According to Mark

  True, Mark thought, if a little obvious. That was the trouble with Strong; he had a knack of hitting nails on the head with such a flourish as to claim total originality. It gave one a good idea of what he must have been like in the flesh: pontificating away, banging his points home on the table, chucking homemade aphorisms around. Mark looked, guiltily, at his watch; the morning continued to crawl onwards. It would, eventually, be one o’clock and he could decently go down to the kitchen.

  And, eventually, it was and he did and there she was sitting at the table eating bread and cheese, the orange socks on her feet and a streak of dirt down one cheek. At the same moment as Mark entered the room, saw her and experienced that universal thrill that is compounded of panic and exhilaration in equal proportions, it came to him that he was, quite simply, suffering a form of illness. He was temporarily disabled; there should be some kind of treatment for men of his age and situation thus stricken. It should be possible to go along to some professional but understanding bloke in a consulting-room and say, ‘Look, I have this tiresome problem; I’m a busy man and I’ve fallen in love with a girl with whom I have nothing whatsoever in common and I happen to love my wife anyway and I can’t afford the expenditure of time or emotion.’ And the chap would nod and reach for a prescription pad and say, ‘There’s a lot of it around at the moment. Take these three times a day – they usually do the trick.’ And that would be that.

  She avoided his eyes. She said, ‘Oh gosh, I hope there’s some more bread. I expect there’s some in the bin. Bill’s just coming. D’you want some coffee?’

  Mark sat down. ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘I’d go for a drive this evening. Explore the local scenery. I’m beginning to feel desk-bound. Will you come with me?’

  Carrie became very involved with the arrangement of cheese on bread. ‘Well …’

  Bill came in.

  ‘I was just suggesting to Carrie,’ said Mark, ‘that she treats me to a tour of the local beauty-spots this evening. Seeing as it’s such a nice day. What about you?’

  Bill, washing his hands at the sink, thought that this was a good idea. Give the girl an evening off. Count him out though – one or two things he had to see to.

  ‘Ah …’ said Mark, in tones of regret. ‘O.K., then, Carrie?’

  ‘Well …’ said Carrie, squirming.

  ‘Sixish, then. I’ll stand you a pub supper somewhere.’

  ‘There,’ said Bill. ‘Say thank you to the gentleman.’

  Mark cut himself another hunk of cheese. ‘Terrible racket the rooks make in the mornings. What’s it all about?’

  ‘Sex,’ said Bill.

  ‘Really?’ Mark pondered this with the air of one receiving interesting but possibly debatable information.

  ‘They’re nesting,’ said Carrie, and went pink.

  ‘Your grandfather disliked them. He organised shoots from time to time.’

  ‘How horrid.’

  ‘Live and let live is her line,’ said Bill. ‘Regardless. Universal tolerance, eh? She hasn’t got it in for anything. Or anyone.’

  Carrie, pinker still, muttered, ‘Oh, don’t be stupid.’ Mark, covertly, beamed upon her. Bill, ignoring them both, picked up the local paper.

  When at last he had got her into the car, Mark said, ‘I had in mind the Sturminster direction, if that’s all right by you? A general potter round the area and stop for anything interesting.’

  Carrie, it turned out, was a good deal less familiar with the locality than one might have expected. She knew this place or that because it was where she went for supplies of one kind or another, or because she had delivered things to customers there, but that was the extent of her knowledge. For Mark, on the other hand, this lush emotive landscape had two dimensions – what it was and what it suggested. It was peopled twice over, both by the mundane matter-of-fact figures of the transistor-playing girl who filled the car with petrol for him or the pseudo-military landlord of the pub at which they stopped and those other presences, in many ways more powerful: Tess and Angel Clare and Bathsheba and Henchard and the rest of them. The names signalled on road signs – Dorchester and Blandford Forum and Shaftesbury – had also these inescapable reflections. The whole place was both what it was and what one knew it to be. This preoccupied him so much, despite everything else, that once he said, ‘I must go to Casterbridge at some point – I’ve never even been there.’

  ‘Where?’

  Mark, put out, crashed a gear. ‘Damn. Dorchester, I mean. Dorchester is really Casterbridge, in Hardy’s novel. The Mayor of, and all that.’

  Carrie considered this for a moment and said, reasonably enough, ‘Then it isn’t really Casterbridge, if it’s in a book; it’s really Dorchester.’

