The Watch Tower (25 page)

‘You didn’t even like him at first.’ Laura tipped water into the earth round her ivy plant and replaced the pot on the wide window-sill. Clare said nothing.

‘Now you rush to the other extreme. You’d think poor Felix was the worst in the world because he spends the evenings in there with him.’

‘No. They’re all right,’ she said carefully. (There was nothing to be done about it.)

‘You said he found too much conversation trying.’

‘Ah, well—’ Clare stood up and poured herself some coffee. It was not that Laura and Felix wanted to destroy him, only that they wanted to survive, themselves.

‘I only meant—you know how you feel when you have one of those rotten headaches. If anyone even looks at you you feel you’re going to die.’

With a shiver of dread, Laura touched wood. ‘Bring your coffee through to the sitting-room. Write your letters there. It’s chilly out here. But Felix thinks your behaviour’s quite odd, Clare,’ she added in a low warning voice. She switched off the light. ‘You mustn’t let your enthusiasm run away with you.’

‘No.’

They stood for a moment in the dark before moving.

‘It’s only because he’s Dutch you think he’s unusual.’

‘I wouldn’t say that exactly,’ Clare said cautiously. She paused. As though assigned to describe to a blind
.
person the features of a landscape over which poets had pondered, she hesitated. Minutely she considered. Then as she might have said in simple helplessness, ‘Hawthorn grows by the road. There is a river,’ she said, ‘He speaks well of people. He has a generous
disposition.’

‘You’ll be back in the office on Monday.’ Laura and her sister strolled round the garden together desultorily snipping a flower here and there. And a very excellent thing that would be, too, she thought privately. Bernard was supposed to be
Felix
’
s
friend. ‘You’ve had a sort of a rest, anyway, even if you didn’t get away for a change,’ she went on cheerlessly. A drop of rain fell on the crown of her head. She looked up at the sky through the Imperial plane tree under which they stood.

Clare raised a hand and brought down a bare branch. ‘No, I’m not going back.’ The yielding branch sprang up as she released it, and swayed.

Laura said many words. Underfoot the grass was spongy after a week of heavy storms. Clare walked over it, feeling herself sink slightly with every step. Laura followed her, saying words.

‘No, I’ve resigned,’ she said, when Laura stopped speaking. ‘Yesterday. There hasn’t been a chance to tell you.’ An impossible act turned out to have been inevitable but of no importance. She had not even made a decision. It had just come about because it was necessary to stay with Bernard till he was well.

Laura stared at her sister’s half-averted face, examining the curve of her hair, her full-lidded grey eyes and painted mouth. ‘You haven’t really resigned?’

‘Yes. It was never an ideal occupation.’

‘Ideal! Ideal!’ Laura felt she had never been so angry in her life. Since Clare had become so inhuman as to be impervious, though, to terseness, temper, sarcasm, Laura decided it might be best to pretend the entire conversation had never taken place. ‘How are you going to live?’

Clare smiled faintly. ‘That’s a question.’

Oh! This infantile obsession with Bernard. Well, no amount of torture on the rack would persuade her to ask Clare one single question. Heaven forbid that she should appear curious! If Clare chose to tell her her plans (which were only in her imagination, anyway) she would listen noncommittally. She strained to see, as though through a dense fog, the berries and leaves in the shallow basket slung over her arm. ‘That should do for two vases.’ And Clare saw there was nothing Laura was willing to hear.

‘She’s off her rocker. She’s crazy. What? So she can keep an eye on young Bernie?’

‘And keep chasing around to get him in somewhere for this famous course of his.’

‘Oh, she is, eh? I think she must be up the wall. Well, well, well, well, well, well, well.’

To Laura’s surprise, Felix began to look almost pleased as he stared at the traffic ahead and guided the silver Jaguar past all the peasants in tin cans who thought they could share the road with him. Since he could only find pleasure in tearing people’s wings off,
Laura’s clenched mind considered the possibilities. Her thumbs tucked themselves under cover and did not emerge till she reached the factory.

At Bulli Lookout, forty-four miles south of Sydney, Felix drew the car up and there was a moment’s stock-taking silence.

‘Whew!’ He turned to Bernard, searching his eyes. ‘It’s no easy thing holding a car like this in, I can tell you. Takes a lot of practice.’

‘It’s a beauty.’ Bernard ducked down suddenly to feel the loose sole of one of his brown suède boots.

