Mr. Sneyd himself was sitting up in bed wearing a hospital bed-jacket. It was a pink flannel affair tied up with tapes; it might have been designed to make its wearer look ridiculous. Mr. Sneyd’s sallow face, and creased almost fleshless throat, looked strangely insect-like emerging from all that pinkness. He held out his hand, his damp, trembling hand, and seized Gerald’s warmly.
“Good boy,” he said. “Good boy.”
“I’ve brought you these,” Gerald answered awkwardly. “Just a few grapes.”
“Good boy,” said Mr. Sneyd again. “Good boy.”
It was obvious that he was overcome, and he could not trust himself to say more. He just lay there and kept darting sideways glances at Gerald as though to satisfy himself that it really was his son who was sitting at his bedside; after ten years it seemed a long time.
“How are you feeling?” Gerald asked at last.
“Oh, I’m better when I’m in bed,” Mr. Sneyd answered. “Perhaps all I needed was a good long rest. A real, proper rest in bed.”
He savoured the words with his tongue as he said them, making them sound something lofty and unattainable. And, as Gerald looked at his father, it occurred to him that perhaps that was what was the matter—it was simply that his father was utterly worn out, an exhausted, burnt up husk of a man.
“That’s right,” he said. “You’ll feel better if you’ll just take it easy for a bit.”
“Got to get my strength up,” the older man remarked. “They’re keeping me on slops at the moment. It’s” lowering.”
He raised his hand wearily to his forehead as he spoke. The pink bed-jacket fell away and revealed his arm; it was withered and bony; all the flesh seemed to have vanished from it.
“Got to build up again,” he added apparently to himself. “Must keep going at all costs.”
“They’ll build you up all right,” Gerald assured him. “That’s what they’re here for.”
The vision of the narrow back door rose for a moment in his mind and he suppressed it.
But Mr. Sneyd senior did not appear to be listening. He beckoned Gerald to him.
“I want to talk to you,” he said. “Bring your chair up closer.”
When Gerald had done so, Mr. Sneyd took his hand again. “You’ve done all right for yourself you have,” he said. “You’re all fixed up.”
There was no envy in his voice as he said it; only relief and a little unconcealed astonishment that in an insecure and precarious world anyone should have been able to establish himself in comfort.
“You’ve got a lovely wife,” he added.
“I’m glad you liked her,” Gerald answered.
“She’s a peach,” Mr. Sneyd repeated. “You’re one of the lucky ones.”
“You must come down and stay with us when you’re better,” Gerald went on. “Got a little car you know. Run you about and show you things.”
“Got a car, have you?”
The tears in Mr. Sneyd’s eyes ran over and he was openly crying; crying from sheer happiness. He felt that if he had to die there and then all the pain and sharpness of parting would be softened by the knowledge that his son possessed a car.
“You’ve done better than me,” he said at last. “I’ve kept things going. That’s been about all. Never been able to make any proper provision.” He paused and began picking at the bedclothes. “If only this operation “—it was the first time he had used the word; it slipped out carelessly and unnoticed—” could have waited for another five years.’ Then Violet would have been grown up. It wouldn’t have mattered so much then if anything had happened to me.” He shifted in the bed and corrected himself. “Not that it’s anything serious, you know. Just an ordinary sort of operation. It’s really observation I’m here for.” Mr. Sneyd suddenly sat up on one elbow as though something had frightened him. “Don’t let that car of yours use up all your money,” he said. “You may need it some day.”
“That’s all right,” said Gerald awkwardly. “I’m looking after that.”
“D’you carry any life insurance?” Mr. Sneyd asked him.
Gerald told him that he did.
“They’ wouldn’t have me,” Mr. Sneyd admitted miserably. “I went up before them and they wouldn’t have me.” There was another pause and Mr. Sneyd gave a little grimace as though something inside had hurt him. “I wish you’d see Flo sometime,” he said. “She’s always asking after you. She hasn’t been well lately and now with me away … ” His voice trailed off and he closed his eyes.
