Prowling exploratorily round the side of the house, he came on a table laid for tea under a beech-tree, with deckchairs grouped round it. It was laid for three, so apparently he was in fact expected. Not very actively expected, however, it seemed. Having scrutinized the back garden and found it wanting, he sat down in one of the deck-chairs, and after some minutes’ uninteresting self-communion ate a cake with pink sugar icing on it. He had just finished this when, Mrs. Flack being momentarily quiescent, he heard a laugh from the trees at the bottom of the garden.
It was a woman’s laugh, low, unfeignedly happy and also (regrettable to state) slightly wicked. And Fen, enlightened, got to his feet, scowled in the direction from which it had come, and took several strides towards its source in a very grim and determined manner.
Then he stopped.
Well, after all…
He returned to the table. He poured tea for himself and drank it while consuming a second cake. He appropriated three sandwiches to eat in the train. Then, with a single benevolent glance in the direction of the trees, he left the garden and walked back to ‘The Marlborough Head’.
He was packing when Mogridge brought him his bill, and interrupted himself to examine the document in a rather minute and offensive way. ‘I ought,’ he said severely, ‘to make a deduction on account of all these spiders I’ve had to share the room with. To the best of my knowledge you never made the least attempt to do anything about them.’
Mogridge contemplated the offending creatures with some attention.
‘When I was a boy,’ he said, ‘we used to race them for marbles. It’s a thrilling sport.’
Fen thought otherwise, and said so; but he had half an hour to waste before he need leave to catch his train, and he was as prepared to waste it in racing spiders as in anything else. It proved, in the upshot, to be a trying occupation in that the spiders’ unreadiness to proceed at their briskest possible pace from starting point to winning-post required the formulation of a vast network of rules designed to cope with an almost illimitable number of contingencies—contingencies ranging from major mishaps (such as one of the competitors eating another) to the exacting problem of whether a pause in mid-career was to be ascribed to exhaustion, fear, or mere obstinacy. Moreover, Mogridge’s propensity for cheating by prodding the runners with the point of a pencil a perceptible interval before shouting the word ‘Go!’ gave rise to a great deal of altercation and bad blood, as a consequence of which, having lost one pound five shillings and twopence to Fen, he retired from the course in a huff, leaving Fen to dispose of the competitors, single-handed, by putting them out of the window.
He returned almost immediately, however, to announce that Fen had a visitor. And having by now completed his packing, Fen took his bag and went, obedient to this summons, downstairs to the Lounge.
Penelope Rolt got up from the window-seat as he entered. Her narrow, pale, pretty face bore inevitable witness to the events of the day before, and her thin, stained fingers were still tremulous. But she smiled when she saw Fen, and the smile was in her eyes as well as in her mouth.
‘I—I had to come,’ she said. ‘I heard you were leaving, so I had to come…’ Then she became aware of the bandage. ‘I say, I never knew you were as badly hurt as that!’
Fen was much gratified by this novel reaction to his appearance. ‘And how are you?’ he asked.
‘Oh, I’m all right. The only thing is—’
‘Well?’
‘I—well, you see, they haven’t let me be alone, not since I—not since it happened, I mean. Miss Bonnet’s outside now, and I had an awful job to stop her coming in and—and hanging about.’
‘It’s to be expected, you know,’ said Fen gently. ‘For a little while, anyway.’
‘Oh, but it’s absurdl’ she burst out. ‘Don’t they realize that after last night I—I just couldn’t…’
‘Yes, I think they do realize. But you can’t scare us all out of our wits and then expect things to get back to normal again in twenty-four hours… By the way, did you dream last night?’ She nodded soberly.
‘Yes.’
‘That too is to be expected. But it will certainly wear off in a week or two, so you’re not to fret about it.’
Hesitantly, she said: ‘I—I must thank you.’
‘Must you?’ said Fen cheerfully. ‘I shouldn’t bother about being grateful, if I were you. You’ve got quite enough to put up with without the addition of that. I hear your father’s going on well.’
Her eyes lit up at that. ‘Yes,’ she said eagerly. ‘He was rather marvellous, wasn’t he? Everyone’s talking about it, and all sorts of people have been to see him at the hospital, I mean people he hasn’t been on speaking terms with, and he hasn’t growled at any of them. Sir Charles—’
‘Sir Charles?’
‘Sir Charles Wain,’ said Penelope with reverence; it was evident that in her view this innocuous baronet constituted a sort of one-man accolade. ‘He was at the hospital this afternoon. He brought some peaches from his hot-house, and he and Pa stayed gassing for—oh, ages. So there’s really only one thing that worries me now.’
‘Oh? What’s that?’
‘Well, it sounds silly, but I’m worried about not being more worried, if you see what I mean. About—about Peter, I mean.’
She looked up at Fen in perplexity. And tonically remorseless, he said:
‘In that case I should just stop worrying about not being more worried, and worry about something sensible instead.’ Then he spoke more earnestly. ‘In one sense you’re very lucky, you know. It might have hurt.’
‘Yes,’ she admitted with youthful seriousness. ‘I s’pose it means I didn’t really care for him very much. And it’s funny, but in a queer’—she struggled to find the right word—‘in a queer, sideways sort of way, I realized that all along.’ Then suddenly she laughed, and from what she said next Fen knew that now she was almost grown up. ‘Just a pash,’ said Penelope lightly. ‘So that’s that, and as far as Pa’s concerned…6’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, I think,’ she told him, ‘that perhaps things are going to be different, from now on.’
And Fen smiled at her.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think that very likely they are.’
And thus it came about that on the afternoon of Monday 5th June 1950, Gervase Fen (whilom Datchery), having deposited his week-end bag on a bus with the request that it be delivered, at the railway-station, into the hands of a reliablelooking porter, set out to walk the four miles which separate the village of Cotten Abbas from the market town of Twelford.The sun that Monday had risen in a tumult of wind; but at breakfast time the wind had dropped, and by midday the earth had once again begun to absorb and accumulate heat. To an obbligato of bird-song Gervase Fen marched beneath a mellow sky towards Twelford. And he carolled lustily, to the distress of all animate nature, as he walked.
‘You shall wash your linen,’ sang Gervase Fen, ‘and keep your body white, in rain-fall at morning and dew-fall at night.’ And the cattle, lifting their heads as he passed, lowed a mournful burden to the tune.
The Long Divorce Page 21