Ripeness is All

by Eric Linklater

  Such, without making any more to-do about it, was the temper and thought and talk of Lammiter tea-parties that winter.

  With matter of this kind to fill their minds it was natural, though perhaps unfair, that the Vicar’s accident should receive less sympathy and attention than otherwise it would have commanded. It was, however, an accident serious in itself and charged with more serious consequences.

  After returning from his Mediterranean voyage the Vicar had made a brave attempt to resume not only his duties but a normal course of existence. He was handicapped by grief that still weighed upon him like the after-effects of concussion, and even, at times, enwrapped him like a fog, in whose gloomy light he appeared half-blind to the outer world; but he did his best to overcome the enervating effect of bereavement, and performed his parochial duties with the somewhat distracted air of a man who, though absent-minded, is eager to oblige. In November, being partly persuaded thereto by Hilary, he resolved that fox-hunting would be good for him, and though his new poverty imperatively declared he must dispose of the stable he had previously maintained, and indeed compelled him to sell three-fourths of it, he kept a hard, ewe-necked, short-legged brown gelding which, though not handsome, was able to get through the mud and do a long day.

  Neither the Vicar nor the horse could be blamed for what happened. They enjoyed several days of moderate sport and one superlative four-mile point over the best of the Lammiter country, after which the Vicar, greatly cheered, preached so rousing a sermon from a text in the Book of Kings – ‘The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the walls of Jezreel’ – that Sir Gervase excitedly muttered ‘Get along forrad!’ in the middle of it, as though he were hunting the Lord’s hounds himself; and everyone believed the Vicar to have made a complete recovery. But on the following Wednesday, in pursuit of a dog-fox that obligingly and immediately quitted woodland for cow-pasture, the Vicar, well to the front, jumped a rough fence, and the good brown gelding landed disastrously on the stump of a willow-tree. The Vicar was picked up unconscious, with a couple of cracked ribs and a fractured femur.

  In the nursing home where he lay for seven weeks, his most regular visitor was Hilary. She was the first to call on him after the operation for reduction of the fracture: he lay with a look of bewilderment and three days’ growth of reddish beard on his face. His injured leg, elaborately tied to a black steel splint that protruded from the foot of the bed, endured the drag of a huge lead weight which prevented the distal part of the broken bone from over-riding the proximal end. A cage, over which the blankets made a kind of wigwam, covered his lower limbs. The room was bare and heartlessly clean. A tumbler and a jug of barley-water stood on a bedside table.

  ‘My poor Lionel!’ said Hilary. ‘It must be torture to lie like that!’

  ‘Torture,’ repeated the Vicar, ‘simply torture. And why, Hilary, why!’

  ‘But it might have been worse,’ said Hilary. ‘Thank heaven you weren’t killed.’

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ said the Vicar. ‘I’ve suffered so much already. Caroline’s death was more than I thought I could bear, and now this happens. There was no reason for it, no reason whatever.’

  ‘Anyone’s liable to fall off a horse.’

  ‘Yes, but why should I be the one? It’s so unfair. Caroline’s death was unfair. I relied on her for so many things, and her death crippled me. And now I’m crippled again.’

  ‘You’ll get better,’ said Hilary comfortingly. ‘Do what the doctor tells you to do, try not to worry, and you’ll be all right in a few weeks’ time.’

  ‘But don’t you see the unfairness of it?’

  ‘Of course I do. But grown-up people can’t afford to grumble simply because life isn’t fair to them. Well, I must go now, because the nurse said I wasn’t to stay more than two or three minutes, but I’ll come back tomorrow, and I expect you’ll be feeling more comfortable then. Goodbye, Lionel, and whatever you do, don’t worry about yourself.’

  ‘Do you think I’m under a curse?’ asked the Vicar.

  ‘I never heard such nonsense,’ Hilary replied, and paused to smooth his sheets before she left him.

  On the following afternoon she returned and found him flushed by a high temperature. He had been shaved, and his eyes were bright. Despite his cramped and comfortless position he looked remarkably handsome; but he soon began to talk in a feverish and foolish style. He complained once more about the iniquity of being singled out for injury from among a whole field of fox-hunters, and when Hilary reproved him for his childishness, kindly but firmly, he hotly exclaimed, ‘How should man be just with God?’

