The Colonel's Daughter Read online

  Off we go, then. Always put a macintosh on when I do the tour of the house; protects me from the damp. Dry rot, wet rot, mould, fungus – we’ve got it all here now. The Somnambulists would turn in their graves! There used to be fires in all the bedrooms and furs on the four-posters. The room Gordon allegedly slept in had a tiger skin as a hearth rug. Can’t remember what we did with it. It got the moth, I wouldn’t wonder. Or perhaps I sold it off when I bought Lady Bressingham the Quinta San José. I can’t remember. Rooms are practically empty, though, now. Don’t expect finery, will you? Just a lot of cold, empty rooms now. Nothing much to look at. Terrible legacy, a house like this in an age like this. Glad I haven’t got a son to leave it to. Daff’s pregnancy was phantom. Did I tell you that? Your gloves match that scarf. Very nice. You’re a very bright, lovely woman. If I was younger, you wouldn’t be safe with me. Dunno how that phantom got into Daff. Through the air conditioning in the Bentley perhaps! Don’t understand women. Never will now, will I? My daughter. Daff. My wife. All potty in one way or another. People are. That’s why I wanted to give them a funfair – to let them have a good scream.

  A Shooting Season

  ‘You’re writing a what?’

  ‘A novel.’

  Looking away from him, nervously touching her hair, Anna remembered, the last time I saw him my hair wasn’t grey.

  ‘Why the hell are you writing a novel?’

  Grey hairs had sprouted at forty-one. Now, at forty-five, she sometimes thought, my scalp is exhausted, that’s all, like poor soil.

  ‘I’ve wanted to write a novel ever since I was thirty. Long before, even . . .’

  ‘You never told me.’

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘Why “of course not”?’

  ‘You would have laughed, as you’re laughing now.’

  Anna had always been enchanted by his laugh. It was a boy’s giggle; (you climbed a cold dormitory stairway and heard it bubble and burst behind a drab door!) yet their son didn’t have it: at sixteen, he had the laugh of a rowdy man.

  ‘I don’t approve.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s an act of postponed jealousy.’

  Well, if so, then long postponed. Six years since their separation; four since the divorce and his remarriage to Susan, the pert blonde girl who typed his poems. And it wasn’t jealousy, surely? In learning to live without him, she had taught herself to forget him utterly. If she heard him talk on the radio, she found herself thinking, his cadences are echoing Dylan Thomas these days; he’s remembered how useful it is, if you happen to be a poet, also to be Welsh. Three years older than her, he had come to resemble a Welsh hillside – craggy outcrop of a man, unbuttoned to weather and fortune, hair wiry as gorse. Marcus. Fame clung to his untidy look. No doubt, she thought, he’s as unfaithful to Susan as he was to me.

  ‘How did it start?’

  The novel-writing, he meant, but he had a way, still, of sending fine ripples through the water of ordinary questions which invited her to admit: I was in love with him for such a long time that parting from him was like a drowning. When I was washed ashore, the sediment of him still clogged me.

  ‘I found there were things I wanted to say.’

  ‘Oh, there always were!’

  ‘Yes, but stronger now. Before I get old and start forgetting.’

  ‘But a novel?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You were never ambitious.’

  No. Not when she was his: Mrs Marcus Ridley, wife of the poet. Not while she bore his children and made rugs while he wrote and they slept.

  ‘Do your pockets still have bits of sand in them?’

  He laughed, took her strong wrist and held her hand to his face. ‘I don’t know. No one empties them for me.’

  *

  Anna had been at the rented cottage for three weeks. A sluggish river flowed a few yards from it: mallard and moorhen were the companions of her silence, the light of early morning was silver. In this temporary isolation, she had moved contentedly in her summer sandals, setting up a work table in the sunshine, another indoors by the open fire. Her novel crept to a beginning, then began to flow quietly like the river. She celebrated each day’s work with two glasses, sometimes more, of the home-made wine she had remembered to bring with her. She slept well with the window wide open on the Norfolk sky. She dreamed of her book finished and bound. Then one morning Margaret, her partner in her craft business, telephoned. The sound of the telephone ringing was so unfamiliar that it frightened her. She remembered her children left on their own in London; she raced to answer the unforeseen but now obvious emergency. But no, said Margaret, no emergency, only Marcus.

