Coming Home
‘I'll come back to Nancherrow today if it would help.’
‘That's what you mustn't do. I only told you because I thought you'd be upset if you weren't told. I know that you feel about Aunt Lavinia very much the way that the rest of us do. But don't cut short your holiday. We'll see you next Sunday, or whenever. And, incidentally, Gus'll be here as well. There was a message for me when I got back last night. He's driving down from Scotland, on his way already.’
‘Oh, Edward. What an inopportune time for more visitors. Can't you put him off?’
‘No. I don't know where he is. Probably Birmingham, or somewhere gruesome. Can't get hold of him.’
‘Poor man. He's going to arrive to a sort of pandemonium.’
‘Oh, it'll be all right. He's a very easy guest. He'll understand.’
Judith decided that men — even Edward — could be at times extremely thick. He had spent his life inviting friends back to Nancherrow, and took entirely for granted the domestic upheaval and organisation that these prolonged visits involved. Now, she had a mental picture of poor Mary Millyway, with a family crisis on her hands, and enough to see to at the best of times, having to deal with this extra chore: alerting Mrs Nettlebed to the fact that there would be an extra mouth to feed; taking clean sheets from the linen cupboard; organising Janet to get ready one of the spare rooms; seeing to towels and fresh soap; checking on coat-hangers in the wardrobe and rich tea biscuits in the tin by the bed.
‘Perhaps I should come back.’
‘You're absolutely not to. I forbid it.’
‘All right. But I am sorry for you all. Send my love to everybody. Give your father my love.’
‘I will. Try not to worry.’
‘And love to you.’
‘The same, by return.’ She could hear the smile in his voice. ‘'Bye, Judith.’
Gus Callender, at the wheel of his dark-green Lagonda, left Okehampton behind him and roared up the steep hill which led out of the little market town and into the high country beyond. It was a bright and breezy August morning, and all about him was pleasingly new and unfamiliar because he had never come this way before. A verdant countryside of pasture and stubble fields, lying gold in the late-summer sunshine. In the distance, friezes of ancient elms marked the boundaries of the hedgerows.
He had been driving for two days, taking his time, relishing the freedom of being on his own, and the satisfying surge of his powerful car. (He had bought the Lagonda a year ago with the money he had been given for a twenty-first birthday, and it was just about the best present he had ever had.) Leaving home, of course, had been a bit of a facer because his parents had thought that, having had those two weeks in France, he would be content to spend the rest of his vacation with them. But he had explained, and cajoled, and promised to return before too long, and his mother had made the best of it, and bravely waved him off, flapping her handkerchief like a little flag. Despite all his resolutions he had, momentarily, been consumed by a ridiculous guilt, but as soon as she was out of sight he was able, without too much difficulty, to put her out of mind.
He drove from Deeside to Carlisle, then Carlisle to Gloucester. Now he was on the last leg of the long journey. After Scotland (wet) and the Midlands (grey), it felt like arriving in a totally new world, sun-washed and pastoral. At the summit of the long hill, Dartmoor came into view, the deserted miles of tor and bog subtly changing colour as billowing cloud shadows rolled across, blown by the western wind. He saw the curving shapes of slopes that seemed to lean up into the sky, the emerald green of bogland, the cairns of granite, carved by the wind into primeval, yet oddly modernistic, sculptures. And his painter's eye was caught, and his fingers itched for pencil and brush, and he longed to stop, then and there, and somehow try to capture, on his sketchpad, this place and this light forever.
But if he stopped, he knew that he would be there for the rest of the day, and he was due, expected, at Nancherrow sometime during the course of the afternoon. Painting must wait. He thought of France and the picture he had done of the Beaths' delectable villa. Thinking of the villa, he began to sing the song that would always be the theme of the holiday, heard on the radio, or played on the gramophone, while they sunbathed by the pool, or sat on the terrace in the blue-scented evenings, drinking wine, watching the sun slip behind the mountains of the Midi, and the lights of Sillence come on one by one, spangling the opposite hillside like Christmas decorations on a dark tree.
