Pack of Cards, Page 2

  Next week I must get down to the papers.’

  Sir Philip had taken him up to the attics. ‘I really don't know what we shall find,’ he said. ‘Things get shoved away for years, you know, and one has very little idea … I've not been up here for ages.’

  There were pieces of furniture, grey with dust, and suitcases, and heaps of mouldering curtains and blankets; a sewing-machine that looked like the prototype of all sewing-machines; gilt-framed pictures stacked against a wall; a jumble of withered saddlery that Sir Philip picked up and examined. ‘I wonder if Sally mightn't be able to make use of some of this.’

  Dieter, looking at an eighteenth-century chest of drawers pushed away beneath a dormer window, and thinking also of the furniture with which the rest of the house was filled, said, ‘You have some nice antique pieces.’ Sir Philip, still trying to unravel a harness, said, ‘Oh no, Dieter, not really, it's all just things that have always been here, you know.’ He put the harness down and moved away into another, inner attic room with a single small window overlooking the stable-yard. ‘I have a feeling the stuff we're looking for is in these boxes here.’

  Later, Dieter sat at a small folding green baize card table he had found in a corner, and began to open the bundles of letters and papers. It was much as Felicity Sutton had predicted: there were family letters all mixed up with official correspondence both from and to the Sir Philip Lander of the 1840s. It was a research worker's gold-mine. He glanced through a few documents at random, and then began to try to sort things out into some kind of order, thinking that eventually, before he left, he must suggest tactfully that all this should be deposited in the Public Record Office or some other appropriate place. In the meantime it was just his own good luck …

  Curiously, he could not feel as excited or interested as he should. He read, and made a few notes, and yawned, and beyond the fly-blown window small puffy clouds coasted in a sky of duck-egg blue, the garden trees sighed and heaved, and if he lifted himself slightly in his chair he could see down into the stable-yard where Sally was in attendance on that enormous horse of hers, circling its huge complacent rump with brush and comb. Presently Sir Philip drove the tractor into the yard, and, with one of the boys, began to unload bales of hay. Dieter put his pen down, tidied his notes into a pile, and went down to help.

  He had never known time pass so slowly – and so fast. The days were thirty-six hours long, and yet fled by so quickly that suddenly he had been there for two and a half weeks. Much embarrassed, he went one morning to find Lady Lander in the kitchen and insist that he should pay for his keep.

  She was making jam. The room was filled with the sweet fruity smell; flies buzzed drunkenly against the windows. Astonished, she said, ‘Oh, but of course not, we couldn't hear of such a thing, you are a guest.’

  ‘But I am staying so long, originally Sir Philip suggested a few days, and with one thing and another it has got longer and longer. Please, really I should prefer …’

  She would have none of it.

  He hardly knew himself how it was that his departure was always postponed. Of course, he had done no work at all, as yet, on the papers, but he could get down to that any time. And always there was something that loomed – ‘You must be sure to be here for the County Show next week,’ Sir Philip would say. ‘You'll find it amusing if you've not seen that kind of thing before – do you have the equivalent in Germany, I wonder?’ Or Sally would remember suddenly that the first cubbing meet was in ten days' time. ‘You'll still be here, won't you, Dieter? Oh, you must be – honestly, if you've never seen a meet …’

  He protested to Lady Lander – ‘Please, I would be happier …’, but could see that there was no point in going on. ‘In any case,’ she said, turning back to the pink-frothing pan on the stove, ‘you have been most helpful to my husband, he is always short-handed at this time of year, I am afraid only that we drive you into things you would never normally dream of doing. You must say, you know, if it bores you – we tend to forget, down here, that not everyone lives this kind of life.’

  And she, he wondered, had she not once been someone quite different? On Sundays, both she and her mother appeared for church in quite unfashionable but recognisably expensive clothes – silk dresses and citified hats of pre-war style. In these incongruous outfits, they walked down the lane to the village church. The family filled the whole of the front pew; Sir Philip's confident tenor led the sparse congregation; afterwards they would all stand, every week, for the same amount of time, chatting to the vicar. Then back to Morswick, stopping again from time to time to talk with village people.

