Strange Music (3 page)

‘But you don't smoke,' Gracie pointed out.

‘Not actively, no, but the light of my life and captain of my soul makes sure I get my share. So you're relieved.'

‘Not really. Go on you lot – we'll catch you up. I feel the need of a little walk myself. We can go together.'

‘I wish I could have walked to school like this every day,' Eric said as they set off in pursuit of the children. ‘A coppice is such a strange form of woodland, don't you think? Not a tree trunk in sight – just half-a-dozen saplings on each single root. You expect the rabbits to have multiple legs and the birds to have four sets of wings to match.'

‘You would in one of
your
books,' Gracie agreed – and then giggled. ‘Betty loves
The Chocolate Soldier
. I thought he was going to escape by melting . . . but making the warder
eat
him and then him turning into the warder. Oh, my!' She shook her head and then added morosely: ‘Me, I grew up in Whitechapel. My school was just two streets away. I was always late.'

‘I lived in a village so I trudged along high-walled lanes through a mixture of modern suburban and medieval and all very discreet and withdrawn. There were monsters and monstrous delights concealed behind every wall and hedge.'

‘Such as?'

‘Oh . . . gryphons and wyverns and manticoras . . . and . . . nudist camps. We must have had at least thirty nudist camps in one street alone, with hedges that would stop a bullet.'

‘Boys! Is Charley already imagining things like that?' She raised her voice. ‘Charley! Sam! Not that way today. They haven't put a new log over the ditch yet. We'll go the old way.'

‘We can jump!' Charley shouted.

And jump he did – as a pheasant took to flight right beside him – but not over the waterlogged ditch.

‘It wasn't prurience,' Eric went on as the two boys turned disconsolately toward the old crossing point. ‘It was fascination with the grotesque. Like the church organist, whom my father called Praisegod Barebones because even on a good day he looked like those people in Belsen . . . we thought if he was stark naked, it would be a sight worth fighting through an acre of thorns to see.'

‘Were you at the liberation of Belsen – like Arthur?' Gracie asked. ‘In fact, I've often wondered – what did you do in the war? I can't imagine you as a typical Poor Bloody Infantryman. Pardon my French.'

‘I was only fifteen when the war began, and I stayed on at school to take distinction papers, so I didn't join until just after D-Day. They put me in the Intelligence Corps. I had what they call “a bloody good war.” You?'

‘Todd and I got married in 'thirty-eight, just after I turned twenty-one. I was a dispatcher in the fire service. I should've lost the job then because that was the rule: get a husband, get the sack. But everyone knew the war was coming, so they let me stay on. And I still did it part-time even after Betty came along. Betty!' she called out. ‘Help Sam, there's a duck.' She grinned at Eric. ‘He's never yet made it all the way to school without his shoelaces coming undone.'

Until recently, Eric, being still in his twenties, had considered women in their thirties to belong to his mother's generation – not exactly out of bounds but more useful as people to talk with rather than as girls to pursue. But now, looking dispassionately at Gracie, with her clear skin, bright eyes, warm smile, and lustrous hair, he began to feel that he had, perhaps, been a mite
too
discriminating. Not that he would
do
anything about it, but to live in a world peopled by many more attractive females than he had been aware of before now . . . well, it could only be an enhancement.

However, that was a distraction from his main purpose in joining Gracie on the school walk on this particular morning. Time to get down to it. ‘In five years from now,' he said, ‘there'll be fourteen taking this path to school. And that's not counting the ones not yet born. Could be sixteen . . . eighteen. One parent isn't going to manage that.'

Gracie remained silent, as he thought she might.

‘Not even a mother with all the experience
you'll
have by then,' he added, not taking his eyes off her.

She stopped dead and stared at him, a baffled smile on her lips. She knew what he was getting at. ‘You take the biscuit, Eric, honestly you do. I don't believe Isabella's out of fags at all. I've half a mind to go back and ask her; leave you to take them up the field.'

‘I only lied slightly. She
will
have run out by midday.'

‘Come on,' she said wearily, pushing him ahead of her. ‘You might as well tell me what's on your mind now, because I'll badger it out of you by the time we get to the school. Who told you? Or how did you find out?'

