But in the very moment that she uttered these words, Lady Cameron realised that they proposed something no longer possible of fulfilment. Beyond the bridge the roof of the coach was visible above the small tumble-down farm building. And it was evident that the vehicle was in motion.
‘I suppose the fellow’s just turning round,’ Charles said, having himself become aware of what was happening. But he spoke without conviction, and it quite clearly wouldn’t do. The coach was gathering speed. The coach disappeared in the direction of Arta.
‘I’ve known Mrs Boss-Baker do it before,’ Lady Cameron said, with a casualness she didn’t actually feel. ‘She’s extremely careful, but she does occasionally count the heads incorrectly. It must be very easy to do.’
‘But I can’t believe she’d fail to see I wasn’t yet on board the damned thing!’ Charles exclaimed indignantly. ‘It’s impossible! It’s an outrage! I’ll have the woman sacked.’
‘I don’t think we ought to take it too seriously, Mr Hornett. And we had better return over the bridge at once. It’s probable they’ll turn back in a few minutes. They mayn’t miss me, but they’re certain to miss your voice.’
‘I bloody well hope so.’ Charles had been conscious of no barb in his companion’s words. ‘But if they don’t miss me until it comes to allocating the rooms in the hotel, they mayn’t come back to pick me up for more than an hour.’ Charles paused, broodingly. ‘Or you,’ he added as an unexpected afterthought.
‘Let us hope it won’t be as long as that.’ Lady Cameron now felt that it quite probably would be. Her former husband did, after all, take those fifteen-minute naps on board the coach. So her small witticism hadn’t meant much. ‘For I rather think,’ she said, ‘that it’s going to turn chilly.’ This was undeniable. As they reached the apex of the bridge a cold wind caught them. She regretted that she had left her overcoat in the coach. For that matter she had left her handbag as well, which wasn’t at all her habit. This meant that she was penniless. It wasn’t important, but it was a shade vexatious. The town of Arta was invisible, and might be several miles away. The anglers and the courting couples had departed, and the surroundings now registered a back-of-beyond effect which was far from pleasing. There was nothing but the pot-house they were now approaching, and it was no more than a low hovel with a couple of dirty benches outside. Lady Cameron disliked the effect of dependence on Charles which all this engendered.
‘I’d say it was a pub of sorts,’ Charles announced. ‘I dare say I can get a drink. I’ll ask them for an ouzo.’ He glanced absently at Lady Cameron, and it was as if a vague memory of the usages of civilisation stirred in his head. ‘What about you, Lady Cunningham?’
‘A café grecque, perhaps.’ Lady Cameron had been so surprised that she sat down abruptly on one of the grubby benches, although it was something she had just decided not to do.
‘Ten drachmas.’
It was not the habit of Messrs Pipkin and Pipkin’s pilgrims to be perpetually standing one another drinks, but in the present circumstances this demand was decidedly peculiar.
‘My purse is in the coach,’ Lady Cameron said briefly.
‘Ah, yes.’ Charles spoke as if this settled the matter, and departed. When he emerged again from the hovel he was carrying a single glass. It wasn’t a matter, his former wife told herself, of brutish bad manners. Charles wasn’t exactly like that. It was much more that the very existence of other people in the universe was a fact continually slipping from him even between one second and the next. Strictly regarded, much of his monologue was really pure soliloquy. And now, when he had sat down with his drink in front of him, he was actually silent for some time. Any attention that he did pay to the external world appeared to be directed towards the bridge, close to which they were still sitting. Lady Cameron was silent too; she felt rather like one of those bespangled females whose function is to disappear opportunely on the stage of an illusionist. Once or twice she detected Charles as producing a sound which she had very little memory of associating with him: a kind of semi-internalised laughter. He seemed to be tickled by the bridge.
Then something very disturbing happened. Charles ceased gazing at the bridge and gazed at her instead. He was actually gazing at her with genuine, if fleeting, curiosity. And he was looking puzzled, as well.
‘I’ll tell you an odd thing about myself,’ Charles said abruptly. ‘It has come into my head that you remind me of somebody.’
‘Indeed, Mr Hornett?’
