by Thomas Hinde
‘Did Peggy see it?’
‘I think so. I’m not sure.’
I glanced sideways, wishing I had not already kissed her.
‘Let’s have a look,’ I said.
‘Must you?’ he said, but he began to sit up and untuck.
At that moment I heard Molly on the stairs.
‘Oh well, another time,’ I said quickly. I bent, kissed him and met her in the doorway.
Half-way downstairs, when I knew from the silence that Molly was kissing Dan and could tell from the way Peggy was calling for her that she knew it too, I came to a complete halt.
I was amazed at my obtuseness. But perhaps for an hour now I had guessed. By inserting two oblique strokes it became a date. Twenty-eight, nine, sixty-four.
I had three weeks.
PART THREE
People don’t sit in cars, flashing secret messages across the countryside on warm English summer days. I knew it as well as anyone. That hot night I broke into sweat under my single sheet as I realized it. But how could I be sure? As I’ve said, I had every reason to believe that I wanted not to believe it, that I had worked on myself or been worked on till I was unable fully to believe it. Still more confusing, I knew that these things did happen. Over the past years I’d read again and again in newspapers of grown-up people playing at spying in a boys’ adventure story way. Of course I didn’t believe newspapers. I’d never met anyone who’d taken part in any of the reports they printed and often thought that they could be manufactured as a drug by gigantic computers which fed out just enough comfort to keep people sane and just enough provocation to keep their adrenal glands active. And even if I believed them I knew the odds were millions to one against it happening to me. But I could see the delusion in that. I wasn’t going to be bemused as most people were by accidents or when they came to die, their chief feeling, surely this can’t be happening to me.
I saw too that my disbelief could be an attempt to escape, now that the time of my test was coming, and that in the days to come this could become an increasing temptation. I would make myself look at all the people around me who would laugh or be angry if they were told what I knew. I would ask myself, was it possible that they could all be wrong and I alone right. I would argue with myself that even if I was certain I was right, need I commit myself by some irrevocable act; because this might make me less rather than more useful. I would struggle and struggle to escape. Only by standing above my struggles and seeing them clearly as instinctive animal squirmings for self-preservation could I keep myself steady to my duty.
That week we went to dinner with the Quorums.
‘Ah ha, the great woodsman,’ Charlie Quorum said, standing back with mock ceremonial, keeping that deadpan look on his Victoria-plum face.
One year Jim and Janie Brightworth had given a fancy-dress party and Charlie Quorum had come as a female gypsy pirate. Female and gypsy from his cushiony bosom and big brass ear-rings, I suppose, and pirate from his baggy trousers and the curved sabre he kept shaking. For several months afterwards I couldn’t meet Charlie without feeling that he was missing something – his bosom and sabre, of course. Even now he sometimes seemed to me a disguised female gypsy pirate.
‘What’s he talking about?’ Queenie said to me.
‘Don’t you know?’ Charlie said. ‘Lurking in our midst!’
‘What, Harry here?’ Queenie said, moving back her head, tilting it sideways, giving me a narrow-eyed stare, at the same time holding out both her hands with arms straight so that I had to take them. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Isn’t a doubt,’ Charlie said. ‘Caught in the act.’
The conversation made me sweat. I was tempted to have some sudden gripping pain so that I’d have to leave. I forced myself to stay. Apart from not wanting to remind Molly of the incident, I was afraid the Draycotts might come – or be here already, and that times would be mentioned. There was at least an hour of my previous Saturday morning I couldn’t account for.
But when I got into the sitting-room it was empty except for Percy Goyle and his peke.
We smiled and shook hands warmly, if rather formally, as Percy seemed to make one. I was so pleased and relieved to see him that for a moment I could not believe it would be hard to talk to him. I even thought of mentioning butterflies, a subject I’d avoided since those early days.
I said the garden was badly dried up.
