The Pandervils

by Gerald Bullet

  Egg waited in not unpleasurable agitation until his son returned from this hazardous mission with a cool ‘It’s all right, I’ve squared her for you.’ The spirit of holiday began dancing in his heart, for it was fun, undeniably fun, and not a little grand, to be strolling down the road to take luncheon with one’s eldest son—for what at home was ‘dinner’ became ‘luncheon’ when it cost nine-pence (with napkin) and was served at Pardoe’s. Bob counted it lucky that they were alone for the latter part of the meal, and when, at its end, he wiped some glistening crumbs of suet from his mouth and expressed this opinion for the third time, it was evident that something important was to be discussed.

  ‘Well?’ said Egg. ‘So you want a word with me, do you, my boy?’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Bob. ‘I do, and that’s a fact.’ He coughed nervously, and his face became slowly crimsoned over with embarrassment. ‘I’m going to get married, Dad. That’s about the size of it.’ He stroked the downy beginnings of a moustache, striving to look manly and casual, and succeeding in looking at least ten years old. Egg had never liked the young man so much before.

  ‘I see,’ said Egg. He was envious and he was compassionate. ’And you ’aven’t told your mother?’

  ‘You bet I haven’t.’

  ‘And you don’t much like the job?’

  ‘Can’t say I do,’ admitted Bob, staring down at his dirty plate and shuffling his feet in confusion. ‘And there’s reasons enough for that. Fact is, I want you to promise to say nothing about it till I give the word.’

  Egg stared. He was this boy’s father, and something had got to be done about this affair. ‘Well, out with it, my boy. Who’s the girl?’ It occurred to him—and he half-smiled at the thought—that he ought to have asked that question before. But until this moment he had almost forgotten that his son’s marriage involved a particular girl, and not the vague and radiant embodiment of young girlhood that in his own mind was evoked by what he had been told.

  ‘Well,’ said Bob, speaking very slowly, with long painful pauses between his phrases, ‘that’s the trouble, you see. I don’t know that you’ll be so extra special pleased about it. It’s not a girl you know. Don’t suppose you’ve ever seen her. In fact I’m jolly well sure you haven’t. She lives out Keston way.’

  Egg’s agitation provoked him to sarcasm. ‘Has she got a name, this girl, as well as an address?’

  ‘Kitty Dyce is her name, and—well, she’s all right, naturally.’ Bob hurried past the question of her personal excellence. ‘I’m … we … she … well, we’re pretty far gone on each other, if you want to know. So that’s that,’ finished Bob defiantly.

  Egg considered this pronouncement. He could hardly believe that they were at the end of the story. ‘And what’s all this about your not telling your mother? That don’t seem to fit in somehow. She’s got to be told, you know that ‘swell as I do.’

  ‘She’ll have to be told some time, of course,’ agreed Bob. ‘But not yet. I’d rather she wasn’t.’

  Egg became peevish. ‘That’s silly talk. Still I suppose you can keep it quiet for a bit if you’re so set on it. But whyja bring me into it?’

  Bob looked up in astonishment. ‘Well, that’s a funny way to take it, Dad, I must say. You wouldn’t a had me get married without telling anybody, would you! Not you! You’d a bin the first to complain. I thought being a man you’d understand how a chap feels.’

  ‘All right!’ said Egg. ‘Steady does it, my boy. Don’t excite yourself. But I don’t understand, not yet I don’t. You ’aven’t told me everything. By the way you’re talking it looks to me as though you want to make a fool of yourself. Want to get married to-morrow, I suppose. Is that it?’

  ‘That’s it, near enough,’ muttered Bob sulkily.

  ‘Bob!’ said Egg, eyeing his son sternly. ‘Are you talking serious?’

  ‘You bet I am!’

  ‘You think you can get married, and you not turned twenty-two and earning next to nothing a week! Tie yourself up for life to some girl you’ve just said How-d’ye-do to! For life, mind you. For life. I know what I’m talking of, so make no mistake about it.’

  ‘It’s to be a secret marriage,’ said Bob, trying to take no notice of his father’s outburst. ‘That’s why I’m telling you. We shan’t set up house, not for a year or two, not till I’ve made my way a bit. She’ll go on at her work, and I’ll go on at mine, and no one will know we’re married at all till… they do. Only I thought I’d like you to know, you being a man.’

