Silver Birches Read online

  Angela was beautiful, as beautiful as I remembered her. Nowadays the blonde hair was streaked with some darker color, and I assumed she was wearing more makeup than in the old days, but the smile — the smile was the same magical switching on of a bright light that had so captivated us boys as teenagers. When she came to greet me at the backdoor end of the long, narrow kitchen, she was wearing floor-length, twenties-style gray baggy trousers with a square-shouldered short red jacket over a thin gray T-shirt. Her figure was fuller but still exquisite. She looked lovely.

  My plan had been to ask about Jessica’s mysterious request as soon as we met. Now I knew that I would never mention it until Angela did.

  She put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me lightly on the cheek.

  “Wonderful to see you again, David. Come and meet the others. They’re all here.”

  And indeed they were. At the other end of the huge kitchen a sitting room area had been created, and it was here that my fellow guests were seated rather stiffly with drinks, waiting, presumably, for someone to kick off the process of becoming vulnerable and open. I swept the nervously welcoming faces with my eyes, searching for clues.

  Yes, the serious-looking fellow dressed in a sports jacket, the one with the thinnish face and skinny beard, that must be Andrew.

  And there was no mistaking the hooked nose and angular body of Peter Grange. With his hollow eyes and straight-cut fringe of dark, tortoiseshell hair parted in the middle, Peter bore a striking resemblance to pictures and photographs of the tragic Victorian artist, Aubrey Beardsley.

  The diminutive, vole-like man in gray, sharply creased trousers must be Graham, but who was the rather anxious-looking woman I had noticed staring fixedly at me when I first came in? She had turned away as soon as she thought I was looking at her. Well, of course, it had to be Jenny Thomas, didn’t it? She was the only other woman on the list. She wore a toffee-colored pleated skirt and a cardigan in lighter brown. Her hair was cut in a straight, plain fashion that did nothing to flatter or highlight a striking pair of brown eyes.

  Oddly enough, I didn’t recognize Mike at first. The hair was just about gone from on top, and all that remained at the back was a little tail of hair, twisted into something like an old-fashioned sailor’s pigtail. The square, quizzical face was more satchel-like than I remembered it, a record of repeated excess in those scored lines. Mike seemed quite pleased to see me.

  In fact, warm recognition was the order of the day. Most of us acted as if we were close friends who had been prevented from meeting by cruel circumstance. Angela was very good at the relaxing process, but it was an uphill task at that stage. She refilled everyone’s glasses, with what looked like water in Peter’s case, and suggested that, before going any further, each of us should very briefly say something about ourselves and why we’d come. Perched on the arm of a chair beside Mike, she set the ball rolling herself.

  “You all know I’m Angela, and you all know what’s been going on in my life because I told you in the letter I sent you. I’m on my own here now, trying to keep the business going with a bit of paid help. As far as I’m concerned this weekend’s a little holiday from being alone, and I’m really, really pleased to have you all here.”

  Graham told us in his quiet voice that he was happily married with two small daughters. His work was something to do with selling animal feed, and he’d come on the weekend because his wife thought he needed to “get away” and he agreed with her.

  Mike announced in his very loud voice that he’d been married and divorced twice. His work was doing “this and that,” mainly in the car trade. He’d come because he wanted to see everyone again, especially Angela. He joked that he’d also come because he’d heard there might be free booze.

  Hilarious.

  Andrew’s contribution was brief and unsmiling.

  “I’m married with one son. I manage a golf hotel near the course at St. Andrews in Scotland, and I’m hoping that this weekend will be useful.”

  Jenny was single, lived in Northampton, and worked for an international aid agency in Milton Keynes. She was looking forward to catching up with old friends and was feeling a little nervous about our spooky surroundings.

  “I sell hats and cases and umbrellas in Harrogate,” said Aubrey Beardsley, “and I’ve come here hoping that God will find an opportunity for me to do something that’s very important to me.”

