Uncle Paul

by Celia Fremlin

  “And you? Which sort of person are you?”

  “Me?” Meg was startled. “How do you mean?”

  “I mean,” Freddy spoke carefully, “I mean, Meg, that if you had found yourself in Mildred’s place, married—or as good as married—to this fascinating scoundrel—would you have gone to the police? And given evidence against him?”

  No one could have been more surprised than Meg to find that she did not need to reflect on her answer for even a moment.

  “Of course I wouldn’t!” she cried. “I’d have kept it dark: I’d have told lie after lie. And if another murder was necessary to help him escape, I’d have committed it with him! There!”

  She paused, breathless, astonished at her own vehemence. Freddy’s eyes were fixed on her with extraordinary brilliance.

  “You wouldn’t, of course,” he commented. “When it came to the point, you’d behave like any ordinary, sensible young woman. But it’s pleasant—yes, it’s quite remarkably pleasant —to know that, in your inexperience, you think you would.”

  CHAPTER VII

  THE LOUNGE OF the Sea View Private Hotel was full when Meg and Isabel, fulfilling their promise, arrived after lunch on the following day. Every chair was occupied, and over all brooded a guilty tranquillity. Everybody knew that they couldn’t go on sitting like that much longer, for this was a holiday, and they mustn’t waste it sitting about in the hotel. Even as Meg hesitated in the doorway, trying to locate Mildred among the somnolent throng, a sort of unhappy stirring was beginning.

  “I think—in a few minutes—it would be all right to think about bathing, Dear,” ventured the blonde and ineffectual mother whom Meg had encountered yesterday. Her son, to whose deaf ears this remark was being addressed, was no longer in possession of the best armchair. Instead, he and his patience cards were spread out to their fullest extent on the stretch of floor that everyone had to cross to reach either the writing table or the door. A further area to his left was also rendered impassable by three or four sheets of foolscap paper, ruled into columns, and filled from end to end with cramped, untidy figures.

  “Or perhaps,” his mother continued her soliloquy above his unresponsive torso, “perhaps it would be better to wait another quarter of an hour. You had rather a heavy lunch.” Impassively, the youth writhed round to write another figure in his overflowing columns, and then began to shuffle the cards again, their edges clicking fussily on the polished boards. A small grey-haired woman peered down at him over her spectacles.

  “There doesn’t seem much point in bringing him for a holiday, does there, Mrs Forrester?” she observed with the forthright tartness of the elderly—of those, that is to say, who have become spectators of life rather than players, and are no longer responsible for the success of the show. “If all he wants to do is to read and play cards, he could do it just as well at home, surely? And much more cheaply.”

  “Oh, I know, Miss Carver, I know.” Mrs Forrester wagged her head forlornly. “But, you see” (in a lower tone) “his father isn’t—well, isn’t living with us any longer, and I don’t want poor Cedric to feel that he’s missing anything. Especially as he’ll be going on a visit to his father straight after,” she added, rather irrelevantly—irrelevantly, at least, as it would seem to anyone unfamiliar with the weary competition for their child’s approval which besets so many separated parents.

  Miss Carver continued to look disapproving. Pointedly she withdrew her neatly laced foot as the tide of patience cards crept nearer.

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not speaking personally, you understand, Mrs Forrester; but it does seem to me that the children nowadays don’t enjoy their holidays as we used to do. To us, a seaside holiday really was a holiday. It was the only time when we could discard our black stockings and our petticoats, and run bare-legged in just a holland overall. You can’t imagine—you can’t imagine—what it was like to feel the sun on our bare legs for the first time!”

