THIRTEEN
Tony Bowerchalke said, “I can’t remember what I said.”
Robin smiled discreetly. “You only said you’d had an idea.” Tony’s message on his Clapham answering machine had shown a certain alarm at the machine itself, which he treated like a dictaphone, signing off with “All best wishes, Tony Bowerchalke.”
“Well, I hope you’ll like the idea.” They were standing on the gravel circle, where Tony had been waiting, perhaps all morning, for his arrival. “That very smart car belongs to the people in flat one,” he said, nodding towards a soft-top silver BMW parked beside his own peppermint-coloured Nissan Cherry.
“They’re in already…”
“They took it immediately. I don’t know if I’m not asking enough. It’s a young banker and his fiancee.”
“Are they all right?”
“They’re perfectly charming,” Tony said, in a way that might have intimated some huge reservation; but he went on, “It’s very pleasant having other people in the house, I find. I think they’ll stay.” He looked at Robin with an unsteady smile, and there was an impression of a half-memorised speech being glanced at and thrown away. “So that was, and remains, my idea: more flats. Turn the whole house into flats. Actually, if I’m to stay here, I think it’s the only way.”
Robin nodded slowly. It would certainly help to solve the unpleasant emptiness of the coming year; so far the only job he had was the commission for a neo-Georgian toilet-block in Lyme Regis. And the ongoing worry of the pyramid, of course. “I’d be happy to do it,” he said, “if you’re sure.” Tony seemed to have nerved himself up for change, and Robin thought he might have reached his decision only by ignoring its implications. There was an uneasy cheerfulness about him.
They went into the low vaulted hall and Robin felt the semi-derelict gloom of the place grip him consolingly. It was work, at least, technical, and imaginative in its latter-day way; he had his sketchpad in his briefcase and his tape-measure clipped to his belt and a hidden but hungry sense of usefulness. After a week in London, where he had tinkered artificially with late decorative amendments to the Kew job, before rushing home to eternal half-pissed evenings by the silent phone, the call to Dorset was like a firm hint from a friend.
In the library, in the smell of crumbling leather and vague rawness of papery damp, Tony had put out the tooled black album containing the original plans of the house. Robin glanced at them again with his professional sense of familiarity, the eye’s fluent movement among the old inked lines and wiredrawn annotations of every closet, corridor and stair. Victorian country-house plans still had their special appeal; they were like board-games mimicking the business of a social labyrinth that had once been serious enough. To the converter they were almost too rich in novel backstairs opportunities. He turned the pages, and felt his pleasure of a few moments before had been exaggerated and was abruptly wearing thin. The rapid twist was typical of his mood these days, when his thoughts were ragged and hard to control, and rushes of excitement could be stifled by a black chill.
He said, “Why don’t you show me over the whole house? There’s a lot I’ve never seen.” He needed to find out if there was a contradiction between Tony’s dogged love of the place and his new need to let it go. The emotions seemed to him obscurely parental.
They spent an hour or more going systematically from room to room, Tony saying again how the house had always been reviled, how in the thirties and forties it was the apex of bad taste, and yet how his mother had loved it, and how, seen in the right way, it was if not beautiful then at least remarkable and certainly unique, a rogue, in Robin’s word, among the discreetly elegant seats of the county. Robin was glad that Tony had taken on the rogue idea; he couldn’t deny that the house’s mixture of Tudor, hotel rococo and early French Gothic was astoundingly uncouth; but it showed too the bracing indifference to opinion of someone doing exactly what they wanted.
There was a sequence of large bedrooms, the south-facing ones already full, of dusty heat. Robin paced around each room, to get the measure of it, and there was a touch of professional con too, a hint at more mysterious calculations. One bedroom adjoined a boudoir with a painted ceiling of flowers on trellises – it was Tony’s mother’s room, and still had her silver-backed hairbrushes and tassled perfume spray on the dressing-table. At the front of the house was a room that Tony called the Lake Room, apparently because his aunt, who was always given it, and who recorded her dreams, had said over breakfast one morning, “I dreamt that there were two lakes in my room.” “People were always pleasantly surprised to be told they were in the Lake Room,” said Tony, standing at the window and peering down at the waterless circle of the drive.
