One
This Friday evening in late summer was so lovely that Phyllis Fischer sat at her dressing table with the window wide open onto the garden. Life flowed into the room from beyond the window in its drowsy suburban evening stream: the steady relieving splash of a hose in a herbaceous border, confiding clack of shears, distant thwack of balls from the tennis club, broken sharp cries of children playing, fragrance of cut grass and roasting meat, jiggling of ice in the first weekend gin and tonics. When slanting low sunlight was suddenly blinding in one wing of the dressing-table mirror, Phyllis adjusted it and the light ran instead around the cut-glass toiletry set and her bottles of L’Air du Temps and witch hazel and cleansing milk. She sat forward in her petticoat, leaning on her elbows to see more clearly in the mirror, feeling the flirting of the breeze on her bare shoulders, smelling the soap on her skin. She was forty but still had an expectant, animated prettiness: her sandy, tanned face was brushed with faint freckles across the upturned nose, her rather dry fair hair – not yellow, but a shadowed gold like washed-out straw – was backcombed into volume for tonight, and stiff with hairspray. She put on pale lipstick carefully, pressing her lips together, frowning at the mirror because she thought that her mouth was too big – too soft and indefinite, as if she might blurt out something coarse or raw. In fact she was easy, an easy person, easily made happy, glad to make others happy. She was pleased with her life. The year was 1967.
Her dress for this evening waited like a friend, hooked on its hanger over the wardrobe door: empire-line with a skirt that ended above the knee, green chiffon with bold vertical red and orange stripes, green grosgrain ribbon sewn under the bust, fastened in a bow in front. She had asked Mandy Verey to press it for her, before she went home – no need to keep Mandy on to help serve dinner, because it wasn’t a formal dinner party. The young man who was coming, Nicholas Knight, might turn out anyway to be a bore; Phyllis had a dim memory that he’d been a bore as a small boy. She’d met him long ago, when she was first married to Roger and her daughter Colette was a colicky baby. At nine or ten years old, Nicholas had been owlish, with a big heavy head and black-framed thick glasses, brimming with factual knowledge, insisting that they test him on flags and capitals of the world; patiently Roger had obliged. Nicholas was the son of Roger’s friends Peter and Jean Knight – who were really his parents’ friends, older than he was. Phyllis’s anticipation of Nicholas’s visit this evening was only buoyant because she liked entertaining – and because he was a man after all, even if he turned out to be gauche and unattractive. She liked men, she couldn’t help herself. Though there was no question of her flirting with Nicholas, who was nearer to the age of her own daughter.
The children playing outside were screaming now with excitement at the climax of some pursuit, weaving on their secret paths around the gardens in the hot light, ducking behind clipped high privet hedges or pushing through thickets of rank shrubbery: rhododendron and hydrangea, poisonous spotted laurel, stiff bamboo. Some of these gardens ran to half an acre or more, and the children had made dens in the scraps of woodland at their far ends, where they arrived at the river, out of parental reach; one garden of an abandoned house was an overgrown wilderness, and they had worked themselves up into a horror of coming upon dead things in there. They knew all the broken places in fences for squeezing through, streaking their clothes with lichen stains or tearing them on nails. An adult opened an upstairs window in one of the nearby houses in the Fischers’ cul-de-sac, to shout at them: with a splash and cry a child missed a stepping stone in a fish pond, lifted in dismay a dripping sandal, a soaked sock – but there was no time to stop, the others were pitiless. — You idiot! one of them sharply exclaimed. Phyllis thought with exhilaration that her son Hugh would be running with them, perhaps out at the front of the tribe, leading the way. She ought to lean out of the window and call to Hugh to come inside, it was time for his supper – but she was still in her petticoat, and anyway couldn’t make herself be offended by the children’s exuberance. She felt with them the promise of the evening, the gathering shadows, the pang of ending.
