And Wilfrid knew he couldn’t say. He stepped further into the light. He hoped his own blotchy cheeks and sniffy nose were proof that something serious had happened, but there was no question of saying what. He said, ‘Oh, Daddy, I’ve just seen . . . Mrs Cow.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said his father, at once visibly disappointed.
‘I think she’s fallen over.’
His father tutted and went to stand beside his desk, switched on the lamp, peered at some papers as if already getting on with something important. His hair, normally black and shiny, stood up at one side like a wing. Nanny seemed entirely uninterested; she had stood up, straightened her skirt, shifted the cushions on the settee to find her handbag. Without looking at him, Dudley said, ‘And have you told her to get up?’
‘No, Daddy,’ said Wilfrid, feeling another wail rising in his chest at his father’s perversity. He said, ‘She can’t get up, you see, as a matter of fact.’
‘Broken both her legs, has she?’
Wilfrid shook his head, but couldn’t say more, for fear of crying, which his father couldn’t stand.
‘I wonder if I should look, Sir Dudley?’ said Nanny, with odd reluctance, patting her hair. It was her day off, anyway: she probably didn’t want to be involved. Slowly, with the playful menace he brought to telling a story, Dudley turned his head, and stared at Wilfrid.
‘I wonder if what you’re trying to tell me, Wilfrid,’ he said, ‘is that Frau Kalbeck is dead?’
‘Yes, Daddy, she is!’ said Wilfrid, and in the relief of it he was very nearly grinning at just the same moment the saved-up tears poured out of him again.
‘Of course she should never have come here,’ said his father, still maddeningly unexcited, but no longer blaming Wilfrid himself, it seemed. He looked sharply at Nanny. ‘Upsetting my son like this.’ And then he gave a surprising laugh. ‘Well, it’s taught her a lesson, what? She won’t be coming here again.’
Nanny stood behind Wilfrid, and laid her hands hesitantly on his shoulders. ‘Now, don’t cry, there’s a good boy,’ she said. He struggled to obey her, as he wanted to, for a moment, but when he thought of the dead woman’s face again, and her hand moving by itself, it was all beyond him and over him like a wave.
‘Run along to Wilkes’s room and telephone Dr Wyatt, would you, Nanny?’ said his father.
‘At once, Sir Dudley,’ said Nanny. Wilfrid of course would go with her, but she turned uncertainly at the door, and his father nodded and said,
‘You stay here, old boy.’
So Wilfrid went to his father, and was pulled experimentally for a second or two against the heavy strange-scented skirts of the brocade dressing-gown. It was the touch of privilege, a feel of the luxurious concessions allowed when something awful had happened, and in the interesting surprise of it he at once stopped crying. Then they went together, snapping odd sharp fragments of china underfoot, to the window, and each drew back a curtain. Nothing was said about the dinner service; and his father already had the mischievous preoccupied look that sometimes announced a treat, an idea that had just surprised him and demanded to be shared. It was like the mad glint, but usually nicer. Staring into the garden, fixing his eye so hard on something that Wilfrid thought for a moment it must be the source of his amusement, he started to talk, too quietly and rapidly at first for him to follow – ‘The body was found – it lay on the ground – without a sound’ –
‘Oh, Skeleton, Daddy,’ he said and his father grinned tolerantly.
‘ – old fat Mrs Cow – with her face like a sow – you won’t hear from her now’ – he turned and walked excitedly round the room, Wilfrid had a distracted sense of how he really never noticed his father’s limp – ‘with her Wagner and Liszt – and her hair in a twist – and always pissed – like a terrible Hun – with a twelve-bore gun – what? – ’
‘Yes, Daddy . . .’
‘ – smelly old Valkyrie – rosewater talc-ery – came down to Corley – and said she was poorly – took it quite sorely . . .’ A little flick of spit from his father’s mouth danced in the light as he turned. Wilfrid couldn’t follow or understand a lot of the words themselves, but the joy of improvisation caught at him as well as the sense of horror that his father’s poems always challenged you not to feel. He had got to the door and flung it open – ‘And that, young man,’ he said, ‘is more than I’ve written of my book for the past six months.’
‘Really, Daddy?’ said Wilfrid, unable to decide from his father’s tone if this was a cause for celebration or despair.
