I wonder if you’d care, by any chance, to run down to my country place for the week-end? My wife would be delighted. Loose Chippings is about twelve miles from Kingham Junction, and of course we’d send a car to meet any train. Just send a telegram.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur Prendick
Reading this letter may be said to have calmed Phil down. ‘Unmoved’ would be the word to describe him when he’d finished it. Then he noticed the letters ‘T.O.’ in another hand at the bottom of the page, and his heart misbehaved again. He turned over. There wasn’t much. It just said:
Do come. I’ve things to say.
J.C.
Phil got downstairs to find both Mark and his father at breakfast.
‘I got to go,’ he said. He was very confused. He was glad Alice was away with her dogs or ponies or something. ‘Today I got to go.’
For the first time in their acquaintance, Mark Thickthorne looked at him in surprise.
‘Go?’ he said. ‘Leave us?’
‘Some friends I promised.’ Phil waved his letter rather feebly. The week-end, like.’
‘Oh, the week-end.’ Mark’s face cleared. ‘Don’t make it a long one, Phil. Get back on Monday.’
‘I’ll try,’ Phil said. His voice wasn’t right.
Lord Braydon looked up rather absently from his newspaper.
‘And put your address in the book,’ he said. ‘Good habit.’
Phil nodded. He went over to the table where there were a lot of things on hot plates. He’d been eating enormously since Operation Pilot began. But this time, somehow, he didn’t eat much.
Chapter Twenty
When Phil Tombs came to look back on Loose Chippings what always came first into the movie that seemed chiefly to constitute his unassuming mental processes was the stone mushrooms.
That was what they were – and there seemed no rational explanation of them. And there wasn’t an irrational or magical explanation of them either. He’d read somewhere – perhaps it was in that Physician’s Love-Play book – about phallic symbols. But if that was what they were they were pitiful squashy affairs: just a great half-circle of rather new and expensive stone mushrooms, say three feet high, round what Prendick called his sweep. Prendick said they were a Typical Feature of a Cotswold Manor – but beyond that he seemed a bit vague about them. Jean had a theory they were evolved from things you used to get on to horses from. And Mrs. Prendick – who came from the North and was the one Phil liked – thought they would be nicer if mingled with gnomes and pixies. You could get pixies and gnomes – brightly coloured and highly glazed – from an art-and-craft pottery near Burford. But Prendick didn’t take to this idea. He seemed to feel that gnomes and pixies weren’t quite class – not for a Cotswold Manor.
A Cotswold Manor was something you built in a kind of butter-coloured stone. You put a heavy stone roof on it, with a bit of a sag here and there that had puzzled Phil a lot at first, although later he saw that it was intended to give a ye-olde effect. There weren’t any sags inside. Everything was on the level – like Prendick’s business, you might say – except that in the suite for the very grandest visitors there was a bathroom with a bath sunk into the floor. There was a hall which was all very new stone mixed up with very old beams, and round it there were a lot of portraits of gents in wigs who must be Prendick ancestors. There was also a Family Tree. Phil knew it was that, because there was one at Thickthorne – only there, for some reason, it was kept not in the hall but in the boot-room where the boy in the green apron cleaned things. There was a sense in which the Prendicks were altogether higher-toned, you might say, than the Thickthornes.
There was something in all this that you could think about – and Phil might have done more thinking if he hadn’t been a good deal distracted by the house-party. Prendick called it that. Mrs. Prendick tried to call it ‘our friends’ – only you could feel that the poor lady hadn’t the conviction that would carry it that way. Phil himself saw clear enough that it was a house-party. The ring of Jaguars with their noses down among those mushrooms had told him that as he was driven up to the house in Prendick’s Jaguar. If he’d had the nerve, of course, he could have driven up in his own Jag. All he’d have had to do was to walk into the right place in Nottingham and tell them to register this one or that one quick. It tickled him, this did. But of course you should ask your girl before choosing a car. But who – he asked himself – did you ask before choosing your girl? Or – he dimly felt – letting a girl choose you?
