The Girl Green as Elderflower Read online

  ‘Oh—yes and no. I usually have my frostbitten nose in a book.’

  ‘That old Latin, still? Will anything come of it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘There’s something I want to do, but I don’t see how. Like you with your painting, I find that I let myself down. Though you know you don’t, Lissa.’

  ‘It is rather cheering,’ she said, ‘to push on anyway. Who was it who believed in acting “As If”?’

  ‘Camus,’ he said, ‘I think. Yes, I do know the cheer of pushing on. Out there,’ he explained, suddenly diffident, ‘I used to do a lot of writing. I thought I might forget the language otherwise.’

  He saw that she approved, but exactly as she approved of Mark’s new interest in music, on principle. ‘It is odd,’ she said, ‘to think of a Clare swotting away at his Latin down in The Hole. Oh, I’ve remembered something. Do you think you could face a game of Monopoly with the children?’

  ‘I suppose I could,’ he said. ‘But what a jump, from spooks to real estate.’

  ‘How quickly they jump from anything to anything. I find the adaptability of children rather inhuman. Do you know that last year little Amabel was flown all the way to Hong Kong, and couldn’t remember afterwards seeing anything that was worth mentioning.’ She rose from the creaking chair, and put away her needles and wool in a drawer.

  On the high mantelshelf, level with his eye, Clare noticed a photograph taken in the garden in late summer. Mikey was grimacing at the photographer, Lucy was self-consciously sensible. On the grass several yards of Mark were disposed, huge feet towards the camera. Alicia, in a headscarf, was glancing aside at Clare himself, whose face was white and hollow-eyed. He thought: One would say that man was terrified.

  Alicia said, watching him: ‘Sometimes you did look like that. Not now, though. Much more healthy and cabbage-like now.’ She opened the door, and the guitar grew louder. He followed her out, into the older, darker house, in which there were distant sounds of Mikey throwing a tantrum.

  On the road the new snow lay powdery and creaking. ‘This is a bit better,’ said Mark. ‘I went flat on my back here last night.’ He stamped his heavy boots and swung his long arms, looking massive and dark in the white-gleaming night.

  Ahead the red curtains of the Shoulder of Mutton glowed like coals. A light but bitter breeze had risen, and the pub sign creaked a little.

  ‘Goo-to-hell, booy,’ Mark shivered, ‘thass a lazy old wind.’

  ‘Why “lazy”?’ Clare asked.

  ‘That don’t want to goo round you, that just goo through.’

  As they reached the pub door it opened and a girl came out, almost colliding with Mark, who stepped clumsily aside, scattering snow. She was a slight girl, whose hair, lit from behind, shone very fair.

  ‘Hullo there,’ Mark said. ‘Happy New Year.’

  The girl’s eyes, as well as Clare could see, were green or blue. She paid no attention to Mark, but looked past him at the night, then stepped forward and walked away across the snow.

  ‘Could you say,’ Clare asked, enjoying Mark’s discomfited face, ‘that someone had lazy eyes? Hers certainly went straight through you.’

  ‘Foreign bitch,’ Mark muttered. ‘All right, we haven’t been introduced, but that’s no reason for her to treat me as if I was a flasher.’ He pushed the heavy curtain aside, and Clare, following, banged the door.

  The long bar was full of wood-smoke and tobacco-smoke, trapped between the low ceiling and the red-quarried floor. Clare, as he took his place beside Mark in front of the leaping fire, felt his eyes immediately and as usual begin to smart. While Mark acknowledged the automatic greetings, he asked curiously. ‘Who was she?’

  ‘Ah,’ Mark said. ‘Fancied her, did you?’

  ‘I hardly saw her. She looked interesting.’

  ‘She’s one of Lady Munby’s au pairs. They come and go. From Scandinavia and thereabouts. Usually their English is more theory than practice. I suppose she didn’t want to get into a conversation she couldn’t understand.’

  Clare wondered why she had been there at all, in a bar where so many spoke a dialect which baffled Londoners. That male and smoky place was no setting for her ethereal blondeness.

  A gypsy-looking boy in a woollen cap, who was practising darts by himself, turned at the board and called to Mark: ‘Sudbury!’ Mark made a vaguely rude gesture at him, and moved on towards the bar.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Clare wondered.

  ‘Sudbury? It means you’re keeping the fire off everyone else. No one knows why.’

