‘Wait, dear,’ said Grandma. ‘Go in there.’ She pushed Fenella gently into a small dusky sitting-room.
On the table a white cat, that had been folded up like a camel, rose, stretched itself, yawned, and then sprang on to the tips of its toes. Fenella buried one cold little hand in the white, warm fur, and smiled timidly while she stroked and listened to Grandma’s gentle voice and the rolling tones of Grandpa.
A door creaked. ‘Come in, dear.’ The old woman beckoned, Fenella followed. There, lying to one side of an immense bed, lay Grandpa. Just his head with a white tuft, and his rosy face and long silver beard showed over the quilt. He was like a very old wide-awake bird.
‘Well, my girl!’ said Grandpa. ‘Give us a kiss!’ Fenella kissed him. ‘Ugh!’ said Grandpa. ‘Her little nose is as cold as a button. What’s that she’s holding? Her grandma’s umbrella?’
Fenella smiled again, and crooked the swan neck over the bed-rail. Above the bed there was a big text in a deep-black frame:
Lost! One Golden Hour
Set with Sixty Diamond Minutes.
No Reward Is Offered
For It Is GONE FOR EVER!
‘Yer grandma painted that,’ said Grandpa. And he ruffled his white tuft and looked at Fenella so merrily she almost thought he winked at her.
Joyce Cary
THE BREAKOUT
TOM SPONSON, at fifty-three, was a thoroughly successful man. He had worked up a first-class business, married a charming wife, and built himself a good house in the London suburbs that was neither so modern as to be pretentious nor so conventional as to be dull. He had good taste. His son, Bob, nineteen, was doing well at Oxford; his daughter, April, aged sixteen, who was at a good school, had no wish to use make-up, to wear low frocks, or to flirt. She still regarded herself as too young for these trifling amusements. Yet she was gay, affectionate, and thoroughly enjoyed life. All the same, for some time Tom had been aware that he was working very hard for very little. His wife, Louie, gave him a peck in the morning when he left for the office and, if she were not at a party, a peck in the evening when he came home. And it was obvious that her life was completely filled with the children, with her clothes, with keeping her figure slim, with keeping the house clean and smart, with her charities, her bridge, her tennis, her friends, and her parties.
The children were even more preoccupied – the boy with his own work and his own friends, the girl with hers. They were polite to Tom, but if he came into the room when they were entertaining a friend, there was at once a feeling of constraint. Even if they were alone together, he perceived that when he came upon them they were slightly embarrassed, and changed the subject of their conversation, whatever it was. Yet they did not seem to do this when they were with their mother. He would find them all three, for instance, laughing at something, and when he came in they would stop laughing and gaze at him as if he had shot up through the floor. In fact, if he asked what the joke was his wife would say, ‘You wouldn’t understand’ or ‘Nothing’ or ‘I’ll tell you afterwards’, but she never did tell him afterwards; she would put him off with some remark like, ‘Oh, it’s perfectly silly, about something April said’.
He said to himself, ‘It isn’t only that they don’t need me, but I’m a nuisance to them. I’m in the way. I’m superfluous.’ One morning when he was just going to get into his car and his wife had come out to say good-bye, he suddenly made an excuse, saying, ‘Just a moment, I’ve left a letter’, and went back to his desk, and then dashed out to the car and drove off, pretending to forget that good-bye had not been said.
Immediately he felt that he could not stand any more of this existence; it was nonsense. It was not as though his wife and children were depending any more on the business; he could sell it to a combine tomorrow, and it would support all of them in comfort. Actually he would miss the business; it was his chief interest. But if he had to give it up for the sake of freedom, of a break in this senseless life, he could do even that. Yes, joyfully.
As he circled Trafalgar Square, that is to say, as he came within the last few hundred yards from his office, he told himself that he could not go on. It was as though that moment when he dodged the customary good-bye had broken a contact. The conveyor belt on which his life had been caught up had stopped as if at a short circuit, a break in a switch. No, he could not go on. So, instead of turning down the Strand out of the Square, he drove straight on to a West End garage.
