a man whose language was strange to her – not, on the face of it, an advantageous exchange. In due course her parents overcame their dismay and grew very fond of him, but his parents never truly forgave him for converting himself from an Anglican bachelor into a married Catholic.

Tom’s route to work in his crank-started Ford Pop took him through the little hamlet of Sweynsend, which at that date contained a church, a general-store-cum-post-office, a couple of farms and a handful of houses. There was never a pub. Sweynsend Hall was the largest of the houses. It was flanked by a long, red brick wall about twelve feet high that started at one of two immense brick gateposts and then at once was pierced by an arch with a small adjacent wicket gate, which was redundant because the main gates had long since fallen off or been removed. Thereafter, the wall formed the side of a barn and ran continuously along the road for about six hundred yards, opposite the churchyard. There were two other entrances: a gate from the lawn gave the house easy access to the church; another near the end of the wall, shortly before it turned away from the road, was the gardeners’ entrance to the huge kitchen garden. At first glance from the road the house looked impressive, but it was dilapidated. As the eventual purchaser, I can vouch for this. It was a miracle it hadn’t fallen down already. No working gutters or drainpipes, roof like a sieve, rotten windows all round, subsidence, cracks, dry rot . . . you name it.

Soon after I bought the place, Tom remarked to me that the Carews were ‘not very flush with cash’. I treasure the understatement because it conveys not only the Carews’ hopeless penury but also Tom’s own acceptance of the situation as dignified and respectable. (The English class system, it seems, is sustained by forces from below as much as from above.) Had they been wealthy, or had the estate been maintained in a mildly conventional manner – had it been maintained at all – then Tom would never have stayed, or even come. In order to regard his own lifestyle as normal it was perhaps necessary for Tom to attribute some normality to the Carews’ circumstances.

The Carews were flat broke. Any normal people would have sold up, quit, bought a condo in Florida or whatever English people do. Left it, I suppose. But the Carews were not interested in normality and never had any intention of leaving. By all accounts, Mrs Carew was a resourceful lady and did what she could to bring in a few pounds for the upkeep. One of her more straightforward ploys was market gardening: for some years she sold vegetables, fruit and flowers at a stall on the verge outside the gardeners’ gate, where Tom sometimes used to stop on the way home to Tullworth. Mrs Carew wasn’t often there in person but her presence was nonetheless felt. It was always ‘Mrs Carew this, Mrs Carew that’, or ‘Mrs Carew says’. Surprisingly, Mr Joy and his son, who looked after the stall and did the work in the garden in return for the free use of part of it, didn’t appear to mind. The produce was good and they didn’t regard the prices that Mrs Carew chose to set as any of their business.

From time to time, however, Tom encountered Mrs Carew herself. Being polite, he would have answered this determinedly nosey woman’s questions patiently; being respectful, he wouldn’t have thought her authority odd. Nor would he have appreciated how her interest in him was influenced by the fact that he was a presentable young man. So she knew that he was married and that he lived in a very small flat, and the news that his wife was pregnant was less than a day old before Mrs Carew knew it too, for he had bought all her roses. And, being nothing if not intelligent, she could see that they would want to move to somewhere larger. Mrs Carew knew that Marie was unlikely to find satisfactory work nearby precisely because she was French, and since she was herself half French – which few people knew – she was sympathetic. Help in the house being hard to find, and expensive, Mrs Fairfax might be a godsend and – the best sort of godsend – a cheap one. One thing the Carews didn’t lack at Sweynsend was space. So one day when Tom drew up in his Ford Pop beside the stall to buy some more roses on his way home, Mr Joy said to him, ‘Good evening to you too, Mr Fairfax. Mrs Carew said for me to tell you that s’posin you was to stop by, p’raps you’d be so kind as to pop into the ’all for a word.’