‘Is that so,’ Percy said. I recognized the way he often came to a subject I started from a long way away, as if adjusting himself to the strange fact that it interested me, as if this was the thing of interest. Now, when I caught him watching me, he glanced out of the window, as if to help him to understand by actually seeing some dried-up garden. He clearly hadn’t noticed and I remembered that he had a gardener.
‘Will it affect your . . .’ he began and checked himself, either forgetting what I grew or realizing how painful it might be to me.
‘Fruit,’ I said, to help him. ‘I doubt it. I’m lucky.’
At this moment Charlie brought Molly down from the bathroom.
‘Ah ha,’ he said to Percy. ‘Meeting our great ranger of the forests?’
Percy Goyle smiled at him and then began, without hurry, to look round the room for some other guest he hadn’t noticed.
‘No, no, it’s a joke,’ I said. Somehow I had to stop this.
‘It’s not a joke,’ Charlie said. In mock anger he crossed to the whisky table. ‘It’s no joke at all.’
Seeing him pouring whisky reminded me of the time when he’d come to supper and I’d given him my own brand, which I got wholesale from the co-operative that sold me fertilizers and sprays. Presently I’d seen that he hadn’t drunk any, which was unusual. Queenie had seen long before.
‘Oh Charlie, don’t be silly, go home and get it. Harry won’t mind.’ So he’d gone home and got his own bottle.
Of course I’d laughed. I’d seen that it wasn’t another of Charlie’s affectations but a genuine taste which genuinely embarrassed him. For about a year after that, each time we’d met he’d apologized, usually starting, ‘Look, old chap, your charming reception, I’m terribly sorry, but I honestly find it gives me such a headache, that weed-killer of yours – whatever am I saying . . .’
For the first time I wondered whether I’d fully understood the incident. Why had Charlie been so suspicious of my whisky?
But as the evening continued it was for other reasons that I found my attitude to Charles Quorum changing. And principal of these was the way he went on about the camp-bed incident. I was relieved when dinner started and I knew the Draycotts weren’t coming, though as we ate I became afraid they might drop in for coffee and Charlie might still be pursuing this boring joke. I could see that it had become boring not only to me but to everyone else. I wondered why Charlie went on in this untypically boring way . . . About Charlie I had no sudden revelation. I couldn’t tell you at what moment that evening I realized.
I sat next to Queenie. Queenie had that special manner which made me believe her when she said her background was ‘theatre’. I guessed that long ago she’d had a holiday job looking after the properties for her local rep, of which her mother had been a patron. Whatever it was, she’d decided the manner suited her and never let it go.
‘Coming from theatre,’ she’d say, as if it was another country. ‘Of course that was before I met him.’ People think when they abuse each other in that sort of playful way no one will guess that they’ve let real feeling into it. They’re wrong. Queenie’s real feeling about Charlie showed clearly, and it was love. She abused him because she knew he expected it but with shame, and when she laughed she hoped he’d join.
As Queenie talked to me she often stared at me with big eyes, laying a hand on my wrist and bending forward to force me to look up from the vegetables I was gathering. But occasionally she spoke through closed teeth, her half-closed eyes deliberately focused on a distant wall. Though it was her dinner-party she co
uld talk to me because she didn’t serve it. She sat upright, one hand on each side of her plate, and told Charlie what to serve.
‘Look at him,’ she said in a stage whisper as Charlie carried round the dishes. They were heavy and antique. ‘Isn’t he nice?’ It still surprised her. ‘You’d never think he once had three Turks to press his trousers.’
‘Charlie’s birds,’ she said, noticing my fixed stare at the two silver-plated grouse. ‘Isn’t he too bourgeois.’ But I saw how they shone and knew who polished them.
As I talked to her about azaleas – like Molly, she loved gardening – I reasoned it out this way: he was a retired First Secretary, the least suspect sort of person. That was a highly suspicious point. A principle I work on when I want to find something is to look twice in the most likely place. When I’ve looked twice and not found it I look a third time.
‘Mine have scarcely a leaf between them,’ Queenie said.
‘Nor mine,’ I said, allowing a hint of her tragic tone to infect my voice.
