A fine male blackbird was singing throatily, with two cuckoos calling in the near gold-green distances of oak and chestnut and a woodpecker laughing somewhere beyond them, almost in mockery, as Mr. and Mrs. Barclay sat down to lunch on the first Sunday in May.
‘What is this?’ Mr. Barclay said and proceeded to prod the joint of meat in front of him with the wrong end of the gravy spoon.
It was the leg of boar, in the Pyrenees style, Pierria di Jabali a la Pirenaica, Mrs. Barclay explained, that they had in Spain last year. The only difference was that she had had to do it with leg of mutton. Nor had it been possible to get the globe artichokes the dish called for so early in May and she had had to do the best she could with swede turnips, though she thought that with lavish use of the sauce espagnole you would hardly notice the change.
‘The possibility of life on Uranus?’ Mr. Barclay said. The gravy spoon, poised in air, seemed to be held ready for the act of carving. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
This was Mr. Barclay’s answer to a question, put quite some time before, by his elder daughter Philippa, who was twelve and wore her coarse fair hair long and loose, in the style of Alice in Wonderland.
‘Yes, but do we know?’ she said. ‘Is it a fact, I mean? Are we certain?’
Mr. Barclay, now vaguely prodding the meat about as if searching for some favourable point at which to make an incision, confessed that he supposed they were not. The great distance of the planet precluded any certainty.
‘Yes, but what do we mean by life? That’s what I want to know.’
The youngest of the Barclay children, Henry, put his question in a severe inquisitorial treble. He was seven. He was wearing a thick dark blue polo-neck sweater, home-knitted and three sizes too big for him. His brown-rimmed spectacles were large and thick and gave him the look of an inquiring deep-sea diver who had just surfaced from under the table.
‘There’s no point in being vague,’ he said.
‘Astronomically speaking,’ Michaela said—she, the middle one of the Barclay children, wore her stiffish onion-brown hair in a plain round bob that might have been idly trimmed up with the aid of a colander some weeks before—‘I suppose there is no such thing as uncertainty.’
‘Quite. What did Pope say?’ Philippa said. ‘“Whatever is, is right”?’
‘Exactly,’ Henry said. ‘Absolutely.’
Mr. Barclay now actually exchanged the gravy spoon for the carving fork and gave the Pierria di Jabali a la Pirenaica a sharp poke with it. A protesting squeak, like that from a tight leather sole, came out of it, but Mr. Barclay took no notice at all, merely declaring instead that Michaela was quite correct. Science knew no uncertainty.
‘Those blasted bull-finches are playing hell with the cherry-buds again!’ Henry suddenly shouted, shaking a dirty fist. ‘I’ll murder the lot! The greedy bastards!’
Mrs. Barclay, who was wearing a dark brown hairy sweater, also home-knitted, and who would have been pretty in a mole-like way if only she had used lip-stick and left her light brown hair to grow naturally instead of pinching it into a stringy Victorian bun that hung well down her neck, started spooning mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts on to the plates that Mr. Barclay had so far left empty. The potatoes, steaming ever so slightly, had a grey, cement-like look about them and the brussels sprouts the appearance of old chestnuts par-boiled in soot water.
Mr. Barclay, after solemnly reminding Henry that everything had to live and that in the very nature of things bull-finches couldn’t differentiate between good and evil, again stuck the carving fork into the mutton. Nature was neither moral nor immoral, he said and picked up a butter knife in preparation, at last, to start carving the meat.
‘Help yourselves to the sauce espagnole,’ Mrs. Barclay said to the children, as if in veiled warning that the meat might be some time in reaching them yet.
Mr. Barclay, who was thirty-two, prematurely bald and rather podgy, was wearing a shirt of Italian-red flannel, expansive blue shorts, horn-rimmed spectacles and a pair of Spanish slippers made of rice-straw. He had somehow managed to get himself a government grant to attend classes at Art School four times a week. He painted rather well on silks. It was a bit of a struggle, even with a cottage in the country, to get through.
