The Old Man and Me (13 page)

The food on my plate and the wine in my glass began concentrating on me. Yum-yum. Sorry folks. No recipes, no vintages. You’ll have to take my word for it: it was the best I’d ever eaten. Lady Bessemer had been reading a book on extra-sensory perception, she was all hung up on the subject. The yachtsman, whose ear and eye were permanently cocked in her direction, picked it up and we were off: hypnotism and table-tapping...the sort of thing you can listen to with one third of your mind and still come in with appropriate noises at appropriate times. It was the Changing of the Plates and I fell into my old habit of trying to guess who was the richest person in the room. First I raked the table carefully up and down to see if I could detect anyone as poor as or poorer than me. I was very sensitive to the outward symptoms: too much good taste, too much Spartan simplicity disguised as a Pose—my game, in fact. My other way of ferreting them out was much more extra-sensory and largely unsuccessful. I would look at each person separately until they looked back at me and then wait for their sudden recognition of our conspiracy. Most of the time people thought I was flirting with them. Anyway, I was the poorest of this gang—that was clear. Now, who was the richest? Start with Mr. and Mrs. Something. They were utterly colourless but they were sunburned and to be sunburned at that time of year always meant being fairly rich. But there was about them a complacency and mildness of manner I couldn’t equate with the very
very
rich. Also they had a rather pimply son, a dead ringer for Dad, sitting next to the youngest Daggoner child and, God knows why, but that made them not so rich too. Ann Authoress was not poor. I’d glanced at her books on my way up to my room and they were privately printed. And Greece, all that jazz—that was not exactly poor either. And all that self-indulgence; I sensed two rich, loving parents backing that up. But was she an out and out Heiress? I doubted it. The man to the left of Lady Daggoner was in clerical garb. The local vicar. So much for him. The Colonel was a house pet. I’d seen Lady Daggoner ordering him around.

And so we came to the young man with a yacht. A yacht, that was something to conjure with. You don’t run a yacht with a first-class French chef using coloured buttons for money. But maybe there was only a yacht. Yo-ho the Life-of-the-Sea and a one-room apartment on a chic little street. And then too,
he
was younger than
she—
(she being Lady Bessemer), and with a kind of dependency upon her and deference to her that might be based on money. Lady Bessemer. Bessemer. Steel. Maybe she owned all the steel in the world. If so I’d award her the Golden Calf Stakes hands down. But did she, or did her husband, wherever he was? By process of elimination, I saw that he was not there. And Young Yachter was. Lady Bessemer a divorcée? If I ever saw one. And wait a minute—“My ex” she’d said during some part of the Occult conversation. Her “ex” had forbidden her to take part in a séance. Too bad. Alimony is something but it is not All.

My host had a hunk, did he not, did he not, by Gad. What it must cost to run this show. But in cold cash? I wondered. Maybe it was all ploughed back in the land. So that left dear C. D. Or rather Me/ C. D. That was still all cash, as far as I knew, good old available cash—minus whatever splurges in food, drink, clothing and general living it up he went in for. I was going to have to find out specifically about all those things at the earliest possible date. A good look at his bank-book for instance would help for a start. Wouldn’t it be funny if after all he was the richest person in the room, I mean if
I
was?

“A penny for your thoughts,” said my host.

“I was thinking about money,” I answered frankly.

“Ah—you’re in need of it?” It was a probe, not an offer.

“I was,” I smiled. “But I’m not any more.”

“She doesn’t like my being here. She’s trying to fix you up with old horse-face,” I said to C. D. We had gone for an after-dinner stroll and were sitting on a bench in Lady Daggoner’s Folly. It was mild and pleasant there sheltered by a high hedge. I looked up at the cypress trees trying to convert them into the suitors of Ann’s heated imagination but for me they stubbornly remained trees while an enormous fountain in the centre (mysteriously omitted from her account), gorgeously flood-lit and softly splashing away, dominated the surroundings. I wondered how she’d avoided whirling, flirting and teasing smack into it.

C. D. laughed. “If there’s one thing I’m immune to it’s Lady Novelists. Think of being constantly forced into daily contact with all her imaginary characters: ‘I had such
fun
with Jonathan this morning: I believe I
found
him,’ and so forth.”

