A Sentence of Life

by Julian Gloag

  “He must have been knighted young.”

  “Oh he wasn’t a knight then. Ah, yes, ha ha. You seem in better spirits today, my boy. Am I wrong?”

  Jordan was mildly disturbed at the family’s enthusiastic appreciation of Willy. Only Colin seemed immune. “Remember you introducing us at Cambridge. Nice girl,” he’d said and then gone on to tell Jordan not to worry about his degree—“An aegrotat will get you into Sutlif and Maddox alright.” He laughed jovially. “This spot of bother will put paid to your military service, of course. I can’t say I’m sorry. It’ll be good to have you in the firm a bit earlier.”

  “Do you remember the last time I was ill in bed, with chicken pox, you sent me a case of Cox’s Orange Pippins?”

  “Apples. Did I? Did I now? That must have been in the war. I wonder how I got ’em.”

  Jordan’s mind was often invaded with memories of that other illness. He put them away when he could, for, although they were dim, they had the peculiar habit of making him want to weep. This, like his bad temper, was, he guessed, the effect of the pleurisy, as everyone had agreed to call it.

  He tried to be less ungracious to Willy because in a way he felt grateful to her. And also because, when his wrenching cough had become less violent, he was, to his great surprise, pricked with little pins of lust. She came in to clean his room every day, and she would stand by his bed, removing the objects from his bedside table and carefully dusting them. At such moments he was seized with the impulse of a lecherous old man to put his hand up her neat tweed skirt. Then she would move away and his spasm would pass, leaving him weak. He didn’t know whether she had any inkling of his feeling—the extent of their physical contact had never been more than kisses hardly passionate enough to disturb her hairdo.

  When in the New Year he was well enough not to need a nurse, Willy took over Miss Flanders’ functions. She also inherited Miss Flanders’ exemption from Jordan’s bad temper. He talked to her quite a lot and, maybe because she made no demands upon him, he became comfortable with her. Comfortable and disturbed. More and more he caught himself imagining her naked. He was glad of the contagion that outlawed their physical connection.

  “Jordan,” she had said tentatively one day, “Jordan, I’ve got to go back to Cambridge next week.”

  “Do you? I am sorry. Why?”

  “Well, I think I ought to. Mummy’s been creating a bit and—and I don’t want to outstay my welcome.”

  It didn’t sound a very pressing engagement. “You’ve given Mary and Trevor more stimulation than they normally have in a month of Sundays. I’m sure they’d be awfully sorry to see you go.

  “Would you?”

  “Yes, of course I’d be sorry to see you go.”

  She came and sat on the bed and held his hand. “Would you really?”

  “Yes, of course. What is this all about?”

  She counted his fingers. “The doctor says you’re going to need looking after for quite a long time.”

  He smiled at her head bent over his hand.

  “Jordan. I’d be willing to look after you. I’d like to look after you.” She looked up at him.

  “I don’t know how we could manage that, Willy.” But as he said it, he suddenly knew only too well how it could be managed.

  “If you’ll have me,” she said, as though she had not heard him.

  “Get married?” His hand began to tremble in hers.

  “We could live with Mummy until you get your degree, so I could really take care of you. And then you won’t be going in the army now. will you? So you could go straightaway to work for Uncle Colin and we could find a nice house nearby, so that it wouldn’t be too tiring for you. Getting to work, I mean.”

  He was not fully aware of what she was saying, although he heard himself answering that it sounded like a grand idea. He was only conscious that he was gripping her hand very tightly in his and that she was evidently willing to forget all about contagion for the moment—“Just this once,” she murmured before he kissed her. And then she was lying beside him. Before very long, the immaculate skirt was above her knees and his lecherous hand deep between her smooth white thighs.

  They announced their engagement to the family next day, and in The Times two days later.

  “Of course, you’ll have to take things easy,” said Trevor on the first day Jordan was allowed downstairs, for tea before the living-room fire. “And that means there’s no possibility of a first now. What a pity, after your close miss in the first part of the tripos. Still, we must remember, my boy, there are many things more worthwhile on this earth than academic distinction.”

