According to Mark

  So, the churning waters of Diana’s mind, an impressionistic torrent which includes references to Hungary (she is cooking a goulash, and tries to remember from whence this dish emanates), her mother (whom she must telephone), a blue dress with white collar (which she saw in a window this week and considers buying), Welsh slate (a builder has called with an estimate for the repair of their roof) and Mark. It is at this point that the darting track of images assumes a steadier path, and the clear bright messages flash.

  There’s something up. Only ever so slightly up, but up all the same. I can always tell – that fidget in his voice, silences, not wanting to say yes or no. Something about the Strong stuff? Some project? Or difficulty with this girl? More likely that. She’s being awkward. Wants to look over his shoulder. May be going to interfere. Or … ? Or what?

  Which is why I need to go down and have a look.

  Mark said, ‘Would it be a nuisance if Diana came down tomorrow? For the night – I’m going back on Friday, anyway. She’s rather longing to see it all. And, um, to meet you.’

  ‘That’s O.K.’

  ‘It won’t,’ continued Mark, ‘be often. Just this once.’

  Carrie, who had put on a pair of National Health Service wire-rimmed spectacles and was sorting through a pile of invoices, looked across the table at him. ‘I don’t mind people coming. It’s boring for them, that’s all, here. If they’re used to London.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s boring at all.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you were short-sighted.’

  ‘It’s only when I have to do this kind of thing. Sorry – they look ghastly, I know. Bill’s always saying.’

  ‘Is he?’ said Mark, in a rather tense tone that made Carrie look at him again. She wondered why he didn’t go off and do whatever it was he was doing. She had a vague feeling of guilt. Probably she ought to entertain him in some way. But how? she wondered – I can’t talk about the sort of things he’s interested in and I don’t know anybody else like him I could ask round to do it. Actually it wouldn’t help all that much if Bill were here. So there isn’t really anything to be done. An idea struck her. ‘There are lots of books in grandfather’s study, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mark, perplexed. ‘I saw.’

  ‘I just thought you might like to borrow one.’

  ‘Oh, I see – in case I want something to read. No, thanks. The last thing I want at the moment is a book. In any case,’ he added gloomily, ‘I’ve probably read them all.’

  ‘Goodness,’ said Carrie. ‘There are hundreds.’

  Mark, who had not meant to brag but merely to state what suddenly seemed to him a rather dispiriting fact, was silent. He was thinking of a passage in one of Strong’s essays in which he called books one of the greatest divisive forces in society. Something about being distanced from one’s neighbour as much by what you have both read or not read as by circumstances of birth or economic status. Quite so. At this point an immense jumbled heap of books – the contents of a moderate-sized public library in a small market town – seemed to come between him and Carrie. He could see another reason why people burn books, apart from the historically conventional ones.

  ‘I’m not boasting,’ he said. ‘It’s just the way it is. It’s what I’ve spent most of my life doing.’

  Carrie pushed the spectacles up onto her nose with one finger. ‘Yes. I see. Actually, I didn’t think you were.’

  Outside, the rain continued to fall. Somewhere a blackbird sang ripely in the twilight. Mark said, ‘I don’t think those glasses are ghastly. They suit you, somehow.’

  4

  Diana, preparing herself to visit Dean Close, put on quite different clothes from those she would have selected for a day at the gallery, or even for any day in London. She retained, in fact, though she was not aware of this, an outdated sense – product of the more affluent days of the middle class – that one dresses in one way for town and in another for the country. Her parents, who lived in Somerset, would have had special equipment for their twice-yearly visits to London: a dark suit for her father, as opposed to his tweed ones; a little black dress for her mother, and a navy outfit with matching accessories. It is odd that cities seem to require a form of mourning, not quite banished even with the passing of the Clean Air Act and the consequent lightening of the atmosphere. At any rate, Diana, clad for Dorset, wore a pair of neatly fitting cord jeans normally kept for holidays or occasional weekends at home, a T-shirt which had cost more than T-shirts usually cost, and a blazer. She had put into her overnight bag a warm sweater, since it is known that the country is several degrees colder than London, even in May. Thus equipped, she stepped into the train and, eventually, out of the station taxi into the drive at Dean Close. Where, like Mark, she stood for a moment gazing up at the house.

