Brian Penton

by Inheritors (v1. 0) (lit)

Flanagan became busy with his mummified foot and pretended not to hear. When the corners of James's mouth relaxed and the dangerous moment seemed past, he stopped blowing and panting and said, “But of course I wouldn't see ye letting yourself in for any unbusinesslike arrangement out of your generosity. What say we renew the bill for another five years?”

  James was still enjoying the Jovian pleasure of balancing Flanagan's fate, but the bland impudence with which Flanagan arranged the affair took all the sting out of magnanimity. In a pique, he said, “I'm afraid that wouldn't be satisfactory.”

  “No?”

  “Thirty thousand pounds is a lot of money, Sir Michael, and this is a time when one can make good use of it.”

  “Jimmy! Jimmy!” Flanagan cried in dismay. “Have I got the gout in me foot or me ear that I hear ye say your money would be better used than in saving a poor orphan girl that you once had a soft spot for from destitution?”

  “This is a matter of business, Sir Michael. I wish you wouldn't try to confuse the issue.”

  “Sure,” said Sir Michael tearfully, “business is business and the soft feelings of the heart are another thing to be kept in a different compartment, but woe the day that I hear young Jimmy Cabell saying it.”

  “You gave me my first lesson in keeping them apart,” James said, then bit his lip.

  Flanagan was on to him like a weasel. “Then it's not only business makes ye so hard? Ye think ye've got something to pay me back for?”

  “Certainly not. Why should I?”

  “Ye think I let ye down the day ye came to see me here?”

  James laughed. “Good heavens, I'd forgotten about it—almost.” He felt that this did not ring quite true, so he added loftily, “A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. I married, and er. . . a charming girl, and er. . .” He floundered, and at last had to dispose of the charge by saying, “Anyway, the decision rests with my father. I'm only his agent.”

  “Ah, but ye can do a lot, Jimmy, for the sake of old times.” James rose. “I'll do what I can. I'll tell him what you say and communicate with you later.”

  Flanagan struggled out of his chair. He had yet another card to play. Tapping the floor loudly with his stick he hobbled across to James. James was backing to the door but Flanagan hung on his arm. “I'll come and see ye off. Easy now, me boy. Ouch, a bit slower. I'm not as spry as. . .”

  A knock on the door leading to the next room halted him. “Who is it now? Come in.”

  The door opened slowly to a smell of violets, and Jennis poised on the threshold with a slow, soft coo of surprise.

  “Och,” Flanagan said severely, “didn't ye know I was busy, didn't ye?”

  Half-smiling recognition, half-confused, she started to withdraw, but Flanagan said, “Come in now ye're here, and give an old friend your greeting.”

  She stepped close to them and offered her hand, and James felt again the full, soft, fleshy weight of it against his palm as a revelation of her body's nakedness. He dropped it quickly, and all the studious selfpossession went from him, leaving him embarrassed and incoherent as her dreamily speculative eyes searched his face and asked, he imagined, why he had delivered such swashbuckling speeches, then run away. He was annoyed with them both and wanted to escape, but could not find the formula which would get him through the door. With relief he saw the fatuous smile with which Flanagan looked from face to face turning into words, but it seemed an interminable time before Flanagan said, “Have ye lost your tongue, Jenny? Ye bellyache because he never comes to see ye and when he does ye've got nothing to say.”

  “Grandfather!”

  “Ye little witch, I'll tell on ye.” He pinched her cheek and laughed, then pretended to be shocked at himself, “Here, what am I saying? Me mind's wandering. Forgive a sentimental old fool, children. Seeing ye together just brought back the drame of me life.”

  “I came to ask if you wanted tea?” she said.

  “No, no. Take Jimmy along with ye. I don't want no tay.”

  Her eyes melted into James's. “I was going to ask him.”

  He heard himself saying, “Really, no, really. You must excuse me. I'm due back in town. I'm late.”

