This is his home, she kept saying to herself; he cannot help his home. It is the place where he grew up; he loves it; it is as cruel and wrong to shun it as it would be if he had grown up in some slum tenement.
Yet this argument did not altogether convince. She must try to imagine this house, she thought, then she would be prepared, and could, if need be, feign her reaction. By then, her mind had already laid out that park, the terrible perfection of that park; now she must try to face the house itself. She knew it would not be quite large, but very large; she immediately made that adjustment to Colin’s statement. She found she could begin to see this very large house, this mansion. It was perched up, she discovered, on some eminence. It was grey, austere, grand; its architectural style was both classical and assertive. She felt this house might well resemble Mansfield Park, or perhaps that great edifice, Mr Darcy’s Pemberley. On the other hand, it might look, dear God, like Brideshead, or Thrushcross Grange, or Manderley. It would be like all of those places, she thought, in that it exacted a charge from interlopers such as herself who crossed its threshold. That charge was a male child, a son for the son, an heir for the heir; this hidden aspect of his house, Colin had not mentioned once. She wondered now, for she could feel how tense and anxious he was, whether he would ever be able to bring himself to mention it. She looked towards him; she knew he loved her; with pain, she accepted that on this subject he would remain utterly silent.
‘Through here,’ Colin said. He held out his hand to her. ‘Let me help you over the stile.’
They had reached the edge of the wood at last. The moon, veiled by some ragged scrap of cloud, was revealing nothing. Ahead of her, Lindsay thought she could glimpse something still—and something moving. She gave Colin her hand and climbed over. She stepped down onto soft grass, cropped by animals. Colin put his arm around her shoulders and turned her a little. He raised his fingers to his lips; Lindsay peered into shadows and tried to make substance of shadows. A light gust of wind washed soft rain against her face; the cloud stayed still and the moon moved, bestowing radiance.
At first, Lindsay did not see the house. She saw that there was a river, wide and swift-flowing, curving along a valley. Ahead of her, beneath the spreading branches of a tree, a group of roe deer were grazing. She could see the females, heads bent to the grass, the moonlight greying the lovely curves of their necks and flanks. A little apart, head lifted and alert, there was a stag; she just glimpsed the branching of his antlers, then he scented their presence, and with one accord, moving at speed like a single creature, the herd ran off. She listened to the soft drumming of deer hooves; following the deer’s passage with her eyes, she found she was looking at Shute.
It was not as she had expected. It was not set up upon an eminence, but lay against the side of the hill, as if it had gradually grown up from the ground over the centuries. There was, at one end of its irregular outline, an attempt at a fortification, for there was some form of tower or gatehouse there. Leading away from this was a long quiet frontage, which had a collegiate or monastic look. It had glorious ranked windows which the moon made silver and mercurial; she could see square bays; she glimpsed curved gables, gentle stone embrasures, clustering and fantastic chimney-pots; and, seeing a house built not for display, but for the quiet delights of domesticity, she gave a low cry of unfeigned pleasure.
‘Oh, it’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘Colin, I never imagined it would be this beautiful…’
Colin, who had been watching her face with the utmost intentness, gave a sigh. All the tension left his body. His heart, which he was sure had stopped beating for some while, now began to beat strongly.
‘It’s the most romantic house in England,’ he said, looking at it with love. ‘At least, so it’s been said…’
‘Who said that?’ Lindsay asked, still staring at the house. ‘They were right; it is romantic. It’s wildly romantic…’
‘I think it was William Morris,’ Colin said, ‘or it might have been Ruskin.’
One of them, Colin thought, had said something roughly similar. He hesitated; oversell, he knew, could be fatal.
‘Oh, what’s that glorious tower thing at the end, Colin?’
‘Well, it’s a gatehouse really. A tower-shaped sort of gatehouse.’
‘I love towers. I love gatehouses.’
‘That’s medieval.’ Colin was beginning to feel more encouraged. ‘It’s the only part of the original house that’s left. Various Lascelleses kept adding bits. They had this compulsion to build. Apart from the gatehouse, what you’re looking at now is mostly late Tudor and partly Jacobean.’
