The Squire Quartet

Truth kills …?

7

Land Full of Strange Gods

Pippet Hall, Norfolk, Christmas 1976

His mother had cared enough for the Jews to do something positive for them.

That was in the early summer of 1938 when, as a widow of one year’s standing, she had taken the Normbaum family into the Hall. They were refugees from Hitler’s Third Reich, and had fled from Hamburg leaving almost all their possessions behind. Patricia Ann Squire – supported by her sister, Tom Squire’s Aunt Rose, who was also living at the Hall in those days – had invited the poor Normbaums to stay indefinitely.

During the Christmas of 1976, Squire thought of those distant pre-war days as he gazed down upon the face of his dead mother.

Patricia Squire had died during the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Her body would lie in its coffin over Christmas and be consigned to the ground on the twenty-eighth of December, at eleven o’clock in the morning, in the church of St Swithun, Hartisham.

The sense of the dead body in the house made for a subdued Christmas when, after breakfast on Christmas morning, everyone retired to the morning room for present-giving and-receiving. Squire left as soon as he could, and went to sit by the mortal remains of his mother.

Downstairs were Teresa, the girls, and her parents, Madge and Ernest Davies; Tom’s brother, Adrian; together with Deirdre and Marshall Kaye, Tom’s sister and brother-in-law, who always drove over from Blakeney to stay at Pippet Hall for Christmas, bringing with them their three children, Grace, Douglas, and Tom. Uncle Willie would arrive later, after the family had been to church.

An LP of carols from Norwich Cathedral played on the record player. Nellie the Dalmatian rooted among the discarded wrapping paper.

Squire waited upstairs in the small room, furnished with little more than the open coffin. Fragments of scripture, platitudinous saws, floated through his mind.

We are but little time upon this earth.

What’s done cannot be undone.

Ashes to ashes.

Your place is with the living. Join the children downstairs.

And that old quotation from Walter Savage Landor:

There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there are no voices, O Rhodophe, that are not soon mute, however tuneful; there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.

John Matthew Squire, his father, dead so many years, had once cried the name of the red-haired Patricia Ann Hodgkins with all the emphasis of passionate love. Now both were gone, and the echo of that cry could be heard only in his own head, and in the heads of his sister and brother.

There was no immortality, of that he was certain, or none in the sense that the Church intended. Yet there was no death, or at least there was a residue of life. For that vast and perennially never-entirely-satisfactory thing, his relationship with his mother, grievously damaged on the very day of his father’s death by her savage beating of him, ostensibly for shooting the mastiffs – though even at the time, in his many kinds of grief, he perceived that the beating was merely her pain, her confusion in the face of death, her hatred of this unexpected beastliness, which had driven her to attack him – still hung and would ever hang between him and the phantom domains of his past.

Looking away from his mother’s emaciated form, and her closed face splotched by greys and browns unknown in living nature, he gazed with sorrow on the still world of Christmas outside. A light fall of snow, followed by an iron frost, had welded the previous night’s mist to the trees. Every bare twig had its nimbus of cold. The grass of the lawns was furred with white. It was a white and blue-grey picture. Death seemed to have deprived the world of colour. The still cold had enlarged the plantation and created a deadness in its depths so that it resembled an ancient forest, or perhaps he saw a spectre of it as it would be a century from now, when his eyes and the eyes of his children would no longer perceive it.

He allowed himself to picture two Shire horses, such as had worked on his father’s estate when he was a boy, pulling a great trunk from the forest, of the trunk being set light to, and of cheerful flames leaping to the ashen sky. Truly, one could understand how, long before a sailing ship and a pious old man in monk’s habit had brought Christianity to these shores, men had set out with animals to drag in the yule log and burn it, ensuring that the death of the sun in the embers of winter solstice was temporary merely, not lasting.

But the sun was dead, he thought. Every year it did die a little. Though less swiftly than he.

The door opened and Teresa entered in her Sunday clothes. Patricia Squire’s body had been brought in its coffin to a small room on the top floor, which had served in its time as maid’s room, children’s room, and box room. The passage outside was thinly carpeted and Squire had heard his wife’s footsteps approaching.

