3

Mr Sole and Mr Cridley lived at the Rimini Hotel in Wimbledon. They had done so ever since Mr Sole’s wife died two and a half years ago. It was a quiet, somewhat cheerless place, with an automatic telephone in the hall and the smell of boiling meat almost everywhere. It catered specifically for the elderly, and in spite of the implications of its title was little more than a boarding house. Miss Burdock, who ran it, was a brisk middle-aged woman with a massive bosom and a penchant for long grey clothes. Once a year, in June, she put on a flowered dress and went somewhere in the afternoon. She wore a hat on this occasion, a large white one with decorations on it, that had been handed down from her mother. She smeared a pale lipstick on her mouth and dyed the hairs on her upper lip. Her guests wondered where she went, but they never asked her. They preferred to conjecture, and they looked forward quite a lot to this special day. An old lady, now dead, had claimed to have seen Miss Burdock stagger as she returned after one of these outings, and had sworn there was alcohol on Miss Burdock’s breath.

‘The man has written about the washing machine,’ Mr Sole said, passing to Mr Cridley a typewritten letter and a coloured leaflet. They were sitting in the sun-lounge after breakfast, going through their mail. In the sun-lounge there were wicker chairs and top-heavy plants in pots. There were small tables laden with photographs of relatives of long deceased guests, and shells and trinkets that had been left to Miss Burdock in various wills. An old wireless stood silent in a corner. It would crackle to life at five to ten when Miss Edge and Major Torrill and Mrs Brown in her wheelchair came to hear A story, a hymn and a prayer.

‘Tasteless breakfast,’ Mr Cridley remarked, perusing the letter about the washing machine. ‘You can’t cook fried eggs like that. This fellow says he’ll give you a demonstration. I’d take him up on that.’

A clock, set in a pleated gilt shape that might have suggested a fan if the clock had not been added, chimed from the wall. It was nine o’clock. The dining-room would be cleared by now: early to rise was the order of the day at the Rimini.

‘I’m in doubt,’ said Mr Sole. ‘I don’t know that I quite like the sound of this fellow. Does the letter strike you as being a bit pushing? And I do not understand the expression your dealer. I have no dealer; I do not even know one. The advertisement did not mention dealers.’

‘The dealer will give you a demonstration, or, failing that, the chap who wrote the letter will. He says so. “I should be pleased … at your convenience … et cetera, et cetera.” I wouldn’t say pushing, you know. Seems a decent sort of fellow to me.’

The two men, who for more than sixty years had never been very much out of touch, were quite similar in appearance: spare of form, with beaky, weathered faces and strands of whitening hair. By strangers they were often taken for brothers. Of the two, Mr Cridley was the tetchier, though his tetchiness came only in flashes and was a sign of his age, for in earlier days he had been the more temperate. Age had calmed Mr Sole and emphasized what had always been true; that Mr Cridley led and Mr Sole followed.

‘It is not at all explicit,’ said Mr Sole. ‘He does not say if he will come and give a demonstration here. I think he means we must travel to him or to this dealer you speak of. That will not do. I fear we must write this off.’

‘I have heard from the central heating people. It seems quite a good system they offer, and their brochure is most colourful.’

‘Is there a personal letter?’

‘Yes, and agreeably written. The telephone number has sixteen lines. They must be in a big way.’

‘The heating people I wrote to said I should have sent money. I remember they did not even enclose a leaflet. I call that bad business.’

‘People expect a leaflet if there is a coupon. It is a waste of a stamp otherwise. I told you to be wary. It was a very small advertisement.’

‘Listen to this: Smokers delight in using Eucryl smokers’ tooth-powder, it removes unsightly tobacco film instantly makes teeth white again. And then it says: Without any fag at all!’

‘I don’t understand it. Is it a letter?’

‘It’s in the newspaper. It is only difficult to understand because of economy with punctuation. You often complain of nicotine on your teeth.’

‘Is there a coupon?’

‘No. It just says: Buy a two-bob tin of smokers’ tooth-powder and prove it for yourself.’

‘One should not be asked to prove anything for oneself. Proving should be seen to by the manufacturers.’