Tom might have looked at his watch. He would have wondered how long this was going to take, because Marie would be worried if he were more than a few minutes late. But it would have been foolhardy of him to ignore one of Mrs Carew’s requests and drive on. Nor would he have wished to, for it had occurred to him that the solution to his problems might lie at Sweynsend despite its unpromising appearance. So he wrenched the car through a three-point turn, puttered back down the road and passed for the first time between the Hall’s gateposts.

Leaving the car in the yard, he knocked on two or three doors hoping one would prove to be the back door. Later he discovered that he had been knocking on the door of a kitchen that hadn’t been in use since the twenties, and its adjoining scullery and dairy.

Eliciting no response, he followed the drive round past a yew hedge to the front of the house. Attached to a Georgian façade were unusually restrained Victorian wings and, in the centre, a delicate white porch, whose half-glass door rattled as he pushed it open. He tugged the bell pull and straightened his tie.

With a squeak and shudder of stuck wood, the front door opened and Major Carew greeted him:

‘Huh-huh! Thomas Fairfax, Mister Thomas Fairfax! I never thought I should welcome a Roundhead into my house!’

The first thing everyone says about the Major is that he possessed a beautiful voice, even in old age. He is said to have sung well, and his speaking voice modulated with his words almost as if he were singing. ‘He spoke exquisite English too, with rhythm and cadences,’ Tom told me one evening soon after I came here, probably when he described his first encounter with the Carews. I asked him what he meant by this and he smiled with that hint of withheld knowledge that might be mockery or self-mockery – you never really know with the English – but is suggestive, and ironic; it can be profoundly charming, or irritating. With Tom it is always the former, and as he explained, I wondered if his own speech was influenced by long exposure to the Major’s. ‘His voice was a gift that smoothed his passage through life, I suspect. It made him more attractive than his good looks and better company than his temperament alone allowed. He was clever and witty to a point, but his voice enhanced the effect of brain and wit. It obscured his selfishness from listeners and diverted them from his idleness. He was of average height and moved very languidly. He never rushed. He would saunter, heigh-hoing to nobody in particular; tap his fingers on a table top as he passed or, if he was outside, peer through chronically short-sighted, clear blue eyes at a plant.’

Although Teresa only remembers the Major’s hair as being snow white, when her father greeted him for the first time it would have been black.

‘No relation, I’m afraid,’ said Tom Fairfax. ‘Good evening, Major Carew.’

‘You must not be afraid. I am comforted, Mister Fairfax. Since my wife told me you were taking the nursery I’ve been considering whether I shouldn’t prime my matchlocks. Come in, let me give you a drink. You see,’ he confided, indifferent to Tom’s rising astonishment, ‘my family acquired Sweynsend following the Restoration. I owe my inheritance to the King. And my wife, I might add, is descended from the Duke of Buckingham.’

Pausing only to indicate two ancient firearms resting on hooks inside the door, the Major entered the passage-room on the right of the hall. Already darkened by oak panelling, the room was thick with suspended swirls of blue smoke from the fireplace. Through the murk, Tom saw Mrs Carew seated with embroidery on her lap. She bestowed on him a smile like a prised-open vice, then addressed her husband: ‘Do be quiet, Tip. How could Mr Fairfax be a Roundhead? He’s a Catholic.’

‘A Papist? Worse and worse!’ He trembled with delight as he reached for the decanter. ‘Sherry?’

‘That would be lovely. Major . . .’

‘Mr Fairfax,’ Mrs Carew interrupted, ‘we expect you and your wife would like to take the nursery.’

Despite Mrs Carew’s breadth, her face still had a clear bone structure with a straight nose and unencumbered chin. ‘She was oppressive when she looked at you,’ Teresa said yesterday, sitting in my arms in her dressing-room. It seemed she felt it necessary to introduce the presiding figure to me anew, regardless of all that I had already heard. It struck me when she flicked some loose hair away from her forehead that the gesture was a nervous one, as if the act of speaking about Mrs Carew in this frank way might be held in evidence against her by the walls themselves. ‘She challenged, testing to see how far you would let her push you. She had an inviolability that I’ve never come across in another human being. It may sound paradoxical but I think it was sustained, in part, by an impression of her own fragility, a sense of impending catastrophe, as if resistance to her will would cause her to shatter more immediately and violently, with greater consequence, than anyone else. I can’t imagine anything frightening her, except loneliness.’

