The Bachelors (9 page)

And so
he never refused Patrick an appointment, or a piece of advice, or a drug to
alleviate the effects of a trance. Patrick was not unduly troublesome. Dr. Lyte
even went so far as voluntarily to obtain the new drug which had been employed,
for experimental purposes, to induce epileptic convulsions in rats, and which,
taken in certain minor quantities, greatly improved both the spectacular
quality of Patrick’s trances and his actual psychic powers.

‘What
can I do for you, Patrick?’ said Dr. Lyte when Patrick was shown in at
half-past twelve sharp. Dr. Lyte was untroubled: he had got used to Patrick, as
one does get used to things.

‘It’s
about Alice. She won’t think of doing away with it. Not by an operation. I
mentioned the address—’

‘Well,
she can get it adopted. Much easier if you don’t marry her till afterwards. The
State has arrangements for these girls.’

‘Yes’
Patrick said. ‘Alice,’ he said, ‘isn’t too well.’

‘Send
her along.’

‘I
think perhaps she isn’t taking her injections properly,’ Patrick said.

‘Oh,
she’s got to take her two injections every morning before breakfast. They need
the regular insulin. Tell her she’ll die if she doesn’t take it.’

‘How
long does it take,’ Patrick said, ‘for a diabetic person to die if they deprive
themselves of insulin?’

‘She’s
not trying to take her life, is she?’

‘I’m
not sure,’ Patrick said, his fingers interlacing each other in agitated jerks. ‘But
don’t you think she might try to get rid of the baby by reducing the insulin
and making herself really ill?’

‘That
would be foolish,’ said Dr. Lyte. ‘Surely she knows — but why don’t you see to
the injections yourself until this trouble’s over?’

‘Oh,
she won’t let me touch them. She won’t ever let me use the needle on her.’

‘Do you
watch her taking it?’

‘No.
You see, she won’t let me see her doing it.’

‘I’ll
have a talk with her. I’d better come along.’

‘Well,’
Patrick said, ‘I don’t think that’s necessary. I’ll tell her she’ll die if she
doesn’t take her insulin. I’ll say you said so. How long would it take?’

‘It
varies,’ said the doctor. ‘My goodness, if Alice really did get negligent she
might die within a few days. But she
knows—’

‘
Perhaps, on the other hand, she is taking too much insulin,’ Patrick
said. ‘Would that account for her symptoms?’

‘What
are the symptoms? Exhausted? Hungry?’

‘Yes.’

‘Really,
you know, I’ll have to see her. What makes you think she isn’t following her
proper routine in the mornings?’

‘Oh, it’s
only an idea I had,’ Patrick said. ‘I may be quite wrong.’

‘Is she
testing her urine every morning?’

‘I don’t
know,’ Patrick said. ‘It’s all just a stupid idea in my mind that she may be
neglecting her insulin treatment. She’s probably just off colour, with the baby
and so forth…. It’s a worry for me. Tell me, if she took
too much
insulin,
what might happen?’

‘She’d
die. I’ll look in this afternoon,’ said the doctor.

‘Very
well,’ Patrick said. ‘Good of you,’ he said; and the doctor was vaguely
disturbed by his docility. Patrick was saying, his voice trailing off, ‘But my
suspicions may be quite unfounded, and how am I to know what she does with the
needle and so forth…?’

‘Feeling better?’ said
Patrick.

‘Heaps
better,’ she said. ‘I’m going to work tonight.’

‘Did
you miss me the last two days?’ Patrick said.

‘You
know I did, darling.’

‘I was
worried about you all the time,’ he said. ‘I asked Dr. Lyte to come and see
you.’

‘Oh! He
hasn’t been.’

‘He’s
coming this afternoon.’

‘Well,
you can put him off. It’s too late. I’m better.’

‘He’s
anxious in case you’ve been forgetting to take your insulin.’

‘I
never forget my insulin. But I’ve missed you giving me the injection.’ She took
his hand. ‘I’ve missed that little touch the last two mornings, Patrick.’

‘Dr. Lyte,’
Patrick said, ‘wondered if perhaps you were taking too much.’

