The Watch Tower (26 page)

Laura rummaged through her button box, found a pearl button of the required size and proceeded to sew it onto the blue cotton blouse on her lap. She said in a hard level voice, ‘But he doesn’t like anyone to know any more than he does. He’d rather spend hundreds—throw it away on these—At least this time it might be doing a bit of good to someone. But it’s surprising.’

They frowned at each other, the two women. Because it
was
hard to reconcile this gesture with what they knew of Felix. Bernard would learn what he wanted
to know, would expand, grow beyond his benefactor, would be—in a word no one uttered—free.

‘Just as,’ Laura continued, looking down again, ‘he would buy you a present for ten pounds, but make you ask for ten shillings in cash.’

Pushing her chair further back from the fire, Clare said neutrally, ‘Well. It’s nice for Bernard.’

‘And it doesn’t look as if
you
can help him get into his course.’ Her hands occupied with needle and blouse, Laura bit sharply at the thread of cotton, snapping it with her pretty white teeth.

Back to the fire, balancing his coffee cup unevenly in its saucer, Felix laughed down at them. ‘Licked him twice, gave him his knock-out drops, and you couldn’t wake him with a brick. In three weeks he’ll be fighting fit and flat out in the factory office making up for lost time.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What do I mean? Chorus!’ Perplexed, he stared down at his wife and her sister. ‘Oh! Oh! You’re thinking of his grand career? When he gets his family off the bread-line he can take up my offer. But that’ll take him a few years, you know, and by that time he’ll know he’s not too badly off just sticking with old Mr. Shaw.’

Clare turned pale. Almost, it seemed intrusive to look at Felix’s dreaming face. She said, ‘I see—But Felix—what about—couldn’t he work at the office
during the day and go to classes at night? If he has to?’

Felix threw his head back and gulped down the last of his coffee. Without looking at Laura, he held out his cup and she refilled it from the shining percolator on which the flames were reflected while he said in wise, soothing tones, ‘No, no, no, no, no! Do it properly or not at all. You don’t want to be half-baked about things. He agrees with me. Everything’s jake. Nothing for you to worry about. Except finding yourself a new job!’ he added, stirring his fresh cup of coffee, then stretching out a hand for a slice of toast.

‘Clare. Please come and talk to me.’

Bernard stood on the verandah. She started to walk up the steps. ‘I thought you were still asleep. I was raking up the leaves. Laura and Felix left for work ages ago.’

‘I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what you’re thinking. Are you disappointed?’ He shoved the hair up from his forehead with both hands and stared down at his battered suede boots.

‘Nothing’s changed,’ Clare said lightly. ‘Felix has only proved what he said the other day: you can’t take up any offers or scholarships till we’ve found some way of taking care of your family. All I’m thinking is that we have three weeks before you’re allowed to work in which to think of ways and means.’

‘Would you feel the same about it if a government
department had given it to me?’

‘Yes. I don’t feel anything in particular about it.’ Her hands had the bright idea of rolling up the big collar of her blue sweater so that only her eyes and the top of her head were visible over it.

Gold-flecked hazel eyes and grey eyes stared.

‘That isn’t true,’ Bernard declared, after a considerable silence.

‘It is.’ As she pulled the collar down, a crumpled tobacco-coloured leaf fell out of her hair. She gave him a straight look. ‘Except that in that case you wouldn’t have been—’

‘—Felix’s protégé.’

‘You’re not that,’ she said brusquely, walking away to stand against the verandah rail, staring unfocused at the pile of leaves on the grass below, at the rake and the wheelbarrow. ‘I meant—under an obligation to any particular person. Independent. Independence. I suppose that’s all I was thinking about.’

‘I know what you mean.’ He tried not to think about it. He said, ‘Felix is increasing my salary. I can save more, and at night I’ll take another job. We have to be realistic, Clare.’

Incredulously she looked at his face. ‘Is that what you call it? Nothing different? Exactly as you were?’

‘I can wait,’ he said stubbornly. ‘Felix thinks I’ll forget my plans, and he’s wrong. But I can wait.’

‘For how long? Why aim so low? Those egg custards
I’ve been forcing on you were not meant to give you the strength to feel resigned! Work in that place with Felix for four or five years before you see daylight?’

‘No,’ he insisted. ‘Everything’s different. When I came here to stay I thought I was dying, and I wanted to die.’