THREE
‘Steady, boys, steady!’
1
At five o’clock, when they were all getting their things, Miss Cobb, the Manager’s secretary, made a rare appearance in the staff-room. ‘Oh, Mr Bryant,’ she said, ‘with Miss Carter away, I wonder if you would walk with Mr Keeping.’
‘Oh,’ said Paul, glancing round at the others, ‘I don’t know . . .’ In his mind he was already halfway home, in the high summer evening.
‘I’ll do it,’ said Heather Jones.
‘Mr Keeping did ask for Mr Bryant,’ said Miss Cobb. ‘He likes to get to know the new staff.’
‘Well, of course I will, in that case,’ said Paul, blushing, with no idea, really, what he was being asked.
‘I’ll tell Mr Keeping. In five minutes, in the Public Space? Thank you so much . . .’ – and Miss Cobb withdrew, with her sad flinch of a smile.
In a week he had got to know all their names, which were still coloured and almost physical for him, made distinct by their newness and the need to tell them apart. Heather Jones and Hannah Gearing; Jack Reeves, the chief cashier; Geoff Viner, the second cashier, a bit of a looker; Susie Carter, a good-natured chatterbox, who was off today, attending a funeral in Newbury. Her empty chair and shrouded typewriter had quietened the office behind him. He slid his thermos into his briefcase and said quietly to Heather, ‘What does Susie do with Mr Keeping exactly?’
Heather seemed to think for a moment. ‘Oh she just walks home with him.’
Hannah, with her more maternal note, said, ‘Mr Keeping likes someone to keep him company. Normally Susie goes because she lives up past the church. It’s a nice little walk, really – it’ll only take you five minutes.’
‘Just don’t say, “How are you, Keeping?” ’ said June Underwood.
‘I won’t,’ said Paul, to whom the whole business sounded odd and euphemistic. From what he had seen of him, Mr Keeping was a cool and formal sort of man, with a sarcastic streak, but he’d noticed the staff took a strangely protective attitude to him. If they’d ever thought it odd for a middle-aged man to need walking home, they treated it now as the normal thing. He said, ‘Isn’t the Manager meant to live over the bank?’ He’d seen upstairs, where the sitting-room of the bank house was lined with filing-cabinets and the bedrooms were stacked with old desks and junk.
‘Well, this one doesn’t,’ said Jack Reeves, who’d just got his pipe going, the coarse dry smoke like a sign of his authority.
Geoff Viner, taming his hair with a comb and the flat of his hand, said, ‘I assume you don’t know Mrs Keeping.’
‘Oh, you know her, Geoffrey, do you!’ said June, and a bit of a laugh went round the room.
Jack Reeves said, ‘I assure you Mrs Keeping has no intention of living over the shop.’
‘I’d hardly call the Midland Bank a shop,’ said Heather.
‘Her words, not mine,’ said Jack.
‘Well, she’s got the boys to think of too,’ said Hannah. ‘They need a proper garden to run around in.’
‘What children have they got?’ said Paul.
‘Well, I say boys . . . John’s at college, isn’t he.’
‘John, the elder boy, is at Durham University’ – Jack Reeves frowned over his pipe, out of his greater intimacy with the Manager. ‘Julian is in the Sixth Form at Oundle School, and doing very well, I believe.’ He sucked and nodded and gazed over their heads. ‘They talk of Oxford’ – and he wen
t out, leaving them half a roomful of smoke.
In the Gents Paul washed the money smell, copper and nickel and grubby paper, from his hands. The geyser rumbled. Grey-black suds speckled the basin. He was bothered about the imminent walk, but it was an opportunity, as his mother would say, and it looked a little easier if the Keepings had sons, one of them about Paul’s own age. John and Julian: he saw them, seductive images spun from nothing; already they were showing him around their large garden. He smiled narrowly at himself in the mirror, turning a little to left and right: he had a long nose, the ‘Bryant nose’, his mother said, disclaiming it; his hair was cut horribly short for the new job, and the strip light, which spared nothing, brought out its odd coppery sheen and the stipple of spots across his forehead. Then he started grinning, to see what that looked like, but immediately Geoff came in behind him and went to the urinal; it was a double one, on a raised step, and Paul looked furtively at Geoff’s back in the mirror.
