‘What a lovely place!’ Anthony exclaimed. ‘I shouldn’t mind being buried here.’
Patricia laughed. ‘I’d rather be alive at Smoky Joe’s.’
The grave was just inside the gate. When the old flowers were removed and the new ones arranged she said soberly:
‘Let’s go down and feed the swans. I always bring something with me.’
So they clambered down to the lake and sat on its edge throwing bread and kitchen scraps to the big white birds, which knew Pat and came over to her at once.
An older and wiser person would not have mentioned the fracas of Sunday afternoon; but Anthony’s was a nature which could not rest in peace while there was the possibility of misunderstanding with someone he liked.
‘Look, Pat,’ he said. I’m awfully sorry about – about Sunday. I mean about me peeping through the curtain. I didn’t intend – it was …’ As she did not speak he went on, ‘I’d only just come out of the kitchen, and I heard the noise and …’ He was astonished with himself for telling this lie but was somehow forced into it by her silence and by his desire that she should think well of him. The words had come from him unawares.
She shrugged. ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. My affairs are free for all anyway.’
‘Oh, no,’ he contradicted. ‘ They shouldn’t be.’
‘Why?’ she said after a moment. ‘ Do you think I should have seen him alone?’
Thus questioned, he drew back quickly within himself like a snail which has touched something foreign and perhaps dangerous.
‘I – I don’t know. How can I tell? I don’t know anything about it.’
‘No,’ she agreed moodily. ‘How can you tell?’
There was silence, while the swans ducked their heads in the water and drank and waited for more food.
‘It’s funny,’ said Anthony. ‘I never even saw your ring, you know. I just didn’t notice it until it was mentioned last Saturday …’
‘Where d’you think I met him?’ she said, taking off her picture hat and letting the wind and the sun play with her curls.
‘… Don’t know,’ said the boy.
‘In the police court.’
He screwed up his cap. ‘ In …’
‘And who do you think introduced us?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Dad himself.’
Patricia emptied her bag into the lake.
Anthony’s mind was struggling in deeper waters than any the pond could offer. I thought Uncle didn’t like him.’
‘Not as a son-in-law. Women aren’t the only contrary ones, are they?’
The sun went behind a cloud and a breeze ruffled the waters of the pool.
‘Of course, I was chiefly to blame,’ she went on after a pause, more brightly, as if she found some cause for self-congratulation in being in the wrong. ‘ You see; it all began like this. There was trouble in our restaurant one Saturday night; there sometimes is; but this was worse than usual; a Dutchman got a knife stuck in him. I’ve always told Joe; I’ve told him and told him not to let anybody in. On a Friday and Saturday a lot of men spend part of their time in a public house and then come into our restaurant half drunk. I’d refuse them admittance. But Joe says, no, they’re all customers and have a right to buy what they can pay for – and he’ll keep them in order. That’s all very well most times, but if bad trouble ever starts it’s too far gone before he can stop it. And Uncle Perry shouts a lot of terrible oaths but he doesn’t do much. Fridays and Saturdays are usually the nights; you may have noticed the last two evenings have been quieter.’
Anthony nodded. ‘Uncle Joe said there was a Greek ship in this afternoon,’ he volunteered.
‘Well, this night in March a lot of men wanted to come in together, and there were two or three among them who were pretty drunk, and I happened to be standing at the counter and I said to Dad, “ Say we’re full up,” but of course he wouldn’t. Joe can’t bear to turn away a penny. So in they came. They were a lively lot in the lower restaurant even then. Well, somebody started a quarrel, and before you knew where you were everyone was fighting everyone else – and by the time the police came someone had stuck a table knife into a Dutchman who had nothing to do with it at all. Two or three others had to be treated for broken ribs and things.’
‘Did he die?’
‘The Dutchman? No. But he accused a man called Fossett of having stabbed him. Mr Fossett was a shipbroker and practically Dad’s oldest friend. But sometimes he would drink heavily and he was a bit hot-tempered. Dad didn’t like the idea of him being accused: he’s funny that way when he makes up his mind about a thing, and he tried to get all the blame put upon the Dutchman himself. Two or three witnesses went into the box and testified that the whole place had been sweetness and light until the Dutchman came in and that it was he who was the only drunk one, and that he’d started an argument about the Transvaal and then things went wrong. But that wasn’t true at all.’