Lady Cameron had offered this convention of mild encouragement automatically. She still didn’t in the least want to encourage or coax her former husband’s pathologically defective memory. But clearly the thing now had to come. There was no point in attempting diversion or delay.
‘Only I can’t remember who it is. Perhaps it will come back to me later. Of course it can’t be of any importance to me, can it?’
‘Almost certainly not, I should imagine.’ Lady Cameron produced this reply with some relief, and at the same time she looked anxiously in the direction of what she supposed to be the road from Arta. There was always the possibility that a relief expedition would heave into view. And now for the moment the crisis had passed. Charles’s attention had wandered again. It was once more engaged with the bridge.
‘I call that a damned good yarn,’ he said. ‘Sensible chap, eh? And resourceful, too. I’ll bet he made up that raven.’
‘Perhaps the whole story is made up. It’s not a particularly agreeable one.’
‘Depends on how you look at it. And I’ll tell you another interesting thing about myself, Lady Cunningham. I had a wife just like that myself. Never stopped chattering at me. I tell you I just could not shut her up. But this chap managed that in the simplest and most literal manner. Piled up the rubble on her, eh? Stout fellow! I drink to him.’
Charles Hornett raised his glass and drained it. He showed no awareness that the woman vaguely known to him as Lady Cunningham was staring at him in naked horror. And even when she had a little recovered herself she didn’t attempt to speak. The strangeness of this neat and convinced reversal of historical fact was too much for her. For the present, at least, she simply wanted to get away, to be released from a nightmare at once absurd and insupportable.
And release was at hand. Suddenly as if by magic, the coach had appeared and was drawing to a halt beside them. It contained only the driver and Mrs Boss-Baker – who was already lavishly signalling rescue and apology.
‘Well, thank goodness for that,’ Charles said. ‘I was getting damned bored, sitting outside this God-forsaken pub and talking about nothing at all. At least I shan’t be late for my dinner.’ He stood up, glancing blankly at Lady Cameron as he did so. Or glancing, so to speak, at where she was. For it was reassuringly evident – she somehow knew this – that her former husband wouldn’t give her another thought during the remaining course of ‘Sites and Flowers of Thessaly and Epirus’.
THE TIME-BOMB
I
Gilbert Pillman and Francis Gethin shared digs. They were in their early twenties, and among the most junior of the junior lecturers in a provincial university. Their resemblance to one another stopped short just there. Pillman had taken his first steps in learning at a small Midland grammar school and considered himself (or thought he ought to consider himself) lucky to have got where he had. Apart from being clever there was nothing remarkable about him except his being very good-looking, which he was in a rather distinguished and (so to speak) unexpected way. People regarded him as being good natured and as not incapable of being good fun.
Gethin was the son of an eminent philosopher and the grandson of a peer. He just couldn’t believe that Winchester and Oxford had vanished from his ken and that here he was in this absurd place. Along with this intolerance and fastidiousness there went, oddly enough, a great deal of modesty and diffidence. His acquaintances accounted for this by remarking that, as a physical presence, he was distinctly pinched and meagre. Chetif was his own word for hims
elf when he became intimate and confiding. But this he didn’t do at all readily. In fact in all Nessfield it was only his room-mate Gillie who was allowed much glimpse of a gloomy and self-tormenting Franco.
Neither of these young men was particularly keen on his job. Pillman’s subject was English literature (capital ‘L’ literature in professional contexts), and he wasn’t very clear as to what one did about it. He could run up quite amusing lectures surprisingly rapidly – which was just as well, since he was required to hold forth on a dais four times a week and had as yet no stock of the wretched things in a drawer. But, to get on, it was essential to be a scholar. You found something to edit, or somebody whose humdrum life you burrow into, or books which could be speciously represented as ‘influenced’ by other books. ‘We come on quite an interesting line of derivation here,’ he would say from that dais. ‘It’s odd how big dogs go for little dogs’ vomit. You’d expect it to be the other way round.’ And he’d get a not very comprehending laugh here and there from the captive audience ranged in front of him.
Gethin was a mathematician. It was the very bloodiest thing you could be, he declared, if you happened to be not a mathematician. He had recently counted up and found that there were at present six mathematicians in England. He himself was not among them.
