by Nina Bawden
Now the memory seemed trite, cheapened by too many war stories, by seven years of living on a lower level of intensity, so that now even reality looked counterfeit. Remembering how passionately he had admired Johnny, Charles felt raw shame pitch in his stomach as at the memory of some appalling adolescent naïveté. For a moment it distorted not only past but present assessment: he felt a twinge of resentment as Johnny smiled into his face and asked him what he was doing now, handing him, Charles thought, his open smile and his flattering interest like an expensive present.
But there was no basic insincerity there. ‘How simply splendid,’ Johnny said when Charles explained about the Fulbright grant that had taken him to America and the law fellowship he was hoping for. The ‘splendid’was not gushing but carried a sort of disinterested passion that impressed Charles who despised envy, but guessed that to be quite without it, to be genuinely, deep down, absolutely delighted by another man’s success, was a luxury few people could afford. He realized that he did not know how Johnny was able to be like that, that he knew, indeed, almost nothing about him or the world he lived in that had made him the way he was. He asked, suddenly curious, ‘What are you doing now?’
‘Changing horses in midstream. You know, I signed on for another five years. I only came out about eighteen months ago.’ He hesitated and added, ‘I meant to go on flying—the airlines are crying out for pilots—but I failed my medical for a civil licence. Apparently my eyesight’s not as good as it was.’
He smiled, but it must have shocked him, Charles thought. If you had spent ten years of your life flying and thinking about flying, it would be a difficult thing to forget. ‘How do you feel about it?’ he asked.
‘A bit early to tell. Rather like having a limb cut off, I suspect. One flounders a bit at first. I’ve just joined my uncle’s firm. It used to be the family firm but we sold out—Lester’s still on the board.’
‘Will you enjoy it, do you think?’
He frowned slightly. ‘Hard to say. At the moment I don’t exactly feel—fully stretched, if you know what I mean? As if the old engine was only just ticking over?’ He laughed cheerfully at himself. ‘Oh—it’ll turn out all right.’
Charles lifted his glass. ‘Good luck, anyway,’ he said, meaning it, but thinking that luck was something Johnny hardly needed. It was something he had as naturally as breath, so naturally that you couldn’t resent it, any more than you could grudge a happy child a birthday present.
They talked for a little longer, drifted into that sudden, alcoholic freedom in which everything becomes marvellously easier. Then the slight tension Charles had felt snapped altogether and Johnny was simply Johnny, the dressed-up memory and the living man suddenly become one—a perfectly nice, personable man with an easy laugh who wasn’t concerned with anything except an unaffected pleasure at seeing his old friends again. They were not alone for long. The party became fluid and they welcomed with boisterous gaiety men they hardly remembered. Someone thumped a piano, a small man with an air of seedy roguery sang a song that went to the tune of ‘There is a Green Hill Far Away’. Charles’s mood developed into a rosy, sentimental glow. He exchanged addresses with a tall, lean, sad man with a wilting moustache, with a grinning Scot with two teeth missing, with Johnny.…
‘You must come and see us,’ he said. He didn’t look drunk—he didn’t get drunk, Charles remembered—only ruddily flushed as if after a week in the open. Charles nodded, smiled, tucked the card in his wallet, sure that by tomorrow it would mean as little as the promises to the Scot, to the sad moustache. Their worlds didn’t touch; sober, they would have nothing to say to each other. Affection could survive with a limited vocabulary but only for one evening, once in a while.
Outside the hotel, he found Climper, hovering alone on the pavement, rather drunk, too late to catch the last train home to his bungalow by the sea. Charles took him out to dinner, endured two long, sweating, mournful hours and then packed him off to spend the night (he said) with an aunt in Fulham. It was a maudlin, rather pointless gesture that was partly an apology, partly a nervous gesture to the gods, like carrying an umbrella on a sunny day.
