The Stranger's Child (32 page)

Paul wished Geoff hadn’t told him about Mr Keeping’s mental problems – and felt anxiously uncertain whether Mr Keeping himself would expect him to know about them. Smiling vaguely, he took in nothing of the shops and people he was staring at with such apparent alertness. His sense of the walk as an opportunity to get in the Manager’s good books was undermined by his fear that he’d been singled out for some kind of correction or discomfiting pep-talk. He saw Hannah Gearing across the square climbing into the Shrivenham bus as if leaving him to his fate. ‘And how is your mother?’ said Mr Keeping.

‘All right, thank you, sir,’ said Paul. ‘She manages pretty well.’

‘I hope she can manage without you for the week.’

‘Well, my aunt lives quite near us. It’s not really a problem.’ He was relieved but a little disconcerted by these kind questions. ‘We’re fairly used to it.’

‘Terrible thing,’ said Mr Keeping, raising his hat to an approaching lady with a murmur and his unsettling smile, as if to say he remembered exactly the size of her overdraft.

They went up into the quieter reaches of Church Walk, with its fanlights and front railings and lace curtains. A week ago Paul had known almost no one in the town, and now he had been put into an odd grim privileged relation with hundreds of them, over the counter, through the little mahogany doorway of his ‘position’. He was their servant and also an adjudicator, a strange young man granted intimate knowledge of at least one aspect of their lives, which was how much money they had, or didn’t have, and how much they wanted. He spoke to them courteously, amid tacit understandings, muted embarrassments: the loan, the ‘arrangement’. Now he glanced at Church Walk, grey veils of the curtains, glints of polished tables, porcelain, clocks, with a sense of arrangements reaching rooms-deep, years-deep into the shadows. Mr Keeping said nothing else, and seemed satisfied by silence.

Opposite the church they turned into an unmade road, Glebe Lane, with larger houses on one side and a view over a hedge into fields on the other. Long brambly strands of dog-roses swayed in the breeze along the top of the hedge. The lane had its own atmosphere, exclusive and a little neglected. It was odd to find yourself here two minutes from the centre of town. Grass and daisies grew patchily along the ridge of the road. Paul glanced through gateways at squareish villas set back behind gravel sweeps in broad gardens; between one or two of them humbler modern houses had been awkwardly inserted – ‘The Orchard’, ‘The Cottage’. ‘This is a private road, you see, Paul,’ said Mr Keeping, reverting to his ironical tone: ‘hence the countless potholes and unchecked vegetation. I advise you never to bring a motor-car along here.’ Paul felt he could pretty safely promise that. ‘Here we are . . .’ and they turned into the driveway of the penultimate house: the lane was sloping down already and narrowing, as if to lose itself in the approaching fields.

The house was another wide grey villa, with bay-windowed rooms either side of the front door, and its Victorian name, ‘Carraveen’, in stucco above it. The front door was wide open, as though the house had surrendered itself to the sunny day. A pale blue Morris Oxford stood in the drive with its windows down, and in its shadow a fat little Jack Russell lay on the gravel alternately panting and thinking. Paul squatted down to talk to the dog, which let him scratch it behind the ears but never really got interested. Mr Keeping had gone into the house, and it seemed so unlikely that he had simply forgotten him that Paul stood and waited with a consciously unassuming expression. He saw the drive had an In and an Out, not marked as such, but the fact sank down in him to some buried childhood idea of grandeur.

There was a thick flower-border, colourful but weedy and overgrown, around the edge of the drive, and over the top of it he looked into the garden beside the house, which stretched away through mysterious shadows of two or three large trees to a bright mown lawn that must run across the back. The whole place, at this indefinable time of day – late afternoon, late June, work over but hours of sunlight still ahead – made a peculiar impression on him. The time, like the light, seemed somehow viscous. He studied the name ‘Carraveen’, a bit like caravan, a bit like carrageen, the stuff his mother used to set a blancmange, but clearly romantic too, Scottish perhaps, some now completely forgotten home or holiday place that someone had loved long ago. He felt seduced, and delicately stifled, by something he couldn’t yet explain. Through the left-hand bay-window he could see a grand piano in what appeared to be a dining-room, though the table in the centre was covered with books. The church clock struck the quarter-hour, and the silence afterwards seemed discreetly enhanced. Really all you could hear was the birds.