  Only when he was out on the street, fuming, “It was all arranged. It was all a trick. He tapped his stick to bring her in,” did the image of her begin to burn clearly on his senses—the ripe maturity of her body which mothering two children had brought to the fullness of its weighted perfection, the soft flesh of her arms peeping through slashed sleeves, her lusciously half-open mouth, the tender sing-song of her lazy voice, and her eyes more provocative than ever with a woman's happy knowledge in place of the old wonder and discontent. He rubbed the palm of his right hand vigorously against his coat and hurried on. People called to him across the busy pavements and waved, but he hung his head and pretended not to notice. He wanted to get back into his room and shut the door. He felt that something was working to pieces in him and some unpleasant expression coming out on his face which they would see if he stopped and let them look. A ridiculous fancy, but when he reached his suite in the Royal he could not make himself go to the mirror. He opened the window and stood in the cool breeze from the river, breathing deeply. Gradually the sweat dried in elastic bands round his jaw and he went across to the dressing-table and looked. What he saw was only the pale, melancholy face he was used to, of course, so pale that the tight cap of black hair was like a wig over it. He sniffed at his folly; but as he gazed the face in the glass became slowly unfamiliar, unreal. For the first time, studying it with the eyes of nine years ago which that afternoon had reopened, he saw that youth had gone from it. He saw the unhealthy blotches round the eyes, the hollows under the cheek-bones which only yesterday it seemed were full, the hair thinning from the temples, and the dyspeptic wrinkles at the end of the mouth. He returned to the window and sat down in the arm-chair frowning. Again, vividly, he felt the heavy, boneless hand on his palm. He took up the morning's paper and tried to read but the words would not come together. “It was a trick,” he said aloud angrily, but he felt no anger, only a sharper stimulation, and then he was looking out across the roofs of the town towards Frogs' Hollow with his heart swelling across his chest, so that he could hardly breathe. “This is appalling. I must be going off my head.” He pulled the blind down and turned on the light and forced himself to write a long, technical letter to a horse-trainer who was preparing Cabell's Pride for the coming Sydney Cup meeting.

  Then it was time for dinner. He took a bath, dressed, and went downstairs. The dining-room was nearly empty. His quick glance around counted five women, four waitresses and a woman sitting alone at a table. After a second or two he realized that there were seven or eight men at the tables, some of whom had looked up and nodded as he entered. He tried to concentrate his attention on the men, but the women stood out of the picture as though a spotlight was on them, on their swaying hips, their necks, their mouths. While he was staring at the woman eating, she looked up at him and smiled. His heart bolted, his breath caught before he realized that she was a woman whose husband he knew and that she was merely smiling recognition. In the anticlimax his heart contracted to a little, cold ball against his ribs. He ordered a quick dinner, ate it quickly and tastelessly, and went back to his room.

  There were yellow pools of light around the street lamps and the shops now. He stood at the window again, looking across to Frogs' Hollow, thinking of the stories he had heard, thinking, thinking, thinking, while the blood beat into his temples and drew a tight band around his brain. “It's appalling. You must be off your head,” but on the other side of his mind he argued, “It's not natural—the way I live. A man's a man. Others have gone there, not hooligans like Geoffrey. The very best people kept mistresses. Look at Lord Blackenridge and the Earl of Coverdale. Nobody thought any worse of them. Wellington, too. Some of the women are quite ladylike.”

  He put on his hat and coat and went downstairs again. As he passed the corner he looked across the dark was
tes of Edward Street which led towards the river and Frogs' Hollow, turned and stepped out briskly for his club. In the smoking-room he found a man who wanted to talk about the acceptances for the Sydney Cup, and James clung to him long after the subject was exhausted, repeating over and over the genealogy of Cabell's Pride and the history of its sire's achievements in England till the man stared, then yawned, and at last dozed. James left him reluctantly. Ten o'clock. Soon he could go to bed, sleep, and in the morning catch the first train home. Work—that was what he needed, work. He compressed his lips and wandered into the billiard-room. An absorbing game of Russian pool excluded him. Glancing into the bar he saw Jeffers, a lawyer, one of the men he had dealt with for his father, a bawdy fellow who. . . “My God he knows those places. He's always making up parties.” He withdrew in a hurry and went on to the library, where he read the English papers mindlessly for an hour, trying to visualize names and places and recover the feeling of his spiritual fellowship with that untarnished world, but the feeling would not come and his efforts to evoke it ended in a sense of disillusion, of vapidity. As he passed the bar on his way along the hall to get his hat he heard the rich burst of men's laughter. He paused at the door again, breathing the male smells of whisky and cigars, but the faces at the bar, glancing up from Jeffers's lewd histrionics, held off an uninitiate, a notorious prude. He was furious because he felt snubbed and for the moment could marshal no pride against them.