‘I don't know what you're on about.' He grinned.

‘Did Betty say anything? I'll kill her if she did.'

Eric gave in with a sigh. ‘You dropped a piece of paper the other day. With a phone number. I rang them. I wasn't expecting it to be an estate agent so I had to pretend I was looking for a property in Dormer Green. And it turns out there's only one house there with that estate agent's
For Sale
sign outside. Are you really thinking of leaving the community?'

‘We'll talk about it on the way back. Betty's already overheard more than she should.'

They left the children at the school gate and went next door to the village shop, where Gracie bought a jar of Virol and Eric chose a packet of Capstan Full Strength.

‘Is that what Isabella is smoking these days?' Gracie asked. ‘I thought she was on Balkan Sobranie. Her and Faith.'

‘It's what she's going to be smoking these
next few
days, anyway,' he replied.

‘They're lethal. She won't thank you.'

‘Oh, that'll make a change!' He laughed. ‘I'll tell her that's all they had.'

They flattened themselves against the hedge to let a tractor and trailer-load of dung go by. Gracie fanned her nose in distaste.

‘He takes a load through the village every day,' Eric warned. ‘Including Sundays. Are you still thinking of moving?'

She sighed. ‘It's not that we're unhappy at the Dower House. But that lovely little cottage, right on the green – it's only five hundred and fifty quid and we could put twenty per cent down and get tax relief on the mortgage, and all that. We're accumulating nothing at the Dower House, but bricks and mortar is bricks and mortar.'

‘Or wattle and daub in your case.'

‘Go on, it's not that old.' After a pause she added, ‘Is it?'

‘Get Tony or Adam to do a survey. Or they'd know someone who would.'

‘Then the cat
would
be out of the bag.'

‘It's probably out anyway, bonny lass. Someone in Dormer Green will have seen you going in there. They'll remark on it to someone who'll pass it on to someone else . . . and pretty soon it'll be blurted out to one of us.'

She slumped and slowed to a snail's pace. ‘We should tell everyone, I suppose.'

He gave her arm a squeeze. ‘It's not a confession, pet. Adam is the most evangelical. He'll probably be disappointed, but the rest of us will understand. And I'm sure you won't be the only family to leave, as the years go by.'

‘Thanks.' She brightened up. ‘And I'm grateful, even though I suspect this cigarettes-for-Isabella story was just a ruse to . . . to—'

‘Help you face facts. You joined us. You liked us – still do, I hope. We liked you – still do, I know. You want to move on . . . place of your own. What's wrong with that?'

She almost shed a tear but, with one good blow of her nose, avoided it.

They walked on down the hill, keeping to the hedge, in an easy silence. After a while Gracie said, ‘You know you mentioned Belsen back there – is that where Felix was? I often wanted to ask but you don't like to, do you. He did once say he was in a Car Elle. But I didn't know then that was German for concentration camp.'

‘Koncentrations
. . .
lager
. Kay . . . el to us,
ka
. . .
el
to them. I don't think he'd mind. He neither hides it nor wears it on his sleeve. Though, come to think of it, he does wear it
under
his sleeve. Amazing, really. He wasn't in Belsen but another one – there were more than a thousand of those camps, you know. He was in one in Austria called Mauthausen. You know he met Tony and Adam and Willard there on the day it was liberated?'

‘Yeah. That's what Tony told Todd. Hard to credit. And here we all are!'

‘Here we all are, pet! Angela was another concentration camp victim – I suppose you know that, too?'

‘Is that where they met? There was an Eyetie prisoner of war camp over Wheathamstead way. They used to go out with lots of local girls – after Italy surrendered and they opened the camps and let the Eyeties out to work. Some of them got married and settled here.'

‘No, Felix met Angela over here, in London, after the war – just a month or two before you first came here. Funny, isn't it, how we all live in the same house – except Felix and Angela – and Faith – and they're only just ten steps away across the yard – and yet there's so much we don't know about one another. I don't really think this is an experiment in communal living at all. We're just flat dwellers who share a garden and three electricity meters. Do you think we'll ever sort that out?'

