The Pandervils (40 page)

‘Time gup!' James said. Receiving no answer, he repeated the injunction. ‘Time gup!'

‘What!' Nicky was incredulous. ‘Oh
damn!'
James, in his methodical unenthusiastic fashion, was already smearing himself with water. The sight of that unresponsiveness roused a little demon in Nicky. ‘James, I made a remark.'

‘Eh?' said James.

‘I said: Oh damn! Do you agree with me, dear James? Oh damn! Oh blast! It's rotten getting up in the dark. Don't you think so, brother slave?'

‘Um,' said James, splashing and hissing in his basin.

Nicky sat up, slid his legs out of bed, and paused for a moment dangling them.

‘James, you're a jovial man, aren't you!' He affected a ghastly jocularity for the concealment of his bitterness. ‘You're like a suet pudding, James, and when I think on thee, dear friend … I say, could you bear to show a bit of feeling sometimes, just to oblige me? … Could you? Will you?'

‘Eh?' said James. His face emerged from behind a towel. He had not been listening. ‘We'll
maybe get a bit of that vetch cleared away 'smorning. No use to anyone, isn't vetch.'

Crabbe's Farm, on account of its proximity to the little shop in which Miss Lady Dark sold boiled sweets out of one bottle and picture-postcards out of another, was held to be in the district of Brinkley. Miss Lady Dark (why she had been christened Lady I don't know) was situated almost precisely nine and a half miles east of Mercester, the hub of the civilized world. She sat behind her counter, a large ageing woman with the beginnings of a beard that the young men of an earlier generation would have envied her, and supplied the world with postage stamps, gum, cigarettes, chocolate, stationery, and acid drops in various colours. She did not speak often; she seldom moved; she merely sat still and grew larger and older, and, with the help of her brother the postman, dealt with the letters despatched and received by the five and thirty inhabitants of Brinkley. From Lady's plump fingers Nicky received most of his letters, for they reached Brinkley after the first delivery, and there was no second delivery in the district unless the postman happened to be passing that way. It became therefore necessary, for impatient people like Nicky, to call at the office and confront the postmistress in person. Nicky, in his solitude, became more and more dependent on his letters. Most of them were from his father, who
wrote with unfailing regularity once a week. Others were from Tooley: queer things these, curiously middle-aged and, in spite of their friendliness, somehow formal in tone. Tooley bought and sold in the city; he did not see what he bought; nor, till he had sold it again, did he pay for it; in fact, what he did, so far as Nicky could see, was to sit in his office and do neat little sums the answers to which represented his profit. In this simple fashion Tooley, still in his early twenties, was growing rich; he was thinking, he said, of settling down, and had found (but here I do not believe him) a nice place at Crouch End. No doubt there was a girl somewhere in his mind's eye, but of her he said nothing, so that Nicky was not obliged as yet to burden his imagination with the singular idea of Tooley as a married man, being called ‘my dear', and sleeping in a double bed, and mowing a small suburban lawn every fine Saturday afternoon in the summer. But he was a little chilled by the change that had overtaken Tooley. ‘Well, my dear Pandy, I must close now, With kind regards and wishing you “all the best”, Yours sincerely …' In such sentences Nicky could not recognize the voice of his friend. Those quotation marks daunted him.