“Still, I’m glad you recognized her from my description. Have you read any of her books?”

“One.”

“What’s it like?”

“Chloroform.”

“She was telling me she’s at work on what the French call a ‘roman à fleuve.’”

“She reads as if she’s been writing under water.”

He smiled at me benevolently.

“Why is Lady Daggoner so eager to marry you off?”

“Oh, you know what one’s friends are. And it’s much safer if it’s someone they know—simplifies the seating arrangements. They know who’s going to get along with whom. It’s a while since my wife died.” He sighed. “I suppose Pam’s decided my usefulness as one kind of an extra man has ended. She has two categories: the fill-ins and the eligibles.”

“You are an eligible.”

He took my hand. “You don’t consider me eligible? You perhaps prefer the Colonel? Or Rozelia Bessemer’s latest?”

“No, I prefer you. I can’t speak for the others but to me you are easily the most eligible man here.”

He looked at me thoughtfully. “That is the first nice thing you’ve said to me since we met—”

“It’s the first chance I’ve had—”

“—and it was meant as a joke,” he finished.

“I—” we both started off together.

“You,” he conceded.

“No, you,” I urged.

“Why I was about to mention how fond I am of this part of the country,” he disappointed me by saying. “I am thinking of spending my declining years somewhere around here. I was brought up in the country, though very different from this sort of thing. Wild, savage, rockbound. My earliest memories are of seaweed and sheep.”

“Seaweed and sheep...” I echoed dreamily, trying to picture it.

“More sheep than people,” he assured me.

“Isn’t it funny, I can imagine you quite easily as a baby—but I can’t imagine you growing up”—(I’d almost said “grown-up”)—“what was it like?”

“Come now, you don’t want me to bore you with all that.”

“Yes I do.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes I do.”

“Well then,” he cried with a sudden spurt of energy and settling into the stone seat as if it were an easy chair he began: “Once upon a time on a sparsely inhabited isle in the Outer Hebrides—that’s off the coast of Scotland—there lived a dashing young ne’er-do-well and his brave little wife. Not long after the brave little wife gave birth to their only son, the dashing young ne’er-do-well dashed off the isle, and from there—who shall ever know? By the time I was ten, we were penniless and deserted and the seaweed so rampant we could hardly get into the front door. Whereupon my brave little mother, keeping her wits about her, threw us upon her nearest relation, a sister who, as it happened, had married the Laird of the Isle. We went to live in the castle—people in those days having a rather stronger sense of responsibility towards their kin than now—where I was brought up along with the other children. The years go by and then, quite suddenly—well no, perhaps not all that suddenly, it took two tidal waves to do it—my uncle announced his intentions of abandoning the isle. It seems he’d found a sheep ranch tucked into the wilds of Canada and had decided to emigrate there with his family. The sheep turned the trick, I imagine, made him feel it was a home from home, or a sheep from sheep. I was not seventeen. My mother had died six months previously. To emigrate or not. The decision was left to me. I decided not. We had been educated at home, as was the custom in those remote feudal outposts, and, with all due modesty, I had turned out to be something of a prodigy in the schoolroom. I was eligible for a scholarship to Oxford. Curious how little the New World, even at that early age, attracted me. Never has...Where were we? Oh yes—I entered Oxford the following year, did well, as they say, eventually became a Student of the House.”

“What?”

“That’s very special, means you’re allowed all sorts of privileges like walking on the grass and motoring into the college—and settled down more or less happily to the academic life. Then came the war—”

“And your brilliant military career—”

“A fluke,” he said dismissingly, “but deeply unsettling. It was no good after that, I couldn’t go back; the academic life had lost its appeal and so I went to London and got mixed up in—” He broke off frowning and I followed his thoughts back to the disastrous Clute scandal. This time I knew better than to say anything. I kept my mouth shut and we both looked at the fountain for a while. I found myself thinking of Pauly...How had those unlikely two ever gotten together? I tried to remember the short note she’d written me at the time, of which only the fact of her marriage to an Englishman had remained. But there was something about a yacht, I dimly recalled; something about their meeting on a yacht. Somehow she’d taken a cruise on a yacht and he’d been there. I tried to picture Lady Bessemer’s Yachtsman and Pauly together. Impossible. The Daggoners and Pauly. Equally impossible. And for the first time in my life I thought in a connected way—a way connected with myself: Poor Pauly.

