At eleven, Jenna begins to yawn. She apologises: it has been a long day, and she has an early start in the morning. We look out of the window at the lights on the hill. In summer, she tells me, every house is lit up at night; in the dead of winter, they are nearly all dark. She often works for Londoners in the holiday months. ‘Some of them, you wonder why they have children. But they pay good money,’ she says.
‘Not all of them,’ says William, putting his arm around her.
Jenna gives me a hug. She hopes to meet me again.
‘I’m sure you will,’ I answer.
‘Oh, you will, definitely,’ says William.
As soon as Jenna has left us, William asks, as if a lot depends on the answer: ‘So? What do you think?’
‘She’s terrific,’ I tell him, candidly.
He looks towards the window. ‘OK,’ he murmurs, and for a moment, despite what I’ve seen of them together, I think he’s about to tell me that he is having doubts. But what he says is: ‘In that case I’m going to give her the bended knee routine. If she says Yes, you’re the best man. Or the best I can manage.’
In one of her letters Adeline makes reference to an ancestor, John Hewitt, who died at Clyst Heath. His throat was cut by a German Lanzknecht. On August 5th, 1549, nine hundred Cornish prisoners were killed in this way at Clyst Heath, by order of Lord William Grey, who had one thousand German mercenaries under his command. Grey and his Germans were fighting the Catholic insurrectionists of Cornwall alongside the king’s troops. The king’s chronicler, John Hayward, recorded that the nine hundred prisoners were bound and gagged before their throats were slit, and that the slaughter lasted a mere ten minutes. On hearing of the atrocity, an army of two thousand Cornishmen advanced on Clyst Heath. Nearly all of them died there, in the bloodiest day of the Prayer Book Rebellion, an uprising that cost the lives of ten percent of the population of Cornwall, by some estimates. Speaking of the battle of Clyst Heath, Lord Grey stated that he had never ‘taken part in such a murderous fray’. Two years earlier, he had led the massacre at the battle of Pinkie Cleugh, the last pitched battle between Scottish and English armies. Unlike at Pinkie Cleugh, there is no memorial at Clyst Heath. A rugby pitch marks the place where the nine hundred were executed.
A lustrous early morning in the park; windless; cloudless; cool. Long shadows of the trees on the pale gold grass. A sense of pause; the withdrawal of autumn is under way. Sitting on the bench, I recalled taking Imogen onto the terrace, in the wheelchair. The sun was still touching the hill; washes of mist lay in the hollows. She said something, so quietly that I did not hear her clearly. Smiling, her face in the light, she repeated: ‘One more day.’ She said it as if life were an addiction that she lacked the strength to overcome. She took off a glove to hold my hand; her skin was as cold as tap water.
A scene to which intense happiness is attached, like a labeclass="underline" in Cornwall, above a cove. The spray was being thrown up to the cliff tops; from time to time it touched our faces; the water boomed and seethed on the rocks below. Huge ribbons of foam a long way from the shore. The sea in flux everywhere. A sumptuous sunset. Vast clouds filled the sky – an endless troop of them approaching over the sea, mighty turmoils of white and pink above the roseate water. I see Imogen in her big Aran sweater; her hair disarrayed. We sat for an hour or so, and barely said a word.
The date of Imogen’s birth. Every year, unless work made it impossible, she came home for her birthday. It was an observance that she felt obliged to maintain, and not just for her mother, she told me. At a break in the rain, in the late afternoon, we went outside. Above the hills, the sky was a mess of steel and iron colours, but the water on the paving stones was like a golden paint. Bright water dripped around us as we walked through the pergola. One of the horses was at the fence; a thin steam rose from its back. She stroked its muzzle and pressed her face to its neck, savouring the smell of the animal. Hans was the horse’s name; he was Imogen’s favourite; at times, when Hans raised his head into the sunlight, it was possible to believe that contented-seeming Hans had a consciousness of his contentment. At some point before we returned to the house, we talked about birthdays, about the religions that acknowledge no anniversaries. Imogen had worked with someone who had told her about an ex-boyfriend whose mother, a Jehovah’s Witness, though appalled by the idea of birthday parties, had spent a fortune on her daughter’s wedding; soon after the wedding, the ex-boyfriend had abandoned the Witnesses, and was consequently disowned by his family. When we celebrate an anniversary, Imogen remarked, we are like people standing together in the middle of a river, holding hands to brace ourselves against the current. Now I throw another page into the water.
