The Pandervils

by Gerald Bullet

  With no one but James within reach, Nicky was starved of companionship. It puzzled him to observe that Gladys and Lottie were rather fond of that silent man, and that he himself, so much nearer them in age, somehow intimidated them. Gladys was sixteen, her sister a year younger; and, though they were not specially attractive or amiable girls, Nicky in his loneliness would have been glad enough of their friendship. He had no one at all to talk to, or even to sit with in the pleasant silence that familiar friendship breeds. Mr Crabbe, uneasily arrogant in his self-importance, was always concerned to prove that he, educated or not educated, was more than a match for any young man who came to him, fresh from school, talking genteel, and with money in his hand, to be taught farming. ‘Needn’t be afraid of dirtying y’r fingers, Pandervil. Nor y’r boots neither.’ This was a favourite saying. And once, when for the first time in history the word ‘Woolsack’ appeared in the Mercester Chronicle, and provoked artless questions from Lottie, Mr Crabbe, having sneeringly extorted an answer from Nicky, burst into angry sarcasm. ‘Ah, my love, Mr Pandervil knows, you see. It’s what the Lord Chancellor sits on. A kind of cushion. Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr Pandervil. In Germany it’s the Rucksack. Ain’t that so, Mr Pandervil?’ He gave a short laugh. ‘I may not ’ave bin to the Oxford and Cambridge College, but I know what’s what. … Well Mother, and what are you scowling at, eh? You mind y’r own business and look a bit pleasant about it.’ Clearly Mr Crabbe was not a man from whom Nicky could hope for friendship. As for Mrs Crabbe, she was too profoundly worried and dispirited to be able to take more than a merely civil perfunctory interest in a young man whom her husband had made up his mind to dislike. Nicky was driven into himself, a dark tumultuous wonderful world.

  That world, upon its surface, seemed placid enough, even dull. But below there was a quickening and a restless desire. Earth’s loveliness—and Mershire was lovely in Nicky’s eyes, though he didn’t see it quite as Egg saw it—could not be all. What one saw could never be all. These fields, these birds and beasts, these patient dreaming cows, these young sheep calling to each other like babies, this astonishing sky and those nude maternal hills of the horizon—lovely, he thought, lovely and wonderful, but there’s something behind it all, some meaning, isn’t there?—something that’s like Edna Howard (that boyish fancy), warm and intimate and all-sufficing. In search of this mystery he cycled on Sunday evenings to Mercester, under cover of going to church; and sometimes, indeed, he did go to church, not in order to worship Mr Crabbe’s God—an irascible potentate, peevish with age, but still doing a brisk trade in repentance and forgiveness—but in the hope of finding there what he had never found in the Ebenezer Chapel at home, a presence (for he had read a little Wordsworth) that disturbs us … yes, disturbed him, and quickened him, and spilled silence like a benediction into his heart, a presence that he felt in the first soft breath of a summer evening and heard in the soaring skylark. The reaction from Ebenezerism drove him, inevitably, towards the Church of England; but God, if he attended that place of worship, always slipped quietly out, it seemed, just before the sermon. Nicky took some pleasure in the sonorous prayers, though they did not, to his mind, make good sense. And why is religion so holy, he thought; and he hardly knew at first what he meant by the question, for he had found no words for his obscure feeling that somehow this holiness, this solemnity and hush, was a kind of timidity in disguise. It could not burst into song, as the lark did; it did not make the heart leap as did the sight of the first green of the year budding in the hedges. It was—and this he did say—sober and respectful and middle-aged, this holiness. And, quite definitely, it wasn’t what he wanted. What, then, did he want?

  Well at least he didn’t want Gladys Crabbe, though perhaps … no, he didn’t want Gladys Crabbe, who came seeking him one evening, one warm dusky summer evening, in the granary. ‘ There’s a bit of supper ready. Dad and Mum’s abed.’

  ‘All right,’ said Nicky. He concealed his surprise. ‘Thanks. I’ve about finished here anyhow.’ After a pause he added, making conversation: ‘Where’s Lottie?’

