The Copper Peacock Read online

  ‘You see, she says I’m to have it one day – she means when she’s dead, poor dear – so why not now?’

  ‘Why not indeed?’

  ‘It was just my luck to have my wallet stolen the day after she’d given me all that money.’

  He asked her to have dinner with him. Bridget said all right but it mustn’t be anywhere expensive or grand. She asked Elizabeth what she should wear. They were in a clothes mood, for it was the evening of the Annie Carter talk to the women’s group which Elizabeth had been persuaded to join.

  ‘He doesn’t dress at all formally himself,’ Bridget said. ‘Rather the reverse.’ He and she had been out for another drink in the meantime. ‘He was wearing this kind of safari suit with a purple shirt. But, oh Elizabeth, he is amazing to look at. Rather too much so, if you know what I mean.’

  Elizabeth didn’t. She said that surely one couldn’t be too good-looking? Bridget said she knew she was being silly but it embarrassed her a bit – well, being seen with him, if Elizabeth knew what she meant. It made her feel awkward.

  ‘I’ll lend you my black lace if you like,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It would suit you and it’s suitable for absolutely everything.’

  Bridget wouldn’t borrow the black lace. She refused to sail in under anyone else’s colours. She wouldn’t borrow aunt Monica’s emerald necklace either, the one she had bought to replace the necklace the burglars took. Her black skirt and the velvet top from the second-hand shop in Hammersmith would be quite good enough. If she couldn’t have an Annie Carter she would rather not compromise. Monica, who naturally had never been told anything about the married accountant or his distant predecessor, the married primary school teacher, spoke as if Patrick Baker were the first man Bridget had ever been alone with, and spoke too as if marriage were a far from remote possibility. Bridget listened to all this while thinking how awful it would be if she were to fall in love with Patrick Baker and become addicted to his beauty and suffer when separated from him.

  Even as she thought in this way, so prudently and with irony, she could see his face before her, its hawk-like lineaments and its softnesses, the wonderful mouth and the large wide-set eyes, the hair that was fair and thick and the skin that was smooth and brown. She saw too his muscular figure, slender and graceful yet strong, his long hands and his tapering fingers, and she felt something long-suppressed, a prickle of desire that plucked very lightly at the inside of her and made her gasp a little.

  The restaurant where they had their dinner was not grand or expensive, and this was just as well since at the end of the meal Patrick found that he had left his chequebook at home and Bridget was obliged to pay for their dinner out of the money Monica had given her to buy an evening dress. He was very grateful. He kissed her on the pavement outside the restaurant, or if not quite outside it, under the archway that was the entrance to the mews. They went back to his place in a taxi.

  Patrick had quite a nice flat at the top of a house in Bayswater, not exactly overlooking the park but nearly. It was interesting what was happening to Bridget. Most of the time she was able to stand outside herself and view these deliberate acts of hers with detachment. She would have the pleasure of him, he was so beautiful, she would have it and that would be that. Such men were not for her, not at any rate for more than once or twice. But if she could once in a lifetime have one of them for once or twice, why not? Why not?

  The life too, the lifestyle, was not for her. On the whole she was better off at home with a pot of strong hot tea and her embroidery or the latest paperback on changing attitudes to women in western society. Nor had she any intention of sharing aunt Monica’s money when the time came. She had recently had to be stern with herself about a tendency, venal and degrading, to dream of that distant prospect when she would live in a World’s End studio with a gallery, fit setting for the arrogant Bond Street chair, and dress in a bold eccentric manner, in flowing skirts and antique pelisses and fine old lace.

  Going home with Patrick, she was rather drunk. Not drunk enough not to know what she was doing but drunk enough not to care. She was drunk enough to shed her inhibitions while being sufficiently sober to know she had inhibitions, to know that they would be waiting to return to her later and to return quite unchanged. She went into Patrick’s arms with delight, with the reckless abandon and determination to enjoy herself of someone embarking on a world cruise that must necessarily take place but once. Being in bed with him was not in the least like being in the VAT records office with the married accountant. She had known it would not be and that was why she was there. During the night the central heating went off and failed, through some inadequacy of a fragile pilot light, to restart itself. It grew cold but Bridget, in the arms of Patrick Baker, did not feel it.

