Giant's Bread (15 page)

‘I'm coming straight out with what I want to say, my boy – but I don't want you interrupting till I've finished. See?'

‘Yes, Uncle Sydney.'

‘The long and short of it is just this.
I want you to come into Bent's
. Now remember what I said – no interruptions! I know you've never thought of such a thing, and I dare say the idea isn't very congenial to you now. I'm a plain man, and I can face facts as well as anyone. If you'd got a good income and could live at Abbots Puissants like a gentleman, there wouldn't be any question of the thing. Well, I accept that. You're like your father's people. But for all that, you've got good Bent blood in your veins, my boy, and blood's bound to tell.

‘I've got no son of my own. I'm willing – if you're willing – to look upon you as a son. The girls are provided for, and handsomely provided for at that. And mind you, it won't be a case of toiling for life. I'm not unreasonable – and I realize just as much as you do what that place of yours stands for. You're a young fellow. You go into the business when you come down from Cambridge – mind you, you go into it from the bottom. You'll start at a moderate salary and work up. If you want to retire before you're forty – well, you can do so. Please yourself. You'll be a rich man by then, and you'll be able to run Abbots Puissants as it should be run.

‘You'll marry young, I hope. Excellent thing, young marriages. Your eldest boy succeeds to the place, the younger sons find a first-class business to step into where they can show what they're made of. I'm proud of Bent's – as proud of Bent's as you are of Abbots Puissants – that's why I understand your feeling about the old place. I don't want you to have to sell it. Let it go out of the family after all these years. That would be a shame. Well, there's the offer.'

‘It's most awfully good of you, Uncle Sydney –' began Vernon.

His uncle threw up a large square hand and stopped him.

‘We'll leave it at that, if you please. I don't want an answer now. In fact I won't have one. When you come down from Cambridge – that's time enough.'

He rose.

‘Kind of you to ask Enid up for May week. Very excited about it, she is. If you knew what that girl thought of you, Vernon, you'd be quite conceited. Ah, well, girls will be girls.'

Laughing boisterously, he slammed the front door.

Vernon remained in the hall frowning. It was really jolly decent of Uncle Sydney –
jolly
decent. Not that he was going to accept. All the money in the world wouldn't tear him from music …

And somehow, he would have Abbots Puissants as well.

May week!

Joe and Enid were at Cambridge. Vernon had been let in for Ethel, too, as chaperon. The world seemed largely composed of Bents just at present.

Joe had burst out at once with: ‘Why on earth did you ask Enid?'

He had answered: ‘Oh, Mother went on about it – it doesn't really matter.'

Nothing mattered to Vernon just then except one thing. Joe talked privately to Sebastian about that.

‘Is Vernon really in earnest about this music business? Will he ever be any good? I suppose it's just a passing craze?'

But Sebastian was unexpectedly serious.

‘It's extraordinarily interesting, you know,' he said. ‘As far as I can make out, what Vernon is aiming at is something entirely revolutionary. He's mastering now what you might call the main facts, and mastering them at an extraordinary rate. Old Coddington admits that, though, of course, he snorts at Vernon's ideas – or would if Vernon ever let out about them. The person who's interested is old Jeffries – mathematics! He says Vernon's ideas of music are fourth dimensional.

‘I don't know if Vernon will ever pull it off – or whether he'll be considered as a harmless lunatic. The border-line is very narrow, I imagine. Old Jeffries is very enthusiastic. But not in the least encouraging. He points out, quite rightly, that to attempt to discover something new and force it on the world is always a thankless task, and that in all probability the truths that Vernon is discovering won't be accepted for at least another two hundred years. He's a queer old codger. Sits about thinking of imaginary curves in space – that sort of thing.

‘But I see his point. Vernon isn't creating something new. He's discovering something that's already there. Rather like a scientist. Jeffries says that Vernon's dislike of music as a child is perfectly understandable – to his ear music's incomplete – it's like a picture out of drawing. The whole perspective is wrong. It sounds to Vernon like – I suppose – a primitive savage's music would sound to us – mostly unendurable discord.

