The Squire Quartet

His voice faltered only once. He kept his thoughts away from the figure of greys and browns lying under the roof with its eyes now always closed, concentrating instead on the magi’s account, and on his discomfort at finding – as many men had done – that after returning from a long journey, one’s native land was also full of strange gods.

He had read this poem every Christmas morning since returning from Yugoslavia in the late forties, before he married Teresa. His mother would have liked him to continue what had become a tradition. He realized how deeply the words still cut, words of an Anglican poet so much crisper, more uncompromising, than the sentimental consolations Rowlinson ladled out. The real Christian message – which went beyond Christianity – was here, that birth and death were hard, conditions between always unsatisfactory, vision intermittent. Christianity must have been a great religion when it belonged to the underdog.

‘Why would you be glad of another death, Uncle Tom?’ asked Grace, when he had closed the book and set it back in its place in the bookcase. ‘Isn’t one enough at present?’

Grace was his favourite niece. She had her mother’s fair hair but was going to be taller and slimmer. He smiled at her and said, ‘That line isn’t a reference to your grandmother. It’s spoken by one of the magi, as I suppose you realize.’

‘But why did he want another death?’

‘I’ve always supposed he referred to his own death.’

She said lightly, ‘I think about God a lot, these days, but I don’t know many people who believe in him.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Of course, the Rev. Rowlinson and Mrs Rowlinson and Matilda all believe in him, but that’s their job, isn’t it? Of course, I suppose it’s easier to believe at Christmas. Do you believe, Uncle Tom, or do you mind saying?’

He hesitated, and immediately felt her interest slip away, saw it in her eyes as they switched their gaze to something happening at the other end of the room. He was tempted to lie to shield her, to say that he did believe. He was tempted to fudge the question, to say that it was a question of perspective. He found himself inarticulate, unable to reply. A thousand answers rose to his mind.

Still with her attention on the other end of the room, where mince pies were appearing, closely followed by the other children, Grace said, ‘Someone at school told me that God existed, but he left Earth at the end of the Stone Age because he could see that mankind was getting on pretty well without his help. But I guess that doesn’t explain Jesus, does it?’

With a polite smile, she made for the mince pies.

How were Jews treated in the Stone Age? He sipped at his negus.

The question of God was a matter of perspective. It was easier to believe as a child, just as it was easier to believe in Santa Claus. The mere fact of having parents to care for you made a parental God plausible. Then one acquired knowledge, and worse succeeded.

He had a disturbing memory of his mother, throwing a cup down on the flagstones in the kitchen, angry because she was having to do her own washing up. Time, one of those grey years in the late forties when, the tide of war having withdrawn, people were still coping with the effects of the flood. People like Patricia Squire expected the servants to come back after the war, expected that life would return to what it was in the thirties. But the young people of Hartisham did not intend to work at menial jobs any more. They saw their chance: they left Norfolk and went to earn good wages in the car factories of the Midlands. The thirties had been reviled in their time; money was short and nothing was as it had been in grandfather’s time, before the Great War. Now, after another war, the thirties were suddenly seen as halcyon. Time gilded them.

The seventies. Everyone complained, comparing them unfavourably with previous decades. Even the forties were now looked back upon with a certain nostalgia. Yet the time would inevitably come when the seventies would themselves be remembered as a time of peace and plenty. So they were, for all their alarms.

He pictured Grace, now munching a mince pie, as a grown woman, saying, ‘Christmases are not what they were when old Granny Squire was alive.’ And later, to her children, ‘Christmases are much more commercial than they were when my old Uncle Tom was alive …’

Plain Matilda Rowlinson brought him a mince pie. As he talked to her, his wife filled his glass with more negus. They smiled happily at each other, not needing to speak. The wine, flavoured with cinnamon and nutmeg, ran across his palate, mingling with the rich taste of the mincemeat.

‘Do you think God approves of mince pies, Matilda?’ Squire asked in sudden mischief. ‘Or does he think they’re ungodly?’

She laughed. ‘I think he leaves it to each of us to decide for ourselves.’

A good answer on the spur of the moment, he thought. All the best gods should leave it to the customer to decide.

It was a question of perspective. Periods of time seemed better or worse according to what followed. When you were young and had seen nothing follow, then time was special. So with God; he was special until you had seen certain things happen, Belsen, authorized murder in Yugoslavia, or your father’s face eaten by dogs.