Next point, he’d come to this part of the country for no obvious reason – no childhood associations, no old school or service friends. At least twice I’d heard him mention how he’d chanced to see the house advertised on the noticeboard of a Chelsea newsagent among models and corduroy fetishists – as an illustration of how good can come of evil. That was a strange subject to have occurred spontaneously twice in the times we’d been here.
‘Or do they anyway lose their leaves when they’ve bloomed?’ I asked.
‘They certainly don’t,’ Queenie said, drawing herself up.
Then, what a huge house it was for a childless retired pair in their early sixties, and how little of the inside we’d ever been shown.
‘You could try watering them,’ I said.
‘Do you think he would?’ she asked, taking my upper arm in both her hands, bending her cheek close to mine, turning her eyes towards Charlie.
Again, there were his long solitary rounds of golf. What better opportunity for contact work?
‘But wouldn’t it make their little roots turn up?’ Queenie said, looking into my eyes, tense for my answer. ‘Expecting more, and it never coming?’
‘Maybe,’ I said. I was following the golf idea, remembering how Queenie had once told me that although he was retired he still went a solitary early morning round on Saturdays. ‘So he can be lazy for the rest of the week-end,’ she’d said. ‘But’ – gripping me and whispering loudly so that he’d hear – ‘I think it’s because he hasn’t noticed he’s retired.’
And if he hadn’t noticed he’d retired, why was that? Because he didn’t feel retired? Because he was still at work?
No doubt it was risky, but towards the end of dinner I had what I thought a clever idea. Turning to Queenie, who was stage-whispering to Percy on her other side – I could see him leaning away as if she were frightening him – I said, ‘The trouble with this weather is the way it makes the milk go bad.’
At that moment there was complete silence in everyone’s conversation. Queenie stopped talking to Percy. I could understand that, because out of context my remark may have seemed odd. More important, Charlie stopped talking to Molly, as he had been, about the way the seats of his Citroën let down to make a double bed. I was sure he’d had more to say about that.
Pretending to be totally unaware of this I went on, ‘It means you must only order one or at most two pints at a time.’
‘Oh, I can’t see why,’ Queenie said.
‘But it makes such lovely cheese,’ Molly said.
Percy was bright red and feeding himself fast with teaspoonfuls of fruit salad, in embarrassed sympathy for me, I guessed.
‘Now out in the wilds . . .’ Charlie began, but he didn’t go on and no one laughed.
When dinner was over I had a chance I’d been waiting for. I strolled out through the french windows into the garden. I walked away from the house between lawns with sprinklers and herbaceous borders giving off heavy scents in the falling dusk.
Their garden was like a deep tropical channel. On either side beyond the lawns and the herbaceous borders vast banks of rhododendrons rose fifteen or twenty feet, hiding everything beyond except occasional pine tops. They made the garden seem part of some huge forest. Though it was probably not much bigger than its neighbours, I never imagined it having boundaries.
Except at the bottom, of course, where I now hurried and where the rhododendrons closed in and a pathway led under them. Beyond this there was peaty ground free of undergrowth below tall trees. A single wire on slim posts, several of which were missing, made a doubtful boundary with the common. It could have been crossed at a dozen places by scarcely lifting a foot. Moreover the dry needles underfoot would have left little sign if there had been a path to a regular crossing place.
I hurried away. Already I’d been too long. Just before I passed again under the rhododendrons I stopped and looked back between the pine trunks. I don’t know what I thought I’d learn. I’d already located the pale shape of the Draycotts’ house across a short stretch of common, even shorter than I’d expected. I’d already been surprised to see how little back garden it had, perhaps seven yards, as if Rene Draycott’s father had suddenly become impatient at the idea that he should give them a back garden too. Now, as I looked towards that stunted piece of ground, I saw a movement. There was someone in a pale shirt standing by the garden fence.