La mer
Qu'on voit danser le long des golfes clairs
A des reflets d'argent
La mer
Des reflets changeants
Sous la pluie.
Launceston. He recalled a small bridge, and realised that he had already crossed the county boundary. He was in Cornwall. Ahead lay the wastes of Bodmin Moor. Somewhere there was a pub called Jamaica Inn. It was half past eleven, and for a bit he debated with himself as to whether he should stop there for a drink and something to eat, and then decided against it. Instead he would press on to Truro. Before him the road lay empty. He accelerated and allowed himself to revel in an unaccustomed and uncharacteristic elation.
La mer
Au ciel d'été confond
Ses blancs moutons
Avec les anges si purs
La mer bergère d'azur
Infinie.
Truro drowsed in its valley in the noonday sun. Approaching, he saw the spire of the cathedral, the silver glint of tree-fringed water. He drove into the town, into the wide main street, parked outside The Red Lion, went inside and found his way to the bar. It was very dark and wood-panelled, smelling beery and cool. One or two old boys sat around reading newspapers and smoking their pipes, but Gus settled himself at the bar, and having ordered his half-pint of bitter, asked the barman if it was possible to have something to eat.
‘No. We don't do meals down here. Have to go up to the dining-room for something to eat.’
‘Do I have to book a table?’
‘I'll send word up to the head-waiter. On your own, are you?’
‘Yes, just myself.’
The barman drew his half-pint and set it down on the counter. ‘You travelling, are you?’
‘Yes. I've got my car outside.’
‘Come far?’
‘Yes, actually. From Aberdeen.’
‘Aberdeen? That's up in Scotland, isn't it? Some drive. How long's it taken you?’
‘Two days.’
‘You've come a long way. How much further have you got to go?’
‘Right to the end. Beyond Penzance.’
‘Good as John o' Groats' to Land's End, isn't it?’
‘Just about.’
‘Live in Scotland, do you?’
‘Yes, born and bred.’
‘You haven't got no accent, if you'll excuse me saying so. We had a Scotsman in here a month or two ago, from Glasgow, and I couldn't make out a word he was saying.’
‘Glasgow's a tricky accent.’
‘Tricky all right.’
A couple of new customers came through the door and the barman excused himself, left Gus and went to serve them. Alone, Gus felt for his cigarettes, took one and lit it. At the back of the bar, behind the shelves of bottles, the wall was lined by a mirror. In its murky depths, beyond the bottles, bits of his own reflection stared back at him. A dark young man, looking, he decided, older than his years. Dark-eyed, dark-haired, pale-skinned, clean-shaven. He wore a blue cotton shirt and had knotted a handkerchief around his neck in lieu of a tie, but even this informality did nothing to dispel the image of a dour fellow. Sombre, even.
Cheer up, you gloomy sod, he told his reflection. You are in Cornwall. You've made it. You're here at last. As though his reflection didn't already know. You've come a long way, the barman had remarked, but he had spoken a subtler truth than he realised.
Gus raised the glass to himself. You've come a long way. He drank the cool, woody beer.
It was Edward Carey-Lewis who had first started to call him G
us, and the nickname had stuck. Before that, he had been Angus, the only child of two elderly parents. His father, Duncan Callender, was an astute and successful Aberdeen business man who had pulled himself up, from humble beginnings, by his bootstraps, and by the time Angus arrived on the scene had already amassed a tidy fortune in the ship's chandlery business. As well, over the years, his interests had diverged to include a wholesale ironmongery business and large chunks of city property; tenement blocks and terraces of low-rent housing.
Angus's early childhood had been spent in the heart of Aberdeen, in a solid granite town house set in a small walled garden. The garden had a front lawn and a back green for the washing line, and a small patch of earth where his mother grew runner beans and cabbages. A small world for a small boy, and he was perfectly content.
But Duncan Callender was not. He had got where he was by his own hard work, honesty, and fairness, and so had earned the respect of both his work force and his colleagues. But that was not enough. For his only son he had ambitions, and was determined to raise and educate him a gentleman.