Teresa was dressed in a light coat with fur-trimmed pockets. She wore a fur hat which haloed her hair, and carried gloves. Her smile was warm and loving.

‘We’re ready to go to church, Tom, if you are.’

He rose hesitantly. She went over to him where he stood by the window and put her arms about him, running her hands through the hair at the base of his skull, murmuring to him.

‘I’m sorry about your poor old mother, my darling. It’s sad for you, I know. And it wakens up that old wound of your father dying so tragically. I know that too because I’m a part of you. Don’t grieve too much, darling – I’ll be your little mother as well as your plump little wife. We’ll be fine, you’ll see.’

They all walked to church as they always did, through the ringing cold, down the drive, over Repton’s bridge, along the village street, up the hill, to St Swithun’s, twelve of them where there had been thirteen the previous year. Several cars were parked outside the church, including the Porsche belonging to Ray Bond, the flashy builder who had bought the vicarage. The five-minute bell was ringing as they walked between the gravestones, the children, who had led the way impatiently until now, dragging behind.

Inside the church, where worshippers retained their coats to ward off the damp which the massively old-fashioned Victorian heating system did little to dispel, brass plates commemorated the names of the fallen who had given their lives for the country in two world wars. The organ, which was delivering a voluntary based on, or aspiring towards, Holst’s ‘Christmas Day’, under the skeletal fingers of Mr Beaumont, had been presented by the Squire family to commemorate the fallen.

Tom Squire’s first sight of the Normbaums had revealed huddled figures in ill-fitting overcoats, staggering into the hall of Pippet Hall, late on a summer evening before the war. Spinks, the Squire’s old stableman, brought in a couple of battered cardboard boxes and set them down by the stairs, leaving without a backward look. Young Squire had not understood the alien gestures of the newcomers. He had immediately understood Spinks’s unthinking gesture of dislike and disapproval. He stood on the stairs, refusing his mother’s invitation to come down, resenting this intrusion of foreign things into his home, this threat of coming war into Hartisham, into his county of Norfolk.

Why should they look so ugly, why should they dress so incongruously, when this super, kind, rich English family was letting them stay here, safe from Hitler, free, no charge? Why couldn’t they look grateful instead of scared?

He had long since forgiven himself that ungenerous reception of the Normbaums, and his flight upstairs into the bedroom when his mother called him peremptorily down to greet their guests. What had been less easy to forgive, what perhaps should never be quite forgiven, but should lie about in the mind like a dead albatross, a warning for all worse and more subtle situations to come, was the way he had secretly sympathized with Hitler’s – well, in those days one did not realize it was extermination – Hitler’s extirpation of the Jews.

In the newsprints and on newsreels, ground out in the local fleapit before the appearance of Humphrey Bogart, or Eddie G. Robinson, or Will Hay, or Errol Flynn, Hitler looked rather nice and sensible in his uniform. Tom could not believe what Uncle Robert said about Hitler being a ‘villain of the first water’. But he disliked the look of the German Jews, seen scuttling here and there in heavy clothes, dirty, drab, suspicious, the men with matted black beards and strange hats, the women fat and weepy. Their eyes were so frightening. Why should they inhabit Germany? It seemed a good idea to get rid of them if they were causing trouble, as everyone said they were.

Now here these troublemakers were in his own house, in father’s house, and father would surely never allow that. Already the trouble was starting. He had had to exchange his pleasant big room next to his mother’s for a smaller room on the top floor, redeemed only by its stunning view over the rear of the house, the stables, the farm, the village, and the distant tower of Thornage church. Rooks and pigeons were his companions.

Mr Normbaum spoke good English. He was cosmopolitan. But he disappeared almost as soon as he had deposited his wife and children at the Hall. The wife spoke almost no English, the two children, Rachel and little Karl, none. Memory, which after a while proves to have none of the fading properties of the body enshrining it, still held that scene in the hall, under the chandelier, with the door in the background open on sunset sky: Spinks balefully moving away, waistcoated figure averted, mother going forward, arms open in smiling welcome, tall Mrs Normbaum, two ill-clad little children looking up apprehensively into the shadows to where something scuttled away.

It took some days to realize how beautiful those children were, the blue-eyed Rachel in particular.

