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According to Mark

Penelope Lively



  PENELOPE LIVELY

  According to Mark

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  ACCORDING TO MARK

  Penelope Lively grew up in Egypt but settled in England after the war and took a degree in History at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. She was married to the late Professor Jack Lively, has a daughter, a son and six grandchildren, and lives in London.

  Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award; City of the Mind; Cleopatra’s Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; and Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award.

  She has also written radio and television scripts and has acted as presenter for a BBC Radio 4 programme on children’s literature. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year’s Honours List.

  To Sheila

  1

  Mark Lamming, driving from London to Dorset to visit a young woman he had not met, thought about her grandfather. Gilbert Strong he had not met either but he knew as much about him as it is possible to know about a man twenty-three years dead: his opinions, his tastes, the texture of his beard, his whereabouts on particular days of particular years, his use of the semi-colon, his pet-name for his mistress. Folded into the driving-seat of the Fiat (bought principally for the use of his wife Diana and inappropriate for his long legs) Mark passed from city to the linked suburbias of Surrey and eventually into emptier and profounder landscapes in which despite himself and rather to his irritation he began to think of Hardy. Hardy simply arose from the hills and villages and inhabited the car, also with eerie familiarity: hat, stick, beard, wives, works. Mark, aware and vaguely resentful of some kind of conditioning, pulled into a garage as a distraction, filled up the car and consulted the map once more. There were only four miles to go. He felt, now, unsettled and somewhat apprehensive. He did not consider himself as confident as other people thought him to be.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ the man at Weatherby and Proctor had said, a year ago, ‘she doesn’t seem to have heard of you. But then she isn’t exactly the sort of person who would have. Despite the background. She runs a Garden Centre, you know.’

  ‘At Dean Close?’ said Mark, startled.

  ‘At Dean Close. It is, actually, a rather satisfactory solution to various problems. Anyway, Mr Lamming, the great thing is that she has no objection. She is prepared to co-operate fully. You have her blessing, so to speak. Guided, if I may say so, by us, as Trustees. We keep very much a watching brief. We advise Miss Summers and er, and her mother, whenever appropriate.’

  ‘I know,’ said Mark. ‘Thank you.’ He stared past the man’s head into the murky London afternoon; he knew now with fair precision what he would be doing for the next three or four years. The certainty, though sought, was somehow dampening. He was forty-one, and on occasions thought wistfully of the blithe unpredictability of youth. He had not been much surprised by life for some while now. He was moderately well known and regarded in circles that he himself respected; he loved his wife; he was not financially secure but prepared to accept this as the price of his occupation. He was doing what he wanted to do.

  He was a biographer.

  For the last four miles Mark thought again about Gilbert Strong, who must have known intimately this line of trees, this bend, this row of cottages. He tried to subtract from the landscape the accretions of the last thirty-odd years and refurnish it with the squat and bulbous cars of the last decade of Strong’s life, to reclothe the few people that he passed, to reword the advertisements on a hoarding. This could be done, up to a point, but in the process the whole scene somehow leaked its colour and turned a dull sepia, like photographs in the Illustrated London News. Those whose professional task is the reconstruction of other times have this problem. The effort of imagination has its own special effects. This century, for Mark, was brown; the eighteenth was a delicate powder blue.

  The sight of Dean Close, although expected, took him by surprise. He almost drove past it; past the large green and white sign that said DEAN CLOSE GARDEN CENTRE. OPEN DAILY INCLUDING BANK HOLIDAYS, past the CAR PARK arrow, pointing into the stable yard, past the façade of the house – familiar from photographs – with its half-timbering and gables and rustic pillars, like some superior cottage orné, past the glimpsed mountain of yellow plastic bags in the drive. It was these, perhaps, that had clinched his impression that this could not be his destination; a marker beside them said PEAT – £2.50.

  He started to go into the car park and then changed his mind and drove up to the front of the house. He sat for a few moments looking at it. It was less ugly than he had expected, shaggy with wistaria and altogether less stark than in pictures. It seemed also to have shrunk a little; the surrounding trees, he realised, had grown considerably.

