‘What?’
‘Bernard,’ said Adela more loudly.
‘I heard you say my name. I was asking in effect what you wanted, not for a repetition of what you had said. As my use of a falling rather than a rising inflection might have suggested.’
‘Oh, honestly … You’ll go in and see George, won’t you?’
‘What about?’ Bernard seemed struck by unlooked-for possibilities.
‘You know very well. Just see him.’
‘Just seeing him would hold few enough attractions. Talking to him, which is what you mean, holds fewer still. Being talked to by him, that is.’
‘I freely undertake to give you the undeniable support of my companionship in your charitable enterprise, Bernard,’ said Shorty.
‘Don’t forget it’s because of you he’s here,’ said Adela to Bernard.
‘What?’
‘Don’t forget it’s because of—’
‘Oh, what nonsense,’ said Bernard lightly. ‘It was all your idea, as you well know.’
‘In his condition … given his circumstances …’ Adela’s head moved about on its short neck as if she were looking for physical escape. ‘He hadn’t got anybody else. You must realize …’
‘That bloody dog.’
‘But you can’t expect—’
‘We all realize, Adela,’ said Shorty. ‘Even Bernard when he’s not playing silly buggers. You go off now before the shops fill up. Go on.’
‘When will you be back?’ asked Bernard. ‘In case some man comes or rings up or something.’
‘I’ve told you: as soon as I’ve been to the supermarket and the cleaners and the—’
‘When will you be back?’
‘What o’clock is what the brigadier desires to be informed,’ said Shorty.
Adela looked at her watch again. ‘With luck, about twelve.’
‘Ah,’ said Bernard. ‘Twelve-thirty. Ish.’
Two
Stumbling slightly over the threshold, Adela Bastable left Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage by its front door. The house, standing at the edge of a fair-sized tract of woodland and once, perhaps, the abode of gamekeepers, had been her and her brother’s and Shorty’s home for eleven years. Adela, to whom it had fallen to conduct all the dealings, had picked the place up cheap from an artistic couple who said they had found it too large for them. They might have added that they had also found it too cold in winter, in too much disrepair to be renovated except at great expense, and too isolated: three miles from the nearest village and nearly seven from the nearest town, Newmarket. Nobody would deliver milk or newspapers. So it had not been cheap in the sense of being a bargain, only in that of being what, for the new occupants, it had had to be – low in price and not actually uninhabitable. To Adela, it was a pretty house too, prettier than anywhere else she had ever lived, at any rate on the outside.
As always when leaving or returning, she paused now and looked up at the long, crooked façade with conscious pleasure. Eighteenth-century timber-frame was what she called the style of the house when asked, and sometimes when not. She would admit to herself that she was not really sure about either half of the description. The estate agent had been emphatic as to the period, but had turned vague, though staying emphatic, when asked to specify a date. It was her guess that the building had originally been called something else now left far behind by the flight of whim that had retitled it. The timber-frame issue was unclear too, in that there was not very much timber involved. But never mind: what with the quiet, the nearby woods and all their wild life, the results of Shorty’s work in the garden, it was far from a bad place to end up.
She had been in the driver’s seat of her 1967 Morris 1100 estate car for some little time before she realized that the ignition key, since it was neither in its socket nor in her handbag, must be on her dressing-table. Back in the house, she passed Bernard on his way to the sitting-room. He was limping heavily, but then he could have heard her come in. When she explained about the key, he said with a smile that it was a good idea to go and fetch it, because he had always found that cars worked better with their ignition switched on. Adela mounted the steep, creaking stairs. She wished, as she still occasionally found herself doing, that her brother would let her love him, but of course it was too late for that. It had been too late since they were children before the first war.