Accordingly, when Angus was seven, the family moved. From the comfortable, unpretentious house that had been home, to an enormous Victorian mansion in a village on the banks of the River Dee. From here, Duncan Callender commuted each day to his office in Aberdeen, and Angus and his mother were left to make the best of it. After the city streets, the shops, and friendly rattling trams, the majestic hills and straths of Deeside were both strange and overwhelming, and their new abode only slightly less so, with its plethora of fumed oak and stained glass, tartan carpeting and fireplaces large enough to roast an ox if one felt so inclined.
As well, a large number of servants had to be employed in order to run this massive establishment. Where, before, Mrs Callender had managed very nicely with a cook and a housemaid, she now found herself expected to give orders to a resident indoor staff of six and two gardeners, one of whom lived in the lodge by the entrance gate. She was a devoted wife and mother, but a simple soul and found it a sad trial to be always struggling to keep up appearances.
In Aberdeen, she had felt comfortable; knowing her own place in the world, and safe in the dignity of a modest, well-run home. But on Deeside, she was totally out of her depth. Neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring. She found it almost impossible to communicate with the village folk, and became convinced that their dour faces and monosyllabic responses to her tentative advances proved that they thought little of her, and were not impressed by the wealth and style of such newcomers.
Her other neighbours, the old noble families who had occupied their castles and estates for generations, were even more terrifying, alien as creatures from another planet. Lady This and the Marquis of That, with their beaked noses and their lanky tweeds. Mrs Huntingdon-Gordon, who bred Labradors, and reigned like some all-powerful warlord, in an archaic keep on the hill. And Major-General Robertson, who read the lesson in church on Sundays rather as though he were barking out orders for battle, and never bothered to lower his voice even when he was being rude to the minister.
It was a very difficult period, but for Angus did not last long. At eight years old he was despatched to boarding-school, an expensive preparatory in Perthshire, and his childhood was virtually over. At first he was teased and bullied. Because of his Aberdeen accent; because his kilt was too long; because he had the wrong sort of fountain-pen, and because he came top of his class and was dubbed a swot. But he was a well-muscled boy and good at football, and after he had bloodied the nose of the lower-school bully, in full view of everybody who happened to be in the playground, he was left alone and swiftly settled down. By the time he returned to Deeside for the Christmas holidays, he had grown two inches and his accent was a thing of the past. His mother secretly grieved for the child she knew she had lost, but Duncan Callender was delighted.
‘Why do you no' ask some of your new pals home?’ he asked, but Angus pretended not to hear him and went out of doors to ride his bicycle.
Finished with prep school, he went on to Rugby, where he earned the reputation of a reliable all-rounder. It was at this period that he discovered the joys of the Art Room, and a latent ability to draw and paint that he had never even suspected he possessed. With the encouragement of a sympathetic art master, he began filling a sketch-book, all the time developing his own style. Pencil drawings, tinted by a pale wash of colour…the playing fields; a boy working at a potter's wheel, a master striding across a windy quad on his way to class with an armful of books and his black gown billowing like fat black wings.
One day, leafing through a copy of The Studio, he read an article on the Cornish painters, the Newlyn School. Illustrating this was a coloured plate of a work by Laura Knight: a girl standing on a rock and watching the sea. The sea was peacock-blue, but the girl wore a sweater so it couldn't be all that hot, and her hair was copper-red, dressed in a single plait which fell across one shoulder.
His attention caught, he read the article, and for some reason it set his imagination ablaze. Cornwall. Perhaps he would become a professional artist, and go and settle in Cornwall, as so many had done before him. He would wear bizarre paint-stained clothes, grow his hair, smoke Gitanes; and there would always be some besotted, devoted girl around, domestically inclined, of course, but beautiful. She would live with him in his fisherman's cottage, or perhaps a converted barn, with an outside staircase of granite blocks and a blue-painted door, and there would be geraniums growing scarlet in earthenware pots…
The illusion was so real that he almost felt the warmth of the sun, smelt the sea wind scented with wild flowers. But a fantasy. He looked up, across the deserted art room, through a tall window to a wintry midland sky. A schoolboy's fantasy. He could never be a professional painter because he was already committed to maths and physics, streamed for Cambridge University and a degree in engineering.