  It was a fantastically magnanimous remark, and Jordan curbed his smile. He felt faintly ridiculous with a rug over his knees and united benevolence mantling him at every turn.

  “You mustn’t overdo it, darling,” said Willy as he took another chicken-and-ham paste sandwich.

  “One more won’t do him any harm, Willy my dear. Build him up.” And Aunt Mary smiled benignly.

  It was a weird sensation to be thus cosseted and, if it had not made him inexplicably uneasy, he would have found it diverting. He thought of the line, “The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast,” but it didn’t amuse him as it should.

  They were pleased—even Colin, up for the weekend—to have him safely set for marriage, a good marriage. He was easily tired and still very feeble—were they pleased at that too, pleased to have him at their mercy? The imagination of the sick. Yet as he looked round at them, he was inescapably reminded of another, similar scene in this room. More than four years ago. Mr. Mansard had partaken of that funeral tea, but otherwise it was the same. Except, of course, it had been Annie, not Willy, who had passed round the cups of tea and proffered the sandwiches and lifted the lid from the crumpet plate.

  It was on the tip of his tongue to ask, “Do you remember …?” But he didn’t need to. From their very cheeriness he could read the answer. They remembered alright.

  He shook his head.

  “Anything the matter, darling?”

  “Just a touch of heartburn.”

  40

  “Hello—tea.”

  “Hello, Annie.”

  “Ah, the cup that refreshes.”

  Outside it was cold and greyly raining. Inside it was dim, but still too early in the afternoon to light the lamps. Aunt Mary treated the onset of darkness as though it were a disease which it would be weakness to admit until the last possible moment. And yet, although it was still October, she had caused a fire to be lit—not usually allowed until November the first. The fire smoked uneasily and threw little warmth into the living room. They sat round it closely.

  “The fire could do with a bit of livening up,” said Colin, reaching for the poker.

  “I’ll do it, Colin. Let me.” Trevor woke out of his musing stare and picked up the poker and got to his knees. But energy seemed to desert him; he pushed the poker listlessly four or five times into the heart of the fire and then let it drop with a rattle. He had succeeded only in loosening a little slack, which trickled down to extinguish a single preliminary sprout of flame. He reached up to the mantelpiece and pulled himself to his feet.

  “Tea, Trevor dear,” called Mary. He turned with a vague murmur and took the cup which Annie proffered him with lowered eyes and subdued movement. Her black church clothes were unadorned with the usual apron, Jordan noticed. Her servile status had been temporarily mitigated by the common grief, though not sufficiently for Aunt Mary to ask her to sit down to tea with them.

  Common grief. What were they grieving for, thought Jordan as he watched Trevor stir his tea round and round? Not for Uncle John. Perhaps they were grieving for their absence of grief. Or for this sudden, unhappy intrusion into the even tenor of their days.

  He still did not know what had really happened. Late last night he had gone to the rectory chapel where John’s body lay. But the lid of the coffin had already been screwed down, as though the corpse were something shameful, better unse
en. As he watched the coffin jerkily lowered into the grave this afternoon, Jordan knew that he would always wonder what John had looked like in death. Had the jaw been set strong, or slack? Had those always so wide-open light blue eyes really been shut? Had anyone thought to clip and brush the military moustache? And had they arrayed him in his colonel’s full-dress regimentals?

  He knew the answer to the last. There had been not the faintest touch of fanfare to the funeral. In church they had sung thinly, “Fight the good fight with all thy might,” but Jordan could not bring himself to carry the shallow tune. He thought of the way it ought to have been, of the way it might have been. He thought of Moore at Corunna. The solemn steps of upright men, the muffled drum, the lowered flag, the last salute. Instead, they had stood coldly and without ceremony in the drizzle, Trevor muttering over the grave and Mansard twitching slightly, his lonely Defence Medal pinned back to front on his surplice. They hadn’t even asked a representative of the regiment, for which Lieutenant-Colonel John Freeman, D.S.O., M.C., had sacrificed the full sunny use of his reason not really so very long ago. It seemed to Jordan, angrily, that they had let John go in bitterness, without any of those things—military honours, they call it—which might have in some sense restored the order of an old dignity.

