‘And Arthur says that you are intelligent.’ Again Mrs. Prendick hesitated, and this time went on rather quickly. ‘And he’s rather fond of making plans for people.’ She put a hand on Phil’s arm. ‘Phil, dear – Arthur thinks it would answer very nicely.’
‘Jean and me marrying?’ If he was intelligent, Phil thought, there was no point in pretending to be a fool.
‘Of course. If you turn out to be thinking of it, that is.’
It was Phil who hesitated this time. He mustn’t say anything that might be going behind Jean.
‘But isn’t there anybody else?’ he asked. ‘A young man in her own class and all?’
‘Oh, I don’t think so!’ Mrs. Prendick looked surprised. ‘There was somebody, I believe. But my husband – and Jean’s family – very much disapproved of him.’
‘Weren’t his principles good?’ Asking this, Phil saw that he liked Mrs. Prendick so much that he could risk teasing her a bit in turn.
‘I didn’t hear anything against them. But unfortunately he had no money at all. And Jean’s people are not wealthy. They’re not even prosperous.’
‘I see.’ What Phil thought he was seeing was that this other young man couldn’t be Moore. A baronet or whatever Moore was couldn’t have no money at all. ‘So it was off?’ he asked. ‘Would you say Jean would marry, or not marry, who she was told?’
‘I am quite sure that Jean wouldn’t marry without having what are considered the proper feelings, Phil.’
There was something in the way Mrs. Prendick said this that troubled Phil.
‘Love and that?’ he asked awkwardly.
‘And that – certainly.’ Mrs. Prendick had said this with a sudden coldness that made Phil almost start back. And quickly she again laid a hand on his arm. ‘All these things are different,’ she said, ‘when you look back on them long, long after they are over. They are so strong, and – don’t hurry me – so fragile, vulnerable, impermanent. My heart stops, when I see young people in the power of them.’
There was a long silence, and then Mrs. Prendick stood up and turned back towards the house. Phil walked beside her thoughtfully. He was very much impressed by this talk with her. And – at quite the same time – it would be fair to say it didn’t mean a thing. He might have been a schizo, that is, for all the tie-up there seemed to be between the Phil of this rational conversation and the Phil who wanted Jean Canaway. Still, there were more things he wanted to know.
‘You think me and Jean should marry?’ he asked.
Mrs. Prendick paused in her walk to look at him gravely again.
‘I have no advice to give you,’ she said. ‘None at all.’
‘But an opinion, like?’
‘Judging by what I have seen since you arrived, Phil, it would be a marriage starting with one or two advantages. It might also – I just don’t know – be starting with some disadvantages that became – don’t hurry me – prominent and preponderant later on. But then the number of marriages of which all that is true must be very large.’
‘I never thought.’ One Phil – you might say the sagacious Phil – was really seeing that he had never been very largely reflective in this field. But the other Phil – the Phil who was very much physically alive and kicking – was suddenly just wanting to get away from this old lady and to join a much younger one. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I don’t know about afterwards. About marriage much later on, I mean. But you have to take a chance, like.’
‘Of course you have.’ She had turned to him with a renewed warmth, but now she was looking round her garden. ‘It would all stop, otherwise. Nobody to plant roses, and nobody to gather them.’
Phil laughed.
‘But about that long table,’ he said. ‘If me and Jean had one.’
‘Long table?’ She was puzzled. She was old, Phil thought, and didn’t remember.
‘With a house-party and all. Would Jean be feeling, do you think, that I was there at the other end only because she’d had a failure of nerve?’
‘It’s possible, of course.’ Mrs. Prendick was dispassionate again. ‘But you know—’ and she turned to look squarely at him— ‘if Jean does marry you it will be just with failure of nerve that she won’t have the slightest reason to reproach herself.’