The Sister came over to the bed and told Mr. Sneyd that he had talked too much already. Gerald got up and held his hand for a moment; the fingers felt damp and feeble as he touched them. And Mr. Sneyd kept putting his other hand on top of Gerald’s as he said good-bye. It was with difficulty that Gerald finally broke away. Then he tiptoed down the ward with the Sister beside him. At the door he turned and looked back. He could see Mr. Sneyd’s dark eyes staring after him.
It seemed strange, emerging into the outside world again. Once through the glass swing doors of the lobby, he turned St. Martin’s Corner and came on a street of cheap tailors, cooked-meat shops and classic cinemas. There was life of a flashy, noisy kind going on all round him. It was crude and ugly. But at least it was life; it had the laugh over the precarious, exhausted stuff that was just kept going in the wards.
The thought of Alice waiting for him in the clear, fresh-smelling heights of Boleyn Avenue reminded him how lucky he was; a fivepenny bus ride and he had escaped from all this.
The only thing that worried him was having to leave his father behind in the midst of it all.
“Where have you been?” Alice asked when Gerald came in. “I’ve been getting so nervous about you.”
She went up and put her arm through his. This was the moment she had been waiting for all the afternoon. And now that it had come, she couldn’t say what was on her mind. She was just standing there as if it had been any ordinary evening.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I’ve been seeing the old man.”
“How is he?” she asked.
“Bad,” Gerald answered.
“You don’t think it’s anything dangerous, do you?”
“I dunno. They wouldn’t tell me. They just said you couldn’t be sure with that kind of case.”
“Does he know how ill he is?”
“You bet he does,” said Gerald. “He’s scared.”
“Can I go and see him?” Alice asked.
“He’d like it,” said Gerald. “He’s gone on you.”
He took out his pocket-comb and straightened his hair in front of the hall mirror. The hall mirror had been a wedding present. It was an oval plaque of wood from which hung a clothes brush, a hat brush, and a buttonhook; the looking glass was a small inadequate circle in the middle. Alice watched him as he pulled his tie into position. Somehow, when he was tired he seemed more good looking than ever. They went through into the drawing-room together. The enormous radiogram greeted them from the opposite wall.
“Oh, it’s come, has it?”
He made no attempt to go over to it, however. He just looked at it in a vague, hostile way and turned his back on it.
“Shall I put it on?” Alice asked.
She was already bending over the set as she spoke.
The machine jumped into life; a noisy, mechanical life of its own. Someone was playing dance music and the house became filled with it. It was like being shut up in a box with a band. Alice noticed that Gerald’s right foot was moving in time with it. In the ordinary way he would have got up in a moment and put his arm round her waist. But to-night he didn’t move.
“Turn it off, dear,” he said at last.
“Why?”
“I’ve got a headache. Do you mind?”
“Oh, no. Not a bit. Of course I’ll turn it off if you want it turned off.”
She was disappointed. This wasn’t in the least what she had expected it would be like. In any case, she had only put it on to keep
her mind off other things; she could forget about the baby altogether while the music was playing.
She got up and turned the master knob. After so much noise, the silence seemed to come with a jolt.
“I’m sorry you don’t like it,” she said.
“I do like it.”
“You must do, if you want it turned off.”
“It isn’t that. I just don’t feel like it.”
She went and shut the lid down hard. Unintentionally hard, in fact. It sounded as though someone had hit the thing with a hammer.
Gerald looked in her direction.
“There’s no need to smash the thing,” he said.
“You’re very fond of it all of a sudden, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m not. You wanted it. I didn’t.”
“Well, I’m sorry we ever got it. I am, really.”
“You’re sorry we got it?”
“Yes, I am. Very sorry. I wish I’d never seen it.”
“Then why did you make me buy it?”
“I didn’t make you buy it.”
“Then who did?”
“You wanted it yourself.”
