Goodbye Sweetheart Page 7

  To be feared, worst of all, then.

  Yes. And avoided. You must train yourself out of it, if you notice any tendencies. As I am sure you do not.

  He felt comforted. Maybe he was a Casaubon in his talent falling short of his ambition, but he had not caught himself in envy.

  How had Pepita known his fear of being Casaubon?

  You are something of a sport, she said. Aren’t you. You know all the old cultural references.

  So do you.

  I’m seventy years older than you. It was the thing, even for teachers of elocution. But not any more, not for anyone much, these days. You are a sport. I said something like that to one of my really young pupils and he said, Oh no, I am not at all good at games.

  Yes, I know I’m a sport, said Ferdie, and believe me it doesn’t please me. There’s nobody left to talk to.

  We’re living in a world that is narrowing, and darkening, said Pepita. Its mental furnishings are reducing to a minimalism that is becoming painful. It’s a kind of sensory deprivation—a form of torture, if you’re used to something grander, richer, more full of light.

  Old people are always supposed to be saying that kind of thing, she sighed. But sometimes it’s going to be true.

  Berenice didn’t much like economical outings but she was quite keen on the idea of a picnic on a warm day. He took boiled eggs and ham with some very good bread and butter and peaches, with cider to drink. Berenice had brought a bottle of champagne. Daddy keeps me in champagne, she said. He thinks it’s the only suitable drink for a young woman.

  Your father must be rather rich.

  He doesn’t think a young woman should drink a lot of champagne, said Berenice.

  It was a lovely summery day with zephyrous breezes and the leaves massed dark green on the trees, very still except when they twirled in little eddies of wind. Everything calm, and then suddenly a little cluster of leaves twirling in an invisible wind. The trees were oaks, with trunks larger than a person could hug, and branches beginning above head height and spreading in a horizontal fashion, like arms stretching out. Ferdie thought of the word benign when looking at them. Their sheltering arms. And also the words that had become associated, like hearts of oak. Solid, trustworthy, keeping you safe like the sturdy ships that were built from them. And winning battles and gaining empires.

  He was being fanciful. It was necessary to pay attention to Berenice. Would she want to know about the sixteen-hundred-year-old oak in Yorkshire that could hold seventy people in its hollow trunk, or the one in Sherwood Forest called Robin Hood’s Larder, that was a thousand years old when it was blown down in 1966?

  Fancy being in a forest so close to London, she said.

  It’s not very big, said Ferdie. But big enough for our picnic.

  He’d brought a rug and a faded Indian cotton tablecloth, the only one he had and which he never used at home. He had glasses with long stems and blue and white china plates.

  This is all very proper, said Berenice.

  Of course. No point in doing it if we don’t do it proper. What did you expect, takeaway chicken in a box?

  For a while he’d been in love with a girl called Alison who’d wondered if his desire to do things properly came out of his study of English literature. Its provenance is so essentially domestic, she said. He thought of Spenser and Pope and Shakespeare and Congreve and Tennyson. Domestic, he said. Don’t you mean—life? Okay, said Alison, domestic life, if you like. The thing is, you pursue it in rooms, you sit in a room and read, in a comfortable house—or an Oxbridge college—you read and you look about you and you want what you see to look good. To reassure you that you can keep on reading. That you don’t have to get up and change things.

  He was a little bemused that what he had imagined was going to be a penetrating comment on his life’s work turned out to be really only about interior decoration. That did not stop him considering her remark as if it did have cultural and philosophical significance. He did like orderliness and elegance—no wonder he’d fallen in love with Great-Aunt Pepita—but did that come about because he was a student of literature, or more fashionably these days of cultural studies (he had the terminology if not the intention), or was he such a student because it was in his nature to appreciate the ordered and elegant?

