‘How does Shenstone come along?’ she asked.
‘Shenstone?’ For a moment Gillie was actually at sea. ‘How odd that you should remember him.’
‘You told me about The School-Mistress. A Poem.’ Lou sounded amused, and Gillie wondered whether he was being made fun of. But perhaps the idea of a learned person as engaged with something called The School-Mistress. A Poem was funny in itself.
‘So I did. But I dropped Shenstone, more or less.’
‘And took up with something else?’
‘Oh, yes—one thing and another.’ It was evident that Lou Gethin was no more given than Diana Eatwell to following the course of Wordsworth studies. Gillie wasn’t offended by this ignorance of his academic fame; in fact he was delighted to be now engaging Lou’s attention at all. At the same time he was conscious of a certain uneasiness as besetting him. He could even believe that Lou had glanced at him in a peculiar way. But the plain fact was, of course, that the whole region upon which they had happened to touch was still capable of producing at least a mild paranoid reaction in him. At times he was capable of believing that a postman or a bus-conductor knew more about him than was wholesome. (The time-bomb, in fact, still faintly ticked.)
The next game began, and it seemed likely to be the last in the match. Gillie felt that if Lou wasn’t going to vanish permanently from his ken swift action would be required. Match point came and brought its customary hush – which lasted, however, only for a moment since the issue was decided by a brilliant ace. Both players bounded forward and shook hands vigorously across the net amid general applause. Gillie had to wait until this had subsided, and when he was able to speak his mind was made up.
‘Do you live in London, Lou?’ he asked. (Lou had said ‘Mr Pillman’, so there was a bit of bold initiative here.)
‘Yes, Gillie.’ (This was marvellous.) ‘I’m a Senior Registrar in an East End hospital.’
‘I’m going to be in town until the middle of next week. I wonder whether you could possibly lunch with me one day?’
‘I’d like to very much.’ Lou was gathering up a light coat she had shed during the heat and excitement of spectatorship. ‘Only it’s rather difficult, since just at present I have to be on call rather a lot.’ She glanced at Gillie consideringly. Gillie felt rather dashed, since this sounded like a polite preliminary to declining his invitation. Nothing of the kind, however, followed. ‘But look,’ she said, ‘could you perhaps come to dinner with me one evening? My flat’s quite close to the hospital, you see, and I’m at the end of my telephone there. Would Tuesday be possible?’
Gillie, whom a long period of somewhat unsatisfactory sexual life perhaps rendered particularly susceptible to altogether superior possibilities, felt that he had seldom heard more enchanting words. Lou seemed to be proposing something much more intimate than he himself would have dared to do.
‘That would be quite lovely,’ he said. ‘Let me get down your address, Lou.’ And he fished out a pocket-book.
The next few days passed in a dream. Gillie sat in the North Library of the B.M. in such a state of idle reverie for the most part that the elderly man who gave out the books took to looking at him disapprovingly, as if he had come in to shelter from the rain and was improperly occupying accommodation which ought to be available for some more genuinely enquiring person. When he went out to lunch in the little Greek restaurant in Coptic Street he was as unconscious of what he ate as the most abstracted scholar frequenting the place. And at the end of the day he fell into so deep a muse on the Underground that he was carried far beyond his proper destination to the mysterious region of Ealing Broadway.
He found that he couldn’t remember nearly as much as he wanted to about his brief encounter with Lou at Wimbledon. Just how had she been feeling about him? Why should she feel about him at all? Had she been responding to his mere looks as quite casual girls did from time to time? They had exchanged very little of what might be called hard information. He had been sufficiently possessed by the uncomfortableness of the past to have failed to enquire properly about her brother. And she hadn’t volunteered anything on that front. He wondered whether Franco was still a respectable Cambridge don, or whether his unfortunate constitution had carried him in some direction making easy chat about him difficult. Whatever the situation, it was probable that at a tête-á-tête dinner she would be more communicative. He wondered whether Franco had ever told her as much as he knew about the wretched conclusion of the affair with Diana. And he wondered at his own boldness in venturing anew within the whole Eatwell–Gethin network. There even lurked a disturbing thought prompted by this image. The lure of Lou Gethin was proving so potent that he could almost think of himself as a helpless fly being drawn insensibly into a spider’s web. He found himself behaving in an absurdly juvenile fashion over the forthcoming engagement. Walking down Piccadilly on the day before it was to take place, he dodged into the Burlington Arcade and bought himself a new tie.
