Now they turn off the straight road and leave behind the river and its wastes of water and climb into the low hills that were once a part of Arden demesne. As this little elevation is steadily gained Adam’s spirits lift too. The going on this road is bumpy and the station-wagon yaws and rumbles and they hear the salt water sloshing in the tank under their seats. The hill to the left is a hedgeless upward sweep of close-cropped sward capped by a small stand of larches. Sheep are placidly grazing the hillside. A pied horse kicks up its hoofs as they pass by, gallops friskily a little way, stops and turns its head and looks back at them boldly, showing them its behind and flicking its tail from side to side. Rooks wheel in sunlight above the little wood. O Arcady! how I pine for thy brooks and glades.
“I have a great fondness for your father,” Roddy says. Adam has to make an effort not to smile — Roddy has a way of saying things as if they had been written down on prompt-cards and practised many times — but before he can reply Roddy speaks again, quickly, in a muted yet vexedly accusing tone. “I know what you think of me.”
“Do you?” Adam, surprised, says. “I’m not sure I know myself what I think of you, or of anyone else, for that matter.”
Adam waits, but Roddy, it appears, has nothing more to add. He sits with his head thrust forward, looking steadily out through the windscreen with a faint, pursed smile, of satisfaction, even of triumph, it might be, as if there had been a hash in need of settling and he had settled it with gratifying finality and dispatch. Adam has the unsettling sensation of having been engaged in a far more extensive, far more rancorous exchange, involving him but carried on somehow without his full participation.
I am admiring the gorse blossom: it is truly glorious, a froth of buttery gold over the hillsides and along the hedgerows. Aye, this world we gave them appears a pretty place, on occasion.
“Is this all your father’s land?” Roddy asks.
“No, no. There’s only the house and the acre or two it stands on, and the wood behind. The rest was sold off long before our time.” Roddy nods. He peers out at the passing spectacle of green and gold and wrinkles his brow as if faintly deploring all he sees. Adam glances down sideways at Roddy’s tan slip-ons. His white linen jacket is folded on his knees as neatly as a parcel. “Everyone is glad you’ve come, you know.” Roddy does not respond to this, but holds himself aloof, pretending he has not heard or is too preoccupied to pay heed. Adam presses on. “It’s strange, the house, since Pa got sick. We feel we’re all”—he sadly smiles—“mourners-in-waiting.”
Roddy turns his head quickly to look at him. “Is he going to die?” He sounds incredulous.
They round a bend and the house comes into view. Really it is, Adam sees, not for the first time, an impossible sort of folly, square and mad-looking, with its yellow-painted walls and pale-blue shutters and that winged tin figure — ahem! — atop the single turret. Viewed from this perspective the entire structure seems to lean slightly to one side, drunkenly. Two palm trees, dusty and dejected, stand one each before either pillar of the gate — palms, in this climate, and here, in the heart of the country! — brought from afar, perhaps on the SS Esmerelda, by a Blount forebear of missionary or, more likely, buccaneering bent. When he was a boy Adam used to play with their shed fronds, pretending they were scimitars, duelling two-handed with himself. As he turns the car from the road on to the drive the crunching sound the wheels make in the grit-filled ruts brings back for an instant a confusion of lost, sunstruck summers. Rex has heard their approach and in the distance sets up a deep-throated barking, each bark followed by a measured pause, as he waits in vain for echo or response. They wallow on soft tyres to the end of the avenue of limes and make a half turn around the no longer functioning fountain — a blank-eyed boy on a rampant dolphin, last year’s dead leaves choking the dry basin — and pull up short on the gravel outside the front door and sit unmoving for a moment in the sudden, startled silence.
“Look, Roddy,” Adam says, and pauses. Roddy has taken out the flat silver case and is judiciously selecting a cigarette, as if they were not all perfectly alike. “I want to ask something of you. I want to ask you to be nice to my sister.”
Roddy stops with the cigarette half-way to his lips and lifts his eyes and looks straight ahead. The sloping glass of the windscreen with the sun on it is greyly hazed and all beyond is indistinct. “Nice?” he says, seeming to dangle the word aloft by one corner.
Adam’s bare elbow is hot where it rests in the car’s open window. Five ducks in a skein fly over fast, their wings making a whirring sound—hurry-hurry-hurry—and from far off, out on the slobland, there comes, insequentially with the seemingly fleeing ducks, the miniature muffled thud of an out-of-season shotgun-blast. The front door’s blue paint is peeling; gnarled wisteria wreathes the lintel.
“Yes,” Adam says shortly, and puffs out his cheeks and lets them deflate again. “Nice. It’s not so much to ask, is it? Think of it as a gesture to Pa. Because he is dying, you know.”
Roddy, lighting his cigarette, seems about to laugh — at what? — when the front door opens and Rex shoots out, barking again. He dashes menacingly towards the station-wagon with stiff, arthritic gait, not so much running as bounding up and down from back legs to fore like a rocking-horse set jerkily in motion. When he sees Adam his bark breaks and he snaps his jaws shut and looks embarrassed. Adam gets out and Roddy on his side opens his door but holds it close and hangs back behind it until he judges the dog has done capering and the gravel-dust has begun to disperse. The harsh dry salt reek from the car’s exhaust spreads thinly in the dusty air. Petra has appeared in the doorway, in baggy corduroy trousers and a long-sleeved blue shirt buttoned at the wrists, and stands with her left arm pressed stiffly against the peeling frame and frowning hard at a point on the ground half-way between her and the station-wagon, from behind the door of which now Roddy emerges, with his bag held protectively in front of him and his linen jacket folded over his arm, still keeping an eye on the dog, and advances towards her, queasily smiling.
. . .
Ursula in the Sky Room has heard Rex’s barking and the sound of tyres on the gravel but goes on clipping her husband’s fingernails. They do not really need to be clipped but she is doing it anyway, to be doing something. The curtains are still closed and the room is dark and she has switched on the reading lamp on the bedside table and angled it to light her task. She does not know why she keeps the curtains pulled against the summer day, or why, indeed, she set a reading lamp beside the bed. She cannot tell if her husband registers light or lack of it in those rare moments when he opens his eyes; she cannot be sure that he registers anything, but she makes herself believe that he does. His hands are cold as water, soft, and clammy. The nails are flattish and finely striated, and the skin beneath them is milky blue and the half-moons at their bases are a ghostly shade of grey. She started off with scissors but they were too fiddly and made her flesh crawl, and so she is using the clippers, which are easier though still it is a shivery business. She has never cut anyone’s fingernails before, except her own, and she would not cut even those if there were someone who would do it for her. When Adam and Petra were small she was too squeamish to do theirs and left the job to their father or to his mother. She seems to remember that Granny Godley used to trim young Adam’s nails with her teeth when he was a baby. Can that have been? Surely not — surely she is imagining it? Yet in her mind she clearly sees the old woman, lanky and white-skinned like her son, leaning over the cradle and baring her long, yellowish horse-teeth, exactly like the witch in a fairy-tale.