Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

Fairhead laughed. ‘You really are utterly original. I can’t imagine where I found you.’

‘Court Road, Eltham,’ she said. ‘The Grampians. And all because of poor Ashbridge, if you remember.’

‘I think I must have found you in some exotic place where completely new ways of thinking have resulted from the intercourse of philosophers and angels. What would you want if you were God?’

She bit her lip and thought for a few seconds. ‘I would want us to rebuild the Garden of Eden. I’d want us to recreate it.’

‘We have a lovely garden,’ he said.

‘Let’s build a wall round it so no one can look in.’

‘That would be rather high. And awfully nice. We can’t afford it, though.’

‘Let’s do it ourselves. I’m sure Daniel would help. He loves that kind of thing, and he’s at an awful loose end just now, and having to live at The Grampians is driving him quite barmy. He knows everything about stresses and whatnot, doesn’t he?’

‘Rather like me.’

‘You don’t know anything about stresses and whatnot,’

‘No, I mean the loose end.’

And so it was that over a period of three months, in a desultory manner, a red-brick wall rose up and encircled the azaleas and camellias. It was nine-foot high, with occasional buttresses, and was capped by demilunar tiles. At the southern end Fairhead planted passion flower, to remind himself of the religious origin of their idea, and because he enjoyed the fruit, and in the least windy places he planted clematis. Sophie insisted on having climbing roses up one wall, and Virginia creeper up another.

There came the day in late spring when Humorist won the Derby, and the sun broke out of the cloud over Blackheath. The walled garden blocked the wind and trapped the heat, and Sophie and Fairhead put a tartan rug on the lawn and brought a picnic of tea and sandwiches out of the house, in order to celebrate the official opening of their new Garden of Eden.

After they had polished off the food, Sophie flung herself back on the rug and spread her arms wide, saying, ‘Bliss, oh bliss, oh bliss!’ Suddenly she stood up and pulled Fairhead to his feet. ‘Come on.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘We are walking round the garden two or three times to make sure no one can look in.’

‘Are we?’

‘Yes we are.’

‘As my beloved wills.’

Arm in arm they circled the garden, scrutinising every angle. ‘No one can see in,’ declared Sophie at last. ‘We are invisible and indiscernible.’

‘We are indeed invisible and indiscernible and indivisible.’

‘We are safe from scopophiles.’

‘No scopophilia here.’

‘There are no balloonists or aeronauts. Let’s take our clothes off,’ said Sophie.

‘Darling, we can’t possibly.’

‘We can if we lock the front door.’

‘But, darling, it’s not done!’

‘What is this?’ asked Sophie, waving her arm to indicate the whole garden.

‘The garden?’

‘The Garden of Eden,’ she said firmly. ‘No clothes, no fig leaves.’

‘I’m really not sure I can. I’m a clergyman, for God’s sake!’

‘Oh fie!’ she said, sitting down on the rug and holding her arms up to him. ‘Come here, clergyman. It’s what God wants if we were God. They were naked and they were not ashamed.’

Afterwards they lay entangled on the rug with the sun on their skin. Sophie rolled aside a little and said, ‘Oh, darling one, I’ve got kalopsia.’

‘I’m sure you can cure it with Beecham’s,’ murmured Fairhead.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?’

‘No.’

‘You old spoilsport. And we forgot to lock the front door. Talking of kalopsia, have I ever told you that you are the apple of my eye, the pineapple of my pineal gland, the melon of my mouth, the nectarine of my knees and the fig of my foot? Have I ever declared before witnesses that you are the most beautiful man in the world? Have I ever informed you that you give me the most truly fearful tentigo, such as will wear me out before I’m thirty?’

‘Almost every day. My scepticism remains, however. My teeth are yellow and my moustache is orange down the middle from smoking too much.’

‘I know it’s only because I love you,’ she said.

‘No amount of love would turn a moustache orange. I’m sure it’s the cigarettes. Do I take it that you’re fishing?’

‘In what manner might I be piscatorial?’

‘You want me to say you’re the most beautiful woman in the world.’

‘No I don’t. I know I am. I have complete confidence. My pulchritudinosityness knows no bounds.’

‘It’s infinite.’

‘Quite. Because you love me. You exist, you love me, therefore I am beautiful. It’s a perfect paralogism.’

‘I like a nice paralogism,’ said Fairhead. ‘Let’s have one for tea.’

IT WAS THE custom at Christmas for the McCosh family to do two things. One was for them to wait upon the servants, the day before Christmas Eve, and treat them to a proper Christmas dinner, complete with a goose, roasted parsnips, chestnut stuffing, Christmas pudding, and their own present under the tree, to be opened afterwards. Mr McCosh’s father had got the idea from an army friend, who had told him that in the Queen’s Bays it was the custom at Christmas for the officers to wait upon the men.

Since this custom had been imported from Mr McCosh’s family, rather than from that of his wife, she, needless to say, heartily disapproved of it, even though it originated in the manners of an elite cavalry regiment. Mr McCosh, however, always entered into the spirit of the occasion, and enjoyed it with great gusto even if the servants did not.

He had to concede that it had lately become a somewhat melancholy occasion. Because the male servants had never returned, there were only Cookie and Millicent left, apart from the Honourable Mary FitzGerald St George, who had been given leave to return to her father for Christmas. Whereas before the war the two women had not felt at all self-conscious being served by the family, it was distinctly embarrassing and awkward now that there were only two of them.

This year Mrs McCosh seemed highly confused, and so the sisters ushered her upstairs for a rest, and created chaos as they attempted to conjure a decent supper out of their inexperience. Fortunately Cookie always made two puddings on Stir-Up Sunday, but now she sat in the withdrawing room with Millicent, light-headed from the unpleasantly dry sherry that Mr McCosh insisted on plying them with, in a lather of worry about what appalling mistakes the sisters might be making in the kitchen. Fairhead sat smoking in one armchair, having exempted himself from kitchen duty on the grounds of incapacity, masculinity and general incompetence. Gaskell, monocle in place, her short dark hair slicked back, smoked one Abdulla after another from her immensely attenuated cigarette holder. She was clad, as usual, in such a manner as to suggest that she was just about to go shooting. Her plan was to go to her own family the following day, and she was not helping in the kitchen on the grounds that it was already too crowded down there and she only knew how to cook under the stress of continuous bombardment. Daniel sat next to her, with both Esther and the cat on his knee, peeved at having been excluded from the kitchen, when it was quite clear to himself that the French half of him might have been quite useful. He found it agonising to have to sit still for any length of time anywhere, an agony that always seemed so much worse when it occurred in the McCosh withdrawing room, especially when Mrs McCosh was there. His own mother had gone to stay with her family in France for the Christmas period, and Daniel greatly wished that he could have been there with her. ‘Don’t worry,’ Mme Pitt had said, ‘ une belle journée we will have a Christmas all ensemble en Normandie .’