‘Oh,’ Lindsay gave a long sigh. ‘It was there at the time of the Armada. When Shakespeare was writing his plays. Mary, Queen of Scots was alive then. Raleigh was discovering his New World…’
‘Yes,’ said Colin, feeling this was a fairly accurate summation.
‘It has a Wars of the Roses sort of look too,’ Lindsay went on. ‘And I can just imagine crusaders riding off to fight the Saracens…from the gatehouse, that is.’
‘Definitely,’ said Colin, who by then was inclined to agree to anything.
‘I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if Henry VIII didn’t stay here, with Anne Boleyn.’ Lindsay gave a deeper sigh. ‘While he was still in love with her, of course. Some years before he chopped off her head.’
Colin hesitated then. To this, the purist in him could not consent. Anne Boleyn, executed in 1536, was, strictly speaking, unlikely to have visited a house the construction of which commenced some fifty years later. On reflection, he felt he could stretch a point.
‘More than possible,’ he said. ‘Maybe he composed Greensleeves for her here…You never know.’
‘Colin, my dates aren’t that bad. I’m teasing you.’ Lindsay turned to look at him. He saw she had tears in her eyes. ‘I’m teasing you and I’m not teasing you. And it’s lovely—so very lovely.’ She paused. ‘I don’t think it frightens me, after all. I thought it might, you see. I thought it might be, you know, grand. Regimented. Marble halls. Great staircases…’
‘I love you,’ said Colin, realizing the wisdom of showing her the house from this side and at night. He need not mention the large eighteenth-century wing, invisible from here, until the morning, he decided. William Kent’s contributions to the house, he felt, were better approached with circumspection. Lindsay would cope with Kent, he was sure, in time. After all, she was prepared to forgive his money and his ancestors. If he could ensure that his careful plans for the rest of the night, and for the following day, went as well as this, his opening move, then success might be his.
Accordingly, and with deep emotion, he kissed her. When this long kiss finally ended, and Lindsay drew back from his arms with a blind, urgent look, Colin, who felt equally urgent, but determined, caught her by the hand and began to draw her towards the house. He was having difficulties with his voice, which had dropped and kept catching.
‘I want to—show you the inside. Introduce you to my dogs. My father will have gone to bed, but I want you to meet my dogs. I have these two old dogs, and—Lindsay, quickly. Darling, this house is nearer…’
Lindsay, not inclined to argue, allowed herself to be drawn up the slope towards the walls of the house. The moon lit it and hid it. Reaching a dark porch, Colin drew her inside it and began to kiss her again. Then, suddenly remembering another aspect to his plan—a key aspect—he drew her out again into the moonlight, where, as resolved, he again proposed to her. He watched the moonlight move upon her face and brighten her eyes. Lindsay took his hand in hers and kissed it. In a halting way, beginning the sentence, breaking off, then beginning again, she said that she needed more time to consider—but so sweet and so gentle was her expression as she said this that conclusions leaped into Colin’s brain. He could see she was anxious to cause him no pain by this answer; he felt at once a soaring conviction that progress had been made. An advance on silence, he thought, drawing her towards the studded oak door deep in the por
ch. He must persevere; he would soon—it must surely be soon—be rewarded with acceptance.
Colin had left his father very explicit directions; as a result, his home looked as it usually did, which was untidy and idiosyncratic. As he had foreseen, Lindsay did not notice the Gainsborough portrait in the entrance hall, partly because it was badly lit—in fact, unlit—and partly because she was distracted by the room’s very noticeable oddities. These included a line of walking boots, stout shoes and gumboots sufficient in number to have shod the feet of a small army; a mountain of binoculars, field glasses and small telescopes; a baby owl, one eye open and one shut, perched on the back of a chair by the fireplace, and, in a cardboard box lined with newspaper, a small hedgehog, which smelled pungently.
‘My father has a bit of a thing about wildlife,’ said Colin, looking at her with hope. ‘When he’s not watching birds, which he does most of the time, he’s rescuing things. Like that hedgehog. The gardener—someone found him the other day. He should be hibernating. Daddy’s been making him a new hibernating nest; he goes back in it tomorrow.’