  Behind the bar the landlord nodded: ‘Evening, Mark, Cris,’ and reached under the counter for two pint pots. Filling one at a tap, he asked as an afterthought: ‘Bitter?’ and without waiting for an answer went on: ‘Still snowing?’

  ‘Sky’s clearing,’ Mark said. ‘Peter, do you know that girl’s name?’

  The landlord set down one pot and started on the second. ‘What girl is that?’

  ‘The blonde bird. The foreign one.’

  The landlord, in a bright yellow cardigan which was clearly a Christmas present, was solid, bald and slow. ‘Blonde bird,’ he said to himself, pondering. ‘Oh-ah. Just now went out. First time I sin her.’

  ‘It’s mine,’ Clare said, putting his money down. ‘Good health, Marco.’

  ‘Cheers, Crissie,’ said Mark. ‘By the way, I’m called Mark outside the nest.’

  ‘She come in with Jim,’ the landlord said. ‘She only stay five minutes.’

  Clare followed his gesture to see which Jim he meant, and noticed the large man sitting alone at one end of the bar. Reading the clues of the man’s face and coat and short hair, he concluded that Jim was American. He said to the landlord: ‘Air Force?’ and was then abashed to find that the stranger had turned his head and was looking back at him. To break contact he raised his pot and squinted into it.

  ‘No,’ Peter said; ‘tourist. We put him up just before Christmas. Nice chap, Jim. Not much to say for himself, for a Yank.’

  Mark, who had dreams of California and wild freedoms, gave the Yank an interested glance, but found him too old to matter. In a tactful movement his eye travelled on to the dart-board, and watched the gypsy-looking boy, with much preparation, plant three darts in it. Mark said loudly: ‘Rubbish.’

  The dark youth turned and looked at him, impassive, but with humour in his long-cut eyes. He said: ‘Should you care to make a spectacle of yourself, dear boy?’

  ‘Mind if I leave you alone for a while, Cris?’ Mark asked. And as Clare, drinking, gave an assenting shrug, he took the darts which the landlord handed him from behind the bar and went to join the boy in the knitted cap.

  ‘Robin will give him the brush and have a pint off him,’ Peter said. ‘He int very sharp, young Mark.’ His straying eye took in some slight gesture from the American, and he wandered away to the other end of the bar.

  Clare, studying a beermat, listened to the light thud of darts, the click of dominoes on a table behind him. A dart thunked into wood, then fell to the floor, and one of the domino-players called sardonically: ‘Lovely arrers, Mark.’

  The American, Clare noticed, was drinking double whiskies, which in a public bar in Swainstead made him exotic.

  He felt a light tug at his trouser-leg, reminding him of Mikey, and looking down met the stare of a black kitten. Its mouth moved in a silent mew. He wondered what impossible thing it could expect from him, with eyes so indecipherable and intent.

  The domino-player explained in the same slow voice: ‘What she want, Cris, is she want you to buy a packet of crisps.’ At the sound of his name he swung round, and saw John with his face again downturned over his hand of tiles. Somehow he always wanted to laugh at the sight of John, the type of the young yokel from nineteenth-century melodrama. His hair, cut pudding-basin fashion, was like frost-bitten grass. From under his fringe, small round blue eyes, already netted in weather-lines, looked up with the slyness of purest innocence. The prototype of John had always th
ought itself a shrewd sort of chap, even as it went like a lamb to the chair of Sweeney Todd.

  He was not used to seeing John away from the farm, and was surprised to recognize in the back of the other domino-player John’s older and very taciturn work-mate Roger. In the summer, so it had seemed to Clare, they must have spent almost every waking hour together. Perhaps such habits became necessities. Roger, with a wrench of his black head, growled: ‘How do, Cris,’ and went back to studying his tiles.

  The robust, canary-breasted landlord returned, and said: ‘Jim say would you like a drink?’ He seemed embarrassed by the message.

  ‘But I don’t know him,’ Clare said. ‘Why me? Anyway, I’m not ready.’

  The landlord, too, was uneasy about such foreign manners. ‘I just mentioned to him you was interested in the same kind of things.’

  Not knowing what the things were, Clare looked for a clue to the American himself, and seeing in the other man’s face an expectation, picked up his beer and walked to where he sat. At his approach the American turned on his stool, and seemed with a movement of his eyes to suggest another stool, which Clare as silently took.