‘She’ll be a heroine,’ Phil said. He heard how his own voice sounded happy and careless. It was because, any minute now, he’d be finding Jean. But he realised that Mrs. Prendick had been trying to help him. He was just going to say – no doubt awkwardly – ‘Thanks a lot’ when he saw that she had turned quickly away and entered the house. She would be passing, it occurred to him, that Family Tree, and those gentlemen in wigs who could hardly be the ancestors of a gardener – not even a gardener who worked for a duke.
Chapter Twenty-One
Phil might have been quicker at getting clearer with Jean – at least events wouldn’t have happened so on top of each other on the Monday morning – if it hadn’t been for the way things got across him the evening before. It began with a kind of argument with a cynical old man called Bevington.
It’s not so bad, of course, old people being cynical as young. If you take a straight look at life you see there’s at least an excuse for it in the way life seems to batter people about. You wouldn’t call Mrs. Prendick cynical – but you could guess that there had been times when she’d had to catch hold of herself, and get out into the garden quick, to stop herself going that way. Another thing you can see is that, with some people, a great deal of success doesn’t stop them turning cynical. This Bevington was a regular associate of Prendick’s – not just one of the new contacts being tried out – and Jean said he was a bigger tycoon than her uncle by quite a bit. Certainly you could tell he was a heavy-weight in his line. He must have been over 12st. 71b. all right, and you felt at once the same thing about his personality, as they say. Well, you’d expect what you might call a certain largeness going with that. At least Phil expected it. He’d have been more careful if he hadn’t been imagining Bevington that way.
Phil was sitting with some people after tea in a loggia – it’s an affair Cotswold Manors have several of – and he didn’t drift away because he wasn’t sure when people did. At least he wasn’t sure when men did. For on this occasion it was the women who had drifted away, leaving the men among the sandwiches and fancies and alarmingly fragile tea-cups. It seemed the wrong way round, that. Anyway, it was a general thing he’d noticed about this party – that the sexes tended to separate out. He was surprised, because he’d always supposed that the politer you got the more you kept mixed up. But here was just this group of men, talking finance and that, and this Bevington in the middle of them, starting in on smoking a big cigar.
Phil, of course, kept mum. He wasn’t going to talk finance. His position was kind of delicate, seeing finance was something he very much had and at the same time entirely hadn’t. So he just sat still, letting his eyes wander to another group of guests, who were fooling around with some golf-clubs and golf-balls in a paddock in front of the house. When he didn’t look at them, he looked at the dogs. He liked looking at the dogs, because they reminded him of Alice Thickthorne. Only the funny thing was that Alice’s dogs were a joke. She was always going to look after them, but they didn’t really exist. At Loose Chippings, on the other hand, real dogs were very numerous, and nobody paid any attention to them. It was like they’d been bought with the furniture. Phil supposed there must be a dog-man or dog-maid who came on duty as required.
Phil was watching the dogs when this Bevington spoke to him. He saw afterwards that the man had done this to be polite. But he somehow did it so that what he was really doing was showing the others they weren’t polite, and that it was because he was a cut bigger than they were that he knew it was proper to pay attention to this silent young prole. Which wasn’t quite fair, in a way, seeing that most of them had done their best with Phil at one time or another. So it was all false and awkward, rather. And then Bevington did have this way of talking –
dry, you might say, and almost sarky.
‘And what do you have it in mind to do now, Tombs?’
Tombs again, you see. Phil didn’t mind that. It was quite natural now. Only he didn’t know whether to call Bevington Bevington. He certainly wasn’t going to try the Sir business here. They might have got it wrong.
‘Oh,’ Phil said, ‘I’m going back tomorrow to the friends I’ve been staying with.’ He knew it wasn’t just immediate movements like that that Bevington had meant. But it wasn’t Phil’s idea to get talking about his future at large. And there was a bit of a silence, as if he hadn’t said enough. So, being a shade nervous, he added, ‘Lord Braydon. It’s his son Mark’s my friend.’
There was an immediate quickening of attention. It happens, when you mention a lord.
‘Braydon?’ Bevington said, as if he was trying to think. ‘Now, I wonder what familiar name that has come to mask?’
Phil didn’t understand this, but he knew it wasn’t friendly.
