The Squire Quartet

‘I suppose I meant more personally.’

As the kettle boiled and switched itself off, he said, ‘You could pray for me.’

Matilda frowned. ‘There’s no need for you to be ironical.’

‘I wasn’t.’

Filling the teapot, she said with a sigh, ‘I suppose it’s my sheltered upbringing, what else, but human relationships – I do find them difficult to handle.’

He laughed dryly. ‘We all do. It’s believed that the human race was once endogamous. Ever since exogamy set in, everyone’s found relationships a bit sort of difficult. Fascinating, of course, but difficult to handle, as you say.’

Accepting the cup she offered, he walked round the other side of the table and took a chair. They sat facing each other. As they sipped, the paper in the stove turned to ashes.

‘Would you care for a biscuit?’

‘No thanks.’

‘You’re not – are you going to sleep here alone this weekend, Tom?’

‘I must get back to Blakeney before dark.’

‘There’s a whole hour and more of this lovely twilight before it’s dark. And it was Full Moon last night.’

The kitchen was filling with dusk already, making of her face a pale blur. He felt her personality, tender and sensible, radiating across the scrubbed table towards him.

‘I’m glad of the tea,’ he said. ‘And I’m glad you came. But I’ve got to be going.’

‘Let me know the next time you’re coming up. I’m always at home.’

She drew the one open shutter into place, and the kitchen faded into darkness.

12

Tribal Customs

Ascot, Berks, New Year’s Eve 1977

Near Ascot, and not far from the famous racecourse, lies the area of Hazeldene, a developer’s paradise of the thirties. It remains far enough from London by road and near enough to it by train to serve as a refuge for the semi-rich. Half-timbered leather-work shops abound and, on Saturday afternoon when the Jags are parked in front of their mansions, children and adults appear on well-groomed horses, to canter through stretches of bracken which have somehow survived among the desirable residences. Here Tom Squire’s old friend and publisher, Ron Broadwell, had his home.

It was the last day of the year, cold and windy, and the weeping silver birches tossed behind neat beech hedges. At seven in the evening, it had already been dark for two hours.

As Squire drove towards the Broadwell house, he recited a poem aloud:

’Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the days …

The sun is spent …

The world’s whole sap is sunke,

The generall balme the hydroptique earth hath drunk.

He had once been able to recite the whole poem; now parts were gone from memory. He had recited it long ago to a Serbian girl called Roša – who had laughed heartily – as they stood on the steps of the Avala memorial outside Belgrade, one midnight, drunk. He smiled at the recollection. When Squire was at Cambridge, Donne and Eliot had been the fashionable poets, and he had never lost his love of them. There were no poets like them.

The Broadwell mansion, ‘Felbrigg’, was visible from the road, sprawling tentatively behind its paddock and a white ranch fence. A tarmac drive with real old-fashioned streetlamps burning at each end led to the house. Lights blazed in the windows. As he drove up, he caught the twinkle of lanterns on a Christmas tree; it held promise of a pleasant evening ahead.

Both Ron and his wife Belinda came to the door to greet him. Ron was a large solid man with a cheerful florid face, a crop of shaggy dark hair tinged with white, and a predilection for the good things of life. He appeared with a big cigar in his mouth. Belinda was a tall lady running unhurriedly to fat, a smiling woman with a miller’s face who, despite many years of marriage to Ron, still spoke with a slight Virginian accent. She wore a long black velvet gown with the air of one humorously aware she was doing something typical of her.

Belinda had previously been married to Ron’s partner in the publishing house of Webb Broadwell, but that marriage had lasted no more than a year. ‘Webb was great stuff as a publisher,’ she confided to Squire once. ‘But not so damned hot when it came to handling a shy virginal wife. I guess he performed better between bawds.’

They greeted Squire heartily, as he handed over to Belinda’s safekeeping an enormous box of Swiss chocolates. In the large bright hall, the Christmas tree glittered. Ron’s dogs barked excitedly in a distant part of the house. The air was spiced with the flavour of good things.

Squire gave Belinda a big kiss. ‘Mmm, good old Virginny – I feel better already.’

‘Very pleased you could make it,’ Broadwell said, hanging up Squire’s coat. ‘All the Broadwell tribe cleared off the day after Boxing Day, having eaten us out of house and home. So this evening we have plenty of room for the Squire tribe. Teresa phoned me from Malta this morning, and she hopes to join us about nine.’