During the sermon, the Rev. Rowlinson mentioned Patricia Squire, in order to remind his scanty parishioners of the good she had done in her lifetime. He had occasion to mention the fact that she had given refuge to a Jewish family in the troubled days before the last war broke out.

‘All times in this realm of earth are troubled. Although it may seem to our eyes that the kinds of troubles vary, that we have to fight against various sorts of evil, that is only because our mortal lives are so short. Could we but look at matters with a wider scan, had we the vision of the Almighty, we would see that there is really only one sort of evil, that evil puts on many guises, yet remains itself, and that it is in us all. Patricia Squire worked all her life against evil …’

Limitations of intellect did not prevent the Reverend Rowlinson being a good vicar; indeed, perhaps they helped him. But what he said was only partly true, or only partly useful. For, given the brevity of life’s span to which he made reference (a snide but traditional way the Church had of making you depressed and therefore not so actively bad), one had to make ad hoc arrangements against evil; so it suited all and sundry to chop evil up into parcels and, by pretending it was divisible, remain able to divide and conquer it. Given a bit of luck.

For instance, there was the evil of ignorance, such as the young Tom Squire showed in his lack of sympathy for Hitler’s suffering Jews. That lack had been banished when he was in his teens and acquired knowledge. The dreadful revelation of Belsen and the other concentration camps, which almost coincided with the first flush of puberty, jarred him like the passing of a terrible express train. It had jarred him with knowledge. As an earthquake levels tall buildings, he felt whole edifices of ignorance fall within him. He saw the wickedness of the Nazi regime and – on a par with it if knowledge cannot be quantified, as old Rowlinson appeared to be claiming – his own wickedness. (Yet the wickedness lived even in its own ruins. How grateful he had been when he read Orwell’s words, ‘I could never find it in my heart to dislike Hitler.’ He wondered if all the British felt that way. Hadn’t they said, even at the sour end of the war, ‘We should have joined up with the Wehrmacht and smashed the Russians while we had the chance’? … The things that were said, between individuals, between husband and wife, seemingly so transient, never forgotten … ‘I’ll be your little mother as well as your plump little wife …’)

As the sermon laboured on, Squire’s attention wandered. His younger brother Adrian sat on one side of him, Teresa on the other, in the family pews. In a niche on the wall just above them stood a bust in white marble of Matthew Squire, 1689–1758, one of the benefactors of the church. Anxious, in his nouveau riche state, to keep in with the Church as well as the local gentry, Matthew had endowed the church with a fine wooden pulpit, carved by William Kent, no less, probably from timber left over from the construction of the Hall.

Matthew’s bust showed a serious man – but who would not achieve seriousness whilst being carved in stone? The high forehead, the long nose, were echoed in a nearer, living, face: that of Adrian, whose gaze, fixed rigidly on the Rev. Rowlinson, was almost as stony as his ancestor’s.

Squire reflected that he probably spent more time thinking about the long-defunct Matthew than about his still-living brother. Although Adrian was rather a dull stick, that was a mistake; blood was thicker than marble.

Adrian was the only member of the family to subside into the civil service. He had been doing worthy and inscrutable things in Whitehall for a quarter of a century and, for most of that time, had owned a flat near the Fulham Road. Whatever his private delights and excitements, the only episode in Adrian’s life to stir the family had been when he went on a delegation to Bombay and returned with an Indian film actress on his arm, a lady by the name of Sushila.

That had been almost fifteen years ago. Well did Squire remember how he and Teresa had gone to London to meet Sushila on Adrian’s invitation. In theory, Squire thoroughly approved of the match. He too had a taste for the exotic, but had never expected the same to manifest itself in his sober brother; perhaps Adrian’s infant imagining also had been stirred by the dark beauty of Rachel Normbaum.

Sushila was beautiful beyond imagining. Squire and Teresa both found themselves silenced before her elegance. ‘I wear saris here in London because it is expected of me,’ she said. ‘At my home, I am more comfortable in jeans.’

‘Have you visited London before?’ asked Teresa.

Her answer was a silvery laugh. ‘My family is pretty cosmopolitan, I’m glad to say.’

