He raised his eyebrows at Lucy, comically signifying, presumably, that I was a touchy artist who must be humoured. ‘Lucy’s read some of your stuff. I gather she thinks very highly of it.’
I did not point out that this remark meant his earlier question had been entirely redundant. ‘I’m glad.’ My words fell into a silence and we sat for a moment. There was an inertia in the room and we all three felt it. This often happens when old friends get together after an interval of many years. Prior to the meeting they imagine that something explosive and fun will come out of it, but then they are usually faced by a lacklustre group, in late middle age, who have nothing much in common any more. For better or worse, the Rawnsley-Prices had negotiated their journey, I had travelled mine and now we were just three people in a very dirty kitchen who didn’t know each other. Besides, I needed further information before my pilgrimage could be considered complete and I wasn’t going to get it while Philip was with us. It was time to break up the group. ‘Can I see the shop?’ I said. There was a pause, with a sense of the unspoken in the air. I assume this was simply Philip’s male need to present himself as my equal in terms of worldly success which, modest as mine has been, might prove hard when I had actually seen the business. Or maybe it was Lucy’s sudden realisation that for the same reason I was not going to take away from our day spent together the idea that everything was going swimmingly. It is an unspoken ambition for most of us that our contemporaries should see us as successful, but in Lucy’s case she was about to be denied it.
After a pause, Philip nodded. ‘Of course.’
It will come as no surprise that the farm shop was a hopeless place. Fittingly, I suppose, it was housed in a former cattle shed, which had been converted quickly and with insufficient money. There was a cheery, if forced, optimism in the inevitable pine counters and shelves. Above them, brightly coloured cards in faux, red, giant handwriting proclaimed the scintillating array of produce on offer: ‘Fresh vegetables!’ they shouted. ‘Home made Jams and Jellies!’ But in that yawning, unpeopled space they took on a dismal, pathetic quality, like someone eating alone in a paper hat. The floor was cheap and the ceiling had not been properly finished and, as I could have predicted, the whole place was full of items no one in their right mind would ever want to buy. Not just tinned pâté made from wild boar or goose wings, but gadgets to prevent wine losing its flavour in the fridge and woolly things to wear inside your boots while fishing. Christmas stocking presents to be bought and given by someone who knows nothing about it. The meat counter looked particularly unattractive, even to a carnivore like me, and seemed actively to repel further investigation. A single customer was paying for a cauliflower. Other than that the place was deserted. We looked around in silence. ‘The trouble is all these shopping malls -’ Philip drawled the word in a bad, American accent, trying to convert his pain into a joke. ‘They’re building them everywhere. It’s impossible to match the prices without going broke.’ I hesitated to mention that they seemed to be going broke anyway. ‘We keep being told that everyone’s environmentally conscious nowadays, that they care about where their food comes from, but…’ He sighed. What might have been intended as an ironic shrug just turned into a sad sag of his shoulders. I freely confess I felt tremendously sorry for him in that moment. Whether or not I used to dislike him, I had after all known him for a very long time and I did not wish him ill.
It is a fact that in the brutal periods of history, what changes is not the cutting edge of every new market, or the ambition that drives a new factory owner or a new hostess, or a new conquest from the performing stage, or a new triumph in a political drawing room. All that is constant. It is the level of coasting that goes on behind the bright and harsh façade that is different. In a gentle era – and my youth was passed in a fairly gentle era – people of little ability could drift by in every class, at every level of society. Jobs were found for them. Homes were arranged. Someone’s uncle sorted it out. Someone’s mother put in a word. But when things get tough, when, as now, the prizes are bigger but the going is rougher, the weaklings are elbowed aside until they fall back and slip over the cliff. Unskilled workers or stupid landowners alike, they are crushed by a system they cannot master and find themselves ejected on to the roadside. Just such a one was Philip Rawnsley-Price. Subconsciously, he thought his braggadocio would carry him through, that he had the charm and the connections to make it work, however he might choose to live his life. Alas, his connections were the wrong connections and his charm was non-existent, and now he was in his late fifties there was no one left alive who cared much whether he swam or sank.
I had never taken to Philip when we were young, but I pitied him now. He had been defeated by our ‘interesting times’ and he would not rise again. A hand-to-mouth existence lay ahead, of inheriting a cottage from a cousin and trying to rent it out, of hoping he would be remembered when the last aunt bit the dust, of wondering if his children might manage a little something for him on a regular basis. That was what he had to look forward to and it was anyone’s guess whether Lucy would hang around to share it. It rather depended on what alternatives presented themselves. All this we both knew as we shook hands awkwardly outside. ‘Come back and see us again,’ he said, knowing that I never would.
‘I will,’ I lied.
‘Don’t leave it so long the next time.’ And he was gone, back to his vacant counters and his empty till.
Lucy followed me to the car. I stopped. ‘Did you ever get to the bottom of Margaret’s condition?’ She looked at me, puzzled, for a moment. ‘You said it was hereditary but there was no trace of it on either your side or Philip’s.’
‘That was the thing. Of course I had the most nerve-racking suspicions. I kept thinking I ought to be poring through Damian’s medical records…’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘No. I was about to confess and suggest it, with a sinking heart as you can imagine, when we found out that Philip’s aunt, his mother’s eldest sister, had died of it, the very same thing, in childhood. And his mother never knew. Nor did either of her siblings. You can imagine how it was in those days.’ She gave a little grimace. ‘They were all just told that our Father in heaven had taken their sister because he loved her. Basta.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘Total luck. My ma-in-law was talking to her mother, who must have been about a million by then, and for some strange reason she told her all about Margaret. We’d never explained to Granny what was wrong, because we didn’t want to worry her. At any rate this time she finally learned the truth, and right away she started weeping like a fire hydrant and it all came pouring out.’
‘Poor woman.’
‘Yes. Poor old thing. Of course she blamed herself and it more or less finished her off. We all told her that it wasn’t her fault, that it wasn’t a killer any more and so on, but I don’t think it made much difference.’ She smiled sadly. ‘So the mystery was solved. The tragic thing was that the aunt could so easily have been saved with the right drugs but it happened in the twenties, when it was a question of hot drinks and cold compresses and having your tonsils out on the kitchen table. Anyway, as I say, Margaret’s been fine ever since.’
‘Were you at all sorry?’
This time she was genuinely bewildered. ‘About what?’
‘That she was definitely Philip’s and not Damian’s.’ This was unkind of me, since it would hardly help her to dwell on heaven, trapped, as she was, in an outer circle of hell.
But Lucy only smiled and, just for a second, the minxish child-woman she had once been, looked out from behind her wrinkles. ‘I’m not sure. Not at the time, because the whole drama had been explained and that was such a relief. Later, maybe. A little. But please don’t give me away.’