‘Do you recall,’ said Mr Sole, tired for the moment of the subject, ‘those chain letters that used to fascinate us so? You copied a letter six or eight times and forwarded half a crown to a specified stranger –’

‘To the name at the top of the list.’

‘And it was very bad luck to break the chain. One was warned against that.’

‘An insidious business, those chains. Based on compulsion and fear. Someone may have made a lot of money.’

‘A chain of which I was an ardent link was begun by a British major in the Boer War. The man was dead, the letter claimed, and if I’m not mistaken there was talk of his having begun the chain as he lay expiring on the battlefield, the implication being that one insulted a soldier’s memory if one did not play the required part.’

‘There was a chain letter that got going at school. Burdeyon spoke of it. He likened it to current crime waves in America. “Gangster” was a great word of Burdeyon’s. It was a new expression at the time, and of course he was a great one for modernity. “Gangsters! Gangsters!” he would yell, striding on to some upheaval in Dining Hall. There is a story of Swabey-Boyns’ of how Burdeyon came upon him taking tomatoes from a greenhouse. “Arrest this gangster!” he cried to a nearby gardener, and Swabey-Boyns was led away on the end of a rope.’

‘It was Swabey-Boyns who began the chain that Burdeyon protested against. Not the Boer War one. Boyns’ idea was that the letter had been started by an Indian called Mazumda. There was some fearful concoction about a god that this man was in communication with, who had the power to inflict typhoid fever if Mr Mazumda did not meet with cooperation. Boyns boasted he made seven pounds ten. Mostly from new boys.’

‘Boyns was as cunning as a bird.’

‘The Devil,’ said Mr Sole, ‘incarnate.’

They clipped the coupons out of the advertisements in two newspapers, and filled them in and prepared their envelopes. The weight of their mail was important to them.

‘Hullo, hullo,’ said Major Torrill, and the music began on the wireless, and Mr Sole and Mr Cridley rose to go, as they did every day, as they had done for two and a half years.

Mrs Jaraby took small rock cakes from the oven, knocked them from tins on to a wire tray and pierced one with a needle. The needle showed traces of a yellow slime, which would set, Mrs Jaraby hoped, as the cakes cooled, but which indicated nevertheless that the mixture had not been fully cooked. Her husband had told her at lunchtime of his invitation to his friends. She had reacted sharply, not because she disliked the two men – old Sole and old Cridley – but because her husband had failed, again, to warn her sufficiently in advance. He did not realize that one cannot with confidence present guests with rock cakes that have been hastily made and are still clammy within. She opened the window and placed the cakes on the sill. The sunshine caught them. Swearing to herself, she picked them one by one from the wire tray and placed them together on a plate. She put the plate in the refrigerator.

A woman preparing for a birth could not have been more preoccupied than Mrs Jaraby. Given to similes and symbols and telling analogies, she would have accepted with enthusiasm this very comparison. For she saw the return of Basil as something that was much akin to the arrival in the house of a new child. ‘If you wish for proof of my labour,’ she might well have said to her husband, ‘there is my single-handed piercing of your groundless opposition.’ She had done more than dust and clean the prepared room. In a drawer of the dressing-table she had placed a dozen linen handkerchiefs with the letter B exotically in blue at one corner of each. She had bought a small alarm clock and she wound it every day, so that the room had a lived-in feel about it. She was determined about Basil; it might be her last battle, but she intended to win it. Basil should live in the house, and when they died the house should be entirely his. Sheets for his bed were warming in the airing cupboard.

For Mr Cridley and Mr Sole it was a journey by bus to Crimea Road. They posted their letters on the way and discussed the lunch they had recently eaten.

‘The jaws of an Alsatian dog could not have managed mine,’ said Mr Cridley.

‘I noticed Major Torrill left all the pudding. We shall have to fill up on Jaraby’s cake.’

‘The last time it was some seed thing he had bought. I do not come all this way to be offered seed-cake. Should I get some biscuits and produce them if the fare is not up to much? It might suggest more care in future.’

‘Biscuits would be taken amiss. It would be like taking clothes for them to change into in case we did not like what they wore.’