  He had thought, when he first came, that it was feudal, and had been amused. Now, his perceptions heightened, he saw otherwise. ‘It is not that they are not respected,’ he wrote to his father. ‘Far from it – people are deferential to them – a title still means something, and they have always been the big family in these parts. But it is as though they are runners in a race who are being outstripped without even realising it. I think they hardly notice that their farming neighbours have new gadgets they have not – washing machines, televisions – that theirs is the shabbiest car for miles around, that the Morswick tractor is so out-of-date Nethercott (the neighbour) declined the loan of it when his broke down. And why? you will be saying, after all they have land, a house, possessions. But the land is not good, a lot of it is rough hill-grazing, I suppose that is at the root of the problem – and a mansion and a family past are not very realisable assets. I certainly can't imagine them selling the furniture. But when you come down to it – it is as though there is also some kind of perverse lack of will, as though they both didn't know, and didn't want to know.’

  The children were where it most showed. Beside their contemporaries – the sons and daughters of the local farming families (many of them at private schools, their country accents fast fading), they seemed quaint, too young for their ages, innocent. Sally, talking to other adolescent girls at an agricultural show, was the only one without lipstick, a hair-do, the quick glancing self-consciousness of young womanhood. She seemed a child beside them.

  At the cubbing meet – held outside the village pub – he found it almost unbearable. Standing beside Lady Lander, he watched her. Lady Lander said, ‘She's not well mounted, I'm afraid, poor darling – we've only got old Polly these days.’

  It was a huge horse, with a hefty muscularity that suggested carthorse ancestry. Seated on it, Sally towered above the dapper ponies of the other children. Beaming, unconscious of the vaguely comic figure she cut, she yanked the horse's head away from a tray of glasses that was being carried around, and waved at Dieter. She wore her school mack over grubby breeches and a pair of battered hunting-boots. The other girls were crisp in pale jodhpurs, tweed jackets and little velvet caps.

  Dieter was wrenched by pity, and love.

  He adored her. With horror he had recognised his own feelings, which smacked, it seemed to him, of paedophilia. She was sixteen; her rounded features, her plump awkward body, were raw with childishness. He was obsessed by her. He forced himself to contemplate her ignorance, her near-illiteracy. He thought of Erika, of her sharp clever face, the long hours of serious discussion, the shared concerns, and it did no good at all.

  And Sally had not the slightest inkling, nor ever would, of how he felt. She jostled him in puppyish horse-play; she worked beside him in the harvest field, her breasts straining at her aertex shirt, her brown legs as shiny with health and vigour as the rump of that incongruous horse she rode; he could hardly take his eyes off her, and was appalled at himself.

  In the evenings, he played board games with the two boys, held skeins of knitting wool for old Lady Lander as she wound the balls. Sometimes, he took a book from the great high cases that lined the walls of the drawing-room. They held an odd assortment: bound volumes of Punch, row upon row, Edwardian books about hunting and fishing, the classic Victorian novelists, books of humorous verse, Henty and Buchan and Rider Haggard. He read with perplexity
novels like The Constant Nymph, Precious Bane and Beau Geste that seemed to fit not at all with the concept of English twentieth-century literature that he had formed after two years' carefully selective leisure reading. Scanning the titles on the shelves, he had a confusing impression of being presented with a whole shadow culture of which he had been unaware. Yet again he felt his own judgements and perceptions to be hopelessly inadequate. Sir Philip, standing beside him at the book case one evening, said, ‘Glad to see you're making use of the library, Dieter – I'm afraid none of us get much time for reading.’ There was hardly a single recent addition, not an untattered dust-cover to be seen.

