Sensible Life (42 page)

Heavy rain squalls hit the windscreen. Late September brought equinoctial gales; the north coast might be too rough. He would cut south from Launceston; stay in a pub, perhaps? He could spend the night at Pengappah. He was welcome, as were all Hubert’s friends, to collect the key in the village and make himself at home. But I am not at home there, Cosmo thought irritably. I have never felt at home since Flora told me she had heard us discussing her. Then he thought, It is eighteen years since that happened. Hubert is married and has found success; I have married and divorced; I have a good practice. I have no room for sentimentality. I must take a pull and be sensible.

Thinking this, Cosmo remembered his father. Had he not, during that awful row that Christmas at Coppermalt (patched up, of course, but unforgettable), said something about Flora being sensible? One wondered, thought Cosmo, driving through the rain, who under their veneer of ordinariness was sensible. I cannot claim good sense, he thought; it was stupid to marry Joyce, cheaply cruel to my mother. I have often been idiotic. Look at that trip I made to Brittany; nothing could have been stupider. St. Malo destroyed in the war is rebuilt. There is a barrage across the water where we crossed in vedettes, the beach beyond St. Briac is built up with villas and a concrete car park covers the site of our picnic. Even giving Coppermalt to Charles has not erased anything. I remember the silky feel of the water when Hubert and I drifted down the river that hot day. The sight of Flora undressing, and catching her unaware in the water. Sometimes I hear her voice or remember the salt taste of her eyelashes when I kissed her on the last night of her visit. Or finding myself, as I occasionally do, getting out of a taxi at Paddington, I remember the feel of her wrist as I held her. It is ridiculous. I remember it all. I am fifty years old yet I am frequently tempted to seek out Irena Tarasova. Nothing could be simpler but I am afraid. Then he thought, more cheerfully: I make my living from other people’s lack of sense; who am I to complain?

In the dusk a policeman flagged him down. There were fallen trees blocking the road; it would be best for Cosmo to take the main road to Plymouth. Cosmo said, “I will wind my way round by the lanes.” The policeman remarked that the lanes were tricky, it was easy to get lost. Cosmo replied jauntily that he was in the mood to get lost and turned the car.

Quite lost some ten miles on, rounding a bend, he found cars parked by the side of the road and jamming a disused quarry. Groups of people were straggling up a moorland path. Reaching for his binoculars, Cosmo focused them on a bonfire on top of the hill, a frieze of happy and skipping children. On impulse he got out of his car and started walking towards the fire. As he climbed he smelled roasting lamb on the damp wind and heard harsh shouts above the cries of children. He overtook a wheelchair pushed by two boys. The woman in it ordered them to make haste; she had an authoritative voice. Cosmo said, “Can I lend a hand?” and, pushing, asked, “What’s the picnic in aid of?”

“It’s not a picnic, it’s a ram roast,” said the woman in the chair. Cosmo felt snubbed.

One of the lads pushing said, “Some would call it a barbecue. You all right there?” He shot off at a gallop, leaving Cosmo to push.

“You shouldn’t have given him the chance, he’s a lazy bugger,” said his mate.

Cosmo said, “I’m sorry.”

“So long as you get me up there,” said the woman. “I don’t want to miss anything.”

“What are you celebrating?” Cosmo ran through a few historical dates in his mind.

“We are not celebrating anything,” said the woman in the chair. “It’s
her
idea, ‘A bit of fun at the end of the season,’ she said. She gave the lamb.”

“Celebrating the end of the
grockle
season,” said the boy.

“Tourists, trippers,” explained the woman.

“I know what grockles are.” Cosmo was tempted to stop pushing. When they reached the top, he wondered what had possessed him to get involved. He was out of breath. He went and sat on a rock apart. He would not stay long. The woman in the wheelchair had barely said thank you.

As well as the bonfire proper there was a second, more seriously built fire, where men were turning a sheep on a spit. Fat dribbled into the fire which flared up, illuminating the men’s faces. Young women held babies in their arms and small children by the hand; the larger children and adolescents chased each other, shrieking. A group of older women, taking orders from the woman in the wheelchair, tried in the wind to anchor a tablecloth onto a trestle table under which crates of beer were stacked. The wheelchair woman cried, “Not like that! Do it the way I tell you.” Dogs ran about, getting in people’s way. Some of the men in charge of the roast had started on the beer. Cosmo thought, This might be a scene from Breughel. Then, unhappily, My thoughts are unoriginal. He felt he should leave, but if he was seen leaving it would look ill-mannered; he sat on.