‘Nonsense, it is not at all like that. No one brings clothes out to tea. Biscuits seem like a contribution.’

‘They might take it as a reflection on their hospitality.’

‘That is what it is. It is not our fault that their hospitality leaves something to be desired.’

‘They do not get on well together.’

Mr Cridley clapped his hands together in exasperation. ‘What has that to do with it? It does not give the excuse to starve their friends. They are as bad as Miss Burdock.’

‘It will soon be time for Miss Burdock’s summer outing.’

‘We are talking about the Jarabys. What has Miss Burdock’s summer outing to do with them? Unless you are suggesting that it is them she visits. I think that is unlikely, you know.’

‘I was changing the subject. I imagined we had worn this one thin.’

‘You had reduced this one to fantasy, if that is what you mean – with your talk of clothing the Jarabys.’

‘I have always thought them an ill-suited pair. There is constant strain in that house.’

‘I had not noticed it, though I grant you Jaraby is a short-tempered fellow. He will make a good President, I think. He is quite alive and gets things done.’

‘He was a good Head Boy. That House was decadent when he took it over.’

They dismounted from the bus and walked in the sunshine through the suburban roads. They progressed as slowly as they could, having time to spare.

Voices in the hall denoted the arrival of the visitors. Mrs Jaraby wore a hat when there were visitors. She ran to her room to fetch it.

‘This bloody disinfectant,’ Mr Jaraby said. ‘I must apologize. My wife, you know.’ On account of the cat, Mrs Jaraby sprayed the house with an air-freshener. It was her habit to do so, several times a day, in the hot weather.

‘I thought we might take to the garden,’ Mr Jaraby went on, leading his guests through the french windows of the sitting-room. ‘It is a pity to be indoors on a day like this.’

The sky was a pale, misty blue, unbroken by clouds. The little patch of grass that was Mr Jaraby’s lawn was shorn close, a faded green, brown in places. Herbaceous flowers neatly displayed behind metal edging, were limp in the heat. ‘Everything is dying,’ said Mr Jaraby. ‘I cannot carry enough water to them.’

‘You need help. One cannot entirely cope with a garden, however minute. It becomes a bore.’

‘Mr Sole, Mr Cridley.’ Mrs Jaraby smiled and held out her long fingers. The men rose and in turn grasped them. Mr Cridley, given to old-fashioned gestures, would have liked to carry them to his lips, but feared the liberty might be misunderstood.

‘Are you well, Mrs Jaraby?’

‘As well as age allows me. I find the heat a penance.’

They settled themselves in deck-chairs and sat for a moment in silence.

‘We are having trouble at the Rimini,’ said Mr Cridley. ‘The food is really quite inedible, and the smell of meat is always in the house. It seems Miss Burdock is losing her sense of values.’

‘Here it is the smell of living meat: our giant cat. His foodstuffs, rotting fish, are more than nature is made to bear.’ Mrs Jaraby stared in front of her, avoiding her husband’s glance.

‘One’s nose is acute as the years pile up. Although I recall a resident at the Rimini who had lost entirely her sense of smell.’ Recognizing that the air was charged, Mr Sole tried, not too obviously, to change the subject. ‘A Lady Bracken. She came from Horsham. Now that I bring her to mind I believe she was older than we. So perhaps it is that this acuteness is temporary, and particular to the seventies.’

‘We have a cat she does not care for,’ said Mr Jaraby. ‘I bear that cross, and must protect the beast from sly tormenting. You would not envy my lot in this house if you knew the details.’

‘No cats, or pets of any kind, are allowed at the Rimini.’ It seemed to Mr Cridley that their friend would soon suggest moving to the Rimini, since all was not well with his life as it was. Miss Burdock was adamant about animals: if he owed her even perfunctory loyalty he must make it crystal-clear.

‘Miss Edge had a spotted terrier when she came. She carried it in her luggage and hoped to secrete it in her room. They say it savaged an Irish maid and was at once put down. Miss Edge had named it Bounce and may still be heard calling the word through the passages.’

Mrs Jaraby fetched the tea, and passing it round said: ‘There is celebration here these days. Basil Jaraby is shortly to return.’

‘That is good news,’ said Mr Sole, wondering if indeed it were.

