Life: An Exploded Diagram

  Ruth and George knew that the sexlessness of their marriage was unnatural. They were quietly ashamed of it, as other couples might be ashamed of a perversion. It was their closely guarded secret, and shared secrets are, of course, what keep people together. All the same, they were embarrassed by it. Hurt by it. They coped by pretending that sex simply didn’t exist. They wouldn’t hear of it. Which was as difficult as Eskimos refusing to admit there is such a thing as snow.

  Most evenings they would watch the television. Clem sat at the table, paying intermittent attention to the homework spread in front of him. Ruth and George sat on the new mock-leather sofa, George’s ashtray between them. Win sat on an uncomfortable wooden stool because it was small punishment of her flesh.

  Sometimes (with increasing frequency, it seemed to them) there would be a program in which love raised its ugly head. A couple would confess it, and then their faces would come close together, a slow, ghastly prelude to the inevitable kiss and the fade-out that suggested they were Doing It. At these awful moments, the dread entered the living room of 11 Lovelace Road like a chilling fog. In response to it, Win would look down, muttering, and accelerate her knitting. George would frown and light another Player. Ruth’s plump neck would redden, and she would get to her feet.

  “I can’t put up with this soppy old squit,” she’d say. “I’ll go an put the kettle on.”

  And Clem returned to his homework until the embarrassing scene was over. Before, that is, Frankie happened to him. After, he gazed furtively at the screen from the shelter of his hand, afraid of the fear in the room, his poor heart tumbling to the memory of her parted lips and busy tongue.

  TIME, LIKE EVERYTHING else, was against them. By mid-August, the fruit-picking season, and Frankie’s delicious penance, was at an end. Soon, very soon, there would be no more casual, urgent encounters with Clem in the nooks and fringes of her father’s fields. The inevitability of this disaster made them frantic and despairing by turns. How would they be able to speak to each other? How could they arrange to meet?

  The telephone offered tantalizing possibilities that were fraught with risk. There were three phones at Bratton Manor: one in the morning room, Gerard Mortimer’s “center of operations”; another in the master bedroom, on Frankie’s parents’ bedside table; the third in the front hall. The morning room and her parents’ bedroom were more or less out of bounds. If Frankie were discovered using either of those phones, it would be immensely suspicious. If she used the hall phone, there was always the chance that she would be overheard by Mrs. Cutting, the housekeeper, or one of the two live-in maids, or one of the part-time staff. All this was complicated by the fact that the phones were all on the same line, which meant that a conversation on one phone could be overheard by anyone who picked up either of the others. Clem could not call her, of course. It was not proper for the youngest member of the household to answer the telephone. And if she did, thus arousing suspicion, her parents could simply ring the local operator and ask who had just called, and then the game would be up.

  Despite all this, they settled on a desperate stratagem. Clem would be at home between three thirty and four thirty every weekday. Frankie would call him from the front hall phone sometime during this hour, it being a relatively unbusy part of the day at the manor, and say, “Tonight, quarter to eight,” or “Tomorrow, two o’clock.” (But she could not call on a Wednesday, because it was Ruth’s half day off from the chemist’s.) Clem would name the place. They’d hang up. Five seconds, at most. Even so, there were days when she dared not or could not make the call. Then Clem would spend the hour in an agony of waiting and the remainder of the day in numb despair. Naming the place was increasingly problematic. They’d abandoned their hiding place in Skeyton Woods. Twice they’d been almost discovered: once by warring young boys, then by a man with a dog. So, after his parents and Win had gone to work, he’d set off on his bike to reconnoiter places that were roughly equidistant from Millfields and the manor. He’d found one or two that might be suitable. The trouble was that he knew the surrounding countryside far more intimately than Frankie did, and their furtive calls were not long enough for him to give her foolproof directions. One afternoon he waited in a snug little copse for two hours, not knowing that she was urging Marron up and down a lane half a mile away, looking for the way to it. They had their first argument the following day.

