Noens /Hencn
B The Hole'
Ho A LE
Hand copy wanssenp
O'The Hol'
Hard Copy I mamtonst
The Hole
Haud lwrtkan note


Because I've changed so much since that time (little
more than a year ago) it won't be easy for me to describe
the events that wrecked my six-month marriage, robbed me
of my inheritance and drove us insane.
My name is John Bloomfield and before all this hit
me I was a successful New York lawyef of thirty-two.
I'm now thirty-three but see my former life across a
mighty black chasm which I dare not cross (I mean I no
longer have contact with old friends, law colleagues etc).
I'm writing this in an exclusive clinic in Wiltshire,
England, which is devoted (to put it politely) to mental
care. John Bloomfield isn't my real name, nor are the
other names in this story.
The fact is that I have to
protect the identity of ArthurWarren, 2f5 as I'm-goingto
call him, and the group of people round him who are lead-
ing double lives.
If I revealed his real name, or mine,
the cat would be out of the bag. Or would it? Who
would believe my story? You don't topple the status quo
that easily.
And this particular group has been under
cover for no fewer than six centuries, believe it or not.
Like the freemasons they did well to infiltrate the upper
echelons of power---the government, the City, the church,
the best homes. Instead of fearing justice you administer
it---this ris the wayto survive with a treasonable secret
in your heart. And Arthur Warren, to name the current


cock of their walk, is a JP, apart from being one of the
wealthiest landlords in the country. And this is as
near the wind as I'm going to sail.
I ought to add that unlike the freemasons this group
has never been heard of, much less named.
Not bad going
for six centuries of ceaseless fervent activity.
So in
a sense this story is an exposure.
Anyway, we agree to call it a story, a tale, whereas
it is God's truth if ever there was truth.
It was Arthur Warren who brought all the tortures of
the last year on us, or so I believe, and so I shall write.
He seduced my wife (we were married hardly six months
before in Beaufort, South Carolina) and deprived me of
my English inheritance or what was called in my mother
Elizabeth's will 'the Suffolk lands', of which Cawne
Manor was the centre jewel so to speak.
CawneManor lies about twenty miles from the Suffolk
coast, and the same distance from the Norfolk border,
surrounded by its own moat which is now largely dried
up and full of slanting alder trees which have a strange
luminousness at night.
Its banks are so clustered with
oaks, yews, birch and poplar that it provides the garden
and the magnificent many-roofed house with a sort of
protective faery wall, as well as a baffle-board against
the roar of the six-lane highway not half a mile, away.
That was where Suzie and I spent our second honey-
moon, after my mother's death. My mother Elizabeth
stipulated quite clearly in her will that I was to reside
for at least three months at Cawne Manor during the year
of her decease.
So the plan was laid quite neatly, you see. Or
should I say the trap?
I always remember Cawne Manor in sunlight, yet it
became the darkest place on earth for, dark and fascinating
and hypnotic, and how I survived its terrors physically
I shall never know. ASS I write this I see the islands
of shrubs and flowers on the smooth rising lawn, with
the thick trees of the moat as a background, and it looks


like a glittering enclosed jewel as I gaze out of the
latticed lounge window, everything so still, an island
if ever there was one. On warm days I would take one of
the armchairs out of the house and sit on the lawn staring
at the house in a peculiar daydreaming mood that was quite
unlike me, or so I thought.
I was capable of moving from one point to another of
that bewitching garden all day until the sun went down
behind the circle of tall trees.
The sunlight seemed to
belong just to us and I was always absurdly surprised to
see it shining elsewhere, beyond the wide wooden gate.
All day I might sit and gaze while the blackbirds and some- -
times a nightingale or two sang, and the blue tits picked
at the pork fat I hung for them under the porch.
The rooks
squawked, the magpies floated down in heavy black-and-white
bundles to steal something (if it's true they steal).
Then there was the rose garden with its little wooden
pagoda painted golden and red and aquamarine at one end.
It was doubly sheltered, an island in an island with neatly
clipped hedgerows and holly, its strips of black earth
freshly hoed, and there was every sort of rose, Sonyas and
tea-pinks and deep purples.
They were so vivid they all
but hurt the eyes.
I said above that the lawn visible from the lounge-
window glittered and this was especially so early in the
morning when I took my coffee. I could see the grass
flashing minutely with dew, millions of tiny flashes, and
it many times crossed my mind that I'd been watching this
ever since I was born or even before.
Sometimes my excite-
mentht being the owner of Cawne Manor was so overwhelming 3
that tears came to my eyes.
Which brings me back to my earlier self, before I set
foot in the house and knew it only from my mother's brief
and infrequent references to it over the years. I always
knew she'd inherited an English property but it seemed no
more to her than a useful source of rent.
I realise now
that her reticence was all part of the design that wrecked
my life. As a matter of fact before her death I was quite a


hustler, though my clients rarely saw it. It was my
mother who taught me howsto worry a brief to death, never
give up on it.
Once I had my claws on a case a kind of
white-hot energy got hold of me. . But she also taught me
charm. So I was trusted (and underrated, which can be a
professional asset). My successes were looked on as
amiable accidents, which meant that they excited little envy
within my firm, which was riddled with internal politics.
Sometimes I overdid it.
The year before my mother died
I received threatening phonecalls after having an indict-
ment slammed on a man for irregularities' in real estate
which my father had practised without blinking. As the
case touched on the inviolability of contracts I dug up a
Supreme Court ruling dated 1810, the Fletcher versus Peck
case, and got away with it by means of sophistry.
But I
nearly paid for it with my life. Yes, my mother gave me
my dangerous gift for exposure, which is why I-suppose I'm
writing all this.
If it hadn't been for my mother's sudden death I would
have had my own firm by now. I had,wealthy clients as
far afield as South Carolina, and it was this that took me
to Columbia one evening to a client called Clive Rembold - -
who introduced me to the loveliest girl I'd ever seen, the
daughter of a sales rep in pharmaceutical products in
Beaufort. She was nearly as tall as I was, extremely dark,
and well---we didn't stop looking at each other all evening.
The next day we flew to New York together.
But still I
waited two years before marrying her. And I didn't tell my
mother Elizabeth one thing about her. She, my mother,
always used to joke about my girlfriends, how I changed them
like socks. And until then I used to tell her about every
one of them, down to intimate details, which made her laugh
so long as what I said didn't sound vulgar or cruel. She
wouldn't stand for smut. I suppose she was extremely old-
fashioned. My father respected her so much that he talked
about her in a hush even when she was just one. room away.
That was an amazing love. I was terribly jealous if any man


other than my dad so much as glanced at her. Dad/land I
sort of threw a male security net round her, which sometimes
produced hostility when, there were other men around, especial-
ly if we overdid it: I mean sometimes they had no intent-
ion of trying to seduce my mother.
It was a chivairy thing.
She inspired that.
Anyway, I didn't. tell her about Suzie
Besant.
Elizabeth Bloomf ield was a remarkable woman.
She
had the softest body I ever knew in a human being. I
still think my dad was the luckiest man ever born. He
visited Suffolk, England, in '38 or '39 and they met at
Arthur Warren's house, or rather his father's as it was then.
In a year they were married and she emigrated to New York.
Dad went back to his real estate business and started making
big money for the first time in his life.
When he died
(just eighteen months before Elizabeth) he left me sizeable
chunks of New Jersey and Florida, which is why I could
afford to take a three-month sabbatical at Cawne Manor after
a long honeymoon in the Bahamas.
I never expected her to die. No one else did either.
Her doctors were baffled.
The director of the clinic in
Stanford Conn. where she spent her last weeks saw no path-
ological reason why she should die, and in fact he gave me
a date for her release a few days before it happened.
Her
blood count, blood pressure, heart performance, metabolism
were exemplary. She was hardly sixty. She'd never been
sick---just the usual colds and flu and, once, glandular
fever.
She stopped eating one day and told me she couldn't
hold her food down.
But her digestive system was OK.
In the last weeks she didn't even drink.
With my permiss-
ion she was fed intravenously but to the astonishment of
the nursing staff she continued to fade away. Her mind
was clear to the last moment, so was her speech.
She
gave me precise instructions about her aj partment on 62nd
Street should she die but I took this as a joke, and she
let me.
One bitter December morning I drove over to Stanford U 7


