That’s bad, but there’s something worse.
There is—was—a girl called Ellie. She was pretty sick, in a quiet way. She took the not-eating very seriously, and got thinner and thinner. And thinner. The other day, someone went up to look for her—she slept in a tiny attic. Well, it wasn’t someone, it was me.
And she was dead. Quite cold, with her mouth and eyes open.
I thought, now they’ll have to get a doctor, or the police.
But they buried her, in the garden, with singing and clarinet music.
It was quite respectful, and if you’re dead, you’re dead, but it’s illegal.
And they seemed to think oh well, it was quite natural, she was better off, her journey was over, Gander said.
Avram, I think you’d better tell someone.
Who can I trust with this letter?
I can’t think.
What can I do?
Oh, shit.
The Winter’s Tale was performed in the Great Hall at Long Royston. Alexander had asked Harold Bomberg who had played Gauguin in his London production of The Yellow Chair to play Leontes, and had found a Hermione amongst the lecturers in English in the University who had been at Cambridge with Frederica, and was now a mediaevalist. The rest of the cast were university teachers and students, with the exception of Perdita. Perhaps sentimentally, but also because Blesford Grammar School said she was outstanding, he had chosen Mary Orton. For this reason, Daniel, as well as Frederica, Agatha, Saskia and Leo, had come North to see the first night. They sat together in a long row, Bill Potter next to Daniel, Winifred next to Will, who was on the end, Frederica between Daniel and Alexander. The university dignitaries and the county notables were in front of them, including Matthew Crowe, in his own arm-chair, wrapped in blankets.
Vincent Hodgkiss sat, not with the university dignitaries, but with Marcus, further back, behind the row of Potters. Luk Lysgaard-Peacock was with them. He looked to see where Frederica was—deep in family and old friends—and looked away again.
Alexander had had a hand in the costumes. They were vaguely classical, with Elizabethan touches. In the first act, with its crescendo of jealousy and its polarised trial scene, the men wore black, with touches of crimson, and the women wore white, with touches of purple. The boy, Mamillius, wore a miniature version of his father’s black robe, standing collar, and tights. He spread the wings of his cloak to tell his ghost story. “A sad tale’s best for winter.” He told his father “I am like you, they say” and went off, to die of grief and humiliation. Gerard Wijnnobel listened with delight and amazement to the tortured syntax, the straining thread of language, of Leontes’ agony of jealousy. It was coherently incoherent, beyond bearing, and entirely beautiful.
Luk Lysgaard-Peacock got faintly bored of all these words, and considered the back of Frederica’s red head. He had always supposed she slept with Edmund Wilkie—they seemed to be a couple—and he saw her touch Alexander Wedderburn’s arm with a sort of intimacy. She was a free woman. He might go and talk to her. Or not.
Marcus suddenly had a complicated idea about the geometry of the physics of nodes of growth forming on the stems of sunflowers. He looked desperately around for a mnemonic.
“My life stands in the level of your dreams,” said Hermione.
“Your actions are my dreams,” returned her terrible husband.
Frederica wanted to cry, at the closed perfection of those running feet. She remembered her dream of Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. What relation did it have to the now-dreamy nature of remembered actions? There were drinks at the interval. Luk decided he would speak to Frederica, made his way across the Hall, and found her with her son and the headmistress. “You should have been Mamillius,” said Miss Godden, “if Mary is to be Perdita.” Frederica put an arm round Leo. “I don’t want him to be Mamillius,” she said. “Hullo, Luk. In any case, he’s in his own school play. He’s in The Wizard of Oz.”
“I wanted to be the cowardly Lion. But I’m the Scarecrow. I sing, I dance.”
“I must come and see that,” said Alexander. He said to Bill
“How are you bearing up?”
“Oh, the first half’s splendid. It’s always splendid. The verse, the pace, you’ve got it very well. It’s the damned statue. I’m waiting to see what on earth you can have done with that impossible piece of stage machinery.”
