This Real Night (13 page)

‘But wait a bit, wait a bit,’ said Uncle Len. ‘You kids can give a bit of help here, I shouldn’t wonder? Sound’s waves, ain’t it? Right! Now suppose you could freeze the waves that make music, would they look like buildings?’

The quicksand of this argument was rising round our knees.

‘I hope not,’ moaned Mamma, ‘it would be a coincidence that proved nothing,’ and Richard Quin said, ‘I don’t think so, I don’t see how frozen waves could look like a building with walls and roofs and windows and staircases and cellars.’

‘Come to think of it, they couldn’t,’ said Uncle Len, ‘not if they were all going the same way, which I suppose they would be more or less. Grrr,’ he exclaimed, and tore up the clipping and threw it away.

‘I think it must have been a German who said it,’ suggested Mr Morpurgo. He was going on to suggest that it might have been Goethe, when Uncle Len wailed, ‘Whadju mean? You’re saying that whoever said it might have been a German, when Mrs Aubrey here says that it must have been someone who didn’t know nothing about music, when everybody knows that the Germans are more a musical nation than us any day?’ Mr Morpurgo opened his mouth, closed it, and made a gesture of despair. ‘Oh, it’s my fault,’ continued Uncle Len, going down on his knees and picking up the bits of clipping, ‘it means something all right, and you mean something, but I can’t understand it, and anyway I can’t see the meaning of the general layout. Here’s this thing about music and architecture and here’s the lot of you, you kids and your Ma and Mr Morpurgo here, all saying there’s no sense to it. Now what’d he say it for, whoever said it, if it don’t mean nothing? That’s why I want to get my teeth into this science. According to what I understand they keep everything out of it that don’t make sense. It’s time somebody put the shutters up on this nonsense business. It’s all over the place. Granted the man who said this thing is the one to blame, what’s this newspaper doing, not letting the thing lie where it dropped, and putting it in at the end of the column where you’re bound to read it, if you care for interesting things. Lots I’ve learned that way. They had a bit last week about how if all the eggs in herring-roes grew up to be herrings you could walk across the North Sea on solid herring. Now they put this thing in about music being frozen architecture that can’t be true. You’re sure,’ he implored us, ‘it couldn’t mean something?’

It was Mary who found his eye rolling on her. Doing her best, she said, ‘I don’t think it could, possibly. If architecture’s frozen music, then music’s thawed architecture, and that doesn’t work out.’

‘No, my girl, you’re wrong there,’ said Uncle Len. ‘That don’t follow. With all the asparagus we’ve served here, and I thank Heaven every summer for that beautiful bed, though mind you, it’s getting old now, I know better than that. Because a thing goes one way and changes into something else it don’t mean that it can turn round and go the other direction and end up as what it started. You take melted butter to the table all hot and runny, it don’t never cool down to being butter again. Now, why’s that, I wonder?’ he asked Mamma. She shook her head and held up her hands. His eyes questioned us, Mr Morpurgo, the Thames Valley, the summer sky. ‘But, oh, good glory,’ he said, plummeting down like a shot pheasant. There’s the Reading Young Methodist League. Twenty-four of them rowing up so happy, wanting their lunch at an ungodly hour because they rose with the lark, and who the heck asked them to do that, I’d like to know, and an ’orribly frugal meal they been and ordered. Monks I could understand, but they’re Dissenters, and why leave the C. of E. if you gain nothing, and anyway not a penny spent in the bar. Well, so long for the moment. Just remember where we got to in this argument, Mrs Aubrey, I’d be obliged.’

‘That I will not be able to do,’ sighed Mamma as he ran from us up the sloping lawn. ‘Oh, Edgar, Richard Quin, will you be able to remember where we left off and help the poor man?’

‘No’, said Mr Morpurgo, ‘I would not have enjoyed what he was saying so much if it had not been too odd to be remembered,’ but Richard Quin said, ‘I don’t think we need remember, it’s more a question of being ready to board the bus when it starts again.’

