English Settlement by D. J. Taylor

Author:D. J. Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504015233
Publisher: Open Road Media

10. This is a low

On long summer evenings, back early from the Mirabelle or Tarantino’s, I used to amuse myself by listening to the long-range shipping forecast. Begun by chance, this recreation had swiftly grown into a settled habit, whose interest lay in its novelty. There was no American equivalent to these sombre yet comforting recitations. Regional radio stations might occasionally offer weather reports or storm warnings, but the great divisions of marine geography lay far off, a mountain range dark beyond foregrounded hills. For some reason, as the months passed, these prognoses – which appeared almost fortuitously, jammed up between garrulous actors’ monologues and books at bedtime – grew and expanded in my mind until they took on the form of incantations, mantras almost, from another world, shining uplands glimpsed narrowly through fog. ‘Dogger, winds backing westerly, seven … Cromarty, fair, six … Shannon … Biscay …’ There was something elemental about this ghostly roll-call, something serious and profound in the thought of waves breaking on remote Scottish beaches, crofters huddled in their huts against winds moving south from the polar cap. Its effect was wholly fabulous, so that for a long time Dogger, Moray and Shetland seemed at best glittering and elusive threads picked out of a giant mythical tapestry, distant sequestered kingdoms, dormant in the mist, whose frontiers I could never hope to cross.

All these sensations, even down to the sonorous voice of the radio announcer, were knocked to the surface by the occasional visits I paid to Henrietta’s apartment. Inconveniently situated, halfway between South Kensington and Gloucester Road, on the topmost floor of a redbrick mansion block, it was an unlikely cornucopia. But I was used to unprepossessing frontages of this kind yielding up unlooked-for treasure trove. Like the locked trunk in the attic of my Marshall grandmother’s house outside of Baltimore which opened to reveal old militia uniforms and cavalry harness from the Indian wars, Henrietta’s apartment contained a great deal behind its prosaic exterior. Exact connections, in the shape of an Edwardian yachting map of the Irish coast borrowed from her parents, gave way to milder echoes: photographs of strange English people with fierce blue eyes and jutting chins bending over dogs or standing uncomfortably on terraces, pictures of Henrietta at various salient points in her career – dazed and sleepless in a ball gown, with fat white shoulders, on an Oxford bridge at dawn; reclining in a punt; in subfusc outside the Senate House accompanied by slim, saturnine dandy swains. Somehow my mother is there in these Brideshead reveries. Once, squiring Henrietta to a drinks party thrown by some high-born pal of hers (Felicity? Camilla?) in Cadogan Square, I turned to stare at the line of photographs on the gleaming mantel and there she was, almost, dressed in riding gear and standing on a gravel drive in front of what looked like a castle’s worth of turrets and terracings.

It was a week until Christmas. Standing rigidly in the doorway between hall and lounge,

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