Mischief (16 page)

‘I say,’ said the photographer to Julian Simley, as he wheel-barrowed a load of red roof-tiles from the yard to the cider house, ‘you should get the ivy off the chimney; it’ll break down the cement.’ The photographer knew a thing or two – he’d just put in an offer for a house in the country himself. An old rectory: a lot to do to it, of course, but he was a dab hand at DIY, and with his new girlfriend working he could afford to spend a bit. A snip, a snip – and worth twice as much, three times, when he was through. Even the surveyor said so.

The house read his mind and sang, ‘When
we’re
through with
you
, when
we’re
through with
you
: you can call yourself an owner, who are but a slave, you who come and go within our walls, for all old houses are the same and think alike,’ and the photographer smiled admiringly up at the doves in the creeper, as they stirred and whirred, and only the journalist shivered and said, ‘There’s something wrong with my ears. I hear music in them, a creaky kind of music, I don’t like it at all.’

‘Wax’, said the photographer absently, ‘can sound like that.’

Julian Simley said, ‘Christ, is that ivy back again? That’s the last straw,’ which is not what you’re supposed to say when you’re telling the press a success story of restoration, or renovation, in return for a hundred-pound fee, which you desperately need, for reclaimed old brick and groceries. ‘I haven’t the head for heights I had.’

‘You fool, you fool,’ snarled the house, overhearing. ‘You pathetic weak-backed mortal. Let the ivy grow, will you? Turn me into weeds and landscape? Leave me a heap of rubble, would you! Wretched, poverty-stricken creature: grubbing around for money! You and your poor crippled wife, who’d rather fit a dresser handle than tile the kitchen floor! I’ve no more patience with you: I’ve finished with you!’ and as Julian Simley stood on a windowsill to open a mullioned pane so the photographer could get the effect of glancing light he wanted, the sill crumbled and Julian fell and his back clicked and there was his disc slipped again, and he lay on the ground, and Harriet rang for the ambulance, and
House
&
Garden
waited with them. It was the least they could do.

‘He should have replaced the sill,’ thought the photographer, ‘I would have done,’ and the house hugged itself to itself in triumph.

‘We can’t manage any longer,’ said Julian to Harriet, as he lay on the ground. ‘It’s no use, we’ll have to sell, even at a loss.’

‘It’s not the money I mind about,’ grieved Harriet. ‘It’s just I love this house so much.’

‘Don’t you think I do,’ said Julian, and gritted his teeth against the stabs of pain which ran up his legs to his back. He thought this time he’d done some extra-complicating damage. ‘But I get the feeling it’s unrequited love.’ The house sniggered.

‘But how will we know the next people will carry on as we have? They’ll cover up the kitchen floor and not let it dry out properly, I know they will.’ Harriet wept. Julian groaned. The ambulance came. The journalist and the photographer drove off.

‘You want to know the secret?’ the house shrieked after them. ‘The secret of my success? It’s chew them up and spit them out! One after the other! And I’ll have you next,’ it screamed at the photographer, who looked back at the house as they circled the drive, and thought, ‘So beautiful! I’ll withdraw the offer on the rectory, and make a bid on this one. I reckon I’ll get it cheap, in the circumstances. That looked like a broken back, not a slipped disc, to me,’ and the house settled back cosily into its excellent, well-drained, sheltered site – the original builders knew what they were doing – and smiled to itself, and whispered to the doves who stirred and whirred their wings in its creepers. ‘Flesh and blood, that’s all. Flesh and blood withers and dies. But a house like me can go on for ever, if it has its wits about it.’

1988

This is a sad story. It has to be. It rained in Sarajevo, and we had expected fine weather.

The rain filled up Sarajevo’s pride, two footprints set into a pavement, marking the spot where the young assassin Princip stood to shoot the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife. (Don’t forget his wife: everyone forgets his wife, the Archduchess.) That happened in the summer of 1914. Sarajevo is a pretty town, Balkan style, mountain-rimmed. A broad, swift, shallow river runs through its centre, carrying the mountain snows away. The river is arched by many bridges and the one nearest the two footprints has been named The Princip Bridge. The young man is a hero in these parts. Not only does he bring in the tourists – look, look, the spot, the very spot! – but by his action, as everyone knows, he lit the spark which fired the timber which caused World War I which crumbled the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the crumbling of which made modern Yugoslavia possible. Forty million dead (or was it thirty?), but who cares? So long as he loved his country.

