The Pandervils (21 page)

‘Letter?' said Egg.

‘Yes. It come this morning right enough. P'raps I was surprised to get it, p'raps I wasn't. I won't say it was what I'd call a neighbourly letter, Mr Pandervil; but I will say that maybe I deserved it.'

Egg was troubled and mystified. ‘Got the letter on you, Mr Wimmett?' Mr Wimmett looked astonished. ‘Mind if I have a look at it,' said Egg. ‘Just to refresh my memory, you know.'

Mr Wimmett found the letter in his pocket. Egg, having read it through, handed it back with an apologetic frown. It was not a neighbourly letter, and it was signed E. Pandervil. Egg had never seen it before.

‘Funny thing,' said Egg, after a difficult silence. ‘I didn't remember the letter was quite so … so strong as that.' A conflict raged within him: to whom was his loyalty due—to himself and his friendship with Wimmett, or to the writer of that letter?

‘Well, I must say,' said Mr Wimmett, ‘since you've said it yourself, as good as, I must say it don't read to me quite like you, Mr Pandervil. Still I'm not saying I don't deserve it, and if you can be patient a while longer I'll see you get every penny of it, every blessed penny. I tell you what I'll do, what's more,' cried Mr Wimmett, with sudden enthusiasm, ‘I'll pay interest on it. Ten per cent. I'll pay. No, twenty per cent. …'

Egg interrupted him, for he saw that in the ecstasy of this resolution Mr Wimmett was in danger of regarding the debt as already paid, and of walking out of the shop inflated with a sense of his own generosity. ‘We don't want interest, and we won't have it. But we do,' said Egg, remembering Carrie, ‘we do want the account paid, and the sooner the better. Fact is,' he added, unable to sustain his asperity, ‘Mrs Pandervil doesn't care about giving credit at all. It's always been spot cash in this shop, and that's the best way in my opinion. Pay for what you have
when
you have it,
and then this kind of unpleasantness between neighbours doesn't arise.' Old Mr Noom, could he have heard this speech, would have smiled recognition at it.

‘Ah, Mr Pandervil, if I could only lay my hands on a fifty-pound note, I'd never run up another account as long as I lived, I wouldn't.'

‘By the way,' said Egg, ‘I don't know if you're a man for riddles and problems and general knowledge and suchlike.'

‘Pretty middling that way,' said Mr Wimmett.

‘Well, I met some folks the other day. No one you know. Nice people too. Well, we got talking, and the question come up: when they call people honourable, what does that mean? Some said this, some said that. In the end, I'm dashed if we didn't have a little bet on it.'

‘Honourable?' Mr Wimmett looked as though he didn't quite like the tone of the conversation. ‘You're not getting at me, Mr Pandervil? For let me say this, that I didn't come here to be called out of my name. I'm a mild man, Mr Pandervil, and I try to be neighbourly with them as is neighbourly-minded. But if I thought. …'

‘Bless my soul!' Egg laughed with a boisterousness that would not have deceived a less simple man than Mr Wimmett. ‘What bree's biting you now?' he cried, and his tongue took pleasure in remembering that Mershire saying. ‘No, no, Mr Wimmett, you're on the wrong track. What I mean is this. Suppose you call somebody, as it might be, the Honourable John Smith, ‘what's
the meaning of that? Some said,' added Egg hopefully, ‘that it was something to do with a man's father.'

‘Dunno,' said Mr Wimmett. ‘Lost my poor old father years ago. Give it up. What's the answer.'

‘No good asking me,' replied Egg. ‘We had a little bet on it. Of course it makes no matter, whatever it means. But you know how folks get talking. Myself, I thought it might be this way. Suppose your father was a lord, Lord Farringay we'll say. Then you'd be the Honourable So-and-So Wimmett. But that's only a guess.'

Mr Wimmett smiled wanly, and repeated the rich fantastic words with the air of trying them on his person: ‘The Honourable So-and-So Wimmett! That's a good one, that is! Though I reckon a fifty-pound note'd be more use to me than a high-sounding affair like that. Well, good day, Mr Pandervil.' He paused at the door to inquire, over his shoulder: ‘Children well? … And
Mrs
P? … That's right. Well, good day to you, I'm sure.'