Roger Fischer arrived home from the Foreign Office where he was a senior civil servant, a respected and subtle Arabist, taking off his coat downstairs in a dazzle of coloured lights from the stained glass in the porch door, calling out to his family as he hung it on the coat stand, appraising himself only for tidiness, not vanity, in the small square of mirror with its bevelled edges. He was tidy: medium height and stocky, waist turning to softness, striking jowly face, dog-heavy eyes, dark shadow of beard growth, black hair slicked back. The hallway was savoury with cooking smells and through the open dining-room door he saw the table laid ready with flowers, a colourful check cloth and napkins, wine glasses. Upstairs at the dressing table Phyllis paused with her mascara wand held to her eye and met her own glance for one moment in the mirror, unfathomable – although her expression was arranging itself brightly in welcome already, she was singing out her greeting. Roger would go in first to see poor Colette, who was struggling as usual with her homework. Phyllis had time to put on her nylons, slip the dress over her head, dab L’Air du Temps on the pressure points at her wrists and behind her ears.
If Colette was struggling it wasn’t because she wasn’t clever. She was very clever, but everything was a struggle with her. English Literature homework ought to have been easy, but too much was at stake: she was supposed to be writing an essay on imagery of growth and decay in Twelfth Night, which she could have done standing on her head, except that through it she was trying to communicate, in a veiled language, her passionate affinity with her new English teacher – who was in her forties, slim, equivocal, elegant, dry, divorced. Colette attended a private girls’ day school, dragging her reluctant feet each day, in their regulation brown lace-up outdoor shoes, all the way up the steep hill from where her father dropped her off, through ominous wrought-iron abandon-all-hope gates, down into the Underground Cloakroom with its mineral smell of hockey boots and cold sweat, where she must take off her bottle-green mac and change into indoor sandals. Girls at Otterley High were hearty and sporting and blithe, gifted with unconsciousness of themselves; Colette was a lonely tortured intellectual. She thought of setting up, like Viola, a willow cabin at her new teacher’s gate, but knew she couldn’t play the part: Viola had to be exquisite, poignant, pocket-sized. Colette was substantial and square-jawed, bosomy, with curling dark hair at a moment when only dead-straight hair was beautiful. And she wore glasses – stubbornly, she had insisted on standard-issue National Health glasses with transparent pink frames. — I’ll buy you some more attractive ones, her mother had pleaded. — Your father won’t mind paying.
— I don’t want more attractive ones, Colette had bleakly said.
Although she read everything, she refused to read the novelist her mother said she was named after. She could guess what her mother’s idea had been, calling her Colette in the first place: she’d been imagining some fey imp of a child, skinny and lithe and French-looking, blinking appealingly through the fringe hanging in her eyes. Some child who was not her. Bitterly Colette applied herself to her essay, her bedroom window shut tight against the seductions of the evening outside. She always did her weekend homework on Friday, as if she were clearing the way for something, although when she’d cleared it she didn’t know what the something was. Through the glass and the sealed-in stale heat of her room she was aware of the children calling outside as they hurtled headlong, and was swamped with regret for a time when she’d been one of them – which seemed centuries ago, although she was only fifteen.
Colette hadn’t ever been a skinny imp. She’d been hot-faced and barrel-shaped and bossy, pumping her fists like pistons when she ran – she knew, because her brother had imitated her. But in those days she was powerful; she could remember standing with her legs apart, in wellingtons, on top of the rockery, hands on hips, tummy thrust out under her dress, shouting out orders to her gang of friends – who were being Egyptian slaves building the pyramids. Her fantasies had often involved an element of historical instruction; but the others had wanted to play with her nonetheless, because she made up the best games, the most terrifying ones. They’d launched a leaky raft in the river and nearly drowned – she’d lost her then glasses, they’d lost two oars borrowed from somebody’s parents’ boathouse. They had kneeled in the dusk with a torch in the ruined greenhouse in the abandoned garden and made chalk marks on the stone floor to call up spirits. They had found dead cats and rats in that garden, and once in a stream they’d sordidly killed an eel by stoning it, because they were too afraid to touch it – afterwards they’d been ashamed of this, and never spoke of it.
