The Squire Quartet

‘Perhaps tomorrow the horoscope will mention a grand reconciliation, then you’ll be convinced.’

She said, turning to confront him, ‘Supposing I want to go off and get screwed by any man who happens to come along. How will you like that?’

‘Would you like it? Is that what you want? You could have been more enthusiastic with me.’

‘You were bound to throw that in my face sooner or later! I suppose you’ve forgotten that the doctor said after John was born that I was to take things easy and avoid exertion?’

He began pacing about the room. ‘You went off with that sneak Jarvis, you brought him into my house when I wasn’t there, more than once. You’ve more than evened things up, Teresa. You’ve treated me like shit. There are historical and biological reasons why men are less likely to be faithful than women, less able to endure monogamy … I’ve done my best in that respect, so you can keep quiet and do your best. Otherwise we’ll get nowhere.’

‘Is that what you call a grand reconciliation?’

‘I hoped for something better.’ He regarded her narrowly, his expression closed. ‘When two countries are hostile, they make what peace they can. So with us. Do you wish to come back? Are you prepared to make a go of it? It’s now or never.’

‘Don’t start laying down conditions. Maybe it’s too late. My heart isn’t as soft as it once was. Things will never be what they were.’

‘How I wish it was possible to turn the clock back …’

She asked, ‘What is this grand reconciliation you talk about, anyway?’

He attempted lightness. ‘As I say, maybe a housewarming at the Hall, friends round, celebrations, flowers, champagne, Nellie going mad, the girls back in their own beds, you and I in ours, kisses, violins, apologies, forgiveness. You name it.’

She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Tom, you’re being unreal. If you think that after what’s happened we can just fling ourselves into each other’s arms, you’re mistaken. It may appeal to your sense of drama but not to mine. I’m not one of your actresses, however much you may regret the fact.’

That evening, Teresa and her mother were waved goodbye as they continued on their way to Norwich. Squire, restless after the fruitless encounter, decided to drive himself over to Pippet Hall. The Society for Popular Aesthetics was expanding rapidly; the secretary was even able to take on a secretary; and Squire needed documents relating to its foundation for an article he was writing. The Hall was only six miles from Blakeney.

He had been staying permanently in London, either with friends or at his club, since the New Year, when the shock of seeing Teresa in the company of Jarvis had discouraged him from returning to Norfolk. London was more convenient, and provided more than enough work for him. So the Hall was closed down, and Matilda Rowlinson and the farm manager looked after it. He had been back only twice – once for a day, once for a solitary weekend – in the last half-year.

The grass on the lawn looked rather long. The downstairs windows of the house were shuttered; that would be careful Matilda’s work. Caught by the peace of the evening and the surroundings, Squire strolled across the side lawn before entering the house, to gaze at butterflies circling round Teresa’s buddleia. Here The Who had once played to delighted crowds, and local rock’n’roll groups like The Bang-Bang. Pop was truly an international language.

Teresa and he had had a language in common in those happier days. But now. Your silence is all I need from you.

He tried not to resent the cruel things she had said that afternoon. She was, in her own way, uttering a cry for help.

His shoes were damp from an early dew as he unlocked the front door and entered the hall. He stood, closing the solid oak behind him. No children called except spectrally. No Dalmatian came up at a run, scattering mats. Only a cat appeared, yawning and stretching, to dissolve into the shadows.

Light filtering through the tall windows on the staircase filled the hall with a dim beauty. He stretched his arms and walked about with pleasure. The portraits of Matthew and Charlotte looked benevolently down. His footsteps echoed.

‘All I need from you is your silence.’

In his study, the darkness was so intense that he opened one of the shutters. Outside lay the meadows where once had nested the pipits who gave their name to the place; now only a few blackbirds hopped amid the grass, mechanically perky.

When he had finished at his desk, and collected the papers he needed, he went over to his refrigerator, which stood on a filing cabinet under Calvert’s painting, and poured himself a vodka-on-the-rocks.