‘No, the thing about the boss, young Paul,’ Geoff said, with a quick glance over his shoulder, ‘is he had a very bad war.’
‘Oh, did he, right . . .’ said Paul, busying himself with the taps and then with the damp curtain of roller towel.
‘Prisoner of war,’ said Geoff. ‘He never talks about it, so for god’s sake don’t mention it.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t, would I,’ said Paul, ‘obviously.’
Geoff finished, jiggled, zipped up his wonderfully tight fly, and came over to the basins, where he looked at himself in the mirror with no sign of the dissatisfaction Paul had felt. He jutted his jaw, and turned his head both ways with a stroking hand. His roundish, full-lipped face was sharpened up by a pair of handsome sideburns, shaved forward at the bottom into dark points. ‘Sorry to say,’ he said, ‘he’s a bit of a nervous wreck. Pathetic, really. He ought to have a much bigger branch than this. Brilliant brain, they say, but can’t take the strain. Feels he can’t go anywhere alone. There’s a word for it . . .’
‘Yes. Agoraphobia?’
‘That’s it. Hence the girls walking him home.’ He ran the hot tap and the geyser flared up again. ‘At least he says that’s the reason . . .’ Paul found he was looking at him in the mirror, one eyebrow raised, and he sniggered and coloured and looked down. He wasn’t nearly ready to joke about the other staff. He knew he had picked up on certain atmospheres between them, thought he glimpsed little histories; but any sort of sexual joke seemed to threaten him with exposure too. He knew he couldn’t bring them off. Geoff came up close to him to use the towel; he had a sharp five o’clock smell, smoke, bri-nylon and faded aftershave. ‘Well, mustn’t keep My Fair Lady waiting,’ he said. He was walking out with a girl from the National Provincial, the rival bank across the square, a fact which the girls at the Midland seemed to think a bit off.
When Paul got back into the Public Space Mr Keeping was just coming out of the Manager’s office. He held a light raincoat folded over his arm, and carried a dark brown trilby. Paul scanned him nervously for signs of his weakness, his wartime trauma. The dominant impression, of course, was his baldness, the great square blank of brow the home and symbol of that brilliant brain. Below it his features seemed rather small and provisional. He had dry, oddly rimless lips, and his smiles drew the corners of his mouth down with a confusing suggestion of distaste. When they were outside he stayed on the step to hear the successive muffled shocks of the door being locked and bolted from within. Then he settled his hat, with a forward tilt, low on his brows. At once he had a charming and even mischievous look. His guarded grey eyes, in the shadow of the brim, now seemed almost playful. And with a little bow, a little questioning hesitation – it was almost as though he expected Paul to take his arm – they set off up the broad slope of the marketplace, Paul instead earnestly gripping his briefcase, while Mr Keeping, with his raincoat over his arm, had the air of a mildly curious visitor to the town.
Paul wished Geoff hadn’t told him about Mr Keeping’s mental problems – and felt anxiously uncertain whether Mr Keeping himself would expect him to know about them. Smiling vaguely, he took in nothing of the shops and people he was staring at with such apparent alertness. His sense of the walk as an opportunity to get in the Manager’s good books was undermined by his fear that he’d been singled out for some kind of correction or discomfiting pep-talk. He saw Hannah Gearing across the square climbing into the Shrivenham bus as if leaving him to his fate. ‘And how is your mother?’ said Mr Keeping.
‘All right, thank you, sir,’ said Paul. ‘She manages pretty well.’
‘I hope she can manage without you for the week.’
‘Well, my aunt lives quite near us. It’s not really a problem.’ He was relieved but a little disconcerted by these kind questions. ‘We’re fairly used to it.’
‘Terrible thing,’ said Mr Keeping, raising his hat to an approaching lady with a murmur and his unsettling smile, as if to say he remembered exactly the size of her overdraft.