Her pen spluttered, she mopped at the mess and then her fingers were inky; she was suddenly sweaty and wondered if the room smelled of her unpleasantly, because she had her period. When she heard her father come in downstairs, she leaped up to open a window, then sat down at her desk again, in a posture of absorbed study. At least her father always came to say hello to her first, because Colette was still his little muffin – though tactfully these days neither of them mentioned it. He knocked before he peered around the door.
— Hard at it? he enquired sympathetically.
— Rotten idiotic essay. Twelfth Night.
— Lovely play.
— I know but . . .
— Horrid putting a lovely play through the mincer. What’s your theme?
She crossed her eyes comically, which her mother said she shouldn’t. — Imagery of growth and decay.
Roger laughed. Her father’s intelligence was so much stronger than her mother’s, Colette thought; yet it was the slippery labyrinth of her mother’s mind – illogical, working through self-suggestion and hunches according to her hidden purposes – which was closed to Colette, and therefore more dangerous for her. Phyllis appeared in the doorway behind her husband, lipsticked brilliantly, wafting scent, draping herself against his shoulder and not-quite-kissing his cheek, because of the lipstick. How was Colette supposed to perform as a young girl while her mother persisted in wearing girlish dresses like this one, with its short skirt and high bustline, trailing ribbons tied in a bow?
— Colette’s going to eat with us tonight, Phyllis said in her pleased, encouraging voice. — I’m going to do Hughie beans on toast in a moment, get him out of the way and off to bed.
Roger smiled steadily between his wife and daughter. — Let’s hope the occasion lives up to such good company.
— Just don’t get any ideas, Colette warned her mother darkly.
— You’re always telling me that I don’t have ideas.
— But you have stupid ones. Like about me chumming up with this Nicholas Knight, whoever he is. I can tell you right now that he’ll hate me.
— He won’t hate you. It’s much more likely you’ll hate him, he’s probably dreadfully dull.
— We ought to be nice to him, even if he’s dull, Roger said. — His mother’s a very dear old friend. Because of her, I feel an affinity for this young man. Let’s give him our best shot.
Phyllis asked Colette what she was going to wear, she said she refused to wear anything.
Her father said that should sharpen Nicholas’s concentration.
Phyllis tied an apron over her dress in the bright modern kitchen which was all yellows and blues, with flowered curtains she’d sewn herself, at the window over the sink. Everything was ready, the pork terrine decorated with bay leaves and glazed in its aspic in the fridge, the charlotte russe inside its palisade of sponge biscuits on the counter, beef fragrant and spitting in the oven. She was an adventurous cook and read Elizabeth David, cut out Len Deighton’s columns from the newspaper; over the years she’d educated Roger to like his meat cooked with herbs and garlic. They bought strings of garlic and onions on their holidays in France. It might of course turn out that their guest preferred plain food; hadn’t Jean Knight, now she came to think of it, been a funny old stick, the boiled potato type? Well, if Nicholas was fussy then it was time he tried something new.
Stepping out of the kitchen door, she passed down the side of the house and out into the garden. The children’s voices had quieted, and the pregnant warm light seemed dense and suspenseful as amber; nothing stirred until a blackbird gave off its clucking alarm cry, burrowing into the dusky, dusty foot of the hedge. Then even before she called for him, Hugh came racing suddenly full pelt from among the trees, alone because the others must have gone in for tea: he was stripped to the waist and wearing his Red Indian trousers with the white plastic fringe down each seam, aiming his rifle at her, dropping to one knee behind the hammock to squint along his sights until he fired at her, making that pee-yong noise which was supposed to be bullets ricocheting off the rocks. Phyllis died, although feebly, because she didn’t want to risk her dress – sometimes she managed almost to frighten him, dropping so authentically in a heap. She closed her eyes and crossed her arms across her chest, staggering and groaning. Hugh came running then, cannoning into her so hard that she spun round under his force, laughing and protesting and hanging on to him so as not to lose her balance. The top of his head came up to her chin, he pressed his probably dirty and snotty face into her breast, she put her face down into his hair and smelled the sunwarmed salty heat of him, undertones of shrubbery and foliage, metallic tang of his gun.
