The View from Mount Dog Read online

  Ah, you think we’re grieving fuddy-duddies, we of the 7:42 from Sevenoaks? But, good heavens, we know about deficit financing and I don’t believe a single one of us cares a hoot despite having been brought up with that firm admonishment ringing in our ears: Neither a borrower nor a lender be. We also, believe it or not, know about computers. I myself use a desk-top micro every working day, and very boring it is, too, but I can use it perfectly fluently. The other morning one of the junior partners – a bright youngster, incidentally, an agreeable but to me uninteresting representative of the new breed – let on that when he went home at night he and all three of his children played computer games together. And this stopped me in my tracks because it suddenly crystallised what had changed. It was that for this young man life had become seamless. All day long in the City he sat at his desk and used a computer and then in the evening he returned to Beckenham or Petts Wood and went on using a computer.

  Why not? you ask. Why ever not? No reason, of course; I and my friends can only fall silent. There is no reason why not, except that of desire. When we were younger one of the piquant pleasures of life was the great gulf fixed between work and play. Going to work in the City every day was absolutely unreal, for all that there were occasional episodes of pleasure and pain. (In this respect it was very much like school.) Eight hours of formal unreality earned you an immediate holiday in the shape of twelve hours of informal reality. Once back home and out of the suit and into some comfortable old cords or tweeds all lingering thoughts of the office and the recent swift passage through suburbia dissolved in the open fields and woods. A walk with the dog along the river-bank to watch I don’t know what, the black gyres of mayflies above the crinkling water, the moorhens come and go in the rushes, the cows switching their tassels in the evening light while from way beyond the woods the parish bells drone faintly in waves as if beneath the setting sun a great door were being opened and closed. That was real, no doubt about it; that was the England of my childhood where one could still – if one listened very attentively – hear the piper at the gates of dawn.

  But now? Well, not only has suburbia spread like a cancer across the face of southern England, making it almost impossible to see an honest field with an honest cow in it much inside an hour’s travelling time, but that blissful idea of the two lives – the hidden life – has gone as well. Nowadays I gather that most of my younger colleagues take work home with them for the evening and even for the weekends, and in consequence their faces look as featureless as the screens into which they gaze all their working lives: mere blank surfaces across which flit the endless columns of glowing figures, adding up and multiplying and adding up to nothing.

  For when I described the work we do in the City as unreal I was being entirely accurate. All that rhetoric about harsh realities and fingers on the world’s commercial pulse betrays a communal fantasy of extraordinary proportions. What on earth are we to think when serious, clean-shaven young men in suits are described as ‘eager to meet fresh challenges’? Why, that they are figments trapped somewhere between Arthurian legend and Evensong, sharpening up their attacking slogans before spearheading an assault on traditional product strongholds while always striving for the highest prize. And now not even the money we deal in is real. How well I know the fictions of ‘creative accountancy’; how familiar the hypnosis of those flickering electronic figures. Not a banknote to be seen anywhere! How chimerical the wealth which translates into Rolls-Royces and military hardware! I am glad now to be nearing retirement. I shall not be sorry to leave this Disneyland which, for all that it is a filigree world of ever-dissolving castles and turrets, leaves on the air a taint which is solider far than itself.

  This must be so, and it must be starting to contaminate me since the other night – I’m not sure if I should tell this because it may be yet another betrayal – I had a dream, an appalling dream as it happens although there were no monsters or anything conventional of that sort. Its dreadfulness resided entirely in an atmosphere which was of terror and melancholy. Not easy to imagine, I grant you; but easier perhaps if I say that the terror was more a panic not unlike those at school which kept one awake thinking of the imminence of an examination, incredulity mixed with self-upbraiding for having let things get to this point, while the melancholy (which would not have been possible then) came from knowing that in a million years one could not have done any differently. Anyway, the dream was of an unidentifiable voice and what it said was: ‘Imagine that at the instant of death you were told, Well, Tom old boy, that’s it. Very short and never again. What do you remember of it? What’s the first – and last – image in your brain, the legacy of it all? So, what is it?’