He heard a voice and looked again through the shadows to the bright back lawn, where he saw a woman in a wide straw hat with a red flower on the brim talking to someone out of view as she moved slowly towards the house. She was a largeish figure, in a shapeless blue dress, and carrying a large tapestry bag. Could this be the disdainful Mrs Keeping, mother of Julian and John? Surely too old. Mr Keeping’s own mother perhaps, a friend or relative who was visiting. She stopped for a moment, as if stumped by what she’d just been told, and gazed at the ground, and then unseeingly along the side of the house, where she did in fact see Paul. She said something to the person – now Paul heard another woman’s voice – and when she looked back he raised his head with a slight smile and then waved weakly, unsure if he wanted to announce himself or efface himself. There was another exchange, she nodded distantly, not exactly at Paul, and then strolled on out of view behind the house.

Paul went to the front door to call goodbye. He felt he’d been placed now as a low-level intruder, a peerer through other people’s windows. A middle-aged woman with a wide pale face and black hair that was swept up and set in a stiff, broad helmet was coming towards him. ‘Oh, hello,’ he said, ‘I’m Paul Bryant – from the bank . . .’

She gave him a practical look. ‘Did you want to see my husband?’

‘Well, actually I’ve just walked here with him,’ said Paul.

‘Oh . . .’ she said, with an air of momentary concession. She had strongly drawn black eyebrows which made her look hard to please. ‘Was there something else?’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Paul; and feeling he shouldn’t be put in the wrong, ‘He just left me here.’

‘Ah . . . !’ said Mrs Keeping, and half-turning she called out, ‘Leslie!’ Mr Keeping appeared at the end of the hall. ‘This young man doesn’t know if he’s been dismissed or not’ – and she stared rather drolly at Paul, as if to say the joke was on everyone but her.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Mr Keeping. ‘This is Paul Bryant. He’s just joined us from Wantage.’

‘From Wantage . . . !’ said Mrs Keeping, as if this were droller still.

‘We all have to come from somewhere, you know,’ said Mr Keeping.

Paul had grown up in the mild but untested belief that Wantage was a fine little town. ‘Well, sir, it was good enough for King Alfred,’ he said.

Mrs Keeping half-allowed the protest, and the joke. ‘Mmm, you’re going back a bit,’ she said. Though something else had occurred to her. She set her head on one side and frowned at his shoulders, his posture. ‘How strong are you?’ she said.

‘Well, reasonably,’ said Paul, confused by the scrutiny. ‘Yes, I suppose . . .’

‘Then I think I can use you. Come through,’ a tiny glow of cajolement now in her tone.

‘Paul may have other plans, darling,’ said Mr Keeping, but in easy surrender to his wife.

‘I shan’t need him for long.’

‘I’ve certainly got a couple of minutes,’ said Paul.

They went down the hall and into the room at the end. ‘I don’t want my husband risking his back,’ said Mrs Keeping. The sitting-room was densely furnished, large easy-chairs and sofas arm to arm on a thick gold carpet, nests of tables, standard-lamps, and a pair of surprising Victorian portraits, very large in the room, a woman in red and a man in black, looking out over the stereogram and the teak TV cabinet that flanked the fireplace. On top of the TV were several framed photos, in which Paul made out two boys, surely Julian and John, in yachting gear. They stepped out through the open french windows on to a wide patio. ‘This is Mr Bryant,’ said Mrs Keeping. ‘You can leave your briefcase there.’

‘Oh . . . right . . .’ said Paul, nodding at the two females who were sitting in deckchairs. They were identified as ‘My mother, Mrs Jacobs’ – this was the old lady in the straw hat, whom he’d already seen – and ‘Jenny Ralph . . . my niece, yes, my
half
-brother’s daughter!’ as if she’d just worked it out for the first time. Paul himself only pretended to do so, nodded again and murmured hello as he sidled past. Jenny Ralph was a frowning dark-haired girl a bit younger than he was, with a book and a notepad on her knee – he felt himself sidestepping some sulky challenge she seemed to throw out.