‘Jeffries is full of queer ideas. Start him off on squares and cubes, and geometrical figures and the speed of light, and he goes quite mad. He writes to a German fellow called Einstein. The queer thing is that he isn't a bit musical, and yet he can see – or says he can – exactly what Vernon is driving at.'

Joe cogitated deeply.

‘Well,' she said at last, ‘I don't understand a word of all this. But it looks as though Vernon might make a success of it all.'

Sebastian was discouraging.

‘I wouldn't say that. Vernon may be a genius – and that's quite a different thing. Nobody welcomes genius. On the other hand he may be just slightly mad. He sounds mad enough sometimes when he gets going – and yet, somehow, I've always got a kind of feeling that he's right – that in some odd way, he knows what he's talking about.'

‘You've heard about Uncle Sydney's offer?'

‘Yes. Vernon seems to be turning it down very light-heartedly, and yet, you know, it's a good thing.'

‘You wouldn't have him accept it?' flamed out Joe.

Sebastian remained provokingly cool.

‘I don't know. It needs thinking about. Vernon may have wonderful theories about this music business – there's nothing to show that he's ever going to be able to put them into practice.'

‘You're maddening,' said Joe, turning away.

Sebastian annoyed her nowadays. All his cool analytical faculties seemed to be uppermost. If he had enthusiasms, he hid them carefully.

And to Joe, just now, enthusiasm seemed the most necessary thing in the world. She had a passion for lost causes, for minorities. She was a passionate champion of the weak and oppressed.

Sebastian, she felt, was only interested in successes. She accused him in her own mind of judging everyone and everything from a monetary standard. Most of the time they were together, they fought and bickered incessantly.

Vernon, too, seemed separated from her. Music was the only thing he wanted to talk about, and even then on lines that were not familiar to her.

His preoccupation was entirely with instruments – their scope and power, and the violin which Joe herself played seemed the instrument in which he was least interested. Joe was quite unfitted to talk about clarinets, trombones and bassoons. Vernon's ambition in life seemed to be to form friendships with players of these instruments so as to be able to acquire some practical as opposed to theoretical knowledge.

‘Don't you know any bassoon players?'

Joe said she didn't.

Vernon said that she might as well make herself useful, and try to pick up some musical friends. ‘Even a French horn would do,' he said kindly.

He drew an experimental finger round the edge of his finger-bowl. Joe shuddered and clapped both hands to her ears. The sound increased in volume. Vernon smiled dreamily and ecstatically.

‘One ought to be able to catch that and harness it. I wonder how it could be done. It's a lovely round sound, isn't it? Like a circle.'

Sebastian took the finger-bowl forcibly away from him, and he wandered round the room and rang various goblets experimentally.

‘Nice lot of glasses in this room,' he said appreciatively.

‘You're drowning sailors,' said Joe.

‘Can't you be satisfied with bells and a triangle?' asked Sebastian. ‘And a little gong to beat –'

‘No,' said Vernon. ‘I want glass … Let's have the Venetian and the Waterford together … I'm glad you have these aesthetic tastes, Sebastian. Have you got a common glass that I can smash – all the tinkling fragments. Wonderful stuff – glass!'

‘Symphony of goblets,' said Joe scathingly.

‘Well, why not? I suppose somebody once pulled a bit of catgut tight and found it made a squawky noise, and somebody once blew through a reed and liked it. I wonder when they first thought of making things of brass and metal – I dare say some book tells you –'

‘Columbus and the egg. You and Sebastian's glass goblets. Why not a slate and a slate pencil.'

‘If you've got one –'

‘Isn't he too funny?' giggled Enid. And that stopped the conversation – for the time, at any rate.

Not that Vernon really minded her presence. He was far too wrapped up in his ideas to be sensitive about them. Enid and Ethel were welcome to laugh as much as they chose.

But he was slightly disturbed by the lack of harmony between Joe and Sebastian. The three of them had always been such a united trio.

‘I don't think this “living your own life” stunt agrees with Joe,' said Vernon to his friend. ‘She's like an angry cat most of the time. I can't think why Mother agreed. She was dead against it about six months ago. I can't imagine what made her change her mind, can you?'