‘Fine. At least there’s no fog to delay flights.’ They stood in the hall, smiling at each other.

‘Teresa said Malta was pleasant,’ Belinda said. ‘We hope that you and she will get things together again this evening, Tom. If she can enjoy Malta, she can put up with you.’

‘New Year’s Eve – ideal time for New Year resolutions,’ Ron said. ‘I’ll get her to one side and tell her about all the royalties you’re going to earn.’

‘Forgive our tribal customs. It’s kind of you to put up with us and act as neutral ground.’

‘Oh, we’re not all that neutral,’ Belinda said.

‘Come on,’ Ron said, ushering Squire into the living room. ‘We can get in two good hours’ drinking before Teresa arrives.’

‘Don’t overdo the booze,’ his wife cautioned, adding to Squire, ‘Keep your eye on Ron. The doctor told him to cut down on those cigars, and on the whisky.’

‘I’m as fit as a fiddle, lass. Played a round of golf this morning, didn’t I?’

‘Just behave yourself, that’s all I ask. Tom, we have a couple of house guests, and I believe you already know each other. Come say hello.’

In the fireplace, a cheerful log fire burned. To one side of the fireplace sat a woman, painting. She was a petite dark-haired lady in her forties, neat, plump, magnificently groomed and manicured, with a gold ribbon in the back of her coiled hair. She wore a biscuit-coloured terylene lounging suit and amber rings on her fingers. She was painting a very small picture on a small sketching block, using acrylics from a tiny palette lying by her right hand. She used a brush as delicate as a grass snake’s tongue. As Squire entered the room, she smiled resignedly at her work and laid aside the sketchpad.

Her husband, sprawling opposite her on a chesterfield, was totally immersed in a newly published Webb Broadwell coffee-table book, entitled The Sower of the Systems, a collection of apocalyptic paintings through the ages, by Leslie Lippard-Milne. He wore a crumpled brown suit, with brown-and-yellow striped socks showing between trousers and slippers. Squire knew the couple well. The man was the editor of Intergraphic Studies, Jacques d’Exiteuil, whom Squire had last seen, with his wife Séverine, only a few months earlier in Paris.

Becoming aware of approaching bodies, d’Exiteuil jumped up abruptly, dropping the Lippard-Milne book on the chesterfield and beaming at Squire. For a small, thin man, he managed to convey a lot of stature. Squire shook his hand till d’Exiteuil’s coppery locks trembled.

‘You didn’t bring your son John along?’ d’Exiteuil enquired. ‘He was with you last time we met in London, if you recall. He impressed me with his knowledge of the music of the Genesis pop group.’

‘I saw him a few days before Christmas. This evening, he is seeing the old year out with Fred Cholera and the Pustules. They’re a bit more punk than Genesis. Tomorrow, he sees the New Year in with a demonstration outside a power plant.’

He laughed and crossed to hold and kiss Séverine d’Exiteuil – always a pleasurable experience. She smelt delicious, as ever.

‘Dear Séverine, you smell like an orchard!’

‘You are as always so conservative, Tommy,’ she said. She was one of the few women outside his family who addressed him with the diminutive. ‘Whatever are nuclear power stations for but to demonstrate outside?’

He pretended to look astonished. ‘I’ve never voted Conservative in my life, Séverine. Couldn’t bring myself to do so. In the sixties, that happy time, it was fashionable for everyone to be radical, whether they combined it with seriousness or frivolity, whether they worked for Apple or the Beeb. But Conservatism lacked chic.’

Séverine laughed; they liked to tease each other as a substitute for anything more earthy.

‘All the same, whatever you say … I’m sure that as a privileged landowner you are just an old Tory at heart!’

‘Yes, Séverine, if Ruskin was a Tory, if William Morris was a Tory, then I also am a Tory.’

She was silent for a moment, regarding him smilingly but absent-mindedly. In that pause, her husband said crisply, from his side of the hearthrug, ‘I’m not so surprised that you link yourself with the names of Morris and Ruskin, Tom, because there is something lordly about you. We’re products of our environment, and you’re owner of Pippet Hall. But, from my viewpoint, Morris and Ruskin are practically Tory. You remember Herbert Wells’s dismissal of them – in A Modern Utopia, I think – as Olympian and unworldly, “the irresponsible rich men of a shareholding type”. A good phrase.’

‘Don’t knock shareholding, Jacques,’ Belinda said. ‘It’s a responsible job.’

