‘Well, the bloody estate is broke. Be reasonable. You’re so vituperative: why should he want to forgive you?’
‘You can’t see that aspect of things as clearly as I can. After all, you’re a Squire too. Tom just wants me at Pippet Hall. That satisfies his love of order. He’ll forgive anything, anything, to get me back, because the Hall is the most important thing in his life. Any messy divorce, or anything like that, and he could lose the Hall. I’ve got him by the short hairs and he knows it. I’m being kinder than you think, driving over here today to see what he has to say, especially with my health delicate.’
She stopped before the anger in Deirdre’s face.
‘Don’t dare think that way. You’d even use his love of the Hall against him? Just watch it. Marsh and I may have been away, but we also have an interest in the Hall. I have witnesses to prove that you have been back there on several occasions, and have taken that little rotter Jarvis with you. And you had him over when Tom was away filming, before you found out about Laura.’
As they stood there confronting each other, they heard footsteps and voices outside in the back yard.
‘Don’t bring Vernon Jarvis into this,’ Teresa said. Her face and lips were pale.’ He’s not around now. He had nothing to do with this quarrel — ’
‘He has fleeced you and hopped it?’
‘I said, he is not around. Tom started the quarrel and Tom has to mend it. Money doesn’t mend quarrels, if you think it does. Tom’s the one in the wrong.’
‘Well, get him out of the wrong, then. You certainly owe him that.’
The ponies were hired from Old Man Hill, who had run a stable in conjunction with his fishing boat for longer than anyone in Blakeney could remember.
After walking along in the shallows of the sleeping sea, the animals were reluctant to be turned towards the land. Douglas and young Tom rode ahead, wearing only swimming trunks and trying to steer the animals with their knees. Tom Squire and Marshall Kaye followed behind.
For two summers in succession, Kaye had been digging in Greece. He was tanned a deep brown behind his spectacles, and presented a striking appearance. His drooping moustache was yellow, his eyebrows dark brown, his hair brown fading to blond on top, where the Aegean sun had bleached it. So the years had baked him, Squire reflected, from a brash young Yale graduate to a seasoned and renowned archaeologist. His eyes, fringed by dark lashes, were light blue. Above his shorts was a worn windcheater of a similar faded hue.
He was giving Squire an account of his and Deirdre’s stay on Milos, making both it and the excavations sound rewarding. Squire envied the stability of the younger man’s life.
‘Despite everything, despite that amazing sense of being surrounded by the history of your own culture, I find Greece and the islands depressing,’ Kaye said.
‘How’s that? I thought the Greeks were getting into their stride again, now that the colonels have departed.’
Their mounts negotiated low swelling dunes through which some first spears of grass appeared.
‘They are, kind of. I suppose I mean that the denudation problem is depressing, and the way nothing’s being done about it, or is ever going to be done, as far as I can see. Not more than two per cent of the entire country retains its original top-soil…’
‘Not more than two per cent!’
‘Nope. That’s the fact at the root of all Greece’s problems. From the Peloponnesian wars onwards, the forests have been ruthlessly hacked down and the timber used for ships or fuel. Rain and wind soon does for naked topsoil. You never see a damned bird in Greece. A few mangey sparrows round the tourist spots. Ravens. Nothing else. It’s a dead place, killed by man, his lust for war, and his domestic animals — mainly goats.’
He was silent, then he said, ‘Political stability is impossible until you get your agriculture right. I’d hate to calculate how many billions of dollars the US has pumped into Greece since World War II in order to keep it safe for democracy, without once worrying whether it was safe for corn.’
They were off the beach now, moving inland, the boys still leading. They travelled in single file along the top of a dyke, water and rushes setting up their perpetual rustle on either side. Where the land rose from the marshes ahead, there stood Blakeney, distinct in a medley of whites and umbers, its church crowning the rise and dominating all other buildings.
Squire rode at the rear of the file. Addressing his brother-in-law’s back, he said, ‘Considering its significance for the West, it would be a sad day if Greece became communist.’
‘But not necessarily fatal, to my mind.’ Kaye twisted in the saddle to add, ‘I’m slowly altering my opinions. The West has been reluctant to realize how nationalism remains a safeguard against the monolithic aspects of communism. Your experiences in Yugoslavia show how nationalism triumphed over ideology there. So it will elsewhere — China for example. Maybe Eurocommunism is a genuine new direction. The Eurocommunists in Bologna make noises like decent uncorrupt capitalists.’
‘Don’t weaken, Marsh. That way the rot sets in.’
‘Maybe. Maybe not. I like to talk, Tom, but I was always a dove, not a hawk. That’s why I quit the States during the sixties. More aggressive we get, the more trigger-happy the Russians become.’
‘That’s an attitude they want us to adopt, certainly.’
After a pause, Kaye added, “I appreciate that Britain’s position is far more vulnerable than that of the States. We’re just as open to sudden armed strikes here as Western Germany. But I discover I have ceased to believe in the concept of sudden strikes.’
They were moving among sailing craft lying on their sides on muddy banks patterned by bird feet.
‘Despite events in Czechoslovakia in ‘68?’
‘Of course, there are many people in the States, mainly of the older generation, who would feel about the collapse of the UK much as you would about the collapse of Greece.’
Squire laughed. ‘Well, that’s a consolation.’
The sun enveloped Squire’s body, bathing it in summer. He felt the heat on his sparsely protected head and the occasional runnel of sweat down his chest. That suited him well. Yet he felt uneasy, he did not know why.
He was sorry to hear his brother-in-law speak as he did. The world was a dangerous place — that was the open secret a younger generation of Englishmen resolutely refused to learn; they believed that as long as everyone earned the same wages, all was well. Marshall’s generation of Americans knew better than that. But everyone, of whatever nationality, seemed to prefer to forget that certain ancient laws were not revoked simply by the setting up of trade unions and health services: predators were about. The world was a dangerous place: for the individual as well as the nation.
The patient ponies carried them to the flat ground by the harbour.
‘We’re going to grab some ice creams, Dad,’ Douglas called.
Squire and Kaye handed the ponies over to Old Man Hill’s daughter, a gnarled woman, who sat patiently by the artist’s van. The men looked in at the paintings displayed for sale inside the van, and were confronted with a conventional array of windmills, churches, cows, and willows. They strolled together towards Marsh House, which faced them from the other end of the quay. Along the quayside, they passed the hotel where Squire had dined with Tess, Grahame Ash, and the camera crew a year ago; it seemed a happier time in retrospect.
‘You gain a different perspective on the world when you’re engaged in a dig,’ Kaye said. ‘In a sense, you live in the past, the present becomes remote.’