‘Tip, he won’t want the sweet,’ Mrs Carew had said. ‘Give him the dry.’

It was as if there had been an earlier meeting where all this had been agreed. Tom found it eerie. ‘How very kind of you. Of course . . .’

‘I suppose you’ll want to have a look at it before agreeing. But before I take you up there, my husband has a proposal.’

‘You make it sound as if I intend asking Mr Fairfax to sing, Delia. Can you sing, Mr Fairfax, by the way?’

‘No.’

‘Never mind. Now, it is simply this: you may have the flat for a modest rent, if it suits you, if in return you undertake some services for us.’

‘What sort of services did you have in mind, Major?’

‘A little Hoovering; some dusting, I imagine; nothing too onerous. I understand that your wife is expecting, and we shouldn’t wish to impose. Then if you’d be so kind as to mow the lawns from time to time, I think we should rub along fairly smoothly. What is it you do yourself, Mr Fairfax?’

‘I am a dentist.’

‘So you said, I recall now. You’re not a Roundhead after all, are you?’

‘Don’t be fatuous, Tip. He’s a Catholic,’ said Mrs Carew.

She heaved herself from the chair with the wooden action of a woman whose hips cause her pain that she has no intention of admitting for fear of handing an advantage to others. ‘Now.’

It seemed that Tom was not to be allowed to drink his sherry. He followed her into the hall and up the wide staircase. The house was suffused with the scent of wood and smoke, a special blend which lingers still. High over the dogleg landing of the stairs is a wide, arched window, visible from the churchyard as a distinct focus of the house. Mrs Carew trod heavily along the corridor upstairs to the green baize door at the end. The other side was the nursery landing, an uneven, fraying slick of crimson lino between the first and second flights of the steep back stairs.

The far door opened to the nursery flat. It consisted of two rooms, one of which was so large and airy that the Fairfaxes’ flat in Tullworth might have fitted into it twice over. Tall windows looked out to the yard on one side and the lawn on the other. A smaller room lay beyond, overlooking the lawn. There was no separate kitchen: a two-ring cooker and an aluminium sink were fixed in beside each other on one side of the main room. The bathroom and loo were reached from the landing.

Despite the untidiness and the damp and the cold (already evident in September), Tom agreed to take the nursery flat for a trial period of six months, subject to consultation with his wife. He was afraid it was a foolish thing to do because there was still no clear sense of what the household duties would entail. Certainly the Carews would want something from him, but they seemed ready to allow the space he wanted in return. It might turn out to be a drama of exhausting oddity, but he was intrigued.

In the following months Tom and Marie learned that the Carews could also be kind. ‘Here, have this,’ Mrs Carew would say, producing a chair or a cabbage, a cupboard or a teapot. She didn’t ask if these gifts were wanted any more than she knocked at ten o’clock in the evening before presenting them with a half-plucked duck. She might suddenly take things back if she decided she needed them herself, but seemingly without malice. Asking was not her style: she gave or took, bluntly.

As Marie got used to her landlady’s surprising manner, she found it more reassuring than off-putting. It made her feel accepted as part of the place and she was glad to do what she could to help. She liked belonging in this capacious establishment, where no one objected to her planting herbs in the tubs in the yard and lavender in the neglected border.

Then one day in January the bedroom roof caved in. It wasn’t just the plaster falling away from the ceiling: the rafters themselves had rotted and a section of roof came crashing into the room.

‘I thought it would go one day,’ the Major remarked.

Marie was out when it happened, but it was the middle of winter and she was heavily pregnant.