  Needs a coat of paint. And one or two repairs. Lutyens? Could be. Nice, if you like that sort of thing. Freezing cold, I bet. Should have put in a hot water bottle too.

  At this point Carrie appeared from the stable-yard. Diana, whose instincts were neat, knew at once who this was.

  She’s not attractive. At least I’m almost sure she’s not. She can’t be – that fuzzy gingery hair, all those freckles, funny white skin, awful clothes. She obviously doesn’t give a damn what she looks like – scruffy shirt, dungarees.

  Carrie said, ‘Oh – hello.’

  Diana advanced, briskly smiling. ‘I’m Diana Lamming. How nice to meet you.’ Having noted Carrie’s generally earthy appearance she did not hold out a hand.

  ‘Mark’s somewhere,’ said Carrie. ‘I’ll go and …’

  ‘Don’t bother. I’ll find him. I’d adore to see the house, if you’ve got a moment.’

  They toured the ground floor. ‘Good grief!’ said Diana, looking round Strong’s study. ‘It stopped dead in 1920, didn’t it?’

  Mark came into the room. Husband and wife discreetly embraced. Mark turned to Carrie. ‘I was up in the attic – I hadn’t realised Diana was here. Anyway, you’ve introduced yourselves.’

  Carrie, who was thinking about Botrytis and wondering if it would be all right to go now, said yes they had. Diana continued to comment on the furnishings. Mark watched Carrie.

  Carrie, as was usual for her, had paid only superficial attention to Diana. During her years with Hermione she had met so many people that she had almost ceased to notice them. Hermione’s associates had swirled around her, talking and drinking and having rows with each other and changing from month to month and place to place so that they had in fact become interchangeable: they all seemed much the same anyway. When at last she reached college and embarked upon a life of her own she had acquired such a habit of self-sufficiency that her contemporaries and instructors continued to have little impact on her. She was politely responsive but more interested in soil types and grafting and mist propagation: learning about things she found positively entrancing. Her first job was in a big nursery in Hertfordshire where she quickly rose in status, being good at everything and hard-working. Here, she became connected with one of the two sons of the proprietor – the more usual term ‘involved with’ is inappropriate since, as the young man complained, involvement was outside Carrie’s range. ‘I’m never sure,’ he said, ‘if you even like me.’ Carrie, frowning in concentration and scanning her feelings as she would a sickly plant, assured him that she did. The young man, eventually, took up with a new Austrian apprentice and Carrie left for Dean Close. She had by now had three lovers (the other two had been fellow students) and had come to the conclusion that she was not like other people, who always seemed to be in a state about these things. She had been exposed to the anguish of the lovelorn and the howling grief of the jilted and wondered at these things rather like some unlettered peasant might marvel at the complexities of a dictionary. She saw that she must be flawed in some way and could not make out if this was a good thing or a bad thing. It was difficult to be envious of all those hours that other people seemed to spend weeping in
to their pillows; on the other hand whatever it was that generated it must be in some way interesting. Sex she found rather fun.

  ‘We mustn’t hold Carrie up,’ said Mark. ‘She has work to do.’ Carrie, gratefully, began to sidle towards the door. ‘Tell you what,’ he continued, ‘why don’t we take you for supper at the pub later? And Bill if he’s around.’

  ‘Lovely!’ beamed Diana.

  ‘O.K.’ said Carrie, with doubt. A meal out she had no objection to at all, but it would mean clean clothes and, ideally, washing her hair. She glanced uneasily at Diana’s outfit, which struck her as extremely chic.

  Diana, upstairs, dumped her bag on the floor and bounced on the bed.

  ‘Jesus – this is a hair mattress! I didn’t know they existed outside of folk museums. Have you slept a wink?’

  ‘One gets used to it,’ said Mark.