Lou’s flat, when he entered it, proved to be a single large sitting-room, to which a bedroom and adequate offices were presumably attached. There was an agreeable smell of cooking, and Lou made equally agreeable haste to offer him a glass of sherry. What was not so agreeable was his immediate awareness of a dinner table laid for four people. So it wasn’t going to be a tête-á-tête occasion after all. Gillie had barely digested this ungrateful fact when the door opened without ceremony and the two remaining guests walked into the room. For a moment he couldn’t believe his eyes. Yet there wasn’t a doubt about it. The couple confronting him were Franco and Diana.
And they were a couple. Not only were they husband and wife; in the most matter-of-fact fashion they took it for granted that Gillie was aware of their condition, just as he would have been of the married state of any other two people whom he knew fairly well. And Lou, whether disingenuously or not, evinced exactly the same attitude. All this emerged in seconds and during greetings entirely unaccompanied by the suggestion of any surprise. Gillie himself, although to be described as left gasping, was for some reason reduced to wild dissembling. Eventually he was told, as something he might not yet know, that Diana Gethin had lately borne her second child.
Gulping a second glass of sherry, Gillie asked himself whether Lou had deliberately and of malice contrived for him this peculiarly devastating coup de théâtre. She was certainly glancing at him from time to time in a considering or quizzical way of which the other two were entirely innocent. But then Lou had the habit of something of the sort. Franco had the appearance of taking the occasion without effort in his stride, although he did sometimes frown at Gillie in a forbidding manner. But that of course had been Franco’s habit of old; he could even contrive the appearance of a kind of contemptuous coldness towards Gillie when presumably his feelings weren’t cold at all. As for Diana, she was not without a slight air of confusion in face of this meeting – which was natural enough upon being once more in the presence of her one-time adorer of the den. She was certainly very proud of Franco. So, no doubt, was the old ruffian Lord Furlong, who’d be as pleased as Punch at marrying off his daughter to the grandson of an earl. Gillie now remembered, with a certain irritation, having heard long ago that if an uncle of Franco died without an heir, as he appeared likely to do, Franco’s father the philosopher would succeed to the title – which would mean Franco’s becoming Viscount Something-or-Other straight away. Diana would probably be quite pleased about that too. As for the Gethin crowd, they’d probably been far from upset when a son whose proclivities had been prompting family anxiety fell for a girl who was the sole heir to an enormous brewing concern.
Gillie wondered how on earth Franco and Diana had hit up with one another. He also wondered whether Diana knew that she had reclaimed or diverted her husband from peculiar courses, or whether she was entirely without knowledge of them. He had read somewhere – probably in Proust – that inverts make particularly good husbands. If this was true they probably made particularly good fathers as well.
But there was a much more urgent riddle that required an answer, although Gillie didn’t at all see how he could with any discretion arrive at it. Had Diana ever happened to tell her husband about that birthday present – mentioning not only the business of Wordsworth’s signature but the title of the work in which it was inscribed? If so, had Franco then tumbled on the truth? Franco wasn’t at all a literary character, but Gillie remembered that he did have the habit – as he described it – of ‘glancing over the booksy bits in the public prints’. So he might well have come across the fact that Gillie had presented the world with what the young Wordsworth thought of Observations on Man, and he might similarly have read some reference to the manner in which Gillie was supposed to have come upon the book in a shop hard by the Jardins de L’ancien Evêché at Blois. Franco, in fact, might be possessed of the whole dire secret – and be the only person in the world, apart from Gillie himself, who was so. Or he might even have told his wife about it, so that she knew too. Realising this, Gillie experienced a moment of sheer panic. It completely destroyed for him the pleasure he would otherwise have taken in Lou’s distinctly superior boeuf en daube. Francis Gethin was the time-bomb. It was as simple as that.
‘What are you working at now, Gillie?’ Franco asked. He put the question in his most diffident way, as if Gillie’s labours were so likely to be vastly increasing the world’s stock of knowledge that the outer profane should scarcely venture to mention them.
‘Gillie is busy with one thing and another,’ Lou said (surely with a faint mockery?). ‘That’s how he put it to me the other day.’
‘Quite right,’ Gillie said. ‘Just bits and pieces – chiefly by the Romantics. Lou, this is an absolutely delicious daube. Do tell us how you make it.’
