When the Green Woods Laugh Read online

  ‘I’d better take her a bite of something out. Glass of milk and a slice of flan or something. She can’t sit out there on an empty stomach. She’ll go over.’

  Less than a minute later Ma was away across the yard on an errand that was less of mercy than one of sheer correction. It simply wasn’t right for people to do these things. It was as plain as the moon: if you didn’t eat you didn’t live. It was criminal. You faded away.

  Pop had hardly mixed himself a third pick-me-up before Ma was back again, bearing the offering of apricot flan and milk, now rejected.

  ‘On a very strict diet,’ Ma said. ‘Trying to get her weight down. Got a proper chart and pills and units and points and all that sort of thing.’

  Pop, remembering Mrs Jerebohm’s over-rounded thighs, tight in the thin white suit, was suddenly jolted by piercing shrieks from Ma. Her great sixteen-stone body seemed to be laughing from every pore.

  ‘I told her to look at me,’ Ma said. ‘I think it cheered her up a bit. She was no more than a sylph, I said.’

  Pop put the word away in his mind for further reference. Ma took the sizzling leg of lamb from the oven again and a few moments later Pop was deftly carving it into generous pink-brown slices, to which Ma added steaming hillocks of fresh-buttered French beans, two sorts of potatoes, new and braised, mint sauce, and vegetable marrow baked with cheese.

  Bent over this feast in attentive reverence, Pop at last paused to drain a glass of beer and look up at Ma and say:

  ‘Ma, what did I pay for Gore Court in the end? I forget now.’

  ‘First it was going to be nine thousand. Then it was seven.’

  Pop helped himself to five or six more new potatoes, remarking at the same time how good they were in the long hot summer, and then sat in thought for a moment or so.

  ‘What shall I ask? Ten?’

  ‘Show a nice profit. Might be able to have that swimming pool Mariette keeps talking about if you brought the deal off.’

  There was a lot of land there, Pop reminded her. And all those greenhouses and stables and asparagus beds. To say nothing of the lake and the cherry orchard. He thought he’d ask twelve.

  ‘Why not fourteen?’ Ma said serenely. ‘You can always come down.’

  Pop said that was true, but was Ma quite sure it wasn’t too much?

  ‘Not on your nelly. Look at the paltry bits of land they ask five hundred for nowadays. Don’t give it away.’

  No chance of that, Pop said. Not if he knew it. No fear.

  ‘Go up a bit if anything,’ Ma said. ‘No harm in trying. Ask fifteen.’

  Pop, ruminating briefly, thought he detected sense in this and finally, with an airy flourish of a hand, said he thought it wouldn’t choke him if he asked seventeen.

  ‘Now you’re talking,’ Ma said. ‘Now you’re using your loaf.’ She laughed suddenly, in her rich, quivering fashion. ‘Might be able to have the swimming pool heated now. You know how I hate cold water.’

  Less than half an hour later, after eating three slices of flan, half a dozen maids-of-honour, and a raspberry tart or two, at the same time abandoning with reluctance the idea of a nice lie-down with Ma, Pop put on his light summer jacket again and went out to Mrs Jerebohm, leaving Ma at the task of feeding little Oscar, now eighteen months old, with much the same lunch he and Ma had had themselves, except that it was all mashed up and in smaller proportion. Oscar, he proudly noted, was getting as fat as a butter ball.

  Out in the road a chauffeur in bottle green cap and uniform held open the door of Mrs Jerebohm’s Rolls and Pop stepped into an interior of beige-gold, the upholstery softer than velvet.

  ‘Well, here we are,’ Pop said. ‘Perfick afternoon.’

  ‘I see you too have a Rolls,’ Mrs Jerebohm said.

  ‘Oh! that old crate. That’s a laugh.’

  Pop, who in reality adored and revered the Rolls with pride and tenderness as if it had been the eighth of his offspring, cheerfully proceeded to tear the car’s paltry reputation to pieces.

  ‘Took it for a small debt,’ he explained. ‘Wouldn’t pull pussy. Knocks like a cracked teapot. You’d get more out of a mule and a milk float. Still, the best I can afford. Struggle to make ends meet as it is.’

  As the Rolls turned the last bend before the house faded from sight he invited Mrs Jerebohm to look back on his pitiful junkyard, the paradise from which he scratched the barest of livings-if he had good luck.