Giving his rusty laugh, Felix climbed out of the car and led the way across to the platform high above the ocean. Bernard waited for Laura who had sat alone in the back, insisting that she preferred it.

The day was magnificent. There was a small exhilarating wind, and there rose up before the bright rough blue of the sea a fabulous haze. Voices faded and ceased. Miniature waves far away shuddered and crumbled in slow motion, giving tiny belated roars. Invisible wheeling birds cried out spasmodically. Over all, the whole world, was a blue and legendary haze.

‘Well, does this beat the Mediterranean hollow or doesn’t it? Leaves Capri for dead, I’d say.’

The Shaws were fascinated suddenly to notice that Bernard was taking in the landscape with so much
interest that Felix’s remarks had passed unheard.

‘Shh!’ they mouthed at each other, gazing at him with delight.

‘You’d never want to leave this country once you hit it, if you were in your right mind,’ Felix sounded him, speaking louder.

Bernard had jerked round to stare at an undistinguished patch of scrub with that same thrilling concentration.

Laura and Felix exchanged glances and moved closer to him as though his returning vitality had been a fire they might grow warm at.

‘A pity Clare didn’t come,’ Laura said experimentally, in her soft voice, raising her eyes to the angular young face.

‘Yes.’ Bernard pushed his fists into his pockets and turned to smile at her. ‘But she was busy.’

‘Of course we’ve stopped here often. Since she was a schoolgirl, really.’ Laura sighed silently.

Felix looked about enviously. Even with the sleeve of his coat brushing Bernard’s, he could not feel enthusiastic as the boy felt enthusiastic. What was he seeing, looking over the Pacific? What was there to see? Except water and bush. ‘How’s about a cup of something?’ he asked, stamping restively on the uneven rocks.

‘He was happy as Larry today in the car with us,’ Laura remarked to her sister in the evening, after the
day’s outing.

Yesterday, rather selfishly, Bernard and Clare had gone for a walk in the afternoon, leaving Felix all alone and at a loose end. It turned out that they had only sat in the little park at the end of the street, sunning themselves. And poor Felix had skulked round looking for odd jobs till he settled to weeding the lawn. ‘It’s nice for Felix to have a man’s company,’ she continued now, ‘because he never sees a soul to talk to. When we’re at the factory he’s shut up in his little office and then all weekend here there’s only us. Literally, he sees no one to exchange a word with but the man in the garage when he gets his petrol.’

Clare said nothing. Laura had called her in to the dining-room where she was on her knees washing the paintwork.

‘I can see Felix is to blame for this himself, in a way,’ she went on argumentatively. ‘I know he’s always put business before people. But you’ve got to do that if you want to get anywhere, Clare.’

‘Well, then!’

‘Yes. So he’s just taken Bernard out to the office to go through the factory’s books. He might take him in to the office. At the factory, I mean. He’s even hinted that he might like to adopt him.’

‘What?’

‘Yes.’ Laura was too busy, suddenly, to meet Clare’s eyes. ‘Then in due course he might make him a partner.
Why?’ She looked up from her job, her face glimmering with malice. ‘You’d like it if he lived here all the time, wouldn’t you?’

Clare took a deep breath and shifted restlessly, her movement expressing the extreme irrelevance of her liking to the probable and/or desirable outcome of the proposition. ‘It couldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen.’ She stopped abruptly. ‘You don’t want that, do you?’

‘We’ll see.’ Laura’s arms rubbed away fiercely at the spotless white paint of the skirting-board as if to set an example in these matters to all the world.

‘Do you have to do that? It’s so clean already.’

‘It has to be done, Clare. It won’t do itself, you know!—You’ve got your coat on.’ She sat back on her legs and allowed her rubber-gloved hands to droop over the edge of the bucket.

‘I’m going for a walk. Bernard and I are.’

Laura searched about in the water for the sponge and finding it wrung it out severely. ‘Very fond of walking all of a sudden. You went for a walk yesterday. He’s talking to Felix.’

‘When they’ve finished,’ she said patiently.

Laura’s small person bulged with unspoken reproof and criticism. Her blue-grey eyes looked as unyielding as solid glass balls.

Clare turned away and walked down the hall, head bent in thought, scuffing the carpet as though it were turf.

‘Hi there, young Clare! Where’s your sister? News for you all.’ Felix had his arm about Bernard’s waist.