  Her letter was in his briefcase. It was in large scrawly handwriting, on the Garden Centre’s business notepaper and said simply that she would be glad to meet him on the day he suggested and as Strong’s literary executor she would give any help she could but that actually Mr Weatherby knew more about papers and things than she did. She signed herself Carrie Summers. She had made three attempts at spelling executor and ended up getting it wrong.

  He stood on the front doorstep ringing the bell for five minutes. Eventually he gave up and went round the side of the house into the Garden Centre. The stables, he saw, had become the office and sales area and beyond stretched a couple of acres of neatly organised wares, aisle upon aisle of plants in boxes and pots or with their roots shrouded in black plastic, among which cruised a few people pushing supermarket trollies. The contents of the trollies, Mark observed as he wandered uneasily towards a large greenhouse, were as motley as the contents of trollies in Sainsbury’s, conjuring up visions of gardens as ill-conceived as other people’s weekly diets – one conifer, two dozen pansies and a berberis. Or a dozen lobelias, one winter-flowering jasmine and three hostas. Gilbert Strong, whose personality had been so powerfully with him all day, suddenly evaporated.

  For the past eighteen months he had read little that was not either written by Strong or pertained to him in some way. He could quote chunks of his Disraeli and his Napoleon and of the essays on fiction and on biography. He knew what Shaw said about him and what he said about Shaw and the size of his advance on the first of the travel books and his views on Thomas Love Peacock (admiring), on socialism (guarded), on female suffrage (tolerant) and on Cubism (irritable). He knew the sequence of his infidelities to his first wife and the depth of his friendships. He was so keenly tuned to Stron
g’s name that when the word turned up in any context he reacted: signs referring to Strongbow cider induced a double-take. He had read the manuscripts deposited in the Bodleian and the letters loaned by the various friends and associates whose co-operation had been secured by Mr Weatherby’s tactful letter. He had visited several of these people, all of them in their eighties or nineties and as jumpy as kittens about his enquiries. All they wanted to know was what he was going to say and what A, B or C had said about them. Very ancient ladies peered up at him and said plaintively that one just wanted to be sure that one wasn’t going to be misrepresented in any way. Men with many letters after their names and long histories of office and achievement implored him to disregard the testimonies of other similar men. He had had no idea that the past frightened people so. The word ‘truth’ kept cropping up. ‘You must,’ he was told, ‘tell the truth, which was thus.’ A labyrinth confronted him; it had been much easier writing about Wilkie Collins, remembered by no one.

  ‘Why him?’ Diana had said, way back, when the idea was first aired. ‘I mean,’ she went on with more caution, ‘it sounds rather a good idea, but isn’t he a bit, well, on the side-lines? Nobody reads him now. Except of course that play.’

  ‘Nobody reads Lytton Strachey or Harold Nicholson,’ said Mark, ‘and look what’s happened to them. In point of fact Strong’s very interesting. The novels are pretty awful, and the travel stuff is very much of its time, but the essays are strong meat, the criticism is lively and Disraeli at least is a first rate biography. And he was in the thick of things.’ He did not add: and the great thing is that he hasn’t been done yet. Diana, in any case, would take that point. Indeed, she said after a moment, ‘How can you be certain someone else isn’t going to write a book about him?’

  ‘Because,’ said Mark, ‘I shall see to it that they aren’t. In so far as that’s possible.’

  And of course it more or less was possible. Or at least it was possible once he had persuaded the Trustees that he was far and away the best person to take it on and through the Trustees the granddaughter who was now literary executor after the death of Strong’s old friend Harold Baxter. No one, knowing Mark Lamming to be working on Strong, would be likely to decide to compete. His Wilkie Collins book had been praised widely and at length; the edition of the Somerset Maugham letters was considered scholarly stuff; he had won a couple of prizes; his publisher was enthusiastic, or as enthusiastic as the publishers of works of literary interest allow themselves to be.

  ‘Did he know Vanessa and Roger and Duncan and Virginia and all that crew?’ asked Diana.

  ‘He was sort of on the edges of that.’

  ‘Gawd,’ said Diana. ‘Poor you.’

