LITMIR.BIZ

       LYCHFONT HOUSE

       LYCHFONT

       HANTS

       Hi Lizzy

       I said I’d write as soon as I got here, didn’t I, and tell you about the journey. And here I am doing it, just like the dork you’ve always called me. The flight was fine. Soggy chicken but I kind of liked it. I even survived Dad’s driving – just. The only lousy thing was the direction. Away from you. I don’t know much about art, but I know this landscape would look better with you in it. I don’t know much about love either, but I think I’m in it with you. With you but without you. Philosophical, huh? On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelph—

      Ossian put a diagonal line through all that. How come he was suddenly so gushy? He seemed to have got sidetracked into writing exactly the wrong kind of letter. This wasn’t Lizzy’s thing at all. She liked to know about people and music and clothes; she liked to hear the funny things people said and who laughed. She liked – needed – to picture it all, as if she were watching a movie. But Ossian did not notice things in that way, or did not remember them; in any case, he couldn’t shape them into words. And now he had lost the knack of saying easy, natural things. He drew a picture instead, of Catherine and her friends yakking under summer hats and stuffing themselves with smoked-salmon sandwiches. Social satire on the British: Lizzy would laugh at that all right.

      But it wasn’t what he’d wanted to tell her. He’d wanted to tell her that he was in love. Why was that so difficult to say straight out? It wasn’t as if Lizzy wanted him to be witty all the time. That was one of the things that condemned Jack in her eyes. “I only want you for your body, stupid,” she used to say.

      He never could be sure how much of a joke that was.

      He shut the pen and paper in the drawer of the side table. It was too fine a day to spend in his room. The others would think he was sulking. He went down the short corridor to the bathroom and washed his face. He had to pick his way, for the shadows there contained alcoves in which heavy stone busts brooded, Catherine’s collection of noble Greeks and Romans. Julius Caesar’s nose came close to catching him in the ribs.

      Catherine had moved to a hammock seat, twenty metres from the terrace. Six or seven people were gathered there now, and Catherine herself swung under the hammock’s flowery awning, its shadow tasselling the lawn. The sharp sun made the scene unreal. As he stood in the doorway, Ossian tried to sort out which of the guests were Catherine’s horsey types, and which Mr Frazer’s businessmen. Catherine was being inscrutably polite to all.

      “Yes, hardly anyone has heard of it,” she was saying in response to a query from a lugubrious man whose lip was haunted by a wisp of pale moustache. “The Abbey ruins here are not, of course, to be mentioned in the same breath with Rievaulx or Fountains, but in a quiet, backwaterish way Lychfont has its own dignified tale to tell.” Sensing a silence, she added: “Henry VIII always struck me as such a lout, don’t you agree?”

      Everybody did agree; they had no choice. The lugubrious man’s wife had always preferred the Stuarts, she said – much more dashing in those wigs.

      “Nothing like being beheaded to give a man romantic appeal.”

      Ossian, who had been approaching in the shade of the wall, heard the laugh that followed this, a laugh like glasses being chinked, and checked his step. The mention of beheading caused him to grip his own neck and his Adam’s apple rose and fell. Everyone in that group must be at least twice his age. And in that time, what smoothing of rough edges there must have been; how ready the world had made them for this sipping of drinks on the lawn at Lychfont House, and laughing tinkling laughs and chiming with the tinkling laugh of Catherine.

      Fool that he was, he felt afraid – as if he were nine again. Any moment now, Catherine would turn and see him, wave and invite him to be clever too. And he couldn’t – wasn’t. He turned on his heel with his face flushing hot in the shadow. How stupid! And he knew they had seen him after all, for Catherine was saying: “Jack’s boy? Yes, always a quiet one. Hard not to be overshadowed by Jack, of course.”

      “Not that it’s a competition,” said another female voice – but by now Ossian had made the corner of the house and seen the grass bump down in cloddy terraces to the flood meadow.

      Sod Catherine Frazer, comparing him with Jack like that. That was all she saw when she looked at him, then: an after-image of Jack Purdey, much dimmer than the original. Or a muffled echo mouthing things that had already been said more clearly, more cleverly, better. It was humiliating – but oddly enough, it also made him afraid, in a way that had nothing to do with his father. It made him wonder whether he was real at all. In this mood, he became conscious of the bending of the grass beneath his feet, the play of light on the skin of his eye. He was fearful that at any moment he might unravel, be revealed as a random knot of touch and sound, a net of shadows cast from some place far beyond him.

      It was at such times, indeed, that he was most likely to meet with ghosts.

      The meadow was dark and lush, shadowed in part by the house and by its own river border of willow and silver birch. In wet weather, the river could break its banks and spread a sudden lake there. You could find minnows jungled

Скачать книгу