  ‘Like my poor old place,’ he said. ‘Just about had it. Falling apart and I’ll never get the time to put it together again.’

  ‘Charming countryside, though,’ Mrs Jerebohm said. ‘I adore the countryside.’

  Pop resisted a powerful impulse to praise the countryside. Nothing in his life, except Ma, brought him nearer to celestial ecstasies than the countryside. Instead he now started to concentrate, with a new warm glow, on fresh enthusiasms.

  ‘Ah! but wait till you see Gore Court. Wait till you see that.’

  ‘I’m absolutely dying to. Absolutely dying. We’ve seen so many that haven’t-you know-sort of dove-tailed, but this one gives me a kind of thing –’.

  A moment later Mrs Jerebohm took a handkerchief from her white suede handbag, releasing an unrecognizable breath of perfume on which Pop’s hypersensitive nostrils at once seized with eager delight.

  It was a wonderful perfume she was wearing, he said. Could she tell him what it was?

  ‘Verbena. French. You like it?’

  It was perfick, Pop said. It suited her perfickly. It was just her style.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She smiled as she spoke, this time with her lips parted a little more, so that the edges of her mouth were crinkled. The effect of this was so surprisingly pleasant after the frigidities in the yard that Pop wondered for a moment whether or not to hold her hand and then decided against it. Even so, he thought, it might not be all that much of a hardship to dove-tail with Mrs Jerebohm one fine day.

  He was still pondering on the pleasant implications contained in the word dove-tail when the Rolls rounded a bend by a copse of sweet-chestnut, beyond which were suddenly revealed a mass of baronial turrets taller than the dark torches of surrounding pines.

  ‘There!’ Pop said. He spoke with a studied air of triumph, waving a hand. ‘There’s the house. There’s Gore Court for you. What about that, eh? How’s that strike you? Better than St Paul’s, ain’t it, better than St Paul’s?’

  2

  Mr Jerebohm, who had stayed the night with Mrs Jerebohm at The Hare and Hounds, had been up that morning with the lark. He was not at all sure what sort of bird a lark was or what it looked like, but he knew very well it was the bird you had to be up with.

  Numbers of small brown birds in the many thick trees surrounding the pub, which both he and Mrs Jerebohm called the inn, had chirped him awake as early as half-past four. He supposed these might have been larks. On the other hand they might well have been robins. He was a stranger in the country; it was a foreign land to him, distant as Bolivia, unfamiliar as Siam. He simply didn’t know Nor did he know anything distinctive about the trees which stood about the pub with tall lushness, almost black in high summer leaf. A tree was a shape. It had branches, a trunk, and leaves. In spring the leaves appeared; they were green; and in autumn they fell off again.

  Grass was to be recognized because it too was green, or generally so. It grew on the floor, most conveniently, and cows grazed at it. Mr Jerebohm recognized a cow. It had horns, teats, and gave milk. If it didn’t it was a bull. He also recognized a horse because even in London, where stockbroking absorbed him day and night, you sometimes still saw one drawing a cart. You also saw them on films and television, running races. You also hunted foxes with them, which was what Mr Jerebohm hoped to do as soon as he and Mrs Jerebohm had finally settled on a suitable place in the country.

  Finding a suitable place in the country had turned out to be an unexpectedly difficult and tedious business. The notion that you rang up or called on a house-agen
t, described the kind of residence you wanted-Mr Jerebohm invariably referred to houses as residences and their surroundings as domains- and bought it immediately was nothing but a myth. This was not in the least surprising since myths were exactly what house-agents dealt in. They were crooks and liars. Their sole idea was to sell you pups.

  Mr Jerebohm was determined not to be sold any pups. Nobody sold him any pups in the world of stockbroking and nobody was going to sell him any in the world of larks and cows. He was, since he was a Londoner, clever enough not to be caught by that sort of thing. People in London were naturally clever. They had to be; it was due to the competition.

  On the other hand, everybody knew that people in the country were not clever, simply because there was no need to be. There were enough fields, trees, cows, horses and all the rest of it to go round. You had ample milk fresh from the cow. You kept hens and they laid multitudes of eggs. Farmers made butter. As to the people, you smelled innocence in the air. They were naturally simple. The sky, even when rainy, was full of purity. The fields had a sort of ample pastoral virginity about them, unbesmirched by anything, and even the manure heaps had a clean, simple tang that was good to breathe.

