Relative Love (11 page)

Compared with the rolling horizons and arid scrub of Venezuela and Ecuador – still vivid in Stephen’s mind – the English countryside was as cosy and welcoming as a well-stocked garden. Each field, forest and garden, stitched into asymmetric but solid shapes by stout fences, hedges and winding lanes, looked as integral as the squares on a counterpane, part of some civilised, thoughtfully ordered pattern. Next to the station there had been a row of stocky stone cottages with tidy front gardens and brightly painted front doors. Beyond them, scattered between the shops and the pub, were several larger houses with thatched roofs and fenced lawns. As Stephen progressed along the road out of the village, though, the homes he glimpsed behind yew hedges and five-barred gates, grew fewer and further between, until he hit a forested stretch where there were no houses and the trees arched at such a height that the sky was almost obscured from view. Deprived of the sun, the chill in the air struck with fresh force, needling its way up his cuffs and behind his collar. A bird bursting out of a mesh of grey trunks on his left made him jump. He fumbled for the solid edge of the notebook in his pocket, gripped it hard, and willed away the sense – always vaguely present – of alienation. He would write the book, he told himself, he would make it happen, make it real. The editor who had organised the commission had faith in him. It was a question of self-belief, of having the courage, perhaps for the first time in his life, to see something through to the end.

It was a relief to emerge from under the vaulted roof of the forest and feel the pale sun again on his face. As he passed a small church with a square spire, he peered over its surrounding wall at the rows of tidy gravestones, trying to make out the name ‘Harrison’ and thinking how
reassuring it would be to know that one’s final resting-place was among friends and neighbours in such a green and quiet corner of the world.

‘Your young man’s here and he looks cold.’ Pamela’s friend Dorothy, over from America where she lived comfortably in a Miami condominium, craned her neck through the hall window for a better view of the drive. She had only just got in, having spent the previous forty minutes striding round the grounds in trainers and tracksuit (at seventy-two she had given up trying to break into a proper jog) in a bid to work off some of her old friend’s fabulous cooking. She always ate shamelessly on her visits to Ashley House, her appetite sharpened by the moist country air and a break from the tyranny of cholesterol and calorie-counting. (Her body retained fat easily, her doctor said, and if she wanted a long life she had to look out for it.) ‘He looks young, too. How old did you say he was?’

‘I didn’t,’ murmured Pamela, joining her at the hall window. ‘Heavens, he must have walked from the station. I should have offered to meet him – I didn’t think.’

‘He didn’t say he wanted meeting, did he?’ said John, appearing down the stairs behind them, a large, sagging cardboard box in his arms. ‘So there’s nothing to feel bad about, is there? Where shall I put this lot?’

‘In the drawing room, I should think. Was that all you could find?’

John was tempted to make a sharp retort. Wading through the attic with toothache earlier in the week had not been fun. It had taken some time to gather together his brother’s memorabilia and the dust had made his throat sore. And the morning had not gone well: he had cut himself shaving, so badly that he had had to keep two blobs of tissue paper stuck to his chin right through breakfast. Dorothy, with her usual American tact, had kept remarking on it, offering to dab his wounds with TCP, then volunteering the cheery information that during the latter stages of her husband’s life (Walter had died of Parkinson’s some ten years before) she had had to do all his shaving for him. Then she had commandeered the main section of
The Times
and – between comments on the state of his face – had read aloud whole paragraphs. John always forgot, until the moment she burst across the threshold, how trying he found the visits of his wife’s oldest friend. He hated people who read bits of newspapers out loud. He hated people who talked at breakfast. Pamela, sailing round the table with fresh coffee and toast, had appeared oblivious to it all. Although he knew she wasn’t: after five decades together it was impossible to be oblivious to such things. Which meant she was ignoring it. Which was even more irksome. ‘Well, if you’d like to look for yourself, darling …’

‘Oh, no, darling, you’ve done very well, I’m sure.’ Pamela flapped her hands at him, dismissing him, just as the doorbell rang.

‘Mr Smith, come in, please come in.’

Stephen, his hand still on the wrought-iron handle of the bell-pull, which was half obscured in the ivy next to the door, jumped back in surprise. Having been cold on his walk he now felt the sweat of discomfort breaking out across his back. ‘I’m sorry if I’m a little late …’

‘You’re not, you’re just right,’ Pamela assured him, seeing at once that he was unsure and in need of soothing. ‘This is Dorothy, who is staying with us. And this is my husband John, Eric’s younger brother, of course.’