  She was the first to wake up. Bridget was the kind of person who is always the first to wake up. She lay in bed a little way apart from Patrick Baker and thought about what a lovely time she had had the night before and how that was enough and she would not see him again. Seeing him again might be dangerous and she could not afford, with her unmemorable appearance, her precarious job and low wage, to put herself in peril. Presently she got up and said to Patrick, who had stirred a little and made an attempt in a kindly way to cuddle her, that she would make a cup of tea.

  Patrick put his nose out of the bedclothes and said it was freezing, the central heating had gone wrong, it was always going wrong. ‘Don’t get cold,’ he said sleepily. ‘Find something to put on in the cupboard.’

  Even if they had been in the tropics Bridget would not have dreamt of walking about a man’s flat with no clothes on. She dressed. While the kettle was boiling she looked with interest around Patrick’s living room. There had been no opportunity to take any of it in on the previous evening. He was an untidy man, she noted, and his taste was not distinguished. You could see he bought his pictures ready-framed at Athena Art. He hadn’t many books and most of what he had was science fiction, so it was rather a surprise to come upon Vasari’s Lives of the Artists in paperback between a volume of fighting fantasy and a John Wyndham classic.

  Perhaps she did after all feel cold. She was aware of a sudden unpleasant chill. It was comforting to feel the warmth of the kettle against her hands. She made the tea and took him a cup, setting it down on the bedside table, for he was fast asleep again. Shivering now, she opened the cupboard door and looked inside.

  He seemed to possess a great many coats and jackets. She pushed the hangers along the rail, sliding tweed to brush against serge and linen against wild silk. His wardrobe was vast and complicated. He must have a great deal to spend on himself. The jacket with the butterflies slid into sudden brilliant view as if pushed there by some stage manager of fate. Everything conspired to make the sight of it dramatic, even the sun which came out and shed an unexpected ray into the open cupboard. Bridget gazed at the denim jacket as she had gazed with similar lust and wonder once before. She stared at the cascade of butterflies in vermilion and purple and turquoise, royal blue and fuchsia pink that tumbled and fluttered from the open mouths of a pair of yellow lilies.

  She hardly hesitated before taking it off its hanger and putting it on. It was glorious. She remembered that this was the word she had thought of the first time she had seen it. How she had longed to possess it and how she had not dared look for long lest the yearning became painful and ridiculous! With her head a little on one side she stood over Patrick, wondering whether to kiss him goodbye. Perhaps not, perhaps it would be better not. After all, he would hardly notice.

  She let herself out of the flat. They would not meet again. A more than fair exchange had been silently negotiated by her. Feeling happy, feeling very light of heart, she ran down the stairs and out into the morning, insulated from the cold by her coat of many colours, her butterflies, her rightful possession.

  Paperwork

  My earliest memories are of paper. I can see my grandmother sitting at the table she used for a desk, a dining-table made to seat twelve, with her
scrapbook before her and the scissors in her hand. She called it her research. For years three newspapers came into that house every day and each week half a dozen magazines and periodicals. She was a diligent correspondent. Her post was large and she wrote at least one letter each day. She was a writer without hope or desire for publication. My grandfather was a solicitor in our nearest town, four miles away, and he brought work home, paperwork. He always carried two briefcases and they bulged with documents.

  Because he was a man he had a study of his own and a proper desk. The house was quite large enough for my grandmother to have had a study too but she would not have used that word in respect of herself. She had her table put into what they called the sewing room, though no sewing was ever done in it in my time. She spent most of each day in there, covering reams of paper with her small handwriting or cutting things out of papers and pasting them into a succession of scrapbooks. Sometimes she cut things out of books and one of the small miseries of living in that house was to open a book in the library and find part of a chapter missing or the one poem you wanted gone from an anthology.

