According to Mark

  Carrie stood chewing her finger-nail. ‘Mmn.’ She threw Mark a quick, guilty look. ‘I just felt you and she would have a nicer time if I wasn’t there any more. And …’

  ‘And you wanted to get away?’

  Carrie did not answer. There was an uncomfortable silence into which the rooks cawed and the kitchen tap dripped.

  ‘Well,’ said Mark, ‘there it all is. I’d better get on and do some work. That, after all, is what I’m here for.’

  ‘I finished Emma. I got another copy.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mark. ‘Where?’

  Carrie turned and became suddenly very busy at the sink. She said she didn’t remember, exactly. In Paris, possibly.

  ‘So now you know how it all turned out.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Carrie. ‘The arrows.’

  ‘What?’

  And at that moment Bill came in so that Carrie’s reply, if reply there was, was extinguished by greetings and then by Bill’s demands for food and so by the preparations for and the having of the well-remembered appalling Dean Close lunch. During which Mark forced himself to glance at Carrie. It occurred to him that she was looking extraordinarily well. She glowed, indeed. He looked away.

  In the attic, dust and dead flies had gathered upon the ranged piles of papers from the trunks. Diana’s neatly lettered date-and-content cards had warped a little in the strong sun through the skylight: ‘1930–1935; corresp. from eds of TLS, Spectator, Horizon, A. P. Watt, Heinemann, photographs, notes on Morocco visit, incomplete diary for 1932.’ The piles grew larger as time progressed. Very little before 1900; toppling heaps for 1940 onwards. It was the content of these piles, and their extent, that Mark wanted to check.

  He had, on the wall of his study at home, a chart, recently drawn up. All the evidence from all his sources had contributed to this chart, which laid out Gilbert Strong’s life year by year and told Mark, at a glance, where he was living at any given points and what, broadly speaking, he was doing. It was lettered in several colours (domestic circumstances, books in progress, contributions to periodicals etc.) and was inspired by similar and even more intricate charts created by the senior history master at Mark’s school, who had liked to see the collective past as capable of being thus simply and neatly displayed.

  The trouble was, of course, that there were gaps. For 1938, say, or 1951, it was possible to pin Strong down for almost every week and for almost every day. At other points there were disconcerting tracts of virgin white paper. And the most extensive of these tracts ran from 1905 to 1915. Where was Strong in his vigorous late twenties and early thirties? Unmarried, working on the life of Napoleon, publishing swingeing opinionated pieces, reviewing, bouncing around in those allegedly halcyon expansive pre-war years. For a time he had rooms off Baker Street. He popped up for a few months in Maidenhead or Weymouth or St John’s Wood. But there were long uncharted stretches. It was unsatisfactory. And, in Mark’s present mood, provocative.

  Throughout the afternoon he sorted and checked. Once he heard Carrie’s voice outside, calling something to Bill. He wished he were elsewhere. He wished he did not have to come here any more. He wanted never to see Carrie again; then in the next minute he fought the urge to get up and go downstairs and outside and find her. He read, and searched, and made notes, and endured. He put into cardboard cartons those items he wanted to take home with him. The afternoon became the evening and he went down into the house. There was a smell of frying from beyond the green baize door.

  They ate, once more. Carrie came in late, when Mark was giving Bill a forcedly spry account of the summer. He did his best to look at her as little as possible (every now and then there arrived within his field of vision a sunburnt arm on which gleamed ginger hairs). He enquired if she had heard from Hermione. She had not. ‘Incidentally,’ he said. ‘How do you feel about me taking some of the material from the attic up to London to work on?’ That, it seemed, would be perfectly all right by Carrie. ‘Good,’ he went on. ‘In that case I probably won’t be around for a while. I’m getting to the stage of gathering all the threads together.’ Carrie was silent. From relief, he presumed.

