‘Adam often has that dream,’ Dorothea confided to me.
‘I was in Istanbul,’ Jonathan said, ‘Or at least it seemed like Istanbul. A man was selling me a stolen picture. A kind of goat, by Marc Chagall.’
‘I had only a wisp of a thing,’ Mrs Lysarth contributed. ‘A bit out of Dorothea’s birth.’
‘I dreamed that Terris’s wife was picking scallions in the garden,’ Dorothea said. ‘ “You’re wrong to think there’s been a divorce,” she said.’
‘Did you dream, Terris?’ Mrs Lysarth asked, buttering toast, but I was so confused about the night that had passed that I thought it better to say I hadn’t.
‘What’s the criterion for
‘Touchstone,’ Dorothea said, and another Lysarth game began. ‘Lord of Eden End’ was ‘North’, ‘poet’s black tie ruined by vulcanized rubber’ was ‘ebonite’. Within ten minutes the crossword puzzle was complete.
The faces laughed and smiled around the breakfast table, the conversation ran about. Especially for my benefit a description of Monsieur Bertain, Adam’s French master, was engaged upon. His accent was imitated, his war wound designated as the cause of his short temper. Dr Lysarth looked forward to a dig in Derbyshire in the autumn; his wife was to accompany him and would, as always on archaeological occasions, spend her time walking and reading. Jonathan said he intended to visit us in Scandinavia. Dorothea pressed him and I found myself doing the same.
In the sunny room, while marmalade was passed and the flowered china had all the prettiness of a cottage garden, the horror was nonsensical. Mrs Lysarth’s elegance, her perfect features and her burnished hair, would surely not be as they were. No wrinkles creased her face; the doctor’s eyes were honestly untroubled, forget-me- not blue, a darker shade than Dorothea’s. And Dorothea’s hands would surely be less beautiful? The fingers clawing at the blue dress would have acquired some sign, a joint arthritic, a single bitten nail. The faces of the boys could not have shed all traces of the awful ugliness. ‘Dear, it isn’t our affair, why Miss Batchelor is troubled,’ my mother agitatedly protested. ‘senseless,’ Felicity shouted. ‘You frighten me with your senseless talk.’
On Tuesday afternoon, three days away, we would marry and the car would take us to the station at Bath after the champagne on the lawn. Our flight to Paris was at five past seven, we would have dinner in the Chez les Anges. We would visit Versailles and Rouen, and the Jeu de Paume because Dorothea had never been there. I may for a moment have closed my eyes at the breakfast table, so lost was I in speculation and imaginings.
‘Well, I have a surgery,’ Dr Lysarth announced, folding the newspaper as he rose from the table.
‘And I have Castlereagh to wonder about,’ Adam said. ‘That fascinating figure.’
For a moment in the sunny room the brothers again stood by Dorothea, an accidental conjunction or perhaps telepathy came into play: perhaps they guessed the contents of my mind. There was defiance in their stance, or so I thought, a reason for it now.
‘When I was little I used to ride here on my ponies. On Jess first. Later on Adonis.’
We walked as we had on the day we’d made love, through a spinney, along the track by the cornfield. Poppies, not in bloom before, were everywhere now, cow-parsley whitened the hedges.
‘The first thing I remember,’ Dorothea said, ‘is that bits of grass had got into my pram.’
I told myself that I should mention Agnes Kemp, but I did not do so. And when we reached the stream I did not embrace the girl who was to be my bride in a few days’ time. We sat with our backs against the tree-trunk, watching the ripple of the water.
‘I was lifted up,’ Dorothea said, ‘and there was a great tutting while the grass cuttings were removed. Years went by before I can remember anything else.’
Murder was not like stealing a pencil-sharpener at school, or spilling something. Agnes Kemp had been detested, a secret had afterwards become a way of life. Few words had perhaps been spoken within the family, Dr Lysarth’s giving the cause of death as a broken neck being perhaps the only announcement as to how the future was to be. The faces of the boys on the lawn returned to me, and Dorothea’s face as she looked down at the still body. Had she afterwards ridden her pony, Jess or Adonis, whichever it happened to be, by the cornfield and the poppies? ‘I dreamed of Agnes,’ was what she didn’t say at breakfast any more, because the family had exorcised the ghost.
Alone, Miss Batchelor walks; the winter waves tumble about. ‘Sea-spray,’ my mother lies. ‘Sea-spray on her cheeks, dear.’ How can my father, morning after morning, leave our gaunt house in order to perform his ignominious work, pretending it is work like any other? How can he hope that I will not scratch away the falsehoods they tell? My father is caught like a creature in a trap, for ever paying back the debts his own father has incurred. It isn’t nice, Miss Batchelor and a music teacher; it isn’t nice, the truth in Northern Ireland. None of it is nice. ‘No, no,’ they tell me, ‘you must be quiet, Terris.’ But I am always quiet. I make no noise in the small grey room where I have to be alone because, so they say, it is better so. The room is full of falseness: then I must write it down, they tell me, quite triumphantly; it will be easier if I write it down.
Americans give arms away, Russians promise tanks. I stand again in the cathedral at Vezelay, pleased that Pope Boniface exposed the pretence about Mary Magdalene. Felicity passes me a drink, smiling with ersatz affection. Our fingers touch, I know how she has spent that afternoon. ‘Poor Dorothea,’ Mrs Lysarth comforts, and the boys are angry because Dorothea has always needed looking after, ever since the day of the accident, the wretched death of a nuisance. I know I am right, as that Pope knew also. They hold me and buckle the thing on to me, but still I know I am right. Flowers are arranged in vases, croquet played beneath the beech tree. Ruairi O Baoill adopts a hero’s voice to proclaim his pretence of a cause, Major Trubstall’s smile is loaded with hypocrisy. The blue dress flutters and is still, telling me again that I am right.
‘I simply don’t believe it,’ Edwin said. ‘Grown-up people?’
‘Well, grown-up now, darling. We weren’t always grown-up.’
‘But
‘I’m sure I’ve told you dozens of times before.’
Edwin shook his head, frowning and staring at his wife. They’d been married six months: he was twenty-nine, swiftly making his way in a stockbroker’s office, Deborah was twenty-six and intended to continue being Mr Harridance’s secretary until a family began to come along. They lived in Wimbledon, in a block of flats called The Zodiac. 23 The Zodiac their address was and friends thought the title amusing and lively, making jokes about Gemini and Taurus and Capricorn when they came to drinks. A Dane had designed The Zodiac in 1968.
