VII.
A taxicab met me outside Stroud train station in the late morning. A small suitcase sat beside me in the car, containing a change of clothes and a kind of floral wreath which my mother had assembled hastily the evening before. Following a short drive through winding country lanes we arrived in the valley on which Fersen Hall looked out. Mist had pooled in the vale’s basin and the surrounding hills, illuminated by the pale sun, appeared as islands in a sea of fog. The house itself was relatively unchanged. There were alterations to the grounds, such as a newly planted tree here and there, and a fence relocated, but the house was as I recalled. If anything the colours were muted, but that could well have been the mist – or even my imagining that the estate, somehow, was itself in mourning. The taxi came to a halt in the stable yard, and I alighted and paid my fare. The crunch of tires on gravel must have alerted the household to my arrival, for across the yard a door opened and Florence was there in a black dress which reached down below her ankles. She grasped the fabric in her two hands to prevent the hem dragging on the stones, and she ran to me and fell into my arms. We stood there a while, entwined and stricken, until she withdrew abruptly.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. Her eyes were unfocused and her long eyelashes were sodden with tears, clumped together like wet fibres of a barley spike. “Daddy is waiting in the hall, and the cars should arrive soon to pick us up.” She took my hand and squeezed it. “I’m so happy you came.” She looked at me, searching suddenly. “I had wondered, if perhaps…”
My stomach sank with guilt, but the accusation – if it could be so described – was left unfinished. I was led in silence into the hall where Mr Barclay sat in a wooden chair beside the grandfather clock, which had stopped some years earlier and was never mended. He wore a black suit and was hunched over a walking stick, gazing intently at the cold stone floor between his legs. The years had been unkind to him, or, I wondered, was it only the past few months? There was little left of the once sturdy, aged rancher. He looked up at the sound of my footsteps and smiled wanly.
“It is good to see you, my boy. You are well?”
I nodded. “Well enough sir.”
“And your trip?”
“Well enough.”
I noticed I had, without thinking, adopted the accent of a Stroud farm hand, and his turn of phrase as well. But if Mr Barclay suspected mockery, or an ill-timed stab at humour, he did not comment, and before we could say more there came to us the low rumblings of the approaching cortège, rubber screeching and squealing on the loose gravel. A shout went up in the courtyard. Florence took her father’s arm, who had risen to his feet, and I walked behind them through the doorway, out to the black cars. The hearse itself, some way back in queue of vehicles, was a carriage, ridden by a young man in dark livery and drawn by a pair of stallions, one almost black and the other pearl-coloured. (Florence told me later that the pearl horse had been her mother’s.)
The roads were deserted of other vehicles and what few pedestrians there were moved to the edge of the road as we came by – they bowed their heads, and those in caps doffed them. I was struck by the quaint, old world feel of the spectacle. It was not as if Mrs Barclay had been some grand baroness, and these pedestrians her feudal subjects, but all the same they were deeply reverent. Or perhaps this was a fanciful misperception – perhaps they had never known Mrs Barclay and they bowed their heads only out of respect, and for fear of death’s dominion.
The village church I knew well: a small, unremarkable building of Norman design and Victorian elaboration, like any one of hundreds up and down the country. I took my usual pew beside Florence – Mrs Barclay would ordinarily have sat on my right. By midday, quarter of an hour later, every bench was filled, and even the arcades were thick with people – many, judging by their dress, were from the farm. Martial ensigns of heavy rich fabric hung between pillars, commemorating this or that platoon drawn from the local boys, obliterated in foreign mire, immortalised in artless gold embroidery. These curious banners gave to proceedings an air of grandiose, pompous lament quite at odds with the reality. The deceased could not have been further from soldiering and human conflict.
As the rear doors opened the organist struck up a thunderous dirge, and the congregation bowed their heads. Mrs Barclay’s coffin, shrouded in a pall and festooned with wreaths including my own, was borne along the aisle by six carriers, and put to rest on the dais before the altar. The dirge concluded, silence fell and the vicar came forward to the lectern.
I have never been particularly religious, it has to be said. True, like my peers I am culturally Christian, but that is the end of it. I am happy not to go along with it, to sing the hymns and make the signs of the cross, but when the churchgoers have gone you won’t catch me at it. The Anglican Church, to me, was ever the foremost element of Englishness – that loose confederation of motifs and institutions which define our mongrel race – but alongside the monarchy, public schools, the armed forces and cricket, I was supremely indifferent. But in that little Norman church where I had used to while away the Sunday mornings, I was transported – although not spiritually. It felt like a homecoming: a five year gulf bridged within an hour, but under the most tragic circumstances imaginable. Presently, Florence and a number of cousins – none of whom resembled her – stood to make readings, and Mrs Barclay’s sister played on the organ the refrain to Pretty Girls of Mayo.
There followed some traditional hymns, and then the vicar’s sermon. The vicar was a man in late middle-age and had a robust, healthy look to him: tall and broad shouldered like an athlete. He began with reminiscences, and I gathered he had come to the parish some four years or so earlier, not long after my own departure. From anecdotes he turned to the readings, and from there to the lesson.