Her anger, her vindictiveness, had seemed so personal. He could not tell how much of it was impersonal – directed at some mysterious target before which he happened to be standing – yet what he hoped was reason told him that she nursed some grievance beyond any folly he had committed.

His behaviour to her was, in a sense, the opposite of hers. He tried always to respond to her as a person, personally. Yet he was aware of the impersonality of his and of all experience. That was where mysticism crept in: he saw how he was not only living but being lived. Well, that was not necessarily a mystical perception so much as a biological one. He was not only an individual but a link in the totally impersonal chain of life, a torch-bearer for the selfish gene.

Which did not by any means absolve the individual from morality. It made the individual important beyond any influences in his own brief lifetime, for by his behaviour for good or ill he helped shape (yes, in a small way) the needful moral improvement of the human race in time to come. Improvement of the whole damned species could only come through the striving of each individual; at that point moralities and biologies met.

He could not seem to explain to Teresa – though he had tried in happier days – that his appreciation of her as an individual was enhanced by his awareness of the impersonal forces in her, that his life experience was most directly read through her being, that it was precisely their sexual and mental closeness that enabled them to explore the richness of being alive. However mistakenly, he had concentrated his life increasingly on that exploration in recent years; both ‘Frankenstein’ and his fatal love affair sprang from it. It was a quest for that richness of experience, an intensification of it before it died from beyond his clutches, which turned him to Laura: and Tess’s subsequent rejection of him that had left him isolated.

The vodka was cool in his throat. He was not acutely unhappy. Isolation was nothing new to him. Perhaps he could soon face the fact that reconciliation was not possible between him and his wife.

In which case – he would have to sell up Pippet Hall.

He closed the shutter and walked from the room, taking the papers he needed with him.

‘All I really want now is your silence.’

Silence had a sinister quality. He equated it with death, and only rarely with spirituality. The silence Teresa demanded from him was death, not spirit. And silence was unique in this respect; it was something one could demand and unfailingly receive. Ultimately, inevitably, he would become silent under her indifference.

If he dreaded silence, there was something he dreaded more: forms of language which masked silence, the absence of feeling. Teresa still felt intensely; he could still hurt her. So there was hope. But all around him he encountered defensive lack of feeling. Official language, the language of the military or of bureaucracy, Marxist jargon – all these were enemies of simple human experience. Instead of conjuring experience, they annihilated it in their repressive structuring.

At least Teresa had spoken to him directly. The worst thing was a woman talking Marxism or one of those other desiccated male languages. One good reason for continuing to love women, even when the going was rough, was that, on the whole, they stayed too human to go for ideological language.

He climbed the stairs, hesitated before their bedroom, and went instead down the passage to the old nursery. He opened the door, half-expecting to find the interior a glowing brown, as he remembered it from childhood, with the warmth of the stained floor and walls enhanced by a coal fire. Instead, he was greeted by Dulux high gloss white paint.

John’s old red wooden fire-engine stood on top of the cupboards. The dolls’ house stood on the table by the window, where he and Adrian had played for long hours with their Meccano.

He gazed blankly out of the window. A rabbit had joined the starlings on the lawn. What would become of the old place if he gave up? Fall into ruin? Wrenched from its purposes and turned into an institution?

Laura had visited Pippet Hall only twice. Once with the film team, before there was anything between them, to play the Sex Symbol in the Georgian House episode. Once last autumn for a weekend, just before they separated for good, following the party at Claridge’s.

As Teresa complained, he had managed to defer that inevitable parting for a month or two, but only because work on ‘Frankenstein’ had continued for longer than anticipated. The break had been final. He could not bear to see her again, to speak impersonally to her. He had dived back to work, she had gone on to play a more interesting role; he had watched her on television recently, as an injured wife in a Play of the Week. Damned good she was.

And when they had parted, nine months ago, she’d been damned good then. Nothing to complain about.

Delays and hesitations inseparable from creativity occurred. Some incidents had to be re-shot. Some of the scenes involving the CSO process had not worked as well as expected. A model had to be re-made. ‘World Dream Design Centre’, the episode they filmed in Hollywood and Los Angeles, had its troubles. Ash fell ill. August turned into September. Definite boundaries became blurred. An electricians’ strike further delayed progress.