Mrs Carew manipulated a solution with characteristic twin shoves of bullying and generosity.

‘They must go into the Manor,’ she announced.

‘What about Mrs Bromage?’ said the Major.

‘That old baggage will just have to budge up.’

So Mrs Bromage retreated into a corner of the Manor unoccupied for a generation, and the Fairfaxes moved into the house that would be their home for the rest of their lives.

Chapter Two

SWEYNSEND MANOR is a single Jacobean house without additions or major alterations. Originally it was larger than the Hall, which was extended by the Victorians, and senior. At some point during the nineteenth century, however, it was divided in two and abandoned to a succession of tenants. I don’t know why this happened. Some tale of woe may lurk behind it, but I’ve never discovered one. I think the explanation is simpler. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Sweynsend vicars were Carews. It suited them to use the Hall as their vicarage because they were enthusiastic in their calling and the Hall was adjacent to the church. They preferred to be identified with the church instead of dwelling in seigneurial detachment in the Manor. Nowadays, even from a secular point of view, the Hall would be regarded as more desirable than the Manor because of its garden, but that is the work of the Victorian parsons who must have seen possibilities for development at the Hall which the Manor lacked.

The approach to the Manor was shadowed by the same unkempt spinney that choked the entrance to the semi-derelict Kennels, a group of buildings around a yard that had been let for many years to a shady character called Stan, who kept horses and rusting pieces of farm machinery there. It had no grand gateposts such as the Victorians built for the Hall. A stranger would probably think that the unobtrusive drive was just a farm track, but it curved round for fifty yards behind some trees and tangled undergrowth and there, at the end, was the Manor, with roses climbing above the front door. Very pretty. I have recently spent a fortune doing it up – new roof, new windows, even the foundations on one side. All the exterior brickwork has been overhauled, and the interior has been stripped back and renewed. Although Tom patched it up as best he could, no substantial work had been done on it for over a hundred years. Teresa’s childhood and youth were studded with fallen chimney-pots, slipped tiles, leaks and so forth, which the Carews never bothered about. Since the Fairfaxes paid a token rent which increased only once in thirty years, and then at Tom’s suggestion, they felt that it was unfair to trouble their landlord. But the house was ready to collapse irredeemably without thorough care. It is no less than the truth to say that I rescued what was already widely regarded as a ruin.

It seems, in fact, that ruin is what the Carews once intended for the Manor. William told Teresa that there was a fire there long ago. Mrs Bromage called the Fire Brigade, but Mrs Carew was furious that she wasn’t consulted first and parked her car across the driveway to prevent the fire engines from reaching the house. After the car was pushed aside it transpired that Mrs Bromage had been unduly alarmed. She had extinguished the blaze herself. When I mentioned this to Teresa’s mother this morning, she said, ‘Oh yes, Mrs Bromage used to go on about that.’ Her lips were pinched in disapproval and her dark eyes avoided mine as she glared at an armful of daffodils that Teresa had left in the kitchen sink, ready for distribution into vases. Apparently Marie has a low opinion of Mrs Bromage, but discretion prevents her from saying so. A rock of loyalty in a fast-flowing stream, she has learned to be guarded about the dead and friendless. Teresa informs me that the Carews allowed Mrs Bromage to live there for almost nothing, until she died a few years later.

The terms of the Fairfaxes’ tenure were never defined, but a pattern was established whereby they would look after the lawns and hedges of the Hall and be ready to help in the house as occasion required. The original idea of housework was given up as soon as the Fairfaxes moved into the Manor and Teresa was born. At first, Marie used to present herself at the Hall ready to work, with Teresa strapped to her back in a papoose, but this made the Carews uncomfortable: for though the agreement had been that she should work, they believed more generally that it was improper for a mother to be working at all, let alone a respectable lady. Believing Marie to be respectable if not altogether a lady (she was foreign, after all, and in questions of social classification – her own origins notwithstanding – Mrs Carew followed her husband’s lead), they were unsettled when she threatened to stick to the bargain. This made Tom glad to do other work in the garden. As children, Teresa and Elizabeth were allowed to accompany him on the strict understanding that they behaved themselves.

