The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon (43 page)

^{"Well, you might at least have pulled the damned curtains and slipped something on before you invited him into the house!" growled Sebastian. "However, it might have been worse I suppose, the idiot might have got away with his disgusting photographs and we shouldn't have heard another word about it until they were handed up to the Judge!"}

^{"He ... he took pictures? You're . . . you're sure he took pictures?"}

^{"Of a sort through the windows no doubt, although I can't really see the purpose of them even now. It isn't as if we were both in the room but I suppose they'd be admissable as evidence that you spent a night in the house! Well, thank God I managed to floor him and get hold of them!" and he bunched a newspaper, put it in the grate and set a match to it, tossing the roll of film into the flames and watching it burn.}

^{"You were absolutely marvellous, Martin!" she said admiringly. "It was just like a Western! One, two, three and he was out for the count. I didn't know you could box. I find out something new about you every day!" and as she rattled on she wriggled into her girdle}

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^{and brassiere as though dressing in his presence was in the natural order of things.}

^{So indeed it seemed for he was preoccupied with other matters. He sat thinking deeply, legs outstretched, hands deep in the pockets of Olga's robe and when she said, "Hi! I was asking where you learned to box?" he looked up with a smile and replied: "I never did, I watched the boys over the years and I suppose I acted instinctively. He was the kind of man it was a positive pleasure to strike. I wish I'd hit him half a dozen times more and knocked all his teeth out!" Then, as though "to himself, "I just can't imagine Sybil doing a thing like that, it's not like her at all. It's something many women might do I suppose but not Sybil, it's too . . . too cheap and stupid!"}

^{He stood up, suddenly, addressing her directly.}

^{"I suppose you know what this might mean to you, Rachel?"}

^{"That I could be cited? Yes, I realise that, I'm not really the 'teenager you make me out to be, Martin and frankly I don't care a damn! If Sybil does divorce you I think I'd be glad about it and noj simply because you might ultimately come round to taking me seriously. I think it would be right for you and the only aspect of it that worries me at all is the effect it might have on Fred. He'd pretend to be broad-minded of course but it would upset the old boy and that's what you're concerned about too, isn't it?"}

^{"Yes," he said, "but there's rather more to it than that, Ray. If Sybil uses you to divorce me it's goodbye to a job at Barrowdene, I'm afraid!"}

^{She looked shocked. "Oh no, Martin, that wouldn't be fair!"}

^{"It's inevitable none the less. Can you imagine the Governing Board approving the appointment of a man whose wife divorced him on grounds of adultery, citing the Headmaster's daughter?"}

^{She stopped tugging at her hair and sat down, looking very troubled indeed.}

^{Will that idiot really summons you for assault and battery?"}

^{"Not him, we've seen the last of him," said Sebastian, "but what I have got to discover is how closely Sybil was involved in getting him here. I think that will decide the future more than any one thing and I might as well start on it now. The fact is, I'm getting}

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^{tired of events overtaking me, I'm going to start shaping them again!"}

^{"You'll go to Sybil? But suppose it's true? Suppose she did send him and won't even talk to you except through a solicitor?"}

^{"Then she can do what the hell she likes about everything!" he snapped.}

^{"Will you come back again?"}

^{"Of course I'll come back! I shall go into partnership with Tapper Sugg if she goes ahead with the divorce."}

^{"Then oughtn't you to ring Father?"}

^{He hesitated. "No," he said at length, "I don't feel like talking to him. At the moment I only feel like talking to one person-my wife! You go to him and tell him the whole truth, exactly as it happened and say I'll be over to see him by mid-week. If he can hold that job open until then well and good."}

^{"But if he can't, Martin?"}

^{"If he can't, it's just too bad," and he turned to go upstairs but she ran forward and caught his arm.}

^{"I'm sorry, Martin, really sorry! You believe that, don't you? I didn't want anything like this to happen . . . me letting him in, me being here; after what I said to you that day it's almost as though I deliberately . . ."}

^{"You never did a thing deliberately in your entire life, Ray," he said, for he could see now that she was genuinely distressed and now considered herself wholly responsible for the situation. She followed him out to the stairs and at the foot he turned to her. "Look Ray, don't blame yourself and stop worrying! I believe I can cope with this and anyway I mean to try right now! You've got things to do about those animals and I've got to pack and get time off. . . !" and he turned his back on her and went upstairs, marching along to his room, pulling open the wardrobe and throwing his knapsack on the unmade bed.}

^{He had intended stuffing a few things into the bag, hurrying into his clothes and going straight over to Bignall's office in order to tell the Clerk he would be away for a couple of days but the sight of the big, shapeless knapsack checked his rush and he stood beside the bed looking down on it, realising that it still had for him the}

