Stephen Morris (19 page)

‘Down the crack?’

‘Down the crack. It was pitch dark and a twenty-foot drop. Some of the chaps in his ship turned up at Falmouth when we were there and came up to ask about him, and told us all the yarn. Seemed to have made no end of an impression on the matloes. Regular cinema thrill – they loved him for it.’

‘And he got the fellow out?’

Wallace laughed. ‘That’s where the fun came in. It was pitch dark; he couldn’t see where he was jumping to. You know those great baulks of timber, like railway sleepers, that they let down the side of a ship with ropes to act as fenders? Well, he jumped slap down on to one of those that was floating in the water, and bust his leg in two places. Then they had to haul them both out.

‘I can tell you,’ he continued, ‘it sent up his stock with Sheila. He was quids in after that. I thought he was going to get away with it there and then – and he would have done, too, if he’d had a bean to bless himself with.’

He paused, and went on quietly, ‘He just faded away. I’d never seen him till today, and I don’t think Sheila had. It’s four years.’

His father pondered for a little, the blue smoke from his cigar curling heavily about his head. ‘Do you know what he’s going to do now?’ he said. ‘Didn’t I hear him say something about Hong Kong?’

Wallace nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He’s got a chance in his uncle’s firm out there – maritime solicitors. I imagine from what he said that he’s to go out as a sort of a junior partner.’

‘In which case,’ said the old man slowly, ‘he would probably be in a position to marry.’

‘That,’ said Wallace, ‘had occurred to me.’

His father rose slowly to his feet and threw the stump of his cigar into the fire. ‘It’s got to come sooner or later,’ he said heavily, ‘and he seems a decent enough boy.’ He turned to his son. ‘And anything rather than that Antony. That would be intolerable.’

Wallace laughed. ‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ he said.

For Dennison the week-end passed very quickly. On the afternoon before he left, he went for a walk alone with Sheila.

At the top of a hill a mile and a half from the house, they paused by a low stone wall.

‘The leg doesn’t seem to bother you much,’ she said.

‘Not a bit,’ said Dennison. He gazed out over the broad expanse of country spread beneath them, chequered with fields. ‘It’s fine up here.’

The girl did not take her eyes from the scene. ‘One sees such a lot of it,’ she said. ‘I’ve got an Australian cousin who came over for the war – I brought him up here. He said that English people would talk and get enthusiastic about anything like the Empire or the Navy, but you never heard a word about the beauty of their country. It came quite as a surprise to him to find that England was a pretty country. Afterwards, he told me that he thought England in the summer was just a fairyland.’

‘He was a sensible man,’ said Dennison.

The girl smiled, and turned to him, ‘You ought to know all about that,’ she said.

He laughed. ‘You mustn’t start me off on the sea,’ he said, ‘or I shall bore you stiff. All England’s simply great, of course, but I think the greatest bits of it are the harbours. Coming into a place like Salcombe at dawn, with the mist rising all pearly-like in the river, and a smell of sausages from below … There’s a certain charm in seeing England from the outside.’

‘Just like my cousin goes back to Australia, and realises that he has seen England from the inside.’

‘Yes,’ said Dennison absently. ‘I wonder if he finds Australia as good as England?’

The girl glanced at him curiously. ‘Will Hong Kong be as good as England, do you think?’

Dennison started. ‘The work will be very interesting,’ he said defensively.

‘But when you aren’t working?’ asked the girl, and hated herself for this question.

‘Oh, well,’ said Dennison. ‘There’ll be plenty to do, you know. And one will be able to come home fairly often – every three or four years, I think.’

The girl did not speak.

Presently they turned to walk down the hill. ‘I shall have to get back to town tomorrow,’ said Dennison. ‘My walking tour seems to have been a bit of a frost, doesn’t it? I meant to do such a lot, too.’

‘I don’t believe you did,’ said the girl. ‘And it’s been splendid seeing you again.’ She walked a little way in silence, and then, ‘Don’t go and disappear again,’ she said. ‘You’ll – you’ll come and stay with us again soon, won’t you?’

Dennison glanced at her, smiling gravely. ‘I shall be disappearing for good before so very long, you know.’

‘Don’t look ahead to it. When will you come again? Could you come down for a week-end – the one after next? I expect Antony will be here still.’

‘Would you like me to come?’ he asked.

She turned to him, a tinge of colour in her cheeks. ‘Why, yes,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t want you to come.’

‘I’d like to come very much,’ he said.

It was that same evening that Antony, who had obviously taken a great liking to Dennison, led him into his bedroom to show him his drawings.

He turned over a sheaf of indifferent attempts and
picked out the best for Dennison; the head of a pony, a thin line impression of an old woman with a bundle of sticks, and a small landscape with a smeary look about it. Then from a drawer he took another.

‘This is the one I want to give to Sheila,’ he said. ‘It’s one I did quite recently, but I don’t know that I care very much for it.’

It was a portrait of Sheila, a head and shoulders in profile. Deficient in technical skill though Antony might be, he had succeeded in catching the likeness remarkably well, the shy, secretive smile, the clustering of the fine brown hair about the neck and ears, the lines of the shoulders. Dennison stood gazing at it; to Antony his silence became embarrassing.

‘It’s – er – it’s rather attractive, isn’t it?’ he said nervously.

Dennison came to himself. ‘It’s very attractive,’ he said candidly. ‘I say, could you … I wonder if I might have a print of this?’