  “It’s simply ridiculous,” Frankie said, refusing to lie down on the thick bed of tea-brown pine needles.

  “Frankie, I said just look for —”

  “I know what you said. That’s not really the point, is it? The whole thing is ridiculous. I must be mad.”

  She was still angry, or pretending to be, when she unbuttoned her blouse.

  Then he found the perfect place.

  He was in misery at the time. Three whole days had passed without a call. He’d spent them getting nowhere with his holiday homework.

  Is Keats “half in love with easeful Death”? Cite evidence from two of the poems.

  Explain the consequences of the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713, in terms of subsequent European history. Quote your sources.

  Produce a piece of work entitled The Intensification of Red. It can be either representational or abstract.

  When Frankie lets you put your hand Down There, which soon she will surely do, what will you do with it? Show your work.

  On the morning of the fourth day, he rode to a telephone box on the far side of Borstead and dialed Bratton Manor. His finger in the dial shook, then slipped. He had to start again. A woman answered.

  “Bratton Morley 239.”

  As if it were a question. A Norfolk accent, the t’s of “Bratton” gone missing. He hung up and pressed the button to get his coins back.

  He mounted his bike and rode nowhere in particular. He found himself on the Gunston road and regretted it: it was a long, slow, undulating climb. He thumbed the gearchange and leaned down on the pedals, lifting himself from the saddle. The effort of it, if he focused on it, almost drove the hurt away. It was not a road Clem knew well. There were no fruit fields in this direction, and Gunston was nothing. Borstead was Las Vegas compared to Gunston. At the top of the rise, he stopped to rest for a minute, intending to turn back. There were no hedges alongside this stretch of road, just low banks of fading grass punctuated by stunted hawthorns.

  He was surprised how vast the view was from this modest elevation: almost three hundred and sixty degrees, although the horizon was blurred by heat haze. Ahead and off to the left, he could make out the stumpy tower of Gunston church. On either side of the road, fields of wheat stubble stretched into the distance. Huge fields, bigger than any he had ever seen, uninterrupted by hedgerows. Alien, somehow. Had it always been like this? It had been a couple of years, maybe, since he’d been out this way, but Clem was fairly sure it hadn’t been possible to see such distances back then. What had happened? Where had all the trees gone?

  He became aware of a faint, uneven rumbling. Shading his eyes, he could just make out the lumbering bulk of a combine harvester. No, three combine harvesters, working side by side in a wide cloud of dust. He’d never seen that before, either.

  The openness of this landscape, its bareness, confused him. Spooked him slightly. It was as if he’d accidentally cycled into another country. He climbed onto the bank to his right and gazed around, trying to get his bearings. He’d been riding south, so he was facing westward. He’d come about three miles, so he was looking toward Bratton Manor. And Frankie, perhaps. About two miles away? He could just make out the gray-green hump of Skeyton Woods, but the house was hidden by a fold in the brown and naked land.

  Clem remounted the bike and turned toward home. He reckoned that after a few shoves on the pedals, he’d be able to freewheel downhill for the best part of a mile. It was the first pleasant thought of the day. Then in the afternoon there’d be the hour of waiting for the phone to ring. The hour willing it to ring.

  He coasted down the dipping road for fiv
e minutes, and then, where it leveled again, braked. He hadn’t noticed the knot of trees and the tangled hedge on his way up the hill. He’d been concentrating on the climb, and besides, he hadn’t known at the time that something so ordinary was about to become an unusual feature of the landscape. Now he saw that the disorderly hedge had overgrown a line of bent and rusty railing and that the gap in it contained a wrought-iron gate hanging aslant from a single hinge. Something — curiosity, luck, instinct — made him wheel the bike over to it. A rectangular slat of wood lay in the grass under the drunken gate. He picked it up and turned it over. A word had been carved into it, long ago. Clem cleaned the dirt away with the edge of his palm. The first five letters jolted him: Frank. Then: lins. Franklins. He heard the sound of a car and dropped the sign and shoved the bike through the gateway. He crouched behind the hedge. The car passed. He stood up, wondering why he had needed not to be seen.

