No. He stops dead. Molly flies over his head, over the jump, it is all so slow, so graceful, picks up her hat, takes Shylock by the reins (he is standing there quiet now, shocked at what he has done) and leads him out of the ring.
The crowd mumbles sympathetically, wipes its brow, there is a general feeling of exertion over. The jumping proceeds.
First Stirling Moss, and now this. It has been a bad day.
‘Gosh, what rotten luck, Molly.’
‘He can be such a pig.’ Her eyes red, searching for the handkerchief in her sleeve.
I look away. ‘I’m terribly sorry.’
Blow it all out of your nose, the whole world of those objectionable beasts, then come to me, Molly, I will console you.
‘I was afraid you might have been hurt.’
‘If only I had been!’ she cries, bursts into tears for her shameful graceful flying fall, for having been mocked by a horse, by her own Shylock.
‘Oh, go away, Teddy, please go away!’
*
August the fourteenth, a Monday evening, and the sun is striking back at the clouds, issuing purple and black summonses, writs, judgments, while the sky cringes away from the west.
I walk alone in the avenues of yews, muttering fragments of poems. Pigeons wheel, calling among themselves, like a family unpacking after a journey. A slow black rook flies ploddingly towards Cartersfield. God is unjust. There is no truth except there is no truth. Molly is going on Wednesday. Blackness is all. Very well, then, I am a man, I will have blackness. Give me blackness, blacker than black. And the telephone has not rung for me.
My mother calls me home across the quicksands of sixteen. Dinner. I am not hungry. I never want to eat again.
‘Teddy!’
Perhaps I am hungry after all.
*
Tuesday morning, and I lifted the receiver and dialled the number and Molly was out but she would call when she got back. Into the dining-room for an orange, to the kitchen for a lump of sugar. Sucking the sweetness of an August morning, I walked round the garden, sniffing the fragrant exhaust-and-hay smell of the motor-mower. Arthur was spinning it round at the far end of the lawn. The noise was good, grew louder, deafened, died away again. I would never drive such a petty machine. No chance to double-declutch, no opportunity for fancy pedal-work.
‘Teddy!’
Shall I answer?
‘Teddy!’
‘I’m here!’
‘Telephone!’
The crew-cut grass scarcely feels the weight of my feet as I speed, through the gear-box and into top, brake at the door, in and slam, to the phone.
‘Teddy?’
‘Molly?’
‘Hello.’
‘How are you, Molly? I mean, why don’t you—if you haven’t anything else on, that is—why don’t you come over?’
Pause. The line hums to itself, haws a little, like a cook mumbling over her pots on the stove. I have been too fast, I should have——
‘Well, that would be awfully nice. What are you doing?’
‘Nothing, really. It would be nice, I was thinking, with you going away tomorrow—I mean—we could think of something to do, couldn’t we?’
‘Yes, all right. I’ll just go and ask Mummy. Hang on.’
The line is now a choir, high up near the roof of a great cathedral, the basses and trebles soaring out, then the low continuo of alto and tenor. They are singing our song, Molly, they are singing our song.
‘She says all right. After lunch. I’ll be over about two, if that’s O.K.’
‘Yes, yes. Marvellous. I’ll think of something by the time you get here.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Something to do.’
‘Oh. Well, at two, then.’
‘Yes. And—Molly? I just wanted to say how sorry I was about the gymkhana. Really.’
‘But didn’t you stay?’
‘No, we went home after the jumping. What happened?’
‘Shylock and I won the bare-back jumping!’
‘You won!’ Bare-back, and jodhpurs, knee and thigh, against the bare animal back. And I missed it. Good. I could not have watched her pressing her knees into the bare back of Shylock, no, not that.
‘How marvellous! Congratulations. No one told me.’
‘It was rather nice, wasn’t it?’
‘Gosh, yes. Stupendous.’
‘Well, it was just my lucky day, I suppose. And after the proper jumping, I was just determined——’
‘You did very well. It wasn’t your fault. It was Shylock.’