“Don’t waste your time on me,” he said suddenly, “I assure you, I’m the least eligible man on earth.”

“Not to me.” I moved closer to him so that my face was almost touching his.

He kissed me.

And then, to my chagrin, I giggled.

“What’s so funny?”

“I’m sorry,” I gasped, “‘They kissed in the conservatory,’ I couldn’t stop that phrase running through my mind. It must be all those sheep and seaweed and remote savage Isles and Gothic Castles and this Folly. It’s getting too much for me.” I kept giggling helplessly. “I feel as if I should be wearing a crinoline and hiding behind a fan.”

“You’re impossible,” he said stiffly and drew away from me.

“Oh please, I don’t want to be! Please kiss me again. Please.”

This time we really kissed. I mean I took a great step forward and walked across an ocean of time and space and the fan dropped out of my hand and I stepped out of my crinoline and it was C. D. I was meeting head on. C. D.’s mouth joining with my mouth. And it was all right, it was fine, it was O.K. And when we parted from that kiss we were already lovers. The question had been
answered. It was merely a matter of when. And where. Not, however, there. A heavy mist had rolled up drenching us through.

When we came back into the drawing-room there was Lady Daggoner, daggers drawn beneath the façade, almost springing out of the french window curtains to receive and separate us: C. D. to a bridge game, me to Mr. and Mrs. Slug. And very soon thereafter, Mr. and Mrs. Slug and I having discovered not exactly to our surprise that we had nothing in common, I began thinking of bed. Clara Hatch had the right idea about this house, I decided. Bed was the place to be. As much as possible.

“Cos and I are going to look over some land I think he might be interested in tomorrow morning,” Lady Daggoner said, tearing herself away from the bridge game for a moment. “Hope you don’t mind.”

“As a matter of fact I do.” What a joy it would have been to say it but instead I managed a cool, “Not at all.”

“D’you ride?” she asked me indifferently.

“No.”

“Well then, sleep as late as you like. I know you Americans like to stay in bed till noon.” She tried a smile which was not a success and promptly abandoned it. “Write your breakfast order on the pad over there and ring for it tomorrow whenever you’re ready.” She was at the cards arranging her bridge hand snap snap. “Oh,” she said as an afterthought, “we’re having some rather amusing young people in for luncheon.” That, I suppose, to discourage any notion I had of sleeping all through the day.

No doubt because of my being an American (though possibly the strain of all the mixed emotions I’d been feeling that day might have had something to do with it as well), I was out cold the moment I hit the sack that night and it damn near was noon next day when I came to. I rang the bell and I must have slipped back into sleep, or the pussy-footing was super-perfect—at any rate, when I registered again the curtains were parted, the breakfast tray was on my bedside and, you guessed it, the bath had been drawn. And all I’d caught sight of was the tail end of the black uniform.

I dressed and went downstairs into what I was beginning to think of as the non-Assembly Hall. I mean it was truly remarkable the way they all had of getting in there and spreading themselves limply about the furniture and
not
assembling.

Through the french windows, invincible in tweeds, impregnable in brogues, burst Lady Daggoner, an English Rose turned hyacinth from the morning’s exertions, closely followed by C. D. and—peek-a-boo—Ann too, whom she’d also taken along on the expedition, the rat.

We all more or less looked towards their general direction—though I certainly wouldn’t wish to imply any
group activity
in this movement.

“What was it like? Is the house nice?” somebody not much wanted to know.

“Absolutely
dazzling
,” said Ann stretching her neck prettily and giving us her profile. I wish I could reproduce that awful English
azz
. It always went right through me. It had a “y” in there after the “d” so you got a “dyazzling,” which is pretty horrible for a beginning, but it was the way they started to say “dyazz—” and ended up flattening it into “dyezz—” that set me on edge.

C. D. came over and sat by my side. “What did you think of it?” I asked him with, need I tell you, a more than academic interest in his answer.

“Cos was being his usual tiresome self,” said Lady Daggoner with an indulgent smile for him. “All we do is look and look. And all he does is fuss and complain. He’s made slaves of us all.” She let her hand trail along the back of his neck in an intimate manner I didn’t care for as she went in answer to the butler’s summons.