New World in the Morning (7 page)

“Yes, I do. It's for your being so intuitive and clever and mature. For expressing yourself so well. For remembering all my tiny pearls of wisdom.”

“If it goes on like this,” he said, “I may start writing them down and learning them for homework.”

“Wise fellow. Just tell me, though. Who's the spiffiest father in the whole wide world?”

Matt had pocketed his ten pounds.

“Ask me again in another week.”

I laughed. So did Junie.

“But I've got to admit it, Pop. Since last night you do appear different. Somehow.” (I didn't say so but I found this tribute the most gratifying he could have made.) “Is it going to be okay, Mum, d'you think…for me to keep this loot?”

“Why ask me? It's your father's money. I've got nothing to do with it.”

Yet Matt still seemed unbelieving.

“Dad, I'll get it changed at some point and give you back your five. That would be fair, wouldn't it? After all, I only asked for five.”

“Perhaps, then, this will have taught you not to set your sights too low? Not to ask too little out of life? In any case, my darling, I want you to hold onto it.”

I added: “And let me say that I admire you for your integrity; for your reluctance to exploit the situation.”

He leant forward and kissed the back of my neck.

Already, I thought. Already three small items for the diary.
Cooked breakfasts. Ten-pound note. Demonstrative affection
. I smiled at him in the mirror.

And a fourth one:
acknowledgement of difference
.

Unsolicited, to boot.

We turned into the drive, drew up by the front door. There were two other cars parked along the verge and a further two behind those—first-comers always left space for later brethren. Jalna was in a quiet and tree-lined cul-de-sac; a fifteen-minute drive from us, from Cowper Road. It was a fairly attractive house, Tudor style, built during the nineteen-thirties. Relatively imposing…but in no way as beautiful as ours. I'd never have considered swopping.

Ella came to meet us. She'd been sitting on the swing in the front garden, awaiting our arrival. “You're late!” she announced, moodily.

“Hello, darling,” cried Junie, through the open window. “Have you been having a good time?”

“Hello, Mum. Oh, not bad, I suppose. Hello, Dad. Hello, Susie.”

“Hello, Matt,” said Matt.

I walked round the car, lifted my daughter and gave her a big hug. She seemed to have grown heavier since the last time I had done this. Nothing daunted—indeed, responding to the challenge—I then hoist her well above my head and swung myself around a couple of times, laughing up at her. “Hey, why so physical?” she asked, when I had set her down.

“Because you're my little girl and because you always used to like my doing that. I remember when you couldn't get enough of it.
Again
, you'd say,
again
!”

Susie jumped up at her as though the two of them had been apart for weeks and while Ella stroked and patted her, and Junie was taking her fruit pies out of the boot and handing three of them to me, Matt said to his sister: “He's acting pretty weird today. If only I cared for you a bit more I'd pass on a tip which could definitely prove useful.”

“Like what?”

“Like, for instance, see what happens if you ask him for a piggyback or something.”

“You must be nuts. Why should I want a piggyback?”

“Or
something
,” he repeated, almost spitting out the word. “Anything.”

“I don't get you,” she said.

“You're so thick,” Matt told her, dispassionately.

Though neither of my own children wanted piggybacks or to ride upon my shoulders, or to be whirled around like aeroplanes—as Ella had so lately been—there were plenty of other children who did; and some of them not a whole lot younger. “Oh,
poor
Uncle Sam,” was a cry heard many times during the course of the afternoon, “now, won't you please take pity on him, you monsters?” But this wasn't only because of piggybacks and the like. For who was it who, while the rest of the fathers dozed in their deckchairs, organized a crude treasure hunt around the garden and, after that, a game of hide-and-seek in some nearby woods (with Susie proving so much of a liability, poor excited thing, she had to be shut away inside the house; I would somehow make it up to her) and, after
that
, played several bouts of tag—even having to throw off his shirt and wipe himself down with it? “Well, truly, doesn't that put you four sluggards to shame?” asked Octavia, whose husband was pasty-faced and stolid and looked fifty although he wasn't yet forty-five.

“Oh, he's only making up for lost time,” he answered good-humouredly; Raymond's glamour might have gone but not his geniality. “He's feeling bad he didn't get here soon enough to help mark out the tennis court. We've got to be nice to him.”

