Back (12 page)

“Don’t give the matter another thought, boy,” Mr Grant said. “It was partly my error, I’ll confess. When I’m in the wrong, or not entirely in the wrong because things aren’t often black or white, life’s not so simple as you’ll find when you grow older, no, when I consider I’ve been the least bit in the world to blame, then I’m the first to admit the fact, that’s me. But giving me away to Nancy is a different kettle of fish altogether.” And he halted before Charley, who, in confusion, lowered his eyes.

“I can’t understand that even now,” Mr Grant accused, staring at him.

“I never …” Charley tried to begin, only he looked so guilty it encouraged Mr Grant.

“Now see here, my boy,” he said, “I’m older than you, I’ve had more experience. What I’m going to tell you will be of benefit in your job. Never divulge a confidence. That’s all. Never. I’ve had men come to me in business, competitors, who’ve let something drop which if I’d liked was not less than putting a hundred pound Bank of England note right in my hand. But what they’d done was in confidence, mind. They just used those few words to start with, that changed the whole conversation from a useful tip to something sacred. There you are. And it’s paid me. Many’s the time, even when I couldn’t see what value there might be. I still kept silent. For why? Because it was a trust.”

A voice quavered from the house. “Gerald,” it called twice, thin and fretful.

“We’d best keep out of sight,” Mr Grant remarked, leading the way out of his front garden. “We don’t want Amy to have another of her turns.”

Once they were behind the tree, where he had given Charley
Miss Whitmore’s address with no word about keeping the source dark, Mr Grant began to lecture again. The injustice of all this absolutely silenced Summers.

“Mind, I appreciate your coming down, though of course you can’t tell how difficult it is for me to get outside the house, even just for now, with Amy in the condition she’s in. We all have our troubles, right enough. The only difference there may be, lies in how much we talk about ’em. There’s another truth for you. No, I appreciate it that you felt you had to say you were sorry. Shows you have the right stuff in you, Charley boy.”

“I’m sorry, but …,” Charley said, and Mr Grant interrupted him.

“I tell you it pays hand over fist, keeping a confidence. That’s what life’s taught me.”

“But why did you send me?” Charley got out at last.

“To be a bit of company for her, of course,” Mr Grant said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. “She’s living alone now. She had her husband killed out in Egypt, and changed her name back. She’s a plucky little thing,” he said. “Because what you have to remember, Charley boy, is that you’re one of the lucky ones. You’re back. I know I reminded myself of that, come the finish of the last war, when I couldn’t seem to understand at certain times, just after I got out of France. You see I trusted you. It’s not everyone I’d give her address. And I trust you still, if I may have been mistaken in one respect. Don’t you younger fellows ever think of others? There’s that little lady been alone now for close on two months, ever since the fly-bombs got so bad. Of course I thought of you.”

“When did she marry, then?” Charley managed to ask.

“While you were in Germany,” Mr Grant answered, bright. “That’s all the life they had together. In 1943 it was. They had three leaves, then he was gone. And once he was killed it seemed to turn her bitter towards me. Life is like that sometimes.”

A bigamist, Charley thought. Would this awful thing never stop? His jealousy got hold of him again.

“There’s Arthur Middlewitch living right across the landing,” he said, so bitterly there was no mistaking it.

“Middlewitch?” Mr Grant cried out. “Who’s with the C.E.G.S.?”

Charley was beyond an answer.

“How do you know?”

“She told me,” Charley said, with a sort of satisfaction.

“Are you acquainted with Arthur Middlewitch?” Mr Grant enquired, cautiously.

Charley did not reply, which seemed odd to Mr Grant.

“Do you know him, then?” he repeated, sharp.

“He was where they fitted my last leg.”

“And you took him along to her?”

“Me?” Charley brought out, with such disgust that the older man could see he had done no such thing.

“I should hope not and that’s a fact,” Mr Grant agreed. “It’s true I recommended Arthur to your landlady, the same as I done for you. There’s a number of you young fellows I’ve served a good turn when I had the chance. That’s what we’re here for, after all. But not that man for Nance. You’d hold a funny opinion of me to think I’d introduce them. Because you might as well confess up. That’s what you’re supposing, isn’t it?”

“Well …”

“I may have been mistaken in you,” Mr Grant said, as if wondering aloud. “It’s not often I am, but then no one’s infallible, you can’t have all my experience without you learn that. But what sort of a man d’you take me for? The things Ann Frazier told me, after he hadn’t been in her house above three weeks, opened my eyes, I can tell you. To send a chap of his bent along to a decent girl? If I were a younger man, I’d knock you down for it.” He had become truly indignant.

“I didn’t send him,” Charley said, behindhand again.

“And I never thought you did. Maybe I’m a bit inclined to leap to conclusions,” Mr Grant said, in a more amenable sort of
voice. “Things aren’t easy,” he went on, “not now particularly. What with Amy, and me not being able to leave her for an instant, I’m liable to dash at things. But she should be warned. She’s only young after all. She hasn’t much experience. Someone should tell her the sort of dirty hound the man is. She’s so sore with me at this moment she’d never listen. But I’ll wager you told her, eh Charley?” Mr Grant was almost pleading with him.

“I didn’t get the chance.”

“That’s bad, Charley, that’s bad, yes. Mind, I’m not blaming. I know. Look, someone must have the job, and it can’t be me, just now, as things are between us.”

“She won’t listen to me, Mr Grant.”

“When you get to learn as much of their ways as I have, my boy, you’ll never say anything so definite about women. There’s no man can tell one way or the other. Not one. But she’s got to be warned.”

Charley was sharp enough to see where this was tending.

“I doubt if she’d see me a third time,” he said.

“What’s that?” Mr Grant enquired, at his most suspicious. “And has she a reason?”

Charley could not answer.

