“Ah, feeling better,” Sir Nigel said incontrovertibly.
“Perhaps.”
“Not very agreeable,” Sir Nigel said, “but you know we couldn’t let you go, could we, without taking a look?”
“Did you see anything?”
Sir Nigel gave the impression of abruptly moving downstream to a quieter reach and casting his line again.
“Don’t let me stop you dressing, my dear fellow.” He looked vaguely around the room before choosing a strictly upright chair, then lowered himself on to it as though it were a tuffet which might “give.” He began feeling in one of his large pockets—for a sandwich?
“Any news for me?”
“I expect Dr. Cave will be along in a few minutes. He was caught by a rather garrulous patient.” He drew a large silver watch out of his pocket—for some reason it was tangled up in a piece of string. “Have to meet my wife at Liverpool Street. Are you married?”
“No.”
“Oh well, one care the less. Children can be a great responsibility.”
“I have a child—but she lives a long way off.”
“A long way off? I see.”
“We haven’t seen much of each other.”
“Doesn’t care for England?”
“The colour-bar makes it difficult for her.” He realized how childish he sounded directly he had spoken, as though he had been trying to draw attention to himself by a bizarre confession, without even the satisfaction of success.
“Ah yes,” Sir Nigel said. “Any brothers or sisters? You, I mean.”
“An elder brother. Why?”
“Oh well, I suppose it’s all on the record,” Sir Nigel said, rolling in his line. He got up and made for the door. Wilditch sat on the bed with the tie over his knee. The door opened and Dr. Nigel said, “Ah, here’s Dr. Cave. Must run along now. I was just telling Mr. Wilditch that I’ll be seeing him again. You’ll fix it, won’t you?” and he was gone.
“Why should I see him again?” Wilditch asked and then, from Dr. Cave’s embarrassment, he saw the stupidity of the question. “Oh, yes, of course, you did find something?”
“It’s really very lucky. If caught in time . . .
“There’s sometimes hope?”
“Oh, there’s always hope.”
So, after all, Wilditch thought, I am—if I so choose—on the conveyor-belt again.
Dr. Cave took an engagement-book out of his pocket and said briskly, “Sir Nigel has given me a few dates. The tenth is difficult for the clinic, but the fifteenth—Sir Nigel doesn’t think we should delay longer than the fifteen.”
“Is he a great fisherman?”
“Fisherman? Sir Nigel? I have no idea.” Dr. Cave looked aggrieved, as though he were being shown an incorrect chart. Shall we say the fifteenth?”
“Perhaps I could tell you after the week-end. You see, I have not made up my mind to stay as long as that in England.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t properly conveyed to you that this is serious, really serious. Your only chance—I repeat your only chance,” he spoke like a telegram, “is to have the obstruction removed in time.”
“And then, I suppose, life can go on for a few more years.”
“It’s impossible to guarantee . . . but there have been complete cures.”
“I don’t want to appear dialectical,” Wilditch said, “but I do have to decide, don’t I, whether I want my particular kind of life prolonged.”
“It’s the only one we have,” Dr. Cave said.
“I see you are not a religious man—oh, please don’t misunderstand me, nor am I. I have no curiosity at all about the future.”
3
The past was another matter. Wilditch remembered a leader in the Civil War who rode from an undecided battle mortally wounded. He revisited the house where he was born, the house in which he was married, greeted a few retainers who did not recognize his condition, seeing him only as a tired man upon a horse, and finally—but Wilditch could not recollect how the biography had ended: he saw only a figure of exhaustion slumped over the saddle, as he also took, like Sir Nigel Sampson, a train from Liverpool Street. At Colchester he changed onto the branch line to Winton, and suddenly summer began, the kind of summer he always remembered as one of the conditions of life at Winton. Days had become so much shorter since then. They no longer began at six in the morning before the world was awake.
Winton Hall had belonged, when Wilditch was a child, to his uncle, who had never married, and every summer he lent the house to Wilditch’s mother. Winton Hall had been virtually Wilditch’s, until school cut the period short, from late June to early September. In memory his mother and brother were shadowy background figures. They were less established even than the machine upon the platform of “the halt” from which he bought Fry’s chocolates for a penny a bar: than the oak tree spreading over the green in front of the red-brick wall—under its shade as a child he had distributed apples to soldiers halted there in the hot August of 1914: the group of silver birches on the Winton lawn and the broken fountain, green with slime. In his memory he did not share the house with others: he owned it.
Nevertheless the house had been left to his brother not to him; he was far away when his uncle died and he had never returned since. His brother married, had children (for them the fountain had been mended), the paddock behind the vegetable garden and the orchard, where he used to ride the donkey, had been sold (so his brother had written to him) for building council-houses, but the hall and the garden which he had so scrupulously remembered nothing could change.
Why then go back now and see it in other hands? Was it that at the approach of death one must get rid of everything? If he had accumulated money he would now have been in the mood to distribute it. Perhaps the man who had ridden the horse around the countryside had not been saying goodbye, as his biographer imagined, to what he valued most: he had been ridding himself of illusions by seeing them again with clear and moribund eyes, so that he might be quite bankrupt when death came. He had the will to possess at that absolute moment nothing but his wound.
