THAT should have been the end of the day. It was past seven when Richard wheeled his bicycle into the gardener’s shed and impaled it on a stack of other decrepit machines. He thought vaguely of spreading the eiderdown from his bed on the rug in front of the gasfire and himself on top of it. He thought, I could write a story; a poem. The uncommitted evening sprawled in front of him comfortingly, soothingly; he was excited by its sheer vacuity. It seemed ages since he had had a few hours entirely to himself. He ought to write letters, not poems. He owed Mary one, perhaps two. He couldn’t be sure she herself wrote with less duty and more affection. He could, and ought, to write to his mother. She had a day for letters herself and it was the regularity of her cosy little descriptions which gave more pleasure to Richard and Quentin than the descriptions themselves. But then he wouldn’t write letters. He wouldn’t do anything. He’d actually spread the eiderdown over the skimpy hearthrug and was seated on it, taking off his shoes, when Bateson burst in.
‘Don’t tell me,’ he said, ‘you’re licking your wounds? High society’s been too much for you?’
‘I suppose you never do this. You wouldn’t have to, anyway. Your armchair happens to have springs.’
‘I came to drag you out.’
‘What——?’
‘Only for an hour or so.’
‘But I’ve just decided to be in—very much in as a matter of fact. Sorry and all that.’
‘You couldn’t have,’ Bateson declared dubiously. ‘You know you won’t be setting a foot outside this dump till Friday at the very least. It’s your tables week—or perhaps you didn’t know? Actually the Winner only plastered up his little notice about an hour ago.’
‘He did ask me,’ Richard said. ‘Awfully sorry Bateson old boy and all that, but honestly, insane as it might seem to you, I’d sooner stay where I am.’
‘You won’t get a drink till Friday,’ said Bateson warningly.
‘I don’t want a drink till Friday.’
‘Oh my God,’ Bateson sighed. He then assumed an attitude of classical despair; his eyes and his eyebrows drooped at their ends and he wagged his head from side to side. ‘Do you know what you are, boy? You’re a Winner, a little budding, embryo Winner.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it. I did,’ he added rather forlornly, ‘rather look forward to a can in your esteemed company.’
‘Blast,’ Richard searched around for his discarded shoes. Dulled and sodden with slush, they were an added and most eloquent reason for his not turning out again. ‘Where was it you thought of going?’
‘Have you ever heard of “The Case is Altered”?’ Bateson enquired with great casualness.
‘A pub?’
Bateson groaned. ‘A pub—Oh, my God! If you go on like that you’ll be having the law on them for serving you. Of course it’s a pub.’
‘Not—not at Stokely?’
‘Yes, at Stokely.’
‘But it’s miles——’
‘It’s just two miles. How did you know it was at Stokely anyway? Have you been there before?’
‘Never.’
‘Then how did you know?’ Bateson was oddly persistent.
‘I suppose it’s a trick of remembering villages by their pubs and churches. Quenny, my elder brother and I used to spend most of the summer holidays on brass-rubbing expeditions when we were so high.’
‘That explains it,’ said Bateson. ‘Poor fellow, you’ve had the most ghastly childhood. Buck up with those shoes. I tell you, you’re going to be bloody grateful to me one day. Now your coat!’ He began to hum a little tune. Now and then he stopped to say, ‘Poor old fellow … Poor old Dicky Brand …!’ and, ‘Brass-rubbings—did you ever hear the bloody like … Christmas!’
‘There’s no need to be that pleased with yourself.’ Struggling back into his coat and scarf, which still had an unpleasant warm dampness about them, reminded Richard that it was barely twenty minutes since he had taken them off. But he was pleased all the same. Pleased like a fifth-former with having pleased Bateson. Now that he had made the effort he was bound to admit that curling up in front of a row of gargling gas-mantels was a particularly feeble way to spend the evening, all the more since, as Bateson had reminded him, it would be quite a long time before he was free to go out again as he liked. Mr Winsley preferred to arrange people’s duties in large slabs, rather like the nursing shifts in hospitals or guards in the Army. ‘Tables’ meant one could say goodbye to any social activity for a week at least. Only Bateson contrived to remain unencumbered with such fetters. His position as coach made it difficult to nail him down to a rigorous timetable. It also placed him outside the actual surveillance of Mr Winsley who had learnt, over forty years, to take it on trust that the robust sequence of puzzlingly slangy, square-shouldered, stiff-chinned young men he had engaged in this capacity, did really instruct in the philosophy and technique of cricket and rugby football. Bateson, as it happened, was not only conscientious in his teaching, but successful in the result. He did it all effortlessly and squandered his very considerable energies in oddly futile pursuits, in loveless encounters and far-from-merry binges, from both of which he returned childishly unscathed both in appearance and mind.
‘And there’s something else you ought to know—I’m broke—or pretty nearly.’
‘It’s not a night club we’re going to,’
‘It’ll be an extravagance for me if it’s just beer and biscuits.’
‘Well then, don’t come,’ Bateson said though not before making sure that he wasn’t taking any risks by appearing so casual.
‘How you can expect me to disappoint you when you’re looking as about as pathetic as a St Bernard that hasn’t been let out for a week, I don’t know.’
But Bateson was dancing lightly round the skimpy furniture. His arms sheltered and guided an invisible girl. He sang:
‘When a Broadway baby says, “Goodnight”,
It’s early in the morning.
Manhattan babies don’t sleep tight
Till day is daw-aw-ning …’
‘If we’re like this before we even get to Stokely …’
Bateson swooped to a standstill. His hand remained outstretched cupping the small of a phantom back. ‘The trouble with you—Dick—Don’t mind me calling you that, do you?—No, what was I saying; the trouble with you …’
‘No,’ insisted Richard loudly. ‘Don’t say it. Just shut up, there’s a good chap. Why the hell I’m so obvious a supplicant for this world’s good advice, God only knows. But I am. Everybody turns to me when they want to get rid of a little—why?’
‘I could tell you,’ said Bateson flatly.
‘After Stokely?’
‘Perhaps you won’t be in so great need of it then.’
‘How sibylline you’re being tonight, Bateson.’
Bateson was about to defend himself from any accusation of profundity when his eye happened to see the Reverend John Brand’s half-hunter lying on the dressing-table among a welter of soiled collars, loose change and curling, unframed photographs.