Finding somebody she could love had been the main quest of Adela’s life until about the time of her fiftieth birthday, when its impracticability had become clear to her. The prospect of receiving love she had abandoned much earlier. She had never been kissed with passion, and not often with even mild and transient affection. This she explained to herself as the result of her extreme ugliness. She was a bulky, top-heavy woman with a red complexion, hair that had always been thin, and broad lips. To love somebody, she had found, was impossible unless something was given in return: not indeed love, nor so much as positive liking, but interest, notice. Her career in hospital catering, taken up after she had been told, without further explanation, that she was not the right type to become a nurse, had brought her into contact with thousands of people until her retirement in 1961. None of them had become her friend, in the sense that none had agreed to go to a theatre or a coffee-shop or a sale with her more than a couple of times, and so she had lived alone throughout her working life. Now, after Bernard had made his astonishing offer, that she could housekeep for him and Shorty, she was among people and, with all the difficulties this seemed inevitably to bring, happier than at any time since her childhood. Her only fear was of falling helplessly ill and having nobody to leave in charge; it was a comfort that Dr Mainwaring, whom she trusted in medical matters, had told her that her gastric ulcer, while bringing her occasional bouts of pain and nausea, was under control, and that she was otherwise in good condition for a woman of seventy-one.
The Morris lurched and swung its way along the fifty yards of unmade track to the road. She must tell Shorty to have another go at filling in the pot-holes, which seemed to reappear with every heavy fall of rain, such as the mid-autumn skies now threatened. Adela was late and would have to face the traffic and the crowds, but she knew she could manage that.
Three
‘You’d be far better off in a home,’ sang Shorty, vigorously running a wire pad round a frying-pan, vigorously enough to shorten its effective life by one per cent or so – ‘you’d be far better off in a home …’ He had picked up the tune in his Army days, and singing it was largely an unconscious habit. Not altogether: now and then the thought would recur to him that these words might pass for a comment on his situation in life, so Adela heard them from him fairly regularly. He sang them through again several times in the course of preparing the sprouts and potatoes and tidying up the little dark lopsided kitchen.
A good half of the space here was taken up by a bare rectangular table; farmhouse style, it was sometimes said, and whenever it was said Shorty would mutter to himself that the thing must have come from the part of the farmhouse they kept for the shower that shovelled the shit. The table had indeed a cheap, hasty look. Round it stood some upright chairs, no two the same, lone survivors of otherwise vanished sets. The china crowding the dresser showed further unplanned variety, also the cutlery drawer, in which Shorty laid the final egg-eroded teaspoon.
He went to work briefly on the floor with a broom, leaving some fragments behind among the irregularities of the tiles, shoving the majority through a useful crack under the sink. The pit beneath must fill up some day, but he reckoned it would last his time. After shaking the greasy rush mat in the outer doorway, he replaced it in front of the range, where a log fire burned. Really successful fires at Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage were far from the rule, but this one had never quite gone out for over two months, and was now well on the way to gaining a hold. He checked the gas-oven (the range was never hot enough for actual cooking) just as the clock above the mantelshelf, stolen by him
from a station waiting-room one drunken wartime night, struck the hour.
‘Eleven ack-emma,’ said Shorty. ‘Time for a burn and a nip.’ He took cheap cigarettes and a book of matches from the pockets of his navy-blue cardigan and, while lighting up, considered. How recently had he punished the bottle he kept behind the vacuum cleaner in the cupboard under the stairs? Probably not since the previous morning. He went and poured a good, a very good, half-tumbler of Dr Macdonald’s, a proprietary mixture of Scotch whisky and British wine, and drank with a will. The taste he found rather unpleasant, but if he had found it pleasant he might be drinking more of the stuff and becoming incapable earlier in the day. It was cheap, too, and Adela never missed a chance of going on at everyone about the need for economy, always adding, with the show of fair play that gave him the pip so consistently, that she had no real right to go on at him, because he contributed more to the household budget than anybody else; and then sometimes adding, when they were alone, that at seventy-three he should drink less for his health’s sake. Drink more for his age’s sake, he would say to himself.