A smile creased Sebastian's long yellow face.

‘I could make a guess,' he said.

‘What?'

‘I shan't say. In the first place, I may be wrong, and in the second place I should hate to interfere with the (possibly) normal course of events.'

‘That's your tortuous Russian mind.'

‘I dare say.'

Vernon didn't insist. He was much too lazy to probe for reasons that weren't given him.

Day succeeded day. They danced, breakfasted, drove at incredibly fast speeds through the countryside, sat and smoked and talked in Vernon's rooms, danced again. It was a point of honour not to sleep. At five in the morning they went on the river.

Vernon's right arm ached. Enid fell to his share and she was a heavy partner. Well, it didn't matter. Uncle Sydney had seemed pleased, and he was a decent old boy. Jolly good of him to make that offer. What a pity it was that he – Vernon – was not more of a Bent and less of a Deyre.

A vague memory stirred in his mind – somebody saying, ‘The Deyres, Vernon, are neither happy nor successful. They can't make good –' Who was it who had said that? A woman's voice, it had been, in a garden – and there had been curling cigarette smoke.

Sebastian's voice said: ‘He's going to sleep. Wake up, you blighter! Chuck a chocolate at him, Enid.'

A chocolate whizzed past his head. Enid's voice said with a giggle:

‘I can't throw straight for nuts.'

She giggled again as though she thought it very funny. Tiresome girl – always giggling. Besides, her teeth stuck out.

He heaved himself over on his side. Not usually very appreciative of the beauties of Nature, this morning he was struck by the beauty of the world. The pale gleaming river, here and there on the banks a flowering tree.

The boat drifted slowly downstream – a queer silent enchanted world. Because, he supposed, there were no human beings about. It was, when you came to think of it, an excess of human beings who spoilt the world. Always chattering and talking and giggling – and asking you what you were thinking of when all you wanted was to be let alone.

He always remembered feeling that as a kid. If they'd only let him alone. He smiled to himself as he remembered the ridiculous games he had been in the habit of inventing. Mr Green! He remembered Mr Green perfectly. And those three playmates – what were their names, now?

A funny child's world – a world of dragons and princesses and strangely concrete realities mixed up with them. There had been a story someone had told him – a ragged prince with a little green hat and a princess in a tower whose hair when she combed it was so golden that it could be seen in four kingdoms.

He raised his head a little, looked along the river bank. There was a punt tied up under some trees. Four people in it – but Vernon only saw one.

A girl in a pink evening-frock with hair like spun gold standing under a tree laden with pink blossom.

He looked and he looked.

‘Vernon –' Joe kicked him correctively. ‘You're not asleep, because your eyes are open. You've been spoken to four times.'

‘Sorry. I was looking at that lot over there. That's rather a pretty girl, don't you think so?'

He tried to make his tone light – casual. Inside him a riotous voice was saying:

‘Pretty? She's lovely. She's the most lovely girl in the world. I'm going to get to know her. I've got to know her. I'm going to marry her –'

Joe heaved herself up on her elbows, looked, uttered an exclamation.

‘Why,' she exclaimed, ‘I do believe – yes, I'm sure it is. It's Nell Vereker –'

Impossible! It couldn't be. Nell Vereker? Pale scraggy Nell, with her pink nose and her inappropriate starched dresses. Surely it couldn't be. Was Time capable of that kind of practical joke? If so, one couldn't be sure of anything. That long-ago Nell – and this Nell – they were two different people.

The whole world felt dream-like. Joe was saying:

‘If that's Nell, I really must speak to her. Let's go across.'

And then the greetings, exclamations, surprise.

‘Why, of course, Joe Waite. And Vernon! It's years ago, isn't it?'

Very soft her voice was. Her eyes smiled into his – a trifle shyly. Lovely – lovely – lovelier even than he had thought. Tongue-tied fool, why couldn't he say anything? Something brilliant, witty, arresting. How blue her eyes were with their long soft golden-brown lashes. She was like the blossom above her head – untouched – Springlike.