Strange Music (20 page)

Angela wondered whether it would be better to leave him to think it over now or to throw a few more thoughts his way . . . which, in the end, is what she decided to do. ‘It would be wonderful for Faith and Alex, too, to have the full run of this cottage. And Jasmine – poor little thing! She's been moved from pill box to . . . no! What's the saying? Pillar to post! To belong to The Tribe would transform her.'

‘Why don't Faith and Alex buy the Tithe Barn, then? They could easily afford it.'

‘Oh, Felix! D'you think they're not already considering it? The part that should be your studio would make a wonderful indoor parking place for an Aston Martin, a Jaguar, and whatever van they buy as a runaround. People will be standing about over there, admiring those cars, when they should be admiring your sculptures. But there! I've said my say and I leave it to you. You won't hear another word from me.'

She hadn't left the room above twenty seconds when she returned: ‘Faith comes back from Italy next Wednesday. We have a clear run until then.' She turned away once more . . . but added over her shoulder, ‘Possibly.'

Two minutes later she was back again. ‘I've said nothing about what it would mean to
me
to have a fully equipped electronic workshop. Things are
really
happening in the field of electronic and synthesized music.'

And finally her voice drifted back into the studio as she climbed the stairs: ‘I can just picture you a year from now – pressing your nose against the back window of the studio, squeezing round a sculpture that barely fits here, cursing those cars and all the space they aren't even using.'

In her nursery upstairs Pippin began to grizzle – as she always did on waking.

‘And now we've woken her up with all this unnecessary discussion!'

A short while later, as she sang Pippin back to finish her afternoon nap, walking back and forth across the nursery, she glanced out of the window and saw Felix pacing the distance from the edge of the Dower House grounds to the nearest corner of the Tithe Barn . . . then onward to the pair of windows she had suggested swapping with the barn door . . . and then he passed out of sight as, no doubt, he went round the far side to look at the door itself. Just before he vanished he turned and waved to her. Love, she reminded herself, was once an unaffordable luxury.

When he returned, she resolved to say nothing, knowing her silence would irk him. But when they climbed into bed that night, and he still hadn't spoken, she knew she'd not sleep until he had.

‘Well?' she prompted.

He reached down for the hem of her nightdress and started to raise it.

‘Well?' she insisted, gripping his wrist and holding him there.

‘I think . . .' he said, overpowering her grip and raising the hem a few inches more. ‘I think . . .' [and a few inches more] ‘. . . we should . . .' [and yet a few more] ‘. . . start another baby around now . . .'

‘Oh, no!' she cried.

‘. . . and make it our deadline to be living over there before it is born.'

It took a second or two for his meaning to sink in, but then all she could think of to say was: ‘Oh . . . yes!'

Thursday, 30 November 1950

‘Champagne!' Faith cried. ‘What's the occasion? Are we wetting Diana's head somewhat belatedly?'

‘No. We did that when you were in America.' Hilary handed her a glass. ‘It's hard to catch a time when you're in England these days.'

‘Or even Europe,' Alex added as he took his glass from Terence.

‘We're celebrating Terence's appointment to the chair of this new National Planning Council. So leave a smidgeon in your glass for a toast when the others arrive.'

‘I say!' Alex raised his glass to Terence and looked him up and down. ‘The destiny of the nation's now in your hands, eh!' In a stage whisper to Faith he added, ‘We must move all our funds abroad at the earliest opportunity.'

‘I'm not sure I should be drinking at all,' Faith said, laying a significant hand over her stomach.

‘Really? But how wonderful! When's it due?'

‘
Now
will you get married?' Terence asked.

‘Don't look at
me
!
'
Alex said.

‘Next May,' Faith said. ‘But there's many a slip—'

‘Oh, don't be so negative,' Hilary said. ‘It'll be a Festival of Britain baby.'

Alex said, ‘Eric says we can call it Fester. Or Festina.'

‘But will it be a Bullen-ffitch or a Findlater?' Terence asked again.

‘I have nothing against the name Findlater,' Faith told him. ‘But
Faith
Findlater? Find faith later? It's so trite.'

The Breits and Johnsons arrived, stamping slushy snow off their galoshes and rubbing some warmth back into their fingers. And they barely had glasses in their hands when the Palmers and Wilsons turned up, saying, ‘Isabella insists on driving down but they're having trouble starting the car.'