An hour later, he was in the train for Westford, a seaside place where he had once spent a summer holiday before his marriage, with three friends from college. On the luggage rack was a new suitcase containing new pyjamas, shoes, a new kit, as for a holiday by the sea – even new paperbacks for a wet day.
It was February, but when he reached Westford he was surprised, for a moment, to find that both its hotels were closed. Only the village pub, The Case Is Altered, was still open for visitors, and as he sat in the coffee-room, he appeared to be the only visitor, except for a commercial traveller, one Sims, a dignified young man who addressed him with the most formal politeness and showed a strong tendency to talk politics – politics on what he called the ‘highest level.’
In his view, he said, what parliaments did and what dictators talked about did not really matter; what mattered was population statistics and economics. ‘You can put over anything with the wireless and the telly – that’s the way these dictators do it – but you can’t feed people on words. They’ll swallow all the lies you like, but they can’t live on hot air. Sooner or later most of these chaps have to face facts.’
‘Yes,’ said Tom. ‘A lot later – generally too late. Look at what Hitler did with his little yarn – and called it the Big Lie all the time. Look at all the people eating lies now and getting poison all the time. What can they do, poor devils? So long as the big noise has a really tough police.’
Tom was a Liberal, a strong supporter of the United Nations. A week before, he had been saying just the same things as Mr Sims; probably they had come out of the same papers. But now all at once he was revolted, quite furious with Mr Sims, with all those nice chaps at the club and the golf course, who had been so ready to talk this nonsense with him, who simply refused to face facts, especially the enormous, obvious fact that civilization was going to smash just because of all this cant, this wangling, this political gabble, this nonsense.
Mr Sims shook his head and remarked that the police hadn’t saved the Tsar.
‘No,’ Tom said. ‘What knocked him out was a superior brand of cant. He thought the people loved him, and sent his Guards to the front. But the Bolshies told the people they’d bring in the golden age right off. And they won. They had a bigger lie and they were smarter swindlers. The poor old Tsar only cheated himself; they cheated everybody.’
Suddenly Tom caught Mr Sims’s eye fixed upon him with a speculative alarm. The man was shocked. He was so used to the regular nonsense, to the old, worn records grinding out the same old popular tune, that he was bewildered by this contradiction.
‘Quite a new idea,’ Mr Sims murmured. ‘Very interesting.’ He was growing more and more alarmed.
‘Excuse me,’ Tom muttered, and hurried out into the front hall. It was almost a run. He was afraid of losing his temper with Mr Sims, who was obviously a nice chap, a very nice chap, who read all the best papers, the best nonsense.
What especially angered him in Mr Sims was that Mr Sims’s nonsense was his own nonsense of a week before. Sims was a looking-glass in which he saw his own silly face. And it made it no better that, as he now perceived, he had always known his nonsense to be nonsense. All that time when he had been talking it at business luncheons, at the club, in the train, at breakfast to his own family, he had had the same deep feeling: My God, what nonsense!
For years he had been hiding this knowledge, just as he had always pretended that he enjoyed nothing so much as his family. life. How often had he boasted of the sympathetic devotion of his wife and children, saying how lucky he was
compared with so many others, who found themselves ciphers in their own homes. Why, why had he gone on telling himself these lies, living a life of hypocrisy? It was as if he had been drugged – or was it simply that the air was so thick with nonsense, with cant, that it was almost impossible for any man to see the truth, even the biggest, the most obvious truth? Wasn’t it simply by a stroke of luck that he had broken out into clear air? And as if the words themselves demanded the action, he put on his mackintosh and went out.
It was raining still, but the opposite side of the bay was sharp and clear, as though seen through a lens. The grey sky was brilliant with diffused light, and the breeze had a taste of sea salt. The whole world seemed washed as clean as the pebbles on the beach.
