‘Why do you?’ Myra asked, drawn at last from the somnolence of his car and monologue.
‘You know why? Because it’s a smoke-screen behind which I can carry on my real work — without being bothered by a lot of soapy-mouthed English stupidities. Mind if I roll the window up? I shan’t smoke another cigar: since I’ve been rich I feel the cold more. You’re right, though. It’s no use getting excited about it. We’re all a pack of grown-up half-educated neurasthenics. Camus came to the conclusion that, after all, the artist was a romantic. I began there. Where I am now I know exactly; but where I’m going I never shall know till I get there.’
Chapter Three
It was the sort of fine rain that would never soak you, rasping over the leaves, light enough in weight not to bend them, yet steady enough to turn the lawn soggy underfoot. Her only task in life was to resurrect the house, and look after the baby. The garden, which had been totally neglected, needed unearthing like the ruins of Troy, and she had hardly made a start on it. Vegetable proliferations feeding on rich soil had climbed and coiled from fence to fence. Paths had vanished under it. Flowerbeds with stone and tile borders could not be seen. Lush on top, it was rotten underneath after seven months’ absence. Frogs like small vivid leaves had come up from the river and made it their private jungle. She cleared the paths, but the rest did not matter.
Myra had darkened after the baby, and a more ample figure made her appear taller. Hair grown long made her seem plainer. She looked in the full-length bedroom mirror, a corner of the double-bed reflected at her knees and thighs. The baby slept in a heavy, antique wooden rocking-cradle set between the bed and far wall, a cradle that had been in the family for generations, passed on to her by Pam. Their grandmother, one of twelve who had slept their first months in it, had tugged and handled it from the far marches of eastern Europe — hardly any luggage, and pulling that huge heavy mahogany cradle across tracks and platforms and guarding it on the deck of a crowded rat-eaten rusting steamer from Hamburg. Mark looked safe in it, eternal, never wanting to grow up, grateful to that misty forgotten grandmother for taking so much trouble. It rocked him gently, high sides dwarfing the Dawley blood in him.
The house was a corpse, and she gave it the kiss of life — phone, gas, electricity, water. Everything shone again except the garden. The house glowed from within, warm from the baby out. Having a child alone with her, she was sometimes terrified of a disaster happening while asleep upstairs, that she would faint or die and, nobody aware of anything, and thinking she had gone to her parents in London, the baby would starve to death. The vision haunted her on deep and windy nights of spring, a penalty of winter’s end, and punishment for living alone.
Her body in the mirror shone back, had reshaped well from the birth, firm and immobile as she looked at it, different now that her breasts were full, aching slightly from the weight of the next feed, marked by blue veins where they rounded towards her arms. She drew back at the touch of her own thighs and slipped the nightdress over. Down in the darkness the garden was three sides around the house. She sat on the edge of the bed.
Outside it was mist and mud, primroses beyond the leaded windows, the elaborate cave of the house. Cat, paraffin, coal-smoke from the stove while the central heating was re-engineered. Wet grass, night birds continually, a cow in labour bellowing, dunghills steaming in the nearby farm. Buds, confetti stuck on thorns for the marriage of mist and mud under the hill of Thieving Grove. An aeroplane prowled on old-fashioned engines through low cloud. She’d read Wuthering Heights and Pilgrim’s Progress. Her house was under the cat-back of the hills. She’d bought mimosa in Aylesbury, but the house odours soon killed it. The toothless cat, old marmalade, sat on the outside windowsill downstairs, senile and independent. There had been no sun till four in the afternoon. Where was he? Lost in the vast freezing acreage of the bled? Her body shuddered for him, shook as she gripped herself.
The baby was fed, changed, back to sleep by the time Mrs Harrod unlatched the gate next morning. Mark was put to bed, and she was putting herself back to a lonelinesss similar to when George was with her, now that he wasn’t here any more. The day was cold, so she built a wood fire in the living room, heaped up logs and drew back furniture that might get scorched, smiling to realise there could be no danger of it. It was a waste of wood, for she still had work to do and could not be near it, but it was like another inhabitant of the house in which everything nevertheless was so strange. She wanted to fill the house with noise and fires and people, drench it in light and vigour. But at the moment that seemed a dream. So in her quiet way she worked to restore it to a common translucent state of ordinary comfort, oblivious to anything beyond the foundations of what had been built years before by George and herself. When perfection reigned and ruled you could venture elsewhere.
Chapter Four
Albert Handley’s house had been named The Gallery, and often he didn’t know whether one might call it an art gallery, a rogues’ gallery, or a shooting gallery, though mostly it was a bit of all three rolled into one mad house. It stood on a hill beyond the village, at the end of a lane that wound up from the paved road between two thick closed-off copses — a large simple house with two floors and a spacious attic, late Victorian country-nondescript that had at one time served the manager of an estate long since hammered up. The slate roof glistened in weak morning sunshine, its brick façade glowed. Two caravans stood in the large front garden, forming a sharp angle pointing away from the house like a scarp designed on Vauban’s defence system. Across the path, amid a marshalling-yard of tracks and rut-marks, stood a Land-Rover and a well polished Ford Rambler. A newly built kennel beside the front door stored a bulldog that, when standing belligerently out, looked like a miniature iron bedstead about to leap. Behind the house was a long newly-erected wooden hut used as a children’s playroom, and a solarium had been built nearby, as well as a new fuel store. This was the house that Handley had lived in while poor, and that he preferred to stay in now that he was better off.