  A hansom was waiting at the kerb, but he waved the cabman off and started slowly towards Queen Street with his coattails flapping in the wind. It was a hot wind now, blowing from inland. “I can't sleep in this. I'll take a walk to the river first,” and his heart commenced to pop again; but he passed two riverward side streets before he plunged, after a quick glance back along the lighted thoroughfare, into the darkness. “Hypocrite,” he sneered but did not hear himself. Unconsciously he hurried now, between the high walls of warehouses and decayed remnants of the old town, lop-sided little buildings so shrunken and twisted that light shone out through the walls. For a while he lost his way in the unfamiliar terrain and the darkness smelling of rubber and tar and stale horsedung and the unaired miasma of slums, saw a light at the end of the labyrinth of galvanized-iron fences at last, and hastened towards it.

  He hastened with the inert, dizzy compulsion of a straw in a cataract, unaware of his pistoning legs, towards the stirring scent of joss sticks and the sound of a woman singing at a piano. Suddenly he was out in the light with women all about him. They sat on the kerb, on the steps of the houses, or lounged against veranda posts, their kimonos billowing open in the wind. The light was hazy, filtered through red window blinds, but he felt, with their languid curiosity on him, that it was broad daylight. Above the noise of voices bandied to and fro across the street, some men quarrelling with a woman around a distant lamp-post, a drunken sailor singing, a burst of Chinese gabble from a door which opened surprisingly upon the plush interior of an apparently deserted shed and shut again at once, he heard girls calling, “Hallo, dearie. Looking for someone? Won't I do?” But he did not understand yet that they were speaking to him. He stood with one foot in the lane and one in the street orientating himself and recovering from the shock of finding how blatantly these things were done, three hundred yards from the quiet respectability of Queen Street. This was not at all what he had expected. Now he did not know what he had expected, and in the quick moral revulsion from the publicity and sordidness of the street tried to deny that he had expected anything at all. “What a cesspool. Right in the middle of town where a man stumbles on it walking to the river!”

  A girl detached herself from a post and came across the footpath. “Hallo, dearie. Looking for me?” Her kohled and carmined caricature of beauty, which reminded him of someone he knew, breathed stale powder and stale booze into his face.

  He drew back sharply.

  “I'm not going to bite you, old codger,” she said. “I thought you was looking for a friend. Lost your way, have you?”

  “Yes,” he said severely.

  “That's the way back to Queen Street if that's what you want.” She pointed up the street between the lines of kimonos.

  He peeped around the corner at the gauntlet he would have to run, then spun about and careered down the lane, back through the tar and dungsmelling darkness which tasted like the water of a stagnant pool befouling him as he rushed through it. He pulled himself back into the shadows as he was about to re-enter the street leading to the club. Some men were passing. He recognized Jeffers's voice. What if they were to see him—HIM who had always turned up his nose at their dirty jokes and their plans for a “night out with the girls.” He flattened against a wall and hung there till their voices faded in the distance.

  Back in the hotel he bathed once more. The devils were under hatches again. His only emotion now was fear. Would that girl recognize him if she saw him. He had heard stories. Sometimes they blackmailed you. But acuter was the fear which came over him as he lay on the bed thinking of what he had done, the risks he had run, how for those five minutes no considerations of propriety, morality, or honour had been able to restrain him. He realized now that the whole evening had been a violent struggle against the evil, ugly thing in him, which had broken his will like a match-stick at last and scattered the careful poses of nine years. Was it so strong? “Well, nothing happened,” he tried to console himself, but it was no consolation to discover on what a volcano he lived. In the early hours he dropped off to sleep and dreamt that he was walking down endless corridors with Miss Montaulk. She kept saying something which annoyed him until he hit her savagely across the cheek. Afterwards he was trying to wash some filth off his hand—the paint from Miss Montaulk's face. Then it wasn't paint at all, he saw, but his own dark skin. . .