‘No, it was me. The rosette—the one we got for the potato race—had got loose, and was flapping near his eye.’
‘What an awful shame. Rotten luck.’
‘He couldn’t see properly.’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Well, see you this afternoon. Mummy says she wants to use the phone.’
‘O.K., Molly. I can’t wait.’
‘Good-bye.’
‘Good-bye.’
My mother is arranging flowers in the hall. Listening in, probably. No privacy, anywhere.
‘Who was that, Teddy?’
‘Molly.’
‘Oh?’
‘She’s coming over this afternoon.’
‘Oh? What will you do?’
‘Oh, things. You know.’
She tidies a final zinnia. ‘Good, darling.’
*
Molly arrives in the family Rover. Her mother says: ‘I’ll be back about six, darling. Have a nice time.’ She drives off without saying anything to me except ‘Hello’ and ‘Good-bye’.
‘What would you like to do, Molly?’
‘Could I have a drink, please? I’m terribly thirsty, I don’t know why.’
In the kitchen Mrs Clark, our cook, is finishing the washing-up from lunch. We get in her way, choosing among lime-juice, orange and lemon squashes, and cider. Molly takes orange. I fetch her ice, mix it for her with a silver swizzle-stick, help myself, to be bold, to cider. Then we go out to deck-chairs on the lawn. We sit and talk of this and that, mostly of her triumph at the gymkhana. I look covertly at her legs, swinging freely from under her dress, think of them clamped to Shylock’s back.
Then I say: ‘Would you like to go for a spin, Molly?’
‘You’re not allowed to drive, are you?’
‘Oh yes. To the end of the drive.’ And into the sunset with you, Molly Simpson. ‘Would you like to see what I can make the old Ford do?’
‘All right.’
The sun has gone briefly behind some dank-looking clouds. A small wind is testing itself in corners down at the garage. We look in the harness-room. Jane is there, polishing her bridle.
‘Are you going to let him drive you?’
‘Now you be quiet, Jane.’ I’ve had enough of your betrayals, sister, ex-co-driver. Silence.
‘He’s a maniac behind the wheel. You’d better take a crash-helmet.’
‘Oh, really, Jane. You know I’m perfectly safe.’
‘Is he a maniac?’ says Molly, her eyes grave and gay, daring me on, and timid.
‘Well, I won’t go with him any more,’ says Jane.
‘No, you’d rather play pat-ball or tennis, or whatever you call it. You’re too young to enjoy driving.’ That should crush her. ‘Let’s go, Molly.’
The back spring has been repaired. The car looks unusually dignified, I washed it this morning. It sits four-square and dumpy, reliable, like an old woman behind a market-stall.
I open the door for her, shut it gently. It has to be slammed to shut properly. ‘Excuse me.’ Slam. Skip round the nose, and in, slam, and ‘Here we are!’
I back with circumspection. There are tell-tale traces on the door of the garage. We turn in the yard. We are off. First gear, a brief harrumph, second gear down to the house, grinding a little. Now, safely beyond recall, we rev up and into third (three gears only, but good ones) and now St Stirling Moss and the blessed Mike Hawthorn and the venerable
Donald Campbell be with me, and the gravel begins to spit against the mudguards.
‘Ah!’ The corner is nicely judged, just a whisp of a skid, and then, oh dullness and boredom and the end of the drive.
‘I’m not supposed to go any further.’
Two dull spots of rain on the windscreen. Big splatters of frustration. The white gate hangs open. Beyond is the river of life, the black magic of a tarred road.
‘Let’s go for a little drive. Just round the lanes. No one will know.’
‘But, Teddy——’
But it is too late, we are off, we move cautiously to the very edge of the gravel, the frontier-post of sixteen. I am a spy in the adult world of public highways, this slim black line between hedgerows, wandering past the Thomsons’ farm and the three cottages which are Mendleton, and the little chapel where the rector comes once a month to preach to himself between the cramping walls of a nineteenth-century manorial ambition.