‘Beg pardon?’ he said. And he saw another of these chaps give a kind of indulgent smile.
‘I was wondering about the family name,’ Bevington said. ‘So often one hears these titles, and they turn out to conceal somebody one has known in the City as the highly respectable Smith or Jones – or, for that matter, Rabinovitch or Stein.’
One of the chaps managed a laugh at this. Likely he was hoping, Phil thought, to do some deal with Bevington. But this didn’t stop Phil beginning to feel angry. Idea was, it seemed, that Lord Braydon was what Artie Coutts called a parvenoo. He wouldn’t be any worse if he was, Phil thought. But certainly he wasn’t.
‘I get,’ Phil said. ‘But they been where they are quite a time, these friends of mine. Name’s Thickthorne.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Bevington puffed at his cigar and looked at Phil as friendly as you could think. ‘And have you been there quite a time – as a friend of theirs, I mean?’
Phil flushed. He felt that impertinent was the word for this.
‘Matter of days,’ he said curtly. And then he added, because he didn’t want just to snap at the chap, ‘We got interests in common, Lord Mark and me.’
He could hear how comical it sounded. He could see how comical it sounded. Because they were all – having manners, after all – being quite careful not to smile. Afterwards, he was to decide that what this Bevington said next wasn’t meant malicious. Only he had that dry way of saying things. Bevington really saw it as he said. He was giving an honest warning. At least that was the proper thing to think about him, seeing you oughtn’t to think evil.
‘I’ve heard it remarked,’ Bevington said – and he took another puff at his fat cigar – ‘that alert rapacity is the keynote of an impoverished noblesse.’
It took a second for Phil to work this out. There were two unfamiliar words in it. Then he did.
‘They don’t know,’ he said. ‘Not like Mr. Prendick.’
There was a silence. And he felt he’d got this wrong. In a way what he’d said was fair. He was at Loose Chippings, and being smiled on as Prendick’s niece’s suitor – that was the word – because of the money. But at the same time it wasn’t fair. Because he’d come here, after all, knowing what he was doing. He’d agreed to be Prendick’s guest. And Prendick was a decent old chap in his way. If Prendick made his money out of a kind of mild social disease – well, it wasn’t for Phil to take up a parson’s attitude to that. Anyway, he ought to have kept his mouth shut. Instead of which – well, he just opened it again.
‘I like them at Thickthorne,’ he said. ‘They like things and people for themselves—see? They’re not always doing sums.’
‘Sums?’ Bevington said. He said it like he was absolutely charming. But there was an ugly look in his eye.
Phil remembered he liked words. They stuck in his head.
They may be funnies,’ he said. ‘But with them it’s not the bleeding cash nexus all the time.’
You might have expected another silence after this. But Bevington spoke instantly, and as easy as easy. And he was standing up.
‘Shall we all,’ he said, ‘stroll over and join our golfing friends?’
It had seemed to Phil that this was a tactful move on Bevington’s part. Phil had allowed himself to out with something that didn’t make much sense – not seeing he was a kind of apprentice capitalist spending his first days in the shops. It had been what these people called speaking out of turn, all right. So he went along with the others, not feeling apologetic exactly, but quite wanting to please.
The gardens were at the back of the house, and this was a long paddock that ran down the front of it and quite a way beyond. It was just on the other side of all those mushrooms and Jaguars. There were three men practising what was called driving. They had knobbly clubs on steel shafts, and they seemed to have dozens of balls, and away at the far end of the paddock was a boy that collected the balls every now and then and brought them back on a bicycle. It seemed to Phil rather a feeble way of putting in time, particularly as it seemed so easy. The three men weren’t young or athletic. In fact they were just the elderly out-of-condition sort that Prendick collected. But they simply steadied their red faces and pivoted on their fat bellies and swung their thick arms, and away the ball went far further than you’d think it could.
‘You a golfer?’ one of the men said to Phil as he was standing there. He was a friendly man.
‘No,’ Phil said. And he added incautiously, ‘Never tried.’