  The trees nearest him were youngish sycamores. Trees that grew like weeds if you let them. They’d colonized what might once upon a time have been a lawn. He was standing on what might once upon a time have been a path or drive. He left the bike where it was and followed the path, here and there turning sideways to shoulder through branch and bracken.

  He almost stumbled into the pit where the house had once stood: its cellar, he supposed. Three sides of it marked by the low remains of walls, a gable wall higher than the others, all now gripped and pierced by tree roots and sprouting fern. The overgrown path continued past the ruin, and Clem pushed along it, arriving at last at the rear of a mossy redbrick building that looked pretty much intact. He walked around its corner and stopped dead, confounded.

  He found himself standing on a low peninsula of wilderness that protruded into the vast ocean of stubble. Its edge was defined by a stand of tall and ancient Scots pines, their trunks all reddish, peeling scales. He stood in the mottled shadow of the trees and gazed out. Everything ahead of him and around him looked scalped and baked, but now this did not dismay him. Because he was looking down on Bratton Manor. It was closer than he’d thought it would be. He could make out the stubs of its chimneys, part of its walled courtyard, the drive curving away between the chestnuts. He couldn’t resist the desire to cup his hands around his mouth and call her name. The word disappeared, echoless, into the enormous sky.

  Clem turned away and looked at the brick barn behind him. It was quite large, about forty feet long and twelve high. It had no doors, just a wide opening with a weathered timber frame. Above that, a slumping oak lintel under a roof of skewed slates. The only window, a small shuttered aperture, high up, to the right of the door.

  Inside, it took several moments for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. It was not entirely dark; sharply defined shafts of light tilted down from where slates were missing. He stood still until he could make out the obstacles on the leaf-strewn floor: a bundle of fence stakes wrapped in barbed wire, a heap of moldering sacks, an upended wooden thing like a child’s crudely carpentered bed. Close to the back wall, a rough narrow board rose up. A banister, of sorts, beside a flight of steps. He looked up. The building had a second floor. Or rather half of a second floor: a hayloft supported by heavy wooden beams that spanned the building. The steps were narrow, no wider than the rungs of a ladder. He tested each tread with his foot before trusting it with his weight. They all gave and groaned, but did not break.

  At the top, the darkness was more intense. On the far side of the loft, there were four thin lines of light, forming a square. It took Clem several moments to work out that this was the shuttered window he’d seen from outside. He made his way toward it on his hands and knees, slowly, horribly afraid of the floor giving way, of falling into darkness among its wreckage. His hands encountered dry leaves, straw, splintery planks. When he reached the window, he steadied his breathing. His fingers found a wooden latch but could not turn it. He clubbed at it with his fist, scraping his knuckles, until he felt it give way. He thumped the shutters, but they wouldn’t open. He thought about it, then pulled instead and fell backwards in a blaze of light.

  Kneeling — the roof was close to his head now — he peered out. For an absurd moment he felt like a character from an adventure story. The powder boy looking out through the gun port of a man-o’-war. The young hero finding his way out of a dark labyrinth of caves. Then far more thrilling possibilities occurred to him.

  He was looking between two pines at the bare undulating fields. There were the roofs of Bratton Manor again. The combine harvesters were out of sight beyond a swell of the land, but he could tell where they were from their dust cloud. So how did they get there? Bratton Manor Farm was farther over to the right, invisible from where he was. But the machines must have come to the fields from there.

  And if they could, so could Frankie.

  The phone rang at three forty, almost stopping his heart.

  “Seven this evening,” she said, very quietly.

  He was so sickened by relief that he almost forgot the short speech he’d practiced.

  “Go to the farm, Frankie, then up into the fields where your dad’s combines are working. Thas eastwuds, toward the Gunston road, okay? Look for a group of big pine trees and a barn. You can’t miss it. About a mile and half. It’s called Franklins.”

  He waited.

  She said, “I don’t . . .”