The problem was a stone trough on the far side of the lawn, which had somehow slipped or been pushed off one of the two squat blocks it sat on, earth strewn on the grass and a clump of disoriented wallflowers, orangey-black, leaning out and up. ‘I jolly well hope you can shift it,’ said Mrs Keeping, with a return of her unjolly tone, almost as though Paul had pushed it over himself. ‘I don’t want it falling on Roger,’ she said.

Paul stooped down and gave the trough a preliminary heave. The only effect of this was to rock it very slightly on the skewed axis of the other block. ‘You don’t want to bring the whole thing down,’ said Mrs Keeping. She stood several yards away, perhaps to be clear of any such accident.

‘No . . .’ said Paul; and then, ‘It’s quite heavy actually, isn’t it.’

‘You’d stand a better chance with your jacket off.’

Paul obeyed, and seeing that Mrs Keeping showed no intention of taking the jacket from him hung it on a lichenous garden seat nearby. Without the jacket he felt even less able, his skinny frame more exposed. ‘Right!’ he said, and laughed rather fatuously. His hostess, as he tried to think of her, gave him a provisional sort of smile. He worked his hands in under the near corner of the trough, where it lay on the grass, but after a couple of hefts in the shuddering manner of a caber-tosser he could only raise it an inch and let it down again heavily just where it had been. He shook his head, and glanced across at the figures on the patio thirty yards off. Mr Keeping had joined his mother-in-law and niece, and they were gazing generally in his direction as they talked but, perhaps from politeness, not showing any detailed interest. He felt simultaneously important and completely insignificant.

‘You’re going to have to empty it, you know,’ said Mrs Keeping, as though Paul had been actively refusing to do this.

He saw a certain stoical humour was going to be necessary – a smiling surrender of his time and plans. ‘Have you got a spade, please?’ he said.

‘You’ll need something to put the soil on, of course. And do be careful with my wallflowers, won’t you,’ she said, with a hint of graciousness now they’d come to such niceties. ‘Do you know, I’m going to get that girl involved.’

‘Oh, I think I can manage . . .’ said Paul.

‘It will do her absolutely no harm,’ said Mrs Keeping. ‘She’s going up to Oxford next term and she does nothing but sit and read. Her parents are in Malaya, which is why she’s stuck with us’ – with a fairly clear suggestion she felt they were stuck with her. She moved off across the lawn, chin raised already, calling out.

Jenny Ralph took Paul off to the far side of the garden, and through a rustic arch into the sunless corner that sheltered the compost-heap and a cobweb-windowed shed. At first she treated him with the nervous snootiness of a child to an unknown servant. ‘You should find whatever you need in there,’ she said, watching him edge in among the clutter of the shed. The mower blocked the way, its bin caked at the rim with dung-like clots of dried grass. He reached over for a spade and kicked a loosely propped stack of canes that spilled and clattered ungraspably in every direction. There was a stifling smell of creosote and two-stroke fuel. ‘It’s rather hell in there,’ said Jenny from outside. She had a notably posh voice, but casual where her aunt was crisp. The accent was more striking, more revealing, in a young person. She sounded mildly fed up with it, but with no real intention of abandoning it.

‘No, it’s fine,’ Paul called back. He covered the awkwardness he felt with a girl in a brisk bit of business, passing out the spade, some old plastic sacks – he must be five or six years older than her, but the advantage felt frail. Her poor skin and the oily shine of her dark curly hair were signs of the troubles he’d hardly emerged from himself. The fact that she wasn’t especially pretty, though in some ways a relief, seemed also to put some subtly chivalrous pressure on him. He emerged, a trowel in his raised hand, just a little satirical.

‘I don’t suppose you want to be doing this for a minute,’ Jenny said, with a slyly commiserating smile. ‘I’m afraid they’re always getting people involved.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ said Paul.

‘You know it’s a test. Aunt Corinna’s always testing people, she can’t help it. I’ve seen it masses of times. I don’t just mean on the piano, either.’

‘Oh, have you?’ said Paul, amused by her frankness, which seemed original and upper-class too. He looked out nervously as they came on to the lawn. Aunt Corinna was in the far corner, inspecting a sagging trellis and, quite possibly, lining up further tasks or tests for him. Beside her a large weeping beech-tree spread awkwardly but romantically, a table sheltered under its skirts.