A Summer in the Twenties Page 11

  The summer had taken a turn for the better. As the morning passed, heat-haze engulfed Lincolnshire, turning the distance into an amorphous green dimness. At the same time Tom found that the nature of his nervousness was altering. It had begun as a tight knot of apprehension near the centre of his being—the importance of hitting it off with Mrs. Tarrant and the obvious difficulty of doing so made him feel mentally gawky. Now, helped by the growing heat and the physical exercise, the knot seemed to loosen itself, but its elements did not vanish. Instead they travelled, as it were, outwards to the frontiers of his consciousness, manifesting themselves as bouts of awareness both about himself and about this place, which seemed to be also discoveries about a whole series of possible selves and places.

  There was a lull in the talk while Mrs. Tarrant concentrated on extricating from a clump of trailing flowers small sections which had rooted themselves, and replanting them in the tray of damp, peaty soil he had brought her. The plant had a lush, cloverlike leaf, but bright blue pea-shaped flowers on stiff little stems.

  ‘That one’s lovely,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen it before.’

  She seemed not to have heard him but when she had finished and given him the tray to carry down she suddenly said ‘Parochetus Communis. It’s too early to do this, but I shall be away in September. Yes, it’s pretty, isn’t it? Don’t drop them.’

  Picking his way down precipitous and irregular steps he discovered that that abrupt exchange had quite altered his perception of her. She was still an obstacle, but no longer a demon or goddess who had to be placated by a ritual of acceptable behaviour. She was certainly difficult to cope with, but he rather admired her, in the way that one might find one admired a particular building in a style which one had hitherto thought unsympathetic. It was even conceivable that he would one day come to like her. As he was proposing to make her his mother-in-law, this was perhaps just as well.

  At once a long stretch of time displayed itself before him, invisible in detail like the fields beyond the Humber, but still unavoidably there. The discovery made him stop half way down the mountain, as one might to look at a view; in fact he stood gazing at the tray of plants in his hand, their leaves already floppy from shock, and without any effort of imagination perceived himself (knee-joints beginning to creak, straw hat on balding brow) carrying this tray and these plants down this path when Mrs. Tarrant was dead and gone. Since his acceptance of the possibility that Gerald’s Christian Scientist might get him on the rails enough to take over at Sillerby, Tom’s own future had consisted (insofar as he had thought of it at all) of images of Arcadian freedom, shared with Judy. Suddenly, as if in some elaborately staged play with huge slabs of moving scenery, a definite vista of the future opened before him, but at the same time other alterations took place, walls sliding close on either side, silently eliminating the unnumbered possible lives and homes which had been there, however vaguely, five minutes before. If Mrs. Tarrant was to become his mother-in-law, then eventually he and Judy would live here, at Brantingham Manor. Their children would scramble over the mountain and devise names for the iron chamois.

  He shook his head and finished his descent. At the lead trough beneath the Wellingtonias he lowered his tray onto the rack where its soil could suck up water from below and settle comfortingly round the startled rootlets. The plants did not look at all happy. No doubt Mrs. Tarrant knew what she was doing, but even she had said that it was too early for such a disturbance. He climbed back to her empty-handed.

  ‘I believe you are a friend of Bertie Panhard, Mr. Hankey.’

  ‘Well, I don’t see all that much of him, but . . .’

  ‘You stayed with him in France.’

  ‘That’s where I met Judy.’

  ‘Of course.’

  A tacky little pause. Evidently Tom’s acquaintanceship with Judy was not the subject of this exchange.

  ‘Bertie,’ he said. ‘Well, he just asked me. We were at one of those Christmas dances and we were talking about how we were going to spend the spring vacation, and I said I’d probably go butterfly-collecting for my father. That was when he asked me to stay. The western end of the Pyrennees hasn’t been very thoroughly collected, you know.’

  She did not, and did not wish to.

  ‘Was that the first time you had met him?’

  ‘Oh no. I think the first time was at Rokesley. Woffles Belford and I were at school together, you see, and Woffles . . .’