“You do have to lend it your imagination.”
“I have never been able to do so. Never once. Just because he got old and self-indulgent—is no reason why I should—”
Most of this meant nothing to Luk. He said to Frederica
“I saw you interviewing that herpetologist. I noticed you mentioned my research. Quite a lot of people have remarked on it. Remarked on the mention on TV, that is.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no, I didn’t mean that. It’s always good to get recognition. I wanted to say, thank you.”
Frederica remembered the previous thank you. Her face stiffened. Luk drew back. The second half began.
Alexander had dressed the sheep-shearers and pastoral dancers in sharp pinks and blues and yellows—new colours of the 60s, colours of the flower children, dyes that hadn’t been created when Frederica played the young Elizabeth in 1953 on the terrace of the House. It was winter, outside and in, and Alexander filled the stage—the space under the minstrels’ gallery, under the plaster frieze of marble men and maidens under blanched forest boughs—with an artificial summer of silk flowers—poppies and lilies, roses and delphiniums, marigolds and convolvulus—made by a clever Chinese artist he had found working for tiny sums in Soho.
Mary Orton appeared, in a demure white cotton dress and a floral crown, weightless and intricate. She began to speak Perdita’s flower speech.
O Proserpina
For the flowers now that frighted thou let’st fall
From Dis’s wagon ...
Daniel was quite unprepared for the effect this would have on him. She was acting a woman a year or two older than herself, and was full of the careful dignity of speaking great verse clearly. She was in her own world, not trying to charm, but enchanting. He saw, not his daughter, but his wife. Only for a moment, but entirely, and remembering life he remembered death, automatically, and his eyes filled with tears. He heard a small sound next to him. Bill Potter was rubbing his cuff angrily across his faded eyes. An audience is one, and many, it is moved separately, and together. Daniel pushed at his own eyelashes, and with his other hand touched Bill’s knee, to show he knew they knew.
The play swept on, and broke up into the irritating little runnels of scenes in which the greatest of playwrights evaded the recognitions, reparations, climax, everyone had a right to expect, and fobbed off his audience with oratio obliqua, reported speech, when the father met the lovely living daughter who replaced both his dead son, and her exposed infant self, for whom he had mourned for sixteen unstaged years. What a mess, Frederica thought, as she always thought. “I can see why he did it, and we find ways to excuse it, because it is what he did, but what a mess—”
And all squeezed and rushed and jangled together for the sake of the set piece of the damned statue.
Alexander had done his best, like many before and after him. He had put the woman on a plinth, and had veiled her, in imitation of those virtuoso seventeenth-century marble carvings of metaphorical stone veiling over metaphorical stone flesh. With hidden gold safety-pins he had pulled the fine muslin back over the dead Queen’s face, as though a wind was blowing through the twilight of the windless underworld. He had damped it very slightly, and the contours of the face—the nose, the cheek-bone, the eyeballs, the lips and brow, could be seen. They were highlit with a white spotlight—a white of a purity and coldness also unavailable in 1953, a dead white, that made pure shadows.
Paulina, the psychopomp, led the repentant intemperate king, his rage cool, into the vault, followed by his reconciled friend, his daughter, and her young lover.
It is an impossible pi
ece of creaking stage machinery.
LEONTES See my lord,
Would you not deem it breathed, and that those veins
Did verily bear blood?
POLIXENES Masterly done.
The very life seems warm upon her lip.
LEONTES The fixture of her eye has motion in’t
As we are mocked with art.
“Mocked” mouthed Bill Potter, silently. Daniel saw. Alexander’s lighting changed to rose and gold, which filled the whole space under the minstrels’ gallery with a liquid shimmer, in which, to the sound of music, rebeck, hautbois, lute, the veiled figure, its face pressed against its cerecloth, began to flow down off its pedestal and to cross the ground. The stage-vault was heaped with colourless silk flowers, transparent like the discs of honesty, or the operculum which closes a snail-shell in winter. The rose and gold light transfigured these drifts of ghost-petals, making them substantial. Mary-Perdita had one in her hair, which now caught this new light, and shone out like a living flame. The statue—the only moving thing in the dumb-struck gathering—swept on towards the king, and lifted its veil, like a bride, and held out a rose-bathed face for a kiss.