  Mark had read and enquired and talked and listened and now, on this amiable green and blue May morning, he was about for the first time to set eyes on Gilbert Strong made manifest, as it were. What was left of Gilbert Strong; flesh of his flesh.

  He entered the large greenhouse, in which a young man could be seen doing something to trays of seedlings. He said, ‘I’m looking for Miss Summers. She is expecting me, actually.’

  The young man, without turning, called, ‘Carrie – someone wants you’, and from the far end of the long aisle there arose from amid a forest of pots and seed-trays a girl, dungareed and gum-booted, who put down an implement, stared across the vegetation at Mark and approached. She had gingery curly hair, a small face splodged with freckles, very dirty hands and looked about eighteen, which confused Mark who knew from documentary evidence that Caroline Summers was thirty-two.

  She said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m Mark Lamming.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Gosh. Yes. I was thinking about the man from the fertiliser people, but it couldn’t be, really, could it … I mean …’ Embarrassment, now, took over.

  ‘No,’ said the young man. ‘He doesn’t look like anyone from a fertiliser firm.’

  ‘This is Bill,’ she said. ‘My partner.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Mark. He held out a hand, which wavered.

  ‘I shouldn’t,’ said Bill. ‘I’m filthy. Hello.’

  Mark, disadvantaged, surveyed the greenhouse. ‘I’m most impressed. I hadn’t realised you were doing things on such a scale. Fascinating. I’d love to hear how it all came about. I must admit, I’m not much of a gardener myself.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Bill kindly.

  There was a silence.

  ‘Carrie,’ said Bill, ‘you should take the gentleman into the house and give him a cup of coffee.’

  She jumped. ‘Sorry. Yes. Do come in and have some coffee.’

  Mark followed her. They stopped off in the sales office for Carrie to give some instruction to the girl who kept the till and answer a complex enquiry from a customer about species roses. Mark, covertly, eyed her. She bore no resemblance whatsoever that he could see to Gilbert Strong. She looked now not eighteen but about twenty-five. She gave the impression of having been lightly dusted all over with sand; even her eyelashes were a pale ginger. The dungarees, he noted, were not the light-hearted kind in pastel shades with many frivolous pockets sometimes worn by Diana at weekends but the real thing: uncompromising and certainly not flattering. It was not possible to tell if, within them, she was fat or thin. Thin, he thought, probably. Her bare arms glinted with fine golden hairs and were as freckled as her face.

  They went into the house through a side door. ‘Sorry,’ said Carrie. ‘It’s an awful mess. Bill and I just use this end of the house. We live in the kitchen really.’ She went to the sink and filled a kettle. ‘Is Nescafé O.K.?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely.’ The room was, indeed, untidy – a large kitchen which was evidently several other things as well: office, sitting-room, even possibly bedroom. A huge pin-board was covered with bits of paper referring to orders and to firms supplying fibre pots or slug bait or seed; a couple of worn armchairs squatted beside an old Rayburn stove; in the corner was a divan. Mark felt further disconcerted; the mention of Bill grated in some way – for absolutely no good reason; the chap had seemed perfectly agreeable, had committed no offence whatsoever. He pulled himself together and began to speak the prepared words. He said how excited and pleased he was to be doing the biography, the er, as it were official biography. How grateful he was for her co-operation. How lengthy a task it was. How anxious he was to get it – well, right. Carrie spooned Nescafé into two mugs (chipped), added water and too much milk, and sat down at the table, which was covered with what Mark, even in mid-speech, noticed to be real oilcloth, vintage, probably around 1949, yellow check webbed with tiny cracks.

  ‘And,’ he said, ‘if I may say so, this is one of the most exciting moments of all. Meeting,’ – his eyes swerved demurely from her face – ‘you. At last. I’ve left it almost deliberately till now. There is so much I want to ask. I’ve talked to so many people who knew him, but you … Well, it’s of a different order. And your mother, whom I very much hope to meet also at some point.’

  ‘She lives in France.’

  ‘Of course. Anyway … You were nine, weren’t you, when he died?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Carrie.

  ‘You remember him?’