  ‘I much prefer to hear him called James.’

  The remark was little more than a murmur, but somehow manifested the so-far semi-mythical Mrs. Tarrant of whom both Father and Judy had spoken, that embodiment of pure will who even as a child had contrived to force her world into the shape she chose.

  ‘I’ll try and think of him as James,’ said Tom. ‘You’ll have to forgive me if I slip up, because I’ve known him as Woffles so long. I think he brought the name to Eton from his prep-school, even.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said.

  ‘Anyway, James usually asks me over to Rokesley for the partridges, even though we don’t see as much of each other at Oxford as we used to at Eton. I think the year before last was the first time Bertie was there too.’

  ‘You are a good shot?’

  ‘Fair. About the same standard as James, though he gets more practice of course. Bertie’s first class.’

  ‘So I understand. He’s a very interesting young man, Mr. Hankey.’

  ‘My father thinks so too.’

  Mrs. Tarrant turned back to her work with a quite definite air of rejection. For a moment this was hard to understand. Had she perceived that Tom had deliberately introduced Father into the conversation? Was she simply not interested in any judgments other than her own? Did she actively disapprove of Father, as sections of the county certainly did? There was no way of knowing. Watching her snip the dead heads off a cluster of straggling, rush-like plants it struck Tom that she seemed in no way impressed by pedigree. This was a mild surprise. Even as apparently sophisticated a friend as Dick Standish could be sensed to acknowledge the fact that the Hankey fortunes, however dwindled, sprang originally from the plunder of monasteries and that this gave them a mystical precedence over larger collections of money that came from mere nineteenth-century coal. To Tom, having to live within the Hankey income, the precedence was illusory and tiresome. He knew quite well that if the family’s finances were reduced to the point where Sillerby had to be sold the Hankeys would within a generation find themselves a long way down the social ladder, but he was aware that for the time being many quite sensible people thought the distinction real and serious. Mrs. Tarrant, though on almost exactly the same social footing as the Standishes, evidently did not.

  ‘Bertie is trying to do something very important,’ she said without looking up. ‘I think you are aware of that.’

  ‘Yes. In fact he asked me to help him during the strike, but . . .’

  ‘You were needed on the railways. I think you were quite right, Mr. Hankey. Bertie’s plans during the strike came to absolutely nothing.’

  ‘He got me out of a bit of a jam, as a matter of fact.’

  Silence again. She moved up the steps to another group of plants, motioning to Tom to pick her snippings out from among the spiky leaves. It was clear now that despite her alliance with Bertie he had indeed told her nothing about the fight in the cutting. On the other hand it was beginning to look more and more as though this whole episode on the rockery had been planned, not by Judy but by Mrs. Tarrant herself—or perhaps Mrs. Tarrant had taken advantage of a scheme of Judy’s for her own ends. So Bertie had asked her to talk to him. Had he told her about Tom and Judy? Probably not. Bertie was a miser with secrets.

  ‘What are your plans for the rest of the vacation, Mr. Hankey?’

  ‘Well, it’s not really a vacation. I’ve finished with Oxford. I’m going to take the Civil Service exam in January, and I’ll have to do a bit of work for that . . .’

  ‘Not the Foreign Office?’ />
  ‘My father’s getting on. I don’t want to be out of the country for long periods.’

  ‘I thought you had an elder brother.’

  ‘Gerald’s not been well since the war.’

  Did she really not know? Were there corners of the county into which the legends had not penetrated? Or perhaps she simply chose not to know, her will-power being sufficient to enforce ignorance of the most notorious misdeeds. The tone of her response supported the idea.

  ‘How sad.’

  ‘Yes . . . yes, very. Anyway, I’m going to start cramming for these exams in September. Till then I haven’t any real plans.’

  (Except to be, as far as possible, wherever Judy is—an aim as unpredictable as the pursuit of some erratic-flighted specimen across gusty uplands.)

  ‘I think, Mr. Hankey, you ought to talk to Bertie again. I agree that in normal times a young man deserves a holiday after coming down from university, but these are not normal times.’

