All The Nice Girls (21 page)

‘ . . . Don’t you see, they caught you at an early age and now you’re content to look on at things. You’re a perfect example of what I call the
New Spectator
. You don’t take part in life, you observe it, like a bird-watcher. You’re like forty million people in this country.
You
wouldn’t think of cheering the Queen as she drove by, no more than you would think of cheering her if you saw her driving by on TV. You’re not even looking, you’re
viewing!
’

‘Well
said
Agatha! ‘

Humphrey, Donald and Vera pounded the table approvingly and then, abruptly, got up and left, taking Agatha with them.

‘Blimey, that was a bit sudden,’ said Dagwood.

‘Probably time to go and picket the local T.A.,’ said the guitarist, still picking at his instrument.

‘Do you play that in a band or anything?’ Dagwood asked, anxious to make friends with someone.

‘No. Do you think I should?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Solo guitar is the purest music existing. Have you ever heard Segovia?’

‘Only on records.’

‘He makes the sort of music the angels hear every day.’

‘I quite agree. Still ...’

‘Still what?’ demanded the guitarist pugnaciously.

‘I was just thinking, if they heard it every day all day they might get a bit bored with it.’

‘You needn’t try and insult me like you did Humphrey!’

Oh God, thought Dagwood, here we go again. ‘I’m not trying to insult you, I assure you. I just feel that solo guitar sometimes needs a little support.’

‘The more instruments the better?’

‘Well no, within limits of course ...’

‘I suppose you’re the sort of person who thinks Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is the finest music ever written?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ Dagwood defended himself, having barely heard of Mahler at all.

‘Do you know how many instruments that’s scored for?’

‘I’ll make a guess . . .’

‘Sixteen first violins, sixteen second violins, twelve violas, twelve cellos, twelve basses, four flutes, four oboes, one clarinet in E flat, three clarinets in B flat. . .’

‘Yes, but. . .

‘ . . . One bass clarinet in B flat, three bassoons, one double bassoon, eight horns, four trumpets, three trombones, one bass tuba, two harps, celesta, timpani, cymbals and a tambourine!’

‘What, no guitar!’

‘Would you like some more coffee, Dagwood?’

It was Barbara. Dagwood had quite forgotten about her. She had made no contribution to the previous conversations, probably, Dagwood suspected, because she could think of’ nothing to say. Barbara was a delectable body and not much else. She was accepted in ‘Black Cat’ circles because of her decorative appearance, being the sort of girl a man needed to feast his eyes on after sixty days at sea (what effect she might have had in such circumstances upon as volatile a personality as Gavin,
Seahorse
’s late Navigating Officer, Dagwood could hardly bring himself to contemplate).

On the other hand, there was another way of looking at it. Barbara may have been a handicap in a dialectical discussion but she was just the sort of girl for a cosy cuddle on a sofa. Which reminded Dagwood.

‘Come on, Barbara, let’s go and get something to eat.’

Dagwood had taken the precaution of laying in some raw materials for shush kebab and some burgundy before he went out and within ninety minutes he and Barbara had eaten and drunk and taken up their positions on the sofa.

The evening had all the makings of a satisfactory consummation for Dagwood, but he could not rid himself of one small disturbance. Whenever he bent to murmur in Barbara’s ear (those ears, each like a lotus nestling on the banks of the Euphrates) he could hear an extraordinary ringing echo of his own words.

‘Kissing your lips is like taking a long cool drink of water,’ he whispered to Barbara.

‘. . . Drinka water,’ said the echo.

Dagwood blinked. He lay back and studied the moon shining on the skylight in the Tithe Barn roof.

‘Had we but world enough, and time,’ he began.

‘ . . . And time,’ came the tinkling spectral echo.

‘This coyness lady were no crime.’

‘ . . . No crime.’

‘We would sit down and think which way . . .’

‘Whichaway . . .’

‘ ... To walk and spend our long love’s day.’

‘Love’s
day.’
’

It was a full minute before the solution occurred to Dagwood. He had frequently read descriptions of the physicalphenomena associated with falling in love; if the descriptions were to be believed, the collision of two people irresistibly attracted to one another was clinically similar to the symptoms of severe concussion. Dizziness, ringing in the ears, the music of celestial choirs, flashes and stars exploding in front of the eyes, a sudden apparent drop in stomach level - the symptoms were fully documented and Dagwood was quite familiar with them. But this was the first time he had experienced such a manifestation himself. This must be love, Dagwood told himself, I’m hearing double.