“I suppose you think I can put my feet up in the middle of the afternoon and listen to a gramophone.”
“Well, I like that,” she said. “If I put my feet up every afternoon how do you think the work would get done?”
“Oh, I dunno,” said Gerald. “Let’s forget it.”
“You’re beastly,” she said to him. “Simply beastly.”
He got up and went over to the door.
“What about having something to eat?” he suggested.
“You can have it alone,” she answered. “I don’t want any.”
Then before he could stop her she had walked past him and gone upstairs. He saw that she was crying again. …
It was a cheerless meal in the bleak, wooden-looking dining-room. The electric fire was all ready to fill the room with plausible, artificial flickers but he didn’t trouble to turn it on. He just sat there remembering the hospital, remembering that Alice was miserable, remembering the radiogram.
It was the hospital in particular that he remembered. The white, shrivelled face of his father had unnerved him. It was so astonishingly like the face of a dead man already. And it was, moreover, strangely unlike the face that had appeared round the drawing-room door to announce that Mr. Sneyd senior, in diffident but indefatigable fashion, was searching for his son. It seemed somehow as though there had still been life in him then; and now there was none. It was as though when he had come out to East Finchley with the excuse that he was just passing, he had been having a last exquisite flutter before the gun went off.
Gerald got up from the table and went through into the drawing-room; it was doing him no good, he told himself, to sit there worrying about his father in that way. Alice was still upstairs and the drawing-room seemed lonely and deserted. He put his feet up on the couch and took out a pencil. Once he was settled he began to make notes on the back of an envelope. He wrote slowly and carefully, frowning as he did so. It was some time before he got the phrases exactly to his liking. When he had done so, he sat back and read them over.
DOES ANYONE, the message ran, REQUIRE A PERSONABLE YOUNG MAN WITH INITIATIVE AND ABILITY ABOVE THE AVERAGE? FIRST CLASS ADVERTISING CONNECTIONS. SURRENDERING PRESENT POST FOR LACK OF PROSPECTS.
It was good of its kind, he acknowledged; but too long. Taking out his pencil again he proceeded to cut it down to the three lines for eight shillings that was all that the paper allowed.
Then he began to wonder what Alice was doing. She had been gone a long time. He could hear no sound from the bedroom and it occurred to him that perhaps she wasn’t well. Putting the piece of paper away carefully in his pocket, he went upstairs slowly and deliberately. If she were just sulking with him, he would come down to the drawing-room again. He might even play the radiogram to himself.
But she wasn’t just sulking: there was a great deal more to it than that. She was lying stretched out sideways across the bed with her head resting on her arm. She didn’t even move when he went in.
“What’s up?” he said. “Aren’t you well?”
There was no answer.
“Sorry I was cross,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
He went over and put his arm round her. She moved away from him.
“Please go downstairs again,” she asked him.
He did not move.
“Don’t go on like this,” he said. “I don’t want to quarrel.”
“Then why were you so beastly?”
“I said I was sorry, didn’t I?”
“It isn’t that I was crying about.”
“Then what is it?”
He put his arm round her again. She did not move away this time.
“I think I’m going to have a baby,’ she said.
Gerald sat up.
“You can’t be.”
“But I tell you I am. I feel awful”
There was a pause.
“Have you seen a doctor?” he asked.
“I went to one this morning.”
There was another pause, a longer one this time. He got off the bed and went and stood over by the window.
“Now, if anything happens we are in the soup, aren’t we?” he said.
Chapter Eight
The idea of running out an informal Life-line to Mr. Sneyd was Mr. Biddle’s. He raised the matter at the first available Harbour Sitting. There was the East Finchley Fleet, he said; and there was one of their own Order lying in St. Martin’s, neglected and washed up by the tide. Something, he made it clear, had got to be done about it.
He put it to them quite simply, after the formal business of the evening was over and they had elected the two Official delegates—Commodores Extraordinary they were called—to the Margate Conference.