After a warning glance at her husband, who lapsed into his wine glass, Séverine remarked, ‘Jacques and I have always been Communiste, as long as we have known each other. It was once the smart thing in Paris, thanks to de Beauvoir and Sartre. Now the trendy people opt for anarchy instead.’

‘Well, I’ve voted Tory all my life, and I certainly don’t intend to change now,’ Broadwell said, laughing. ‘This is a Tory country until publishing is nationalized, and I’m the Last of the Small Time Capitalists.’

‘Yes, but you aren’t chic, darling,’ said Belinda affectionately, draping an arm round her husband’s shoulder. ‘You eat and drink too much to be chic. If all these strikes continue and we run out of food, that could be good for you. Now why don’t you get that gift we have for Tom – but fast – and then pour us all another drink?’

‘Don’t you long to go back to the States, with all this trouble in Europe?’ Séverine asked Belinda. ‘We had a strike on the Metro, and then when we arrive at Heathrow the baggage men are striking and messing up everything. Last time, it was the computer men. The excitement has been put back into travel with a vengeance … When Jacques and I spent our year in San Francisco, everything was so smooth and nice.’

‘England’s a very nice place for Americans, even when it takes on some aspects of a banana republic,’ Belinda said. ‘It still has civilized virtues you don’t find elsewhere, except maybe in France. I remember all that the country has suffered this century in two world wars, and how it has lost an empire – given it away in a fit of absent-mindedness, more like; that helps me remain patient with the economy. I just wish you’d speak to the Reds in the TUC who disrupt industry.’

‘Those poor men really only strike for a better wage. Wage rates in England are shockingly low.’

‘Well, I guess I’m just an imperialist at heart, Séverine. If I had my choice, I’d be reincarnated and marry Curzon.’

‘You have enough trouble managing me, darling, never mind India,’ Broadwell said consolingly. He started distributing drinks and passed his wife a Cinzano Rosso and Squire a vodka-on-the-rocks.

Squire was studying Séverine’s miniature painting. It showed part of the room, with Jacques sitting on the sofa with his feet on the arm. On his shoulder rested a gigantic parrot, with beak of stone and brilliant plumage.

D’Exiteuil came over to Squire’s side, grinning and smoothing his little beard. ‘She’s a talented painter, but that bird is slightly menacing, to my mind. Tom, you know why we’re here? Ron will publish a special selection from Intergraphic Studies, the best essays, and lots of illustrations. It could lead to publication of the magazine over here. The hope is that we’ll catch a little of the lustre emanating from your good works when they appear. We also hope to persuade you to write the Introduction. Of course we will also be including your Humphrey Bogart article in the book. Is it a possibility?’

‘I should think so. If I can find something useful to say, and not merely write a vague endorsement. I feel written out of things to say at present – you know I’m just an amateur in this field.’

‘Not at all. I told Ron that it might be possible as a commercial venture to produce a limited edition especially for members of the SPA.’

‘Are you getting any further with arrangements for the conference you mentioned when I was with you in Paris?’

D’Exiteuil clutched his head. ‘My God, the trouble I am having! I am trying to get a grant from the International Universities Foundation, which exists mainly to bestow grants. Will they cooperate? No! They say the subject is not a subject. I think their secretary is mad, judging by his letters … But just before Christmas I had a communication from a Dottore Frenza, at the University of Ermalpa in Sicily. He’s a philosopher.’

‘Ermalpa! What do they know about future culture?’

‘No, no, the situation has possibilities,’ d’Exiteuil said, shaking his head sagaciously. ‘Ermalpa University has a Faculty of Iconographic Simulation, with a few bright young men like Enrico Pelli. They are determined to run a conference in September, just to put themselves on the international map, so we at IS may join in. I will send you details when anything tangible results. You will have to be there.’

‘Can you persuade people to go to Sicily?’ Broadwell asked, arriving with a brightly-wrapped package.

‘Anyone will go anywhere if you pay their air fare,’ d’Exiteuil said, ‘Ancient proverb of the nineteen-seventies.’

‘Present for you, Tom,’ Broadwell said, thrusting the package forward.

Squire unwrapped it. Inside the Christmas paper was a ten-inch 78 record, with Irene Taylor singing ‘Everything I Have is Yours’ on the Decca label. On the other side, she was singing ‘No One Loves Me Like That Dallas Man’.

‘Lovely, thanks very much, Ron. Taylor has a perfect period voice.’