  On a day of sullen rain clouds, when the whole landscape seemed sunk in apathy, the old tractor broke down with more than usual finality. For hour after hour, Sir Philip and Daniels crawled around it, oiling and adjusting; Dieter, on edge with vicarious anxiety (it was needed for several urgent jobs), watched in frustration, cursing his lack of mechanical know-how. The worry on Sir Philip's face distressed him greatly; he longed to help. Eventually, the tractor sputtered into fitful life, and everybody stood back smiling. Sir Philip said, ‘Well, Daniels, we shan't have any of these crises next year, when we've got the new one, I hope.’ And Daniels said, ‘That's right, sir, we'll be in clover then’, and added, looking down the drive, ‘Here's Mr Nethercott now.’

  Nethercott had come, though, to talk not about fields but to look at the bull Sir Philip proposed selling. It was a young bull, whose performance was proving unreliable. Daniels was in favour of going over to artificial insemination. Sir Philip had reluctantly concurred, as they stood side by side at the gate, a few days before, watching the bull at work among the cows in a steeply sloping field opposite. Sir Philip said, ‘You're right, Daniels, I'm not too happy about him either.’

  ‘Silly bugger don't realise he got to do it downhill.’

  Sir Philip turned away. ‘Oh well, there's nothing to be done – he'll have to go. Now, George Nethercott's wanting a bull, I know – I'll give him a ring tonight.’

  And now Nethercott too stood at the field gate, studying the bull. Other matters were talked of for a while, then he said, ‘How much were you thinking of asking for him?’

  Sir Philip named a price.

  Nethercott nodded. There was a brief silence and then he said with a trace of embarrassment, ‘He might well work out more satisfactory than he looks just now – but the fact is, what I'm looking for's going to cost a fair bit more than that. Thanks for letting me have a look at him, though.’

  A week or so later, they heard through the postman that Nethercott had paid five hundred pounds for a bull at the Royal Show. Sir Philip said, ‘Well, good heavens! Lucky fellow.’ He was standing with Dieter in the front drive, the two or three brown envelopes that the postman had brought in his hand. ‘I really don't know how people manage it, these days. He's a good chap, Nethercott – they're a nice family. His grandfather used to work here, you know, for mine – stable-lad he was, I think. Well, I suppose we might get on with that fencing today, eh?’

  Up in the attic, the sun striking through the window had browned Dieter's single page of notes; there was a faint paler stripe where the pencil lay.

  At the beginning of September, the boys went back to boarding school. The corn was down, the blackberries ripening, the green of the trees spiced here and there with the first touch of autumn colour. Since he had come here, Dieter realised, the landscape had changed, working through its cycle so unobtrusively that only with an effort did one remember the brimming cornfields of July, the hedgerows still bright with wild flowers, the long light evenings. Now, the fields were bleached and shaven, the hedges lined with the skeletal heads of dried cow-parsley and docks, the grass white with dew in the mornings. It came as a faint shock to realise that the place was not static at all, that that impression of deep slumber was quite false, that change was continuous, that nothing stood still. That he could not stay here for ever.

  There was a dance, in the local market town, in connection with some equestrian activity, to which he went with Sally and her parents. It was the first time, he realised, that he had ever been anywhere with them when the whole family had not come, grandmothers and all. Sally wore an old dress of her mother's that had been cut down for her; it did not fit and was unbecoming, but she shone with excitement and anticipation. In the hotel where the dance took place, the other young girls were waiting about in the foyer in sharp-eyed groups and he was stricken again at Sally's frumpish looks in contrast to their fashionable dresses, their knowingness. But she was quite happy – laughing, greeting acquaintances.

  He danced with her once at the beginning, and then left her with a group of her contemporaries. But later, the evening under way, whenever he saw her she was dancing with friends of her parents, or sitting alone on one of a row of gilt chairs at the edge of the room, holding a glass of lemonade, but still radiant, tapping her foot in time to the music. After a while he went over and sat beside her.

  ‘Are you having a good time, Sally?’

  ‘Marvellous!’

  ‘Let's dance, shall we?’