  It reminded me of contestants introducing themselves on some dreadful television quiz show. In the course of this rather bland list there had been a lot of nervous laughter at anything that might remotely be construed as amusing, a familiar feature of early encounters in most residential weekends. Now it was my turn. Not amusing for them. Excruciating for me.

  “I’m David. I was — I was married to Jessica, Jessica Foreman when you knew her. She died at the beginning of this year. I came because — ” I looked at Angela. “Well, for the same reason as Andrew, I suppose. I hope it’s a good idea. Something like that.”

  That didn’t just cool proceedings for a while. It nearly froze them.

  If ever there was a house made for ghosts, it was Headly Manor. Angela invited those of us who were interested to join her for a little tour of her home before we ate, beginning with the vast, low-ceilinged cellar. Here, by the light of two naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and a torch brought from the kitchen for the purpose, she showed us the remains of the Roman building that had originally been built on the site. Above that, we learned, a Saxon hall had been erected, only to be replaced with a Norman house by one of William’s important lords late in the eleventh century. By the time the seventeenth century was under way, this Norman building had itself been largely demolished and built over, and much of the existing house dated from that period. All around us were clear and visible reminders of all these stages of development.

  “It’s all a case of money,” said Angela, as we mounted the deeply indented stone steps from the cellar. “If I had more cash available I’d make the living areas a lot more livable-in, and I’d get the really old, interesting bits into the sort of state where people can come and see them properly.” She shrugged. “But as I haven’t got any, it’s still all a bit of a mess.”

  The house may have been a bit of a mess, the woodwork in need of a polish, the floors uneven and creaky, but it was still very impressive. Angela showed us the grand downstairs rooms, the Meeting Hall, the Dining Chamber, and the Library with its secret chapel that had been used during the persecution of the Catholics, and a fascinating carved overmantel that swung open to reveal steps in the chimney leading to the room above. There were ten bedchambers on the next floor, including two dark-paneled bedrooms, one of which contained a four-poster bed and a priest hole — a sort of secret cupboard where fugitive priests once hid — up under the ceiling, its door hanging ominously ajar. This room, the very model of settings for most traditional horror stories that I had ever read, was to be mine for the weekend, Angela lightly announced.

  “You’ll be all right in here, David, won’t you?” she inquired innocently.

  “Oh, fine,” I replied dryly, “as long as members of your paying public aren’t scheduled to come strolling through here early tomorrow morning staring at me just as I’m beginning to surface. They might think I’m part of the entertainment. I think I’d prefer ghosts.”

  “Oh, there’ll be no visitors this weekend,” Angela assured me. “This is my holiday as well, remember. Can’t speak for the ghosts.”

  The house was wonderful. As we tramped down the narrow back stairs toward the kitchen I thought how much Jessica would have loved to see and explore this place. Together, we could have made the weekend into a real adventure. Instead, I was going to spend it playing silly games with people I hardly knew.

  We came together to eat a very polite meal at the kitchen table. I felt cold and alienated. The spare, conciliatory conversation and the clack and click of cutlery on china came close to driving me mad. I groaned inwardly as the pudding was
passed around. Had I really trapped myself into staying here until Sunday? What would this evening and tomorrow and the morning after bring with them? Unless something radical happened this could turn out to be one of the most wretched weekends of my life. Not the most wretched, of course. Oh, Jessica!

  I can’t help it.” Mike’s head drooped as he spoke, his body swaying from side to side, like a child dismally aware that nothing good will ever happen in his life again until he’s managed to be sick. “I mean, I’m sorry if it spoils your party. We said we’d try to tell the truth, and that’s what I’m doing. I can’t help feeling the way I do. There’s no way you can just switch yourself off, you know.”

  “And the way you feel is — what, exactly?”