  Egg was touched and grateful, but he thought it his duty to dissemble gratitude. ‘Work? What’s she working at?’

  ‘Well, that’s just it,’ explained Bob, at once eager and sheepish. ‘Mother’s got such big ideas, I’d never hear the last of it. She’s … well, she’s a general servant, if you want to know, down Keston way.’

  Egg remained deep in thought for a few minutes. At last he said: ‘There’s worse things than general servants. My own mother was in service once, and I never died of it. And there’s an aunt of yours—’

  ‘I know!’ Bob was triumphant. ‘’Tisn’t our place to be high and mighty. And I wouldn’t care if she was a gutter-girl, for myself. It was only Ma I was thinking of.’

  ‘Yes, I daresay,’ remarked Egg. ‘But there’s more in it than that, my boy. What’s the hurry? That’s what you haven’t told me. And I’m waiting to hear.’

  ‘There’s reasons for hurry,’ said Bob.

  ‘Oh, there is, is there!’

  ‘Very good reasons,’ said Bob, drawing patterns on the tablecloth with his forefinger. ‘It’s all my fault, and I’m not going to let her down, and I don’t care what anyone says. It was none of her doing.’

  ‘None of her doing, wasn’t it!’ What a noodle the boy is, thought Egg. Thinks he did it all by himself, I s’pose. ‘I’m surprised at you, Bob!’ That seemed so inadequate that he added, not with complete conviction: ‘And I’m ashamed of you, what’s more!’ In both these statements he lied, partly in the interests of good morals, but more because he must at all costs conceal from Bob how greatly alarmed and horrified he was by the prospect of a scandal in the family. Fancy having to break this news to Carrie! It was too dreadful to be faced. But the next instant it flashed into his mind how years ago, when he was Bob’s age, he had carried upstairs Jinny Randall heavy with her child and Willy’s; and he yearned towards his son, but could only repeat: ‘I’m ashamed of you!’ And he added, in real exasperation: ‘First Harold, then you! It’s too much of a good thing!’

  ‘Harold!’ Bob’s eyes widened with curiosity. ‘What’s young Harold been up to?’

  ‘Nothing at all!’ snapped Egg. ‘He knows how to behave himself, Harold does. Which is more than you do, seemingly.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t understand,’ said Bob wearily. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever felt like Kitty and me feel. Pretty clear you haven’t. You’ve never been what I’d call in love, have you?’

  Egg, having essayed irony several times in this interview, now for the first time achieved it. ‘No, my boy, I never have. Old fogey like me, don’t know what love is. Suppose you tell me, eh?’

  Not entirely obtuse, Bob had the grace to blush for himself. ‘Anyway, Dad, you see how it is. I want to marry her. Quite apart from all this bother, I want to marry her. And I’ve just got to. You do see that, don’t you?”

  They rose, paid their bill, and walked back to the shop. As they crossed the threshold together, Egg took his son’s arm and slightly, shyly, pressed it, grateful that the boy had not thought it necessary to demand a formal promise of secrecy. The future—at which for a moment he cocked a timid speculative eye—could hold little but storm for him, dark days and angry seas. Pandervil’s was still yielding no more than a precarious livelihood, and Harold was the most reluctant of assistants. To look forward was no better than to look back, and to look back was bitterness. Passion, for him, had flowered vainly; budded and blossomed and spilled its scent in a desolate place and was no
w withered away. Yet there remained things in life that he would have been reluctant to lose. There was this belated feeling of kinship with his eldest son. There was friendship and neighbourliness, saying How-do to familiar faces, a pipe of tobacco of an evening when Carrie had gone early to bed, and a quiet read of the noozepaper, and summer mornings, and the way the slate roofs of the High Street glistened after rain. And, to-night, there was Nicky to be bathed.