  Diana grunted.

  ‘You needn’t have come,’ he added. Mildly.

  ‘Didn’t you want me to?’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘Is this all the stuff you’ve got to read?’

  ‘Some of it. There’s another trunkful and a half upstairs.’

  ‘Lor!’ said Diana.

  Mark, after two days’ work at Dean Close, saw where he was going and it seemed immeasurably far off. He had scrapped one outlined schedule of advance and adopted another. He would return now to the chronological approach, abandoning for the time being his previous system of scrutiny of all material regardless of sequence. The diaries and letters in the attic could be sorted into five-year parcels and looked at in order, each lot endorsing (or not, as the case might be) the other. Different themes – money, health, family, friends and so forth – would be entered, as before, in the card-index which provided a system of cross-reference independent of chronology. Thus, he was building up two separate sources of information – Strong’s life as it was lived, year by year, and Strong’s life according to various subjects. This latter division, while useful, struck him as peculiarly artificial, something like the slicing up of history by historians into different areas of study: social or economic or political. Strong suffering from jaundice (1932) was after all the same Strong as was at the same moment negotiating with his publisher for a substantially higher advance and embarking upon a liaison with a young woman working in Hatchards (she who some fifty years later was to give Mark food poisoning with take-away kebabs). Life, like history, is one and indivisible. That, of course, is the nature of its complexity and the reason why those brave enough to embark upon analyses thereof are obliged to chop it up into more manageable segments.

  ‘Anything I can do to help?’ enquired Diana.

  ‘Well, yes, actually there is.’

  And so the Lammings spent the afternoon side by side in the attic of Dean Close arranging upon the floor in as orderly a manner as possible the contents of the cabin trunks: pile upon pile of shabby paper staked out by Diana with card markers – 1920–25, 1925–30 and so on. The bundles of letters had to be undone and carefully redivided according to period (none of these were from Strong himself, but included all or many of those written to him by both wives, and by various editors and literary associates); the diaries and draft manuscripts had equally to be allocated; miscellanea like photographs and books and newspaper cuttings had to be identified and put in the right place. Diana was good at this, methodically beavering away; Mark tended to be led astray by detail, poring over a snapshot or flipping through a notebook. The sun began to go down and the light leaked from the attic. Diana complained about how dirty she was getting and speculated on the hot water supply.

  ‘I feel nosy, too. I wouldn’t like the idea of someone rummaging around my things. Don’t you feel like that sometimes?’

  ‘Frequently,’ said Mark.

  ‘It’s like marching into someone’s bathroom while they’re out and having a look at what kind of deodorant and laxative they use.’

  ‘Is that something you’ve done?’

  ‘Only inadvertently.’

  This subject arose once more when, a couple of hours later, the Lammings, Bill and Carrie were seated around one of the saloon bar tables in the Horse and Jockey eating steak, chips and salad off enormous oblong platters which Diana had criticised as more suitable for carving on than eating off. Music leaked from the walls; the sporting prints and hunting horns displayed around the room all had the sparkle of recent production. You could, Mark thought, have been anywhere; in Yorkshire, Somerset or mid-Manchester. An image, sepia-tinted of course, drifted into his head of some pub patronised and described by Strong, with tankards (really?) and sawdust and colourfully spoken yokels. The clientele here, from snatches of overheard conversation, seemed to consist mainly of commercial travellers.

  ‘Well,’ said Diana. ‘It’s food, I suppose. Of a kind.’ She lifted three discs of cucumber and some cogwheels of radish from the large and dry leaf of lettuce upon which they lay.

  ‘The chips are super,’ said Carrie. ‘We never have chips because they’re always either soggy or the oil catches fire.’

