The Man Whose Dream Came True

by Julian Symons

  Easter was over and only half a dozen people were staying at the Seven Seas, a young couple who looked as if they were just married, a husband and wife in their seventies, he wearing a deaf aid and she tottery, a rabbit-faced clergyman whose lips moved ceaselessly perhaps in prayer, and Mrs Harrington. Supper was tomato soup, thinly sliced cold meat and salad, and ice cream. Obviously this was one of the bad days. Widgey appeared only intermittently at meals, and was not present at this one. The food was eaten almost in silence. The young couple whispered to each other as though in church, the clergyman’s lips moved, Mrs Harrington viewed food and company with a fixed smile. Only the deaf old man said, ‘What’s this, then, what’s this?’ as each course came up. ‘Tomato soup…it’s cold meat, dear, mostly ham I think,’ his wife quavered and then powerfully repeated as he turned towards her the deaf aid which made a slight whistling sound.

  Afterwards he signed the visitors’ book firmly, ‘Anthony Bain-Truscott,’ with a fictitious address in London, and went to see Widgey. She sat in an armchair in the parlour reading a romance called Love and Lady Hetty. She put the book down, marking the place carefully.

  ‘Just having my evening cupper. Want one?’ She took the kettle off a small gas ring, got two unmatching cups from a cupboard, made tea, rolled a cigarette and said, ‘Well?’

  The tea was very hot, thick and in some mysterious way very sweet, although she had put in no sugar. ‘How do you mean, Widgey?’

  ‘What’s up? Landing here without even a telegram. What name, by the way?’

  ‘Bain-Truscott.’

  ‘Tony for me.’ She swilled tea round her mouth. False teeth clattered slightly. ‘No need to say anything. Any real trouble, I’d like to know.’

  ‘There’s nothing.’ But he felt an urgent need to talk about the way in which he had been deceived. ‘It was a damned girl.’ He told her about the Fiona who had turned out to be Mary and was indignant when she laughed. The laugh turned into a cough, ash dropped from her cigarette. She drank some more tea, stopped coughing.

  ‘Glad it’s no worse. You ought to settle down.’ He did not answer this. ‘Broke, are you?’

  ‘I’ve got some money.’

  ‘Your father wrote the other day, asked if I’d heard from you. Don’t worry, I won’t tell him you’re here. He’s had an accident, broken his leg, laid up.’

  ‘Let him rot.’

  ‘He’s not my favourite man.’

  ‘He killed mother.’ He wondered why he spoke so fiercely when he had never been close to his mother as he had to his father.

  ‘Sheila killed herself. She was a stupid cow. She should never have married.’ She did not amplify this statement.

  The conversation made him uncomfortable. He said flirtatiously, ‘You ought to marry again, Widgey.’

  ‘Who’d have me? They’d be marrying the Seven Seas. But you should think about it, you’re getting on. Sure you aren’t in trouble?’

  ‘Oh, Widgey.’

  ‘Just I’ve got a feeling. Hardly ever wrong, my feelings.’

  ‘They’re wrong this time,’ he said a little snappishly. As he bent to kiss her he caught her characteristic smell of tobacco blended with something both sweet and sharp like eau-de-cologne. The past rolled over him in waves, the years of bucket and spade holidays, the years when he had come down alone and walked about looking for girls. One of the rolling waves was composed of pure affection. ‘I won’t be any trouble.’

  ‘I don’t mind a little trouble. I just wish you knew what you were doing, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’ He made a gesture that embraced his well-cut clothes and his personality. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said flatly. He went upstairs, and to bed.

  Chapter Two

  He spent the next forty-eight hours recovering his poise, as others convalesce from influenza. There could be no doubt that the Fiona-Mary affair had been a fiasco. He recalled it continually like a man exploring a sore place with his tongue, feeling each time the shock that had run through him on reading the story in the paper. The thought that he had been deceived was hard to endure.