‘Telephone!’ Henry said and sprang up from the table as if to answer the ringing of the bell.
‘I’ll go,’ Mr. Barclay said.
In the sudden absence of Mr. Barclay his wife seized the opportunity to start carving the Pierria di Jabali a la Pirenaica, mutton style. She had been dreadfully suspicious for some time that all was not quite well with it. Perhaps she had marinated the meat too long; or perhaps not long enough. The principal thing she understood about cooking was that, as in science, you applied heat to things and certain changes took place. In due course, in a miraculous way, objects became fried, boiled, baked, steamed or casseroled. If the taste in most cases was very much the same this seemed to make little difference, at least to the children, who didn’t know any difference anyway and were always as ravenous as vultures.
‘Who was it for?’ she said. In the absence of Mr. Barclay, now back at the table, she had succeeded in stabbing off several stumpy cuts of meat and serving them out to the children. The mutton, which had been cooking for some four hours, still seemed decidedly gristly. Perhaps, she thought, she ought to have cooked it longer?
‘Nobody,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘The line was dead.’
Mr. Barclay stared at the plateful of meat, grey potatoes, brussels sprouts and compressed turnips, now generously covered with sauce espagnole, which Mrs. Barclay had set before him. He was unable to distinguish between one object and another or to detect that the food was almost cold. He attacked it instead with a shovelling vigour and relish, head close over the plate, only pausing once to say:
‘It doesn’t taste awfully like boar, does it? You think so?’
‘You must pretend it’s boar,’ Philippa said. ‘Taste is illusory. Relative, I mean. It’s merely a question of—’
‘Telephone again!’ Henry said and again jumped up as if to answer the bell, only to be restrained this time by Mrs. Barclay, who said:
‘I’ll go this time. I don’t think it is the telephone after all. I’ve a feeling it’s the front door bell.’
As she left the room Henry stared hard through the open casement window at the garden, his jaws grinding moodily on a sinewy lump of Pierria di Jabali a la Pirenaica. This gave him a certain air of savage preoccupation as he watched a pair of bull-finches stripping to shreds, on the far side of the lawn, in a gay combination of mischief and hunger, the pink buds of a late flowering cherry-tree.
‘I hate bloody bull-finches,’ he said. ‘I absolutely and positively hate the blasted things.’
‘That’s a great mistake,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘I’ve told you before—the application of human emotions to the complex structure necessary to preserve the balance of nature only leads to a falsity of attitude about life. And above all sentimentality.’
‘Is that the same as the pathetic fallacy?’ Michaela said.
‘Not quite,’ Mr. Barclay said, ‘but there are certain features common to—’
He paused, suddenly aware that Mrs. Barclay had come back into the room. She had in fact stopped just inside the doorway, where she was anxiously and dryly rubbing her hands together.
‘There’s a man here,’ she whispered, ‘who says you invited him to Sunday lunch.’
‘Never. Impossible. We’re half way through it anyway.’
‘He seems awfully positive about it.’
‘He can’t be. Ask him what his name is.’
‘I did and—’
‘It’s Floater, Mr. Barclay!’ a voice called with muscular familiarity like a clarion from the passage outside. ‘It’s me, Mr. Barclay. Floater.’
‘Good grief!’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘I could have sworn it was next Sunday.’
‘Who is Floater?’ Mrs. Barclay said.
‘Take it calmly,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘He’s from Art School. He’s had a marvellously interesting life. He’s been everywhere.’
‘Well, since he’s arrived here too I’d better put the meat back into the oven. This sort of dish is never so good if it gets cold.’
While Mrs. Barclay hastily took away the Pierria di Jabali a la Pirenaica, now less than luke-warm, Mr. Barclay rushed forward towards the passage with extravagant greeting, saying:
‘Floater, my dear fellow, Floater. We thought you were never coming. We’d given you up.’
‘Eh? You told me—’
‘Sit down. Here, next to me. I fear we’ve started, but only just. Philippa, Henry, Michaela—this is Floater Pearson. I’ll get some beer.’
