Selected Stories

‘It’s decidedly unlike him, but even so he has. I think I told him where it was. Not that he asked.’

‘You mean, he went along and bothered those people for no reason?’

‘He just said he’d looked it over.’

A flicker of unease disturbs Clione. It might have amused her if ever she had confessed that Michingthorpe has feelings for her; but to have confessed as well that he has never displayed them, that her woman’s intuition comes in here, would have led too easily on to a territory of embarrassment. Could it all not be imagination on her part? Or put more cruelly, a fading beauty’s yearning for attention? ‘Oh, but surely,’ Clione has heard James’s objection, the amusement all his now. Better just to leave it, she has always considered.

‘He knows our offer has been accepted?’

‘Oh, yes, he knows.’

Two days later, in the early afternoon, they visit again the house they have bought, received there by an elderly man – a Mr Witheridge whom they have not met before, whose daughter and son-in-law showed them around. They are permitted to take measurements, and in whispers speak of structural changes they hope to make.

‘Nice that your friend liked it too,’ the old man says, waiting downstairs with teacups on a tray when they have finished.

Profuse apologies are offered, and explanations that sound lame. Some silly muddle, James vaguely mutters.

‘Oh, good heavens, no! Oast-houses are in Mr Michingthorpe’s family, it seems. Michingthorpe Ales, he mentioned.’

The garden is little more than a field with a few shrubs in it. The present occupants came in 1961; Mr Witheridge moved in when his wife died. All this is talked about over cups of tea, and how mahonias do well, and winter heathers. But there are no heathers, of any season, that Clione and James can see, and herbs have failed in brick-edged beds in the cobbled yard.

‘Martins nest every year but they aren’t a nuisance,’ the old man assures them. ‘I’d stay here for ever, actually.’ He nods, then shrugs away his wish. ‘But we need to be nearer to things. Not that we’re entirely cut off. No, I don’t want to go at all.’

‘We’re sorry to take it from you.’ James smiles, again apologetic.

‘Oh, good heavens, no! It’s just that it’s a happy place and we want you to be happy here, too. There’s a bus that goes by regularly at the bottom of the lane. I explained that to your friend when he said he didn’t drive.’

‘Yes, I dare say he’ll visit us.’ Clione laughs, but doubts – and notices James doubting it too – that Michingthorpe often will, not being the country kind. The long acquaintanceship seems already over, the geography of their lives no longer able to contain it.

‘Your friend was interested in the outhouses.’

‘You’re intending to live with us?’ Clione stares into the puffy features, but the slaty eyes are blank, as everything else is. His voice is no more lifeless than it usually is when he explains that he happened to be in the neighbourhood of the oast-house, a library he had to look over at Nettleton Court.

‘Not fifteen minutes away. Nothing of interest. A wasted journey, I said to myself, and that I hate.’

‘You mentioned converting the outhouses to that old man.’

‘I have a minikin’s lifestyle. I like a certain smallness, I like things tidy around me. I throw things out, I do not keep possessions by me. That’s always been my way, I’ve been quite noted for it.’

‘We’ve no intention of converting the outhouses.’

Michingthorpe does not respond. He takes his spectacles off and looks at them, holding them far away. He puts them on again and says:

‘What d’you think I got for the Madox Ford? Remember the Madox Ford?’

‘We’ve never talked about your living with us.’

It is impossible to know if this is acknowledged, if there is a slight gesture of the head. Michingthorpe Ales were brewed at Maresfield, Clione learns, but that was long ago. In the 1730s, then for a generation or two.

‘I never took much interest. Just chance that I stumbled across the family name. In Locke’s Provincial Byeways, I believe it was.’

‘We’ll move down there in May.’

Quite badly foxed, the Ford, the frontispiece gone. ‘Well, you saw yourself. Six five, would you have thought it?’

Later, Clione passes all that on. The faint unease she experienced when she heard that Michingthorpe had been to Sussex is greater now. For more than twenty years he has had the freedom of a household, been given the hospitality a cat which does not belong to it is given, or birds that come to a window-sill. Has he seen all this as something else? It seems to Clione that it must be so, that what appears to her children and her husband to have come out of the blue is a projection of what was there already. Michingthorpe’s clumsy presumption is the presumption of an innocent, which is what his unawareness makes him. She should say that, but finds she cannot.

She listens to family laughter and when the children are no longer there says she is to blame, that she should have anticipated that something like this would one day happen.