‘That’s not the time—?’
‘It is; to the second.’
‘Well hurry, man. You do want to go, don’t you? only we musn’t expect too much,’ he added. ‘Then we shan’t be disappointed—isn’t that what they say?’
‘I’m not expecting anything, unless it’s cold feet.’
Bateson, who had reached the door and was holding it open looked round suddenly. He didn’t speak, but as Richard stuffed a scarf inside his coat and kicked the gas-tap off, an unusual percipience took the place of the customary aggressive charm in his face. Then the percipience died, lacking, perhaps, the kind of energy needed to keep such a thing viable. He was Bateson once more. But for a single moment he had been about to interpret a quality (or defect) in the character of another person which, had such visions become a habit, could have put some very substantial thought in the too-airy spaces of his understanding. The moment passed. The gas fire went out like a lion. Richard started; it was a noise he found particularly detestable. Then they walked slowly out of the School into the Sunday streets. High above their heads Miss Bellingham’s room watched the night, its gaze wily, oily and yellow. With maddening regularity, a shutter whacked the wall. It was freezing fast. Each step they took broke through a layer of soiled, crisp snow, the colour of damp brown sugar. Flakes still fell thinly, but so vacant and sparse in effect that they were less like winter than like smuts blowing up from a half-dowsed wood fire. Breath unfurled from between their teeth in ectoplasm strips. Bateson continued to hum when he wasn’t cursing the fact that his foot had once again sunk more deeply and damply into the meringue-like gutter and discovered water.
‘Did you take Church Duty?’ Richard asked.—‘I expect so.’
‘Everybody went, everybody, that is, except the Winner. Incidentally, have you seen what they’re doing to the old place?’
‘What, the church?’
‘They’re sandbagging it.’
Richard recalled later the extraordinarily momentous effect this simple scrap of information had had on him. The knell of an age which is slipping away sounded so subtly and so variously that most people never hear it. It isn’t until they are well on into the later experience that they can see part of their own endurance walled-off by time and events and never again to be approached except through history itself. When Bateson said, ‘They’re sandbagging it’ Richard felt that the foundations of a barrier were being laid which was to keep him out forever from the life that had been his until that moment. It was tragic and yet it was exhilarating. He was appalled and yet made gay at the same instant. He supposed that even the most slavish traditionalist has his moments of perverse joy when all the vestiges of what he has spent a lifetime believing in are obliterated by some mighty leap in the world’s progression (or retrogression). The thrill that something has ‘gone’ sometimes comes before the misery of knowing that one will never see it again. There is nothing so dazzling as the idea of revolution, nor any happiness so brief and questionable as that which follows one.
‘Think of it,’ went on Bateson complacently, ‘all those trimmings from the good old horse-and-cart days being tidied away before the showdown! I wonder what the poor old Belle makes of it all. Not much I shouldn’t wonder. They’re going to take most of the stained-glass out of those narrow windows in the choir—it appears it’s pretty classy stuff, though I must say I’ve never seen anyone looking at it. Old Lord Stick-in-the-mud too—the johnny with the toga—well they’re making him nice and cosy too.’
‘The Debenham memorial?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘You’ve not heard anything more about joining-up I suppose?’
‘Nope.’
As they walked, the swift, sweet and undeniable fact occurred to Richard that he would like to get drunk. What had been farthest from his thoughts an hour ago, now overpowered them to the reckless exclusion of everything else. Was it the same with Bateson, he wondered? But Bateson was jogging on quietly with nothing to show how he felt, one way or the other. Also, like so many sportsmen, he was finding a long walk curiously fatiguing. The magnificent resilience which made him a legend on the playing-field deserted him on a longish stretch of road.
‘Roll on “The Case”,’ he complained.
It was rather a snivelling little place set a few feet back from the slushy road when they did at last get to it. Two trestles and four sagging forms left outside in the night were covered with fat white bolsters of snow. The bar was packed and seemed the more amazingly so because no hint of its raucous gaiety leaked out into the surrounding no-man’s-land of beet fields and shivering sloe thickets. They pressed their way through the fudge of dubious jollity. The noise was incessant. Men were laughing and boasting and shouting and every now and then, like the cheer-leader of a Sapphic contingent, the enormous landlady would drag her brown satin bosom up from where it appeared to be resting on the brightly polished counter, and bring up a whole supporting passion of shrill female mirth by letting out a great whoop of her own unfettered enjoyment. Behind the fat woman a little thin man leapt about doing all the work. Four barrels lay on their sides on a hearse-like structure and he fled from one to the other of these with pots and glasses and imprecations. He worked against a background of fairylights, silver doilies and fretted mahogany. It seemed quite pointless to try and get a drink. In the uproar they’d never be able to speak to each other. Something told Richard that he’d never want to drink enough of the contents of the seeping, lachrymose barrels to get the effect he had earlier longed for. He even doubted if beer could produce such an effect anyway. In fact he was all for getting out of the place.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Bateson ineptly. Everybody laughed again with fearfully good-natured exuberance. Bateson’s handsome head was bowed to the level of the landlady’s. In a jolly, half-mesmerised way, lifting and letting drop her huge pink hands, she was advising him. She stared at him steadily, her eyelids falling and opening and her breasts rollicking under the generous satin. ‘Back room,’ bawled Bateson. ‘Hang on.’ The landlady swung a leaf up from the counter and led the way. Bateson followed holding two pints of beer high in the air like libations. ‘She says it’s quieter,’ he was shouting. ‘Quieter—did you hear what I said?’
And indeed it was so. The back bar was a cell of quiet. Again, in some miraculous fashion, the Breughel uproar was sealed away and they found themselves in a hot, dismal little room where the fire blazed under a black-leaded Norman arch. The landlady, jelly-like yet agile, mounted a sofa and put a match to a swinging paraffin lamp. When she had gone they were left self-consciously with their backs to the fire facing a photograph of a bun-faced sergeant in labyrinthine puttees standing in front of a cardboard view of the Pyramids. On the opposite wall was a framed and glazed poster which said, ‘Save the Women from the Hun.’ It showed a lady in a lozenge-shaped hat criss-crossed with ospreys being chased by a gorilla. There were two dark pleasant buttony seats of worn leather, two highly-shone shell-cases filled with spills on the mantelpiece, a spittoon filled with fibre and planted with unwholesome looking bulbs of some kind or another, an upright piano, vaguely Parthenonian in design, its front filled in with dirty silk stretched across fretwork lyres and one small window absolutely crammed with frost-nipped geraniums. There was also a close, cupboardy, nudging smell, not wholly objectionable.