They went up into the quieter reaches of Church Walk, with its fanlights and front railings and lace curtains. A week ago Paul had known almost no one in the town, and now he had been put into an odd grim privileged relation with hundreds of them, over the counter, through the little mahogany doorway of his ‘position’. He was their servant and also an adjudicator, a strange young man granted intimate knowledge of at least one aspect of their lives, which was how much money they had, or didn’t have, and how much they wanted. He spoke to them courteously, amid tacit understandings, muted embarrassments: the loan, the ‘arrangement’. Now he glanced at Church Walk, grey veils of the curtains, glints of polished tables, porcelain, clocks, with a sense of arrangements reaching rooms-deep, years-deep into the shadows. Mr Keeping said nothing else, and seemed satisfied by silence.
Opposite the church they turned into an unmade road, Glebe Lane, with larger houses on one side and a view over a hedge into fields on the other. Long brambly strands of dog-roses swayed in the breeze along the top of the hedge. The lane had its own atmosphere, exclusive and a little neglected. It was odd to find yourself here two minutes from the centre of town. Grass and daisies grew patchily along the ridge of the road. Paul glanced through gateways at squareish villas set back behind gravel sweeps in broad gardens; between one or two of them humbler modern houses had been awkwardly inserted – ‘The Orchard’, ‘The Cottage’. ‘This is a private road, you see, Paul,’ said Mr Keeping, reverting to his ironical tone: ‘hence the countless potholes and unchecked vegetation. I advise you never to bring a motor-car along here.’ Paul felt he could pretty safely promise that. ‘Here we are . . .’ and they turned into the driveway of the penultimate house: the lane was sloping down already and narrowing, as if to lose itself in the approaching fields.
The house was another wide grey villa, with bay-windowed rooms either side of the front door, and its Victorian name, ‘Carraveen’, in stucco above it. The front door was wide open, as though the house had surrendered itself to the sunny day. A pale blue Morris Oxford stood in the drive with its windows down, and in its shadow a fat little Jack Russell lay on the gravel alternately panting and thinking. Paul squatted down to talk to the dog, which let him scratch it behind the ears but never really got interested. Mr Keeping had gone into the house, and it seemed so unlikely that he had simply forgotten him that Paul stood and waited with a consciously unassuming expression. He saw the drive had an In and an Out, not marked as such, but the fact sank down in him to some buried childhood idea of grandeur.
There was a thick flower-border, colourful but weedy and overgrown, around the edge of the drive, and over the top of it he looked into the garden beside the house, which stretched away through mysterious shadows of two or three large trees to a bright mown lawn that must run across the back. The whole place, at this indefinable time of day – late afternoon, late June, work over but hours of sunlight still ahead – made a peculiar impression on him. The time, like the light, seemed somehow viscous. He studied the name ‘Carraveen’, a bit like
caravan, a bit like carrageen, the stuff his mother used to set a blancmange, but clearly romantic too, Scottish perhaps, some now completely forgotten home or holiday place that someone had loved long ago. He felt seduced, and delicately stifled, by something he couldn’t yet explain. Through the left-hand bay-window he could see a grand piano in what appeared to be a dining-room, though the table in the centre was covered with books. The church clock struck the quarter-hour, and the silence afterwards seemed discreetly enhanced. Really all you could hear was the birds.
He heard a voice and looked again through the shadows to the bright back lawn, where he saw a woman in a wide straw hat with a red flower on the brim talking to someone out of view as she moved slowly towards the house. She was a largeish figure, in a shapeless blue dress, and carrying a large tapestry bag. Could this be the disdainful Mrs Keeping, mother of Julian and John? Surely too old. Mr Keeping’s own mother perhaps, a friend or relative who was visiting. She stopped for a moment, as if stumped by what she’d just been told, and gazed at the ground, and then unseeingly along the side of the house, where she did in fact see Paul. She said something to the person – now Paul heard another woman’s voice – and when she looked back he raised his head with a slight smile and then waved weakly, unsure if he wanted to announce himself or efface himself. There was another exchange, she nodded distantly, not exactly at Paul, and then strolled on out of view behind the house.
Paul went to the front door to call goodbye. He felt he’d been placed now as a low-level intruder, a peerer through other people’s windows. A middle-aged woman with a wide pale face and black hair that was swept up and set in a stiff, broad helmet was coming towards him. ‘Oh, hello,’ he said, ‘I’m Paul Bryant – from the bank . . .’
She gave him a practical look. ‘Did you want to see my husband?’
‘Well, actually I’ve just walked here with him,’ said Paul.
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