‘Teddy, you shouldn’t have, you know you shouldn’t have!’
‘But I’m perfectly safe, Molly. No one will know. We’ll just go down to the crossroads and then come straight back.’
The crossroads are a whole long mile away. I drive with great caution, thirty-five—‘Look, I’m only going thirty-five’—then, well, yes, perhaps a little faster, and the needle creeps up to fifty and Molly says: ‘That’s too fast,’ so I slow down a little, and the road curves and winds like a stream searching for a river, and there, suddenly, is the crossroads.
Molly looks scared. ‘You shouldn’t have.’
I take her hand. ‘Don’t be silly, Molly.’
But she takes her hand away again and says: ‘Now don’t be stupid. I want to go back, please.’
‘We are going back.’
It is raining now, and the wipers are on, thlap, thlap, across the glass. As we round a bend, just before we are on home ground again, we see someone in the road, walking.
‘It’s Miss Spurgeon!’
Miss Spurgeon, Miss Spurgeon, your’re seventy and hale, walking your afternoon walk as every day of your long-nosed life, you have to be here, and it coming on to rain, and, naturally, to stop us and: ‘Why, if it isn’t Teddy Gilchrist and Molly Simpson.’
‘Hello.’
‘Do you think an old woman can trouble you young people to give her a lift back to Cartersfield? It’s raining quite hard and I came out not thinking….’
Disaster. Stark as the finger of God.
‘Of course, Miss Spurgeon, please get in.’
‘Thank you so much. You are sure you aren’t going anywhere, are you?’ and chatter and spinster and blather and oh God damn it why did this have to happen all the way, all the long black illegal way to the town, and please God, if You’re there, don’t let me be seen, I’ll never spray gravel again like gunshot, I’ll be good to my mother and father, just this once, God, please let me get away with it, I know I shouldn’t have, God, are You listening, and don’t let Molly say anything to give us away (‘Yes, Jane is fourteen now, Miss Spurgeon,’ ‘My, how you children do spring up, and your mother?’) and there’s only another mile, and, dear Christ in Heaven, I’d forgotten, there’s the main road to cross, and the traffic, my hands are slipping and sweating on the wheel, and it has, by God it has, stopped raining.
‘Oh, stop a moment, Teddy. I think it’s stopped.’
I believe in You, God, I really do.
‘Do you know, I think I’ll walk on again, if it’s really stopped. I don’t like to miss my walk. And you’ve been so kind already.’
‘Just as you like, Miss Spurgeon, but you mustn’t get wet.’
Get soaked to the skin, die of pneumonia tomorrow, Miss Spurgeon. All your long malicious life you have been spreading the vilest gossip, and often you’ve been right, though always for the most disturbing reasons, poking in muck-heaps and love-nests, Miss Spurgeon, and if you tell anyone about this … But of course she will. The damage is doomed, the sky has collapsed, it’s a leaky roof, patched up with blue, treacherous blue, blue holes, and God, I’m not quite convinced yet.
‘Yes,’ she is saying, ‘it was only a shower, there won’t be another for half an hour or so. I have plenty of time.’
And out she gets, all smiles and thank-yous, and she’s right, women like that always are, the sun is soothing down the rain-rumpled feelings, and the shower has gone off to London to see the queen and her people.
We turn in a gateway and go slowly, oh so slowly, back.
‘She’ll tell the whole town,’ I say.
‘You are an awful fool,’ says Molly.
‘She’ll tell everyone.’
‘About how kind we were.’
‘How she met us in the rain.’
‘So fortunately.’
‘Damn her.’
‘Thank goodness I’m going away tomorrow.’
Unkindest cut! In silence we pass the customs at the white gate hanging open. To slam it behind us, keep out the story, fight all Spurgeons to the death. Sentries, be at your keenest, keep her out, keep her quiet, kill her. Put up a huge notice: MISS SPURGEON KEEP OUT. Cut out her tongue.