The landlady returned to put a log on the fire. When she had gone, slamming the door behind her and cutting out the neighbouring hubbub as neatly and completely as though she had switched off a wireless set, their privacy was so intense as to be almost sensual. Bateson swigged his beer at an alarming rate so that Richard had to follow suit and say, ‘the same again?’ long before he was ready.
The bar was at the other end of a long passage. Feeling slightly amazed at the turn his polite day at Sheldon had taken, he walked down it hardly comprehending the boisterous uproar getting louder and louder at every step, and certainly not comprehending that in the minute or two since he and Bateson had passed to the snug, two girls had taken up their position in the passage and were regarding him with predatory interest as he edged his way by them. The landlady’s warmth as she spilt his change all over the counter had to be answered and he was still smiling vaguely when he passed the girls for the second time. They smiled back narrowly. Richard’s smile extended itself into a hard, meaningless grin. At once the girls’ faces froze into immobility. One of them gave a short, rough little laugh, over almost before it began. Richard didn’t look back but he couldn’t help being faintly entranced by this. So that was the kind of evening it might possibly turn out to be! He continued to grin as he plonked Bateson’s beer down in front of him.
‘Still awful?’ Bateson asked.
‘Packed.’
‘You soon got served.’
‘It’s the landlady—she seems to like you.’
Bateson pressed his lips together in a pleased smirk.
‘All you have to do,’ he declared, ‘is to find out in what capacity a woman has decided to show herself in the eyes of a man—mummy, auntie or baby.’
‘Oh—? What is it in this case then?’
‘Mum,’ said Bateson. ‘Mum every time, old boy. Didn’t you notice that matriarchal leer? Why it was all she could do to stop herself from turning me over and tanning my behind!’ Then he lolled against the fireplace, his eyes half-closed, as though he was divesting himself of certain small graces. There was an edge to the most trivial of his movements, even in the way one leg rocked on the slippery brass fender. It was like a dress-rehearsal for the sort of person he wished to be known as during the next few years. And if you’re sensible, he implied, you’ll damn well be the same! Forget that potty little school, forget that odd fish, Sir Paul, forget all you’ve ever known—because, boy, it’s going to be easier that way! A bright streak dramatised the wilting geraniums for a second or so and then travelled on.
‘You on the searchlights?’ the chalky-faced girl was enquiring.
‘We’re …’ Richard began.
But Bateson was more alert. ‘Not this lot,’ he said with careless ease. The beam returned to the window, pierced the barrier of dusty stalks and entered the half-lit room like a waggish pointer.
‘They’re from Wintlesham I reckon,’ said the chalky-faced girl. ‘But there, we don’t want to be nosy, do we!’
‘You got wet,’ stated the other girl. Looking down he saw the steam gently rising from the bottom of his trousers. The girl laughed her rough little laugh of silly concern.
‘You didn’t though,’ said Bateson. He stared at her ankles with enormous deliberation, though hardly with interest.
Both girls at once began to shift, carefully, because of their platform-soled shoes, which were surgical in thickness.
‘They had them in white, Rube—do you remember?’ said the chalky-faced one. ‘Fancy white, Rube! I wouldn’t want white would you, Rube?’
‘Are you at Wintlesham then?’ asked Rube, ignoring her friend.
‘Hush,’ said Bateson. ‘You heard what the lady said, didn’t you—you musn’t be nosy!’
‘Rube!’ cried the other girl. ‘Oh isn’t she awful!’ She gave her friend a violent push.
‘Well are you—?’ persisted Rube. She obviously relished her role of terrible and knew it was her duty to lead the way in such encounters and to gain ground with her mock-childish daring that might later be consolidated with the other’s more formal approach.
Bateson gave her a sample of his most splendid indifference, then turned to her friend. ‘And what did you say your name is?’ he asked.
‘Miss Lilley,’ said chalky-face. ‘And I didn’t say.’
‘Lily’s your Christian name?’
The girls shrieked suddenly and fell on each other. Then Rube cried, ‘No. Her name’s Daphne.’
‘Miss Daphne Lilley,’ said Bateson in a very proper voice, ‘it’s a beautiful name.’
‘That’s right.’ They were at once composed. How lovely he talked!
A hiatus followed in which Richard struggled desperately to think of something to say. He felt as though he had been smiling for days on end. Seeing Daphne looking at the framed sergeant—she was actually looking through the sergeant at herself to see what her mouth was like—he said ‘Was he the landlady’s husband?’
Daphne wheeled round at once. ‘’Ow should I know?’ she demanded indignantly.
‘How indeed,’ Bateson mocked, very sure of himself, and enjoying these brash preliminaries. He stared past Daphne at Rube. Rube stared back. Their wordless arrangements concluded, he said, ‘Come on, what about a little drink?’ His fist full of glasses, he disappeared down the passage.
‘I just thought you might happen to know,’ said Richard apologetically, ‘—as you live about here,’ he added.
‘You know a lot, don’t you?’ Daphne said rudely and then, in a surprisingly refined and solicitous voice, ‘I expect you find it very cold working on the searchlights?’ In the fraction of a second between her first statement and the remark she was about to follow it with, the significance of the wordless rapprochement that had taken place between Rube and Bateson had worked itself up in her mind like yeast. So that was the way it was, she thought. Winner take all—or first pick—which was about the same. No flies on old Rube. She was lucky. That big feller ought to go on the pictures. She resigned herself philosophically to Richard. He looked a bit artistic, she considered doubtfully. Though nice; ever so nice when you came to think of it. Rube was lucky though. Trust old Rube!
‘Freezing,’ Richard answered shortly. ‘—Does he know what to get for you?’
‘Gin,’ she said; ‘gin and orange.’
