A Kindness Cup (11 page)

Dorahy is silent. Something tells him he will win by waiting.

‘Look,' Lunt says and he chuckles, ‘I might come if I could bring her, too. That would make them sit up.'

‘They'd use her to rip you apart,' Boyd warns. ‘They'd say you're a gin lover and grind your face in it.'

‘It has been ground before,' Lunt says simply.

‘Think about it,' Dorahy pleads, sensing a weakening.

Lunt only smiles. ‘You two,' he says, ‘you're not going back tonight. We'll have a yarn, eh? I can make you shakedowns on the veranda and we'll have a bite to eat. It's been a long time.'

Boyd grimaces as if the pain has been transferred to him.

‘We'd love to stay,' he says. ‘Ignore this mad bastard who has his axe to grind. We've come to see you.'

Lunt looks thoughtful. ‘It's nice to have been asked, anyway,' he repeats. ‘Oh, I wouldn't be coming to please Tom. Just myself. Maybe a change away from here would do me good. I've only been away once in the last eighteen years. A man rots a bit.'

Dorahy
decides to press home. ‘Then you may come?' He is greedy as a child.

‘Oh, my God, Tom,' Boyd groans. ‘Leave it.'

‘We'll see,' Lunt says. ‘I'll sleep on it.'

Boyd sighs and shrugs. Is there some especial charisma in Dorahy, some magnetic tug that draws others like filings? Why, there's enough of the irritant in the fellow, he knows, to alienate people by scores. He understands this and yet still sees himself the willing courier drawn by some particular ascetic quality in the man. Fanaticism always has its disciples, he thinks bitterly. But why me?

T
HE SCHOOL
OF ARTS
is jammed with protestations of loyalty.

Someone has tacked bunting round the stage where a table and chairs have been set up for the welcoming committee. The whole room has a faded and worn-out look, but no one's complaining.

There are three hours yet before the committee begins its self-adulatory session of whoopee.

And perhaps three hours are enough for Buckmaster, who has heard of Dorahy's proposal to bring Lunt up for the opening hoo-ha. He rages inwardly and silently, a rage all the worse for its containment, and goes to Sweetman's house where he will renew his anger.

Sweetman's calm refuels Buckmaster.

‘It won't matter,' he says. ‘There's nothing now that can be done. They can stir up the past a little, I suppose, but everyone here will be beyond it. We're beyond it.'

They are pacing about the front garden, monks of misrule, amid the sterile ambience of scentless gorgeous tropicana. The sky is crazy with stars.

‘He must be stopped,' mad Buckmaster says. ‘When are they due back?'

‘Benjy Wilson says they set off up the coast some time yesterday. They should be back soon—if they're coming.'

‘Then we'll have to intercept them.'

Sweetman snaps off an allamanda bloom and examines it so minutely he might be seeking his salvation in the flower's golden centre. Buckmaster's clenched fists whiten with
the effort not to dash it from him—salvation and flower.

‘My boy says to count him in,' he continues. ‘He's willing to do something.'

‘What?'

Buckmaster lets the question pass. He'd let a lot of questions pass in his day, politically practising.

‘Can I count on you?' he asks suddenly.

Sweetman worries this one. ‘To do anything now,' he says, ‘might be a lot worse than simply letting him come, celebrate, if that's what he's here for, and go away again. In any case he might have refused. Tom Dorahy can't force him to come.'

‘But it's not Lunt I'm worried about,' Buckmaster says. ‘It's that bloody schoolteacher. He always was a great nose-shover into other people's affairs.'

‘A stinking, righteous man,' Sweetman says with a smile. ‘You hate them, don't you? Well, maybe Boyd's horse will lame or an axle break. Then your problem will be solved. But count me out of your plans. Do what you like. Only be warned, Jim, don't mess up things for the rest of us.'

Yet Boyd's buggy is immune to bone-pointing. It comes back into town an hour after sunset and in the deeper dark takes Dorahy and Lunt home to Boyd's. And it is then, as they drag cramped limbs down and move into the shadow of trees, that Dorahy receives the first shattering blow and Lunt the second.

There is nothing Boyd can do: there is only the sound of the attackers' horses cantering away. He shouts for his wife and proceeds to lug Dorahy over to the steps. Then his wife appears and bends over Lunt, who has managed to sit up. Her stooped figure contains elements of tribal lament.