“Brother Mariners,” he said, “there’s one of us in pretty bad shape at this moment. And it wouldn’t surprise me if we lost him. It’s up to the rest of us to do the best we can for him while he’s still here.”
“Who do you mean?” Mr. Vestry interjected.
“I mean Brother Sneyd,” Mr. Biddle replied, still in the same quiet voice that he always used. “He’s in St. Martin’s, Pentonville, and he’s on the danger list, only he doesn’t know it.”
“But what’s wrong with the Pentonville Fleet?” Mr. Vestry asked.
“Hear, hear,” said Mr. Ankerson.
Mr. Biddle paused and began playing with his watch chain.
“ It’s not for me to say anything against another Fleet in the Order,” he replied. “Only somehow if we leave it to them, I don’t reckon that Life-line will ever get run out.”
“Well, what do you want us to do?”
It was Mr. Vestry speaking again; he spoke as though he rather doubted the necessity of a Life-line at all.
“Just go and see him, that’s all,” Mr. Biddle explained. “Make up a party and go down and cheer him up.”
“Don’t you think there’s plenty of visiting to be done on our own chart”—the whole of London was divided up into charts—“without going off into other people?”
“No, Brother Vestry, I don’t,” said Mr. Biddle quite firmly. “There’s too much in-shore sailing going on everywhere to-day. If you don’t rescue a drowning man simply because he’s on someone else’s chart you haven’t got any right to call yourself a Mariner.”
It was straight talking but it had its’ effect. Mr. Vestry hurriedly endeavoured to make his position clearer. “I never said I wouldn’t go to St. Martin’s … ” he began; but the spirit of the meeting had already turned against him.
Even Mr. Ankerson, who usually followed Mr. Vestry’s lead, came out on his own. “I’ll man that Life-line,” he said.
“So will I.”
It was Mr. Hill, the chemist, who spoke this time. He was a tall, pale man with a high, wax-like skull and neat, rimless spectacles. In his time he had done more tha
n his share of sick-bed visiting in the Order; he had carried his queer professional odour of scent and antiseptics into a hundred strange bedrooms.
“Do him the world of good to see a few smiling faces,” Mr. Hill added.
“Have to fix a time, you know,” Mr. Vestry reminded them.
“Thursday’s visiting day,” said Mr. Biddle. “Four till six.”
“I never get away by six,” Mr. Vestry objected. But Mr. Biddle was imperturbable.
“Leave all that to me,” he said. “The R.M.O. is one of us. He’ll let us in if we get there any time before seven. I’ve got all that arranged.”
So the four men shook hands on it. It was after ten and the Harbour Sitting had gone on long enough. There still remained the business of closing the meeting, however, and Mr. Biddle rose solemnly to administer the Oath. “Inasmuch as it has pleased the Great Mariner to bring us safely to this day of grace,” he began speaking slowly and distinctly, “now at night-fall into His hands we commend our ship.”
Everyone stood round with bowed heads and then Mr. Biddle pulled them to attention.
“The Oath,” he said simply. They said it quietly and reverently after him—those seven, secret words which no Mariner since the Order started has ever revealed.
As he walked back home, Mr. Biddle kept congratulating himself on the way the evening had gone. At the thought of all the good they were going to do Mr. Sneyd simply by going there, his heart ripened. And then his mind wandered off on a familiar track and he thought again of the desirable stone-built bijou residence in Dorset that was going to be his one day. The more he let his mind dwell on it, the more it seemed something fairy-like and unobtainable, like a cottage in Atlantis.
“Only another year,” he kept saying, “and then I’m through with things.”
There was no denying it: the thought of life with no Miss Wachett tiptoeing around was very, very agreeable.
The R.M.O. at the hospital seemed rather surprised when Mr. Biddle phoned him up next day. He was not used to having the Mariner’s pass-word spoken in his ear at ten o’clock in the morning. But he was extremely nice about it.
“Very well,” he said. “Any time till seven. You can say I said so.”
Love in Our Time Page 8
