She had packed a suitcase for herself and had stuffed the child’s things into an old cricket bag that had belonged to her father; there was the impression of everything having been snatched up and bundled together in anxious and angry haste. She was indeed a woman in flight. I confess it was all in a small way exciting, despite my grim forebodings.
Along the narrow roads the big motor yawed and swayed, seeming more ponderous than ever, as if weighted down by the freight of trouble it was carrying. The rain had turned sleety, and swarmed and slithered on the windscreen like blown spit. Trees loomed blackly before us, and rents appeared in the clouds, burning white glares within a dull grey surround, though the wind quickly sealed them up again. Behind the salty fumes of the engine I caught hints coming in from outside of drenched grass and loam and leaf-mould, the smells of autumn and of childhood. I looked at Polly’s hands on the wheel, one of them with its bandaged thumb, and saw with a mild jolt of surprise that she was still wearing her wedding ring. But why was I surprised? I was sure she didn’t believe her marriage to Marcus was at an irreparable end; at least, it was my strong hope that she didn’t. But what, then, did she think? I shifted in my seat with grave unease. The child was asleep, trussed up in her special seat in the back, her head lolling sideways and a thread of silver drool dangling from her lower lip. I had noticed that Polly no longer referred to her as Little Pip, that she was just Pip, now; another custom gone, another fragment of the old life cast aside. By the way, that can’t be her real name, can it, Pip, it can’t be her full name? Strange, the things one doesn’t know, the things one has never bothered to find out. Is it short for Philippa, perhaps? But who would call a child Philippa, a name I’m not even sure I know how to pronounce? Though there are Philippas, who must once have been infants, just as there are Olivias. These and others like them were the idle thoughts I revolved in my mind, if thoughts they could be called, as we bowled along the rainy road. In my desperation I was, of course, seeking by whatever means to set myself at a remove from all this, mentally at least: from Polly, from the child in the back, from the wallowing car, from myself, even, my uncertain and increasingly apprehensive self. Polly as fugitive was an altogether novel phenomenon, and a far more ample handful than she had been hitherto. The old masters of apologetics were right: the imperative of self-preservation is stronger than the generative urge and all that it dictates and entails. Poor old love, what a frail and tremulous flower it is.
I asked Polly if her father was expecting her. She didn’t take her eyes off of the road. “Of course he is,” she said, with a dismissive quick lift of her head. “Do you think I’d just turn up without warning, and set my mother off on one of her jags?” Rebuffed, I said no more, and fell to twiddling my thumbs and looking out of the window beside me. The passing trees tossed their tops wildly about in the wind, and leaves flew haphazard, speckling the air, yellow with jade-green patches, burnt umber, floor-polish red. Streaks of rainwater glinted in the flooded fields, and a flock of small dark birds, struggling into the wind, seemed to be flying strenuously backwards against a sky of smudged pewter. I had refrained from asking Polly why she should want me, me of all people, to accompany her on this momentous, indeed this desperate, return to the place of her birth and scene of her youthful days: home, as she said. So far, in fact, I had asked her almost nothing. I always assume everything is perfectly simple and obvious, and that I am the only one who doesn’t understand what’s going on, and so I tend to say nothing, ask nothing, but keep quiet, for fear of being laughed at for a dullard. It’s my essential character to lie low and let the hounds go hullabalooing past. It used to serve me well, that prudent policy; not any more, alas.
The ancestral seat of the Plomers — Plomer is Polly’s maiden name, another nice soft plosive — is called Grange Hall, or, more commonly, the Grange. This was my first visit to the place, although I had heard Polly speak of it often — as often, I’m sure, as she insisted she had heard me speak of my old home; how the past does cling, raking us lovingly with its tender claws. The iron gates to the narrow drive stood open, as they must have done for decades, and sagged dejectedly on their hinges; rust had made a knobbled filigree of their bars, and the lower ones were overgrown with scutch grass and nettles. As we were turning in from the road something inside me seemed to shift and slide, and for a moment I felt nauseous, and panic sent a hot bead rolling down my spine. Would I, too, be caught here, like these gates, caught and held fast? What was I letting myself in for? What awaited me in the midst of these ragged fields, in an unknown house where an improbable couple, Polly’s doddery father and her poor daft mother, were seeing out their days? Slowly the nausea gave way to a stifling sensation, as if an invisible caul were being pulled down over my head and shoulders. However, a moment later the child woke, and the qualm passed. “Here we are,” Polly said, in what seemed to me a fatuously cheery voice, causing in me a flash of annoyance. What, I demanded of myself again, what was I doing here, along with this desperate young woman and her insupportable tribulations? I would have made a poor knight errant, my lady’s veil a tattered and muddied pennant drooping from my drooping lance.
The house was built of granite, heavyset and plain to the point of severity, save for the arched, mock-Gothic front door, which lent a vaguely ecclesiastical effect overall. Many tall chimneys stood out against the sky, portly and self-important; rapid white smoke issued from one of them, like a papal proclamation, and was no sooner out than it was snatched up by the wind and torn to shreds. The gravel was thin on the turning-place before the front steps and patches of shiny wet marl showed through. An ancient retriever, which once would have been golden but now was the colour of damp hay, came forwards to greet the car. “Oh, there’s Barney!” Polly said, a wail of sad pleasure. The dog was arthritic and had a floppy, disjointed gait, as if its various parts were strung together on an internal frame of slack wires and hooks and rubber bands. It wagged its heavy tail and gave an effortful, happy-sounding bark, saying distinctly, Woof!
Polly, grunting from the effort, lifted the child out of the back seat, while I went round and unloaded the boot. She snapped at me for setting the cricket bag on the ground, where the bottom of it would get wet. We might have been, I grimly reflected, a middle-aged, middling couple, inveterately married, by turns testy, disputatious and indifferent in each other’s company. When I shut the lid of the boot and straightened up, I found myself looking about in sudden startlement. The day seemed huge and luridly luminous, as if a lid somewhere had been abruptly lifted. How extraordinary, after all, the perfectly ordinary can sometimes seem, the Humber’s cooling engine ticking, the rooks wheeling above the trees, the dowdy old house with its incongruously churchly door, and Polly, with her daughter clinging to her front, looking distracted and cross and pushing a strand of hair out of her eyes.
“Oh, God,” she said, under her breath, “here comes Mother.”
Mrs. Plomer was approaching stumblingly over the gravel. She was tall and bonily thin, with a shock of wild grey hair that made her look as if she had recently suffered a severe electric shock. She wore a mouse-coloured mackintosh, a crooked tweed skirt and a pair of green wellington boots that must have been four or five times too big for her. “Good,” she said briskly, arriving before us and beaming at the child, “you’ve brought little Polly.” She frowned, still smiling. “But who are you, my dear,” she enquired sweetly of her daughter, “and how do you come to have our baby?”