  “Why didn’t you get a bugler to play the last post?” he heard himself ask.

  There was silence and then the quick motion of spoons in teacups.

  “I mean, couldn’t you at least have sent over to Istoke barracks for a bugler? He was a battalion commander …”

  Trevor murmured something about “no fuss.”

  “We thought things were better left as they were, dear,” said Aunt Mary firmly, but in her voice that odd deference which both she and Trevor had shown him since yesterday.

  “John,” said Trevor, blinking his eyes, “John didn’t have much to do with the regiment in his later years, you know.”

  No. He was warned away. Not allowed out. Cut off from even the small remnants of regimental life and memory.

  “What the Lord giveth the Lord taketh away,” said Mr. Mansard, and immediately blushed and bowed his head over a piece of crumbled seed cake.

  Jordan’s anger slipped back into the recess from which it had briefly broken out.

  “I think—I think,” said Colin, “that I’d like a whiskey and soda, Mary my dear, if you don’t mind, instead of this tea.”

  “Of course, Colin. How thoughtless of me.” She rang the bell briskly, startling Mr. Mansard. “Annie, Mr. Sutlif would like a whiskey and soda.”

  “Very well, ma’am.” Annie nodded. Everyone in the room was content to watch her as she deftly mixed the drink. It seemed to give them an excuse for stirring, wiping their lips, putting down their cups—movements which a moment before might have broken the fragility of the normal taken-for-granted tea-and-crumpet calm. Wordless fulfillment of her duty freed Annie from any pretence of community of spirit. And yet, Jordan thought, she seemed more than ordinarily aloof. She was not going one inch beyond the dutiful. She would not look at Jordan.

  Annie handed Colin his drink and went over to the fireplace. With a sure, quick hand she attended to the fire, and, a minute after she left the room, it began to catch and then blaze.

  “Ah,” said Colin, “that’s better.”

  Aunt Mary said, “I’m so glad no one sent a wreath or anything of that kind. Simple garden flowers are so much more suitable. What a pity the best was over.”

  Colin cleared his throat. “Mary, I think Jordan and I should go back tonight, you know.”

  “Oh dear, we were looking forward to having you for the night, weren’t we, Trevor?” Mary looked at her brother. He nodded slowly. His usually bland countenance was set in a deep frown. Now, as he looked up, the reflected flames of the fire danced in the lenses of his glasses, concealing his pale eyes.

  “Is it still raining?” he said. The windowpanes were beaded and glistening.

  “Yes, Trevor dear.” As though afraid of something her brother might say, Mary turned back to Colin. “I’m afraid you’ll have a wet drive back.”

  “I’m afraid so. Very busy time of year for me. So if you don’t mind, Mary …”

  Mr. Mansard coughed shyly. “Dear dear. What a great pity. I always think slippery roads are such a death trap.” He was staring at his empty teacup. “But of course you have a driver.” He ventured to glance up. “Your driver …”

  Mary brought her protuberant eyes silently to bear on the curate. Then she sniffed and turned her head sharply. “Yes, of course, Colin. And I’m sure Jordan is anxious to be back at school too.”

  “You’ve got a match tomorrow, haven’t you, young-feller-me-lad?”

  Jordan looked at Mansard, as though he had asked the question, and smiled. “There is a match tomorrow, but I’m not playing. I’m not really part of the team, only a substitute.”

  Mr. Mansard nodded tremblingly. “Ah. You’re a soccer school, aren’t you? I recollect when I—”

  “Really, Mr. Mansard, where are your ears?” Aunt Mary snapped. “I should have thought you’d heard us talking about school matches often enough to know rugger—”

  Jordan interrupted, “We used to be a soccer school years ago. I expect that’s what you’re thinking of, isn’t it, sir? And we still do play a bit, but not seriously. I don’t know which headmaster it was that changed us over to rugger.”

