‘I’ll get you, I’ll get you!’
Lungeing at Clive, he became entangled in the legs of the chair and fell, pulling the chair down with him. The knife was jolted from his grasp; he lay sprawled face downward, gasping for breath. A small trail of blood appeared on the carpet.
The boy darted forward, light as a ferret. ‘He’s bleeding! He’s dying!’
‘He’s hit his nose against the chair,’ Clive said. ‘And presently, I suppose, he’ll be wanting a handkerchief, too. Well, I can’t oblige him, that’s all. Here, take that knife and for God’s sake put it back where it belongs. I’m sick of the pair of you.’ It seemed to him that he had invaded a very disagreeable family.
After a minute the man sat up. He was weeping, and mopped his eyes and his nose alternately. ‘I can’t go on, I just can’t go on,’ he lamented. ‘God knows I’ve always done my best—and look what happens to me. I love my wife, I don’t look at another woman, I take her out of Woolworth’s and put her in this splendid house and make a lady of her, I slave to keep the roof over our heads—and she goes off to live in a bungalow with a motor mechanic! I do everything I can for the boy, I keep a smiling face for his sake, I get up in the middle of the night to boil milk for him—and he hates me! And today, when I go to see my lawyer, first he keeps me waiting for nearly an hour, and then he tells me I can’t ask for damages, not for the wife of my bosom, because it’s common knowledge how unkindly I treated her. Unkindly! What about the way she’s treated me? And there you stand, grinning. Grin on, grin by all means! Your time hasn’t come yet.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of laughing at you,’ Clive said. ‘I’m sure I’m very sorry for you.’ But he knew that he had smiled. For the man’s nose, rapidly swelling, made him talk just as the boy did, and the words ‘get up in the biddle of the night to boil bilk’ had been too much for him.
The boy had opened a book and feigned to be absorbed in it. His hate no longer warmed him; he sat hunched up and shivering—a sickly child, in terror of rats and dark corners and swaying trees. But suffering and depravity had put their aristocratic stamp on his pallid face; there could be no doubt which of these two would be master.
Dad was now on his feet, rubbing his shins and groaning. ‘You don’t happen to have such a thing as a bottle of liniment in that bag, I suppose?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘I might have known it!’ He spoke as though this were the culmination of his misfortunes and injuries.
‘And I really must be getting on,’ Clive said. ‘Good night. Don’t trouble to show me out. I know the way.’
He saw the beard begin to bristle again, and the fury of suspicion mounting. The boy must have seen it too, though he continued to read. A smile crossed his face as though something in the book had amused him.
‘Tony!’ the man said. ‘Where are your manners? Get up and say good night.’
The boy rose, and bowed with formality. ‘Good night.’
*
‘Just in time,’ said Clive, slamming the door behind him and running down the path. ‘Whew! Just in time.’ At the same moment, the laurel hedge caught him in a dragonish embrace and remembering the rabbit hutches he went on more cautiously. It was the ambiguous interval of winter nightfall when one seems to be wading through darkness as through knee-high water while there is still light overhead. But soon it would be unequivocally dark and though he was out of that nightmare house he had still to find his way home. Ahead of him was the lane where he had heard the man shouting at cows. It seemed likely that this was a continuation of the lane he had followed so patiently and which would have brought him here if he had not left it at the call of the engine whistle. His best hope would be to turn to the right and follow its windings till it joined the road he had taken from Yetton Halt. He did so, and had walked for what seemed quite a long way when a picture came into his mind’s eye of himself sitting at Yetton Halt watching trains that didn’t stop there go by. But how to get home wasn’t his only trouble. He must also decide on a story that would somehow account for him being so muddy and so belated, a story that would satisfy Ella tonight and Mr. Ingham tomorrow—for Ella being Mrs. Ingham’s niece he could not expect the story to remain under his own roof. ‘I tripped and wrenched my ankle.’ But if he had tripped anywhere on the path of duty there would have been a telephone within reach. ‘I got into the wrong train at the junction.’ But the train would not have carried him into a ploughed field and muddied him to the knees. ‘I heard there was a family who had just moved into an old manor house with masses of oak panelling.’ But Mr. Ingham had little sympathy for enterprise, and would have even less for an enterprise that had not resulted in as much as an order for a three-shilling tin of Busy Bees Household Wax—their cheapest line. So what was he to say? And which way should he turn in order to say it? As he stood hesitating and hearing the wind mutter along the hedge, he saw a shaft of light and heard the approach of what must be a very old and slow car. The slower the better. He might thumb a lift. The car, bouncing and rattling, seemed to be close at hand, but its light travelled onwards. There must be a crossroads. If it were enough of a crossroads, it would have a signpost. He hurried on.