  His father had been enraged when Ferdie told him, somewhat after the event, feeling the need of accomplished fact to deal with the anger he expected. Medicine was what he was intended for, in his father’s eyes. Failing that, the law. Architecture, at a pinch; it was a bit arty but still potentially a prestige- and money-generating profession. Ferdie knew that had his father looked closely at his results he would have seen that they were gradually excluding the medicine option, if not law entirely, but he was happy when Ferdie reported high distinctions, and did not enquire with any rigour as to what subjects they may have been in, his own money-generating profession not leaving much time for paying attention to children. When he registered them it was too late; Ferdie was set in his course.

  His father looked at him with hostile eyes. You realise, I hope, that you are condemning yourself to life as a second-rater?

  I’d never have got into medicine, so there I’d have been a failure. I might have made it into law, but that’s where I’d’ve been truly second rate. I’m good at this, top rate. Studying top-rate stuff.

  Only because nobody with any ability wants to do it. Where will it get you? A schoolteacher. A dominie. A poverty-stricken usher.

  Ferdie admired his father’s vocabulary and took it for the beginning of an acceptance of defeat. Well, he said, after a while I’m expecting to be a poverty-stricken PhD student, and then, who knows. I’ll be doing what matters to me. I know you probably think I’m an idiot idealist, but doing what I love is more important than making money.

  It’s easy to say that now. Wait till you’re as old as me.

  Of course Ferdie wasn’t going to say, I hope I’m nothing like you when I’m your age. He didn’t know his father well enough to be so rude. He did mutter, Isn’t it supposed to be you telling me that money can’t buy happiness? Now, reclining on a rug while a woman as beautiful as Berenice poured champagne into a glass that in her hand became a goblet, he didn’t feel poverty-stricken.

  She was wearing a sundress in a fine cotton Liberty print of silvery green willow fronds that owed a lot to William Morris, with a hooped skirt and thin straps over her white shoulders—she’d carefully chosen a shady spot to keep them from getting sunburned—and carried a small white curly-fur jacket. With her springing red-gold hair and silvery-grey eyes she looked enchanting.

  Berenice was a quiet sort of girl, given to occasional brief and sharpish remarks. If Ferdie had thought about it he would have noticed that she didn’t have a lot to say, but he didn’t think about it at all. Not then. He had plenty to say; she gazed at him with her large grey eyes and he was entranced by her beauty and his words. He was telling her about Pan. Pan was where he was up to in his work.

  He’s a terribly important god, he said. He was the god of woods and fields—which is a fair bit of the ancient world—and shepherds and flocks, but more than that, the name Pan means ‘all’, so that he comes to be seen as a symbol of the whole universe, as a personification of nature.

  Wasn’t he half goat? Horrible hairy haunches, and cloven feet?

  Handsome hairy haunches, he said. Yes, exactly, so he unites the animal with the human. The ancient world valued that, animals were significant, and they liked to be inclusive, not chop things out and get rid of them. And he played a pipe, a syrinx, which he invented—that’s another story—played it brilliantly, though maybe not quite so well as Apollo. He was lustful, of course, but that’s also important, it means fecundity. You have to admit, that’s an issue these days. Ferdie was thinking of his half-sister Aurora, who at thirty-six was very miserable failing to get pregnant.

  Here in the woods, said Ferdie, this is the haunt of Pan.

  So far north? said Berenice. I though
t he was Mediterranean.

  In ancient times. But the Romans came to Britain. They brought their gods with them.

  The Romans were driven out.

  That’s not to say the gods went too. Anyway, there’s this marvellous story. At the moment when the angels told the shepherds—watching their flocks by night and all that—about the birth of Christ, at that very moment there was a deep groan, heard through all the isles of Greece, crying Great Pan is dead! All the gods of Olympus were dethroned and all the oracles ceased at that very moment.

  Berenice looked at Ferdie.

  Milton wrote a poem about the nativity and it has this really sad bit, of weeping and lamenting, mourning for the old gods. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on the other hand, positively gloats.

  Is she the one who spent her life on a sofa until Robert Browning came and married her?

  You know? said Ferdie.

  Obviously all she needed was sex.

  Possibly. They eloped.

  The idea of sex.