The sheep was presently removed from the spit amid bonhomous shouts. The woman in the wheelchair screamed shrill directions but the men paid scant attention as they began to carve. Soon the men were handing out chunks of meat to the crowd. One detached himself and came towards Cosmo with a helping on a paper plate. He looked hard at Cosmo as he gave him the plate, but did not speak. Cosmo felt he should offer some explanation of his presence, but the man carried a second plate which he was taking to someone behind Cosmo, beyond the firelight.

Cosmo had not known that there was anyone behind him he had thought himself outside the circle. He felt self-conscious, exposed, afraid to look round. He thought, This is ridiculous. I am fifty years old, what have I to fear?

A considerable amount of drinking was now going on. Round the fire some of the shouts had an anarchic ring and the laughter was raucous. Cosmo thought again that he should leave; he had not been invited. Should he thank somebody? Say goodbye politely? Should he slink off? He could perhaps thank the woman in the wheelchair. Had he not helped push her up the hill? Was she the host? Standing up, he felt a cramp in his leg. Stamping to rid himself of it, he turned about and saw the person behind him who had received the plate of lamb.

A woman sat on a rock dressed in anorak and jeans and Wellington boots. She had a dog at her feet. The dog was watching its mistress, who was watching him. Cosmo could not see the woman’s face but he thought, She will do. I can thank this woman, apologise for gatecrashing, be on my way, make a lame explanation, sound courteous. As he stepped towards the woman the bonfire crackled up and he recognised Flora.

He must have been standing there some little time when three men detached themselves from the festivities and closed in. They carried mugs of beer; he could smell their breath. One of the men, pressing close to Cosmo, said, “You all right, Flora? Making a nuisance of himself, is he? Shall us sort him out?”

Flora said, “It’s all right, Jim. I know him.” Then she said to Cosmo, “They think you may be a man from the Ministry; we have not got permission to have the bonfire on this hill. Are you from the Ministry?”

Cosmo thought her voice had not changed at all. He said, “I am not from the Ministry.”

The man called Jim said, “Not a snooper, then,” and laughed. He seemed a friendly sort of fellow.

Cosmo said, “But I gatecrashed your party. I wanted to say goodbye and thank you, to the lady in the wheelchair perhaps? She seems to be in charge.”

Flora smiled and the men burst out laughing. Cosmo saw he had been mistaken. He said, speaking at last to Flora, “I’ve forgotten her name.”

Flora said, “Everybody called her ‘The Natural Leader.’ It’s a type.”

A little puzzled, the man Jim said, “Right then, we are going to see about the music.” He drifted away with his friends. Flora called after him, “Thanks, Jim.”

By the light of the bonfire he could see her hair was still thick and dark, her teeth when she had smiled at Jim white and even. He had not particularly remembered her teeth. He said, “Portable gramophone, squeezebox?”

Flora said, “Pop. They run it off one of the land rover’s, batteries, I think. I don’t understand these things.”

Cosmo said, “Nor do I. May I sit down for a minute? I think my legs are giving way.” Flora made room for him on the rock. The dog sniffed Cosmo’s trousers. Cosmo said: “Is she called Tonton?” He stroked the dog.

Flora said, “No.”

Presently Cosmo said, “There’s nothing wrong with my legs, I’m as strong as a horse.”

Flora said, “Good.”

Cosmo said, “The fact is they were shaking. I thought, too, that I might have a coronary.”

She said, “Please don’t.”

Flora’s dog leaned its chin on her knee and groaned. Flora said, “She’s terrified of the bonfire, that’s why we are sitting here.”

Some of the party had managed to get a land rover up the hill. A voice said, “Testing, testing,” and there was a burst of the Everley Brothers.

Cosmo said, “When those friends of yours closed in on me just now I realised what a stranger I am. I was quite scared.”

She said, “They’d love that.” She laughed.

The Everleys sang “Come Right Back,” the volume wobbling in the wind. Flora put her mouth close to Cosmo’s ear and asked, “And how is Joyce?” Her breath tickled his neck.

He said, “We were only married about five minutes. Didn’t you see our divorce in
The Times
?”