He had no real doubts about the meaning of those six words on the back of Prendick’s letter. It was on. Or at least with one Jean it was on. For the first thing you had to learn about any girl was that there were several of her. He’d had lunch with at least two Jeans – not to speak of meeting quite another one for about thirty seconds later on. So he was wary as well as confident when he met the person called Jean now.
But of course his blood was quickening as well. The time seemed centuries away when his imagination had seen her as different in kind from every other woman. She had everything – but now he knew just how he wanted it. She was the girl who had leant across that little table towards him so that he had caught the scent on her. She was the girl who had leant, too, over his battered body in a low-cut dress like for a ball, so that he’d known how quick her breath was going. And, for her, he was the corresponding sort of man. Right or wrong, it was like that now.
‘That Moore here?’ he asked. There wasn’t any point in just doing polite talk.
She shook her head, and gave him that straight look that yet had the faint suggestion to it of doing sums.
‘I think Dolly may have been asked. But he’s rather shot his bolt with his Dean. The Oxford term’s nearly over, and he won’t get more leave. But don’t let’s talk about Dolly quite yet.’
‘It’s all one to me.’ He had to catch hold of himself to make sure he continued to talk any kind of sense. It was because of the way they were allowing themselves to look at each other, that was. ‘Didn’t you tell your uncle about that night – how you found me in the lift, and all? His letter didn’t look like you had.’
‘No, I didn’t. He didn’t know Dolly was coming to collect me, for one thing.’ She smiled wonderfully. ‘And an efficient secretary doesn’t bring her boss any minor worries.’
‘You call having a crook porter like that a minor worry? I’ll tell you his game. He was tied up—’
‘I know.’ She was impatient. ‘I worked it out, more or less. But he won’t be seen again. And you don’t want to have to go into some law-court, do you, as the country lad who was had? Forget it, Phil. You remember you talked about going places?’ She just hesitated. ‘Well go places this week-end. Borrow a car and go runs each day. It’s nice country. We needn’t tag around with all these people.’
‘They’re your lot, aren’t they?’
This question had far more effect than, in his swimming head, he’d intended. It was like she’d pulled up suddenly on seeing a high fence. But then she was off again.
‘They’re bores!’ she said. ‘City stuffed-shirts and their overdressed wives and ill-educated daughters.’
‘You well-educated?’ he asked. He was just seeking information.
‘Not really. I read the fashionable highbrow books. They read the fashionable lowbrow ones. There’s not much difference. So perhaps they’re my lot, as you say. Anyway, they’re not so exciting as you are.’ She put her chin back rather defiantly, and gave the same wonderful smile. ‘And I don’t suppose any of them are anything like as wealthy.’
He couldn’t take this lightly.
‘Jean,’ he said, ‘you’d like me a bit if I hadn’t all that lolly?’
‘Yes,’ she said. And he could see that she meant it – although he could see, too, that she didn’t somehow look happy as she said it. ‘Yes. But not at first. That was just nonsense and – and a vulgar temptation. Afterwards, yes. I can show you. Kiss me.’
They were in a
corner of Prendick’s perfectly kept garden – and he wondered what it could be that made him feel, for a fleeting moment, like they were on a stage. It was a large garden. But because Prendick’s was such a large house-party, you couldn’t be sure of not knocking up against people in any corner of it. Perhaps this was why, after all, she broke from him quickly.
‘Drinks time,’ she said. ‘I help to get them around. We must go in.’
And there was, it turned out, a good deal of that sort of ‘must’ during the week-end. Perhaps it was because Jean was something like her uncle’s social secretary as well. Perhaps it was because, since the Prendicks’ own grown-up children were away, she was acting as daughter of the house too. Anyway, the house-party did a lot of claiming her. She disintegrated into it, you might say, so that it was difficult to get quite the whole of her out of it again. She was on these people’s wave-length, and a switch to anything else was a jerk. Not that this was, for Phil, more than a small cloud. For of course he was himself on a cloud – a big cloud, and perhaps what his friend Peter Sharples would have called a gilt-edged one. He’d hardly have been troubled a bit, if he could at all have got along with the house-party himself.