He strolled over to his sister and slid his arm through hers.

‘How’s things?’

‘Oh, extremely cheerful, all things considered. And you? I was just thinking that with a few of these neguses under my belt I could perhaps face looking at mother. Would you come up with me?’

‘If you like.’

‘Do you remember, people used to say “Bearing up”, if you asked them how they were.’

Deirdre filled her glass and they went upstairs. Her boys, Douglas and Tom, were playing with a Slinky on the stairs. ‘I’ll be down soon,’ Deirdre told them, ‘I’m just going to inspect your grandmother.’

Her defensive facetiousness fell away from her once they were in the small room on the attic floor. Squire stood by the window, gazing out at the iron landscape, listening to his sister’s choked sobs.

He forced himself to speak. ‘She went so suddenly when she went. A week and she was gone. Ten days ago, she was joking, and quizzing me about “Frankenstein”… Teresa had been having bad dreams. She dreamed that a black figure was trying to get into the house. I told her that we would get a better burglar alarm, but now I wonder … Well, it’s easy to believe in portents at such a time – death makes everything irrational.’

Deirdre said, with a forced distinctness, ‘I blame myself that I never came over to see the old girl when I phoned and you said she was unwell. You know what it is, just before Christmas one’s always busy. It was end of term and we had to go over and see Grace in her school play, and Douglas had a cold and Tom had carol-singing and a party … Still, I should have bloody well come over. I can see that now. Poor old thing. I don’t fancy being a corpse, do you?’

Making the effort, he went over to her and put an arm round her shoulders. ‘There’s always guilt at these times. Filthy death, filthy guilt. Let it wash round you, don’t let it stay. We could all do better by everyone; it must be a cosmic law or something.’

‘Old Rowlinson could explain it, I don’t doubt.’

He could no longer bring himself to look down at his mother’s body. ‘I’ll put the lid on, if you’ve had enough.’

‘Oh, I don’t think I could bear to see you do that. Let me get out of here first.’ But she made no move to leave. She adjusted her hair. ‘Why haven’t you got flowers in here? Why hasn’t Teresa put some flowers in the room?’

‘A grey Christmas. Do you remember when we were kids and it snowed heavily just before Christmas, and we got stuck on the bridge at Wisbech? And father just laughed. He was enjoying it.’

‘They’ve both gone now. Mother was such a repository of family history – I can feel it already, there’s going to be a huge vacuum all down the left-hand side, here …’ She sketched a large position vaguely in the air.

‘Well, there’s nothing we can do. Bow to the Grim Reaper, damn him … Irrational … I keep having an irrational feeling that it’s the cold emanating from her that chills the landscape, that she’s become a dreadful natural force, that … it’s as if the corpse erupted out of the dead landscape, the way she keeps bursting into my thoughts …’

‘What’s Adrian said about it?’

‘You know Adrian; he never says much about anything.’

‘It beats me why you wanted to have the body lying here over Christmas. Bit morbid, isn’t it?’

He shrugged. ‘It was her home, after all.’

Deirdre went over to the door with a somewhat slack-shouldered walk he had noted in her lately. She put her hand on the doorknob, then hesitated.

‘Are you afraid of being alone in this house, Tom?’

‘How do you mean? Ghosts?’

She nodded. ‘Ghosts and things like that. Father, for instance.’

‘That sort of thing doesn’t worry me.’

She laughed with a partly derisive note. ‘Of course, you’re so tough. You’ve killed chaps in Yugoslavia – I try to forget that rather nasty side to your character. All the same … What about Teresa? Isn’t she scared? How’s she going to be when you’re trooping round the world doing your TV series?’

‘Oh, that won’t take many weeks.’

‘It’ll alter your lives.’

‘Not at all. And I don’t think she’s afraid of ghosts. She’s never said.’

‘I’d have thought you’d have asked. It’s an obvious enough question, stuck in a place like this. Really, I don’t think I’ve ever liked Pippet Hall, not even when I was a small child … I wouldn’t care to live here. Won’t Teresa be lonely?’

‘She keeps very busy. Her decorative insects are really developing into something tremendously attractive, don’t you think? Aren’t they original?’

Opening the door, casting a last suspicious glance at the coffin, Deirdre said, ‘You, aren’t you lonely here on your own?’