“I gave up reading
The Times
,” she said.

Cosmo said, “I have wanted to find you, but I hadn’t the nerve. I knew I might be able to trace you through Irena Tarasova. Once I went to backtrack in Brittany, but it was horrible. There wasn’t a sniff of you. Then I thought if I did find you, you would give me the brush-off.”

“You brushed me off when you went to Algiers.” She was furious.

Shouting above the Beatles, Cosmo yelled, “That was a bloody stupid mistake, you must have known it was.”

Flora’s dog jerked itself up and bared its teeth. Flora said, “I thought you were going off to get killed and wouldn’t want an involvement,” gentling the dog.

“Christ!” Cosmo shouted. “Any chance of my getting killed was long gone. I was on my way to a desk job.”

Flora thought, We are grown people, adults. We should be managing better than this, and was silent.

Cosmo said, “I remember you coming up out of the sea with that dog, carrying your clothes in a bundle. You were pretty stroppy then.”

He had shouted, “Espèce de con, idiote!” She remembered that.

The younger people were dancing round the fire. The men who had managed the ram roast drank and laughed in sharp claps of sound. They could see Flora from the corner of their eyes; she was all right. “She’s away,” said Jim, and his voice was caught by the wind.

Mothers with children began to leave. A group of older women disappeared suddenly over the brow of the hill, pushing the woman in the wheelchair in a flurry of precautionary shrieks. Flora said, “I hope they don’t tip her out.”

Cosmo said, “D’you like her?”

“She’s kind.”

“Rather interfering?” he suggested.

“Qualities which run in tandem,” she said.

Cosmo thought of his mother; he must not talk of her yet. What
was
safe? “All those years in London when you say you were working as a maid, what did you do?” He had asked this before when they sat side by side in the train.

“I went to the theatre; the pit cost very little. Museums, galleries.”

Who had gone with her to the galleries, who had shared her enjoyment, who had had a part in those lost years? “Alone?” he asked dubiously.

“Usually.” It had been safer, less trouble to be alone. Childhood habits die hard.

“Do you still prefer living and working in the country? Are you content? You told me in the train that you were content.” It rankled that she should be content. He was resentful of such a state.

“You will run out of innocuous questions soon.” Flora stroked her dog’s ears, looking straight ahead. Her voice was steady.

“All right. Are you married? Are you living with somebody? Have you had many love affairs?”

Flora said, “Phew, how brave.”

Cosmo said, “Well?”

“Are you like this in court?”

“Much better. The wig gives presence, the gown threatens.”

“Ah.”

“So?”

“Not married. Not living with anyone. Yes, I have had affairs.” It would be peculiar, she thought, watching the men stamping out the remains of the fire, if I had not. The affairs, such as they were, had been ephemeral, pleasant; there had been no risk of hurt. “You did not ask,” she said, “whether I have children. I haven’t.”

Cosmo thought, I don’t believe I have ever been alone with her; there have always been people. Oh yes, that time I found her by the river and muffed it in some way. God damn all those people. He remembered the French officer and the Colonel from Texas in the train. But we were alone, he remembered, that first time on the beach.

The bonfire was dying, and people dribbling away. The men had finished stamping out the fire and others loaded the trestle tables onto the land rover. There were shouts of, “Night, Flora,” “Night,” and, “Thanks a lot, see yer.” Somebody started the engine and the land rover tipped out of sight down the hill.

Cosmo, watching it go, said, “Were you the host?”

It was almost dark but the rain was reduced to a drizzle.

“I gave the ram. It was a communal do. A bit of fun for the village.” As they sat she too thought back, remembering the picnic and her terrible despair the following day. “I went back to the beach,” she said, “the day after the picnic. There was a circle of black where the fire had been; that was all.”

She had written their names in the sand: Cosmo, Felix, Hubert. The sea had washed them away.

Cosmo said rather crossly, “Well, I’m here now.”

The wind which had dropped now gustily renewed its energy, bringing with it rain. Flora’s dog whined and shook herself. Flora said, “If we go on sitting here, we shall get the most awful rheumatism.”

“I am afraid,” said Cosmo, turning up his coat collar, “that if I ask you to marry me, you will refuse.”

“You could always ask me again,” said Flora, getting to her feet, “when we have got into the warm and dry.”