‘I like the sound of that already. I want tickets for the first night, front row.’ Crickmay smiled. ‘I want to be corrupted before I die.’
‘Me too,’ Hugh added, lighting his cigar. ‘I want to be corrupted too – but you’ve got a good few years left in you, Papa.’ He passed the port decanter to Lysander. ‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s about a rich, well-born woman who has an affair with a valet.’
‘Marvellous. But they’ll never let you put it on.’
They laughed. Crickmay lit his cigar, coughed and slapped his chest.
‘Don’t tell your mother, she’ll get cross with me.’
He was looking decidedly older these days, Lysander thought, his face slowly collapsing, big bags under his rheumy eyes and sagging cheeks. His thick white moustache needed clipping.
The three men were sitting in the dining room in their dinner jackets, smoking and drinking port, the women having retired to the drawing room. Lysander topped up his glass, feeling a little drunk. Telling his mother about Hettie and Lothar had encouraged him to drink more than he meant. Brandy and soda before dinner, too much claret with the roast lamb and now port. Better stop if he was going to walk to Winchelsea tomorrow.
‘Shall we join the ladies?’ Crickmay said, heaving himself to his feet with difficulty and limping out of the room.
‘Bring the port, Lysander,’ Hugh said. ‘Are you thinking about going to church tomorrow? If you won’t, I won’t.’
Lysander picked up the port decanter.
‘No. I’m walking to Winchelsea tomorrow, check up on the Major.’
‘Amazing fellow. Where’s he been to now?’
They walked down the wide corridor towards the Green Drawing Room.
‘Somewhere in West Africa, I think. Exploring the upper reaches of the Benue River, the last I heard. He’s been away for two years.’
They turned into the drawing room, where May was playing the piano and his mother was searching through sheet music looking for a song. It was her party piece, a nod to her past that everyone indulged and enjoyed. Lysander went and stood by the fireplace, looking at her with admiration as she stood in the ogival curve of the piano, one hand resting on the music stand, and raised her chin firmly, ready to sing. It was still light outside – the deepening blue of the short summer night just beginning to overcome the last of the sun’s iridescence in the sky. Lysander felt a pressure at the base of his spine and a feeling of peace flow through him. He had a son – it was as if the news had only just registered. He had a son called Lothar. He wondered if one day he would ever bring him to Claverleigh Hall to meet his grandmother. It seemed an impossible dream. His mother began to sing and her warm vibrant voice filled the air.
‘
Arm und Nacken, weiss und lieblich,
Schimmern in dem Mondenscheine. . .
’
Brahms, he recognized, one of his favourites. ‘Summer Evening’. ‘White and lovely, her arms and neck glimmer in the moonshine.’ He felt the emotion well and brim in him – such a simple poem. Hettie, he thought at once – it wasn’t over, clearly. He stood and crossed to the window as his mother continued singing. He looked out through his reflection in the panes to the darkening park beyond, the sun below the horizon now, though its light still charged and brightened the blue-grey air. The ancient limes, oaks and elms in the fenced enclosure seemed to solidify, losing their individual character as trees, and became great opaque shaggy monoliths that, as the remaining sunglow removed itself from them, somehow better revealed the true artful geography of the landscape gardener who, a century before, had placed the feathery saplings here and there – on the sides of hillocks, on the edge of the small lake, and grouped them in gentle valleys – to make a near-perfect man-made landscape that he would never see.
3. The Walk to Winchelsea
Lysander was up at six o’clock and went down to the kitchen, where he gulped a quick cup of tea and had two rounds of cheese-and-pickle sandwiches made up for him. He had found a pair of corduroy trousers and some mountain boots in his wardrobe and with a linen jacket and a Panama hat he was ready for the day. He reckoned it was a twenty-three-mile walk to Winchelsea, more or less straight across country, following lanes and tracks via the villages of Herstmonceux and Battle before he briefly joined the main trunk road that would lead him down to the coast at Winchelsea.
The day was warm but there was a threat of showers, according to Marlowe, so he stuffed a rubberized cycling cape in his rucksack, along with his sandwiches and his playscript of Miss Julie, and set off across the park looking for the first of the cart-tracks that would lead him east to Herstmonceux.
He made good going in the early morning freshness over the downland, catching glimpses of the silvered sea to his right whenever he hit higher ground and the unfolding valleys opened up to afford him a view southwards. He felt good in himself, as he always did when he was walking with purpose, his mind emptying of everything except what he could see and hear around him, as he skirted the oak and beech copses, following sunken lanes hedged with hornbeam and blackthorn, hearing a late cuckoo piping its two-note song, looking down on small farms from ridge-paths, crossing trunk roads as quickly as he could, eager to remove himself from traffic and the noisy reminders of the twentieth century.
They were beginning to cut hay in the fields as he passed, the haymakers scything down the meadows and filling the air with the sweet, pungent scent of cut grass. Around the middle of the morning he realized he had slightly lost his bearings. He hadn’t seen the sea for an hour and, although he knew he was heading broadly east – the position of the sun told him that – he hadn’t come across a fingerpost or a sign for a village for a mile or two. He met a four-horse wagon jingling up a lane and asked the carter’s boy who was leading the team where he could find the road to Herstmonceux. The boy told him he’d passed Herstmonceux and he should turn back. If he went on aways he’d come to a country church. There was a signpost there that would tell him the directions.
He paused at the church, ancient and solid, faced with grey-blue flint, with a battlemented tower and a graveyard half overgrown with nettles, long grass and cow parsley. Gnarled, bent apple trees flanked the cemetery wall. He ate the first of his sandwiches here and the cheese and pickle gave him a thirst so he strode on to Battle, finding an old milestone on the verge that told him Battle was two and a half miles away. Battle with its pubs. He was making good time – a pint of ale, a cigarette and he’d be ready to move on again.
In Battle he found a quiet pub called The Windmill – it was only just noon – not far from the abbey. He bought a pint of cloudy ale for sixpence and sat down on a bench seat by the window and watched three haymakers in dirty smocks play dominoes. He took Miss Julie out of his haversack, thinking he really should try and read it through before the first rehearsal tomorrow afternoon in St John’s Wood. He read a page or two then closed the book, thinking that August Strindberg was not part of this world and it was something of an affront to both Strindberg and The Windmill pub in Battle to introduce them to each other.
Sitting in this small pub with its cool flagged floor, listening to the murmuring voices of the haymakers and the click of dominoes falling, drinking beer here in the middle of summer in England in 1914, he suddenly felt a stillness creep up on him as if he were suffering from a form of mental palsy – as if time had stopped and the world’s turning, also. It was a strange sensation – that he would be for ever stuck in this late June day in 1914 like a fly in amber – the past as irrelevant to him as the future. A perfect stasis; the most alluring inertia.