At the end of the corridor he met Cuthbertson and Bishop. He had a vivid impression of their two faces: Cuthbertson’s massive, thick-eyebrowed, curiously rigid-looking; Bishop’s pink-cheeked, marked by a sort of uncertain joviality as if there were some joke he hadn’t quite seen yet. Neither of them spoke, and in a moment he was past.
It was not until he was back home, in his lodgings, that he thought of the cheque. When he did so an exclamation broke from him. Date, sum, signature, all were completely illegible – merely a series of indecipherable scrawls.
‘I have always felt,’ Lavinia said, ‘that you were a person I could rely on.’
She and Mr Honeyball were strolling in the private garden at the back of the house, separated by a high privet hedge from the part used by the students, and Lavinia was contriving as many light collisions as possible in the hope of arousing the slumbering beast in Mr Honeyball.
‘I always thought you fair but kind,’ she said.
‘I always made it my first concern that no regulation of the Ministry should be contravened,’ Honeyball said.
‘Very right and natural,’ observed Lavinia, brushing his flank with her hip.
‘At the same time,’ Honeyball said, stepping directly aside over the wet grass, ‘I do not think I interpret the regulations too narrowly. If for example I come up against a room which is both cloakroom and toilet, I give it credit for being both. Certain colleagues of mine, admittedly men of an older generation, would say it must be one or the other.’
‘Not too rigid,’ Lavinia agreed, experiencing a slight heaving of the abdomen.
‘There must be some latitude of interpretation,’ Honeyball said.
Lavinia stopped in her walk and turned to him. She had thought that being out of doors might do something for Mr Honeyball: he had seemed so ill at ease on the sofa. And indeed he looked better now, more relaxed. An open-air man, obviously, she thought, returning to her earlier idea of him, happier in the great open spaces.
‘It doesn’t do to be too flexible,’ she said, and looked at him with lips slightly parted.
The rain had stopped now, but there was still a good deal of moisture in the air. The hedges and shrubs in the garden were dark-looking, motionless, as if tensed by their burden of moisture. Somewhere at the end of the garden a blackbird burst into loud song.
Mr Honeyball smiled his narrow, white smile. His moustache stretched with humorous, knowledgeable effect. He was pleased with Lavinia’s words of commendation.
‘Dear lady,’ he said, ‘I am so glad that you will be meeting Eric this evening.’
‘After hearing so much about him I feel I know him already,’ Lavinia said, with some asperity. She was beginning to feel slightly dismayed at the number of times this Eric’s name cropped up in Mr Honeyball’s conversation.
‘He will be able to explain to you, far better than I, some of the things we stand for,’ Mr Honeyball said, not noticing her change of tone in the fascination of the topic. ‘I hesitate to call them ideals,’ he added, giving her a quick glance, then looking away. ‘People don’t always understand our aims,’ he said. ‘We are very short of funds, too. You’ll hardly believe this, but we haven’t even got an office of any sort. To use as a base, you know.’
‘That seems a terrible shame,’ Lavinia said. ‘Why, there are rooms in this house that Donald never uses.’
For a moment Mr Honeyball was unable to believe that she had actually uttered such propitious words. Then, in his elation, he permitted himself the remark that proved his undoing. ‘What a marvellously understanding person you are,’ he said. ‘As well as beautiful.’
‘Do you really think so?’ Lavinia experienced a quickening of the pulse. He had never said anything so bold, so intimate, before. The moment had come, she felt. She moved two steps nearer and leaned the front of her body lightly against Mr Honeyball. ’I would not refuse you anything,’ she said. ‘I know the longing that is pent up within you.’
Mr Honeyball was taken completely by surprise. Too late he saw where this was tending. ‘Eric,’ he said desperately, ‘will be glad, will be delighted, to have the opportunity of – ’
‘Never mind Eric,’ Lavinia said. ‘I realize your loyalty to your friend, but we must think of ourselves now.’ She leaned against him more heavily. Mr Honeyball, caught off balance, clasped his companion loosely behind her elbows, whereupon Lavinia kissed him.
Mr Honeyball released her arms and stepped back. She could read no expression on his face but a sort of vagueness, as if he were cogitating something very remote.
‘What a darling man you are,’ she said, moving again towards him.
‘We can be overlooked,’ Mr Honeyball said. ‘Anyone glancing through one of those upper windows – ’
‘True,’ Lavinia said. ‘How practical. Let’s go inside.’ Seeing something change in Mr Honeyball’s face, she said, ‘It only means a few minutes’ more delay. Be patient, darling.’ In a low voice she began to give him instructions. ‘You must use the side entrance,’ she said. ‘The secretary would see you if you went the front way. Go round the side of the house from here and you will see it, halfway along, a green door. There is a separate staircase to the first floor, when you get to the top of the stairs go straight ahead. My bedroom is the last room on your left. No one will see you.’
‘But your husband,’ Honeyball said. ‘The students.’
‘Donald will be in the midst of the Presentation Ceremony by this time. He will be far too busy to think of anything else. And no Student ever uses our part of the house. Wait for me in my room. I’ll go up the usual way. You’ll be there first, I should think, but I won’t be far behind you.’
