I sat and listened to the old boy, admiring the effortless way in which he disguised his real motives behind some brilliant claptrap about patriotic duty. He must have been the only man in Cartersfield who didn’t realize that his only objection was that the billboard was so close to his drive.
‘I’m glad we agree about this, Drysdale,’ he said, and his eyes grew cloudy for a moment, no doubt thinking of some of the major issues on which we had clashed in the past—the bus-shelter, for instance, and the new public lavatory. I was thinking myself about how nice it would be to get back into opposition again. Hobson managed to make me feel like his batman when he spoke to me, and I am not, I like to think, the batman type.
He went off without accepting my offer of a third drink, but I stayed and had a chat with Sam. As a landlord, Sam hears every side of every question, and never gives an opinion, though it’s usually quite clear what he thinks.
‘Jack says the Brigadier can’t touch him,’ he said, polishing a glass in rather a detached way, as though he knew all the answers but didn’t want to embarrass me with them, since I might not find them to my liking.
‘Don’t tell me you’re on Jack’s side, Sam.’
‘I don’t take sides,’ he said, still polishing. ‘I’m in trade. I don’t mind an advert. Cheers the place up. Outdoors is different, perhaps. I haven’t thought about it.’
This meant that he was on Jack’s side. And he had a point, I suppose. His bar would have been a very dreary and dank place without those Schweppes girls and Guinness animals all over the walls.
‘What do you think will happen?’ I said.
‘It’ll all die down in a week or two,’ said Sam. He nodded at the bottle of sherry. ‘Ever tried that stuff?’
‘I hate sherry. The headmaster always serves it before dinner. Not that he asks me more than twice a year. It turns my stomach.’
‘Well,’ said Sam, ‘he’s a pretty sour man, the Brigadier. I don’t reckon that stuff helps him any.’
‘I dare say it doesn’t. Cheers, Sam. I must be going.’
‘Don’t be gone long,’ said Sam, automatically. I don’t know where he picked up the expression, but it’s one of the things that make me suspect Sam of having a doubtful past.
Thinking about the whole business, it seemed pretty clear that Sam was right, though, about Hobson’s inability to do anything. And as it turned out all his allies failed him. The CPRE let him down, Gwatkin let him down, the Member was away on a fact-finding tour of the grouse moors by the time Hobson’s letter reached him, there was no one left who gave a thought to the matter after about a fortnight. Except Hobson and me. Even Harry Mengel, who had been, for ideological reasons, strongly on our side to begin with, lost interest and went back to his shop and a girl called Joan Cartwright whom he was trying to seduce, in his usual impetuous way, by rushing her up to London a couple of evenings a week.
‘Hell,’ he said one morning, when I went in to get some cigarettes, ‘the thing’s bloody awful, of course, but it’s better than a petrol station. Jack Solomons would put one up like that if someone suggested it to him.’
‘Oh my God,’ I said, ‘don’t even suggest the suggestion. Hobson would have a heart attack.’
‘Well,’ said Harry, unsympathetically, ‘he is getting on a bit, isn’t he?’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘I know it isn’t,’ said Harry. ‘Look, I’ve got more important things to do than natter with you all day. Do you want these cigarettes or not?’
So there we were, Hobson and I, an island of decency, as it were, in a sea of indifference, and I knew that at any moment the issue of the carnival would come up, and then we would return to our usual positions of hostility, our little island neatly partitioned. There was talk of putting flags out across the streets, an idea which filled me with horror and disgust, but which was certain to appeal to all the worst in Hobson. You only have to mention the queen or the flag and he starts stiffening his back, and if you’re lucky you can see the lump bulging in his throat. We have our carnival in the middle of September, and a splendid thing it is, in a way, with everyone turning out and trying to be polite to each other, and an atmosphere of calm self-content. But recently there had been an attempt by certain dastardly commercial interests to widen the scope of the thing, to turn it into a county affair, generally to muck it up. And I have always been of the opinion that Cartersfield is a much nicer place when it keeps to itself, that men with blonde women don’t add to the town’s attractions, that any attempt to bring in visitors undermines the whole ethic of the place. I am, you might say, a Little Cartersfieldsman. Flags across the street seemed to me then, and seem, for that matter, now, a desecration and worse still, only a beginning of something much worse. Besides, I detest flag-waving and any other form of hysterical patriotism. If a great victory has been won a small flag may not be out of place, but to deck the narrow thoroughfares of Cartersfield with bunting just for the sake of the carnival is absolutely absurd. On this, though, Hobson couldn’t be trusted. Almost certainly the thought of flags would blind him with patriotism, and creeping commercialism would have crept another few inches. So I didn’t think our pact would hold up very much longer, since it was now the middle of August, and the question of bunting would come up at the next meeting of the Carnival Committee, of which he was chairman.
