Choice of Evils

The 3.45 to Gallmouth arrived at the station at 3.55, on Friday, the fifteenth of October, only ten minutes late. Most of the passengers on the train were pleasantly surprised. Professor Andrew Basnett, who had been dozing in his seat, came to himself with a start, grabbed his suit-case and the copy of the
Financial Times
which he had been reading earlier, hoping, though as usual failing, to make out if he was a little richer or a little poorer than he had been when he had last studied this newspaper, got to his feet in a hurry and made for the exit from the carriage.

On the platform he did not waste time looking for a porter but set off down the stairs to the station yard. When he and his wife Nell, who had been dead now for over ten years, had first discovered Gallmouth, there would have been more than one porter eager to carry his suit-case, and also there would have been flowerbeds on the platform. But these, like the porters, had long disappeared. In the yard, however, in the old days there would have been only two, or at most three, decrepit taxis waiting hopefully for passengers, whereas now there were more than half a dozen. You lose a little, gain a little with the passage of time, Andrew reflected. He took the taxi at the head of the rank and asked to be driven to the Dolphin Hotel.

Andrew was in his mid-seventies. He was a tall man who would have looked even taller than he generally did if he had resisted a tendency to stoop which had developed
during the last year or two. He had kept his spare figure and still walked with some vigour, had bony features, short grey hair and grey eyes under eyebrows that had remained formidably dark. He had an intelligent face, though its expression during the last few years had been becoming increasingly detached, instead of showing the lively interest in most things that it had had when he was younger. He had been a professor of Botany in one of London University's colleges for nearly twenty years, but now had been retired for some time, yet was still living in the flat in St John's Wood where he and Nell had lived together until her death from cancer. He had nearly moved out then, thinking of something that would not be haunted by memories. But in fact it had been the memories that had held him. Any thought of moving into something smaller and perhaps more convenient had passed long ago.

The Dolphin Hotel was on the seafront of Gallmouth. It was an undistinguished but reasonably comfortable place which suited Andrew, because, among other virtues, it was moderately inexpensive. The service was good, the food tolerable, and without being ostentatious about it, catered mostly for elderly people. Andrew and Nell had stayed there together two or three times, and now, when a need to escape from London occasionally came to him, he generally returned to their old haunt, because it was less trouble to pick up the telephone and fix up a room for himself there, knowing exactly what he would get, than to venture into the unknown.

It was a Victorian building, which only recently had improved its plumbing, installing a bathroom for each bed-room, and arranging adequate parking space in what had once been its garden. Not that parking space was of any interest to Andrew, who did not own a car, holding that to do so in London was a costly inconvenience. If it was essential to have one for some particular occasion, it could
always be hired. He was thinking, as the taxi drove him to the Dolphin, that perhaps he would hire one for the week that he intended to stay in Gallmouth. On the other hand, walking would do him good and there were some attractive walks along the cliffs that rose steeply on each side of the little town.

Once comfortably installed in his room at the hotel, he treated himself to some afternoon tea. This was something that he never did when he was by himself in his flat, but to have it now in the roomy and not overcrowded lounge with its pleasant view of the sea, gave him an agreeable sense of luxury. A nice-looking girl brought him his tea on a tray, and pushed a trolley up to him laden with a variety of the rich-looking sort of cakes that he would never have thought of buying for himself at home. Some-thing that looked soft and creamy, topped with chocolate, seemed to him particularly inviting, and gave him a sense, as he bit into it, that he really was on holiday.

Not that it could really be said that he needed a holiday. Ever since he had finished writing his life of Robert Hooke, the noted seventeenth-century microscopist, he had been unable to settle down seriously to any other work. It had been a great mistake to finish the book. He had been very contented, working at it and really, in his heart, had never believed that it would ever come to an end. But he had been tempted by a clever young editor in a large firm of scientific publishers, who had given him two or three excellent lunches and dangled a contract before him. Having a contract had made Andrew feel rather grand. Whether the fact that the editor had once been a student of his, who had gone into publishing instead of into research or teaching, had had anything to do with Andrew's finally producing the book on which he had worked happily for so long, he was not sure, but the thing was done now, and in the last month or so he had even finished the proofs, the bibliography and the index. That
had been quite hard work, so perhaps, after all, he did deserve a holiday. Looking dreamily at the sea, glinting in the pale October sunshine, and eating the creamy, squashy thing that he had chosen from the trolley, he felt that it was very nice to be back in the Dolphin.

