The Pyramid (22 page)

So then I had the difficulty of confessing to Bounce that I was not going to work for my ARCM after all; but she said little, merely nodding as if she had expected this. Our lessons returned to the old way of wasting time. Indeed, we wasted more time than before, since the rows had reached a critical point. Henry might escape from the hall, gently but firmly, secure in his brown, double-breasted suit with the two fountain pens in the breast pocket, but he would leave flames behind him.

“And you don’t owe me
anything
,
I suppose!”

“We’ve given as much as we’ve took!”

And still they did not go.

“I won’t have him here, that horrible,
horrible
boy—he was torturing it—”

My last lesson came and went; and after a restless summer, I reached the excitement and tremor of packing for Oxford. It was only on the evening before I went that I thought of Bounce again, because of the large square van parked on the cobbles in front of her railings.

“What’s up with Bounce, Mother?”

My mother jerked her head in contempt.

“They’ve gone.”

“Who?”

“The Williamses. Who d’you think? The Pope?” She made a noise as near as nothing to a spit. “I knew they would, one day when she was no more use to him. They’ve taken one of the new bungalows for the time being. It’s said that Henry Williams is going to build himself a house. I never trusted the man. Never.”

I could not remember that my mother had ever had any dealings with Henry, and I wondered how she could be so definite. I watched the door of the house open, and men bring out a few sticks of furniture, carpets, rugs, crockery and beds. My mother watched at my side.

“All shoddy, second-hand stuff. Never spent a penny he didn’t have to.”

Presently the van drew away and my mother returned to her sewing. A pupil, complete with music, went in at Bounce’s door.

“You’d better go over this evening after she’s finished teaching and say goodbye to her,” said my mother. “You owe her that.”

“Oh no! Look—Mother!”

“Nonsense,” said my mother calmly. “You know you’re devoted to her.”

So that evening, when the sodium lamps had shuddered into their ghastly brightness round the Square, I went, a young man dripping with hair oil and burning to get away, across the grass to the old house. The bow window was dark, and I hoped deeply that she was out, or asleep; for the guessed-at lights of Oxford, the concerts and plays, the books and people that would be mine in the intervals of chemistry, drew me strongly, and I could not think of
anything
else. But looking back at our cottage, I saw how a corner of the curtain was lifted to leave a little triangle in which I felt my mother’s eye. So sighing deeply, I stepped over the chains and onto the cobbles. I opened her front door; and the cold thought fell on me that once more the corridor and the rooms upstairs were dark and empty. Even that hall was haunted again; and despite my eighteen years I left the front door open as a retreat. Sodium light from the Square outlined a window on the floor and lay vertically against the door of the music room. With a tightening of the chest—and perhaps with the phantom of a quarter-size violin in my left hand—I raised the other hand to knock; and took it back again.

The sounds that came from beyond the dark panelling were a kind of ear-test. But a rook had no business to be down there on the left, on the rug before the dull, red eye of the fire. Nor could it add to its faint cawing those curious, strangled sounds as from an incompetently handled instrument. I stood stone-still left hand down, right hand raised, and listened as the caws and chokes prolonged and multiplied themselves; and the ear-test provided the picture I could see as clearly as if no panelling divided us. She was down there in the dark on the left, huddled before the dim fire beneath the glowering bust; trying to learn unsuccessfully without a teacher, how to sob her heart out.

I stole away, my hair lifting against the oil. I closed the door as carefully as if I had committed a burglary. I hastened across the grass and tried to sneak upstairs without my mother seeing me. But though she was sewing still, she had kept her ears open.

“Didn’t have a long talk then, Oliver?”

I grunted, as much like my father as I could.

“Come in and tell me about it.”

Groaning, and curiously enough, blushing as if I had been detected in some impropriety, I went into the sitting room.

“What did she have to say, dear?”

“—She wasn’t there.”

“Nonsense! She hasn’t left the house.”

“She wasn’t there I tell you! Perhaps she’s gone to bed.”

My mother looked up at me over her spectacles and smiled slightly.

“Perhaps she has.”

