He thought people were looking at him. And he thought, That won’t do. Walk on. Ignore. Marble Arch, Bayswater Road, walk to Oxford, A40. But he was some place quite quiet – it must have been a side-street – when things began going round on him. He could manage, while they just went round slowly. Only they went faster – and then they went up and down as well. It was like the Whip – the one that accelerates as it corners, and that only some kind of centrifugal force keeps your back glued to as it swings.
Then the force failed, and he was flying through space.
‘What’s your name?’ the old chap asked.
‘Phil Tombs.’
‘What’s your address?’
Phil told him.
‘What day of the week is it?’
‘Monday.’
‘Can you remember what you were doing at eleven o’clock this morning?’
‘I was in the train, coming to London.’
The old chap straightened up, and spoke to somebody behind him.
‘All right there, too,’ he said. ‘If there was a bit of concussion, it’s gone. And – as I said – nothing broken. But I’m not sure you oughtn’t to have in the police.’
‘No!’ Phil said – loudly, as he believed. ‘I’ll be boggered if I have the dicks.’
‘I think it’s for him to say, you know.’ A familiar voice spoke from somewhere outside Phil’s range of vision. ‘Unless you insist, Doctor, as you’ve a right to do.’
‘Have it your own way.’ Phil could see that the old chap was stowing something away in a black bag. ‘He could have fallen down a flight of steps, I suppose. For legal purposes, that is to say.’
‘That’s what I done,’ Phil said. His Oxford Varsity grammar wasn’t standing up to this business of coming to his senses in two successive unknown environments. But he was quite clear about the police.
‘Then good evening to you,’ the doctor said briskly. And he went out.
Phil struggled into a sitting position. It was becoming quite an act with him. And he stared at Mark Thickthorne.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘– what is this, anyway? How’d I come here?’
He was in a bedroom about the size of his own bedroom at home. It had the same sort of sloping roof and attic window. The furnishing wasn’t so good. At least it wasn’t anything like so new. There were two chairs that had once been painted white and that had tattered silk on them, like you might see in a museum. There was an old battered cupboard with gold on the corners, and there was a small old dark picture of a man on a horse, and another man holding its head, and a big house in the background – but you could see that what the chap had been told to paint was the horse. The bed he was on was quite small, but it was the queer old kind that has a lid to it, like you might expect it was going to rain and didn’t trust your roof. There wasn’t much else.
‘Some people brought you,’ Thickthorne said. ‘Sensible of them. Of course, they found you only a hundred yards away. Coming to see me, were you? I was hoping you would. Seems you were robbed. Shall you be all right for a few minutes? I’m going to make some coffee. The old saw-bones said you could have that.’
‘I was robbed, all right.’ Phil stretched both his arms, and found they weren’t hurting too badly. He looked at Thickthorne in wonder. Thickthorne looked back at him without any wonder – as if this whole affair was absolutely nothing out of the way. ‘Robbed and clobbered,’ Phil said. ‘But how did anybody know to bring me here? Your home, is it?’
‘Not exactly. Just a useful hide-out I keep in town. My idea rather is to take you home, if by any chance you’d care to come.’ Thickthorne grinned cheerfully. ‘A few days to repair that damage. We could talk. And with my father too. You’d like him, I think. Same sound ideas.’
Phil couldn’t think that he had any ideas, sound or otherwise. But he ought to be grateful.
‘Thanks a lot,’ he said. ‘And coffee will be just the job. But I still don’t see—’
‘How they got you here? It was frightfully lucky. Whoever robbed you left just one thing in your pockets. Remember? I gave you a visiting card at Paddington.’
‘A visiting card?’ Phil said. It didn’t mean a thing to him.
‘Here it is.’ Thickthorne picked up a battered scrap of pasteboard from a little table and handed it to Phil as he went out of the room.
Phil looked at it. He had one eye in working order to do that with. And he saw that the thing read:
Lord Mark Thickthorne
Thickthorne Court
Notts.