  ‘A bit.’ There was a pause. ‘He had a beard,’ she added.

  ‘Er, yes,’ said Mark. ‘Yes, he did indeed.’

  A clock loudly ticked. Mark picked up his mug and put it down again; the coffee was fairly undrinkable. An occupational hazard; one of Strong’s former mistresses had given him food poisoning with take-away kebabs. He gazed at Carrie’s odd, rather childish face, and looked away. Green eyes, with little brown flecks. ‘It must have been very different here then, with this place in full swing. All those weekend parties. Cary and people. I dare say you sat on his knee.’

  ‘Whose knee?’

  ‘Joyce Cary’s.’

  ‘No,’ said Carrie.

  ‘You could have done,’ said Mark, with faint irritation. ‘It’s chronologically quite possible, and he was a friend of your grandfather’s.�€
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  ‘Well, I didn’t, I’m afraid. Would you like some more coffee?’

  ‘No,’ said Mark hastily.

  ‘They had servants and all that then,’ Carrie offered. ‘Him and Susan. Susan was the person he married after grandmother died.’

  Mark sighed. ‘Yes. Quite.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Carrie, ‘I didn’t come here all that often because of being with my mother and her not liking England much.’

  Mark nodded. He tried to give an impression of sympathy and understanding. The personality of Hermione Summers, Strong’s only child, had been explained to him with restraint by Mr Weatherby and rather more colourfully by various other people. ‘A little unpredictable and vague’ had been Mr Weatherby’s phrase, followed by a clearing of the throat. ‘Something of a problem to the Trustees, over the years.’ Others spoke of her variously as a drunk and a nymphomaniac. ‘Louche,’ said the ex-mistress. ‘Distinctly louche.’ She lived, apparently, in the Dordogne and visited London only rarely and in order to try to extract more money from the Strong Trust. Strong, Mr Weatherby hinted, had got the measure of his daughter and her income was accordingly rationed and at the discretion of the Trustees.

  Dean Close, since Strong’s death, had been owned and administered by the Trust, in conjunction with the Strong Society, an organisation which had been formed some ten years or so later and which while frail in terms of numbers was rich in enthusiasm. Its dozen or so members, several of them associates of Strong’s and most of them advanced in years, undertook the preservation of the contents of the house and the arrangements for its opening to the public on the first Wednesday of every month. The public, admittedly, did not flock, but there was, Mark had been told, a respectable trickle of littérateurs and the odd American academic. All this was made possible by the existence of the Strong Trust. Strong’s later years had been financially buttressed by, ironically, the one work for which he never made any great claims. Dean Close, the Strong Estate, twenty years’ economic peace of mind were founded upon the maverick success of a theatrical piece, tossed off in a winter of desperation and unpaid bills and which, ever since, had been in perpetual production. Somewhere in the world, every night, some company romped its way through Queen Mab’s Island, that farrago of nonsense history and rumbustious English whimsy – ‘a play for children and the young in spirit’. Few people, nowadays, could readily name its author. Barrie, was it? De la Mare? Good heavens – Gilbert Strong! Or, simply – who? Its title was a household name; its author irrelevant. And Strong, frankly, had preferred it that way, while pocketing the royalties with appreciation. And the play had begotten the New York production, which in turn had begotten the film musical starring Julie Andrews, on the credit list of which Strong’s name rolled up in rather small letters somewhere at the bottom but which nevertheless nicely paid the salary of Mr Weatherby’s junior typist, financed various whims of Hermione’s and dealt with the nasty outbreak of dry rot at Dean Close in the 1970s. So far as Mark was concerned, Queen Mab’s Island did not bear too much examination; a glib and arch but adroit enough medley of sentiment, swashbuckle and fantasy, it was variously indebted to Carroll, Thackeray, Peacock, T. H. White and Barrie – a ladleful of theatrical soup in other words and of no great significance, least of all perhaps in the context of Strong’s own oeuvres. A piece of professional luck, simply, and one of which Strong himself, to give him credit, was always slightly ashamed. It was to be regretted that it was for that that he was, today, chiefly remembered. The biography might, if it did nothing else, correct this.