The Sunlight on the Garden (2 page)

‘No. Asthma. I have this asthma.'

‘Oh, Christ, yes! How you used to gasp and wheeze!' His face cracked into a lop-sided smile, the mouth twisting upwards. ‘ Well, you can see the sort of state I'm in. No more bloody use. Shot down,' he added bleakly.

‘You're going to be back on your feet in no time at all.' His mother spoke with a desperate attempt at conviction that could not fool me and certainly could not have fooled him. ‘They're quite confident about that.' She was always to speak of the doctors and nurses as ‘they'.

‘So it's now the vacation?'

‘That's right. But I must get a job.'

‘
Must
?'

‘My scholarship doesn't stretch all that far.' Though I did not want it to be, my tone was resentful. That tone said: ‘ You've never had to worry about money for a single moment. My mother and I have to worry about it all the time.'

‘What sort of job are you looking for?' Lady Hammond asked.

‘Oh, anything. I thought I might get some tutoring. Music would be best. That's the only thing I'm good at.'

‘So you still want to be another Rubinstein or Solomon?' Hammond interposed.

I did not answer. It was the same affectionate yet jeering tone that I remembered from those already remote days when I had been his slave.

Lady Hammond tilted her head, the sunlight glinting on the ornamental silver buckle at one side of her pink hat. ‘ I might think of something,' she said. ‘You wouldn't want to do farm-work, I imagine. If you did, I could ask our bailiff.'

‘Mouse would be no bloody use at farm-work. He was always hopeless at anything practical.'

‘Let me have a think about it.' She opened the bag hitched to one of the handles of the wheelchair and drew out what looked, at first glance, like a small silver cigarette case. Attached to it was a pencil, also silver, almost as slim as a matchstick. She opened the cover of the case and then passed both it and the pencil over to me. ‘Give me your address. On that pad inside. Oh, and also add the telephone number. Do you live in London?'

‘Yes, not far from here … Stop it Roy!' He was tugging impatiently at his lead. It was difficult to write with one hand while the other attempted to restrain him.

‘Let me have him while you're writing.'

I disentangled the lead from my wrist and she took it from me.

‘Now stop that! Sit!
Sit
!' Amazingly Roy at once obeyed her. He stopped jerking at the lead and moved close against one of her legs, his head raised to look up at her with those eyes that my mother called soulful and I thought merely sloppy. He was never as obedient as that with my mother, much less with me.

‘Well, it was good seeing you, Mouse. You haven't changed at all. Except that you're much bigger now. The mouse could now almost pass for a rat.'

‘Do you know my son's companion?' That was how Lady Hammond would introduce me to visitors or people encountered when we were out together. But I was far more than merely a companion. Perhaps she thought that, by ignoring that fact, she allowed me to retain my dignity. All too often – since the staff at the Hall had been so much reduced by the war – I was also nurse, messenger, butler and valet. As I practised at the sadly out-of-tune Bechstein piano in the music room, I would hear the thumping of Hammond's stick on the ceiling above me. As I wandered across the overgrown croquet lawn, I would hear, from the open window beneath which his daybed had been placed, his imperious ‘Mouse, Mouse,
Mouse
!' Sometimes he wanted me to ‘nip down' (as he usually put it) to the village store for the Senior Service cigarettes at which he constantly sucked with desperate greed. Sometimes I had to perform some more intimate duty for him – hauling him on and off the commode, fetching him the urine bottle and then emptying it, or sponging down his once athletic and now emaciated and shattered body. So far from showing any gratitude for these services, they would all too often make him irritable. ‘ Oh, you're so clumsy!' he would exclaim, writhing under my hesitant touch. ‘Oh, do call Nanny!'

