the bridge. It was here, browsing in the county histories, that I discovered that a skirmish had been fought on that bridge in the Civil War when five young Cavaliers had held the bridge against the Roundheads until all of them had fallen. Even their names were set out, a roll-call of romantic courage: Ormerod, Freemantle, Cole, Bydder, Fairfax. I went to Xan in great excitement and dragged him into the library.
“Look, the actual date of the fight is next Wednesday, August 16. We ought to celebrate.”
“How? Throw flowers in the water?”
But he was not being either dismissive or contemptuous and he was only slightly amused at my enthusiasm.
“Why not drink to them anyway? Make a ceremony of it.”
We did both. We went to the bridge at sunset with a bottle of his father’s claret, the two pistols, my arms filled with flowers from the walled garden. We drank the bottle between us; then Xan balanced on the parapet, firing both pistols into the air as I shouted out the names. It is one of the moments from my boyhood which have remained with me, an evening of pure joy, unshadowed, untainted by guilt or satiety or regret, immortalized for me in that image of Xan balanced against the sunset, of his flaming hair, of the pale petals of roses floating downstream under the bridge until they were lost to sight.
Monday 18 January
I can remember my first holiday at Woolcombe. I followed Xan up a second flight of stairs at the end of the corridor to a room at the top of the house looking out over the terrace and the lawn towards the river and the bridge. At first, sensitive and contaminated by my mother’s resentment, I wondered if I was being put in the servants’ quarters.
Then Xan said: “I’m next door. We have our own bathroom, it’s at the end of the corridor.”
I can remember every detail of that room. It was the one I was to have every summer holiday throughout my schooldays and until I left Oxford. I changed, but the room never changed, and I see in imagination a succession of schoolboys and undergraduates, each one bearing an uncanny resemblance to myself, opening that door summer after summer and entering by right into that inheritance. I haven’t been back to Woolcombe since my mother died eight years ago and I shall never go back now. Sometimes I have a fantasy that I shall return to Woolcombe as an old man and die in that room, pushing open the door for the last time and seeing again the single four-poster bed with its carved bed-posts, the cover of faded silk patchwork; the bentwood rocking-chair with its cushion embroidered by some long-dead female Lyppiatt; the patina of the Georgian desk, a little battered but firm, steady, usable; the bookcase with the editions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century boys’ books: Henty, Fenimore Cooper, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Sapper, John Buchan; the bow-fronted chest of drawers with the flyblown mirror above it; and the old prints of battle scenes, terrified horses rearing before the cannons, wild-eyed cavalry officers, the dying Nelson. And I can remember best of all that day when I first entered it and, walking over to the window, looked out over the terrace, the sloping lawn, the oak trees, the sheen of the river and the small hump-backed bridge.
Xan stood at the door. He said: “We can go off somewhere tomorrow, if you like, cycling. The Bart has bought you a bicycle.”
I was to learn that he seldom spoke of his father in any other way. I said: “That’s kind of him.”
“Not really. He had to—hadn’t he?—if he wanted us to be together.”
“I’ve got a bicycle. I always cycle to school, I could have brought it.”
“The Bart thought it would be less trouble to keep one here. You don’t have to use it. I like to go off for the day but you don’t have to come if you don’t want to. Cycling isn’t compulsory. Nothing is compulsory at Woolcombe, except unhappiness.”
I was to discover later that this was the kind of sardonic quasi-adult remark he liked to make. It was intended to impress me and it did. But I didn’t believe him. On that first visit, innocently enchanted, it was impossible to imagine anyone suffering unhappiness in such a house. And he couldn’t surely have meant himself.
I said: “I’d like to see round the house sometime.” Then I blushed, afraid that I sounded like a prospective purchaser or a tourist.
“We can do that, of course. If you can wait until Saturday, Miss Maskell from the vicarage will do the honours. It’ll cost you a pound but that includes the garden. It’s open every other Saturday in aid of church funds. What Molly Maskell lacks in historical and artistic knowledge she makes up in imagination.”
“I’d rather you showed it.”
He didn’t reply to that, but watched while I humped my case on to the bed and began to unpack. My mother had bought me a new case for this first visit. Miserably aware that it was too large, too smart, too heavy, I wished that I had brought my old canvas grip. I had, of course, packed too many clothes, and the wrong clothes, but he didn’t comment, I don’t know whether out of delicacy or tact or because he simply didn’t notice. Stuffing them quickly into one of the drawers, I asked: “Isn’t it strange living here?”
“It’s inconvenient and it’s sometimes boring, but it isn’t strange. My ancestors have lived here for three hundred years.” He added: “It’s quite a small house.”
He sounded as if he was trying to put me at ease by belittling his inheritance but when I looked at him I saw, for the first time, the look that was to become familiar to me, of a secret inner amusement which reached eyes and mouth but never broke into an open smile. I didn’t know then and still don’t know how much he cared for Woolcombe. It’s still used as a nursing-and-retirement home for the privileged few—relations and friends of the Council, members of the Regional, District and Local Councils, people who are considered to have given some service to the State. Until my mother died Helena and I made our regular duty visits. I can still picture the two sisters sitting together on the terrace, well wrapped up against the chill, one with her terminal cancer, the other with her cardiac asthma and arthritis, envy and resentment forgotten as they faced the great equalizer of death. When I imagine the world without a living human being, I can picture—who doesn’t?—the great cathedrals and temples, the palaces and the castles, existing through the uninhabited centuries, the British Library, opened just before Omega, with its carefully preserved manuscripts and books which no one will ever again open or read. But at heart I am touched only by the thought of Woolcombe; the imagined smell of its musty deserted rooms, the rotting panels in the library, the ivy creeping over its crumbling walls, a wilderness of grass and weeds obscuring the gravel, the tennis court, the formal garden; by the memory of that small back bedroom, unvisited and unchanged until the coverlet rots at last, the books turn to dust and the final picture drops from the wall.
Thursday 21 January
My mother had artistic pretensions. No, that is arrogant and not even true. She had no pretensions to anything except a desperate respectability. But she did have some artistic talent, although I never saw her produce an original drawing. Her hobby was painting old prints, usually Victorian scenes taken from damaged bound volumes of the Girls’ Own Paper or the Illustrated London News. I don’t suppose it was difficult, but she did it with some skill, taking care, as she told me, to get the colours historically correct, although I don’t see how she could have been sure of that. I think the nearest she got to happiness was when she was sitting at the kitchen table with her paint box and two jam jars, the angled lamp precisely focused on the print spread out on a newspaper in front of her. I used to watch her working away, the delicacy with which she dipped the finer
