The Sunlight on the Garden Read online

  From time to time he would travel down with a muscular man with a low, wide forehead, a large nose and hairy forearms. His complexion was so dark and his hair so wiry and black that he might easily have been mistaken for a Greek or an Arab. Whereas I never came to call Hammond by anything other than his surname, Fred was never, at his own insistence, anything other than Fred to me from our first encounter. He had, I soon learned, been Hammond’s closest friend in Fighter Command. Miraculously, unlike Hammond, he had survived numerous perilous sorties, which had earned him a DFC – a medal that Hammond had also been awarded. He had then been shifted to a desk job at the Air Ministry. The strength of his attachment to Hammond was immediately clear to me. From time to time, I used to catch him staring, elbows on the arms of his chair and fingers raised in a steeple, at his friend. His eyes squinted with a dazed, frightened distraction, as though he were pondering some life-or-death problem way beyond his intellectual capacities to solve.

  On the afternoon of the first of his visits, I was practising at the Bechstein when I became aware that someone had opened the music-room door and was standing motionless on the threshold. I broke off and turned my head.

  Fred smiled. ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin? Bravo. Very difficult.’ Then he added something that puzzled me at the time. ‘Very apt.’ Later, sleepless in bed, I wondered about that word ‘apt’. Was this an oblique acknowledgement that his friend was doomed, whatever the brave, reassuring things Lady Hammond and ‘they’ might say?

  ‘You recognised it! Then I can’t have been playing so badly.’

  He approached the piano. ‘ That piano’s terribly out of tune. The whole family’s totally unmusical. I must have a word with Lady H. about getting in a tuner.’ Clearly he was on sufficiently close terms with her to make a suggestion that I should never have dared to make.

  ‘Do you play?’

  He laughed. ‘ Well, hardly! I’ve never had a lesson. But from time to time I vamp something from ear. That’s the best that I can do.’

  That same evening in the drawing-room after dinner – Sir Lionel had already retired, with a cup of coffee and a cigar to his study – Fred urged me: ‘Why don’t you play something for us?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Oh, go on!’

  ‘Yes, play something, Mouse. Play, play, play! It may help to pass yet another dreary evening.’

  I got up reluctantly and crossed to the piano. Unlike the Bechstein, it was an upright. In addition to the Ravel, I had also been learning the Bach D major Partita. I hesitated about whether to play the Aubade, surely one of the most beautiful pieces of keyboard music ever written, and then, having decided that its resigned melancholy was wrong for the occasion, opted instead for the perky, forward-thrusting Courante.

  I had been playing for little more than a minute or two when Hammond shouted: ‘Oh, stop, stop, stop! Oh, Mouse! That sounds like a room full of sewing machines going at it hammer and tongs! I can’t stand that din.’ Mortified, I swung round on the piano stool, preparatory to quitting it. ‘Let Fred play something. Come on Fred!’

  Fred was reluctant. ‘But he was playing that Bach so well. It’s far from easy, you know. I’m just an amateur.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Fred!’

  I rose from the stool and Fred seated himself at it. There was a pause, as he thought what to play. Then, shoulders and head lowered, he began to toy around with the melody of Gershwin’s ‘ Summertime’. Despite some miscalculations and fumblings, with an occasional ‘Blast!’ or ‘ Hell!’ he did remarkably well. Lady Hammond had paused in her game of patience. She was staring across the room at the piano, with a look of puzzled, surprised revelation.

  ‘Bravo!’ Hammond brought his claw-hands together in an attempt at applause. There was no sound. ‘Now how about ‘‘ Red Sails in the Sunset’’? That was one of your triumphs at the Blue Bear.

  Remember? At our sing-alongs?’ Fred nodded, mouth pursed. ‘All right,’ he agreed reluctantly. ‘Happy memories.’

  I watched from my bedroom window as the woman’s bicycle, its high handlebars supporting a wicker basket, zigzagged and wobbled up the drive. The grey-haired, elderly man riding it had no clips on the wide trousers of his faded blue pinstriped suit, so that their ends flapped around his ankles.