  Peter was leaning forward in his armchair, confidently, purposefully, to ask the question. I was curious to see if his way of dealing with people had changed much. Probably not. People don’t seem to alter a great deal, even in more than two decades. No, his neat head would still be full of solutions, all meticulously stored and arranged like those tools that hang over drawn shapes of themselves on the walls of garages or workshops belonging to organized people. Divine spanners. Spiritual WD40. Special gadgets for getting at the insides of things so that you can locate the fault and fix it. Leaning back, I noticed that since Peter’s last trim, the hairline above his collar was not quite precisely level. One side had had the nerve or the revolutionary zeal to grow a little faster than the other. I felt vaguely pleased, then guilty, then silly.

  “It’s not anything exactly,” retorted Mike irritably without raising his head. “Nothing’s exactly anything, is it? Not in my world, anyway. Or perhaps you all live in a different world from the one I have to get up and grapple with every morning?”

  “You know, I think I can guess your trouble, Mike,” said Angela, cool and composed as she expertly extracted the cork from yet another bottle of the tasty Australian Shiraz Cabernet that most of us had been enjoying. “Your problem, if you don’t mind me having a stab at it, is that you’ve never really recovered from the shock of finding that no one objects to your hair being long any more.”

  General, genuine laughter. Glancing up, Mike found his attempt at a resentful glare transmuted against his will into a self-conscious grin. There was not an atom of offense in the sweetly confident smile that Angela threw him as she set her opened bottle down on the ancient low oak table in front of the fire. I wondered if he would have taken the jibe from me.

  Oh, well, I reflected, here is what one might conceivably call a mellow moment. Perhaps there was an outside chance that it was going to be bearable after all. Wine. Laughter. Fire. Friends. Friends? Mmm. Well, anyway, it certainly was the first even vaguely unifying experience of the weekend.

  Our meal had been over for some time. We were back at the sitting room end of the kitchen, the atmosphere considerably more relaxed as people began to realize that the experience of being together couldn’t kill them, and might even be fun. Mike had volunteered to be the first to reveal his greatest fear.

  As far as one could gather it was something about him being doomed to a life in which he would never enjoy a warm and meaningful encounter with God. The problem was that, before and after dinner, he had drunk rather more than the rest of us. For no discernible reason other than this, he seemed determined to behave toward the rest of the group as though we were all strongly objecting to him talking honestly about how he felt. Angela’s flippant interjection had come as quite a relief. There was some truth in what she had said, though.

  None of us were likely to have forgotten the famous Battles of Mike’s Hair. Sitting here tonight in our new, postmodern millennium that somehow didn’t seem to need actual people as much as the previous one, it seemed hardly possible that the length of a teenager’s hair could have been such an issue back in the late seventies. Mike had been involved in a number of colorful skirmishes and one memorable public battle with elders and house-group leaders back in those days. They had not considered it appropriate for a young Christian person to wear his hair way down below his shoulders. Try as I might, I could not actually remember the root of their objections. Mike’s basic argument had been that God had saved him exactly as he was, and that included all of his hair, from roots to rebelliously distant split ends. Not much of an argument, but all his own, and all he had.

  “Where in the Scriptures,” I could remember him hotly and single-digitally inquiring of the mild but lobster-clawed critics who took him on, “does it say anything about men having to have short hair? You show me that and I’ll do something about it. What you’re really saying,” he would add, tearing into those in authority over him with the scything insights of a teenager who is very nearly eighteen months into his Christian life, “is that it makes you uncomfortable to have someone around who doesn’t come over as respectable enough to fit your personal pattern of what a Christian should look like. Well, being respectable isn’t what following Jesus is about, so, whatever you say, I’m leaving my hair exactly as it is! Why don’t you ask the girls to cover their hair? Eh? Eh!”

  Gracious apologias of this sort had, inevitably, given the nature of our church, resulted in troubled questions about whether Mike’s had been a valid conversion. Phrases like “Spirit of Disobedience” were muttered gravely in connection with him. In fact, an ideal candidate for Grafton House if dear old Nora’s doctor had been around at the time.