Not least among the more infrequent of his correspondents was Uncle Algy, who wrote from time to time insisting that Nicky should visit him again. From Uncle Algy he had indeed a standing invitation; such phrases as ‘open house' and ‘Liberty Hall' were for ever on the old man's lips
and in his letters, and Nicky could not go often enough to please him. Uncle Algy lived at Woodithorpe, a couple of miles north of Mercester where, first as a clerk and afterwards as a partner in the firm of Fox Fox Fox Deever and Pandervil, he had had such a prosperous career. Retiring from business thirteen years before, at the age of sixty-five, he had bought a miraculous ‘little place' at Woodithorpe known as the Old Vicarage, where ‘me and little Min, Eggie boy, can get a bit of quiet at last'. Quiet was the last thing you would have supposed Uncle Algy wanted, for he was not himself a quiet man, and when presently he got it in a form he had never bargained for—the devastating silence of bereavement—he was changed from that hour, for though he recovered, in time, his jauntiness of manner, there was now something in his life he couldn't talk about. Of Aunty Min he spoke more than enough: of her goodness, her patience, her devotion, and how she was carried off, as you might say, by an east wind on top of a bit of a sniffing cold. But of his grief, and what the loss of her meant to him, he said nothing; the most profound experience of his life, it was the only one he made no conversational use of. Since then he had had Mrs Meadows, a middle-aged widow, to look after him, her father the septuagenarian George Hake to control the garden, and her son Tom to assist both. There were still cronies who came from Mercester and tempted him to eat and drink more than was good for him, for feasting his friends was become perhaps the greatest of
accessible gratifications; and there were one or two young fellows, too, who came to admire and to laugh and to exchange winks with each other behind his back. But for the most part he had no audience but Mrs Meadows, an unresponsive woman, and old George Hake, whom, although he was seven years George's senior and George a man who might have passed for fifty, he insisted on regarding as a venerable museum piece. Nevertheless he was proud of his own age and would have quickly corrected anyone who understated it. He spent most of his time, in fine weather, being pushed about the grounds in a bath-chair by Tom Meadows or driven in his car by the same Tom Meadows (but how different in shining livery!); and he was as full of pawky jokes about his rheumatism as he had once been of boasts about his health. Now, as then, he used hackneyed sayings with the air of having invented them. ‘Fit as a fiddle, boy. Fit as a brace of fiddles. But touch wood, of course!' That had been a favourite remark in early manhood. And now, despite his having touched wood regularly for fifty years, he was in the grip of an enemy that he knew would never let him go. ‘A bag of old bones, that's me,' he would say, with a pleased air, as though it had been the best joke in the world. ‘And a bag of old
aching
bones, what's more. But bless my soul, young Nick, I wish every man o' my age was the match for
me
in health and strength. In a general way y'know. In a general way.' Sometimes, when the sun shone, he would call
his nephew ‘Old Nick', and laugh homerically at the joke, recalling what Nicky's Granny Noom had said when Egg, who never wearied of telling the story, had brought to her the news of Nicky's birth and name. It was one of the most enduring and popular of the family jokes; even ‘poor Carrie' had been known to enjoy it, and Egg, when he remembered that, for a moment wished her alive again. To Egg, nowadays, she was always, when he spoke of her, ‘poor Carrie' or ‘your poor mother', that ‘poor' representing a forlorn attempt to compensate her, in retrospect, for the fact that even though in a fashion one loved or had loved her, she was for the greater part of her life an essentially unlikeable woman. No one spoke of Algy's late wife as ‘poor Min'; one could not pity so blithe a spirit, one could only pity the world that had lost her.

Uncle Algy's house was a solid, dignified, early Georgian building in white stone. Screened, but not wholly hidden, by a group of tall pines, it stood a hundred yards back from a quiet hedge-bordered road. At the back lay three acres or so of garden and a small paddock where the ancient donkey— friend of Nicky's childhood—still grazed. The garden ascended in a series of three terraced lawns to a tiny forest of silver birches. These trees, slender and maidenly, stood, it seemed, on the very edge of the world, with nothing but sky—or was it sea? the imagination asked—shewing between them; for they grew upon a narrow ridge, beyond which the ground sloped sharply away to the wall
that surrounded the estate. Uncle Algy would never allow himself to be wheeled to a point from which that wall was visible; for some reason never stated even in his thoughts, he preferred to stare at the picture of sky that the trees framed for him.

For Nicky the place was at once familiar and new. The reality confronting him strangely confirmed and corrected his childhood memories of it. The garden was so much smaller than he had thought it; and the paddock, once a vast green kingdom of happiness, was now just a paddock, a half-acre paddock. There was a magic gone, and Aunty Min for ever absent; but there was another magic come, for beauty now had for Nicky the air of a promise. The dew that sparkled on that smooth grass, the satin touch of green buds and green leaves, the thrust of flowers towards the light and the young trees yielding to the wind—these and a thousand other incidents in the lovely natural drama were somehow, he dimly felt (not thought), prophetic of a desire fulfilled. And, though he recognized a pathos in Uncle Algy's predicament, he was too youthfully and egoistically alive to be much saddened by it. The old man had had a long life, and couldn't, in the nature of things, last much longer, reflected Nicky; but whenever the spectre started up in his thoughts he was quick to remind himself that death was the common lot and that he, anyhow, needn't begin thinking about it for another fifty years or so. Meanwhile there was life; the board was spread for him, the feasting
hardly begun; and he did not lack appetite. These visits to the Old Vicarage, this contact with an aged man, whetted his appetite, while renewing for him that sense he had had in boyhood of worlds, many in one, of which he alone had the entry. It was Nicky who called this place miraculous, by which he meant only that its conjunction with Uncle Algy was the most improbable thing—now that one came to think of it—that could have happened. Didn't know the old boy had such good taste. But p'raps it was Aunty Min's doing. There was reason for this latter supposition, for it was admittedly due to Aunty Min that the Old Vicarage did not suffer a drastic change of name. ‘Algermin House' had been her husband's first fancy, and ‘ Pandervil Court' the likeliest alternative. ‘But y'r aunt didn't see eye to eye about that, Nicky. So I let her have her way. The best woman in the world. The very best, there's not a doubt. But just a lil bit conservative, my boy, as women
will
be. You'll find that out for yourself, young man. Believe
me!
But don't,' added Uncle Algy, ‘don't be in too much of a hurry about that kind of thing. Ten years time'll be soon enough, eh?'