At the end of the main corridor was his own room, which he opened up with self-conscious briskness. With its high single bed, formica-topped table and Germolene-coloured satin eiderdown it had the air of an old school sanatorium. The square of carpet was laid over beige linoleum. On the table was a transistor radio and an oldish book about wartime espionage. A further passage led into a tall narrow space enshrining the polished teak bench and scalloped porcelain bowl of the “Clifford,” a majestic Victorian water-closet. Robin didn’t like to examine the bedroom too closely. He knew little about Tony’s intimate life, but the singleness of the room agitated him, as if he had suddenly come on evidence of something he would rather ignore. On the wall there were framed photographs of permed middle-aged women, some pre-war children, a bull-terrier, nailed up in the inartistic but serviceable way that was perhaps Tony’s version of the family blindness. He thought of his own life, which seemed in retrospect to have been gripped and shaped by sexual love, the constant indispensable presence of another person, one after another, and overlapping – he thought of his awful behaviour in Simon’s last days and couldn’t suppress a certain shocked admiration for his own instinctual drive. Later Robin realised that this room had also carried a hushed resonance of the Wiltshire nursing-home in which his mother, the “redoubtable” Lady Astrid, had spent her last unreconciled year.
The top floor of the house could be reached by three different staircases, which Robin said would be convenient. Tony said, “They take some getting used to. Let’s go up this one. My aunt used to say that she came down this staircase but she would never go up it because she didn’t know where it went.”
After a minute or two Robin, with his normally fine sense of orientation, said, “I see what your aunt meant.” Up under the roofs there was a maze of odd-shaped stuffy rooms with tiny windows, linen-cupboards with skylights and ladders of empty shelves, unannounced changes of level. In several rooms chamber-pots or old tin basins had been placed on the threadbare carpets and bare iron bedsteads to catch dripping rainwater; though now they held only chalky stains. Tony flung open numerous cupboards, as if wanting to make a clean breast of the thing, though again it was only emptiness that he revealed. Robin felt very remote from the outer world. “You don’t often come up here,” he said.
“I did in my Sardines days,” Tony said, with one of his nervous schoolboyish gestures of straightening and neatening himself. “Those low cupboards under the eaves were admirable hiding-places.” Robin could imagine him crawling into one and pulling the door shut. “I go up to the Top Room, of course.”
“Oh yes, I want to see that.”
It appeared to be another closet with an ill-fitting door, but inside there was a narrow staircase, with fluffy dust at the side of the treads, and bright daylight up above. The Top Room was Tytherbury’s attempt at a tower, a little lookout among the chimney-stacks, with its own small summer-house fireplace and rattling leaded casements on three sides. In the old days visitors had always wanted to see it, and those with connections were invited to scratch their names on a window-pane with a diamond. Florence Hardy, Hallam Tennyson, Muriel Trollope: an interesting if strictly secondary collection. There was also an R. Swinburne, which Tony said people wanted to believe was A. Swinburne having trouble with his stylus; and a Wm Shakspere, facetiously introduced by Tony’s grandfather when he was a boy. “It’s ice-cold in winter,” Tony said, “and as you can see baking hot in summer.” Robin looked at the south-facing sills, which were warped by sunlight and rotted by rain-water. Beyond the glass the view was compromised: the light-industrial chimney, the new barns and silos on the Home Farm, part of the vanished layout of the garden visible in dry weather as in an aerial photograph; not the sea, but the straggly pines above it, and the top of the pyramid. That particular structure was taking on a further symbolic burden, as the task that wouldn’t go away, the problem that a younger man would already have solved, but which filled Robin with a paralysing sense of responsibility.