Part III
COUNTRY HOUSES
Chapter Eighteen
There were things made Phil nervous on the railway journey next morning. He’d never travelled with a lord – not with any lord at all, let alone one you had to keep an eye on about the communication cord. Then there was how he himself still looked. Just one scrap of trouble with a guard this time, he was sure, and they’d both be run in at once. Not that he minded having a few matters to worry about, if they took his mind off Jean. Forget it, was the only advice he could give himself over that – or anyway forget it for now. She’d been carried away like she hadn’t ought to have been, and he’d have to think of it – what she’d done in that astounding second – as showing what can happen when it gets to a bit of violence. He didn’t blame her. He wouldn’t have her not be a bit primitive. But that it had been some queer reflex from his blood on her hand – well, that was a thing you had to think about. But better not get thinking yet.
He’d taken to this Thickthorne, all right – and Thickthorne seemed to have taken to him. At first Phil had been afraid that as well as being a lord he might be a bore – gassing about his gas-projects all the time. But it wasn’t like that. He talked a bit about it but not a lot, so that Phil finished the journey quite feeling he’d like to hear more. Lord Thickthorne – if that’s what he was, but he’d said with a laugh it wasn’t exactly that – had a wild, roving kind of mind. He talked about everything with a quick interest you might think was put on as a kind of politeness, only Phil felt it wasn’t just a hundred-per-cent that. He was full of curiosity about things Phil might think. In fact the only thing he wasn’t curious about was what Phil was. He had rather the air that he and Phil had been at school together round about the age of six, and that whatever had happened to each of them since that time could perfectly comfortably keep. There was a bad patch when Phil felt that this was a sort of coming it over him that he didn’t like. Then it occurred to him that it was politeness, this was – but not in the least of a chilly keep-your-distance sort. Finally, there was the fact that Mark Thickthorne was mad. Nobody who wasn’t mad could have done that on the train the day before. Phil hadn’t ever liked madness. In fact he’d always thought it could be worse than anything – worse, even, than something beginning to change inside your bones because of fall-out. Mark Thickthorne was suddenly showing him you could be mad and vivid and gay. Anyway, if you were a mad scientist. All the mad scientists Phil had read about were very sinister indeed. So he found this one doing him quite a lot of good.
He liked, for instance, hearing about the Sargent Society. Sargent was a declassy American railroad-king, it seemed, in a story by Rudyard Kipling, and Kipling had made out how unspeakably low-class he was by having him stop an English express train at the bottom of his garden because he wanted to board it and get to London. Thickthorne, it turned out, didn’t like Kipling. He liked Sargent. And the Sargent Society was going to be an Anti-British-Railways affair, and anybody who belonged to it had to promise to eat a pound of coal for every pound he used except in liquid form. Of course it was alarming to hear Thickthorne getting off on this tack. Still, when he shouted with laughter, Phil shouted too – and then in a minute Thickthorne would be off again about the critical temperature of ethylene or the residual problems of radiation in double-walled vessels. Their journey, although it involved having lunch on the train, seemed to take no time at all. The place they got off at was called Thickthorne. It g
ave Phil quite a queer feeling, that. Getting excited about the aristocracy, he told himself sardonic. But he didn’t really feel that way about this chap.
They were to be met, Thickthorne had said – and Phil had wondered by what. If you’re a lord then your father’s a duke, he supposed. Unlike poor old Hannay, you probably do really have a second Rolls. But all that was at this little station was a girl with a pony and trap. Thickthorne called it the governess-car, so Phil decided the girl must be the governess. But she seemed a bit young for it, and quite soon it turned out she was Mark’s kid sister. She was like Mark, for that matter, in the way she looked at you without any appearance of doing sums. That – it occurred to him oddly – made her different both from Beryl and from Jean. But then she was only a kid – this Alice Thickthorne was – that you’d never think of looking at except innocent like.
‘How do you do?’ Alice said crisply, and shook hands as if she was entirely grown-up. She took a good look at Phil’s face. ‘Come a purler, haven’t you?’ she added without notable anxiety.
‘Yes,’ Phil said. ‘Just about that.’
‘Was the horse all right?’ This time, Alice sounded rather more concerned.
‘Nonsense, Alice,’ Mark said. ‘You’ve only one idea in your head. And Tombs hasn’t been on a horse.’
‘Never have been,’ Phil said cheerfully to the kid. ‘Except wooden,’ he added.
‘I’ve got a wooden one still,’ she said. This was mildly puzzling Phil when she added: ‘Where’s your luggage?’
‘I haven’t got any,’ he said. This second confession rather confused him.
