nervously as they came on to the lawn. Aunt Corinna was in the far corner, inspecting a sagging trellis and, quite possibly, lining up further tasks or tests for him. Beside her a large weeping beech-tree spread awkwardly but romantically, a table sheltered under its skirts.
‘You know she should have been a concert pianist. That’s what everyone says, at least; I don’t know if it’s actually true. I mean anyone can say they should have been something. Anyway now she teaches the piano. She gets fantastic results, of course, though you can see the children are simply terrified of her. Julian says she’s a sadist,’ she said, a touch self-consciously.
‘Oh…!’ said Paul, with a frown and disparaging laugh and then, from the mention of anything taboo, a sure- fire, searching blush. Sometimes they ebbed unnoticed, sometimes kept coming, self-compounding. He stooped and half-hid himself spreading the plastic sacks on the grass. ‘So Julian’s her younger son,’ he said, still with his back to her.
‘Oh, John wouldn’t say that, he’s far too square.’
‘So Julian isn’t square…?’
‘What’s Julian? Julian’s sort of… elliptical.’ They both laughed. ‘Have I embarrassed you?’ said Jenny.
‘Not at all,’ said Paul, recovering. ‘The whole of your family’s new to me, you see. I’m from Wantage.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Jenny – as if this was in fact a bit of a drawback. ‘Well, they’re rather a nightmare to sort out… the old lady you met over there is my grandmother.’
‘You mean Mrs Jacobs?’
‘Yes, she married again when my father was quite small. She’s been married three times.’
‘Goodness.’
‘I know… She’s about to be seventy, and we’re going to have a huge enormous party.’
Paul started gingerly unearthing the plants from the trough – they trembled under this further assault on their dignity. He stood them, in their trailing tangle of earth and roots, on the old Fisons sack. Soft clots of some kind of manure, loosely forked into the soil, were still slightly slimy. ‘I hope I’m doing this right,’ he said.
‘Oh, I should think so,’ said Jenny, who like the others was watching but not exactly paying attention.
‘So your aunt said you’re going up to Oxford.’ He tried to disguise his envy, if that’s what it was, in a genial avuncular tone.
‘Did she. Yes, I am.’
‘What are you going to study?’
‘I’m reading French at St Anne’s.’ She made it sound beautifully exclusive, the rich simplicity of the proper nouns. He had taken his mother all round Oxford, gaping at the colleges, as a kind of masochistic treat for both of them before he went off to Loughborough to train for the bank; but they hadn’t bothered with the women’s colleges. ‘Julian’s applying to Univ this year.’
‘Mm, so you might be there together.’
‘Which would be rather fab,’ said Jenny.
When he’d dug out all the earth he rocked the trough with both hands and it moved more readily. Still, he laughed at the second looming failure. ‘Here goes,’ he said, and squatted down again. Over the lawn he saw Mrs Keeping bearing down, with her keen sense of timing. With a violent force that in the moment itself seemed almost comical he heaved up the great stone object and with a stifled shout he lodged it on its other block, on the edge of it at least, but the job was done. ‘Aha!’ said Mrs Keeping, ‘we’re getting there at last,’ and as he held it steady and smiled almost devotedly up at her he felt it turn under his hand; if he hadn’t jumped back in the second it slipped and fell it would have crushed his foot – the block underneath had lurched over, and now the trough itself, massive and unmoving, lay sideways on the grass. ‘Oh god, are you all right?’ said Jenny, gripping his arm with a welcome note of hysteria. Mrs Keeping herself made a kind of panting noise. ‘Now we’re jiggered,’ she said. ‘Oh look,’ said Jenny, ‘your hand’s bleeding.’ How it had happened he didn’t know, and it was only now she said it that it began to hurt, a dull deep pang in the ball of the thumb and needle-like stinging of the grazed flesh. He supposed the pain had been held in check by the knowledge, so far his alone, that the trough had cracked in two.