Laura came out into the hall where the three had met, and drew off her rubber gloves apprehensively. Her nose was shiny.

‘Well. The big news.’ Felix looked round at each of them separately, and he gave his down-turned gangster’s smile, and his eyes laughed and jumped with a sort of unholy animation.

Looking into the intense darkness of Felix’s gaze was not like looking into the eyes of an insane person, though the internal resistance was similar; yet it in no way resembled the experience of looking into the eyes of another nominally rational human being. His eyes were rather peep-holes through which a force could be glimpsed, primitive, chilling, subterranean beyond definition.

‘What
is
the news, then?’ Laura asked, moving her mouth stiffly.

‘Only that I,’ Felix proclaimed, banging Bernard on the back, ‘am going to see this fella through his course. Pay his fees, feed him, get him a few rags to wear. What’s he have to bother with scholarships for? You can forget all that,’ he said to Clare. ‘Let ’em keep their charity, huh? You don’t have to be beholden to strangers while you’ve got old Uncle Felix, do you, Bernie? So all your letters and your important appointments with your mighty professors were a waste of
time, weren’t they?’ He smiled at Clare again.

She shrugged easily, looking down at her shoes, hands in the pockets of her coat. ‘Maybe. It looks like it. It was fun, though.’

There was a slight silence. Bernard watched Clare. She and Laura flashed a glance at each other.

Felix said, ‘Well, you haven’t got a lot to say for yourselves. You don’t seem very interested.’

‘It’s you. You cut the ground from under a person’s feet, springing surprises, that’s all,’ Laura said, working herself up into nervous high spirits. ‘But it’s—’

‘—surprising,’ Clare finished for her. She had an unfunny sensation of having to haul her eyes up to Bernard’s face by a series of detours. ‘What do you think of it, Bernard?’

They looked at each other with strained interest. ‘Oh, I’m—very surprised, too. Mr. Shaw mentioned this to me three minutes ago. I said I couldn’t take so much, but he—’

‘Yes, yes, you must accept,’ Laura cried recklessly, noticing that Felix looked hugely amused and gratified to have caused such a hullabuloo. (If only you could trust him!) ‘And we’ll celebrate. Tomorrow night I’ll cook a very special dinner for Bernard’s celebration.’

‘You’ve got your coat on,’ Felix said to Clare.

‘Yes. We’d thought of going for a walk.’

‘You two?’

‘But it’s getting dark. It’s too cool. It wasn’t a good
idea. Why don’t we all—go and sit down somewhere instead of standing in the hall?’ Clare disappeared into her room, letting her coat slide off.

‘You should go to bed, Bernard. The doctor only let you up on sufferance. Please. I’ll bring your dinner in. You’ll worry me if you stay up.’ Laura gave his arm a little pat and hurried away to collect her plastic bucket from the dining-room before she set about preparing dinner. She realised that Felix was standing still, behind her; she remembered instantly the friendliness of her words to Bernard; she lurched into a black pit and began to clamber slowly up its familiar sides.

‘What’s me pal been sent to bed for? We were all set for a yarn. Everyone’s gone and left me,’ Felix complained, pretending to sob.

Laura rushed back, her legs liquid with relief, to console him, and Bernard and Clare appeared in their separate doorways. Felix was coughing and spluttering with laughter.

‘After dinner we’ll play chess,’ Bernard said, and Laura agreed, ‘Yes, you can adjourn to your boyfriend’s room the minute you’ve eaten. Clare, would you put a match to the fire, please?’

The log-fire in the sitting-room was meticulously set ready to crackle, and Clare was shortly backing away to watch its flames.

‘In a trance?’ Felix sauntered in. ‘That’s some blaze!’

With difficulty, Clare looked away from its gorgeous face and silent conversation. ‘Yes—Felix. That was generous of you to help Bernard like this. You’ll be proud of him. And proud of yourself, too.’

They were quite close together. Felix examined Clare’s light-grey eyes, and whether he was more inclined to devour her or strike her felt a very moot point.

‘You think, eh? You think?’

‘Well,’ Laura said, when he had retired to play chess with Bernard and she and Clare were alone by the fire, ‘he might have done something like this for
you
years ago instead of—’ If steel spikes were stuck through her, Laura would not mention her own deprivations, past or present.

‘I don’t know. If he means it—It could be a fine thing all round. For Bernard and for Felix, too. I suppose.’