Lindsay was undone. Afterwards, she was never sure whether to blame the hedgehog, or Colin’s use of the word ‘Daddy’, which had slipped past his guard and caused him to blush crimson. Hiding her face, she bent over the hedgehog box. The hedgehog, not fully grown, was curled up in a ball, and was slowly beginning to bristle. Lindsay, who knew herself to be a sentimentalist, with a weakness for all animals, particularly small ones, looked at the beauty of its spines. They were darker at the tip, paler at the base. Touching them with one finger, she found they felt soft and vulnerable, except at the tip. If Colin does not say anything about fleas, she thought—most people, in her experience, could not mention hedgehogs without mentioning fleas in the next breath—it will be a sign: I shall know I am right about Colin.
Colin, watching her with a tender expression, said nothing about fleas. Lindsay waited. Minutes ticked. He still said nothing about fleas. The hedgehog, having decided the possible threat had retreated, lowered its spines and uncurled; Lindsay saw its sharply pointed snout, its black nostrils. It made a snuffling noise, retreated the snout and went back to sleep. Lindsay acknowledged the truth; not that she loved Colin, she had known that for some while, but that she loved him in the right way—that being, as she felt any woman would know, a nice but vital distinction.
Now there was nothing to do but hope, she thought, straightening. She looked at Colin across the entrance hall. She was aware, dimly, that it was paved with a chequer-board of worn black and white flagstones. She vaguely perceived that it contained furniture and paintings, that there was an owl on the back of a chair, and that two rough-haired dogs, stretching, a little arthritic, had now appeared, and were greeting their master.
She watched them lick his hands; their tails thumped; they gave small yelps and barks of canine pleasure. She could not even see these dogs clearly, she realized; the rest of the room blurred as she looked towards Colin. He was bending down to his dogs, his hair falling forward across his face, his hand extended. He was wearing an old tweed overcoat, which was muddy. She had a muddled sense that he was good—she knew him to be good—that he was strong, and that he was deserving. Straightening up from his dogs, he met her gaze, his face becoming serious and quiet as he read her expression. With love, her eyes rested on his hair and the beauty of its coloration; they rested on his blue unwavering gaze, and it seemed to her extraordinary that she could once have been blind to this face’s distinctions.
She might have liked, perhaps, to accept him as a husband then, but since she could not, she went across to him, greeted his dogs, then took his hand and went upstairs with him to his bedroom.
Colin was careful to take a route to this room which led away from the larger and grander rooms here; the Great Hall, he felt, with its bristling displays of ancient weaponry, and the Long Gallery, flanked with too many portraits of too many ancestors, a surfeit of ancestors, could safely wait until the morning. So he took her up to his rooms by a winding back stair, pointing out to her only those small things he felt would please her—the old pane of glass on which, in 1672, a lover had scratched with a diamond the initials of his mistress; the bed-curtains in his room, which had been embroidered and stitched with consummate skill by some latter-day Lascelles wife who had had the patience of a Penelope.
Lindsay, entering his bedroom and admiring the bedcurtains en passant—she herself hated to sew—saw that the room was at the very top of the house and was open to the roof, with the rafters exposed and the great structure of its beams and king-posts visible. This delighted her. Colin, thankful that his windows faced south, thus giving no view of the more dangerous classical wing of his home, told her that when she woke in the morning, she would look out at the river.
Lindsay, who had not taken her contraceptive pills for two nights, not since that walk back through the snow from the Conrad, was pleased by this. She had no intention of taking those powerful chemicals again and, feeling that she was giving herself up to the equally powerful forces of nature, she liked the idea that the first thing she would see from these windows was the flow and currents of water.
She was aware that this strategy—like most of her strategies—was unreliable and could not be continued indefinitely. If she conceived, well and good; she would then be in no doubt as to her next action. If she did not conceive, and Gini’s predictions proved true, then she would have to find a way to leave Colin. So she would have to determine a time limit, she thought, as Colin drew her down beside him on the bed. Six months? A year? No, a year was too long, she thought; a year with Colin and she was afraid she would never have the will-power to disengage from him. Six months then, she thought, as Colin kissed her. Perhaps seven, she thought a minute later. Here, of course, was the right and perfect place to conceive his child, she thought a minute after that, though, in truth, this idea had first occurred to her somewhat earlier.
