8

Basil came to tea at Crimea Road, but the occasion was not a successful one. Basil was silent, listening to his parents in turn, agreeing by gesture, nodding and smiling a bit. His eyes seemed drowsy, reflected twice in the thick lenses of his spectacles. He is taking drugs now, thought Mr Jaraby; and bit back the inclination to accuse his son thus. Mrs Jaraby was worried mainly by the condition of Basil’s clothes. He wore a striped suit with a waistcoat, of a heavy cloth that made no concession to the weather. Here and there it was burnt and marked, and seemed generally to be dirty. Dandruff clung to its collar and lapels, bird-seed in small patches to waistcoat and trousers. As well, Basil wore boots. They were army boots of rudimentary design, black and unpolished, surplus stock he had bought for a pound. ‘Do you eat enough?’ Mrs Jaraby asked, offering him rock cakes. There was an unhealthiness about his plump face, and she remembered his lung trouble as a child. How could this man be the baby she had nursed? How could the crinkled body have grown so swiftly to this? Had he, she wondered, been real as a child, learning to speak, teething and falling over, or was he real now, middle-aged and shuffling before his time? The line that connected the two images faded and was gone: for all she knew, the man who ate her rock cakes might be an impostor. ‘Your mother is addled in her mind,’ Mr Jaraby said when she had left the room. ‘I urge her to seek the attention of an expert but …’ He made a hopeless gesture with his arms. Basil seemed to be thinking of something else.

Mr Jaraby had referred to the school reports and had spoken at length of the Old Boys’ committee. During all this his wife had shifted impatiently, sighing and uttering short cries. She attempted, while her husband spoke, to engage Basil in a separate conversation.

‘Are you happy?’ Mrs Jaraby asked as he left, when her husband had already made his farewells and was watering plants in the garden. ‘Are you happy where you live and in what you do?’

‘Happy?’ He spoke as though he questioned the meaning of the word, as though he might draw a dictionary from his pocket to check or confirm its connotation.

‘Are you happy, Basil, in your life now? Would you care to live with us here? Would that be easier for you?’

‘I have my birds. I am happy looking after them.’

‘You would not have to cook or make your bed. You would not have to clean and dust. Your old room is as you left it. Sheets and blankets in the airing cupboard.’

‘It is kind of you.’

‘You would find it less expensive, your food and lodging no longer a draw on your purse.’

‘I could not.’ Having said it, Basil sought round for a reason.

‘Oh come, it is not like you to be proud. It is your due. We are your parents. He owns the house and it shall pass to you when we die.’

‘I could not bring the birds here.’

‘Why not? We can take to the birds as well as other people. We would soon grow used to their chirping.’

‘It is not so simple.’

‘I have had to accept a cat that is little short of a monster. What are a few birds in comparison?’

‘It is the cat I fear. Cats and birds do not see eye to eye.’

‘You are afraid Monmouth would injure your budgerigars, is that it? Monmouth is old, he has not long to live. Without a cat about the place you would think differently?’

‘Oh yes. My birds are quite valuable. After all, they are my livelihood. I cannot take risks.’

Basil left, and Mr Jaraby, his watering completed, returned to the sitting-room. ‘So that is our son,’ he exclaimed, easing himself into an armchair. She did not reply. She felt in no mood for conversation.

‘Come, puss,’ Mr Jaraby said. ‘I shall talk to you. What did you think of our Basil? Ah, old Monmouth, you are the only comfort this old man has left. We age together, my cat and I. Are we not two of a kind? Plagued and tormented by the cold nature of a woman. Ah, you are purring. You do not purr often, my cat, and I not at all. How good it is that you are happy on your master’s knee at the end of this trying afternoon. Your master is almost happy too, for he has one loyal friend –’

‘Such slop!’ cried Mrs Jaraby. The simplest thing, she reflected, would be to do away with the cat. Although it would have suited her better to do away with them both.