‘No clothes and things?’ She was quite matter-of-fact. ‘But you can have Mark’s. He hardly ever wears any. I mean, he hardly ever bothers to change, or wash, or anything like that.’
‘That so?’ Phil said. He was surprised. He’d always supposed that lords felt it due to their position to have three baths a day. ‘I got some clothes at home,’ he added rather inconsequently.
‘Where’s that?’ Alice had opened a minute door in the governess-car and waved Phil in.
‘Oxford.’
‘Oh, yes. I’m supposed to be going there the year after next. If I have the brains, which is held doubtful. Would you like to drive?’
‘Yes, I’ll drive,’ Phil said.
And, somehow, he did. When he pulled the reins in the wrong way and the pony came to a halt, it was natural to say something about the communication cord. And Alice seemed to understand at once.
‘Mark, you great idiot!’ she said. ‘Not again?’
‘He done it,’ Phil said. ‘But we got away with it.’
They all shouted with laughter. And the pony, taking this as a signal, walked on. He didn’t really need attending to, because he was now in a country lane that he knew quite as well as the Thickthornes did. Not that the scene was entirely rural. Hovering on all its horizons were pit-heads, factory chimneys and smudges of smoke. Phil found it well-balanced and agreeable. But Alice seemed to divine that he was a person of urban background.
‘I’m afraid this is a bit slow,’ she said. ‘But it will be a year, you see, before I’m old enough to have a licence to drive the car on public roads. But of course I can drive. So I can take you round the park, if you like. There are great rivers of bluebells in some places now.’
‘Bluebells?’ Phil said. It was a queer one that, somehow. ‘Do you find that people come in and – tear them up?’
‘Oh, yes – most atrociously. But I go after them with the dogs.’
‘I see,’ Phil said. He was thinking it was queer, too, that this child must be the same age as the clueless little tart-in-the-making he’d managed to haul out of McLeod’s place. ‘Big dogs?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely enormous. Mastiffs, St Bernards, Elk Hounds, Irish Wolf Hounds – and, of course, the Seven Sisters.’
‘The Seven Sisters?’ Phil was impressed and alarmed.
‘They’re my very own seven Bloodhound bitches.’
‘She’s talking utter nonsense,’ Mark Thickthorne said. He spoke as if this, in a Thickthorne, was pretty well unheard of. ‘But here’s the drive. We’ll be there in half an hour.’
The Thickthornes’ father – who was going to turn out, rather bewilderingly, to be Lord Braydon to you and the Marquis of Braydon to strangers – was walking up and down an enormous mouldering terrace, fighting intrusive weeds with a flame-gun. The house behind him was clearly the big house in the painting in Mark Thickthorne’s bedroom in London – only it had grown yet bigger, and decidedly more shabby, since the painting had been done. Lord Braydon himself was small but not shabby. His tweeds were as good as Phil’s, and had the advantage of not having been through a fight to the death. When he saw the governess-car he extinguished the flame-gun and came across at once.
‘How do you do?’ Lord Braydon said. He spoke with affable vagueness – until he took a look at Phil’s face. ‘I hope the brute hadn’t to be shot?’ he then added earnestly.
‘Tombs hasn’t been riding,’ Mark said. ‘He’s been robbed.’
‘So have I – for years.’ Lord Braydon, as he shook hands, appeared to feel that here was a bond established between Phil and himself at the start. ‘You won’t, I judge, have read my Thoughts on Rent. If I can find a copy and persuade you to turn it over, I shall value your comments on it. I worked it up from one or two things I said in the House of Lords. Are you interested in apples?’
‘I don’t know much about them,’ Phil said.
‘Capital. We must certainly take a walk through the orchards. It is an area in which the impact of fresh minds is badly needed. Sir Isaac Newton was, I suppose, the last man to give the apple any serious attention. But first we must have some tea. Alice, my dear, persuade somebody to make tea, while Mark shows his friend to his room. Later we will take a little stroll through the labs. Mr. Tombs won’t fail to be interested in our improved cascade process, to say nothing of the new continuous vertical retort house. But of course—’ Lord Braydon added by way of courteous afterthought— ‘there are one or two other things, if your interest happens to be in their direction. Several marbles an ancestor of mine had on the quiet from a fellow called Elgin. And a Poussin that came to us at the time of the d’Aumale marriage.’
