Then I remembered that whatever he looked like he was nevertheless a doctor; and I knew why girls saw doctors. I watched the happy pair disappear back towards the house as if they had been gorgons. One thing was clear. I had to see her. Yet I had no excuse for going through into the reception room. Unless I had something as obviously wrong with me as a broken arm or a rash, any plea that I needed medical attention would be met by my father with more opening medicine; or perhaps, in view of the complete success of the last two doses, some closing medicine. Even my left hand had healed and limbered up, as though busting the panel of a piano were only a sort of eccentric fortissimo and all in the day’s work. Melancholy and anxious, I surveyed myself and found myself healthy. There was no doubt about that. Moreover I had a veneration for doctors which was remarkable, seeing how close I lived to them; and I had an irrational fear of their tests as if Dr. Ewan might gaze into my Specimen then announce that I was an expectant father. I had to see her, and braced myself to be blatant about it. I went and took a book from the shelf by my bed, marched downstairs, straight into the dispensary. My father was peering through his pebble glasses at a prescription.
“Book for Miss Babbacombe,” I said casually. “Thought I’d take it through. Save me the trouble of—”
I need not have worried, for my father went on peering and muttering without noticing, as his right hand groped for a spatula. I strolled along the passage and opened the door into the reception room. Dr. Jones leapt away from Evie as if she had stuck a hypodermic in him. He stared at me, a minute trace of lipstick visible by his mouth. He said with a kind of relief—“Oh it’s you!”
Then the outer door banged open and massive Mrs. Dance trundled in, wailing as loudly as her weight and breathlessness would let her. She had young Duggie in her arms. He was red in the face and jerking about. Dr. Jones changed immediately and took charge.
“Calmly Mrs. Dance! Let me have the child. Miss Babbacombe—I need you.”
They bundled through into the surgery, all four—or five—of them. I was left by the door, holding out my copy of Miss Sitwell’s Bucolic Comedies. I turned away, still racked by uncertainty as to whether I was expectant or not and went through the dispensary where my silent father was making his slow, utterly sure movements.
So I returned to spying and prying and patrolling; and however my mother tempted me to eat, I had no appetite. Then it was Sunday morning and I met Evie again. I was standing glumly by the wall at the bottom of the Ewans’s garden, in Chandler’s Lane. I had even prowled round the wooden hut at the other end for I thought they might have been doing or having their possible Mass; but the place was silent and shut. I had gone the other way, past the bottom of the vicarage garden and the cottages with their hedge of veronica, until I was well within sight of Chandler’s Close itself. I had hung about there, hoping to see her come out of the cottage at the entrance. At last I had wandered back, nagged and hopeless, and stood, leaning against the rough brick of the Ewans’s wall. I glimpsed at first a flutter of skirt coming round the long corner. I knew it instantly for Evie’s cotton dress, white, and strewn with the pale blue sprigs of flowers. I jumped away from the wall and went towards her quickly. She was not pacing, but moving as quickly as I was, hair blown back, dress moulded against breast and thigh, one knee going past the other. I went straight up to her and grabbed her by both arms.
“Evie—tell me!”
She stared up at me sullenly as if I were her enemy. She was made up heavily and carefully. Her matted lashes had been combed out, then stuck together with some black stuff so that they were like plates. There was blue stuff round her eyes, and her lips were so neatly painted they looked like scissor’d slips of scarlet paper.
“Leave go, young Olly. I’m not going to see you again.”
She wrenched at my grasp but could not shift it. I whispered urgently.
“Are you going to have a baby?”
“Oh that!”
I shook her.
“A baby! Are you—”
She got free and stood, looking venomous.
“You’d like to know wouldn’t you?”
“I must!”
She shook her bob irritably and made to pass. I stretched out my arms to stop her. She tried to duck under them, then finding this no use, ran sideways into the path up to the clump. She saw where she was and turned, but I was blocking the entrance. She hurried up the path away from me but I followed closely. I grabbed her bare arm and swung her round.
“Evie!”
She turned her head towards the hedge and spat out something.
“Look, Evie—what’s the matter with you?”
She straightened up and glanced at me under her black, clicking plates.
“Swallowed a fly.”
“Once and for all. Are you going to have a baby?”
“No I’m not. A fat lot you’d care if I did. Or anyone.”
“Thank God!”
She mimicked me savagely.
“Thank God, thank God, thank God!”
She stumbled on up the path, smacking branches aside, careless of nettles, ducking and weaving. I trotted after her. A great joy and peace had opened in my heart. I trotted faster, was no more than a yard behind her as she stumbled on with movements at once slack and jerky. As she ran, she talked, the words jerky as her movements.
“You wouldn’t care if I was dead. Nobody’d care. That’s all you want, just my damned body, not me. Nobody wants me, just my damned body. And I’m damned and you’re damned with your cock and your cleverness and your chemistry—just my damned body—”
We broke out into the sunny clump. Laughing in my joy and freedom I pulled her round again, wanting her to share it, wanting everyone to share it. One arm at her back, her rounded breasts against me, I lifted her face with my hand to kiss it. She grimaced, turned it sideways and spat like a kitten.