Clare nodded, her face expressionless. He had told her this before, but she had known anyway. In the midst of her high certainty, he had transmitted this intention to her, to amaze and appal her.

‘Dr. Bell talks about youth’s natural resilience. He’s pleased with his injections and drugs. So I don’t tell him what made me survive.’ Bernard picked up the leaf that had fallen from her hair.

‘Good food and sleep,’ Clare said quickly. ‘Never underestimate my cooking. Not that you’re a tremendous credit to it yet. Come and have breakfast.’

Bernard looked at her, eager but imploring. ‘Though nothing appears different, nothing feels hopeless now. I can work and send money home till Birgitte leaves school and my grandmother is better. As long as necessary. And when I’m free, Felix and I will come to our arrangement and I’ll repay him when I’m employed at the end of my course. I can live on very little. It wouldn’t take so long.’

He leaned both hands on the railing and stared very hard at the harbour over the flowering hedge and the declining tiers of tree-tops and roof-tops, everything
about him defiant, pleading with her not to disagree.

Clare realised her own cruelty in wanting to stir, agitate, discontent him. He was a boy who had known true things torn from life raw and still smoking with blood. For the moment he wanted to be safe, not to know, not to attract the attention of fate, circumstances, the mover of things.

‘No, it wouldn’t either,’ she said tonelessly, out of her thoughts. She smiled at him with all of her attention. ‘Wait in the sun here and I’ll bring your breakfast out.’

The angularity went from his bones. He leaned heavily against the verandah post and smiled back at her through eyes narrowed against the light of such a day as must have heralded the morning of the world. And he felt overjoyed to be here and alive, with a person who knew more than he did, who would make everything all right.

‘I’m sorry,’ Bernard said, and there was a short, not natural, silence at the other end of the line. ‘You see,’ he started to go through his apologies again, ‘I met them on my way to the clinic with Clare. They’re sailing tonight, so when they asked me to have dinner, I felt—’ He was confounded to realise how much it mattered to her.

‘No, no,’ Laura said, on the terrible high note of strain that women who never cry sometimes have to speak in. ‘It doesn’t matter. Have a good time with
your friends. Is Clare going with you?’

‘No, she wouldn’t come.’ Hardly knowing how to console her for his offence, but suddenly aware that he was now in the act of drawing a sword from Laura’s breast, Bernard explained a trifle desperately, ‘They’re Americans, Laura. My father and I met them on the way out.’ He spoke jerkily, his attention coming and going between the sense of his words and Laura’s mystifying reaction. ‘Josh’s done quite a bit of exploring in South America.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Laura, who did not believe in explorers or South America, and Bernard felt her painful smile of endurance, felt that she was physically deaf with the suffering he had caused her, but that she would stand smiling in obedience to the laws of ladylike behaviour and saying, ‘Uh-huh’, if he talked for a week.

‘I won’t be late. I’ll be in time for a game of chess with Felix.’

‘Uh-huh,’ she said again, with that almost visible twisted smile of pain. As if Felix would play on these terms, having been shelved for American friends of longer standing! ‘And Clare’s not going?’ She would salvage something.

‘No,’ he assured her, saying goodbye.

Starting across the hotel foyer, in the direction of the restaurant where he was to meet his friends, Bernard felt physically enmeshed, coerced by—he could hardly have said what: the Shaws’ fondness, and kindness,
and attention. Inflexions, silences, looks. Implications and inferences. Something monstrous, monstrous, seemed to pursue him from that telephone.

A few bull-necked young men wearing Roman hair-cuts and suits as expensive as small cars stood about. Bernard was looked at as he passed in his informal clothes.

‘That you, Felix? Working in the dark?’ Clare’s heels made a steel clink on the cement steps down to the courtyard. There was an equivocal grunt from the shape bending over the garden-bed.

‘It’s been a lovely day,’ she said encouragingly, to encourage him, herself, anyone who might happen to be listening.

‘Has it? I’m afraid I’ve been too busy to notice.’ The tone dead, sour, meant to puncture.

‘Oh—what a pity!’