I went away from Stilbourne then, thinking this was my final escape. But I might have known that as long as I was connected with it in any way, we should all continue, even at a distance, to exercise some kind of gravitational influence over each other. Thus, the first copy of the
Stilbourne
Adver
tiser
which my mother forwarded to me contained not only news of my grand elevation to the status of undergraduate, but also news of Bounce. I read how Miss C. C. Dawlish (well-known local resident) had been involved in an accident at the junction between Cold Harbour Lane and the King’s Path. Little damage had been done but Miss Dawlish had sustained shock. This seemed not very significant to me; but I learned better in the Easter Vacation when I went home. I was spending as much time as I could, walking in the countryside. I had gone down across the Old Bridge, walked up the hill on the other side of the valley and was as far as I could be from the Square. I was brooding on the cheapest way of spending the Long Vacation abroad, somewhere; so it was not surprising that I almost walked into her. The two seater was at right-angles to the road. It had crossed the grass verge and the front wheels were in a muddy ditch. Bounce stood by it, gazing impassively into the woods. I had no chance of avoiding her.

“Hullo, Miss Dawlish! Having trouble?”

Her eyes turned first, then her head. Her mouth was very tight, the deep grooves running into it.

“You’re not hurt, Miss Dawlish, are you?”

All at once her face relaxed and lightened.

“It’s old Kummer!”

“Can’t I help?”

“Help?”

The darkness and tightness settled on her face again. The grooves came back. She began to shake her head, slowly and solemnly.

“No. No, no, no.”

“I could push—”

“No. No.”

A milk lorry came bumping and rattling along through the woods.

“Shall I—”

“No.”

She had not stopped shaking her head. She was frowning and saying “No” as if faced by some very difficult problem, the answer to which was only just out of reach.

“Well then—”

Suddenly the darkness lifted. It was extraordinary and frightening; there was such an instantaneity about the change—like a wireless with a dud valve when the sound is here one moment then clicks away into the distance. Her eyes focused on me, she grinned and showed her gold teeth.

“It’s old Kummer! Are you looking for a girl in the woods?”

I remembered the whole business of Evie Babbacombe and I felt my face blaze. I backed away, holding my walking stick like a sword.

“I—”

“How’s the piano then, my son?”

“No.”

“Better things to do, eh?”

I felt the sweat on my forehead.

“Chemistry and Physics, nowadays. Look—I’m walking back into Stilbourne. It’ll take a long time, I’m afraid. I’ll try to get a lift. Shall I fetch Henry?”

She put back her head and laughed.

“Do you know, Kummer? He always services my car
himself
—changes the oil and all those things, things inside, I don’t know what they are. And he always cleans it himself, washes it, polishes it. He puts on overalls and gets down to it just like he—”

“I’ll fetch him, Miss Dawlish. You’re quite sure you don’t want me to stay? You’ll be all right, here in the—?”

“Here in the woods?’

She laughed again. Then the darkness and tightness was back, eyes unblinking.

“I’m quite safe. Nobody’s going to bother about an old lady like me. Quite safe.”

“I’ll be as quick as I can.”

I hurried along the track, taking the shortest way to
Stilbourne
. I turned before I reached the corner and waved, as if to assure her of something or other, but she never saw me. She was standing on the verge by the car, staring into the woods. I came to a long bend in the road and there, a hundred yards away, was Henry’s breakdown van
approaching
. I shouted and gesticulated back to Bounce, trying to convey this to her by a kind of incompetent semaphore. I shouted and pointed at the van, too; but Henry passed me without noticing, in his brown double-breasted suit and trilby hat—passed me, staring mournfully before him through the windscreen. I waited, until I saw his van draw up beside her.

At supper, when I was questioned about my walk, my mother was very interested. She listened to my factual account of my meeting with Bounce, nodding and smiling grimly. My father looked up at her over his spectacles.

“Getting worse.”

I looked from one to the other.

“Worse? How? What’s happened?”

My mother waved away my question.

“I knew how it would end when he’d got what he wanted.”