‘I
never take too much. Does he think I’m an imbecile? I’ve been taking injections
for six years.’

‘Well,
I’ll ring and put him off,’ Patrick said.

‘I’ll
ring and tell him what I think of him,’ she said. ‘Suggesting
that I’m negligent’

‘Now,
Dr. Lyte is a good friend. Better leave him to me. I’ll tell him you’re all
right now.’

‘And
then we’ll go out and celebrate,’ she said, ‘the collapse of the court case.’

‘Well,
it’s only in abeyance. Of course Freda Flower hasn’t a leg to stand on. But she’s
a dangerous woman, and she could change her mind.’ His voice faded away out of
the window where he was looking.

‘Hasn’t
she got a heart?’ said Alice. ‘Hasn’t she got a heart?’

‘The police want to
proceed,’ Martin Bowles told Ronald in the book-lined banisters’ chambers. ‘But
the widow won’t stand by her evidence satisfactorily. Seton has scared the
pants off her with messages from beyond the grave.’

‘Is it
forgery, then? I thought you said fraudulent conversion,’ Ronald said.

‘Fraudulent
conversion on one count. But Seton has now produced a letter by which he hopes
to prove that the widow gave him the money. Of course, it’s a forgery.’

Ronald
looked at the letters and the sad second-hand-looking cheque with the bank’s
mark stamped on it.

‘She
wants them back,’ Martin said. ‘But the police are hanging on to them. We’ve
got photostats.’

‘I can’t
work from photostats,’ Ronald said, locking the documents away in his
brief-case. ‘The widow will have to wait.’

‘I’ll
give you a lift home,’ Martin said. ‘I’m going along to Isobel’s.’

They
walked through the Temple courtyard to Martin’s car.

‘What
do you think,’ Martin said, ‘goes on in a man like Patrick Seton’s mind when he
looks back on his life?’

People
frequently asked this sort of question of Ronald. It was as if they held some
ancient superstition about his epilepsy: ‘the falling sickness’, ‘the sacred
disease’, ‘the evil spirit’. Ronald felt he was regarded by his friends as a
sacred cow or a wise monkey. He was, perhaps, touchy on the point. Sometimes he
thought, after all, they would have come to him with their deep troubles,
consulted him on the nature of things, listened to his wise old words, even if
he wasn’t an afflicted man. If he had been a priest, people would have
consulted him in the same way.

‘What
goes on at the back of his mind?’ Martin enquired of the oracle. ‘Tell me.’

‘I
should think,’ Ronald replied after a meet pause, ‘that when he considers his
past life he suffers from a rush of blood to the head, giddiness and bells in
the ears. And therefore he does not consider his life at all.’ And having thus
described his own symptoms when a fit was approaching, Ronald fell silent.

Martin
negotiated the traffic all along the Strand to Trafalgar Square. ‘I think,’ he
said then to Ronald, ‘that’s a terrifically good piece of observation. Do you
feel like coming along and cheering Isobel up?’

‘All
right,’ Ronald said.

‘Got
your pills?’ said Martin.

‘Yes, I’ve
got them on me.’

Chapter V

IF there is one thing a
bachelor does not like it is another bachelor who has lost his job.

The
Hon. Francis Eccles, small, with those very high shoulders that left him almost
neckless, leaned over the bar of the Pandaemonium Club at Hampstead, whose
members were supposed to be drawn from the arts and sciences. No scientist had
yet joined the club in its twelve years’ existence, but the members at present
in the bar were fairly representative of the arts side: a television actor, a
Welsh tenor, a film extra who took peasant-labourer parts when they were
available, a ballet-mistress, and a stockbroker who was writing a novel.

It was
not only the Hampstead representatives of the arts who frequented this club: many
who had left Hampstead occasionally returned to it. Walter Prett for instance,
the mammoth art critic of middle age and collar-length white hair, had come
from Camden Town; and Matthew Finch, having sent off the last of his week’s
tidings for the
Irish Echo,
had come to meet Walter here on the early
autumn evening that tiny Francis Eccles hunched necklessly over the bar so
sadly, having lost his job.