One evening about that time, when hope seemed gone for good, Hobson took the totally unprecedented and dangerous step of asking me to dinner. This was meant to be, I suppose, a mark of great honour, since they hardly ever entertained except on an exchange basis with other ex-officers and their wives in the neighbourhood, and certainly never undistinguished schoolmasters such as myself. I pondered a bit before accepting, and finally did so with reluctance, mainly because I wanted to know what the inside of his house was like. Mrs Hobson’s cooking, it was widely reported, did not go much beyond iron rations, with a strong emphasis on corned beef, and since there was no conceivable way in which I could return the hospitality, the whole thing was deeply embarrassing. However, banking on a rupture of relations in the near future, I put on the unworn suit which Jack Solomons had sold me and set off to Hill Crest, the Hobson home.
As it turned out, the popular estimate of Mrs. Hobson’s cooking was pretty accurate. She gave us what seemed to be mutton stew, in which I searched with less and less hope for something more edible than parsnip, my most detested vegetable. Hobson was very gloomy that evening, and chewed away to himself, so I had to try and talk to Evangeline, who was wearing a high-necked bottle-green dress, and whose hair still wasn’t quite grey enough to make her as distinguished as she no doubt hoped. The general festivity of the occasion can be judged by this sample conversation.
‘Are you a gardener, Mr Drysdale?’
‘No, Mrs Hobson. I have never much cared for flowers.’
‘Oh. I am very fond of them.’
‘I suffer from hay-fever.’ (This was a lie, of course, but I felt I had to make some excuse for my blunder.)
‘I hope you don’t mind the roses. Do they bother you?’
‘Not at all, not at all.’
‘My sister has the same trouble. She lives in Kent, you know. She surfers appallingly, she says, during the hop-picking season.’
‘She never picked a hop in her life,’ said Hobson, startling both of us.
‘Really, dear, I didn’t say she picked them herself. I simply said she suffers terribly from hay-fever in the picking season.’
‘Terrible people from London go down and pick ’em,’ said Hobson. ‘Frightful job.’
‘I believe it’s very hard work,’ I said.
Hobson chewed for a moment, then said ‘Hops’ with great bitterness.
Well, as you can imagine, that ended that conversation, and the evening trailed on in much the same way, with me glancing covertly at my watch, Mrs Hobson doing her best to find some common topic, with a total lack of success, and Hobson treating us both as though we were junior sta
ff-officers at the dinner-table of a famous general. And I simply couldn’t eat the parsnips.