The river, they say, can run so shallow in the summer it’s known derisively as ‘the wet road’. Today, from what I could see through the sheets of falling rain, it seemed full enough. Yugoslavian streets are always busy – no one stays home if they can help it (thus can an indecent shortage of housing space create a sociable nation) and it seemed that as if by common consent a shield of bobbing umbrellas had been erected two metres high to keep the rain off the streets. But the shield hadn’t worked around Princip’s corner, that was plain.

‘Come all this way,’ said Peter, who was a Professor of Classical History, ‘and you can’t even see the footprints properly, just two undistinguished puddles.’ Ah, but I loved him. I shivered for his disappointment. He was supervising my thesis on varying concepts of morality and duty in the early Greek states as evidenced in their poetry and drama. I was dependent upon him for my academic future. Peter said I had a good mind but not a first-class mind, and somehow I didn’t take it as an insult. I had a feeling first-class minds weren’t all that good in bed.

Sarajevo is in Bosnia, in the centre of Yugoslavia, that grouping of unlikely states, that distillation of languages into the phonetic reasonableness of Serbo-Croat. We’d sheltered from the rain in an ancient mosque in Serbian Belgrade: done the same in a monastery in Croatia: now we spent a wet couple of days in Sarajevo beneath other people’s umbrellas. We planned to go on to Montenegro, on the coast, where the fish and the artists come from, to swim and lie in the sun, and recover from the exhaustion caused by the sexual and moral torments of the last year. It couldn’t possibly go on raining for ever. Could it? Satellite pictures showed black cloud swishing gently all over Europe, over the Balkans, into Asia – practically all the way from Moscow to London, in fact. It wasn’t that Peter and I were being singled out. No. It was raining on his wife, too, back in Cambridge.

Peter was trying to make the decision, as he had been for the past year, between his wife and myself as his permanent life partner. To this end we had gone away, off the beaten track, for a holiday: if not with his wife’s blessing, at least with her knowledge. Were we really, truly suited? We had to be sure, you see, that this was more than just any old professor-student romance: that it was the Real Thing, because the longer the indecision went on the longer Mrs Piper, Peter said, would be left dangling in uncertainty and distress. He and she had been married for twenty-four years; they’d stopped loving each other a long time ago, naturally – but there would be a fearful personal and practical upheaval entailed if he decided to leave permanently and shack up, as he put it, with me. Which I wanted him to do, because I loved him. And so far I was winning hands down. It didn’t seem much of a contest at all, in fact. I’d been cool and thin and informed on the seat next to him in a Zagreb theatre (Mrs Piper was sweaty and only liked TV), was now eager and anxious for social and political instruction in Sarajevo (Mrs Piper spat in the face of knowledge, Peter had once told me), and planned to be lissom and topless – I hadn’t quite decided: it might be counterproductive to underline the age differential – while I splashed and shrieked like a bathing belle in the shallows of the craggy Croatian coast (Mrs Piper was a swimming coach: I imagined she smelt permanently of chlorine).

So far as I could see it was no contest at all between his wife and myself. How could he possibly choose her while I was on offer? But Peter liked to luxuriate in guilt and indecision. And I loved him with an inordinate affection, and indulged him in this luxury.

Princip’s footprints are a metre apart, placed like the feet of a modern cop on a training shoot-out – the left in front at a slight outward angle, the right behind, facing forward. There seemed great energy focused here. Both hands on the gun, run, stop, plant the feet, aim, fire! I could see the footprints well enough, in spite of Peter’s complaint. They were clear enough to me, albeit puddled.

We went to a restaurant for lunch, since it was too wet to do what we loved to do: that is, buy bread, cheese, sausage, wine and go off somewhere in our hired car, into the woods or the hills, and picnic and make love. It was a private restaurant – Yugoslavia went over to a mixed capitalist–communist economy years back, so you get either the best or the worst of both systems, depending on your mood – that is to say, we knew we would pay more but be given a choice. We chose the wild boar.

‘Probably ordinary pork soaked in red cabbage water to darken it,’ said Peter. He was not in a good mood. Cucumber salad was served first.

‘Everything in this country comes with cucumber salad,’ complained Peter. I noticed I had become used to his complaining. I supposed that when you had been married a while you simply wouldn’t hear it. He was forty-six and I was twenty-five.

‘They grow a lot of cucumber,’ I said.

