Other People's Worlds Page 2

  ‘No, not a weed,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I haven’t pulled it up.’ He smiled, causing the angularities of his face to soften. The way he’d held the hosta leaf towards her had reminded her of another, or a continued, theatrical interpretation, as if greater significance should be attached to the gesture than the gesture itself implied. From being casually borne, the leaf had abruptly become precious, proffered on the palms of both his hands, a talisman or a dagger. Had he been a royal personage as he passed among the circular rose-beds, or a disaffected duke lost in melancholy and plotting? He couldn’t help it, it wasn’t affectation. Nor could she help her gossipy speculations.

  ‘I’ll bring us tea,’ he said, caressing the hosta leaf with a fingernail. He smiled again and turned to make his way back to the house. His manner invariably inspired pleasantries. He might easily have stayed beside her, listening to her talk about hostas for another ten minutes or so, his weight on one leg and then imperceptibly shifted to the other. He had a way of leaning against the Rayburn stove in the kitchen, no trace of boredom affecting his features, while he absorbed Mrs Spanners’s chatter about Princess Margaret. On one of his first visits to the house he’d revealed that his parents had died when he was still a child, both of them in the same railway crash. In his pensive moods there seemed to Mrs Anstey to be, just now and again, traces of that loss lurking in his light-blue eyes.

  Lucky in her first marriage, Julia might as easily have ended up a second time with someone awful. There’d been, for instance, Mrs Enright’s elderly brother-in-law, and weekend men at Sunday cocktail parties, all of them in Mrs Anstey’s view unsuitable. There’d been a restorer of pictures, a man with an unkempt beard who’d settled briefly in the neighbourhood, whose name was foreign and difficult. ‘Professor Doings’ he was familiarly called and to her mother’s horror Julia had taken exception to this, claiming that the man was being denigrated, which of course wasn’t in the least the case. He was a lone and untidy individual, his ties stained with food droppings, his suits a mass of creases. He and Julia began to have coffee together in the Bay Tree Café, which mildly became a talking point in the town. It wasn’t apparent at the time that he was just another of her lame ducks, of whom there was quite a collection.

  Thankfully dismissing the memory of this man, Mrs Anstey watched the slow progress of the river. Philadelphus blossom floated by, and then a tattered red rose. Such delicate remains might not reach the house called Anstey’s Mill, eight miles from the town, which for so long had been her home; but more robust debris would safely make the journey, through the mill-race empty of a wheel, through the mill-yard and the meadows beyond. Sixty years ago she had been brought to Anstey’s Mill as a bride, to a house she had adored, different in every way from the one she lived in now. She turned her head to examine the grey stuccoed back of Swan House, its narrow tallness and the semi-circular conservatory that jutted into the garden beneath an arrangement of windows set in pairs, the top two almost reaching a slated roof. She envisaged features she could not see: the bow windows of the house’s façade the gateless pillars standing high between a cobbled courtyard and the street, the white swan in a niche above the hall door, wistaria in profusion. It had been called the plainest house in Stone St Martin, built without the assistance of an architect in 1871.

  The other house was a field centre now, devoted to the study of geography, but externally it hadn’t changed. A long avenue of beech trees, branches interweaving overhead, led to its two storeys of Cotswold stone, set among lawns. Its roof was prettily tiled, its garden full of little corners. Behind it, close to where the river flowed, a railway line – used once upon a time to convey grain from the mill-yard to Cheltenham – had been removed, leaving behind a long straight path of grass on which Julia as a child had trotted a pony called Dandy. In 1954 Mrs Anstey’s husband – whose portrait hung above the mantelpiece of the drawing-room in Swan House – had succumbed to bankruptcy due to his own mismanagement, and had died a year later.

