Snowleg (3 page)

“Well, you can imagine. He wants to die in his own sheets and your mother has promised. Anyway, see for yourself. He's coming for tea.”

They drove up Tisbury High Street and as a roof flashed past Peter couldn't help thinking of the old man lying in bed. His grandfather had been born at a time when if anyone living beside this road fell seriously ill, straw would be scattered thickly outside the house to dull the noise of horses' hoofs and wagon wheels. This morning, opposite the shoe-shop, two men sat on their motorbikes and adjusted the straps on their helmets.

The Rover turned right after the post office and headed east towards Sutton Mandeville. Narrow lanes and tall hedgerows opening at intervals into wide downs where his father took him bird-watching. The Nadder glinted at the bottom of a shallow valley and in fields on either side the chalky soil glowed up through grass and lines of beech. Walking with his father on the edge of that river, Peter had come across his first plover's nest. “See, the eggs are all pointing towards the middle. That means the chicks will soon be hatched.”

He turned to look back at the river. On the rear seat was a camera case and tripod. “Dad, what's that camera for?”

“Ah, yes, well. Didn't Mummy tell you?” As was his habit when under pressure, his father scratched at the large, inflamed bump that the cravat concealed. He called the unsightly goitre his “Derbyshire neck” and attributed it to the limestone in the water around Tansley where he had grown up.

“No,” said Peter. “She hasn't told me anything.”

“I've become a photographer. Nothing fancy. Weddings, portraits, that kind of thing. But it makes a lot of sense – if I'm doing the invitations. Two birds with one stone and all that.” He gave a sad, light laugh. “Guess who I'm photographing next week?”

“I'm no good at guessing, Daddy.”

“Port Regis.”

“The school?”

“The whole school. Tell Mr Tamlyn. Maybe he'd like a House photo of Southgate. Tell him I'll give him a discount.”

Minutes later, the Rover turned through gates Peter had never seen closed, into the white gravel drive, and stopped outside the house.

His parents didn't have the means to live in London after Peter was born and moved to the “Wet country”, as Rodney dubbed the rain-soaked countryside south of Salisbury. Here, in a stone tithe-barn, Rodney clung to the lifeline offered by commercial art, earning a living of sorts designing letterheads and bookplates and invitations to parties, weddings and funerals.

Despite a coolness in the air, the French windows were open. From inside came the sound of a piano.

Peter rolled up his window and they sat for a moment, neither seeming to want to leave the car. Large insects moved in and out of the foxgloves and everywhere it was green and lush. His eyes tracked a hobby across the lawn and the sight of the swing suspended on blue ropes from the chestnut tree brought back another birthday. He was eight when his father had put up the swing. Suddenly, now, he wanted nothing so much as to feel a hand on his back, propelling him into the sky.

The hobby flitted to the roof of the stable that was his father's studio, paused on the gutter, and flew off over the fields to the steep ridge beyond. The long hill, stretching from Salisbury to Shaftesbury, had a Roman ox-drive along the top. Peter didn't know its name, but on summer days, when the wind was right, they would go up there and reel out a kite.

“Doesn't look too promising.” His father, hand on door, glanced at the dark clouds bunching over the summit, and got out.

And still the music poured from the living room. His mother had hung on to the piano after she stopped singing. She was a first-rate pianist from her family's point of view, but she was never going to sing again.

“I do hope Grandpa recovers,” Peter said to his father over the car roof. “Poor Mummy sounds seriously tense.”

“Go and talk to Ros,” said his father in a tender voice and went to put away his camera.

In the kitchen, Rosalind stirred a pot. Peter crept towards the stove. On the antique oak table where his mother's pots had rested and burned circles, there were marks left with a blunt knife that mimicked his grandfather's face.

But she heard him and spun around, and in a Monty Python voice said: “And that, my liege, is how we know the earth to be banana-shaped.” She licked the wooden spoon and made a musketeer's lunge at his chest. He parried the spoon, seized her about the waist.

