Strange Music (21 page)

‘I guess I don't listen that much,' Willard said. ‘Why do they do it?'

‘Fear,' Alex said. ‘Fear that someone will say something libellous. Or worse – slip in a few words of our Anglo-Saxon vernacular. Also it's a leftover from the war, where people might have let some hush-hush cat out of the bag. But we'll have to stop it. There's no real life in anything we do that's supposed to be a slice of real life.'

‘You should listen to Jack Jackson on Radio Luxembourg,' Marianne said. ‘He's not reading from a script. You're going to need people like him who can just talk.'

‘And
AFN
,' Willard added. ‘Their interviews with
GI
s are recorded just the way they speak – and they blur out any naughty words.'

‘Not all of them,' Eric said. ‘I tuned in on
AFN
the other night and an exceedingly hoarse man was yelling at the top of his voice –
If Ah had mah ahms 'n legs cut off – Ah wud craaawl on bleedin' stumps – to the body of the Laaawd – who is mah Sayvyeh! Halleluyah!
And they didn't blur out a single word. Maybe comedy's different, though.'

And so the ashtrays filled, and were emptied, and were filled again; the wine bottles emptied; the liqueurs came out; and the plates that had held some very English smörgåsar were stacked in the Belfast sink, and Tony cut up some envelopes rescued from the salvage basket, making little white squares on each of which he wrote a letter of the alphabet or a number from zero to nine, finally arranging them in alphabetical order, in a two-foot circle on the newly cleared table. When he asked for a smallish tumbler, Terence said, ‘Oh, not this! Surely we're all rationalists and humanists here?'

‘I've seen some pretty amazing things in India,' Alex said.

‘Yes, it's truly wonderful,' Eric agreed, ‘how swiftly their ancient spirit guides were able to master the Graeco-Roman alphabet, and I'm told it coincided almost exactly with the circulation of coinage with Queen Victoria's head on it.'

‘I'll join in,' Willard challenged, ‘if the . . . whatever-it-is can tell us what the initial A in my name stands for.'

Everyone laughed because, of course, they all knew by now that it stood for nothing – like the S in Harry S Truman, which was why there was no ‘period,' as Willard called it, after the letter.

‘It
may not know that,' he said, ‘and don't anyone here say it out loud.'

And then it turned out that not everyone knew it. Hilary for one. And Angela – who didn't even know he had a middle initial. And Nicole said she had forgotten what name it stood for. So they sat at roughly 120 degrees to each other and placed a finger on the base of the upturned wine glass.

‘What now?' Hilary asked.

Tony explained: ‘If there's a spirit in the room, it will enter your fingers and move the glass to spell out Willard's middle name, one letter at a time.'

For a good thirty seconds nothing happened; they were just about to give up when the glass moved – jerkily, hesitantly, zigzagging out from the centre of the circle toward the A. Then, still uncertainly, to the S . . .

‘Ass?' Eric guessed.

Everyone shushed him.

H. The movements were becoming more decisive. L . . . A . . . N . . .

‘My God – no!' Willard said, in little more than a whisper.

‘What?' Several voices chorused.

D.

‘Ashland!' Willard said. ‘I was born in Ashland, New Hampshire. A one-horse town. A
part-time
one-horse town! Which of you guys knew that? Someone must have sneaked a peek at my birth registration. Who was moving that glass?'

All three denied moving it with any intention; each said it felt as if she was following the glass rather than pushing it, even when it moved directly away from her across the table.

‘It never occurred to me,' Willard said in amazement. ‘I'm going to have to ask Mom and Dad – did they put that A in my name for Ashland. And hey! My sister's name is—'

‘Don't say it!' Felix cried. ‘See if this so-called spirit knows that one.'

‘And I say we stop this right here. Right now,' Terence said, to general noises of disappointment and frustration. ‘We did this once at school. Five of us in the house sanitorium with measles, and we had an assistant matron who claimed to be a medium. And it ended up with the table lifting itself off the floor, with us standing up and all our hands on top.'

‘So you believe in it,' Felix said.

