Louis de Bernieres - Notwithstanding - Stories from an English Village

Our phone number was 293, amazing when you consider how long the numbers are nowadays.

I love sitting here at Christmas time, at the end of the garden. I don’t feel the cold. I like to sit here because the house looks so wonderful with the Christmas tree behind the French windows. There’s a full moon, and I can see everything around me with perfect clarity. The stars are out, and I can never remember which ones are the planets. Perhaps they’re the very bright ones. Sebastian used to point them out to me, but I don’t know how he knew. I used to point them out to girlfriends when I was being romantic, but I was bluffing. I knew that they didn’t know either. The house and the garden and the sky look like something out of a Christmas card, appropriately enough. The only thing missing is snow. I only ever remember one white Christmas, when it snowed as we came out of church, and Catherine was wearing a lilac coat with a hood that had a lining of white rabbit fur that framed her face and made me think that she was the prettiest sister that anyone ever had. Everything is silver and shadow now, except for the Christmas tree, which is glowing with all sorts of different-coloured lights that reflect off the tinsel and the glass balls.

It reminds me of that dreadful night of the fire. We had little candles in those days, little candles that sat on cups that clipped to the branches of the Christmas tree, along with all the tatty taffeta angels that we’d inherited. It looked magical but it wasn’t ever a good idea. Trees dry out, and they’re full of resin. They go up like a torch.

We all went to midnight Mass, and when we got home we had a nightcap. We talked about plans for Christmas Day. My father used to like to go shooting, but my mother more or less forbad him. She said it wasn’t nice to go round bowling over rabbits and blasting birds out of the sky on the day when our Saviour was born to bring peace and harmony to the world. We decided we’d all walk to Abbot’s Notwithstanding and back again before lunch, but my mother would have to drop out because someone had to baste the goose. I think she was probably relieved, because she wasn’t a great one for unnecessary exercise.

The whole family were there, including the baronet. We liked the baronet. He didn’t put on any airs, and he didn’t have any side. He had a quiet charm and a confidence. He gave up the army for Catherine’s sake, because she didn’t want to have to be sent off all over the world at a moment’s notice. It was decent of him because he was a Coldstreamer, he was doing well, and he obviously loved it. He and Catherine came down from Cambridgeshire in the Riley to be with us for Christmas. Sebastian and Michael came down from Merton, and I was living at home anyway, because I didn’t want to move anywhere else, not unless I married, and anyway I’d found a decent job in Guildford. I paid rent to my mother without telling my father, which seemed the best thing. Knowing her, she spent the money on shoes.

That night, what with us being tired and having a tot of whisky inside us, we forgot to put out the candles on the tree, just as anyone might, but the next thing I knew, I woke up choking. I got out of bed, hacking and coughing, and I groped about in the smoke. But I couldn’t find the light switch and there was a terrible pain in my lungs, and I was coughing so much that it was agony. I felt that I was vomiting my lungs up. My eyes stung so badly from the smoke that I couldn’t open them, and even so they were still streaming with tears. I remember the pain, the coughing, the stinging in my eyes, and the insuperable fear, the not knowing where I was in the room, the roaring noise, and then it was as if my chest and my brain were full of molten lead, and I must have passed out. I don’t really know what happened next.

As I sit here at the end of the garden, on the rockery, looking at the Christmas tree with its electric lights, it’s hard to believe that the house was almost gutted. The tree must have set the curtains alight, and so on. Anyway, it’s all been repaired, and you’d never know that anything happened. It’s part of the wonder of the house. It doesn’t die, it just keeps on evolving. The house is alive. It watches over me always, and it’s watching me now.

The house may be alive, but my family aren’t. They all perished in the fire, from inhaling the smoke, every one of them, including the cat. Even so, it doesn’t stop them turning up. Just now my father put his hand on my shoulder, and said, ‘Come on, my boy.’ Death hasn’t changed him at all. He’s just as solid, he’s still got the same voice and even the same smell of Three Nuns pipe tobacco. He wears the plus fours and long socks and brogues that I used to find so embarrassing and old-fashioned. Every time I sit here, he comes and asks me to leave. I wish he wouldn’t. I love him, but he isn’t entitled to tell me what to do any more.

They’re all here now, as solid and real as when they were alive. There’s Catherine and her baronet, hand in hand, and Sebastian and Michael looking at me pityingly. There’s even the cat. It’s not Tobermory. This one is called Gerald, and he was two cats later. Gerald used to drink from the dripping tap in the bathroom basin, whereas Tobermory would get under the sofa, stick his claws into the hessian underneath, and drag himself along on his back as fast as he could go. Gerald settles on his haunches and looks up at me with interest, as if I were an experiment.

My mother is here too. She reaches out a hand to try and hold mine and says, ‘Please, darling, please,’ but I take my hand away, not roughly, but gently. I know she loves me, you see, and I don’t want to cause her any hurt. She implores me with her eyes, and still holds out her hand.

‘Come on, you big fool,’ says Sebastian, grinning like a schoolboy, and Michael thumps me on the shoulder with the same old fraternal violence and says, ‘Come on, old thing. You’ve been here quite long enough.’

‘I’m watching the house,’ I say.

The baronet lights a cigarette, and when he throws the match to the ground, it disappears. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘I know I’m not strictly family and whatnot, only being married in, as it were, but you’ve got to give it up one of these days, this watching-over-the-house lark.’

‘It’s really the house watching over me,’ I say. ‘Anyway, you’re all dead.’

‘When are you going to understand?’ asks Catherine, shaking her head.

‘What’s wrong with staying here?’ I say.

‘Please,’ says my mother.

After a while they leave, one by one, as they always do. My mother and Catherine give me a gentle kiss on the cheek. It’s surprising how you can distinctly feel the kiss of someone who is dead. My father once surprised me by taking my head between his hands and kissing me on the forehead. He would never have done that when he was alive, and he hasn’t done it since. Michael and Sebastian subject me to more claps between the shoulder blades. They all turn and wave modestly before they fade away not far from where the bonfire always used to be. Only Gerald stays a little longer. He winds himself around my legs a few times, and reaches up to touch a claw to my hand, as he used to when he suspected that it contained a morsel of Cheddar cheese. Eventually he wanders away after the rest of them.

I don’t understand why they keep coming back. I am glad to see them of course, but they’re dead. I keep telling them, but they don’t seem to be able to take it in. They don’t seem to understand why I won’t go with them. Perhaps death makes you less perceptive.

Anyway, I am perfectly contented, sitting atop this rockery by moonlight. I love it here. I love this beautiful house, I love the way it holds me as if it had hands and I was cupped inside them. I sit here and it watches over me, I feel absolute happiness, and there’s nothing I’d rather do.