To Love and Be Wise (3 page)

'Occupied by whom?'

'By what the remaining natives call "they artist folk". It is very sad for them, poor things. They took Aunt Lavinia in their stride, because she was the owner of the "big house" and not part of their actual lives at all. And she has been here so long that she is almost beginning to belong. The big house has never been part of the village in the last hundred years, anyhow, so it didn't matter much who lived in it. The rot started when the mill house fell vacant, and some firm was going to buy it for a factory. I mean: to turn it into a factory. Then Marta Hallard heard about it and bought it to live in, right under the various lawyers' noses, and everyone was delighted and thought they were saved. They didn't much want an actress creature living in the mill house, but at least they weren't after all to have a factory in their nice village. Poor darlings, if they could only have foreseen.'

She set the car in motion, and drove slowly along the slope, parallel with the village.

'I take it there was a sheep-track from London to here in about six months,' Searle said.

'How did you know?'

'I see it all the time on the Coast. Someone finds a good quiet spot, and before they've got the plumbing fixed they're being asked to vote for mayor.'

'Yes. Every third cottage in the place has an alien in it. All degrees of wealth, from Toby Tullis—the play-wright, you know—who has a lovely Jacobean house in the middle of the village street, to Serge Ratoff the dancer who lives in a converted stable. All degrees of living in sin, from Deenie Paddington who never has the same weekend guest twice, to poor old Atlanta Hope and Bart Hobart who have been living in sin, bless them, for the best part of thirty years. All degrees of talent from Silas Weekley, who writes those dark novels of country life, all steaming manure and slashing rain, to Miss Easton-Dixon who writes a fairy-tale book once a year for the Christmas trade.'

'It sounds lovely,' Searle said.

'It's obscene,' Liz said, more hotly than she intended; and then wondered again why she should be so on edge this evening. 'And talking of the obscene,' she said, pulling herself together, 'I'm afraid it is too dark for you to appreciate Trimmings, but the full flavour of it can keep till the morning. You can just get the general effect against the sky.'

She waited while the young man took in the frieze of dark pinnacles and crenellations against the evening sky. 'The special gem is the Gothic conservatory, which you can't see in this light.'

'Why did Miss Fitch choose this?' Searle asked in wonder.

'Because she thought it was grand,' Liz said, her voice warm with affection. 'She was brought up in a rectory, you know; the kind of rectory that was built circa 1850; so her eye became conditioned to Victorian Gothic. Even now, you know, she doesn't honestly see what is wrong with it. She knows people laugh at it, and she is quite philosophical about it, but she doesn't really know why they laugh. When she first brought Cormac Ross, her publisher, here, he complimented her on the appropriateness of the name, and she had no idea what he was talking about.'

'Well, I'm in no mood to be critical, even of Victorian Gothic,' the young man said. 'It was extraordinarily nice of Miss Fitch to have me down here without even stopping to look me up in the reference books. Somehow over in the States we expect more caution from the English.'

'It isn't a matter of caution with the English; it's a matter of domestic calculation. Aunt Lavinia asked you down on the spur of the moment because she didn't have to do any domestic reckoning. She knows that there is enough spare linen to furnish a spare bed, and enough food in the house to feed a guest, and enough "labour" to provide for his comfort, and so she has no need to hesitate. Do you mind if we go straight round to the garage and take your things in through the side door. It's a day's march to the front door from the domestics' quarters, the baronial hall unfortunately intervening.'

'Who built this and why?' Searle asked, looking up at the bulk of the house as they skirted it.

'A man from Bradford, I understand. There was a very pleasant early Georgian house on the spot—there is a print of it in the gun-room—but he thought it a poor-looking object and pulled it down.'

So it was through ugly passages, dimly lit, that Searle carried his luggage; passages that Liz said always reminded her of boarding-school.

'Just drop them there,' she said, indicating a service stair, 'and someone will take them up presently. Come through now to comparative civilisation and get warm and have a drink and meet Walter.'

She pushed open a baize door and led him into the front of the house.

'Do you roller-skate?' he asked, as they crossed the meaningless spaces of the hall.