— Confess, Mother, you didn’t see that coming.
She was always Mother, with this affectionate irony, not Mummy.
— Hughie, get off me, you’re ruining my dress!
— The watchword is vigilance! he said.
This happiness can’t last, Phyllis thought.
Hugh was nine, he had to go away to school, to grow up and forget her. Phyllis made an effort to hide how much she loved her little son, treating him breezily with a special lightness, bantering and joking, because she believed her too-much-love could damage and pervert his nature. She half hoped that he would lose some of his beauty when he grew to be a man: his good looks were uncanny, like an angel’s in a painting, with white-blond hair and wide-open blue eyes, skin that turned in summer to golden brown. He had almost killed her when he was born, in the nursing home after such a long and difficult labour, because he was breech, and the doctors couldn’t turn him. And Hugh wasn’t ashamed of playing a teasing game of close affection with his mother, indifferent to what his friends might say, supremely confident in his own actions. He sometimes kissed her openly in front of them.
At the kitchen table he shovelled in baked beans on toast with ketchup, swinging his feet out restlessly from the stool where he sat, his gaze roaming around the room but without much interest, telling her about his adventures which she could hardly follow – some woman in Elm Rise was an old witch, it wasn’t fair that Smithy had the ARP helmet for two days in a row, they were supposed to capture something from the enemy but Barnes-Pryce got his foot wet, lost his sandal, his folks would blow their tops. When he’d finished a bowl of tinned mandarin oranges, Hugh retreated upstairs – he dreaded visitors, their horrible questioning and fondling. Gregarious outdoors, he was fierce in defence of his privacy inside their home. Only his mother was permitted to cross the threshold of his bedroom; a paper sellotaped to the door warned trespassers, especially Miss Colette Fischer, that entry was Stricly Forbiden and punishable by very Severe Mesures, including Torchure and Death. Hugh’s relationship with his father was amiably superficial, they left each other alone – Roger only took him out on Sundays for cricket practice. Everything that mattered between them was postponed, by tacit agreement, until the time came for Hugh to be sent away to Roger’s old school. Once he was at Abingdon he’d understand his father.
Colette had corrected the spelling on her brother’s notice with a red pen, and made a point of going into his room whenever Hugh was out, monitoring the progress of his various collections – which amounted to mania, she privately thought. The room was a chaos, heaped up with penknives, stamp albums, cigar boxes, notebooks. The butterflies he asphyxiated himself in jam jars with laurel leaves, before spearing them with glass-headed pins onto polystyrene ceiling tiles, where gradually they turned brown and fell apart. She was touched, despite herself, by the idea of her little brother so absorbed and solitary in the evenings, sitting on the bed cross-legged in his pyjamas, sorting solemnly through these mad heaps of his possessions, listing and cataloguing. When he was a bonny, beloved, laughing baby, delighted for hours on end with his blue-lustre plastic rattle, tanned from sleeping in the sun in his pram, she hadn’t thought he had this seriousness in him.
Nicky Knight was over an hour late for dinner with some old friends of his parents, who were probably appallingly dreary. He had no memory of these people from the past, and couldn’t think why he’d agreed to this visit. Was he supposed to get something out of them? But the husband was at the Foreign Office, full of fascists and colonial types – surely even his own fond mother couldn’t believe that her son’s future lay in that direction? Nicky imagined complacently that there was a file on him in MI5, and that this file must be thick by now with reasons a Foreign Office career was unlikely. The suburban train out to Otterley – trundling between the tamed, meek house backs and allotments, crowded with commuters sweating in their suits, barricaded behind their newspapers – had so filled him with flatness and despair that as soon as he’d got off it he’d fallen into the nearest pub, where he was on his second pint.