“Has Mummy told you? I have a Holy Grail to whit to woo, too.” She pulled away, smoothed back a stubborn blonde curl, and said, very seriously: “I'm going to become a gourmet chef.”

“Of course you are.”

Being at home, Rosalind was first in line in the epic food battle with their mother.

“Happy birthday, Bedevere,” giving him an asparagus-scented kiss.

From next door came their mother's staccato rendering of the Goldberg Variations. Her voice might have gone, but her music was unstoppable.

“She's bought you a present you won't forget,” Rosalind teased, with the same inflexion as their father.

“What is it?”

“Not exactly something you can take back to school with you.”

“Have you heard from Camilla?”

“Yes,” slyly. “She sent you a message.”

“Well?”

“She wants to invite you to a party with Luke.”

“Luke?”

She wiggled her index finger in a way calculated to irritate. “Her
BOYFRIEND
.”

“Peter!”

Peter hadn't heard the music stop. His mother wore a long saffron dress, a hand-me-down from one of his nannies, and her man's watch, always slipping on her thin wrist.

“How long have you been here?” looking with a puzzled expression at the watch. Peter had given up asking why she insisted on wearing it. Never for a day had it kept the right time.

“Only a minute.”

They kissed. He put his hand on her shoulder and she tensed, drawing back to look at him. “Happy birthday, darling,” she said a little sadly, the same regretful tone as his father. She smelled of the French perfume that she always put on for special occasions, and he wondered for one ghastly moment if she had invited Leadley's parents to lunch.

“I just hope it doesn't rain, that's all. What do you think, Rodney?” She placed all her faith in picnics.

He had just come into the room. “I don't think it'll rain,” and turned his inattention to the window. Next second, the heavens opened.

They had Rosalind's vichyssoise in the dining room, then an asparagus quiche. His mother had chosen his favourite food, spoiling him, and he drank too much red wine.

He felt his father watching. He was aware of a quiet unrest in him and, when he thought about it afterwards, a premonition of something final.

The rain went on until they were eating strawberries and then the sun came out.

“Darling,” said his mother, rather nervous, as if testing a blade. “Can I show you something?”

“Mummy, the cake! Don't forget the cake's in the oven,” Rosalind said.

“Oh, God.”

His mother went into the kitchen and moments later he heard her going upstairs. When she came back she was clutching a photograph album he had never seen before. She sat beside him at the table and opened it: calf-bound, blue, full of images stuck down with white triangles, all of an odd-looking boy. Holding a cricket bat in a communal garden. Leaning from a pram. In christening robes.

“Look at those eyes – huge – always watering.”

He yawned. Why was she doing this?

From somewhere up in the house came a yap.

She moved her chair closer. Turning the wide pages, she told Peter that the boy was him. A fearer of dragons who had to ask their permission to get up in the mornings. The sun wasn't yet hot enough for her face to be trickling with sweat. Some sort of expectation was making her nervous.

She went on speaking, but in a voice he hadn't heard before. What she was telling him was beyond the furl of his understanding. Peter found the images far from reassuring. This was not a person he recognised, the boy with huge eyes. And why had his mother hidden this album all these years? He felt intruded on.

“Mummy!” he protested, and struggled against his mother's arm around his shoulders. It was probably the cake making her morbid. She hated to cook, and had spent the whole morning preparing it.

“Wait.” In the same strange, needy tone she told him that he had been born one tea-time during a cold summer shortly before the Berlin Wall went up.

Pretending to look at the album, Peter studied the watch almost at her elbow. Even allowing for a spectacular margin of error, his train didn't leave for another three hours. “You ought to get a new watch,” he said.

“I'm quite happy with this one, thank you.”

“Who's that?” He craned forward, interested for the first time.

“That's me in the Wigmore Hall, the year I went to Leipzig.”