‘Like to hear it now? I picked it up in Bristol market just before Christmas. I don’t think it’s been played.’

They were sitting round the fire peacefully, sipping drinks and listening to the Irene Taylor record. Elm logs crackled, drowning the surface hiss – it was apparent that the record was much beloved by a previous owner. Stereo made it sound as if the lady was singing in her shower.

Squire sat beside Séverine, basking in her delicious aroma while she continued to paint. Seville in summer – perhaps it was just the association of names. Oranges, sunlight, a bed for two in an attic.

The Broadwell living room was decorated in rather a florid taste, the perfect extension of Ron Broadwell himself. Three Piranesi Carceri were mounted with wide green mounts and framed in exuberant gilt. The wallpaper was green-and-gold stripe. At the rear of the room, sliding glass doors opened into an extensive conservatory, most of the work on which Ron had done himself, aided by a son; there, a collection of exotic finches fussed from bough to plastic bough. Beyond the birds, in a wintry garden, lay an oval swimming pool, floodlit – presumably more to impress than invite guests.

The Piranesis excepted, the pictures in the room were modern. Two nice Mike Wilks fantasy cities, an alarming Ian Pollock, an Ayrton minotaur, all framed in aluminium. They hung above a long bookcase filled mainly with Webb Broadwell books – Squire identified the spine of his own Cult and Culture, it was the book which had persuaded the despots of television to invest in ‘Frankenstein’. It and Against Barbarism were the only other books he had written or was likely to write. An Introduction for Jacques he could manage.

The fireplace was declamatory but certainly knew how to burn logs. The semi-pornographic nineteenth-century Japanese woodcut over the mantelpiece was not a good idea. On a side-table were silver-framed photographs of the children, mostly smiling, now grown up, and their children, mostly waving, and dogs, mostly begging, interspersed with little silver articles which must have had utility in one culture or another – say before the invention of side-tables. It would have been more fun for visitors to have a random collection of plastic mazes available; there were brilliant mazes and puzzles on the market now which had so far escaped serious comment. But that was not exactly the object of furnishings and bric-a-brac. They existed more to make the householder feel secure and the visitor insecure. Not that Ron and Belinda actively thought that way; they simply followed Vogue and Homes and Gardens, a rack of which stood behind the piano.

When they had played both sides of the record, Broadwell showed d’Exiteuil an advance copy of Frankenstein Among the Arts.

‘We are also doing a limited edition, five hundred copies, all signed, with one hundred extra plates, bound in full crushed blue morocco, in slip case. Sixty quid a time.’

‘All very elegant, Ron. How many examples of the ordinary edition do you publish?’

‘We have a first print run of sixty thousand, almost all already subscribed, and a reprint under way, and the book club have taken another fifty-five thousand. That’s how we managed to include so much colour and keep the price within bounds. Nice, isn’t it? Publication day, Friday, 3rd March.’

D’Exiteuil shook his head ruefully, ‘Ah, success, success … You know that my sole book, a collection of essays, in English, called The Stupidity of the Rich, was merely a succès d’estime. Oddly enough, I see some of my more absurd ideas cropping up in this book, The Sower of the Seasons, which you published.’ He turned to Squire. ‘Tom, do you know Lippard-Milne?’

‘I know his wife quite well.’

‘Well, you see he has no guiding principle in criticism. Being English, he has a good critical eye, and is observant. That’s because you English all read your Bibles so much until a generation ago. You attended to the details, which were expressed in a fine language. Now the Bible has been rendered into civil servant English, and you are left without direction, and the whole perpetual instrument of Marxist analysis has yet to be taken up with the same expertise as it is wielded in France.’

‘Marxism naturally doesn’t suit us, any more than absinthe, garotting, or lederhosen,’ Squire said. ‘We have a monarchy, if you recall.’

‘Do you pretend that the Queen is obstructing literary criticism, Tommy?’ Séverine asked, and they all laughed.

‘No politics allowed here tonight,’ said Belinda. ‘Let’s all sink our differences at least until next year – which is only a few hours away. Come and eat now. I have just a little snack for you to keep the wolf away. We won’t wait for Teresa in case she’s late, but I’ve kept something for her.’

The little snack proved to be a pocket-sized banquet. They had just finished, and were returning to the living room, when there were sounds of a car engine in the drive, and the front-door bell chimed. The Broadwell hounds barked furiously from the kitchen.