John had emerged from the drawing room and reached between the women to shake the young man’s hand, thinking as he did so that the chap didn’t look capable of writing a comic strip let alone a serious book and that all the attic-rummaging had almost certainly been for nothing.

‘Such a wonderful idea … We’re so thrilled, aren’t we, John?’

‘How many others are you doing? I mean, how many unsung heroes are there in the world?’ John rubbed his palms together as he spoke, relishing the notion of putting the biographer on the spot.

‘I’m sure there are millions, but I plan to write about ten. A chapter on each. Though it’s still quite early days – a lot of it depends on the research.’

‘Of course it does,’ interjected Pamela, ‘and we’d like to help in every way we can. Now, how about coffee? Or tea, perhaps? Do come this way, Mr Smith. And I apologise in advance for any mess. You take us very much as you find us, I’m afraid.’ The comment, as Pamela well knew, was unnecessary. The house, with the help of Dorothy, who liked dusting, and Betty Seymour, who came in from the village three afternoons a week, looked perfectly presentable.

Stephen walked slowly down the main hallway behind his hosts, his eyes wide. He had never been in a house that was at once so large and so comfortable-looking: at every turn there were beautiful pieces of furniture – dark wood bookcases, corner cabinets, chests and elegant chairs – all looking valuable but also much-used.
En route
to the kitchen he peered through the open doorways, glimpsing the vast oak fireplace in the drawing room, the grand piano in the music room, the widescreen TV in the room next door and the impressive line of windows running along the arched veranda outside. The furnishings were all huge – the sofa was twice the size of his bed and each curtain a waterfall of velvet – but the colours were welcoming country greens and rusty reds, sufficiently faded in appearance to indicate that they had been in position for some time.

‘Did you say tea or coffee?’

‘I … Coffee, please … I … Could I just say this is the most lovely house?’

‘Thank you. How sweet of you.’ Pamela beamed at him, noting with pleasure that some of his initial stiffness was wearing off. He had an interesting voice, soft and low with a hint of something northern. ‘It’s been in my husband’s family for three generations. We are all very fond of it.’

‘I’ll say.’ Dorothy was torn between taking herself off for a bath and staying downstairs for coffee. That Pamela was clearly flirting with her young visitor made it no easier to decide. Making people feel good about themselves – which was what flirting amounted to at their ripe old age – was one of Pamela’s supreme skills and Dorothy knew she hadn’t a hope of competing. On the other hand she wasn’t going to hang around the kitchen feeling left out. ‘I come here every year – best hotel in town.’

‘Really? That must be very nice.’

‘Oh, believe me, it is. The Harrisons
really
know how to make a girl feel at home. Pamela and I have been friends for – what is it now, Pam? Forty … Oh, my God, fifty years. We met on a secretarial course in Kensington. My parents sent me over to Europe to be
finished
, as people did in those days, but then I met my husband and – but, hey, I shouldn’t go on like this. You guys have lots you need to talk about and I must freshen up. I’ll catch you later.’ She took her coffee and left the kitchen, tugging her tracksuit top down over her hips to hide the sag in her backside.

‘So, how did you get on to our dear Eric?’ asked Pamela a few minutes later, when they were seated on the sofa in the drawing room, the box John had brought down from the attic on the coffee table in front of them. ‘We would so love to know, wouldn’t we, darling?’

‘We would indeed,’ agreed John, whose mood had sweetened with the lighting of his pipe and the assumption of a satisfactorily separate yet dominant position in one of the armchairs on the other side of the table. He puffed gently, enjoying now a surge of excitement on his brother’s
behalf. There was something indisputably timeless and permanent about a book; a chapter on Eric would be a marvellous record for posterity – a toehold on the future for every member of the Harrison clan.