  The sewing-room door was always left open. This was so that my grandmother might hear what was going on in the rest of the house, not to indicate that visitors would be welcome. She would hear me coming up the stairs, no matter what care I took to tread silently, and call out before I reached the open door, ‘No children in here, please,’ as if it were a school or a big family of sisters and brothers living there instead of just me.

  It was a very large house, though not large enough or handsome enough to be a stately home. If visitors go there now in busloads, as I have heard they do, it is not for architecture or antiquity, but for another, uglier, reason. Eighteen fifty-one was the year of its building. The architect, if architect there was, was one of those Victorians who debased the classical and was too cowardly for the innovations of the Gothic. White bricks were the principal building material and these were not really white but the pale glabrous grey of cement. The windows were just too wide for their height, the front door too low for the fat pillars which flanked it and the hemispherical portico they supported, a plaster dome shaped like the crown of my grandfather’s bowler hat and which put me in mind, when I was older, of a tomb in one of London’s bigger cemeteries. Or rather, when I saw such a tomb, I would be reminded of my grandparents’ house.

  It was a long way from the village, at least two miles. The town, as I have said, was four miles away, and anything bigger, anywhere in which life and excitement might be going on, three times that distance. There were no buses. If you wanted to go out you went by car and if there was no car you walked. My grandfather, wearing his bowler, drove himself and his briefcases to work in a black Daimler. Sometimes I used to wonder how my mother had gone, when I was a baby and she left me with her parents, by what means she had made her escape. It was not my grandmother but the daily woman, Mrs Poulter, who told me my mother had no car of her own.

  ‘She couldn’t drive, pet. She was too young to learn, you see. You’re too young to drive when you’re sixteen but you’re not too young to have a baby. Funny, isn’t it?’

  Perhaps someone had called for her. Anyway, two miles is not far to walk and a denizen of that house would be used to walking. Had she gone in daylight or after dark? Had she discussed her departure with her parents, asked their permission to go perhaps, or had she done what Mrs Poulter called a moonlight flit? Sometimes I imagined her writing a note and fastening it to her pillow with the point of a knife. Notes were always being written, you see, particularly by my grandmother (to my grandfather, to Evie, Mrs Poulter, to the tradesmen, to me when I could read handwriting, thank-you notes and even occasionally notes of invitation) so I had experience of them from an early age, though not of knives at that time.

  I used to wonder about these things, for I had plenty of time and solitude for wondering. One day I overheard my grandmother say to an acquaintance from the village, not a friend, she had no friends: ‘I have never allowed myself to get fond of the child, purely as a matter of self-preservation. Suppose its mother decides to come back for it? She is its mother. She would have a right to it. And then where should I be? If I allowed myself to get fond of it, I mean?’

  That was when I was about seven. A person of seven is too old to be referred to as ‘it’. Perhaps a person of seven months or even seven days would be too old. But overhearing this did not upset me. It cheered me up and gave me hope. My mother would come for me. At least there was a strong possibility she would come, enough to keep my grandmother from loving me. And I understood somehow that she was tempted to love me. The temptation was there and she had to prevent herself from yielding to it, so that she was in a very different position from my grandfather who, I am sure, had no temptation to resist.

  It was at about this time that I took it into my head that the scrapbook my grandmother was currently working on was concerned with my mother. The newspaper cuttings and the magazine photographs were of her. She might be an actress or a model. Did my grandparents get letters from her? It was my job or Evie’s to take up the post and on my way to the dining room where my grandparents always had a formal breakfast together, I would examine envelopes. Most were typewritten. All the letters that came for my grandfather were typed letters in envelopes with a typed address. But regularly there came to my grandmother, every two or three weeks, a letter in a blue envelope with a London postmark and the address in a handwriting not much more formed than my own, the capitals disproportionately large and the ‘g’s and ‘y’s with long tails that curled round like the Basenji’s. I was sure these letters were from my mother and that some of them, much cut about, found their way into the scrapbook.