  ‘Well, yes, I see what you mean. But if you know the books very well it all gets a bit confused.’ Hell – one didn’t want to start going on about books again; the damn things seem to crop up all the time, whatever you did.

  ‘Are they good books?’ enquired Carrie. She sounded quite dispassionate; on the other hand she might just be making conversation.

  ‘Well …’ said Mark. He decided against an in-depth literary consideration of Hardy. ‘There’s one I’m rather fond of about a girl who is seduced and has a baby and then meets the man she really loves and marries him and when she tells him about the baby, he walks out on her, more or less, and eventually she’s driven to live with the man who seduced her and when her husband comes back she kills him.’

  ‘The husband?’

  ‘No. The seducer. And in the end she’s hanged. At Winchester.’

  There was a pause. ‘It sounds like one I read once – Bill’s mum left it in the bathroom after she’d been staying. I can’t remember what it was called. It was that kind with pink covers and a picture that you see lots of in corner shops.’

  ‘Mills and Boon,’ said Mark after a moment.

  ‘They come in Gothic or Historical or Hospital Romance. This was Historical, I think.’

  Mark was silent. They passed a row of beetle-browed cottages and a pub festooned with floral hanging baskets. ‘Actually that wouldn’t really be very like the book I’m talking about. There’s a lot more to it than what I said. It’s a question of how you tell a story, really, as well as what the story is.’

  ‘Mmn,’ said Carrie, and then, ‘Could we stop for a moment?’

  He pulled into the verge. Carrie hopped out and vanished behind the hedge. Mark, tactfully, stared in the opposite direction. After a few moments she called out, ‘Don’t you want to come?’ Perplexed, he scrambled through the hedge to find her half-way up a hill-side, on her hands and knees.

  ‘Orchids.’

  Mark inspected. They looked, to the untutored eye, rather scruffy little flowers, but he made noises of appreciation. ‘How did you know they’d be here?’

  ‘It just looked an orchidy sort of field,’ said Carrie vaguely. She sat down on the grass. It was an evening of blue and green and gold: sky and grass and warm thick air that seemed, in the fading sunlight, as though it were slightly tinted. Carrie glittered all over in its rays – her sandy lashes and brows, the hairs on her bare arms. Mark sat down beside her and watched her out of the corner of one eye. He wanted desperately to touch her.

  She picked a buttercup and took it to pieces. ‘What you said yesterday – is it any different today?’

  ‘No. Frankly.’

  ‘Oh. I thought perhaps it might be sort of getting better.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t,’ said Mark irritably. ‘The condition tends to be a bit more enduring than that. At least at my age. Perhaps,’ he added, ‘it would have been better if I’d never told you.’

  ‘Oh, I expect you should have. I mean if it was bothering you.’

  Exasperation seized him. He had to wait until it subsided a bit before he could speak. ‘Haven’t you ever felt like this about anyone?’

  ‘Actually I’m afraid I haven’t.’

  He was about to say, ‘But you must have read about it,’ an
d checked himself. Instead he said with determined lightness, ‘Well, we’ll just have to hope for a rapid recovery,’ glancing sideways at Carrie to see how she took this. You couldn’t tell. She was now making a buttercup chain. He laid a hand on her knee. Carrie did not shift the knee but continued to fish in the grass for more buttercups. Mark, gazing into the blue wastes of Dorset, was quite unable to decide if he was extremely happy or much disturbed.

  ‘Out where?’

  ‘Driving around. It was a nice evening. Not raining.’

  ‘All on your own?’

  ‘Carrie came with me,’ he said. ‘She was at a loose end.’

  In London traffic rumbled beyond the open window and someone was whistling. ‘And how was that?’ enquired Diana.

  ‘Oh – fine.’

  ‘Given the weather, I thought why don’t I come down on Friday instead of you coming back. Then you could work through the weekend and come back with me on Monday. I take it they wouldn’t mind?’

  At Dean Close the hall clock thrummed and the rooks raged in the elms. ‘Well. Yes. No, I’m sure they wouldn’t. Yes, well, why not? On Friday, then?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Suzanne can do without me for a day.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Mark. ‘I see.’

  ‘Tomorrow. The ten-thirty train, if you could meet me.’

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  ‘Diana rang. She’d like to come down for the weekend, if it’s all right.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Carrie enthusiastically.

  ‘Tomorrow. Till Monday, when I’ll have to go back with her. I’ve got to do things in London next week.’