  ‘Peter,’ said the American, at length, ‘tells me you’re an antiquarian.’

  The word struck Clare as strange, perhaps because it was presented as coming from the landlord’s mouth. ‘He told me,’ he said, ‘that you were a tourist. So am I, more or less.’

  The American sipped his whisky. ‘You’re called Cris.’

  ‘Yes. You’re called Jim.’

  ‘Right.’ The American seemed to consider the idea of shaking hands, and to drop it. ‘Could I buy you a drink?’

  ‘Not now, thanks,’ Clare said. ‘What do you do, as a tourist?’

  ‘I poke around in churches,’ the American said. ‘Like you, I hear.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve done a bit of that,’ Clare admitted. He remained wary of the stranger, who would sooner or later ask some question difficult to answer.

  In the room behind them Mark burst out: ‘What the hell’s the matter with me?’ and Robin said: ‘You need a white stick and a dog, that’s what’s the matter.’

  ‘It’s great,’ the American said; ‘the accent.’

  ‘I like it,’ Clare agreed, growing easier with him. ‘Perhaps that’s atavism. My people must have spoken pretty broad at one time.’

  ‘But not now,’ the American supposed.

  ‘We’re extinct. Well, nearly. I’ve two or three distant cousins. That beanpole playing darts so badly is one.’

  On Mark’s half of the board, virgin of any score, Robin was chalking the outline of a whitewash brush, incomplete.

  ‘I guess we’re extinct, too,’ the American said, ‘in Europe. Not that I looked very hard when I was in Brittany.’ As Clare put interest into his face, the man explained: ‘I’m French-Canadian, from Maine. My name’s Jacques Maunoir.’

  For friendliness, Clare said: ‘Crispin Clare,’ and for civility they did shake hands after all.

  ‘Crispin,’ the big man said thoughtfully. ‘Crispin Clare. I know that name.’

  ‘I’ve a headstone in the churchyard,’ Clare said. ‘It even has my address on it.’

  ‘The Hole,’ Jim Maunoir remembered. ‘Does it make you laugh, too?’

  ‘It did,’ Clare said. ‘Not that I often hear it, except from old people.’

  A groan came from Mark as Robin speared his last double. ‘Shot, sir!’ he congratulated hollowly. ‘Nice arrow, boy. Jammy prat.’

  ‘The beanpole lost,’ deduced Jim Maunoir.

  ‘Didn’t even score,’ Clare confirmed. ‘Obviously you’ve poked around the church here.’

  ‘I did a brass-rubbing,’ Maunoir said, ‘as well as I could with my hands frozen. Were you here before that girl went out?’

  ‘We passed her,’ Clare said. The kitten was tugging at Maunoir’s leg, and the two of them were staring at one another.

  ‘Why I asked,’ Maunoir said, ‘was because I met her in the church. Well, it wasn’t a meeting, but we were both there. And tonight I passed her on the road, a mile outside the village, tramping along through the snow. So I offered her a ride, and after that a drink to thaw her out. She came in just to please me, that was made clear, but she wouldn’t settle. She was like a bird. Do you know her?’

  ‘No,’ Clare said. ‘Nobody seems to know her. She’s foreign, isn’t she?’

  ‘Is she?’ Maunoir said, surprised. ‘She could be. She surely doesn’t talk a lot. She has some kind of accent, but I picked her for a local girl.’

  ‘Perhaps she is,’ Clare said. ‘Probably Mark mixed her up with someone else.’

  ‘A really strange kind of girl,’ said Maunoir, reliving it. ‘I mean, yes and no were quite long speeches. And she looks at you. This cat made me think of her. She looks at you like that, and her eyes are green.’

  Imagining the scene, Clare realized what it was about Maunoir that, by striking him as slightly out of key, appealed to his sympathies. The American seemed to be in his early thirties, and of the type from which Hollywood drew its football heroes. His frame was large, his hair cropped, and his strong and open face potentially stern. At variance with everything else, his eyes were somehow undefended. If the blonde girl had stared at him like the kitten, it would have been with a kind of manly wistfulness that he looked back at her.

  A hand clamped on Clare’s shoulder, and Mark said: ‘Lend me half a crown, mate. I’ve enough for your pint, but I owe Robin one.’

  Clare rummaged in his jacket pocket and found a crumpled note. ‘Here, have ten bob,’ he said. ‘And I don’t need a drink.’