There was a signpost, but he had to swarm up it before he could read by the flicker of his cigarette lighter that to his left was Branham, five miles, and to his right Yetton St. Gabriel, two miles. Branham had it. He knew Branham, it was a place on his rounds. He lit a cigarette, knocked the worst of the mud off his shoes and set off again, this time on a good hard-surfaced road that rang reassuringly under his tread. Now all he had to think of was his story. Why not, after all, include a measure of the interesting truth, leading up to it by that hearsay manor house? He was on his way to the manor house, which was much farther off than it had been reported to be, when he noticed a solitary house which stood a little back from the road and had a sort of moat round it. The strange thing was that even before he drew level with it, he felt as though the house had a call for him. If it had not been for one lighted-up window, he would have supposed it was empty and deserted. Then, glancing through the lighted window, he saw a man with a knife in his hand chasing a little boy round a table. Not wasting a moment, he jumped the moat, ran to the window and banged on it, shouting, ‘You leave that child alone!’ The man threw open the window and leaned out, saying, ‘Mind your own business!’ ‘Just what I mean to do,’ retorted Clive, and sprang in over the window sill. At this point Mr. Ingham’s voice interposed itself, exclaiming, ‘It’s a case for the Prevention of Cruelty Society, Peters, if not for the police. We’ll report this right away,’ while Mrs. Ingham cried, ‘You tell me where he lives, Clive, and I’ll teach him something about carving knives, that I will!’ So no sooner was Clive in the room than the man’s whole demeanour changed; dropping the knife he came up to Clive and wrung his hand, saying, ‘God must have sent you, God must have sent you! What mightn’t I have done otherwise?’ And then, bit by bit, it all came out: how the man’s wife had left him that same morning, how when he got back from market he had found her gone and a letter saying she wanted an easier life with a younger man, how he had found the child cold and hungry and crying for his mammy, and how, in his desperation, he had decided to put an end to himself—but first he must take the child with him. Clive, feeling that he had indeed been called, realized that there was nothing for it but to give up all idea of the manor house and stay with the frantic husband till he calmed down again. (‘Quite right, Peters, quite right.’) So he quickly kindled up a nice wood fire, and there they sat, going into it all, till it was time to turn on the news. This helped to clear the air, and after a little more chat Clive rose to depart, seeing that his work was done. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever meet again‚’ were the man’s last words. ‘But I’ll remember you in my prayers for the rest of my life.’ Deeply religious, which made the wife’s action an even crueller blow, he was more to be pitied than blamed.
More to be Pitied than Blamed. Pom! More to be Pitied than B
lamed. Pom! Marching to the rhythm of the words, carried on towards Branham by their asseveration, Clive felt that he had got both truth and fiction safely under his control. The story was certainly a case of making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but he had managed it; the purse was constructed, and ought to satisfy everybody. All that remained was to put the true afternoon firmly out of his mind and rehearse the fictional one till he was word-perfect in it. Manor house to house, not forgetting the premonition, then the lighted-up window, then the man with the carving knife and the terrified child dodging him round the table, then the banging on the window and the window thrown up and his retort (another touch not to forget) and his entry…. Suddenly and appallingly, Ella’s voice broke in. ‘But what about the poor little boy, Clive? Didn’t you do anything for him? Didn’t either of you men think of giving him his supper? You said he was hungry.’ The sow’s ear bristled out of the purse, the real child started up before him, dancing like a ferret at the sight of his father’s blood. No wonder he had shirked facing the issue of the fictional child. He, too, was the father of a son.