  ‘She’s abed too. She’s not feeling herself.’

  Gladys made no movement to go. She stood near him, tall and slim and rather disturbing in this new mood of friendliness, her face and flowing hair a vague blur in the dim half-light. ‘I say, I’m sorry I was rude to you at tea.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Nicky rather sharply. He was surprised to the point of alarm. Gladys was eighteen now, and he twenty-one; and after all, if rudeness was in question, she had been more or less rude to him for two years. But his feeble pretence of not having heard could not be sustained. ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Not a bit.’

  The straw rustled. She came nearer. ‘Will you forgive me? I’ve always been catty, haven’t I? I dunno why. It’s something comes over me, so’s I want to bite. It isn’t as if …’ She stretched out an eager wavering hand to him. ‘Will you …’

  ‘Why, what’s come over you, Gladys!’ He forced a laugh, which even to himself didn’t sound very real. ‘You mustn’t take things so seriously.’

  They confronted each other in the darkness, shadow to shadow. He found it queer and frightening that he could not see her face. And presently the silence was broken by a quick gasping sob. ‘Oh I hate you, I hate you!’ Her voice broke, changing to a childish squeak. She clutched at his hand and pressed her mouth against it, and sank to the ground at his feet.

  ‘What on earth …? I say, are you ill? Let me help you into the house.’

  He felt helpless and foolish, and angry for being made to feel so. Bending over the sobbing girl, he tentatively touched her shoulder, and then, becoming bolder, began lifting her. At last she uncovered her face and thrust him fiercely away. ‘I hate you!’ she repeated brokenly.

  It was very odd; there was something here that greatly puzzled and excited him; he could find no clear reason for not believing what she said, though in his heart he doubted it. He stood waiting until her agitation had subsided. ‘Let’s go and have that supper, Gladys, for heaven’s sake.’ At last she consented, and they went back to the house, she walking quickly, with downcast head, a yard or two in front of him. James, as they entered the kitchen, was wiping drops of milk from his ragged moustache. ‘Good night,’ said James, rising and going to the door, and the two others sat uneasily facing each other, almost as if they were waiting for his heavy footsteps on the stairs to cease and leave them undisturbed. The girl’s hair, in colour a lustreless gold with rich hints of copper here and there, was in disorder: a warm handful of it, unfastened, hung over her left shoulder and provided a new setting for her profile. She sat moodily silent, not touching her food; and Nicky, stealing an occasional secret glance at her, saw for the first time that she was a woman. His heart began beating loudly, and he found he could no longer swallow without difficulty. She would have let me kiss her up there! Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I want to? For he had never—and he burned when he thought of it—he had never kissed anyone as he now wished to kiss Gladys. But it wasn’t Gladys he wanted, as he knew. And he knew, or fancied, that if he let go of himself now he would be committed to something far beyond his calculation, something which, while making him profoundly different (oh profoundly! he thought in his innocence), would leave him in one thing unchanged, for it would not and could not, Gladys could not, appease the ultimate desire of his heart, which was set upon a vision of beauty so marvellous, so remote, so far beyond the range of waking sight, that his imagination was all but exhausted with the labour of conceiving it. I wish she would be quiet, he thought in a panic; for, though she had said not a word since entering the house, and though she kept her eyes averted and her mouth angrily pouting, she was still in a state of tumult.

  ‘Well, bed for me!’ said Nicky. His chair scraped on the brick floor.

  He walked round the table and past her. Unwillingly, his feet faltered. Gladys did not raise her drooping head, but he saw a shiver pass through her and he hated himself. In
imagination he cupped her face in his hands and kissed it hungrily. She would lean back in his arms and abandon herself to him. But it wasn’t Gladys he wanted, and he dragged himself away from her allurement. Not Gladys, and yet, as he entered the bedroom— ‘You’re back then!’ grunted James, in his sleep— why the devil didn’t I do it up in the granary! It’s too late now. I wish … if only … I wish. Wishing vaguely that everything, especially himself, were different, he at last drifted into sleep, to be wakened, almost immediately as it seemed, by James shaking him.