Ten minutes later he found himself – clown, hero, victim, he couldn’t tell which – in a low garden chair with a large gin-and-tonic in his right hand. His left hand was impressively bandaged, the fingers hard to move in their tight sheath. Mrs Keeping, with a smirk of remorse, had bandaged it herself, the remorse turning steadily more aggressive as the long strip of stuff was bound tighter and tighter. Now the family glanced at his hand with concern and regret and a touch of self-satisfaction. Paul, tongue-tied, reached out to scratch Roger the Jack Russell, who had come round to the back of the house and was sitting panting in one of the broad purple cushions of aubrietia which spread over the flagstones. Mr Keeping was in the drawing-room, fixing drinks for the others; he called out through the french windows, ‘Your usual, darling?’
‘Absolutely!’ said Mrs Keeping, with a tight little laugh and shake of the head, as if to say she’d earned it. She perched on the wooden bench, and tore at the cellophane on a packet of Kensitas.
‘And what about Daphne?’
‘Gin and It!’ shouted Mrs Jacobs, as if taking part in a game.
‘Large one?’
‘Vast!’
Paul and Jenny laughed at this, but Mrs Keeping gave a barely amused grunt. Mrs Jacobs was sitting facing Paul, and between them was a low metal-framed table with a mosaic top. Over the rim of the table he had, if he wanted it, a direct view into the beige-coloured mysteries of her underwear. In her shapeless sundress and wide floppy hat she had an air of collapse, but her expression was friendly and alert, if ready, with age and perhaps a degree of deafness, to let one or two things slip past her. She wore large glasses with clear lower rims and tops like tawny eyebrows. When her drink was set in front of her on the mosaic table, she gave it a keen but illusionless smile, as if to say she knew what would become of it. Her smile showed surprisingly brown teeth – a smoker’s smile that went with the smoky catch in her voice. ‘Well, cheers!’
‘Cheerio…’ Mr Keeping sat down, still in his bank manager’s suit, which made his own large g-and-t look slightly surreal.
‘Cheers,’ said Jenny.
‘What are you drinking, child?’ said Mrs Jacobs.
‘Oh, cider, Granny…’
‘I didn’t know you liked cider.’
‘Well, I don’t particularly, but I’m not allowed spirits yet, and one has to get drunk on something, doesn’t one.’
‘I suppose one
‘Paul’s just started at the bank this week, Daphne,’ said Mr Keeping. ‘He’s joined us from Wantage.’
‘Oh, I love Wantage,’ said Mrs Jacobs; and after a moment, ‘In fact I once ran away to Wantage.’
‘Oh, Mother, really,’ said Mrs Keeping.
‘Just for a night or two, when your father was being especially beastly.’ Paul had never heard anyone speak like this, and couldn’t say at first if it was real or theatrical, truly sophisticated or simply embarrassing. He glanced at Mrs Keeping, who was smiling tightly and batting her eyelids with contained impatience. ‘I took you and Wilfie under my wing and drove like hell to Wantage. We stayed with Mark for a day or two. Mark Gibbons, you know,’ she said to Paul, ‘the marvellous painter. We stayed with him till the heat died down.’
‘Anyway,’ muttered Mrs Keeping, drawing on her cigarette.
‘We did, darling. You’re probably too young to remember.’ She sounded slightly wounded, but used to being so.
‘You didn’t know how to drive, Mother,’ Mrs Keeping went on brightly, but unable to stop herself.
‘Of course I could drive…’
Mrs Keeping blew out smoke with a hard humorous expression. ‘We needn’t bore Mr Bryant with our family nonsense,’ she said.
Paul, in the first nice giddiness of a very strong gin-and-tonic, smiled, ducked his head, showed he didn’t mind the mild bewilderment at unexplained names and facts. As often with older people he was both bored and unaccountably involved at the same time. ‘No, no,’ he said, and grinned at Mr Keeping, who surveyed the whole scene with quizzical composure. The evening had swollen to a shape entirely unimagined an hour before.
‘You see, I think our family