Mocked, tricked, Daniel Orton and Bill Potter wept, and pushed away their tears.
Afterwards, there was the usual rejoicing and celebration. Bill Potter tried to tell Daniel about his revelation—after all, he had shared it with him—but Daniel was pushing through the crowds, looking for his daughter. So he told Frederica. “I’ve just understood. Never too old. Never too old to understand something. The thing about the late comedies—the thing is—that what they do, the effect they have, isn’t anything to do with fobbing you off with a happy ending when you know you witnessed a tragedy. It’s about art, it’s about the necessity of art. The human need to be mocked with art—you can have a happy ending, precisely because you know in life they don’t happen, when you are old, you have a right to the irony of a happy ending—because you don’t believe it. Are you listening?”
Frederica was abstractedly looking for a scientist. Who was putting his coat on, to leave.
Daniel found Mary. He wanted to say, “Whatever you do, don’t die.” He hugged her. She danced, a human girl, within his arms’ circle, and said “I got it right, I remembered it all, every word—as though it just spoke itself ...”
Winifred came up, and said “Lovely, lovely Mary. Has anyone seen Will?”
“He was sitting next to you,” said Daniel.
“Well, he got up and went out—just after the sheep-shearing scene—and I thought he’d gone to the lavatory—it is some way, in this building. But he didn’t come back.”
“Perhaps he went home,” said Daniel. He thought, and then said “I’ll go and look.”
“He’s only sulking,” said Mary. She didn’t say why. She didn’t have to, and was a nice girl.
Will was not at home. He had been at home, it was slowly established, because his anorak and his bicycle were gone, and his desk-drawers were open and tumbled, though nobody knew what had been taken, since his privacy was always respected, and he lived in a horrible mess.
The bicycle was the worrying thing.
It was possible he had just gone out for a long ride and possible he would simply come back. There was also the pit of other possible things. And general uncertainty over what to do. Also, it was a foul November night, and thick mist was rolling in over the Yorkshire moors, making the roads very dangerous, and the sheep-tracks and footpaths treacherous or impossible.
Various small excursions were made into the wall of fog. Schoolfriends were called, and knew nothing. The night went past. In the morning, the police reported that a lone cyclist had been seen by a farmer, riding furiously along the edge of Mimmer’s Tarn, in the fog, which had opened briefly, like a curtain, and revealed him in the headlights.
Leo said “He used to go to listen to that Zag, playing. When there was that tent. He liked his playing. I didn’t.”
Daniel drove out with Frederica to Dun Vale Hall, and was told by the long-haired young men on the gate that they had seen no one. And no, he could not come in.
Frederica said that Luk Lysgaard-Peacock went in and out through the Pale, she happened to know, to check on his snails.
Luk arrived at Freyasgarth in his blue Renault. The family was tense and desperate. Mary sat weeping in a corner, feeling that her moment of glory had precipitated disaster, and feeling also, as siblings do, that disaster would have to be her fault. Bill was telephoning. Leo was white and shaking. Luk watched Frederica, who paid him no attention beyond a brief welcoming smile, talking to the boy. She was not telling him it would all be right. She was telling him that there were things to do. Her sharp face was concentrated and grown-up, with a look Luk had never seen before. When he and Daniel left for Dun Vale Hall she was sitting with the boy in her arms. Both were staring out of the window, grimly composed. They were very like each other.
The moorland fog was still thick when Luk and Daniel went through the Pale. They strode down across heather and fields, towards the Hall, and were able, because of the fog, to come to the back gate of the farmyard unseen. Coils of air and water wound themselves round them, thick and grey. The watchful geese began an invisible honking. Daniel pointed. The bicycle was leaning against an outbuilding.
