sitting-room wasn’t warm, giving the Gregarys to believe it just happened to be that on this one particular morning a fire hadn’t been lit there. I don’t ever remember a fire being lit in the sitting-room, which was a room that smelt of must. The only time I remember anyone sitting down in it was when my father entertained a man from the taxation authorities, going through papers with him and giving him whisky.
‘Now please don’t put yourselves out!’ Mrs Gregary shrilled. ‘Anything does for the Gregarys.’
‘We’ve been pigging it up in the house all morning,’ her husband added, and he and his wife laughed over this, finding it amusing. The son laughed less.
‘You could do with tea, I’m sure,’ my mother said. She was cross with me for bringing them into the kitchen to find her all red-faced and floury, but what could I have done? Her hair was untidy and she was wearing a pair of slippers. ‘Put out the cups, Matilda,’ she ordered, finding it hard to keep the displeasure out of her voice, worried in case the Gregarys thought it was directed at them.
‘So you’re a Matilda?’ the woman said, smiling her bony smile. ‘What an enchanting name!’
She’d sat down at the table. The two men were poking about the place, trying to work out what the kitchen had been like when the house had first been built. They murmured about an open fire and an oven in the wall. They glanced up the steep back stairs that led straight out of a corner of the kitchen. They even opened cupboards.
‘There’d have been a wheel there,’ the son said, pointing at the Aga, ‘which you turned to operate the bellows.’
His father wasn’t listening to him. ‘Structurally in splendid nick,’ he was saying. ‘Not a dodgy wall, I’d say.’
‘More than you could claim for the manor!’ the woman cried, her sudden shrillness making my mother jump. ‘My God, the damage!’
‘It’s been a long time empty,’ my mother said.
‘Dry rot, wet rot, you name it!’ cried the woman. She had four rings on the fingers of her left hand and two on her right. It seemed a mistake of some kind that she was coming to live in Challacombe Manor, like an absurdity in a dream.
‘We’ll be interested in buying land,’ Mr Gregary revealed. His head was very neat, with strands of hair brushed into its baldness. His face had a polished look, like faintly pink marble. The flesh of his chins didn’t wobble, but was firm and polished too. His eyes had a flicker of amusement in them.
‘It’s Ralphie’s venture really,’ Mrs Gregary said. ‘We’ll only ever come on visits.’
‘Oh no, no,’ the son protested.
‘Longish visits, darling.’
‘We’re all in love with Challacombe Manor actually,’ Mr Gregary said. ‘We can’t resist it.’
I wanted to say I loved it too, just to make the statement and by making it to imply that my love was different from theirs. I wanted it to be clear that I had loved Challacombe Manor all my life, that I loved our farm, and the gardens of Challacombe and the lanes around it, and the meadow we used to walk through on the way home from school, a journey which had been boring at the time. I wanted to say that I loved the memory of the past, of the Challacombe Mrs Ashburton had told me about, as it had been before the first of the two wars, and the memory of our family as it had been before the second. I wanted to say all that to show them how silly it was to stand there in a tweed suit and to state you were in love with a house and couldn’t resist it. I wanted to belittle what wasn’t real.
Politely I offered them milk and sugar, not saying anything. My mother told me to get some biscuits and Mrs Gregary said not to bother, but I got them anyway. I put some on to a plate and handed them around while my mother talked about the farmhouse and the farm. The Gregarys’ son smiled at me when I held the plate out to him, and all of a sudden I was aware of a pattern of events. It seemed right that Challacombe Manor had stood there empty for so long, and Mrs Ashburton’s voice echoed in my mind, telling me something when I was nine. I didn’t know what it was, but all the same I felt that sense was being woven into the confusion. An event had occurred that morning in the kitchen, and it seemed extraordinary that I hadn’t guessed it might, that I hadn’t known that this was how things were meant to be.
‘They think we’re peasants, finding us like this,’ my mother said crossly when they’d gone.
‘It doesn’t matter what they think.’
A long time went by, more than a year. Challacombe Manor was put to rights. The garden was cleared of the brambles that choked it; for the second time in my memory the tennis court became a tennis court again; the masonry of the summer-house was repointed. I watched it all happening. I stood in the garden and sometimes Ralphie Gregary stood beside me, as if seeking my approval for what he was doing. I walked with him through the fields; I showed him the short-cut we’d taken every day from school, the walk through the meadow and then through the garden; I told him about the tennis party Mrs Ashburton had given on the Thursday afternoon before the second of the two wars.
One day we had a picnic, one Sunday morning. We had it in the garden, near a magnolia tree; there was white wine and chicken and tomatoes and chives, and then French cheese and grapes. He told me about the boarding-school he’d been to. When he left it he went into his father’s motor-components business and then he had fought in the war. During the war he had slowly come to the conclusion that what he wanted to do when it was over was to live a quiet life. He had tried to return to his father’s business but he hadn’t cared for it in the least. ‘This is what I like,’ he said. I felt quite heady after the wine, wanting to lie down in the warmth of the noon sun. I told him how Dick and Betty and I had collected ladybirds for Mrs Ashburton so that they could eat the aphids that attacked the roses. I showed him the table in the summer-house which had been laden with food on the day of the tennis party. I smiled at him and he smiled back at me, understanding my love of the past.
‘You can’t make it come back, you know,’ Miss Pritchard pointed out to me that same day, in her tiny sitting- room.
‘I hate the present.’
We ate the macaroons she’d made, and drank tea from flowered porcelain. It was all right for Miss Pritchard. Miss Pritchard was too old to belong in the present, she didn’t have to worry about it.
‘You mustn’t hate it.’ Her pale eyes were like ice, looking into mine. For a moment she was frightening, as she used to be when you didn’t know something at school. But I knew she didn’t mean to frighten me. ‘You should love the man you marry, Matilda.’