Nanny had first been nanny to Lady Hammond. She had then become nanny to Hammond, an only child. Now that Hammond had physically regressed to babyhood, she had once again become nanny to him. By the time that I met her, she must have been in her eighties, a tiny, bowed woman, with round, red cheeks and wispy grey hair pulled back into a tight little bun on a neck criss-crossed with wrinkles. As she bent over Hammond, she would make odd, inarticulate crooning noises or mutter ‘There, there; there!' Clearly her memory was failing. When we encountered each other by chance, she would peer at me with a vague alarm as though wondering who this intruder might be. Her chief occupation was to listen to the war news on the wireless. An arthritic hand cupped round an ear, she would lean towards the over-amplified set in the cramped nook that everyone called ‘The wireless room'. Its blackout curtains were frequently left closed, with only a dim overhead light illuminating her tiny form. Lady Hammond never entered there. Now that her cherished son had been so decisively removed from the hostilities, she had lost all interest in them. From time to time Nanny would excitedly come up with the news of some battle won or some city bombed. But as far as Lady Hammond was concerned it might have been the bailiff giving a report on the birth of a calf or the state of the milk yield. Hour after hour her tall, narrow figure would sit upright in a straight-backed chair at a card-table, a game of patience spread out before her. She would stare down, deliberating. Then slowly she would extend a hand, withdraw it, extend it again. Once, as I entered the room with a message from Hammond, she peered up at me with a look of vague distraction. Then she leaned over and moved a card. ‘Yes?' I passed on the message. She nodded. No more. Then she said in a fretful voice: ‘I'm having no luck with Miss Milligan today. So I'm going to try Sevens.' All her life, I decided, had now become this endlessly extended game of patience.

At weekends, Sir Lionel would appear. He would arrive by train at Manningtree station, seven miles away, and Lady Hammond would drive over to fetch him in the long, sleek Armstrong Siddely that I would sometimes be asked to ‘be an angel and polish'. They received a special petrol allowance, partly because of Hammond's disability but chiefly because Sir Lionel was now a junior minister in the Air Ministry. Much of the weekend Sir Lionel would spend in his study, official papers piled up before him. Twice during my time at the Hall, he returned to London immediately after breakfast on the Sunday, after an urgent telephone call from Downing Street. He did not at all care for it when his wife despatched me to summon him to meals. Without a word of thanks, he would explode ‘Oh, blast! Oh, hell! Am I never be to left in peace?' An amateur boxer in his youth, he had a large saddle nose, obviously smashed by a fist, its tip a shiny, red pommel. He was constantly raising a forefinger to it and sniffing. He rarely addressed me, and when he did so his tone was always perfunctory, sometimes even contemptuous. It was he who paid me each Saturday, slowly counting out the notes in front of me and then, having handed them over, adding ‘You'd better check there's been no mistake.'

From time to time he would travel down with a muscular man with a low, wide forehead, a large nose and hairy forearms. His complexion was so dark and his hair so wiry and black that he might easily have been mistaken for a Greek or an Arab. Whereas I never came to call Hammond by anything other than his surname, Fred was never, at his own insistence, anything other than Fred to me from our first encounter. He had, I soon learned, been Hammond's closest friend in Fighter Command. Miraculously, unlike Hammond, he had survived numerous perilous sorties, which had earned him a DFC – a medal that Hammond had also been awarded. He had then been shifted to a desk job at the Air Ministry. The strength of his attachment to Hammond was immediately clear to me. From time to time, I used to catch him staring, elbows on the arms of his chair and fingers raised in a steeple, at his friend. His eyes squinted with a dazed, frightened distraction, as though he were pondering some life-or-death problem way beyond his intellectual capacities to solve.

On the afternoon of the first of his visits, I was practising at the Bechstein when I became aware that someone had opened the music-room door and was standing motionless on the threshold. I broke off and turned my head.

Fred smiled. ‘
Le Tombeau de Couperin
? Bravo. Very difficult.' Then he added something that puzzled me at the time. ‘Very apt.' Later, sleepless in bed, I wondered about that word ‘apt'. Was this an oblique acknowledgement that his friend was doomed, whatever the brave, reassuring things Lady Hammond and ‘they' might say?

‘You recognised it! Then I can't have been playing so badly.'

He approached the piano. ‘ That piano's terribly out of tune. The whole family's totally unmusical. I must have a word with Lady H. about getting in a tuner.' Clearly he was on sufficiently close terms with her to make a suggestion that I should never have dared to make.

‘Do you play?'

He laughed. ‘ Well, hardly! I've never had a lesson. But from time to time I vamp something from ear. That's the best that I can do.'