But by the first week of October, all thirteen episodes of ‘Frankenstein Among the Arts’ were completed to the satisfaction not only of the British but of the German, American, and Australian interests involved in the production. Everywhere, quiet and sometimes noisy confidence grew that something special had been created.

After a grand farewell party at Claridge’s, attended by all the crowned heads of television, and some from the arts world, Squire drove with Laura in her car, back to her flat.

‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘I realize for the first time that we’re all a stunning success.’

‘Wait till you read the reviews …’

The flat was tiny without being cosy. It occupied part of a house on the run-down fringes of Canonbury. Laura’s husband, Peter, was away on a photographic assignment, she knew not where. He had left a scrawled note without saying.

They bought pitas on the way to the flat, stopping at a kebab house in Essex Road. They ate standing in her narrow kitchen as they said goodbye.

Both of them trembled. Laura leaned against the breakfast bar, unable to touch him. Both of them dropped pieces of lettuce, tomato, and meat, in their anguish at facing this final moment.

The mansion, once moderately grand, designed for a prosperous middle class with servants, had been divided into several flats. It was always full of mysterious young people, designated of course as ‘students’, whenever Squire was there. Bicycles blocked the hall passage. Laura’s flat was decorated with her husband’s photographs, framed in metal. Generally shots of streets, taken from ingenious angles no one else would have thought of. Never a shot of Laura in the nude, or even dressed. Silly bugger.

The furniture looked cheap but was expensive, Laura said; it was too low to get out of easily. Laura and Peter quarrelled all the while, she said, excusing a general neglect.

When he went to pee in the toilet, his eyes came level with a packet of sanitary towels lying on the window sill. The sight of them moved and obscurely hurt him: though on this evening of parting everything brought him close to tears. He thought of her vulnerability. Didn’t vulnerable and vulva derive from the same Latin root? She would have taken care to keep her Tampax out of sight a few months earlier. They were both of them going down the drain – like the Tampaxes, eventually – and he had to remember that she, at twenty-six, felt acutely that youth was passing.

He returned to the kitchen and his half-eaten pita.

‘I’ve really fucked things up for you, my love. It’s as well I’m disappearing at last.’

‘You haven’t fucked anything up. I was just a mess till you came along. Your dear steadiness – you have been that way all your life, I can tell. I didn’t need an older man, I needed you.’

‘It goes too deep for me to say. I was muffled for so long. With you – no guard possible, no guard needed …’

‘We’ve had something so worthwhile together. In that sense, I don’t mind parting, though I’ll hate myself for saying it when you’ve gone … I’ll never forget you, Tom. You’ve changed me, given me so much, so many things …’

‘Nothing – nothing compared with what you’ve given me. With you I’ve been aware of the whole world again. You’ve made me whole again …’ A piece of mutton fell to the floor. He kicked it in the direction of the sink.

‘You’re such a dear, dear person.’ She reached out and touched his neck. He clutched her wrist, still brown from the summer they had had.

‘Don’t be hurt. Grow. Continue. My love and gratitude will always be with you, for whatever that’s worth. Laura, dear Laura …’ He spoke indistinctly, munching the bread.

‘We’ve had such travels together, gone so far.’

‘I’ll never forget what a weight you were when you fell asleep on me on the plane back from LA.’

‘And try not to forget how many miles it is to the River Bug.’ Her lip trembled as she said it.

‘Perhaps one day we’ll meet in that little romantic Polish village whose name we remember so well.’

‘You mean Molly Naggy?’

‘I think it was Lolowsky Molehold.’

‘Anyhow, we’ll recognize it by all the dead horses.’ She started to laugh and cry a little.

He put an arm round her waist. ‘You’re rotten at geography, incredible at everything else.’

‘You’ll always be my lovely man.’ She rubbed her face against his jacket. ‘My standard. Let me give you a last cup of coffee. Instant. And there will always be “Frankenstein”… Something worthwhile we did together.’