So here was something more the two had in common, after all: a morose comfortable grousing was agreeable to them both. They’d hold sessions for this of an evening, sitting on either side of a smoky little fire in their shared sitting-room, drinking cheap burgundy (and it was really cheap in the nineteen-thirties) out of a flagon shaped (Gethin said) like a po.
Pillman was quite fond of Gethin. He approved of a distinct tendency in Gethin to admire him: something the more gratifying in that Gethin seemed indisposed to admire much else. Pillman felt it to be his role to jolly Gethin out of his glooms; even to rag him mildly at times. They had become Gillie and Franco to one another in the first week of their association.
‘He’s quite too absurd,’ Franco would say of his professor, whose name was Shuffrey. ‘It’s hard not to intimate one’s sense that he ought to have a little shop somewhere. Rather a shady little shop, with French letters kept under the counter.’
‘How very coarse. And I don’t believe, Franco, you’d know a French letter if you saw one.’
‘Oh, shut up, Gillie.’ For some reason Franco disliked this quip very much. ‘And do you know? He refers to his children as the kiddies. It’s unbelievable.’
‘I suppose it would be unbelievable in your class of society, my dear infant. But even men who beget kiddies are also God’s creatures. And I rather like your Professor Shuffrey. His finger-nails keep mine company, I suppose. Pass the bottle.’ Franco during the previous week had commented unfavourably on Gillie’s notion of adequate cleanliness in this regard. Public school standards of uncompromising candour were among the few things he felt he could assist his friend to a command of.
‘Look not on the third glass, Gillie.’
‘Bloody well look on the third glass when it’s three lectures on Samson Agonistes that lie ahead. Three lectures on Samson Agonistes! It’s straight murder.’
‘You’d better get started.’ Gethin himself had recourse to the third glass. ‘We don’t seem very cheerful, do we?’
‘No.’
‘Nor shall be when we’ve become professors in some awful hole in Wales or the Middle East. Nor when retired and seventy.’
‘Perfectly true, Franco. Sighing that only one thing has been lent to youth and age in common: discontent.’
‘I suppose you chuck those stale old poetical tags at your undergraduates.’
‘Students.’
Franco was falling into the habit of staring at Gillie quite a lot, but in the course of this exercise he usually switched on a frown of disapproval. He did this now.
‘Students or undergraduates,’ he said, ‘they’re a dreary crowd.’
‘Oh, some of them aren’t too bad.’ Pillman in fact rather liked many of his pupils, and particularly three or four of the prettier girls. In bed at night, and before he went to sleep, he commonly put in time accomplishing the seduction of one or another of them. They weren’t, after all, much younger than he was, and were certainly above what one read of in the newspapers as the age of consent. Unfortunately it seemed you could be sacked for sleeping with a member of the university in statupupillari – which you couldn’t be for going with some stray girl down in the town. Not that Pillman had ever done this. It was one of his few secrets that he was a virginal youth. Possibly Gethin was too. Gethin would sometimes describe a man as a ‘womaniser’ in a tone of chilly contempt, but without enlarging on the topic.
‘I suppose I’d better get cracking,’ Pillman said. He struggled out of a creaking basket chair, crossed the room, and glowered at the typewriter on his small work-table. ‘”Oh dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon.” Why was it Samson’s hair that Dalila cut off? I could tell them it’s what psychoanalysts call an upward displacement. Like inserting a foreign body in old King Hamlet’s ear.’
‘If you’ve only got rubbish like that in your head, Gillie, you’d better leave it until tomorrow.’
‘I can’t. I’m going to Notton Grange tomorrow. It’s going to be a regular Saturday assignment for quite some time. A great opportunity for me, Hedger says.’ Hedger was Pillman’s professor.
‘Hell, Gillie! What about our golf?’ For a moment Gethin was pale and furious. The two young men had recently taken to playing singularly bad golf on the municipal links. ‘And what’s this Notton Grange, anyway?’
‘It’s Lord Furlong’s place. He’s a local grandee.’ Pillman told himself that ‘place’ was pretentious, as being what some other sort of person would say, and that he ought to have said ‘house’. Much reading in Eng. Lit. had given him a lot of information about U and non-U usage, although these actual terms had not yet been invented. ‘I’m going to have the run of the library.’