Floater Pearson gave a large friendly grin and sat down at table.
‘Morning all,’ he said.
‘Strictly speaking it’s afternoon,’ Michaela said. ‘Good afternoon.’
‘I see,’ Floater said. ‘It’s like that, is it?’
‘Well, it’s either afternoon or it’s not, isn’t it?’ Philippa said. ‘It can’t be both at the same time.’
Floater Pearson, looking rather wistfully about the table, said it wasn’t afternoon with him, not until he’d had his dinner; and he hadn’t had it yet.
‘That’s a mere arbitrary distinction,’ Michaela said.
‘Time is time,’ Henry said. ‘You can’t change it. Don’t be so artificial.’
Floater Pearson opened his mouth sharply and then, utterly at a loss, shut it again, so that the upper plate of his false teeth gave a bony snap. He seemed slightly affronted, even hurt.
‘Blimey, I—’
Floater started to protest and then, with a gasp, gave up. He was rather tall, very broad in the shoulders, which were padded out, and narrow at the waist, where his trousers were held up by a thong of plaited leather by a magenta and chromium buckle shaped like a mermaid. His suit was a bright plum colour. His shirt, a pure canary, had an accompanying white tie patterned with prominent blue figures, a climbing galaxy of naked buxom girls.
‘I’m seven,’ Henry said. ‘How old are you?’
Floater scratched his intensely black head of hair and said he was a year younger than Mr. Barclay. He knew because they’d compared notes the other day.
‘That makes you thirty-one,’ Henry said. ‘And where did you come from?’
‘Oh! I live at Fordstone,’ Mr. Pearson said. ‘Near the Art School.’
‘I didn’t mean like that,’ Henry said. ‘I meant in the first place. I came from a cell. You did too, I expect.’
Floater Pearson suddenly laughed with singing clarity, showing three gold teeth in his broad and rather handsome mouth.
‘Could be,’ he said. ‘Could be.’
‘What exactly do you take at Art School?’ Philippa said.
Floater laughed again, rather more warily this time.
‘Mostly what I can catch,’ he said.
During this conversation he had become more and more fascinated by what the children had on their plates. It puzzled him considerably. There was nothing recognisable at all in the mess of brown and white and orange lumps except perhaps the potato. As if sensing his doubts Henry said:
‘This is boar. We had it in Spain last year.’
‘Boar?’
‘A male pig. Only wild of course. It’s mutton really.’
‘Good Gawd,’ Floater
Here Michaela interposed to say that what Philippa had really been asking was whether Mr. Pearson painted or sculpted or what? Floater scatched his head again, in what was evidently a favourite gesture of his and was just beginning to explain that as a matter of fact he wasn’t exactly at Art School any longer when Mr. Barclay came back into the room with a big glass jug of beer and two glasses.
‘Well, here’s the beer,’ he said. ‘The food won’t be a minute.’
A moment later, as Mr. Barclay started to pour the beer out, Henry suddenly got up and threw his dinner out of the open window, plate and all. Mr. Barclay took no notice whatever of this; nor did Philippa and Michaela who went on eating with a voracity almost enraptured.
‘What’s he gone and done that for?’ Floater said.
‘He obviously doesn’t like it,’ Michaela said. ‘Unless you can think of another explanation.’
Floater couldn’t think of any explanation at all; he sat mute. At this moment Henry returned to the table with a large orange which he began to peel by savagely biting lumps off it with his front teeth. Several of these lumps he threw straight up into the air without bothering to look where they fell. One of them in fact fell on to Mr. Barclay’s plate, the contents of which had now congealed quite solid, but he took no notice of that either.
‘Well, here’s to the wallop,’ Mr. Barclay said. This sudden and unexpected concession to politeness so startled Floater Pearson that he actually stopped dead in the act of lifting his glass. It was then that he thought he detected something very peculiar about the beer.
It was a sort of strange muddy yellow, he noticed. It looked as if it might have been made with a curious type of floor polish. A few dark objects, rather like dismembered tadpoles, were slowly floating up to the surface of it.