‘And your lovely photograph in the book. I’ll send you a copy before it’s published. Lasciviously inscribed.’

‘To hell with Peter. Bring it round in person.’

‘I’ll see about that. No, no coffee – I’d better go, my love.’

‘My love.’ Her beautiful gaze engaging his.

‘Oh, dearest Laura …’ They clung tightly to each other for the last time.

It was autumn. He felt the chill as he blundered down the garden path, the chill a younger man would not have noticed. He thought, as he went blindly into the street, ‘From now on, there’s only autumn. Then winter. Fifty next birthday. Old age. I was lucky to have a Laura in my life, bloody lucky. Just that short while – not so short, either …

‘Well, somehow I’ve done what I said I would, at last. Now I must go back and make amends. The great renunciation … I hope it counts for something …

‘Oh, Laura …’

He unlocked the secret compartment in the nursery cupboard. Only a few treasures there these days. A little framed pencil sketch his father had made of him when he was a child of four, just after Adrian was born. Not very good, when considered dispassionately. A school magazine dating from only a few years back, in which was his son John’s article, then considered both daring and amusing, on why the monarchy should be abolished. A couple of letters from Laura – notes, really. He smelt the envelopes, but enclosure in the cupboard had made them fusty. Two letters dating from last winter from Tess, and a rough copy of his response.

Grantham

6th Nov.

Dear Tom,

Thanks for your letter. There’s a reason why I have not returned to Pippet Hall as you request.

I do not have to do as you say. Honestly, what you think or say is not so important to me as it was once. You know that even a worm will turn. You did not keep your promise about leaving that girl at the end of August, did you? Have you really left her as you say, or do you still pine for all the things she gave you …

I am doing well here. I have my own flat and workplace and my company is now exporting to the USA. You don’t have to feel sorry for me, and the girls are fine. So is Nellie.

They send love.

Teresa

Travellers’ Club

Pall Mall

15 November

My dear Tess,

Matilda forwarded your letter to me. I’m in London, being unable to tolerate the Hall on my own. I am not, as you may imagine, ‘having fun’ here, although there are one or two old male friends to support me, so I am not utterly desolate. I’ve also seen John on two occasions; he’s much as always.

I am delighted to hear that your company is flourishing. I’ve encouraged the idea from the start, you may recall. When I asked you to return to Pippet Hall, it was not an order, but a simple hope that you would come back to me. I still have that hope. Do so, and we can convert the barn into a studio for you.

As I told you in my last letter, I have renounced Laura Nye. That I did as soon as ‘Frankenstein’ was completed, as promised. In fact, on the very day of the farewell party at Claridge’s. I admit to feeling lonely; I need your dear love and comfort. There are two schools of thought about how a wife behaves towards an erring husband, but you must let yourself be guided by your feelings, rather than fashion or friends. May I suggest you don’t treat me according to my deserts but according to your capacity for sweetness.

Thanks largely to Grahame Ash, the series looks extremely handsome – I think you’ll approve, especially the design side. It is to be shown at 8.10, prime viewing time, every Friday evening, starting on February 23rd next. Ron Broadwell will publish the book as his great New Year title, and is planning a signing tour, round the country, on which I hope you’ll be able to accompany me; it should be fun and easy to do. VIP treatment guaranteed.

Christmas is approaching, as the meretricious glitter of the shops in the West End painfully reminds me. I hope that this angst can be quelled soon, and that we can all spend Christmas happily together at the Hall as usual. It’s almost a year since mother died – how fast this hectic year has gone. I hope you and your mother have fully recovered from the shock of your father’s death.

Your loving

Tom

Grantham

2nd December

Dear Tom,

In your latest piece of optimism you outdo yourself. What makes you think I wish to tramp round England as part of your menagerie, promoting your book? What makes you think I want even to hear about it, or the series, knowing your fancy woman is in them both?

Can’t you realize how you hurt me? I’ve got feelings too you know.

As for Christmas, I’m sorry but I’m making my own arrangements. I’m going somewhere where I can find some sun and peace. Worry is making me ill. Once I thought I could trust you, but disillusion has crept in. Burst in.