  Hilary was surprised. It was not his habit to talk of God, except in the pulpit, and she experienced a certain embarrassment, as though at some indelicacy, when she heard him mention his Creator without the appropriate ritual and vestments.

  ‘Your pillow’s very crumpled,’ she said, ‘let me straighten it for you.’

  The Vicar thrust out a restraining hand. ‘I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul,’ he shouted.

  Hilary grew rather frightened. She looked for a thermometer, but the nurse had removed it.

  ‘Am I a sea, or a whale, that thou settest a watch over me?’ demanded the Vicar in a voice that was hoarse and wild.

  ‘Really, Lionel, you mustn’t excite yourself like that,’ said Hilary. ‘If you lie quietly and take things easily you’ll get better very quickly; but if you worry about trifles …’

  ‘Who ever perished, being innocent?’ cried the Vicar.

  ‘Now do be sensible, please.’

  The compulsive tone of her voice had a brief effect. The Vicar lay motionless and silent for half a minute. Then a frown corrugated his forehead, his head moved recklessly on the pillow, and he muttered: ‘I have sinned, I have sinned. If I were pure and upright He would make my habitation prosperous. The hypocrite’s hope shall perish, he shall lean upon his house but it shall not stand.’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ asked Hilary.

  ‘My transgression is sealed up in a bag,’ said the Vicar.

  Hilary tiptoed to the door, but before she reached it, it opened and a nurse came in. She was a brisk, capable woman with percipient quick eyes and a hairy mole on her chin. She whispered to Hilary, ‘It’s all right, Miss Gander. I was listening outside, and I heard him getting restless. He’s been upset all day. I think you’d better go now. I’ll tidy him up and make him comfortable, and I expect he’ll drop off and have a sleep then.’

  Hilary waited in the corridor. Presently the nurse came out and closed the door firmly behind her and without apparent regard for the patient. She had a Bible in one hand.

  ‘I took this away from him,’ she said. ‘He asked for it this morning, and Matron said he could have it, though I knew it wouldn’t be good for him, in his state. He’s been reading about Job all day. The very idea!’

  ‘He’s delirious, isn’t he?’ asked Hilary.

  ‘No, not really. Job’s gone to his head a bit, that’s all. I remember the same sort of thing happened to me when I was training: I had to go into hospital with a floating kidney, and while I was there I borrowed a book on surgery from a medical student. Well, you’d never believe all the complications I had: cysts, and embolism, and congestion, and double ureters, and Bright’s disease, and I don’t know what all. And that’s what’s happened to Mr Purefoy: he thinks he’s got everything that Job had. Well, I’ll never let a parson read the Bible again, not in this nursing home.’

  Hilary was partly reassured by the nurse’s confidence and her good sense, but while she was walking home she could not help speculating about the nature of the transgressions that apparently burdened the Vicar’s conscience. As it was impossible to believe he had committed any of the major sins, she supposed he was thinking, with morbid exaggeration, of some youthful peccadillo of the kind that everyone is guilty of and has long forgotten. Or perhaps he was beginning to reproach hims
elf for having lived so long on his wife’s money. Hilary herself had never thought the worse of him for this, though some of her less amiable acquaintances did, but she realized that in his present condition, hotly fevered and recently bereaved, he might well have discovered sentimental grounds for remorse in a memory of past luxury.

  His financial status was now deplorable. His stipend was £450 a year, the Vicarage was large and expensive to live in, and to educate six children in a manner suitable to their ancestry – on the distaff side – and to his position as a Churchman and a fox-hunter, cost as much as might keep in comfort a score of working-class families. The two elder boys, Denis and Rupert, were at a highly esteemed public school; Cecily had gone to a school in Surrey that boasted a swimming-pool, a Greek theatre, and six mistresses from Roedean; Patrick was at a small but expensive preparatory school a few miles from Lammiter; and Rosemary and Peter attended a suitable day-school for infants in Lammiter West. The aggregate of their annual fees for tuition and board was £1140, and though Denis and Rupert were both clever at travelling without a ticket, a considerable sum had to be added to that for train-fares, clothes, and holiday entertainment.