But he couldn’t. Prendick was very kind. But Phil had a nasty feeling that he’d been edging round all these loudly talking, perpetually drinking people and telling them that they must be kind too. Some of them were all right, but most of them were what you’d call cordial in a way that made him want to get out of the room. Some of them stared curiously when they thought he wasn’t looking. So the whole thing became awkward, and the awkwardness went right down. Phil couldn’t manage naturally with the servants. Even the Prendicks’ spoons and forks went wrong on him, so that he realised that he was in for Kipps’s troubles after all.
He couldn’t understand it at first, and he was furious with himself – which was something that didn’t help him to pick up the little things you have to pick up cool and quick if you’re not going to do something silly. He’d thought at first it would be like Thickthorne – that, in comparison with anything he’d known, these would be exactly the same sort of people. Like if you found yourself in China, he’d thought, you wouldn’t know one Chinese tribe – if there were tribes in China – from another. But it wasn’t so.
They weren’t easy, Prendick’s lot. It puzzled him as well as disconcerted him, so that in spite of an absorbing happiness or excitement he found that he had to try to use his brains to find out why. But it was like being a blind man on the job. The upper classes, you’d call them. But he saw that he hadn’t even the beginnings of the sort of knowledge that would enable him to sort them out. He was sure that each of these washed and polished, confident-seeming men would approve of each of the others as having been to the right sort of school and all that. He was sure that all these screeching and commanding women had similar assurances as confident-like as if it was a trade-mark tattooed on their tightly corseted behinds. And yet they weren’t confident. That was it. Males and females, they must have been like this – with their cars and country houses and dividends and directorships – for quite some time. With some it would be their dads that made it, and with others it would be their grand-dads. But they all had an uneasy feel that they were a jumped-up crowd. Almost it looked as if you had to be a Thickthorne – which meant, really, just a small lot of funnies badly in need of a lick of paint – before you could look another human being in the eye without starting to do sums on him. At least his own class wasn’t like that, he thought. He hadn’t illusions about the folk he’d been brought up with. It wouldn’t even be honest to say that he liked them – not really. But at least they weren’t always wondering about themselves.
It was queer, all right. Here he’d got Jean – or he knew he just had to do that to have her – and here he was caught up in a crude, half-baked vision of English society as a bleeding nightmare. The wealthy Phil Tombs would marry and have kids. And those kids’ kids, after they’d been to Eton and Harrow and taken their sodding seats in what these people called the House, would be like these people were now. Christ, it made you glad the bloody thing would have fallen by then. When he got Jean away – as two or three times on Saturday and Sunday he did – he tried to tell her all this, for he was very excited and exultant and despairing. And she didn’t seem to think he was talking nonsense – not from what might be called his point of view – but it seemed to make her more thoughtful than responsive. He realised that she was very clever. And he told her so, seeing he was going to tell her everything. She said poverty had sharpened up her wits a bit. He was rather shaken by that. He was again as he’d been in the restaurant – working unused muscles so hard that he didn’t know when he’d crack. Only now there was this of her being, in snatches, passionately in his arms. It came into his head that if they were going to be sane together they’d better live on a desert island.
And then he had his talk with Mrs. Prendick.
He hadn’t expected Mrs. Prendick to seek him out for that walk as she did. For what seemed nice about Mrs. Prendick was that she behaved like she didn’t really play. You wouldn’t call her homely. She was beautifully dressed, and she moved about in a way that told you she was the lady of the house. But she somehow suggested that, whatever life was, she’d had it, and that now she was just putting in a bit of time quietly in the grandstand, waiting the close of play. Here they were, though, Mrs. Prendick and Phil, walking down a long ride through woodland.