  ‘Marcus?’

  ‘Yes. Drunk and full of his songs. Said he needed to see you.’

  ‘And you told him where I was?’

  ‘Yes. He said if I didn’t, he’d pee on the pottery shelf.’

  *

  ‘Marcus.’

  The rough feel of his face was very familiar; she might have touched it yesterday. She thought suddenly, for all his puerile needs, he’s a man of absolute mystery; I never understood him. Yet they had been together for ten years. The Decade of the Poet she called it, wanting to bury him with formality and distance. And yet he surfaced in her: she seldom read a book without wondering, how would Marcus have judged that? And then feeling irritated by the question. On such occasions, she would always remind herself: he doesn’t even bother to see the children, let alone me. He’s got a new family (Evan 4, Lucy 3) and they, now, take all his love – the little there ever was in him to give.

  ‘You look so healthy, Anna. Healthy and strong. I suppose you always were strong.’

  ‘Big-boned, my mother called it.’

  ‘How is your mother?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘You never let me know.’

  ‘No. There was no point.’

  ‘I could have come with you – to the funeral or whatever.’

  ‘Oh, Marcus . . .’

  ‘Funerals are ghastly. I could have helped you through.’

  ‘Why don’t you see the children?’

  He let her hand drop. He turned to the window, wide open on the now familiar prospect of reed and river. Anna noticed that the faded corduroy jacket he was wearing was stretched tight over his back. He seemed to have outgrown it.

  ‘Marcus . . .?’

  He turned back to her, hands in his pockets.

  ‘No accusations. No bloody accusations!’

  Oh yes, she noticed, there’s the pattern: I ask a question, Marcus says it’s inadmissible, I feel guilty and ashamed . . .

  ‘It’s a perfectly reasonable question.’

  ‘Reasonable? It’s a guilt-inducing, jealous, mean-minded question. You know perfectly well why I don’t see the children: because I have two newer, younger and infinitely more affectionate children, and these newer, younger and infinitely more affectionate children are bitterly resented by the aforementioned older, infinitely less affectionate children. And because I am a coward.’

  He should be hit, she thought, then noticed that she was smiling.

  ‘I brought some of my home-made wine,’ she said, ‘it’s a disgusting looking yellow, but it tastes rather good. Shall we have some?’

  ‘Home-made wine? I thought you were a businessperson. When the hell do you get time to make wine?’

  ‘Oh Marcus, I have plenty of time.’

  Anna went to the cold, pament-floored little room she had decided to think of as ‘the pantry’. Its shelves were absolutely deserted except for five empty Nescafé jars, a dusty goldfish bowl (the debris of another family’s Norfolk summer) and her own bottles of wine. It was thirty-five years since she had lived in a house large enough to have a pantry, but now, in this cupboard of a place, she could summon memories of Hodgson, her grandfather’s butler, uncorking Stones ginger beer for her and her brother on timeless summer evenings – the most exquisite moments of all the summer holidays. Then, one summer,
she found herself there alone. Hodgson had left. Her brother Charles had been killed at school by a cricket ball.

  Anna opened a bottle of wine and took it and two glasses out to her table in the garden, where Marcus had installed himself. He was looking critically at her typewriter and at the unfinished pages of her book lying beside it.

  ‘You don’t mean to say you’re typing it?’

  She put the wine and the glasses on the table. She noticed that the heavy flint she used as a paperweight had been moved.

  ‘Please don’t let the pages blow away, Marcus.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s a mistake to type thoughts directly onto paper. Writing words by hand is part of the process.’

  ‘Your process.’

  ‘I don’t know any writers who type directly.’