His brother, Wilditch knew, would be faintly surprised by this visit. He had become accustomed to the fact that Wilditch never came to Winton; they would meet at long intervals at his brother’s club in London, for George was a widower by this time, living alone. He always talked to others of Wilditch as a man unhappy in the country, who needed a longer range and stranger people. It was lucky, he would indicate, that the house had been left to him, for Wilditch would probably have sold it in order to travel further. A restless man, never long in one place, no wife, no children, unless the rumours were true that in Africa. . . or it might have been in the East . . . Wilditch was well aware of how his brother spoke of him. His brother was the proud owner of the lawn, the goldfish pond, the mended fountain, the laurel-path which they had known when they were children as the Dark Walk, the lake, the island . . . Wilditch looked out at the flat hard East Anglian countryside, the meagre hedges and the stubbly grass, which had always seemed to him barren from the salt of Danish blood. All these years his brother had been in occupation, and yet he had no idea of what might lie underneath the garden.
4
The chocolate-machine had gone from Winton Halt, and the halt had been promoted—during the years of nationalization—to a station; the chimneys of a cement-factory smoked along the horizon and council-houses now stood three deep along the fine.
Wilditch’s brother waited in a Humber at the exit. Some familiar smell of coal-dust and varnish had gone from the waiting-room and it was a mere boy who took his ticket instead of a stooped and greying porter. In childhood nearly all the world is older than oneself.
“Hullo, George,” he said in remote greeting to the stranger at the wheel.
“How are things, William?” George asked as they ground on their way—it was part of his character as a countryman that he had never learnt how to drive a car well.
The long chalky slope of a small hill—the highe
st point before the Ural mountains he had once been told—led down to the village between the bristly hedges. On the left was an abandoned chalk-pit—it had been just as abandoned forty years ago, when he had climbed all over it looking for treasure, in the form of brown nuggets of iron pyrites which when broken showed an interior of starred silver.
“Do you remember hunting for treasure?”
“Treasure?” George said. “Oh, you mean that iron stuff.”
Was it the long summer afternoons in the chalk-pit which had made him dream—or so vividly imagine—the discovery of a real treasure? If it was a dream it was the only dream he remembered from those years, or, if it was a story which he had elaborated at night in bed, it must have been the final effort of a poetic imagination that afterwards had been rigidly controlled. In the various services which had over the years taken him from one part of the world to another, imagination was usually a quality to be suppressed. One’s job was to provide facts, to a company (import and export), a newspaper, a government department. Speculation was discouraged. Now the dreaming child was dying of the same disease as the man. He was so different from the child that it was odd to think the child would not outlive him and go on to quite a different destiny.
George said, “You’ll notice some changes, William. When I had the new bathroom added, I found I had to disconnect the pipes from the fountain. Something to do with pressure. After all there are no children now to enjoy it.”
“It never played in my time either.”
“I had the tennis-lawn dug up during the war, and it hardly seemed worth while to put it back.”
“I’d forgotten that there was a tennis-lawn.”
“Don’t you remember it, between the pond and goldfish-tank?”
“The pond? Oh, you mean the lake and the island.”
“Not much of a lake. You could jump on to the island with a short run.”
“I thought of it as much bigger.”
But all measurements had changed. Only for a dwarf does the world remain the same size. Even the red-brick wall which separated the garden from the village was lower than he remembered—a mere five feet, but in order to look over it in those days he had always to scramble to the top of some old stumps covered deep with ivy and dusty spiders’ webs. There was no sign of these when they drove in: everything was very tidy everywhere, and a handsome piece of ironmongery had taken the place of the swing-gate which they had ruined as children.
“You keep the place up very well,” he said.
“I couldn’t manage it without the market-garden. That enables me to put the gardener’s wages down as a professional expense. I have a very good accountant.”
He was put into his mother’s room with a view of the lawn and the silver birches; George slept in what had been his uncle’s. The little bedroom next door which had once been his was now converted into a tiled bathroom—only, the prospect was unchanged. He could see the laurel bushes where the Dark Walk began, but they were smaller too. Had the dying horseman found as many changes?
Sitting that night over coffee and brandy, during the long family pauses Wilditch wondered whether as a child he could possibly have been so secretive as never to have spoken of his dream, his game, whatever it was. In his memory the adventure had lasted for several days. At the end of it he had found his way home in the early morning when everyone was asleep: there had been a dog called Joe who bounded towards him and sent him sprawling in the heavy dew of the lawn. Surely there must have been some basis of fact on which the legend had been built. Perhaps he had run away, perhaps he had been out all night—on the island in the lake or hidden in the lake—and during those hours he had invented the whole story.
Wilditch took a second glass of brandy and asked tentatively, “Do you remember much of those summers when we were children here?” He was aware of something unconvincing in the question: the apparently harmless opening gambit of a wartime interrogation.
“I never cared for the place much in those days,” George said surprisingly. “You were a secretive little bastard.”
“Secretive?”