A short path led through the trees from the Manor, emerging between the old Victorian School House and a collapsed cow byre on the edge of the Hall’s yard. The way was always dark, dank and overhung except around the bonfire patch. Nettles grew with ferocious persistence despite Tom’s efforts. Rats were sometimes seen among the decayed bricks of the byre.

The School House was inhabited by Jed’s chickens. Jed must be about eighty-five now but I don’t imagine he has changed much in the last thirty years: head like a conker, spiky teeth, stalwart in his dislikes. Born in the Home Farm across the fields, he has lived in Sweynsend all his life. He is married to Mabel, who is still the postmistress; they have a daughter living in Birmingham. Jed was a sort of honorary gamekeeper at the Hall and used to wander about the fields and covers nurturing pheasants for the Major to shoot. He also kept sheep and chickens. After the frequent sleepless nights of her childhood, as Teresa watched the world materialise through the dark from her bedroom window, she would see Jed setting out across the dim fields on his early stroll with his gun snapped open over his crooked arm. During the next half-hour she would hear two or three shots, then he would return through the mist with a rabbit or two dangling from his knotted fist, his steps firm and steady over the swelling land. ‘I suppose there must have been a time when he wasn’t retired, but I’ve no idea what he did then,’ Teresa says. I imagine him to have been a lucky officer’s batman, serving faithfully in Egypt, Burma or Malaya, pathetically homesick.

We were ambling in the afternoon sunshine alongside the ha-ha. The ordered view it once bisected, from the front door to the ridge-and-furrow fields beyond, was spoiled in the Major’s day by the new road driven through the Sweynsend estate. I am aware that the collapse of the ha-ha’s retaining wall is an image pregnant with doom, but I would not have bought Sweynsend if I were ready to accept the necessity of such a fate: the ditch has been dug out and the wall rebuilt. I might not have done this – it would have been much more sensible, given the truncated view, to have the bank bulldozed into the ditch – had not Teresa happened to tell me during the winter I moved in that the spring spectacle of daffodils on the bank rising to the ha-ha was one of the most beautiful she knew. When spring came round I remembered this. The ha-ha is necessary for the daffodils to achieve their concentrated force, so it had to stay if Teresa was not to lose her bank of daffs. Now you can walk along the top, behind the monkeypuzzle and the ilex trees, to a secluded summerhouse from which a little bridge spans the ha-ha to the flat ground beyond, where Teresa told me that the Major played lawn tennis with his brothers before the First World War. William had once shown her some old photographs, she said, with boys in white trousers, and vast-skirted ladies watching from beyond the touchlines. I thought a hard court would be more use but Teresa insisted that it should be grass, so that is what we have constructed there, and we overlooked it as I sat listening in the summerhouse. She stood in the doorway surveying the shades of those long-ago players, so that my view of our tennis court, laid over its predecessor, was shaped as much by the contours of her body as by her words. She was wearing a long skirt, in a gauzy fabric that revealed her legs against the sunlight; they seemed very long. Her voice had a narrative urgency that always animates her conjuring of memories.

If the girls were going into the Hall’s garden they would either walk across the cobbles to the shed beneath the nursery wing, where the mower was kept, then out the opposite door to the croquet lawn; or they would go round by the drive, perhaps collecting the wooden barrow from behind the yew hedge which screens the boot room, to the open area of gravel in front of the house which is divided by the daffodils and the ha-ha from the meadow with Jed’s sheep and the huge, hollow ash tree solemnly sighing. Here Teresa would experience a skitter of fear because it felt like a private, adult domain. The clustered shrubs past the end of the house and the tall monkeypuzzle tree were more enticing: the grass unfolds into the garden itself, round to the croquet lawn at the back of the house and the red brick wall adjoining the road. Mrs Carew would be cross if she found Elizabeth or Teresa alone on the lawn because she was convinced that children would damage the turf that the Major required to be immaculate for his croquet. They went instead among the hedges and shrubs that lead to the kitchen garden which their father maintained: the box-lined pathways and screens of yew, the little areas of lawn dividing the peony beds and all the paths in the kitchen garden itself. They were allowed to play there, and Tom even made a turf-edged sandpit beneath the ilex tree.