Hesitantly. ‘I am afraid of my own loneliness. But that goes wherever I go. If anything, it’s less here, where I belong.’

‘I can’t stand it when Marsh is away from Blakeney. I’m worse now I’m getting older. He’s already put in for, and been accepted for, some bloody dig on some bloody Greek island next summer. I may go with him. Though you can’t see me living in a tent exactly, can you?’

‘You aren’t quite the pioneering type.’

‘Me perched on some bloody outcrop of Hellenic rock, while Marsh grubs up bits of broken urn?’ She laughed at the ridiculous picture she had conjured.

Squire closed and locked the door behind them.

‘What did you do that for?’ his sister asked. ‘Afraid she’ll get loose?’

They descended together to the lower regions, from which seasonal aromas of roast turkey, sausages, bacon, stuffing, and other fleshly delights arose.

The meal took its accustomed course. First, champagne all round and a loyal toast to the sovereign; that tradition must have gone back as far as Matthew Squire himself.

The toast held special meaning, for the Queen was spending Christmas at Sandringham; it was easy to imagine her with her family, sitting down to table only twenty miles away.

After the toast, Scottish smoked salmon, followed by the main course with all its ramifications – the glistening brown barrel of bird attended by a fleet of small china boats containing gravy, bread sauce, cranberry sauce, and blackcurrant jelly. Then came pudding, flaming luridly, amid cries of delight from the children. Lastly, there was a whole Stilton, wrapped in a napkin, for those to cut at who still had room and courage enough, attended by a good port to wash it down with.

Most of the adults collapsed into chairs after the feast, and somnolence reigned. Marshall joined the children in a new card game. Half an hour later, Teresa and Squire put on their coats and went to see their estate manager. Uncle Willie and Adrian came as well, to walk off the effects of lunch.

The air was cold and still, with a slightly smokey flavour to it.

Teresa took her husband’s arm. Uncle Willie grasped hers, leaning rather heavily against her. ‘Very good lunch, my dear. It’s amazing how much nourishment the human frame can withstand.’

Their footsteps echoed on the frosted ground.

The manager lived in an eighteenth-century farmhouse at the far end of the estate, on the Walsingham road. As they returned, an hour later, Teresa pointed to the western sky, where a thin red bar showed between strata of heavy cloud. ‘The ghost of the sun!’ she exclaimed. A hemisphere of sun emerged from below the cloud curtain, then the whole ball, less lurid than the pudding had appeared two hours earlier. It hung above a furred outline of slope, apparently emitting little light and less heat.

‘Tom, Teresa was telling me about her nightmares,’ Uncle Willie said abruptly. ‘About a dark figure trying to break into the Hall. I suppose I shouldn’t ask you this, but are all your cloak-and-dagger activities with the secret service firmly in the past?’ He drew himself up, trying to straighten his shoulders, peering past Teresa’s furred shoulder at Squire.

Adrian laughed in a way he had, as if thinking better of the humorous aspect that provoked the sound almost before uttering it. ‘You don’t imagine that KGB agents are tracking Tom down in Darkest Norfolk, do you, Uncle?’

Tom said placidly, ‘Be sure there are KGB agents in Norfolk, but they have no particular reason to interest themselves in me.’

To Teresa, Adrian said, ‘KGB, my foot! I’d hazard a guess that that figure in your dream was more likely to be a tax inspector than a KGB man, eh?’

Snuggling her shoulder under Squire’s arm, Teresa said, ‘Let’s go back to the fire. Mother’s death has made us all morbid. Christmas cake is the perfect antidote.’

As they headed for the rear of the house, Willie said, ‘I’m the last of my poor old generation left now. It makes for morbidity.’

She hugged him. ‘You’re the toughest of us all, Uncle, dear,’ she said.

In the waning afternoon light, the side of the house presented an aspect of greyness, as if a blanket had been draped over it. Lights gleamed in the room downstairs, and children could be seen, running here and there, laughing. Matilda Rowlinson was playing a game with them. The last rays of the sun caught the three lower panes of the window of the room where Patricia Squire’s body lay; they gleamed with dead colour as the four walkers went below them into the shade of the house.

‘Perhaps I’ll tell the kiddies a ghost story after tea,’ Adrian said. ‘I always fancied myself as a story teller.’