But Bateson had got it right and was soon back and the bantering, two-edged conversation was continued. After quite a number more rounds of drinks, Bateson and Rube, who had been sitting with superb detachment on one of the buttony sofas carrying on a laconic conversation, the gist of which could only be guessed at either by Bateson’s snuffly laugh or Rube’s sudden short scream, over almost before it began, were rapidly becoming much less detached.
‘Well, really,’ Daphne remonstrated, observing this.
‘Aren’t we awful!’ said Rube happily. ‘Go on, say it, Daph; you were just about to!’
‘I’m not saying anything,’ Daphne retorted primly. She held her dusty, dead-white face high and sniffed. Rube lolled against Bateson, sipped her gin like a bird and made no attempt to conceal her huge satisfaction at the way things had turned out.
Bateson hummed, ‘When a Broadway baby says goodnight’ under his breath, equally contented it seemed. Rube wriggled and said that’s an old one and didn’t he know ‘Room 504’—it was ever so nice and her favourite. Richard, glancing round in search of the clock, discovered only the maroon timelessness of the wallpaper and the threadbare carpet and the Hun and the lady rushing helter-skelter through the dun confines of their mount.
‘“Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid,
Follows with dancing and fills with delight
The Maenad and the Bassarid …”’ Richard couldn’t remember any more. But that’s what the poster outlandishly brought to mind.
‘What on earth is he jabbering about?’ Daphne beseeched the company.
‘It’s just a poem,’ he was about to explain, when Bateson, with uncharacteristic humour declared, ‘Now don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the Fleet-Foot Kid! Better than Tom Mix any day!’
‘Go on …!’ Rube said, pushing free of his grasp.
‘Go on yourself,’ retorted Bateson, pulling her back. He was expert at all this and enjoyed every minute of what might be termed his pre-conquest hour.
‘He’s a lad, isn’t he!’ Daphne declared admiringly and, Richard couldn’t help feeling, critically so far as he was concerned. He defended himself by saying, ‘He’s always like that when he’s had a few.’
‘What’s your name?’ Daphne enquired.
‘Di—Richard.’
‘I thought it might be Arthur.’
‘Arthur—why?’
‘I don’t know. I just thought.’
Something in the way she said this made him suspect that ‘Arthur’ carried with it some subtle insufficiency. Arthur wasn’t a good name—it was déclassé in Hollywood perhaps—and Richard wasn’t over-good either it seemed. ‘He’s Arthur,’ he asserted treacherously, waving the hand with his glass in it at Bateson.
‘That’s right,’ Bateson agreed. Names meant absolutely nothing to him. ‘I’m Arthur—he’s Dick—Richard.’
‘I think you’re both soppy,’ Rube said.
‘Oh we are, are we,’ Bateson muttered.
There was a slight scuffle, a loudish squeal and an ear-piercing, ‘No.’ Richard waited in agony for the fat landlady to come bustling in and was surprised to hear Rube asking in a very politely moderated voice, ‘What time did you say you have to be in by?’ And Bateson answering her with, ‘I didn’t say—what time do you?’
‘Really!’ said Rube, outraged.
‘Tut-tut-tut!’ admonished Bateson. There was a further romp, a fainter, more rabbity squeak, then Rube shook herself free, reached for her gin and said:
‘Those two standing up there—just look at them! Who do they think they are anyway—God or book-ends?’
Bateson considered this exquisitely funny. He rocked with spluttery laughter and in the process, rocked Rube as well.
‘Do you want me to be sick?’
This must have reminded Bateson of some primordial disaster in his career as a lover, because he stopped clowning at once and gave Rube the full benefit of his two-thirds profile smile. ‘You’re not really going to be sick, are you?’ he asked in a worried voice.
‘Of course not, daft,’ she said. ‘But larking can make me sick.’
‘Larking always makes her sick,’ corroborated Daphne, who was, if anything, managing to hold her head even higher on her pale thin neck. Most of the time she was smoking inexpertly; making little pup-pupping sounds and letting her weight fall first on one foot and then on the other.
‘Come on, we’ll take our ease too, shall we?’ Richard said, aware that they must look pretty ridiculous standing one either side of the fireplace. Besides, although it hadn’t seemed much at the time, the five or six hours he had spent perched on Sir Paul’s library steps were making themselves felt. The backs of his legs didn’t ache; they had atrophied into a kind of stony discomfort. I suppose it’s all right … he was wondering. Any movement towards the buttony sofas at once implied so much more than sitting.
‘They ring a bell when it’s closing-time,’ Daphne said, settling herself on the sofa with about as much enthusiasm as if she were going to have a tooth extracted. ‘Mrs Rook’s a good sort,’ she added. ‘One of the best.’
‘Well it only wants the Winner to see us now …’ Bateson said. Rube was sitting at right-angles to him with her head on his shoulder and her legs across his lap. A wordless debate made up of squirmings and little shoves went on between them in a struggle to decide where, exactly, Bateson’s hands should be. As in most debates, there was a foregone conclusion and Rube’s defence was rhetorical more than anything else.
‘The Winner …?’ Daphne asked.
‘Their officer, daft,’ said Rube.
‘I was talking to the butcher not the block. Is he?’ She turned to Richard.
‘I suppose he is …’
‘Major Winner,’ elaborated Bateson, for whom the fantasy possessed a singular piquancy.
‘That’s a crown, isn’t it?’ Daphne allowed Richard to squeeze her hand into his and knead the back of her knuckles with his thumb.
‘Yup.’
‘We thought you were pippers.’
‘Oh——?’
Bateson’s eyes shone with anticipated delight. He felt like the footman in an eighteenth century farce approaching the cue when he must go off-stage and return gloriously as the earl’s son to the acclamation of the entire theatre.
‘You’re not though?’ persisted Daphne.
‘Er—no,’ said Bateson regretfully.
‘Must be chilly in them searchlight huts …’
‘Must be,’ Richard answered shortly. ‘Here, isn’t it time we all had a drink!’ Feeling decidedly odd and unnaturally facetious, he said, ‘How about you—Arthur?’ and got a you-wait-till-later glower from Bateson.
‘He’s had enough,’ Rube said repressively. ‘Honestly, he’s worse than my dad—I told him he’s worse than my dad, Daph.’
Daphne confirmed this. ‘Her dad’s a one! You ought to see him.’