  The Vicar had made no attempt to solve the problem of paying annual bills of £1140 out of a yearly stipend of £450. In the grief-stricken days that followed his wife’s death he had said to all his friends, ‘I am a beaten man,’ and left it at that. Such was the simplicity of his confession that it achieved the likeness of dignity. His grief, indubitable and obvious, had disarmed criticism. He had retired, for months, into a trance of sorrow; passivity had made him handsomer than ever. And in this seemingly helpless state he had seen re-enacted the miracle of the loaves and fishes: his brother-in-law, Lord Quentin Whicher, the quixotic financier, having rescued more than he expected from the wreckage of his lost company, had promised to pay for Denis and Rupert for at least a year; Hilary had offered to pay Cecily’s fees; and the Duke of Starveling, on the strength of dreaming that he would win a prize in the Dublin Sweepstake, had sent a cheque for £100. The Vicar had accepted this manifestation of the expansive power of five loaves and a few small fishes with gratitude but no great surprise: it is likely that the majority of those present on the shores of the Sea of Galilee also failed to notice the miracle that had occurred.

  The Duke damned and confounded his generosity as soon as the result of the Cambridgeshire was known. Lord Quentin also regretted his benevolence, for no sooner had he contracted to pay the boys’ fees than a chance came to get in on the ground-floor of a new process for the mass production of gas-masks (civilian pattern) for daily use in the next war, and ‘he naturally wanted every penny he could lay hands on to invest in an enterprise so useful and, with good luck, so enormously profitable. Hilary alone remained well pleased with her one-sided bargain; she delighted to think that Cecily’s education was proceeding out of her purse, and she began to budget for a blissful future in which Rosemary and Peter should also be dependent on her. She told herself that this care for Caroline’s children was no more than she owed to the memory of her dead friend, but she had the grace to admit that she thoroughly enjoyed her piety. They were charming children, for they had inherited their father’s looks and the enthusiastic vitality of their mother.

  Chapter 11

  While the Vicar uncomfortably waited for his broken leg to mend, Stephen expected a union at least as painful. Pride compelled him to hide the apprehension that grew greater as marriage came nearer, but under a mask of equanimity there lay often terror and dismay. Fortunately for them both, Bolivia was so busily engaged in preparations for the wedding that she had little time for the show and practice of affection. Naturally she had said no word to Stephen of her basic motive in desiring to marry him, and no suspicion of such a motive had occurred to him: he knew that all young women most ardently desire to be married, and he knew that he was by no means unattractive: the terrible Giulia, indeed, had shown conclusively, by biting his ear in the Via Tosinghi, that he was almost indecently desirable. He had no need to search Bolivia for any motive deeper than that. Sometimes he tried to comfort himself by thinking he might now inherit the Major’s fortune; but he could not persuade himself that this was really probable. He had never reconciled himself to the unfairness of his uncle’s will, but he had long abandoned, in bitterness of soul, all hope of sharing in the estate; and even now, though marriage confronted his morning thoughts as closely and insistently as the nine o’clock postman, his imagination refused to conceive an ululation of infants in the decent quietness of Mulberry Acre. He would have been startled to the depths of his being had he known that Bolivia, having already decided to turn Wilfrid’s room into a nursery, was consulting an architect about the possibility of cutting off part of the drawing-room to make a playroom.

  Bolivia had already acquired a busy domestic look. She had almost given up golf, and her manner towards Stephen was a curious mixture of maternal solicitude, a little girl’s pride in a new frock, healthy amativeness when she had time for it, and an elder sister’s impatience with a schoolboy brother. They had a long argument about the rehabilitation of the principal bedroom which was typical of all their intercourse.

  Bolivia disliked the steel and enamel furniture that suited Wilfrid and Stephen; and Stephen was repelled by the pale and massive suite that Bolivia desired. But Bolivia sensibly told him, ‘A single bed isn’t going to be much use to us now, is it?’

  Stephen bit his lip, and fidgeted with his ring, and said querulously, ‘We could have two single beds, I suppose.’

  ‘You are a darling,’ exclaimed Bolivia irrationally, and gave him a sudden hug and a loud cheerful kiss.