  ‘Oh, Mr Friedmann, this is my son’s companion.’ She did not mention either my real name or that awful ‘Mouse’ that all of them, with the exception of Fred, still insisted on calling me. ‘He’s the pianist among us. The piano sounds all right to me but he says it’s out of tune.’ In fact, I had never said anything to her about the piano being out of tune. It was Fred who had done so.

  Friedmann cleared his throat and stooped over the Bechstein. His hands were bluish, with prominent veins. One usually sees elderly people with such hands in the winter, not on a hot summer’s day. I noticed, for the first time, the stiff collar with the rounded ends and the small, hard knot of a dark blue tie fraying at the edges. He played a chord, another chord, an arpeggio.

  ‘He is right, my lady. Your piano is out of tune.’

  She pulled a little face. ‘Well, you know best,’ she said.

  I left the room with her and then, because I had nothing better to do, soon returned to it. Friedmann was at his work. For much of the time I merely watched him and listened to him. But occasionally he broke off and we talked. He had been released from internment on the Isle of Man only a few months before, he confided in me. Well, better internment there, he added with a sardonic smile, than in a concentration camp. He had been drawn to this part of the world partly because he knew an English couple, owners of a restaurant in Manningtree, who had offered him a room in their house, and partly because of all English painters Constable was the one whom he had always admired the most and Manningtree was so near to Constable’s Flatford.

  Had he bicycled all the way from Manningtree?

  Yes, all the way. He loved the English countryside. It was no hardship to him to bicycle so far. He often bicycled for the fun of it.

  He had a soft, hesitant voice, and nervously he kept clearing his throat, raising a small hand to his mouth each time that he did so. There was something both maidenly and steely about him.

  Florrie, a maid almost as ancient as Nanny, was banging on the gong. I was going to ignore it but Friedmann said ‘They’re calling you.’ After a moment of hesitation, I jumped to my feet.

  In the doorway I met Lady Hammond.

  ‘Oh, Mr Friedmann, I thought that you might like something to eat before embarking for home. I’ve asked for a tray to be brought to you.’

  ‘That’s really not necessary, my lady.’

  ‘Of course, it’s necessary. You have that long ride ahead of you. You don’t want to do it on an empty stomach.’

  ‘You are very kind. I thank you.’

  She walked to the door, then turned. ‘ I’ll settle with you before you go.’

  ‘Thank you, my lady.’

  ‘Come along, Mouse! The rabbit stew will be getting cold.’

  As I sat down to the rabbit – a dish I had come particularly to dislike, since it appeared so often on the menu at the Hall – I suddenly thought how mean-spirited it had been not to invite Friedmann to join us. I almost announced that I hoped that everyone would excuse me if I went to eat with him. Even today, I still feel guilty that I did not have the guts to do so.

  The next day, Lady Hammond said to me: ‘ Oh, Mouse, I’d so much like to meet your mother. When you’re next in touch with her, do ask her to come and spend a weekend. She could come on the same train that my husband takes, so there’d be no problem about meeting her.’

  I did nothing about the suggestion.

  A few days later, when she asked if I had passed on her invitation, I lied with a glibness that surprised me. My mother, I said, had no one with whom to leave the dog, and long journeys with him on a train were always a problem, now that he was so old and, as I put it, liable to make messes.

  I had dreaded – absurdly and
unjustly, I have long since realised – that if my mother were to accept the invitation, she might be condemned to solitary eating off a tray, just as poor Friedmann had been.

  Despite the gloom that enveloped not merely the vast house, most of its rooms now closed for lack of staff, but also the spirits of everyone imprisoned there, in recollection after more than half-a-century it seems as if day after day the sun never ceased to shine. I see it glinting in jagged flashes off the pond, seething with carp. I see it pouring its radiance over the fields as I look down on them from the edge of a dense, strangely sinister little spinney, mysteriously never haunted by birds. I see it making incandescent the panes of the summerhouse, a Gothic folly raised by a prodigal eighteenth century ancestor, who all but ruined the family.

  For the rite of the annual cricket match between the village and a neighbouring and rival one, the sun also shone.