  He could not sleep. The hair mattress, angst and the indigestion commonly induced by Dean Close fry-ups combined to produce an intolerable restlessness. The only book he had to hand was Gilbert Strong’s third novel, Once in Summertime, an undistinguished but in some ways persuasive account of rural love. The novels, poised somewhere between Ford Madox Ford and Galsworthy in style but with an occasional disconcerting whiff of Mary Webb, were hard to take. There wasn’t much of a case to be made out for them, if any. Good thing Strong had packed it in fairly early on. Grudgingly, Mark opened Once in Summertime; truth to tell, he’d only read it rather cursorily.

  Carrie had been consumed with guilt about Mark. Guilt for having walked out on them like that in France; guilt for what had happened in Paris because now she knew – oh, how she knew – what Mark must have been feeling like. And when he had walked into the kitchen all this guilt had surged forth like some shaming disease. Above all, she didn’t want him to know about Nick. She had worried about this all afternoon. And then, at supper, everything had been unexpected. In the first place he hardly looked at her. And then he had asked, quite casually, if she minded him taking stuff up to London, which she didn’t – she never had, indeed, but previously Mark had somehow implied that this was out of the question. But now, apparently, it was perfectly practicable.

  He’d got over it, she supposed. He wasn’t in love with her any more. Which of course was an entirely good thing. Why, then, was she both melancholy and somehow queasy. She went out to shut up the greenhouses and the feeling stayed with her. She contemplated the alpines and a sad confusing anxiety gnawed at her. And then she had to come in because Bill was going out and the telephone could never, nowadays, be left unattended: Nick might ring. He might ring and not get an answer and then not ring again for hours, or for a whole unendurable day.

  She was glad, for Mark, that he didn’t feel like this any more. She wasn’t at all sure that she wanted to feel like this herself, but, of course, there is no choice. And at the same time, in the midst of it, she was assaulted by a knowledge of the treachery of things. That one condition slides into another of its own volition; that you can cope with what you do, but not with what you are. She had never seen this before with such sharpness. Perhaps it was of this instability that those fairy stories warned, for all their talk of living happily ever after.

  Diana, alone in London, decided not to telephone Mark. In the same way that she had seen it would be best for him to go to Dean Close alone, so it now seemed to her more sensible to leave him unsupported. She had no qualms about the Carrie business; that would not start up again. Her observation of Mark, which combined the shrewdness, experience and folk-wisdom of an old-fashioned nanny, had convinced her that he had been going through a difficult phase which was, given continued astute treatment, well past the critical stage. For Diana, although to all appearances in the vanguard of fashion in every way and especially ideologically, retained a view of men that was not only pre-feminist but in fact somewhat in advance of feminism. She regarded men as different; not as inferior or superior but quite simply as apart in a sense that transcended discussion, or made it superfluous. You treated them differently from women and expected different (and, by implication, irrational) behaviour from them. Accordingly, you perfected certain lines of approach, changed strategy and studied form – much like any professional handler of a related but crucially distinguishable species. She was often surprised that other women did not seem to know about this, or that men apparently were impervious to it.

  She had known, when she first met Mark, that she would have trouble with him. This affected not in the slightest her decision to marry him. So far as she was concerned, not only should any girl worth her salt be prepared to confront difficulty, but that was what she was there for. Nor did this state of conditioned readiness have any bearing on her feelings for Mark; s
he loved him. But love was not a matter for brooding or analysis; it was simply the climate in which you lived, and you dealt with it appropriately, with the help of barometers and umbrellas and air-conditioning.

  Right now, she was no longer concerned about Carrie but about Mark’s state of mind within a wider context. It was not unusual for him to be abstracted or mildly evasive or periodically irritable. He was all those things at the moment but with a manic tinge that was new to her. She mistrusted it. This book, she suspected, was at the bottom of everything. Personally, she didn’t care for the sound of Gilbert Strong at all; from what she had read, both at Dean Close and in Mark’s study, he was the kind of man whose resources matched her own. Had he been alive, this would have been both a compliment and a declaration of war.

  Twenty-four hours later the Lammings confronted each other across Mark’s desk, from which Mark was feverishly and somewhat inefficiently gathering papers and notebooks.

  ‘Somerset …’ said Diana. ‘All that way. The whole thing could turn out to be a wild goose chase. Can’t you just write to people?’