  Not wishing to think about any of that, Mrs Anstey tried to read but found that the past she had stirred still nagged a little: her husband had had stubborn ideas about the Anstey family, she herself should have firmly spoken out, the bankruptcy had been ridiculous and avoidable. Her role in the end had been to hold grimly on to her jewellery, refusing to admit to the bailiffs that it even existed. She was proud that she had done so, that what she had salvaged was now occasionally worn by Julia and would eventually pass to Henrietta and Katherine. There weren’t many pieces for them to share, and they weren’t even particularly valuable, but at least they constituted something: almost all that remained of a marriage and a house, and the life that had gone with both. That they were also a reminder of a family down on its luck didn’t matter, for time had created its perspective and the nagging always ceased when she thought her way through the change in circumstances. She had done so now and picking up her book again, she read with more success. Ten minutes later Francis returned with a tray of tea, and macaroons and coffee cake.

  Social occasions at Swan House were not frequent but whenever one occurred Mrs Spanners presented herself, unbidden, in the kitchen. Her henna-shaded hair was always freshly dyed, her sixty-year-old face decorated with eye-shadow and lipstick. She smelt of Love-in-a-Mist, her favourite.

  This evening she wore a cherry-coloured dress, precisely matched by cherry-coloured shoes and fingernails, and a cherry-coloured wisp of handkerchief tucked beneath the strap of her watch. In the kitchen, which was high-ceilinged and faintly pink and which easily absorbed a large oak dresser and a table that proportionally matched it, she hummed a dance tune of her youth as she arranged cocktail tit-bits on Wedgwood-patterned plates. The kitchen also contained the Rayburn against which Francis liked to lean, a fridge and a washing machine, and blue-painted cupboards built into the walls, on either side of the sink and draining-boards. After fifteen years’ service in the house Mrs Spanners considered this spacious room her very personal domain and if extra work had to be done there, such as that entailed by a party, she liked to have a hand in it. In Mrs Anstey’s opinion she held pride of place among Julia’s lame but greedy ducks: fifteen years ago Mrs Spanners had been on her uppers, a pathetic coughing woman, in a fix because her husband, Charle, had lost his job as a farm labourer and could not find another. Julia had taken both of them under her wing, offering Mrs Spanners a morning’s work every Monday, and helping Charle to a position with the Forestry Commission. Neither had ever looked back.

  ‘Oh lovely, Mrs Spanners,’ Julia said, coming into the kitchen with her shopping and noticing at once the arranged tit-bits.

  ‘Are we having the little sausages then? I could easily fry a few up.’

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t bought any. Very few people are coming, actually.’

  ‘I just thought something hot. I could nip back for a half of chipolatas I have in the fridge. Easy as anything.’

  ‘Oh no, no. No, thank you very much, Mrs Spanners.’

  ‘Very nice your hair is. I was saying to Charle dinnertime I must go in for a change of style one of these days. Thought maybe I’d go short again.’

  ‘Oh, I think it suits you the way it is.’

  ‘Charle says it suits. But of course you never know with men, do you? Not where there’s money involved.’

  Julia laughed since it was expected of her. She put away the things she’d bought. Mrs Spanners stood on a chair to reach down the glasses which she knew from experience were the right ones. She wiped them with a tea-cloth in case they should be dusty, still talking about the shortcomings of men as arbiters where hair and clothes were concerned. ‘Like that beige pleated I was after. See right through him you could, the way he said it didn’t suit on the hips.’

  ‘I think I’d better change,’ Julia said, interrupting this flow. What she meant, and felt shy of saying, was that she must go and find Francis. It was nice, his wanting to garden. It was nice the trouble he took over her mother and Mrs Span
ners, so attentively listening to her mother’s evocation of the past and Mrs Spanners’s speculations about the life of Princess Margaret. It was nice, as well, that he had so enthusiastically fallen in with her own desire to go to Florence for their honeymoon. Henrietta and Katherine had spent some time in Italy, and at one time of her life Mrs Anstey had travelled to the cities of Tuscany and Umbria every autumn, but Julia never had. For as long as she could remember, her mother had been pressing photographs and postcard reproductions on her, memories of well-to-do days in Perugia and Urbino, Florence and Arezzo. Julia had established her own favourites among all the della Robbias, and had become particularly attached to Donatello’s summery David and Lorenzo di Credi’s Adoration of the Shepherds. Are they gossiping, she had wondered in a diary, those two angels at the back? She had saved up to make the journey herself, intending to take her mother with her as a guide; that it should be Francis with whom she would wander now, who would stroll with her among the lemon trees of Fiesole and in the cool of Santa Croce, seemed like a luxury she didn’t deserve. Yet it was fitting that it should be he, for in spite of Mrs Anstey’s appreciation of the Italian Renaissance and the religious faith it honoured, her agnosticism remained. Julia had never revealed to her the original plan she had had for this journey, nor mentioned the savings she had accumulated in order to implement it. She was glad of that now.