‘If they can grow cucumbers,’ Peter then asked, ‘why can’t they grow mange-tout?’ It seemed a why-can’t-they-eat-cake sort of argument to me, but not knowing enough about horticulture not to be outflanked if I debated the point, I moved the subject on to safer ground.

‘I suppose Princip’s action couldn’t really have started World War One,’ I remarked. ‘Otherwise, what a thing to have on your conscience! One little shot and the deaths of thirty million on your shoulders.’

‘Forty,’ he corrected me. Though how they reckon these things and get them right I can’t imagine. ‘Of course Princip didn’t start the war. That’s just a simple tale to keep the children quiet. It takes more than an assassination to start a war. What happened was that the build-up of political and economic tensions in the Balkans was such that it had to find some release.’

‘So it was merely the shot that lit the spark that fired the timber that started the war, et cetera?’

‘Quite,’ he said. ‘World War One would have had to have started sooner or later.’

‘A bit later or a bit sooner’, I said, ‘might have made the difference of a million or so: if it was you on the battlefield in the mud and the rain you’d notice: exactly when they fired the starting-pistol: exactly when they blew the final whistle. Is that what they do when a war ends: blow a whistle? So that everyone just comes in from the trenches?’

But he wasn’t listening. He was parting the flesh of the soft collapsed orangey-red pepper which sat in the middle of his cucumber salad; he was carefully extracting the pips. He didn’t like eating pepper pips. His Nan had once told him they could never be digested, would stick to the wall of his stomach and do terrible damage. I loved him for his vulnerability, the bit of him that was forever little boy: I loved him for his dexterity and patience with his knife and fork. I’d finished my salad yonks ago, pips and all. I was hungry. I wanted my wild boar.

Peter might have been forty-six but he was six foot two and well-muscled and grizzled with it, in a dark-eyed, intelligent, broad-jawed kind of way. I adored him. I loved to be seen with him. ‘Muscular-academic, not weedy-academic,’ as my younger sister Clare once said. ‘Muscular-academic is just a generally superior human being: everything works well from the brain to the toes. Weedy-academic is when there isn’t enough vital energy in the person, and the brain drains all the strength from the other parts.’ Well, Clare should know. Clare is only twenty-three, but of the superior human kind herself, vividly pretty, bright and competent – somewhere behind a heavy curtain of vibrant, as they say, red hair, which she only parts for effect. She had her first degree at twenty. Now she’s married to a Harvard Professor of Economics seconded to the United Nations. She can even cook. I gave up competing when she was fourteen and I was sixteen. Though she too is capable of self-deception. I would say her husband was definitely of the weedy-academic rather than the muscular-academic type. And they have to live in Brussels.

The Archduke’s chauffeur had lost his way, and was parked on the corner trying to recover his nerve when Princip came running out of a café, planted his feet, aimed and fired. Princip was seventeen – too young to hang. But they sent him to prison for life and, since he had TB to begin with, he only lasted three years. He died in 1917, in a Swiss prison. Or perhaps it was more than TB: perhaps they gave him a hard time, not learning till later, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, that he was a hero. Poor Princip, too young to die – like so many other millions. Dying for love of a country.

‘I love you,’ I said to Peter, my living man, progenitor already of three children by his chlorinated, swimming-coach wife.

‘How much do you love me?’

‘Inordinately! I love you with inordinate affection.’

It was a joke between us. Ind Aff!

‘Inordinate affection is a sin,’ he’d told me. ‘According to the Wesleyans. John Wesley himself worried about it to such a degree that he ended up abbreviating it in his diaries. Ind Aff. He maintained that what he felt for young Sophy, the eighteen-year-old in his congregation, was not Ind Aff, which bears the spirit away from God towards the flesh: no, what he felt was a pure and spiritual, if passionate, concern for Sophy’s soul.’

Peter said now, as we waited for our wild boar, and he picked over his pepper, ‘Your Ind Aff is my wife’s sorrow, that’s the trouble.’ He wanted, I knew, one of the long half wrangles, half soul-sharings that we could keep going for hours, and led to piercing pains in the heart which could only be made better in bed. But our bedroom at the Hotel Europa was small and dark and looked out into the well of the building – a punishment room if ever there was one. (Reception staff did sometimes take against us.) When Peter had tried to change it in his quasi-Serbo-Croat, they’d shrugged their Bosnian shoulders and pretended not to understand, so we’d decided to put up with it. I did not fancy pushing hard single beds together – it seemed easier not to have the pain in the heart in the first place.