In Honour Bound

by Nina Bawden

  ‘I thought her nice.’

  ‘Hm.’ He stuck out his full lower lip. ‘Did she tell you the story about Asquith?’

  ‘Yes. It’s a good story.’

  ‘The first time, maybe. She has another one. About Lloyd George. And Gladstone dandled her on his knee. She knows a lot of people who used to have influence.’ He grinned at his own joke. ‘That goes for most of the family. For a whole, dying class.’

  The fatuous, rolling relish with which he pronounced this last sentence made Charles realize he was fairly drunk. He glanced nervously round the room but no one was looking at them. Clara was talking to Lester’s son, a heavy, charmless young man who had just come down from Cambridge. She was standing with one knee on a chair and her large hands clasped on the back of it. Charles could not hear what she said but caught an occasional, italicized word. Marvellous, splendid, so wretchedly something or other …

  Florence Prothero was displaying the drab piece of tapestry she was working on to a bulky, plain woman in silver lamé, one of those elderly ladies who do some excellent work or other, usually unpaid, and whom Charles had liked, though he could not remember her name.

  Johnny’s uncle, Lester, was standing by the window with Mary, apparently gazing out into the summer night; a big, solid, heavy-breathing man with a smooth pink face and a monocle screwed into one disingenuous blue eye. He had a menacingly powerful body, short-legged and over-balanced like a wrestler’s. He was well dressed, almost a dandy, in his Cheviot tweed suit, velvet waistcoat and regimental tie. His suits were made for him by a famous firm: at dinner he had complained to Charles of the expense but said, ‘Where else can you buy clothes?’ as if the alternative to Savile Row was nakedness. Watching him, seated between his wife and his niece, Charles had thought that he looked like a peacock between two peahens.

  He said, ‘I wouldn’t have thought Johnny’s uncle particularly moribund.’

  ‘Lester? Lord no—he’s indestructible.’ Cloutsham leaned forward, his eyes held a staring, over-concentration like a losing chess player’s. ‘You know—when people talk about the decline of the ruling classes, they ought to take a good, long look at Lester. He’s the dinosaur that managed to adapt.’ He chuckled, a warm, pleasant sound.

  Charles stood up. ‘I detest sociological party games,’ he said with a rudeness that was due less to Cloutsham’s glib nonsense than to a sudden rush of resentment. He guessed that Cloutsham would not have bothered to talk to him if he hadn’t found out that Joseph Fraenkel was his uncle. It was a kind of calculation Charles had always detested. He approached the pair by the window, shaken out of his benign mood into one of conscious annoyance. Mary was saying something. Charles caught the tail end of a sentence, ‘… feel about him as you do.’

  Lester said hurriedly, ‘My dear girl, that’s not fair, y’know. Johnny will always have a home here.’ His manner had a touch of paternal contempt in it but something else too—a kind of brusque wistfulness as if he wanted her to like him.

  She said, ‘Only on sufferance. He …’

  She saw Charles and stopped. He had had no chance to move away. Her eyes were wide and dark, she gave him a social smile, brilliant with anger. Over her head, Charles and Lester exchanged glances carefully devoid of meaning. To bridge the uneasy moment, Charles asked him a question that rose quite naturally out of a discussion they had had at dinner about the economics of expansion in the magazine industry. Lester launched on an over-long, dull, but highly competent explanation. His firm dealt mainly with trade papers. He ended, ‘Of course as far as they are concerned the question of expansion hardly arises. No one except a boilermaker is going to buy the Boilermaker’s Gazette, don’t y’know? There was a boom during the war for other kinds of magazine but it began to level out pretty soon after. There won’t be much room for expansion now except in the woman’s market.’ He glanced at Mary. His eyes had a sleepy, cautious look.

  She said, ‘And for that, you need bright young women from Somerville, not ex-officers with qualities of leadership?’ Her voice held a note of uncertain rebellion.

