Stephen Morris (29 page)

He turned to his wife. She was several years younger than he, hardly more than a girl. ‘I say,’ he said, and munched steadily for a moment or two. ‘We ought to have a double cherry somewhere. We had one at school – it was just outside my bedroom window. Great.’

‘M’yes,’ said the girl doubtfully. ‘I don’t know whether it would do in this soil.’

‘It would have a damn good try,’ said Morris firmly. ‘We’ll look it up in the book of the words after dinner and see what it says.’

He went upstairs, changed into old clothes, and spent the evening laying down great russet slabs of crazy-paving along one of his paths, while his wife scratched the turf and scattered grass seed. He worked well, and had finished several yards when his wife came out and stopped him.

‘Time you went and had your bath,’ she said.

He straightened up and gazed at her affectionately, dusted his hands together, and trod heavily upon the last stone.

‘ “The benison of hot water,” ’ he said reflectively. Then ingenuously, ‘Have we got a nice dinner?’

The girl laughed cheerfully, though she had little heart for it. ‘I’m not going to tell you what you’ve got,’ she said. ‘You’ll enjoy your bath all the more. The pleasures of anticipation.’

‘I shall probably be able to smell it when I go indoors, anyway,’ said Morris. He did not move, but stood meditatively wiping his hands upon the seat of his
trousers, surveying the unfinished portion of the path.

‘It does seem a pity to leave it,’ he said. ‘I never seem to get any time at home nowadays.’

The girl gave a little gasp. ‘I’ll – I’ll get Adams to finish it while you’re away,’ she said.

Morris turned and took her arm, his grubby hand upon her white sleeve. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said. ‘I want to do them myself.’

‘All right,’ said Helen. She drew him a little closer to her, and moved towards the house.

Morris lingered for a moment, and looked over his shoulder at the unfinished paths. ‘There’s a lot to do yet,’ he said. ‘Still, we’re getting on. And I shall only be away just over three weeks this time.’

He turned to the house and walked up the garden arm in arm with his wife. ‘Then we shall have all the summer to get it into order,’ he said. ‘Only about three and a half weeks. That’s hardly any time.’

But the girl did not answer, and they walked on up to the house in silence. They went indoors and closed the garden door behind them. Presently light shone out from behind thin curtains in the leaded, casement windows; cheerful lights, such lights as are to be seen in the dusk from any prosperous little suburban home where the middle-class business-man takes his ease of an evening in the bosom of his family.

The sky turned slowly to a deeper blue than ever the Council of the garden suburb had dared to paint the dial of a clock.

Dennison sat in the smoking-room of his club before the fire, a novel on his knee, a pipe in his mouth, and an empty coffee-cup by his side. Outside there was a touch of frost in the air; he found the fire comforting. Though he had dined alone, he had put on a dinner-jacket;
he did not quite know why. It was half-past nine. He had made a good dinner, and he was very comfortable.

He could not read his novel. He had sat in the smoking-room since dinner, smoking his pipe, watching the flickering of the fire, and wondering dispassionately whether he would ever sit there again. He had done sufficient flying during the past month to be able to picture the flight in his mind beforehand. He knew what the Atlantic looked like. He had had some experience of it in the
Irene.
He knew what the flight would be like. They would be catapulted from the ship in a similar manner to the trial flight, would climb slowly from the water upon a compass course. Then would come hour after hour of monotonous travel across the waste, deafened and stupid with noise, and listening all the time with morbid anxiety for a splutter in the roaring of the engine. For ten hours they would sit like that if they were lucky – ten hours of watching the long Atlantic swell ahead of them, mesmerised by noise, numb and deaf. At the end of that time land would appear as a line upon the horizon; he would have to cast off his fatigue, find out what land it was, and guide Morris to Padstow.

That was the programme.

