Chapter 9: Rupert - The Golden Hours

Rupert disengaged during Christmas lunch. It was a lot of pressure, so many people, and quite a few undercurrents. A big meal with a lot of people was a good opportunity to be silent. He sat himself between two children and proceeded to ignore them. They didn’t mind.

He knew Zoë was angry with him but couldn’t work out what he could do about it. The school was in a mess. Creatively, it was wonderful: the students were more interesting and fruitful each year, and there was no shortage of them. He and Archie both loved teaching and were good at it. It was a shame about Archie’s leg, and while of course it was rather inconvenient having to turn the drawing room into a teaching studio for him, what else could they do?

Rupert glanced down the table, to where Archie was quietly enchanting Pen by showing him how to fold a napkin into the shape of a mouse. Archie caught his eye and grinned at him. Perhaps they both remembered the slight variation whereby the mouse could be transformed into a penis. Not, though, at Polly and Gerald’s lovely Christmas.

Rupert rolled his shoulders back and stared up into the high vaulted ceiling, at the chandelier hanging gracious and delicate, with its astonishing capacity to be both heavy and weightless at the same time. That would be a thing to paint, he thought. The movement of the light through the crystal. The stillness.

Perhaps two artists setting up a school had been bonkers, he thought. It was the admin which drove everybody mad. Zoë had never helped with any of that: ‘Wife and mother is enough for me,’ she’d said, elegantly sidestepping. And after being really quite helpful for several years, Clary had quite plainly refused to do any more. She had her own work, she declared, and was not here to do their accounts. If her dad and her husband wanted a clerical assistant, they could bloody well hire one. And pay them. And find them a desk. She didn’t ask them to type out her plays, she said, which had been rather a shock. They’d both thought she liked contributing.

Dear Clary. She was sitting opposite Archie, concentrating quite hard on something interminable that the twins seemed to be telling her, presumably about their horses, with which they remained obsessed. Everybody found both Clary and Archie easy to talk to. Nobody found either Rupert or Zoë easy at all – not even each other, not even after all these years of marriage. Well, he’d put Zoë through it. When they’d married she’d taken on two motherless children, Clary and Neville, neither of them at all happy. Then their daughter Juliet was born, during the war, while he was away in France, and then came his extended absence – for which he knew he could never really be forgiven, no matter what kind and forgiving things people said. How could anybody genuinely forgive him when he simply didn’t deserve it? And then young George arrived, just when Zoë might have felt she was free of children at last. George was sitting down near Clary now, absolutely stuffing his face, and Rupert could hear him suggesting to Andrew that he should persuade Gerald to sell the Hall to finance expeditions around the world to find rare animals.

The light from the chandelier seemed almost to bounce off the tangerines in the silver fruit basket. How clever of Polly to find tangerines in Norfolk! Rupert loved them. But his plate was still awash with sprouts and gravy, and bits of crunchy fat goose. The stuffings were delicious. He recognised Clary’s hand. God, what a dreadful cook she used to be!

He’d actually mentioned to Juliet – where was Juliet, anyway? He’d thought she was coming with Clary and Archie – that there was work going at the school. It wasn’t clear to him what she was doing for work, or to keep the wolf from the door. Modelling! It worried him. She was incredibly pretty and deeply lacking in judgement. His comfort was that she was close to Louise, and if anybody knew how to steer their way through a tricky world, it was her . . . But then he wouldn’t wish Louise’s experience of men on anybody . . . and neither would Louise herself, and that would presumably help her to protect Juliet.

He didn’t actually know where Juliet was spending Christmas. With her friend Chrissie perhaps? The moment there was mention of Neville coming, Juliet had announced that she had ‘plans’, though what they were was not revealed. Probably just as well. Rupert did not want to think about these two in the same breath. To be honest, he probably hadn’t handled that situation very well.

He hoped she hadn’t high-tailed it to Paris with some suave bastard in a sports car. Though since that pretentious drip Tarquin, Juliet had never produced another boyfriend anyway. He wished she would. Perhaps she had a secret one. No telling with Juliet. He probably ought to pay more attention to her.

