Chapter 13: Bertie - The Golden Hours

On Boxing Day, the snow was even deeper and more promising. Bertie spent the morning with Georgie, getting the hang of the bow and arrow Louise had given him. ‘Is it alive?’ he had dutifully inquired. The shape of it, wrapped, gave plenty of scope for interpretation. Now he had an idea for the Boxing Day Snowman Competition, to which the bow and arrow would contribute, plus, they could shoot Andrew, if things came to it. It was a proper archery bow, not a silly toy, so it could shoot somebody. And they needed to make sure they were on the same team, and Andrew was not.

Together they sauntered with juvenile manliness across the cold hall, through the ballroom, and up the west back stairs to the old office on the first floor which nobody used any more, except for the handfuls of bluebottles which went there to die behind the stuffed old filing cabinets. And people – like them today – in search of Louise’s old dressing-up trunk. This ancient item was made of black tin, dented and printed and labelled with details of their grandfather’s travels: Shanghai, Peking, Vancouver, Cape Town, many others unreadable, faded, rubbed off. It gaped with disintegrating treasures: feather boas, a scrap of peach-coloured silk kimono, a hand-sewn boiled-felt jacket, a despondent crinoline with hoops askew, a hand-embroidered Chinese silk gown, something dark green made of parachute silk from the last war, a pink flapper dress dripping with sequins (most of the beaded fringing had found its way into the trunk’s dusty corners), some cotton sailor-tops left over from a domestic production of H.M.S. Pinafore, a smell of talc and ancient sweat. Each time he looked, Bertie found something new – well, new to him. A pirate hat! A large inexplicable piece of pale yellow tulle! A silver lamé turban!

‘We should just tip it all out, I expect,’ Bertie said. ‘For research.’

They had no say in the teams, because Clary and Hugh picked them. Louise, Edward, Rachel and Lydia would be the judges as they didn’t have offspring in the contest so couldn’t be accused of favouritism. Unfair! came the children’s cries anyway, purely from habit. Each team was to be made up of an adult, a big girl, a big boy, and a little one, i.e. Pen or Buttercup, which allowed for four teams, if you counted Jemima and Rupert as little ones. ‘We’re far too old to be any use, you wait and see,’ said Rupert. ‘Sorry, Jemima.’ Belka and Strelka pranced about, delighted and appalled. Bertie wondered if Georgie might be persuaded to harness them somehow, have them as part of the snowman, a live performance. Rivers Two stared disapprovingly, then went inside. The sofas would be empty.

The object of the competition was to make the funniest, cleverest and most unusual snowman. As they’d been doing it for years – it was a Home Place tradition, transplanted – almost every good idea had already been had, especially after a run of non-snowy years required them to translate the competition into a build-a-snowman-out-of-whatever-is-to-hand competition, which involved everything from cardboard and string to papier mâché, cake, pets and younger siblings. In the early years, a snow pirate or even a snow woman had been enough to win; now it was necessary to produce what Uncle Rupert called a Compendious Idea: an idea made up of more than one idea. He and Archie were in deep discussion about how to make a diving helmet look like a diving helmet rather than just a snowman’s head, ‘because they’re pretty much identical, after all’.

‘Dad!’ objected Bertie. ‘Stop fraternising with the enemy!’

‘We want to make a ballerina,’ cried Janie and Za. Every snowy year since 1956 they had wanted to make a ballerina – ideally in an arabesque, on one leg, and perhaps even on horseback – and every year they had been voted down. In full-family voting, involving grown-ups, the authority of their twinship dwindled.

‘A frog ballerina!’ Georgie suggested.

‘You’re not even on my team,’ said Janie icily.

Because the adults were not idiots, the boys were all on different teams. Georgie allowed Bertie to use the splendid idea they’d had the day before. After all, the bow and arrows were Bertie’s. Thus, Bertie, his dad Archie, Laura and little Buttercup produced, ‘with many a setback’, as Laura described it later, Sagittarius: a marble-white centaur lying at ease on the south lawn, with coal-black eyes (made of lumps of coal) and gleaming muscled flanks, his torso, arms (rather short) and bow raised, and his arrow pointing directly at the fountain. He was wonderful.

While they made it, Archie told them a story. ‘One winter,’ he said, ‘hundreds of years ago, in Florence, the most beautiful city in the world, where all the world’s greatest artists lived, a great deal of snow fell. Florence was normally a warm place, full of jasmine and roses. Snow there was unusual. The Florentines – I mean, the people of Florence, not those delicious chocolate things with the almonds – were excited. So the Prince of Florence, Piero de’ Medici – and by the way, children, that’s how it’s pronounced, MED-itchy, not MerDEEchy as some people will undoubtedly say in your hearing – summoned his finest artist, the famous sculptor Michelangelo, who usually carved the finest white marble from Carrara, and did it so beautifully that the marble itself was named after him, so beautifully that he could show a teardrop running down a face, or the dent in flesh where a hand clasped it . . . Prince Piero summoned Michelangelo, and had him make a statue from the snow in the courtyard.’