  If children are not loved, they say, when they are little, they never learn to love. I am grateful therefore that there was one person in that house to love me and a creature whom I could love. My grandparents, you understand, were not old. My mother was sixteen when I was born, so they were still in their early forties. Of course they seemed old to me, though not old as Evie was. Even then I could appreciate that Evie belonged in quite a different generation, the age group of my schoolfellows’ grandmothers.

  She was some sort of relation. She may even have been my grandmother’s aunt. I believe she had lived with them since they were first married as a kind of housekeeper, running things and organising things and doing the cooking. It was her home but she was there on sufferance and she was frightened of my grandmother. When I wanted information I went to Mrs Poulter who was not afraid of what she said because she did not care if she got the sack.

  ‘They need me more than I need them, pet. There’s a dozen houses round here where they’d fall over themselves to get me.’

  The trouble was that she knew very little. She had come to work there after my mother left and what she knew – as, for instance, my mother’s inability to drive – was from hearsay and gossip. My mother’s name she knew, and her age of course, and that she had not wanted to marry my father, though my grandparents had very much wanted her to marry without being particular about whom.

  ‘They called her Sandy. I expect it was because she had ginger hair.’

  ‘Was it the same colour as the Basenji?’ I said, but Mrs Poulter could not tell me that. She had never seen my mother.

  Evie was afraid to answer my questions. I promised faithfully I would say nothing to my grandmother of what she told me but she wouldn’t trust me and I daresay she was right. But it was very tantalising because what there was to know Evie knew. She knew everything, as much as my grandparents did. She even knew who the letters were from but she would never say. My grandmother was capable of throwing her out.

  ‘She wanted to throw your mother out,’ said Mrs Poulter. ‘Before you were born, I mean. I suppose I shouldn’t be telling you this at your age but you’ve got to know sometime. It was Evie stopped her. Well, that’s what they say. Though how she did it when she never stands up for herself I wouldn’t know.’


  Basenjis are barkless dogs. They can learn to bark if they are kept with other sorts of dogs but left to themselves they never do, though they squeak a bit and make grunting sounds. Basenjis are clean and gentle and it is a libel to say they are bad-tempered. They are an ancient breed of hound dog native to Central Africa, where they are used to point and retrieve and drive quarry into a net. Since I left that house I have always had a Basenji of my own and now I have two. What could be more natural than that I should love above all other objects of affection the kind I first loved?

  My grandparents were not fond of animals and Evie was allowed to keep the Basenji only because he did not bark. I am sure my grandmother must have put him through some kind of barking test before she admitted him to the house. Evie and the Basenji had a section of the house to live in by themselves. If this sounds like uncharacteristic generosity on my grandmother’s part – you will not expect this from her after what I have said – in fact their rooms were two north-facing attics, the backstairs and what Mrs Poulter called the old scullery. All the time I was not at school (taken there and fetched by Evie in the old Morris Minor Estate car) I spent with her and the Basenji in the old scullery. And in the summer, when the evenings were light, I took the Basenji for his walks.

  You will have been wondering why I made no attempt to examine those scrapbooks or read those letters. Why did I never go into the sewing room in my grandmother’s absence or penetrate my grandfather’s study in the daytime? I tried. Though my grandmother seldom went out, she seemed to me to have an almost supernatural ability to be in two places, or more than two places, at once. She was a very tall thin woman with a long narrow face and dark, flat, rather oily hair which looked as if it were painted on rather than grew. I swear I have stood at the top of the first flight of stairs and seen her at the dining-table which could seat twelve, the scissors in her hand, her head turned as she heard the sound of my breathing, have run down and caught her just inside the drawing-room door, one long, dark, bony hand on the brass knob, twisted away swiftly and glimpsed her in the library, taking from the shelves a book destined for mutilation.