‘What happened?’
‘Mr Fossett got six months in the second division. Of course, I never thought of getting him as much as that when I did it.’
Anthony looked at the girl. ‘Did what?’
She pulled down a piece of stick and stirred the lake gently while the swans nosed about it expecting more food.
‘You see, I was called as a witness, as I was in the restaurant at the time of the quarrel; but instead of testifying that it was all the Dutchman’s fault as Dad expected, I supported the Dutchman’s story, because he was telling the truth. He hadn’t even been drunk at the time; he’d just come in for a quiet meal and was eating away when the quarrel broke all around him. It was Joe’s fault for letting any rag-tag come in and be served; it was Joe’s fault for being so grasping for every penny that it hurt him to turn a single one away. You know … he wouldn’t shut the restaurant the day Mother died. He even begrudged her having a doctor until near the end … I thought this would teach him a lesson. At least … I didn’t reason it out as plainly as that at the time. I went into court feeling a lot and not quite knowing what to say, and then before I properly knew, I was telling the whole truth. I’d just got to.’
Anthony spent some minutes wondering if even at nineteen he would have the moral courage to speak against his father in a court of law.
‘And that was where you met – your …’
She shook her head. ‘No. That was later. You see, other things happened then that I didn’t expect. No sooner was that case settled than the police brought a charge against Joe for keeping a disorderly house. Of course, Joe was furious.’
‘Yes, I suppose he would be,’ agreed the boy.
‘He quarrelled with almost everybody at that time. Even Uncle Perry had a job to stay on.’ She smiled wryly at this. ‘He turned me out of the house the night after I’d given evidence favourable to the Dutchman.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Slept with Aunt Louisa in Arwenack Street. That was easily arranged because I lived with her during holidays while Mother and Dad were abroad. But it made things worse in a way because Dad can’t stand his sister nowadays. Well, he quarrelled with his solicitors too about their conduct of the case, and when the police summons came along he put it in the hands of Harvey & Harris of Penryn.’ She was silent a moment, pondering her own strange feminine thoughts. ‘Tom … Tom Harris did very well for him in that: he was only fined ten guineas and costs. But he wasn’t a bit grateful; he quarrelled with Tom because he hadn’t got him off altogether.’
The swans had become aware that this stirring of the water was a trumpery deception; one by one with slow imperceptible strokes they moved away, breasting the water square and smooth like a convoy of white East Indiamen.
‘We ought to go,’ said Patricia rising. ‘ They’ll wonder what has happened to us.’ She picked up her hat and parasol. ‘Come on: I’ll race you to the top of the hill.’
Womanlike, she started off before he could even get to his feet. He rushed after her, but she was half-way up b
efore he overtook her, laughing his triumph. Whereupon with the same curious lack of logic she at once abandoned the race and sat on the hedge careless of her frock and breathless and smiling.
But when they had restarted her mood changed again.
‘You know, Anthony, mine was a funny sort of marriage. The way it happened, I mean. When I first saw Tom in court I admired tremendously the way he defended us. I thought him very good looking then. Of course he was in his element; I didn’t realise that. But you don’t marry a lawyer for the way he behaves in law courts any more than you’d marry a sailor for the way he sails his ship. I was silly; but there you are. He came to me when it was over and asked me to go out with him the next evening. I said yes. Joe started raising steam when he heard of it. I was living at home again when this second case came off, and we were good friends again; but me wanting to go out with the lawyer who, in his view, had just let him down was more than he could endure. So of course we had another quarrel and the more he said I wasn’t to go out with Tom the more I went – and so it developed quickly.’
Anthony said nothing, but he could well understand that much. Joe had been trying to govern someone with a bit of himself in her.
