to face a challenge.
‘You deny that you disapprove of everything, Emma,’ said Peregrine Thoresby. ‘So tell us. What do you approve of?’
‘I approve of disapproval,’ said Emma, ‘because the world deserves it. I approve of alcohol, because it makes me feel good. I approve of cricket, because it’s going to get Luke out of my hair for hours every weekend in summer if we’re still together. I approve of bees, because they’re clever and lovely and I like honey. I approve of rabbits, obviously.’ Her most recent painting was a massive canvas of rabbit droppings. She looked at Peregrine and David. ‘Oh, and I approve of homosexuality.’
‘Thank goodness for that, eh, David?’ said Peregrine.
‘She’s just saying it to be polite,’ said David, and at the word ‘polite’ Emma snorted.
‘Sir Gordon, you’re a bit of an enigma, you know,’ said Peregrine.
‘Oh, I do hope so,’ said Sir Gordon, but he said it without his usual conviction. He felt uneasy in this conversation.
‘You can be so forward-looking with the collection at times, but you’re regarded as a rather reactionary soul. We’ve never discussed this and I think we get on well, I hope we get on well. What’s your attitude to gays?’
Sir Gordon wanted to tell them of his happy relationship with Dennis Hargreaves in Dudley all those years ago, but he couldn’t think of a way of putting it that wouldn’t sound a bit like boasting in this context, as if he was telling them that he wasn’t narrow, he wasn’t prudish, he too was a man of the world, a man of broad tastes. So he didn’t. Instead he repeated something he had said at a seriously stuffy dinner party in Leatherhead.
‘I have no objection to male homosexuality,’ he said. ‘I get on very well with homosexuals actually, but I loathe lesbianism.’
Throughout the house the conversation was buzzing merrily, people were beginning to go for desserts, soon it would be fireworks time, but in this corner there was a stunned silence. Luke broke it at last.
‘That’s ridiculous, Dad.’
‘I don’t want to be rude,’ lied Emma, ‘but it’s ludicrous. How can you possibly justify it?’
‘Two male homosexuals are two rivals out of the way,’ said Sir Gordon. ‘Two lesbians mean two lost opportunities. Simple self-interest.’
There was another, only slightly less stunned silence.
‘Every decision in the world is made out of self-interest.’
‘Oh bollocks,’ said Emma, and she stormed off, to the extent to which it was possible to storm off in such a crowded room.
‘Oh, Dad,’ said Luke, and he set off after her.
‘They’re young,’ said David Emsley. ‘The truth still hurts them.’
The truth. Was it the truth? Sir Gordon wasn’t sure any more. It didn’t explain his phone call to Siobhan.
And then, shortly before ten o’clock, the guests trooped out into a night that wasn’t quite wet and wasn’t quite dry, that wasn’t quite cold and wasn’t quite mild, and they stood in their overcoats and their massed ranks right at the bottom of the garden.
Behind them, the house shone with light, a fantasy of gables and even a small turret, built in brick, rambling, almost mirroring a medieval house that had grown over the centuries, though this had grown in two days on the drawing board of a fast and not too punctilious architect.
Just beyond the fence, at the top of Top Field, the mountainous bonfire burst into life. The flames lit up the faces of the locals, beyond the bonfire.
Now the fireworks began. The Surrey sky was alive with double and triple rockets, meteors, comets, whistling tails, crackling willows, canopies of glittering starburst, noise and glitter and bursting greens and blues and reds. His guests ooohed. The locals aaahed. The guests aaahed. The locals ooohed. All was noise and light.
Dogs whimpered and hid. Cats hissed. Bewildered finches woke and fled. Nervous horses neighed and pranced and fell. Rabbits hared to their burrows. Sticklebacks in the streams felt the vibrations. Sir Gordon caught sight of the Greek Orthodox archbishop looking endearingly boyish and excited, and wondered again whether there was a plot to kill him or kidnap him tonight, under cover of all this excitement.
But most of the time his eyes were gazing into the sky, marvelling at the barrage of rockets, the titanium salutes, the wildly whistling missiles that burst into confusions of colours. Nobody noticed a frail old man slip through a gate with an agility beyond his years, but then he was nineteen again, he was in the Eighth Army, he was inspired by Monty, he was inspired by Rommel, who was that rarity, an enemy worth fighting. Nobody noticed him ride out the hail of bullets, dodge the wickedly whistling shells, and speed – well, totter, but it seemed like speed to him – towards the conflagration.
‘There are men in there,’ he cried, but his voice was frail, and nobody heard his cry. ‘There are men dying in there.’ But the noise was loud, and nobody heard his voice. But then he tripped, and the fall caught somebody’s eye, and voices were raised, Sir Gordon and others heard the cries, Sir Gordon saw his father, slender and tottering in the glare of the flames, getting to his feet again, shouting desperately but oh so feebly, stumbling towards the flames, but oh so slowly, men were catching him, Sir Gordon was running but he was too late, too late, his father fell again, arms reached out for him, a log spat viciously, sparks flew, his father’s straggly hair was on fire, his father screamed, then he saw his father pulled away out of the reach of the fire, there was a bag over his head, somebody was pressing the bag down so that the fire couldn’t breathe, but his father couldn’t breathe, Sir Gordon couldn’t breathe, a great pain shot through him, he was having a heart attack, he was dying, he was lying and dying beside his dead father.
But Sir Gordon didn’t die and neither, amazingly, did his father. They made them tough in Dudley, and besides, don’t forget, Clarrie was nineteen again.
The bonfire burned on, the fireworks continued to explode, many people hadn’t even noticed the kerfuffle beside the fire. Somebody found Dr Ferguson, who examined the old man with great tenderness. There beside the fire he was in the warmest place around. Dr Ferguson suggested that they let him recover a little from his shock before they moved him. And then, during the spectacular climax to the magnificent display, when almost all eyes were on the heavens, they moved Sir Gordon’s frail, shocked father carefully, and carried him with infinite care back to the protection of the warm, wonderful house. Dr Ferguson said that to move him to hospital, a twenty-mile trip in an ambulance, to transport him to a bed when there was a bed here safe from MRSA, would be senseless. He himself would stay beside him, tend him, treat him, dress the burn on his scalp, comfort him.
‘Well,’ said Sir Gordon Coppinger to his spouse of twenty-nine years, ‘do you think inviting him was sensible now?’
‘It might have been a good, brave way for him to go,’ said Lady Coppinger, the former Miss Danish Pastry (West Midlands).
Sir Gordon sighed. It was a sigh steeped in realism. She would always have the last word.
Some people knew what had happened and sent their condolences, but far more of the revellers had no idea that anything untoward had happened, such had been the splendour of the display.
There