He woke at dawn with a dry mouth and remembered that he owed Johnny ten pounds. He got out of bed, rinsed out his mouth and lay down again, feeling slightly confused as if he had committed some minor social gaffe. Not in forgetting the loan—a hurried necessity on the morning the hospital telephoned to say his mother was dying: when he came back Johnny had been posted and his own de-mob papers were in—but in remembering it now. Charles had that curious shyness about money that dogs so many people who have been poor: it embarrassed him to imagine the smooth astonishment on Johnny’s face when he was reminded of this small debt. Ten pounds had meant nothing to him, he had lent it as he always lent money, with a kind of apologetic carelessness as if to be rich was a matter for reproach. Looking back in the dawn depression, it seemed to Charles that his generosity had carried not apology but condescension, like a sting in the tail.
Then the treacherous thought that he could quite easily forget the whole thing, appalled him. It would be impossible to rest now until he had dealt with it. He bathed and dressed, found Johnny’s card in his wallet and went straight to the telephone.
He invited Johnny to lunch. Johnny sounded surprised, pleased, but lunch was impossible. ‘We’re going down, to Fitchet—my grandfather’s house in Kent. Making it a long week-end.’
Charles said, ‘I have to go to Cambridge on Monday.’ There was a pause: the end of the next week seemed impossibly far away. He said, ‘The fact is, I owe you some money.’
‘What?’
‘Ten pounds.’
‘Good God.’
Charles explained hurriedly. Some distant inflection in Johnny’s voice made him feel that the whole thing was somehow in rather poor taste.
Johnny said, ‘What a very extraordinary thing. How terribly nice of you to remember.’
He seemed to bubble over with well-bred, incredulous amusement. Charles had a moment of irrational anger.
He said, ‘It’s a racial characterisitic to be conscientious about money.’
There was a pause. Charles knew just how Johnny must look: the blank, marble surprise, the veiled withdrawal in the eyes.
Johnny laughed, not quite easily. ‘My dear chap …’ There was another, slightly longer pause and then he went on with a noticeable increase in warmth and garrulousness as if he felt he needed to apologize for something. He was so sorry about lunch, he bad been enormously pleased to see Charles again, it was shocking how one lost touch with one’s friends. They really must fix something. It sounded to Charles, smarting from his own stupidity, like an excessively well-mannered brush-off. When Johnny asked him to hold on a minute, Charles amused himself by ironically listing the elaborate excuses he was sure would follow: they were absolutely booked up for the next five weeks, then they had to run over to Cannes or up to Scotland for a spot of salmon fishing or to Norfolk for a week’s shooting. Charles had no very real idea how people of that sort spent their time, nor did he much care. He was too absorbed in his own world—growing a little solemn with the long nights of study, a little complacent with a kind of success that yielded not to money but to intelligence and effort—to be very curious about what went on outside it. He was curious about Johnny, if he had not been, memory would hardly have dredged up that trivial debt, but it was almost an academic interest, totally without envy. In all his life Charles had never envied anything except security. Now that he had it, he wanted nothing else, nothing beyond the safe perspective of scholarship, university appointments and articles in the Modern Law Review; a warm, bookish world from which life could be safely looked at from one window, for ever.
It always unnerved him slightly to be offered a different view. He decided that he was not altogether sorry Johnny could not lunch. What would they have found to talk about? Johnny was the sort of man who would naturally find it difficult to talk to someone not exactly of his own kind. Now t
hey were no longer flying together, he might not feel quite comfortable with an intellectual Jew.
Johnny said in his ear, ‘Look, old man, I know it’s awfully short notice but we seem to be booked solid for the next few weeks—could you possibly come down to Fitchet this weekend? My wife’s longing to meet you.’
Charles imagined Johnny’s wife; a rangy ex-deb with a plangent voice. He said, ‘That’s very kind of you.’ Surprise had emptied his mind. For a moment he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go or what excuse he could offer if he didn’t. He stumbled into what he felt was the correct idiom. ‘Won’t your people mind? I mean—it’s awfully short notice for them, isn’t it?’