* * *

The light outside was beginning to fade, and there was movement at the other end of the table. Polly was pinging her fork against a glass to make everybody be quiet; then everybody shouted that she had to stop the ring before it faded because otherwise a sailor would drown. Pen wanted to know why, so everybody had to explain, all at once, that whenever a glass gets pinged a sailor goes overboard, and if you stop the ring with your finger, he’s saved, but if the ping dies out on its own, ‘he drowns horribly,’ said Janie, ‘and gets tangled up with mermaids and seaweed,’ said Za, ‘and those are pearls that were his eyes,’ said Janie, in a rather ghastly voice, and then Nanny gave them a warning look, and they said, ‘but Nanny, it’s Shakespeare,’ as if that excused everything, and Nanny said, ‘Yes, well, so’s Titus Andronicus but it doesn’t mean you should talk about it at the table,’ whereupon the twins visibly made a mental note to look up Titus Andronicus at the first opportunity. ‘You’ll regret it,’ said Nanny, who had eyes in the back of her head.

Polly pinged the glass again, to announce the imminence of the pudding. Simon went and turned out the lights at the door; only the candles down the centre of the table remained. The big church candle rose from its tall gilded wooden stand. Gerald, close by, was already holding the silver ladle full of brandy over its steady flame. Hilarity was over. A murmuring silence fell, as everybody turned to watch the ritual. Patience was required. Brandy takes its time. But the time was beautiful: hushed and gentle, glowing. Someone began to hum a carol, and there was a soft tear in one or two eyes – and then the faint steam began to rise from the bowl of the ladle, and Gerald tipped, just tipped, the ladle’s bowl so that the flame leapt over the silver edge and into the golden liquid, and caught, blue as lapis lazuli. Reverently, he poured the liquid fire over the dark pudding, where it charred the sprig of bright red-berried holly and streamed in swift rivulets down the dome’s flanks, dancing and burning, chasing itself to and fro in circles till it pooled, still, finally, on the dish. The awed silence remained until it flickered its last.

The tune of ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’ popped unbidden into Rupert’s head. He remembered so well the Brig doing this ritual, year after year, at Home Place. It occurred to him that he’d like to have Christmas at Bank House one year; just the immediate family. They could walk by the river, and he could be the pater familias, and set the pudding on fire. Every Christmas as boys he and Edward and Hugh had squabbled about it, and the Brig had silenced them with ‘Only an adult can do it’. One year their sister Rachel had expressed her own desire to be in charge of the extraordinary fire, and they had all silenced her, telling her that this, like further education, voting, cricket, trousers, living alone, joining the navy and asking people to dance, was only for boys. Well, how wrong we were, Rupert thought now. Though he still never got to set fire to the pudding.

In the afternoon, what there was of it, after the Queen’s Speech on the wireless (all about the Commonwealth, the stormy seas of modern life, and the ideal of human brotherhood), they put on gumboots and coats and scarves and mittens and walked to the lake in the crunchy snow, before coming back through the dusk to a restoked fire, a huge pot of tea, and the Christmas cake. It was iced to look exactly like the view from the window, even down to the pine tree and the little deer hiding in the woods. Though obviously there was no Frog Orchestra in the park. As far as they knew . . . his mind wandered to summer, the frogs in the lake burping and hiccuping through the pale nights.

The usual arguments about marzipan ensued. Archie ate Bertie’s. Bertie wanted an extra mince pie to make up for it. Rupert glanced over to Hugh and Edward, who were laying out the chessboard on the card table for their evening game. He smiled at their cake plates: without a word Hugh was helping himself to Edward’s marzipan, as he always had.

Zoë was delicately picking out a glacé cherry, and parking it on the side of her plate.

‘No rationing,’ Rupert whispered to her. ‘Still a relief.’

‘No rationing,’ she murmured back, smiling, in a voice which made him think that tonight she might not enforce her rule about not having sex while staying with relatives.