He looked tenderly down at Barbara. There was no denying the evidence of one’s own sensory organs. Dagwood resolved never to sneer at women’s magazines again; clearly they were reporting scientific facts.

Dagwood was so elated by his discovery and so buoyed up by the thought that he had been granted what amounted to a sign from heaven, where all good marriages are made, that his sense of deprivation and shock was all the sharper when he later came across the hearing aid, neatly concealed in Barbara’s Byzantine bosom.

‘I don’t like the look of this at all, Frank,’ said The Bodger.

‘I know. He seems to have dropped the girl altogether.’

‘Not only that, he seems to have gone overboard with every other girl within a radius of fifty miles. You remember you put me up for the Conservative Club when I first got here?’

‘Yes. It’s a good way of keeping your finger on the pulse.’

‘Exactly. Well, there isn’t a member there with a daughter of marriageable age who hasn’t told me at some time or other that his daughter was being taken out by young Dagwood! That barn of his seems to have a fatal attraction.’

‘For every girl except the one who matters.’

‘What’s more, none of them seem to have any objection to becoming Dagwood’s father-in-law. I should have thought that the last thing any man wanted was a son-in-law in the Navy but some of them seem to be all for it.’

‘All except the father-in-law who matters.’

‘I may be mistaken, but I got the impression that Dagwood was quite attracted to the wench, you know. And she didn’t seem to be exactly repelled by him, either.’

‘What are we going to do about it then?’

‘What can we do? I’ve introduced them once. I can’t keep bouncing them together like billiard balls. I shall just have to give the thing a bit more thought. I’ll think of something, never fear.’

Meanwhile, Dagwood was quite unaware that his social life had been causing The Bodger and Mr Tybalt concern. As Daphne had said, when he told her he had taken the Tithe Barn, he was having the time of his life. For the first time since he became a submariner, he could appreciate the changing seasons on the land. Often while he was in a running submarine he had noticed very little more of the approach of summer than that the weather was getting warmer and the nights shorter. On the Watsons’ farm Dagwood was living in a society where the cycle of the seasons and the weather were not merely subjects of conversation but vital facets of existence. Long after he had left the farm Dagwood remembered small happenings of that spring and summer: the two hares which played in the ten acre field behind the barn, fleeting over the grass in the early morning sun like two wisps of brown smoke; Shep, obeying the instinct of his breed, herding ducklings through the farm gate; the hawthorn hedge outside the back door exploding almost overnight into star- bursts of white blossom; the day Chubb took him out to a clump of pines to see the hobby’s nest and they waited in a ditch for four hours to see a flash of red plumage as the bird arrived at the nest; and Bill’s haymaking, when Dagwood and such sailors as were not on courses worked ten hours a day for half a crown an hour and free cider.

Dagwood did not attend any courses himself. He did not have the time. Instead he took Sarah Judworth to Oozemouth Races on Gold Cup Day, Hilda Judworth to the beach, and Fiona to an open air performance of ‘A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.’ He had supper occasionally with Ollie and Alice and he spent many happy hours, hat tipped over his eyes, watching the cricket at the County Ground. Sometimes a sailor would drift back from a course. Dagwood shook up the slips in his cap and sent him off again.

Sometimes, while he sat watching cricket or lay sun-bathing on the beach, Dagwood thought guiltily of his friends daily going down to the sea in their submarines and being paid less for it. But such thoughts were short-lasting and Dagwood’s conscience was appeased by the knowledge that his friends, had they been given the chance, would have done exactly the same and would probably not even have spared him a thought while they were doing it.