From the terrace, with Imogen’s mother, I watched Imogen and her brother, walking towards the paddock; he gestured grandly; plans were being explicated. Jonathan was a strategist, I was told; a young man who was prepared to embrace change, whenever change was necessary, as it now was. And Helen was invaluable too. ‘Invaluable’ was the adjective that Imogen’s mother used. The profundity of Helen’s pedigree had already been impressed upon me. ‘Her people have been here since Stonehenge was new,’ Imogen had joked. In addition to being handsome and well-finished and infinitely English, Helen had proved to be an astute businesswoman; she had negotiated effectively with various buyers for their produce, Imogen’s mother told me. The estate was in safe hands with Jonathan and his wife, I was assured. ‘Imogen has been swimming against the current all her life,’ her mother said. ‘But one cannot do that forever.’ It seemed that I had some potential as a sensible influence, an antidote to the wilfulness that had been characteristic of Imogen since childhood. My appreciation of the house and of its history might help to weaken Imogen’s resistance, she seemed to imply. There was something in the way that Imogen attended to her brother, as he swept an arm across the scene, that seemed to indicate that a change had begun, her mother thought. ‘One day she will come back,’ she stated.
Returning to the living room, to find me studying the portrait of her mother, Imogen’s mother remarked: ‘Imogen always detested that picture.’ We considered the painting of Éloïse. The grandmother’s hair, fiercely wrought, was framed by the splendid autumnal foliage of the garden in Meudon; the texture of the hair was indistinguishable from the texture of the leaves; her fingers, flatteringly elongated, seemed to have no bones; her face had little more definition than a pillow. She was extremely proud of her hands, Imogen told me; she treated them every morning and every night with an esoteric unguent derived from Madagascan vanilla orchids. They were aristocratic hands: she had reason to believe that her bloodline flowed back to an unnamed mistress of the duke of somewhere or other, a duke for whose existence, according to Imogen’s father, there was nothing in the way of proof, of any kind. ‘Le Duc de Mirage’, her father called this elusive ancestor. Like her father, Imogen found it hard to love Éloïse. And Éloïse, for her part, found it hard to love the grandchildren. She seemed to care most deeply for her clothes (as Imogen remembered her, she would dress for the family visitations as a normal person would dress for an evening at the opera), her garden, her dogs – she always had a Bichon Frise or two – and the memory of her husband, Michael, the brilliant diplomat and debonair Englishman, whom she had met in Paris after the liberation and promptly married. Imogen’s father, though treated with respect, was conscious that Michael had set a standard that he could never match. No man could ever match the élan of Michael. He had been killed in a road accident, aged fifty-one, and Éloïse had vowed never to remarry. It was genuinely a vow. She had taken a decision, and Éloïse never went back on a decision that she had made, as she often reminded her family. It was one of her principles. To remarry would have been to traduce the peerless Michael. For the rest of her life she would be an exemplar of noble widowhood. Two or three times a year her family were welcomed – ‘perhaps not the right word’, said Imogen – to her splendid house. It was necessary for the family to go to Éloïse, because Éloïse would never leave Paris. This seemed to be another point of principle. She conducted herself, Imogen said, like an actress who had abruptly, in her prime, abandoned her profession and withdrawn from the public gaze. What she did with her days was a mystery. As far as her granddaughter could tell, her principal occupation, other than inspecting the gardener’s work, was browsing the innumerable fashion magazines to which she subscribed. Reference was sometimes made to her visitors, who were understood to be women of leisure and a certain distinction, but none of these visitors were ever seen, or had names that Imogen could recall. The garden was vast. Play was permitted in a small and precisely delineated zone of greenery and in one room of the house, a room that was almost devoid of furniture and never warm, even in the height of summer. The whole house was chilly, as Imogen remembered it; the air was like the air in the depths of a cave.