‘Including Wordsworth?’ Diana asked quickly. She had pricked up her ears (one of which Gillie remembered, in those delirious minutes, having managed to kiss).
‘Well, yes. Wordsworth among others. There’s a lot coming to light about the composition of his Ecclesiastical Sonnets. It’s most interesting.
‘Is there fennel in it? I imagine I can taste fennel.’
‘Gillie and I used to read Wordsworth together,’ Diana said. ‘Franco, I’ve told you about that.’
‘So you have, darling.’ Franco seemed amused. He even glanced at Gillie as if he expected Gillie to be amused too. ‘And, later on, Gillie discovered something marvellous about Wordsworth’s reading. Isn’t that right, Gillie?’
‘More or less.’ Gillie wondered whether the perturbation he felt was reflected in his voice. Franco was smiling at him as if enjoying some private joke. But was it, this time, a smile that could be described as embodying a sadistic component? He was sure that Franco knew or suspected something, but was entirely in the dark about Diana—or, for that matter, Lou. He had a sudden irrational glimpse of a long vista of years ahead during which Franco would amuse himself by appearing on the verge of betraying the dire secret of Blois as if it were no more than a funny thing that had once happened in the past. Yet Franco, if he knew the story, must also know what the true consequences of its gaining currency must still be.
In fact (he told himself) what Franco proposed was nothing less than a cat and mouse game, and this dinner party was a kind of family rehearsal for it. They were all joining in to torment him. Gillie now remembered all Franco’s glooms, his bouts of arrogance or cold contempt over this and that, his unstable psychosexual constitution – and, above all, that horrible and unforgivable punch on the jaw. Professor Gilbert Pillman decided that, sooner or later, it was going to be all up with him.
But now something very odd happened. The conversation drifted away just as if Gillie’s Wordsworth studies were far from being of consuming interest; were certainly not nearly so interesting as Lou’s Grassy Corner Pudding, which she had prepared in rivalry with the kitchen of her brother’s Cambridge college, where the delectable concoction had apparently been invented. During the discussion of this Gillie simply sank back exhausted. And then, suddenly, the meal was over. The point had come at which, in a former time, the women would have withdrawn, leaving the men to linger over their wine. What happened now was that the women stayed put while the men went into a little kitchen to wash up. Gillie nerved himself for a plunge. He would challenge Franco to come clean.
But it was Franco who, whipping up detergent in the sink, spoke first.
‘Gillie,’ Franco said, ‘it’s tremendous fun meeting again like this. Were you awfully surprised when you heard I’d married Diana? And did you forgive me? Say you did.’
‘I never heard anything about it. Not until tonight.’
‘Good Lord! I know you must find it unexpected. But people do change, you know. And I always terribly wanted kids.’
‘Kiddies.’
‘Yes.’ The allusion to Professor Shuffrey’s plebeian vocabulary seemed to escape Franco. ‘And it was all quite simple. I just fell tremendously in love. It began at those tennis parties. You remember what Diana’s brother had meant to me when I was quite immature.’
‘I see.’ Gillie was utterly bewildered – so much so that he almost dropped the plate he was drying.
‘And you do forgive me?’
‘About marrying Diana? Yes, of course.’
‘Hurray! I do so enormously admire you, you know. About all that business we were talking about. The Wordsworth nonsense.’
‘Nonsense?’
‘Your taking such a big risk in fudging up that story about the bookshop in Blois. I was staggered when I tumbled to it – which was quite some time after Diana told me about her birthday present to you. It was sheer chivalry. And just because you thought it might get her into a row with her father! And the irony of its not being necessary! That does really get me.’
‘What do you mean: the irony?’
‘The whole Furlong Library has been Diana’s sole property for years. Legally, although in a hush-hush way. It was one of my rascally father-in-law’s dodges for mitigating death duties, of course. Diana could have given away anything she pleased. And the old boy wouldn’t have minded a bit about some books, anyway.’ Franco grinned happily. ‘It was the disposal of his daughter he was worried about. Lucky for me, I suppose.’
A bemused Gillie Pillman dried another plate, this time with the greatest care. It was slowly dawning on him that, from the start, the time-bomb had contained nothing but sawdust. But, no: that wasn’t quite true.
‘Does Diana know?’ he asked.