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^{significance of a banner. He recalled so vividly how he had plucked it from the shelf in the spare room a few months ago, or was it half a lifetime ago? It had all seemed so straightforward then, a mere stuffing of necessities into that bag and a slamming of doors on a life that he was shedding like a pair of worn shoes but now it wasn't anything lik'e so simple as it had appeared on that mild April night. One could go through the motions of changing the course of one's life but was never able to shed old ties and old loyalties. No matter how far or fast one ran they were always there, tagging along in pursuit, sometimes below the horizon but sometimes, as now, breathing down one's neck. And with this knowledge the futility of all that had happened since he began his odyssey came down on him like a wet fog bringing a sensation of fear, frustration and helplessness. The blows he had struck upon the person of the egregious Scott-James had carried him through the immediate crisis but now that the man was no longer there to be used as a punchbag he felt like a castaway waving his arms and shouting at a vessel steaming past the island. The improbability of his situation maddened him. If Scott-James had appeared on any other morning but this he would have had to return to Sybil with his tail between his legs and it seemed to Sebastian quite monstrous to be called upon to account for wild oats that had not even been sown, notwithstanding strong and consistently applied temptation on the part of the girl downstairs. As he remembered this, his anger against Sybil rose in his throat and into the furnace of his rage he threw not only Scott-James and his camera, but all Sybil's prejudices and vanities that separated them like a prickly hedge preventing them from building a life worth living, and this at a time when the minutes of history were ticking away with terrifying speed!}

^{He stood there looking down at his fallen standard, the folds of Olga's bathrobe hunched about'him, the bluish stubble on his chin giving him the haggard look of the defeated, and then he was suddenly aware of Rachel standing in the doorway looking across at him with a kind of communicated comradeship, as though evaluating his sense of loss and yearning to share it without trespassing further on this privacy.}

^{As their eyes met, she said, deliberately:}

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^{"There's an old story, Martin, the one about the innocent man who served twenty years for murdering someone who was still alive!"}

^{"What about him?" he growled and she said, quietly:}

^{"When he came out of prison he took a gun and shot the man he was supposed to have killed in the first place!"}

^{He said, gruffly: "Very well, shut the damned door and make sure you lock it this time!" and when she had done this and crossed to him, lifting her face to be kissed, he took hold of her with a kind of savage frenzy, as though she represented all the people and forces who had prevented him from becoming the man he wanted to become and believed he had become up to the moment when he identified Scott-James in the hall below. His use of her was not only impatient but almost painfully demanding, and the words and expressions that issued from him were alien to all she knew of the man, but she did not resent this any more than his roughness because she was aware that he did not at that moment identify her as Rachel Grey, the woman who had been importuning him for weeks past but simply as a means of release from the almost intolerable oppression within him, a chance of hitting back at everything that had harried him down the years. It had been the certainty that such a release was vital to him that had impelled her to lock front and back doors and follow him up to his room, for she wanted now to offer herself not as a woman in search of physical gratification but as an instrument that would enable him to reassert himself to himself, as someone who was not wholly defeated. He had often surprised her and now he did so once again with his strength and brutality but when the climax passed and he had subsided physically and emotionally she sensed triumph at having been the means of such reassertion, at having restored to him by a few moments of turmoil a dignity that he could never have found in the body of a stranger without full knowledge of his inner conflict.}

^{She held him to her while he became aware of what had occurred, while the sun beat into the room and the silence of the house settled about them like a presence. She thought, wonderingly: 'He's never really had a woman before, not really, not like this! Those other women, his wife and that experimental spinster of his, they only took from him, the one regularly, the other spontaneously. They}

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^{didn't yield anything of themselves in the process because he was too gentle and considerate and had so much essential kindness. Now perhaps he's learned something about women, that it doesn't do always to be kind and gentle and after-you-madam! I'll never have him again but it isn't necessary that I should because he's moved on now and perhaps I have too, and when he meets his wife again he'll be a different lover altogether and my guess is that she'll be grateful in the end.' She said, aloud: "This is the one and only}

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^{time, Martin, but it wasnt so one-sided as you imagine, dear. At least it has established something, two things!"}

^{"What did it establish, Ray?"}

^{"That you really are the man I thought of you as being and that I've been of real use to someone at last. Remember that, because I won't be around to remind you when you come back. Knowing you has taught me so much I needed to know and could never have learned from anyone else! I'm not going to risk you going sour on me!" and she got up and went out, closing the door.}

^{He lay still for a few moments thinking but his thoughts no longer seethed and tormented him as they had done when he was standing by the bed looking down on his knapsack.}

^{CHAPTER TEN}

^{Mr.
Sermon Takes Mother-in-Law's Advice}

^{mr. sermon
caught the train for London that same afternoon.}

^{He set off without any preconceived plan or notion of what he would do on arrival home or, in fact, where he would go when he reached the Paddington terminus.}

^{It may seem odd that Mr. Sermon gained impetus to project him towards his wife from an act of adultery but it was so, for Rachel's almost compulsive act had opened his mind to a conviction, perhaps an unconscious one, that if one woman desired him then the other necessarily must. To simplify it further, if Rachel Grey, young, unattached and undeniably attractive, was prepared to go to such lengths to demonstrate her affection for him, then Sybil, his wife, was unlikely to set aside a man who had remained faithful to her for twenty years and had fathered her children.}

^{Sebastian arrived at the Junction soon after two o'clock and having so much on his mind had forgotten to supply himself with reading matter for the j ourney. He sat in his empty compartment and studied the landscape until the express roared in and then, having no necessity to change trains (for the coach was switched to the main line train by a local engine) he watched passengers leave the express and pass his window on their way to the branch line.}

^{It was high season now and there were a good many of them,}

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^{mostly elderly couples, for despite the Kingsbay U.D.C.'s donkeys and paddling pool the town had yet to attract a family patronage. One of the first to pass Sebastian's carriage was a lean, sun-burned traveller wearing a new panama hat and suit that did not look as if it had been made in Britain. He was carrying a heavy case and a large leather grip, both bearing labels 'Marseilles'.}