he stood.
There he was about his passionate horticultural summer affairs in a collarless pin-stripe shirt and a tweed hound’s-tooth check waistcoat with its gold watch chain, his horn-rimmed half-moon spectacles on his nose above a bristly little silver-grey moustache, and his bald head shining. There were his slender six feet six and a half inches, slightly stooped, long sleeves rolled up and his huge hands holding a pair of parrot-beaked secateurs and a woven trug bulging with dead heads and clippings. There he was with his pipe in his teeth, staring down at me over his glasses with eyebrows raised in pretended astonishment. ‘It’s dead,’ I blurted out. ‘And there’s blood everywhere.’ And then I cried.
My grandfather tossed the secateurs into the trug, placed it carefully on the bench and bent to pick me up. He swept me effortlessly up, up, up and away from the swirling images of blood and death, away from the clutching ache of panic, up and still further up until I too was six feet six and a half inches above the frightening world my exploration had led me into. He held me firmly in his arms and carried me out of the long, airless, stultifying geranium house so unspeakably burdened with sweet and heady scent, out into the sunshine freshness and the birdsong, and back toward the heavy carved oak bench on the edge of the smoking-room lawn.
He sat down and held me on his knees. ‘Now you must dry your eyes and tell me what is dead.’ His voice was gentle and all-embracing and as deep as a wine cask and as old and wise as Solomon. He drew an acre of silk handkerchief from his trouser pocket and dabbed my tear-salted cheeks. It was soft and springy and smelled of pipe tobacco and bay rum, at that moment the most reassuring incense I could possibly have wished to inhale.
It was the scent of unassailable authority; of great age and timelessness and security and the source of all well-being and the fount of all knowledge and all hope and all sanctity. It was the aroma that lingered in the long upstairs corridors that led to his bedroom – more forbidden territory we would not have dared encroach – and in the smoking-room lavatory we were not allowed to use but where we had peeped in and seen his silver-backed hairbrushes and a tortoiseshell comb laid out on a marble washstand beneath the gilt mirror. It was the lofty perfume of the olden days, of knights and kings and archbishops, the paternalistic aroma of history and Empire, and, in a peculiar way I could not have begun to describe or explain, it was the scent of love.
‘It’s a dog.’ The words choked themselves out. ‘And it’s dead.’ And the tears erupted again, welling into the crumpled silk; the image too stark and the trauma too vivid to be contained in so young a head.
‘I think you’d better show me this dog.’
I held his huge hand as we strode up the mossy slabs of the laurel-lined Broadwalk, shady beneath the cloistered intimacy of huge elms and beeches, slabs that had been heaved into tectonic undulations by the ramifications of roots beneath. I had to take three steps to his one long pace, so I jogged along beside him, still jabbering out the awfulness of my find. We climbed the post and rail fences and out into the fields.
White-faced Hereford bullocks frisked away from us as we cut across their moist pasture of buttercups and clover and lanky thistles. We strode up the field hedges of dense hawthorn and may, where blackbirds and thrushes burst out with a shimmer of sun-silvered wings and clucking alarms, undulated away from us and dived back in again far up ahead. A magpie jetted out beside us and flew off cackling like a witch. We drew close and my heart began to pound. I ran forward. We jumped a ditch: a mighty leap for me and one stride for him as he muttered, ‘Where on earth are you taking me, boy?’
And there it was. There it was dead and snarling with a buzz of bluebottles about its nose and crawling over the bloody void where the ear and a slice of skull should have been.
‘Hmmphhh,’ my grandfather grunted from somewhere deep inside his waistcoated chest as he took the pipe from his teeth and pulled his lips forward and together in a pursed grimace of knowing disapproval. Then he nodded solemnly, ‘I know that dog. It’s been shot at very close range.’ And we turned away and began the long walk back to the house, the silence punctuated only by the regular sharp intake of breath from the side of his mouth.
* * *
It was mid-afternoon. My mother was away in hospital. My father, I learned, had driven my sister in the old black Rover the narrow twenty miles of the Roman Fosse Way – as straight as a blade – and a few winding Warwickshire-Oxfordshire back lanes into the quiet Cotswold market town of Banbury on some domestic errand. By the age of seven I had achieved a reputation for never being an asset on any shopping trip.
So that day I had been abandoned to my own devices; even by then I had established blissful contentment at being left to explore on my own, under the vague and undefined supervision of Nellie – ‘Now don’t you go getting lost, young Jack, or I’ll be for it’ – to catch red admiral butterflies on rotting plums or search for birds’ nests, things of which adults vaguely approved but had little desire to supervise. As usual I had wandered off that day into the woods and fields of the Manor Farm.
‘They’ll all be back for tea,’ my grandfather told me, pulling out his gold pocket watch and tapping its glass as if it needed waking up before telling him the time. ‘In another hour or so. You mark my words.’
He smiled down at me as he lit his pipe with a Swan Vestas, smoke pluming dragon-like from his nostrils, and then he was gone, leaving me earnestly marking his words, striding away from me, the high priest returning to his altar, back to his beloved geraniums and delphiniums and pyrotechnically bursting camellias that almost no one ever saw. He was gone again, gone for the moment, gone in measurable distances of yards and feet and inches, gone in physical presence with his tobacco trail wisping out behind him like an echo, gone in thought and preoccupation as his passion for flowers hauled him away, but to me he had not gone at all. Like the dog’s blood, the events of that day had congealed immutably within my seven-year-old head. My grandfather had become as present and live and tangible and knowable and, yes, as mine, as God to a lonely spinster.
At the ritual of five o’clock afternoon tea at the kitchen table, Nellie sliced the large white loaf in her own alarming style. She would hold the loaf on end, cut face uppermost, and saw horizontally across the top with the blade flashing back and forth toward her own ample bosom. The result was thick, ragged slices for making toast on the ancient Aga hotplate in a folding wire mesh frame. (There was a bread slicer for what she called ‘proper dining-room bread’.) This hot toast, with its imprint of mesh-singed check, she smeared with salty butter the colour of daffodils from the farm dairy, heaped dripping onto a platter and placed strategically in the middle of the table where two large jars, one of honey and the other of her own strawberry jam, lay invitingly open.
It was an invariable routine and a near-compulsory gathering of such family as were about, possibly for the first time since breakfast. ‘I’ve baked a cake,’ Nellie would announce, delivering to the table a warmly volcanic fruit cake rising to a sultana-fissured crater at its summit. Her toast and cake drew us in like moths to a candle. Only on Sundays was the tea ritual extended to the hushed formality of the Jacobean panelled dining room, and that was an adult affair where from the sideboard they poured their tea into Dresden bone-china cups from a silver teapot and the bread was neatly sliced on the slicer. Children stayed in the kitchen with Nellie, and that suited me fine.
Kitchen tea came from a large china pot, glossy brown, dressed in a knitted and fitted blue and yellow cosy, and was poured through a strainer into big blue-ringed teacups of simple household ware. With a long-drawn sigh my grandfather always collapsed his great length into a big, high-backed oak carver at the far end of the table; my father and my uncle sat on either side, while my sister and I perched nearest the Aga under Nellie’s watchful eye. ‘Now, no tipping back!’ she would hiss at me in an audible whisper, flipping her tea towel against my shoulder in mock anger. ‘Or you’ll be in right trouble and