  5

  The bath, which failed to resemble porcelain only because it looked somehow better than porcelain, so cunningly had the paint been applied—the bath demands a word to itself. It was new; it was Selina’s pride and care; it possessed two brass taps that were polished every day and never used (hot water was carried upstairs in saucepans); and it was the monument to a great event. It was Uncle Algy, and he alone, who had instantly with a prescience little short of extraordinary, recognized the greatness of the event. While others joined hearts, and sometimes voices, in deploring that yet another child was born to Carrie and Egg, Uncle Algy, paying them one of his infrequent but regular visits, was as hearty in his applause as he had been on previous and similar occasions; the house echoed with his ‘Bray-vo, Carrie! Bray-vo, Egg! Bray-vo, Baby!’ And, with a change of accent that gave new and hearty emphasis to his pleasure and surprise: ‘Bray-vo!’ Ever since his unexpected emancipation from farm-work and his espousal both of auctioneering and Aunty Min, Uncle Algy had bounced through life like a balloon—for time persisted in inflating him—heartily applauding and patronizing everything. And here at last was something to which with aptness as well as enthusiasm he could apply his favourite adjective; for Nicky was indeed little, the very smallest baby, thought Egg (who was no judge, however), that had ever been born. ‘I’ad thought of spoons, Carrie,’ said Uncle Algy surprisingly. ‘I ’ad thought of a silver spoon, y’know, Eggie old son. But no, ’e don’t want spoons. And besides there’s plenty of such in the house already. Ha ha ha! No, seriously, Eggie, what I’ll do is I’ll give him a bath, old boy. Hear that, Carrie? I’ll give the little man a bath. Blest if I don’t!’ Carrie, failing to seize his drift, objected that he would take and drop the child, a remark of which Uncle Algy reminded her upon every succeeding visit. And when the bath came, newfangled affair though it was and a ridiculous expense no doubt, Carrie allowed it was very handsome of Uncle Algy. And Egg was overwhelmed to the point of feeling awkward about it. ‘That’s nothing, old boy. Nothing at all, is it, Min, my dear!’ For Uncle Algy was by way of being a rich relation, and though he took a franker pleasure in savouring his generosity than modern delicacy would approve, one could hardly grudge him his naive self-approval. ‘I haven’t exactly gone down in the world, Eggie, and I won’t pretend I have. But I’m never too big to remember old times, boy, and blood’s thicker than water, whatever you may say.’ And so here, mute witness to the inferior density of water, stood Nicky’s bath; and though its taps were not connected to a cistern, it had a real plughole, with a plug that hung on a stout chain, and the water that was carried up by Selina did not need to be carried down again but escaped through a waste-pipe to the cesspool at the end of the garden. Here stood the bath, and here, with his father in attendance, was Nicky ready to use it.

  Well, not quite ready, for first he must be undressed. ‘Shall I be a rabbit, Dad, and you skin me?’

  Egg thought this a good plan. He whipped out an imaginary knife and skinned his rabbit expertly. He was always surprised that Nicky, who had invented it, did not find this a rather gruesome game.

  ‘Oooo!’ cried Nicky.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ asked Egg.

  ‘It hurts something awful,’ said Nicky. His father stared down into his face. Nicky gravely returned the look. ‘It only pretends to hurt, you know.’

  Footsteps approached the door; went past; came back; stopped. ‘Eggie dear!’ It was Carrie’s voice.

  ‘Yes, Mother?’ answered Egg.

  Carrie came in. The two Pandervils faced her with questions in their eyes. ‘I’m bad again,’ said Carrie. ‘Whether you like it or not, you better know. I’m going to bed.’

  ‘Can I do anything for you? Make you something hot? Rub you?’

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ said Carrie. ‘Oh no, you can’t do anything. I must bear the cross alone if it’s God’s will, though what I’ve done to deserve all this pain I don’t know. I’m going back to bed, and never oughta ’ave left it. People don’t know ’ow bad it takes me. But never mind.’ She paused at the door, and added in raised tones: ‘And there’s another thing, Father. You’ll have to speak to Daniel.’

  ‘Speak to ’im?’

  ‘Yes, speak to ’im. He’s not treating my girl right. Not by a long way he isn’t.’

  ‘What’s he bin doing?’ asked Egg. ‘I thought: there was something ‘smorning.’

  ‘Fast and loose,’ said Carrie. ‘On the drink and worse. There’s a lot o’ dirty sluts in this town, let me tell you. Wish I could lay me ’ands on ’em. Not that I’d touch ’em. I should think not indeed! You gotta speak to ’im about it.’

  ‘Um,’ said Egg.

  ‘Oh, you may um!’ retorted Carrie angrily. ‘You oughta never a let my girl marry a man like that.’ She went out, slamming the door behind her.

  ‘What’s dirty sluts?’ asked Nicky.

  ‘Stuff you get in the water after your bath,’ said Egg. ‘That soapy scummy stuff as you see wriggling down into the plughole. Now, are we ready?’