However, after dinner things cheered up a bit, mostly because Mrs Hobson pretended she had to do the washing-up, thus leaving us together with some whisky. Why she made the pretence I really don’t know, since everyone in Cartersfield knows exactly who works for whom, and it is no secret that Mrs Badham comes in every morning to do Mrs Hobson’s housework for her, but I dare say the poor woman wanted a rest after her conversational labours. Anyway, there we two sat, looking at the unlit fire and wondering when the winter would descend and whether it was really correct to say it had ever left the previous April. Although the outside of Hobson’s house is impeccably Victorian, even to the extent of having a turret, inside it’s the most horrible mixture of styles. The great tragedy of the Hobsons’ lives was, and still is, their son Hubert, who is never mentioned. He was, however, still mentionable, and perhaps even lovable, though it is hard to believe it, at the time the Hobsons retired and moved into Hill Crest. Hubert was then about twenty-five, as far as I can remember, and he had already appalled his father by keeping out of the war on account of flat feet or asthma or one of those dodges. In the way that only really nasty young men do, he had gone into the interior decorating business. The interior of Hill Crest was one of his earliest creations, and he had, no doubt, done his best, which was simply awful. What with Regency wall-paper, William Morris chairs, pouffes all over the place, velvet drapery and chi-chi by the ton, he must have cost his parents a good deal of their capital, and I must say that if I had been Mrs Hobson I would much rather have spent the money on a good cook. No two walls were the same colour, and most of the chairs were designed for a human buttock a good deal smaller than is normal and decent. Poor old Hobson, who would have been much happier in something simple, like a dog-kennel, moved round the house with an air of great distress. But his wife made what can only be called a sporting attempt to live with it, and by the time they’d decided the thing was really too hideous to endure they could no longer afford to have it put straight again. In fifty years’ time, perhaps, Hill Crest will be sought out by connoisseurs, but definitely not at the moment.
Well, sitting in the ‘den’, which was more like the dressing-room of one of the seedier kinds of chorus-girl, but which Hobson had tried to make habitable by adding pictures of his regiment sitting with folded arms, cartoons of himself in his polo-playing days, culled, I am sure, from regimental magazines, and even a snapshot, much enlarged, of what appeared to be Monty ticking him off very sharply—sitting there, with his past on the walls, Hobson became slightly less gloomy.
‘I’m damned if I’m beaten yet,’ he said, sucking hard on his pipe, which immediately went out. He tried to light it again, burning his fingers with monotonous regularity, the grate slowly filling with matches. Watching him, I suddenly had a brilliant idea. But at the same moment Hobson had his.
‘I’ve got it!’ he said, and let his pipe alone for a moment. ‘I’ve got it, Drysdale, by God if I haven’t!’
‘What?’ I said.
‘I’ve got the way to dish that fellow Solomons. Can’t think why it never occurred to me before. A night manœuvre. Are you game?’
‘I really don’t know,’ I said. ‘What is the plan?’
‘We simply go and chop the damned thing down. Chop it down and take it away. Throw it in the gravel-pit lake.’
‘I don’t think you can really get away with that,’ I said. ‘It sounds a bit too much like John Buchan to me.’
‘Damned good writer, Buchan,’ said Hobson, looking at me suspiciously. ‘Met him once. Awfully nice chap.’
‘I dare say he was,’ I said, ‘but you still can’t go round destroying property. There are laws against it.’
‘Ah,’ said Hobson, ‘but you see they’d never suspect me. They’d think it was those Teddy boys from Slough.’
‘Brigadier, I’ve never heard anything so immoral in my life.’
‘Never cared much for morality,’ said Hobson. ‘Not my line. Always liked men with some guts. Never liked sending people to the colonel just because of a bit of high spirits. Hated having to deal with defaulters. Got to have discipline, of course. But there’s no point in sending a man to jail just because he has high spirits.’
Well, as you may imagine, I was more than a little taken aback by this side of a man who I had always supposed hankered to be made a magistrate. His idea had excited him, he looked positively happy.
‘By God,’ he said, ‘I’ll show that Solomons.’
I’d never felt sorry for Brigadier Hobson before, but I did now.
‘Now come, Brigadier,’ I said, ‘you know as well as I do that you can’t go and chop down a billboard in the middle of the night. You’ll be fined. You’ll be the laughing-stock of the whole town.’
‘Do you really think so?’ he said. Underneath all his bluster and beefiness, I decided, Brigadier Hobson was just another child who has never grown up. I teach children, so I know what the percentage is, and it’s a lot higher even than you might think. Now he looked like a schoolboy cricketer in the rain. But I can’t feel sorry for Hobson for very long, and anyway I had an idea of my own, and furthermore I suddenly saw how I might bargain with Hobson, my idea for his support against carnival bunting.
‘I have an idea,’ I said, ‘which, if you will forgive my saying so, is better than yours, Brigadier. But first, let’s talk about the carnival.’
‘The carnival?’
