The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (27 page)

When, later on in the term, my mother and father paid one of their rare visits to England and to me at school I insisted that they should take Freda and Gordon out to lunch. The four got on well together, though my mother and father, both in their ways highly intelligent as well as intuitive, had their reservations. My mother thought that Gordon was ‘an absolute charmer’, but that Freda was rather ‘brittle’. I asked what she meant by the word, but either she could not explain, or I could not understand. My father’s reactions were different. He found Freda entirely sympathetic, but though he acknowledged Gordon’s charm, he said he felt uneasy about him. ‘I’m not sure you can believe a hundred percent what he says. He told me he was “in Spits mostly” during the war and based at Biggin Hill. All very glamorous. I’m not so sure.’

‘He was,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen an old photograph of him in RAF uniform at their home.’

‘That doesn’t mean he was in Spitfires though, does it?’ said my father. ‘I think he’s a bit of a romancer.’

Despite misgivings my mother and father came to an arrangement with Gordon and Freda that they should take me out to lunch on one or two week-ends during term-time. In this way my parents relieved some of their guilt at being so distant; and no doubt my non-driving aunt felt happier too.

As I got to know Gordon and Freda some things about their life puzzled me. They behaved not as I had seen other married couples behave, but more like friends. They chattered away to each other and laughed and teased, but they very rarely touched. I was surprised to find that Freda and Gordon had separate bedrooms. There was something odd too about Halton House. It seemed only partly furnished, and what furniture there was, with the exception of a few small pieces, was battered and undistinguished. I noticed that several of the rooms in the house were empty. I later discovered that Freda and Gordon were not the owners of Halton House, but merely its tenants.

One Saturday, on my second or third visit to them from Stone Court, Freda sent me upstairs to her room to fetch some cigarettes. On the dressing table where I had been told her silver cigarette case was to be found were two photographs. One was of a beautiful blonde woman in WAAF uniform, taken obviously in the war. It took me a few moments to realise that it was Freda. The features were hers, but the expression was not one I recognised. It was gentle, wistfully happy, full of quiet joy. Freda could be cheerful and high-spirited, sometimes noisily so when she had had a gin or two, but beatific calm was not one of her moods. There was a restlessness about her even at the best of times.

Beside this, in an identical silver frame and taken by the same photographer, was the picture of a man in RAF uniform. It was not Gordon. This man had crinkly fair hair and the slightly soft good looks of a 1930s matinee idol. His expression was similar to Freda’s, but something was lacking. The wistful romance was there, but not the joy. He seemed to be staring out of his golden youth into a very uncertain future.

I wondered whether the man might be her brother, but the kinship of those two faces had nothing to do with physical resemblance. I stored the two images in my imagination and went downstairs with the silver cigarette case. An elegant thing, made by Cartier, with Freda’s monogram on the lid picked out in diamonds, it evoked for me an entire vanished world of cocktail bars, luxury liners and Hispano Suiza limousines.

At the end of that Summer term Mr Capstick suggested to my parents that I was clever enough to sit for the scholarship exam to Winchester, my father’s old school. This idea found favour. The ambitions of a father for his only son and of Stone Court to improve their honours board coincided. I was bewildered as I had no sense of being more than slightly above average intelligence. Moreover I had no desire to be, because I was aware that exceptional gifts carried their own burden of responsibilities which included the obligation to work hard. But I was also timid and pliable, so I fell in with their plans.

The idea was that I should sit the scholarship exam the following Summer and, with this in mind, my parents decided that I should have some extra coaching for the last four weeks of the Summer holidays. They proposed that I should stay with Freda and Gordon and that I should go over to Stone Court on two days a week for Latin and Greek with Mr Capstick. The rest of my studies were to be supervised by Gordon.

Before this was settled Mr Capstick wrote to my father saying that Gordon Barrymore was a quite unsuitable person for me to stay with and that I should stay with him and Mrs Capstick at Stone Court. Though not by nature strong-willed, I expressed an adamant opposition to this suggestion, and my parents were neither able nor really inclined to overrule me. My father said that it was impertinent of Mr Capstick to interfere with his plans, while my mother murmured something about the Barrymores needing the money. This surprised me. I had always assumed that because Gordon and Freda had two cars (hers was a mini), lived in a splendid house and ate out at good restaurants they must be very rich. My parents lived well within their means, and so, I thought, did everyone we knew.