Bertie blinked. He’d seen a small black-and-white photograph in an art book of a white marble Jesus stretched across the lap of his white marble mother Mary. A snowman by Michelangelo! Snow marble!

‘It must be terribly valuable,’ said Laura.

‘Oh, it melted,’ said Archie. ‘They didn’t have fridges.’

‘What was it of, Dad?’ asked Bertie.

‘All we know is it was beautiful.’

Lost for ever! thought Bertie. The romance pierced his heart.

He had brought down some accessories from the dressing-up box in case any were needed, and now laid the straggly eau-de-Nil feather boa carefully around the centaur’s neck, and considered it. No. Too fussy. Art must be clean. Michelangelo wouldn’t put a boa on a statue, unless he carved the boa itself out of marble. He removed it, scraping the specks and scraps of dusty feather that had frozen instantaneously on, carefully polishing over the little flaws left on the smooth icy shoulders. As soon as he could, he would go to Florence and see every single beautiful thing. He had loved Rome. He couldn’t resist attempting a tiny reshape of the centaur’s neck.

The head fell off.

The awfulness hung over him in full shame. Buttercup’s pink face went even pinker and her mouth into a terrible O –

‘Ah, well done,’ said Archie. ‘Now it looks properly antique. Doesn’t it, Buttercup?’ and he picked her up. ‘Look, he looks just like a real ancient statue in a museum, doesn’t he? We can leave the head just there, for added authenticity. Sweetheart, do you know about Time being the great artist?’

Buttercup shook her head.

‘Well, now,’ he said, cuddling her in, ‘Hogarth said that Time is not a great artist, but weakens all he touches. I don’t agree. I agree with what’s-his-name, who said that Time was a great artist, the greatest, and improves things: by letting plants grow up them or changing the colours, or allowing cracks, or bits to fall off, or washing paint away with rain, or wearing things down . . . So what do you think? Does our fine centaur look noble and wonderful with his head lying there? Have you read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe yet? No of course not. It’s rather like that too. Tragic yet marvellous . . .’

Buttercup laid her head on his jumper. Bertie knew what she was doing; he remembered doing it himself. Later she would recognise the smell as woodsmoke and turpentine and Balkan Sobranie pipe tobacco, but for now it was just Daddy. Bertie caught his dad’s eye, and Archie made a little rueful face.

‘I didn’t like that book,’ Laura said. ‘Turkish Delight is horrible.’ She started swirling about with her mittened hands up in the air, being the pretty slave girl in the advert who gets rolled out of the carpet in her bikini and a peignoir. ‘Fry’s Turkish Delight!’ she yelled untunefully. ‘Makes you sick in the night!’

Bertie had to admit that the ballerina, across the lawn, looked pretty good. Her standing leg was stout and mighty; her extension was elegant, if noticeably broom-shaped, its foot supported on a bale of straw. The faded pink satin ballet shoe he recognised – Polly said it had been Great-Aunt Villy’s, from her days with the Ballets Russes. Harriet’s team had produced a sleeping cat with a crown on, which looked, to some eyes, alarmingly like a gigantic white cow-pat, but nobody said so. Pen’s team had ambitiously attempted to reproduce the scene from CS Lewis’s The Silver Chair, where the children were stuck in a maze of gulleys which later turned out to be giant writing, saying ‘UNDER ME’, but that could only be seen from way above. The team had only got as far as UNDE, and of course there was a lot of trampling, plus the underlying flaw that they hadn’t thought about where the judges would be able to read it from. The windows of the house were too far away, and they faced in the wrong direction. Aunt Rachel did express herself willing to climb up to the top of the west tower, to the one window which might give the necessary angle, which Bertie thought decent of her, but Polly forbade it, saying there were far too many steps. Bertie was pretty sure nobody had been up there in his lifetime and made a note to go tomorrow. It was probably marvellously dangerous.

It snowed again that night. Snowed and snowed, till they were snowed in. Magic words, bringing unimaginable promise and undreamed-of benefits: not being made to go outside; perfect fun if you did go outside; justified claim to being allowed to play tennis in the long gallery or spend the afternoon in the stable with the poor freezing horses, Glory and Hallelujah, who would need company and extra hot mash (this was the twins); parents too lethargic to come all the way upstairs and discover you in the act of unstuffing a stuffed bustard to see what was inside (Bertie, Georgie and Harriet); parents unable to go out for the evening therefore more likely to read you a story and tuck you in (of special interest to Buttercup and Pen). The real possibility of not being able to get back to school.

In later years, Za and Janie would insist the Ballerina won the Snowman Competition; Bertie was adamant it was the Death of Sagittarius. Everyone else claimed not to remember, except for Buttercup who supported Bertie, but general opinion was that she’d been far too small to remember anything.