The Sunlight on the Garden (3 page)

‘Of course, it's necessary. You have that long ride ahead of you. You don't want to do it on an empty stomach.'

‘You are very kind. I thank you.'

She walked to the door, then turned. ‘ I'll settle with you before you go.'

‘Thank you, my lady.'

‘Come along, Mouse! The rabbit stew will be getting cold.'

As I sat down to the rabbit – a dish I had come particularly to dislike, since it appeared so often on the menu at the Hall – I suddenly thought how mean-spirited it had been not to invite Friedmann to join us. I almost announced that I hoped that everyone would excuse me if I went to eat with him. Even today, I still feel guilty that I did not have the guts to do so.

The next day, Lady Hammond said to me: ‘ Oh, Mouse, I'd so much like to meet your mother. When you're next in touch with her, do ask her to come and spend a weekend. She could come on the same train that my husband takes, so there'd be no problem about meeting her.'

I did nothing about the suggestion.

A few days later, when she asked if I had passed on her invitation, I lied with a glibness that surprised me. My mother, I said, had no one with whom to leave the dog, and long journeys with him on a train were always a problem, now that he was so old and, as I put it, liable to make messes.

I had dreaded – absurdly and unjustly, I have long since realised – that if my mother were to accept the invitation, she might be condemned to solitary eating off a tray, just as poor Friedmann had been.

Despite the gloom that enveloped not merely the vast house, most of its rooms now closed for lack of staff, but also the spirits of everyone imprisoned there, in recollection after more than half-a-century it seems as if day after day the sun never ceased to shine. I see it glinting in jagged flashes off the pond, seething with carp. I see it pouring its radiance over the fields as I look down on them from the edge of a dense, strangely sinister little spinney, mysteriously never haunted by birds. I see it making incandescent the panes of the summerhouse, a Gothic folly raised by a prodigal eighteenth century ancestor, who all but ruined the family.

For the rite of the annual cricket match between the village and a neighbouring and rival one, the sun also shone.

After I had inexpertly shaved – ‘ Oh, for Christ's sake, you've nicked me!' – and dressed Hammond for that occasion, he stared down at his hands. ‘ Oh, look at my nails. I must do something about them. Sorry, Mouse, you'll have to do it for me.' He himself was incapable of properly manipulating the scissors. ‘Do you mind awfully?'

‘Of course not.' But I did mind. Naturally squeamish, I often minded the tasks that Nanny never minded. Of all those tasks, having to manicure Hammond's hands was, oddly, far more unpleasant for me than having to attend to his bodily functions. As those gristly talons rested on my palm, I was conscious of minuscule grey flakes of skin falling off them like ash. The task done, I had to find some excuse to leave the room and first brush myself down with panicky movements of my hands and then hurry into the cloakroom, where I soaped and scrubbed them.

‘How did these nails get so long? It can't be more than a week since you last did them.' He looked up at me. ‘Did you know that nails continue to grow on a corpse.' He smiled. ‘True.'

I nodded. Having reached for the file on the table beside me, I smoothed a rough edge. Then, suddenly and surprisingly, I felt an annihilating tenderness that I had never felt before when doing his nails. I looked down at the cruelly distorted hands and then up into the even more cruelly distorted face. I felt an ache in my throat, as though some indissoluble object had lodged there, and a sudden fullness of the eyes.

Since his disability had made him hypersensitive to other people's feelings and thoughts, whereas in the past he had been entirely indifferent to them, he must, I now realise, have intuited my feelings. When I had finished the job, he said ‘Thank you' in a barely audible voice, using not the hated ‘Mouse' but (something that rarely happened) my Christian name. ‘What would I do without you?'

‘Oh, I'm sure you'd manage very well.'

Fred and I took it in turns to wheel the chair to the cricket ground, beyond the church. Fred propelled it effortlessly along the narrow up-and-down path, as though it were no more than a pushchair with a baby in it. I struggled at every bump and twist and soon began to wheeze and sweat. Eventually, with none of his usual contempt and impatience when I showed my ineptitude, Hammond said quietly: ‘You'd better give up, Mouse. Let Fred do it. We don't want your asthma to ruin the day for you.'