  ‘You’ve got one,’ Mark said, ‘in the stable,’ and he went back to Robin.

  Maunoir said: ‘If your family’s extinct, it won’t lie down. That was done like a brother. On his side, I mean.’

  Clare said: ‘You sound like a brother.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ the big man said, ‘there’s a whole bunch of Maunoirs where I came from.’ Suddenly he seemed to have something faintly saddening on his mind. ‘Even the younger ones always figure I need a dollar.’

  ‘What do you do?’ Clare asked. ‘Sorry, I take back that question. Only, I wondered whether you might be something interesting, like a starving genius.’

  ‘No, sir,’ Maunoir said, and flashed his candid smile (his Joe College smile, thought Clare, who had been a film-goer in his student days), which his light-coloured eyes contradicted by seeming to be shadowed over. ‘All I am is a retired teacher.’

  ‘Retired?’

  ‘Temporarily retired. This fall I took off.’

  Clare wondered, because of the shadowy sadness, about divorce, or widowerhood, or even a scandal involving a pupil. But he wanted no more information about Jim Maunoir, who would surely expect some return.

  And Maunoir expected already. ‘You wouldn’t be a starving genius yourself?’

  ‘Shut up about starving,’ Clare said. ‘No, I’m—’. He saw that a brief dash would do it best. ‘I’m also retired. I was a very raw anthropologist, working for one of the colonial governments. About eighteen months ago I was bowled over by tropical diseases, some way from a doctor. I took leave, but it turned into resignation.’

  He began to notice a change in Maunoir’s demeanour, a change which made him more familiar, though Clare could not think why. It was partly that he listened and looked so intently.

  ‘You people are casual about that word “colonial”,’ he remarked.

  ‘Just then,’ Clare said shortly, ‘I used it correctly.’ At once he regretted the shortness, though it had made no impression on Maunoir’s rather commanding, grave face. ‘But if you mean I’m a relic of the past, I admit it. I am.’ It ocurred to him that a deluge of personal details would be likely to kill unwanted questions. ‘I was born in South Africa, of a New Zealand mother and a father born in India. My mother and I sat out the war in New Zealand. After that, my father was in Malaya, and I went to boarding school in Australia. Then he was in Kenya, and
I went to school in Devon. The end of the Empire was pretty confusing to families like mine.’

  He had been fiddling with his pint-pot, printing circle on circle with a little beer which he had slopped. When he looked up, he understood with sudden, amazing clarity the expression of Jim Maunoir. What he had taken for a kind of wistfulness was a kind of bargaining. The eyes said: In return for what I admit of the sadness of myself, have confidence that I won’t fail to understand you.

  Clare could not take his own eyes off the man. ‘You’re a priest.’

  Maunoir did not answer, and his face did not change.

  Something happened inside Clare’s head, something which had happened before. It was as though his brain fell backwards a short way. Afterwards, he asked: ‘Who sent you?’

  Maunoir gave his Joe College smile, but his eyes were the same. He said: ‘What a question, Cris.’

  ‘Oh, I thought it was over,’ Clare muttered, in despair. ‘The priests. The psychotherapists. I thought it was all over now.’

  Maunoir asked: ‘Are people sent here often, Cris?’

  ‘Not here,’ Clare said. ‘Not in this country. Oh Jesus, I don’t want it spoiled in this country.’

  ‘Listen,’ Maunoir said. ‘No, look at me, Crispin.’ His shadowed eyes were offered like a vow. ‘No one will be sent to you in this country. And I am not a priest.’

  ‘No?’ said Clare, doubting. ‘Would you lie to me, Jim?’

  ‘I was a Jesuit,’ Maunoir said. ‘I’m not one now.’

  Clare put his head down, and breathed deep. He looked at the toes of his Wellingtons among the fag-ends. He started to laugh.

  ‘What’s the joke?’ Maunoir asked.

  ‘I’m paranoid,’ Clare said, still laughing. ‘Paranoid. It is a joke.’

  Maunoir said genially: ‘It wouldn’t take much to convince me you were psychic. Non psycho sed psychico. A fatherly funny. Here comes the beer from your cousin. Sit up straight now and drink it like a man.’

  Clare pushed aside his emptied pot and looked at the circles on circles stamped in drying beer over the shining wood of the bar. So inside atoms. So in all space. The everlasting terror of a process without term.