‘The Lagonda?' Willard asked.

‘No, the Morris. They wouldn't take the Lagonda out in this.'

‘Who's babysitting?' Terence asked.

‘May's got a stinking cold so Arthur's staying up with her,' Nicole said. ‘And Pippin's put down with our two. And Lena's there, of course.'

‘And Gracie has let Betty sleep over with us tonight,' Adam concluded. ‘She knows where to go to find a grown-up.'

Sally added, ‘It would be truer to say that Betty has badgered Gracie into agreeing to let her sleep over. The place is becoming more than her
spiritual
home. Are Chris and Anna coming?'

‘They were invited but they've gone to the Friday night hop at the Slade. I don't suppose they'll be back tonight at all.'

‘They have the key to Robert Street,' Felix said, holding up two sets of crossed fingers.

The Brandons arrived – on foot. ‘Bloody Morris!' Eric said. ‘Oh, for a decent
Japanese
car – if they make them, that is!'

Everyone laughed at that fantasy – a Japanese car, forsooth!

‘It's turning to snow,' Isabella said.

‘Did Ruth go down in the end?' Adam asked her.

‘I don't know. I just left her crying. It didn't sound too-too utterly sincere. Gracie was right – one worries far less with the second one than the first. What's the celebration?'

She was the only who
hadn't
said on arrival, ‘Ooh – champagne!,' as if it were special. And several there were thinking they hadn't noticed her worrying all that much about Calley, their firstborn, either.

Fourteen was too large a number to seat at the dining-room table, which was instead laid out, as Hilary put it, ‘like the smörgåsbord we just
lived
off on the ferry to Gothenburg last summer.' The party divided into parties, who helped themselves and sat or stood in knots in the kitchen, the parlour, and the living room.

‘Dare I ask how the Tithe Barn's coming along?' Alex asked Marianne.

She told him, ‘We applied for consent even before the purchase was completed, and got it. I think the Hertford planners liked the idea of one of their buildings being featured in the
AR
– especially as our interior doesn't even touch the medieval fabric. The builders have already swapped over the door and the two windows, so we start pouring concrete tomorrow. Seventy-five yards!'

‘Reinforced?'

‘As we go. Double the depth where Felix might want to put any weight of sculpture. It'll load to twenty tons a square foot.'

Faith drifted away. Alex was only tormenting himself that they had dithered too long; he still had forlorn fantasies of leaping out of bed in one of Sally and Marianne's cedarwood boxes, perched on bright aluminium scaffolding, and coming out to stand on the balcony and gaze lovingly down on two or three aristocratic sports cars. ‘We'll get the second galleys for the last chapter of the fashion book on Monday,' she told Isabella. ‘I'll have a set sent straight round to
Vogue
.
So we're going to be screaming for those last few illustrations before next Friday. Otherwise you and Eric have done bloody well.'

‘Eric?' she asked as if this collaboration were complete news to her. ‘He was just a pain in the neck.'

To the extent that he always managed to cut a thousand words of your text down to the planned four hundred and fifty without losing any of the meat, Faith thought, but she said, ‘You must lead a charmed life at
Vogue
. From our perspective at Manutius, yours was the ideal partnership. Fogel's pleased, anyway.'

‘How's life treating Stackaprole and Stackaprole?' Eric asked. ‘Is yours higher than Willard's or is his higher than yours?'

Adam no longer rose to the bait. ‘We prefer to measure it in terms of the green space all around. Theo loves your
Bruno the Piebald Polar Bear
, by the way. He goes off to sleep murmuring, piebald . . . piebald . . . It's sweet.'

‘I suggested a sequel in which Bruno marries Brunette – another piebald polar bear – and they have one black, one white, and two piebald cubs. Mendelian genetics for preschool toddlers. You can't start too young, you know.'

‘And?'