as usual and walked across the gravel forecourt to the
clinic entrance. There were two nurses waiting for me.
"I'm afraid she died a few minutes ago,' " one of them
said.
I felt the ground float away from under my feet and
the nextthing I knew a doctor was standing over me in the
entrance hall patting my cheeks.
One of the staff put a call through to Suzie in
Beaufort and she took a plane to New York that day.
I was helpless. She found me in the bathroom of my
mother's apartment crying like a baby. A man should have
a.n measure of control over his grief but the tears poured
out of me even in my sleep. I realised that almost every
thought I had was in some way addressed to my mother.
If I came off well in court or found a stunning new girl
the first thing I did was call her up and tell her about
it. She was my constant audience of one. Now suddenly
the theatre had gone dark. I was crying about that too.
Anyway, Suzie had to work a sixteen-hour day to get
things straight for me. My mother's will stipulated that
she was to be buried at the church of St Clement's in
Tarnley Green, Suffolk, England, and that Mr Arthur Warren
of 'Wilmers', Walpole, Suffolk, England, 'my lifelong
friend and agent', already knew of this desire and would
complete formalities for the burial at his end. So Suzie
had to start working on the highly complicated task of
expatriating my mother's remains despite the fact that she
was an American citizen.
She solicited help from my firm
and, well, it really is marvellous what lawyers can accomplish
when they pull together.
In two days flat my mother's
remains were travelling Pan Am in an expensive coffin with
enormous brass handles which Suzie chose. I had to go to the
mortuary for two identifications(there was talk of an
autopsy but it didn't happen, due I think to my firm's
influence) and each time I broke down, to my shame. I didn't


give a damn wha t the mortuary officials thought, it was
Suzie I was worried about.
She was only twenty-five and
no less impressionable than most girls of her age. I was
supposed to be the one man in her life whom no emergency
could ruffle. My mother had taught me an unnerving calm
but it died with her, I think.
When I got on the plane
to London (I had sufficient presence of mind to spare Suzie
the funeral) I thought I was never going to get myself
straight again.
I couldn't understand why my mother didn't want to be
buried at my father's side in Georgetown, Washington,
where he'd been born. I felt some jealousy on his behalf,
a suspicion that she had deeper loyalties than he'd known
about.
I arrived at London airport sedated to the eyeballs
and it took a man called 'Tiny' Petersham (he was actually
vast) over an hour to find me. He drove me to Suffolk
in complete silence, sucking on a dead pipe which sent off
a sickening smell far worse than smoke.
The moment we
drove over the narrow bridge into the Cawne Manor property,
clattering on the steel rollers put there against cattle,
a change came over me. I believe it was then, at that
very moment, with that metallic clatter in my ear and the
misty, green but shadowy island before me, so different
from the rest of the world, that I became the man I am now,
and my previous life separated from me like the warm
placenta at birth, once negessary to growth but now discard-
We drove the length of the curving drive to the front
porch and I was surprised to see how many cars were gather-
ed on the gravel forecourt.
The house was crowded, even
festive, with the front door open. I couldn't understand
this. In forty years my mother hadn't revisited Suffolk
once. I believe she was in London once or twice changing
planes. So who were these people?
It was a chill afternoon, just before dusk, and
rainwater was dripping from the bare black branches.
Light streamed from the lounge windows, yellow in the mist


and with a peculiar glow that seemed to extend all round
the property as far as the dark curtain of trees in the
moat. I glimpsed people kneeling in prayer.
Then I had a sensation which was both pleasureable
and chill.
I felt my mother behind me. She was urging
me to enter the house. More than that, she was looking at
everything through my eyes, quite as if she (had. needed to
die in order to revisit the property she'd inherited at
the age of nineteen or twenty and never seen again.
She
made me look up at the roof or rather roofss having been
added to again and again over the centuries since its
foundation in pre-Tudor times the house had many roofs
and hidden quadrangles.
It all seemed so exciting and
inviting, like a tiny city, and for a moment I forgot my
grief. Or rather, she made me do so. The helpless
bereavement I'd felt before never returned. It seemed
that I was with her again, she was waiting for me here
at her house. I walked inside feeling that she hadn't
died after all and that, on the contrary, it was I who
had had to take a journey---in order to meet her again.
I date the beginning of my progress towards the place
where I am now from those first moments after Petersham
politelyopened the door of his Rover for me to climb out.
I ducked from the low beams. I noticed that silk
scarves had been draped over some of the lampshades.
In the lounge a massive log fire was blazing.
The
inglenook was big enough to step inside.
There was a
Nativity on the wall which I knew from a visit to Rome
with my mother in my college days. It'was a Caravaggio
and came, if I remember rightly, from a church in Piazza
del Popolo. We'd gazed at it together (now his light-
and-shade effect doesn't interest me) and perhaps she'd
been thinking of the Cawne Manor lounge, where I suppose
the-reproduction must_already havé been_hanging. And now.she-
seemed to be directing my eyes to this Nativity in her
intimate, unhurried way, and it felt as if we were in
Rome again. I swear there was no difference between


my sense of her at my side in that Roman church and
my sense of her now, after her death.
I don't know if
this idea seems confusing.
But I felt exactly the same
on both occasions.
Looking past the heads of her mourners I saw a photo-
graph of her on the sideboard almost smothered in flowers.
I'd never seen it before.
She was a young woman, before
her hair had turned from.bright frolicsome gold to grey.
Oh how lucky my father had been! I stood there gazing
across at her, greeting the lovely creature who had decided
to bring me into life.
But who were these mourners? Cousins, nieces and
nephews? And where was Arthur Warren, whom she'd mentioned
to me once or twice as the friend in charge of the 'Suffolk
lands', as she called Cawne Manor and its adjacent farms?
From time to time, I remembered, she had received letters
from England, always in the same handwriting, and I wondered
now if these had been his. Over the years he'd rented
Cawne Manor and the holdings/(good cropland and dairy
pasture, with some valuable woods), and had kept the
accounts with impeccable honesty and, so my mother once
told me, without taking a nickel in commission.
There were groups of_people everywhere in the hall
and corridor leading to the other rooms. I passed between
them awkwardly. There were children too. Surely this
was more than family sorrow could account for?
How had
my mother ma intained so many relationships during her
absence? I found that the pa 1ms of my hands were sweating,
an unusual reaction in me, and I was aware of looking
extremely pale.
Darkness was falling outside and through
one of the latticed lounge windows I could see the sloping
lawn and the brooding mass of the moat-trees beyond.
The
huge man Petersham had gone. There was such a silence.
Yet everyone was talking.
It had something to do with my
mother, she seemed to spread a comforting hush over every-
thing.
Then the question entered my mind, suppose my mother


had in fact visited Suffolk regularly over those forty
years? And without telling my father?
Or had it been
a secret shared between the two of them and not with me?
In that case why had I been excluded? I felt like a man
who finds outi about his wife's lifelong infidelity only
after her death.
Yes, I felt that degree of shock over a mere
suspicion.
Perhaps my nerves were in a more distraught
state than I was willing to admit to myself.
But the
suspicion and the shock grew stronger. I remember as a child
staring through the gauze of the summer window-frame in
my bedroom at the Long Island house trying to identify the
dark huddled figures below on the lawn as they laughed and
chatted and drank, wondering where she was, and whether
other men than my father were at that moment standing close
I stood gazing at her photograph and thought I saw
the slightest smile on her face---I mean a smile different
from the actual smile. And that hidden smile seemed to
suggest secrets I might/find unbearable.
Someonecame up" behind meand put hishandon my
"I'm Warren," he said.
turned and saw a man nearly as big as Petersham
but much more imposing, even formidable.
He had a high
forehead which.I noticed at once and deep steady eyes
that made me flinch, almost:as if he'd caught me having
bad thoughts about my mother.
His nose was firm and
straight, the kind my father always used to call 'the nose
of judgement'. He looked no more than forty-five but I
knew he'd grown up with my mother, which made him at least
sixty. He had massive shoulders and (I glanced down at
them as we shook hands) long slender fingers and narrow
wrists, not at all what you expected in a man so big and
so forthright in appearance. We were standing among
people deep in prayer but he seemed quite unconcerned
about this, quite as if he alone were the arbiter of good
manners.
He drew me out of the lounge into the corridor,
hardly making an effort to keep his voice down.