  ‘Won’t he be in France now?’

  ‘He is spending only three weeks there this summer. The rest of the time he will be staying here in Yorkshire.’

  ‘Good Lord.’

  ‘He realises that we must all make sacrifices.’

  They had hardly looked at each other during this exchange, each crouched on the path and concentrated on their work. Now Mrs. Tarrant rose and came down the steps holding a trug loaded with debris for him to take from her. Her plucked and arching brows expressed no kind of question. She was not in fact asking one. She was making a statement about what he must do.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll give Bertie a tinkle. Perhaps Judy could run me over.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  8

  Holme on the Wold, 8th July, 1926

  ‘AH,’ SIGHED BERTIE, leafing with fastidious fingertips through Tom’s copy of The Sickle, rather as if he had been a surgeon who had traced a difficult disease to its source in one of the muckier regions of the social anatomy. He began to read the lurid and inflammatory prose, giving little grunts of satisfaction as he did so.

  Hitherto the interview had not gone well. It was Tom’s first visit to Holme Lodge, and he had not been quite prepared for the effect, had perhaps subconsciously been expecting an English version of Bertie’s style at Hendaye, the relaxing comforts of affable wealth. The Lodge, though it lay at the end of a mile of drive through deer-stocked parkland, was not aggressively large, a symmetrical white regency house with little onion-domes at the end of either wing and a larger, flatter one at the centre. It was clearly kept in perfect trim, and in any kind of decent weather would have sparkled on its hill-side, but on this drenching morning had the snug, smug look of a pretty woman walking well weatherproofed in a shower.

  ‘Doesn’t he like you to smell the money?’ Judy had whispered as she braked the Lagonda beneath the pillared porte-cochere.

  Both leaves of the front door opened before Tom could pull the bell-knob. Two footmen—black coats and trousers, yellow satin waistcoats—produced slight, unsmiling bows.

  ‘Miss Tarrant and Mr, Hankey?’ said one. ‘Miss Tarrant is to wait in the drawing room. Mr. Panhard will see Mr. Hankey in the library.’

  It was a manner of speaking, for at first Bertie seemed deliberately not to see Tom, merely gesturing towards a chair with an index finger while he dictated into a machine what sounded like a political speech, the orotund phrases contrasting with the brisk, flat tones. It ended with a mystical-sounding passage about the coming age, when the new men had done their work and cleansed and purged the social fabric, and England would be England made all glorious once more. Tom was struck by the difference between Bertie’s vision of England and his own. Bertie’s desk was the largest he had ever seen, but most of its acreage seemed used, with reference books, files, piles of papers, stacks of pamphlets, all in their allocated spots, and all looking as though they had a reason for being there. By contrast the uniform editions of books in the library shelves stood so crisply in their ranks that it was hard to believe that any single volume had ever been taken down. Its absence would have left too glaring a gap.

  At last Bertie had put the mouthpiece down, clicked a switch and turned to gaze at Tom with piercing and unfriendly eyes.

  ‘Strong stuff,’ said Tom, nodding towards the dictating machine.

  Still Bertie did not smile.

  ‘I think you owe me an explanation,’ he said.

  ‘If you’ll tell me what needs explaining.’

  ‘Your behaviour in Drewton Cutting.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I was set to teach those fellows a real lesson. You stopped me. And in front of my own men.’

  ‘Sorry about that. It was on the spur of the moment, of course.’

  ‘Of course. You imply that you would have acted differently if you had had time to think.’

  Tom hesitated, already aware that the interview was moving in an unsatisfactory direction, He guessed now that Bertie had asked Mrs. Tarrant to try and manoeuvre him into making this visit, and that that had been the main purpose of the morning on the rockery. If they were working in such collusion, it might be more important than he had realised to appease Bertie . . . On the other hand, it was no use building a temple of peace on a totally false foundation . . .

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I think I’d have done the same.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You couldn’t know what had been happening before. We’d reached an arrangement . . .’

  ‘You were fighting.’