‘What absurd person had taken to concealing himself behind that cognomen? Another prosperous brewer, I suppose.’
‘Quite right. The family name’s a bit odd. It’s Eatwell.’
‘Eatwell?’ Repeating the word, Franco raised his eyebrows in a deprecating way, and then dropped them into a frown. ‘I once knew an Eatwell. It was in a juvenile society, in which he suffered for it. Justly, of course. One ought not to allow oneself to be born to such a bizarrerie.’
‘Well, here’s an Eatwell who has escaped from it. You’d be damned glad to become a first baron, or whatever it is, yourself if you’d been born Francis Eatwell instead of Francis bloody Vere de Vere.’ Pillman grinned amiably as he delivered himself of this. He knew that Franco quite liked being the recipient of such crude banter. On this occasion, however, Franco did not respond, but spent some minutes staring sombrely into his glass. Then he roused himself.
‘Tell me more about this nonsense, Gillie,’ he said abruptly.
‘Well, Lord Furlong has this library – starting from scratch, and buying every volume in it himself.’
‘Himself?’
‘He has agents, no doubt. And he has a librarian. The Furlong Librarian. A chap called Bounce. I’ve had a letter from him, signed just like that. “C. Bounce, Furlong Librarian”.’
‘Ye Gods!’
‘Quite so, Franco. And now his lordship has been going in for manuscripts as well as books. He has discovered, much to his surprise, that you can pay even more for stuff written by hand than for real printed books. So he has told Bounce to go ahead. I expect Bounce will take to calling himself “C. Bounce, Furlong Librarian and Archivist”.’
‘Your ridiculous subject does seem to be taking you among queer cattle, Gillie.’
‘Hedger has discovered there’s a lot of eighteenth-century material, including a batch of letters by Shenstone.’
‘Shenstone?’
‘Do quit that silly trick, Franco. I’ve told you about Shenstone. Hedger says nobody much seems to
be working on Shenstone, so here’s my chance. Shenstone has a social tone you might rather admire. Poems upon Various Occasions. Written for the Entertainment of the Author, And Printed for the Amusement of a few Friends, Prejudiced in his Favour. What do you think of that? And Shenstone was a country gent. He entertained himself with landscape gardening as well. It might be quite entertaining to get up all that. Only there are several rather good books about it already. You should read Christopher Hussey’s. It’s the best one for beginners.’
‘I’ll have a look. I’m bloody ignorant, I know.’ Gethin was suddenly lapsing into his diffidence. He was also looking at his friend with unguarded pleasure, presumably at being in the company of so cultivated a character. ‘Just to keep up, I never dare take my nose out of maths. All figures and squiggles. It’s utterly barbarous.’
‘Nonsense, Franco. Numbers first began our might. There’s Yeats’s word for it. And look at your father. He takes maths in his stride and weaves it into the most profound philosophical speculations.’
‘So they say. I never made anything of my father – not any way on. I must have gone in for just having a mother right from the start.’
‘I suppose some chaps do. My father made himself felt. With quite a heavy hand.’ Pillman found himself tapping at the keys of the typewriter in front of him. Franco had never talked about his family before, and there was something a little uncomfortable about it now. ‘They let you play on that course on Sunday afternoons,’ he said suddenly. ‘We might have a go then.’
‘So we might.’ Gethin had faintly flushed, as if aware of having been made an object of consideration in an unwonted and not wholly agreeable way. ‘Yes, let’s say Sunday.’ And he put the cork in the burgundy flagon as a sign that he was going to bed.
Left to himself, Pillman tapped on for a few minutes on his boring machine. ‘The date of the composition of this sombre non-drama,’ he tapped, ‘is in dispute among the learned. So is the merit of its leaden versification.’ He stared at this and saw it wouldn’t do. It was half-baked throwaway stuff, which wouldn’t even raise a smile. So he ripped the sheet from the machine, crumpled it up, and went off to bed himself. As he climbed the staircase he selected, rather half-heartedly, his bed-time girl for the night.
The Bridge at Arta Page 3