No sap now to lock brakes and tail-spin at the corner, the gravel susurrating smug and fat beneath the wheels, the puddles smacking their lips together. To the garage. So, disheartened, not even the trace of a manner left, Molly opens her own door, I am too lacklustre to notice.
‘I hope it’ll be all right,’ she says.
To the house. Mooning about, looking at old papers, The Tatler, no one we know, Country Life, The Field. My mother comes in two or three times, smiles brilliant and thin, goes out again.
‘You’re leaving tomorrow.’
‘Yes.’
I stand by the window. It begins to rain again. Too late, Miss Spurgeon is already telling it, over her tea. True love is always fettered. We are the victims of an environment. What am I going to do for the rest of these intolerable holidays?
‘It’s so sad,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘Oh, everything.’
A merciful release, the Simpsons’ Rover, black as a hearse, shushes to a stop at the front door. In the back seat a riding-crop, a jockey-cap.
‘I’d love to stop for a drink, but really we have so much packing to finish tonight.’
‘It’s very good of you to bring Molly out,’ says my mother.
‘I shall be thankful when they can drive themselves,’ says Mrs Simpson.
Gone the grave face, perhaps she has some deadly sickness, that is why she is so pale, I shall never see her again, this is my last glimpse of her, the rain settling in for the night and all eternity.
Oh, Molly, beware of the French with their sneaky ways, their easy greasy charm, the oil in their hair and their little black moustaches, for you are mine, Molly, and one day soon we will be married in Cartersfield church, and there will be twelve bridesmaids in silver-grey dresses for this day of rain.
But she is dying. They are taking her away to die. Of consumption, perhaps? Oh, don’t waste away, Molly, waste not and want not, love must not wither on a foreign soil. I shall treasure my last glimpse of your face so grave, carry it to the grave, mine or yours—no, yours alone—and there I shall kneel and weep for our love which might have been, which lasted a thousand reels and more in my projecting head.
*
Heat-wave. August the twentieth. I am sunbathing in the garden, reading Dylan Thomas. He understood life. ‘Never until the mankind-making flower-fathering and——
‘Teddy!’
Shall I answer?
‘Teddy!’
‘Yes!’
‘Come here. I want to speak to you.’
Sluggishly I go.
‘What is this I hear from Miss Spurgeon?’
Damned lies.
‘What, Mummy?’
‘She says she met you in the road in the car and you took her more than half-way home.’
‘Well, yes. You see——’
‘I shall tell your father
.’
*
Ostracized from home and love, I sink with the sun, the exhausted day, chased from a heat-wave heaven by the fury of my black father, the night.
My heart swells. My finger-tips sense every breadth of breeze. The yews huddle about me, sighing their traditional lament of evergreen darkness and death. Stillness like the moment before the world was made. There is no God, no Justice. You say I have no manners. Was it not well-mannered to help an old lady in a storm? Well, then …
The spire of Cartersfield church points a forensic finger at the stars. The cows stand absorbed in evening beneath the first scatter of twinkles. One bright glimmer. Perhaps it is Venus. She is going out, once and for all.
A draught of air, cool, like an inhalation of the earth. I walk back up the avenue of yews. Their roots are like the knuckles of skeleton giants. Dust beneath my feet. Where is the medieval lady who walks here? They say she is weeping for her lover, trampled beneath some Cypriot castle’s walls.
I will console you, lady. I too know what it is to suffer, to taste the bitter rind of misunderstanding, to be unloved. You may take my hand.
But you are not here.
I dawdle, stray wisps of music in my head, like a wind sighing among the cobwebs in a deserted attic. I stop. I sink to the earth, stretch out, close my eyes. My lips meet a knuckle of root. Yews are poisonous. I kiss, but I do not bite.
After a hot day, after a hard day, what coolness beneath the yews. They have endured, they are insensate, not even animals. To live beyond the unendurable, that is the lot of man. I open my eyes to a deep grey dusk, here under the yews. Stars shine at the sunset end of the avenue. I roll over on to my back and stare up at the black impenetrable branches.
4. The Brigadier
A Disturbing Influence Page 7