  Southbourne had grown dramatically since the war, sprouting a holiday camp and glass cliffs of flats, but it was still a small resort, a lesser Hastings rather than a miniature Brighton. He walked up and down the promenade as he had when a youth, moving very slowly like a man recovering from illness. He wandered beside the sea, played the slot machines on the pier, and on a day of blustery rain listened to the concert party in the Pier Pavilion. The season had not begun, and there was only a sprinkling of people in the canvas seats. Afterwards he went into the café under the Pavilion’s dome, ordered a pot of tea and toast and sat staring through the plate glass window at the sea.

  ‘Mr Bain-Truscott. I thought it was you.’ Mrs Harrington stood beside his table. ‘Isn’t this the most awful weather?’ She hovered, twirling a damp umbrella. At his suggestion she sat down and drank a cup of tea. They laughed together when the waitress said that a pot for two would cost more than a pot for one.

  ‘English seaside resorts.’ Tony shook his head. ‘Can you wonder more and more people go abroad for holidays.’

  ‘Are you a great traveller?’

  ‘I know France pretty well. Mostly around Paris.’ One of his secretarial jobs had taken him to France for a week. It was the only time he had been out of England.

  ‘Ah, Paris in the spring,’ Mrs Harrington sighed.

  He moved off this dangerous ground. ‘You’re taking an early holiday.’

  ‘Not exactly a holiday. We used to live here and Alec Widgeon was a great friend of Harrington’s. I still know several people here. And of course I visit his resting place.’ From a crocodile bag she drew a small lace handkerchief and delicately wiped not her eyes but her nose.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘How could you know. It was a motor bus. Driven by a coloured person. I miss him greatly, although of course he is over there.’

  He was about to ask where, when he remembered her attention to the cards. Her brown Pekinese eyes looked into his. ‘Harrington was a very vital man.’

  He did not know what to say, and remained silent. ‘You’re Widgey’s nephew, aren’t you? She’s a remarkable woman. Such intensity of feeling. I really think she knows things. Was your mother her sister?’

  ‘Yes.’ He started to explain about the colonial origins of the Bain-Truscotts. Mrs Harrington waved a jewelled hand and said it added distinction. She was wearing a diamond clasp that must be worth a lot of money if it was real, and no doubt it was real. And that large emerald ring – he became aware that she had said something and asked her to repeat it.

  ‘I wondered what you were doing here.’

  ‘I sometimes come down to stay with Widgey. And I’ve had rather a shock. I thought I was going to get married, but it was broken off.’

  ‘You’ll think I’m a prying old woman.’ She gave a trill of falsetto laughter.

  ‘You haven’t been prying at all. And I think of you as just the same age as myself.’

  ‘That’s very nice even if you don’t mean it. Remember, there are just as good fish in the sea.’ Her hand, podgy and slightly wrinkled but ablaze with the stones she wore, touched his. As they walked back to the Seven Seas he asked her to call him Tony. He learned her name which, rather dismayingly, was Violet.

  On the following day they were going out of the door at the same time, and he accompanied her on a tour of the town’s jewellery shops. She was looking for a pearl choker and examined some that cost three and four hundred pounds, but she did not neglect rings and bracelets. He was impressed by the professional way in which she looked at the things and bargained with the jewellers. In the end she placed a diamond and ruby pendant round her ample neck and asked him if he liked it. He said truthfully that it was very pretty.

  ‘You really think so?’ She said to the jeweller, ‘I’ll give you a hundred and fifty.’

  The pri
ce was a hundred and seventy-five. The man raised his hands in despair, but she got it at her price after some haggling.

  ‘Will you take it off, Tony.’ He stood close behind her, his fingers touched the back of her neck, warm and smooth. He was aware of a faint tremor in her body as he undid the clasp. In the glass her brown eyes, warm and ardent, looked into his.

  ‘You’ll think I waste money, but you’re wrong,’ she said afterwards. ‘I may be a fool about a lot of things but I know what I’m looking at with stones. I don’t keep them for ever. I sell them after a few years, and I almost always make a profit.’

  ‘I thought you were wonderful. I could never have got the price down like that.’