"I hope you don't mind all this," he went on.
"I thought it was a fitting thing to do.
I've arranged
for a day and night vigil until the funeral which is
Thursday."
I glanced back at her photograph again, vantingto
ask her a question but not knowing what it was. My head
was dizzy with the heavy scent of lilies everywhere.
Warren drew me out of the lounge into the dining room
next doorwhere drinks and a cold buffet were being served.
I was horrified by this. I suppose it offended some sort
of puritanism in me to see people eating and drinking so
close to the room of mourning.
Warren introduced me to
a man called Mike Hammonsworth who was vicar of the church
where my mother was to be buried. A man less like a
minister I couldn't imagine. He was dressed in muddy
riding breeches with a colourful ascot round his neck
and he wasieating a chippolati. I who never entered a
church and had no God had sensitive feelings about all
this! I'm amazed now at my first reaction to this humble
and devout man. He was almost as tall as Warren, though
quite skinny with a lined face and a sharp nose, very
much an individual, rather jumpy in his movements.
And
every now and then he flashed a curious sparkling glance
at me with very open, vulnerable, black eyes which I swore
were Italian or Spanish. Actually, like Warren and myself,
as I learned later, he had French blood.
There was also a blonde woman whose figure at once
caught my eye. She wore a white close-fitting knitted
dress, cut very low at the neck.
That too seemed most
inappropriate to me. Her name was Daphne Price and she
was the wife of a local doctor. I thought she looked more
like a girl out of a Chicago cathouse. Anger stirred
under my grief.
But I was more baffled than anything.
I just couldn't see how you could mourn somebody's death
dressed like that (I can now).
She had white luscious
skin and her figure was one of the most delectable I've ever
seen, soft like my mother's.
She was middle height with
cal 1m, rather audacious blue eyes and shoulders that,
goodness knows why, suggested intelligence to me.


Cars kept coming and going outside. I wanted to
ask Warren what it was all about but_was"afraid
might show how little I knew my mother, or rather how
little she had confided in me. I returned to the photo-
graph, in fact I couldn't drag myself away from it.
Thankfully Warren came back to the Jounge and said,
"Supper's waiting for us. Will you come ?"
"Oh sure."
"I've fixed up a bed for you at Wilmers. You won't
want to stay here all alone."
'Tiny' Petersham was waiting outside still sucking
on his pipe. He and Warren seemed to be old friends,
so close in fact that they snapped at each other instead
of really conversing, short sharp sentences which I could
hardly understand. It was quite a pleasureable experience
for me to hear the English accent, like a homecoming.
Of course I was used to that accent from birth, because
of my mother.
That was one of the things between my:
parents. They adored - each other's accents and made the
other promise not to adapt it in any way.
Petersham took the wheel again and we drove north
along narrow lanes.
Here and there the first buds were
appearing. This was my first visit to England and the
enchantment of its countryside began to take hold of me.
I wonder if this is because I have English blood? Yet
I feel a terrible nostalgia for Amèrica, too.If I think
of certain places in Pennsylvania where I intend! to build
a house I find it unbearable. As I write this I'm.wonder- 1
ing if I shall ever see that little town fifteen miles
south-east of Gettysburg again.
That's where I'm buried,
the old self.
Wilmers was quite different from Cawne Manor--- a
simple rectangular Georgian mansion with vast windows
and balustrades and still pools and ferns in stone pots.
The house was in darkness, its wide steps leading up to
a palladian front gleaming with some vague light from the
moonless sky. I discovered when we wal lked into the vast
hall that Warren never used electric light.
There were


chandeliers with dripping candles everywhere. I waiked
in with Warren and three dogs came rushing to meet us,
slipping on the carpets and clawing at the parquet but
not barking.
They were young coach dogs and Warren
seemed to have perfect control of them. They jumped at
his side yelping and huffing with joy but the moment he
said "Down!" they ran into the library and curled up under
the desk.
In the corridors flames quivered every time someone
walked past. It only needed a spark to catch pne of the
curtains and all that deal and pinewood panelling would
have gone up like ma tchwood in seconds.
But he seemed
to enjoy the danger, and the apprehension it caused in
his guests. Sometimes he left candles blazing after he
went to bed, to splutter out in their own way. It was
just like him to tempt fate like that, on the grounds
that fate is controllable.
What an extraordinary man he
was. No wonder my mother had more faith in him than in
anyone on the globe (I write this rather bitterly).
Wilmers was the most eccentric house I've ever been
in but everything had its reason, as I found out slowly
over the months. There were dog baskets everywhere,
and the rooms were perhaps not too clean. The carpets
looked precious but had taken a fair beating.
The
central heating was a typically English non-starter and
what warmth the radiators mustered with enormous- gurglings
blew away in the chill draughts from open doors and ill-
fitting windows.
Only the library, where everyone
collected before and after dinner, was really warm, with
its constantly burning log fire.
In every room there were piles of books, on the floor,
on tables, on ricketty shelves. My bedroom, apart from
being an ice-box, had heaps of locked trunks piled
against one wall which made it impossible for me to get
to the bathroom.
"That's OK," Warren said.
"You can use mine."


There was a French housekeeper called Rachel who
hardly ever spoke. She cooked and served at table.
She usually appeared from the pantry when you entered
the hall.
The green padded door opened silently and
there she was, offering to take your coat without a word,
much less a smile. She was tall and slim but with large
limbs that belonged to a farm woman in the fyrenees:
Her face was gaunt and pale and she wore her black hair
drawn back tight into a bun, which threw her cheekbones
into rather ugly prominence. She served at table so
quietly that you could never understand how your glass
got filled.
It seemed against the house rules to address
her even with a thank you and on that first visit I wonder-
ed if she was deaf and dumb.
Then I heard her talking
rapidly in the kitchen with a French accent.
We had dinner the first evening with 'Tiny' Petersham.
He reluctantly put his foul pipe on the table in order to
eat and I saw Warren, at the head of the table in a sort
of throne, give it (and Petersham) a sour look.
When
she served the soup Rachel shifted the pipe a few feet
down the table with the back of her hand and Tiny seemed
to accept this like a child.
He ate with concentration,
his head lowered, and said hardly a word all the time.
But when he did speak it was with the most charming accent
I've ever heard in the English language, as clear as a bell,
and in a voice so courteous and pleasant-sounding that you
couldn't believe it belonged to his body even while you
were staring him in the face.
During dinner I asked Warren (it took a surprising
amount of courage) how it was that my mother had So many
mourners when she'd---as far as I knew---been absent from
the country for at least forty years.
He went on eating and finished his mouthful before
replying, his eyes resting on the dark furthest wall of
the dining room.
"You see," he said, "Elizabeth and I were so close


I suppose my feelings for her sort of washed off on
others over the years."
It didn't sound true, or even mean to sound true.
I thought there might beaismile in his eyes.
"You mean you were always talking about her?"
He turned to me slowly and gave me the full benefit
of his gaze. I'd never been looked at like that before.
The eyes told me simply that the subject was closed.
Yet theywere without the slightest anger or reproach.
They conveyed the message to me with a clarity that almost
made me shudder.
He then went on playing with his food,
placid and composed as I've rarely seen a human being
outside India or China, or in some religious community.
He never really ate. He picked/at hisfood and sipped.
a little wine.
His housekeeper paid him hardly any
attention at table, I suppose for this reason.
Frequently
she offered dishes to the guests but not to him.
How
can I put it? He was like a guest always, at his own
table.
As if to provide an epilogue to his cryptic remark
about my mother he murmured as we walked back to the
library after dinner, "You mustn't mope about her, you
know. Elizabeth didn't like that sort of thing."
And, believe it or not, I felt that a calming hand
had been laid on me, I don't know whether his or hers,
and I wanted to cry, not with my early grief but with
gratitude at receiving unbiassed love.
That night I lay awake gazing at the trunks all round
me marked 'Wanted on Voyage', 'Basrah', 'Port Said',
'Bombay', wondering if they were still full of belongings
from years ago because they'd never been unpacked.
The flickering candles sent a comforting light round the
room, producing dense shadows in which, had I been
susceptible that way, many ghosts could have lurked.
I realised that all my life I'd neglected my mother
while doting on her.
Perhaps all sons do that.
I never
once asked myself what kind of human being she was. In


fact seeing so many mourners at Cawne Manor hadf raised
bersocially_in, myeyes.
This was a distress ing
feeling to become aware of because it showed me that I
had under-valued her during her life in a most patronising
way. She must have seen that and shrugged it off as the
lot of maternity.
I don't know if I'm telling this story properly. If
not it's because I lack culture.
I began to realise
that for the first time in England. I picked up little
at high school or even Harvard. I got into a rather
a smart brainless set (of course 'smart' means nothing
today compared with what it did in my mother's time).
The little I knew she taught me. She used to sit on the
other side of the room in the 62ndstreet apartment
talking to me in that remote cool way of hers.
"When you want to influence somebody," she used to
say, "you must do it from inside, not outside. No one
is going to be manipulated from the outside.
What you
have to do is get inside their thoughts and see things
from their point of view. And then you telepathically
suggest your line of action to them as if they'd chosen
it themselves. This always works if you do it properly.
You canitao it with people you hate or fear. You have
to get rid of those feelings first."
She had hundreds of things to say like this and I grew
up thinking that all mothers talked this way. And her
advice really got inside me. I think it was the secret
of my successes as a lawyer. She had a way of talking so
that you felt the influence even though you didn't quite
understand what she was saying.
But apart from what she taught me I was a thoroughly
ordinary young man. I believed what I read in the papers,
I pulled out of discussions if they looked like getting
serious, I enjoyed playing fives every evening with an
English friend, Ilearned karate and developed a powerful
muscular frame (which actually put Suzie off when she first
met me) and I changed my car about three times a year.