  “Ah, but I think I do.” Mr. Mansard smiled shyly. “What can I have been thinking of? It must have been Winstanley. A great headmaster. One of the great modern headmasters. A quite remarkable appointment at the time. It was considered so. He was very young, you know. As a matter of fact, you wouldn’t believe it, but I had once been his fag …” Mr. Mansard chattered happily on. Poor old chap. For the first time Jordan saw the clergyman’s innocent humility as endearing, as well as pathetic. The end of the war had been the end of the most important job of Mr. Mansard’s life, as a sector captain for the local fire watchers. A conscientious and totally inefficient commander, his fire watchers had held him in affectionate contempt and, towards the end of the war, would seldom report for duty. Uncomplainingly Mr. Mansard took over their patrols himself. Danger had only come to Sibley once, when in the early days the low drone of a lost German bomber had been followed by a faint crump. Almost the whole village had turned out at two o’clock in the morning to search for the bomb. But it had been Mr. Mansard who had discovered it. Running excitedly across the hundred-acre field, he had fallen flat into the shallow crater, breaking his glasses and grazing his hands and face rather badly on the gravel. It had been a great hour for the curate as for the first and only time the first-aid kit had been brought out and his wounds dressed and tended. “Our bomb,” he still talked of it with deprecatory pride, “our little bit of excitement.”

  Mr. Mansard’s present ramblings were tolerated because he was under Jordan’s protection. It was as if they—Mary and Trevor—were afraid of their nephew, fearful of what he might say, of an outburst.

  At length the curate’s timidity reasserted itself and his rambling monologue faded and died. There was silence.

  And suddenly Jordan could not bear it. He stood up. They watched him. For a moment he thought that if he picked them all up and shook them together, like rattled dice they might come out six or three or maybe just one.

  “You, er, want to do a little exploring, I expect, my dear?” Aunt Mary said.

  “I’m going to get a breath of fresh air.”

  “Wrap up well, my dear. We don’t want to send you back to school with a cold, do we? Dinner is at half past seven. You won’t be late, will you?”

  Trevor came to life. “Jordan, before you go out, I wonder if you’d spare me a minute?”

  “Now?”

  “If it would be convenient. As you’re leaving tonight.”

  The study was dark and chilly, but Trevor didn’t turn on the lights. He went over to his desk as if to put it between them, for he didn’t sit down.
/>   “Well?” said Jordan abruptly.

  Trevor turned his head to the window. “Everything’s left to you,” he said in a muffled voice.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I mean the will. The terms of the will. Everything goes to you.”

  “John left everything to me?”

  Trevor seemed to retreat a little at the mention of the name. “The sole beneficiary. Yes. It wasn’t the, well, original will. Not the one we drew up some years ago. This is a recent one, very recent. But of course your aunt and I wouldn’t dream of, er, disputing it. No.”

  “How recent? When did John make it?”

  “Let’s see, it’s dated, yes. Last Sunday. There were no witnesses, of course, but …”

  “The day he died.”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. Jordan, my boy, this is all very painf—”

  “In the previous will, I was not the sole beneficiary?”

  “Quite. Er, your aunt and I …”

  “What did he leave me? What did he have to leave?”

  “Not a great deal, my boy. There are the effects of course, the personal effects. I think Mary would like to distribute the clothes in the village, with your permission, naturally.”

  “Not the regimentals.”

  “Oh naturally not. If you wish not, of course. And then there is the workroom and, er, these.” He slid open a desk drawer and took out, one by one, six small leather-covered boxes. “His medals. I used to keep them here for—safekeeping.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, there was a little money. Let me see, I had a note of the balance in the last statement. Yes, two hundred and forty-three pounds, seventeen shillings and twopence. And the holding in Freeman’s Ales. We all were left a holding in Freeman’s Ales, you know. One thousand shares. A small but respectable income. Small but respectable.”

  Jordan picked up the medal cases and held them in his hand. It was odd, but in all these years he had never seen Uncle John’s medals. “That’s all?”