Squire had hardly been able to keep his eyes or hands off her, and had deeply envied his brother – an envy that Teresa had infallibly sensed. He remembered the terrible row after Adrian and Sushila were married, when he had acted as his brother’s best man. But the marriage was not to last. Perhaps Adrian was too set in his ways. A son was born to them but, within two years, the cosmopolitan Sushila was on a plane back to Bombay, with the child. Adrian had never spoken of her or the boy since in his brother’s hearing.

Since those exciting times, the profile had grown sharper, thinner, had acquired a moustache and spectacles with which to regard the changing world. Yet unhappily it seemed no more inclined to exchange confidences than the marble bust behind it.

The Rev. Rowlinson’s sermon came to an end, the congregation rose on frigid feet to unite in ‘Hark, the herald angels sing’.

After the service, all were cheerful. Everyone shook hands with Edward Rowlinson as he stood in his surplice, a tall and not undignified figure despite the loose false teeth, wishing everyone a Happy Christmas as they filed past him at the entrance. Purple-visaged Ray Bond – an Australian gentleman, some parishioners said – shouted out a ‘Merry Christmas’ before jumping into his yellow Porsche and belting off in the direction of the nearest whisky.

When the church was empty, the Rev. Rowlinson put on his blue raincoat and gloves. He and his wife and their grown-up daughter Matilda walked downhill with the Squire party to Pippet Hall. It was customary for them to eat their Christmas lunch at the Hall. The children, Ann, Jane, Grace, Douglas, and Tom, led the way, running and calling, keen to get back to their new toys and games, now that duty was done.

The hospitality offered the Rowlinsons was the last drip of a stream of Pippet Hall hospitality which had flowed over the centuries. The sheltering of the Normbaum family, though an act not without self-interest, had been in that good tradition; but taxes direct and indirect, and the winds of change, had dried it. All that was left was an impoverished squire offering a meal to an impoverished vicar. A turkey bone, a game of Consequences, and duty was fulfilled for another year.

The little Normbaums had soon shown themselves marvellous at games round the house. In no time, Rachel was talking a pretty variety of English, and Karl was hardly slower. Rachel was slender and had blue eyes and dark hair, a dashing, brilliant, affectionate child who became Tom’s first and unconsummated love. Oh, the delight of having her there, of coming back from school in the holidays and finding her awaiting him, long-legged, at Hartisham station (for in those days the old Great Eastern trains still ran). Those were the happy years, the years of sheltered childhood while the war played itself out below the horizon. And the end of the war – unwelcome in many ways, not least because suddenly the Normbaums were gone to Detroit in a new world, and Pippet Hall became empty and full of shadows, debt, dry rot, servants not returning, old order disappearing in shabbiness, damp, and tarnished silver. Then he had learnt – at the time of the Belsen revelations – that mother had taken in the refugees only to save the Hall being commandeered by the RAF.

Mother had friends in the county, in some cases traditional old friends of Squire’s father and grandfather. They helped her. Thomas Squire had neglected them in their old age, preferring more sophisticated friends in Cambridge and London.

At the Hall gates, Squire paused to let Madge and Ernest, his parents-in-law, catch up with him. Matilda, the pale Rowlinson daughter, went on ahead with Teresa and Deirdre to see how the Christmas lunch, the turkey with all its gallant accessories, was faring. As the party progressed past the artificial lake – frozen but not frozen enough to bear skaters – it could hear Nellie barking from the house, and see Uncle Willie’s Austin Maxi standing by the front porch. Like Deirdre and Marshall, Willie always drove over for Christmas Day; unlike them, he would be driving home in the evening, claiming that his cat could not survive overnight without him. He had protested also that Pippet Hall beds were too hard for his old bones.

Despite Patricia’s terminal illness, Squire had insisted on the Hall’s being decorated for Christmas. The party trooped through the front door, exclaiming at the cold now they were safely out of it, and gathered to admire the Christmas tree, which stood in the hall as usual on such occasions. Its lights seemed to emphasize a dreary negation of light which hung this year at the top of the stairs to the upper regions, where the body lay.

