‘I’m afraid we can’t,’ Pamela said.
She was wearing a white dress and tennis shoes and socks of the same pristine freshness. There was a white band in her hair and she was wearing sunglasses. She wasn’t carrying her tennis racquet.
‘Can’t what?’ Hubert said, stroking a ball over the net. ‘Can’t what, Pam?’
‘We’re not allowed to play tennis.’
‘Who says we’re not allowed to? What d’you mean, allowed?’
‘Grandmother says we mustn’t play tennis.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Because it’s Sunday, because you haven’t been to church.’
‘Oh, don’t be so bloody silly.’
‘He asked her what we were doing. She had to tell him.’
‘The idiotic old brute.’
‘I don’t want to play, Hubert.’
Hubert stalked away. I wound the net down. I was glad he hadn’t insisted that he and I should play on our own.
‘Don’t be upset by it.’ I spoke apologetically. I didn’t know what else to say.
‘There won’t be a quarrel,’ she reassured me, and in fact there wasn’t. The raised voices of Hubert and his grandmother, which I thought we’d hear coming from the house, didn’t materialize. Pamela went to change her dress. I took off Hubert’s tennis shoes. In the drawing-room at teatime Mrs Plunkett said:
‘Hubert’s turned his face to the wall, has he?’
‘Shall I call him?’ Pamela offered.
‘Hubert knows the hour of Sunday tea, my dear.’
Lily brought more hot water. She, too, seemed affected by what had occurred, her mouth tightly clamped. But I received the impression that the atmosphere in the drawing-room was one she was familiar with.
‘A pity to turn one’s face to the wall on such a lovely day,’ Mrs Plunkett remarked.
Silence took over then and was not broken until Mrs Plunkett rose and left the room. Strauss began on the piano, tinkling faintly through the wall. Lily came in to collect the tea things.
‘Perhaps we should go for a walk,’ Pamela said.
We descended the stepped path between the rockeries and strolled past Hanrahan’s yard. We turned into the sandy lane that led to the dunes and made our way on to the strand. We didn’t refer to what had occurred.
‘Are you still at school?’ I asked.
‘I left in July.’
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘I’m hoping to study botany.’
She was shyer than I’d thought. Her voice was reticent when she said she hoped to study botany, as if the vaunting of this ambition constituted a presumption.
‘What are you going to do?’
I told her. I envied Hubert going to Africa, I said, becoming garrulous in case she was bored by silence. I mentioned the cultivation of groundnuts.
‘Africa?’ she said. When she stopped she took me unawares and I had to walk back a pace or two. Too late, I realized I had inadvertently disclosed a confidence.
‘It’s just an idea he has.’
I tried to change the subject, but she didn’t seem to hear, or wasn’t interested. I watched while she drew a pattern on the sand with the toe of her shoe. More slowly than before, she walked on again.
‘I don’t know why,’ I said, ‘we don’t have a bathe.’
She didn’t reply. Children were running into and out of the sea. Two men were paddling, with their trousers rolled up to their knees. A girl was sunbathing on a li-lo, both hands in the water, resisting the tide that would have carried her away from the shore.
‘My bathing-dress is in the house,’ Pamela said at last. ‘I could get it if you like.’
‘Would you like?’
She shrugged. Perhaps not, she said, and I wondered if she was thinking that bathing, as much as tennis, might be frowned upon as a breach of the Sabbath.
‘I don’t think, actually,’ she said, ‘that Hubert will ever go to Africa.’
Lily stood beside my deck-chair, a bunch of mint she’d picked in one hand. I hadn’t known what else to do, since Hubert had not come out of his room, so I’d wandered about the garden and had eventually found the deck-chair on a triangle of grass in a corner. ‘I’m going to read for a while,’ Pamela had said when we returned from our walk.
‘It’s understandable they never had to be so severe with Pamela,’ Lily said. ‘On account of her mother being sensible in her life. Different from Hubert’s father.’