Before he could make up his mind to take a sample drink of it Mrs. Barclay was back with the food, which was now steaming prodigiously. This was because Mrs. Barclay had decided that her best course was to cut up the remainder of the lamb, submerge it in sauce espagnole and fry it all up rapidly with a bit more pepper.
Floater, suddenly depressed and feeling appetite leaving him at every breath, merely stared hard at the beer. Mrs. Barclay for some reason seemed to take this as a sign of anticipatory relish and said with enthusiasm:
‘Ah! yes, Floater, you must tell us what you think of our beer.’
‘Your beer?’
At this moment Henry got down from table and kicked the entire orange, football fashion, into the air. It fell perilously near to the Pierria di Jabali a la Pirenaica which Mrs. Barclay was now serving to Floater Pearson without arousing any comment from anyone except Floater himself, who said:
‘Here, blimey, watch it, mate. Turn it up.’
‘It’s dandelion,’ Mrs. Barclay said. ‘It was fresh-made last week. We make it ourselves.’
Floater lowered his face to the beer. There was a very ropey smell about it, he suddenly decided. It was sort of yeasty.
By this time Mr. Barclay was shovelling food into his mouth again, washing it down with positive gasps, rather than gulps, of beer.
‘It has a certain tang about it, don’t you think?’ he said. ‘You can taste the earth in it, I feel.’
That was a fact, Floater thought. That was how it tasted: a bit of the yeast and a bit of the earth. He longed deeply for a pint of mild-and-bitter. With apprehension he started to cut at the wild boar, mutton style, with his knife and fork, at the same time glancing out of the corner of his eye to see how Mr. Barclay did it.
Mr. Barclay, he decided, was a shocking untidy eater. With the gravy spoon in his left hand and a fork in the other he used both implements as shovels. The children were much better. With them the knife and the fork went into the mouth, as Floater knew they should, alternately.
‘We make one with herbs too,’ Mrs. Barclay said. ‘Jack-by-the-hedgeside, sorrel, thyme, wild mint—Oh! about a dozen of them. It has a fresher, more aromatic flavour than this. It’s from a very old local recipe.’
‘I prefer the dandelion,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘It has much more nose. It has that tang.’
Henry, it seemed, preferred it too. He came boldly up, took a sample of beer from Floater Pearson’s glass and spat it on the floor.
‘What course are you taking at Art School, Mr. Pearson?’ Mrs. Barclay said.
‘Blasted bull-finches!’ Henry shouted. ‘I’ll murder you!’
Some of Floater Pearson’s sense of humour had, by this time, deserted him. He slowly finished masticating a mouthful of mutton, washed it away with a sip of beer and said:
‘Well, as a matter of fact, I was doing the boilers.’
‘You mean you’re not any longer?’ Philippa said. ‘Then why don’t you say so?’
‘He is what is nowadays politely called redundant,’ Mr. Barclay said. He spoke acidly, openly picking his teeth with a finger nail. ‘In other words, he’s had the sack. In my view damned unjustly.’
By this time Henry had wandered into the garden, where he was throwing stones at bull-finches. From somewhere came the startling crash of broken glass.
‘He’s the victim of social ostracism. Or in this case official ostracism.’
‘You’re damn right,’ Floater said.
‘You don’t mind my wife knowing this, do you, Floater?’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘As a matter of fact, Floater has done time.’
‘Oh! I am sorry,’ Mrs. Barclay said.
‘Not my fault,’ Floater said. ‘I never had nothing to do with it.’
‘This was discovered, you understand,’ Mr. Barclay said, ‘after eight months, by some busy-body of a clerk. Eight months Floater worked at the boilers—admirably, to universal satisfaction.’
‘What did you do to get imprisonment?’ Michaela said. ‘I’m absolutely fascinated.’
‘Well, two pals of mine done a warehouse and I was supposed to be there.’
‘And you weren’t?’ Philippa said.