That same evening in the drawing-room after dinner – Sir Lionel had already retired, with a cup of coffee and a cigar to his study – Fred urged me: ‘Why don't you play something for us?'

I shook my head.

‘Oh, go on!'

‘Yes, play something, Mouse. Play, play, play! It may help to pass yet another dreary evening.'

I got up reluctantly and crossed to the piano. Unlike the Bechstein, it was an upright. In addition to the Ravel, I had also been learning the Bach D major Partita. I hesitated about whether to play the Aubade, surely one of the most beautiful pieces of keyboard music ever written, and then, having decided that its resigned melancholy was wrong for the occasion, opted instead for the perky, forward-thrusting Courante.

I had been playing for little more than a minute or two when Hammond shouted: ‘Oh, stop, stop, stop! Oh, Mouse! That sounds like a room full of sewing machines going at it hammer and tongs! I can't stand that din.' Mortified, I swung round on the piano stool, preparatory to quitting it. ‘Let Fred play something. Come on Fred!'

Fred was reluctant. ‘But he was playing that Bach so well. It's far from easy, you know. I'm just an amateur.'

‘Oh, come on, Fred!'

I rose from the stool and Fred seated himself at it. There was a pause, as he thought what to play. Then, shoulders and head lowered, he began to toy around with the melody of Gershwin's ‘ Summertime'. Despite some miscalculations and fumblings, with an occasional ‘Blast!' or ‘ Hell!' he did remarkably well. Lady Hammond had paused in her game of patience. She was staring across the room at the piano, with a look of puzzled, surprised revelation.

‘Bravo!' Hammond brought his claw-hands together in an attempt at applause. There was no sound. ‘Now how about ‘‘ Red Sails in the Sunset''? That was one of your triumphs at the Blue Bear.

Remember? At our sing-alongs?' Fred nodded, mouth pursed. ‘All right,' he agreed reluctantly. ‘Happy memories.'

I watched from my bedroom window as the woman's bicycle, its high handlebars supporting a wicker basket, zigzagged and wobbled up the drive. The grey-haired, elderly man riding it had no clips on the wide trousers of his faded blue pinstriped suit, so that their ends flapped around his ankles.

‘Oh, Mr Friedmann, this is my son's companion.' She did not mention either my real name or that awful ‘Mouse' that all of them, with the exception of Fred, still insisted on calling me. ‘He's the pianist among us. The piano sounds all right to me but he says it's out of tune.' In fact, I had never said anything to her about the piano being out of tune. It was Fred who had done so.

Friedmann cleared his throat and stooped over the Bechstein. His hands were bluish, with prominent veins. One usually sees elderly people with such hands in the winter, not on a hot summer's day. I noticed, for the first time, the stiff collar with the rounded ends and the small, hard knot of a dark blue tie fraying at the edges. He played a chord, another chord, an arpeggio.

‘He is right, my lady. Your piano is out of tune.'

She pulled a little face. ‘Well, you know best,' she said.

I left the room with her and then, because I had nothing better to do, soon returned to it. Friedmann was at his work. For much of the time I merely watched him and listened to him. But occasionally he broke off and we talked. He had been released from internment on the Isle of Man only a few months before, he confided in me. Well, better internment there, he added with a sardonic smile, than in a concentration camp. He had been drawn to this part of the world partly because he knew an English couple, owners of a restaurant in Manningtree, who had offered him a room in their house, and partly because of all English painters Constable was the one whom he had always admired the most and Manningtree was so near to Constable's Flatford.

Had he bicycled all the way from Manningtree?

Yes, all the way. He loved the English countryside. It was no hardship to him to bicycle so far. He often bicycled for the fun of it.

He had a soft, hesitant voice, and nervously he kept clearing his throat, raising a small hand to his mouth each time that he did so. There was something both maidenly and steely about him.

Florrie, a maid almost as ancient as Nanny, was banging on the gong. I was going to ignore it but Friedmann said ‘They're calling you.' After a moment of hesitation, I jumped to my feet.

In the doorway I met Lady Hammond.

‘Oh, Mr Friedmann, I thought that you might like something to eat before embarking for home. I've asked for a tray to be brought to you.'

‘That's really not necessary, my lady.'