Antony flushed with pleasure. ‘I’m so glad you like it,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid I can’t get you a print of it. You see, I spoilt the plate. I wanted to try and intensify it a little, and I did it all wrong and let the mordant get all over it. Perhaps I could let you have this one in a little time, after she’s forgotten about it.’

Dennison smiled, and glanced at Antony. ‘It’s a splendid likeness,’ he said.

In person Antony was small and finely built, pale, with smooth black hair and immense black eyes. He spoke rapidly, with a touch of nervousness and with singular charm. The only child of the local rector, he had spent the nineteen years of his life in a perpetual struggle with disease. There was nothing organically wrong with him, yet things that ordinary people never got, Antony had twice. He had been educated at home until he went to Oxford.

For the fortnight after Easter Peter Dennison proved an intolerable trial to Lanard with whom he shared rooms in London and a small seven-ton yacht
Irene
on the Solent. He refused to settle down in the evenings, but stood smoking and walking about the sitting-room till Lanard raised a protest. And he was exasperatingly cheerful.

Towards the end of the fortnight he wrote a letter. Lanard watched him dourly from the fireside as he wrote; he knew perfectly well what Dennison was writing about. It was a letter to his uncle in Hong Kong; Lanard suspected that it would be posted after his visit to the Wallaces. Lanard sat watching him, his feet on the fender, a glass of hot water at his elbow. Digestion was a weak point with him.

‘They have a sort of thing they call a sampan in China,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Very good craft, I believe – one can get quite good sport out of them. You have a black boy – or is it a yellow boy? – sitting on the outrigger. And a lateen sail with stiffeners on it like a metre boat. You’ll have to get one of those.’ He reached out for his hot water.

Dennison put away his letter and came over to the fire. ‘I don’t think they’d be very much fun,’ he said with disarming simplicity. ‘You can’t work to windward in them.’

‘If you ask me,’ said Lanard, ‘I should think you’d find precious little fun out there at all.’

Dennison did not answer.

‘I can’t say I’ve grasped what you’re going for at all yet,’ continued the other. ‘Anyone might think you were simply money-grubbing.’ He considered a little, and picked his words carefully. ‘You aren’t doing so badly here, you know. You’re well in with a good firm, and you’re making a comfortable little income at work that you’re interested in. You’ve got the
Irene
– or half of her. You’ve got a pretty good name in the Solent. And you’re giving it all up to go on an infernal wild-goose chase like this.’

Dennison finished filling his pipe and dropped into a chair. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘It’s a very good job.’

‘You’ve got a very good job now.’

‘Don’t be a fool. The Chinese one carries more than double the screw.’

‘I see,’ said Lanard. ‘That’s the way it is.’ He pondered for a little. ‘So that you can marry?’

‘So that I can marry.’

Lanard laughed suddenly. ‘Pity this job didn’t come along in the autumn,’ he said cynically.

He rose to his feet and straightened his waistcoat carefully. ‘I don’t suppose it will do the least good if I say I think you’re making a big mistake,’ he said. He moved over and stood in the window, a favourite position.

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Dennison smiling. ‘You think that marriage is a mistake?’

‘Good God, no!’ said Lanard suddenly. ‘That’s not the mistake you’re making. The mistake you’re making is in letting marriage influence your life, or your plans. You’re living to suit your marriage – not marrying to suit your life. That’s the mistake you’re making.’

Dennison glanced at him. ‘There’s only one thing to say,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking this over for four years, and I think it’s worth it. That’s all there is to it.’

‘In that case,’ said Lanard quietly, ‘I suppose there’s no more to be said.’

Next day Dennison travelled down to Didcot.

Sheila and Antony were delighted to see him, but the first evening with Antony’s added company seemed interminable.

Dennison took his opportunity, when Sheila went out of the room to see about kitchen affairs, to deal with Antony.

‘If we’re going to do any bird photographs in the morning,’ he said to the boy, ‘it means getting up very early. I’d go to bed early if I were you.’

Something in his tone checked the indignant comment that sprung to Antony’s lips.

‘Very early?’ he said.

They heard Sheila’s footstep in the passage. ‘Practically at once, if I were you,’ said Dennison gravely.

‘All right,’ said Antony, ‘but I shan’t get a wink of sleep before one, you know.’

‘I don’t care two hoots about that,’ said Dennison callously. He said no more, for the girl was in the room.

Presently Antony dutifully put in a plea of fatigue and disappeared. Sheila wrinkled her brows in perplexity. ‘He’s probably got a novel that he wants to read in bed,’ she said. ‘I think that must be it. It’s hardly ten.’

Dennison threw the end of his cigarette into the fire. He sat down on the edge of the fender. ‘It isn’t that,’ he said. ‘I told him that if he was going to get out of bed to photograph birds, he must go to bed early.’

He paused. ‘I suppose you know why I told him that,’ he said. He glanced up at her, standing beside him, and smiled. ‘You see, I wanted to ask you if you’d like to marry me.’

The girl met his eyes with an expression that he could not read. ‘Would you like me to go on?’ he said. ‘Because – I can stop here if you like.’

There was an immense silence.

The girl looked him squarely in the face. ‘If I were to tell you to stop,’ she said, ‘what would you do?’

‘Go to bed,’ said Dennison, ‘and go home by the ten-fifteen tomorrow morning.’

‘And if I were to tell you to go on?’

He smiled. ‘I should try to tell you how this – how this happened.’

The girl turned, and sat down on the edge of a chair, her chin resting on her hands. ‘Please tell me,’ she said gravely.