These words fell warmly and precipitously from Lavinia’s lips. She regarded Mr Honeyball’s narrow serious face, seeming to detect in it an impatience similar to her own. ‘I won’t keep you waiting long,’ she said. ‘I promise.’
Mr Honeyball nodded dumbly, completely unnerved by this cannibal eagerness. He could think of no way of disengaging himself. This latter-day Messalina must be at all costs kept well disposed. Everything, the whole future of their operations in the town, depended on the gallantry of his bearing now. He thought briefly of his room, too far away now, almost, for desire or regret, his warm cluttered little room at home, in the house he shared with his sister. Hearing the blackbird’s uninterrupted song, he felt as if he had drifted or been wafted somehow into a world totally contrived by people he would not have liked, had he met them.
He forced on to his face what he hoped was an expression of ardent desire. ‘Don’t be long,’ he said – it was his heroic moment. ‘Don’t be long, darling.’
Mr Adams had had a trying time with the tap. He had begun work with a certain satisfaction, feeling that he had put that brazen secretary in her place, and vindicated the essential decency of the British working man. He had assumed, moreover, on first seeing the dripping tap, that it was a matter merely of a perished washer, which would take no more than five minutes to replace and yet enable him to charge for an hour’s labour. The artisan, in his person at least, was not going to be taken advantage of.
So it was with something of an initial glow that he approached the tap. To his annoyance, however – and confirming his general sense of the household’s depravity – he found that the tap was loose on its thread; it slipped when he tried to close it off. It was one of those wide-mouthed, swanky taps, typical, he thought of the sort of people who would have a pink and black bathroom. He carried spares of the standard sort, nothing like this. He would have to dismantle the tap partially, and deepen the bottom threads. A fiddling, unrewarding job without aesthetic or technical interest. Mr Adams straightened up, catching sight of himself in the wall mirror as he did so: a bad-tempered-looking man, with scant hair and disproportionately large ears. When we get a more just society, he told himself, no one will be allowed taps like this; there will be the one standard tap for all domestic interiors. No one will ever again be able to assert p
rivilege, wealth, or class distinction through the type of tap they use, or come to that the type of bathroom appurtenances generally. Brothels will be closed down. Mr Adams looked vindictively at the ceiling. They’ve made it easy too long, he told himself. Their days are numbered.
To his further annoyance he found that he had not brought up a file fine enough for the job. He had to go back to his van to get one. He made a mistake on the way down, took the wrong turning, found himself going further into the interior of the house instead of towards the street, heard from behind one door on the ground floor a tenor voice singing a song that was familiar.
Lonely as the desert breeze
I may wander where I please.
The words of the song continued to reverberate in his mind as he retraced his steps. Even when he was back in the bathroom again, they returned to him from time to time.
The mains tap was high up on the wall at the side of the electric immersion heater, and this caused some return of his resentment. Typical of these people to have their mains tap in such an inaccessible place. No consideration whatever for the people who provide the nation’s wealth. Their days were bloody numbered. He had to climb on to the edge of the bath in order to shut the water off, which was a dangerous proceeding. Actionable, he thought. If I slipped off here and did myself a mischief, it would be bloody actionable.
However, some time later, when the job was finished and the tap replaced, Mr Adam’s mood lightened. All he had to do now was turn the water on again and check there was no leak. He put a piece of cloth on the edge of the bath so as not to scratch the enamel when he climbed up to reach the mains tap. The words of the song came back to his mind and he began to sing, in a gusty baritone,
One alone to be my own,
One alone to share my caresses.
‘Excuse me,’ Mafferty said. He had not succeeded in getting back in time to reach Cuthbertson in his office, but had managed to reach him just as, accompanied by Bishop, he was making his way down the last bit of corridor towards the main hall, Bishop was carrying the certificates with both hands, the cards stacked neatly on top. Both men were wearing gowns, Bishop’s a threadbare black one, Cuthbertson’s black with a scarlet hood.
‘What is it?’ Cuthbertson said. He looked at Mafferty for a moment, then the solemn anguish of his face broke suddenly into a smile. ‘I knew he wouldn’t be able to keep away,’ he said to Bishop.
‘It is about the cheque,’ Mafferty said. In the interval, remembering certain oddities of Cuthbertson’s that day and on former days, and with the evidence of the illegible cheque before him, he had decided that the Principal was deranged, and needed to be handled carefully.
‘Check?’ Cuthbertson said. ‘Check what? Everything is in order. Still, it was a generous impulse. There is some good in him, you see,’ he said to Bishop.
Mafferty looked with fascinated apprehension at the papers in Bishop’s hands. Should he say anything about them? Cuthbertson might refuse to amend the cheque. If he kept quiet the thing might sort itself out somehow without his being involved. In any case, responsibility for it would not be immediately laid at his door. Once he got the cheque corrected he could be over the hills and far away.
‘He isn’t wearing a gown,’ Bishop said.
‘Not that kind,’ Mafferty said. ‘I am referring to the cheque – ’
‘Where is your gown?’ Cuthbertson said. ‘You can’t attend without a gown.’