‘The level pointing finger,’ Alice said suddenly, ‘and the horses of the sun.’
‘Particularly the horses,’ Mark said. ‘They’re as wooden as the one in the nursery, which is why Alice adores them.’
‘I see,’ Phil said. And in a way he did. He didn’t, that is to say, find these mild mysteries awkward. It came, he supposed, of their being nice people, Mark Thickthorne’s lot.
And there was nothing, of course, to surprise Phil in Thickthorne Court. He’d been through plenty such places with Beryl at half a crown a time. It wasn’t as big as Blenheim Palace, although the idea was very much the same. There was a busload of people being trailed through it now, and it did seem a bit queer to Phil to catch a glimpse of them at the far end of a room, barred off by a long red rope.
‘You coming into all this?’ he asked Mark. He was wondering how much of the property you could buy for a quarter of a million nicker. Not, of course, that he felt drawn that way. No occasion for places of this sort now. The Thickthornes, he supposed, must feel much as Noah’s grand-kids did about the outsize houseboat down at the bottom of the garden. Distinguished, in a historical way. But hard to know what to do with.
‘Come into Thickthorne? Good lord, no.’ Mark appeared to see this as obvious, although Phil couldn’t understand why. ‘My brother will do that. But he’s away at present, governing some islands. Now, here’s your room, and that’s mine, over there. You’ll find you do have a bathroom – although you’ll also find we don’t contrive to do anything much in a Ritzy way. If you go and wash, I’ll start looking out some clothes.’ Mark Thickthorne smiled happily at his guest. ‘Including some pretty old ones, so that we can do a bit of real mucking around.’
‘I use a boiler-suit most times for that,’ Phil said. ‘But anything will do.’
‘Boiler-suits are quite a line with us,’ Mark said with increasing satisfaction. ‘We’re workers, you know. Or rather you don’t. You think we’re quite agreeable eccentrics, spending easy wealth on a hobby or fad. Isn’t that right?’
Phil felt himself blushing.
‘I never said that, I didn’t.’ Phil thought that his rather pitiful confusion must be redressed. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘what do I call you, like? Your lordship – that proper?’
Mark Thickthorne’s chuckles turned to loud inoffensive laughter. ‘It wouldn’t do at all. You’d find it disconcert the servants. There still seem to be a few around, from time to time. I’d be pleased if you tried out Mark.’
‘Can do,’ Phil said rather gruffly. ‘But what about your dad?’
‘Just Lord Braydon – but not too often. “Sir” would be all right too. He’s getting reconciled to it.’
‘Reconciled to it?’ Phil supposed that the march of democracy must be involved in this.
‘Well, it shows he’s getting a bit elderly. Not that my brother and I haven’t always called him that.’
That seemed to Phil about the queerest of the lot. But of course he didn’t show it.
‘And that kid sister?’ he asked.
‘You’ll call her Alice, if you call me Mark.’
‘Then that’s fixed, Mark. All clear.’
Mark Thickthorne shook his head.
‘It isn’t all clear,’ he said. ‘Not till you see we’re skilled men, my father and I. Then we’ll call it quits, Phil.’
Phil did see, and did have to call it that. It wasn’t that he didn’t know his Properties of Gases. If you’d asked him ‘Is it technically sound to assume that real gases are perfect?’ he’d have answered at once, and if you’d said ‘Write a short essay distinguishing between the theoretical contributions of Boyle and Charles’ the probability is that he’d have got pretty well everything right except the spelling. He’d have known, too, that it was in west Yorkshire that they pioneered piping gas over long distances, and he’d have had a good deal to say – in fact, he said it – about the gap between that simple sort of operation and Mark Thickthorne’s extravagant visions. But of course he wasn’t either a chemist or an engineer, and although he ended the day feeling it would be a good idea to be both, he ended it with his head swimming as well. It was true that when he’d examined the working model of the Thickthorne improved cascade process he’d seen at once how the expansion valves could be improved. But then he’d done Refrigeration at the ‘Tec – it being a pretty good thing to do – and of course a cascade process is nothing but refrigeration in a big way. He’d have done better, he knew, if the Thickthorne passion had been for electricity. Still, he didn’t exhibit himself as a fool, and when he was out of his depth he said so.
The Man Who Won the Pools Page 17