‘No, no, I can manage. Really.'

But Fred was already moving into position, edging me aside.

I had hated cricket at school, not merely because I was so hopeless at it but also because it proceeded so slowly and interminably. But all that day, as Fred and I sat out on the grass beside Hammond in his wheelchair and his parents reclined in deck-chairs brought out to them by one of the organisers of the match, the local butcher, I felt inexplicably happy. From time to time I would look up at Hammond, as he stared out eagerly at all the activity – or, as I saw it, dearth of activity – on the field before us. At school, he had been the captain and hero of the First XI, just as he had been an athlete often tipped to be the first man to achieve a four-minute mile. He was keeping up a running commentary: ‘ Oh, Christ, what a shot! … Idiot! Couldn't he see that that was a googly? … Oh, good, good, good …'

Soon Sir Lionel was pouring out shots of Scotch into silver tumblers that fitted into each other like Russian dolls. When, finally, he came to one for me, I shook my head. ‘ Not for me. Thank you.'

He scowled at me. ‘Oh, come on! Be a man!'

I again shook my head. I took pleasure in defying him.

‘Well, please yourself. Perhaps Lady Hammond can spare you some of her coffee.'

Shortly before the lunch interval, Hammond asked me to wheel him to the lavatory behind the pavilion. As the chair bumped from tussock to tussock, he said: ‘ You poor chap! I ought to have asked Fred to take me. But by now you know the drill and he doesn't.' The ‘drill' had always repelled me. But, amazingly, for once it did not now do so.

As I took the bottle from him – when he went out, it always went with him in a canvas bag – he pointed: ‘Is that blood?'

I peered in horror. Through the glass, what looked like lengths of scarlet thread were gently wavering in the orange urine.

‘Oh God, don't say I've started the bleeding again!'

I had never known him to bleed while I had been with him.

‘Do you want to go home?'

‘No. Of course not! Don't be such an ass. But it's' – he smiled up at me – ‘inconvenient.'

For the rest of the day he was more cheerful than I had ever known him. After the match was over, I wheeled him from one group of people to another. Since he was not merely the son of the squire but also the local hero, there was a certain obsequiousness in everyone's behaviour to him. At the high tea that followed back at the Hall, he made a speech that, unlike his father's portentous one, was exactly right for the occasion in its judicious blend of humour, self-deprecation and love for the village in which his family had lived for so many centuries. I realised that he could easily have followed his father into politics.

‘Well, that was a good day, Mouse,' he said, as I put my hand to the switch of the overhead light, before leaving him, propped up on three pillows, on his orthopaedic bed. I slept in the next-door dressing-room – always lightly, so as to be ready for his summons.

‘Yes. Wonderful.'

‘But cricket's not quite your thing, is it?'

‘That's true. But – but – yes, it was wonderful. A wonderful day.'

Nanny and I sat facing each other in the middle of the table that seemed to stretch endlessly away in the light from two forty-watt bulbs. In those years to save electricity, as to save everything thing else, had become a patriotic duty. Neither of us had had any appetite for what Lady Hammond had referred to as ‘cold cuts' – thin greasy slices of ham and shiny chicken interleaved with each other, purple on white. She had driven to Manningtree to meet the last train from London. For once Sir Lionel was coming back to the Hall on a weekday, bringing with him the famous specialist, now an octogenarian, who had come out of retirement because of the war. Hammond was asleep upstairs. He now had two nurses, both stout, elderly woman in white starched uniforms, to nurse him round the clock.

Nanny munched, looking not at me but sideways and over her shoulder as though in a dealer's appraisal of the boulle cabinet under the window to her left. As so often when we were alone together, there had been a long but not uncomfortable silence between us. I had been lost in thoughts of Hammond. Perhaps she had too. Certainly it was of him that she now began to talk, with her slight West Country burr. ‘It's the kidneys. That's the trouble. They were crushed, you know. Kidneys can't grow again. And you can't replace them, can you? If they're not working properly, then the system is poisoned.' She put down her knife and fork and then raised her napkin to her lips. ‘ He was such a strong little boy. Never ill. And he never cried. Never. Even after he had had a fall into the empty swimming-pool he never cried. We thought then that he might have broken a leg, but it was only a bruising.' Her mistily pale blue eyes, with their inflamed upper lids, stared at me, as though trying to sum me up.

