‘No indeed. I see. Well, I’m sorry you’ve been put to this trouble.’
‘No trouble, I assure you - I do hope — ’
‘My maid knows Ennistone well and will be perfectly able to show me round, so there is no need for you to be inconvenienced.’
‘But — ’
‘Anyway, I am going home soon.’
‘Home —?’
‘Back to Colorado where I live.’
The American name entered the conversation with a kind of fierce chopping movement, and Tom felt brought up short as if he had been suddenly confronted by an icy cliff of Rockies. ‘Oh well - in that case — ’ he murmured.
There was a silence, during which Hattie picked up her glass from the floor and reached out to replace it with a click upon the glass-topped bamboo table. Then she stood up.
Tom began to say, ‘I’m afraid I — ’ Then he stood up too.
Pearl, who had of course been listening outside, smartly opened the sitting-room door. Tom (this had now somehow become inevitable) marched out into the hall. He turned and faced the two girls, the thin pale young one, the sturdy brown older one, their faces knit up into expressions of extreme hostile anxiety. He thought, this is absurd, it is all a mistake, I can explain. But he could not explain. He said, ‘I’m awfully sorry - I’m sorry I bothered you - I’m afraid I didn’t manage to say — ’
‘Not at all,’ said Hattie.
Pearl opened the front door.
Tom went out into the rain and began to blunder his way through the now totally dark garden in the direction of the back gate. The rain, soaking his hair and running down his neck, reminded him that he had left his umbrella behind. He turned back and was approaching the house again when the front door flew open. Something was hurled violently out and scattered on the lawn. It was his ill-fated bunch of tulips. As the door slammed shut he stood still, shocked, for a moment, looking at the candle in the hall window wavering wildly in the sudden draught. Then he turned and ran away down the garden.
‘But what is it?’ said Pearl, as Hattie’s tears ran through her fingers.
‘Didn’t you hear?’
‘Yes, but — ’
‘He isn’t an admirer, he’s a liar - and he brought those horrible lying flowers — ’
‘It wasn’t the poor flowers’ fault! And why is he a liar?’
‘He just came because he was told to.’
‘All right then, but he thought you’d understand.’
‘Understand what? Something horrible —’
‘But you’re complaining because he’s not an admirer.’
‘I’m not complaining!’
‘You said you didn’t want one!’
‘I don’t. I just want to be left alone. And then this horrible spoiling thing happens. Oh why did he have to come? He’s a horrible person. so rude - and it’s all spoilt now - oh Pearlie, Pearlie, I want to go home. I want to go home!’
Oh dear, thought Pearl, as she took Hattie in her arms, what a mess, whatever is it all about - and what a handsome boy he is too - well, I suppose that’s part of the trouble. Awful things are just starting. And soon poor Pearl was finding tears of her own to shed.
‘Are you going for your usual walk?’ said Gabriel to Brian.
The notorious McCaffrey summer expedition to the seaside was in full swing. The sun was shining, the east wind was blowing, it was now May. The jaunt had, after discussion, settled down to being for one day only, which was generally agreed to offer the worst of all worlds. Brian usually demonstrated his dislike of this intensive family gathering by turning his back on the famous element and walking inland, thus avoiding any participation in junketings on the beach.
‘No,’ said Brian.
‘Why? Are you too tired?’
‘No. I’m not in the least tired. Why should I be?’
‘Will you sit here then? Or would you like to go on the rocks?’
‘Why do you want to make it all out into a programme? Just don’t bother me!’
Gabriel gave a little (maddening to Brian) frown at being hurt, and went on silently unpacking the various ritual objects which always made up the Brian McCaffreys’ home base on the beach.
Brian asked himself, why don’t I want to go for a walk like I usually do? The answer was terrible. He was afraid that Gabriel might find herself alone with George. She might actually attempt to be alone with George. Am I going mad? Brian wondered. Why did George come anyway? It was shameless of him to come to the seaside just as if he were an ordinary person.
Of course there were other expeditions to the sea but this was the one which was supposed to assemble all the clan, and which Gabriel had (not felicitously for her husband) compared to Christmas. It continued a tradition of annual family summer gatherings at Maryville and could be seen as a kind of remembrance of, or mourning for, that house which was less than a mile distant from where the clan was now encamped. This was an aspect of it which Brian particularly detested. He had never liked the McCaffrey seaside house, since he so much preferred his own. He had however resented (as they all did) Alex’s disgraceful act of selling it without consultation. Now he felt the whole thing was better forgotten. Gabriel always came back in tears, lamenting for the lost house. And if the visit was supposed to show the usurping Blacketts that the McCaffreys didn’t care it was clearly misconceived. Of course, that particular bit of coastline, as well as being the nearest unspoilt sea to Ennistone, was exceptionally delightful; but it would have showed more spirit to abandon the place altogether. In a more general sense of course the pilgrimage survived because it had somehow become a family custom, animated and maintained by the sentimentality of the women (that is Gabriel, Alex and Ruby) and the expectations of the children (that is Adam and Zed). Alex pretended indifference, but in fact valued the event as an exhibition of her matriarchal power.
‘If only Stella were here,’ said Gabriel, as she spread out a large tartan rug, ‘it would be — ’ she was going to say ‘perfect’, only honesty compelled her to realize that no such picture with Brian in it could be perfect - ‘so nice.’
Stella, who had not reappeared, was now said, in terms of a rumour which probably had no sounder foundation than the one that pronounced her dead, to be staying with friends in London.
‘Stella hated this jamboree as much as I do,’ said Brian, kicking a stone. ‘And if we must come I fail to see why we have to have those bloody outsiders.’
The persons gathered, now scattered, upon the windy sunny beach were as follows: Brian, Gabriel, Adam and Zed, Alex and Ruby, George, Tom and Emma, and Hattie and Pearl. Alex had prompted Tom to bring Emma. Tom, who loved the occasion, would have come anyway, and the two ‘idle louts’ as Brian called them, had evidently found no difficulty in escaping from their university work in London. Gabriel had also, to Brian’s disgust, invited Hattie and Pearl, encountering them one day at the Baths. She did this partly out of benevolence to one generally agreed to be a waif, partly out of a sort of motherly possessiveness which she had enouraged herself to develop about Hattie and which had so far found no other expression, and partly out of an obsessive irritated envy and curiosity which she felt about the fortunate tenant of the coveted Slipper House. Anyway, there they all were.
The Brian McCaffreys had driven themselves, together with Tom and Emma, in Brian’s old Austin. Pearl had driven Hattie in a hired Volkswagen. (The girls had never been allowed to have a car of their own, but Pearl had learnt to drive in America where they were occasionally permitted to hire a car.) Alex had driven George and Ruby in William Eastcote’s Rover, which William always pressed her to borrow whenever she needed it. (It had never for some reason been ‘the thing’ to invite the Eastcotes, William, Anthea, and when she was alive, Rose, to join this family occasion.) The cars were parked on a track at the upper end of the long sheep-dotted yellow field of wiry wind-combed grass down which they had walked to the sea. The grass ended in a wire fence through which one crawled on to the dark rocks, easy to descend, which fringed the beach all along. The beach itself was gritty, the coarse sand mingling with small pebbles, and the dark raggedy rocks began again seawards, covered with golden brown seaweed and extensively visible at low tide.