‘In ten years time I shall be thirty-two, uncle.'

‘Dessay you will, boy. Quite an old man.' This was said almost in Egg's manner. ‘Don't you be in a hurry.'

‘No hurry,' said Nicky, insincerely. ‘Still, if I ever do get farming on my own I'll have to instal a butter-maker on the premises, I s'pose. Farmers have to have wives, don't they?'

Nicky took refuge in jocularity, being shy of the subject of marriage because of his consuming interest in it, and shy of discussing his own future because he could not help knowing that Uncle Algy was planning benefactions for him on a large scale. He wished Uncle Algy had been the kind of man one could consult about intimate affairs; he wished, indeed, that such a kind of man existed. But probably Algy, like Egg, would only look solemn and uncomfortable and change the subject, and so make him feel ashamed of having mentioned it. For nowadays Nicky was uneasy; troubled by amorous fantasy, angry with himself, and more than a little frightened, seeing no way of escape but to propose marriage to Gladys Crabbe, whose presence in the house disturbed him more and more as the weeks went by. He confessed to himself that he wanted Gladys, but he knew that it was not Gladys he wanted. The thought of marriage with her made his pulse hurry, and he could hardly stop to remember that there was more in marriage than going to bed with a woman. Sometimes, nevertheless, he did remember this, and found it so little to his liking that he contrived to forget it again. He was divided against himself, the one half of him, nature's dupe, plotting the overthrow of the other, which saw that he was in danger of bartering his life's freedom for a brief fiery pleasure. Dash it, he thought, there's no harm in kissing the girl; and his fancy began inventing a friendship between himself and Gladys—just a warm friendship, nothing more, of which kissing and mutual fondling
should be the innocent expression. It should all be secret and beautiful and chaste. But even while indulging it he didn't much believe in his dream; and under the scrutiny of commonsense it became manifestly absurd and impracticable, for the sufficient reason that in Nicky's world a kiss was in effect a betrothal. In face of that convention how could he explain to Gladys that he had no ‘intentions'? The difficulty was insuperable. Meanwhile he found himself on more than one of his Sunday evenings in Mercester, prowling the streets in quest of a temptation strong enough to resolve, however crudely, his torturing doubts. He received and returned glances; he looked back, he wavered in his walk, he turned to follow, and then, defeated by prudence, turned again and resumed his original course. There was one woman in particular whom he often caught sight of; he was attracted by her accessibility, by something in her bearing that he interpreted as comradeliness, and by the feeling that here was a woman without shame, and one, therefore, with whom he himself need have no shame. Sin was not sin to her—a strange and liberating thought! He was attracted, and he wilfully exaggerated the attraction, dressing it up in all the colours of romance. Half-knowing himself to be playing a game of self-deception, he in his thoughts vowed her pretty and plucky and charming; waxed indignant with the world that had degraded her; and longed to rescue her, longed to play knight-errant to her forlornness, a part that would naturally involve an exchange of tenderness. Disgusting
muck, he said to himself; she's got something to sell and I want to buy it, that's all. And that wasn't the whole truth either, but it served its purpose, which was to rouse him from a fevered dream and send him hurrying off to the inn-stables where his bicycle was lodged. Cycling back in the moonlight to Mr Crabbe's, he congratulated himself upon having escaped something that he knew would have been ugly in retrospect, a perpetual scourging of his self-esteem; but the thought could not be dismissed that life was after all none the easier for this escape, the danger being avoided but not removed. And this thought was confirmed the very next Sunday evening he had free, for this time he followed her with more persistence: still undecided, it is true, but giving freer rein to his idealizing fancy. In a side street she dawdled and from time to time cast a quick questioning glance at him over her shoulder. Wonderfully alluring she was; his heart throbbed noisily, he could scarcely breathe in his excitement as he sauntered after her, still trying to conceal his interest in her and still uncertain of what he intended. Should he speak? Yes. And what then? Nothing. He intended nothing, after all: with a pang of disappointment he realized that he intended nothing, whatever he desired. This is ugly, stupid; I'll clear out of here, he thought; but his feet still followed—and more quickly now—in the wake of adventure, until the woman suddenly turned round and came towards him. Now at last he'd got to do something, one way or the other. She
stared at him. He met her stare.