‘Do you think this specialist can do something?' I think that I already knew the answer to that question: no.

‘Well, dear, we must go on believing that he can. Mustn't we? We have to have that faith. If we believe enough …' A Roman Catholic, she would each Sunday walk three miles across the fields to the nearest Roman Catholic church and then walk back again. Once I said to her: ‘Couldn't you bicycle?,' to receive the firm answer ‘ No, I couldn't do with that.'

I, too, now put down my knife and fork.

‘Maureen has left an apple tart.' She got to her feet and peered. ‘And some custard by the look of it. Too thin, as always. How about that?'

‘Thank you, no. I don't feel all that hungry.'

She sat down again.

‘Wouldn't you like some?'

She shook her head. ‘I'm not a great one for puddings,' she said, as she had often said before. She raised her tumbler of water and sipped at it, then sipped again. ‘Wars are terrible things.'

‘Well, yes, they are.'

‘My fiancé was killed in the war, you know. Did I ever tell you that? I mean the war before this one.' How could I have supposed that she might mean the present one? ‘At Mons. You may have heard of Mons. Thousands and thousands of people were killed there, you know. English, French, Huns. And he was one of them. Later, people – meaning to be kind of course – used to tell me that someone else would come along for me. That's what they used to tell me. Someone else. But there was no one else. How could there be? After the war, there were too many women for the men to go around. So here I am.' She raised her glass and sipped again. ‘But it's not been a bad life. I've been lucky to have spent all these years here. The house is almost a palace, isn't it? And Mr Derek has been like a son to me. His mother was always so busy, you know. In those days, when he was growing up. She had all those charities and she loved her hunting. And – oh – all those other things.' She squinted at me, her mouth pursed, and then said in a suddenly sharp voice: ‘It's odd, your not having been called up.'

‘I'm exempt. I have asthma.' There was no reason why I should feel self-defensive and guilty but I did.

‘Oh, yes, your asthma!'

A silence followed, eventually broken by the sound of voices from beyond the dining-room door.

Nanny jumped to her feet. ‘Oh, there they are!'

I soon came to hate the rigid manner of the two nurses in their starchy uniforms. Clearly, they resented my intrusions into the sickroom. Clearly too, they even more resented any task that Hammond asked me to do for him. On one occasion, as I was patting a pillow, one of the two women snatched it from me. ‘I can do that!' A few days later, when I had begun to read to him the news from the
Morning Post
, the other, who was then on duty, interrupted: ‘I think he ought to get some sleep now. Doctor said that sleep was the best thing for him.' No longer did I occupy the dressing-room, since that was where, the door always open, one or other was always sentinel. My new room, far larger, with a yellowing sitz-bath with rusty taps in one corner of it, was at the other end of the long corridor.

One afternoon, when one of the two had left and the other had still not arrived, I was alone with Hammond. His face was blotched with curious reddish-purple swellings, each the size of a then penny piece, and his forehead was creased and shiny with sweat. His eyes were closed as, seated in an upright chair, I stared across at him with a dull, heavy mingling of repugnance and grief. There was a rusty stain of blood, shaped like a star, on his pillow, whether from his mouth, his nose or somewhere else I could only guess. The ammoniac smell was overpowering.

His eyes opened blearily. He stared, then screwed them up. ‘Mouse,' he muttered.

‘Mouse. Oh, Mouse. It's you.'

I got up slowly, approached the bed and lowered my hand. At once, with a swiftness that struck me with momentary terror, one of the claw-hands shot up and gripped it. ‘Oh, Mouse, I feel so ill. Why do I feel so ill?'

‘It's because of the temperature. That's all. But it's going down,' I added, lying. ‘You're getting better.'

‘Oh, don't be silly, Mouse. I've had it. I'm sure I've had it. I thought I'd had it after the crash and I was wrong. But this time …' He raised his head and then let it fall back sideways on the pillow.