I have blonde"hair and I'm good-looking in a perhaps
over-symmetrical way. I didn't have to fight for people's
good opinion of me because i I picked friends on my own
level and not above it, ii) I had enough money not to have
to depend on what other people felt about me and iii) I
could charm a ferret out of its hole.
But while I had no mind I had a lot of unconscious
animal power over other people which I used in my work
as well as in love affairs.
"The girls fall for you like skittles," my mother
used to say with her tinkling laugh that reminded me of
a girl of fifteen.
It was her clever grooming that made this possible.
But why she gave me this particular upbringing with its
emphasis on the muscular I shall never really know, since
it was the opposite of what she admired in a man. She
turned me into a baseball player, a philistine, a nearly
crooked lawyer, a party-goer, a philanderer, a handyman
who could do repair jobs at the Long Island house. Some-
times I think it was to keep me out of the drug-scene.
She was always talking about that.
After all, everyone
else in my generation had some drug experience but not me.
I never once smoked grass, let alone sniffed coke or shot
horse. I never once smoked even a straight cigarette.
As for drink, I like wine with my meals but that's as far
as it goes.
Only now do I realise just how unique this
was for my generation.
None of my friends were dopeheads
but they all smoked a bit of pot from time to time or took
speed or swallowed a purple heart at a dance for the kicks.
When offered these things I just laughed and did a sort
of recoil.
I felt too healthy. And I wanted to stay
that way. I was very heavily into sex from the age of
fifteen.
I was insatiable, and pregnancies and outraged
parentsfollowed me all through high school and college.
My mother didn't seem to mind that.
Perhaps it was my
way of balancing the rude health.
She often told me that for her drugs were the same
as surgery.


"Once you cut certain nerves," she would say,
"it's the devil's own job to get them to function again."
I didn't know what she meant. I just nodded.
What
I thought she meant wasn't in fact anything like what she
did mean. It has taken me a year's hell (such as I
wouldn't wish on my wickedest enemy) to find out the
meaning.
Had I entered the drug scene I would have gone in
head first like I did into sex. So the only way she had
of keeping me out of danger was to turn me into an extra-
vert, fornicator and bore. At least that's my guess.
I lay awake a long time that first night at Wilmers,
with foxes making their ghostly bark outside. My windows
looked out on lawns and ponds. These ended in a so-called
ha-ha, a sudden drop in the ground intended to keep cattle
out of the garden, which Warren said generations of drunken
guests had fallen down.
Beyond the garden were flat
meadows just getting lush, and a fast stream, and open
country as far as you could see, not a chimney or even a
farmhouse in sight.
They say that land in Britain is
still in the hands of only five percent of the population,
with the result that you get these uninterrupted views.
Well, Warren was certainly a member of that little landown-
ing club, hate them though he did.
Girls kept coming to the house while I was staying
there.
This surprised me.
Warren referred to them,
almost with a wink, as his 'nephews'.
And I swear that
that one of them---sometimes two---went up to his bedroom
each night.
In part of the cavernous pillared cellars under the
house he'd fixed up a kind of discotheque with a bar and
easy chairs and knee-height tables and, incredibly, those
highly professional coloured spots and twinkle-lights that
flash to the rhythm of the musi ic.
He suggested an
evening down there---my mother's funeral hadn't yet taken
place. I looked at him woefully and met his eyes again.
This time he was gazing at me with cool pitying curiosity.
I didn't feel this fitted the occasion at all.
But it
really was impossible to resist this man and we went down-
stairs, where he obliged me to dance to the deafening juke-


box with three girls round me. I had a feeling that
he'd more or less ordered the girls to fuss over me.
After I met Suzie I decided to be faithful for the first
time in my life. It was hard going at Wilmers.
Finally
Warren saw my distress and sort of called the girls off
rather as he called off the dogs Bounce, Sandy and Booful.
"I think we'd better turn in," he said,
"It's the
funeral tomorrow."
A1l kinds of feelings were stirring in me-- -ones
that accused me of disloyalty toward my mother, as well
as to Suzie.
Because I enjoyed the dancing, and certainly
the girls, their light breasts, so subtle behind their
blouses. I also felt increasingly suspicious that my
poor dad had been duped. I formed the idea that my
mother's assocation with Warren had been too shameful to
mention to him.
But a glow returned to my cheeks at Wilmers.
played tennis every morning with Mike Hammonsworth, the
vicar of St Clement'sc He darted about the court like
a demon---for a moment I had the impression that he had
a monk's habit on and it was flying all over the placed)
as he jumped and lunged at the ball. He mostly lost but
he gave me a hard game. He always left the court sweating
so profusely that he looked as if he'd just taken a shower.
Losing made'him irritable. You just couldn't imagine this
man having a religious thought. He was so very childish--
it took me a long time to see that this was : humility,
acquired'from yearsof bitter
inner-struggle.
The food at Wilmers was succulent, alltoo much so.
Rachel served the most exquisite French food. Nothing,
not even sardines on toast, was like you'd had it before.
Apart from playing tennis I went riding with Warren on
one of his 'old skins' as he called his fine stable.
One
of the mares had recently taken second place at the
Thousand Guineas.
He showed me old photographs of my mpther in several
albums. He sat at my side on the library settee, and the


way he was leaning back, gazing at me half from behind
as I looked at them, you would think he was proudly recall-
ing a deceased friend for someone who'd never set eyes on
her.
My mother could look So light.
This is difficult
to describe.
You felt you could lift her up on a finger.
I recognised in those early photos that playful, almost
skittish element I knew so well in her, symbolised perfect-
ly by the loose way she wore her hair. This didn't change
at all as she grew older.
"Are there any tenants at Cawne Manor?" I asked
Warren quietly, without knowing why.
"No. I sent the last tenants away a few months ago."
"I had the impression that your mother wanted to come
and stay, now that your father was dead.
Just an impress-
ion. So I had the place done up."
"You know she wants me to spend three months there
this year, don't you?"
"She says quite categorically in the will that it has
to be this year, the year of her decease.
And she feels
so strongly about it that she's made it a condition of the
inheritance."
"Perhaps she's right.
Cawne Manor needs a resident
owner for a change."
"Yes but I plan to marry when I get back.
It won't
be easy. And for three months, impossible!
I've already
got a huge backlog of work waiting for me."
"You'1l surely find a way," Warren almost whispered.
Warren didn't give me an answer but he was right, as
matters turned out.
I did find a way. After the funeral
I flew down to Beaufort in South Carolina and married
Suzie two days later, then took her to the Bahamas and
from there phoned my firm to say I was taking a three-
month sabbatical.
Now I look back on it I didn't have
much to do with the deçision, it just happened. I won't


say that Warren made it happen but sometimes, over the
months that followed, it began to feel that way.
My mother's funeral was as perplexing for me as the
'vigil' at Cawne Manor.
The church was crowded and there
was even a sprinkling of lookers-on outside.
The wreaths
were something to gape at.
Some were so huge and lavish
they needed two or three people to carry them.
And
there were so many. You would think a celebrity had
died.
It was one of those warm gentie days, touched with
the slightest balmy breeze, which I have come to recognise
as England's occasional heavenly reward for otherwise heart-
rendingly inconstant weather.
Everything seemed to float
dreamily in this atmosphere.
Even the nearby roaring
highway was silent.
Probably the wind-direction was
favourable.
One could smell the sea, senselits reflection
in the sky. Nature was moving.
The trees were putting
on their first leaves. I noticed crocuses and the first
daffodils.
Mike Hammonsworth swept past me in a cassock
and freshly washed surplice 7 on his way to the vestry, as
six men bore the coffin into the church.
The sunlight
glittered on its brass handles.
Thankfully Warren stayed
close to me throughout the ceremony. I couldn't have
remained on my feet without him. He seemed no different
from the previous days, neither more nor less reverent.
He gazed round at the other mourners in his placid,
unruffled, open way, his hands in his pockets.
He wore
dark grey with a black tie. He nodded to a few people,
smiled.
Again I had the impression that he was setting
the tone for everyone else's behaviour.
Daphne Price was there, alone as before.
I was
amazed at myself for having judged her so harshly at
the Ca wne Manor vigil.
She was still dressed in white,
though. A spring coat covered her dress (I don't know
if it was the same dress as before but the neck was cut
just as low). There was something in her bearing that
struck me. Far from greeting me, she never once glanced
at me. Nor did she glance at the others.
She gazed