  For a moment, the memory of that long-ago ecstasy illuminated Miss Carver’s lined face, tautened her tired body as if in readiness for that first enchanted scamper across the sands of sixty years ago. Then, quickly, she recaptured the thread of her discourse:

  “But nowadays, when children spend the whole summer with next to nothing on in their back gardens, and even in the street—well, naturally, half the point of going to the seaside has vanished. And then again, for us, a holiday meant a chance to be with our parents for much of the day. Ordinarily, you know, we were kept very strictly in the nursery, in the care of our nurse. We rarely met our parents on equal terms, as—”

  Miss Carver stopped in mid-sentence. No doubt she had been going to say: “As children do nowadays”; but the sight of the untroubled figure on the floor, now whistling faintly through its teeth, must have daunted her. How could any parent, let alone this particular one, ever hope to be counted as the equal of this self-possessed creature, with his almost superhuman indifference to anyone’s concerns but his own?

  While listening with half her mind to this interchange, Meg had meanwhile been scanning the room for her eldest sister. She now caught sight of her, at the far end of the room. Mildred was not sitting on the coveted armchair this time, but on a sofa in the corner; and Meg saw that she was wearing the expression of fixed animation that meant she was talking to a man. In fact, Meg noticed the expression before she noticed the man, so small and insignificant did he seem beside Mildred’s colourful presence. Meg was not a little surprised, therefore, that as she and Isabel moved in that direction, the insignificant little figure should suddenly burst into song:

  “If the line AB is paral-lel to the li-ine CD—then the opposite a-angles are eequal—” he carolled and then, returning to his normal, slightly falsetto voice, he continued: “Like that—every single thing I said during his lesson, he made me sing it! Everything! You can imagine what a fool I felt! But it worked, you know. Within a year, my stammer was cured. Completely. Except for just now and then if I’m n-nervous….”

  His voice wavered as he saw Meg and Isabel bearing down upon them. Mildred also saw them, without, Meg fancied, very much pleasure.

  “Oh—hullo, dears,” she greeted them, rather perfunctorily. “I’d forgotten you were coming. Do sit down—er—somewhere. Oh—this is Captain Cockerill—” But the little captain was on his feet already, his beaming gallantry only a little marred by the impression he gave of being tangled up in his own legs as he attempted simultaneously to offer Isabel his own seat on the sofa, and to secure for Meg a spindly little chair which was so far successfully evading him on the other side of a polished mahogany table.

  Tranquillity was finally restored, only, alas, to reveal that none of them could think of anything to say. “Do sing to us again” was the only thing that came into Meg’s mind, but she discarded it as unlikely to ease the situation.

  As so often happens, the uncomfortable little pause coincided with a lull in conversation all over the room; and the lull forthwith gathered momentum until it became a stony silence, as the remaining talkers, one after another, realised that their remarks could now be overheard by the entire company.

  Now indeed came the test of courage; and, surprisingly enough (so unpredictable are the different brands of valour) it was Mrs Forrester who first spoke.

  “I believe it’s going to rain,” she said.

  This heroic pronouncement had the desired effect, and relief ran like a current of warmth through the lounge. It soon became apparent, too, that the relief was not due solely to the breaking of an awkward silence: there was an unmistakable look of furtive hope about many of the faces that turned with conventional concern towards the window. Was a comfortable afternoon of idleness in store for them after all?

  “Oh dear, I’m afraid it does look rather unsettled,” exclaimed a pale little woman, trying to disguise the satisfaction with which she unfolded again the embroidery which she had been dutifully putting away. “I fear” (with ill-suppressed eagerness) “I fear
we must resign outselves to an afternoon indoors.”

  “I fear so” … “Very threatening” … “I noticed the glass had fallen” … The chorus of guilty hope was swelling; library books were reopened with stealthy relief; feet were replaced on footstools; knitting-needles resumed their comfortable clicking.

  And then, suddenly, all was shattered. It might have been the voice of Nanny herself, ringing across the decades:

  “I think it’s going to clear up,” Miss Carver announced briskly. “It’s just the day for a good walk.” Heedless of the ruined hopes she was leaving behind her, Miss Carver gathered up her belongings and tripped out of the room.

  No one’s moral courage could stand up to this. A few last, forlorn glances were cast out of the window, where a streak of blue on the horizon was relentlessly growing bigger; and then the whole room, the whole house, was astir with preparations.