‘They're actually considering it! People are starting to take me seriously – it's
awful
.
'

‘When we drove with the kids down to Cornwall last summer,' Willard said, ‘we stopped at Stonehenge and had a picnic, right in the circle. It was spooky, sitting on those ancient stones, eating sandwiches and thinking of all that history. Then we went over Dartmoor – by moonlight – man, that was really something. Except we had to stop five or six times for Marianne to get out and open gates for me to drive through and then she had to shut them behind us. Two of them were already open. Left that way by drivers who couldn't care less. I'd have driven on, too, but Marianne, being Swedish of course, said, “No. They've got that notice saying please shut the gate behind you,” so we did the decent, responsible, upright thing. But I tell you, those couldn't-care-less guys are the real public benefactors. If we all copied them, those farmers would scrap the gates and install cattle grids,
PDQ
. It's crazy – that's the main highway, the
only
highway, across Dartmoor – barred by five gates!'

Faith said she'd been along main roads worse than that in Wales.

Tony and Nicole could trump them all with one in the Highlands.

All were agreed – in a very British way – that British roads were nothing but a joke.

‘My aunt in Paris,' Nicole said, ‘thinks they've ended rationing completely in Germany and soon, too, in France.'

‘They could do the same here,' Willard said. ‘What have the British managed to take off rations this year?
Soap!
If we didn't have this communist government, we could have completely eliminated—'

‘Socialist, not communist,' Terence butted in. ‘Socialism is what communism aspires to achieve, so it's even worse from your point of view. Communism is when they put up traffic lights in every street but they're all set to red. Socialism is when they take them all away . . .'

‘. . . and the streets
run
red,' Eric put in. ‘Sorry, Nicole, it was just too good to miss. But you needn't worry, Willard. The Tories will get back soon enough. Then bloated plutocrats like you will inherit the earth. But you'd better make the most of it because I read the other day that we've only got enough oil left to last another twenty years.'

Terence laughed. ‘We've
always
only got enough oil for twenty years. The oil companies have no commercial incentive to look farther into the future than that.'

‘So what does being chairman of this National Planning Council mean?' Marianne asked him.

‘With this socialist government?' he said. ‘Mainly it's telling them what they can't afford to do. If the Tories get back in . . .'

‘. . . they'll sack all you academics,' Willard said cheerfully, ‘and replace you with entrepreneurs who know how to . . .'

‘. . . how to rerun the Great Depression,' Eric said. ‘Only more thoroughly. This time they'll get it right.'

Willard turned on him. ‘Whose side are you on, Eric? You make this great play of sitting on the fence. Time you came down.'

‘I'm on Isabella's side – as always.' He smiled at her as if he hadn't known she was passing by.

‘You're eating too much,' she said. ‘They can't let those trousers out any further.'

‘Did you listen to
In Town Tonight
last Saturday?' Tony asked. ‘Poor John Snagge! I'm sure the editors shove in one item each time to flummox him.'

‘What was it?' Sally asked.

‘I heard that,' Eric said. ‘Some modern poet with an appalling cockney accent that I'm sure wasn't genuine. And his poem ran something like –
When I'm dead don't bury me down
.
Just saw me up and feed my hound
.
And tell him this as he'll snarl and roar – There's more where this came from – over there on the floor . . .
Something like that. You can just imagine what poor old Snagge made of it! He said, “Oh, you've got a hound, you say. What sort?” And the poet said, “No, it's figgrative. It's a pome.”'

‘I heard that, too,' Tony said. And then all he could think of to ask was, ‘Do you think you're going to die soon, then? And the poet said, Yeah, probbly.'

‘There's a fundamental point about it, though.' Alex joined the group. ‘That particular item was slipped in as a last-minute time filler, when they saw they were running short, so it wasn't from a script.'

‘Pretty obviously!' Eric said. ‘Why have a script, anyway?'

‘Because Auntie still has this absurd rule that we can't broadcast the spoken word – the genuinely spoken word, off the cuff. When Stewart MacPherson does
Down Your Way,
for instance, he meets a number of interesting and important people in the district and interviews them –
twice
. The first time, he's asking questions and they're answering just as they would in ordinary conversation. Then the producer turns it into a script – question, answer, question, answer – only this time they're reading it. So they take – for example:
They tell me you've lived here all your life
?
'S'right
.
Born in that 'ouse there, see – with the hydrangeas
.
Still live there
.
Never moved
. And they turn it into:
I understand you've lived here all your life, Mister Smith? Oh, yes, indeed, I should say so – man and boy
. And so on. And the poor bugger has to read it out – lines that would tax the powers of a top-class actor. That's why it always sounds so fake.'