TWENTY-FOUR

Tables had been set out in the field at the back of the houses; bunting had been hung from wooden poles: pieces of coloured cloth and Union Jacks had been strewn along the fences. At the far end of the field, where it abutted on to the back gardens of the houses flanking Spinney Moor Crescent, two poles supported a banner which read ‘LONG LIVE OUR QUEEN’. A picture of Queen Elizabeth, in colour, was secured to a placard at the foot of each of the poles.

A gramophone was playing and several couples had begun to dance, the groups of children, still sitting at the tables, pushing back the chairs and benches.

Bryan had just come in from the field with Margaret; she wore a pale-blue dress, belted at the waist and, on coming into the house, had taken off her wide-brimmed hat, sitting at the table in the living-room in much the same fashion as he had first seen her sitting there, years before, on her first visit to the house.

And yet, as he brought in a tray with a pot of fresh tea and cups and saucers, he was reminded more distinctly of someone else – a figure so elusive that only when Margaret reached out to the teapot, and righted one of the cups, and insisted on pouring the tea herself, did he finally recognize, seated there, a youthful Mrs Corrigan – younger even than that first moment when he’d glimpsed her, seated at the kitchen table, at Feltham, in her blue-spotted dress and her wide-brimmed hat; and as her look came up, and he saw her smile, and he recognized, too, the Spencer eyes – set in a broader and more expansive face – she asked, ‘What are you gazing at? Anything wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ he said, glancing to the field where the dancing couples gyrated in the sun – his parents, he noticed, presently amongst them – and thought, ‘It’s strange how everything that is full of life has come back here. Like a heart from which the blood is pumped, expanding beyond this room, beyond these houses, beyond Spinney Top, out to the world, like that time,’ he reflected, ‘when I used to imagine a spirit at Christmas passing overhead, focusing its journey on every house and moving with the speed of light through a world that expanded to infinity in every direction.’

She followed his gaze herself, and specifically, Bryan thought, to where his brother had come into view dancing with his wife; almost aimlessly, having poured the tea, she said, ‘I read about your work. “A prodigal talent. Bought by several private collections.”’ She smiled. ‘So that’s what you meant by someone special.’ And, half anxiously, she asked, ‘What happens next?’

‘I mean to go on,’ he said, and wondered if he might tell her of his life-long dream that he was the successor to a line of monarchs, stretching back into the mists of time, and realized, in that moment, ‘But this is my kingdom, the kingdom of the heart; this is my rule: we are all a part of it,’ and he began, carelessly at first, to arrange the pieces on the tray before him, arranging, rearranging, and perhaps something in his movements persuaded Margaret to look across.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I see it’.