‘I’d sooner see you,’ Richard said promptly and was just as promptly appalled by his own unsuspected gift for banality.
Daphne was enchanted with this answer. ‘I don’t really want no more to drink,’ she said, ‘and I’m sure your friend doesn’t. Just look at him!’
‘Look at yourselves,’ Rube said in a half-smothered voice. After which recriminations were ended by Bateson rising suddenly and declaring, ‘This thing’s smoking’—when it was doing nothing of the kind—and turning the lamp down until they were all but plunged into darkness and the dying fire tinkled into cinders and became a dull yellow puddle amongst all the brass pokers, tongs, shovels, scuttles and things which loaded the fender. Bateson and Rube remained reflected monolithically against the blind for a minute or so, then sank down and became united with the slab of horizontal gloom which was their buttony sofa. Rube chattered amiably the whole time, like a hostess whose party contains an unavoidably embarrassing element. ‘Honest,’ she was saying, ‘you ought to see it. They’re having it the whole week because it’s so good. It’s at the Palace, you know, the Palace in ’Friston. ’Friston’s a lousy hole, isn’t it Daph? We always go to Ipswich weekends, don’t we Daph? You know Ipswich? You know the ‘Bell and Book’? Well that’s where Daph and me go. It’s a Tolly house …’ There was a clock-racked silence and the landlady bounded in and bounded out again saying, ‘Whoops—sorry’ quite abjectly. Richard kissed Daph but she didn’t kiss him. Dutifully she turned cheek or mouth or chin in his direction when she felt it obligatory to do so. Apart from these parroty considerations she maintained the equanimity of a well-powered clothes-peg.
It wasn’t long before he concluded that she didn’t like him and so was the more greatly surprised when, after he had sat up to have a drink, merely retaining her contracted little claw of a hand for the look of the thing, she made a small cheated-baby sound and tugged him towards her. He was then further troubled by the fact that, now his eyes had got used to the firelight, the room was just as visible as it had been before Bateson had turned the lamp low, in fact more visible, since their four bodies seemed to have absorbed the darkness and swollen up to twice their proper size. Richard had never been more aware of two other people in the same room as himself in his life before. Rube and Bateson had hogged so much of its privacy and its ordinary amenities that he felt like a goldfish pushed up to the lip of its bowl and gasping for its very existence. Being so drained of action himself he was willing to forgive Daphne her res infecta. It was in the spirit of a solicitous understanding that he planted a last kiss or two on her fat red mouth. For most of the time she stared up at him unblinkingly with glassy grey pupils and once she smiled and showed two rows of exceedingly small teeth. And once she said, ‘You’re nice,’ which in the circumstances sounded less inflamatory than it might had they been alone. It was a proof of the non-participatory state of his senses that all this time—in fact almost from the moment Bateson had arrived to drag him out—Richard was still going over in his mind all the earlier events of the day.
Then Bateson and Rube stood up suddenly, gave each other one or two playful punches, Bateson spread an arm in Richard’s direction, a movement that was half-way between a yawn and a valediction, and they went out.
‘She’s left her bag,’ Daphne said at once.
Mildly alarmed, Richard said, ‘Where are they off to?’
The clothes-peg grew sprightly. ‘That’s telling! What have you been thinking about?’
‘You,’ he lied automatically.
‘Really!’ She was immensely pleased. ‘I expect you’re wondering about me aren’t you? Well I’ll tell you; I’m waiting for Mr Right.’ She caught her breath suddenly and said, ‘Pardon.’ Her eyes lost their glassiness and assumed a rapt, almost ethereal longing. ‘Fellers are all the same. They only want loving …’
‘But won’t Mr Right want that too?’
‘’E’ll want me,’ Daphne replied indignantly. She hiccupped. ‘Ooh-er, pardon again.’
‘I’ll get you some water, shall I?’
‘Ask Mrs R. for water?—Rather you than me.’
‘Well I’ll get something. Here, hang on a tick …’ He made his way to the proliferating bar and ordered two beers.
‘Your friend’s a nice boy,’ Mrs Rooke said. ‘Beer, dear? If that’s for Daph you’d better go back and make sure. She usually likes her little drop of poison——’
But Richard insisted on something long and Mrs Rooke said Daph had better have a ‘nip’ then and poured out a small, but expensive beer with a great fog of froth on it and said, ‘Two-and-a-tanner, ducks.’
‘I’ll have the same then.’
‘That’s right, ducks; you’ve got the same. Two-and-a-tanner. Full of strength, them nips. I lived on them when I had my Charlie.’
The nips were certainly full of something. They left Daph and Richard mildly aware of an off-key expression in one another’s faces, but quite incapable of changing it. Daphne ceased to hiccup. Her eyes countermanded his, lustrous and blank. A funny feller … she was thinking. Not Mr Right by a long chalk. But she liked him because he was so clean. Too clean in a way for a feller …
‘Where do you think Bate—Arthur and Rube have gone?’
‘You do get anxious, don’t you!’ She was turning the lamp up a fraction. ‘Does he worry about you like that? I bet he doesn’t! Ooh, my face!’ She held her chin up to the mirror and banged hard at her cheeks with a broad greasy puff. ‘Thin,’ she said; T used to go nine-ten—you’d never believe it would you. But what does it matter if you feel all right!’ She swayed slightly and Richard said, ‘Come on, you had better sit down. Your face is O.K.’
‘Adore it.’
She regarded him suspiciously.
‘B-bloody men,’ she said with feeling.
‘Well …!’
‘All the same,’ declared Daphne. She retreated to the sofa and threw herself down. ‘Who are you anyway?’
With his head feeling most peculiar, like a tremendous sunflower about to burst from its bud into flaming petals, and his eyes seeing everything through a bright, though uncertain, nimbus reflected by this dizzy blooming, Richard said, ‘Mr Right … I hope …’
‘Ahhhh …’ murmured Daphne, not without tenderness. ‘You’d like to be wouldn’t you. But you’re not, you know!’
‘Oh, who am I then?’ he asked, his hand at her breast.
‘You’re Dick,’ she answered, ‘and if you ask me, you’re just like the rest! Nice Dick,’ she added inconsistently. ‘No… no …!’