(And here, with an early diary entry in view,
I Capture the Dovecot
, I was already thinking that, for the sake of avoiding complexity—always an aspiration—I should have to make these characters pipe up in turn.)

“Yes, indeed,” agreed Ted, who also wouldn't have looked any great shakes these days without his shirt. “The least we can do is give him this chance to salve his conscience. Life doesn't always provide us with a second opportunity. We urge you to go for it, Sam. Just go for it!”

Unlike these other two, who were businessmen, Robert was a librarian. The poor chap suffered from anaemia and ought by rights to have found each Sunday's get-together more wearing than anybody; but either he drew strength from togetherness or else was seriously well trained.

“Sammy, I get scared,” he said, “so painfully worried that you might simply burn yourself out—too much, too soon, too fast!
Then
who's going to creosote the fence and paint the greenhouse and build the rockery and attend to all the other little things that no doubt Mimsy and Pim have already lined up to keep us entertained throughout the summer?” He shook his head, sadly.

“Listen,” said Jake, who was the most intellectual of my brothers-in-law and actually had a thick book of poetry open on his lap. “Why are you standing there as though you had nothing better to do—just blocking out the sun? You can take the children on a long hike or something.” He added graciously, “That way you can atone for the disturbance you created a short while ago, with all that screaming and running about in the wood.”

I said: “You're like a bloody barbershop quartet. You're like a troupe of performing seals. Hasn't anyone ever told you?”

“Yes, they're a thoroughly smirky lot,” Yvonne confirmed, with grudging laughter. She was next up in line from Junie and like all the Fletcher girls was short and bouncy and big-chested. “Well, I wouldn't take it. You're larger than they are, Sam. For my part I give you full leave to grab Ted and teach him a good lesson.”

Rose and April also granted me permission to educate—respectively—Jake and Robert. Octavia chipped in, as well.

“But I thought they were my friends,” I opined piteously, hanging my head.

“Well, of course we are,” crooned Raymond. “Now, if we weren't, we'd hardly be putting you forward for Uncle of the Year. Would we, guys?”

“Uncle of the Year! Would you
really
do that for me?”

“You have our word on it.”

“Oh, shucks! I don't know what to say.”

“You don't have to say anything, Samuel. Just run along now. Perhaps to Sandwich and back. No—forget about
and back
. Jake will get the kids lined up in pairs.”

“Oh, yes? Let him but try!” Rose, who'd objected to my using my shirt as a towel, was now shaking it out forgivingly, about to bear it off to a clotheshorse or to an ironing board, despite Junie's halfhearted remonstrances that I shouldn't be so pandered to. Or mothered. (In a way, surprisingly, I liked the notion of being mothered.) But Rose had become my champion; roused, she twirled my shirt about her husband's head as a baton of subdual. She was like the Devil Girl from Mars; Drum Majorette from Hell. I timidly expressed the hope this mightn't be allowed to interfere with the placing of those nominations.

Soon, though, it was teatime. My dieting plans had gone awry—not so badly during lunch but I needed now to preserve my energy. “Today I want the biggest piece of everything to go to Sam,” proclaimed Myrtle Fletcher, raising plump and dimpled forearms. “And the smallest piece of everything to go to Robert. I heard what he said about creosoting fences, etc. So did Pim. He won't get much of a glass of sherry, either.”

“You on the other hand, Sam,” said my father-in-law, “will have a tumbler if that's what you'd like.” He was a small man, rosy-cheeked, bald-pated, amiable. Always synchronized his viewpoint with his wife's—at any rate, in public; “I need to,” he would say, “the old girl's got a longer reach than mine!” He'd been kind to me and I was fond of him, wasn't proud of the fact that I had grown increasingly to feel contempt: subservience in a husband troubled me. Either I couldn't have been so fully aware of such meekness at the start or it had become more pronounced over time.

“Oh, Lordy, Lordy,” said Robert. “Even the walls have ears.”

“And the kitchen has open windows, too, where Pim and I discovered, to our disappointment, that it was for
ingrates
we were making tea! I'm sorry to have to inform you of something else. Your own two daughters were amongst those of us who heard.”