I may seem to be running on but you must understand that all this is important. Not just for the sentimental reason that Sweynsend was the Fairfaxes’ home and so they loved it – the Hall, as well as the Manor. No, the point is that the Carews welcomed the Fairfaxes to Sweynsend and let them make their home there. The arrangement worked because they were useful to one another. And as the lavender that began in the yard wound its way further each year in a fragrant, shimmering fringe about the outbuildings, and the purple campanula bloomed on the roadside, and the copse in front of the Manor glowed with bluebells, the Carews appreciated that their surprising tenants loved the place.

Everyone else who ever had anything to do with Sweynsend Hall and the Carews associated the place with pain and trouble.

Ever since the Fairfaxes came to Sweynsend, most of the people living in the village have worked in nearby light industries. Choosing to live there because it seems charmingly rural, they attempt to transform it into a freak outcrop of suburbia. There is the church, Blake Farm, and a scattering of other farm cottages, but mock-Tudor dwellings with grandiose doorknockers and bulls-eye windows have appeared like cellophane-wrapped bouquets of dahlias in a mediaeval rose garden. Yet the village is truly old. The sharp angle in the street suggests the boundary of an ancient demesne, and the grazing half of the Hall’s big field is scored as if a giant had pulled a taloned hand back and forth across the landscape. These strips must long pre-date enclosure. The village’s name is said to derive from a Viking leader called Sweyn who came here. The church too reveals that the village has been a Christian community for a thousand years, although its comically pockmarked exterior confuses church historians as much as residents. The clue is over the road, in the Hall, which has taken the history of Sweynsend into itself and lets it out in discrete strands like a harassed, cunning spider. Thus it was the Major who caused the once-uniform cladding on the church to be stripped away in places to expose the earlier brickwork in the suspect name of historical veracity, of which he – for the glorification of his ancestry – was the undisputed tyrant in Sweynsend.

Just as the Carews came to dominate the church in Sweynsend, so the Hall itself dominates the village. Secure behind its red brick wall, it makes an imperious claim on your attention, as if anything that happens in the village can only happen under its aegis: if the Hall isn’t concerned, then the thing doesn’t happen. Unless you count the Post Office, there is no meeting-point apart from the church, and within living memory the Post Office has been managed by Mabel and can therefore scarcely claim independence, while the church is cheek-by-jowl with the Hall. The name Carew features inside the church more often than Christ and, says Teresa, ‘with the Major and his wife sat like Pomp and Majesty in their pew each Sunday, year in year out, a girl might be forgiven for attributing sinister heresies to the place.’

Only Blake Farm provided an alternative. The Simmonds children were close to Teresa and Elizabeth in age and they saw them often, although the differences that later became obvious meant that the bonds they formed were the product of familiarity rather than true friendship. Hayley was between Elizabeth and Teresa in age, so Marie and Mrs Simmonds packed the girls off to play with one another. But Hayley was shy and the Fairfax girls were impatient. They must have been a torment to her; she is a sad dope even now. But she had brothers. Not that they were juvenile tearaways either, but they were at least objects of curiosity. As a boy, Michael only wanted to play with machines. Sissy girls were no use to him and, since he was clever, by the time he was old enough to be interested in girls he wasn’t much at home. His brother John was cheerful and obliging but also rather dull, for which I suppose we should be thankful since he would otherwise have moved away and we would now miss his benign presence in the village. Teresa has known him all her life and there is a comforting, fraternal solidity to him. If it seems to me that the only associations people ever had within the village were shaped by the Hall, the Fairfaxes’ relationship with the Simmondses appears as an exception.

