The People on Privilege Hill Read online

  There was a pause after the plates were taken away and, unthinkably, Veneering, his eyes askew with gin and wine, excused himself and made again for the piano, Herman trotting behind.

  “Oh no, I won’t have this,” said Dulcie.

  “America, I suppose,” said Feathers.

  A torrent of honky-tonk flowed out of the playroom and some loud cries. The drums began.

  Bass drums, floor-tom, normal-tom, cymbals. High-hat, crash-ride, thin crash! And now, now, the metallic stroking, the brush, the whispering ghost—listen, listen—and now the big bass drum. Hammers on the pedals, cross arms, cross legs, tap tap, paradiddle, paradiddle, let go! Hammer on pedal now then—HIGH HAT! CRASH RIDE! THIN CRASH!

  The glass doors of the conservatory, now filming up, shook as if they’d received the tremors of a not-too-distant earthquake, and a new sound joined the drums as Veneering began to sing and almost outstrip the tremors. Not a word could be heard round the dining table and Dulcie rushed out of the room. As she left, came the crescendo and the music ceased, to reverberations and cackling laughter.

  “Herman! Please return to the table. Don’t dare to monopolise Judge Veneering.”

  And Herman, staggering dazed from the mountain tops, let his small jaw drop and fell off his perch, scattering instruments.

  Veneering sat on at the piano, hands on knees, chin on chest, enwrapped in pleasure. Then quietly, he began to play again.

  “No—I’m sorry, Terry”—she had remembered his nasty little name—“I’m sorry but I think the latecomer has just arrived. Come at once.”

  There was a commotion going on in the hall.

  “Dear Terry—please. It’s boeuf bourguignon.”

  Veneering jumped up and embraced her, grinning. “Honky-tonk!” he said. “He’s good, that boy. Tremendous on the normal-tom. Could hear that bass a quarter-mile away. Beautiful brush on the snare.” He went back to the dining room rubbing his hands. “Been playing the Blues,” he said to one and all.

  “You haven’t,” said Herman.

  “Well, the Pale-Rose Pinks,” said Veneering. “Near enough.”

  “Veneering, more wine,” said Feathers warningly.

  “Much better not,” said Fiscal-Smith.

  The two damaged sisters sat, making patterns on the damask with their fingers.

  “Hey! Could he play as well as me, your son?” asked Herman in an American accent.

  There was a pause.

  “Probably,” said Veneering.

  “Did he make it? Was he a star? In music?”

  “No. He died.”

  “What did he die of?”

  “Be quiet, boy!” Feathers roared.

  “Now,” said Dulcie. “Now, I do believe—here is our monk. Father Ambrose. On his way to St. Umbrage’s on the island of Skelt.”

  “Bullet,” said Veneering. “Soldier.”

  “It’s stupid to be a soldier if you can play music.”

  “As you say. Quite so. Now, get on with your lunch, boy. We’ve plainsong ahead of us.”

  But the plainsong was not to be. Nor did the monk join them for lunch. Kate the cleaner put her head round the dining-room door and asked to speak to Dulcie for a moment—outside.

  And Dulcie returned with stony face and sat down, and Kate, unsmiling, carried in the stew. “Take Father Ambrose’s place away,” said Dulcie. “Thank you, Kate. It will give us more room.”

  Cautious silence emanated from the guests. There was electricity in the air. In the very curtains. Time passed. The carer thought that she would kill for a cigarette.

  “If he’s not coming in, Granny,” asked Herman, loud and clear, “can I have some more stew? It’s great.”

  Dulcie looked at him and loved him, and there was a chorus about the excellence of the stew, and Fiscal-Smith said it was not a stew but a veritable daube as in the famous lunch in To the Lighthouse.

  “I’ve no idea,” said Dulcie grandly. “I bought it for freezing. From the farmers’ market, months ago. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a lighthouse.”

  “Virginia Woolf couldn’t have given us a stew like this. Or a daube,” said one of the sisters (Olga), who had once been up at Oxford.

  “She wasn’t much of a cook,” said the other one (Fairy). “But you don’t expect it, when people have inner lives.”