  Further delayed by Mrs Spanners in the kitchen, she found herself dwelling again on the circumstances of being in love at forty-seven. Was it because her passion more properly belonged to an earlier period of her life that she experienced such impatience? She wondered, but didn’t know. All she could say to herself was that even on the very first occasion, eighteen months ago in the lounge of the Queen’s Hotel in Cheltenham, Francis Tyte had been different from all other men. She had known that as soon as he’d spoken, as soon as he’d smiled and slightly inclined his head. And weeks afterwards, when he’d visited Swan House, that special quality had been bit by bit confirmed. His life had been shattered by tragedy, but it wasn’t from this wounding or from his gentleness that the flickers of excitement emanated. They came mysteriously, from the mystery that made him what he was. And what would have happened, she wondered, if Roger had not died? Would she still, in middle age, have fallen in love again? There was the thought as well – wretched and unwelcome – that her marriage to Francis would have a quality that hers and Roger’s hadn’t possessed because of the shared Catholicism. She hated all this disloyalty to Roger’s memory, and felt she deserved the guilt that pursued it, spoiling the perfection. Roger was like an old brown photograph now, young in his uniform, no longer real, and yet he mattered more than ever.

  ‘You’ve only got twenty-five minutes,’ Mrs Spanners reminded her, nibbling an asparagus canapé, ‘if you’re thinking of doing your face.’

  But Julia postponed attention to her face. She found Francis among the raspberry canes, working with a hoe. He put it down in order to embrace her, to admire the handiwork of Diane, and to tell her he’d quite painfully missed her.

  An hour later the guests stood on the river bank beneath the tulip tree. Mrs Spanners bustled about with cocktail food, Francis passed among them with a glass jug full of gin and vermouth, and Julia with a decanter of sherry. Mrs Anstey remained in her high-backed wicker chair.

  Hands were raised against the evening sun, backs were turned on it as it came low across the lawn. Voices chattered, faces smiled. There were a dozen people on the lawn, including the inmates of Swan House and Mrs Spanners. Six cars stood on the cobbles in front of the house. In one of them a forgotten radio whispered, relaying to no one the everyday adventures of The Archers.

  Francis was being a waiter tonight, Mrs Anstey thought: obligingly he had lost himself in the role, sustaining the demands of all these people he hardly knew. ‘Cox’s,’ a man with a tanned face said, going on to praise at length this brand of apple, and then regaled her with Laxton’s shortcomings.

  Not paying attention, she next watched Mrs Spanners. It was silly that a cocktail party could not be given without her presence. The only real labour there ever was was the washing of glasses, which due to the woman’s surreptitious intake of alcohol tended to end up broken. As well as which, she had a way of engaging the guests in quite lengthy conversations, retailing to them the gossip gleaned by her husband in the Three Swallows or mentioning Princess Margaret. ‘Who on earth is that extraordinary woman?’ a stranger to the house had once inquired of Mrs Anstey.

  Her glance passed from Mrs Spanners’s painted face to the undecorated one of Father Lavin. It was a grey face, small and tidy above his clerical attire. The white tip of a handkerchief protruded from the upper pocket of his jacket, his jet-black vest bore not a speck of dust or fluff, his black shoes gleamed. Without straining her eyes to peer at him Mrs Anstey knew all that, for the priest was never different. ‘Oh yes, yes,’ she heard him murmur, his soft Cork accent easy to pick out among the other voices. ‘Yes, I’ve always rather liked Sweet William.’

  A girl in a red dress, who had brought a whippet on a lead, laughed and chatted with a woman whose name Mrs Anstey had once been told but had not managed to retain. Beside them young Father Dawne was tall and long-armed, with a shock of pale hair falling into his eyes. Dr Tameguard was different with his social air turned on.