  ‘Time gup!’ James said. Receiving no answer, he repeated the injunction. ‘Time gup!’

  ‘What!’ Nicky was incredulous. ‘Oh damn!’ James, in his methodical unenthusiastic fashion, was already smearing himself with water. The sight of that unresponsiveness roused a little demon in Nicky. ‘James, I made a remark.’

  ‘Eh?’ said James.

  ‘I said: Oh damn! Do you agree with me, dear James? Oh damn! Oh blast! It’s rotten getting up in the dark. Don’t you think so, brother slave?’

  ‘Um,’ said James, splashing and hissing in his basin.

  Nicky sat up, slid his legs out of bed, and paused for a moment dangling them.

  ‘James, you’re a jovial man, aren’t you!’ He affected a ghastly jocularity for the concealment of his bitterness. ‘You’re like a suet pudding, James, and when I think on thee, dear friend … I say, could you bear to show a bit of feeling sometimes, just to oblige me? … Could you? Will you?’

  ‘Eh?’ said James. His face emerged from behind a towel. He had not been listening. ‘We’ll maybe get a bit of that vetch cleared away ’smorning. No use to anyone, isn’t vetch.’

  2

  Crabbe’s Farm, on account of its proximity to the little shop in which Miss Lady Dark sold boiled sweets out of one bottle and picture-postcards out of another, was held to be in the district of Brinkley. Miss Lady Dark (why she had been christened Lady I don’t know) was situated almost precisely nine and a half miles east of Mercester, the hub of the civilized world. She sat behind her counter, a large ageing woman with the beginnings of a beard that the young men of an earlier generation would have envied her, and supplied the world with postage stamps, gum, cigarettes, chocolate, stationery, and acid drops in various colours. She did not speak often; she seldom moved; she merely sat still and grew larger and older, and, with the help of her brother the postman, dealt with the letters despatched and received by the five and thirty inhabitants of Brinkley. From Lady’s plump fingers Nicky received most of his letters, for they reached Brinkley after the first delivery, and there was no second delivery in the district unless the postman happened to be passing that way. It became therefore necessary, for impatient people like Nicky, to call at the office and confront the postmistress in person. Nicky, in his solitude, became more and more dependent on his letters. Most of them were from his father, who wrote with unfailing regularity once a week. Others were from Tooley: queer things these, curiously middle-aged and, in spite of their friendliness, somehow formal in tone. Tooley bought and sold in the city; he did not see what he bought; nor, till he had sold it again, did he pay for it; in fact, what he did, so far as Nicky could see, was to sit in his office and do neat little sums the answers to which represented his profit. In this simple fashion Tooley, still in his early twenties, was growing rich; he was thinking, he said, of settling down, and had found (but here I do not believe him) a nice place at Crouch End. No doubt there was a girl somewhere in his mind’s eye, but of her he said nothing, so that Nicky was not obliged as yet to burden his imagination with the singular idea of Tooley as a married man, being called ‘my dear’, and sleeping in a double bed, and mowing a small suburban lawn every fine Saturday afternoon in the summer. But he was a little chilled by the change that had overtaken Tooley. ‘Well, my dear Pandy, I must close now, With kind regards and wishing you “all the best”, Yours sincerely …’ In such sentences Nicky could not recognize the voice of his friend. Those quotation marks daunted him.