Presently he got up and left the club. He turned down a side street into Pall Mall and walked along to the St James’s end. Outside the gate of Marlborough House there was a guardsman on sentry, stiff and erect; in the square the lamps were bright. It was very quiet. A taxi passed with a whirr and vanished into the Mall; the towers of the Palace were very straight and stiff.

One could not be afraid.

He turned up St James’s towards Piccadilly. Near King Street he was accosted by a very old man; a man with long white hair flowing on to his shoulders from
under a battered, old-fashioned hat. From the folds of his cape he drew a sheaf of envelopes.

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said in a gentle refined voice. ‘But do you by any chance patronise the Turf?’

Dennison paused.

‘I can give you a remarkably good selection for Ascot,’ said the old man. ‘I can assure you that you may place every confidence in them.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Dennison, ‘but I’m not a racing man.’

‘The Oaks?’ hazarded the ancient. ‘I could put you in the way of a very considerable turnover upon the Oaks.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ said Dennison, ‘but I don’t bet at all.’

For a moment the old man gazed at him searchingly, incredulously. ‘Ah yes,’ he said at last. ‘I see. You never touch it. You never touch it at all. Well, perhaps that is the better way after all.’ He moved aside. ‘Good night, sir. I’m sorry to have troubled you.’

‘One moment,’ said Dennison. ‘I never bet – I don’t know enough about it to back my fancy. But – I am leaving England tomorrow. A long journey, and perhaps a dangerous one. I should be very glad if you would drink with me this evening.’

The old man took the coins. ‘That is extremely good of you,’ he said. ‘May I ask if you are going far?’

‘To America,’ said Dennison.

‘Ah yes,’ said the tipster. ‘I once visited America, but I did not care for the country. I wish you a prosperous journey, sir, and a happy return.’

He held out an envelope. ‘You will take this suggestion for the Oaks?’ he said. ‘I think it is a good one.’

It seemed that Antony was ill. That was not an infrequent event and Sheila would probably have heard nothing about it until it was all over but for the loquacity of her cook. As it was, the news was exact and recent, coming direct to Cook from the mother of the housemaid at the Vicarage. Mr Antony was laid up again and was in bed at Oxford with a cold in his chest. His mother was very upset about it, and suspected that it was caused by his landlady neglecting to air the sheets.

At the time the news did not appeal very much to Sheila. Antony was always getting ill, and Sheila had enough anxiety of her own to occupy her mind at this time. Since Dennison had left her she had had no word of him; that was nearly two months before. She knew that she must wait upon events; in all her trouble she was quite sure that he had given up Hong Kong. But – if only she could hear something of him. As the weeks went by she grew more anxious and more miserable; small inanimate objects seemed to combine together to irritate her, a conspiracy of pinpricks. The centre of this conspiracy was in her bedroom where things got in the way so that she trod on them and hurt herself. In some mysterious way her bed grew harder and coarser, so that she lay awake at night listening to things rustling and creaking about the room that had never rustled or creaked before. She realised that the trouble lay with her, and commenced to take a tonic.

But she had little thought for Antony and his ailments.

Gradually, however, the news of Antony’s illness began to appeal to her. It was bad luck on him, just as the weather was getting nice, to be laid by the heels by a cold that would not go away. She knew how much he had been looking forward to the summer term, and now he was missing it all. In her loneliness, she recalled what good company he had been for the week after she had sent Dennison away; she began to think more of him. Antony was ill in Oxford, only eighteen miles away. She could quite easily drive over and see him.

‘I’m sure I wish you would,’ said his mother. ‘He gets so tired of bed, and his friends come and sit on his bed all day so that the room is always full of tobacco smoke. I don’t think it’s right of them to smoke in a sick-room, do you? And they bring him such horrible things to read.… ’

So she had lunch and took the big car and drove herself over to Oxford. She knew the town fairly well and had sometimes visited her brother when he had been up after the war. Immediately she reached Carfax she noticed a great change in the type of undergraduate. The bronzed and cheerful men that she had been accustomed to were gone and were replaced by pink-cheeked youths, callow and arrogant upon the pavements. Oxford was herself again.