  The voices clashed, fragments of conversations wafting easily to Mrs Anstey, for she had no trouble with deafness. Someone spoke of racing pigeons, inquiring if they were raced for gain, if betting took place. Most certainly they were, another voice replied. Breeding and gambling were an industry, the sums involved sizeable. Birds had been known to race from Estepona to Cheltenham, and there was laughter after a joke about a pigeon was told.

  Such gatherings had been familiar to Mrs Anstey ever since she’d come from Anstey’s Mill to live in the town. Voices and faces had changed with the years, but the essence that remained was similar. ‘No good whatsoever,’ was another verdict on another brand of apple, and then she noticed that the whippet had strayed from its owner’s side and was rooting in a flowerbed. A long-jawed woman was making a point about money, that nowadays it was in the wrong pockets. It was the Englishness of everything that hadn’t changed, Mrs Anstey reflected, the leisurely standing about of the middle classes in evening sunshine, the Gloucestershire landscape that stretched away on the other side of the river. The owner of the whippet called her dog. ‘Baloney!’ she seemed to cry, her voice almost lost in the hubbub. Mrs Spanners was swaying a little now, Julia was hastening to Dr Tameguard and his fat wife. Accepting more cocktail mixture from Francis, Father Lavin inclined his head in a sideways bow. Young Father Dawne was laughing.

  Her long association with the Anstey family had caused Mrs Anstey to become used to priests. Her husband had regularly attended the Church of St Martin, with which the Ansteys had connections that were pecuniary as well as religious. At Anstey’s Mill there had been different priests in the past, and at Julia’s convent there had been nuns. Mrs Anstey had always managed to get on perfectly well with these spiritual people, respecting their views and their beliefs just as she had respected her husband’s and still respected her daughter’s desire to keep the Ansteys’ Catholic tradition going. It was only that the whole notion of prayer, and of the son of a universal God made man in a miraculous way, seemed more than a little absurd. She thought so now, watching Father Lavin with his cocktail glass, yet conceded that he brought comfort and consolation into lives that needed them. And personally she counted him as a friend.

  ‘Beauty of Bath of course,’ the man beside her said, after which the stream of information about apples ceased. The long-jawed woman came to talk to her, and then the owner of the whippet. Others came too, a youngish couple who lived in someone’s gate-lodge, the wife of a man who’d retired from a job in Africa, another man who appeared to be drunk. In the end she was left alone in her wicker chair while Julia and Francis saw the guests through the house and into their motor-cars, and Mrs
Spanners clattered among the glasses in the kitchen.

  Something worried Mrs Anstey quite suddenly then, something formless, like a fragment from a dream: she couldn’t establish what it was. She poked about in her mind, but could only find the same sensation of unease. Had it to do with the gathering on the lawn? Had it been there earlier? Had it possibly to do with the distant sound of Mrs Spanners washing up in the kitchen, an elderly worry about breakages? It made her feel stupid that she couldn’t track down its source. She closed her eyes, searching for it in the house she didn’t care for.

  In spite of its bow-windowed façade Swan House was always dusky and it seemed to Mrs Anstey as she tried to trace her worry through its rooms that this dimness covered a multitude of sins. The Indian carpet and red-striped wallpaper in the drawing-room were so faded that they needed to be replaced, the springs of a sofa and several armchairs needed attention also. Only a set of Redouté roses, in slender mahogany frames, brought the room to life; like Mrs Anstey’s jewellery, they had been filched from the grasp of bailiffs. The dining-room, low-ceilinged and green, was friendly; the hall was almost dark, its pitchpine staircase marching squarely out of it, up to landings that were shadowy also. From the depths of other shadows blurred images appeared in Mrs Anstey’s mind: a brown marble paperweight, brass candlesticks from the dining-table, the swan in its niche above the hall door, the portrait of her husband, seeming stern above an ormolu clock on the drawing-room mantelpiece. The swan regularly became discoloured and had to be repainted; her husband had not been stern; appearances were nothing. ‘We shall be happy here,’ her husband whispered, leading her through the rooms of the other house, the home of his family since 1548.