  Of course I knew what I wanted to say. I wanted to offer up a memory of a special place by the river, or how the sun looks on a moving cornfield, or rooks roosting up in elms, one of those ordinary moments which leave one without thought or speech. I wanted to offer up my poor boy Adrian before he became ravaged by his last attack, bouncing round the paddock on Minefield in the sunlight, as lost in timeless pleasure as any other twelve-year-old on his new pony. But nothing would come. I could not form a single image. Everything gave way before a clear view and I was forced to speak the truth.

  ‘A corridor, that’s what I see. There’s a water-cooler halfway along. I … I don’t know where I am, an office, a hotel, a government department, a hospital. Everything’s beige. The floor’s beige, the walls are beige, I’m walking along behind three men in beige suits and with beige hair. Even their aftershave smells beige. And there are beige sorts of office sounds coming from behind the doors we pass. The corridor is without end.’

  ‘Is it like anywhere you recognise?’ the voice asked recedingly.

  ‘Yes, it is exactly like anywhere,’ I heard myself say. ‘It’s like everywhere in particular.’ And then I woke up weeping and weeping, although I know how silly it sounds especially after so banal and null a conversation. But, as I said, it was the atmosphere far more than the words; that and the blank enigmatic backs of the three men.

  Well, it’s hardly news that we shall all be swept away. Yet the unspoken sadness I share with my friends in the City, what we read in each other’s eyes, is something more than that knowledge alone. It concerns, I think, a loss of more than mere self. Certainly the closer the great erasing broom approaches each of us the more it seems to me I should do my remaining year or two in the City with great good humour and an absent mind, for inside I am immortally nine or ten and buried in summer grass among orange tips and clouded yellows and red admirals. I may say it is becoming easier all the time: not only do the years of practice help but so does sheer age itself. We senior partners do not spend much of each week in the office, and if one no longer has to commute daily one can afford to live in ever remoter shires.

  *

  Of course we live nowhere near Sevenoaks – that was a satirical example. As a matter of fact we live in another direction entirely and a good deal further from the City. An odd thing is how close-knit we are, geographically speaking, and this without our ever having planned it. Some mysterious gravity has drawn us together in this region – and draws us still, as I discovered this morning. I had woken in the river-bank and was watching the stately skid of water, its dimplings reflected on the low ceiling. I cannot tell you the happiness of eating toast and marmalade while watching a grebe, its feathers aflame in the early sunlight, pass the window on a level with your eyes, its feet working busily across the glass. I walked over to look at it more closely and the movement must have caught its eye, for it stopped abruptly and jerked its head round. What must it have thought, expecting to see muddy river-bank and finding instead a sheet of glass through which it could see into a large room with a man standing considerably below the river-bed and eating toast and marmalade? Off it sailed, not completely startled, into the morning brightness, and I went up the steps to join it. Despite the most ingenious (not to say costly) lighting, insulation and damp-proofing my river-bank den wh
ich is so cosy at night or in overcast weather becomes slightly gloomy and chill when the sun is shining outside. So up I went and emerged in the bushes which conceal the entrance.

  In the distance across two fields I could see the kitchen corner of the house where Mrs Simmonds the housekeeper was no doubt eating her own breakfast, and nearby the paddock where so often over the years I have seen a boy on his pony in the long evening light, for he rides there still. But what took my attention was the sudden coming to life of a chainsaw from the corner of Rokesy Wood nearest my little estate, and I remembered having heard sounds of activity there for some days now, sounds which reminded me that I was reputed to have a new neighbour but which had not been enough to overcome my natural uninquisitiveness. But a chainsaw was a different matter: who knew what monstrous damage might be casually inflicted by a new owner chastising his woods for becoming so overgrown? As it turned out, though, I need not have worried.