I arrived back in England after my truncated Summer holiday with a sense of anticipation and adventure. I was going to be with friends; the educational aspect of my stay did not bother me much. I suppose I must have done some academic work that Summer at Halton House, but it is all erased from my memory. On the other hand, I did get to know the Barrymores very well, and that knowledge has stayed with me. The better I came to know them, the stranger their life seemed.

For such apparently gregarious people they lived a curiously isolated life with few friends. The only ones I met more than once were the Trantings with whom Gordon and Freda played Bridge once a week. I enjoyed these evenings and was allowed to take an intelligent interest in the proceedings with the result that Bridge is the only card game at which I have any proficiency. Tom Tranting was a retired naval Commander, one of those apparently straightforward types who have hidden depths. His wife Venetia, a faded beauty, wrote dull children’s books. Gordon and Freda used to apologise to me for them and say that they were ‘a bit of a bore’, but I did not find them boring.

Once, when we were at their house, I found myself walking in the garden with the Commander. His lawns were immaculate. A characteristic naval neatness determined everything about his domestic arrangements, except his wife, whose occasional waywardness he tolerated with uncomprehending good humour. He asked me several questions about myself to which I gave the shortest answers that courtesy would allow. He did not seem to mind my brevity, but merely nodded, as if he now understood that I was one of those people who did not like to talk about themselves. When he stopped questioning me I had the opportunity to ask him how long he had known the Barrymores.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘So you want to know about your hosts. Well, we got to know them when they took Halton House about six months ago. Apparently they’ve moved about a bit. I like them, but they haven’t made themselves universally popular in the locality.’

‘Why not?’

‘This is strictly under your hat, you understand? They don’t fit in. People are terribly stupid about that sort of thing, especially round here. I personally don’t give a damn, but Gordon and Freda sometimes send out the wrong signals. They’re not terribly good at paying their bills sometimes. People don’t like it if you’re a bad payer, and then they see you swanning around in your Jaguar and having expensive meals in restaurants. I suppose that’s unwise, but don’t judge them too harshly. They had a tough war, both of them. I’ll let them tell you about that themselves.’

Now that I was fully aware of their financial difficulties I began to understand their listless, haphazard approach to household management; their irritation with telephone calls; their frequent nervousness when they saw someone coming up the drive. I also appreciated the tact with which they shielded me from their troubles. As to their ‘tough war’, I learned about that the day after my talk with the Commander.

On the afternoon of the following day Gordon had to go into Canterbury on some mysterious ‘business’. The sun shone and I was deputised to ‘help Freda with the garden’. Freda’s idea of gardening was to wander about in a large hat, occasionally snipping off dead heads and blowing cigarette smoke at greenfly. There was a gardener who came once a week, but his visits invariably coincided with Gordon and my going out on some ostensibly educational expedition, to Richborough, say, or Walmer Castle.

This afternoon, Freda’s attempts at gardening were even vaguer than usual. We had had a rather scrappy lunch ‘in’ during which Freda had begun drinking gin and she still had a glass in her hand when we went out into the garden. She was not drunk in the sense of being unsteady on her feet or in speech, but her manner was more than usually distracted. She snipped savagely at a rose bush.

‘I don’t really like roses,’ she said. ‘I mean in the raw like this. I only really like them when they arrive at your door wrapped in cellophane. I suppose you think that’s horribly superficial of me. I suppose it is. . . . You always get rose bushes in cemeteries. Nasty little groups of them in beds with crazy paving all around. They remind me of death. . . . Never get old. Never live longer than you want to. The lucky ones were the ones that died. I saw that even at the time. Oh, God, I’m exhausted; let’s sit down.’

We sat down on a teak bench side by side and Freda lit a cigarette. The view across the lawn to a belt of tall trees was peacefully idyllic. I looked at Freda and saw that tears were rolling down her cheeks. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief.

‘Sorry, darling,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me today. Must be the booze. Ought to cut down. My mind goes back. What did your father do in the war?’