Liz said that she hadn't thought of it, but that the place was, of course, useful for dances. 'The local hunt use it once a year,' she said. 'Though you mightn't think it, it's less draughty than the Corn Exchange in Wickham.'

She opened a door and they went from the grey spaces of Orfordshire and the dreary dim corridors of the house into warmth and firelight and the welcome of a lived-in room full of well-used furniture and scented with burning logs and narcissi. Lavinia was sunk in a chair with her neat little feet on the edge of the steel fender and her untidy mop of hair escaping from its pins all over the cushions. Facing her, with his elbow on the mantelpiece and one foot on the fender in his favourite attitude, was Walter Whitmore, and Liz saw him with a rush of affection and relief.

Why relief? she asked herself, as she listened to the greetings. She had known Walter would be here. Why relief?

Was it just that she could now hand over the social burden to Walter?

But social duties were her daily task and she took them in her stride. Nor could Searle be justly considered a burden. She had rarely met anyone so easy or so undemanding. Why this gladness to see Walter, this absurd feeling that now it would be all right? Like a child coming back from strangeness to a familiar room.

She watched the pleasure on Walter's face as he welcomed Searle; and loved him. He was human, and imperfect, and his face was already growing lined, and his hair showed signs of growing back above the temples, but he was Walter, and real; not—not something of inhuman beauty that had walked out of some morning of the world beyond our remembering.

She took pleasure in remarking that, face to face with Walter's tallness, the newcomer looked nearly short. And his shoes, for all their expensiveness were, from an English point of view, distinctly regrettable.

'After all, he's only a photographer,' she said to herself, and was caught up by her own absurdity.

Was she so impressed by Leslie Searle that she needed protection against him? Surely not.

It was not uncommon to find that morning-of-the-world beauty among northern peoples; nor was it to be wondered at that it made one think of tales of the seal people and their strangeness. The young man was just a good-looking Scandinavian-American with a deplorable taste in shoes and a talent for using the right kind of lens. There was not the slightest need for her to cross herself, or utter charms against him.

Even so, when her mother asked him at dinner whether he had any family in England, she was conscious of a vague surprise that he should be possessed of anything so mundane as relations.

He had a girl cousin, he said; that was all.

'We don't like each other. She paints.'

'Is the painting a non-sequitur?' Walter asked.

'Oh, I like her painting well enough—what I've seen of it. It's just that we annoy each other, so we don't bother with one another.'

Lavinia asked what she painted; was it portraits?

Liz wondered, while they talked, if she had ever painted her cousin. It must be nice to be able to take a brush and a box of paints and put on record for one's own pleasure and satisfaction a beauty that could otherwise never belong to one. To have it to keep and look at whenever one wanted to until one died.

'Elizabeth Garrowby!' she said to herself. 'In no time at all you will be hanging up actor's photographs.'

But no; it wasn't like that at all. It was no more reprehensible than loving a—than admiring a work of Praxiteles. If Praxiteles had ever decided to immortalise a hurdler, the hurdler would have looked just like Leslie Searle. She must ask him sometime where he went to school, and if he had ever run races over hurdles.

She was a little sorry to see that her mother did not like Searle. No one would ever suspect it, of course; but Liz knew her mother very well and could gauge with micrometer accuracy her secret reactions to any given situation. She was aware now of the distrust that seethed and bubbled behind that bland front, as lava seethes and bubbles behind the smiling slopes of Vesuvius.

In that she was, of course, right. When Walter had borne his guest away to show him his room, and Liz had gone to tidy for dinner, Mrs Garrowby had catechised her sister about this unknown quantity that she had unloaded on the household.

'How do you know that he ever knew Cooney Wiggin at all?' she asked.

'If he didn't, Walter will soon find out,' Lavinia said reasonably. 'Don't bother me, Em. I'm tired. It was an awful party. Everyone screaming their heads off.'

'If his little plan is to burgle Trimmings, it will be too late tomorrow morning for Walter to find out that he didn't know Cooney at all. Anyone could say they knew Cooney. If it comes to that, anyone could say they knew Cooney and get away with it. There was practically no part of Cooney Wiggin's life that wasn't public property.'