  ‘I’d better see if there are any clean sheets for the bed.’

  ‘So we won’t get much more time alone together.’

  ‘I s’pose we won’t.’

  ‘Tuesday evening was wonderful.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Carrie. ‘I’m glad I found that orchid place.’

  ‘I shall think about it when I’m back in London.’

  ‘The orchid place?’

  ‘Up to a point the orchid place,’ he said.

  ‘D’you think Diana would like to go there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Doesn’t she like the country?’

  ‘Up to a point, again. In moderation and largely through the windows of cars.’

  ‘Well,’ said Carrie, fidgeting. ‘I must get on …’

  ‘I’ll see you this evening.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you’re not busy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m not sure if that means you will be busy or you won’t.’

  ‘Nor am I,’ said Carrie, after a moment’s reflection.

  He looked at her with despair. He could not recall ever having known anyone before with whom conversation took this disconcerting elastic course. Except, it occurred to him, children. Carrie went out into the garden and he climbed the stairs to his room where, festering with various emotions, he opened the next of Strong’s diaries. It occurred to him also and for the first time that Strong was personally responsible for his present situation: if he, Strong, had not perpetrated – indirectly – Carrie he, Mark, would not be feeling like this. His attitude towards Strong underwent another subtle adjustment.

  7

  Diana was afflicted not only with an indiscriminately recording eye but also with an unstoppable urge to improve. She had long since learned that on the whole this could not be indulged, but there was still nothing she could do about it. On the brief train journey from London to Dorset she redesigned some British Rail posters, reconstructed the train compartment, re-dressed the girl opposite and gave her a new hair-do, and thought for a while about her own kitchen, which could do with an uplift. That, at least, was a possibility. When she saw Mark at the station barrier she noted that he needed a clean shirt and that his shoes would soon be past redemption, but, with the wisdom of experience, forebore mentioning either of these things.

  In the car she set about assessing the next three days.

  ‘What do they do at the weekends?’

  ‘Work. It’s when the Garden Centre gets most customers.’

  ‘What are the eating arrangements?’

  ‘Haphazard,’ said Mark.

  ‘Would it be taken amiss if I suggested doing the cooking?’

  ‘It would be taken with a sigh of relief, I should imagine.’

  Diana, who disliked inaction as much as she disliked indifferent food, looked satisfied. ‘Shops?’

  ‘The village. Or Winterbury for anything ambitious.’

  When they arrived at Dean Close, Diana strode straight into the Garden Centre to find Carrie. Mark saw her briskly greeting and proposing. Carrie shifted from foot to foot, smiling. For some reason, the whole exchange made him uncomfortable. He retreated upstairs where, after a few minutes, Diana joined him.

  ‘She seems to like the idea. I’ll go down and suss out the kitchen and then take the car to Winterbury.’ She stood behind Mark’s shoulder, looking down at the desk. ‘What awful scrawly handwriting he had. These people should think of others.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mark. ‘They should.’

  ‘Odd girl, that. Slightly fey, one feels.’

  Mark made a note and turned the page; he wore a frown of concentration.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it, then. See you later.’

  He nodded, and made another note.

  Thus it was, that evening, that the inmates of Dean Close ate, for supper, not the usual fry-up but chilled cucumber soup followed by a prawn quiche and interestingly eclectic salad, ending with a lemon sorbet and cheese. There was a bottle of wine. Diana whisked from stove to sink to fridge, explaining how her menu had had to be adapted to the shortcomings of the kitchen.

  ‘No,’ said Bill. ‘A garlic press is not known here, I’m afraid. Now I know what to give Carrie for her birthday.’

  Carrie said little and ate enormously. Bill was evidently concealing amusement. Mark, tense with various reactions, made some conversational efforts of which, later, he had no recollection whatsoever. Diana, apparently impervious, presided.

  The ghost of Gilbert Strong, were he looking on, would have been hard put to it to know what to make of them. He would probably have paid most attention to Diana, as a man with an eye for an attractive and vivacious woman. Mark he would have registered – a mite wearily perhaps – as a type he knew only too well, a bird of a feather, a book man, a tribal associate. Carrie he would probably have passed over, unless he happened to get a whiff of that faint, oh very faint, family resemblance. Bill would have mystified him, his dress and accent being too difficult to define; he would probably have taken him for the chauffeur or handyman, though in that case his presence at the table would be puzzling. But the whole set-up would have baffled: what had these people to do one with another?