  ‘Nothing to it. He wouldn’t have liked it if I’d just said yes to the asking price.’

  He decided to make his financial situation clear. ‘A hundred and fifty pounds. By my standards it’s a fortune.’

  She patted his hand. ‘Dear Tony, you’re so straightforward. That’s one of the things I like about you.’

  That evening they had a séance, or rather a table rapping session. It was against Widgey’s principles because she only approved of seeing the future in the cards, but it turned out that the deaf man and his tottery wife were interested in the world beyond, and the five of them sat at the round table in the parlour with the lights out. For some minutes nothing happened.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Deaf aid. ‘I heard something.’

  They sat in silence. Tony repressed an inclination to giggle. Three sharp knocks were heard. Mrs Deaf aid grunted something unintelligible. Widgey said, ‘Have you got a message? Is it for one of us? Two raps means you have.’ Two knocks sounded. ‘Is it for Mr Bennett?’ So that was Deaf aid’s name. One knock only. ‘For Mrs Bennett?’ Again one knock. ‘For Mrs Harrington?’ Two knocks. ‘Is it a close relative?’ Two knocks. ‘Her husband?’ Two knocks.

  Tony’s right hand was gripped by Mrs Harrington’s left. She held it tightly, the rings pressed into his fingers. She continued to hold it as questions and answers continued, slowly because as always in table rapping the answers were confined to plain ‘yes’ and ‘no’. When she herself began to ask questions about life over there her hot fingers slithered over his palm. It appeared that Mr Harrington was happy on the other side, although he missed Violet.

  ‘You were always so busy down here. Are you – is there enough for you to do?’ Two knocks, rather peremptory.

  Falteringly Mrs Harrington continued. ‘I have bought a pendant and I should like your opinion on it.’

  The response to this was an absolute fusillade of knocks, irregular ones which gradually became fainter.

  ‘Don’t be angry,’ Mrs Harrington said pleadingly. ‘Don’t go away, I have so many more questions.’ She asked some, and then Mrs Bennett put a question or two, but the spirit refused to respond.

  ‘We may as well call it a night,’ Widgey said. There was the sound of chairs being pushed back. Mrs Harringron took away her hand. As often happens when lights are turned on after darkness, the blinking faces looked guilty. Mrs Harrington was flushed. ‘It’s strange that it becomes difficult when you reach a really interesting point.’

  Widgey rolled and lit a cigarette. ‘Why should they answer if they don’t want to?’

  Mrs Bennett agreed. ‘They don’t want to know about our lives. Why should we expect to know everything they think and do?’

  The conversation continued in this vein. Widgey went out and made them all a cup of tea. They dispersed, the Bennetts first, then Mrs Harrington and Tony. Her room was number eleven, on the floor below his. She opened the door, turned back to him, took his hand.

  ‘I want you to know that I’m grateful.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You were so sympathetic. I know you must think I’m foolish.’ Her hand still held his, she had moved inside the room and it followed that he was now standing inside the doorway.

  ‘I don’t think anything of the sort.’

  ‘Come in.’ The injunction was not necessary for now he was quite certainly in the room. He closed the door. Around Mrs Harrington there hung always some curious scent, rather like low-lying mist clinging to the ground on a damp morning, but in the bedroom this heavy cloying smell was thick, as though he were in the lair of some powerful animal.

  ‘Look.’ She extended her arm, pointing, and for a moment he was absorbed in the spectacle of the arm itself, revealed as the sleeve of her dress moved up, a fine thick object against which the gold bracelet gleamed. The arm appeared to be pointing at the bed, but now she moved away from him and returned with a framed photograph which she pushed into his hand. It showed the head and shoulders of a tight-faced man whose brow was corrugated by a frown. What was he worried about?

  ‘Harrington.’ She spoke reverentially.

  Tony returned the photograph to its place beside the bed. Beside it stood another, of a pleasant large house standing in considerable grounds. ‘Is that your home?’

  ‘Yes. It’s William and Mary. Very pretty, don’t you think?’

  It was more than pretty, it was tangible evidence of large sums of money, which he saw suddenly adhering to her.