  Then she was speaking more loudly. “I don’t know, I’m afraid. Yes, I’ll tell him you called. Thank you. Good-bye.”

  Click.

  His hand was shaking as he put the receiver down.

  It had been the longest phone conversation they’d ever had. He prayed they hadn’t blown it.

  Frankie loitered in the hallway until she was fairly sure that the coast was clear. Then she slipped into the morning room. The big collage of aerial photographs was now liberally marked with blue rectangles, arrows, and dates. She tracked her finger from the manor toward the Gunston road. Her nail passed through several groups of trees and meandering hedges, but she knew that the landscape didn’t look like that anymore. She tried to repicture it, to wipe those details out. She reached the road and tracked south a little way until she came to a clump of trees shaped a bit like an arrowhead aimed at the manor, at her. She studied it closely, biting her lip. Yes, those might well be pines. And was that a roof?

  It seemed to her that the thump of her heart might be audible.

  Her parents were going out tonight.

  She would have time.

  Okay.

  She went to the door, then glanced back. There was a pack of Three Castles cigarettes on her father’s desk. She hesitated, then went and picked it up and shook it. It sounded sort of half empty. She stuffed it into her skirt pocket.

  Clem and Frankie leaned on their elbows, their shoulders touching. Outside the small window, the sky above the horizon was a deep amber. Thin streamers of cloud the same color as their cigarette smoke.

  “I’m really sorry. Daddy suddenly announced that he was going to London for a business meeting. I thought, Great. Then Mummy decided that we would go, too, and do some shopping. I tried to get out of it, honestly. I couldn’t call you before we left. You must have been worried sick.”

  Below them, Marron snuffled and stamped his feet.

  “Yeah, I was. I thought you’d . . . You know.”

  She turned her face to his.

  “What? Gone off you?”

  They kissed, tongue slithering over tongue, cigarettes held away.

  “So what did you do? In London.”

  “I told you. Shopping.”

  “What, for three days? What did you buy?”

  She shrugged.

  “You know. Clothes and so forth.”

  He felt there was something she wasn’t telling him. He didn’t want to know what it was. But he couldn’t keep the sulk from his face. She saw it and plucked the cigarette from his fingers and stubbed it out on the floor, then did the same with her own. She rolled on top of him, pressing down on him, kissing him. br />
  When she had breath enough, she said, “Put your hands lower down. Please.”

  A lifetime later she lifted herself off him, tossed her hair aside, and looked at her watch, a small silver-framed square on a black leather strap.

  “I don’t want to stop,” she said, “but I have to go now.”

  “I thought you said your mum and dad were out.”

  “It’s not just them.”

  She was kneeling astride him. With the last light behind her, all he could see of her face was the glimmer in her eyes. He took her breasts in his hands.

  “Oh, Lordy,” she said.

  “Frankie.”

  “No. Clem.”

  “Please.”

  “No. I have to go.”

  She stood, stooping under the roof. He thought she was angry.

  He said, “What d’you think of this place, then? Will it do?”

  She looked over her bare shoulder into the gloom.

  “It needs tidying up a bit. But, yes, it’ll do.”

  THEY FURNISHED THE loft modestly. An inventory of its contents would be brief: a horse blanket (clean) from the manor’s tack room; a sleeping bag (only slightly less so), last used three years ago on Clem’s one and only (and miserable) school cadet camp; a few candles and a box of matches (sometimes, when dusty rain flurried at them over the naked fields, they found it necessary to close the shutters); a shallow wooden box, found beneath the loft, kept supplied with carrots and apples (to placate Marron when he grew restless); fear (often); delirium (frequently).

  They embarked upon their halcyon days. Their brief golden age.

  Over breakfast, Frankie would tell her parents that she thought she might take Marron on a nice long hack, then go to the kitchen and ask Cook, sweetly, if she would prepare a packed lunch.

  Nicole found it vaguely worrying.

  “Don’t you think it strange, this sudden enthusiasm for riding, Gerard?”

  Mortimer replied from behind the Daily Telegraph.