Red is the colour of dying light, as incandescence sinks towards invisibility. The bars of the electric fire in my bedroom, dying when switched off, when Rachel lived with us. Long ago now.

Rachel’s mother, Rebecca Normbaum, had died some years earlier. Squire was sure his mother had told him as much; at the time, busy with other things, he had paid little attention. He remembered a late photograph of Rebecca, taken in America by polaroid camera when such things were rare in England. A tall elegant woman, still with eyes of blue, though her hair was grey. She stood in a suburban Detroit garden – or ‘yard’, as she and Rachel would have learnt to call it.

Karl, the son, the uninteresting boy, kept the Normbaum and Squire families spasmodically in touch. He was Charles nowadays, name Anglicized, manner Americanized. He had married a striking blonde Jewish girl in Detroit, and commuted regularly with her to Israel in his prospering line of business, which involved car exhausts and gas filters.

At the beginning of the seventies, before the power crisis, Squire had met Charles in London. They had not found much to say to each other, once the reminiscences had been exhausted. Rachel had made a respectable marriage. She lived in a big house. She had two children, both boys, who were doing well. And a dog. She had shares in a downtown restaurant. She and Charles saw each other about once a month.

So the promise of youth deteriorated into family history.

After their meeting, afflicted by a mixture of curiosity and nostalgia, Squire wrote to Rachel. He received no reply. The following Christmas, a printed card arrived. Little Rachel Normbaum was now Mrs Gary Baxter.

Although Blakeney was so near, Deirdre, Marshall, and their children always slept at the Hall on Christmas night. It was part of the tradition. When they were younger, this had been a time for drinking too much brandy and port and playing childish games after the children had gone up to bed. Now they were more staid, and Uncle Willie drove himself off to Norwich at nine-thirty in order, as he explained, to look after his flat and his cat.

Squire and Mrs Davies went to see him off at the front door.

‘You’d better look after your granddaughter, Madge,’ Uncle Willie warned Mrs Davies, as he wound a woolly scarf round his neck. ‘Do you know what Grace said to me?’

‘I’m sure it was something very precocious, Will. Young girls reach the age of – become young ladies very much earlier than they did in my day. I can’t understand it. It must have been something in the diet when we were young.’ She smiled at him teasingly.

‘Come, my dear, you are still a beautiful lady, and Ernest is a very lucky man. Blossoms that flower late go on flowering into the winter.’

Squire, slightly surprised at this flight of fancy from his uncle, asked, ‘What did Grace say to you, Uncle?’

The old man hesitated, then chuckled. ‘Why, she told me that she’d had a dream in which she had gone down to the beach, and there she had seen a fully grown male seal sporting in the waves. Although it was a bit rough, she took off her clothes and joined him, and put her arms round him and held him tight. She said it felt lovely. Those were her words: “It felt lovely.”’

‘She is getting to that age …’

‘It was her comment afterwards that shocked me. She said, “I expect it’s a premonitory dream about enjoying sexual intercourse, don’t you, Uncle?”’

While Squire and Uncle Willie laughed, Mrs Davies pretended to look affronted. After Willie had gone, she said as she retreated with Squire from the chilly regions of the front door, ‘Willie Squire is such a nice man. Ernest and I have always admired him. A pity he doesn’t marry again. I suppose even marriage is unpopular or something these days – so many people seem to be getting divorced.’

‘Most of them tend to remarry. It’s what Dr Johnson calls the triumph of hope over experience.’

‘I’m so glad that you and Teresa are happily married, and have this lovely house, full of such exquisite workmanship.’

‘Sometimes I am afraid she feels imprisoned here.’

‘Oh, no, not Teresa.’

He took her arm and led her into the warm living room, where her husband was already setting out a Scrabble board.

Later in the evening, the children submitted to Adrian’s ghost story and then climbed upstairs to bed. Madge and Ernest followed them, and the Rowlinsons left.

Marshall Kaye threw an additional log on the fire and stretched out before it on the sofa, next to Adrian. Deirdre smiled at her husband and returned to the novel she was reading. Teresa trimmed the candles, which were now the room’s sole illumination, while Squire poured everyone a malt whisky.

‘Not for me,’ Adrian said, waving a hand. ‘I’m fighting against middle-aged fat.’

‘You’re very thin, Adrian,’ Teresa said. ‘A whisky would do you good.’

‘It’s refusing all the whiskies that would do me good which keeps me thin.’