I’m writing this in bed. Unwell.

Teresa

Under the letters lay a little red book bearing the impressive word ‘Memoranda’. In it, in his eight-year-old hand, he had inscribed the bare fact of his father’s death. He did not open the book.

There was also an official letter in an envelope with a Belgrade postmark, congratulating him on his services to Anglo–Yugoslav understanding. Enclosed with it was a message scrawled in pencil from a man called Slobodan. He did not open the envelope.

Under the envelope and red book lay a little folder with covers made from wallpaper. Inside were three stories, each under a page long, written in a childish hand and illustrated with pictures done in crayon. They were by Rachel Normbaum, and had been presented to him almost forty years ago. He did not open the folder.

He cleared the secret compartment of all but the pencil sketch, and stood with its contents in his hand. Time went by.

Outside it was growing dull.

He locked the cupboard and went downstairs to the kitchen.

There, an unpleasant smell distracted him from his purpose. He set the documents of his past down on the table and went over to the tall windows, opening a shutter to let in a ray of evening light. For a while he stood peering out.

The room appeared sombre and dead. It smelt as if it had been closed for a long while. The large red enamel Aga, which he had had installed in place of the old range when he and Teresa were married, was cold for the first time since its installation. He walked round the room, familiar since childhood, today chill, unfriendly. In one corner were mouse droppings, in another by the scullery door, a damp patch along the floor, where the wallpaper was peeling; the damp had always been there, and looked no worse than before. In the scullery, a tap dripped intermittently. Squire went through to turn it off.

Back in the kitchen, he prepared a small fire in the Aga. He stuffed some old newspaper and cardboard into the grate and set light to them. He piled the letters and ‘Memoranda’ book on top of the flames. The past no longer meant anything. It had died. He was free, whether he desired to be, or not. ‘I’ll be happier, once this is over,’ he promised himself.

‘All I really want is your silence now.’

As he waited there dumbly, gazing at the blue flames, a key grated in the scullery door. He stood alert, with the door of the Aga open and smoke escaping into the room. Matilda Rowlinson entered the kitchen. She smiled, more composed than he. Squire felt guilty without knowing why.

‘Hello, Tom. Lovely to see you. I saw your car in the drive.’ She came and shook hands.

‘You’re keeping everything in good order. I’m burning some old stuff.’ He heard the guilt in his voice. ‘Old papers, actually.’

‘It’s a pleasure. I love coming over to the Hall. I come every day without fail – generally about this time of day. I like it when evening’s setting in, not being the kind who’s afraid of ghosts.’

‘I’ve never seen a ghost.’

As she went over and closed the door of the Aga, she said, ‘I’m only sorry that you and Teresa aren’t still here together.’

She had turned from the cooker. They were close. Squire looked with pleasure at Matilda’s pale, honest face. It was slightly spotty about the mouth. Her hair was more attractive, richer, than he recalled. He sensed the warmth of her spirit as she regarded him with shining eyes. Something in her bodily gesture, an eagerness, appraised him of her mood; the knowledge must have shown in his eyes, for she suddenly became embarrassed and dropped her gaze, moving away defensively.

‘I thought perhaps you’d like a cup of tea. That was why I came over.’ She started to busy herself with preparations, filling the kettle, switching it on, getting out cups and saucers.

‘It’s been a gorgeous day …’

‘I remember you when you were a baby, Matilda.’

She put the milk bottle down and regarded him seriously.

‘I’m a grown woman now, Tom, as you are probably aware.’

He smiled. ‘Yes, I am aware.’

‘What are you burning?’

‘Just a few old documents. Records of my past. I suppose I have their contents by heart well enough.’ He stirred the pages with a poker. The school magazine was slow to burn. He watched it blacken.

There was a long silence, in which she stared at the Aga with him.

‘Your heart can’t be very easy at present.’ Another silence. ‘I wish there was something I could do.’

She took her coat off and laid it over the back of a chair. Her neat and modest figure was shown at its best by her green cotton dress.

‘I am very grateful for what you are doing.’