  Nicky made a mysterious face enjoining silence. He crept closer to his father and whispered: ‘There might be a mouse in the bath, you know. So we must go very quietly and take a peep. Shall we?’

  They did.

  ‘There he goes,’ whispered Nicky hoarsely. ‘Can you see him?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t he swim fast!’ exclaimed Egg admiringly.

  ‘He’s not swimming,’ said Nicky reproachfully. He’s running. On top of the water, like Jesus. He does run fast, don’t he? And in a minute he’ll run faster and faster and faster and faster.’

  ‘Shouldn’t wonder,’ agreed Egg.

  Such a possibility was worth watching for.

  ‘I told you he would!’ said Nicky. ‘He ran as fast as a real one, didn’t he!’

  In due time Nicky suffered himself to be hoisted into the water and to be soaped and sponged all over. He talked a great deal throughout these processes, and Egg, who privately believed, without irony or reservation of any kind, that this was the pleasantest and cleverest child in the world, sustained his part of the conversation with an unvarying gravity of demeanour and a dancing lightness of heart. And the moment came when Nicky, fortified by his father’s presence, found courage to pull the plug up by its chain. With Selina it was a different matter, for the last gurgle of the water was apt, with the help of her artful fancies, to bear a very sinister interpretation. Egg was more genial company, and, when that funny ugly noise did at last occur, Nicky was able to shout with a pleasure unalloyed by fear: ‘Go away, you dirty sluts!’ And as he lifted the pink and steaming child out of the bath and planted him carefully on the cork mat, this elderly grocer chanced to recall an odd saying that his own mother had been wont to use on bath-nights, more than half a century before, in Mershire. ‘And now,’ said Egg Pandervil, ‘you’re fit to kiss the ladies!’

  Part Two

  Chapter the First

  The Cub

  1

  Seeing their camp-fire burn low, the two boys hastened to replenish it with sticks and fir-cones and handfuls of crisp rust-coloured leaves; and when the fire blazed again they squatted down in the long grass, which, under the onrush of darkness, was beginning to sigh and rustle and change its greenness for the colour of slate-roofs. Responding to the mood of the hour and the magic desolation of the scene about them, they were silent for a long while. From time to time one of them, without getting up, tossed another stick or two into the flames. They felt lonely, courageous, mature. A cold wind fluttered out of nowhere and blew the woodsmoke—an acrid memorabl
e smell —into their sensitive young nostrils. The elder boy, Ralph Tooley, was thirteen years old. The younger, Nicky Pandervil, was not quite twelve. Between them they had just relieved Kimberley.

  From where he sat, hugging his knees, Nicky could see the field slanting darkly and steeply under him to the marshy bulrush beds, and thence rise again, in a more gradual ascent, to the row of conker-trees that flanked Coppett’s Avenue. To the west, which was still stained with the afterglow of sunset, the chimney-pots of Albert Road presented to his vision a serrated horizon that might have been cut out of black paper, so artificial and insubstantial did it seem. At one point to the north-east, precisely at the east end of Coppett’s Avenue, stood the ugly extensive building known as Coppett’s Asylum for Infirm Watchmakers and Clockmakers, a place which Nicky’s imagination, misled by a not unnatural confusion of ideas, peopled with aged bespectacled lunatics who spent what remained to them of life in a fantasy of witless and everlasting watchmending. In all other directions nothing was visible but field and trees and wool-gathering sky. Crouched on the summit of his green hill, at his back a belt of pines that completely hid the villas of Victoria Avenue a quarter of a mile away, he felt that at any moment, if he so chose, he could float out into space and remain indefinitely hovering in that mysterious middle distance. Coppett’s Piece bred such fancies, especially when dusk came with its cold sighing breath, and elms and oaks, having quietly dreamed the afternoon long, became quick with whispering noises. Abandoned by Coppett—a benefactor of whom little beyond his name is known—and not yet seized by the ubiquitous builder, it was a region queer, romantic, desolate, and delightful: queer by virtue of its switchback contours, those two monkey-trees, that suggestive fragment of brick wall, and that sculptured faun lying on his back naked and abandoned in the grass; and delightful because, although Nicky, the grocer’s son, could reach it from his home in half an hour, it was in spirit so utterly remote from Farringay High Street. Coppett’s Piece was a place where anything might happen.