  ‘You know me. Please put the stone back, Marcus.’

  He replaced the pages he had taken up, put the flint down gently and spread his wide hand over it. He was looking at her face.

  ‘Don’t write about me, Anna, will you?’

  She poured the wine. The sun touched her neck and she remembered its warmth with pleasure.

  ‘Don’t make me the villain.’

  ‘There is no villain.’

  She handed him his glass of wine. Out in the sunshine, he looked pale beside her. A miraculous three weeks of fine weather had tanned her face, neck and arms, whereas he . . . how did he spend his days now? She didn’t know. He looked as if he’d been locked up. Yet he lived in the country with his new brood. She it was – and their children – who had stayed on in the London flat.

  ‘How’s Susan?’

  No. She didn’t want to ask. Shouldn’t have asked. She’d only asked in order to get it over with: to sweep Susan and his domestic life to the back of her mind, so that she could let herself be nice to him, let herself enjoy him.

  ‘Why ask?’

  ‘To get it over with!’

  He smiled. She thought she sensed his boyish laughter about to surface.

  ‘Susan’s got a lover.’

  Oh damn him! Damn Marcus! Feeling hurt, feeling cheated, he thought I’d be easy consolation. No wonder the novel annoys him; he sees the ground shifting under him, sees a time when he’s not the adored, successful granite he always thought he was.

  ‘Damn the lover.’

  ‘What?’

  He’d looked up at her, startled. What he remembered most vividly about her was her permanence. The splash of bright homespun colour that was Anna: he had only to turn his head, open a door, to find her there. No other wife or mistress had been like her; these had often been absent when he’d searched for them hardest. But Anna: Anna had always wanted to be there.

  ‘I’m not very interested in Susan’s lover.’

  ‘No. He isn’t interesting. He’s a chartered surveyor.’

  ‘Ah. Well, reliable probably.’

  ‘D’you think so? Reliable, are they, as a breed? He looks pitiful enough to be it. Perhaps that’s what she wants.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘What do you want, Marcus? Did you come here just to tell me your wife had a lover?’

  ‘Accusations again. All the bloody little peeves!’

  ‘I want to know why you came here.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘So do I want to know. All I know is that I wanted to see you. If that’s not good enough for you, I’ll go away.’

  Further along the river, she could hear the mallard quacking. Some evenings at sunset, she had walked through the reeds to find them (two pairs, one pair with young) and throw in scraps for them. Standing alone, the willows in front of her in perfect silhouette, she envied the ducks their sociability. No one comes near them, she thought, only me standing still. Yet they have everything – everyone – they need.

  ‘I love it here.’

  She had wanted to sit down opposite Marcus with her glass of wine, but he had taken the only chair. She squatted, lifting her face to the sun. She knew he was watching her.

  ‘Do you want me to go away?’

  She felt the intermittent river breeze on her face, heard the pages of her novel flap under the stone. She examined his question, knew that it confused her, and set it aside.

  ‘The novel’s going to be about Charlie.’

  ‘Charlie?’

  ‘My brother Charles. Who died at school. I’m imagining that he lived on, but not as him, as a girl.’

  ‘Why as a girl?’

  ‘I thought I would understand him better as a girl.’

  ‘Will it work?’

  ‘The novel?’

  ‘Giving Charlie tits.’

  ‘Yes, I think so. It also means she doesn’t have to play cricket and risk being killed.’

  ‘I’d forgotten Charlie.’

  ‘You never knew him.’

  ‘I knew him as a boy – through your memories. He of Hodgson’s ginger beer larder!’

  ‘Pantry.’

  She’s got stronger, Marcus decided. She’s gone grey and it suits her. And she’s still wearing her bright colours. Probably makes not just her own clothes now, but ponchos and smocks and bits of batik to sell in her shops. And of course her son’s friends fall in love with her. She’s perfect for a boy: bony, maternal and sexy. Probably her son’s in love with her too.

  ‘Can I stay for dinner?’