  I crossed in the skiff and moored up under the great willow, conscious that I was now in enemy territory, then walked up the tufted meadow strung with webs still glittering with dew to the nearest corner of the wood. With schoolboy stealth I crept from tree to tree under cover of the saw’s awful howling and moaning which now had a muffled quality. From behind a stout beech I could watch the scene of operations from within a matter of yards. There was a massive oak I had often admired, not particularly tall but bulbous with age and, alas, with scarcely a sprig of green left as evidence of the thready seasonal beat of its thousand-year-old heart. At its base it could not have been much less than ten feet in diameter and there, almost at ground level, someone had cut a neat narrow hole. In this opening was visible a pair of legs as the sawyer inside carved away with his bellowing blade. After a bit the noise stopped abruptly; there came a muffled exclamation and the man emerged stoopingly, spitting, his hair sprinkled with white chips. By then I, too, had broken cover and he caught sight of me with a start as I stepped forward.

  ‘Forgive the intrusion,’ I said, ‘but I’m your neighbour, Tom. I heard you at work and thought I’d come over and introduce myself. Magnificent tree, that.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Name’s Colin. You must think me an appalling vandal, taking this stinking machine’ – he kicked the stopped saw, which was gurgling to itself like a kettle on a hob – ‘to a grand old oak. But I’m sure you’ve noticed the poor thing’s practically dead and I wanted to get at it before it rots. In fact the heartwood’s virtually dry already. Come and see.’

  Inside was a freshly hewn cell still barely large enough for one man to crouch in. It smelled deliciously of autumn in there. A thousand years of England enfolded me in a redolent cocoon; I was incorporated into its heart.

  ‘It’s coming along,’ I said. ‘You’re Wol, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  We had recognised each other instantly – the eyes as usual – and I could feel the surge of pleasure which comes from knowing one’s world is not after all going to be intruded upon by an outsider. Colin was one of us. ‘Who are you with? Or are you retired?’

  ‘Durrant Anderson. No, I’ve got a few more years in harness. You?’

  ‘Mence Gibb. But let’s not think about all that. When you’ve done your stint come over for a beer or something. Go straight down to the river and give me a shout from the willows. I’ll hear and fetch you across.’

  ‘About an hour, I should think,’ said Colin, picking up the chainsaw. ‘That’s about as much as I can stand, what with the noise and the smell. Still, it’s sweet work.’

  ‘Of course it is. A lifetime aim.’

  ‘Exactly that.’

  I was all ready for him when I heard his hail from across the river. I whisked him over in the skiff and was pleased and surprised he did not spot the sheet of glass let into the river-bank, although it is true that since it extends below the surface and is somewhat browed with grasses (plus the fact that I took elaborate pains to set it unobtrusively) a casual observer might easily miss it. But when I ushered him into the clump of whitethorn to the little entrance he understood at once.

  ‘Ratty!’ he exclaimed with pleasure. He went down. ‘Oh, it’s perfect.’

  And, though I say it myself, it is perfect. One descends the steps and there beneath the river-bank is a snuggery with twin chintz-covered armchairs drawn up before the grate, shelves full of books and objects, the waxed table gleaming in the reflected light of the river. Nothing very valuable, you understand – at least, not in market-place terms – but comfortable and well worn. The slipping river held back by glass and forming the fourth wall would alone be enough to show that one was embedded in England, but even in winter with the curtains to and the firelight twinkling merrily on china and glasses of port one would scarcely be in doubt. Perhaps only in that single corner of the room devoted to Adrian may there be a sense of melancholy but definitely not of gloom. Beneath several pictures of him from babyhood almost to the month of his death are certain keepsakes most emphatically not laid out as if in a hallowed museum but merely left as if tidied away for his return at evening: a pair of scuffed Clark’s sandals with rose-window air-holes cut in the toes, an old Aertex shirt, a grey sun-bonnet, a cricket bat. Here, at least for as long as I myself survive, he will always be, galloping endlessly across the vivid meadows on Minefield while poor Frances wrings her hands with maternal impotence. ‘Tom, Tom,’ I hear her say, ‘it cannot be safe to let him out on that pony without a hat.’ Poor Fran, how her worries echo vainly across all those years.