I guessed she was talking to me like this because she’d noticed I was bewildered. The pettiness I had witnessed in my friend was a shock more than a surprise. Affected by it, I’d even wondered as I’d walked with Pamela back from the strand if I’d been invited to the house in order to become an instrument in her isolation. I’d dismissed the thought as a ridiculous flight of fancy: now I was not so sure.
‘It’s understandable, Hubert being bad to her. When you think about it, it’s understandable.’
Lily passed on, taking with her the slight scent of mint that had begun to waft towards me because she’d crushed a leaf or two. ‘He tried to beat me with a walking-stick,’ Hubert had reported at school, and I imagined the apprehension Lily hinted at – the father of the son who’d gone to the bad determined that history should not be repeated, the mother anxious and agreeing.
‘I was looking for you,’ Hubert said, sitting down on the grass beside me. ‘Why don’t we go down to the hotel?’
I looked at him, his lean face in profile. I remembered Pamela drawing the pattern on the sand, her silence the only intimation of her love. When had an intonation or a glance first betrayed it to him? I wondered.
Hubert pushed himself to his feet and we sauntered off to the lounge-bar of the hotel beside the railway station. Without asking me what I would like, Hubert ordered gin and orange. The tennis we hadn’t played wasn’t mentioned, nor did I say that Pamela and I had walked on the strand.
‘No need to go tomorrow,’ Hubert said. ‘Stay on a bit.’
‘I said I’d be back.’
‘Send them a wire.’
‘I don’t want to over-stay, Hubert. It’s good of your grandmother to have me.’
‘That girl stays for three months.’
I’d never drunk gin before. The orange made it pleasantly sweet, with only a slight aftertaste, I liked it better than stout.
‘My father’s drink,’ Hubert said. ‘My mother preferred gimlets. A gimlet,’ he added, ‘is gin with lime in it. They drank an awful lot, you understand.’
He confided to me that he intended to slip away to England himself. He was softening Lily up, he said, with the intention of borrowing a hundred pounds from her. He knew she had it because she never spent a penny; a hundred pounds would last him for ages, while he found out more about the prospects in Africa.
‘I’ll pay her back. I’d never not.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Anything would be better than the Dublin Handkerchief Company. Imagine being in the Dublin Handkerchief Company when you were fifty years of age! A lifetime of people blowing their noses!’
We sat there, talking about school, remembering the time Fitzherbert had dressed himself up in the kind of woman’s clothes he considered suitable for a streetwalker and demanded an interview with Farquie, the senior languages master; and the time the Kingsmill brothers had introduced a laxative into the High Table soup; and when Prunty and Tatchett had appropriated a visiting rugby team’s clothes while they were in the showers. We recalled the days of our first term: how Hubert and I had occupied beds next to one another in the junior dormitory, how Miss Fanning, the common-room secretary, had been kind to us, thinking we were homesick.
‘One pour la route,’ Hubert said.
He held the man who served us in conversation, describing the same mixture of gin and orangeade as he’d had it once in some other bar. There had been iced sugar clinging to the rim of the glass; delicious, he said. The man just stared at him.
‘I’ll fix it up with Lily tonight,’ Hubert said on the way back to the house. ‘If she can’t manage the hundred I’d settle for fifty.’
We were still talking loudly as we mounted the stepped path between the rockeries, and as we passed through the hall. In the dining-room Mrs Plunkett and Pamela had clearly been seated at the table for some time. When we entered the old woman rose without commenting on our lateness and repeated the grace she had already said. A weary expression froze Hubert’s features while he waited for her voice to cease.
‘We were down in the hotel,’ he said when it did, ‘drinking gin and orange. Have you ever wandered into the hotel, Pam?’
She shook her head, her attention appearing to be occupied with the chicken leg on her plate. Hubert said the hotel had a pleasant little lounge-bar, which wasn’t the description I’d have chosen myself. A rendezvous for the discriminating, he said, even if one encountered difficulty there when it came to a correctly concocted gin and orange. He was pretending to be drunker than he was.
‘A rather dirty place, Dowd’s Hotel,’ Mrs Plunkett interposed, echoing what I knew would have been her husband’s view.
