Guy Jackson took me up to my bedroom at the end of the house facing out over the lawn and the meadow. The branches of a tree, I noticed, almost touched the window and when I looked out I saw in the fading light that it was a huge tree whose trunk had divided itself in an extraordinary way so that it had spread itself out over a large area, its branches falling to the ground across its central stem, like the spokes of an opened umbrella, and then — re-seeding itself in some way, or joining the trunk of another tree, I couldn’t quite tell which — it had sprung up again in another serpentine growth, great branches rising and falling over a space bigger than a tennis court. Along the inside, twining itself among all these bizarre natural forms, a wooden balustraded walk-way had been built leading to a thatched tree-house, a little conical pavilion, at the far end. How wrong the phrase ‘the idle rich’ was, I thought.
When I came down the party was under way with the ticklish, sweet smell of mild explosive in the air over the woodsmoke as the children pulled the English crackers with faces savagely taut for a moment as they tugged, screwed up and frightened before the snap and the short sparks of light in the firelit room. Helen Jackson moved round the table supervising the party, watching her children, Sarah and Sheila. She was close to them now, so obviously tending, watching them: reason enough for not leaving her husband. I thought. That seemed so clear now, and I was surprised that I had ever thought otherwise.
They were not identical twins, though identically dressed in brown corduroy dungarees and white pullovers and straight fair hair with fringes like the spokes of a rake down about their noses. I watched her watch them and it was as if her life with George Graham, all the past she had written and we had spoken about, the places where she had lived, no longer existed in her — that it had been completely erased in this link she had made again with her roots in this house in the woods. This was where she really belonged, where her natural affinities lay, and what had happened in those other places were no more than visits of a rich man’s daughter, a grand tour made by a woman essentially domestic, calm and full of her children.
The hall had become warm with the roused fire, the excited breath and movement of the children, and with an impalpable warmth of family community where this present reunion was one more play in the long repertory of meeting and departure that had taken place in the room over the years — a warm confirmation, for the moment, of continuity, of a heritage willingly accepted.
I stood with my back to the grate next Mr Perkins with a cup of tea in my hand and he said, ‘It was good that you could get up here. Very good.’ But he said nothing else, looking away abstractedly. The children now put on paper hats and there was some squabbling over the peanut-butter sandwiches before they settled into them, hurrying over the plainer food, eyes fixed on the two birthday cakes in the middle of the table, iced in pink and blue with sugar animals and five candles apiece. Finally Harold Perkins was called to the table to light the candles. And when he was finished they put the lights out and two small circles of flame lit up four pink faces and fired the chandelier above with diamonds.
After tea they opened their presents. I had brought them a pair of Babar books — Babar’s Travels and Babar’s Friend Zephyr. And of course the first thing they noticed on the second page of the Zephyr book was the double-page spread of Monkeysville, the city with its shops and rope ladders built in the trees. ‘Like us,’ they shouted. ‘The tree houses — like ours!’ They were children for whom even the most inventive art naturally imitates life.
‘They can change them — if they have them already. I asked at the shop,’ I said to Helen.
‘No,’ she smiled. ‘Not them. They have the earlier ones. Thank you. And this is surely from Alice in France,’ she went on turning again to the children, helping them open a flat, well-packed parcel. Inside was a selection of children’s records, small forty-fives, French nursery rhymes, folk songs and fables — and also a larger record: Alice Perkins at the Porte des Lilas. There was a glossy photograph of her on the sleeve, a girl like Louise Brooks with glasses and short dark hair, bobbed and fringed, cradling a guitar. She had at the moment the features of a beautiful but severe schoolmarm. ‘I may be a popular singer,’ the photograph suggested, ‘but that’s not the point; that’s neither here nor there. I have serious work to do’ — an impression which Helen immediately confirmed for me.
‘That’s Alice — my runaway younger sister. Lives in Paris. She’s the revolutionary for you. Every cause you can think of from Viet Nam to the battle of Wounded Knee. She got herself locked up in Paris with the students, May ’68. Do you remember the song? — “This City never was for lovers.” She’s very serious.’
‘I’ve heard of her, not the song. I’d no idea —’
‘Oh yes. She’s the famous sister. Guy and I don’t see much of her. Thinks we’re outrageously bourgeois and right-wing. Almost fascist pigs. Father — do you want to hear Alice’s latest?’ She turned to him, waving the sleeve in the air like a flag.
‘What is it this time? “Wrap the Red Flag round me”? Let’s hear it. I like her.’
Helen put the record on in the next room — a dark drawing-room with heavy leather furniture I could just see through a doorway off the hall — and the sound of a sharp, classic guitar emerged through the hi-fi equipment, a decisively fingered, lilting introduction, followed by a surprisingly deep, almost male voice — ringingly vibrant, slowly rising into the music, becoming passionately modulated, Piaf-like, whenever the words offered the chance:
‘Si je n’avais plus
plus qu’une heure à vivre,
je la voudrais vivre
auprès de ton lit –
sur un lit d’amour …’
‘That’s not altogether revolutionary,’ I said when Helen returned.
‘I’m sure there’s something in it — some hidden political thing,’ she said, picking up the sleeve. ‘It’s by someone called Moulouji — “Algerian musician and singer.” The Arab cause. It’s that, don’t you think? That’s it.’
Helen seemed strangely anxious to cast her sister in the role of musical agitator — as someone who, in her rather mocking tones, she viewed as politically irresponsible. Yet her father’s politics, as I was to learn later that evening, had been very similar — as were her own, I knew, despite the pains she took to disguise this. The three of them had taken from this rich estate not the autocratic bounty that was their inheritance but a deep sense of shame in the injustice of that gift. Their history in this house had somehow led them all to a shared political cause — the concerns of an imperilled world that lay beyond its gates. How on earth had all this ever come to pass?
… He remembers Alice so affectionately, Helen thought as she listened to her sister’s voice, a radiant presence about the hall. He thinks of her so much as a continuation of his own philosophies, as someone making up for his own political failure. I’m the older, safer, drearier daughter — the Manhattan socialite who married a dull diplomat: a stuffed shirt from the British Foreign Office. I’ve taken after Mother, an old daughter of the revolution — while Alice is a daughter of the proper revolution. That’s what he thinks. But that’s how I wanted it, exactly how. That was the cover. And now the point of it all? It’s gone. I needn’t have bothered — all the lies, the distances I’ve made with my family. I could have been true in the open and sung rebelly songs like Alice and had a good time with her and Father and shocked my husband. Although Guy wouldn’t have married that me, the real one. Not a chance. So that marriage was a lie I could have avoided too.