It was not a busy morning, and the few little tasks demanded of him from time to time—a big parcel to be made up for the Vicarage, a pound and a half of best cheese for Mrs Simmons, and seven pounds of preserving sugar for Mrs Blake—did not seriously interrupt his secret train of thought. He could not forget the contrast between what he had seen in the lid of that biscuit-tin with what he had seen in the little, deal-framed mirror on his chest of drawers at home. And a third face
sometimes appeared among his thoughts. Just before noon Mr Wimmett put his head in the doorway, a certain air of triumph colouring the vague hesitancy that was his normal manner. ‘Mr Pandervil, you there? Ah, I just looked in to tell you about that puzzle of yours. Went and asked Mr Pummice, I did. I thought he'd know. I said to myself: If there's one man in Farringay as'll know, that man's Mr Pummice.'

Egg waited patiently. ‘Well? What did he say?'

‘You was right, he says. If I was the Honourable So-and-So Wimmett—that's a good one, that is!—my father would be a lord. Peer of the realm, I think Mr Pummice said. You know what a one he is for his joke. So you'll have won your bet, I reckon?'

Egg nodded and laughed. ‘Yes, I s'pose I have.'

But his demeanour, when Mr Wimmett was out of sight, did not suggest that of a man who has won a bet. He looked guiltily round the shop; then began feeling in his waistcoat pocket. But at that point his courage failed him. He hesitated; he heard steps approaching from the house, exasperated steps; and, with a spasm of anxiety passing over his face, he called out: ‘All right, Carrie! I'm coming. I'm coming.' There was urgency in his voice. He went into the house at once.

Carrie and Mrs Noom were already seated at the dinner-table, with five-year old Mabel and one-year-old Bobbie within easy reach of them.
Mabel, nearest her grandmother, was a sullen-looking child, and her voice was already edged with the note of complaint. Egg would sometimes mildly reprove her for these ungracious airs, but he was not encouraged to do so. ‘Why must you always be
on
at her, Father?' Carrie would say. ‘She's not feeling well, poor lamb, issums, ducky?' If, on the other hand, he seemed disposed to take pleasure in his daughter's existence, he was accused of spoiling her. ‘She's a pert enough miss already, Father, without you fussing and petting of her. Leave the child alone, do!' He left the child alone; and, if the truth must be told, it was no great hardship to him. Before her birth the prospect of fatherhood had stirred him more to curiosity than to any other feeling, and such pleasure as he had known in anticipation was quickly quenched. The smallness and helplessness of the baby excited compassion in him, but he did not feel towards it any specifically paternal tenderness. Mabel and Bobbie were Carrie's children; it happened that he was their father. Absurd, but it was so. Absurd and unaccountable, and it sometimes profoundly humiliated him to reflect how utterly he had been shaped and bullied by events. Of what he had wished and planned to do, he had done nothing. Instead, he had done a number of involuntary things, acquiring in the process a number of irrelevant possessions, among which were these two children, a shop, and a mother-in-law. Was Carrie herself, then, excluded from this category? That was a question he did not even ask, still less
answer: either because some secret fear, parading in the dress of loyalty, forbade so radical an examination of his heart, or because, having learnt a wisdom of sorts, he was ready, given the slightest encouragement, to exaggerate the compensating advantages of his plight.

‘Now Mabe!' said Egg. Haven't you got a hanky?'

Mabel scowled without answering. He repeated his challenge.

‘Yes, Father.'

‘Then you'd better use it, me dear.'

Bobbie, for no assignable reason, began screaming with rage. ‘Diddums wantum din-din den?' murmured Mrs Noom, with a reproachful glance at Egg. She thrust a rubber teat into the child's mouth. Carrie, who sat within hand's reach of Bobbie, so that she could slap him or cuddle him according to her varying mood, fixed the child with a commiserating stare and remarked to the world at large that some people always did have to be interfering. This did not appease Bobbie, who, having skilfully ejected the ‘comforter', resumed his screaming. As a screamer Bobbie was an unqualified success. He was thorough; he was a worker. He had, for the time being, adopted screaming as his chief business in life, and by industry and perseverance, his deceased grandfather's favourite virtues, he seemed likely to make that business prosper and pay large dividends. Egg, though he made no voluntary sign, was unable to conceal his discomfort; but the two women, without
any further attempt to subdue the screamer, began eating ribs of mutton with an air that told him plainly enough that he had brought it all on himself. He did not rhetorically inquire, either of the women or of himself, what conceivable connection there could be between his daughter's dirty nose—it was still dirty—and his son's fury; experience had taught him the futility of such questions. He sat silent, munching his food; and, when the nuisance became too grievous to be borne any longer, he resorted to a favourite expedient of his, which was to close his eyes and pretend that the noise he heard was that of a steam-engine rushing through a tunnel. In this way, by losing himself in a fantasy of travel, he was able to get just that moment's respite without which, it seemed to him, he must infallibly have gone mad. After five minutes of this intermittent hell Carrie went out of the room to fetch food for its author. When she rose, it became apparent that she was carrying her third child.