Ron Broadwell opened the door. Teresa was not there as anticipated. Instead, her mother walked in, smiling. Madge Davies was smartly dressed in a brown wool coat trimmed with fox. With her was Squire’s Uncle Willie, dressed in his customary navy blue overcoat but wearing what, even on close inspection, was a rather snappy tweed hat.

As the two of them shook hands with everyone, and removed their outer garments, Uncle Willie explained that they had intended to meet Teresa at the airport, but her plane had been delayed.

His cheeks were reddened by the cold outside, but he was very brisk; Mrs Davies seemed at first unusually subdued.

‘Teresa managed to phone through to us from Rome airport,’ Willie explained. ‘For some reason, she chose to return from Malta via Rome. Madge and I guess she had some business there, because she’s doing very well, selling to the US and so on. We think she’s arranging some special packaging. The Italians are good at packaging. Her Rome–Heathrow plane was delayed because of a strike of fuel-tender men. As soon as she gets to Heathrow, she’ll catch a taxi here.’

Séverine raised one of her immaculate eyebrows at Squire. ‘You remember what I said about putting the excitement back in travel. It soon won’t be safe for a woman to travel alone. I can’t wait for that day …’

‘It’s just a handful of communist agitators in each country,’ Willie explained.

‘The capitalists will go on saying that until their system finally breaks down completely,’ d’Exiteuil said. ‘May we play that charming little Taylor record again, Ron?’

‘Go ahead,’ Belinda said. ‘I suppose you think “Everything I Have is Yours” is some kind of commie signature tune, Jacques?’

‘I certainly didn’t expect to see you, Mother,’ Squire said, touching his cheek to Mrs Davies’s cheek. She was wearing a perfume he identified as one of Teresa’s. ‘Uncle Willie even less. I thought he’d be in Norwich, tucked up safely in bed with his cat.’

‘Well, dear …’ She looked embarrassed, and allowed the Broadwells to usher her into the living room. ‘What a charming house you have here, Mr Broadwell, and so wonderfully warm. I suppose that as a publisher… I don’t believe in economizing on the heating, but my flat in Grantham is always so chilly. Double-glazing doesn’t seem to help. You’re all double-glazed here, I expect, of course.’

‘Tell them, Madge,’ Willie prompted.

Madge adjusted her white hair, and said, looking mainly at Squire, ‘Will, at my age, I’m quite … I feel it is rather an imposition to come into a strange house and immediately … sort of … what was that poem about it? Anyhow, Tom, you know that Ernest and I were always very fond of your Uncle Will. Ernest especially. I remember the occasion when we first met him in Norwich, that was in the old Haymarket, no, in the Carlton Hotel, which was then very smart – it’s been pulled down now – and Ernest said afterwards, “I trust that man”, he said. Well, Tommy, old as we are, Will and I have decided – it’s almost a year since poor Ernest was knocked down and killed – he was never what you’d call a strong man – to get married and live together.’

As everyone clapped, Squire put on a puzzled expression and asked, ‘But which are you going to do, Mother – get married or live together?’

Amid the laughter, Willie said, ‘Madge and I are determined to start anew, as far as that’s possible at our advanced age. She’ll sell her place, I’ll sell up mine, and we’ll buy a little bungalow, possibly in Hunstanton. Settle down like Darby and Joan, whoever they were.’

Shaking his uncle warmly by the hand, Squire offered his congratulations. He embraced Mrs Davies.

‘Tom, I hope you won’t find anything too …’ She hesitated for a phrase which had vanished without trace.

‘Does Teresa know?’

‘We told her before she went off to Malta. I mean, your uncle and I are just going to be close friends.’

‘I shouldn’t trust him if I were you, Mother.’

‘It’s thirty-four years since Diana died,’ Willie said defensively. He brought out his pipe and lit it.

Broadwell moved to get more drinks. Mrs Davies’s news was received with amused pleasure. She herself became flustered and apologetic and reminiscent and flirtatious.

When Broadwell returned with champagne, she thanked him and said, ‘If Will and I are to be united, it is important to us that Tom and Teresa – you see, she’s still a child to me, Mr Broadwell, although she’s in her forties, and she and I have always been very alike in our tastes. Not all perhaps, but many. She’s always been artistic. Next year is going to be a good one for Tom, I know, so he can afford to be kind to Teresa and try and understand her point of view. As his publisher, you can exert a good influence on him, I’m sure.’