‘Communal meetings!' she said. ‘That's one thing I
won't
miss.' After a pause she asked, ‘Are you really going to make poor Isabella smoke those awful cigarettes? Don't take offence now but I can't make you two out at all, and I hear more of you than most – mainly through our lounge floor.'

‘Isabella is very good in bed, you know.'

She gave a little gasp and turned away. ‘That's not . . . I wasn't . . . All right, I give up.'

‘If we didn't keep repelling each other verbally, she and I, we'd be at it like rabbits. When people say it takes all sorts to make a world, it's Isabella and me they have in mind. Usually without knowing it.'

By now they were back in the coppice. Halfway up the rise, leading to the pigsties, he stopped. ‘When we were just here – on our way up to the school – you asked me if Betty had told me anything about your moving on. In fact, she did, but entirely without knowing it. I was looking out of my study window one evening last week, about the time when The Tribe was being called in for tea or bath time et cetera, and they all went running indoors – all except Betty. She just stood there, watching all the others vanishing indoors. You had to call her twice.'

‘Oh yes, I remember that.'

‘Well, did you see the look on her face?'

‘No. I mean, what look?'

‘As soon as I saw it I thought,
I know that look
.
Where have I seen it before?
And then it came back to me. Remember I said I had a bloody good war? Well, I wasn't the only one. But I didn't mind it coming to an end. I knew I was returning to something exciting – the publication of my first book and my first step toward becoming the Grand Old Man of English Literature. But for most of them the outlook was pretty bleak. Paradise Lost. They wanted the comradeship and irresponsibility of military life to go on. It had a lot in common with the life of the Dower House Tribe. But one by one their demob papers came through – and
that's
when I saw that same look in their eyes.'

Saturday, 20 August 1949

Tony checked himself in the hall mirror just as they were about to leave. ‘Maybe I should wear a tie?' he murmured.

‘Did Adam say to wear a tie?' Nicole asked.

‘No.'

‘Then don't bother. Did you get the wine from our cellar?'

He lifted it out of the umbrella stand. ‘
Château Curé Bon la Madeleine
. We must bring back more of this next year.'

Lena-such-a-sad-case came out of their kitchen. ‘Enjoy the meal,' she said.

‘I doubt it,' Tony replied. ‘You've not yet had the pleasure of Sally's cooking. Don't wait up. And' – he turned on Fifi and Xupé, their two dogs – ‘you behave yourselves!'

It was one of those summer evenings when the overcast sky is so low and the air so warm and still that ‘outdoors' feels more like a large room than truly open air. ‘I was picking up lightning flashes on long wave,' he said as they crossed the brief expanse of lawn that separated them from the Wilsons.

Just as Adam – wearing a tie – opened the door to them they heard the first distant rumble of thunder. ‘Did Bob solder the strap of the lightning conductor back on that rod?' he asked them.

Tony replied: ‘He said he did but I haven't had time to check yet. Oh, hang on, I forgot something.'

He ran back and put on a tie but when he returned to the Wilsons he found that Adam had removed his. ‘It's too muggy tonight,' he said. ‘Take off your jacket, too.' He handed Tony a tankard of McMullen's, the local brew.

Sally joined them, dressed with casual elegance – a New Look dress, made from a Liberty print, and a stole to match. ‘Gee and tee for me,' she said. And then, seeing Nicole's surprise, added, ‘You'll be delighted to hear I've hired two students from the catering course at Hatfield to manage tonight's meal. We have much to discuss.'

‘We do?' Tony asked.

Sally turned to her husband. ‘You haven't told them?'

‘I was waiting for you. But in any case, I think we should eat first and get down to it over coffee.'

Tony smiled. ‘I think I know what it's about, anyway. I was going to bring it up if you didn't.'

Adam frowned. ‘Has Willard been speaking to you?'

‘No. Gracie told me herself.'

‘Gracie? What—?'

‘The Fergusons are going to buy that cottage on the green in Dormer Green. Isn't that what you want to discuss – who's going to get their flat here?'