‘It is in the staff-room,’ Mafferty said. ‘I’ll go and get it.’ Perhaps there would be a chance later, he thought. Urged on by mingled curiosity and horror, he was not slow to get his gown and return. Those flocks which have nibbled through countless school assemblies were still safely grazing as he took his place on the platform, between Beazely and Simpson. Bishop, Dovecot and Binks were on the other side, thus forming Cuthbertson’s right flank. The Union Jack, draped over the table, was in vivid contrast to their dark robes. On it, directly in front of Cuthbertson, were the two neat piles, formed by certificates and cards, to which Mafferty’s gaze kept returning.
Bach’s pastoral music continued to fill the hall with a sort of reassuring gentleness. The students were almost all assembled now. They sat in ranks, facing the platform. Cuthbertson had had a notice put up concerning dress to be worn by students attending the ceremony, and they were all dressed appropriately, in dark suits. The gathering included quite a large number of students who were not actually receiving degrees on this occasion, but hoped, by attending, to impress the Principal with their seriousness. Mafferty glanced sideways at Cuthbertson from time to time. There was something elemental, frightening, about Cuthbertson’s face, Mafferty thought. It was possibly the least mobile face he had ever seen. No doubt or reservation or anxiety seemed ever to pass over it. It was a face that had no middle range of emotion. Even during that curious outburst during the staff meeting, Cuthbertson’s face had remained passive. He had showed no flicker of expression, either, while making those illegible marks on the cheque …
The students sat sedately, directing at the platform their variously pigmented features. What did they make of it all? Uneasy at the fiasco he sensed on the way, worried about his cheque, hoping desperately that he had by some marvellous fluke replaced the cards in the right order, though the odds against this, he knew, must be astronomical, Mafferty fell again to wondering how far the students lent themselves to this deception, how far conniving, how far beglamoured. Probably the same proportion here as elsewhere, the same mix. Knaves and fools … Cuthbertson must know the degrees were bogus, and yet, and yet… Mafferty could not understand. He was exasperated at the incongruity of it. Here they all were, investing this crudely commercial process with pomp and ceremony. He among the others, sitting in their borrowed robes. Perhaps it was this, the very pointlessness that was the point, transcending all categories of deception. It was pointless not in any philosophical sense of value, but pointless here and now, immediately and self-sufficiently pointless; perhaps this was therefore the thing that had the most point, giving formal notation to the pointlessness, pointlessness before therefore – While he was still struggling amidst these speculations, the music clicked off suddenly. The hall was still. Cuthbertson rose to his feet.
Honeyball was nearly at the top of the stairs when he remembered his brief-case. He had placed it against the sofa when he sat down to have tea. It had remained there, only inches from his left calf, throughout the entire proceedings. Criminally, in his relief at escaping into the open, he had forgotten, he had left it lying there. He stopped dead. My God, he thought, remembering the Contingency Plans, remembering Eric’s words. A cold hand closed over his heart. He must go down again, at once. He could not possibly leave the brief-case there a moment longer, risk its being found, possibly opened and examined, by some unauthorized person. The decision, while not lessening his anxiety, brought an immediate rush of relief on the amatory level. As he went softly back down the stairs he tried to persuade himself that what he was experiencing was disappointment, that this was a case of stern duty triumphing over the clamorous demands of the flesh. Only a pleasure deferred, he told himself… He felt like a man reprieved. Of course, once he had got the brief-case again in his possession, he would make his way back round to that green door, mount those stairs that led to a rent-free office on the premises …
Once more in the garden, he went rapidly round to the front of the house. He had hoped to enter without being noticed, but Miss Naylor saw him from her little office – her window looked out on the front path. She thought it rather peculiar to see him appear from the side all alone like that. He looked nervy too, biting his lip and moving his right arm outwards from his side and back, in a series of stiff little movements. As though he had lost sixpence and found a penny, as she later expressed it to Mrs Garwood. However, she said nothing of all this, merely went to the door of her office and enquired with some hauteur whether she could help him.
‘Well, I was just going,’ Honeyball said, ‘but
I’ve left my briefcase in the sitting-room.’ He saw some curiosity on the girl’s face and with the instinct of a conspirator, he calmed himself, imposed stillness on his body. He must not behave as if the briefcase were of any particular importance. ‘Silly of me,’ he said, forcing a smile, ’I thought I’d better… No, don’t bother to come with me. I know exactly where I left it.’ It wasn’t there, however. Nor anywhere else in the sitting-room. The tea-things had been cleared away and there was no evidence of recent occupation. For a moment he thought he had mistaken the room, but there was no mistaking the sofa. He was obliged to go back to Miss Naylor’s office. ‘It isn’t there,’ he said, making an intense effort to control his anguish. ‘My brief-case isn’t there. It has gone.’
‘Oh dear,’ Miss Naylor said. She put her hand up, in this crisis, to pat her hair, and Mr Honeyball, with that particularity which descends on a man in deep misfortune, noticed that her nails were silver. ‘I’ve only been away from the room half an hour,’ he said, and swallowed convulsively.
She accompanied him back to the sitting-room and looked in. ‘It’s been cleared up,’ she said.
The Big Day Page 14