She had trained as a singer in Manchester and was poised for a career with the BBC when something happened, Peter wasn't sure what. The photograph showed a frizzy-haired young woman, firm shoulders in a long piqué dress, singing with an expression that she had lost.

In an otherwise crotchety cosmology, his mother had certain areas of tolerance. Unusual for one of her generation, she had a soft spot for Germans. The reminder of Leipzig gave her a second wind.

“Do you know what they called the Wigmore Hall before the First World War?” she went on tenaciously. “The Bechstein Hall. It was founded by Germans for German musicians.” She made a finger-crossing gesture. “That's how close we used to be. Anglo-Saxons! I don't care what Grandpa says. For centuries, the Germans have been England's natural allies in Europe.”

“And didn't the Connaught used to be the Coburg? And didn't America very nearly choose German as its official language?” said his father helpfully, a hand burrowing under his cravat.

She exchanged a grateful glance, but it was Peter she had to convince. “You simply cannot imagine the Germanophobia,” she said, her enthusiasm shifting from the album to encompass in one bound a nation. “Even in the '20s, Schubert Lieder, when sung in London, were sung in French.” She touched his arm. “And to think that we owe them our Royal Family, our religion, to say nothing of our music.”

“Come on, Peter.” The conversation was boring Rosalind. “Let's play Scrabble.” And tugged at his hand, eyes plaintive under the stubborn curls.

Another yap.

“Why don't we go for a walk?” Flustered, his mother brushed a lock of hair from his temples in the way that used to infuriate him as a boy. “And then you can have your present.”

“I'm not going for a walk,” said Peter.

“No, he's coming with me,” piped up Rosalind.

“Rosalind!” From the end of the table, their father's tone categorical in a way that Peter hadn't often heard.

“Dear, maybe you could begin the washing-up.”

“Peter never does the washing-up,” Rosalind complained, spitting a strawberry onto her palm. “Ever.”

Rodney looked at Peter. “I think you should go. Do this for me.” And to his wife: “Henrietta. I really think. Now.”

Peter burst out: “What's going on? It's something about you, isn't it? You're having an affair. You're getting divorced. You're ill. Does Rosalind know?”

“I'm not ill. No affair. Just go for a walk. Go with your mother.”

Often at night when he couldn't sleep Peter sifted his English childhood, beginning with the dragons under his bed and proceeding to the walk along the ox-drive and his mother's revelation. A life-altering secret smelling of blackberry bushes after rain and causing a beating in his blood as if a large bird was taking off in the burrow of his chest.

In his memory, they climbed towards a summit fuzzy with rain. Towards the wreckage of the aeroplane and a body never discovered, just an iridescent slick for the Nadder mayflies to hatch on. But the sun, as it happened, was shining.

When they got to the top, she applied lipstick and adjusted her scarf, buttoning every single button of her coat.

“It's turning into a lovely afternoon, but so chilly. Are you covered up? Look at that open neck of yours. Why didn't you bring your scarf? I hope you don't run around St Cross like that.”

A flint road led like vertebrae over the cornfields. She had been stumbling along it for five minutes when she stopped, already breathless.

“As you so often point out, I do have a knack for filing away things I prefer not to think about.” She fixed her watery green eyes on the sky. Her words flat and giving the impression she had rehearsed them. “You could describe it as a blockage of some kind. Or an inability to grapple with ‘personal issues', as Rodney calls them. But I'm starting to talk about myself, and you need to know about Peter.”

She's speaking of me as if I'm not here, he thought. Is she going nutty like her father? He yielded to an irritable blankness: “What do I need to know?”

“Not you, my love, not you,” she murmured. She rotated the watch on her wrist in a purposeless way and said: “Rodney's not your father.”

Peter was aware of a bird's shadow on the damp grass and something tearing inside.

“Your father's someone else.”

“You mean I'm adopted?” he heard himself say.

“No, no, I'm your mother. In every other sense Rodney is your father. We met when you were six months old. Here, let's sit down. I can say it better sitting down.”