‘I’ve always been fascinated by the world wars,’ began Stephen, ‘particularly the second – been a bit of a pet hobby for years. First I loved the poetry – Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Keith Douglas, and so on – and then I got to studying the battles and, well, it just escalated from there.’ He talked fast, aware that his hosts were weighing him up, assessing his credentials not just for the literary task he had set himself but as a human being. What he was asking of them was essentially very personal; he realised that now, although he hadn’t at the beginning. One little old lady in Slough had wept openly as she showed him sepia photographs of her husband as a young soldier, even though it was fifteen years since he had died and a good fifty since she had kept vigil for his safe return from the front. ‘I mean, names get thrown up and so few actually make it into the obituary columns and when they do they are always fascinating …’

‘Are they all alive, the men you have chosen?’

‘No, not all, Mr Harrison. In fact …’ Stephen frowned, embarrassed by the knowledge that Eric Harrison’s hold on life was fragile ‘… just three.’

‘You won’t get much out of Eric, these days, I’m afraid.’ John picked at a loose stitch on the cover of his chair.

‘Mr Smith —’ began Pamela.

‘Call me Stephen, please.’

‘Stephen … I did explain that, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, you did. I would be honoured to meet Eric, of course, but it would be for my own gratification rather than the needs of the book.’ His shy smile illuminated his pale uncertain face so beautifully that Pam decided he must at all costs be persuaded to stay for lunch.

‘So, how can we help?’

Stephen reached into his pocket for his notebook. He knew quite a lot about Eric Harrison already and was happy to show it. ‘In terms of his war exploits I’m really just looking for verification …’ He flicked through several pages of notes. ‘Commissioned in 1939, Fourth Regiment Royal Horse Artillery in the Middle East and Europe, lots of action during the withdrawal through Belgium to Dunkirk, where there was all that dreadful business of the guns being destroyed by our own gunners and where he got his first medal. Then he was in the thick of it in the Western Desert from El Alamein in 1942 till the fall of Tunis the following May. After that he took part in the Salerno landings and that torturous advance with the US Fifth Army to the crossing of the Volturno before the advance along the Italian coast towards Mount Massico. His regiment was then withdrawn to England along with the rest of the Seventh Armoured Division. They fought from the Normandy beachhead, through Belgium and Holland to beyond the Rhine. Eric commanded a battery for the final months of the war and was awarded the George Cross.’

‘Well, you’ve certainly done your homework,’ said John, his voice thick with admiration and pride.

‘What I’m looking for from you, I suppose,’ continued Stephen, his face flushed with enthusiasm and one of those spurts of self-belief that kept him going, ‘is help with the flesh on the bones, so to speak, the family angle, what he was like as a man, as a brother.’

‘Mad as a hatter.’ John laughed.

‘Very shy,’ said Pamela.

‘No, he wasn’t,’ her husband corrected her, only to falter with the realisation that he had used the past tense. ‘He’s just bloody-minded. Fought his war and then – well, this is my theory anyway – couldn’t quite get the hang of real life again. It was all so daring and glorious that he didn’t want to give it up. He handed this place over to me, you know, lock, stock and barrel, didn’t take so much as a carriage clock, and went off to become a mercenary instead – fought in all sorts of dreadful places, wouldn’t tell us the half of what he was up to. Then in his forties he packed it all in, bought a boat and made it his business to sail round the world. Oh, and mountain climbing. He took that up too. A real daredevil, was my brother, although you wouldn’t know it now to look at him.’

‘More coffee?’ asked Pamela.

‘No, thanks.’

‘But you will stay to lunch, won’t you? It’s almost twelve o’clock and we’ve barely started. It’s only a shepherd’s pie, but quite big enough. Don’t shake your head at me, Mr Smith, I’ve quite made up my mind. You carry on talking to John now and if you need me I’ll be in the kitchen. I think we might have a glass of wine, don’t you, dear, seeing as Mr Smith – I mean, Stephen – has come all this way? And I’ll look out some more photographs for you later on – we’ve got some lovely ones in albums that aren’t all covered in dust. Do you like sprouts, Stephen? They are fresh from our vegetable garden, but not everybody’s favourite thing.’

‘I love sprouts.’ Which happened to be true, although Stephen would have said it anyway. He could think of nothing pleasanter than prolonging his visit until the afternoon, with these welcoming people, the blaze of the log fire and the grey sheets of rain now streaming on to the garden, which was framed like a sequence of huge snapshots through the stone arches of the veranda outside. He turned to look at an array of silver-framed photographs on a low table behind him: group shots and portraits of smiling faces, all with echoing resemblances of each other.