ahead with quite unmoving eyes and I had the impression
that my mother meant something very special to her.
I didn't sée her speak once. She was entirely in her own
thoughts. There was something in all this---in the
bearing of the other mourners too, including the children--
which filled me with bafflement and also a sense of help-
less remorse, as if they were accusing me of negligence
toward my mother.
Really, my obvious grief aj part, they
seemed to reverence her far more deeply than I did.
Mike Hammonsworth was a different man in his cassock
and surplice, towering from the pulpit, his hands gripping
the lectern while he swayed to and fro and shouted like
a Neapolitan priest, his black eyes boring into; those of
the congregation. I saw the same sparkle in his dark,
shrouded eyes before but realised now that it was due to
fanaticism.
"Elizabeth Bloomfield was perfect," he bellowed,
"and that was why she died!"
I looked round the congregation, expecting the
Vague expressions of those who are listening to empty
words and thinking other things, but this wasn't the case
at all.
Everyone was concentratedy! grave,as he talked.
And I couldn't understand a word! I knew my mother was
a good woman---and apparently, judging by the size of the
congregation, an influential one too-- --but how could he
use the word 'perfect', especially as he'd almost certain-
ly never set eyes on her?
"We mustn't be afraid of perfection!" the sermon went
on, almost as if he knew what I was thinking.
"There
are those who wait to be called and there are those who
seem even while living to be already received.
And
Elizabeth Bloomfield was one of the latter!"
I puzzled over these words for hours afterwards and
finally gave up. I concluded that Mike Hammonsworth was
a bit touched.
Otherwise how could such a man, well
endowed to fit almost any of the valid professions,
choose to become the vicar of some hen-roost parish in


the Suffolk sticks?
When the coffin was lowered I tottered forward
and felt the strong hands of Petersham on one side and
Arthur Warren on the other pulling me back.
They did
it so forcefully that I. almost féll into their arms.
I couldn't bear to hear those first handfulls of earth
as they were flung down on the coffin. As a child I'd
seen a man trying to clamber into his young wife's grave
as they threw the soil down---he was restrained by weep-
ing relatives. I felt like doing the same. I couldn't
believe that my mother was dead.
Because, you see, I
hadn't even started to get to know her yet.
We arrived at Cawne Manor in early May. The
moat had already dried up and last year's dried-up
leaves formed a soft bed which was pleasant to walk on.
I often remember those first days at Cawne Manor
with Suzie.
The house had been newly decorated by
Thomas Belling across the lane and on the evening of
our arrival we found the kitchen humming with warmth
and cosiness, the ascot stove showing a dim red glow
of anthracite and the clock on the mantelpiece ticking
peacefully as it must have been doing for a century past.
I put my nose into the pantry and saw hams, a brace of
pheasant, and salami sausages hanging.
The master bedroom upstairs was large and rather
low-ceilinged. Itswooden floor creaked loudly every


time you passed.
Arthur Warren had bought new curtains
and bedspreads, and there were fresh chintz covers on
the lounge armchairs.
The dining room was next door to
the lounge, sharing the one vast chimney in that winggso-that
- oni each side of the wall one could step into an inglenooko E
big enough to take two sitting people on freezing nights.
Mostly, at the beginning,, before the summer warmth had
set in, we ate in front of the lounge fire at the settee,
with a knee-height table before us. There was central
heating but, as at Wilmers, the walls and windows seemed
to suck it out greedily.
Wherever you went there were
draughts and you looked round for an open window but
found everything locked.
In the bedroom you pulled the
bedclothes up toyour nose at night and still you felt
exposed, so Suzie started_searind a knitted hat which she
kept under the pillow. We didn't mind.
It was a holiday
house after all.
We had no intention of spending winters
there, though we did mean to stay for the whole of the
three months demanded by my mother's will, which would take
us into the middle of July. I wanted to fulfil this
condition less in: order to inherit the "Suffolk]lands'
than simply to fulfil my mother's wishes. I reckoned
that she must have a reason and I intended to wait for
this to become clear. As for Suzie she'd always dreamed
of living in England.
Charleston had been founded by a
British merchant and, goodness knows why, this had given
her the idea at school that one day she might find a home
in England. And the British accent enchanted her---as,
I soon observed, her drawl delighted the Suffolk people.
It looked as if our stay was going to be idyllic.
made friends quickly. Mike Hammonsworth invited us to
the vicarage for afternoon tennis, and we also played
tennis at the Nat West recreational ground at Tarnley
Cross.
We went riding with Arthur Warren and he gave us
carte blanche to use his stables whenever we liked.


We made the acquaintance of Daphne Price's husband,
the doctor, whose name was Shaun. He was a rather hunched,
disgruntled man with a long curling nose which seemed to
twist with disgust.
But we discovered he was morbidly
shy (as his wife was, if anything, brazen), and quite
affable--Cvery loyal---when we got to know him.
would turn up at Cawne Manor alone in the evening with a
brace of pheasant hanging from his hand (those in the
pantry the first evening were his offering). And all he
wanted really was to sit and chat with us. He never talk-
ed about Daphne but it was clear to us that she was a
source of distress for him. We didn't probe. Never
once was she out with him, unless we invited them both
to dinner. Yet she wasfrequently at Wilmers for dinner.
She would be sitting in the library showing her legs
and, always, a lot of cleavage. She was a quite opposite
type physically to Suzie but they hit it off at once and
became close friends.
They shared a certain irreverence
towards life and were always spluttering with laughter
together.
Suzie told me that most of Daphne's jokes
were about Shaun Price's inadequacy as a husband.
Shaun
apparently disliked Arthur Warren and never visited Wilmers
socially. The odd thing was that he was Warren's doctor.
If I ever tried to bring the subject round. to Warren in
his company he always clamped up, refusing to say a word,
and stared into the log fire, his mouth like a thin thread.
We grew very fit in those first weeks.
I simply
couldn't understand why my parents hadn't spent their
summers at Cawne Manor. My father had often talked
wistfully about Suffolk.
They were of course much attach-
ed to the Long Island property.
But this hardly explains
an absence of over forty years.
The house had so many rooms (some of them locked up)
and mezzanines and twisting corridors that it was easy
to lose oneself.
One looked out of a corridor window
and discovered a tiny quadrangle below which one hadn't
noticed before.
It might have a well of its own, the
handle rusty now. There was so much to see that you


could imagine living the rest of your days without once
going beyond the circle of the moat. You could vary
the picture every day.
What we in fact did was to close
off most of the house, after we'd found the locked rooms
to contain only junk---and even that of little historical
interest.
We decided'to live in the area round the
kitchen and entrance lobby. This contained a winding
wooden staircase so narrow that only one person could pass
at a time. It was steep and rather perilous, especially
as there were no bannisters.
It curled round on itself
so that it reached the upper floor at the same angle with
which it departed from the ground floor, and one stepped
on to a landing outside the master bedroom.
Below,
it was a few paces from the lounge and dining room,
which made a compact arrangement, like living in a cottage
for two while we were in fact in,house of at least thirty
rooms. That suited us.
Rose, a large, red-faced woman with square chapped
hands and a cheerful smile came over most mornings and.
did the housework. Suzie liked having her in the house
and often sat. drinking coffèe with e1 in"the kitchen,
finding out as much as she could about the thinly populated
neighbourhood.
There were two ugly brick houses
the main gat te of Cawne Manor and in one of these Rose (jlived
with her husband Thomas Belling and her silent motherof
ninety whora been born there and knew every nook and
cranny of the Manor, its dark corners leading to unexpect-
edviews of the garden or barns or fields beyond the moat.
Roseseemed to love it, and once or twice I found her stand-
ing in the lounge, duster in hand, gazing out of the window
on to the lawn in a dreamy state.
However, she would
never come to the house if we weren't there.
We put this
down to a nervous disposition.
The narrow staircase was far from being the only one
in the house. The main one was in another wing, quite
a grand affair, dividing into two open landings at.the
top, in a tall hallway pannelled with dark wood from,
so people said,-the time of Oliver"Cromvell.
But the
rooms at this end of the house were too large for us,