‘Well, I were and I weren’t, see? Nothing would have happened if it hadn’t been for a courting couple going by. They had to peep.’
‘But that’s anti-social,’ Michaela said. They wouldn’t like it if people peeped at them.’
‘That’s right. I was just minding my own business.’
‘One debt has been paid,’ Mr. Barclay said, ‘but now another must be extracted. Society, the busy-bodies, must have another pound of flesh. I call that grossly unfair.’
‘Bloody unfair,’ Michaela said.
‘This sort of thing,’ Floater suddenly said, with an entirely new turn of righteous vehemence, ‘would never happen if people would take and mind their own bleeding business.’
‘It’s a gossip-bed,’ Philipa said, ‘that Art School.’
‘No, I mean the other,’ Floater said. ‘I had a very nice career in front of me.’
Mrs. Barclay, after mopping up the last of the Pierria di Jabali with a hunk of bread, remarked that if you looked at it rationally, that is in a purely objective fashion, there was no such thing as right and wrong.
‘After all, we would all steal a loaf of bread or a joint of meat,’ she said, ‘if we were hungry.’
Floater, laughing singingly again, agreed with extraordinary alacrity, delighted to find that there were people of his own way of thinking in the world.
‘I never done no wrong,’ he said. ‘The wrong people just happened to be around, that’s all.’
‘What disturbs me—’
‘Mind if I have a cheroot?’ Floater said. He didn’t usually smoke in the middle of meals but it was the only thing he could think of to take away the haunting taste of the meat and the sauce espagnole, which he had now managed to finish, and the dandelion beer.
‘By all means,’ Mrs. Barclay said. ‘By all means.’
‘Anybody for a cheroot?’ Floater said. ‘Mrs. Barclay?’
Mrs. Barclay declined the cheroot and started to clear away the dishes.
‘I’ll take one,’ Mr. Barclay said.
‘And I too,’ Michaela said.
As Floater offered his cheroot case, a silver one with what seemed to be an edging of gold, Mr. Barclay, with his artistic sense at once alert, seized upon it with admiration.
‘That’s a beautiful thing. What a nice coat-of-arms too.’
‘Always been rather fond of it,’ Floater said. ‘Picked it up on the off-chance a long time ago.’
‘Cheroots smell awfully good.’
‘Nice sample,’ Floater confessed with a certain ample pride. ‘Makes some of ’em look pretty ropey. I like the best.’
‘I’m rather afraid I can’t run to them myself.’
‘No?’ Floater said. ‘No? That’s bad. Have a packet, Mr. Barclay. I got quite a little stock at home.’
After again waving the silver-and-gold case and a packet of cheroots in several directions, as if to indicate limitless generosity, he watched with silent satisfaction as Michaela lighted her cheroot. She did so with a certain expert, adult care.
Some moments later Mrs. Barclay returned from the kitchen with a small brick of whitish material, garnished with what seemed to be caraway seeds, reposing on a piece of muslin in a saucer.
‘Cheese?’ she asked. ‘It’s our own making. Or potato cake? That’s another Spanish dish we’re all rather partial to.’
‘I want potato cake!’ Henry suddenly screamed, his entrance from the garden preceded by a stupendous metallic bang, rather as if a bucket had been thrown at a wall.
Mrs. Barclay was about to cut the potato cake, which had something of the appearance of a lump of rough pumice stone, when Henry advanced on her, picked up the cake and took it away. Sitting with it at the end of the table he locked a pair of broodily defensive arms about it and, as with the orange, started to gnaw lumps off the edges of it, rabbit-fashion, with his front teeth.
‘I was really going to serve Little Pigs of Heaven today,’ Mrs. Barclay said, ‘but—’
Good Gawd, Floater thought. Wild boar for first and now little pigs for afters. What next? He longed deeply again for a straight pint of mild-and-bitter and thought also, with incongruous relish, of something nice and sweet, like a good rice pudding.
‘It’s all sugar and eggs and chocolate sauce,’ Michaela said. She puffed cheroot smoke across the table in an obliterating cloud. ‘Do you know Spain?’