But dreams and fantasies were too precious to abandon altogether. He took out his penknife and carefully removed the colour plate. He slipped it into a folder containing some of his own drawings, and suppressing his conscience, spirited it away. Later he mounted and framed it, and the unknown girl by the Cornish sea made an impressive decoration for the walls of his study.
In other directions too, Rugby widened his experience. Too self-contained to make close friends he was, nevertheless, popular and from time to time invitations were proffered, to spend part of the holidays in other people's country houses, in Yorkshire, or Wiltshire, or Hampshire. These, politely, he accepted, was kindly received, and managed not to perpetrate any obvious social gaffes.
‘And where is it you come from?’ some mother would ask him, over the first cup of tea.
‘Scotland.’
‘You lucky boy. Whereabouts?’
‘My parents have a place on Deeside.’ And then, before she started talking about salmon fishing, a beat on the Dee, and grouse moors, he would change the subject, and ask if he might have a slice of gingerbread. After that, with a bit of luck, the subject would not be raised again.
Returning home after these visits was invariably something of an anticlimax. The truth was that he had outgrown his elderly parents, the hideous house felt claustrophobic and the days endless, broken only by lengthy and tedious mealtimes. His mother's loving attentions stifled him, and his father's embarrassing pride and interest only made matters worse.
But all was not gloom. When he turned seventeen, an unexpected bonus came his way, albeit a mixed blessing. Word, it seemed, had gone around the neighbourhood that the Callender boy, despite the distinct disadvantage of his parents, was not only good-looking but perfectly presentable, and if any hostess was in need of a spare man…? Engraved invitations began to arrive, bidding Angus to various functions to which his mother and father were not. Reel parties and summer balls, where his partners had names like Lady Henrietta McMillan, or The Honourable Camilla Stokes. By now he was able to drive a car, and at the wheel of his father's ponderous Rover he duly got himself to these forma
l events, correctly attired in full Highland rig, starched white shirt and black tie. His training in those country houses in Yorkshire, Wiltshire, and Hampshire now stood him in good stead, and he was able to cope with the formality of massive dinner parties, and afterwards dance until the small hours — smile, be attentive to all the right people — and generally acquit himself to everybody's satisfaction.
But it all seemed a bit like play-acting. He was who he was, with no illusions as to his background or breeding. Driving the long road home after one of these dances, the dark and empty landscape sombre and the sky lightening with the first touch of dawn, the thought occurred to him that, since he was seven years old and the family had left Aberdeen for good, he could remember no place where he'd felt comfortably at home. Not his father's house certainly. Not school. Not the hospitable country establishments in Yorkshire, Wiltshire, and Hampshire, where he had been made so welcome. However much he enjoyed himself, he always felt that he was standing apart and watching others. And he wanted to Belong.
Perhaps one day it would happen. Like falling in love. Or hearing a voice. Or walking into a strange room and finding it instantly recognisable, even though you'd never seen it before in your life. A place where no person would condescend, and he would need no label, no tag. Where he would be made welcome simply because he was himself. ‘Angus, my dear fellow. How good of you to come, and how splendid to see you.’
But matters, unexpectedly, were to improve. After the uneasy years of adolescence, which, for Gus, were more painful and difficult than for most of his contemporaries, Cambridge came as a revelation and a release. From the first moment, he thought it the loveliest city he had ever seen, and Trinity a dream of architecture. During his first few weeks, he spent much of his leisure time simply walking; gradually learning his way about the ancient, time-drenched streets and courtyards. Raised as a Presbyterian, he attended Morning Service in King's Chapel for the sheer joy of listening to the singing, and it was there that he heard for the first time the Gregorian ‘Miserere’, and found himself pierced by reasonless joy as the boys' voices soared to heights that were surely unachievable, unless perhaps by angels.