and apparently former tenants had found the same, since
- there wasino central heating/Inreni(lng. kThe: panelled..
croomsstood hushed and empty, and in one or two of them I
found that the windows were still intact from centuries
ago, the glass hand-made.
We were lucky with the weather, once May was out.
Almost every morning the sun rose gently behind the painted
pagoda in the rose garden and touched the wood panelling
of the dining room with soft orange light. A door led
straight into the rose garden from this room and we were
in the habit of leaving it open while we took our break-
fast at the long polished dining table.
The scent of the
roses would drift in.
And if we had nothing better to do
we would take tea in the pagoda, usually in the afternoon
when the sun had come round, sitting at the entrance while
blackbirds and starlings and robins hopped closer and
closer to us. Behind us the moat was at its narrowest,
so that the lane outside was well within earshot and we
could hear everything that went on while not being seen.
Sometimes a tractor passed on lits way to the fields, or
a herd of cattle was ushered from one field to another.
Or children rode past on ponies, laughing.
Or we would
hear the ring of a bicycle bell.
Sometimes a truck halted
at Rose's house to deliver planks or building materials
for Thomas. Apart from looking a fter Cawne Manor he did
odd jobs as far afield as Wilmers. He would put his
hands to anything. I think he got quite a surprise when
he saw, later, how good I too was with my hands. I could
build walls, doors, chicken runs. That again was my
mother's doing.
She Saw to it that I learned a man's
skills at school.
"I don't want a bookworm, " she used to say.
But she was just that herself. My father used to
shake his head proudly as he watched her reading. She
had a room full of books at the Long Island house.
The
reader will appreciate what an avid reader I was when I
say I had no idea what books they were.
Suzie and I went jogging someti imes in the early


morning.
It gave us a chance to see the farmland
belonging to Cawne Manor and to say hullo to some of
'our' labourers. They seemed quite affable.
But I
couldn't help feeling that England had never recovered
from its class system and that people, however prosperous
they might now be, still had the old attitudes deep down.
Thomas had two cars and a five-cwt truck in his back
yard, and one of the biggest colour televisions I've ever
seen, but he always gave me 'sir' and half touched his
capi I I got a feeling, though, thât there was an element
of deliberate burlesque here. His attitude to Arthur
Warren was cowed to say the least.
If Warren's car (a
Rolls) could be heard slowly crunching its way along the
lane towards Cawne Manor he would leap out of his house
and open the wooden gate as if royalty had arrived.
This
seemed to amuse Warren, and he treated Thomas with chilling
remoteness. Or he would laugh in such a belittling way
that you could feel the other man cringing inside, the
whole five foot ten inches of him, brawn and muscle,
with a thick, blue nose and shoulders that had been carry-
ing sacks of cereal and manure for decades.
Apparently
he'd only left the farm to do building jobs quite recently.
Rose said that Arthur Warren had wanted him to look after
both Cawne Manor and Wilmers because outside builders were
too expensive these days.
I was surprised at his degree
of control over Thomas.
Apart from his building activities Thomas ran a
battery farm, mostly turkeys, ducks and chickens. So
he was in no way dependent on Warren, much less on the
tenants of Cawne Manor. He did poach in the Cawne Manor
woods.
Everyone knew this. He would leave his house
on a Sunday morning carrying a shot gun in a felt case,
as if he had no intention of using it.
We would be
sitting in the pagoda and his shots would ring out.
"It's Thomas," we would say. It made us feel we
belonged.
I went 'up to Town', as I learned to say---it, meant
in fact going south to London. I had agreed with my


firm to make myself useful during the three-month
sabbatical by founding a London subsidiary, which meant
renting suitable offices in the Gray's Inn area and
meeting various of Tiny Petersham's friends who could help
me (he was a retired barrister). I didn't enjoy this
much. I escaped from the long lunches as soon as I could
and strolled through Fleet Street and Covent Garden, my
head thick from the gins and wine that had been more or
less forced on me. Sometimes Suzie and I went to a
theatre.
It was funny how anxious we always were to
return to the old house. We could easily have stayed at
a hotel overnight but we hurried back even if it meant
arriving dead tired at three in the morning.
There was
something at Cawne Manor that called to us,sométhing
special in the silence and the slightly damp freshness of
the air, and the sense of being hidden from the world
by those thick trees that clustered round the moat. And
people seemed so glad to see us back, even after anabsence
of no more than a day. Rose would call out cheerily as
she came down the rose garden quite as if we'd been away
a month, and Thomas would put his awkward head in at the
kitchen door to ask if 'the squire', his burlesque name
for me, needed anything done. Then Warren or Hammonsworth
or one of the Prices would call us up.
It seemed we had
really found a second family---in a place where less than
half a year before we'd had no connections whatever!
It felt like a very special gift from my mother.
Suzie
felt that way too. I think it hurt her that I'd never
introduced her to my mother and of course it caused a bit
of jealousy.
But Suzie wasn't the type to brood.
Once
she'd decided that Elizabeth Bloomfield had been a woman
of hidden powers she began taking her side in all things.
She had the big photo of her, the one I'd seen at the
vigil, reframed and put it in the dining room. She went
to the grave at least once a week and arranged fresh
flowers while the tombstone was being cut.
And she
agreed with me that we had to stay the full three months
stipulated in the will because that had been my mother's
wish.


So she too helped to spring the trap that had been
laid for us.
Cawne Manor began to influence us in other, stranger
ways. We really began to think of it as a magic house.
I don't know how to write about this but our sex-life
changed abruptly or at least quite soon after we arrived
from the Bahamas and I swear it had something to do with
the house. My mentioning this brings back such a yearn-
ing for her.
It makes me tremble, my throat goes dry.
Sometimes, when the yearning comes over me, I go to bed
and bury my face in a pillow. At Harvard in my second
year I kept tame mice, a male and female.
Because they
spawned so many young I got rid of the female and' for weeks
afterwards that wretched deprived male stood hunched in
a corner, its eyes closed, quite still, daydreaming (I'm
sure) about the wife he'd lost.
I would never do that
to an animal now. Since coming to the clinic I've become
vegetarian, as I think my mother would have wished.
now see what suffering we inflict on animals and how much
more love they feel than we do.
But this is jumping
ahead.
I'm half afraid to write about my relationship with
Suzie lest, because of a certain feverish element which
might enter the writing at this point, the reader should
think I deserve to be where I am at this moment.
She and I used sometimes to walk in the moat. It
became quite a habit now that its bed had dried up.
think we enjoyed seeing the trees tower above us on either
side. We would go round and round the property this way,
hidden to everyone but seeing and hearing everything.
And I could feel her darkness, the deep shining blackness
of her long hair.
I could feel her dark texture, if I
may put it like that, without looking at her---and her
litheness at my side, the light way she strode along,
and with such composure. I lived, breathed this texture
night and day. Of course young married couples frequent-
ly make love to an obsessive degree at the beginning.
But we never felt the excess. e
We knew it hadn't happened
in the Bahamas, and certainly not in the previous two


years in South Carolina or New York.
Yet I think we both realised at Cawne Manor that
we weren't in love. It was something different.
always, even after our marriage, found it difficult to
take our eyes off each other.
And we'd known instinct-
ively the first moment, in Clive Rembold's apartment,
that we had to be together, there was no other way.
But we didn't get any of those momentous feelings of
life suddenly changing and great ecstatic vistas opening
up which you have when you fall in love. It was, so
to speak, an already established thing: we were together
from that first moment whether we liked it or not. We
weren't even each other's physical type. A1, her boyfriend)
in Charleston whom she would have married had I not come
along, was physically my opposite.
He was dark, slim, a
very quiet man. He was the adaptable type, lettting life
happen round him. I felt he was much the better man to
marry Suzie.
She would certainly have been happier.
She wouldn't be in a mental-care clinic right now.
Also Suzie made no secret of the fact that my
muscular build (as it was then) put her off, though she
could just take the blonde complexion, the sandy hair,
the freckles here and there.
And on my side I tended to
fall for the Daphne Price type of woman.
But it was our very strangeness to each other that
drew us together,
This isn't quite right. We knew,
from the first moment, that the very differences between
us were what provided the salt, the spices of our feast.
Marriage was in our minds from the moment we first clapped
eyes on each other. We checked that with each other after-
wards.
Of course that was why I didn't tell my mother
about her.
It was one thing to talk about a nice girl I'd
met, another to say I was marrying a girl I didn't know a
thing about even sexually.
Suzie and I were aware of each
other to a hyper-sensitive degree and that still holds, it
didn't wane in all the months at Cawne Manor. You could say
it was a primal thing, came from such deep areas that we
didn't understand what was going on. But it wasn't
carnal in the pr oper sense. That would have worn out,
fatigued us. That first night in Columbia I stayed with