When he had finished his tea he set out for a walk along the seafront. There was a slight breeze blowing in from the sea, making the air cool, but the sunlight had not yet begun to fade into dusk. There was a sparkle on the little waves that slid in towards the beach, and on the frill of surf that toppled gently over on to the shingle. There were not many people about. The season had come to an end at least a month ago, indeed in another two or three weeks half the hotels in Gallmouth would close down for the winter. Andrew had booked in at the Dolphin just in time.

He strolled slowly along the esplanade which stretched from the base of the cliff that rose on one side of the town, to that of the one rose on the other. One or two streets branched off it, leading to the shops, the cinema, the church, the library, a small theatre and the town hall. Andrew walked almost to the far end of the paved walk, to the point where a bridge crossed the Gall, the little river that had given the town its name and beyond which, if he wanted to go on, he would have to start climbing up the cliff there. But he did not feel like doing that. Instead, he turned into a small shopping mall where he vaguely remembered from his last visit that there was a delicatessen. He wanted to buy some cheese.

Not that the Dolphin would not have supplied cheese if he wanted it at dinner, but he had the slightly eccentric habit of eating cheese with his breakfast. Some years ago a friend who was a respected dietician had persuaded him that the day ought always to be started with some protein, and to get himself some cheese, Andrew had found, was so easy compared even with boiling an egg that he had agreed to give the theory a trial. By now, though he had
no faith whatever in the health-giving properties of cheese at breakfast, he had let it become a habit and never felt that the day had properly begun till he had had a slice of it.

He was right about the delicatessen. It was where he had remembered it. He went in, bought a quarter of a pound of double Gloucester and emerging, took a look at the window of the shop next door. It was a bookshop. It had two windows, with a doorway between them. The nearer window, at which he looked first, held what seemed to be a display of children's books written by a woman called Mina Todhunter. The name stirred a memory in Andrew, not of his own childhood, when Beatrix Potter had fulfilled all his literary needs, but of a much later time, when he had often been driven into reading aloud to a nephew of his, aged four, whose favourite writer had been Mina Todhunter. The central character in all her works was a scarecrow, who wore a battered top hat, a red muffler and a tail coat and carried an umbrella, and was called Mr Thinkum. Andrew did not believe that his nephew had ever seen a real scarecrow, and he was certain that the children of the modern age had never done so, so it seemed surprising in a way that the window of a bookshop should be filled with works about one. He wondered if they had been selling well for all those years, or if this display betokened a revival. He felt almost inclined for a moment to go into the shop and buy one of the books, to see if he could discover what the writer's magic had been, but instead he moved on towards the farther window.

‘Andrew!’

He started and turned.

There was the nephew, Peter Dilly, of whom he had been thinking only a moment before, who was now thirty-five and who happened to be a very successful writer of science fiction.

‘Peter! What on earth are you doing here?’ Andrew exclaimed.

‘I might ask you that,’ Peter Dilly said.

He was a small man with fair hair, pink cheeks, an attractive smile and a light, springy way of walking. His writing had made him a rich man, and since he owned a cottage of considerable charm in the country and an apartment in Monte Carlo, it was surprising to find him loose in a place like Gallmouth, unless perhaps he had come to visit friends or had some mysterious professional commitment there.

This was the case, as he explained, when Andrew repeated his question.

‘Haven't you heard of the Gallmouth Arts Festival?’ he asked. ‘I'm speaking tonight. That isn't by any chance what's brought you, is it?’

‘To hear you speak?’

Andrew had a great deal of affection for his nephew, but it would never have occurred to him to go out of his way to hear him speaking on a platform, presumably about his work, which in spite of that genuine affection, Andrew never read.

‘No, no, I mean the festival,’ Peter said. ‘It's not much of a thing, but I was invited to speak and at the same time to stay for the weekend with someone who rather interests me and I'd nothing else to do for the moment, so I came. But you haven't answered my question. I never thought of you as likely to be interested in a thing like an arts festival.’

‘I'm afraid I've got to admit that I'd never even heard of it,’ Andrew replied. ‘Haven't you ever heard me talk of Gallmouth? I've been coming here for the odd week or so for the last dozen years. I've just finished a job of work correcting proofs and so on, on my poor old Robert Hooke, and I thought I'd treat myself to some relaxation.’