  “As we must suppose,” Feathers put in quickly, before Dulcie realised what Fairy had said, “this monk has. He is certainly without inner manners.”

  Everyone waited for Dulcie to say something but she didn’t. Then, “Granny, why are you crying?” and Herman ran to her and stroked her arm. “Hey, Granny, we don’t care about the monk.”

  “He—he suddenly felt—indisposed and—he vanished.” Her lunch party—her reputation as the hostess on Privilege Hill—gone. They would all laugh about it for ever.

  Dulcie couldn’t stop imagining. She could hear the very words. “That brought her down a peg. Asked this VIP bishop, or archbishop, or [in time] the Prince of Wales, and he took one step inside the house and went right out again. And she’d offered to drive him to the airport. What a snob! Of course, Kate knows more than she’ll say. There must be something scandalous. Drunken singing and drums. African drumming. Yes—at Dulcie’s. But Kate is very loyal. They’ll all be leaving her a nice fat legacy.”

  “A funny business. He probably caught sight of the other guests.”

  “Or the dreadful grandson.”

  Etc.

  Then someone would be sure to say, “D’you think there was a monk? Dulcie’s getting ... well, I’ll say nothing.”

  “Yes, there was someone. Standing looking in at them over that trough of umbrellas. Some of them saw him. Dripping wet.”

  “Didn’t he have an umbrella himself?”

  “No. I don’t think they carry them. He was wearing see-through plastic. It shone. Round his head was a halo.”

  “On Privilege Hill?”

  “Yes. It was like Star Wars.”

  “Well, it makes a change.”

  The story died away. The Iraq war and the condition of the Health Service and global warming took over. The weather continued rainy. The old twins continued to drowse. The carer had home thoughts from abroad and considered how English country life is more like Chekhov than “The Archers” or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared. She would write a paper on the subject on her return to Poland.

  But the startling image of the dripping monk remained with her. She felt like posting him an umbrella.

  Kate, the ubiquitous cleaner, told her friend the gardener, “Oh yes, he was real all right. And young. And sort of holy-looking.”

  The gardener said, “Watch it! You’ll get like them. They’re all bats around here.”

  “I feel like giving him an umbrella,” Kate said. “Wonderful smile.”

  And one day Dulcie, in the kitchen alone with the gardener, Herman visiting Judge Veneering for a jam session, said, “Don’t tell anyone this, but that day, Father Ambrose in the rain, I kept thinking of Easter morning. The love that flowed from the tomb. Then the disappearance. I want to give him something.” She splashed gin into her tonic.

  “Don’t have another of those,” said the gardener to his employer.

  Later, to old Feathers, who had called to present her with his dead wife’s pink umbrella, having wrested it the day before with difficulty from Veneering, she said: “I want to give him something.”

  “Come, Dulcie. He behaved like a churl.”

  “Oh, no. He must suddenly have been taken ill. I did know him, you know. We met at a day of silence in the cathedral.”

  “Silence?”

  “Yes. But our eyes met.”

  “And he wangled a lunch and a lift?”

  “Oh, didn’t wangle. He wouldn’t wangle. We talked for a few minutes.”

  “A fast worker.”

  “Well, so was Christ,” said Dulcie smugly.

  Feathers, wishing he could tell al
l this rubbish to his dear dead wife, said, “You’re in love with the perisher, Dulcie.”

  “Certainly not. And we’re all perishers. I just need to fill the blank. To know why he melted away.”

  “He probably caught sight of Herman.”

  “How dare you!”

  “No—I mean it. Monks have to keep their distance from small boys.”

  And Dulcie yearned for her dear dead husband to kick Feathers out of the house.

  “I have a notion to send that ... person in the garden—an umbrella,” said one twin to the other. “I shall send it to Farm Street. In London. The Jesuit HQ. ‘To Father Ambrose, from a friend, kindly forward to St Umbrage on Skelt.’” The other twin nodded.

  Fiscal-Smith, who never wasted time, had already laid his plans. On his train home to the north on his second-class return ticket bought months ago (like the stew) to get the benefit of a cheaper fare, he thought he would do something memorable. Send the monk a light-hearted present. An umbrella would be amusing. He would send him his own. It was, after all, time for a new one. And he had had a delightful day.