“And uncooperative. I had a great sense of duty towards you, but you never realized that. In a year or two you were going to follow me to school. I tried to teach you the rudiments of cricket. You weren’t interested. God knows what you were interested in.”
“Exploring?” Wilditch suggested, he thought with cunning.
“There wasn’t much to explore in fourteen acres. You know, I had such plans for this place when it became mine. A swimming-pool where the tennis-lawn was—it’s mainly potatoes now. I meant to drain the pond too—it breeds mosquitoes. Well, I’ve added two bathrooms and modernized the kitchen, and even that has cost me four acres of pasture. At the back of the house now you can hear the children caterwauling from the council houses. It’s all been a bit of a disappointment.”
“At least I’m glad you haven’t drained the lake.”
“My dear chap, why go on calling it the lake? Have a look at it in the morning and you’ll see the absurdity. The water’s nowhere more than two feet deep.” He added, “Oh well, the place won’t outlive me. My children aren’t interested, and the factories are beginning to come out this way. They’ll get a reasonably good price for the land—I haven’t much else to leave them.” He put some more sugar in his coffee. “Unless, of course, you’d like to take it on when I am gone?”
“I haven’t the money and anyway there’s no cause to believe that I won’t be dead first.”
“Mother was against my accepting the inheritance,” George said. “She never liked the place.”
“I thought she loved her summers here.” The great gap between their memories astonished him. They seemed to be talking about different places and different people.
“It was terribly inconvenient, and she was always in trouble with the gardener. You remember Ernest? She said she had to wring every vegetable out of him. (By the way he’s still alive, though retired of course—you ought to look him up in the morning. It would please him. He still feels he owns the place.) And then, you know, she always thought it would have been better for us if we could have gone to the seaside. She had an idea that she was robbing us of a heritage—buckets and spades and sea-water-bathing. Poor mother, she couldn’t afford to turn down Uncle Henry’s hospitality. I think in her heart she blamed father for dying when he did without providing for holidays at the sea.”
“Did you talk it over with her in those days?”
“Oh no, not then. Naturally she had to keep a front before the children. But when I inherited the place—you were in Africa—she warned Mary and me about the difficulties. She had very decided views, you know, about any mysteries, and that turned her against the garden. Too much shrubbery, she said. She wanted everything to be very clear. Early Fabian training, I daresay.”
“It’s odd. I don’t seem to have known her very well.”
“You had a passion for hide-and-seek. She never liked that. Mystery again. She thought it a bit morbid. There was a time when we couldn’t find you. You were away for hours.”
“Are you sure it was hours? Not a whole night?”
“I don’t remember it at all myself. Mother told me.” They drank their brandy for a while in silence. Then George said, “She asked Uncle Henry to have the Dark Walk cleared away. She thought it was unhealthy with all the spiders’ webs, but he never did anything about it.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t.”
“Oh, it was on my list, but other things had priority, and now it doesn’t seem worth while to make more changes.” He yawned and stretched. “I’m used to early bed. I hope you don’t mind. Breakfast at 8.30?”
“Don’t make any changes for me.”
“There’s just one thing I forgot to show you. The flush is tricky in your bathroom.”
George led the way upstairs. He said, “The local plumber didn’t do a very good job. Now, when you’ve pulled this knob, you’ll find the flush never quite finishes
. You have to do it a second time—sharply like this.”
Wilditch stood at the window looking out. Beyond the Dark Walk and the space where the lake must be, he could see the splinters of light given off by the council-houses; through one gap in the laurels there was even a streetlight visible, and he could hear the faint sound of television-sets joining together different programmes like the discordant murmur of a mob.
He said, “That view would have pleased mother. A lot of the mystery gone.”
“I rather like it this way myself,” George said, “on a winter’s evening. It’s a kind of companionship. As one gets older one doesn’t want to feel quite alone on a sinking ship. Not being a churchgoer myself . . .” he added, leaving the sentence lying like a torso on its side.
“At least we haven’t shocked mother in that way, either of us.”
“Sometimes I wish I’d pleased her, though, about the Dark Walk. And the pond—how she hated that pond too.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps because you liked to hide on the island. Secrecy and mystery again. Wasn’t there something you wrote about it once? A story?”
“Me? A story? Surely not.”
“I don’t remember the circumstances. I thought—in a school magazine? Yes, I’m sure of it now. She was very angry indeed and she wrote rude remarks in the margin with a blue pencil. I saw them somewhere once. Poor mother.”
George led the way into the bedroom. He said, “I’m sorry there’s no bedside light. It was smashed last week, and I haven’t been into town since.”
“It’s all right. I don’t read in bed.”
“I’ve got some good detective-stories downstairs if you wanted one.”
“Mysteries?”
“Oh, mother never minded those. They came under the heading of puzzles. Because there was always an answer.”
Beside the bed was a small bookcase. He said, “I brought some of mother’s books here when she died and put them in her room. Just the ones that she had liked and no bookseller would take.” Wilditch made out a title, My Apprenticeship by Beatrice Webb. “Sentimental, I suppose, but I didn’t want actually to throw away her favourite books. Good night.” He repeated, “I’m sorry about the light.”
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