JOHNNIE BREWER
IT was nine years since Johnnie Brewer last saw his grandmother and his great-aunt Miranda. Then he was a boy, and a visitor from Australia. Now he was a young man, and a returning exile. They had remained two old ladies, two typical old English ladies, living in a country house whose lawn had daisies on it. The lawn he looked down on from the spare room window was smaller than he remembered; but he was larger, which accounted for this. There was the lawn roller, just where it used to be, its handle sunk in the laurel bush. Probably the same toad lived behind it. Toads live to a great age. Spring after spring they amble out into the same patch of sunlight and snap at this year’s flies on the same warm wall. Year after year (while he in the antipodes had been substantiating his nostalgia for a country he had barely seen, and poring over maps and guide books and poetry and manuals on British birds and British wild flowers, and plastering his bedroom walls with photographs from National Trust calendars) the two old dames below had been leading their rich English lives, going out to pick the first snowdrops, watching their pears ripen, seeing the first swallows arrive and the last swallows depart.
He bounded downstairs for tea and burst in on them as they sat with a wood fire burning and yet the window open on the garden, and the smooth fresh faces of old family portraits looking over their heads, and the silver teapot and the green-and-white tea set on the damask cloth. The thought of their accumulated good fortune overwhelmed him, and he exclaimed, ‘Oh, you lucky old darlings, you’ve been here all the time!’
‘Dear Johnnie! I hope you won’t see many changes,’ said his great-aunt.
His grandmother said, ‘At any rate, it’s the same chocolate cake. We’ve still got old Woodie, you know.’
‘I know you have. I’ve been hugging her in the kitchen, behind your backs.’
Their light English laughter was like something out of a musical-box.
‘You mustn’t make us jealous,’ said his grandmother. ‘I hope you had a pleasant drive here.’
‘It was a wonderful drive. I lost my way.’
‘Oh, dear!’
‘And I got into the most amazing valley, with pear trees in bloom all the way along it. Very narrow, very winding, with steep sides—and pear trees everywhere. Would they be wild, do you think? Or old orchards? And a stream with an old humped stone bridge. And a ruin.’
‘Goodness! I wonder where this was.’
‘He must have got into the old Monmouth road.’
‘I don’t remember any ruins there. More likely the road to Pentrice. We used to go that way to the Watsons’.’
‘We never went over a bridge.’
They argued with animation, and he sat remembering the green-and-white hillsides he would remember all his life, the stream rattling over the stones, the birds singing. He had halted the car and got out and drunk the cold stream-water from his cupped hands, saying to himself, ‘Now it will always fetch me back.’ And the chill, the delicate pure chill of the watery valley, had made him quiver with ecstasy.
The car was a hired one. His father had said, ‘Now mind. The legacy’s your own; you can do what you like with it. But two things you are not to do. You are not to buy any English investments, and you are not to buy a car.’ He could not prohibit marrying an English wife, since he had done so himself.
Johnnie worked his passage as a deck steward, made a good haul of tips and arrived at Tilbury Docks when April was there. Climbing onto a bus, he went to Greenwich, where he saw Greenwich Hospital and Greenwich Observatory and sat in Greenwich Park looking at the curve of the river. Then, as it was still early in the day, he went on to St. Paul’s.
By the end of a week, Johnnie was a Londoner. By the end of the following week, he was so much a Londoner that he felt he must spend a weekend in the country. He hired a car and drove into Oxfordshire. There, in a mild rain, he sat on a grass bank and looked at primroses. He also ate bread and cheese at an inn with a faded Charles I on its swinging sign, where a commercial traveller came in, saying he had heard the first cuckoo; and attended evensong—with more primroses—in a village church. England had forty-one counties. He would visit them all. Having done this, he would be in a better position to decide where he would ultimately live. England also contained castles, cathedrals, an unknown number of the oldest yew trees in England, Devil’s Dykes, Devil’s Cheese Rings, Stonehenge and his grandmother. In his pocket was a letter from his mother saying, ‘Whatever else you do, don’t forget to go and see Grannie. But ask her beforehand. Her address, in case you’ve forgotten it…’ He hadn’t forgotten it. Bodkins, Dishpole St. Mary’s, Herefordshire. That earlier visit had been in August. It rained a lot, but he went fishing, and played beggar-my-neighbour with Woodie in the warm spicy kitchen while his mother sat talking to Grandmother and Aunt Miranda. At the time, it all seemed rather tame, but now he would know how to appreciate it—a night or perhaps a couple of nights in a gentle English home where the streets would smell of lavender. It would be a change from sleeping in hotels, too; and afterwards he would drive on and explore Wales. He wrote suggesting himself, and was told in reply that any date that suited him would suit them, and that he was to stay as long as he liked.
