Out of This World by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online Page B

reason: He is as happy as I am, he is exactly as happy as I am.
    On the table, laid for breakfast, was a huge vase of roses, and by my place was a little pile of envelopes. The top envelope was pale blue with strange stamps on it, and Grandad said I should open it first. Inside the envelope was a card and also a letter. It’s funny, I don’t remember what that letter said at all.
    Then Mrs Keane brought in the breakfast, and Grandad said that after breakfast, which I couldn’t eat fast enough, we would go and see how good I was at riding. Then he would take me somewhere nice for lunch. But I must be careful not to eat too much because at four o’clock, of course, there was my tea party, all my friends from school were coming and Uncle Frank and Auntie Stella and their little daughter Carol. If it was fine, which it looked like being, Mrs Keane and Ray would put tables outside, and, of course, everyone would want to see my pony. But in the meantime shouldn’t we think up a name for him.
    We called him Tony. Get it? Tony the pony.
    You see, I was spoilt. I was a spoilt little brat. I was brought up like a princess in a palace and had everything I could ask for. Save, of course, a mother – and a father.
    Palace? But you won’t quibble over a Queen Anne house with oak panelling and a gravel drive and a lawn with two cedar trees, and a walled garden with a pond and a yew-tree walk and an orchard and paddock, and a stable and stable yard, no longer used as such when Grandad became their owner, but reconverted just before my tenth birthday to accommodate a pony and, three years later, a horse. Called Hadrian. That’s palace enough when you’re ten years old and when – with the addition of a housekeeper, a chauffeur-cum-valet and the part-time presence of two gardeners – only you and your grandfather have the run of it.
    Hyfield House, built in 1709 by Nicholas Hyde, Gent. Let’s face it, Doctor K, you can’t
get
that sort of thing over here. The genuine, historical, English thing. You know, Joe and I used to joke that if Hyfield ever really became ours, we wouldn’t have to look any further. It would just be the start. Some glossy advertising in the right places. One- or two-week rentals to rich and impressible Americans. The real, authentic, country-house experience.
    Just a joke, of course. I said to Joe, You’re not hiring out my Hyfield, my childhood. Over my dead body.
    Over Grandad’s dead body! Ha ha! But then, I guess they’d pay more, wouldn’t they? If they knew it was the former residence of Robert Beech, V.C ., hero and true British gentleman. Some gory history. A ghost. And this is the very spot where …
    Just a joke. We’d never have thought then that that was actually what Joe would be doing one day. Castles and manor houses. Up-market vacations. Be a squire or a laird. Take a break from the twentieth century.
    Yet if you want to know, that’s how I used to think ofHyfield once. I had this thing about the past. It used to be a good refuge, once, the past. I used to clop across the stable yard on Tony, and later on Hadrian, and make-believe it was the reign of Queen Anne. I used to imagine I was Mrs Hyde, wife of Nicholas Hyde. Mistress of the manor.
    Maybe that’s how I should begin. When I tell the boys. If I tell the boys. Let’s go right back to the very start, shall we? Once upon a time, in the reign of good Queen Anne … Can you picture it? The world is safe and small – it only stretches to the next hill! The sky is blue – of course it’s blue! But this is pure, clear eighteenth-century blue, and the white clouds that float across it aren’t just clouds, they are time passing very slowly, the way time once used to pass. The apples are ripening in the orchard, the stooks are standing in the field. In the yew-walk, arm in arm, Mr and Mrs Hyde (but let’s call them Beech) are strolling, she in her hooped dress and bonnet, he in his cocked hat and breeches. And all is as it should