  Not least among the more infrequent of his correspondents was Uncle Algy, who wrote from time to time insisting that Nicky should visit him again. From Uncle Algy he had indeed a standing invitation; such phrases as ‘open house’ and ‘Liberty Hall’ were for ever on the old man’s lips and in his letters, and Nicky could not go often enough to please him. Uncle Algy lived at Woodithorpe, a couple of miles north of Mercester where, first as a clerk and afterwards as a partner in the firm of Fox Fox Fox Deever and Pandervil, he had had such a prosperous career. Retiring from business thirteen years before, at the age of sixty-five, he had bought a miraculous ‘little place’ at Woodithorpe known as the Old Vicarage, where ‘me and little Min, Eggie boy, can get a bit of quiet at last’. Quiet was the last thing you would have supposed Uncle Algy wanted, for he was not himself a quiet man, and when presently he got it in a form he had never bargained for—the devastating silence of bereavement—he was changed from that hour, for though he recovered, in time, his jauntiness of manner, there was now something in his life he couldn’t talk about. Of Aunty Min he spoke more than enough: of her goodness, her patience, her devotion, and how she was carried off, as you might say, by an east wind on top of a bit of a sniffing cold. But of his grief, and what the loss of her meant to him, he said nothing; the most profound experience of his life, it was the only one he made no conversational use of. Since then he had had Mrs Meadows, a middle-aged widow, to look after him, her father the septuagenarian George Hake to control the garden, and her son Tom to assist both. There were still cronies who came from Mercester and tempted him to eat and drink more than was good for him, for feasting his friends was become perhaps the greatest of accessible gratifications; and there were one or two young fellows, too, who came to admire and to laugh and to exchange winks with each other behind his back. But for the most part he had no audience but Mrs Meadows, an unresponsive woman, and old George Hake, whom, although he was seven years George’s senior and George a man who might have passed for fifty, he insisted on regarding as a venerable museum piece. Nevertheless he was proud of his own age and would have quickly corrected anyone who understated it. He spent most of his time, in fine weather, being pushed about the grounds in a bath-chair by Tom Meadows or driven in his car by the same Tom Meadows (but how different in shining livery!); and he was as full of pawky jokes about his rheumatism as he had once been of boasts about his health. Now, as then, he used hackneyed sayings with the air of having invented them. ‘Fit as a fiddle, boy. Fit as a brace of fiddles. But touch wood, of course!’ That had been a favourite remark in early manhood. And now, despite his having touched wood regularly for fifty years, he was in the grip of an enemy that he knew would never let him go. ‘A bag of old bones, that’s me,’ he would say, with a pleased air, as though it had been the best joke in the world. ‘And a bag of old aching bones, what’s more. But bless my soul, young Nick, I wish every man o’ my age was the match for me in health and strength. In a general way y’know. In a general way.’ Sometimes, when the sun shone, he would call his nephew ‘Old Nick’, and laugh homerically at the joke, recalling what Nicky’s Granny Noom had said when Egg, who never wearied of telling the story, had brought to her the news of Nicky’s birth and name. It was one of the most enduring and popular of the family jokes; even ‘poor Carrie’ had been known to enjoy it, and Egg, when he remembered that, for a moment wished her alive again. To Egg, nowadays, she was always, when he spoke of her, ‘poor Carrie’ or ‘your poor mother’, that ‘poor’ representing a forlorn attempt to compensate her, in retrospect, for the fact that even though in a fashion one loved or had loved her, she was for the greater part of her life an essentially unlikeable woman. No one spoke of Algy’s late wife as ‘poor Min’; one could not pity so blithe a spirit, one could only pity the world that had lost her.

  Uncle Algy’s house was a solid, dignified, early Georgian building in white stone. Screened, but not wholly hidden, by a group of tall pines, it stood a hundred yards back from a quiet
hedge-bordered road. At the back lay three acres or so of garden and a small paddock where the ancient donkey— friend of Nicky’s childhood—still grazed. The garden ascended in a series of three terraced lawns to a tiny forest of silver birches. These trees, slender and maidenly, stood, it seemed, on the very edge of the world, with nothing but sky—or was it sea? the imagination asked—shewing between them; for they grew upon a narrow ridge, beyond which the ground sloped sharply away to the wall that surrounded the estate. Uncle Algy would never allow himself to be wheeled to a point from which that wall was visible; for some reason never stated even in his thoughts, he preferred to stare at the picture of sky that the trees framed for him.