Sunday came, and Jake went. If he went, in the end, none too willingly, this was less a matter of his own deeper disposition in the affair (something pretty obscure to him, anyway) than of reacting to family fuss. His father made as much ado over the expedition as if he really expected Jake to bring home Velazquez’s Don Balthasar Carlos in the back of his mini-van. His mother appeared to judge it more probable that what he would bring back was Gloria Montacute herself – and perhaps no longer just as Gloria Montacute, but as one whom lightning action on the part of the Archbishop of Canterbury had translated into a Counterpayne. Some dream of this sort even revealed itself as having been in Mrs Counterpayne’s mind a dozen years before – upon the occasion, in fact, of the more or less infant Gloria’s unreturned visit to Olney. So long ago, Jake realised, had his mother seen what might be called a solution in this grand alliance. So long ago, therefore, had the poor lady already been perpending what she was accustomed to refer to as ‘your father’s difficulties’. All this rather browned Jake off.
Ought Jake to take Gloria a present? Mrs Counterpayne distinctly remembered that Gloria, on the occasion of her historic sojourn at Olney, had brought Jake nothing less than an air-gun – a weapon discharging either small lead slugs or brightly tufted darts with equal velocity. The gift, having been a little beyond Jake’s years, had occasioned some anxiety at the time. It was positively transformed into an augury now.
Jake had no intention of taking Gloria a present. Anything of the kind would render implausible the fiction under cover of which he was going to make his bow: to wit, that finding himself quite unexpectedly in the neighbourhood of Nudd he had thought he might as well drop in. Jake rehearsed the delivery of this twaddle to himself several times, being without a clue that it would be beyond him to deliver it. The young know singularly little about themselves. Almost as little as do the aged.
Jake drew to a halt on the brow of a hill. (It is a spot we have visited before.) He wondered who Nudd had been. The name suggested an uncouth personage in a saga, or something of that kind. Perhaps he had been a Dane who had gone in for a spot of rapine in these parts before grabbing some land in a more permanent way and settling down. In which case he would find his old territory not wholly congenial now. It suggested nothing more warlike than the domestication, in modestly genteel dwellings dotted all over the view, of retired Indian Army colonels lingering out their shivering span beyond any last residual warmth that might be at play upon them from the sunset of the raj.
Nudd Manor itself was all right. Jake found that, despite his social and political convictions, he quite took to it. What disturbed him was the larger, although still quite local, prospect. Where the hell had it come from? Why had it been allowed to come about? He reckoned himself – apart from the rudiments of his own profession – as being as superlatively uneducated as any other public-school boy. But he wasn’t sure that there hadn’t been history lessons to which he had sufficiently listened to render him now perplexed before this queerly gentrified scene. It couldn’t have any historical roots, this unnatural concentration of ingeniously mellow-looking country houses (which was what estate agents would call them) all within shouting distance (not that anybody here would shout) of a genuine ye-olde parish church. Something had simply gone wrong with history – with all that stuff about the manorial system and what have you – to produce such a result. Modern England, or Death Warmed Up. There were depressed moments – for example, when he told himself he couldn’t even learn to draw – in which Jake gloomily fancied he might one day find himself writing books. Well, at least he’d write one with just that title.
These were Gloria Montacute’s surroundings, and they must a bit have rubbed off on her. Yet he didn’t remember her as like that. And he did remember her – very vividly indeed. He’d never again in all his life stand, a complete stranger, before a girl who minutes before had learnt of her mother’s sudden death. Once was enough. But a good sort of girl she’d certainly been. That, as his sister had acutely guessed, was what this was all about.
Scowling at his own incoherence, Jake put his hand on the ignition-switch of the van, and then thought better of this and looked at his watch. It was half past twelve, which struck him as an awkward hour. If he drove up to Nudd now, he’d pretty well be inviting himself to lunch. Not on.
He looked behind him and to his right. Up there, and with surprising abruptness, quite a different terrain appeared: something like a ridge of downland, with here and there the hump of a tumulus or an old barn. It was a beckoning leg-stretching prospect, so that on an impulse he scrambled out of the van. Perhaps it was a cowardly and delaying tactic, but he’d walk for the outside of an hour and arrive on Gloria a little after two o’clock. He reached back into one of the van’s capacious pouches and brought out a packet of chocolate biscuits. These, although betraying a somewhat juvenile taste, would be a perfectly satisfactory meal.
He climbed to the skyline, which didn’t take long. And everything was suddenly as solitary as you could please. The only visible work of man was some sort of large tumble-down shed and a few chunks of baled straw. You could sing at the top of your voice, or shout any scraps of poetry in your head, and nobody would be the wiser. Jake almost started singing and then, for some reason, refrained. Instead – which was to prove to be unfortunate – he decided to explore the not very interesting ruin in front of him. It had been a barn or cow-house: something like that. He vaulted a little rampart of straw, turned inward, and stopped dead. With shocking abruptness, he had come on a couple making love.
Love-making was not, for one of Jake’s generation, quite invariably a wholly private affair. But to his own way of thinking it was certainly that, and this made it odd that he now stayed put and watched, in a paralysed but interested way, just what was going on. He had become, of an instant, a voyeur, and for some seconds, at least, the fact didn’t at all trouble him. He realised intuitively, rather than saw, that the couple were very young: quite as young as he was himself. It passed through his head that this was obscurely a factor in his behaviour; that it somehow made his spectatorship innocent. But almost at once he wasn’t liking the reaction of his own heart and pulse. There was something demeaning in that kind and degree of excitement, it seemed, when one wasn’t oneself in on the act. So he was really turning away, or was about to do so, when the man rolled over and he glimpsed the girl. She was a sallow, narrow-hipped creature, who looked less in need of a lover than of a square meal. Jake was suddenly horrified – and in this instant the man sat up and looked at him. And Jake looked at the man. It was the farmer’s son, or whoever, who had once seen him out of Nudd. The young man had arched himself awkwardly in air, and was furiously pulling up his trousers, as Jake mumbled confused words and walked very rapidly away.