Bernard had had the effrontery to stay out tonight. On his own initiative. How shocking! Inwardly Clare gave a grim smile at the predictability of Felix’s reaction. ‘You’ll pay for this, my hearties!’ Et cetera, et cetera—My, he was unselfconscious. He felt no shame at all trotting out old Method Thirty-Two for crushing people. She often felt ashamed for him, as if it was a pity that he wasn’t more original, and more successful at it, since this was the direction in which his talents seemed to lie. Clare sighed. And catching the end of
this deeply indrawn breath as it left her, she smiled again. Misplaced compassion! His simple well-worn methods worked.

‘You’re late,’ Laura said critically, coming in from the dining-room. ‘I thought you’d decided to stay out with Bernard and his American friends. Did you bring the cheesecake?’

Clare tapped the box she had laid on the table. ‘I missed the ferry,’ she half-apologised, for she did want to appease Laura. Not that she would accept any excuse. What was more important than arriving in time for meals? It was all very well to pretend to be indifferent to food the way Clare did, but Laura would just have liked to see her trying to survive without it! And she had told her so, too. Many times.

‘I thought Bernard might have invited us to meet his friends,’ she lied antagonistically, cutting the string on the cake box. She blamed Clare for precipitating his meeting with these tourists, or whatever they were, when she
knew
how Felix felt about the boy’s company.

‘He suggested it. He didn’t want to go, himself. But they’re only here for one evening. I thought it might be a change for him not to be surrounded by—’

Laura’s pallor and relentlessness were borne in on Clare in a long look, and what she endured silently, and what she could say if she would.

‘Laura, I’ve thought of something terrific—marvellous—that might take care of Bernard’s family almost right away.’ Tentatively she approached Laura,
standing in front of her, beseeching Laura for her own sake to be interested, enlivened, glad. ‘Can I tell you? I haven’t even mentioned it to Bernard yet, in case—’

‘You’re standing right in my way, Clare. I want to put these plates in to heat. If there’s one thing I cannot abide it’s hot food served on cold plates.’

‘Well.’ Clare made to leave the room.

‘And what are
you
doing tonight?’

‘I’m going to see Max and Alison Heckler. You’ve heard me mention Alison. She used to be in the office. Her husband’s a solicitor.’

Laura’s eyes were blank. ‘So you’re going to be out, too.’

Some conciliatory explanations occurred to Clare but in the end she only said, ‘Yes.’

Exchanging another look, they both remembered: this is what it was like without Bernard.

Now that she was safely home, her hand on the cold iron of the gate, Clare could begin to attend to the night’s conversation as someone descending from a tightrope slung over Niagara Falls might retrospectively appreciate the view. Away from Bernard, who was her responsibility, she was in peril. Near at hand, where she could hear if he called, she was as incontrovertibly indestructible. She had been catapulted back tonight, frantic with foreboding. Now at the gate the fear simply evaporated and, half-smiling with relief
she started to run down the steps to the house. Then her heart lurched. She halted in mid-flight. Light came from every window of the house. And Felix’s voice.

She tilted her head back for a moment. It was a vast black sky tonight, most pure and marvellously starry. Since she had spent more time in her life looking up at it than most people who were not professional astronomers, her eyes were at home there. Terrible as its spaces were, it calmed and comforted her always. Looking down, she breathed again and descended the steps slowly. And there was Felix’s predictable voice.

‘You wonder why he cleared out tonight, do you? Do you? I’ll tell you why. I can tell you. You don’t know, do you? You don’t know—Do you? No, that’s right. But Mr. Shaw does. Mr. Shaw knows. He’s out tonight so he can be amongst men.
Men
.
That’s why. Yes. That’s why. You didn’t know that, did you? You didn’t know he’d had a bellyfull of the sight of you, did you? You’re too—stupid—to know he’s sick in his guts of being in a house full of women. Christ! They’re not fit—they’re not fit for me to vomit on. That’s why. You’re just—things.’

Her handbag dangling, Clare stood in the shadow of the dark courtyard, peculiarly immobile, her mind thinly covered with ice, and bored, bored, bored. Yet it was amazing to stand within yards of a human being so charged with loathing.

‘Mr. Trotter and Mr. Blaine and—all the others—
all my friends. Why don’t you ever see them here any more? Because they couldn’t put up with the sight of you whining about the place. You’re just filth to them. Do you hear that? Say it! Say it after me! Go on—Yeah. That’s right. That’s what you are. As long as you know it. My friends—Mr. Shaw’s friends think you’re—’