‘Yes, it is a good thing. He will bring youth to the house and keep us on our toes.’

‘One must keep in tune with the times –’

‘We have been out of touch with Basil for some years. An awkward state of affairs. Absurd as well.’

Mr Jaraby shifted in his chair and grunted, spilling crumbs over his clothes.

Mrs Jaraby continued: ‘It is only right that the past should be forgotten and the prodigal receive a welcome. It is the human thing.’ She guessed her husband would not speak his mind before the guests. He feared her careless tongue in public; he had chid her often on that score, and given her thus an instrument she had not known about. ‘As the future narrows one turns too much to the past. One sees it out of proportion, as though it matters.’ Her scrawny hands waved about in the air, in theatrical gestures, making her point. Mr Jaraby sat with his back half turned to her. He could not see her movement, but he felt it and disliked it. ‘Do you dwell much in the past, Mr Sole, Mr Cridley? Your school-fellow, my husband, does: he rarely leaves it.’

‘I think we are concerned with what goes on, the world, its state and what we may expect. We tend to live from day to day, reading the newspapers and observing our fellows. We are not always pleased in either activity I may tell you.’ Mr Cridley spoke; Mr Sole lent emphasis by nodding.

‘Soon she will get morbid,’ Mr Jaraby put in. ‘Soon she will speak of death, for she believes its fingers touch us since we are old. Well, may we talk now of pleasanter things?’

Mr Sole had struck some hardness in the centre of his rock cake. He picked it from his mouth and felt it cold between his fingers. It seemed to Mr Sole to be a piece of metal, like the prong of a fork; though curious, he passed no comment on it.

Mr Jaraby began to speak of the business on the Old Boys’ agenda and of plans he was keen to implement.

Often Mr Jaraby had brought home from an afternoon meeting of the whole Association a youth of eighteen years or so. Mrs Jaraby would prepare tea for both, probably running down to the shops for a jam-roll to eke out what she already had. The two men would talk together for several hours, and Mr Jaraby might well invite the lad to supper. Indeed, it occasionally occurred to Mrs Jaraby that these conversations had a quality of endlessness about them and that the young man seemed set to spend a day or two in her husband’s company. Concerned almost entirely with change, the two spoke of the difference between the days of Mr Jaraby and the days, spent in the same environment, of the youth. ‘Polson here,’ Mr Jaraby said once, indicating his visitor, ‘slept in my old bed at Dowse’s. You know the bed: I pointed it out to you the last time we visited the place. Polson, do they still flick pats of butter on to the ceiling of Dining Hall?’ Anecdotes, memories, the high-lights of sixty years ago: they bubbled out of her husband, and checking the changes was his happiest game. ‘I recall once, Polson, I hopped the length of that Upper Dorm three hundred and forty-six times. By the time the marathon ended half the House had collected by the door. Dowse threw a sixpence on the floor. D’you know, we won the tug of war five times running?’ Polson, or whoever the youth happened to be, would smile; and Mrs Jaraby, the facts engraved upon her brain, would nod from habit.

The old men talked, until by chance a silence fell amongst them. Then Mr Sole, aware of his duties as a guest, addressed his hostess.

‘We got on to chain letters this morning, Mrs Jaraby. Have you ever come across that kind of thing?’

‘Chain letters? The expression rings a bell. Now I cannot quite recall what it means.’

‘Her mind is slipping,’ suggested Mr Jaraby. ‘They are letters which form a chain, foolish lady. The chain is scattered all over the world.’

‘My mind is as sharp as a razor. I remember chain letters now. Basil had one during an Easter holidays. I remember copying the letter out.’

‘One sent them to far-off destinations,’ said Mr Sole. ‘California and Italy. I seem to think the Italians were inveterate writers of such mail.’

‘Basil’s had to do with a certain Major Dunkers, a fallen warrior of the Boer War.’

‘Good heavens, that is the same man! Major Dunkers who started the ball rolling from the battlefield. I was telling you, Cridley. What an amazing thing!’

‘Were you involved with the Major, Mr Sole?’

‘I was part of the chain. I helped to keep it going, and passed it down the years, it now appears, to your son.’