Dorahy
comes to slowly. His head is an enormous throbbing pain which he holds in both hands.

‘Well,' Boyd says, unable to keep the satisfaction of being right from his voice, ‘that's the first of it. Don't say you weren't warned. A taste of stay-off, I wouldn't be surprised. Do you still want to go to the welcome-in?'

Boyd's wife has come down into the dewy garden with a bowl of water and bits of rag with which she is making wet plasters. She moves from Lunt to Dorahy, bathing and murmuring. At fifty the beauty of her bones is even more apparent, and the tenderness she has always felt for Lunt springs like an act of contrition in the movements of tending. She recalls him as he was twenty years ago and is surprised how the moral rigidities of that time have moulded themselves into deeper statements.

‘Of course they will be going,' she says. ‘Especially because of this.'

Seated in their living-room, the whirring in the skull subsiding: ‘Dearest Lucy,' Dorahy muses, ‘have I ever argued with you yet?'

He watches her setting the table, serving dinner, and he absorbs the gentleness of her hands. He knows why he had never married before, that other time, and seeing her now reaffirms his reasons. The fire within her is rarely suspected by those who see only the skin of another, but Dorahy had years ago caught glimpses of flame that alone served to underscore her perfection for him.

‘We'll be going,' he says. ‘The four of us.'

Boyd winces.

‘What sort of confrontation are you after?' he demands. ‘Words or silence? Violence, is it? Something of what they have just done to you? Will you make a public accusation? It would harm you more, and you know it. Their tricky lawyers would see to that.'

‘I'm going to blast a way through the Alps with vinegar,' he says. And then he laughs.

The
protective warmth of the Boyds has an amniotic quality. Pain subsides. His soul is more swollen than the tenderness above his right eye; and amazement that the same bullish tactics are in vogue overwhelms him.

He eases himself upright on the sofa and, leaning over towards Lunt, says, ‘I brought this on you. I'm sorry.' He is a man who finds it difficult to apologise. Squirming a way out, he berates himself, with the moist eye, the propitiatory throb in the voice! The insincerity of it! He cannot tolerate this self-revulsion, though it is a thing he feels more often as he grows older.

Lunt says, ‘I won't be turned into a martyr against my will. But the bastards have roused me this time. I'll go into that pompous ballyhoo with this whacking great headache and show I won't be forced out.'

Boyd is pouring rums and there is immediate solace.

‘This will cut through more than the Alps,' he says.

And he is right, after all, Dorahy recognises, as the bite of it melts the inner rage.

Snoggers Boyd, entering into the spirit of it at last, has pinned sarcastic pieces of bunting, tie-shaped, to their collars. Lunt enjoys, but Dorahy merely tolerates. They make a pretty picture, he thinks, posed here preparatory to entering the old School of Arts from whose pediment sad streamers hang in reply.

People are moving up from either side, blocking the stairs as they revive memories in passageways too narrow for them or their inflated nostalgia. One quick glance and there, just inside the doorway, is Buckmaster shaking hands with visitors in an air loud with greetings and cries of recognition. The hall is too voluble.

While they pause before the crowd, a red-haired fellow with a wide smile comes up to Dorahy.

‘How are you, sir?' he asks slipping automatically into the language pattern of his school days, and equally familiarly
Dorahy slips back twenty years and says, ‘Well, thank you, young Jenner.' They both laugh.

Time, thinks Dorahy, time! How it has gouged out the tenderness of youth, though there is still much that is innocent about the youngish man before him—the steadiness of eye, the firmness of mouth.

‘I've come,' Tim Jenner confesses, ‘to pave the way through Scylla and Charybdis. Barney Sweetman's up there, too. The wandering rocks. I'll release my father and we'll sail through in his wake.'

Dorahy notices then the elderly man behind him. For the first flashing second he does not think ‘There go I' but ‘How he has aged!' Then he realises he is looking at a twin scarring of time. The paint has run on the masks, trickles that make the facsimile sour or disillusioned. Old Jenner looks frail now, but then so does Dorahy.

‘Good to see you, Tom,' old Jenner says. ‘And you, Charlie. What a marvellous surprise!' He takes both of Lunt's hands and holds them warmly. ‘Wonderful to have you here with us—for whatever we're celebrating. Maybe because we are at last a fading point on the map.'