Floater had to confess that he didn’t. Spain was out of his world. No mention having been made of the fact that Henry had apparently taken the potato cake for keeps, Floater now stared moodily at the home-made cheese, watching Mrs. Barclay cutting it into small parsimonious slices. He was a bit shocked, he told himself, about Henry. It was a bit near the knuckle to take things like that. And at your ma’s table too.
Mr. Barclay now poured out more dandelion beer and Philippa, tucking her chin with almost accusatory earnestness into her cupped hands, said:
‘Were you awfully repressed as a child?’
Floater, assuming with a typical singing laugh such as he hadn’t given for some time that this meant him, said no, he didn’t think so, not all that much. He was out on the spree most of the time.
‘Were you beaten, I mean, an awful lot?’
‘Like bleedin’ hell,’ Floater said. ‘The old man used to belt the old woman and then she used to ruddy well take it out on me, the old bitch.’ Floater blew cheroot smoke with a certain regal air, plushily off-hand, not only as if he were perhaps proud of these recollections but as if also with intention of drawing attention to an emerald ring on his right third finger and a pair of gold-and-pearl cuff-links in his canary yellow shirt sleeves.
This air of opulence was suddenly intensified as he picked up a butter knife and with it speared a piece of cheese.
‘You’re wearing a ring,’ Mrs. Barclay said. ‘I really hadn’t noticed it before.’
‘Keepsake,’ Floater said. He turned and looked Mrs. Barclay full in the face, for the first time. His dark eyes had a deeply scrutinous air about them, almost luxurious in feeling, and she felt herself slipping into a state of light hypnosis as he said:
‘I see you don’t wear no jewellery, Mrs. Barclay. You ought to, really. Would suit you.’
Mrs. Barclay, with a certain coolness, deliberately withdrew into herself. She found jewellery a social vulgarity; it was like having too much money or being too successful; it really wasn’t nice.
‘Oh! no, I don’t think so. Jewellery really isn’t for me.’
‘Oh! I thought you liked it sort of. You just admired my ring.’
‘Well, it’s rather like make-up. You can tolerate it in others while not using it yourself.’
Mr. Barclay, dozy by this time, swigged at dandelion beer and then spread his elbows broadly over the table and munched pieces of home-made cheese, putting them into his mouth with his fingers.
‘You still have a few pieces your mother left you, though,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Mrs. Barclay said. ‘That was why I noticed the ring. It’s awfully like one of hers.’
‘Oh?’ Floater said. ‘It is?’
‘I did think at one time of saving them for the girls, but—’
‘Oh! no thanks,’ Michaela said. ‘That primitive sex display stuff—’
As she spoke Henry hurled a large lump of potato cake as big as a croquet ball at the casement window, where it landed with a loud bang, at the same time yelling ‘Cheese!’ Mr. Barclay dutifully passed what remained of it to him and Floater said:
‘Like to have a look at that piece some time, Mrs. Barclay, if I might.’
‘Fetch it down,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘Let Floater have a look at it.’
While Mrs. Barclay had gone upstairs Mr. Barclay felt it opportune to ask Floater how the prospect of another job was going. Not all that well, Floater told him. It wasn’t easy. The word had got round. ‘I’ll have to move to another districk,’ he said and the words were almost sad.
‘Where to?’ Mr. Barclay said.
‘No idea yet,’ Floater said. ‘And if I did I wouldn’t say.’
‘You could tell me. You can trust me.’
That was the great thing, he thought. To impart trust. To create an atmosphere of solid, mutual reliance.
‘Granted, Mr. Barclay. All the same I’m keeping mum to one and all. I’m sliding out. I got to have a clean slate and it’s the only way.’
‘I sympathise,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘God, I feel bloody angry about it.’
‘You do?’
‘I feel angry and ashamed!’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘Yes: I even feel ashamed!’
When Mrs. Barclay at last came back with the ring, a largish one with a diamond and emerald setting, Floater purred over it as over the egg of a rare and exquisite bird.