‘Hanrahan used to drink there,’ Hubert continued. ‘Many’s the time I saw him with a woman in the corner. I’ve forgotten if you said you remembered the late Hanrahan, Pam?’
She said she didn’t. Mrs Plunkett held out her cup and saucer for more tea. Pamela poured it.
‘Hanrahan painted the drain-pipes,’ Hubert said. ‘D’you remember that time, Pam?’
She shook her head. I wanted to tell him to stop. I wanted to remind him that he had already asked his cousin if she remembered Hanrahan painting the drain-pipes, to point out that it wasn’t she who had caused the difficulty that afternoon, that it wasn’t she who had made us stand there while grace was said again.
‘I’m surprised you don’t,’ Hubert said. ‘I’m really very surprised, Pam.’
Mrs Plunkett didn’t understand the conversation. She smiled kindly at me, and briefly indicated dishes I might like to help myself to. She lifted a forkful of cold chicken to her mouth.
‘It’s only that he mentioned you once in Dowd’s,’ Hubert said. He laughed, his eyes sparkling, as if with delight. ‘He asked how you were getting on one time. A very friendly man.’
Pamela turned away from the table, but she couldn’t hide what she wished to hide and she couldn’t control her emotions. Her cheeks were blazing now. She sobbed, and then she pushed her chair back and hurried from the room.
‘What have you said to her?’ Mrs Plunkett asked in astonishment.
I could not sleep that night. I kept thinking about Pamela, unhappy in her bedroom, and Hubert in his. I imagined Hubert’s father and Pamela’s mother, children in the house also, the bad son, the good daughter. I imagined the distress suffered in the house when Hubert’s father was accused of some small theft at school, which Hubert said he had been. I imagined the misdemeanour forgotten, a new leaf turned, and some time later the miscreant dunned by a debt collector for a sum he could not pay. Letters came to the house from England, pleading for assistance, retailing details of hardship due to misfortune. When I closed my eyes, half dreaming though I was not yet asleep, Mrs Plunkett wept, as Pamela had. She dreaded the letters, she sobbed; for a day or two she was able to forget and then another letter came. ‘I will write a cheque’: the man I had not seen spoke blankly, taking a cheque-book from his pocket and, at the breakfast table, writing it immediately.
I opened my eyes; I murmured Pamela’s name. ‘Pamela,’ I whispered because repeating it made her face more vivid in my mind. I might have told her that Hubert, at school, had been sought out and admired more than any other boy because he was not ordinary, that he’d been attractive and different in all sorts of ways. I might have begged her not to hate the memory of him when she ceased to love him.
I fell asleep. We played tennis and Hubert easily beat us. A car lay on its side, headlights beaming on the apes that scampered from the broken cage. On the bloody grass of the roadside verge the two dead faces still smiled. ‘You will know no blacker day,’ the voice of a schoolmaster promised.
In the morning, after breakfast, I packed my suitcase while Hubert sat smoking a cigarette in silence. I said goodbye to Lily in the kitchen, and to Mrs Plunkett. Pamela was in the hall when we passed through it.
‘Goodbye,’ she said. At breakfast she had seemed to have recovered her composure. She smiled at me now, saying she was sorry I was going.
‘Goodbye, Pamela.’
Hubert stood by the open hall door, not looking at her, gazing out into the sunlit garden. On the way to the railway station we talked again about incidents at school. He mentioned the two nurses we’d accompanied to their doorstep and the luck we’d had at the races. ‘A pity we wouldn’t have time for a gin and orange,’ he said as we passed the hotel.
On the slow train, close at first to the sea and then moving into the landscape that was just beginning to seem parched because of the heatwave, I knew that I would never see Hubert again. A friendship had come to an end because when a little more time went by he would be ashamed, knowing I would not easily forget how he had made his cousin a casualty of the war with his grandfather. There would always be an awkwardness now, and the memory of Hubert at home.
