‘Let me have a look,’ said George. He took the field glasses from Alex.
They were installed at the drawing-room at Belmont. Beyond the birch tree (whose droopy pose always reminded Alex of Gabriel) one of the upper windows of the Slipper House was clearly visible. The hazy budding April branches of the tree just brushed the lower right-hand corner of the image. The window was one of the windows of Hattie’s bedroom. George was lucky. He saw what Alex had failed to see, Hattie in a white petticoat suddenly skipping across the room. It was the middle of the morning, and Hattie was an early riser, but she had suddenly decided that she wanted to change her dress. The clergyman was due to call in half an hour, and the subtle voice that tells a woman, even a careless girl, how to dress for a man had told her she must change. Hattie came back into view carrying the dress over her arm, and paused. Her hair was undone and was streaming about everywhere until, with her free hand, she slowly gathered it away behind her bare shoulders. Then she passed out of sight again.
George pressed his lips together and lowered his glasses.
‘See anything?’
‘No.’ He turned away from the window.
Alex followed.
‘A maiden bower,’ said George.
‘I doubt if they’re maidens.’
‘Oh surely the little young one is.’
‘She hasn’t had the courtesy to come and see me.’
‘Two sequestered girls. The town will be in quite a tizzy.’
‘The little cat will get out.’
George had arrived unannounced. Alex came down to find him standing in the hall. George had a way of standing, with his head slightly tilted, which suggested, simply by the way in which he occupied the space, that he had just been slinking along and was now only partly visible. So he stood, looking up under his eyebrows, at his mother. God, how conceited he is, she thought as she looked down on him. But, also, her heart turned over for him, it shifted and burned.
Now, in the drawing-room, he had wandered, touching things, moving the little encampment of bronze figures which had stood more or less in that same place on the mantelpiece since he had been a child.
Alex’s unease about George’s arrival blended with a baneful memory of a dream which she had had last night. She dreamed she was in Belmont, but the house had become enormous like a palace, and rather dark and twilit as if pervaded by a yellowish fog. Alex was walking through the house, sometimes accompanied by a woman who seemed to know it better than she did. In the course of this walking, Alex found herself alone in a gallery from which she looked down into a large dim room, almost like a hall, which was full of all sorts of lumber. The room was obviously abandoned and, Alex felt, had not been entered for a long time. Tables and chairs and boxes and piles of things like lamp-stands and old clocks lay about in disorder, and near the middle of the room there was an old-fashioned gramophone with a huge horn. Alex, looking down into the silent abandoned foggy room, felt terrible fear. She thought, but there is no such room in Belmont. Where could such a large secret derelict room be in my house? She hurried away and told her discovery to the woman who seemed to know the house so well. The woman said, ‘Oh, that’s just the old downstairs sitting-room, remember?’ and threw open a door to reveal a shabby disordered room which Alex recalled as a former housekeeper’s room. Alex thought with relief, oh yes, that’s all it is! Then, looking, she realized that this ordinary room was not the room that she had seen.
George had taken off his black mackintosh. He was wearing one of his light grey check suits with a waistcoat and, today, had put on a tie and combed his hair. His head had its sleek hair-oil look. He took off his jacket and stood before Alex in his shiny-backed waistcoat, staring at her and showing his little square separated teeth. It was not exactly a smile.
Alex thought, he’s different, he’s the same yet different. He smells different, sort of sour. And then she thought of the room in her dream. And she thought, he’s the same, yet he is mad.
Alex looked at George with her cat-look, while with clever quick fingers she adjusted the collar of her blouse. She was wearing an old coat and skirt. If she had known George was coming she would have changed. She noted the little instinctive movement of her vanity.
‘How are you, George?’
‘Fine. How are you, Alex?’
‘All right. Would you like some coffee?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘A drink?’
‘No.’
‘Any news of Stella?’ Alex said this, and indeed at that moment felt it, as if it were the most ordinary sort of inquiry after someone’s wife.
‘No,’ said George after a moment, almost thoughtfully, in a kind of dreamy pensive manner, as if seeing a truthful vision, ‘Stella is all right.’
‘You’ve heard something?’
‘No. But you may be sure … that she is all right …’
‘Good,’ said Alex. Sometimes she and George quarrelled in such an odd painful senseless way because their conversation went astray at some point, took a wrong turn. It was as if George, from a position high above, had decided how the conversation ought to go if it were not to break some law. When the hidden law was broken Alex, punished by pain and confusion, always felt it was her fault. Was their talk, this time too, going to become something awful? She must try hard, she must keep in touch with George. She wanted to place her hand upon his arm, just above the shirt cuff, but of course that was impossible.
‘We may be dead, and indeed perhaps are …’
‘Are you coming with us to the seaside?’ said Alex.
There was something crude, almost pointless in this appeal to a family tradition, just a substitute for touching George’s arm.
‘Lordie, are we going?’ said George, and smiled. He had stopped moving about and sat down near the fire-place, looking up at his mother with his wide-apart eyes and wrinkling his small nose.
‘Yes, I don’t care, but Brian and Gabriel insist.’
‘It isn’t yet anyway. Why do you bring it up? Isn’t it time we stopped going there? You know, we shall never forgive you for selling Maryville.’ George was still smiling.
‘Well — ’
‘How’s your friend Professor Rozanov?’
So that’s it, thought Alex. He has come to find out … And of course I too want to find out … A dull stale sadness came over her.
‘I don’t know. He asked me to come to talk about letting the Slipper House, that was all.’
‘You haven’t seen him since?’
‘No.’
George seemed relieved. He now leaned back in his chair, letting his attention wander.
It was Alex’s turn to walk about the room.
‘How are you getting on with Rozanov?’
‘Me?’ said George. ‘He loves me, he hates me, he pushes me, he pulls me. It’s the old story. How will it end? He’ll be dead soon anyhow. The old people are being cleared away.’ He cast a malevolent look at Alex. ‘We who remain will have other troubles. Hey nonny nonny-no.’
Alex, who had wandered to the window, turned her back on him.
‘Good heavens!’
‘What?’ George got up and joined her at the window.
There were people in the garden.
Alex had lived her life with the view from the window, the drooping birch tree, the copper beech, the fir tree whose noble reddish shaft on which the sunlight glowed soared up so high, the furry lithe awkward ginkgo, and down below the perfect lawn, mown to a shaven sleekness by the gardener, more often now (since he was grown so old) by herself. She had been a child, looked at, in that garden, where she had later looked at her own children. But after, for years and years, there had been no one in the garden, it had remained as the Slipper House. No one, that is, except, when Brian and Gabriel came visiting, Adam and Zed whose presence there she so intensely resented.