‘So there you are,’ she said moodily. ‘That’s the way it is, as you’ll find when you’re older. People never are what they seem. Nice people turn out nasty and nasty people nice. Tom has awfully pretty manners when he likes. I – I thought I was in love with him. In a way for the time I was. A sort of infatuation, I suppose. I was absolutely in earnest, though it may not seem so now. After we were married things seemed to change.’
‘How did, it change? he asked, all attention.
‘Oh, you – you wouldn’t understand,’ she said, and again the conversation lapsed.
But now she was like a moth fluttering round a flame; at each remembrance she singed her wings and sheered away, but the flame still burned, attracting her back. She persuaded herself that there was pleasure in explaining to someone who did not matter. In fact she was glad to speak more fully than she had ever done since her return, to justify herself – but whether to him or to herself was a moot point.
‘They live in a big house in Penryn, you know.’
‘Who do?’ he asked, for he had been watching a yawl dipping out to sea.
‘The Harrises. There’s Tom and his mother and an aunt. He took me there for the first time after we were married. That was the first shock.’
‘What was?’
‘Well, the house was big and old and full of big old furniture that looked as if it could never be moved. It’s the sort of house you’d never expect anyone would ever dare to sneeze or giggle in. That didn’t matter much of itself. Surroundings aren’t very important, and you can be happy in a public house or a museum if you go the right way about it. But Mrs Harris and Miss Harris and their surroundings were all of a piece. A – a stiff elderly maid let us in and another stiff elderly maid showed us into the drawing-room, and there were two stiff elderly old ladies waiting for us for tea. I hadn’t – it had all been such a rush that I hadn’t met either of them before, and I think Tom must have had a bit of a quarrel with his mother the morning before he left when he told her he was going to marry me. That didn’t make for a good beginning …’
‘Didn’t he tell her till then?’
‘It had only been decided the day before. Then we went away for three days and came straight back to the house. I think now that Tom was in a hurry in order to forestall criticism. He thought that once we were married they would make the best of a bad job and put a cheerful face on it. But I didn’t want anybody to start looking on me as a bad job that had to be made the best of. That isn’t the way to start married life. Anyway, they didn’t try hard enough to deceive me. You see – you see, when I went there I felt very happy, bubbling over with good spirits. Their reception was a sort of smack in the face. It didn’t take me long to see what the position was. They thought I wasn’t good enough for Tom.’
She stopped to push some grass through a gate to a pony.
‘Of course I could see his mother’s point of view. She wanted him to marry well, keep up the tradition, in the same house with the same furniture, be gracious, entertain the right people and live to be seventy-seven. In some ways she was nice, and could have been nicer if she’d tried.’ Judicially she repeated: ‘ I could see her point of view, but she couldn’t expect me to fit into it, could she? Sometimes she made a real attempt to be agreeable, and we got on fairly well then, though I was always thinking “ What an effort it must be for her!” and “She doesn’t really like me, she’s only trying to,” and “ I wish I didn’t mind being patronised, she doesn’t really intend it as that.” ’
They turned and walked slowly on.
‘I wonder what it is that makes some people seem so afraid of coming unmelted. Tom has grown up in a house where every feeling and emotion has to be – to be muted and restrained, kept under lock and key because it’s bad form to let them go free. Why are some people so scared of their dignity, Anthony?’
Anthony did not know.
‘I was really thinking of Aunt Phoebe then,’ she said. ‘I might have got on with his mother if there hadn’t been Aunt Phoebe. She … I never could make up my mind which was the tightest about Aunt Phoebe, her mouth or her stays. Sorry if you’re shocked, I keep forgetting you haven’t had a sister. Aunt Phoebe disapproved of me from the start. I was socially inferior and hadn’t been educated in the wooden-face school. I was too flighty and unstable. She didn’t give me a chance before she started picking holes.’ Patricia choked as if the memory were not to be borne. ‘ Naturally, the more holes she picked the more opportunity I gave her. You may say this isn’t anything to do with Tom, but it is. You see, Tom couldn’t understand us at all. He didn’t seem to try. In his own house he was different, seemed a part of it. It was fantastic. You can’t be legal in a home, not if it’s going to be a home. You can’t weigh up things as if you were a judge, and then give so much credit to this side and so much credit to that. You may be able to see both sides, but you can’t take both sides. If he’d come down on one side or the other, then I should have known where I was earlier.