‘You’re chairman of the committee, aren’t you?’
‘I am, yes. What is it?’
‘I expect you’ve heard that certain people, and I needn’t name them, but they are mostly tradesmen, people like Solomons, in fact, though he’s not actually one of them—certain people are planning to turn the town into a sort of coffin this year. You do put a flag on a soldier’s coffin when you bury him, don’t you?’
‘Yes, Drysdale, we do.’
‘Now you and I would agree, I think, that the carnival is an excellent thing, but it ought to be kept in its place, that’s to say Ponting’s meadow.’
‘Of course,’ said Hobson, ‘Ponting is very decent about it.’
‘And we’d agree, too, that we don’t want Teddy boys and hooligans coming to Cartersfield and turning the place upside down, just because we’re having a carnival. We don’t want them smashing up the Flower Show as they did at Blockley last week, do we? We like a roundabout, but we don’t want any skyrockets in Cartersfield.’
‘Skyrockets?’ said Hobson, horrified.
‘They’re extremely noisy things that whizz round,’ I said, not wishing to enlighten him too much. ‘If we’re to keep that sort of thing out, Brigadier, if we’re to keep Cartersfield’s carnival for ourselves, we don’t want to fill the streets with flags, do we? Everyone passing through will think it’s a World Fair. Our carnival must be kept strictly for ourselves.’
‘Of course, of course,’ said Hobson. ‘A World Fair?’
‘Well then, I can rely on you to veto the suggestion of flags.’
‘Now wait a minute,’ said Hobson. ‘I don’t see anything wrong with flags.’
‘It’s the first step, Brigadier, the first step.’
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear your idea about Solomons.’
‘I must feel I have your support on this matter,’ I said.
‘Blackmail,’ said Hobson, ‘sheer blackmail.’
‘Well, if you don’t like my idea, you needn’t support my notion of keeping Cartersfield clean,’ I said.
He looked at me angrily. ‘Let’s hear what you’ve got to offer.’
‘It’s very simple. Solomons’ billboard is about six feet his side of the fence. You build a billboard of your own, right up against the fence, and you’ll block his out completely. And on your billboard you put whatever you like—“HELP STAMP OUT BILLBOARDS”, for instance. Then let him see what he can do.’
Hobson looked at me for a full minute, then he said: ‘I�
�ve got to give it to you, Drysdale. That’s an absolutely first-class idea. Absolutely first-class. I’ll do it tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow is Sunday.’
‘All the better. I think I know some chaps who don’t mind earning a little extra money by working on Sunday.’
‘Well, it’s your billboard,’ I said, ‘you do what you like. But I hope I can rely on you to quash the flag nonsense.’
‘Of course, of course,’ he said, ‘you’re absolutely right about it. Have another drink.’
We’d just got settled again, and he was beginning to expand on some of the pranks he’d been up to as a young man, when his wife came in.
‘Evangeline, Drysdale here has just given me the most brilliant scheme for getting that damned billboard down. We’ll build a sign ourselves, slap bang in front of it.’
She looked at him as though he was mad, and then at me, accusingly. Then she said: ‘Did you feed the cat?’
‘Cat? No.’
She went out again.
‘Always on about that damned cat,’ said Hobson.
Well, though I have occasionally regretted helping Hobson, things turned out exactly as I had planned. It was one of my greatest political triumphs, and no one but Hobson knew whose idea it was. He built his sign in front of the adolescent with the comb in his hand, and Jack Solomons was furious and threatened to go to court, but he was as powerless as Hobson had been, and eventually the sign came down, though not before Mr Richards had had an interview with Brigadier Hobson that left him looking sadder than ever. The day after Solomons took his sign down, Hobson removed his. Neither has spoken to the other since, needless to say, and, equally needless to say, Hobson soon convinced himself that the idea was his in the first place.
He was loyal to his word, though, about the flags, and having been a chairman for a good many years he was able to get his way without anyone quite knowing how. The day after the committee met he rang me up.
‘There will be no flags,’ he said.
‘Thank you, Brigadier.’
A Disturbing Influence Page 9