Sheila drove on down the High, turned into Long-wall Street, and drew up at Antony’s digs. She rang the bell and asked if she could see him.

A stout lady in a print apron beamed at her in the doorway and ushered her up three flights of perfectly dark stairs to the room where Antony lay in bed. As Sheila entered she cast a quick glance round and was in time to catch the merriment dying from the faces of his visitors at her arrival.

Antony was sitting up in bed in a cardigan, a muffler round his neck. His hair was tousled and there was a feverish look about him. ‘I say,’ he said. ‘How perfectly splendid of you to come. Please sit down – oh, it doesn’t matter about my clothes a bit. Or you can sit on the bed. Mrs Williams!’

In some mysterious manner his friends had faded from the room. ‘Mrs Williams!’ said Antony.

The landlady stood in the doorway, her arms akimbo, a placid smile upon her countenance. ‘Yes, sir,’ she said comfortably.

‘Mrs Williams, I want you to give us tea in about half an hour.’ He turned to Sheila anxiously. ‘You’ll be able to stay, won’t you?’ His brows knitted together. ‘Please. I shall want the China tea in my silver teapot, and the silver milk-jug and sugar-basin – the crystal sugar, you know. And buttered tea-cakes, and could you send out and get a nice chocolate cake with the fluffy sort of chocolate on the top. And thin bread and butter, and a little of the midlar jelly.’

‘All right, sir,’ said the woman cheerfully. ‘You shall ’ave them.’

Antony lay back on his pillows with a little sigh and turned to Sheila. ‘It’s so nice of you to have come,’ he said. ‘How did you get here? By car? Do you know, I was hoping that perhaps you might – I’ve been wanting to see you.’

‘It’s simply silly of you to get like this in the summer term,’ said the girl. ‘How did you manage to do it?’

Antony smiled reflectively. ‘I think I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘It was such fun – worth every bit of it. I told my mother that it was the sheets not being aired, and that was rather unfair to Mrs Williams because she really is most careful about the sheets, and of course I shouldn’t have stayed here so long if she did that sort of thing. But it really was the “Usterov Mcoterov” – that’s a club, you
know; the last first and the first last. It was such fun. We had a whole day of it.

‘First of all we got up and dressed for dinner. And one man had a drink of warm mustard and water because he said he always did that before going to bed when he was drunk and he was sure that he was going to get drunk at dinner. But I think that was carrying it too far, don’t you? And then we met and sat round the fire drinking coffee, and then we had the port. And then, at about half-past ten in the morning, we went in to dinner and went all through it from the dessert to the soup. And then we had a cocktail and then we changed and had a bath. And at about one o’clock, we had tea, and at about five we had lunch, and about nine o’clock we had breakfast – bacon and eggs and kidneys. And then the others went and had the before-breakfast bathe in Parsons’ Pleasure. Only, of course, I couldn’t do that, but I went with them and watched them. And there was such a heavy dew – the grass was wet with it, only I didn’t notice it till I got home, and then I found that the legs of my trousers were quite wet. And next day I had this cold.’

‘Anyway,’ said Sheila, ‘you’ll never forget that the first should be last and the last should be first.’

‘No – it’s an awfully good lesson in humility, isn’t it? That’s what we all felt – it was such a good thing to do … and incidentally it was rather amusing.’

They chatted happily till tea-time about books and pictures. Antony’s epic poem had made some progress and he was much exercised in his mind as to what was to become of it. Sheila gathered that it was quite unpublishable, too long for Oxford Poetry, and he could not bear the idea of putting it away in a drawer with a view to publication in future years among his Collected Works. The talk revived Sheila; she felt more herself than she had done for weeks. Antony, however,
had been quick to notice the difference in her and to mark the gradual brightening in her manner. Presently came tea, and after tea the broader outlook engendered by repletion.