  Meanwhile Colin was repeating how perfect it was. I poured him a glass of beer and we stood by the window watching the water boatmen scud in the dazzle.

  ‘I feel at home here,’ he said. ‘I’m glad I came.

  ‘You’re among friends now,’ I told him. ‘We’ve quite a community in these parts; we must get a little party up and introduce you. Durrant Anderson, did you say? I wonder if there’s anyone here you’d know already. Sir Arthur Cramphorn of Schwolb’s?’

  ‘Certainly I’ve met him, although I don’t know him at all well.’

  ‘He’s a bit staid but as loyal a friend as you could hope to meet. He’s Badger: owns Yesterham Hall but lives in what he calls his sett about a mile from here. Who else have we got? Oh, of course, there’s Little Grey Rabbit. That’s Caroline Parry-Savage.’

  ‘Not with HPD?’

  ‘Yes, do you know her?’

  ‘Absolutely. I was over at Harkness Pithers & Drew not six weeks ago for a meeting. She’s senior investment analyst there now, as I recall.’

  ‘The very same.’ We raised our glasses.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Colin, ‘if you can muster the people I’ll throw a house-warming for us all when I’ve finished my hidey-hole. How’s that?’

  ‘Won’t it be a bit cramped?’

  ‘Oh dear, I suppose it will. Funny, I never thought. One’s so used to seeing Wol in his parlour with dressers and grandfather clocks and what not it’s hard to remember that, well, one’s scale is a bit different now.’

  ‘Never mind. We’ll pay you a visit and then we can all come back here. My experience tells me we might need a bit of floor-space. Little Grey Rabbit’s apt to bounce a bit when she gets some cowslip wine down her. But you know how rabbits are.’

  In point of fact it took almost a month to fix up the party, owing to Badger’s gout, by which time Wol had finished his nest. One day the sounds of hammering from the hanging woods across the river ceased and the next I skiffed across and made my way up towards his tree. I did it quietly in order that I might withdraw without being noticed, for that particular moment when at last one can return unhindered to a private reality is very precious and cannot be shared. And so it was that, standing in the lee of the beech, I could see the front door of the oak was shut. How beautifully he had made it, I thought in admiration. Colin had clearly been to immense pains to cut it as true as possible, for the curved outer section he had removed and hinged now closed so snugly into its massive frame th
at one needed to look twice in order to see it. Searching for windows I found still more cause for admiration. Instead of merely hacking rectangles he had made apertures at points where there had been the involuted scars of long-vanished boughs, retaining their original irregular ovoid or circular outlines. They had been glazed, but one at least could be opened, for framed in the topmost window I caught a glimpse of Wol’s face, fixed in a silent broodingness, staring out of his eyrie into the light-patterned trunks and glades with which he had surrounded himself. It was not a moment for intrusion; I turned and crept away down the hill to my own river-bank.

  So there we are: another one of us has found his way unerringly here to this enchanted place. Tonight is the night of the party, and if previous occasions are anything to go by it will be merry and bonhomous. For, necessary as our private isolations sometimes are among the rivers and fields and woods, we are very much at our best in each other’s company. Then those silent messages sent flashing across the fairyland of Cheapside, Poultry and Cannon Street find at last their proper expression in the only true reality which is companionship. And then what tales are told far into the night! What strange rites and goings-on there are among the night creatures of these distant shires! It is as if long-lost nurseries came alive again, and I know that even the solitary brooder in his oak-tree will tonight spread his wings underground with us. So happily, sadly, swiftly the time will pass until suddenly the stars are paler in the sky and the dawn wind springs up and it is time to say goodbye. As the river gurgles and the drowsy farewells of the parting guests die away along their separate paths through field and thicket, the strengthening light is enough to reveal the marks crushed into the dew by our feet, little animal prints which will remain in the dabbled grass until the sun rises to bake them away!