  The exceptions to all this were house-agents. Two weeks of trailing with Mrs Jerebohm from one to another had made Mr Jerebohm tired and angry. He was now constantly taking pills and powders for the suppression of bouts of dyspepsia brought on by viewing manor houses which turned out to be matchboxes, farms which were nothing but hen-coops and country residences of character which looked like disused workhouses or mental homes.

  He wanted no more of house-agents at any price and for this reason had been more than glad when the barman at The Hare and Hounds had told him that a fellow named Larkin had a very nice house that he was planning to pull down. It was a pity and a shame, the barman said, but there it was. Nobody seemed to want it.

  ‘You’re sure it’s nice?’ Mr Jerebohm said. He had heard that word about houses before; it was the most misused, the most callous, in the language. ‘Has it class is what I mean?’

  Class was what Mr Jerebohm was looking for and class was precisely what couldn’t be found.

  ‘I ought to know,’ the barman said. ‘My missus goes in to air it twice a week and cleans and dusts it once a fortnight. You could walk in tomorrow. Class?-it’s a treat. All in apple-pie order.’

  Mr Jerebohm thanked the barman and gave him a shilling. It paid to be generous to the yokels.

  ‘Pinkie,’ he said that night as he folded his charcoal city trousers and hung them on the bedroom towel rail, ‘Pinkie, I’ve got a sort of hunch about this house. A funny kind of premonition. Have you?’

  Pinkie was his pet name for Mrs Jerebohm; it suited her much better than Phyllis.

  Pinkie, who in nothing but panties and brassière was squatting on her haunches in the middle of the bedroom floor, hands on hips, balancing a Bible and a thick telephone directory on her head, going through her slimming exercises, said she thought so too, adding:

  ‘I think I’ve lost another ounce. I weighed myself today in the ladies’ at that hotel where we had lunch. But can’t really tell until we get home and I can take everything off and get on the proper scales.’

  Mr Jerebohm, saying good for her, got into bed, propped himself up on the pillows and started to read the Financial Times. The night was exceptionally hot and stuffy and in any case he knew from long experience that there was no need yet awhile to think of shutting his eyes. It would take Pinkie the best part of another hour to do her balancing acts with books, stretch her legs, touch her toes, do press-ups, take off her make-up and swallow her pills.

  ‘Good night, Sunbeam,’ she said when she got into bed at last. She liked to call him Sunbeam last thing at night, it left a blessed sort of glow in the air. ‘Sleep well.’ She kissed him lightly on the forehead, barely brushing his skin, anxious about her facial cream. ‘I’m mad to see the house. It’s so beautiful here. Don’t you think it’s beautiful?’

  Mr Jerebohm wasn’t sure whether it was beautiful or not. Hot and restless, he found he couldn’t sleep well. It was terribly noisy everywhere. The countryside not only seemed to be full of barking dogs. From the fields came the constant moaning of cattle and, whenever he was on the verge of dropping off he was assailed from all sides by long asthmatic bleatings.

  Later in the night he had a rough bad dream in which Pinkie lost so much weight that she became a skeleton and he woke in an unpleasant sweat to hear a whole eerie chain of birds hooting at each other from tree to tree. These, he supposed, might well have been owls, though he wouldn’t have been at all surprised to hear that they were nightingales.

  Whatever they were they kept him awake until dawn, when once again the larks started their maddening chorus in the ivy.

  3

  When Pop Larkin first saw Mr Jerebohm, hatless and coatless in the heat, waiting outside the tall wrought-iron gate by Gore Court, it struck him immediately that his face seemed in some way curiously out of proportion with the rest of his body.

  Mr Jerebohm was shortish, squat, and slightly paunchy beneath watch-chain and waistcoat. By contrast his face was rather long. It was greyish in an unhealthy sort of way, with thick loose lips and eyebrows that had in them bright sparks of ginger. He looked, Pop told himself, rather like a bloater on the stale side.

  ‘Afternoon, afternoon,’ Pop said. ‘Perfick wevver. Hope I haven’t kept you waiting? Hope you don’t find it too hot?’

  Mr Jerebohm, who in sizzling heat had tramped about the domain of Gore Court for the better part of an hour so that his dark city trousers were now dustily snowy with white darts of seed from thistle and willow-herb, confessed to a slight feeling of weariness. But Pop was cheery:

  ‘Cooler inside the house. Wonderfully cool house, this. Thick walls. I daresay,’ he said, ‘it’s above twenty degrees cooler inside. Had a good wander round?’