The lives of those who lived in Sweynsend tended to be directed outside. The girls went to school in Tullworth until they were eleven, when they were sent to a convent school the other side of Rugby; Marie drove them there and back every day. It’s a nice irony that Tom first stopped in Sweynsend in order to buy something because all shopping (pace Mabel) took place outside the village, as did any entertainment or social event that wasn’t at their home or at the Hall. Even Teresa’s best childhood friend, Melanie Moore, usually came to the Fairfaxes, where there was more space and freedom to play. Her mother was so house-proud that the girls couldn’t do anything without her simultaneously trying to erase all evidence of their activity. She hovered at doorways with cloths and detergent. Teresa remembers her plumping up cushions and forcing unwanted sticking-plasters on her. Perhaps Mrs Moore was unhappy or disliked my Teresa. In any case, the family moved to Birmingham when Teresa was fourteen. Most of Sweynsend’s inhabitants valued the place (as they do now) because they could use it as a dormitory, without the usual obligations and encroachments of village life. And those few who attended church regarded the Fairfaxes as beyond the pale because they were Catholics.

The position was confused further by the ambivalence of their relationship with the Carews.

Take, for example, ‘An Afternoon at the Hall’, a fundraising occasion for the benefit of the church roof. Perhaps because this singular event did not fit with the routine disinterest between the Hall and the village, people didn’t know quite how to behave, and Teresa’s twelve-year-old sensitivity was alert.

She and Elizabeth had spent the previous week helping their mother prepare an enormous quantity of food for Mrs Carew. Teresa has scant interest in food and has therefore forgotten what it was but Elizabeth would remember, I expect, if I asked her – which I will not. Teresa remembers tramping back and forth through the trees to the Hall’s back door and the pantry with bowls covered by tea-towels and plate after plate of sandwiches; and she remembers the groundless certainty that it was all paid for by her parents. Mrs Carew would say, ‘Marie!’ (always rolling the r in the back of her throat), ‘I want cheese straws, and sandwiches for seventy, and ten cakes!’ And her mother would prepare all these, knowing there was no likelihood of the Carews reimbursing her. Meanwhile her father would have been informed by the Major in a subordinate clause of the forthcoming event. Obtaining the details from Marie, he set about smartening up the garden and organising seating outside, with a back-up indoors in case of rain; and, on this occasion, rather more.

Teresa’s parents knew that the aim was to raise money for the church roof. The Carews didn’t tell them how this was going to be done and, since it was not the Fairfaxes’ business, they didn’t ask: until, thinking it odd to hear no mention at all of the afternoon’s main concern and not wishing the Carews to appear ridiculous, Marie enquired of Mrs Carew ‘if Tom should be a little bit busy about it because I think he’s a little bit anxious’ – the French, if you ask me, are as adept as the English at circumlocution. Mrs Carew (herself half French, don’t forget) replied that she assumed the Major, by which she meant Tom on the Major’s behalf, had it all under control. When Marie ventured to doubt this, she was told that something must be done at once – meaning that the Major had obviously overlooked this detail and so Tom had better hurry up and get something together.

It was already ten o’clock on the Saturday morning. The girls were released from kitchen duty and sent off to their father. After quick consultation, Elizabeth went to look for eggs in the old Kennels where they kept chickens, so that they could muster an egg-and-spoon race, and Teresa set up the Carews’ croquet hoops in a cluster in front of a thick box hedge. Lacking coconuts, she picked cabbages, which she split across the stalks and rammed onto the hoops. Meanwhile, Tom persuaded the Major to lay out some of his books on the dining-room table and sideboards, a small exhibition for which a fee could be charged. This seemed the height of eccentricity to the Major. He said that people were welcome to look at his books for free provided they didn’t have mutton fat on their fingers.