“It is tempting in such a time as this – “ he said, drawing to the climax of what was surely a familiar discourse, “— to permit our grief to overcome us.” He paused theatrically, and glanced at the congregation. “It is very human, after all. Even Christ our Lord, not long before his own death on the cross, wept for Lazarus. But his very human grief was portentous, for he knew that victory was close at hand; he knew that through his imminent sacrifice we would achieve immortality – not here on Earth, brutish as it is, but in Heaven…” The vicar paused again, drawing the palms of his hands against the edge of the lectern. “We celebrate our sister’s life, and we mourn her passing from it, but only insofar as we yearn for her companionship once again. That too is human: to yearn for the familiar and the beloved, when we know all such things are fleeting. Our sister is in her father’s house now, in paradise, and for that we must be grateful. Our sister is freed from suffering, and for that too we must be grateful. Draw your minds to the earlier hymn, and in particular to the penultimate verse. Consider its triumphant tone: ‘Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?’ Where indeed… Grief is tinged with defiance. So grieve we must, but for our sister’s sake let us be defiant.”
The vicar folded his notes and put them aside. A little later the organ struck up again, and soon after that the coffin was borne aloft and carried outside. The congregation followed in due course, and a procession was made to the churchyard, where a fresh plot lay gaping.
A reception was held at Fersen Hall, but Florence and I did not attend.
“Let’s go around the garden,” she said, and took my arm as we passed out the kitchen door and onto the patio. The moss was still rampant, and almost black with the dew and rainfall it had sponged. We made a beeline for the flower-beds, water squelching underfoot. A chilling breeze rose suddenly and passed on; joined its kinsfolk dancing and rolling in the broad vale beyond.
“I thought something was amiss,” she conceded when I brought up, falteringly, the matter of my irresponsiveness. “But all the same I had imagined there was good reason – that perhaps you were very busy and would reply to me when you could.”
Oh, sweet Florence. Had it not crossed her mind that I was wretched and pitiful?
“Of course,” she went on, “As I explained in the letter, I was very sorry to have left you as I did. Our holiday plans changed at the last moment, and I wasn’t able to let you know in time. I hope you weren’t put out?”
I shook my head glumly. Her first letter – that which was stowed away – I had read that morning on the train to Stroud. News of a cancelled ferry had compelled the Barclays to rush for an earlier service. She wrote from Capri explaining, and detailing her mother’s frailty, by that point no longer concealable. The letter had taken a long time to arrive, but I had at first not noticed the foreign postmark and peculiar stamp. It was an innocent but disastrous oversight; a detail which could have bypassed anybody, in theory.
“I didn’t read the letter Florence,” I said. “That’s the truth. I put it away because I was upset – you do understand?”
But she had turned away by this point to gaze at the hedgerow. In a quite dreamy voice – at odds with her earlier, relative clarity – she said: “Do you remember our den, just in there?”, and pointed to a gap in the hawthorn where we used to scurry. Red berries now dangled in the entrance, and foxgloves had grown up around it. Obstructing the gap itself, menacing intruders, were clumps of nettles, primed with venomous, glassy barbs.
“Florence?” I said.
“…only we’re much too big now.”
“For heaven’s sake, listen Florence.”
She turned her grey eyes on me. “Oh, I am listening.” Her softness was a rebuke. “But I was reminiscing at the same time. It is quite possible to do both at once. You aren’t angry, are you?”
“Angry? Me? No, not at all. I just wanted to know you forgive me.”
“But you do sound exasperated,” she said, which was true. “And what have you done which needs forgiving? Shall we walk to the pond? I want to see if any tadpoles escaped from the herons – ghastly birds.” And before I could say anything else she was floating away across the lawn, beyond reach, the train of her dress sprawling out behind. And that was Florence: a cousin to reality, many times removed. I gave up trying to apologise. It was clear she did not perceive her initial slight or my subsequent, much clumsier retort. I had not appreciated that I was unable to wound her in any conventional sense, for in her heart she believed I was that same kind-hearted boy of ten years earlier. Except bodily, she had not grown up. And what a way to live, I thought: inured against anything unseemly in human nature, simply by refusing to acknowledge it.
I had no desire to stay on at Fersen Hall under the circumstances. I had left it years before on the cusp of spring, and now it was strewn, like a Hallowe’en bride, in white and wintry cobwebs. The warm sun did not penetrate the dusty window panes, and the corridors lay gloomy and deserted, more aimless than ever before. Overhanging deciduous trees, years earlier had, as if playfully, prodded and tapped the windows in a gust; now they scratched at the panes with spidery, witchlike fingers. In the place of wildness was desiccation and even Florence’s warmth, apparently unaffected by season and weather, was insufficient to lift my spirits.
A tea was held in the drawing room late in the afternoon, and I arrived with excuses well-rehearsed. Only a few cousins remained from the funeral, and I asked for news on the trains to London.
“But young man, you have only just got here,” wheezed Mr Barclay, handing to me a cup and saucer. “I had visions of you staying on a while.”
I protested weakly. “My exams, you see…”
At that, Mr Barclay’s resolve melted and nodded sadly. He was at heart a very sensible man, and schooling thus was a trump card. Had he a son, he would have delighted in overseeing the boy’s education, and he had no intention of impeding mine. But Florence, rolling a peeled quail’s egg in a dish of celery salt, took a much firmer line.
“No, you can go next week. Leander – ", she said, referring to one of her cousins about my age, “ – Leander is doing his exams too. Fettes gave him time off and he’s brought all his books down. You can study with him in the library if you need to.”
Wilting in her bright gaze, I yielded. We compromised on three days, and I telephoned home to tell my parents.