He left the dining-room. In the hall he could still hear the voices of Mrs Ainley-Foxleton and Mrs Bright. Nobody had bothered with him that day; his mother, whose favourite he had always been, was even impatient when he said he had a toothache. Nobody had noticed when he’d slipped away. But from the parapet of the roof everything had been different. The faces of the people were pale, similar dots, all gazing up at him. The colours of the women’s dresses were confused among the flowers. Arms waved frantically at him; someone shouted, ordering him to come down.
On the raised lawn the old man was still examining the grass, his head still poked down towards it, his stick prodding at it. From the glade where the picnic was taking place came a brief burst of applause, as if someone had just made a speech. ‘… today’s the day the teddy-bears have their picnic,’ sang the screeching voice, faintly.
A breeze had cooled Edwin’s sunburnt arms as he crept along the parapet. He’d sensed his mother’s first realization that it was he, and noticed his brother’s and his sister’s weeping. He had seen his father summoned from the car where he’d been dozing. Edwin had stretched his arms out, balancing like a tightrope performer. All the boredom, the tiresome heat, the cotton hat and suit, were easily made up for. Within minutes it had become his day.
‘Well, it’s certainly the weather for it,’ Edwin said to the old man.
‘Eh?’
‘The weather’s nice,’ he shouted. ‘It’s a fine day.’
‘There’s fungus in this lawn, you know. Eaten up with it.’ Mr Ainley-Foxleton investigated small black patches with his stick. ‘Never knew there was fungus here,’ he said.
They were close to the edge of the lawn. Below them there was a rockery full of veronica and sea-pinks and saponaria. The rockery was arranged in a semicircle, around a sundial.
‘Looks like fungus there too,’ Edwin said, pointing at the larger lawn that stretched away beyond this rockery.
‘Eh?’ The old man peered over the edge, not knowing what he was looking for because he hadn’t properly heard. ‘Eh?’ he said again, and Edwin nudged him with his elbow. The stick went flying off at an angle, the old man’s head struck the edge of the sundial with a sharp, clean crack. ‘Oh, don’t go down to the woods today,’ the voice began again, drifting through the sunshine over the scented garden. Edwin glanced quickly over the windows of the house in case there should be a face at one of them. Not that it would matter: at that distance no one could see such a slight movement of an elbow.
They ate banana sandwiches and egg sandwiches, and biscuits with icing on them, chocolate cake and coffee cake. The teddy-bears’ snouts were pressed over the Beatrix Potter mugs, each teddy-bear addressed by name. Edwin’s was called Tomkin.
‘Remember the day of the thunderstorm?’ Enid said, screwing up her features in a way she had – like a twitch really, Edwin considered. The day he had walked along the parapet might even have been the day of the thunderstorm, and he smiled because somehow that was amusing. Angela was smiling too, and so were Jeremy and Enid, Pansy, Harriet and Holly, Peter and the husbands and the wives. Deborah in particular was smiling. When Edwin glanced from face to face he was reminded of the faces that had gazed up at him from so far below, except that there’d been panic instead of smiles.
‘Remember the syrup?’ Angela said. ‘Poor Algernon had to be given a horrid bath.’
‘Wasn’t it Horatio, surely?’ Deborah said.
‘Yes, it was Horatio,’ Enid confirmed, amusingly balancing Horatio on her shoulder.
‘Today’s the day the teddy-bears have their picnic,’ suddenly sang everyone, taking a lead from the voice on the gramophone. Edwin smiled and even began to sing himself. When they returned to Deborah’s parents’ house the atmosphere would be sombre. ‘Poor old chap was overlooked,’ he’d probably be the one to explain, ‘due to all that fuss.’ And in 23 The Zodiac the atmosphere would be sombre also. ‘I’m afraid you should get rid of it,’ he’d suggest, arguing that the blue teddy-bear would be for ever a reminder. Grown up a bit because of what had happened, Deborah would of course agree. Like everything else, marriage had to settle into shape.
Pansy told a story of an adventure her Mikey had had when she’d taken him back to boarding-school, how a repulsive girl called Leonora Thorpe had stuck a skewer in him. Holly told of how she’d had to rescue her Percival from drowning when he’d toppled out of a motor-boat. Jeremy wound up the gramophone and the chatter jollily continued, the husbands and wives appearing to be as delighted as anyone. Harriet said how she’d only wanted to marry Peter and Peter how he’d determined to marry Deborah. ‘Oh, don’t go down to the woods today,’ the voice began again, and then came Mrs Ainley-Foxleton’s scream.
Everyone rushed, leaving the teddy-bears just anywhere and the gramophone still playing. Edwin was the first to bend over the splayed figure of the old man. He declared that Mr Ainley-Foxleton was dead, and then took charge of the proceedings.
The Time of Year
All that autumn, when they were both fourteen, they had talked about their Christmas swim. She’d had the idea: that on Christmas morning when everyone was still asleep they would meet by the boats on the strand at Ballyquin and afterwards quite casually say that they had been for a swim on Christmas Day. Whenever they met during that stormy October and November they wondered how fine the day might be, how cold or wet, and if the sea could possibly be frozen. They walked together on the cliffs, looking down at the breaking waves of the Atlantic, shivering in anticipation. They walked through the misty dusk of the town, lingering over the first signs of Christmas in the shops: coloured lights strung up, holly and Christmas trees and tinsel. They wondered if people guessed about them. They didn’t want them to, they wanted it to be a secret. People would laugh because they were children. They were in love that autumn.
Six years later Valerie still remembered, poignantly, in November. Dublin, so different from Ballyquin, stirred up the past as autumn drifted into winter and winds bustled around the grey buildings of Trinity College, where she was now a student. The city’s trees were bleakly bare, it seemed to Valerie; there was sadness, even, on the lawns of her hall of residence, scattered with finished leaves. In her small room, preparing herself one Friday evening for the Skullys’ end-of-term party, she sensed quite easily the Christmas chill of the sea, the chilliness creeping slowly over her calves and knees. She paused with the memory, gazing at herself in the looking-glass attached to the inside of her cupboard door. She was a tall girl, standing now in a white silk petticoat, with a thin face and thin long fingers and an almost classical nose. Her black hair was straight, falling to her shoulders. She was pretty when she smiled and she did so at her reflection, endeavouring to overcome the melancholy that visited her at this time of year. She turned away and picked up a green corduroy dress which she had laid out on her bed. She was going to be late if she dawdled like this.