He is partly right, for the town has steadily drained out its people for ten years since the boom. There is no talk of Separation Leagues now, though this evening has brought about a quorum. Dorahy's head still throbs and he is giddy with yap and lights. He notices Lunt pass his hand wearily across his eyes and asks how he feels.

‘Pretty terrible,' Lunt replies. ‘I'm beginning to feel sorry I came. There seems to be some sort of brigade at the top of the stairs, too. Do you think they'll let us in?'

‘We'll see,' Dorahy says. ‘We'll see. I wish I wasn't feeling so foul.'

Their party moves towards the congestion at the foot of the stairs where Gracie Tilburn is holding preliminary court. Momentarily Dorahy closes his eyes, reasoning falsely that she won't see him. He hopes blindness makes him
invisible for the pounce, which comes, on the moment, with a richly pitched cry. She demands his recognition but her eyes are on Tim Jenner whose hands she seizes with palpable ardour. She is magnificent in puce, through the pink waves of which young Jenner is struggling towards a dream of pallid blue and lazy daisies. He cannot accept her at once, though her hands are demanding on his own.

He says, ‘Why, Gracie! Gracie!' but his voice is limp.

‘When I sing,' Gracie tells herself, ‘oh, when I sing it will be different.'

She is not so unsubtle that she cannot notice his hesitancy; but bravely the slim girl, who is still present inside this plump woman, greets Boyd's little group with kisses all round, cheek after cheek. The grand gesture. ‘There,' she reasons crazily, ‘I have put my mark on them.' To her this means possession. Consequently she is all graciousness when they reach the small lobby in which Buckmaster and Sweetman are waiting.

They are overcome by puce.

Even their words, ‘I'm afraid this gentleman cannot—', are confused and drowned as she sweeps by. But they still bail Lunt up.

‘Where's your invitation?' Buckmaster demands.

Lunt, still groggy from the head blow, looks up, recognises, and is silent.

‘I'm afraid this won't do,' Sweetman says, coming across. ‘It won't really do at all. We're sorry.'

Jenner and Boyd shove their faces into the group.

‘Nonsense,' Snoggers says. ‘Of course it will do. They're all my guests.'

Newcomers are impatient behind them.

‘Would you mind standing to one side?' Sweetman asks. ‘Just till we get things sorted out. It won't take long.'

‘Bloody nonsense!' Dorahy cries. ‘We're going in.'

The
scuffle as Buckmaster and Sweetman converge on him and Lunt is a blunt parrying of arms at which more newcomers stare in delighted puzzlement. Buckmaster is almost bursting with the effort not to punch.

‘Come along, come along!' Boyd says, edging his wife forward. And more softly, ‘You can't afford to be seen like this. It won't go well with the voters.'

A minion is tapping Buckmaster's arm. It is almost time for the officials to go up on stage.

‘God bugger you,' Buckmaster whispers to Dorahy. ‘Get in then. Get bloody in before I kill you.'

The hall is packed. As Dorahy fumbles his way along a row towards a group of empty chairs at the side, he is again amazed at the familiarity of faces like maps of countries he has once visited. The contours have subtly changed. The rivers have altered their flow. Hills are steeper. Yet they hold sufficient of their early selves to make recognition possible in the way one says, ‘And there was the corner store. There the newsagent. Once I ran along here where a hedge used to be.' He takes his place beside Lunt who is managing his wooden leg awkwardly and observes Gracie Tilburn a row away twisting to catch his eye.

Gracie waves. She will be singing shortly and has no doubts about her magic. Like an empress, her bounds are infinite, and when Barney Sweetman spots her (he has glimpsed the wave) and invites her to join the official party, she concurs with statuesque magnificence.

Up here on stage, she decides, seated near the jug and the water glasses, is my true home. There are no corner stores in Gracie's vision, no newsagent with dog-stained hoardings, no hedges. There is only the blurred flow of faces and the noise made by hands.

A large lady arranges her behind at the piano. The queen is saved in a series of mundane chords. Everyone is standing for these moments, and when the anthem finishes
Sweetman steps forward and waits like an old stager for all to be seated and all sound to subside. He's used to this, anyone can see, catching with his eye every trout in the stream.