  Staunch fellow, he thought. Standing out there in the rain.

  Veneering phoned Feathers to see if Feathers would go in with him on an umbrella for that fellow at Dulcie’s on the way to the Scottish islands, the fellow who didn’t turn up. Feathers said no and put the phone down. Feathers, a travelled man and good at general knowledge, had never heard of an island called Skelt or a saint called Umbrage. No flies on Judge Feathers. Hence Veneering because the pleasure of the lunch party would not leave him—the boy who liked him, the Bechstein, the drumming, the jam sessions to come—amazed himself by ordering an umbrella from Harrods and having it sent.

  Five parcels were delivered soon afterwards to Farm Street Church. One parcel had wires and rags sticking out of it. And because it was a sensitive time just then in Irish politics, and because the parcels were all rather in the shape of rifles, the Farm Street divines called the police.

  Old Filth was right. The Jesuits had never heard of Father Ambrose. So they kept the umbrellas (for a rainy day, ho-ho) except for Fiscal-Smith’s. And that they chucked in the bin.

  PANGBOURNE

  Isit at my computer. It is my first. It is a present from the parish, and generous; for I am old and mad, and I do not look a natural for technology. I am not very friendly. My e-mail address is pangbourne.

  This melancholy word has nothing to do with a place, or surname. It is the name of the great gorilla at our local zoo: the ape that has been the love of my life.

  Pangbourne and I met soon after my marriage, when I moved down here to the blossoms and hops of Kent. I had married a Bounder, very late in life. He was after my money. There were terrible quarrels and, a creaking and distracted bride, I was soon to be seen trudging down Bekesbourne lane to Patrixbourne village, weeping.

  Along the lane stands the zoo and one day at its gates appeared a huge banner: a four-times-life-size poster of a great gorilla. I was transfixed. It was love at first sight. I paid my five pounds and went in. And found him.

  At once I knew that I must see him every day of my life and I arranged to donate almost every penny of my money to the zoo in return for free entry until my death.

  The Bounder left me, shouting back at the house in the village street, “You’re unnatural, that’s what you are. You are the gorilla. You’ve gorilla’s hands.” That evening someone from the church brought me some flowers.

  The Bounder was actually right. I have the hands of a gorilla. My fingers are thick as sausages and purple in cold weather. My nails are broad as postage stamps, my fingertips square, my knuckles an inch thick. I have read that the developing foetus passes through all the stages of God’s creation. There is the insect, the reptile, the fish, the bird, the ape. You can see in many a human being the dominant stage of this development. The Bounder missed being a reptile by scarcely a hundred million years.

  Something more extraordinary must have happened to my embryo, however, for though I am a small-boned little woman with a delicately shaped nose, and genteel and shapely feet, my hands seem to belong to somebody else. As a child I was not allowed piano lessons, I expect because they were embarrassed by my hands.

  This day, the day of my great sadness, I have locked the door on myself and my computer (which inadvertently I manage deftly, swinging the mouse, flipping the paragraphs); I have locked myself in against watchers of my simian hands.

  But it is strange that in all my eighty years nobody has ever said anything about my hands, except the Bounder.

  The years have gone by. Every afternoon in all weathers, through sultry Augusts to black Kent Januaries when most of the animals kept to their lairs, I have walked the lane, carrying my little canvas stool. I have set it down outside the cage of Pangbourne.

  The cage is vast. He shares it with his powerful extended family and also with some chimps who hurl themselves about above him, swing and drop at his feet or creep up from behind. Talking their heads off. He brushes them away with his iron hand and stares at something far beyond the zoo.

  The crowds gather at the thirty-foot-high wire mesh and steel barrier, nose to nose with the notices that say “These Animals Are Dangerous.” They say, “Look! That’s ’im. In ’e big? That’s ’im on the poster. I wun like them fingers raan me neck.”

  Pangbourne broods.