‘This ’ere’s a beaut,’ he said. ‘Your old lady gave you this?’
‘She belonged to the age that set a lot of store on these things. The old establishment. It isn’t surprising it’s cracked up now.’
‘My God, not,’ Michaela said. ‘All that title muck—’
‘Blah!’ Philippa said. ‘Blah!’
Floater now eyed the ring with a fervour so nearly amounting to reverence that he took several deepish swigs at the dandelion beer without really being aware of it.
‘Want to sell it?’
‘I hadn’t thought of it.’
‘Pay for a good many holidays in Spain.’
Mr. Barclay sat upright in sharp alarm, his voice giving several unusually high croaks of inquiry.
‘Several holidays in Spain. Several?’
‘Of course I don’t know what it costs there—’
‘Oh! it’s cheap,’ Mrs. Barclay said. ‘That’s the beautiful thing about it. It’s cheap.’
‘But several holidays? Several? How much do you think—’
‘Oh! this little piece is worth about four hundred nicker—perhaps more—’
‘Nicker?’ Mrs. Barclay said.
‘Quid,’ Floater said, ‘pounds.’
‘Good God Almighty,’ Mr. Barclay said, ‘we could take one of these villas on the Costa de Sol—weeks of it, months, my God—Floater, how on earth do you come to know about these things?’
‘It used to be my trade,’ Floater said. His voice was ever so slightly pained; it might have been that he felt professionally slighted. ‘I was in the trade.’
‘My God, that would solve everything,’ Mr. Barclay said. July, August, September. October even—I’d say we ought to sell.’
‘Why keep this ostentatious muck?’ Michaela said. ‘You might as well have a lump of Uranus.’
‘Quite so,’ Mrs. Barclay said. ‘All right, I’ll sell it. I don’t know why I didn’t before.’
‘Like me to put you in touch with a good man?’ Floater said. The words were skinned off the mouth with a suavity as cool and soft as a grape. ‘Hatton Garden. He’ll give you the tops.’
‘Well, that’s nice—’
Suddenly Floater, rather as if granting a favour, displayed his own ring again.
‘Did a little repair job on this for me not long ago. Take a deck at that little stone there—the emerald. Come loose. He put it back again. Offered me two hundred and fifty for the ring but I said no, it was keepsake: I said no.’
‘How shall we get it there?’ Mrs. Barclay said.
‘Post,’ Floater said. ‘Registered. Unless you—I’ll give you the address.’
‘Unless what were you saying?’
‘I’m going up there tomorrow,’ Floater said. ‘I’ll be seeing this bloke. His name’s Rothman. Of course that’s if you trust me—’
‘Trust you, man? Of course we trust you,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘Trust is the essence of the whole affair. As long as the Art School trusted you all was well. The moment trust was withdrawn the whole fabric crumbled.’
‘Logic,’ Michaela said. ‘Exactly.’
‘My husband is quite right,’ Mrs. Barclay said. ‘Of course we trust you. Implicitly.’
‘Well, as I say. I got to go up there on the off-chance of a job and if I can do you a good turn—’
‘All the luck in the world for the job,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘Don’t forget the reference I gave you—’
‘Not likely,’ Floater said. ‘He always pays cash, this bloke. No trouble at all. I expect I’ll be back on the six o’clock—’
‘I somehow feel it’s a good omen for us both,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘I do believe it’s a good omen.’
‘More cheese!’ Henry started shouting and promptly threw another piece of potato cake at the window.
‘Another cheroot, anybody?’ Floater said and expansively waved the gold-and-silver case this way and that.
‘I think I will,’ Mr. Barclay said, his voice thick now with dandelion beer. ‘You’ve got good taste in that direction, I must say, Floater. Good taste.’
‘I always try to have good taste, Mr. Barclay,’ Floater said. ‘I think it goes a long way.’
‘Beyond question it does,’ Mrs. Barclay said.