  ‘Harrington was a passionate man. I am a passionate woman.’ He was overpoweringly conscious of her nearness. The scent of her somehow gave the ordinary bedroom the atmosphere of a hotel room used by dozens of men and women for sexual purposes.

  ‘Oh, Tony, Tony.’

  ‘Violet.’ In the moment before being enclosed by those plump white arms be thought: I am lost. Then the arms clasped him firmly and bore him back on to the bed which creaked, and even swayed disturbingly, under their weight. Her mouth opened like a sea anemone and sucked him in.

  He went quietly up the stairs to his own room at six o’clock the following morning. Violet had told the truth in saying that she was a passionate woman.

  Chapter Three

  He spent much of the next two days in her company. They walked round the town together, went round the country in her solidly elegant Rover. Tony drove, and it was a pleasure to be behind the wheel of a car again, but at times he felt like a chauffeur.

  ‘In this village there’s a nice little antique shop as you go in on the left, just stop there will you,’ she would say, or ‘I don’t think we’ll have lunch at the Blue Peacock, it’s no good, just take us on to the next village like a dear boy.’ Not simply a chauffeur, but a chauffeur-cum-gigolo, for her manner towards him had become distinctly proprietorial, expressed in the requests she made for him to perform small services like getting her scarf and cigarettes. He did not mind her giving him money to pay for things, nor did he really resent being ordered about, but somehow it put their relationship on a footing which he did not feel they had reached. In the night she moaned for him and asked again and again if he loved her, but in the daytime she behaved as though absolutely certain of his dependence on her. What was the end of the situation, what did he want to happen? He was not sure himself.

  On Saturday morning he came down just after eleven, feeling weary but looking smart in a very pale sports jacket with dark blue trousers and elegant grey suede shoes. The honeymoon couple were going home and Widgey was at the entrance to tell them goodbye. There was no sign of Violet. Widgey beckoned him with a grimy forefinger and he followed her into the parlour, which was untidier than usual. Half a dozen small receptacles were brim-full of ash and stubs, playing cards were littered over the table as if a midnight poker game had been broken up by a police raid, small bits of orange peel were scattered on the side board. Widgey herself was wearing an old grey skirt fastened by safety pins and a dirty blue pullover. The contrast she presented to his own elegance was somehow uncomfortable.

  ‘Sit down.’ He sat in one of the stiff rexine covered chairs at the table. She rolled around the cigarette in her mouth, perhaps a sign of embarrassment, then suddenly emitted a powerful stream of smoke from her nose, like steam coming from a horse’s nostrils. ‘How long are you staying?’


  The question took him aback. It was something she had never said to him before. But she did not wait for an answer.

  ‘I’m fond of Violet, known her a long time. What about you?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  She made an irritated gesture, cigarette in hand. Ash fell to the floor. ‘What are you going to do?’

  He began to feel annoyed. Was he to be blamed because a woman fell in love with him? He moved his shoulders.

  ‘Harrington had some sort of engineering firm. She still owns it. She’s got plenty of money, only stays here for old times sake.’ What was she getting at? ‘You going to marry her?’

  ‘I don’t know. She might not want to.’

  ‘She’d eat you, boy, she’d eat you up alive. Don’t do it.’

  ‘It’s my business.’ He said it with a sharpness he did not intend.

  Widgey did not answer but she turned round and he was startled to see tears in her eyes. In the next moment he felt the pricking behind his own eyes, lowered his head and moved towards her. Then she was in the old armchair that had always stood in this room, his face lay on the rough texture of the grey skirt, he was sobbing and she was stroking his hair. He had the common sensation of thinking that the whole incident had happened before, and then he remembered that this was so, that there had been a time in childhood when he had been lost for a couple of hours on the beach and had been brought back by a policeman and been scolded, and had then dirtied his pants. Rejected by his father and mother he had run into the parlour, flung himself weeping into Widgey’s lap and pressed his face into the roughness of her skirt. It was as simple as that. He wiped his eyes, got up.