‘But, darling …’
Her breasts were the merest cone-shaped ghosts of the fulness his desires demanded; little, formal budding mounds; the breasts of a Clouet lady, feverishly warm, yet comfortless. His hand considered them, curiously and fearfully. All his actions were now conducted with as much precision as he could muster. He felt fatuous and dizzy and gallant and accomplished all at the same time. Very accomplished. He also was able to regard all these aspects of himself with a peculiar detachment, as though they were the component behaviour of somebody else. Such an attitude had its drawbacks, since he at once began to form judgments which inevitably lead to his being conscience-stricken. When one has successfully scuttled commonsense, it seems only fair that one’s conscience should go under as well. Nothing is as humiliating as to be rather tight and yet to be able to appreciate the extent of one’s shortcomings. Where was the blushful Hippocrene? Certainly not in the half-gallon of sourish bitter he had swallowed. There was no magic in that; no gaiety. He was even wise enough to realise that its sum effect was more or less that of a tripwire. He hoped that Mrs Rooke wasn’t just about to make one of her over-understanding entrances, because his affections had veered strikingly in the last ten minutes and he now decided that he would very much like to make love to Daphne. She should be his Dowson-girl and there was in truth that unhealthy narcotic-smirched, bitter-skinned, transiently-fleshed feeling about her narrow body which invited a comparison with a very special cigarette.
She smelt strongly and sweetly of hot art-silk and tepid talcum-powder. If she had had a mind, making love to her could only have been an intellectual delight, an extension of that taste normally directed to fondling small ivories. As it was, she lacked not only the intelligence but the passion requisite for her entire absence of morals. Now and then, when the need to do so occurred to her, she returned Richard’s caresses with a kiss or two. Once she put up her hand and gently squeezed the nape of his neck in her thin, cold, painted fingers. Sometimes she said, ‘pardon’ for no earthly reason at all. Emboldened by the impersonal stillness she manufactured, the brightness of her stare and the fact that she continued to say, ‘Nice Dick’ over and over again, he swept her down in his arms until they were sprawling full length on the slippery sofa.
The next thing he remembered was a stinging blackness in place of the exciting sunflower in his brain, and they were standing up, one at each end of the mantelpiece, panting slightly and glaring at one another in the foetid half-light. Daphne’s hands flew about her person, patting and tapping it in a brittle frenzy as if a bit of it might have snapped off. Now and then she muttered, ‘men’ in a tone which was a mixture of tolerant indignation, making it quite clear that although she found their behaviour revolting, she did realise is was an infirmity indigenous to their sex and that if one got too near these, otherwise fairly reasonable creatures, then one either had to put up with their quirks, or defend oneself as best one could. She was sure that Mr Right, when he came along, would be an exception and sink his energies in a nice little chicken-farm.
‘Perhaps you’ll be good enough to find my friend,’ she said with enormous refinement, and drew a new lipstick mouth. ‘Give ’em an inch and they go a mile,’ she added very generally, making it clear again that Richard wasn’t to feel the blame particularly.
But he apologised all the same.
‘Really,’ Daphne said. ‘Nobody’s asking you to say things you don’t mean, I’m sure!’ You can call it ’uman nature if you like, but ’uman nature has to be checked. Whatever do you think the world would be like if we all gave in to ’uman nature …?’
Just then Rube returned with Bateson following closely behind her.
Daphne at once fell back on her earlier rôle of hen-like concern. ‘There you are, Rube,’ she said. ‘Wherever have you been?’ Knotting her orange knitted scarf, she nagged on and on with Rube rather enjoying all this solicitude. Rube’s face glistened; her eyes were starry and daring, and as often as she sought to screw her lips together in some kind of acceptable composure, they parted softly revealing a generous allocation of extremely white and irregular teeth. Daphne fixed a pink felt halo on the back of her head, squeezed her little dead fingers into damp gloves and sniffed.
Bateson appraised the situation expertly and correctly. He was looking as smooth as a cat after cream; a much-indulged, dearly-beloved cat. His eyelids were half-lowered giving him an expression of sagacious peace. He propelled Rube forward gently, patting her bottom in a small gesture of dismissal which contrived to be proprietary, loving and avuncular all at the same time, so giving her an option on the last should the other attitudes offend her. As it happened, Rube relished all three sensations and was smirking like a calf in a clover field.
‘When you two have quite finished …’ Daphne said primly—which gave cause for an unreasonable burst of laughter from Bateson. He stepped forward and gave Daphne a slap as well. She froze with astonishment, then, uttering an extraordinary yelp she flung herself into Rube’s arms. Together they rocked and shrieked. Bateson watched for a second or so, perplexed by the hysteria the most innocent of his actions always seemed to precipitate where women were concerned, never realising that in spite of all the psychologists propound it is the male with the minimum of understanding of the female complexity that delights it most. ‘Come on,’ he said, and that was how Richard and he left them. Daphne steadied herself sufficiently to call out, ‘And I should get back to them searchlights just as soon as you can.’ This convulsed them afresh.
‘What on earth …’ Richard began, but his voice was drowned in the bedlam of the public bar, through which they had to pass. Mrs Rooke, balancing on a chair, was ringing a handbell and bawling ‘Time!’ Her vast satin-covered bosom shone with fecund promise. Behind her the silver doilies and upturned gin bottles winked. ‘Cheerio, ducks,’ she yelled. Her bell wanged merrily.
‘Oh God!’ breathed Richard when the icy night cut him off from all this, ‘so that was “The Case …”.’
‘That certainly was,’ Bateson said, who was drunker than he knew. He stepped out, determined but unsteady, both conditions increasing as he strode along. He praised the English inn. He repeated the Belloc-Chesterton arguments for it as his own. Now and then he sang in a light, gay voice which carried for miles over the frozen beet fields. Richard was able to walk perfectly, but his head rang with an unpleasant coming and going reverberation, like a gong being sounded behind a busy swing door. He remembered that the last food he had eaten was in the gun-room at Sheldon, which caused him in turn to think of that other part of the day, so oddly divorced from the present, when Sir Paul had probed in the gentlest possible manner into those aspects of his personality which hadn’t been obvious to that penetrating mind. What would Sir Paul think now, Richard wondered, to see Bateson and himself rolling along the dear old English road …? But Bateson was in a gossipy mood.