We stayed in the garden. The children, whose ages ranged from seven to sixteen, either sat on the grass, on rugs or cushions, or roamed at will, eating their scone, sandwich or piece of carrot cake. My own deckchair was positioned next to Jake's. “The Brain and the Brawn,” he suggested. I slightly resented this—well, as much as I could have resented anything in my current frame of mind and on such a sunny afternoon. Or as much as I could have resented anything that part of me found flattering.

He was certainly the scrawniest of the sons-in-law; sharp-nosed, long-chinned, rope-veined. But he always seemed straightforward. Receptive to new ideas. Was likely to be popular, I thought, amongst his pupils.

He had been preparing a lesson for the following day.

I protested.

“Just because you have the Oxford Book of Something-or-Other to use as a tea tray! That doesn't mean you're the only one around here who likes poetry!”

“Oh, sure,” he remarked. “‘If you can keep your head, when all about you…are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too…'”

During even so brief a recitation, I had been thinking about Moira. As though I had ever—quite—not been thinking about Moira.

“Here,” I said, “you mustn't knock Kipling!”

“I don't,” he replied. “But I bet you couldn't recite me four lines of anything a little more weighty. Excluding Shakespeare.”

“Is that so? How about Dryden?”

“Four lines of Dryden?”

“Would that impress you?”

“Well could.”

“All right, then. Listen to this…

‘I strongly wish for what I faintly hope:

Like the daydreams of melancholy men,

I think and think on things impossible,

Yet love to wander in that golden maze…'

Word perfect, I assure you.”

“Yes,” he said, slowly. “I can believe it. I'm not actually familiar with that passage—”

“
Rival Ladies
,” I told him. “But my point is: not all of us are total dunderheads.”

“After nearly twenty years, Sam, do you imagine I don't know that? And, after nearly twenty years, can't
you
imagine I might ever so slightly be pulling your leg?”

But my education had always been a touchy subject. I'd never been to university, had nothing in the way of what
I
considered a genuine qualification: some tangible proof in writing. One of these days I hoped to set this right. Go up to Oxbridge preferably—get to be a rowing blue.

Well, anyway. You gotta have a dream.

“How much more of it can you recite?” He laughed. “Old Memorybags!”

“Of the Dryden? None. But you asked for only four lines. What about two from Alexander Pope? Also impressive?”

“Possibly.”

“‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; the proper study of mankind is man.'”

“Oh, anyone can recite that! With the exception, I mean, of anyone in this garden.”

“And lastly I can offer you the whole of
The Whiffenpoof Song
. But, sadly, not its etymology.”

I sighed. Stood up and went to pass a plate of macaroons. Also one of flapjacks.

As it happened, a few hours later I did in fact give voice to those little black sheep who had lost their way—baa, baa, baa! (And wouldn't get home till the Judgment Day—baa, baa, baa!) But not as a solo. We'd built a bonfire and after a light supper we ate buns and drank hot chocolate around it; some of the children would later place foil-wrapped potatoes in the embers. Ted told a ghost story; not a very scary one, although most of the adults simulated terror. Then we had a spelling bee and played ‘I Spy'. Everyone seemed smiley and relaxed…increasingly so as the night grew darker. Cosy, too—we all had woollen jumpers. Beside me lay Susie, well-fed and content and interested: eyes constantly on the move, snout resting on her paws. (How could all those other households honestly prefer cats?) Young Gary sat with thumb in mouth and head against his mother's breast, and Rose absently stroked the hair back from his brow. I wondered if Jake ever suffered from claustrophobia. He or any of the others. Impossible to tell. I seldom did while I was actually there. I smiled at Junie and my daughter, both sitting straight across from me. People said there was no such thing as a perfect day, and of course there probably wasn't—I supposed—yet I really didn't see how this one could have been improved on. Our initially lusty singsong was now petering out but as I looked at all those friendly faces in the firelight, faces so familiar I usually didn't think much about my fondness for the people attached to them, I suddenly felt regretful that next Sunday mine wouldn't be among them. Although I knew this was merely sentimental and would certainly be fleeting it wasn't easy to shake off. What's more, it happened even before somebody, I believe it was Octavia, led the rest into something I hadn't heard for ages: “Here's a happy tune, you'll love to croon, they call it…Sam's song.” Lots of nods and smiles in my direction and cries from some of the children—“This one's about Uncle Sam! This is about Uncle Sam!”