‘Middle age should not be devoted to abstinence,’ Kaye said, raising his glass and sipping.

‘What is middle age for, Marsh?’ Teresa asked her brother-in-law. ‘I’ve yet to find out.’

‘Well … it’s a sort of reprieve-period, in my book. You’ve finished mating and the furtherance of the species. Your waistline becomes more important than the rat-race … I guess it’s a time when you’re supposed to become wise and good.’

Laughing, Squire brought his glass over and sat down by the fire with them. ‘Most people get more awful in middle age, not more good, and take to drink or politics. Although revolutionaries start young, other shades of politician get involved only when they’re past the optimal breeding age.’

‘Must be a correlation there,’ Kaye said, laughing.

‘When I was a child,’ Adrian confessed, ‘I thought that acquiring knowledge would infallibly make one good. Now I suspect it warps the soul.’

‘That’s a useful bit of knowledge to have.’

Squire said, ‘We can recognize distinct stages in a man’s life. Puberty. Mating. Family-rearing. After that, with the initial biological directives losing their force, he turns to complaining about the state of the country.’

‘Sorry to hear your directives are losing their force, Tom,’ Adrian said.

Kaye took the remark more seriously. ‘I’m all for complaining about the state of the country. I know it’s rather an obsessive British occupation, but in the States it’s regarded as unpatriotic, which it shouldn’t be. Why, we’ve had to import Solzhenitsyn to do the complaining for us. That’s bad.’

Deirdre looked up from her book. ‘Stop grumbling about America, Marsh. Just because they have their own way of doing things.’

‘Good old America,’ he said. ‘So close to God, so far from everyone else.’

‘It is disconcerting the way Russian thinking of various types has so greatly influenced the West, on both the Left and the Right,’ Squire said, reaching for the decanter. Adrian jumped to his feet.

‘I’m going to bed. Politics is something I gave up, along with whiskies that do me good. Thank God that Britain, for all its faults, is not a political nation. To hear you talk, Tom, with your knowing insinuations that there are KGB agents snooping round the grounds, you’d think the poor old country was a dead duck.’

‘As to that,’ said Squire, leaning back and pointing a hand at his brother, ‘as to that, Adrian, old sport, will you dream more sweetly in your whisky-free sleep if I tell you categorically that there is a dedicated band of Soviets and their Warsaw Pact hyenas, all with the most unfriendly intentions towards this sceptred isle, within six or seven miles of this comfortable fire?’

Adrian did his sawn-off laugh. ‘My dear Tom, you are getting to be, you know, a bit of a bore with this Lord Chalfontism of yours. Perhaps it really is compensatory fantasy for lack of the old biological drive.’

Squire stood up, set his whisky glass on the table, and raised his right hand, arm extended, to shoulder level. He swung the arm until it pointed almost due north.

‘That way’s the coast, right? You wouldn’t disagree there. Not more than five miles away as the crow flies or the shell whizzes, right? All round our shores, hugging the two-mile limit, are Soviet spy-vessels, monitoring everything that goes on ashore. Five and two make seven.’

‘Rubbish!’ said Adrian. ‘We’d never let them.’

‘We can’t stop them.’ Squire lowered his arm. ‘They’re seven miles away, sitting in a well-armed ship of modern design. They monitor everything, local radio, police reports, the lot. Plus anything their numerous secret agents ashore like to beam out to them. How come you don’t know this, Adrian? It’s no secret. Is it that you don’t want to know it?’

‘It can’t be true. What could they learn? Anyhow, we probably do just the same to them.’

‘We haven’t got the vessels. You know how the defence budget has been pared away by successive governments year after year for thirty years. That’s right, isn’t it, Marsh?’

Kaye drained his glass. ‘We’re even closer to the bastards at Blakeney. You can see them through the binoculars. Let’s get to bed, Tom. This is no talk for Christmas Day. Maybe, as Solzhenitsyn says, the Third World War is already lost. Just don’t quote me.’

‘I think you’re both being defeatist,’ Adrian said, stoutly. ‘In any case, even if it were true, they’d never dare attack us.’

‘Your trouble, Adrian,’ said Kaye, lifting his glass, ‘is that you’ve given up your sense of history along with your taste for whisky. Think they care about Christmas, six miles from here? They’re for abolishing it for good and ever …’