That summed up our duty, and we were always ready to perform it, between fooling about in the dinghy, and bringing people over on the ferry, and feeding the hens, and helping with the lunches and teas. It was never a tedious duty, for Uncle Len’s bus travelled by picturesque routes. When he got his first Algebra book (Hall & Knight, of course) Aunt Lily looked over his shoulder and squealed that there weren’t just letters and figures, there were a lot of things that were neither, ’orrible things, and he had better get us to explain them thoroughly before we went home. But Uncle Len said, ‘If those girls in the laundries can read laundrymarks, I can find out what these mean.’ When I asked him why he should find it interesting to read that if all the eggs in herring-roes should turn into herrings the North Sea would be a solid shoal, he answered that, things actually turning out so different, it showed that there was a lot of waste going on in nature, and it seemed funny, because you couldn’t keep licensed premises going on that system. All the same, this careening bus took him a long way towards his destination. Richard Quin had told us that it would, that nobody could be a bookmaker unless he could calculate shifting odds on the course, so Uncle Len should find arithmetic easy and mathematics not impossible, and as horsebreeding was a matter of hereditary strains he ought at least to be interested in biology. It was odd how Richard Quin was aware of all sorts of things the rest of our family, and particularly Mamma, knew nothing about. We had no idea what bookmakers did beyond wearing loud checks and shouting, and not till this matter was raised had we suspected that Kate always had a shilling on the big races and half a crown on the Derby and the Grand National, and that the laundry-man, whom we had imagined to be absorbed in grief over his father-in-law’s habit of stealing lead from roofs, took her bets. But when Richard Quin said a thing it was so, it always was; and he was right about Uncle Len’s progress, which was rapid, though it never ceased to be bizarre. Presently he read some books on evolution, and when the doctor and the rector made their calls, he used to raise the subject with them, with a conspiratorial air which always puzzled them. You could see them wondering why he had glanced round to make sure that there was only the family present. But since he had only recently heard of the Darwinian controversy, he did not realise that for others the excitement had died down, and he thought of it as a race still pounding its way to a finish which would declare the winner. To talk openly about the origin of species with the doctor and the rector, whom he thought of as connected with rival stables which each had entries in the race, was to him like standing up to watch a trial gallop instead of decently seeking concealment behind a furze-bush. He got many things wrong like this; but he was not making the mistakes of a stupid man, he was guessing like an explorer.

That was how it was for a long time between us. He was an explorer in our territory, and we were hospitable natives, and at the same time we were explorers in his territory, and he was a hospitable chief. Then our relations altered, during a single night, when we were spending a fortnight of our summer holidays at the Dog and Duck. The inn was able to enfold us all. Mamma and Constance shared a bedroom in the old part that overlooked the river, and the rest of us found wilder lodgings in the rooms round the coaching yard which had been added in the eighteenth century. At that time a landowner in the district had joined up two roads and opened a cross-country road from Reading to East Anglia. ‘Go straight out of the door,’ Uncle Len used to say, ‘turn left and keep straight on and you’d fetch up at Norwich. These here motor-cars do it in the day, handy if you want to buy a canary. The best come from Norwich.’ But the coaches had not been able to do what motorcars do for there was a river that kept flooding and a bridge that kept tumbling down, and soon travellers grew shy of this byroad and went back to the old highway; so the Dog and Duck had no need of its extension. A later generation had pulled down part of it, and now the passage in the upper storey ended in a sealed door, with blanched fronds of wisteria thrusting through its hinged side. The remaining rooms, all high and light and handsome, were empty now except for a few pieces of quite elegant furniture, but they were kept scrupulously clean. They had therefore an air of being inhabited by dispossessed and stoical and housewifely ghosts which delighted us. Richard Quin chose to sleep on a straw pallet in a loft, because Letty Lind, the mare which drew Uncle Len’s trap, was stabled underneath, and he liked to hear her stirring. It reminded him of the games we used to play in the disused stables of our home in Lovegrove, when we pretended that the ponies and horses which had been there in my father’s childhood had never left, and took sugar from our hands by day, and stamped and whinnied in the night. We four girls slept in four beds set in the corners of a square room lined with mirrors, the glass brownish, the frames tarnished, which was divided by folding doors from what was called the Assembly Room, though it was quite small, no larger than the drawing-room in an ordinary house in a Kensington square. This was lit by a large and elaborate crystal chandelier, which must have been brought from some grander place; and when there was a moon we used to open the folding doors and watch, while we undressed, the lustres glittering fire and ice against the moth-soft glow of the walls and the hard black shadows. But one Saturday night when we went up to bed there was no moon, and the electricity suddenly failed. Mary and Cordelia were already in their nightgowns, so Rosamund and I called for Richard Quin and we three felt our way through the darkness to the stairs and went down to get candles and matches.