Had he been there all the time, unnoticed in the dusk till he moved? Or had he just come out? If he’d just come out, why had he chosen this moment? If he’d seen me, had it been possible for him to see who I was? What was that strange object he seemed to be waving over his head, like a saw? These and other questions raced through my mind as I hurried back up that deep garden like a tropical valley. The dark banks of rhododendrons seemed to look down on it and made me want to run.
I didn’t enjoy the rest of the evening. Again I needed quiet to think. I couldn’t respond cheerily when Jim Brightworth, who came with Janie for coffee, slapped me on the shoulder. ‘What’s this I hear?’ he shouted. ‘Taking to the fields?’
‘Charlie’s imagination . . .’ I said.
‘Last seen disappearing over the horizon with two sticks.’
‘A camp-bed,’ I said. ‘Which I was offering to a friend.’
‘Can’t get out of it that way,’ Jim shouted.
‘Be quiet, you noisy brute,’ Janie said.
‘How’s the pool?’ I said.
‘You see, he’s changing the subject,’ Jim shouted, though less loudly.
‘He’s been looking for a site in our garden,’ Queenie giggled.
It was hard for me to control my anger that they had noticed, anger not with Queenie but with Charlie who, I knew, had been the one who’d seen me go.
At that moment all the things I’d liked about him became the reasons for my hating him. His perpetual heavy humour which, I saw, far from giving conversation interest concentrated it on the single boring question of what Charlie was hinting. I saw this perpetual comic mysteriousness not only as offensive in itself, but as a clever technique of concealment.
But I forced myself to smile, knowing that nothing of this must show.
It meant of course qualifying my theory about the Draycotts – so I thought at the time. I could do that. Compared to Wilfred Draycott, Charlie Quorum seemed infinitely sinister.
I was pleased to notice, glancing sideways, that Molly and Percy Goyle weren’t joining the joke, as if they might not have understood it. They were near the window, having the same careful but often silent conversation I’d noticed them having at the Brightworths’ barbecue. It was as if Molly had discovered a way of communicating with Percy and they both understood this.
I was also pleased when Mrs. Willis came, unexpectedly late, for coffee. Perhaps she could fit it in before her bridge. She seemed older that night, with deeper powder-filled crevices, though just as blue-rinsed. I liked her. I liked the way she went on defiantly
enjoying herself at an age when dying must seem close, when she must more and more be doing it for herself as other people’s opinions became less and less important.
The moon, which was in its last quarter, hadn’t risen when we went home, so that although the sky was clear and full of stars the drive was dark and we missed the entrance. Molly took my arm. I didn’t see our house till it loomed above us.
Lying in bed beside her, though not touching her, I couldn’t sleep. Perhaps it was the black coffee; or the way I was remembering all that had happened that evening, trying to understand it, remembering an increasing number of Charlie’s Irish eccentricities which I must now reassess. I felt Molly turn over several times before she seemed to grow quiet.
‘Harry,’ she said.
I jumped, hearing her speak suddenly out of the darkness when I’d thought she was asleep. I realized that she’d been lying on her back, wide awake.
‘Uh huh,’ I said, making it more sleepy than I was.
‘Are things all right?’
It frightened me. I was glad not to answer for several seconds, taking cover under my pretended sleepiness. What did she mean? What had she noticed? I thought of asking whether she’d smelt fire or heard a burglar. But if she was really suspicious I must not offer her such chances of hiding it again.
‘Aren’t they?’ I said. I half turned on to my back, as if waking to listen.
After several seconds she said, ‘I don’t know,’ and sighed.
I moved across the bed and put an arm across her chest and my head against her shoulder. She didn’t move.
‘Tell me,’ I said.
‘We don’t quarrel any more,’ she said.
It was more disturbing than I’d expected. The moment she said it I knew she was right.
‘Don’t we?’ I was too surprised to think of anything better. ‘That’s good then.’ It was what I should have said at once.
She didn’t answer, just lay still. I had the odd idea that she might cry.
I began to stroke her and kiss her shoulder where her nightdress didn’t cover it. At first she wouldn’t move, then she turned her back and wriggled close.