  Captain Cockerill was gallantly anxious that Mildred and her two sisters should accompany him for a walk along the promenade; and Meg could only hope that the poor little man was prepared for the way in which this simple proposal, in the hands of Mildred and Isabel, at once took on the character of a large-scale manoeuvre. First, Mildred had to change into an entirely new outfit, including a different shade of nail varnish which took a quarter of an hour to dry. After this, Isabel had to decide whether or not to take her raincoat. This exhausting topic, which was apt at the best of times to reduce Isabel to quivering uncertainty, seemed on this occasion to be straining her powers of decision almost to the point of paralysis. For the question now depended

  not merely on whether or not it was going to rain, but also on whether or not they would be coming back to the hotel before returning to the caravan. The contemplation of this double set of pros and cons, combined with the conflicting advice of her three companions, was rapidly reducing Isabel to a pitiable state, in which she could neither stop talking about the raincoat nor fetch it from its peg: Meg had finally to come to the rescue by stating firmly that she, Meg, had no intention whatever of coming back to the hotel, and that the coat must, therefore, be brought with them.

  But by this time Mrs Forrester, with the inconspicuous skill of the solitary holiday-maker, had managed to attach herself to the walking party; and so now they all had to wait while Cedric finished his patience, added up a column of figures nine inches long, and divided the answer by eighteen.

  And so, at last, they set out, Captain Cockerill still evincing an undiminished enthusiasm for the expedition which, in the circumstances, was little short of heroic. The wind had risen; it was coming in from the open sea, cutting with damp ferocity across the parade where most people by now were cowering in shelters eating chocolate and waiting for it to be tea-time. But Captain Cockerill, daunted neither by the weather nor by his rather overpowering female escort, strode jauntily along, his head held high in defiance of his short stature, and with every appearance of enjoyment.

  “Wonderful sight it must be in winter!” he exclaimed, gazing out enthusiastically over the grey tangle of water. “The sea comes right up over the parade, you know, during the winter storms.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” contributed Cedric—the first words he had uttered that afternoon. “It used to, but they built the parade higher five years ago. It’s in the Guide Book.”

  “Oh. Ah.” For one second Captain Cockerill seemed a little at a loss. Then, with renewed sprightliness, he turned to consult his rather depressed entourage about where they would like to go? A good tramp over the cliffs, perhaps? Or round the point to Whitesands Bay, if the tide wasn’t too high?

  “What about the Pier?” suggested Mildred, her whole soul expanding as she contemplated its nearness, its roofed-in parts, and the café at the end of it.

  “Oh yes, the Pier!” Mrs Forrester clapped her hands with a display of girlish rapture that was only partly feigned, for she, too, was sustained by the same vision as Mildred. “Cedric will love the slot machines,” she added, anxious to dispel any suspicion that she shared Mildred’s middle-aged preference for comfort. “I’ll give you a nice lot of pennies, Dear, and you can play with all the machines one after another.”

  Cedric glanced at his mother pityingly.

  “They aren’t any good,” he explained patiently. “Unless you’ve got time to really study them, and work out how to get your money back every time. But,” he added, with the air of one offering consolation to a disappointed child, “you can give me the money you would have given me for the slot machines and I’ll put it in my savings.”

  But neither Cedric, nor the wind, nor his unenterprising companions seemed able to depress Captain Cockerill.

  “The Pier it is!” he acquiesced brightly. “Here we are. See? The fourth longest pier on the South Coast. Built in 1875—”

  “No, it wasn’t,” said Cedric. “It was in 1910. That notice is wrong. In 1875 they only—”

  Meg did not hear the remainder of this dissertation. Indeed, the whole of the following hour remained in her memory almost as a blank, so numbed did she allow herself to become with cold and boredom. She remembered, vaguely, that the afternoon was coloured by Mildred’s search for a cup of tea (the pier café had, as usual, proved to be closed); by Isabel’s intermittent and profitless speculations as to whether they were leaving the children for too long; and by Mrs Forrester’s wavering attempts to explain to Cedric why it was that they had had to come for the walk at all. Meg did not really rouse herself until, on their way home, they came across the Fortune-teller’s booth.