A Trinity
Their first holiday since their honeymoon was paid for by the elderly man they both called Uncle. In fact, he was related to neither of them: for eleven years he had been Dawne’s employer, but the relationship was more truly that of benefactor and dependants. They lived with him and looked after him, but in another sense it was he who looked after them, demonstrating regularly that they required such care. ‘What you need is a touch of the autumn sun,’ he had said, ordering Keith to acquire as many holiday brochures as he could lay his hands on. ‘The pair of you’re as white as bedsheets.’
The old man lived vicariously through aspects of their lives, and listened carefully to all they said. Sharing their anticipation, he browsed delightedly through the pages of the colourful brochures and opened out on the kitchen table one glossy folder after another. He marvelled over the blue of the Aegean Sea and the flower markets of San Remo, over the Nile and the pyramids, the Costa del Sol, the treasures of Bavaria. But it was Venice that most instantly caught his imagination, and again and again he returned to the wonder of its bridges and canals, and the majesty of the Piazza San Marco.
‘I am too old for Venice,’ he remarked a little sadly. ‘I am too old for anywhere now.’
They protested. They pressed him to accompany them. But as well as being old he had his paper-shop to think about. He could not leave Mrs Withers to cope on her own; it would not be fair.
‘Send me one or two postcards,’ he said. ‘That will be sufficient.’
He chose for them a package holiday at a very reasonable price: an air flight from Gatwick Airport, twelve nights in the fairyland city, in the Pensione Concordia. When Keith and Dawne went together to the travel agency to make the booking the counter clerk explained that the other members of that particular package were an Italian class from Windsor, all of them learning the language under the tutelage of a Signor Bancini. ‘It is up to you if you wish to take the guided tours of Signor Bancini,’ the counter clerk explained. ‘And naturally you have your own table for breakfast and for dinner.’
The old man, on being told about the party from Windsor, was well pleased. Mixing with such people and, for just a little extra, being able to avail themselves of the expertise of an Italian language teacher amounted to a bonus, he pointed out. ‘Travel widens the mind,’ he said. ‘I deplore I never had the opportunity.’
But something went wrong. Either in the travel agency or at Gatwick Airport, or in some anonymous computer, a small calamity was conceived. Dawne and Keith ended up in a hotel called the Edelweiss, in Room 212, in Switzerland. At Gatwick they had handed their tickets to a girl in the yellow-and-red Your-Kind-of-Holiday uniform. She’d addresse
d them by name, had checked the details on their tickets and said that that was lovely. An hour later it had surprised them to hear elderly people on the plane talking in North of England accents when the counter clerk at the travel agency had so specifically stated that Signor Bancini’s Italian class came from Windsor. Dawne had even remarked on it, but Keith said there must have been a cancellation, or possibly the Italian class was on a second plane. ‘That’ll be the name of the airport,’ he confidently explained when the pilot referred over the communications system to a destination that didn’t sound like Venice. ‘Same as he’d say Gatwick. Or Heathrow.’ They ordered two Drambuies, Dawne’s favourite drink, and then two more. ‘The coach’ll take us on,’ a stout woman with spectacles announced when the plane landed. ‘Keep all together now.’ There’d been no mention of an overnight stop in the brochure, but when the coach drew in at the Edelweiss Hotel Keith explained that that was clearly what this was. By air and then by coach was how these package firms kept the prices down, a colleague at work had told him. As they stepped out of the coach it was close on midnight: fatigued and travel-stained, they did not feel like questioning their right to the beds they were offered. But the next morning, when it became apparent that they were being offered them for the duration of their holiday, they became alarmed.
‘We have the lake, and the water-birds,’ the receptionist smilingly explained. ‘And we may take the steamer to Interlaken.’
‘An error has been made,’ Keith informed the man, keeping the register of his voice even, for it was essential to be calm. He was aware of his wife’s agitated breathing close beside him. She’d had to sit down when they realized that something was wrong, but now she was standing up again.
‘We cannot change the room, sir,’ the clerk swiftly countered. ‘Each has been given a room. You accompany the group, sir?’
The Collected Stories Page 151