Clive and she went to a girlfriend called Kay Shore for
the night (she was working in Beaufort and'staying with
her parents at the time).
But within one hour of separat-
ing we were talking on the phone, and we talked at least
twice a day from that time on, wherever we were.
When
I was in England for my mother's funeral I callediher up
just the same---twice a day. I felt sorry for Al, her
man.
From one day to the next his life fell to pieces.
Because they really were in love. Life is so mysterious,
unexpected. What Suzie and I had for each other was deeper
than love. We knew when we met each other that we were
home .
I just had to get a whiff of her Chanel, mixed with
the dark natural perfumes of her body, to go giddy with
need. At Cawne Manor we were constantly rushing to the
bedroom and locking ourselves away, even with Rose in the
house, even with guests downstairs. We delighted even in
the most snatched contact.
As I said before, young married
couples do make a lot of love but, for God's sake, neither
of us had exactly suffered from sex-deprivation before.
Neither of us seemed interested in having a baby---that
is, though we wanted children, had decided to have them,
that wasn't in either of our mind's when we were behind
locked doors together.
In fact she just couldn't get
pregnant, though she took no precautions whatsoever.
One of the reasons she loved Cawne Manor was because it
would make a wonderful holiday house once we'd started a
family, a place where we could give our children rich
lives indeed.
She wanted to start right away but it
wouldn't happen.
We had tests.
I was OK. On her
side there were no Fallopian tubes problems C No blood-
group discrepancy.
One Harley Street specialist was
convinced before he examined us that we were chain smokers. -
because this, so he said, was a prime cause of sterility,
But tennis and jogging and making love were our pastimes,
not smoking or sniffing or drinking.
Idle hands will find evilwork to do, my mother said.
But we weren't all that idle.
We were up soon after dawn


most days. If I didn't go to town we were out :ôn the
tennis courts or mending something in the house. I
looked after the roof myself, unknown to Thomas. I loved
to get up there and sit fitting the old moss-covered tiles
so that no one should see from below a bright new one.
Our love-making produced moreo energy, not less.
Our nights were often a turmoil, yet we woke refreshed
in the morning.
Our bodies bloomed.
People talk about
the healing pr operties of touch. I think it true to say
that we healed each other of all life's ills the moment
we were alone together, whether in the full light of day
in the pagoda or hidden away in the shadows of the moat.
In the Bahamas our experiences together were what
I would have expected.
We enjoyed it, we were relaxed
afterwards---hungry, ready for a dip in the sea, in need
of a drink.
But at the old house the enjoyment took on
other dimensions, So full of the unexpected as to be almost
unbearable. I don't wish to give the impression that we
were always making love.
We went through periods, sometimes
as long as ten days, of abstinencé. I mean we allowed the
natural biological cycle to take place. We weren't
mentally obsessed with each other, much less with sex
generally.
But these periods didn't feel like abstinence
at all.
We could feei new energies building up, and this
produced an expectant thrill similar to that of the act
itself.
Really I thought marriage was going to be a humdrum
affair after a time. As a lawyer I'd observed it turning
sour or stale after a fairly uniform period of time, in
many couples.
I'd never seen marriage in terms of sex
anyway.
Perhaps that was my mother's influence. I
thought that after a time Suzie and I would continue to
have adventures. In fact, a mutual toleration would keep
the marriage going, especially if there were children.
But it didn't happen that way. An hour's iseparation set
up a sort of nervous alarm in us, a sense of deprivation,
almost malnutrition. The reader will appreciate what


horrors we suffered when first our relationship was
undermined and then we were wrenched apart (I am thinking
again of the tame mouse I kept at Harvard).
One sunlit day I happened to be in the woods and heard
the sharp crack of a shotgun close by. I didn't at once
think of Thomas Belling and hoped I might catch the poacher
hot-handed. I waited, hidden by a tree, while the man's
heavy steps, swishing through the dead leaves, drew nearer.
Thomas came in sight carrying a dark grey hare by the
hind legs. Blood was dripping from its head.
The eyes
were staring pathetically and the body was still twitching.
"Up Ito your old game, I see."
He nearly jumped out of his skin.
I laughed and he said, wiping his chin with his free
hand, "Well!
It's Bloomf ield! I couldn't resist, Mr
Bloomfield!
He practically offered hisself to me!"
His presence of mind had returned in a flash. He
was a quick, artful chap.
He had wide eyes that constantly
looked sideways as if for an àvenue of escape. And then he
looked you full in the face with something derisive in his
expression.
I couldn't make him out at all. Even Rose,
his own wife, talked about him as if he was an enigma.
But I noticed that whatever he said was law as far as she
was concerned.
"You smoke Mr Bloomfield?" he asked, dropping the hare
with an unpleasant thud on the forest floor.
The animal
fell on its head, so that its neck buckled for the fraction
of a second, and blood made a little spurt out of its mouth.
Then he took out a tin of tobacco and some cigarette papers.
"Like a smoke?" he asked me again.
"No thanks."
I was irritated by this performance (he knew perfectly
well that I didn't smoke) and said, "Does Mr Warren know
you poach like this?"
"No sir." I noticed that his eyes started with alarm.
It was hardly perceptible but I hadn't been a lawyer for
nothing.


"And suppose I tell him?"
"He's been trying to stop me poaching for nigh on
forty years, Mr Bloomfield," he said.
"And there's nothing
I can do about it."
"Nothing you can do!
You realise you're stealing
my property?"
He shook his head, concentrating on rolling his
cigarette, and I was astonished to see a look of contrition
on his face.
"I listen to him and say yes, and I do my best not
to make them suffer, I'm a clean shot as you can see.
But I just can't stop myself.
It'll get me into trouble
one day, Mr Bloomfield.
I've made you angry. I can pay
you for this---"
He nodded toward the dead animal.
"Double, treble what it's worth. I just can't stop doing
it, that's all. Mr Warren knows---I mean he doesn't know
I do it but he knows I want to."
"You like the killing part?"
"Yes." He looked at me without guile and added, "Why
don't we sit down squire?"
He lowered himself to the ground and leaned against
a tree.
When he saw that I wasn't sitting he began
struggling to his feet again but I said, "No it's alright",
and found another tree to lean on. He fiddled in his
pockets for a match and lit up.
"Yes," he went on, "I've been doing it since I was a
lad and it's stronger than I am. My old dad used to try
and reason with me but it was no use. Are you vegetarian
by any chance like your mother Mr Bloomfield?"
"No." I gazed at him.
"How did you know my mother
was a vegetarian?"
"Oh, these things get around.
I thought you didn't
like to see the poor beast dead, that's why I ask."
"I'm not squeamish about that, no.
But I don't
come into your back yard and shoot one of your turkeys."
"You're at liberty to, squire," he. said with a smile
that creased his face in an unexpected way, producing


another face.
"Then we'd both be wrong, wouldn't we?"
We sat there in silence and I began to wonder what
I was doing in the middle of Cawne Woods staring at my
nei ighbour. He drew on his cigarette, long pulls which
seemed to satisfy him immensely.
"I wish I was young and just married again," he said
musingly, looking at a point well above my head.
shall be fifty-nine come Michelmas Mr Bloomfield.
But
I don't think anything's changed really."
I didn't understand his drift and he saw it.
"It's as good with the wife as it always was. And
as often," he said.
Then he nodded, and nodded again, as if to confirm
the matter to himself, gazing at the dead leaves while
he pulled again at his cigarette.
"Yes," he went on.
"Take yesterday morning.
just picked a nice wet cabbage and I watched her go upstairs
and I couldn't resist going after her Mr Bloomfield.
I was up there like a shot and in less time"than it takes
to say Jack Robinson that bed was rolling round the room
on its castors and she was hollering for more.
I'll tell
you one thing about Rose.
She gets the message almost
before you send it and she's waiting for you as wide as
any man could wish.
You don't have to spend an hour
waving your flag in front of her like you do with some
women. . #
I didn't know what to say. I wasn't exactly embarrasss
ed but I felt a similar confession was expected of me and
I wasn't going to oblige. I simply looked at him as he
smiled and puffed at his cigarette and shifted his great
boots in the dead leaves.
"So she got some cabbage-dew where she didn't expect
it!" he said with a laugh which had a grating edge, not
unpleasant but disturbing in a way I couldn't put my finger
He finished his cigarette and we got up.
He lifted
the hare againfand we wal lked along towards the Manor.