  ‘More or less, Mary.’ Lester took a cigar out of his pocket and examined it with thoughtful interest. Then he cleared his throat and said with brisk kindliness, ‘Now my dear, Johnny has got a good start. Believe me. Simpson will show him the ropes. We all have to go through the mill, y’know. I had to.’ This thought seemed to stiffen him. ‘If Johnny wasn’t prepared to do that, he should have gone into the Army, what?’ He had a habit of barking ‘what’ or ‘doncher know’at the end of his sentences. Though he had, in fact, recently retired from the Rifle Brigade, it made him sound like a ham actor playing the part of a military gentleman.

  Mary lifted her chin as if to challenge the world. It was a very young gesture: she looked like a proud, stubborn child. She said, ‘Is that the only alternative to being pushed around?’ Charles remembered the way she had said earlier, ‘Too many things are sacred’and guessed that this was something she could not bear.

  Lester’s gaze fixed on a point above her head. It was a habit, Charles noted, that he shared with Johnny who also preferred to ignore remarks in bad taste. Then he laughed shortly. ‘That or a private income,’ he said.

  It was a punishing remark. Charles, who was not easily moved, found that he could not bear the look on Mary’s face.

  He said angrily, ‘A private income would seem the only alternative. Since they dropped the atom bomb, the Army is no longer an occupation for gentlemen.’ He did not know how Lester took this, he was looking at Mary, and felt ridiculously pleased to see her smile. He went on as if Lester wasn’t there, ‘What sort of job is Johnny doing now?’

  ‘Writing editorials for a magazine on agricultural implements.’

  Her voice rang out in silence. Charles saw with a cold, premonitory shock, that the room had emptied suddenly. Only Clara and Julian Cloutsham remained, staring at Johnny who was standing in the doorway. He was pale, tired, strikingly like his sister—the flesh drawn, ironed taut across the narrow, beautiful bone structure of his face. He said, ‘Lester …’

  Lester’s head was thrust down and forward like a bull’s. The enormous strength of his heavy body seemed suddenly to dominate the room. His whole personality had changed with Johnny’s appearance, Charles thought, though it was a change that was difficult to gauge exactly. It was as if he had suddenly become the sort of person Charles had half expected him to be: cold, arrogant, almost brutal.

  He said in a peremptory voice, ‘What is it?’ and then, without waiting for an answer, threw up his head and marched towards the door. He seized Johnny’s arm and wheeled him smartly out of the room.

  The door stayed open. There was a subdued murmur of angry words. Then the murmur broke into frightening coherence. Lester said, ‘Oh God … oh my God … did it have to be you?’

  Johnny said something, a woman answered and then Lester’s voice exploded like a bursting shell. ‘Damn you, damn your soul to hell.’ They heard his feet thundering up the stairs.

  Clara began to cry. She was standing next to Cloutsham whose arm lightly encircled her waist. The tears ran down her face and she made no attempt to wipe them away.

  Johnny came back, slowly, a little way into the room, looking round him with a lost, dazed air as if he saw nothing familiar there. Clara ran to him awkwardly, he put his hands gently on her shoulders and said, ‘He’s dead. It happened so quickly. There wasn’t time.…’

  She clung to him, after a second he disengaged her hands gently and handed her back to Cloutsham like a parcel.

  Then he came over to Charles. He said with a trained, held-down, almost desperate politeness, ‘I’m terribly sorry. This is hideous for you. We didn’t expect it. He’d seemed better … he just went off in his sleep.’

  Mary said, ‘Lester …’

  ‘He’s very upset.’ He answered her quietly and evenly. His eyes flickered unhappily at Charles. ‘It’s unfortunate. My grandfather refused to see him this afternoon. It didn’t
mean anything, he was so ill, but Lester took it very hard .…’

  Mary whispered, ‘He hates you.’ Her hands were clenched and held out a little in front of her as if to ward off something. Her face wore a look of frozen horror, as if she had just woken from a nightmare and found it was true.

  Johnny smiled, a glimmer, a slight movement of the set mouth under the fair moustache. ‘Don’t be silly, love. He was desperately hurt … he loved his father so. People say things they don’t mean.’