‘I did not know they had so long a life.’

‘Nor I. Think of the half-crowns that must have changed hands!’

‘It must have thrived for thirty years at least. Had it become well rooted in that school that both of you were part of it? It may yet survive. Immortal Major Dunkers!’

‘The Headmaster, Burdeyon, was against those letters,’ Mr Cridley said. ‘It surprises me to hear of a tradition like this. Subsequent headmasters could hardly have given the thing their blessing I would have thought.’

‘It was a harmless pastime, Mr Cridley. I see no call for a headmaster to condemn it.’

‘Burdeyon considered it as a dishonourable pursuit,’ Mr Sole explained, ‘with gain its only end. As I was remarking to Cridley, a mutual friend of ours, one Swabey-Boyns, made a small fortune in this manner. Burdeyon would have called that reprehensible. He was a man of violence and high principle.’

‘Who, who?’ asked Mr Jaraby.

‘Old Burdeyon. He disliked those chain letters.’

‘Quite right. A waste of time and energy. Dowse ordered me to clear the House of them.’

‘Because they came from the outside world,’ cried Mrs Jaraby, striking a dangerous note.

‘That they did,’ her husband agreed with vehemence. ‘From idle pawnbrokers, Dowse said. I tore up dozens in my time.’

‘Not Basil’s though. I doubt if you even knew that Basil honoured the death of the good Major Dunkers.’

‘Of the good who? What is the woman talking about?’

‘He fought –’ began Mr Sole.

‘Do not go into it all again,’ said Mr Cridley, clambering to his feet and adding: ‘We thought of attending a Wednesday Compline in Putney. In which case we should be on our way.’

‘It rests our minds and offsets what Miss Burdock has concocted for dinner. Though after your excellent tea we shall require very little.’

‘Salami and a leaf of lettuce. It is likely to be that on a Wednesday.’

‘There was part of a fork in my bun,’ said. Mr Sole when he had passed from his hosts’ earshot.

‘It might have killed you. I did not know about this Basil Jaraby. Who is he, and why did she think him interesting? I must say I had hoped for sherry. It is customary to be offered something as one leaves.’

Mr Jaraby called his wife. He cupped his hands about his lips and shouted. The cat came in from the garden and rubbed itself against his legs, clawing his trousers. Mr Jaraby went to the lavatory and shook the locked door back and forth. ‘What is this nonsense about Basil? We have heard enough of it. I must forbid the name in the house; indeed in the garden too. It is outrageous that you should have spoken so before old friends. I felt my position to be intolerable.’

‘It was meant to be. Please preserve the conventions. I expect peace and privacy in the lavatory.’

‘Oh, rubbish. You cannot pretend that Basil is returning to the house just by stating it. You are making yourself a figure of fun.’

‘I state what is to be. I do not overstep the mark.’

‘Obedience is my due. I will demand it: refrain please from these references to one who is a near-criminal.’

‘I speak of our son.’

‘You speak of a serpent’s tooth who has disgraced the name we bear.’

‘He has done what you have driven him to do. You must mellow and forgive him, as he has forgiven you.’

‘Has he forgiven me? For what? Did I commit some crime?’

‘In terms of Basil, not one but many. Return to the garden and think. Sit in the evening sun with your cat upon your lap and reflect on your son. He is my son too, you know. Weak woman though I am, I have rights in the matter.’

‘You have no rights. If you will see him, then see him. Visit the wretch, but do not impose him on me. You have no rights there.’

Mrs Jaraby had sought her present refuge for no other reason than to escape a face-to-face inquisition. She stood within the small space, sighing between sentences. ‘Basil is invited to tea on Sunday, as the old men were invited today. We shall sit in the garden in the sun, as we have done in the past.’

‘That I forbid.’

‘Then you must forbid when the time comes. You must scuffle with your son in the hallway and prevent his entry with force.’

‘You have cut across my simple desires in this matter –’

‘No, no, that is not quite the story. That is not the essence of what we talk about. What we are saying is that your sting has been drawn: a part of you is dead.’

Mr Jaraby saw that his wife was mad. It saddened him for a moment that she had come so soon to this.