Moving against him, she began to say and do some of the marvellous things that Colin, alone in Emily’s apartment all those weeks before, had hoped for and imagined. And Lindsay, who had always believed in those forces to which Jippy, in New York, had addressed his prayers and his spell, conjured them in her mind now, as, after delays sweet to both of them, Colin came into her body.
The following day was bright, cold and clear. Lindsay was introduced to Colin’s father, whom she found brusque, possibly kindly, and certainly intimidating. With Colin, she attended church—in her case for the first time in many years—where, to a congregation of eight, in freezing conditions, a sermon was preached on the subject and significance of Advent, and Colin’s father, moustache bristling, read the lesson with considerable bravura.
After Sunday lunch was completed, father and son exchanged a glance which Lindsay failed to notice. Colin announced, in a somewhat mysterious, evasive way, that he had one or two people he ought to see. Lindsay was never sure how the two men contrived this, but five minutes later, she was sitting talking to his father, and trying to think of some possible subject of conversation with this brisk, alarming, soldierly man, while Colin, unbeknownst to Lindsay, was steering his fast and exquisitely engineered car in the direction of Oxford.
As he drove, at speed, with skill, Colin rehearsed sentences. These sentences proved less easy to handle than his demanding car; he was getting sentence wheel-spin, drift and skid; the results were unfortunate. ‘Tom,’ he muttered, ‘it is your mother whom I wish to marry. Tom, your mother and I…’ No good, no good, Colin thought. Try again; concentrate. ‘Tom, for some time now, it has been my hope to…’
No good either, Colin thought, becoming desperate. Why had this appalling pomposity descended on him? He was starting to sound like some ghastly suitor in a nineteenth-century novel. Loosen up, he thought; be cool and relaxed, modern and casual. ‘Hi, Tom, how’s things? Just thought I’d let you know. I’ve asked Lindsay to…Lindsay and I are…’ Asked Lindsay to what? Colin was now sweating. He could not think of an
y appropriately cool, relaxed modern usage. Shack up with me? Get hitched? Tie the knot? Get spliced? Worse and worse, Colin thought; either he sounded like an ageing hippie or like Bertie Wooster.
Start again, he thought, zipping around the Headington roundabout. Keep it simple. ‘Tom, I want to marry your mother. Tom, I have asked Lindsay to marry me. Tom, I am deeply in love with your mother, otherwise known as Lindsay, and I want to marry her. I want you to give us your blessing, and tell me what in hell I can do to get her to accept me.’
This was an improvement, Colin thought. At least it was honest. He could refine this, bang it about a bit, get it into some sort of shape. ‘Tom, I am very deeply in love…’ Very, very deeply in love? Fathoms deep in love?
Get a hold of yourself, Colin thought, swerving violently. He realized that he was now in Tom’s street, and his nerve had entirely failed him. He slowed to a crawl. The words jammed in his brain. He began to see that this expedition was the most foolish of mistakes. It was an error of judgement of colossal proportions. On the last occasion he had seen Tom, the only occasion he had seen Tom, he had been drunk…face facts, paralytic. Tom was unlikely to have forgotten this. Supposing Tom turned around and said he had never heard a worse, a more fatuous suggestion in his life? What was he supposed to do then? Ignore Tom, or just crawl away and die somewhere?
He stopped the car outside Tom’s house, but did not turn off the engine; he sat there for some minutes in a state of indecision and panic. He told himself this meeting was better postponed. Tom, according to the telephone call with Lindsay the previous night, was working flat out on an essay on the philosophical background to Fascism. He was toiling through Also Sprach Zarathustra and tackling Nietzsche’s concept of Übermensch. For this reason, Tom had put off Lindsay’s suggestion of meeting. Übermensch? This essay now seemed to Colin a most excellent reason for driving away again. He was just about to release the brake, engage the gears and go, when he had the sensation—the very odd sensation—that someone had just tapped him on the shoulder.