“Come now,” said my father ponderously, as he helped himself to more cottage pie, “Come now. She’ll not have lost. She got her money back ten times over. I’ll say that about young Williams. He’s made a success of things.”

“Not like some people I could mention,” said my mother tartly. “By the time he’s done, he’ll have bought up half the town!”

I took this as a veiled allusion to the dull result of my first chemistry examination, so I kept quiet. My father kept quiet too. My mother had the air to herself: but she was used to this.

“Jacky Williams won’t go to Oxford, not even if he has the brains, which I doubt. You’ll see. He’ll go straight into the business. That’s how they’ll go on. He could afford to send him, but he won’t. And poor Miss Dawlish, slaving away—”

But this was too much for my father.

“She’s no need to‚” he said gruffly. “Why, with what she gets from the money she put into his business she could live like a—she could live in Bournemouth if she wanted to.”

I was getting bored.

“Well, she was lucky this afternoon anyway. Let’s leave it at that. Though I do think the milk lorry might have stopped.”

“Lucky?” said my father. “Lucky?”

My mother echoed him.

“Lucky?”

They looked at each other then back at me.

“I mean she could have been stuck there. It took me an hour to get home. If Henry hadn’t been coming through the woods—What’s the matter?”

They had turned back to each other, my mother with a look of incredulous amusement.

“Oliver, dear,” said my mother fondly. “You really
are
—but then, of course you’ve been away. Everybody knows about her—even the man in the milk lorry. She was a hundred yards from the cross roads in the woods, wasn’t she?”

“Telephone box,” said my father briefly. “She rang him up.”

I shoved back my chair.

“My God! So there is!”

“Not luck at all.”

“But she might have told me! I mean—there was I
prepared
to—”

My mother laughed aloud; then subsided.

“Poor soul!” she said. “All she wants is for him to put a little attention about her.”

There was a sort of convulsion in my mind. Late, later than for anyone else in that neighbourhood, the pieces—ancient and new—flew together, and I understood. My mouth opened and stayed open; for I had nothing to say. Yet they must have seen something in my frozen face, for my father put out a hand, clumsily, and laid it on my sleeve.

“We were forgetting how much she means to you, Oliver. But you see, old son—these telephone boxes—she’s done it before.”

My father’s gesture was so unusual in our undemonstrative household that I grimaced and stood up. I muttered.

“Well, if she’s got enough money—”

“Ah,” said my mother darkly. “Money isn’t everything. You’ll find that out one day, Oliver.”

I took my astonishment away; and in all that confusion of thought and feeling, I had a hazy awareness that the end of my mother’s conversation had contradicted something in the earlier part of it; so that this was the first time I understood she was not only my mother. She was a woman. This mental revolution was emotional too and very confusing. I stood there in the hall, gloves on, scarf hanging down over chest and back, and was consumed with humiliation, resentment and a sort of stage fright, to think how we were all known, all food for each other, all clothed and ashamed in our clothing. I opened the front door to escape her understanding; but as I closed it I heard her burst out with a half-suppressed giggle—

“I wonder what she’ll do when she runs out of ’phone boxes?”

So now when my mother sent me the
Stilbourne
Advertiser
I searched it diligently. Sure enough, I learned not only that at the organ was Miss C. C. Dawlish, but on another page, how Miss C. C. Dawlish had been fined five pounds; and later still ten pounds. When I was at home during the vacations, I sometimes saw her—but from as far away as possible—pacing from the garage to the house, with the ghost of that old, elastic stride. I saw the darkness in her face, too, the ring of muscle contracted round her mouth, eyes unwinking.

“Poor soul‚” my mother would murmur mechanically. I think she had lost interest. Bounce was like the long-dead Ophelia with her hatful of leaves—a Stilbourne eccentric, assimilated and accepted. At last, I read how Miss C. C. Dawlish was the defendant, up for dangerous driving. She had hurt, not herself, but someone else. I read how the
chairman
of the bench had said that he accepted this and that; but that we were none of us getting any younger and it would be in Miss Dawlish’s own interest, etcetera. He would suspend her licence for five years.