“I may have been wrong about you,” the unconfessed father went on, “but surely not in this way, Charley boy? You never offered her an incivility?”

“I did not.”

“Well, all right. I knew better than to think it. What was it, then?”

“I fainted away,” Charley said, ashamed.

“Oh but you mustn’t let a little thing like that upset you. Good Lord no. Of course I realize it’s awkward at the time. While we’re on this topic I could tell you a thing or two, little mishaps which have come to pass before my very eyes. Lord yes. But you’ll mention it when you get back, eh, Charley boy? You’ll do that for me, surely?”

“It’d come better from you.”

“There you are, don’t you understand?” Mr Grant said, with impatience. “You’re the very man has made it impossible for me to speak. Because, as I keep on telling you, she won’t see me since my confidence was betrayed. It’s a long story, but she’s funny that way.”

“I see,” Charley said.

“I can rely on you, now, can’t I?” Mr Grant asked, wheedling.

The one thing Charley knew was, he did not wish to see the girl he still took to be Rose, ever again. He considered she had dug her knife too deep into him and turned it too often, by being the same in so many ways. And, after all, who was Mr Grant to ask favours on top of having done him this injury, which he would never get over, not if he lived to the end of his life. Because from the moment he had seen her, a painted tart, from the moment this man here sent him, Charley considered he was as dead as if he were six feet down, in Flanders, under the old tin helmet. So he couldn’t help himself, he spoke right out.

“I’d have thought, if anyone should tell her, it would be her own father,” he said.

Mr Grant was flabbergasted. The boy spoke as though near to tears. What had the kid done? Fallen in love? But what was Charley doing, knowing about him and Nance? He began to get as angry as Summers already was.

“Who told you?” he demanded.

Charley stayed silent. It was all he could do, now, not to hit this old man.

“I’ve a right to know, haven’t I?” Mr Grant shouted, quivering with rage, his voice rising high until it was like his wife’s.

“She told me herself,” Charley said, truthfully.

“Good God,” Mr Grant yelled. They stood there, careful not to look at one another.

“Who would you be if you weren’t?” Charley mumbled.

“Who would I be if I wasn’t,” Mr Grant echoed, choking
with anger. “What are you insinuating? This is what comes of offering a kindness. And I have to stand here in my own front garden, or nearly, and listen to this? You must be mad, boy. That’s it. What you’ve been through has unhinged you. Mind, I’m denying nothing,” he said, with a lunatic sort of leer. “Why should I? But when you reach my age you’ll realize that some secrets aren’t our own. God bless me and I should think so, too.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Charley said, glaring straight at him as he said it. Was being a tart so secret?

“Have you no delicacy?” Mr Grant demanded. He was actually hopping from one foot to the other.

“Delicacy?” Charley asked, soft with contempt.

“That’s what I said, delicacy,” Mr Grant took him up. “Don’t you know the meaning of the word?” As if in comment, there came again from the house his wife’s voice, calling “Gerald,” twice. “Where we might even be overheard,” Mr Gerald Grant added.

“Don’t make me laugh,” the young man said, and left.

Charley walked off anywhere, so blind with anger he did not know where he was going.

In his good nature, for he was a kind-hearted man, James decided he would look Charley up when next in London. He thought Charley, who had been such a friend of Rose, would be glad to see him for old times’ sake, and besides he was touched that Charley should have come down to find her grave the moment he was back from Germany. Her dying, which he was forgetting, had been the saddest point in his life. Summers was a link between them.

Because Mrs Grant was now too queer to travel, and Mr Grant insisted on her seeing the grandson at least every six months in case she remembered, the next time James was to bring him up for two nights, he wrote Charley. He said nothing of the boy, only that it would be grand if Charley could come along that evening.

When Summers got the letter, a day or so after his scene with Mr Grant, and at a moment when he was arguing in himself whether he should see Rose just once more, if only to warn her against Middlewitch, he saw what he took to be his opportunity to clear the matter once and for all. He also realized it was his duty to bring Rose and her husband together again. If it worked, then she would be saved from the life he was sure she led. So he sent word that he would be round at the hotel by tea time.

It was a bad shock that Ridley should be present, and at first Charley did not attend to James he was so busy in the quest of a likeness to himself, this time, in this boy who might be his own but who, unknown to him, was nothing to do with him at all,
except in so far as he was a reminder of his Rose. For in point of fact Rose had been mistaken, perhaps on purpose. In any case she had never been definite as to when she started the child. But Summers thought he now knew the boy was his, and looked for an echo of his own face in those cheek bones, whereas, immediately after he got back, he had searched for a return of Rose, of whom, now he thought he had found her, he wanted nothing more to remind him, much less the curve of a lip, or its corners when smiling.

At the same time he knew it would be too drastic to confront Ridley with Rose. He also had the idea he would keep this somehow up his sleeve. So, while James was running on with the usual questions, and making great cautious, anxious play with how ill he found Charley looked, Charley had become occupied with the manner in which he could get the husband away to meet the wife, thereby to prove what he now took to be Grant’s ignominy, for, in the last few days, Charley had even come to believe that the father was sharing the daughter’s immoral earnings, possibly because Mrs Grant’s illness came so expensive.

“So I thought I’d look you up, old man,” James was saying for the third time, “for old times’ sake,” he said, “and see how you were looking after yourself, after your experiences, I mean. Because I didn’t think you looked too grand when you were down my way, you know, old chap.”

Ridley sat opposite, right back in an armchair, his head sideways along the back, eyelashes thick as a hedge, watching the people in the corner. Summers thought the boy wouldn’t be so bored if he knew about his mum. And he held it against James, that this man had let Rose get away.

“Something I want to show you,” he brought out at last, with great difficulty.

“Why, of course,” James agreed at once, but Charley was looking with significance at the child.