“Now what?” said Luk.
“Now we fetch him out,” said Daniel.
They strode, a heavy dark man, a brisk, fiery man, across the yard and into the kitchen. The kitchen was full of women who with slowed movements were washing, and preparing food. They all wore the same long pale dresses. The atmosphere was steamy, an indoor fug to match the fog. The room was hung, as with tapestries, with the white on white embroidered cloths, with motifs of suns, moons and stars, sunflowers, melons and grapes. They hung also like banners from the long racks on pulleys which in the old days had carried the laundry. They were spread over the dressers and chests of drawers on which were groups of candles and nightlights. There was a smell of fur and feathers, dog and sheep and hens.
Someone said that visitors were not welcome.
Daniel said he had come to fetch his son.
Someone else said his son was not there.
Daniel said he intended to look for him.
Luk stood in the doorway, poised and watchful.
Daniel pushed through the women and out into the hall. The house was an old house. It had harboured Puritans and Non-conformists. Wesley had preached from its kitchen table. Daniel stood at the foot of the staircase and looked briefly up at the murky stained glass window which showed, though he could not see it, Christian and Hopeful crossing the Jordan to reach the heavenly City, “and the trumpets sounded for them on the other side.”
A dark figure stood on the turning of the stair. It was Eva Wijnnobel. She looked, Daniel thought, hunting a word, mummified. Her hair was glossy as ever, her eyes painted, her lips red. Her gaze was not fixed. She stared, not at him. She said
“You should not be here.”
“I have come for my son.”
“You may not find him. If he is here, he has, like Mary, chosen the better part.”
“Nonsense,” said Daniel.
He pushed past her, and the embalming smell of her perfumes. She said
“You have no place here.”
“Indeed not. I am going, as soon as I have found my son.”
He went on up, trying doors, looking into dormitories and cluttered cupboards. Finally he opened the door of a long attic and was met by a disorienting glitter of light, like ripples of reflection in underwater caverns, like the streams of sparks off revolving mirror-spheres in dance-halls. There was indeed such a sphere, hanging from the ceiling.
The room was a box of mirrors—lined with mirrors, and mirrors behind mirrors, crazily reflecting each other. There was a television, showing white noise. There were low tables, with candles of all kinds in glass dishes of all kinds. There were huge white cushions or bolsters on which, in white dresses, sat the
male Hearers, or some of them. He saw Gideon, he saw Canon Holly, in their trailing white shirts, two dried-up wrinkled old walnuts, with tired eyes. He saw Lucas Simmonds, his cherubic face beaming over his innocent garment. He did not see Will, but he did see Zag, wearing his white shirt over his silver tights, like a crusader’s surcoat, lolling on a heap of pillows. He did not see Gander, he did not see John Ottokar.
“I have come for my son.”
“I don’t think you’ll find him. Here.”
“Then I should like to speak to Joshua Ramsden.”
“He doesn’t speak to strangers,” said Zag.
“Then I shall have to go and look for him,” said Daniel.
He had, in fact been consulted by Kieran Quarrell at Cedar Mount, who was troubled over the present state of the Therapeutic Community, and had been sent to Daniel because Daniel had been present at Four Pence, had worked with Holly at St. Simeon’s, was felt to be a man with his feet on the ground. Quarrell had told Daniel the story of the eleven-year-old Joshua, and the fate of his father.
Daniel lifted up his shaggy head and roared. “WILL. If you’re there, come out, come here. WILL. COME HERE NOW.”
Two doors opened simultaneously, one from a cubby-hole under the eaves, one from behind an avenue or rank of mirrors at the far end of the room. From the cubby-hole Will crawled and stumbled. His face was tear-stained. He stood up, and fell down. He said “They gave me sugar-cubes, white sugar-cubes.”