‘About Blois? She doesn’t, as a matter of fact. I thought she might be upset by it. By your having put yourself so much at risk, I mean.’
‘What about Lou – does she know?’
‘Well, yes. I did tell Lou.’
‘She won’t gossip?’
‘Certainly not.’ Franco was suddenly and sharply offended. Lou, he might have been saying, was a Gethin – and that was that. ‘You and I, Gillie – and Lou – are the only people who will ever know about Blois. I understand it might be misconstrued by your professorial crowd. What an honourable thing you’d done, I mean.’
After this, they finished the washing up in silence. Gillie had a lot more to digest than Lou’s admirable dinner. Everything, he told himself, was now in the clear. Only, as he glanced from time to time at Franco, he became faintly uneasy on a wholly different account. Franco did admire him – and not wholly on the score of his supposed quixotry over the provenance of William Wordsworth’s copy of David Hartley’s Observations on Man. He couldn’t be certain that a trick of the old rage might not rekindle in the reformed Francis Gethin. It might be fancy – he was himself, after all, considerably overwrought by the strains of the past hour – but he wasn’t quite sure about a fugitive glint in Franco’s eye. It was decidedly time to rejoin the ladies.
An hour later, when he had taken his leave, Gillie endeavoured to compose himself by walking all the way back to his Bloomsbury hotel. He thought what a nice chap Franco was. He thought what an escape he’d had. And
once or twice he thought, although not very hopefully, about the enchantingly lovely Lou.
THE LITTLE DUFFER
Richard Howland had the reputation of being an excellent worker. He was married to a sensible woman, had three children who would soon be grown up, and had long ago been promoted from labouring on the home farm to the position of head gardener at the Park itself. It was said that Howland had always been something of a favourite with old General Alford, and that he owed his exalted position at Thorley more to this than to anything that could be called high horticultural ability. Nevertheless everybody respected him. There had been some trouble when he was a small boy, but the report of this, as happens in the handing down of village legends, had assumed such a variety of dim versions that nobody much attended to it. Another point about Howland – perhaps not one regarded, at least by the younger people, as particularly in his favour – was his being much involved with the church. Of course the church was so entirely an annex of Thorley Park, and the tombstones surrounding it merged so imperceptibly into General Alford’s lawns and rose-gardens, that it was natural that the head gardener (rather than the vicar) should have charge of it. Howland saw to the heating (which was excellent, the late Mrs Alford having been of a rheumatic tendency), rang the bell, and took the collection. On a very special occasion, connected with a Royal Jubilee, Howland and not the General had been called upon to read the first lesson. The congregated gentry judged his performance entirely creditable.
Howland’s principal notion of the duties of a head gardener was to see that everything was kept extremely tidy. Mowing and clipping and weeding were the activities he chiefly set his two young assistants to. He himself was particularly good at bonfires – perhaps because ‘burning up’ is the most definitive part of the tidying process. He could get the most unpromising pile of garden refuse blazing in no time, and then kept completely under control. No vagrant smuts ever reached the linen hung out to dry on the green behind the laundry. If General Alford, and his widowed daughter who lived with him, ever chanced to observe this operation through the high Georgian windows of the drawing-room (Georgian in style, although almost the entire fabric now was quite modern) it was with the knowledge that no single waft of smoke would drift their way to cloud the panes. On the other hand if the Loamshire Hunt had met, and the pack had come lumbering and slavering and senselessly yelping through not only the park but even the gardens as well, and the General knew that his neighbour the M.F.H. would treat any complaint with an irritating good-humoured off-handedness, Howland would go to work to different effect. Thorley Park was planted almost on the verge of its demesne, and so, as it chanced, was Sir Charles Apperley’s house, Chesney Lodge. There was a bare two hundred yards between them. Howland would bide his time, attending on the winds, and would meanwhile make large collections of well-chosen combustibles. The day would come when the weather-vane above the stable clock at Thorley Park pointed dead at Chesney Lodge. Then the match would be applied, and almost within minutes Sir Charles Apperley and all his household (including numerous hounds in honourable retirement) would be enveloped in mephitic vapours. But because these two elderly landed proprietors had been at school together, and because each was the nearest conversational resource of the other, this peculiar warfare generated no ill-feeling. The two men between them had come to run the village, and much else for miles around.
The Bridge at Arta Page 10