  Diana, who had in her eye a glitter of interest familiar to Mark that meant she was at work diagnosing the nature of a relationship, had turned to Bill and was questioning him on his past. ‘I’m fascinated,’ Mark heard her say, ‘about the Garden Centre. Tell me all about how you organise things.’ Bill, tucking heartily into his own meal and a half-plateful of Diana’s with which she declared herself unable to cope, supplied bits and pieces of matter-of-fact information about wholesalers and the demand for conifers, all of which Mark knew that Diana would store away in her system of instant mental retrieval and produce possibly in five or ten years’ time, correct to the last detail. He allowed himself to study Carrie. She was wearing a pair of quite clean-looking jeans and a plaid shirt. He was seeing, for the first time, her natural waistline and the size of her hips, unshrouded by the dungarees. She was thinner than he had expected. He described to her the afternoon’s progress in the attic.

  ‘There are quite a lot of letters from your mother when she was young. Would you like me to put them aside for you to read?’

  ‘Well …’ said Carrie. And then, after a moment, ‘Thanks, but actually I don’t think I really want to.’

  It occurred to him that perhaps her reluctance stemmed from delicacy. His own role looked immediately distasteful. Gloom seized him. ‘I don’t blame you,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, we sort of get on all right now, but I just wouldn’t be terribly interested.’

  He had been on the wrong track, he realised. ‘I meant that I feel … well – intrusive – sometimes. After all, reading other people’s letters was one of the things one was brought up never to do. And here am I earning my living by it.’

  Carrie reflected. ‘I suppose it’s a bit like doctors having to look at people with no clothes on. I mean, they don’t exactly want to but they couldn’t do their job properly if they didn’t.’

  Mark beamed. How extraordinarily direct and perceptive she was, like a child. An instance, it struck him, of the value of natural responses, uncontaminated by the wisdoms of acquired knowledge. This was not a quality that normally appealed to him, so that the warm glow she induced was mixed with faint perplexity as to why he should feel like this. You could also call it naïve, and he didn’t usually care for naïvety.

  ‘That’s exactly it,’ he said. ‘So one has to swallow one’s scruples and soldier on. In the interests of the end product.’

  Diana swung round, having finished for the time being with Bill. ‘What’s all this about scruples?’

  ‘I was complaining,’ said Mark, ‘about having to spend a lifetime reading other people’s letters.’

  ‘Nonsense, darling – you love it. He revels in it,’ she continued, addressing Carrie, as though she might not have caught on. ‘He has all the instincts of some bloke in the CID. He likes ferreting away and filing it all up and then coming out with the answers. For Wilkie Collins he read mountains and mountains of stu
ff, in the BL and the Bodleian and over in Texas and goodness knows where. I hardly ever saw him. He’ll do the same this time. He’ll turn up everything there is to turn up.’

  Carrie and Bill, throughout this, gazed at her. Bill began furtively to gather glasses. When she had finished he turned to Mark, ‘Drink?’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mark. ‘This is on me.’ They wrangled briefly; Mark won and went across to the bar. Glancing over his shoulder while he waited, he saw Diana in full flow once more, while Carrie and Bill sat politely attending. He wished the evening was over. He wished he were back in London and then immediately knew that he didn’t really. He wished it was next week and he were back here again. There really wasn’t a lot of point in Diana coming down like this often, it wasn’t as though there was anything for her to do here, or as though she was going to get on particularly well with Carrie. Or with Stevenson.

  The Lammings lay side by side on the hair mattress. ‘God,’ said Diana. ‘It’s even harder than I thought it would be.’

  ‘Susan Strong spent twenty years on one. So did Gilbert, come to that.’

  ‘They didn’t know any better in those days.’ There was a pause, during which Mark and Diana drew closer to one another, ending up thigh to thigh, not out of lust or a sudden access of affection but because both were cold. ‘And it’s damp, too,’ said Diana. ‘You know something – that fellow’s gay.’

  ‘Who?’ said Mark, suddenly alert.

  ‘Bill.’

  Diana’s instinct in these matters was usually infallible. Mark was seized with a sense of wild exhilaration, which he instantly tried to tamp down. ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Diana. ‘You mark my words. Odd set-up, I must say. And she’s a funny little thing. Not exactly an intellectual front-runner. When you were talking about Strong visiting Conrad, it was obvious she didn’t even know who Conrad was.’