‘Nice gardens and things you have here,’ Phil said.
‘Do you like them?’ Mrs. Prendick seemed pleased. ‘I work in them a great deal during the week, when my husband is in town and I live quite quietly. Of course I have a lot of help, because Arthur insists that everything should be in very good order. Yet he doesn’t really care for the garden. Perhaps it is because his grandfather was a gardener.’
Phil thought ‘gardener’ in this must mean like when you say ‘a keen gardener’. So it didn’t seem to make sense. And Mrs. Prendick noticed he was puzzled.
‘Gardener to a duke,’ she said. ‘But still – a gardener. His eldest son – Arthur’s father – was put in a draper’s shop. It was regarded as quite a step up.’
‘I’d rather do gardens,’ Phil said. He was a bit surprised by the old lady’s starting in like this on family history.
‘I quite agree. But at least it led to a step up. When Arthur’s father died a few years ago, he was the owner of two very big shops – really, of two firms. It was a wonderful career.’ Mrs. Prendick paused, and sat down on a rustic seat. Then she patted the place beside her in a motherly way, so that Phil sat down too. ‘A wonderful career,’ she repeated with her queer sort of detachment. ‘And indeed Arthur has had a wonderful career too. You can see that from our friends – from the house-party. Only, of course, he married rather early.’
‘I’d say he made a nice marriage,’ Phil said.
‘Thank you, my dear.’ If Mrs. Prendick was again pleased, she was also amused. He remembered that there are people so simple that they don’t seem to have minds to get confused with. ‘At least my parents were very nice people. I had a good home. For a time we were very poor. My father, you see, started his own little builder’s business, and at first it didn’t seem to answer. But my mother worked very hard, backing him up. We all had to do without things. And then, quite suddenly, and largely because of the war with the German Kaiser, we became very well off. It was then that Arthur and I were married. He has always been very good to me, for he is a really kind man. But sometimes when he looks at me down the long table, with all those people on each side of us, I think he may be feeling that I represent Mrs. Prendick paused. ‘Now, don’t hurry me,’ she said – although Phil was doing nothing of the sort. ‘I found just the right words not long ago. Yes! A failure of nerve.’ She looked at Phil, and he saw that her face was quite untroubled. ‘He might have done better, poor man.’
Phil was horrified. He couldn’t believe that, even if he too lived to be quite old, he
’d ever come to talk of deep private things in this passionless way. He saw, of course, that Mrs. Prendick had led the conversation this way at all only because she’d realized he was a bit at sea. She was wanting to tell him something about what you might call unknown England. He found he wasn’t resenting this. But he did feel an instinct to go cautiously.
‘You have these big parties every week, Mrs. Prendick?’ he asked.
‘Almost every week. There are some people who come quite often. But others not. Arthur says that Loose Chippings is the right place at which to try out fresh contacts. And some don’t take – I wonder if that is the word? We don’t, I mean, ever see them again.’
Phil started to say, ‘Do you think you’ll ever see me again?’ But he modified this.
‘Does Mr. Prendick,’ he asked, ‘often have down winners like me?’
‘Phil, dear – may I call you that? – you know the answer very well. Of course not.’
‘Then why me?’ Phil flushed as he asked it.
‘It is because my husband thinks you are rather an exceptional young man.’ For the first time Mrs. Prendick hesitated, as if she wanted at once to be tactful and straight.
‘Because I got a quarter of a million nicker?’
‘Of course, Phil.’ She looked at him almost teasingly. ‘It wouldn’t be just because of your eyes and hair, would it? But you must please understand that Arthur is a very clever man, as well as being – as I’ve said – a really kind one. He sees more in you than your money. You’re young. Your principles are good. I myself can see that. I think you must come from a good home.’
‘My home’s all right,’ Phil said quickly. He thought of his auntie and decided he could go as far as that.
The Man Who Won the Pools Page 19