“Come on, Evie pet! Cheer up! Cheer up, young Babbacombe!”
For answer, she collapsed against me, hands on my shoulders, head sideways on my chest. She spoke and choked and snivelled.
“You never loved me, nobody never loved me. I wanted to be loved, I wanted somebody to be kind to me—I wanted—” She wanted tenderness. So did I; but not from her. She was no part of high fantasy and worship and hopeless jealousy. She was the accessible thing. I waited smiling for these sheets of summer lightning and storms of summer rain to fade away so that we could come to sensible terms again. She was, after all, a girl, this curious, useful, titillating creature; and sure enough, after a while her snivelling stopped. I expected an arch, mysterious smile to come back, with a little teasing, but instead, she pushed herself slowly away from me and shook out her hair. She went slowly through the thickets to the alders above the rabbit warren, doing things to her eyes and nose with a scrap of handkerchief. She threw herself down in the shade, leaned on one elbow and stared moodily at Stilbourne in its frame of leaves. A moment or two later I came and knelt close behind her, cheerful as a bee at a flower. I stroked her bare arm and she brushed off my hand as if it had been a fly. Laughing, I flicked up her skirt with a Rabelaisian gesture; giggling I grabbed the elastic band of her knickers. She jerked away from me when she felt my hand and they came down to her knees. With one electric convulsion she got them up again and was staring at me over her shoulder, make-up struck on a dead, white face.
Some things need no study, no learning, no repetition in pursuit of memory. They burn themselves into the eye and can be examined ever after in minute detail. Moreover it is their nature—since we cannot even think, without leaving a mark somewhere on the cosmos—to bring with them their own inescapable interpretation. Kneeling there, then, staring at her, and not seeing her but only the revelation, the pieces fell into place with a kind of natural inevitability.
Captain Wilmot, with his wolf grin and load of unexcavated shrapnel! Fix bayonets! Captain Wilmot, good neighbour, chasing the ghost of the youth that had been blown out of him, a desperately dedicated teacher wi
th a naturally gifted pupil!
She had knelt in front of him, that was plain to see; and he, lowered on to a chair perhaps, had reached forward over her bowed head and struck with his right hand, raising those red welts it may be in time with some long ocean swell: and then, tiring—for he was not strong, this broken, heavily secreting gargoyle—he had struck those weaker blows with his left hand across the other weals.
I cannot tell how long I stared at her without seeing her, both of us motionless and silent. I was eighteen and so was she, and I think my first sound was some kind of a laugh, a laugh of sheer incredulity. Then I could see her again, eyes and lips stuck on a white face, Stilbourne out of focus below and beyond her. I laughed again, out of incompetence, feeling lost, as if I or someone had come to a gap, a nothingness where it was not just that the rules were unknown but that they were non-existent. A slice of life.
Keeping her eyes on me, watching me from the back of her head under the motionless plates, Evie put one hand up to her hair and gave a laugh that did not rearrange her face. Then she was silent, still watching me eye to eye, and the blood burst into her face. It was no ordinary blush, glow, suffusion. It tightened the glistening skin, swelled and immobilized the face, seemed to hold her mouth open. She spoke hoarsely, defensively, yet as compulsively as she had blushed.
“I was sorry for ’im.”
I looked away from her, down at the town. Made brighter by the shade under the alders, it was full of colour, and placid. I looked at our wall, the bathroom window, the window of the dispensary, our little garden—and there were my parents, standing side by side on the grass. I could see how my father stood, looking down at a flower bed, while my mother bent in her active way from the waist and picked among the flowers. They were too far off for me to recognize them by anything but their surroundings and their movements, my father a dark grey patch, my mother a light grey one. All at once, I had a tremendous feeling of thereness and hereness, of separate worlds, they and Imogen, clean in that coloured picture; here, this object, on an earth that smelt of decay, with picked bones and natural cruelty—life’s lavatory.
The object was still staring at me and her face was white again. We had made so little movement, so little noise, that a blackbird came picking over the humus. It only had one leg, and was making do, flirting its tail sideways to keep its balance.
Evie knelt up, and the blackbird fluttered out of sight.
“Olly—”
“Yeah?”
“You won’t—”
“Won’t what?”
She sagged on her arms, looking down at the earth. She glanced up again, biting her lower lip so that a tiny stain of crimson appeared on each incisor.
“I’ll do anything. Anything you want.”
My heart gave a heavy leap and my flesh stirred. They were down there, the two grey patches and she was up here, life’s necessary, unspeakable object. I stared curiously at my slave.
“How long? I mean—when did it start?”
“When I was fifteen—”
Unbelievably, a faint smile appeared under the make up, a faint smile in her white cheeks as if she were remembering something shymaking but good.
“—off and on.”
I reached out my hand but she flinched away.
“No. Not today—I—I couldn’t!”
She got carefully to her feet. I addressed her firmly.
“Tomorrow then, after surgery. I’ll be waiting. Up here.”
She shook herself, braced herself; and was Evie again. She even contrived to exhale a bit, and smile lopsidedly. Then she picked a path through the undergrowth and disappeared.