  After I had inexpertly shaved – ‘ Oh, for Christ’s sake, you’ve nicked me!’ – and dressed Hammond for that occasion, he stared down at his hands. ‘ Oh, look at my nails. I must do something about them. Sorry, Mouse, you’ll have to do it for me.’ He himself was incapable of properly manipulating the scissors. ‘Do you mind awfully?’

  ‘Of course not.’ But I did mind. Naturally squeamish, I often minded the tasks that Nanny never minded. Of all those tasks, having to manicure Hammond’s hands was, oddly, far more unpleasant for me than having to attend to his bodily functions. As those gristly talons rested on my palm, I was conscious of minuscule grey flakes of skin falling off them like ash. The task done, I had to find some excuse to leave the room and first brush myself down with panicky movements of my hands and then hurry into the cloakroom, where I soaped and scrubbed them.

  ‘How did these nails get so long? It can’t be more than a week since you last did them.’ He looked up at me. ‘Did you know that nails continue to grow on a corpse.’ He smiled. ‘True.’

  I nodded. Having reached for the file on the table beside me, I smoothed a rough edge. Then, suddenly and surprisingly, I felt an annihilating tenderness that I had never felt before when doing his nails. I looked down at the cruelly distorted hands and then up into the even more cruelly distorted face. I felt an ache in my throat, as though some indissoluble object had lodged there, and a sudden fullness of the eyes.

  Since his disability had made him hypersensitive to other people’s feelings and thoughts, whereas in the past he had been entirely indifferent to them, he must, I now realise, have intuited my feelings. When I had finished the job, he said ‘Thank you’ in a barely audible voice, using not the hated ‘Mouse’ but (something that rarely happened) my Christian name. ‘What would I do without you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you’d manage very well.’

  Fred and I took it in turns to wheel the chair to the cricket ground, beyond the church. Fred propelled it effortlessly along the narrow up-and-down path, as though it were no more than a pushchair with a baby in it. I struggled at every bump and twist and soon began to wheeze and sweat. Eventually, with none of his usual contempt and impatience when I showed my ineptitude, Hammond said quietly: ‘You’d better give up, Mouse. Let Fred do it. We don’t want your asthma to ruin the day for you.’

  ‘No, no, I can manage. Really.’

  But Fred was already moving into position, edging me aside.

  I had hated cricket at school, not merely because I was so hopeless at it but also because it proceeded so slowly and interminably. But all that day, as Fred and I sat out on the grass beside Hammond in his wheelchair and his parents reclined in deck-chairs brought out to them by one of the organisers of the match, the local butcher, I felt inexplicably happy. From time to time I would look up at Hammond, as he stared out eagerly at all the activity – or, as I saw it, dearth of activity – on the field before us. At school, he had been the captain and hero of the First XI, just as he had been an athlete often tipped to be the first man to achieve a four-minute mile. He was keeping up a running commentary: ‘ Oh, Christ, what a shot! … Idiot! Couldn’t he see that that was a googly? … Oh, good, good, good …’

  Soon Sir Lionel was pouring out shots of Scotch into silver tumblers that fitted into each other like Russian dolls. When, finally, he came to one for me, I shook my head. ‘ Not for me. Thank you.’

  He scowled at me. ‘Oh, come on! Be a man!’

  I again shook my head. I took pleasure in defying him.

  ‘Well, please yourself. Perhaps Lady Hammond can spare you some of her coffee.’

  Shortly before the lunch interval, Hammond asked me to wheel him to the lavatory behind the pavilion. As the chair bumped from tussock to tussock, he said: ‘ You poor chap! I ought to have asked Fred to take me. But by now you know the drill and he doesn’t.’ The ‘drill’ had always repelled me. But, amazingly, for once it did not now do so.

  As I took the bottle from him – when he went out, it always went with him in a canvas bag – he pointed: ‘Is that blood?’

  I peered in horror. Through the glass, what looked like lengths of scarlet thread were gently wavering in the orange urine.

  ‘Oh God, don’t say I’ve started the bleeding again!’

  I had never known him to bleed while I had been with him.

  ‘Do you want to go home?’

  ‘No. Of course not! Don’t be such an ass. But it’s’ – he smiled up at me – ‘inconvenient.’