  Mark, stuffing things into his briefcase, replied that no, he couldn’t. He emptied photographs from an envelope onto the desk and made a selection: Strong as a young man, moustached and Norfolk-jacketed leaning against a gate, a beetle-browed cottage with a water pump beside the door and a monkey-puzzle tree alongside.

  ‘That’s the place?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  Diana picked up the photograph and turned it over. ‘Porlock, 1914. And the tree is in this novel? Very Edwardian trees, monkey-puzzles, mind. It’s all a bit tenuous.’

  ‘I know it’s tenuous,’ said Mark. ‘Lots of things are tenuous. It’s a hazard of the trade. But this has to be followed up.’

  Diana sighed. ‘Well, drive carefully, for goodness sake. I wish I could come too, but no way, the state Suzanne’s in about the new exhibition.’

  ‘I’ll only stay a night or so. See if I can find the cottage. Talk to people a bit.’

  He couldn’t wait to be off. He was possessed. He had lain, last night, in the Dean Close guest room bed, persecuted by angst and the hair mattress, and on page eleven of Once in Summertime there was the description of the cottage somewhere in the West Country with the monkey-puzzle tree at the door. And on page twenty-five, when the sensitive young hero met his lady-love, who is not named throughout the book but exists only as a pronoun, a pre-Rebecca conceit which had demanded of Strong much grammatical contortion, there was the mention of the amber necklace, lying against the curve of her strong young neck. And so forth and so on. And at that point he had been able to contain himself no longer but had crept up to the attic to ferret in that inadequate and therefore provocative ‘1910–1915’ pile. And there, as he thought, was the photograph, mildewed in an envelope with others of Strong himself, of an unidentified cricket team, of his parents in old age. And the letter, in an unknown hand, with no address, dated September 1914, saying simply, ‘I am sending you my sister’s amber, with the thought that you may wish to have something of hers to keep. We are as well as can be expected.’ Signed, merely, M.

  Tenuous indeed. Straight, in fact, from the pages of a fiction more romantic and popular than Strong’s wordy, somewhat heavy-handed account of love and separation in a rural paradise. The girl in the book had gone away, mysteriously and precipitately, leaving her lover to mourn through the final high-flown chapter.

  Strong’s other two novels were indisputably autobiographical. Despite his pontificating on the subject of fiction, Strong’s own attempts at it were fatally crippled by his inability to reach beyond the confines of his own life for subject-matter. Admittedly all novelists are subjective to some degree, but Strong was unswervingly so. Novel number one was about his time at Cambridge, novel number three was about high jinks in literary circles in the south of France. Novel number four, happily, had never seen the light of day.

  So, by deduction, novel number two was also about some Strong experience. A person and a place. A person and a place, moreover, for which there existed no other evidence. The envelope of photographs and the letter had been pushed into a folder of newspaper cuttings – reviews and articles – as though they might well have been overlooked. As though, in fact, they might be the only murmur out of what was intended to be a silence.

  14

  It was September. The landscape sliced by the M4 had the wearied look of late summer: the fields scoured, the hedges dark and shaggy. Long, rough-looking clouds were strewn around the horizon. Mark, stopping only at the anonymous concourses of motorway services, had the sensation of the country through which he passed as being detached, an elsewhere in some other dimension of time or space from himself or from these other travellers hurtling through. It did not seem possible that one could stop and step out of the car into it. The fields and hills and clustered houses seemed as removed as the scenery in a photograph.

  He was decanted from the motorway into the narrow roads of west Somerset and at once was reunited with a tangible and contemporary world: hedgebanks that brushed the side of the car, a whiff of manure, a flock of little birds skirling from a tree.

  He reached Porlock and found a pub that could let him have a room for the night. The place, strenuously manicured and catering, it seemed, only for people without occupation beyond riding horses or going for walks, did not appeal to him. He left the car in the pub garage and wandered around, a little disconsolately. The venture now seemed impetuous. The long drive had tired him; he wished Diana were there, with some reviving proposal.