  Stephen made a petulant gesture, as one who slaps at a mosquito.

  ‘Now don’t be silly,’ said Bolivia.

  ‘But we could have two,’ Stephen repeated.

  ‘We could have three, for that matter,’ said Bolivia, ‘but the fact remains that we don’t need more than one. Now don’t argue, dear, because I know more about this sort of thing than you do. I admit that you and Wilfrid have made the house very attractive to anyone who likes modern furniture, but it’s not suitable for a married couple. You must allow me to know best in matters of this kind. I’m going to make you very comfortable, and we’re both going to be tremendously happy. Now we’ll just go down to the furniture shop to say that we’ll take the suite, and then I want you to come to the Club and meet some old friends of mine. They’ve heard all about you and they’re just dying to see you.’

  ‘I can’t go out this morning,’ said Stephen irritably. ‘I’ve got a great deal to do, and I can’t neglect my work simply because I’m going to be married. It wouldn’t be fair to Wilfrid, for one thing.’

  ‘And it wouldn’t be fair to me if you didn’t come,’ said Bolivia, kissing him again. ‘Wilfrid won’t mind doing a little extra work at a time like this, when he knows you’re so busy. I’ll go and speak to him, and tell him you won’t be back till after lunch.’

  Wilfrid was now a pathetic figure. He made brave attempts to conceal his unhappiness, and even to simulate a festive air, a jovial interest in the approaching nuptials: he bought Stephen a dove-grey wedding waistcoat of unusual design, and cuff links for himself: but his heart was desolate, and the old ladies and the elderly ladies who had found him such a merry companion shook their heads over him, and some of them prophesied that he would go into a decline. Now, when Bolivia came into the room where he was working, he appeared very pale and small beside her. She wore a winter coat of tweed, whose rough material seemed to accentuate the hostile abundance of her figure; and Wilfrid, in a slim smooth suit of clouded blue, was looking his daintiest. He winced at the sight of her.

  He listened silently while she explained that Stephen had important business to attend to, and acidly agreed that he could conduct, by himself, the affairs of the Mulberry School of Journalism and Story Writing until after lunch. He watched them pass the window, Stephen reluctant, Bolivia possessive and assured. Tig,
beast, cow, bitch!’ he cried. ‘You fat cannibal, you horror, you creature!’

  A few minutes later, while he was sniffing unhappily, and staring blindly at a story written by a young man in Birkenhead – who had been told to put more punch in his work – Mrs Barrow came in with a cup of tea and a biscuit for him. ‘Drink this, Mr Wilfrid,’ she said, ‘and you’ll feel all the better for it. I thought you might be a bit upset, with them going out together like that and leaving you all alone, and a cup of tea works wonders sometimes. I feel upset myself when I think what this house is going to be like with Miss Bolivia ruling it, and I for one will never be happy when I think of you having to go in lodgings to make room for her.’

  Wilfrid drank his tea gratefully. ‘This is just what I wanted,’ he said. ‘You’re one of the cleverest and nicest people I’ve ever met, Mrs Barrow, and goodness knows how I’ll ever get on without you.’

  ‘It was too good to last,’ said Mrs Barrow mournfully. ‘We were that happy, just you and I and Mr Stephen, it was like Paradise till she came and spoilt it all.’

  Mrs Barrow began to sniff, to grow red and watery, and it was Wilfrid’s turn to play the comforter. ‘There, there, Mrs Barrow,’ he said, ‘we mustn’t make ourselves too unhappy, because that would make Stephen unhappy, and he’s miserable enough already, poor dear. This marriage isn’t his fault, you know, and he’s going to find things so terribly difficult that if we don’t do all we can to help him he simply won’t survive it.’

  ‘She’s a perfect cannibal,’ said Mrs Barrow.

  ‘I know she is,’ Wilfrid agreed, ‘and that’s why we’ve got to be very kind and good to poor Stephen, and never do anything to worry him.’

  Mrs Barrow regarded him with reverent affection. ‘You’re an angel, Mr Wilfrid, that’s what you are,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, what nonsense you talk!’ cried Wilfrid. ‘I’m not in the least bit like an angel!’