‘Then try now,’ the man said idly.
‘Yes, try now,’ Bevington said. And he smiled at Phil like they were father and son.
‘I don’t mind if I do,’ Phil said. He was a cricketer of sorts and he’d been a fair shot. So he knew he had a good eye. It wasn’t until he had the club in his hand, and felt the unfamiliar balance of it, that he had misgivings.
‘Like this,’ the friendly man said. And he went on to give instructions. All the others, of course, were standing around now. Phil swung the club like he’d seen it done, and he watched the ball for all he was worth. Sure enough, he hit it. For a second he thought he’d hit it good. But something must have been wrong, for it buried itself in grass not a dozen yards ahead.
‘Topped it,’ the friendly man said. ‘But not a bad start. Try again.’
‘Yes,’ Bevington said lightly. ‘Try again.’
This time Phil didn’t hit it at all. The ball stayed put on its silly little peg. As Phil had put a lot of force into his stroke, the club – and his body with it – swung round in rather an uncontrolled fashion. It must have looked pretty pitiful. So he felt a fool. He saw that two or three of the men had turned away in a carefully casual fashion, as if they were wanting not to embarrass him. This, of course, embarrassed him a lot. And that didn’t help with his third attempt. Again he missed the ball completely.
‘Much better,’ the friendly man said unexpectedly. ‘You miss it, of course. But the action was right. You’ve got the idea now. You’ll do it next time.’
Phil saw the man was meaning what he said. He also saw that some of the women had come out on the sweep and were watching from there. He didn’t dare to try to make out if Jean was among them. He started once more addressing the ball. This time he had to cope not only with his lack of skill but with a confusion that might get on top of him. He addressed the ball very carefully.
‘I’d move your left foot back a little,’ Bevington said softly.
Phil did as he was told. The friendly man started to say something, but stopped when he saw Phil had begun his stroke. And this time it was all right. Phil felt the head of the club take the ball crisp and clean. The ball went off like a bullet from a gun. Only it didn’t go where the other men’s balls had been going. It went off at an angle like you wouldn’t believe – pretty well straight the way Phil’s nose had been pointing as he stood there. A fraction of a second later there was a crash, and the windscreen of one of the grandest cars on the sweep turned to what might have been a sheet of milk. Phi
l had a vivid instantaneous picture of it – one windscreen gone blind like that and all the other windscreens glaring at him as if he’d been after them too.
Somebody did a shout of laughter. Other people did what you’d call exclamations of well-bred dismay. One of the red-faced men standing round Phil had got redder-faced still, and he said ‘It doesn’t matter a bit’ very quickly, so that Phil knew the car must be his.
Phil heard himself say ‘I’ll pay’. Afterwards, lying awake in the night, he found there was no comfort in his feeling that nobody had heard this last clueless effort.
Chapter Twenty-Two
He was late down next morning. The fact was that, in spite of there being, you’d think, nothing in the world that counted except just seeing Jean, he had to struggle with himself before he could face the house-party again. As he passed through the hall he looked at the place where letters were laid out, and he saw there was one for him. It had been sent on from Thickthorne, and it was in his auntie’s writing. Of course the writing wasn’t educated, and the envelope it was on was cheap and flimsy, and Phil felt a bit embarrassed as he picked it up – which shows you, clearly enough, that Loose Chippings wasn’t being any too good for him. He picked up the letter and shoved it into a pocket before going along to get some breakfast. If he’d thought at all, he’d probably have gone somewhere and opened the letter quietly. For his auntie wasn’t a letter-writer, and her writing at all must mean something.
Breakfast at Loose Chippings was a time when people were very casual with each other. The women mostly had trays in their rooms, like they were in a flash hotel, and the men made a great business of just a nod and a word and then picking up a newspaper. Phil put up a good show doing this himself – it wasn’t much use being what Jean had called assimilative if you couldn’t play up that way when you wanted to – and behind a copy of what turned out to be the Daily Telegraph he started trying to get himself straight.
The Man Who Won the Pools Page 20