He topped up his glass and recapped and replaced the bottle, which was beginning to look a bit of a bloody fool after what he had done to it. To him, the point about this bottle was that Adela knew it was there and, if she judged only by the rate its contents disappeared, must form a falsely reassuring estimate of his daily intake. He imagined, wrongly, that she did not know he knew she knew the bottle was there and, also wrongly, that she did not know about the bottles respectively on top of his wardrobe, in his otherwise empty suitcase behind the box-room door, and among the gardening tools in the coal-house. Further, he kept forgetting, because of being drunk at the time, that the off-licence van normally brought him his fresh stocks at the end of its daily round, just when Adela would be in the kitchen making tea; so throwing a careful three-quarters of the empties away in the woods was labour wasted, except as exercise. The whole matter of Shorty, Adela and the bottles could be taken as, among other things, illustrating in him that strange, inseparable mixture of real, almost instinctive obedience and covert, largely futile disobedience which long Army service in the ranks so often creates. And Derrick Shortell’s service had been long, from enlistment in 1914 as a boy soldier to discharge in 1945 with the rank of company quartermaster-sergeant, and an MM, and an unofficial gratuity of just under £12,000 from flogging petrol, meat etc. to civilians.
He felt a twinge at his anus. ‘You are a sodding liar,’ he said to it. ‘Not an hour ago you were on about that was that for the day – what, you bother me again? not you, and butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. All right, fuck you, I’ll go quietly. That bleeding wine. Thought Scotch was supposed to be binding.’ His drink finished, he hurried outside and round the corner to the lavatory there. As always, it was a quick business. ‘Not like poor old bloody Bernard,’ said Shorty. ‘Half an hour’s nothing. Piles must be hell.’
Perhaps it was piles of unusual hellishness that had that morning intensified Bernard’s always noticeable pallor. Entering the sitting-room a couple of minutes later, Shorty was struck by this and by how old it made the other look. Or rather, how extra old. His eyes were perpetually bloodshot and on the point of running over; half the flesh in his face seemed to have settled about and beneath the downturned lower lip; he was generally fat, again in a bottom-heavy way. More like eighty-five than seventy-five, thought Shorty, whereas he himself, with only a few wrinkles, an upright carriage and a lot of dark brown left in his hair, could pass for sixty-odd, at any rate when reasonably sober. In this he was correct. At moments like the present it struck him how hard it was to believe that, thirty-five years ago, on a couple of dozen occasions, he had let this man make love to him, and had enjoyed it; not hard to remember – that was all too easy – but hard to believe.
On the transistor radio, a woman was saying with conviction that you had to let the mixture marinate for at least two hours beforehand.
‘You listening to this, Bernard?’
‘What?’
‘Are you listening to this?’ asked Shorty more clearly.
‘With inexhaustible fascination. No, in fact I’m waiting for something else to come on.’
‘Is it important?’
‘Of course not. Why?’
‘I thought we might get George done.’
‘Oh Christ, not now.’
‘Either we get him done now, Bernard, you and me together, or you do him on your own while I go into the garden and plant some of those grape hyacinth bulbs for naturalizing. Or you don’t do him at all and Adela gets to know. The decision,’ ended Shorty in what he thought of as a half-crown accent, ‘is entirely in your very capable hands, my dear fellow.’
‘It’s raining.’
‘Not enough to bother me it isn’t, and it’s just right for the bulbs.’
‘Bloody horticulture,’ said Bernard in his slurred tones. ‘All right. Let’s go and do him.’