‘Of course not. I don't know what really happened there. A mass hallucination? All this . . . this . . . occult stuff is just playing tricks on the human mind – about which we know very little. And it's dangerous.'

‘OK!' Willard yielded. ‘We'll do it one evening
chez nous
.
My sister has an empty middle initial, just like me. And, it so happens, it's the same as the first letter of the town where
she
was born – which may or may not have been Ashland. But the secret stays with me. So I'll keep my hands off the glass and we'll see if this spirit can work it out.'

‘Can we play children's party games instead?' Isabella asked. ‘All the ones we played when we were children?'

Everyone turned to her in astonishment.

‘It may have escaped your notice,' she said, ‘but we will have fifteen birthday parties next year – that's just the children, not counting the adults. We can't play musical chairs, pass the parcel, blind-man's-buff, and pin the tail on the donkey at each and all of them.'

‘Fifteen?' Sally asked. ‘Are you sure?'

‘I'm assuming the Fergusons' three will come to most of ours, and most of ours will go to theirs, so we might as well count them in. And, actually, it'll be sixteen if Lena's Tommy is still with us.'

Seventeen, if Jasmine's included by then,
Alex thought but did not press the point.

Eyes vanished into skulls and fingers waved in the air as people anatomized the house and counted imaginary sleeping heads on imaginary pillows . . . and all agreed, with some astonishment, that Isabella was right. What with the children they had made since coming to the Dower House and the ones that some had brought with them, they now had at least fifteen members of The Tribe, ranging in age from William Palmer, Diana Lanyon, and Ruth Brandon, all now less than one year old, up to Betty Ferguson, who had just turned nine.

And so, rather self-consciously, they started playing childhood games other than the ones Isabella had listed. There was Kiss the Queen of Sheba, One-two-three block, Art thou my food partner?, Chinese miming, Whose face is this?, O'Grady says, Murder . . . and many more. They went on so long that Chris and Anna, who had found the Slade hop rather disappointing and so had caught the last train home, were able to join in the final game or two. They all played in a kind of amazed childhood rekindled. They looked at one another – the chairman of the National Planning Council, one of the country's most successful architects, a Very Senior Person at the
BBC
, and women near the top of their professions, too – they looked at one another with eyes that said,
Can you believe we're actually doing this!

All except Felix and Angela; he caught her eye from across the room and each knew the other was thinking:
Did we ever believe we might one day actually be doing this
?

Saturday, 13 January 1951

The baby was just beginning to show when Faith capitulated at last and took the name of Findlater, keeping Bullen-ffitch as her professional name. They were married by her brother Michael, who was back on annual leave from Kenya, at a quiet family ceremony (in the circumstances) in Old Sodbury church on Saturday, 13 January, 1951. Jasmine, almost four, was the only bridesmaid. Alex's brother was his best man.

Alex had bought a new Mark
IV
Bentley, Tudor Grey, with a 4.2-litre straight-six engine and grey hide seats with red piping. The following day the two of them and Jasmine drove to the Dower House, where the real wedding party was held. Two days later, joined now by Delfine Lardan, a distant cousin of Nicole's who was to be nanny to Jasmine and the new baby when it arrived, the four of them set off on a leisurely tour down to the south of France – specifically to Arles, capital of the Camargue, where they could leave Jasmine safely with Delfine while they rode the wilderness of grass and marsh on those magnificent greys they breed down there – the Camaguais. They were lucky with the weather.

At first it was hard to relax – to realize that each day was not snatched from the working timetable, crammed between meetings, presentations, committees, interviews, decisions . . . The urge was strong to pick up the phone each evening and call a colleague to ask what had happened over this or that pending decision . . . who had won an ongoing battle in such-and-such a committee . . . had so-and-so defected to the opposition . . . and so on. It was a full ten days – more than halfway through their time down there, before Faith felt able to say, ‘You know what I was telling you about Abnorman Crowley before we came away – how I'm sure he's going to stage his coup while we're down here? And d'you know what now? I don't
give
a damn!'

