The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss
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good port to wash it down with.
Most of the adults collapsed into chairs after the feast, and somnolence reigned. Marshall joined the children in a new card game. Half an hour later, Teresa and Squire put on their coats and went to see their estate manager. Uncle Willie and Adrian came as well, to walk off the effects of lunch.
The air was cold and still, with a slightly smokey flavour to it.
Teresa took her husband’s arm. Uncle Willie grasped hers, leaning rather heavily against her. ‘Very good lunch, my dear. It’s amazing how much nourishment the human frame can withstand.’
Their footsteps echoed on the frosted ground.
The manager lived in an eighteenth-century farmhouse at the far end of the estate, on the Walsingham road. As they returned, an hour later, Teresa pointed to the western sky, where a thin red bar showed between strata of heavy cloud. ‘The ghost of the sun!’ she exclaimed. A hemisphere of sun emerged from below the cloud curtain, then the whole ball, less lurid than the pudding had appeared two hours earlier. It hung above a furred outline of slope, apparently emitting little light and less heat.
‘Tom, Teresa was telling me about her nightmares,’ Uncle Willie said abruptly. ‘About a dark figure trying to break into the Hall. I suppose I shouldn’t ask you this, but are all your cloak-and-dagger activities with the secret service firmly in the past?’ He drew himself up, trying to straighten his shoulders, peering past Teresa’s furred shoulder at Squire.
Adrian laughed in a way he had, as if thinking better of the humorous aspect that provoked the sound almost before uttering it. ‘You don’t imagine that KGB agents are tracking Tom down in Darkest Norfolk, do you, Uncle?’
Tom said placidly, ‘Be sure there are KGB agents in Norfolk, but they have no particular reason to interest themselves in me.’
To Teresa, Adrian said, ‘KGB, my foot! I’d hazard a guess that that figure in your dream was more likely to be a tax inspector than a KGB man, eh?’
Snuggling her shoulder under Squire’s arm, Teresa said, ‘Let’s go back to the fire. Mother’s death has made us all morbid. Christmas cake is the perfect antidote.’
As they headed for the rear of the house, Willie said, ‘I’m the last of my poor old generation left now. It makes for morbidity.’
She hugged him. ‘You’re the toughest of us all, Uncle, dear,’ she said.
In the waning afternoon light, the side of the house presented an aspect of greyness, as if a blanket had been draped over it. Lights gleamed in the room downstairs, and children could be seen, running here and there, laughing. Matilda Rowlinson was playing a game with them. The last rays of the sun caught the three lower panes of the window of the room where Patricia Squire’s body lay; they gleamed with dead colour as the four walkers went below them into the shade of the house.
‘Perhaps I’ll tell the kiddies a ghost story after tea,’ Adrian said. ‘I always fancied myself as a story teller.’
Red is the colour of dying light, as incandescence sinks towards invisibility. The bars of the electric fire in my bedroom, dying when switched off, when Rachel lived with us. Long ago now.
Rachel’s mother, Rebecca Normbaum, had died some years earlier. Squire was sure his mother had told him as much; at the time, busy with other things, he had paid little attention. He remembered a late photograph of Rebecca, taken in America by polaroid camera when such things were rare in England. A tall elegant woman, still with eyes of blue, though her hair was grey. She stood in a suburban Detroit garden – or ‘yard’, as she and Rachel would have learnt to call it.
Karl, the son, the uninteresting boy, kept the Normbaum and Squire families spasmodically in touch. He was Charles nowadays, name Anglicized, manner Americanized. He had married a striking blonde Jewish girl in Detroit, and commuted regularly with her to Israel in his prospering line of business, which involved car exhausts and gas filters.
At the beginning of the seventies, before the power crisis, Squire had met Charles in London. They had not found much to say to each other, once the reminiscences had been exhausted. Rachel had made a respectable marriage. She lived in a big house. She had two children, both boys, who were doing well. And a dog. She had shares in a downtown restaurant. She and Charles saw each other about once a month.
So the promise of youth deteriorated into family history.
After their meeting, afflicted by a mixture of curiosity and nostalgia, Squire wrote to Rachel. He received no reply. The following Christmas, a printed card arrived. Little Rachel Normbaum was now Mrs Gary Baxter.
Although Blakeney was so near, Deirdre, Marshall, and their children always slept at the Hall on Christmas night. It was part of the tradition. When they were younger, this had been a time for drinking too much brandy and port and playing childish games after the children had gone up to bed. Now they were more staid, and Uncle Willie drove himself off to Norwich at nine-thirty in order, as he explained, to look after his flat and his cat.
Squire and Mrs Davies went to see him off at the front door.
‘You’d better look after your granddaughter, Madge,’ Uncle Willie warned Mrs Davies, as he wound a woolly scarf round his neck. ‘Do you know what Grace said to me?’
‘I’m sure it was something very precocious, Will. Young girls reach the age of – become young ladies very much earlier than they did in my day. I can’t understand it. It must have been something in the diet when we were young.’ She smiled at him teasingly.
‘Come, my dear, you are still a beautiful lady, and Ernest is a very lucky man. Blossoms that flower late go on flowering into the winter.’
Squire, slightly surprised at this flight of fancy from his uncle, asked, ‘What did Grace say to you, Uncle?’
The old man hesitated, then chuckled. ‘Why, she told me that she’d had a dream in which she had gone down to the beach, and there she had seen a fully grown male seal sporting in the waves. Although it was a bit rough, she took off her clothes and joined him, and put her arms round him and held him tight. She said it felt lovely. Those were her words: “It felt lovely.”’
‘She is getting to that age …’
‘It was her comment afterwards that shocked me. She said, “I expect it’s a premonitory dream about enjoying sexual intercourse, don’t you, Uncle?”’
While Squire and Uncle Willie laughed, Mrs Davies pretended to look affronted. After Willie had gone, she said as she retreated with Squire from the chilly regions of the front door, ‘Willie Squire is such a nice man. Ernest and I have always admired him. A pity he doesn’t marry again. I suppose even marriage is unpopular or something these days – so many people seem to be getting divorced.’
‘Most of them tend to remarry. It’s what Dr Johnson calls the triumph of hope over experience.’
‘I’m so glad that you and Teresa are happily married, and have this lovely house, full of such exquisite workmanship.’
‘Sometimes I am afraid she feels imprisoned here.’
‘Oh, no, not Teresa.’
He took her arm and led her into the warm living room, where her husband was already setting out a Scrabble board.
Later in the evening, the children submitted to Adrian’s ghost story and then climbed upstairs to bed. Madge and Ernest followed them, and the Rowlinsons left.
Marshall Kaye threw an additional log on the fire and stretched out before it on the sofa, next to Adrian. Deirdre smiled at her husband and returned to the novel she was reading. Teresa trimmed the candles, which were now the room’s sole illumination, while Squire poured everyone a malt whisky.
‘Not for me,’ Adrian said, waving a hand. ‘I’m fighting against middle-aged fat.’
‘You’re very thin, Adrian,’ Teresa said. ‘A whisky would do you good.’