  For the rest of the day he was more cheerful than I had ever known him. After the match was over, I wheeled him from one group of people to another. Since he was not merely the son of the squire but also the local hero, there was a certain obsequiousness in everyone’s behaviour to him. At the high tea that followed back at the Hall, he made a speech that, unlike his father’s portentous one, was exactly right for the occasion in its judicious blend of humour, self-deprecation and love for the village in which his family had lived for so many centuries. I realised that he could easily have followed his father into politics.

  ‘Well, that was a good day, Mouse,’ he said, as I put my hand to the switch of the overhead light, before leaving him, propped up on three pillows, on his orthopaedic bed. I slept in the next-door dressing-room – always lightly, so as to be ready for his summons.

  ‘Yes. Wonderful.’

  ‘But cricket’s not quite your thing, is it?’

  ‘That’s true. But – but – yes, it was wonderful. A wonderful day.’

  Nanny and I sat facing each other in the middle of the table that seemed to stretch endlessly away in the light from two forty-watt bulbs. In those years to save electricity, as to save everything thing else, had become a patriotic duty. Neither of us had had any appetite for what Lady Hammond had referred to as ‘cold cuts’ – thin greasy slices of ham and shiny chicken interleaved with each other, purple on white. She had driven to Manningtree to meet the last train from London. For once Sir Lionel was coming back to the Hall on a weekday, bringing with him the famous specialist, now an octogenarian, who had come out of retirement because of the war. Hammond was asleep upstairs. He now had two nurses, both stout, elderly woman in white starched uniforms, to nurse him round the clock.

  Nanny munched, looking not at me but sideways and over her shoulder as though in a dealer’s appraisal of the boulle cabinet under the window to her left. As so often when we were alone together, there had been a long but not uncomfortable silence between us. I had been lost in thoughts of Hammond. Perhaps she had too. Certainly it was of him that she now began to talk, with her slight West Country burr. ‘It’s the kidneys. That’s the trouble. They were crushed, you know. Kidneys can’t grow again. And you can’t replace them, can you? If they’re not working properly, then the system is poisoned.’ She put down her knife and fork and then raised her napkin to her lips. ‘ He was such a strong little boy. Never ill. And he never cried. Never. Even after he had had a fall into the empty swimming-pool he never cried. We thought then that he might have broken a leg, but it was only a bruising.’ Her mistily pale blue eyes, with t
heir inflamed upper lids, stared at me, as though trying to sum me up.

  ‘Do you think this specialist can do something?’ I think that I already knew the answer to that question: no.

  ‘Well, dear, we must go on believing that he can. Mustn’t we? We have to have that faith. If we believe enough …’ A Roman Catholic, she would each Sunday walk three miles across the fields to the nearest Roman Catholic church and then walk back again. Once I said to her: ‘Couldn’t you bicycle?,’ to receive the firm answer ‘ No, I couldn’t do with that.’

  I, too, now put down my knife and fork.

  ‘Maureen has left an apple tart.’ She got to her feet and peered. ‘And some custard by the look of it. Too thin, as always. How about that?’

  ‘Thank you, no. I don’t feel all that hungry.’

  She sat down again.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like some?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m not a great one for puddings,’ she said, as she had often said before. She raised her tumbler of water and sipped at it, then sipped again. ‘Wars are terrible things.’

  ‘Well, yes, they are.’

  ‘My fiancé was killed in the war, you know. Did I ever tell you that? I mean the war before this one.’ How could I have supposed that she might mean the present one? ‘At Mons. You may have heard of Mons. Thousands and thousands of people were killed there, you know. English, French, Huns. And he was one of them. Later, people – meaning to be kind of course – used to tell me that someone else would come along for me. That’s what they used to tell me. Someone else. But there was no one else. How could there be? After the war, there were too many women for the men to go around. So here I am.’ She raised her glass and sipped again. ‘But it’s not been a bad life. I’ve been lucky to have spent all these years here. The house is almost a palace, isn’t it? And Mr Derek has been like a son to me. His mother was always so busy, you know. In those days, when he was growing up. She had all those charities and she loved her hunting. And – oh – all those other things.’ She squinted at me, her mouth pursed, and then said in a suddenly sharp voice: ‘It’s odd, your not having been called up.’