I stayed where I was, among the growth and the smells, and stared at Stilbourne, that framed picture hanging on some wall or other.
*
At supper that night, my mother announced a plan.
“You could get yourself tea, couldn’t you, Father? For you and Olly? Or perhaps Olly could—”
My father looked up.
“What? Why? When?”
My mother’s spectacles flashed.
“There now! You’ve neither of you been listening to a word I’ve said!”
My father sheepishly composed himself into an attitude of attention.
“All right, Mother. I was thinking. Yes. What was it?”
“And his mind’s miles away! I must say—”
“What was it then, Mother?”
“As I said,” she announced with dignity, “I’m going into Barchester. On Saturday.”
My father rubbed his head, and identified Barchester in his mind.
“Oh yes.”
“I shall catch the one o’clock bus. The wedding isn’t till three.”
“Wedding?”
My father identified weddings.
“Whose wedding?”
My mother set down her cup with a clatter. Clearly, it was a mood-day.
“Whose wedding do you think? The Pope’s? Imogen Grantley’s of course!”
After a time I could hear them again. My mother was concluding a lengthy speech.
“I shall have tea at the Cadena.”
“Yes that’s the best place, I suppose.”
“What d’you know about it, Father? You’ve never been there! I might go to the pictures afterwards.”
“There’s a cinema in Stilbourne, Mother,” said my father, eager to help. “I don’t know what’s on, though.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know,” said my mother tartly. “Right under your nose, some of it.”
My father nodded placatingly.
“I know. Perhaps Oliver would like—”
“Him!” She referred to me as if I were a contemptible object in Australia. “He’ll be traipsing about the countryside, I’ll be bound!”
For a time we were all three silent. I could hear my mother tapping her shoe against the table leg.
“So I’m not asking either of my fine men to escort me—”
The tapping stopped. She paused, then completed her sentence with brooding finality, “—because I know it wouldn’t be any good.”
My father and I looked at our plates, silent for different reasons.
*
Even by teatime next day, my mother was still smouldering; and I, with much to conceal, had nervous thoughts that jumped into downright apprehension when she broke into our silence.
“That girl was a long time in the dispensary, Father!”
“Yes. Yes, she was.”
“Well I hope you gave her some good advice. It’s time somebody did!”
My father wiped his grey moustache and nodded soberly. People occasionally came to him for advice. This, I believe, was because he looked more like a doctor than Dr. Ewan did, and had not the awesome aura of Dr. Ewan’s county status. People could talk to my father, they said; and indeed this was true, since he seldom answered them. Chewing the cud of an idea until he had extracted the last possible juice from it, he would appear to listen to them as they rattled on. This gave them an impregnable sense of his wisdom; and indeed, since he was effortlessly good and kind and methodical and slow, he may have been wise too. My special relationship as a son, made it difficult for me to judge.
“What did she want, then, Father?”
The cynical end of me triumphed for an instant over apprehension and saw my father offer Evie some opening medicine. But he was staring at the teapot and pursing his lips. I waited.
“She doesn’t think much of—people.”
I debated with myself whether asking what girl this was would convey my indifference; and decided sensibly against. But my mother was glittering and nodding meaningly.
“And that doesn’t surprise me! It doesn’t surprise me at all!”
“Beasts,” said my father. “All men are beasts. That’s what she said.”
“Well,” said my mother. “What d’you expect from a girl like that? Men are what you—”
I blew tea all over the table cloth. This small crisis was a great relie
f; and by the time my back had been thumped I hoped the subject might be changed. But I should have known that my mother in this strangely extended Mood would not be content with a word or two only; and that my father would have to comply.
“Go on then, Father. What did you say?”
My father wiped his moustache, passed a hand over his baldness, adjusted his glasses, and stared at the teapot again. I could hear my mother’s foot begin to tap.
“I said ‘No’.”
The tapping went on, and my father heard it. He amplified.
“I said no they weren’t. I said—I wasn’t! I said our Olly here—”
The tapping stopped. My father was gleaming and glinting sideways at me.
“I said that he had his faults of course, lots of them; but he wasn’t a beast.”
Then there was a pause. My mother looked straight at him and spoke in a still voice.
“What did she say?”
My father had turned back from me and was looking at his plate. He answered her vaguely.
“You know how it is, Mother. I get to thinking, and they—I can’t remember.”
My mother stood up, took the teapot and marched with it into the kitchen, banging the door to behind her. There was another pause; then my father spoke to me, softly.
“It’s the wedding, you see. After she’s been to the wedding, she’ll be—better.”
By the end of surgery I was waiting in the clump. Evie was late, but still she came, cotton dress and all, strolling up the path. I had pictured her in my feverish lubricity, humble and anxious and aware of her new status. But Evie was smiling, triumphantly, if anything, and she was exhaling again. She walked past me, securely, went through the bushes, through the alders, and sat down among the scrapes at the top of the rabbit warren. I hung behind, looking from her to the town and back again.
“Come back here, Evie!”
She shook scent out of her glossy bob and lay back in the sun. She stretched her arms wide, stretched her legs down together and the cotton dress rearranged itself. She laughed at the sky.
The Pyramid Page 8