  ‘According to the rules. It was absolutely fair. They all could see it was fair. I didn’t mind you stopping the fight so much . . .’

  ‘You weren’t going to win.’

  ‘No . . . but I think they might have decided to let the train through after all. That’s not the point. Don’t you see, after we’d come to a fair agreement, I had to do my best to stop you doing something outside the agreement—what you call teaching them a lesson?’

  ‘What would you have done if I’d gone ahead? Let on who I was?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘That’s what you said at the time.’

  ‘Yes, but . . . I’d have tried to think of something else.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’d told me that in confidence, I suppose. It was all I could think of at the time.’

  ‘Not wholly lost to decency, then?’

  ‘Not wholly.’

  Bertie continued to stare at Tom as if he were Mowgli demonstrating his power to dominate the lesser beasts by gaze alone. It was obvious that he resented the interference with his plans not for the sake of the plans but because they were his. That phrase about ‘in front of my own men’ was rather revealing. Tom’s hitherto vague determination not to become one of those men grew sharper and more purposeful. And yet some kind of cooperation was necessary, to prevent Bertie telephoning Mrs. Tarrant and declaring Tom an enemy, even perhaps telling her what he had guessed about Tom and Judy. Tom took his copy of The Sickle from his jacket pocket and pushed it across the desk.

  ‘I did find something which might be useful to you,’ he said. ‘When I knew I was coming over I rang home and asked them to send it. It came this morning.’

  Bertie continued to stare at him for several seconds before withdrawing his gaze and picking up the pamphlet. His mouth bunched into a pout of rejection, relaxed, opened, released its sigh. It was at this point that the mood in the room changed—so suddenly that for a moment Tom thought it must have stopped raining outside and the sun be trying to emerge. But the steady drizzle continued to shroud the Vale of York as it had done all morning.

  Tom was thinking about Judy, deliberately composing in his mind a back view of her at another of these tall windows in her typical tom-boy stance with one hand on her hip gazing at the same grey view and thinking perhaps about him, when Bertie slapped the pamphlet down onto the desk.

  ‘How did you get hold of this rag?’ he barked. The bullying tone was still there
but did not quite mask the excitement. Tom explained the episode at the Hull goods sidings. Bertie continued to stare, but now his eyes, which so far he had kept cold as stones, glittered with such frenzy that Tom felt the need to close on a deprecatory note.

  ‘There must have been several thousand in the batch,’ he said. ‘Some of them must have got into the hands of the police, I should think.’

  ‘You didn’t think of taking this along?’

  ‘I believe Dampier took some but they sent him away with a flea in his ear. They were pretty stretched, remember.’

  ‘Yes, of course, but . . . You kept the addresses, Tom?’

  ‘On the back page. Only one address, for notification. The boxes were marked to be collected.’

  ‘I see. We’ll have to look into that, but it’s not the main thing. As you say, the police have pretty certainly got copies up in Bradford. It’s the Hull end that interests me, and we’ve got something there the police haven’t.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Has it struck you at all, Tom, that your story didn’t get into the newspapers, considering how they went grubbing around for weeks looking for idiot little episodes to show how well the volunteers ran things?’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact, yes. I tried to keep it quiet, asked all the passengers I could catch not to talk about it, but the chap I met in Hull knew that afternoon. Did you have something to do with it not getting out?’

  ‘I had everything to do with it. I killed that story in three separate newspapers. Not for your sweet sake, my dear Tom, of course, but . . .’

  ‘How on earth?’

  ‘You never met my grandfather, I imagine. No, you’d have been about ten when he died.’

  ‘My father sometimes speaks of him.’

  ‘No doubt. A notoriously unpleasant old man. But a genius, Tom, a prophet, after his fashion. He not only saw the war coming, he saw what kind of war it was going to be. He was still buying and selling shares on his deathbed. That’s a fact. I have a copy of a transfer he signed on the morning of May the Fifth, Nineteen Ten. He was dead by supper-time, and it wasn’t a sudden death. He knew it was coming.’