  She was clumsy; he had to steer her round the room. She said, ‘Sorry, I'm hopeless. We did have dancing lessons at school but it's quite different when it's a real man, and anyway I always had to take man because of being tall, so I'm no good at being the woman. I say, Mummy says perhaps I can go to the hunt ball this year – will you still be here?’

  He said, ‘I'm afraid not. I have to go back before the term begins in October.’

  ‘Oh, what a pity.’ They danced in silence for a minute or two and then she said suddenly, ‘What are you going to do after you've finished your – your what's-it, the thing you're writing?’

  ‘I shall go back to Germany and get a job. I expect I shall get married,’ he added after a fractional pause. He had never spoken of Erika at Morswick.

  ‘Will you?’ she looked amazed. ‘Gosh – how exciting. Do write and tell us, won't you, so that we can send a present.’

  She beamed up at him; she smelled of toothpaste and, very faintly, of a cheap scent that she must have acquired in secrecy and tentatively used. He had seen, once, into her room; there had been a balding toy dog on the pillow, photographs of horses pinned to the walls, glass animals on the windowsill. She said, ‘Do you know, they want me to go to a sort of finishing school place in Grenoble next year.’

  ‘I should think you would like that.’

  She said, ‘Oh no, I couldn't possibly go. I couldn't bear to leave Morswick. No, I can't possibly.’

  Dieter said, ‘Sally, I think you should, I really do.’

  She shook her head.

  Later, back at Morswick, he sat with Sir Philip in the drawing-room; Sally and her mother had gone to bed. Sir Philip had taken a bottle of whisky from the cupboard and poured them both a glass: it was almost the first time Dieter had ever seen alcohol produced at Morswick, except for the glass of sherry offered to their rare visitors. Sir Philip said, ‘Quite a successful evening, I thought. Of course, you get rather a different kind of person at this sort of do now – it's not really like before the war. I daresay my father would be a bit taken aback if he was still alive.’

  He began to talk about his war-time experiences in Italy and France: he had been with the Sicily landings, and then in Normandy shortly after D-day, advancing through France and into Germany. Remembering suddenly the delicacy of the subject, he looked across at Dieter and said, ‘I hope you don't … of course, one realised at the time how many people like yourself, like your father … What a wretched business it all was, so much worse in many ways for you than for us.’

  Dieter said, ‘I think you would be interested to see Germany now. I wish you would come to visit us – my father would be so delighted to make arrangements, if all of you could come, or perhaps at least the boys and Sally.’

  ‘How awfully kind. We really must try to – you know, I can't think when we last had a holiday of any sort. Yes, we really
must.’ He swilled the whisky in his glass, peering down into it. ‘Yes. Of course, one is so awfully tied up here, being pretty short-handed nowadays. I daresay things will pick up in time, though. I must admit, it is getting a bit hard to manage just at the moment – still, we keep our heads above water. Anyway, I really mustn't burden you with our problems. By the way, I hope you didn't mean what you said earlier about leaving us next week – I'd imagined we'd have you with us for some time to come. There's the harvest festival on Sunday week – I'm sure Jeanne was intending to rope you in for one thing and another.’

  ‘I have to get back – the term begins soon, you see. My supervisor – well, they must wonder what on earth has become of me. And in any case, you've been far too kind already, too hospitable. I don't know how to thank you enough.’

  ‘I'm afraid what with one thing and another you've not had all that much time to put in on those papers. They've been of some interest, I hope?’

  Dieter said, ‘Oh yes, extremely interesting.’

  The day before he was to leave he went to the attic to clear up the green baize table. His note-pad, with its single page of notes, was curled at the edges now, and dusty. Insects had died on the opened bundles of letters. Beyond the window, the landscape had slipped a notch further into autumn: there was a mist smoking up from the fields, and long curtains of old man's beard hanging down the wall beside the stable-yard. He tied up the letters again and put them away in the trunk, folded the card table, gathered up his things. He opened the window for a moment, with some vague notion of airing the place, and heard, faintly, Sally whistling as she did something out of sight in one of the loose boxes.