He caught her stress and chuckled. ‘Tara is yours and he can't take that away from you, eh!'

‘It's more than that. I actually had to get away from Manutius to understand what's really happening there. I've been drumming up so much new business . . . I mean, I thought I was some kind of super-editorial person who could use
that
skill to sell ideas for books to other publishers. But actually I'm a salesman. Sales
woman
. I've sold new ideas and new series to so many publishers . . . even Japan now. Maybe.' She frowned. ‘Did I tell you about that? I met a Japanese publisher at Mondadori in Verona . . .'

He shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I can't always keep up.'

‘Anyway, it's too much. I can't chase editors, designers, production people the way they have to be chased
and
cope with all this new business. But I couldn't see that – not in the thick of it. All I was thinking was
I've got to keep Abnorman out of my hair
. Wrong! What I've got to do is
let
him steal my job – the super-editor bit – but do it in such a way that he's the super editor of
my
projects and
I'm
still the one who has the final say.'

‘He'll squirm,' Alex warned.

‘Of course he will. But if I've constructed the boundaries around him right, he'll just squirm himself into fitting them perfectly! And it could even turn out that he won't notice what I've done until after the first editorial conference.'

‘And now you want to go back to London tomorrow!'

‘He's a highly experienced
American
editor – that's why he won't get it until it's too late.'

‘I don't follow.'

‘American publishers make books for one market and one language, mostly. And by the standards of Manutius, where we have half the pages in full colour and the rest in two-colour, their books are cheap. And so their editors are the kings of the castle – and queens, too. But at Manutius, to make a living at all,
we
have to sell a British Commonwealth edition, a French edition, Italian edition, German, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish – the Spanish market is huge – and . . . maybe a Japanese edition now. We have to seduce all those publishers into agreeing a common text for each of them to translate. We all share the cost of colour; then each publisher pays for his own text, fitting it around the artwork. It's why Fogel keeps hammering home – “Ve are all prostitoots now.” Abnorman understands all that at the intellectual level, but his guts still tell him that the editor-in-chief is cock of the walk. So I won't fight him at all. I will graciously suggest to Fogel that he should offer Abnorman that title, and I'll just be the company's travelling saleswoman. But when I say, “Rohwolt won't accept that, Norman” . . . who's going to have to roll over?' She laughed. ‘I love those novels where the villain gets his comeuppance, don't you?'

He wrinkled his nose. ‘I prefer them when I'm never quite sure who the villain is. Perhaps it's why I love you so much –
your
villainy is exciting. I asked if you want to go back to London tomorrow?'

‘Certainly not! You remember when we drove down to Castle Combe? How I was supposed to be doing some kind of paperwork for Fogel?'

‘Yes, though I have more pleasurable reasons for remembering that particular weekend.'

‘And just look at the result!' She drew her hands apart to show her belly. ‘Not terribly visible yet, is it? It's going to be a small one – at least I hope so. No, I don't want to go back to London until we're due to return anyway – the twenty-ninth. Well . . . maybe just a day or two earlier so that I can have a private word with one or two people. How do you feel?'

They reined in to a halt and stared out over miles of pool-mottled grassland. The horses champed their bits and tossed their heads at the flies. Devils of Mediterranean wind, unseasonably warm for January, hithered and thithered like swarms of invisible mice, rattling the fronds of grass in a panic. ‘I shouldn't have spoken,' he said at last. ‘We've been so lucky with the weather . . . it's sacrilege to lose ourselves in this utter wilderness, only to talk of publishing and broadcasting. Don't the words sound utterly meaningless when we speak them here?'

When she did not reply he said, ‘No?'

She gave a single, sardonic laugh. ‘I'm utterly in love with this place . . . swept away by it. But I can still look at . . . all
that,
and think,
Yes, this is far enough away for me to think dispassionately about . . . Manutius . . . Abnorman . . . all that jazz
. And that's what I cannot help doing.' Now her laugh was more genuine. ‘You're obviously going to take to retirement, when it comes, much more easily than I ever will!'