  Watching him wrestle with whatever was attacking him inwardly now, real or otherwise, I was struck for the first time by how strange and ironic and terribly sad it was that no one, all those years ago, had had the plain old-fashioned good sense to see that Mike’s long hair was a crucial part of the fragile personality he had just about cobbled together in the course of his sixteen years on earth. His hair was something he had done, a feature that peculiarly and distinctively marked him off as being himself. Besides, I happened to know that he had secretly wanted to be a rock star if “The Christian Thing” didn’t work out, or if the two pursuits didn’t merge, and growing his hair was all he’d done about it up to that point. What a fuss over nothing. Or rather, what a lack of fuss over the important things. Or —

  “In fact, Mike,” continued Angela, who, glass in hand, had squeezed her very attractive person unself-consciously into the space between Andrew and Graham on the sofa, “didn’t I hear on the grapevine that you were having to travel farther and farther afield nowadays to find a church where at least one person would take exception to your — well, I suppose it’s what you’d call a pigtail now, isn’t it?”

  “I could tell you off a bit if it would help, Mike old man,” offered Graham in his hushed, tapioca-soft voice. He raised his hand to his mouth immediately after speaking and coughed a hollow, embarrassed laugh. He seemed faintly shocked at catching himself in the act of contributing to banter.

  “All right, all right!” Mike raised a hand in mock surrender. “Very funny. I don’t mind you all having a laugh at my expense, but it doesn’t change anything, does it? And for everybody’s information, I don’t go to church any more. Haven’t done for years.”

  There was a short silence. The bark on a lump of wood in the fire crackled, then flared and flamed, sending light and shadow flickering over our faces and bodies.

  It suddenly struck me that no one was in charge here. Seven virtual strangers (after twenty years, surely that was what we were) meeting in a house full of ghosts and wine and vague memories with the stated intention of opening up and being vulnerable to each other. Must be joking. Mentally I flicked through the list of drastically altered priorities in my life, the list of things that I was definitely never going to talk about, not even if they tied me down and tortured me. Not that they would, of course, although —

  “Let’s go back to what you were saying, Mike — about the way you feel.”

  Peter was leaning even farther forward on the edge of his seat now, sharp elbows on sharp knees, clasped hands with long fingers interlinked penduluming urgently away
down near his ankles somewhere. He meant business.

  “The — way — I — feel?” repeated Mike slowly, darkly and tipsily, giving every word its full weight and value. “The way I feel, being here with all of you now, is, as exactly as I can bring myself to put it for your benefit, Peter, very, very disappointed.”

  “Disappointed with whom?”

  “With God, of course. Dumbo! Who else? Jerry Springer? Joe Bugner? Oscar Peterson?”

  Peter considered this carefully before replying.

  “You can’t be disappointed with God. God is perfect. It would have to be something about you.”

  Our do-it-yourself expert had obviously decided to begin, in the grand tradition of do-it-yourself experts, by simply hitting the problem with a hammer and hoping that might do the trick. I could have told him it would not. The vehemence of Mike’s reply shot Peter back in his chair as if he had been hit by a bullet.

  “Can’t? What do you mean— can’t? How dare you try to tell me what I can or can’t do or be or think or — or anything. Those days are long gone. Look, just because you chose to have taken up residence in that flimsy little three-colored Lego prison we built for ourselves at St. Mark’s doesn’t mean I have to, does it? Has it still not occurred to you that you slotted it together, so you can take it apart whenever you want?” He came to a stop for a second or two, blinking rapidly. “My God, you certainly haven’t changed at all, have you? Still solid as a block of concrete. When I think that I used to use you as a sort of — I dunno — a sort of reassurance.”

  He sank back into his chair and sipped his wine. I wondered how Peter would cope with this onslaught, but I needn’t have been concerned. In the brief silence that followed he was simply replacing his hammer carefully over its shape before lifting down a crowbar.

  “Scripture says — ”

  “Oh, don’t give me bloody Scripture — please!” interrupted Mike, slapping the arm of his leather-covered chair with one hand. He sounded as if someone had offered him poison.