There was no conversation during the meal. So much the better, thought Egg. That Carrie was in a disagreeable mood did not greatly surprise or anger him; he was eager indeed to make allowances for her, for there existed in him, deep down and long forgotten, a dumb and utterly irrational gratitude to Carrie that dated from her first bodily surrender to him. Tut the light out, do! It's a disgrace.' Half furtive and half eager that surrender had been, missing beauty by reason of her conviction of sin, her shame which made him
ashamed, yet touched, in the end, with a hint of frail grace by her awakening compassion for him. She had kissed him warmly, forgivingly. For that he had been grateful; without knowing it, he was grateful still; that gratitude, buried in him but buried alive, moved him to exercise a degree of patience which he himself, had he seen events from the outside, would have found unaccountable. He no longer, unless disturbed, as he was now, by some unwonted excitement, spent any thought on such matters; marriage was become very much a routine affair; but in those early days he had been greatly perplexed, and for a while deeply unhappy. For what was a man to do? After that sorry bridal night it seemed to him only reasonable to suppose that ‘all that sort of thing', which Carrie appeared to find degrading and repellent, was at an end between them; but his wife quickly found means to convince him of his mistake. She knew her duty, she loved her husband, and for nothing in the world would she be unkind to him. ‘And besides …' said Carrie, and hid her face in the pillow. And so she gave him, insisted on giving him, everything of herself except such beauty and candour as might have made the gift a precious one. He never saw her unclothed. It was his privilege to see her with her hair in curlpapers, to watch her—were he so minded—brushing her teeth, and, inadvertently, to surprise her in various inelegant stages of undress; but her body's grace, the body his own had embraced in darkness, was never revealed to him. Once, before the first baby
had been weaned, he entered the bedroom unexpectedly in the middle of the morning, to be greeted with an alarmed cry: ‘You mustn't come in now, dear! Go away, do! Baby's having her breakfast.' He reproached himself for his rough country manners: but with only half his heart, for surely, he thought, if things had fallen out differently for me …? That conjecture had been too wonderful to be stated even in thought. …

‘There's the bell, dear!' said Carrie.

‘Right-O!' answered Egg. ‘I've had all the dinner I want, anyhow.'

He was glad to get back to the shop, where, with less drastic interruption and in a more congenial atmosphere, he could resume his dream, and perhaps, if fortune favoured him, could torture himself once again with a sight—the still astonishing sight—of her name. Mingling with these reflections was a reiteration of his resolve to have it out with Carrie about that Wimmett letter. She didn't ought to have done that; it's going a bit too far, that is, I'm dashed if I don't tell her so. He doubted, nevertheless, whether his indignation would keep warm enough to be worth pouring out upon her; opportunities of private talk were rare indeed in this household, for when the children were not present Mrs Noom was. Bedtime was the only time for talk, and nowadays at bedtime they were so often too sleepy to exchange more than an indifferent word or two. In the first years of their marriage Egg had found the richest of his compensations, the most substantial reward of intimacy,
in the kindly comfort of that lying side by side in the darkness, quietly turning over, in thought and drowsy speech, the day's doings and the morrow's possibilities; and it was by virtue rather of such homely satisfactions than of passion, or of the marriage service permissive of passion, that Carrie was truly his wife, a woman for whom he would have—even while he might be hating her—a unique, an obstinate, a highly inconvenient and exasperating affection.

Of all this he was not aware, except perhaps in a very dim and confused fashion. Such reflections, indeed, would by no means have accorded with his mood, which was, so far as he could make it so, one of resentment and stern resolution. Yes, Carrie should certainly be told about it—making free with his signature like that, and setting his old friends against him! But his heart was not in this punitive enterprise; his heart was in his fingers which, during all that afternoon and evening, when no one was observing them, would be forever moving towards his waistcoat pocket. Nevertheless, when he followed Carrie that night into their bedroom he at once, with the courage of desperation, launched his attack.