‘But
you don’t need a job, Eccie,’ said Chloe, the young barmaid. ‘I don’t know what
you want with a job anyway.’

Without
exchanging a word or sign and by sheer migratory instinct, Matthew and Walter
removed their glasses over to the window-seat where they were separated from
the jobless nobleman by a grand piano.

‘Tell
me,’ said Walter to Matthew, ‘do I look any thinner?’

‘No,’
Matthew said, ‘you look fine.’

‘I’ve
lost eight pounds,’ Walter said confidentially, moving his snowy long-haired
head close to Matthew’s short blue-black curls.

‘Don’t
worry, you look___’

‘I’ve
got to lose two stone,’ Walter said very loudly. ‘Simply got to. My heart won’t
stand up to it.’

Matthew
shied a little. ‘Were you not on a diet?’ he said.

Walter’s
voice subsided. ‘I was, but it insisted on no beer, wines or spirits. I’d
rather be dead.’ Walter’s eyes bulged redly from the inner circle of his face,
for it was surrounded by outer circles of dark blood-pressured flesh. He sipped
his wine daintily through his face-wide lips. Matthew thought perhaps the glass
would be crushed in Walter’s great hand. Walter was liable to sudden outbursts
of temper for no reason at all. Matthew looked at him uneasily, his eyes
peeping from under his black glossy eyebrows.

Walter,
observing this effect, was dissatisfied. He smiled sweetly, and it was indeed a
sweet smile, such as wide full mouths only are capable of.

‘It’s
my birthday,’ Matthew said. ‘I’m thirty-two today. I come under the Sign of
Libra, the scales of justice. I’m passionate about justice. Like all the Irish.’

‘Do
they all come under Libra?’

‘No. I
don’t believe in astrology,’ Matthew said, drinking down his wine in an anxious
way.

‘Well,
well,’ said Walter. ‘Many happy returns. I could give you fifteen years.’

‘Could
you?’ Matthew said with his mind on something else.

‘Forty-eight
next year,’ Walter said, ‘and what have I done with my life?’

‘You’ve
got your column.’

‘I
should have been a painter,’ Walter said. ‘I showed promise.’

‘Did
you ever think of getting married?’ Matthew said.

‘I
showed tremendous promise,’ Walter said, ‘but my family was indifferent to art.
They were interested in horses. My father kept three hunters in the stable and
then he couldn’t pay the milk bill.’

‘Yes,
you told me that before,’ Matthew said, looking wistfully at a girl in a large
jersey and tight jeans who had just come in and was now sitting up on one of
the high chairs at the bar.

Walter
stood up and roared, ‘Well, I’m telling you again.’ For he hated his family
stories to be treated indifferently.

‘Sit
down, now, sit down,’ Matthew said.

‘Vulgar
little fellows all over the place,’ Walter observed, casting his inflamed eyes
round the room. ‘Especially in the art world.’

‘Sit
down,’ Matthew said. ‘Would you have a drink?’ he said.

Chloe
called over from her place behind the bar. ‘Walter! What’s all the noise about?’

Walter
sat down broodly while Matthew edged round the room and up to the far end of
the bar so that Eccie’s hunched back was turned to him. When he had obtained
the drinks he did the same detour on his return to their window-seat. On the
way, however, he said ‘Good evening’ to the girl in jeans.

‘I’m
thinking of getting married,’ Matthew said.

‘Oh,
are you? Who to?’

‘I
haven’t anyone in mind,’ Matthew said. ‘Only my brother-in-law thinks I should
get married. My sister wants me to get married and so does my uncle. Every time
I go home to Ireland my mother’s ashamed that I’m not married to a girl.’

‘I got
a young woman into trouble at the age of eighteen,’ Walter said. ‘Daughter of
one of our footmen. He was an Irish fellow. The butler caught him reading
Nietzsche in the pantry. To the detriment of the silver. Of course there was no
question of my marrying his daughter. The family made a settlement and I went
abroad to paint. My hair turned white at the age of nineteen.’