‘I’ll give you a receipt for the ring,’ Floater said. ‘Just to make it all fair and square.’
‘Oh! no, no,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘We wouldn’t dream of it. No, no, no.’
‘No?’ Floater said. ‘Up to you.’
With a certain air of hesitation underlined by a sort of dreamy sadness he looked fondly at the ring and then gazed for some moments out of the window, remarking with almost tearful politeness what a lovely day it had been: real grand. All the ghastly accumulated recollections of lunch, of wild-boar, mutton style, sauce espagnole, dandelion beer, home-made cheese and potato cake were well behind him now. He wasn’t even bothered by that little crook Henry any more: the little bastard, no more manners than a stray tom-cat snitching butter. Floater’s Ma would have belted merry hell out of him for manners like that, no two ways about it.
‘Very kind of you to have me, Mr. Barclay,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it. It’s a nice friendly atmosphere here. Real nice and friendly. You feel free.’
‘Free, do you hear?’ Mr. Barclay said with immense enthusiasm. ‘Free? Splendid.’ He resisted an impulse to clap Floater firmly on the back and merely put his hand on his shoulder instead. ‘Absolutely splendid—if only those busy-bodies at the school—Oh! well, ignore them, Floater. Forget them. We trust you, and it’s trust that matters. It’s the mutual confidence that tells.’
Floater, with a beaming grin, said not half it wasn’t and a moment later was shaking hands with strenuous warmth all round. He’d certainly come again, he told them, in answer to a trilling invitation from Mrs. Barclay. He’d like to. In fact with any luck at all he’d be dropping in tomorrow.
‘Tomorrow indeed!’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘Splendid. We shall look forward to that.’
‘Me too!’ Floater said and gave a last flashing, disarming wave of his hand. ‘I don’t half like this nice friendly atmosphere.’
When the plum-coloured suit, the canary shirt and the white tie with its galaxy of naked girls had finally disappeared, Mr. Barclay went back into the dining-room to finish his beer and help Mrs. Barclay with the dishes.
‘I like him,’ she said. ‘I really like him.’
‘Of course,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘He’s a good fellow. The right material’s there. You feel it. Once prejudice is ignored and mutual trust established—’
‘I meant to ask him if he liked Wagner,’ Philippa said. ‘He looked sort of Wagnerish to me.’
‘Oh! no,’ Michaela said. ‘Wagner is sinister.’
‘I didn’t mean in that sort of way. I meant he looked sort of operatic—’
‘My God, three months in Spain,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘Let’s all go into the garden and smell the air.’
‘I liked what he said about feeling free here,’ Mrs. Barclay said. ‘About the nice friendly atmosphere.’
Mr. Barclay said he did too. He followed Mrs. Barclay and the children into the garden. Over against the cherry tree Henry was still throwing stones at invisible bull-finches, yelling:
‘I’ll murder you! I’ll whack your brains out, you little bastards!—I’ll murder every one of you!’
Mr. and Mrs. Barclay, almost as if pleased with what they heard, smiled at each other.
‘I knew there was something—isn’t there a ring round Uranus? Mrs. Barclay said. ‘That was what I meant about the omen.’
‘Saturn,’ Michaela said.
‘I knew it was one or other,’ Mrs. Barclay said.
Over by the cherry tree Henry started yelling murder again and Philippa called:
‘It’s jackdaws you should kill. They’re the ones that steal.’
‘That’s it,’ Michaela said. ‘Let’s all go and kill jackdaws.’
‘You can make jackdaws talk too if you cut their tongues.’
‘All right, let’s cut their tongues,’ Henry said. ‘I’ve got an old razor blade. Come on, let’s cut their tongues with an old razor blade.’
‘Well, let’s kill something first,’ Philippa said and started running ferociously across the lawn, followed by Michaela and Henry, whooping blood-thirstily. ‘I’m bored.’
As if in echo a cuckoo called in the near distances and somewhere farther away a solitary woodpecker laughed on hollow, almost idiotic notes, seeming to mock at it, as in fact it had done for most of the day.