  It was Mildred who first noticed it.

  “Oh, I must be done!” she cried, her mood, for the first time, matching her outfit—from the outset it had struck Meg as a pity to put on so new and colourful a suit just to look sulky in. “I must go in,” continued Mildred. “How much do you think it costs? I don’t seem to have brought my bag….”

  Having thus extracted half a crown from the still valiantly smiling captain, Mildred disappeared inside the flapping canvas.

  Disappeared for a long, long time. Long enough, at any rate, for the rest of the party (more in search of shelter from the wind than of entertainment) to explore the other booths in the vicinity. They achieved one sixpennyworth of warmth in the company of a South American coypu, billed as the Largest Rat in the World; and another, rather longer, in contemplation of the Sheep with Six Legs. Or sixteen—or sixty—the claim would have made no difference, since the creature remained obstinately lying down throughout their visit, staring at them with liquid, expressionless eyes. The Indian Snake Juggler proved little more exciting. A rather dusty looking cobra lay coiled on the floor in a dreamless sleep, while the juggler—a lady of indeterminate nationality touched up with walnut juice—reclined in a chair at its side, draped in emerald green and with shiny black ringlets drooping round her lack-lustre countenance. It seemed that neither she nor the cobra were required by the terms of their contract to show any signs of life; and so it was not long before the party trooped out into the cold again.

  The irrepressible Captain Cockerill, however, seemed to have been quite excited by the dismal little spectacle, and the moment they got outside he began telling them about his time in India. “You wouldn’t believe the things some of those chaps could do with cobras,” he recalled. “They could make the blighters sway and wave their heads about in time to music. I’ve seen it myself. And sometimes one of these johnnies would get hold of a cobra by one end and hold it out stiff as a poker. A creature six or seven feet long, you understand. Marvellous! Some kind of hypnosis, I suppose.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Cedric. “It’s just a matter of pressing a certain part of the vertebra near the base of the head. It’s quite easy. I could do it myself.”

  “You shouldn’t talk like that, Dear,” said his mother, vaguely, as if not quite sure what it was that she was reproving—the contradicting of his elders—the boasting about untried skills—or the mere idea of handling snakes at all. Not that it mattered which she meant, for Ce
dric, of course, was paying no attention to her at all.

  “Cobras make very good pets,” he was explaining, in his informative way. “They’re very intelligent, and very tame, too, if you train them properly. You can get one for forty-five shillings.”

  The serene confidence with which he produced this esoteric and unverifiable piece of information was somehow too much for Meg.

  “No, you can’t,” she snapped—at random, and for no other reason than to show him that even adults will turn at bay sometimes. “No, you can’t. They cost about a hundred pounds.”

  The wildness of the guess made even her own voice falter. Cedric gazed at her pityingly.

  “Where did you hear that?” he enquired; but happily, before Meg found herself provoked into asserting that she had been brought up on a snake farm in Central America, they were interrupted. Mildred, who had rejoined them some minutes ago, and had been waiting impatiently for a chance to claim the full attention of the company, could restrain herself no longer.

  “My dears, she’s marvellous!” she exclaimed, taking an arm each of Meg and Captain Cockerill. “She’s simply wonderful! She seemed to know all about me straight away. Would you believe it, she told me right off that I was married to a man rich in this world’s goods, but poor in understanding and sympathy!”—a single glance, Meg reflected, at Mildred’s smart clothes and her discontented face, would be evidence enough of this—“And she said I was highly strung, and suffered from insomnia—” The trite catalogue continued to its foolish and foreseeable conclusion: “And so she says that for five guineas she can give me a really full reading. With a crystal. She says I’m the sort of person who’d be really worth while, because I have the right vibrations. But I’d have to go to her house, she says, because there’s a fuss with the police if she uses a crystal here, and so—”