to be fuelled by seven, in time to fill the next few hours with fun. This time may be spent in a club or in a pub or keeping fit or studying macrame or learning Mandarin or line dancing or simply watching television while sitting on a sofa. The evening is your oyster and, by eating early, you are free to enjoy every pleasure while it lasts.
The reason this is completely bewildering for the upper middle and upper classes is simply because for them the dinner is the pleasure. It is the apex, the core, the point. If the whole business of feeding is over by half past seven, what on earth is one to do until bed? These people don’t go to self-help groups, or engage in amateur acting, nor do they study art or quilting, or drop into a bar. This is why any role in local government is so difficult for them. It takes place just when they prefer to be sitting at a table for a very different purpose. For those who cross the great social divide, there can be few habits harder to adjust to, whichever direction they have travelled. Certainly, Bridget had found it difficult and now, here I was, deliberately goading her, insulting her, putting her down. I was ashamed of myself. But not, it seems, sufficiently ashamed to regain my good humour. I stared at the plate. ‘And I wish you wouldn’t pile it up like that. It’s so off-putting.’ I whined as I unfolded my napkin. ‘I feel like a tramp being fed before retiring to my cubicle in a Rowton House.’
‘And I feel like the skivvy serving him,’ said Bridget without the trace of a smile, and we let it rest there.
At the time of these events my father lived in a modest village called Abberley, on the Gloucestershire borders. He was eighty-six then and he’d chosen it as his retreat after my mother’s fairly early death ten years before. There was no pressing reason for him to go there, since their marriage had largely been spent abroad and the first years of his retirement had been passed in Wiltshire, but I suppose he wanted a change and our family had been based for the latter half of the nineteenth century at Abberley Park, a rather over-christened large house of negligible architectural merit, situated behind a cobbled forecourt, at one end of the main street of the village. It meant little to me, as it had only been a third-rate hotel in my lifetime; still we would visit it occasionally for lunch or tea, and Pa would pretend a kind of nostalgia for the place. This, I suspect, was to encourage me to take an interest in my family’s history, but I always found his Turgenev-style melancholy fairly unconvincing. The large, dreary hall and the largish dreary drawing and dining rooms on either side of it were all hideously decorated, and any trace of private life had long since vanished from the atmosphere. My father had no memories of the house anyway, since his grandfather had sold it, after the agricultural depression, in the early years of the twentieth century before he was even born. I suppose the staircase, in slightly crude nineteenth-century baroque, was pretty and the dark, panelled library may once have been nice, but its translation into a bar, complete with upside-down bottles on silver holders, had obliterated its fragile charm. However, the seller-grandfather, plus his wife and various other members of the two preceding generations of our clan, lay in the graveyard of the local church and were commemorated with plaques in the nave, and I imagine this gave my papa a sense of belonging, something neither he nor my mother had ever quite achieved in their previous home.
His life in Abberley was pleasant enough but a bit sad, of course, as all old men living on their own are sad, in a way that old women are not. He had a housekeeper called Mrs Snow, who was reasonably civil and would cook him lunch every day and depart after it was washed up and put away. She would leave his dinner in the fridge, in a terrifying array of dishes covered in cling film, with post-it notes carrying strict instructions: ‘Boil for twenty minutes,’ ‘Put in a preheated oven at gas mark 5 for half an hour.’ I could never see the point of this, since she wasn’t a very good cook, to say the least of it, her repertoire consisting entirely of English nursery food from the 1950s, and he could have bought everything at the local Waitrose. It would have been quicker and easier to prepare, as well as much nicer to eat. But, looking back, I think he rather enjoyed the disciplined activity of unwrapping everything and obeying her iron will. It must have taken up quite a bit of the evening and that would have been a real bonus.
On the day that I went to see him Mrs Snow was preparing our lunch when I arrived, but he told me in dulcet tones, as he poured two glasses of very dry sherry, that she was going to leave us as soon as she had brought in the pudding. In other words she was not going to stay to wash up. ‘We’ll have the place to ourselves,’ he muttered out of the side of his mouth as he led the way to a chair in his chilly and unsuccessful drawing room. Why is it that some people can live in a house for twenty years, yet the furniture still looks as if the removal van has just pulled out of the gates? In this, his last house he had copied a few rooms from earlier homes that my mother had decorated, but he never seemed to find a template for the little, irregularly shaped drawing room, so it just waited, with its magnolia walls and disparate collection of furniture, for an inspiration that never came.
‘Good,’ I answered, since that was what seemed to be called for.
He nodded briskly. ‘I think it’s better.’ Years in the diplomatic had made him secretive as a rule, in addition to which he shared the usual prejudice of his kind that it was impossible to have any kind of conversation about money, outside the walls of a bank or a brokers’, were it not serving one of two purposes. These comprised discussing your future son-in-law’s net worth and prospects, and talking about your own will. Since my sister was long married, I gathered at once that the second was what we were in for and so it proved.
We had exchanged bits of family information in a desultory fashion through some unsalted, tasteless shepherd’s pie and we were staring at an uninviting plum duff with custard, when Mrs Snow leant round the door in her coat and hat. ‘I’ll be off, then,’ she said to my father. ‘I’ve put coffee in the library, Sir David, so don’t let it get cold.’ In response to this, he twisted his face into something akin to a wink, signifying that as with all, lonely old people who employ one servant, the relationship was becoming dangerous, and he nodded his thanks. We heard the door bang and he started.
‘I had rather a turn the other day and I went to see old Babbage. He’s run a few tests and it seems I may be cracking up at last.’
‘I thought you said Babbage ought to be struck off.’
‘I never did.’
‘You said he couldn’t diagnose a gunshot wound.’
‘Did I?’ My father was slightly cheered by this. ‘Perhaps I did. Anyway, it doesn’t alter much. I’m going some time and it won’t be long now.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Nothing to bother you with.’
‘I have driven for two and a quarter hours. I deserve details.’
But he could not break the habits of a lifetime. ‘It was all about blood being where it shouldn’t be. Revolting stuff that I have no intention of discussing over pudding.’ There wasn’t much to come back with, so I waited while he got to the point. ‘Anyway, I realised that you and I had never had a proper talk about everything.’
How strange death is. It seems to make such nonsense of the years that have gone before. Here was my father about to die, presumably of some form of cancer, and what had been the point of it all? What had it all been for? He’d worked pretty hard, in the way his generation did work, which was different from, and more sensible than ours, with their late starts and long lunches and getting home by half past six. Even so, he had done his best and travelled the world and stayed in horrible hotels, and sat through boring meetings and listened to heads of state lying, and experts making dire predictions that proved quite unfounded; he had studied worthless reports without
