“Hmn. Yes,” Larry said, “he forgets what he is.”
And lost in our individual thoughts — mine, now I’d stopped thinking about what happened in Greenwich, were of Larry, big and gorgeous in the driver’s seat, larger than life and more fit in his clothing (tweed now in the comfortable, abrupt autumn weather, tweed and cavalry twill and the softest oxford) than a man in a catalogue — we drove on in the crestless Jag to my parents’ house in Cookham-upon- Thames. Who knows what Lawrence was thinking of? The money this whole business had cost the Crown, perhaps, what a Prince’s love drew down from a dynasty’s treasure, of positions even more compromising than any I — horny in smoky fall’s apple ambience, the polished leather promise and poignant feel of its vaguely grainy fabrics — could ever have hoped to put him in, now he’d given his word to the world we were engaged.
I’m not being unfair to him, though none of this had occurred to me then, of course. How could it have done? I was in love, I thought I was to be his Princess. I guess I was just this romantic old silly. Tra la la, fa la la, hey nonny.
I had to hand it to Larry, I really did. With his Prince’s breeding and his almost cartographer’s knowledge of the lay of his lands, and his truly vast, dead-on sense of good husbandry, he had a sort of perfect pitch for his holdings, for all his rents and levies, and not only for his, but for the next lord’s over, too, and the next lord’s after that one, and for the next’s and the next’s and next’s, ad infinitum, filling up the shires and counties and districts and ridings of the kingdom with some genius for property, some blood-driven instinct for the fixed boundaries, qualities, and intrinsics of possession till all England was drawn in on the fine map of his understanding.
He knew the annual rainfalls, the crops and industries and roads and forests, had a feel for its weathers, its wildlife, the fish in its rivers, the birds in its trees.
Cookham is a river village, almost a suburban wetlands. It is, in the best sense, unspoiled, quaint, almost precious. I cannot say how, but Lawrence even knew how to dress for the occasion of its suburban Sunday circumstances, his twills and tweeds, though he was Prince, perfectly, carefully, considerately matched — I found this touching; it made me more anxious than ever to bed him — to their own, the twills, tweeds, and oxfords of their aspiring squires’ middle-class hearts. I hadn’t seen it before, but when we stepped out of the car Lawrence was even wearing one of those soft wool visored caps that are part of the uniform, and that one sees everywhere in the country.
“Country,” of course, is what Cookham so determinedly is. It was never large enough to be anything so grand as even the tiniest market town. It is what it must always have been— a few hundred acres of lovely, ever so slightly remote real estate, its rich dirts vaguely hydrologic, geologic, strangely expropriate, as if they’d been thrown up like magic muds from the bottom of the river, or washed off the surrounding farms like some thick, complex, compact silt. (Nowhere in England is the earth so stocked with bait; nowhere is the soil so amenable, or crowded with the nutrients for flowers. The gardens of Cookham are its glory, its flowers’ flaring pigments like wet primary colors.)
There is no school, no surgery, no library. There’s no place where one may purchase film, postage, tobacco, a newspaper. There isn’t even a shop to buy food. What there is is an old Norman church, two public houses, a BP station with a live-in mechanic, and an estate agent. The estate agent, with all the commisssions he’s earned from the never-ending sale and resale of Cookham-upon-Thames’s sixty-odd houses, must be a millionaire by now. The houses turn over so often not because of the damp — Cookham is damp — or because anything is so very structurally wrong with its housing stock, but because the village is such a marvelous place to live that people could never bring themselves to sell and live elsewhere were it not for the steadily, even incredibly, rising prices of the homes there. No matter what the rest of the economy is like, they double in price every half-dozen years. This is the rule of thumb.
We are, in a sense, a suburb of Richmond. A bedroom community where three out of four ratepayers have their income from antique shops, or the sale of estate cars, or are independent booking agents or the leaders of dance bands in fancy hotels. A queer aspect of society in a town so homogeneously employed is its conversation. People who book tours, for example, are, for some reason, reluctant to talk shop with others in the same trade. Instead, they’ll pick up this or that bit of special information from people in professions different from their own and impart their newly acquired expertise to anyone (conventionally that fourth ratepayer or anyone else not engaged in the flogging of motors, tours, or the sale of fine furniture, or the leading of bands) who will listen.
Father sells estate cars in Richmond but is something of a connoisseur in the antique French-furniture field. Similarly, it isn’t uncommon for antique dealers to know about palm- court orchestras or their conductors to be aficionados of world travel while professionals in this last enterprise will often tell you more than you’d ever want to know about estate cars. And so on and so forth in Cookham, a village of four idées fixes. Usually these conversations (monologues really) take place on weekends or in the evenings at one of the village’s two pubs, though the venue can shift, rather like the tides of the sea-flowing river upon which Cookham is located, inexplicably, mysteriously, almost whimsically, from one time to the next, so that a native whose rhythms are off, or who hasn’t kept up, may discover himself in a pub that has “fallen silent” and find himself consoling (and suppressing) his gregarious spirits in lonely drink.
Do we sound quaint, picturesque? Do I, almost automatically falling in as I do with the eccentric, swollen tropes of my hometown every time I come anywhere near it? Who never even moved here until I was already twelve years old and who’d all but left it for good after I took my O-levels when I was fifteen, and who did leave it for good when I had taken my degree at university, do I sound quaint, picturesque? Maybe all home ever really is is wherever we happen to live whenever we reach puberty. This might account for the extra edge of horniness I felt as we approached the village, might account for the open, shameless way I bumped and rubbed against Larry when he parked the crestless Jag and we started up the path toward my parents’ house, passing through the pretty obstacles of Cookham’s frequent stiles. That’s what I was thinking.
Lawrence was thinking something else.
“This place,” he remarked almost scornfully, “this place is a refuge for Royalists.”
“Have you been to Cookham then, Larry?”
“I know the type.”
“Why do you sound so put out? It seems to me Royalists would be good for your business.”
“Royalists,” he said, “don’t understand my business.”
“That’s dark,” I said. (Larry is dark, and me this pushover for men in solar eclipse; small print, close-to-the-vest guys who won’t give a girl the light of day. He had me jumping, he had me jumping and rubbing and bumping and grinding in my head.)