‘Lord, no. Really. There’s masses of room. Grandfather never minds how many people come. He’s always liked a full house though he doesn’t get much fun out of it now, poor old chap. He’s bedridden—he had a stroke last year.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Charles said. ‘I liked your grandfather.’
He spoke sincerely. His memory was distant but clear: a beaky nose, sharp, dark eyes, a sharp, if confined intelligence. A terrifying old devil, Charles had thought, but basically kind and more—willing to stretch himself, to try to understand ways of thought that were not his own. ‘I didn’t realize you’d met him. But I’m glad you liked him.’
Johnny’s voice softened perceptibly in the way it always had, Charles remembered, when he spoke of his grandfather. ‘He’s a marvellous old man. I’m sure he’d love to see you again. Not many people come nowadays, y’know. Clara—my sister—goes down most week-ends and my uncle and aunt are there, of course, but that’s not awfully exciting for him. Nor for me.’ He laughed. ‘Altogether—it would be most awfully nice if you could come.’
His enthusiasm touched Charles and then disturbed him a little. It seemed to him that the eagerness in Johnny’s voice suddenly rang with a peculiar note of desperation. ‘Do come. It’s a marvellous house. I’d love you to see it. I’ve always loved it,’ he said.
There was nothing odd in the words, the oddness lay in the way he said them, with a kind of urgent wistfulness, as if his old self-sufficiency was not enough, any more.
‘I remember it,’ Charles said, slightly piqued because Johnny had forgotten. ‘You took me there once. For a forty-eight.’
It was a square, red-brick house, approached by a straight gravel drive edged with yew cut in the shape of peacocks. There was a stone-flagged hall; over the door there were two furled, cavalry pennants holed with moth; up the wide, polished staircase several dark, full-length portraits of men in uniform with swords, and one good Romney, a pale, dark-eyed child in a white pinafore with a blue sash.
Johnny had lived there with General Sir George Prothero, his grandfather on his mother’s side. His parents had been in India. His father was a colonel in the Indian Army but there was no portrait of him on the staircase because although he was ‘also a Prothero’, as Johnny had explained when Charles asked him about it, he belonged to a junior branch of the family. The only picture Charles had ever seen of Colonel Prothero was a framed photograph Johnny had with him at the base, of his father in regimentals and his mother in white, leaving the village church under an arch of crossed swords. Johnny carried the photograph with him more out of convention than sentiment: he had once told Charles that he had only really known his parents from letters. He said this without self-pity: in a world of Empire builders and serving soldiers it must have seemed an entirely normal arrangement. When Charles had asked him if he hadn’t missed his parents, he looked honestly surprised. ‘I was too happy at Fitchet,’ he said. ‘It was a wonderful place to live.’
Charles had understood this. It was a pleasant, hospitable house: in the library where stuffed pikes and crossed Zulu spears hung on the walls between the bookshelves, children’s feet had scuffed the Persian carpet and children’s fingers had picked holes in the rose damask chair covers. Everything was used and shabby, nothing was new except the Bentley in the converted barn, but the whole house rang of something subtler than wealth, of generations of unworried comfort as solid and convincing as the gleam on old furniture. It was an unforced, elegiac note, that the inner ear caught everywhere, in the portraits, the eighteenth-century miniatures, the delicate, Coleport coffee cups raised to the lips after dinner, the carpeted, tiny bathrooms that had once been linen rooms.
It was a note Charles had heard that leave without emotion. He looked at Fitchet with the undifferentiating appreciation of a traveller in a strange country; admiring but unmoved.
Chapter Four
Charles went down by train that Saturday afternoon and walked from the station. The white road climbed the hill, sank down through a dark arch of trees and brought him out into sunlight. Fitchet lay in a hollow; quite small, dignified, intensely private. He crunched up the gravel drive between the peacocks and the hot lawns, and a woman in a yellow silk dress came out of the door to meet him.