He walked along the front. Westford’s great charm in the old days had been its smallness, its lack of enterprise. Apart from the two hotels, both old-fashioned, and even forbidding to strangers, there were only a dozen or so boarding-houses along the front, and almost the entire town was in the twenty or so buildings facing the sea, and in the main street of the old village branching off at right angles. There was what was called a Marine Parade, but it was simply a paved path along the front road with, on the seaward side, a strip of rough grass where half a dozen seats had been provided. Below, the magnificent beach had neither pier nor bathing huts. The great landlord who owned Westford was against huts, and summer visitors were expected to use tents that they could hire from the town council. There were no municipal gardens, bandstands, putting courses, or sideshows to vulgarize the place, which, apart from the absence of bathing machines, might have been existing still in the eighteen-sixties.
The wind was rising and big waves were thumping on the beach. The sea turned almost black, and the wet fronts of the houses, in spite of their gay colours, began to have a dreary look. The town seemed absolutely empty; not a human being was in sight. The only living creature to be seen was a dog with its nose in the gutter – as Tom appeared from around a corner, it jumped and looked at him, uttered one sharp bark, and cantered away, completely shocked by the intrusion. But the very dreariness of the scene, the monotonous pounding of the waves, the hiss of the rain in the pools, gave Tom the kind of pleasure that one gets from the defiance of an enemy. He was stimulated, excited. He felt his strength; he felt that he had done well. He had made a big decision and saved his life, and he went down to the beach and walked up and down close to the waves until the rain grew heavy. His shoes filled with sand and he remembered that he had only one suit with him. He turned back to the pub, intending to read one of his new crime novels.
In the little hall of the private entrance, the clerk, who was also the barman, was waiting for him with the register, and, upon an impulse that, for the moment, he did not understand and did not examine, he hesitated and then wrote down the name Charles Stone and gave a false address. He was surprised at himself – he detested such trickery – but it was only twenty minutes later that, lying upstairs on his bed with his book, he realized how necessary it had been, how wisely he had followed his impulse. ‘In the first excitement,’ he said to himself ‘they might well ask the B.B.C. or the newspapers to start a hunt; the last thing I want is any publicity. I’ll write to Louie at once and get things settled in a sensible manner.’
That evening – in fact, as soon as he could, with decent politeness, separate himself from Mr Sims, who was anxious to make him realize that if you can fool the people, you can’t fool population statistics, so long, of course, as they are reliable – he slipped off to his room to write to Louie. There was no writing-table in the room, or any provision for writing, so he set his new suitcase on his knee and proceeded to draft a letter on the flyleaf of his paper-back.
‘Darling Louie’, he began, but stopped immediately. He had always written ‘Darling Louie’, but how could he begin a letter of farewell, an ultimatum proposing an end to their marriage, with ‘Darling Louie’? He crossed it out and wrote ‘My dear Louie’. This also struck him as false. She was not his dear Louie. And was he going to start a new life of truth, of sincerity, by writing this criminal lie? ‘Dear So-and-so.’ What hundreds of letters to total strangers, to touts, to frauds and crooks, to people who were, in fact, absolutely detestable to him, he had started with this lying formula, this stereotyped nonsense. Louie was simply the woman who lived in his house, like a creature dropped from Mars, more strange to him than any stranger. A woman whom he supported and who had no real contact with him at all, who did not even speak the same language. He began again, without preamble: ‘I dare say you wonder where I am, but it does not really matter. As far as you and the children are concerned, I have not existed anywhere for a long time. I’m not blaming anyone for this state of affairs. I imagine it’s a very common one for married couples in our situation. The children are practically grown up and don’t need us any more; they certainly have not needed me for years past, and your life is entirely full of your own private interests. For a long time, I have been aware that I was only in the way. You would be much happier, much freer, as a widow. You could make one of those marriages that women in their forties do make after their children cease to need them, a marriage with a man suited to the new woman you have become. There is something to be said for a change of partners at our age. After all, people don’t stop growing and changing simply because they are married. I agree that they have a duty to their children, but when that duty has been discharged it is absurd to make them waste the rest of their lives in pretending to a community of interests which they no longer possess. It’s even bad for the children, now they are old enough to think for themselves, to live in this atmosphere of fake and hypocrisy. They get infected, too, and so the nonsense goes on to another generation.’ It was a good letter; he was surprised how good it was. He realized that it expressed for him feelings that had been present for years, and that he had been, unnoticed by himself, collecting all kinds of information bearing on his argument. It was a good letter, but he did not send it that evening. He had no notepaper or envelopes with him. He could not make a fair copy and he was not sure that he had not said too much. The whole thing, as read through, had a somewhat professorial air. It lacked the conviction that moved him so strongly. It gave no hint of the bitterness that he felt to be justifiable. He had been a good husband, a good father, and he could not help feeling that he had been treated with ingratitude. He lay awake half the night thinking of new things that he could put in this letter. Once he even turned on the light to write a phrase in another of his crime novels.