But the tree was grand and glittering, swathed in a glass-fibre called Angel’s Breath, which was carefully saved in a hat box from one year to another. The tree had been dug from the grounds and stood in a tub specially constructed for the purpose. At the top of the tree, spreading brilliant plastic wings, was the fairy which Teresa had made; despite its wand, there was about it something of the insect reminiscent of Teresa’s more usual creations. A paraffin stove radiated warmth beside the tree, compensating for the uncertainties of the central heating in this area of the house. From a radio in the sitting room came the sound of Bethlehem bells. The thing lying upstairs would not hear those bells this year as, when living, it had done every Christmas since the invention of the wireless. Soon, there would be no one left who remembered cat’s whiskers and crystal sets; to Squire himself, they were only stories.

As Uncle Willie came into the hall, smiling, to wish them all a Happy Christmas, the children disappeared into the morning room to play with Tom Kaye’s new Scalextric motor race track. The adults, after removing their coats and scarves, went through into the living room, Squire ushering the Rowlinsons hospitably before him.

‘Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without the bells,’ Madge Davies said. ‘Do you remember how funny it was in the wartime, when the churches were not allowed to ring their bells? I expect you remember that, Mr Rowlinson? I feel so sorry that poor Patricia isn’t with us this year – she was quite a campanologist. One can’t help wondering who will be taken from us by next Christmas.’

‘Don’t say that, dear,’ Ernest said. ‘It’s morbid. Besides, we are all in the pink.’

‘What about your back? And Teresa says …’ But she decided not to complete the sentence.

Although the living room struck rather cold, all agreed that it would soon warm up. The room was decorated with boughs of pine tucked behind the pictures on the wall, and with red candles, half-used, which would be lighted again at dusk. To make the fire in the wide hearth burn up, Squire threw onto it elm logs which he had sawn himself. They all stood round the hearth, exchanging idle conversation, except for Adrian Squire, who was silent as usual. He smoked a cigarette unobtrusively, and coughed a little.

‘That is one blessing of the Dutch Elm Disease,’ said the Rev. Rowlinson. ‘It has provided everyone with more wood fuel than they have ever known before. In these days of spiralling prices, it is very welcome.’ He shook his head, as if contradicting his own words.

‘Wood-burning stoves are very fashionable again. Ray Bond told me so,’ said his wife. Dorothy Rowlinson was a large but timid woman with a sharp nose and a memorable amount of grey hair which, though apparently natural, brought to these remote reaches of Norfolk a reminder of the Afro hair-styles affected in Notting Hill Gate. Dorothy Rowlinson’s parishioners claimed that spirits could frequently be smelt on her breath; some said brandy or, the more charitable, sherry; otherwise, none had any complaint about this shy and dedicated woman.

‘It’s fortunate for the look of the countryside that there’s more oak than elm in the region,’ Marshall said, his sharp Bostonian voice in contrast to the rather woolly tones of both Rowlinsons. ‘Northampton and Bedfordshire have been practically denuded of trees. Entire landscapes have changed character in just these last two years.’

Looking mysterious, Uncle Willie took himself off to the morning room, bearing envelopes. He was going to make his annual rather cheese-paring distribution of record tokens to the Squire and Kaye children, and to receive in return their well-simulated cries of grateful surprise.

‘People make a lot of fuss about the elms,’ said Adrian. ‘They’ll grow back again.’

‘I’m damned sure they won’t,’ Marshall retorted. ‘People don’t have time for trees any more.’

‘Oh, surely that’s not so,’ Rev. Rowlinson protested. ‘Dorothy and I are very fond of trees.’

Teresa and Matilda entered, bearing trays of glasses and hot negus. Deirdre followed with crisps in bowls. Grace, now thirteen, slipped into the room to try her aunt’s drink, and tasted it appreciatively. ‘It’s lovely, Aunt Teresa, and not at all alcoholic.’

‘You just take care,’ Deirdre warned her. ‘One alcoholic in the family’s enough.’

When all present were clutching a glass, Squire went and stood at the far end of the room away from the fire, unconsciously framing himself against a window where a landscape in white and blue-grey led towards distant Walsingham. He took a slim book from a shelf and read Journey of the Magi aloud.

‘A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year …’