  When Mark and Diana were courting he had realised one day that she was literal-minded. He had said, in a rather uncharacteristic moment of sentiment, ‘Just think, we might never have met. That I should have met you, out of all the people in the world …’ And Diana had replied, after a moment’s consideration, ‘Oh, but we were bound to. I mean, we both know Peter Jamison and his friends all meet each other.’ Speculation, for her, was confined to thinking about the various different outcomes suggested by alternative courses of action. She was more interested in the future than the past. It was a habit of mind that affected her attitude to literature, naturally enough. Fantasy maddened her, for obvious reasons. Equally, deviousness or obscurity of purpose irritated her; she insisted on discussing the motivation of, say, Dorothea or Anna Karenina or Catherine Earnshaw as though they were acquaintances faced with tiresome but soluble practical difficulties. Henry James, as you would expect, infuriated her. ‘I simply do not understand what these people are trying to say. Have you ever heard anyone talk like that?’ And when Mark would begin, cautiously, ‘Well, no, but that isn’t entirely the point, it’s a question of style and …’ she would interrupt, triumphan
tly, ‘Exactly!’ Back then, in the courting period, which now had a fictional character of its own, he had been unwilling to be too contentious. Nowadays, they had rather ceased to talk about that kind of thing. Nevertheless, Diana continued to read a great deal, though what she derived was slightly mysterious to Mark; people who are unable to suspend disbelief, he reckoned, are difficult both to entertain and to enlighten.

  ‘One sometimes wonders,’ said Diana, ‘how on earth one fetches up with particular people. I mean, these two aren’t really potential soul-mates, from our point of view.’

  Mark glanced warily at her along the bedclothes; the first half of the remark was uncharacteristic. Outside, the rooks were into their morning round of contention. Diana was wearing a sweater over her nightdress.

  ‘He is gay. I’m sure of it.’

  Mark grunted.

  ‘I froze, all night. Of course in this case it’s him who has to be held responsible. Old Gilbert S.’

  Mark, discomfited to hear his own sentiments quite so accurately voiced, said, ‘Well … somewhat indirectly.’

  ‘Have you found anything on this travel book he’s supposed to have lifted off someone else?’

  ‘Not so far. I’m not sure that I really expect to. If there’s anything in the story the first thing he’d have done, I assume, would be to make sure no one was going to find out accidentally.’

  ‘You, in other words.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ This, Mark realised, led you off into a really rather odd line of thought. He lay in Gilbert Strong’s spare room bed and pursued it while Diana, huddled into a winter dressing-gown, went off to the bathroom. Here you were, tethered for a period of your life in this curious intimate fashion to a man you never knew. And all the while he, too, in his way had had to make allowances for you, admit you into his life as it were. When you were still in the cradle, or not even in existence. Strong had known all too well that people would be writing his biography. He had stashed away letters and diaries and manuscripts in the full knowledge that at some point a faceless man or woman would pore over them, speculating. What did that feel like? ‘Jake Balokowsky, my biographer … “I’m stuck with this old fart at least a year.” ’ Well, no – dry detachment of that kind wasn’t really Strong’s line. He would have been more inclined to do a bit of interfering or even manipulating. How far was it accidental, for instance, that certain volumes of the diaries survived but others didn’t? That whole chunks of correspondence had disappeared? The memoir was clearly designed as a piece of special pleading. By which, said Mark sternly, to the shade of Gilbert Strong, I am not taken in. I cannot see you as an exemplary husband nor indeed as a tolerant and accommodating friend. I think you probably did rather badly by Violet and there is incontrovertible evidence that you were a difficult bloke to deal with in many of your more impersonal relationships. You undoubtedly went in for a good deal of shameless literary politicking to get yourself reviewing and to push your own works. You buttered people up when it suited you and gently shed them when they weren’t useful any more. I doubt if your published judgements were always quite as detached as they ought to have been (but, he uncomfortably reflected, which of us has not occasionally bent with the wind, however mildly …). I don’t care for the way you conducted that campaign against De la Mare. You were overbearing towards those you regarded as your inferiors, by several accounts, and dismissive of those who bored you. On the other hand, you wrote some interesting books, some of your insights are penetrating and thought-provoking, and you were undoubtedly extremely good company, or people would not have sought you out as they did. Your second wife certainly loved you; two of your servants stayed with you for thirty years; you maintained your daughter’s ex-governess in a nursing home until she died.