‘After three weeks it was about as bad as it could be. Then Dad was taken ill and I wanted to rush home and nurse him. Tom didn’t want me to do that. He raised all sorts of objections that were just silly. He even offered to pay for a nurse for Dad, but I wouldn’t have that. Joe wouldn’t either, you may be sure. In the end of course I could see what it was: living with his family had convinced Tom that my manners needed a bit of tightening up – when I met a stranger I didn’t say “ How d’you do-o” as if there were a nasty taste in my mouth; I went up and shook hands – and I’d committed the terrible sin of being found in the kitchen, talking to the tweenie. Anyway, I think he thought that if I stayed at Mount House long enough I should get like them, but Smoky Joe’s was a bad influence for me. As if I’d lived anywhere else since I left school! He thought that if I went backwards and forwards between one house and the other I never would improve. So then I told him that I didn’t want to improve by getting like him and his mother and his aunt, and that if he wanted someone like that I didn’t know why he’d married me, and anyway the Veals had a longer pedigree than any Harrises he could find, and whether he liked it or not I was going to nurse Dad, and I wouldn’t bother to come back and lower his prestige any more …’
Towards the end of this statement her breath had been coming as quickly as her speech. They began to go down the other side of the hill. Anthony glanced at his cousin. In talking to him she had relived some of the emotions of that time. Until two days ago she had put all this behind her, tried to shelve it and forget it. Tom Harris’s visit had brought it all up anew. She looked neither so young nor so happy as she had done a week ago.
‘Was Uncle Joe very ill then?’
‘Oh, yes. We thought he was going to die. He’s better now. I’m watching his diet so that he takes regular meals.’
‘Is that why you’re not going back to Tom Harris?’
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘That doesn’t make any difference. I’m never going back to him. I’m never going back.’
Anthony looked down the hill and saw Ned Pawlyn coming up it to meet them.
Chapter Seven
It became a regular practice for Anthony once or twice each week to row his uncle out to some ship in the harbour. One week it was The Grey Cat. Then it was Lavengro. Then it was Pride of Pendennis. This was followed by Lady Tregeagle. Then The Grey Cat returned from Liverpool. There were two barquentines, a schooner and a tops’l schooner, all around three hundred tons; tidy little craft busy about their owner’s business. And the owner was J. Veal. How many, if any, more there might be trekking across the oceans of the world on the business of J. Veal, Anthony did not know.
Sometimes he sat in the little master’s cabin and listened, less than half comprehending, to discussions on freights and port dues and insurance costs. He noticed that whenever the conversation was turned by one of the captains upon what they considered necessary repairs to their ships Smoky Joe had a talent for turning the conversation to something else. If they insisted that the repair or replacement was urgently necessary he always ended the discussion with, ‘Well, we’ll consider it, mister, we’ll consider it.’
He never saw his uncle consult with anyone ashore, though Joe sometimes ventured forth in the morning on his own business with ship’s chandlers, Board of Trade authorities and the like. Once Anthony pulled the cork out of the floorboard of his bedroom and saw his uncle in the office below counting a heap of gold into little piles. There were twenty or thirty such piles by the time he replaced the cork.
There is something about a spy-hole which has an irresistible fascination for a young boy, even the most honourable young boy, and Anthony on a number of occasions took out the cork and stared down on the greying head of his uncle as he was writing or sorting out papers or adding up figures in a huge ledger. Once a knock came on the office door, and the boy noted with what care Joe put everything away – this in the safe, that in a drawer – before unlocking the door to admit, as it happened, Uncle Perry. Uncle Perry looked round the room curiously and made some joke and laughed: it was clear that he had not often been in this room before; and Joe answered his questions tightly and disapprovingly as if to make it plain that he did not like to be interrupted.
The Forgotten Story Page 5