He would have known her anywhere, he thought: Johnny’s sister, Clara. They were so astonishingly alike, tall, long-necked, golden-eyed. Then, when she furrowed her forehead and said, ‘I’m so sorry Johnny’s not here,’ he saw that she looked much older than her brother. Her face was thin with the thinness of middle age, not youth, the skin was tight over the bone and there were cobweb lines round her nose and mouth. It was a face that would look much the same in twenty years’ time, with its melancholy, aristocratic angularity, beautiful rather than pretty, but too nervous to be really beautiful. She reminded Charles of a doe at a park fence: she had just that look of startled gentleness and pride.
She said, ‘They took Martin down to the sea. Johnny must have forgotten the time. I know he meant to meet you.’ She had a soft, rather fey voice that trailed away at the end of her sentences.
‘It’s my fault. I caught an earlier train. But I enjoyed the walk from the station.’
‘Oh good. But it’s so hot. Your bag …’ She called, ‘Julian,’ and a man rose up from behind one of the dark green peacocks. He must have been sunbathing; Charles had not noticed him. He wore shorts and green-stained tennis shoes; a large pair of sunglasses dominated his face and gave him a dangerous look. His body was golden-brown and smooth as a boy’s without a trace of hair on his chest or legs and the hair on his head had the bleached, straw fairness of a child’s in summer.
Clara introduced them, flushing up to the eyes as if the small social necessity unnerved her. The man’s name was Julian Cloutsham. He had a full, heavily inflected voice—he said, ‘How do you do?’—and exuded a kind of breezy heartiness like a male cosmetic. They talked for a minute or two about the startlingly lovely weather and then he said, ‘You don’t mean you lugged your bag from the station in this heat?’ and smiled his supercilious smile at Clara. ‘Old George would have brought it. He’s still there, I see, minus a bit more hair.’
‘Yes—isn’t it extraordinary?’ Clara turned to Charles. ‘He’s always been known as Old George, though he isn’t so terribly old and I’m not at all sure that his name is George. He’s always had so little hair that when we were children we used to try and count the strands each time we came home for the holidays. I can remember peering through the glass partition, giggling and trying to count, and praying he wouldn’t turn round.’
She laughed, a nice little girl’s laugh, sudden and easy. It stripped the years away and made the lines on her face seem ridiculous, a cruel joke.
‘Poor old George,’ Cloutsham said.
They had both spoken, Charles thought, in the indulgently affectionate tone people use for pet animals—as if the balding, elderly gentleman he had seen snoozing in the station taxi belonged to a different sub-species. He didn’t mind this in Clara but he disliked it in Cloutsham, Charles decided, peering into the dark, reflecting pools that hid his eyes. Charles didn’t mind what people were but he liked them to be what they were: Cloutsham had the same kind of voice as Johnny, the same mannerisms, but it was somehow too deliberate, too carefully calculated as if sometime or other he had
had the choice of several different disguises and had decided that this was likely to be the most useful one. He yawned, stretched his smooth, gold body and said to Clara, ‘I think I’ll go and change, sweetie.’ He took off his glasses; without them, his face looked curiously empty. For a second before he turned on his heel and stalked into the house, he glanced at Charles out of pale, sun-strained eyes with an almost contemptuous lack of curiosity.
Clara smiled. ‘I expect you’d like to see your room.’
They followed Cloutsham into the cool, musty hall, up the wide staircase, past the portraits and the assegais and a rather brutal stone bust in a recess at the turn of the stairs. As they reached the landing, a nurse in a crackling uniform came along the corridor carrying a tray covered with a white napkin. She had a long, sallow face and a closed, righteous expression as if she felt herself superior to the rest of the human race. Charles drew aside to let her pass and she twitched her lips in acknowledgement.
Cloutsham had waited for them. He said in a casual undertone to Clara, ‘How is the old boy?’
‘Not too well, poor darling.’ She glanced rather uneasily at Charles as if she did not want to discuss this in front of him.
Cloutsham pulled down his mouth. ‘I hope he makes it,’ he said inexplicably, nodded briefly at Charles and disappeared through a heavy, dark door.