  He awoke with a depressing sense of guilt which sent him back to the Reach determined to be mild and long-suffering with Julia in future and to devote himself more strenuously to uplifting work. He was mild, he was equable, as he had the strength to be, yet every effort he made only increased the ferment in his mind and the tension between Julia and himself. He felt, as he watched himself staring back into her mocking eyes and cracking his knuckles behind his back, that a climax was maturing, and he looked away quickly, not wishing to see what it might be. Desire surged up again, he forced it back, it curdled into hate. But the struggle was wearing him down, the struggle not only against the act of taking Julia by the proffered throat and shaking the insolence out of her, against the impulse to kick the old beast on the veranda who disgraced him to his visitors, but also the struggle to support the fiction of contented matrimony and filial pride which was his façade to the world and to himself. His hate was like a hot stone he juggled in his hands because he had nowhere to throw it.

  Flanagan, uneasy at his long silence, wrote offering to discuss a compromise on his proposal if James would call again. Gout, he said, still held him. Panicky, James replied that he could not leave the Reach. Flanagan could have the money for another five years. He would rather Flanagan kept it than run the risk of seeing once more what he had lost.

  But that was not to be evaded. It was all around him. Every time he heard the stockmen laughing with the maids in the dairy or at the kitchen door of a Sunday afternoon he became irritable, and afterwards was humiliated. He forbade the stockmen to come into the yard, found fault with the maids till they turned up their noses and left. It was better when the agency refused to send any more girls and they had to have Chinamen again. From the dark orange-grove came no more unsettling warm laughter on moonlight nights.

  The year dragged on and the time came for him to go south for the Sydney Cup, his first big race. He packed with relief at escaping for a while from the strain of keeping up pretences against Julia's perpetual nagging and the senile but persisting old brute on the veranda.

  But Julia announced that she would go with him. No use arguing. “I wouldn't miss old Crowbait for the world.”

  “Don't you think t
hat joke's a little threadbare by now?”

  “No, I think it's one of the best jokes I've heard, your paying a thousand guineas for that horse because old Lord Thingumajig put his arm around your shoulder and called you his dear James.”

  “That's utter rubbish. I bought the horse from his agent. It has won races, anyway, hasn't it? Father's forgotten what a good horse looks like.”

  How badly he wanted the horse to win, not for the sake of the horse, not for the glory, not even for the pleasure it would be to come home and crow over his father, but for the same reason which made him stay out on the run and eat in a stockman's hut rather than face Julia across the table when she was in a bad mood. Inside him there was a big sore just waiting for a touch to burst. He was afraid of the bursting, afraid of the corruption he would see.

  But, despite Julia, he began to enjoy himself as soon as he set foot in Sydney and the excitement of a big race meeting obscured his troubles. There was a dinner at Government House, an aide who remembered meeting him with Lord Salisbury at Ascot, an Americo-Italian Marchesa who put herself under his protection on the racecourse because he was the “first real gen'leman” she'd met in the Antipodes.

  On the afternoon of the big day he was at the stalls looking over a horse with a number of his friends, including the Marchesa, when a young man with a happy mouth and a pair of sloe eyes twinkling in a face faintly coffee-stained touched him on the shoulder and said, “You're James Cabell, aren't you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Put it there. I'm your cousin, Rab Surface.”

  James looked at the checks on the waistcoat, the grey derby over one ear, the dark complexion, and pressed the man's hand furtively as though he was taking a tip out of it.

  The Marchesa got out her lorgnette, turned it on the young man, on James. The shape and colour of their eyes, the silky blackness of their hair agreed.

  “Not thinking of buying this nag?” the young man said.

  “What's wrong with it?” said the owner, who could almost feel James's money in his pocket.