Like the people of many northern cities, the people of Oozemouth were kindly but hard-headed. They had a great respect for money and for those who possessed or wielded it. Some Oozemouth families had known each other for three generations or longer. They visited each other regularly, almost religiously, and their children were permitted to grow up in a state of social stability. It was not so important that a family were rich or poor; it only mattered that they had lived in Oozemouth a long time. Families did not arrive, allow their children to grow half-roots, and move on again - like Dame’s neighbours in Buckinghamshire, who changed every five years. At home, Dagwood witnessed a social ebb and flow, a rising and falling in the world, a continual household migration caused by the irresistible centripetal force of London. By contrast, Oozemouth had remained almost untouched, one of the last bastions of the unperturbed middle class. The boys joined the professions or went to work in their family businesses; a few joined the Army, a few went to London, but almost all returned to Oozemouth and their families and friends to settle down. The girls were lured by the prospect of a flat in London and independence but they too, with a few exceptions, came home eventually. Dagwood often told himself that he ought to write down his impressions of Oozemouth, that he ought to record this way of life, lest he return one day and, like Macaulay’s traveller from New Zealand, stand on a broken arch of the Great Iron Bridge to sketch the ruins of the people who built and paid for it.

Dagwood had grown accustomed to the sensation that he was regarded as unusual arid even exotic - particularly by the girls. He was not only a new face, he was unique. It was nothing new for young men from other parts of the country to spend a year living in digs in Oozemouth; the city was on the established circuit of provincial posts to which large firms sent their trainees to gain experience. But someone in the Navy, living on his own in a Tithe Barn, cooking his own meals - nothing could be richer nor stranger. Dagwood’s little dinners, tête-à-tête, became well known. The girls who had thus been entertained exchanged experiences. The word was passed round. Dagwood was known by many more girls than he knew. They went out of their way to meet him. The shush kebab and the burgundy became status symbols. Dagwood’s guests expected them and when Dagwood himself tired of them and made a change by roasting one of Chubb’s chickens and washing it down with some hock he caught such looks of disappointment that he felt morally driven to return to his traditional recipes.

Dagwood also possessed another advantage in that he was a Londoner. Anyone from London automatically assumed a sort of vicarious glamour in Oozemouth. Oozemouth displayed a disdainful curiosity about London which almost amounted to an inferiority complex. No stage play which did not contain famous names could hope to draw an audience in Oozemouth until it had been judged a success in London, whereupon it returned to Oozemouth and played to packed houses. Oozemouth United F.C.’s biggest home gates were always taken at matches against teams from London. Dagwood never gave greater pleasure to his listeners than when he said (with partial truth) that he preferred living in Oozemouth to London and never gave greater offence than when he stated that London was the undisputed hub of the universe.

The shush kebab and the burgundy were not Dagwood’s only properties. The tape-recorded music and recitations at the Tithe Barn skylight played an increasingly important part. The skylight became so important that Dagwood took the trouble to borrow a ladder from Molly and climb up and clean it.

Though the shush kebab and the’ burgundy were invariable, Dagwood varied the rest of his programme to suit his guest. For Barbara, Dagwood had recited Marvell and afterwards played Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. For Vera, Dagwood’s ‘Black Cat’ opponent, once she had conquered her scruples and descended to breaking bread with a hired assassin, Dagwood chose Mozart piano concertos and recited ‘In such a night did Thisbe fearfully o’ertrip the dew.’ For Olga, who was Mr McGillvray’s secretary, Dagwood chose Brubeck, declaimed ‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain,’ and was rewarded by Olga’s bursting into floods of tender tears. For Doris, the ball-bearing supervisor, Dagwood took a less sophisticated line: ‘The Gold and Silver Waltz’ and ‘The Owl and the Pussycat.’ And for Sheila, who worked in the Royal Oozemouth Mercantile & Far Eastern Bank, Stravinsky and ‘How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank’ - a pun which passed wholly unnoticed.

Dagwood’s only serious crisis was caused by Stella, his partner in the Oozemouth Tennis Club mixed doubles. She was a frilly little thing, though possessing a most mature backhand, who evidently thought that dining alone with Dagwood in his barn was morally equivalent to a life of easy virtue. Protesting that she had never known what it was to be intoxicated, she drank two half-glasses of Dagwood’s burgundy and promptly crumpled up on the hearth-rug. Wild visions of newspaper headlines racing through his mind, Dagwood worked frantically to revive her and talked persuasively for a while longer to convince her that he had made no assault upon her chastity (at which she seemed perversely disappointed). However, such moments of unintentional drama were rare; Dagwood steadily improved as a home entertainer.