'I can't think why you should be so suspicious about him. We have often had people we didn't know anything about down here at a moment's notice——'

'Indeed we have,' Emma said grimly.

'And so far they have always been what they said they were. Why pick on Mr Searle for your suspicions?'

'He is much too personable to be wholesome.'

It was typical of Emma to shy at the word 'beauty', and to substitute a bastard compromise like 'personable'.

Lavinia pointed out that since Mr Searle was staying only till Monday the amount of unwholesomeness he could manage to disseminate was necessarily small.

'And if it is burglary you are thinking of, he's going to have a sad shock when he goes through Trimmings. I can't think, off-hand, of anything that is worth lugging as far as Wickham.'

'There's the silver.'

'Somehow I can't believe that anyone went to all the trouble of appearing at Cormac's party, and pretending to know Cooney, and asking for Walter, just to obtain possession of a couple of dozen forks, some spoons, and a salver. Why not just force a lock one dark night?'

Mrs Garrowby looked unconvinced.

'It must be very useful to have someone who is dead when you want to be introduced to a family.'

'Oh, Em,' Lavinia had said, breaking into laughter as much at the sentence as at the sentiment.

So Mrs Garrowby sat and brooded darkly behind her gracious exterior. She was not afraid for the Trimmings silver, of course. She was afraid of what she called the young man's 'personableness.' She distrusted it for itself, and hated it as a potential threat to her house.

BUT Emma did not, as Marta Hallard had prophesied, get the young man out of the house first thing on Monday morning. By Monday morning it was incredible to the inhabitants of Trimmings—all but Emma herself—that on the previous Friday they had never heard of Leslie Searle. There had never been any guest at Trimmings who had merged himself with the household as Searle did. Nor had there ever been anyone who intensified the life of each one of them to the same extent.

He walked round the farm with Walter, admiring the new brick paths, the piggery, and the separator. He had spent his school holidays on a farm, and was knowledgeable as well as receptive. He stood patiently in green lanes while Walter recorded in his little notebook a hedgerow sprout or a bird-note that would do for his broadcast next Friday. He photographed with equal enthusiasm the seventeenth-century honesty of the little farmhouse, and the surrealist irrelevance of Trimmings, and contrived to convey the essential quality of each. Indeed, his photographic comment on Trimmings was so witty that Walter after his involuntary laughter had a moment of discomfort. This amiable young man had more sides to him than were apparent in a discussion on husbandry. He had so taken for granted the boy's discipleship that it was as disconcerting to look at these photographs as if his shadow had suddenly spoken to him.

But he forgot the moment almost before it had passed. He was not an introspective person.

For the introspective Liz, on the other hand, life had become all of a sudden a sort of fun-fair. A kaleidoscope. A place where no surface ever stayed still or horizontal for more than a few seconds together. Where one was plunged into swift mock danger and whirled about in coloured lights. Liz had been falling in and out of love more or less regularly since the age of seven, but she had never wanted to marry anyone but Walter. Who was Walter, and different. But never in that long progression from the baker's roundsman to Walter had she been aware of anyone as she was aware of Searle. Even with Tino Tresca, of the yearning eyes and the tenor that dissolved one's heart like a melting ice, even with Tresca, craziest of all her devotions, it was possible to forget for minutes together that she was in the same room with him. (With Walter, of course, there was nothing remarkable in the fact that they should be sharing the same air: he was just there and it was nice.) But it was never possible to forget that Searle was in a room.

Why? she kept asking herself. Or rather, why not?

It had nothing to do with falling in love, this interest; this excitement. If, on Sunday night, after two days in his company, he had turned to her and said: 'Come away with me, Liz,' she would have laughed aloud at so absurd a notion. She had no desire to go away with him.

But a light went out of the room with him, and sprang up again when he came back. She was aware of every movement of his, from the small mallet of his forefinger as it flicked the radio switch, to the lift of his foot as it kicked a log in the fireplace.