Next day he rewrote the letter. It was not till Thursday, three days after his flight, that he went out in the town to seek notepaper and envelopes. Then he found that the one stationer’s had nothing to his taste – only stationery sets done up in ribbon and containing deckle-edged paper of the most vulgar type, or the cheapest blocks. Both, he felt, were quite impossible for his letter. He had always been particular about notepaper. However, Westford was only ten miles from the large seaside town of Lilmouth, and he would enjoy a visit there, too. He and his college friends had spent a very happy afternoon and evening at Lilmouth at the annual fair. He called, therefore, at the garage, to hire a car, and found that there was one that would be available the next day. He gave the order and returned to the pub. He was in no hurry to write his letter. Why, Louie knew that he was all right. He had phoned the office to tell them that he had to go away for a while, that he would send his address in due course, and he had asked them to inform his wife.
A letter from or to Louie would start all sorts of trouble, and meanwhile he was only just beginning to enjoy his new life. He had found out how to dodge Mr Sims – simply by having his meals earlier. And time was passing far more quickly than he had expected. It was astonishing how this lounging, thoughtful, careless existence had already fallen into a routine. A late breakfast, a stroll along the front, coffee at eleven in a little café that remained open apparently for the use of unemployed landladies, who came there to discuss their bookings
for the next season. Then to the stationer’s for the London papers, then early luncheon with the papers to read. After luncheon, a doze in his room. Then another stroll along the front, or, if it were fine, over the headland and along the coast for a mile or two. The sea breeze was unequalled for giving one an appetite. He had not for years so much enjoyed either the prospect of dinner or dinner itself. The Case Is Altered did not attempt French cooking. All the better. It provided excellent meat, beer, and cheese, and plenty of them. After dinner he was ready for a pipe and another look at the papers, and then to bed, where he read himself to sleep in a few minutes. Even for luncheon he found that he had an appetite, and he was sniffing the smell of chops in the hall, the smell that not many months before would have turned him away from such a place in the first moment, when a large, dark figure, which seemed to have been waiting in the coffee-room doorway, stepped out and said, ‘Mr Sponson?’
Tom, without thought, answered, ‘My name is Stone,’ and then, indignant to see himself confronted by a policeman, went on, ‘What do you want here? Why should I answer your questions?’
The policeman, a large West Country man with a red face, answered, in a deprecating manner, as if to say ‘Excuse me’, that he had not asked any questions. He was holding his helmet in front of his stomach in the manner of a shy man who wants to occupy his hands. Tom saw at once that this polite, apologetic manner was merely assumed. It was hypocritical nonsense.
He said shortly, ‘Well, don’t, because I don’t intend to answer any.’
‘That’s all right, sir,’ said the policeman. ‘No offence, I hope.’ And he went out. Even his gesture, as, turning the corner, he threw up his chin and replaced his helmet on his head, annoyed Tom. It seemed to carry all that confidence of authority, that calm superiority of power, that is so offensive to the private citizen.
The Penguin Book of English Short Stories Page 25