As we passed through the door which divided the older and the newer parts of the inn, we came on Uncle Len, who said, ‘That’s another fuse gone, I’ll be bound. Many and many a time I’ve said I was potty to have had the electric light put in that wing, but if you saw the state the Anglers’ Club gets into every year when it has its annual banquet in the Assembly Room - funny thing fishing never goes with water - you’d understand why I don’t fancy having oil lamps about over there. Wait a minute, chicks, I’ll give you the good candlesticks from the sitting-room. Why, whatever?’ The bell-box on the wall had broken into a continuous ear-piercing buzz. ‘Get the candlesticks yourselves, chicks, they’re on the mantelpiece,’ he sighed, ‘got to go.’ He lumbered along the passage towards the public bar, keeping his head down and sideways, like a sad old bull that sees the need for giving battle once again. We followed him, for we knew what the buzz meant. Uncle Len had had an electric bell set in the floor behind the bar so that whoever was serving could keep her foot on it if a customer was giving trouble.

We hated the bar on Saturday night. Then it was crowded with people from the village and from the near-by farms: all men, of course, for in those days no woman ever went into a country pub. The room was full of a disgusting smell. It was a compound made up of the smell of the beer the men were drinking, the smell of their bodies and their clothes (for such people washed far less than they do now and never sent their clothes to the cleaners at all) and the smell of the cheap tobacco they were smoking; and through the windows came the smell of the lavatories in the yard. That every seven days part of the Dog and Duck should be deprived of its puritan cleanliness and turned into a cube of stench revolted us as much as our own periodical need to excrete offensive matter which we would never have chosen to manufacture had we been given the choice; and we thought of both degradations as little as we could. But this time we felt we had to go into the loathsome place because Uncle Len might need our help, and indeed it was apparent that something horrid was happening. All the customers were standing quite still and nobody was saying anything. Their faces were clay-coloured and featureless, yet not stupid; they might have been shrewd turnips. All these blank but not empty faces were looking through the smoke at the bar, where Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily were standing side by side, both with their hands on their hips, and both with a vague, troubled expression on their faces, as if they thought they might be going to be sick but were not sure. Facing them was a whippy little man in a check suit, long in the jacket and tight in the trouser, with a ginger-brown bowler set far back on the close crimps of his blue-black hair. He looked spruce but dirty. It was odd that anybody should take so much trouble over his appearance and yet not think of trying what washing might do for it. ‘All I’m asking,’ he was saying, ‘is my change. It’s legal tender, this note is, you can’t refuse to take it, the law’s the law, and there it is. So you take the money for my drinks and give me my change.’ He got a whine into the word ‘change’ but all the rest was brassy.

‘Go on with you,’ said Milly, ‘a five pound note ain’t legal tender, not for a matter of shillings,’ and Aunt Lily interrupted as if she were the second voice in a round, ‘Go on with you, how could this be legal tender when it ain’t legal in the first place? This five pound note’s like the cakes we give our teas, Home-made, that’s what it is.’

‘You dare say that and I’ll have the law on you,’ said the spruce and dirty man, and then he saw Uncle Len. ‘Why, here’s the boss. Well, you get your missus to give me my change - she is your missus now, ain’t she? Well, you get her to give me my change. Me and my four friends, we had twelve whiskies, and I’m paying for them with a five pound note, and I’m asking you, missus - she is your missus, ain’t she - to take the money and give me my change. And let me tell you, my four friends are outside in my motor-car, and they could come back in a jiff if I called ’em.’

‘Pick up that note and put down the price of twelve whiskies in the King’s silver,’ said Uncle Len. ‘Six shillings, that is. And when we’ve spun each coin and heard that there aren’t none of them home-made like your note, you can go out and join your four friends in your nasty stinking little motor-car.’