  ‘Not Lester.’ She shivered suddenly and broke out, ‘You can never see, can you? It’s inconceivable to you that anyone should resent you.’ Her voice was shrill.

  Johnny winced. ‘Well—perhaps. But there never seemed any point in looking for trouble.’ He took her arm and shook it, smiling at her gently but humorously as if he were comforting a child. After a minute she smiled back at him, not like a child at all but with a sad, intense anxiety.

  Charles felt miserably confused. Clearly he had to leave but the last train was certainly gone. Cloutsham had left the room with Clara; now he came back, looked at Charles with his pale, disdainful eyes and said, ‘D’you want a lift back to town?’

  Charles accepted gratefully, a little disgusted with himself. Everyone has his pet illusion: Charles believed that he could never be unnerved by a simple, social dilemma. He crept upstairs guiltily as a thief, obsessed by the fear that he might meet one of the family. He glimpsed the nurse at the far end of the corridor and heard voices through a half-open door, but to his huge relief he met no one face to face.

  When he came down, they were talking in low voices by Cloutsham’s car, a long, racy, adventurous affair with monstrous horns and headlamps. Cloutsham opened the passenger door. Charles shook Johnny’s hand and rather evasively gabbled condolences. He felt he could not bear it if Johnny started to apologize for the abortive week-end.

  But apparently there were limits even to Johnny’s sense of social obligation. He seemed limply relaxed in the grey aftermath of emotion. ‘He was old and tired,’ he said. ‘It was the best thing.’

  Charles got into the car. Cloutsham swung in beside him, wearing a pair of glasses with yellow lenses. He said to Johnny, ‘Don’t let Lester get you down.’ He spoke simply, soberly, without any mocking undertone.

  ‘I won’t.’ Johnny half smiled, stepped back from the car.

  But Cloutsham hadn’t finished. He leaned across Charles. ‘Look—in case the job should fold up, think over what we talked about. I think something can be worked out.’ His yellow-moon gaze swung from Johnny to his wife and he added, with a return of his bantering manner, ‘You’ve got to live, you know.’

  She said nothing but turned her head slightly so that the light from the doorway showed a gleam of something—surprise or derision—in her eyes. Johnny smiled rather remotely. ‘It’s not the only thing.’

  Cloutsham gave a sudden, merry laugh as if something had really amused him. He started the engine and they drove off. As they got to the end of the drive Charles turned and saw Johnny, silhouetted against the light, his hand raised in a formal gesture of farewell.

  Chapter Five

  The offices of the Agricultural Gazette were on the fifth floor of the Larch and Hartshorn building, a tall steel and glass block put up by the firm in the ‘twenties when it had been Larch and Prothero. The first four floors were occupied by the directors’offices and the bigger and glossier trade papers. The lift stopped at the fourth floor, so did the carpets, the attractive secretaries and the walnut desks. The fifth floor was dark and stuffy, heavily partitioned and furnished with old filing cabinets and back numbers of all the company’s magazines. The staff of the Gazette consisted of one middle-aged typist with marrow-shaped breasts dangling loosely behind nylon blouses or lacy-knit sweaters, an uppity office boy who could get a new job any day of the week and Simpson who couldn’t—Simpson who had once been the office boy himself and worked his way up to editor; Simpson with his pigeon toes and crippling bunions and sad, fanatical eyes; Simpson who had run the monthly paper single-handed for years with a jealously absorbed devotion and who neither wanted nor needed an editorial assistant.

  In fact there was not very much to do and what there was Johnny found dull and rather pointless, although he tried to ignore this in the same way that he tried to ignore the fact that Simpson resented him—had bitterly resented him from the moment Lester had marched his nephew into the office, introduced him in his most paternally autocratic manner and said in his hoarse, plummy voice, ‘Simpson will show you the ropes.’