‘You know all about the Belle and the Winner, I suppose?’
‘About their once being in love do you mean? I think so. Wasn’t it you who first told me?’
‘I might have: I’m not quite sure,’ said Bateson cautiously. ‘Abelard and Helloish—that’s what they were known as. It must have been all the blackboards and eashels.’
‘How could you know?’ laughed Richard. ‘You weren’t even born!’
Bateson became mildly belligerent. ‘How do I know? I’ll tell you how I know, Dick you old T-Thomas. The Belle told me.’ He began to sing loudly, ‘Ding-dong bell, Pussy’s in the well …’ and a country youth, escorting his girl home, thrust a protective arm in front of her as they passed. ‘Goodnight,’ Bateson called, but got no reply.
This silent criticism sobered him up a bit, because when Richard, dragging the subject back to Miss Bellingham, said, ‘But I thought you and she weren’t getting on so well …’ Bateson answered simply:
‘We aren’t; you’re absolutely right. But we did. I tell you, when I first showed up at Copdock I was the b-bloody blue-eyed boy! She doted on me—she’s doting a bit on you at the moment I notice—Might have gone on if I hadn’t suddenly got the hang of her little game. Anyway, I couldn’t stand her hours.’
‘But the Winner,’ insisted Richard; ‘how does he come into it?’
Bateson was about to make an ordinary statement here, when an exciting hypothesis explaining the entire relationship between Miss Bellingham and her staff suddenly presented itself to him. So exciting, in fact, was it, that he grew vague and incoherent once more in the telling of it.
‘Don’t you see,’ he said, speaking loudly, but none the more distinctly because of that, ‘the Winner was the forerunner—no, that’s not what I mean—he’s the thingummy—the prototype,’ he all but shouted, dragging the word up from the fuddled ponds of his vocabulary. ‘That’s what he is, the prototype. Don’t you see, it explains everything! It explains why all the masters taken on by the Belle have one thing in common and why she’s always been so willing to let other considerations than mere academic qualifications sway her judgment. And why, if it comes to that, why she never employs a woman or two about the place. We could really do with a homely body for some of those younger kids. No, I’ll tell you why not. It’s because the greatest, most important testimonial for a job at Copdock is to have a nice fresh face. A gentlemanly face, mind you; that’s essential. Why, I bet if you could see all the staff the Belle’s had in her clutches since she started the place in the year dot, you’d have one of the fanciest collections of darlin’ bhoys you could meet anywhere!’
This was so preposterous and yet such an ‘un-Bateson’ statement for Bateson to make that Richard stifled his objections to hear what would fallow. ‘Including poor old M’Tooley and poor old Canon Ribbs?’ he asked sceptically.
‘What do you know about M’Tooley?’ demanded Bateson. ‘You don’t know anything. He came to Copdock when he was twenty-five—which was just half of what he is now. There happens to be a photograph of him among all that muck in the Belle’s study. He wasn’t a bad type. Gingery and merry.’
‘And the Canon?’
‘They had high hopes for the Canon,’ Bateson said. ‘Deaneries and things—until she put a stop to them.’
‘How?’
Bateson made a fancy kick at a puff of loose snow before answering, missed it, and slithered ignominiously to a foolish sitting position at the side of the road. He accepted this as evidence of his abnormal state and tramped on with a rather crestfallen air. He grew lugubrious.
‘The same way she stopped the rest of them from getting on,’ he said. ‘She sucked his blood. The Belle wasn’t interested in seeing how far these protégés of hers could go. She wanted them by her all the time. I suppose that was the truth of the matter—still is. The best way to keep a car at home is to empty its tank. You can then sit in it and have a nice cosy chat without having to worry about the view going by. She’s been siphoning all the go out of the poor devils she employs for years. She’s a lady spider, that smart old woman! She’s a naughty old vampire; a leech. Why do you think the Winner never cleared off years ago? M’Tooley as well? M’Tooley’s pretty hot stuff, you know—it’s all there, boy.’ Bateson tapped his temple. ‘People used to come after M’Tooley and beg him to take things. They wanted him badly at Oriel. I’m told he used to contribute to Symposium and was offered the editorship when Danvers—was that the name? You’ll know more about that sort of stuff than I do—anyway, when the last editor died. But do you think he could move? Of course not. Stuck, boy, that’s what he was. Drained by the Reverend Mother MacCree. All passion spent and not even a spot of loose change left to jingle in his pocket. So what is he now? C-classics c-cum scripture at Copdock! And not even any more little confidences behind the door of the sherry-cupboard!’
‘Is it true that she wanted to marry the Winner?’
‘There’s nothing very complimentary about the idea which ever way you look at it if it isn’t.’
‘They … they were lovers, do you think?’ Richard asked, his curiosity overcoming the enormity of such a question.
‘Did they go to bed together—is that what you mean? Well, according to all accounts, and I see no reason to disbelieve them, they did. Then the future Mrs W. came along and rescued the poor old Winner—young Winner then, sorry—from a fate worse than death.’
‘He’d have married Miss Bellingham?’
‘I suppose so, the poor bloody necrophilist.’
Mildly ashamed of himself for wishing to dig down and uncover even more of the mouldering fragments of such antique affections, Richard then asked about Mrs Winsley. He had always been able to see what fascination had once existed in that Royal Doulton little figure, the white skin covered by the lilac silk, the excessively pretty colours of her mouth and eyes and hair, the obedience inherent in all her dolly-dolly movements, which, in spite of their insistence on pastel shades, hinted at warmer, darker tones at a deeper level, like hyacinth flowers. It was women like Mrs Winsley who made young men feel good. Later, it was their experience and not their innocence which went en travestie. In middle age, of course, they were inclined to make their husbands feel sick. The same flatteringly malleable feminity which had proved to be so complimentary to the male ego when both were young, was apt to persist as a reproach when it dragged on into middle age. This was exactly what had happened to the Winsleys. Their married life had been more lover-like than most of their friends were willing to admit, and it had only been during the last few years that what Winsley described as ‘Minna’s girlishness’ had turned him against her. That shrill spinster excitement rising up so uncontrollably whenever she enthused—how could she? he marvelled irritably—after all that their life together had been! ‘You silly bitch!’ he bawled after her one day, for no apparent reason that she could put a name to. And that had marked the beginning of their next stage; his bullying. Now there wasn’t a thing that she could do right, nor any part of all that fragile armoury of love of hers which he did not hurl back with repulsion. Richard could see that she might, at times, be irritating. It was beyond his powers of uncharitableness to appreciate how entirely she could be hated. Fortunately, the truly sensitive are rarely soppy. She suffered, of course, from her husband’s spleenish onslaughts, but not nearly to such a degree as her swimming china-bright eyes might suggest. She was puzzled rather than grieved. ‘Cadman’s getting so peculiar,’ she confessed to Miss Ribbs and added that it really was ‘rather a foxer’—her Daddy’s term. Miss Ribbs, for whom life was better than the cinema every time, absorbed this latest reel of it glassily.
