Life in the West (16 page)

Squire had slowed his pace. Now he halted. ‘No, Willie’s a fine man. If he’s disappointed, it’s because most people end up disappointed if they had any guts in them originally. They start out in life with high hopes and high ambitions which maybe circumstances prevent them from fulfilling, or they can’t overcome their own limitations. Uncle Willie never quite achieved the career he wished for himself. That isn’t to say that he hasn’t been an honourable man, and served others well thereby. I admire Uncle Willie and won’t hear a word against him. I was too quick with him.’

Dobson put his hands in his pockets. ‘You make me ashamed of myself,’ he said, grinning and looking far from ashamed. ‘But I have to listen to Uncle Willie holding forth a lot more than you do.’

‘It was good of you to come after me.’ He clapped the young man’s arm. ‘If you’ve got time to spare, visit the Castle exhibition with me.’

They crossed Bedford Street and climbed the many steps up to Norwich Castle. Squire got out of breath more easily than once he did. After a word with the keeper, who was an old friend of Squire’s, the two men went into the exhibition. It was crowded with tourists. This was not Squire’s favourite way of viewing any exhibition, but he had been abroad when it visited London.

They regarded objects which had come from the Siberian Collection of Peter the Great. Many articles had been preserved by cold, as articles in Egypt were preserved by the dry atmosphere. There were decorations of wood and leather which had once adorned the horses of nomads. All that remained of the dreaded Scythians rested here behind glass: a woollen pigtail case, part of a boot, a child’s fur coat dating from five centuries before Christ. Chance survivors of their culture, these artifacts were beyond price; isolated from it, they were inscrutable. Whilst the permutations of chance which brought them to this foreign place were incalculable.

Since Nicholas Dobson still seemed eager for company, Squire took him to his favourite pub, The Pyed Bull on the Market Square, for lunch after the exhibition. The pub was crowded. They bumped into two of Dobson’s friends, both of whom were cheerful, out of work, and engaged in touring the country picketing nuclear power plants. They regarded nuclear power as too dangerous to use. When Squire offered them a few statistics on the excellent safety record of the industry, they listened politely, smiling a bit, and then went on enthusiastically about the success they had had at Dungeness.

‘There are many reasons why the country needs to develop nuclear power,’ Squire said. ‘I’m sure you know the arguments, and I won’t bore you with them, but it is at present the best practical alternative to coal and oil.’

‘We’ll just have to go without oil when it runs out,’ one of the young men said. He wore a T-shirt with the words ‘Sid Vicious’ across the chest, but was otherwise well-mannered. ‘Get rid of all the cars spoiling towns.’

‘And the lorries, trains, planes, and ships delivering the goods we need,’ Squire said.

‘There’ll be something else,’ said the other young man. ‘Something always turns up, doesn’t it. We’ll develop Uri Geller powers, telepathy, telekinesis… The powers of the human mind are unlimited.’

Almost despite himself, Squire said, ‘Unfortunately, history gives no indication that that is so. The mind has its limitations — it’s almost impossible to pass on the fruits of experience, for instance. Civilizations make mistakes and fossilize and go under. If we continue to impede latest developments by picketing nuclear plants, or pretend that things turn up of their own accord instead of resulting from hard work and applied intelligence, then we shall go down the drain too.’

‘We’re down the drain already, aren’t we?’ The two young men laughed and soon took their leave.

‘Sorry about that, Tom,’ Dobson said. ‘I knew they’d annoy you. They were doing it half as a lark.’

‘I wasn’t annoyed. They told me what they felt. I told them what I felt, I suppose they regard me as an old-fashioned old man with silly ideas. All the same, you observe that the pendulum has swung dramatically — ten years ago, the man in my position would have been conservative and against nuclear plants. The youngsters would have been calling for innovation. But there, neither you nor your friends could know what the pendulum was doing ten years ago. You were still at school.’

‘We were learning about the hazards of nuclear power.’ He drained his glass.

‘Those hazards have been greatly exaggerated — mainly by the Left for its own interests.’

Dobson smiled. ‘I don’t want to get onto politics, not my favourite subject. Thanks. Let me buy you another beer.’

‘No, thanks. I must get home. Nick, it’s sad that your generation should be against such things as nuclear power. My generation believed in the future.’

‘It’s not so much us that’s against it as ecology itself. We want to save the world, not ruin it. You can’t go on forever piling technology on technology with no thought for the consequences. Surely you can see that.’

‘Nor can you continue to strip a country of military or economic weapons without suffering the inevitable consequences.’

‘People just aren’t patriotic any more in the old way. We’ve learnt better. You are fond of talking about new developments, why can’t you see that one development is the junking of old emotions like patriotism which did so much damage? The world is really becoming one — something you talk about but can’t understand. I can feel as much sympathy for an oppressed Greek or Chilean as I can for my next-door neighbour.’

‘But, Nick, you probably know damn all about the actual problems of people in Greece or Chile. You’ve just read a paragraph or two in some newspaper or seen something on TV — ’

Dobson look angry. ‘I have every respect for you, Tom, but I’m not going to sit here listening to you knock down everything I say. I have a dream of a better, fairer world. Well, let me have it. You told Willie that you believed in dreams, well, let me believe in mine.’

‘If you’re referring to Teresa’s dream, that happened to be a nightmare, and my point was that it was difficult to interpret. So is yours. I believe yours is a dream of evading real responsibilities. It would be nice in a perfect world, to coast along thinking things are somehow improving of their own accord just because you and your pals hope things will work out that way, but in fact the world is filled with powerful enemies who have a rough way with dreams, are quite prepared to step in and impose their own nightmares.’

‘I don’t believe that either, any more than you believe in my sympathies for the Greeks.’

They parted five minutes later, rather stiffly, and went their different ways.