Four
George Zeyer, Emeritus Professor of Central European History at the University of Northampton, was lying in bed upstairs waiting to be done. In a different sense he had been done already, when Shorty had helped him to the bathroom and later back. Five months previously, George had had a severe stroke that had incapacitated him with hemiplegia, that condition in which the motor muscles of half the sufferer’s body are paralysed. In this case, George being right-handed, it was the right half. He had come, or been brought, to Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage because, as Adela had observed earlier that morning, and many times earlier than that, he had had nowhere else to go, except into a hospital ward. Bernard, once the husband of his late sister, Vera, was his only surviving connection outside his native Bohemia, which he had not seen since the age of ten. Now, at an exact seventy, he was the youngest of the household, a small man who had often been called dapper in the past and was still handsome in his fashion. He had abundant white hair, clear eyes of an unusual light brown and a healthy skin.
Heralded by the groaning and popping of loose floor-boards, Bernard and Shorty came into the small bedroom, which was damp but, thanks to an electric heater, not cold. George looked over his half-glasses at them and smiled with the left side of his face. Mr Pastry, however, gave an unsteady growl; his sight had been failing for some time and now, as he approached the age of sixteen, his sense of smell too might have started to weaken. He was a white bull-terrier cross, with short legs, a lot of pink on his muzzle, and an odour that was not so much unpleasant as disquieting in some way hard to define.
‘Now now, you silly old thing, it’s only kind Uncle Bernard and kind Uncle Shorty,’ said Shorty. ‘Hallo, George.’
‘Yes, do be quiet, Mr Pastry.’ George’s voice was as indistinct as Bernard’s, but not in the same style. ‘If you go on behaving like that, people aren’t going to want to know you. Just you pull yourself together. That’s a good dog. We really can’t have you interfering in the conversation. I should think so, too. Sorry, chaps – do sit down.’
‘Thank you,’ said Bernard, ‘but when my leg’s giving me gyp, as it seems determined to go on doing, I find standing up tends to help a little.’
‘In that case, of course. I’m sorry you’ve been having a bad time.’
‘How are you, George?’ asked Shorty with some emphasis, seating himself on the walnut Queen Anne chair that George had formerly used at his desk.
‘Oh, I’ve been all right, since we last met. I say, have you fellows seen about this?’
With his left hand, George tapped the copy of the Daily Telegraph that lay open in front of him on the plaid blanket. It was naturally the issue of the preceding day, naturally because of what had become a household custom. He liked a newspaper to read with his breakfast; the newspaper of any given morning did not arrive until Adela had fetched it from the village, and even after that was not available to him until Bernard, in particular, had quite finished with it. So George kept up with events tw
enty-four hours in arrears. To one who was interested in long-term movements of history rather than day-to-day occurrences, and who took the precaution of never listening to news broadcasts, the delay hardly mattered.
‘Seen about what?’ asked Bernard after a pause.
‘This man Banda. Talking his head off again. Some trade agreement he evidently doesn’t care for.’
‘He hasn’t been kidnapped, has he?’ asked Shorty.
‘It doesn’t say so here. Was there something on the wireless?’
‘Because if he had, it would be a Banda-snatch, wouldn’t it? I worked that out the other day.’
Bernard wheeled towards the window as abruptly as if a terrorist had just that moment swung into view outside it.
‘I suppose it would,’ said George judicially.
‘And they’d write the details up in a Banda-log.’
‘Would they? Who?’
‘Oh, some blokes round the place.’
‘Well, anyway, to start with he must have a, a thing, you know, you go about in it, it’s got, er, they turn round. A very expensive one, you can be sure. You drive it, or someone else does in his case. Probably gold, gold on the outside. Like that other chap. A bar – no. And probably a gold, er, going to sleep on it. And the same in his … when he washes himself. If he ever does, of course. And eating off a gold – eating off it, you know. Not to speak of a private, um, uses it whenever he wants to go anywhere special, to one of those other places down there to see his pals. Engine. No. With a fellow to fly it for him. A plate. No, but you know what I mean. And the point is it’s all because of us. Without us he’d be nothing, would he? But for us he’d still be living in his, ooh, made out of … with a black woman bringing him, off the – growing there, you know. And the swine’s supposed to be some sort of hero. Father of his people and all that. A plane, a private plane, that’s it.’
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