‘No, Hester, I’ve got it. He must have come by the road that turns off just after Dunnock’s Cross. And that ruin must be the old Congregationalist chapel. Somebody or other told me that it had fallen down last winter; the roof gave way under the snow.’
‘Did you have a lot of snow here, Grandmother?’
‘Far too much. We were snowed up for over a week. We nearly went out of our minds trying to feed the birds. We soon ran out of bread, of course, but we chopped up all the apples and carrots and potatoes. Miranda said she’d toboggan down to the village. So she sat on the kitchen tea tray and Woodie and I gave her a good shove off. Have a cigarette?’
‘No, thank you, Grandmother. I don’t smoke.’
‘But she ran into a tree and tore all the skin off her leg, and the tea tray went on without her. They found it in the churchyard, after the thaw. And that was the end of her girlish dreams, poor Miranda!’
‘But didn’t anyone come to your help?’
‘In the end. But they had to dig the animals out first. Naturally.’
‘The truth is,’ said Aunt Miranda, ‘it’s damned silly for two old hags like Hester and me to go on living here. We ought to be in a home for decayed gentlewomen. Have a cigarette?’
‘No, thank you, Aunt Miranda. I don’t——’
‘He doesn’t smoke,’ said his grandmother. ‘You’re getting deaf, Miranda. He said so not a minute ago.’
When Woodie came in to clear away, he glanced at his watch. It was earlier than he thought. He would take himself out for a walk—an English stroll.
His grandmother noticed the glance and said, ‘What would you like to do between now and dinner, dear boy?’
‘I’d rather like to—�
� Here, Woodie! I’ll carry that tray.’
Out in the passage, Woodie said, ‘Do you know what you ought to do, Master Johnnie? You ought to offer to take them for a drive.’
He had expected them to go upstairs and reappear in bonnets, but they unhitched some wraps from a stand in the hall and came out hatless, though pulling on gloves. He gave a hasty tidy to the back of the car and held open the rear door, ready to help them in. Miranda got nimbly into the front seat. ‘Miranda’s always sick in the back of a car,’ his grandmother explained. Miranda smirked as though he had been told something to her credit.
He said they must direct him where to go, and once again they began to argue about roads. Now the argument involved a debate as to whether they could get to Hereford in time to do some shopping, and feeling the lovely spring evening slipping away while they bandied possibilities he asserted, ‘I shall just drive.’ Instantly they agreed.
As he drove down the village street houses, flagged paths, names on shop fronts assaulted him with their familiarity. He could have sworn that a white cat sitting on a gatepost had not moved from its position since some unidentified encounter nine years ago. He drove on. A name on a signpost, meaningless then but now dipped in the melancholy lustre of A Shropshire Lad‚ drew him into a succession of lanes. Beyond the hedges, the meadows, starred with kingcups and cuckoo-pint, were like jewels displayed in small compartments. Lambs were feeding in orchards, black-and-white farmhouses sent up tendrils of smoke against the sharp green of newly-leafed sycamores, steeples came twirling towards him as the lanes twisted, houses of Victorian gentility stood among conifers. After a while, the name out of A Shropshire Lad did not recur. Miranda and his grandmother kept up a succession of anecdotes about people of the locality, and he was intermittently conscious that they were trying to entertain him. As for the beauty of the evening, they seemed blind to it though they must have noticed where he was driving them, since when he pointed to a beechwood, an apparition of river, the lovely slope of a hillside, they promptly supplied its name. He could have wished they had not smoked so much, and so often set each other right over details—for really it could not matter to him whether a Captain Hughes had died in 1955 or 1957. But it was a wonderful drive, and a foretaste of what it would be like when he drove alone. He had given them pleasure, too. Miranda, turning to the back seat, had suddenly exclaimed, ‘Hester! Isn’t this fun?’ And his grandmother had replied, ‘Glorious! Scrumptious!’ and then, more explicitly, ‘I can’t tell you, Johnnie, what a treat it is to have an unexpected outing like this. We shall talk about it for months.’ Her gratitude touched him, and he said, ‘I hope I’m not driving too fast for you.’ They assured him that driving fast was part of the fun; but the jolting in the back seat must have tired his grandmother, for she had to be helped out and supported up the path, clinging to his arm and saying he was a dear boy, her dear boy.
A Stranger with a Bag Page 2