‘She was a Waldinfield,’ Bateson said. ‘It’s a wonder somebody hasn’t told you that before now.’
‘She’s pretty—or perhaps I mean—nicer than you’d expect her to be. Her sort, I really mean.’
Fatigue was rapidly overtaking Bateson. The long tramp, the determination he had put into the evening, his own helpless loquacity; these things bundled one upon another began to weigh him down like clumsy garments impeding the movements of his graceful body. He yawned openly and continuously.
‘Yes she is,’ he agreed. ‘Oh, Gawd …! It’s a long time since I felt like this. Last Thursday to be exact. Poor Mrs Winner, she used to worry about me! I think she imagines all the four-ale bars are full of greasy old Fagins. B-bad company I suppose is what she’d call it. Well anything was preferable to squatting in Common-Room watching Canon Ribbs listening to a prom. How did you get on with your paper-doll?’
Startled, Richard answered, ‘Oh all right.’ In the thick grey light he felt Bateson studying him and realised that he was genuinely curious about this. In fact, that Bateson actually longed to know. In Bateson’s case, however, there was little need for words. Richard could see that the basis of his weariness wasn’t what he had had to drink, or the pennant of chatter he had maintained all the way to, and all the way back, from the ‘Case is Altered’, but the aftermath of love.
In Stourfriston the church clock chimed a quarter-to-eleven. A solitary figure was parading the market place like a tourist doing the arena at Aries. At first they identified it with a local policeman on his rounds, but something in the way the precise head was frequently turned to observe some shop corner or the water-spouts gripped by gargoyles on the roof of the church and the reflective attitude generally when the figure paused, caused Bateson to start hard with his smudgy eyes.
‘M’Tooley …’ he said softly.
Although it was impossible for the figure to have heard, or even see them from where it stood by the dark angle made by the church porch, it moved out at once into the empty, but well-lit square and walked briskly across to them. It was Mr M’Tooley.
‘Hallo,’ he said; ‘it should be ill-met by moonlight, except that it’s nice to see you and there doesn’t happen to be a moon!’
‘Getting a breather?’ Bateson asked with forced casualness.
‘We’ve been playing bézique,’ stated Mr M’Tooley, as though that explained everything. ‘In fact we’ve only just stopped.’ He made it sound distinctly daring. ‘Then I came out to get a breather, as you say. Have you ever noticed Stourfriston by night; particularly I mean? All the beautiful worn old plaster-work high up over the shops and the big porches over the doors which become quite elegant again when one can’t see to read the doctors’ and dentists’ plates nailed all over them. It hasn’t changed a bit, you know, since I first came to it. … Not a scrap.’ He glanced at them in turn. In the soft late evening light the steep bald head and gingery, badly-shaved jaw had the guileless evanescence of a fading fresco. ‘Did you have a good day at Sheldon?’ he asked, turning to Richard and Richard remembered afterwards that it was the first time someone had made an enquiry about his activities in that direction without the faint tink! of their inquisitiveness accompanying it.
‘Oh excellent, thanks.’
‘Miss Bellingham is delighted with the arrangement …’
‘Oh …?’ This time they both turned and stared at Mr M’Tooley, but Mr M’Tooley, walking a little aside and a little apart, noticed nothing. When he went ahead to unlock the side door of Copdock, Batson muttered, ‘The fellow’s a monk; a natural, bloody monk …’
When he had locked the door from the inside, Mr M’Tooley swung the key from its iron ring for a thoughtful second or two, then said, ‘Bateson, I may as well let you have this now.’
‘Now …?’
‘For ‘rounds’ tomorrow night. It is your turn isn’t it?’
‘Oh yes; of course.’
Mr M’Tooley laid the tips of his stubby, ill-kept fingers against the tired red skin of his eyes and rubbed softly in a languid gesture of abnegation. ‘Call it a day,’ he said.
‘You can say that again!’ Bateson favoured Americanisms, and in a way the peculiarly brash element of the poetry in them suited him.
Mr M’Tooley, who had begun to climb the stairs, turned and looked suddenly frightened, almost shocked. ‘What …?’ he demanded. And then, ‘Oh, I see …’ as the harmless vacuity in the faces of a couple of beery, wintry young men was conveyed to him. He said no more. The transitory, nibbled-away, faded-Giotto look returned to possess him and when he creaked away into the darkness of the staff wing it was like a shade withdrawing.
The mild interest of stumbling upon what Bateson had described as ‘one of Danny-boy’s cat-that-walks-by-itself acts’ was swiftly superseded by a far more repellent sensation. Darwin, the caretaker, in one of his fruitless attempts ‘to get forward’, as he called it, had decided that gone eleven at night was a favourable time to rootle clinkers from the bowels of the Heath Robinson arrangement in the boiler-room. He was also in charge of some simple, though protracted, task in the kitchen. Since he was never known to shut a door after him the mingled stenches of soot and boiling marrow-bones belched fitfully up through the stair-well. Bateson’s lips parted and his eyes closed. ‘I thought I could be sick, and now I know,’ he said.
Upstairs, in his own room, with the skull from Dunwich as sole witness, he was.
Richard spent a futile hour before sleeping going over in his mind the treacherous successes which had lured him on to so complete a frustration. The image of Daphne trolled through his thoughts. He dropped off with the bemused idea of her lying rigidly beside him like an acquiescent pipe-cleaner.