Blood was dripping quite profusely from the animal and
some of it reached Thomas's trousers jas' he strode along.
He took no notice. In fact I think it gave him some
satisfaction.
Suddenly he said, "Mrs Bloomfield all right, squire?"
And the way he said it, turning to me sideways, his
face blanda and yet full of suggestions made_me_blush.
"She's fine," I said---and a suggestive tone similar
to his came into my voice despite myself. I felt I was
suddenly telling him about my sexual adventures and that
he understood what these were without a word passing
between us. I hurried home, after saying good bye to him
with my face averted, and I felt his eyes on me as I
jumped over the turnstile into the property. Also I
felt desire stir in me, a feeling of complicity with him.
I looked for Suzie but then remembered she was out with
Daphne Price buying pillow covers at a discount in Tarnley
Cross.
It was almost as if---I hesitate to write this--
Thomas and I were sharing the same woman!
Yet I didn't
know who this woman was. It wasn't precisely Suzie but
it was definitely her body in the darkness. Though it
was another woman's too.
It wasn't Rose's, for obviously
she had no physical attractions from my point of view.
It was a most distressing feeling as if Suzie and I could
now be seen making love from the other side of the lane,
from those ugly brick houses, no matter how hidden we
were, how late in the night it was. It felt as if I'd
already made a long confession about these nights to
Thomas/Tand he was smiling at me with that other face of his.
Sometimes events are strangely connected. That
afternoon, when Suzie had returned, Mike Hammonsworth called
up and said, "I've just taken a sliced loaf out of the
deep freeze, would you like to come over?"
He always invited one like this. If he wished to
have us for dinner he said, "I'm going to open a tin of
baked beans on Thusday, would you like to come over about
eight?" Of course we always found a delicious meal--


nothing like the sumptuous affairs at Wilmers but he
cooked himself, served it with care, in a butcher's apron.
No one could understand why Mike didn't marry. Like
Warren, he had girls galore.
Anyway we went to tea. It was a still warm day
with the scent of roses everywhere.
Mike had a large
lawn at the back of the vicarage, protected by a tall wall
with a wrought-iron gate in it, through which you could
see the fields.
He had sunshades and white iron tables
outside and it was most enjoyable to sit there with him.
This afternoon he had no other guests.
One could just
see the churchyard on the hill, behind the church.
The
church clock sounded the quarters.
It was all quite
idyllic.
But this feeling aisappeared pretty soon, at least for
me. It was when Mike said to me out of the blue, after
serving us a second cup of tea, "I wish I'd known your
mother better. I did meet her once you know."
"You were in New York?" I asked him.
"No. It was in the south of France, at a place
called Collioure, you know the painter's village(near
Perpignan. Your mother and Arthur Warren were on holiday
together. I joined them for a few days.
We had a great
"When was this?" I asked.
"Oh it must have been all of ten years ago."
I was going to ask him more but the bell started
ringing for vespers (we'd come rather late). Mike
excused himself and hurried round to the vestry to get his
cassock on.
We wondered if he expected us to come to vespers
and he seemed to sense this because he called out as he
was going, "Finish your tea! And I forbid you to enter
the church!
It's strictly for old cats only this evening!"
He didn't lower his voice at all, though a few of the
old cats were at that moment appearing round the corner.
I drove Suzie home feeling a perplexity that seemed
oddly connected with wha t had passed that morning between
Thomas Belling and myself.
Even now I can't explain why


I should have felt this connection.
So my mother had come to Europe! I could swear
that my father had known nothing about these visits.
My mind Wandered back once more to those evenings in
Long Island when I would put my face against the gauze
of the window frame and wonder whether, by some thrilling
chance, my mother was holding the hand of another man on
that dark lawn below. Yes, I realised now that the idea
was thrilling to me, had always been. It amazes me how
long one can go through life having feelings which one
never becomes aware of.
I remember how, when the laughter and chatter had
died down. and those dark figures had gone into dinner,
I lay in bed and let my imagination create all kinds of
forbidden circumstances connected with my mother. My
mouth went dry and my legs trembled.
Those images
provided the dawn of my sexual awakening, my first
physical release and pleasure.
And, somehow, now, in ways I couldn't define (which
made it all the more distressing), these things had become
connected with my present life at Cawne Manor.
I'm not suggesting anything oedipal. We all know
those cliches.
I repeat that those childhood images
became strangely connected with Cawne Manor for me, not
with my hours of sexual pleasure with Suzie. And there,
for the momentzi am going to leave it.
That night I lay at Suzie's side and thought of my
mother again and again. I hoped Suzie was asleep. As
the night wore on and I heard her breathing steadily and
deeply my mind became increasingly prone to
outrageous,
ideas.
Was it possible that my mother had come to Europe
quite frequently, and without my father's consent? Or with
his reluctant consent? Or to his dismay, horror?
I fell into an odd delirium. Until now I'd thought
I'd come to terms with my mother's death and that the
funeral had closed a certain period in my life but here
she was suddenly revealing herself again, so much alive
that I could almost feel her in the bedroom! Not that


this was at all distressing to me. o
The distressful
thing was that she appeared to me as a young and blooming
and desirable woman, rather of the Daphne Price type, and
I began to derive a distinct pleasure from this which was
much more than filial.
Therefore I experienced shame with
it too---not only because she was my mother but because
she was dead!
But this shame, as shame will, put an
edge on my pleasure, supplying that secretive element
which I seemed to find essential.
While these images were going through my head,
ever more lurid, I began fearing some sort of vengeance
in the form of my mother's disapproval---but since she was
now in the land of the dead this disapproval might reveal
itself in ways I couldn't, with my carefully logical mind,
cope with. I started getting frightened of the shadows
near the wide windows with its cross latticing.
And the silence of the room began to disturb me,
the quaint creaking of the ancient panelling, the cry
of the white owl which always settled on the barn roof,
the lonely swish of the traffic on the six-laned highway,
remote, ghostly beyond the trees of the moat. I date
all the unfortunate events that later occurred at Cawne
Manor to this night during which I gave way to a sensitivity
in me which my New York life had failed to expose.
.The images in my mind became more extravagant. I
realised well enough that I was manufacturing them.
I saw my mother holding hands with another man---then
kissing him---embracing him---while the other guests
continued unaware. Of course the reader may laugh at my
childishness but these images were of the utmost potency
for me, almost a revelation of new pleasures, after Suzie
and I had stumbled on enough to occupy ten lives!
My mouth was dry, I turned and writhed in my bed
as I realised that I'd always wanted my mother to have
another man, wanted that man's hands to wander, wanted
a wet dewy hand to approach her where she least expected
it, and to achieve her degradation!


Well, vengeance wasfexacted on me. I paid for
those images as I half wanted to, even as they flooded
through my mind. Suddenly, from the floor below---it
shattered the images in a moment---there was a tremendous
crash of falling glass and something metallic, like a
small explosion.
I sat up, my mouth open, my eyes gaping into the
darkness, unable to cry out. A trembling had seized me.
I couldn't understand why Suzie hadn't woken and for a
wretched moment I thought I might have imagined that sound.
I was afraid to shake her awake because my shame had
caused that explosion---invasion from below---whatever
it was (what ridiculous thoughts go through our heads at
such hours in the night). I waited for footsteps.
But there was nothing. I think I waited, sitting up in
bed with the sweat pouring out of me, for at least twenty
minutes. That wasn't like me at all. Normally I would
havelleapt out of bed and rushed downstairs.
But the
knowledge that some vengeance was being enacted on me from
another quarter than the real world was what held me back.
Stealthily I got out of bed and took hold of the Sikh knife
which I always kept near me. I tiptoed downstairs. The
chill night air drifted on to my sweat-soaked pyjamas.
I dian't switch lights on. I managed to get down the
steep, crooked staircase without tripping.
Then, once
below, I switched on the corridor light and virtually
kicked open the lounge door in one movement.
And this
sudden exertion released me from my fear. I Switched the
light on in the lounge and saw that there was no one there.
On the floor, in fragments spread over an area of
about four yards square, was the picture" that had been
hanging on the wall close to the inglenook, the - Nativity
which my mother and I had seen together in Rome, the
Caravaggio, the one she'd directed my eyes to during tha t
strange vigil in this same room, as if she were standing
by me alive!