  Anna put her glass to her lips and drained it. He always, she thought, made requests sound like offers.

  *

  Anna scrutinised the contents of the small fridge: milk, butter, a bunch of weary radishes, eggs. Alone, she would have made do with the radishes and an omelette, but Marcus had a lion’s appetite. His most potent memory of a poetry-reading fortnight in America was ordering steak for breakfast. He had returned looking ruddy, like the meat.

  Anna sighed. The novel had been going well that morning. Charlie, renamed Charlotte, was perched high now above her cloistered schooldays on the windswept catwalk of a new university. Little gusts of middle-class guilt had begun to pick at her well-made clothes and at her heart. She was ready for change.

  ‘Charlotte can wait,’ Marcus told Anna, after her one feeble attempt to send him away. ‘She’ll be there tomorrow and I’ll be gone. And anyway, we owe it to each other – one dinner.’

  I owe nothing, Anna thought. No one (especially not pretty Susan with her tumbling fair hair and her flirtatious eyes) could have given herself – her time, her energy, her love – more completely to one man than she to Marcus. For ten years he had been the landscape that held her whole existence – one scarlet poppy on the hills and crags of him, sharing his sky.

  ‘One dinner!’

  *

  She took the car into Wroxham, bought good dark fillet, two bottles of Beaujolais, new potatoes, a salad and cheese.

  While she was gone, he sat at the table in the sunshine, getting accustomed to the gently scented taste of her home-made wine and, despite a promise not to, reading her novel. Her writing bored him after a very few pages; he needed her presence, not her thoughts.

  I’ve cried for you, he wanted to tell her. There have been times when – yes, several of them – times when I haven’t felt comfortable with the finality of our separation, times when I’ve thought, there’s more yet, I need more. And why couldn’t you be part of my life again, on its edge? I would honestly feel troubled less – by Susan’s chartered surveyor, by the coming of my forty-ninth birthday – yes, much less, if you were there in your hessian or whatever it is you wear and I could touch you. Because ten years is, after all, a large chunk of our lives, and though I never admit it, I now believe that my best poems were written during those ten and what followed has been mainly repetition. And I wanted to ask you, where are those rugs you made while I worked? Did you chuck them out? Why was the silent making of your rugs so intimately connected to my perfect arrangement of words?

  *

  ‘So here we are . . .’

  The
evening promised to be so warm that Anna had put a cloth on the table outside and laid it for supper. Marcus had helped her prepare the food and now they sat facing the sunset, watching the colour go first from the river, then from the willows and poplars behind it.

  ‘Remember Yugoslavia?’

  ‘Yes, Marcus.’

  ‘Montenegro.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Those blue thistles.’

  ‘Umm.’

  ‘Our picnic suppers!’

  ‘Stale bread.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The bread in Yugoslavia always tasted stale.’

  ‘We used to make love in a sleeping bag.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Anna thought, it will soon be so dark, I won’t be able to see him clearly, just as, in my mind, I have only the most indistinct perception of how he is in that hard skin, if I ever knew. For a moment she considered going indoors to get a candle, but decided it would be a waste of time; the breeze would blow it out. And the darkness suits us, suits this odd meeting, she thought. In it, we’re insubstantial; we’re each imagining the other one, that’s all.

  ‘I read the novel, as far as you’ve gone.’

  ‘Yes. I thought you probably would.’

  ‘I never pictured you writing.’

  ‘No. Well, I never pictured you arriving here. Margaret told me you said you “needed” me. What on earth did you mean?’

  ‘I think about you – often.’

  ‘Since Susan found her surveyor?’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘Yes, it’s fair. You could have come to see me – and the children – any time you wanted.’

  ‘I wanted . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not the children. You.’

  For a moment, Anna allowed herself to remember: ‘You, in the valley of my arms,/ my quaint companion on the mountain./ How wisely did I gather you,/ my crimson bride . . .’ Then she took a sip of beaujolais and began: