Facing the Tank Read online

  ‘God bless them all,’ thought Evan, bounding down the stairs as the bus stopped by the Coronet cinema, ‘and I bet Kim looks swell.’

  He dived into a cake shop and emerged with a bag of chocolate fudge brownies. Heading down Kensington Park Gardens he bought a Standard and two bunches of anemones. He liked anemones because they looked dead until one gave them something to drink. He liked the deep colours as they revived. Miriam had liked dried flowers, often spraying them with gold or silver paint. She had liked the way they lasted. The flat, and then the house where she had insisted they move, had crackled with their spidery shapes. They would catch on his cardigan sleeves as he passed by and he would relax on a sofa only to have them rustle in his ear.

  Two little girls slid past on roller skates, attached by headphones to the same Walkman. A woman who had to jump out of the way with her shopping bags appealed for support in her wrath but he was smiling and eating chocolate fudge brownies in the street so she turned elsewhere, doubly indignant.

  The Booths’s flat lay on the first floor of one of the high white terraces that swing out on either side of Ladbroke Grove. It faced south over an attractively undercultivated park that one could reach from a spiral staircase off the living room balcony. Evan threw open the balcony windows as he came in, letting in new-mown grass to fight with last night’s tobacco smoke. He flung himself full length on the sofa – he was very tall, so this involved resting his feet on an adjacent table – and stared up into the sunshot greens of the chestnut trees. He had eaten one brownie too many and was dizzied with sweetness. Euphoria had evaporated with his hunger.

  Freedom. As Miriam would have said, whoopee shit. He was in his middling forties and he had never had an affair. He couldn’t drive and tried to avoid air travel. Try as he might he could not grow a paunch and he remained firmly what his English agent, Jeremy called ‘coincé heterosexual’. What price freedom? Evan picked up the Standard to ogle a spread of skinny models flaunting ‘this summer’s look’, but it was hard to read it lying down so he soon let it fall. The telephone rang. It was Jeremy.

  Though arguably coincé, Jeremy was no longer heterosexual. Following certain discoveries regarding the frequency of his trips to the family’s vet, his wife had divorced him. She had kept the children. The dog and Jeremy now lived with said vet in a state of seamless domesticity that varied only from his former married bliss in its higher joint income and more fashionable cookery. For all the disparity in their ages, Jeremy contrived to treat Evan as a kind aunt might an eccentric child.

  ‘Evan, I’ve fixed up Brooster for you.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Barrowcester to you but it’s pronounced like rooster with a b on the front. The inhabitants are called Barrowers though which you pronounce as spelt.’

  ‘How do I get there?’

  ‘Express-ish train from King’s Cross and it takes two hours plus. Now let me check that I’ve got this right. You wanted to use both the cathedral and the school libraries, yes?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Super. Well I’ve spoken to the Dean who says you’ll have the run of the library and can photograph anything you like as long as they get an acknowledgement – we’d send them a signed copy obviously – and I’ve been on to the headmaster of Tatham’s – only they call him the Lord – and he says that’s fine there too only you had better talk to the librarian about photographs. Have I done well?’

  ‘You have, Jerry.’

  ‘Now I must hurry but I want to take you out to lunch tomorrow. How about Manzi’s at quarter to?’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Now Deb’s made arrangements for where you can stay so can I hand you over to her?’

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘Such a shame she’s not available. We must find you someone else and have you and whoever to supper soon.’

  ‘See you at Manzi’s, Jerry.’

  ‘Bye.’

  There was a pause as Jeremy pressed buttons then Deborah came on the line. Of his team of beautiful assistants, Deborah was Evan’s favourite because she had wavy raven hair and was extraordinarily capable. She also had the kind of husky telephone manner that could dissolve tiresome contracts and double advances.

  As she said ‘Hi,’ Evan could picture the loose cream cotton and the pearls at her throat and forgot about brownie sickness. ‘How’s Notting Hill?’ she asked.

  ‘Full of rotting fruit skins and old Colonel Sanders boxes. How’s Bloomsbury?’

  ‘Sticky. Now look.’

  ‘I love it when you’re masterful.’

  ‘Don’t be playful, Evan, I’m holding the fort and I haven’t got time.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Not at all.’ She chuckled slowly and he crossed his legs. ‘I’ve found you lovely lodgings in Barrowcester.’

  ‘Is it really pronounced like that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘This is England. There’s a very motherly landlady who’ll do you a power of good and cook for you and the house is pretty and old. It’s right in the thick of things so you won’t have far to walk.’

  ‘I think I love you, Deborah.’

  ‘Do you want to go tomorrow evening or have you still got work at the B.L.?’

  ‘Sod the B.L. Sorry.’

  ‘That’s quite all right.’

  ‘No. I’ve finished there, but I’ve got to do dull things like wait for dry cleaning and hand over keys to the girl who’ll feed the parrot. I’ll catch the train on Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘Well, make sure you’re at the station on time. I know how unpunctual you are. There’s a train on Sunday at five.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Ssh. And I’ll give names and addresses to Jeremy to hand over to you at lunch tomorrow.’

  ‘Good thinking, Batman.’

  ‘Now I must go. Have a good trip. It’s a beautiful place. Very quiet. Jeremy has a cousin there so you must be sure to ask him for her address.’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Bye Debs, and thank you.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  Without leaving the sofa Evan replaced the receiver and stretched up to the bookcase for a copy of English Cathedral Towns. So far Barrowcester had only been a name on library catalogues and bibliographical cross references. He reached behind him to switch on a light and settled down with an ill-advised third brownie to read about the place.

  2

  Emma glanced at her watch. It was twelve-fifteen. The room before her was full of small boys drawing. She had cheated this morning. She had meant to quiz them on the journeys of Saint Paul but one sight of their unscored little faces had changed her mind. They wanted nothing to do with the ceaseless meanderings of that crazed bigot and she had no desire to force him on them.

  ‘Do you want to hear a really bloodthirsty story?’ she had asked.

  ‘Yes please, Miss.’

  ‘Excuse me, Miss?’

  ‘Yes, James?’

  ‘I thought we were going to do Saint Paul.’

  ‘Ssh!’ said one boy.

  ‘Sneak!’ snapped a second.

  ‘Do you like Saint Paul, James?’ she asked.

  ‘Well …’ James looked uncomfortable. ‘Not much.’

  There was laughter at which she smiled.

  ‘You’ll have to know all about him one day,’ she said, ‘but today it’s Saturday and it’s so sunny and the birds are singing and the flowers are out so I thought …’ She paused in her walking to pick up a small boy’s rude drawing, which she frowned at and crumpled in her palm. ‘I thought we should listen to a really bloodthirsty story.’

  There was more laughter. Blue eyes shining, cheeks radiating health, Emma sat on the front of her desk and read them the story of Jael, Sisera and the tent-peg. Their delight at the description of supper in a lordly dish and brains spilt on sand was her delight and she capped it by letting them spend the last half of the lesson drawing an illustratio
n to the grisly tale.

  ‘Right,’ she now said, ‘time for your lunch.’ There was a wild opening and slamming shut of desk-lids and a buzz of released conversation. ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute.’ Loving her, they were still at once. ‘Put your nasty drawings on my desk and I’ll put the best, nastiest ones on the wall for everyone to laugh at.’ They hurried forward and slammed gory picture after gory picture beside her. ‘And next time,’ she shouted over the hubbub, ‘it’ll have to be Saint Paul.’

  There were groans and they were gone. She gathered the drawings into a pile which she locked in her desk. As she walked down the battered parquet corridor to the playground and freedom, she could hear the dim murmur of,

  ‘Oh Lord, the Giver of Bounty, bless this food for ourselves and ourselves for Thy service. Amen,’ and the appalling clatter of benches being clambered over and plates being slung along tables as Junior Lunch started.

  The choir school was little, fleshing out its income and classes by taking in a few day boys as well as the twenty-six choristers. The standard of everything except music was cheerfully low, but the cachet of the place as an accepted springboard into Tatham’s was such that parents of unmusical sons continued to fork out inflated sums to send their children there. Emma’s qualification for teaching Divinity was less her history degree than the fact that her late father used to be Dean. The head of English had come there to teach the ‘cello once and had somehow taken over the English department during an epidemic of gastric flu. The French master was distinctly Dutch, although no one but Emma seemed impolite enough to have noticed. Anyone in the area with a Latin degree had been lured away by the house that came, along with better pay, with a job at Tatham’s, so what Classics the little boys gleaned had been gathered in a team effort from the staff’s schoolday memories. A well-thumbed copy of Kennedy’s Latin Primer was kept on a string by the kettle in the common room, the idea being to stay one lesson ahead of one’s class. Emma heard James Rees (Forestry degree) leading a senior class in their declension of an irregular verb as she mounted her bicycle and rode out into the Close. The lawns were covered with families in their Sunday best because the city schools’ confirmation service had just finished.

  Her father’s house stood on the corner of Dimity and Tatham Streets in an overstocked, walled garden. He had died five years ago leaving a twenty-two-year-old Emma sole heir, but it was still very much his house. He had retired there from the Deanery when Emma was just starting at Tatham’s. An historian who was also a priest, the ex-Dean had brought his history to the fore once more. He dedicated the eight years he spent in the house before his death to writing a double biography of Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey. The book, Disparate Men, had been a posthumous steady seller, not least in Barrowcester where Dyce-Hamilton’s discovery of an unlikely friendship between Tatham and Wolsey was a matter for some concern.

  The late Dean was regarded as having been a fair and noble one, not only in his policy of non-interference but also in his adoption of the baby Emma. He had married late, to general rejoicing and, his wife being well past a safe childbearing age, they filed for adoption and were granted a baby girl. Mrs Dyce-Hamilton died of cancer all too soon after Emma’s arrival, to general despair, and although a nanny had to be found, the care of the child was taken on whenever possible by her late-middle-aged father. As soon as she was old enough to sit still and silent on a grown-up chair, she was led by him to services in the Cathedral – hence her dispassionate but extensive knowledge of the Scriptures. The sight of him walking patiently slowly with her hand in his and, later, of them walking arm in arm, she now patiently slow, was one dear to the hearts of the diocese. She attended a local day school, but it was his careful coaching that had seen her through the Tatham’s entrance exam at thirteen. Once he had retired and begun work in earnest on Disparate Men she repaid the favour by devoting many of her weekends to helping him track down passages and, as the work grew, to typing up finished chapters. Then as now, Emma felt herself marked out by the other Barrowers as A Faithful Daughter Old Before Her Time.

  Dyce-Hamilton smoked to jubilant excess and had received several cautions from Dr Morton so the news that he was dying of lung cancer had caused his daughter little shock. Hurrying home from Edinburgh, Emma saw him through the last disgusting stages of his affliction, seeing the good doctor to and from the front door via the occasional glass of sherry, and dodging downstairs to the telephone each evening to receive chatty and irrelevant messages from university friends. She had brought her work home with her and studied at his bedside, sometimes holding one-way conversations on her topics. He was forbidden to talk much, was indeed incapable of doing so without inducing violent coughing fits, but he could scribble on a pad and would insist on interrupting from time to time to correct or expand a point or to direct her to a source she had perhaps ignored.

  He died, not peacefully but fast, one morning after breakfast, while she was reading him the morning’s news. It was a characteristically considerate time to die. She returned to Edinburgh to sit her finals in a numb fog, seeing few and speaking to less, then slipped back to Barrowcester so as to be about her father’s posthumous business. She was awarded a respectable two-one in one city and a rush of love and support in the other.

  Five years had passed but Emma could not leave. She had tried. She had taken weekends off to visit friends in their unappetizing bedsits in London. Said friends had descended on her or bombarded her with letters, demanding her immediate removal to the capital and even offering to find her somewhere to live. He had not left her badly off, and since new fast trains drawing it into the commuter town bracket had sent Barrowcester’s property prices soaring, she could have bought a two-bedroom flat in Clapham on the proceeds of her father’s house. But she couldn’t leave, and Barrowcester was not going to let her go. In letters to supportive friends she made lists that set the reasons for her leaving against those for her staying put. She was attached to the house. She loved the garden. She liked Barrowcester well enough – certainly more than filthy London – but found it painfully small. Most of the time she wanted to hate the Barrowers, but this was rarely as easy as it sounded. They were civilized, kind, amusing and often intelligent. Her spurts of rage against their frequent narrowness of outlook were extinguished by her depressing realization that they were as incapable of broadening their horizons as she of leaving. Sometimes she would weep, get drunk on sherry, break something beautiful and storm around the house, furious at the futile job she had drifted into, loathing the gardening she had started to enjoy so much, determined not to be branded as yet another Barrower maiden of certain age. Then she would flop exhausted on a sofa and see two thrushes or a chaffinch in the garden, or hear kind laughter from the street, or a splash of harpsichord music from Dr Feltram’s house next door, and she would moan as the sedation of place soothed her pumping thoughts.

  Emma paused on her way through the garden to wind some trailing wisteria back into its wire arch, then left her bicycle by the porch. The telephone was ringing as she let herself in. It was Lydia Hart.

  ‘Lydia. How lovely,’ Emma said. ‘How are you? Were you at the eight o’clock, this morning?’

  ‘No. I overslept.’

  ‘I couldn’t make it either. Some days it’s so hard to get up. How’s Clive?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘And Tobit?’

  ‘Fine too. Working hard as ever. His dresses are a great success. There was something in the Standard yesterday; you know the sort of thing – models showing them off – this summer’s look. Very good publicity.’

  ‘Good for him,’ said Emma, who had sat down and was holding the receiver under her chin while she used her hands to pull off her sensible shoes and massage an ache in her feet. ‘When’s he coming home again?’

  ‘God knows. I try not to ask. Being a mother gets awfully hard when they’ve just left home.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  Lydia laughed politely at the other end.
r />   ‘That reminds me,’ she went on, ‘can you manage supper one night soon?’

  ‘What fun. Yes. Every night but tonight.’ Emma was doing nothing tonight either, but there was a serial she wanted to watch. Keeping up to date with serials, along with enjoying the garden, was one of the activities whose increasing importance in her life was so abhorred.

  ‘Do you know Fergus Gibson? I thought I might ask him?’

  ‘Which is he?’

  ‘The rather nice Scotsman who lives in the big house at our end of Tracer Lane.’

  ‘No. I don’t think we’ve met. What’s he do?’

  ‘You’ve probably seen him around. Awfully handsome. He runs an interiors firm. He’s just redone a manor house out towards Clough – it was in The Barrower last Friday – and he completely redid Mrs Chattock’s flat at the Palace. He prettied up our extension for me, too.’

  ‘Oh. I remember something … yes.’

  ‘And I’m feeling rather sorry for him because his business partner died last year, which must mean an awful lot more work and, as if that wasn’t enough, his elderly mother has become bedridden and he refuses to let anyone …’ Here Lydia’s voice trailed off slightly. ‘Help him with her.’

  ‘Maybe I can persuade him to redecorate here,’ said Emma, helping her out.

  ‘What a marvellous idea! Not that it needs it exactly but, well … You must suggest it when you both meet,’ Lydia enthused. ‘Now I must dash up and see how the girls are getting on. There are two new Saturday ones in the shop and they’re little more than children.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Emma, trying to put back on a shoe and dropping it. ‘About supper; when shall I come?’

  ‘Oh!’ Lydia laughed. ‘Silly me. Yes. How about next Friday?’

  ‘That would be fine. Eightish?’