  One of the things I’ve learned in the years we’ve been together: one does not look into a gorilla’s eyes. I know his hot terrifying eyes only from an occasional sidelong glance. I have never caught him looking into mine.

  Yet we are one.

  It was many months before I addressed Pangbourne. It was on a bitter afternoon. Only the snow leopard and the wolves were out of doors. Not ape or monkey was to be seen, for even those born in captivity, like Pangbourne, hate the cold, and this was the coldest snap for years. I was so surprised and delighted to see Pangbourne wrapped loosely about with straw, in his usual place by the wire, the glorious inky core of him like a rock in a harvest field—his dear head that goes up to a point, his tongue and bald patch, his working jaw—that I cried out, “Pangbourne! You are here!”

  He was busy helping himself to sugar. A solution is kept filled up in a narrow pot hung inside upon the wire. All the apes take twigs and dip them in these pots, take out the twig and lick it. They are expert and dexterous, and the crowds love it. Pangbourne began to clean his yellow teeth with the twig, then nonchalantly threw it away. He yawned.

  “I’m glad the sugar pot’s not frozen,” I said.

  He sighed, hugely, and looked away over my head at the jungles and shimmering mountains and the tropical flowers, the glitter of suggested snakes, the stirrings in the underscrub and the silence above in the steaming forest canopy. His nostrils flared, searching for the sweet stench of rotting fern and the spice bushes. His eyes blinked at the metallic purple wings of butterflies the size of swallows that lived in his head.

  “I’ve never seen any of that, either,” I said. “I’ve not been out of England, myself.”

  For a very odd moment Pangbourne looked at me and I knew he had the gist of it. He had no words, but he understood, and for months to come we conversed silently, paddling the two separate mulches of ideas that lurk wordless in the recesses of the brain, the mulch behind the word skills, drawn from the primeval soup. Once I wondered if Pangbourne was looking at my hands.

  So the years passed.

  I became almost an inmate of the zoo, sitting with my thermos of tea on my camp stool. As Pangbourne performed his party trick with the twig, he watched me at mine, unscrewing the top of the thermos and transforming it into a cup. The chimps provided the chorus, flinging themselves against the wire, trying to grab and tear, screaming like bad children. The gorillas sat about, unmoved. A blow from Pangbourne could easily kill. One snarling bite and the chimps would scatter, shrieking. And yet I knew him for a gentle beast and could have slept quietly in his arms.

  Except when
the public was near, I talked to my love all the time. The public did not often bother me, though they sometimes took photographs. I suppose I was rather a show for I had long ceased to care how I looked, except that, when not alone with Pangbourne, I always wore gloves.

  One day Pangbourne wasn’t there.

  I waited an hour before I asked a keeper, who told me that the great ape had bronchitis. “I must see him,” I said, and because I had given so much money to the zoo and expected one day to be commemorated on a plaque upon the gorillarium (like the poor keepers who over the years have been eaten by tigers and whose names are carved on a little cenotaph—with a space for more) he said that he would ask permission.

  The next day—oh, what an agonised night!—he took me to Pangbourne’s private chamber and there the great gorilla lay on a shelf with his face to the wall, his back (I now saw) silvery with age. He had a flannel blanket clutched round him like my old gran. I wanted to hug him and rock him and give him a peppermint. “Pangbourne!”

  “No. No closer,” said the keeper, but I knew that the gorilla had heard my voice.

  He was out in the cage again by the spring, in the pale sunshine, but he had failed. He blinked a lot and swung his head—when he lifted it and tried to peruse the sky, soon he bowed down. He took no interest in the syrup supply.

  I could not see for weeping.

  Suddenly I thought to sing to him and, oblivious to the public and the chimps, I raised my voice in a hymn. “We are travelling home to God,” I sang, “in the way our fathers trod.”

  I silenced the zoo! Pangbourne rolled forward in the straw and lay in a large loose heap. I never had a tuneful voice.

  I drew on my gloves and went home.

  I didn’t attend the zoo after that for a full week. I had caught a nasty chest myself. I kept to my bed and missed church on Sunday. On the Monday morning someone called and said I was wanted up at the zoo and should she take me when I felt better. “Please take me now,” I said.