  When he did think about it, Johnny told himself that it was bound to be difficult, at first, to find your feet in civilian life. He knew perfectly well that the Air Force had suited him better than anything else was easily likely to do. He had been prepared for a certain loss of simplicity and vigour. What he had not expected was that he would feel such an incredibly deep gulf between everything he had known—his boyhood, his education, his years as a pilot—and the present. Sometimes the past seemed no more than a wildly unrelated dream, the kind of dream you wake from empty and depressed, because nothing in the everyday world can quite match up to it.

  The morning he had the row with Simpson, he was sitting in his cubicle, a partition off the main office, writing the editorial for the October issue. He wrote slowly, quite competently, and was tolerably pleased with what he had written. He typed it out himself, laboriously, on the old Olivetti that had been discarded by one of the third-floor offices, partly because he had nothing else to do and partly because Simpson objected if he asked for the services of the secretary. When he had finished he read it through, made one or two careful alterations and took it to Simpson’s office.

  Simpson was reading galleys. Without looking up, he stretched out his hand for the typed page. Johnny gave it to him, hesitated for a moment and then went back to his own desk, leaving the cubicle door open. He waited, re-arranged his papers and tore last month’s page off the calendar. It was an idyllic country scene, a photograph of a boy playing by a trout stream with meadows and a wood behind. Underneath there was a four-line verse.

  Johnny looked at the picture and thought, for no particular reason, of his grandfather. It was just over two months since his death. Johnny sighed, crumpled the page of the calendar and threw it into the waste paper basket. He looked out of the small window, almost totally obscured by dusty piles of old Gazettes, at the cold courtyard well. The sun had been shining when he walked to the office but there was no way of knowing if it was still shining now. There were lights burning in the windows across the well. The light was on in his own cubicle, the yellow shade covered with corpses of flies and the bulb dark with grease. He wondered if Simpson would think him over-fastidious if he fitted a new bulb.

  Simpson’s chair squeaked. Then his shoes. He came into the cubicle and threw the editorial down on Johnny’s desk. ‘This is bloody useless,’ he said.

  For the first time for years, Johnny felt the blood burn in his cheeks. He said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Didn’t you know it was?’

  Johnny shook his head, his eyes fixed on his desk. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry, what?’ Simpson said. Suddenly his voice shook with anger. ‘My name’s Simpson. Mr. Simpson to you. I’m fed up with your bloody impertinence.’ He swallowed. ‘Do it again. And this time, give your mind to it, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘I’ll try, Mr. Simpson,’ Johnny said.

  Simpson hesitated. Briefly, he looked almost pathetic, clutching his bitterness to him like a child clutches a battered toy. ‘Get on with it,’ he finished and went out of the cubicle slamming the door.

  The door provided only a visual privacy. The partition walls were matchboard thin: Johnny could hear every time Simpson coughed, every time his stomach rumbled extra loudly. He stared at the door and picked up the editorial, his hands trembling slightly. It was the first time dislike had shown itself so openly. Up to now, there had only been petty pinpricks, minor outbursts of trucul
ent authority, that Johnny had taught himself to endure with a tolerant detachment. He had even been sorry for Simpson: he had a rather exaggerated respect for the difficulties of men who were less fortunate than himself. Simpson was old, he probably saw him as a threat.

  Now humiliation sat like a cold stone in his stomach. He read the page through, wondering what it was Simpson had expected him to do. He reached for a back copy of the magazine and looked at the leading article carefully. Then he re-typed his own piece, changing the shape of the paragraphs, altering a word here and there. It seemed less satisfactory than before. He read it again, feeling blank and stupid and ripped it out of the typewriter. He glanced at his watch and decided that he would be able to think more clearly after lunch.

  Simpson was sitting at his desk in the main office. In front of him were the glass of milk the secretary fetched for him each noon and the packet of sandwiches he always brought from home. He looked up silently as Johnny took his hat from the stand, looped his umbrella over his arm.

  Simpson cleared his throat. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To lunch.’

  ‘Have you finished?’

  ‘No. I’ll get down to it afterwards.’ Johnny smiled, a good-tempered smile. He imagined that Simpson must be feeling wretchedly embarrassed—he would be, and wanted to reassure him. He said in a friendly, jocular way, ‘I need a bit of stimulus.’