I told her that he had been captured by the Japanese at Singapore and had worked on the Railway. Freda drained her glass.

‘How ghastly. How simply ghastly. It was all ghastly. Don’t let anyone tell you it wasn’t. All that smiling through, Dunkirk spirit stuff. It’s rubbish. It was sheer bloody hell. That bloody man Hitler. What a shit he was. Excuse my French. No, but he was. An absolute château-bottled shit. I was a WAAF. You’ve seen that photo in my room, haven’t you? I was a stunner, wasn’t I?’ I nodded. ‘Yes. You noticed. You’re not as innocent as you look. Well, I was. I was in the ops room at Duxford, and of course one got to know the boys. That’s where I met Gordon and Michael. You saw that picture on the dressing table next to mine. That was Michael. You’ve got a look of Michael sometimes. He was a lamb, an absolute darling. I can’t tell you. . . . He and Gordon had been at school together. Best buddies and all that. Inseparable. They were both pilots, in Hurricanes. We used to go round as a threesome, but Michael was the one for me. . . . Michael and I got engaged. Next leave we were going to get married with Gordon as our best man. Then one day I was in the ops room and the news came through that Michael’s plane was down and he was killed. It was the most ghastly moment of my life. It broke Gordon up as well. I think Michael was the love of his life too. He couldn’t fly solo again after that and it caused no end of trouble. But that’s another story. After Michael had gone I thought my life was finished. Perhaps it was. . . . Well, when the bloody war was over, Gordon and I met up again and sort of got together. We married in forty-six. Gordon’s terribly sweet, but I wasn’t in love with him. He knew that and he didn’t seem to mind, as long as I wasn’t in love with anyone else which after Michael I couldn’t be. Well, we decided we were going to have a good time because we’d earned it, and we jolly well did. Gordon had inherited quite a lot of money and we had a lovely time spending it. We went everywhere: South of France, Monte, Capri, Portofino. Gstaad for the skiing, come the Winter. Great larks. Then the money started to run out, so we came back here and Gordon went into business with a RAF chum who turned out to be a complete swine. Left us practically broke. We still had a bit left and so we came here and Gordon got this funny job at Stone Court, and we met you, so it’s not all bad, is it?’

She smiled at me cheerfully and ruffled my hair, but I could tell that she was still upset. Once she had told me her story that afternoon a new level of intimacy grew up between Freda and myself, an intimacy with which I was not entirely comfortable. Whenever Gordon was away she would confide in me, and it was always the same story that she had told me in the garden that day, but with variations and embellishments. I was possessed by its melancholy; my whole idea of the war became suffused with tragedy. Previously I had taken my unthinkingly heroic concept of it from forbidden comics and the
War Picture Library
because, though my father had had a bad war, he never mentioned it.

Gordon took no part in these reminiscences. Once he came in unexpectedly while Freda was giving me a particularly maudlin and gin-sodden recital. She stopped abruptly. He looked at her angrily and his manner was unusually abrupt for the rest of the evening. Later he apologised to me, adding that I was not to pay too much attention to what Freda said, ‘especially when she’s had a G and T or two.’

The tensions in Gordon and Freda’s relationship which had been revealed made my last week at Halton House an uneasy one. This uneasiness came to a head in a strange way three days before I went back to Stone Court. That afternoon I had gone for a bicycle ride in the woods around Halton and was returning rather late. It was hot and sultry and the sun was beginning to set in a yellow haze behind Halton House. As I approached along the gravel drive I caught sight of something white behind one of the windows on the first floor. The first floor windows lined a gallery which ran the length of the façade. Gordon and Freda’s bedrooms opened off the gallery and their windows looked over the back of the house. I had never much liked that bare, dusty gallery for some reason, and was glad that I had been given a bedroom on the ground floor.

I wondered why my attention had been drawn to the object in the window. Perhaps it was because I knew that the gallery was always empty and that it was unusual for something to be there. As I approached the house I kept my eyes on the white thing which did not move. Some mysterious conflict of feelings in me both wanted and did not want me to know what it was. I moved off the drive onto the lawn to a point where I thought I could see it better.