  He could have seen this as a suggestion, but he was too keen to talk about his gods. Anyway, he went on, Elizabeth wrote a long poem rejoicing in the death of Pan, how we don’t need him any more, we’ve got Christianity and Truth, with a capital T, and all that. Ferdie shook his head. It’s sad really. Sad and simple-minded.

  I don’t know. I’m with Elizabeth. Entirely a good thing. Much better stick with Christianity. Much safer.

  Suddenly she raised her white arms, slender and sculpted as a statue, tipped her head back and cried in a loud voice, Great Pan is dead!

  She ran her fingers through her hair so it sprang even more wildly and looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. She leaned forward and picked up his glass, pouring more champagne.

  Ferdie looked at her in amazement.

  Who needs oracles. Animal insides and all that. Great Pan is dead. And a good thing too.

  Are you a Christian?

  I live in a Christian society. I’m not a pagan.

  Yes, but a real believing Christian?

  Aren’t you?

  No, said Ferdie. I like all the stories, the myths, the music, the art. But there’s too much wickedness in the religion.

  Wickedness? She gave a dramatic shiver.

  Someone walking over your grave, said Ferdie.

  The sun going behind a cloud, said Berenice. She pointed upwards. But it wasn’t just a summer cloud flitting over the sun. The sky was no longer blue, it was the colour of lead, and seemed heavy, like lead. Oh poo, said Berenice, I hate these summer storms.

  The air was still, not the summery murmurous stillness of earlier but an anxious and waiting pause, almost a paralysis, as if time were holding its breath. The light became more lurid, a strange light that changed the colours of things, made objects unlike themselves, as if night were about to fall, though it was far too early for twilight even to begin.

  Do you know, said Ferdie in a distracted voice, in English we talk about the fall of night, and the French call it the fall of day? Different sorts of logic.

  There’s going to be the godfather of a storm, said Berenice. Quick! She started throwing food and plates into the basket. Ferdie drained his glass, thinking it was criminal to glug down good champagne like that. Berenice tipped hers on the ground. He caught up the rug and cloth, grabbed the basket and ran with them to the car. Berenice was trying to get her arms into her little fur jacket and hurry to the car at the same time. She got it twisted and was writhing around in a panic trying to pull it on and trapping her arms so she couldn’t escape. Ferdie pulled it off and was straightening it to help her put it on properly but she was jumping in the car. Hurry, she said, hurry. I hate storms.

  Ferdie hurrying did not go through the usual solemn rituals of getting Pegasus’s engine going, and the car wouldn’t start. Berenice hitched her jacket round her neck, buried her face and moaned.

  There were pebbles, not falling, flung from the sky. Hailstones. Occasional and, of course, random, except that it seemed somebody was taking aim and deliberately slowly pelting them. Ferdie got Pegasus’s engine to turn over but still it wouldn’t start.

  I’ll put the hood up, he said. He was wrestling with it when Berenice was struck on the head by a hailstone as big as a walnut. She howled, and covered her head with her hands. Blood ran down her forehead, she brushed it off with her fingers and licked them, then gagged.

  He’d put the hood up only once before. Pepita had shown him; his fragile old great-aunt had nimbly unstrapped and unclipped and folded out the stiff ribbed canvas without a scratch to her long rosy nails. He found himself fighting with it. It caught his hand as it snapped shut like a trap and he had to dance around with his fingers in his mouth yelling to make the pain go away. It was too late to realise he should have practised this at home first.

  Sorry, he said to Berenice. She wasn’t there, in the car. She was running crazily, awkwardly, very fast, through the grand spreading oaks of the wood. He called, but she didn’t stop. He started after her. She was very swift. She had lost her shoes, her feet were bare. The wood had seemed quite small when they entered it with their picnic but now it seemed to go for sinister miles.

  He caught her when she fell down the bank of a small stream and lay wailing in the water.