  Mr Jerebohm confessed that he had wandered but was not sure how good it was. He had learned to be craftily cautious about houses. He was going to be very wary. He wasn’t going to be sucked in.

  ‘Had to fight my way through a damn forest of weeds,’ he said. ‘Look at me. How long has the place been in this state of disrepair?’

  Pop laughed resoundingly.

  ‘That seed?’ he said. ‘Blow away in a night. One good west wind and a drop o’ rain and it’ll melt away. Put up any pheasants?’

  When Mr Jerebohm rather depressingly confessed that he hadn’t put up a bird of any kind, Pop laughed and said:

  ‘Hiding up in the hot wevver. Place’s crawling wiv ’em. Partridges too. And snipe. And woodcock, down by the river. Didn’t see the river? I’ll take you down there when you had a deck at the house. And the lake? Beautiful trout in the lake. Nice perch too. Didn’t see the lake? Didn’t get that far? I’ll take you down.’

  Mrs Jerebohm, following Pop and Mr Jerebohm up the circular stone steps leading to the front of the house from a short avenue of box trees, found herself borne along on a mystical flow of lilting information that might have come from a canary. It was so bright and bewildering that she was inside the house before she knew it, standing at the foot of a great baronial sweep of oaken stairs.

  ‘There’s a flight of stairs for you,’ Pop said. He waved a demonstratively careless hand. ‘Handsome, eh? Like it?’

  Mrs Jerebohm, almost in a whisper, went so far as to say that she adored it. If anything clicked, that staircase did.

  Cautious as ever by contrast, Mr Jerebohm struck the banisters of the stairs a severe blow with the flat of his hand, as if hoping they would fall down. When nothing happened Pop startled him with a sentence so sharp that it sounded like a rebuke:

  ‘Built like a rock!-wouldn’t fall down in a thousand years!’

  With hardly a pause for breath Pop enthusiastically invited Mrs Jerebohm to take a good deck at the panelling that went with the stairs. It was linen-fold. Magnificent stuff. Class. There were walls of it. Acres. Talk about fume
d oak. Fumed oak wasn’t thought of when that was made. You could get ten pounds a square foot for it where it stood. And that was giving it away. And did she see the top of the stairs? The Tudor rose? The Tudor rose was everywhere.

  Mrs Jerebohm, speechless, stood partly mesmerized. At the very top of the stairs, lighting a broad panelled landing, a high window set with a design of fleur-de-lis, swans and bulrushes in stained glass of half a dozen colours threw down such leaves of brilliant light, driven by the strong afternoon sun, that she was temporarily dazzled and had to pick her way from step to step, like a child, in her ascent of the stairs.

  A man from Birmingham had offered him a thousand pounds for the window alone, she heard Pop say in a voice that reached her as an unreal echo, like some line from a far distant over-romantic opera, but he had turned it down.

  ‘Class,’ Mr Jerebohm was half-admitting to himself. ‘Class.’

  ‘How old is the house?’ Mrs Jerebohm brought herself to say. Her voice too was like an echo.

  Pop said he thought it was Georgian or Tudor or something. Fifteenth century.

  Mr Jerebohm, with bloater-like smile, was quick to seize on these transparent contradictions and nudged Pinkie quietly at the elbow as they turned the bend of the stairs. It served to prove his point about how simple the yokels were.

  ‘How many bedrooms did you say?’ Mrs Jerebohm, unable to keep entrancement out of her voice, almost hiccupped as she framed the question. ‘Was it ten?’

  Twelve, Pop thought. Might be fifteen. If it was too many they could always shut the top floor away.

  ‘There’s a beauty of a room for you!’ he said with almost a bark of delight. A huge double door, crowned by a vast oaken pediment, was thrown open to reveal a bedroom half as large as a tennis court. ‘Ain’t that a beauty? Didn’t I tell you it was like St Paul’s?’

  Mrs Jerebohm, stupefied by sheer size and acreage of panelling, heard three pairs of footsteps echo about her as if in a cave. Above them, at the same time, the chirpy solo voice of Pop was urging her to take a good eyeful of the view from a vast blue-and-pink window that might have come out of an abbey.