“Of course not.”
“I can’t take the motorway. Not until I’m dead.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The crem is on the motorway. I really don’t care for it.”
“Ma, would I take you to the crem?”
“Though I dare say you can get a cup of tea there,” she said. “Darling, what if the doctor saw me as we pass the surgery?”
“We won’t pass the surgery.”
“I think we have to.”
“Then we’ll disguise ourselves.”
“Oh, Oliver — what as?”
“Barristers. We’ll borrow Vanessa’s and old funny-face’s wigs.”
“I don’t think they travel with their wigs.”
“Well, get a big hat out of the spare room, and some dark glasses.”
“I haven’t enjoyed anything like this for years.”
“Hold on to your hat.”
“I will. I wore it at poor Babs’s wedding. It must be thirty years old.”
“Is Babs still alive?”
“What? Can’t hear. Are you sure this isn’t the motorway? Oliver! How dare you! This is Cambridge. It was the motorway.”
They sat by the Cam and the low sun shone through the straps of the willows. Students called to each other and splashed about, or glided along. King’s College Chapel reared up like a white cruise-liner on a grassy sea. “I’ve organised tea for us,” he said. “Come on. It’s not far.”
She walked lightly beside him on the tow-path and over a bridge. Fat common people in tight clothes licked ice creams and ate oozing buns and shouted. Some, despite the season, had bare midriffs. Some looked at Claire’s hat. She was enchanted.
“It’s a shame so many young people are bald now,” she said. “I wonder why? Is it Aids or this awful chemotherapy? I’m sure we never had either.”
“It’s the fashion, Ma.”
“Oh, it can’t be. That’s dreadlocks.”
“No, they’re out. Or at any rate localised.”
“Do they go over their pates every day like their chins? Will you be doing it, Oliver?”
“Ma, I’m nearly forty and I’m a chartered accountant.”
“Yes, and you have lovely hair, Oliver. What is Vanessa’s hair like — I mean, when she lets it grow?”
But they had reached Oliver’s old, undistinguished college; a door and a staircase of someone of distinction; a huge, gentle old man. Claire did not catch his name. He was expecting Oliver and was pleased to see them and he nodded at Claire and looked affectionately at her hat. They sat in a room with a tall window that seemed to let in little light and where mountains of books and furniture were deep in dust. They ate cinnamon scones. Other crumby plates lay about the room among the books and balled-up garments that suggested socks and what Claire thought of as woollies. What a peaceful quiet place. What a nice man. How nice for him to know Oliver.
“We thought we’d make for Evensong at King’s,” said Oliver. “Have we missed it, d’you think?”
“Oh, no. Still the same programme,” and the old man began to talk about politics. “I am very fond of Oliver,” he said as he stumbled along with them to the door of the chapel. They all said goodbye.
“Tired?” asked Oliver as they sat down in the choir stalls.
“Not in the least. Did he put on that performance just for us? I didn’t know there were any left.”
“Any what?”
“Eccentrics. Had you told him we were coming?”
“Yes, I rang him up. At the petrol station.”
“From a call box?”
“From my handset.”
“You keep his number?”
“No. I dialled directory enquiries.”
“You are wonderful, Oliver.”
“I am.”
“The world is full of miracles,” she said, “but I think you set it all up. There were computers and internets and e-mails hidden in all those books, and he was an actor who does E. M. Forster parts. I really loved him. Who was he?”
“Who’s E. M. Forster? Anyway, he liked your hat. He was the Dean.” Delighted with the day, the music, the chapel, he said, “You’re a cynic, Ma. Go on — he fancied you. Have him over.”
They stood for the Nunc Dimittis, and Oliver wondered what havoc Vanessa was wreaking on poor old Uncle Eddie.
“Have you always practised in Dorset?” asked Vanessa from her canvas chair.
“No, no. I returned there. Travelled a lot.”
“That was rather good luck.”
“Very good luck.”
“You found some ex-pat clients? Over the years?”
“Not exactly ex-pats,” he said. “The locals.”
“I often think,” she said (Vanessa was magnanimous to people who were no threat), “that to be a family solicitor, in any country, is to be the most useful person in the world. You have to be so subtle. And cleverer than any Barrister. Anyone can be a Barrister. The Bar finals are a joke, you know. Solicitors’ finals,” she said, “are a marathon by comparison.”
“I believe so. So they always said. But it is so long ago.”
She thought: He is quite unaware of me. He is Methuselah. Why do I care? He is so mysterious. I hadn’t expected to be drawn to someone as old as this. Sad silence. He’s so old he’s almost gone, yet he’s sharp — sharper than Oliver. I like his eyes. I wish he’d open them again.
The striped canvas hammock had come from Harrods — a present from Oliver to his mother, last birthday, like the huge, navy-blue sun-umbrella worked by rope pulleys, as for a yacht, supposed to be supported by a dollop of concrete that the window-cleaner and the gardener and the Vicar together had not been able to budge from where the van-man had dropped it by the gate. Claire had begun to grow trailing plants over this base and the umbrella, unwrapped but in cobwebs, was still propped in a corner of the car-less garage. Today Oliver had made an effort and had fixed up the hammock, just before lunch. It hung inside an outer wooden cradle, rather like a horse-jump at a gymkhana. There were no trees in Claire’s garden and the hammock stood out in high display. Passers by along the avenue looked curiously at the old long person stretched out in it, fine nose pointed at the winter sky.
A rope hung beside the hammock ending in a baroque blue tassel.
“I could swing you if you like,” Vanessa suggested, wondering at herself. She had refused Filth’s offer of the hammock for herself as firmly as she always refused a seat from a man on the Underground. She often offered her own seat on the Underground to an older woman. Sometimes these older women refused, too, not feeling older. Great games are played on the Underground, she thought, the premier sport being that everyone avoids everyone else’s eyes. Oh, how happy I am to have enough to think about. Work to do. How pleased I am to have mastered the pleasure — never acknowledged — when scanned, leaned against, breathed upon in the Underground by a man. I’ve got rid of that.
“Do you mind being stuck up here in the hammock in full view of Saffron Walden, Eddie?”
They had called him Eddie. And sometimes Teddy. They had not properly introduced him. They behaved as if she must know him. “Shall I give you a swing with the rope?”
“You sound like Mr. Pierrepoint,” he said, without opening his eyes. “I don’t feel exposed. No, not at all, thank you. No, I don’t need to be rocked.”
“Who is Mr. Pierrepoint?”
“I’m glad you can’t remember. He was the hangman. His last hanging was of a woman, Ruth Ellis, who shot her unfaithful lover a few weeks after losing his baby and whilst her mind was disturbed.”
“Oh yes, well, of course, I know about that. They buried her in quick-lime at Wormwood Scrubs prison, didn’t they?”