Nicky was almost unrecognisable from the unappealing child he’d been when Phyllis Fischer met him years ago. He’d never quite convincingly looked childish: his long nose, full lower lip and dense eyelashes had seemed exaggerated in a little boy, and his ears too had been comically adult-sized, a significant item among his humiliations at school, where he was known as Fat Bat – he had been plump then, with a mop of curls. His parents had moved to live abroad when he was eleven, because his father got into oil: they had lived first in Kuwait and then Teheran, and Nicky had boarded at school and gone out to them in the holidays. He hated his father. Because Peter Knight had wanted him to go to his old college in Cambridge, Nicky had insisted on doing history at Leeds. And now he was long and thin, and his ungainliness answered perfectly to the style of the times. His black curls had grown out straight and his hair hung down well past his collar, so that it was his habitual gesture – almost a tic – to shake it back, raking through it with nicotine-stained fingers, pushing it out of his short-sighted eyes; his glasses were delicately gold-rimmed. The flesh was thick under his eyes and his nose was distinctively crooked, nostrils flared like a thoroughbred; his face seemed marked already with efforts of thought. In concession to the occasion of dinner with the Fischers he had put on a not-quite-clean white shirt and a navy blazer with brass buttons his mother had bought for him, which he wore in a spirit of military parody. No tie: partly because ties symbolised a conformity he despised, and partly because he’d never mastered tying one. At school he’d anxiously preserved the pre-tied noose at the end of each day, slipped it over his head again each morning. If ever he pulled out the knot by accident, he went with it shamefacedly to Matron.
In the pub he huddled in concentration over a paperback of Tristes Tropiques, which he was manhandling as he always manhandled books, bending it back so he could hold it and lift his glass and smoke at the same time, turning down corners, dripping ash and beer onto its pages. He claimed it was capitalistic to put a value on books as physical objects – but his mother said he’d wrecked his picture books when he was small, long before he was against capitalism. When he returned her loans she was rueful over swollen pages and broken spines, trying with her competent freckled hands to press them back into shape. — You’re not supposed to actually devour them, Nicky, you know, she protested mildly. — It’s only a metaphor.
The brown electric light in the pub gathered intensity as the evening grew dusky outside. Everything once pure and whole in primeval life, he thought as he read, was broken and contaminated in the modern era. He was filled with Lévi-Straussian desolation; there remained only the astringency and high style of pessimism. Lifting his head from the page he shook it as if a fly buzzed at him: engraved backwards on the opaque glass of the window he read the words Commercial and Smoke Rooms and was afflicted suddenly with unease, because he was late for dinner. Perhaps he was too late, and couldn’t face the Fischers after all? But he was hungry, imagining chops, peas, boiled potatoes, mint sauce. Getting up to go, he shoved Tristes Tropiques inside out into his blazer pocket.
They had been about to start on the terrine without him. It was Colette who came to open the front door, looking – in her own opinion – like a pink blancmange in her dress, peering out blindly into the drive because the lights were bright inside. Nicky’s relief at having found the place subsided when he saw her. He had feared that the Fischers would have just such a daughter, lumpy and ungracious; no hope there of any sex interest, to help while away the tedium of the evening. He would have fled then if he could.
— Oh hello, Colette suspiciously said, not budging from the entrance to the brick front porch, in which they kept umbrellas and wellingtons and mackintoshes, along with the leashes and chewed rubber balls belonging to a couple of dogs long deceased, which no one could bring themselves to throw away. From beyond her, it seemed to Nicky, there shone out the whole deadly enticement of a bourgeois life, ordered and upholstered and bathed in warm light, smelling of dinner.
— I’ve got no sense of direction, he apologised.
They stood confronted, antagonistic. — It’s a straight walk up from the station.
Colette might have added, but didn’t quite dare – because Nicky had every advantage over her, his age and his freedom and his good looks, and he might have just laughed – that she could smell beer and smoke on him from the pub. He’d probably been in the Queens Head, where she intended to begin drinking herself at some point in the near future. ...
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