Basil, his head aching, walked slowly from the bus-stop to his room. The outing had rather tired him. ‘You remember that letter, boy?’ his father had said jovially. ‘The porridge behind the radiators? How important it all seemed then! How serious and black-browed we were! You scarcely spoke all holidays. I remember being quite stern.’ Basil remembered other things: putting his father’s bicycle-clips down the lavatory, giving his father’s ties to a tramp, collecting slugs, putting earth beneath the cushions of an armchair, smoking paper and trying to smoke coal in an old pipe. One of the first things Basil could remember was eating a rasher of bacon, raw. He remembered the feeling that led to it: the instinct that it was something he should not do, and was not meant to do, although no one had actually forbidden it. He hid it in his pillow-slip and ate it when the lights were put out. He persevered, although the taste was nasty; he wept over it, his stomach turned and heaved, and as he swallowed the rind he was sick all over the bedclothes. At school Basil had done these private things too: he had taken five shillings out of Martindale’s jacket pocket; he had torn all the centre pages out of Treece’s Durell and Fawdry; once while ill in the sanatorium he had left his bed late at night and watched one of the maids undressing through a chink in the curtains; he had followed Rodd major and Turnbill with binoculars.

Such memories, begun by his father’s reminiscing, streamed through Basil’s aching head as he covered the ground to his room and his birds. He wished he had not gone to tea: this upset to his routine was something he could not take in his stride. His mind would play on it, and these images from the past would annoy him far into the night. They were all too close to the surface, too easily accessible to be taken risks with. He should have foreseen it, he should have remembered his father’s penchant for the past and guessed that by going to the house at all he was playing with fire. He sighed, giving seed to his birds and cleaning their trays to occupy himself. He wished there was somewhere to go or someone else who might talk to him. He cooked a tin of beans and wrote briefly to A. J. Hohenberg.

Dear Mr Hohenberg, Thank you for yours of Monday. All goes well with me and mine, although I am a trifle concerned about the chick I bought in Norwich in January. He has grown fast and has a good voice but still seems cramped in movement. He is beginning to moult and appears feverish – could this be psittacosis? Do you know the symptoms? If it is, can you suggest a treatment? Naturally, after the experience I had with Rubie some months ago, I do not wish to embark on anything drastic, but would be grateful for a certain and safe cure. My hopes that the little one might turn out to be pink have been brutally dashed. He has grown as blue as the sky and I shall dispose of him soon, for I feel one should not have to live with a broken promise. Sincerely yours, B. Jaraby. P.S. I hope all is well with you.

Later that evening Mr and Mrs Jaraby spoke again.

‘It is not that I cannot hear the sound,’ he said. ‘There is no sound to hear the way you have regulated the set. You sit there knitting and watching the actors mouth without speech.’

‘It is more amusing. One can study the acting and make the most of faces.’

‘My God!’

They had married when they were quite young. Then she had been more humble, coming from a family in which humility in children and honour shown to parents were golden rules. It was only quite recently that the humility had worn away; only recently that she had ceased to please and ceased to make allowances. She went her own way now, angering him as frequently as she could: by purchasing Australian food, which he forbade in the house because he had a prejudice against that country; by refusing to cooperate in the matter of the fruit and vegetables; by failing to place water on the table at mealtimes, although she had unconsciously done so all their married life; by stirring up trouble with Basil where none need be; by inviting him to tea and threatening that he should again live in the house; by mocking his cat and his affection for it.

Mr Jaraby did not wish to devote this large proportion of his time to a consideration of his wife. He had his work on the committee to do, letters to write, ideas to develop. Even now he should be lobbying his fellow committee members to ensure, to make absolutely certain, that the way was clear for his presidency. He should be thinking about Nox and judging what it was that Nox had in his mind and how, when the time came, Nox would jump. Yet his wife’s attitude sapped his time – having her always about him was like being ill. He would have to do his lobbying at the School on Old Boys’ Day. He would speak to them one by one, extracting where possible a definite promise of support. ‘Ground has been lost,’ he said to himself, but when he mulled over the situation a little longer he reckoned he would easily recover it. He turned a knob on the television set. Dialect voices filled the room.