  He left the centre of the town and followed a lane that began to wind up a steep hillside. He rounded a bend and there, in full colour and distorted only by a new porch and a television aerial, was the cottage. With tree alongside. And the pump, painted sparkling white.

  The Bed-and-Breakfast sign outside said ‘Vacancy’.

  Mark went back to the pub and said he had changed his mind about staying. Ten minutes later he was presenting himself to the lady who opened the door of ‘Pump Cottage’.

  By the morning he knew that if Gilbert Strong had slept under this roof there was no whisper of him left. Mrs Cummings, a widow from Manchester, had retired here with her husband five years ago. Before that there had been the so-and-so’s for three years and before that someone for another five. The cottage’s memory was brief and disordered. The neighbours all appeared to be similar refugees from the Midlands; indeed, Mark had an impression of the urban retired as descending upon the West Country in a gentle nostalgic snowstorm, in search of those summer holidays of yesterday.

  She served him a lavish breakfast, hovering inquisitively. ‘A writer? You don’t look like a writer, if you don’t mind my saying. I’d have thought you did something quite ordinary. I like a good biography. Winston Churchill or the royal family. You haven’t written about the royal family?’

  ‘Unfortunately not,’ said Mark.

  ‘And this person you’re interested in was a writer too? What was his name again? No, I can’t say it means anything to me.’ She patted a sculptured grey curl. ‘Pity. If it had been Bernard Shaw or someone I could have had a sign up, couldn’t I? Well, if you send me a copy of your book when it’s done, I don’t mind putting it out on the hall table for visitors to have a look at.’

  Mark nodded, ambiguously.

  ‘I suppose you could try asking Major Hammond. He’s been here donkey’s years. He might remember something.’

  ‘Major Hammond?’

  ‘Up the road. Big house with white gates. I only know him to pass the time of day with; he’s not all that what you might call forthcoming. Bachelor, of course. But he’s local. They let you know it, round here.’ A frisson reached Mark: a hint of complex matters of status and position. ‘You could give him a try, anyway.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mark. ‘I might at that.’

  ‘That’s the fellow.’ Major Hammond turned the photograph over and then handed it back to Mark. ‘Before the war, that’
s right. Had the cottage down the road.’ He eyed Mark. ‘What d’yer want to know for? Lawyer johnnie, are you – something like that?’

  Mark explained. The Major, though upright and spry, appeared to be in his eighties, which made him ten or so when Gilbert Strong was in Porlock. Well, ten-year-olds can be observant.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ said the Major. He led the way through a windy hall and into a large sitting-room in which crouched innumerable battered leather or wicker chairs, giving the impression of a club premises. Bits of stags and foxes hung from the walls, alongside photographs of polo teams in Burma or Karachi in 1920-something. The Major was dressed in sports jacket and grey flannel of awe-inspiring antiquity. His white moustache was kippered a delicate tan on the right hand side. The room smelt resoundingly of tobacco and dog. An enormous labrador lay on its side on the hearth-rug, as though recently shot.

  ‘Whisky?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Mark. It was half-past ten in the morning.

  The Major took a cigarette out of a chrome case and stuck it under the moustache. ‘My doctor tells me I should pack these in. What I say is, I pay the feller but that doesn’t mean I have to take his advice. Write books, do you? I’ve done a bit in that line myself.’ He got up and went over to a glass-fronted bookcase and picked a slim volume from amid a run of bound copies of Punch and freckled editions of Dornford Yates, Charles Morgan and A. J. Cronin. ‘Verse,’ he explained.

  Mark inspected the title page. Privately printed by someone in Dulverton. Dedicated to the rabbit whose untimely positioning of its burrow had caused the fall from a horse which occasioned the enforced leisure enabling the Major to produce this work. The poems celebrated Exmoor, home leave, a good day with the hounds and once or twice something rather more unexpected. One described an evening in London, date unspecified, when the Major had gone ‘To the Trocadero, And on … To see the girls with nothing on’. Mark laid the book down on a large leather pouffe with a murmur of appreciation. He found himself rather taking to the Major.