Squire went to The Nag’s Head and phoned Laura Nye at her London address. He could hear the bell ringing in her flat, but it was not answered. On the following Tuesday he was due to go to London to film the last episode of ‘Frankenstein Among the Arts’, and would see Laura then. Meanwhile, he could only speculate on how she was passing the weekend, as he drove home.

The road north from Norwich, which casually followed the course of the River Wensum, was full of traffic. Squire switched on the radio and drove slowly, blanking out his thoughts by concentrating on the pleasure of the peaceful summer day. Nobody seemed in a particular hurry to reach the coast. Families were going to picnic and swim, no world was dying, there was no invisible and fateful drama such as Solzenhitsyn envisaged being enacted in these unguarded hours. No need for apprehension.

The first sight of Hartisham when coming from the south was the ruins of Hartisham Priory. The priory had been founded in the year 1131. It had once enshrined a relic of the Holy Cross, and had been frequently visited by King Henry III. Now little was left but the ruins of the gatehouse and the south wall, faced with knapped flint. Lumps of masonry stood here and there about the site, now in the care of the Ministry of Works. A few holiday-makers were inspecting the ruins. A child ran laughing through a stone door where the monks had walked in prayer. Squire drove slowly past, then stopped the car on the verge. He walked back to an ice-cream van parked near the ruin and bought three large tubs of strawberry whirl as a surprise for Teresa and the girls.

When he drove up to Pippet Hall, it was to find everything silent, and all windows and doors closed. Carrying the ice creams carefully, he unlocked the front door and went in. He called. There was no response. One of the cats paraded down the stairs, giving a miaow at every fourth step.

In his study, he found a note lying on his desk. He set the plastic cartons down in order to read it, recognizing Teresa’s untidy handwriting as he did so. It was brief.

Dear Tom,

I have to go away on a business matter that has cropped up. I am leaving the children with your sister at Blakeney. My mother will stay in Grantham. No doubt Matilda will look after you.

T.

He sat down at the desk, studying the sheet of notepaper, which looked all the stranger because it bore the Pippet Hall address embossed on it. The cat came to sit beside his chair, looking up at him expectantly before turning to lick its left shoulder. The sound of its rough tongue on the fur was the only noise in the room.

At one moment Squire looked up swiftly, thinking he saw a black figure at the french windows, peering in. A bird had flown by. Nobody was there. He was alone.

An early summer day, the sunshine faint on the brickwork of the house. The clumps of rhododendron bushes, which concealed the yard and garages from the front drive, spread a wedge of shadow across the most easterly corner of the house, shading the dining-room window; that window reflected a parade of people approaching the house, and dissected their figures among its glazing bars.

The parade comprised people of various periods, men and women and children. There were men in the three-cornered hats, knee-breeches and tight clothes of the eighteenth century, women in the high-waisted, low-necked dresses of the Regency, or in crinolines with shawls in a mid-Victorian fashion. There were ladies with shingled hair in frocks with low belts, and gentlemen in lounge suits and spats, together with chaps and chicks in jeans and leather jackets. All climbed the steps of the front porch and went into the house, the door of which stood wide to receive them.

Squire asked rhetorically, ‘What is man’s greatest invention? Some would say the Wheel, or the control of Fire, or cooking, or perhaps the domestication of animals. Some might say the internal combustion engine or the rockets that have taken men across space to the Moon. All these things have been immensely important in the rise of mankind. The list comprises
things
because our culture tends to think in terms of things, although we act in terms of style.

‘Not the least of the great inventions of the last two centuries is what you are looking at now, on the other side of this lawn. It is not just a house but an embodiment of style, the style of the Enlightenment which still plays its role in shaping our present.’

The viewpoint moved nearer to take in more clearly the house and the figures entering it.

‘There’s a vicar going in, one of Christ’s representatives on Earth. He is walking through a doorway which derives its style from a great portico shrine. He probably doesn’t care about that, as he goes in to sit beside a hearth designed after a miniature triumphal arch or an altar to the Lares. Do the farmer and his wife over there realize that the facade of the house is conceived in terms of a Classical Order, with the windows on its three floors gradated in height? Does that rather corpulent man — perhaps he is a successful draper — have a clear notion of the ideas of the Italian Andrea Palladio or of the English Lords Burlingham and Shaftesbury? And perhaps that young lady with the patched jeans doesn’t realize that she is entering a belated expression of the Renaissance of Roman Architecture on English soil.

‘To these people, and to most of the rest of us, this is simply a comfortable Georgian house. There are still thousands of them of all shapes and sizes all over the country, and the style has been imitated on various scales ever since: for almost two hundred years almost everyone had wanted to live in a Georgian house. What all these people do know is that this extraordinary stylistic phenomenon, which imposes on the domiciles of a small Protestant northern island the temple architecture of a long- vanished heathen Mediterranean culture, results in the most pleasant kind of house ever invented.’

The viewpoint had moved to the interior.

‘The Georgian house is sensibly laid out, easier to maintain than any previous style of home, comfortable, adaptable, and
homely.
“Home” is an English word, for which Palladio’s fellow-countrymen, for instance, have no word; and the Georgian house is a major contribution to civilization and stability. One finds it nowhere but in England and Scotland, and Dublin, and its imitations everywhere.

‘We cannot live without myth. This house enshrines a myth, the myth that life is subject to constant improvement. The Georgian house is a product not only of architectural orders but of the concept of Order itself, to which the early eighteenth century heartily subscribed.

‘Having lived all my life in this particular house, I feel qualified to say that it does promote orderly conduct in the lives lived within its walls — or rather it tends to promote order among the disorderly jumble which constitutes the average life. It doesn’t enforce order, class order, like a Victorian house. It is more than a house: it is a style.