  You are in a state, he said. He pulled her out and held her in his arms, speaking soothing words to her until she stopped shivering and stuttering and trying to twitch away from him and resume her flight. There was a strange deep groaning sound that filled the sky. The branches moved with a restless creaking noise. It began to rain hard. He cajoled her back to the car. Her sobs dwindled to hiccups. The little white fur was snagged on a bush and he picked it off. He wrapped her in the picnic blanket. Nice and cosy, he said. Slowly and carefully he manoeuvred the hood into position. There, that’s better. He imagined himself one day with a small child, consoling her with these meaningless comforting words. All fixed now. Slowly he worked on the hood and this time he got it up. There, he said, not wet now.

  He knew he’d flooded the engine trying to start it too hastily. He went slowly, remembering Pepita’s instructions, her thin little old hands, the fingers coaxing. When it started he slowly eased in the choke, giving it time to warm up. Then he let in the clutch and Pegasus began his slow progress along the winding track through the woods.

  My shoes! said Berenice.

  He remembered the little glittery mules with curly heels she’d been wearing. Funny footwear for a picnic, he’d thought, but since they’d only strolled a short distance across spongy mossy grass that was all right, and he had admired the slip-sloppy way they made her walk, and how her bottom rolled as she stepped gingerly in them.

  They were Jimmy Choos, she said. If you knew what they cost.

  He braked. I’ll go back and find them.

  No! No. Let’s just go.

  The rain drummed on the roof. She combed her hair with her fingers. She didn’t look bedraggled, her hair sprang as energetically as ever, but she did look woebegone and fierce at the same time, her eyes trembling and even more silvery under a film of tears, her eyelashes clotted with them. I don’t know what possessed me. A picnic! I’m an urban girl. I hate nature.

  He couldn’t remember the track winding so far into the woods. They were very dark green in the rain, sombre and tossing like horses’ manes in a slow gallop. Of course the trees themselves weren’t moving, they were fixed and immemorial. But didn’t his sideways glance seem to catch a sly sidestepping? He was sure this was not the sunny path that had led them to the grove for their picnic. They were in an impenetrable net of trees. A cage. A trap.

  He stopped the car and jumped out. He spread his arms wide and tipped his head back. Great Pan lives, he shouted. He turned around. Great Pan lives!

  What are you doing? said Berenice.

  Leaving no stone unturned.

  The leaves stirred. Ahead was a gap in the canopy. The leaden cloud cover began to shred, a scrap of blue sky showed. Soon the track b
rought them to a country road, and the light had become summery again.

  Ferdie supposed that Pepita invited her friends to tea and was taken out to dinner. He liked to drink tea with her, he liked the blue spirit flame under the kettle, the teapot shaped like a silver pumpkin, the arc of golden liquid pouring into the Rockingham cups. In these constant rituals was a whole history of tea-drinking, in fiction and in fact, in pleasant rooms where polite conversation gave no indication of the anguish or bliss, the sorrow or simple calm contentment, of the couples, the families, the visitors gratefully sipping. You could not lay waste to a tea table, no matter how angry or grief-stricken or hurt you were, it stood inviolable and as a measure of your own disorder. Pepita pouring tea: if it had been a painting it would have been an emblem of a way of life, that understood a need for order on the surface but by no means mistook that for what was really going on. He sipped at the hot tea, milkless, with lemon, pale, astringent, refreshing; one more sip, it seemed, and he would understand, but then there was the gilt and roses of the emptied cup and he doubted he was any wiser. He sat in one of the upright armchairs and Pepita sparkled at him, her dark blue eyes teasing sideways, her small mouth pouting into laughter. He thought, this is conversation, and it is an art that Berenice does not have. But perhaps, when she is ninety . . .

  It’s a dead art, said Pepita, with her uncanny gift for reading his thoughts. Tea-drinking.

  I thought it was quite popular . . .

  As a beverage, perhaps. As a ceremony, quite dead. Maybe little pockets still practising, but they are doomed. There’ll be none of us left soon.

  Maybe people will put it into theme parks.

  Indeed. And that’s a sign of death. Interesting: it’s progress, which is almost never civilisation.

  He told her about the picnic in the woods, the sudden leaden sky, the groaning, and Berenice’s terror. Told it as a story, polished and offered as a gift in return for tea out of Rockingham cups.

  So, she said, you went on a picnic and a storm came up. This is England, after all.