Love in Our Time (11 page)

DOES ANYONE, the message ran, REQUIRE A PERSONABLE
YOUNG MAN WITH INITIATIVE AND ABILITY ABOVE THE AVERAGE? FIRST CLASS ADVERTISING CONNECTIONS. SURRENDERING PRESENT POST FOR LACK OF PROSPECTS.

It was good of its kind, he acknowledged; but too long. Taking out his pencil again he proceeded to cut it down to the three lines for eight shillings that was all that the paper allowed.

Then he began to wonder what Alice was doing. She had been gone a long time. He could hear no sound from the bedroom and it occurred to him that perhaps she wasn't well. Putting the piece of paper away carefully in his pocket, he went upstairs slowly and deliberately. If she were just sulking with him, he would come down to the drawing-room again. He might even play the radiogram to himself.

But she wasn't just sulking: there was a great deal more to it than that. She was lying stretched out sideways across the bed with her head resting on her arm. She didn't even move when he went in.

“What's up?” he said. “Aren't you well?”

There was no answer.

“Sorry I was cross,” he said.

“It doesn't matter.”

He went over and put his arm round her. She moved away from him.

“Please go downstairs again,” she asked him.

He did not move.

“Don't go on like this,” he said. “I don't want to quarrel.”

“Then why were you so beastly?”

“I said I was sorry, didn't I?”

“It isn't that I was crying about.”

“Then what is it?”

He put his arm round her again. She did not move away this time.

“I think I'm going to have a baby,' she said.

Gerald sat up.

“You can't be.”

“But I tell you I am. I feel awful”

There was a pause.

“Have you seen a doctor?” he asked.

“I went to one this morning.”

There was another pause, a longer one this time. He got off the bed and went and stood over by the window.

“Now, if anything happens we
are
in the soup, aren't we?” he said.

The idea of running out an informal Life-line to Mr. Sneyd was Mr. Biddle's. He raised the matter at the first available Harbour Sitting. There was the East Finchley Fleet, he said; and there was one of their own Order lying in St. Martin's, neglected and washed up by the tide. Something, he made it clear, had got to be done about it.

He put it to them quite simply, after the formal business of the evening was over and they had elected the two Official delegates—Commodores Extraordinary they were called—to the Margate Conference.

“Brother Mariners,” he said, “there's one of us in pretty bad shape at this moment. And it wouldn't surprise me if we lost him. It's up to the rest of us to do the best we can for him while he's still here.”

“Who do you mean?” Mr. Vestry interjected.

“I mean Brother Sneyd,” Mr. Biddle replied, still in the same quiet voice that he always used. “He's in St. Martin's, Pentonville, and he's on the danger list, only he doesn't know it.”

“But what's wrong with the Pentonville Fleet?” Mr. Vestry asked.

“Hear, hear,” said Mr. Ankerson.

Mr. Biddle paused and began playing with his watch chain.

“ It's not for me to say anything against another
Fleet in the Order,” he replied. “Only somehow if we leave it to them, I don't reckon that Life-line will ever get run out.”

“Well, what do you want us to do?”

It was Mr. Vestry speaking again; he spoke as though he rather doubted the necessity of a Life-line at all.

“Just go and see him, that's all,” Mr. Biddle explained. “Make up a party and go down and cheer him up.”

“Don't you think there's plenty of visiting to be done on our own chart”—the whole of London was divided up into charts—“without going off into other people?”

“No, Brother Vestry, I don't,” said Mr. Biddle quite firmly. “There's too much in-shore sailing going on everywhere to-day. If you don't rescue a drowning man simply because he's on someone else's chart you haven't got any right to call yourself a Mariner.”

It was straight talking but it had its' effect. Mr. Vestry hurriedly endeavoured to make his position clearer. “I never said I wouldn't go to St. Martin's … ” he began; but the spirit of the meeting had already turned against him.

Even Mr. Ankerson, who usually followed Mr. Vestry's lead, came out on his own. “I'll man that Life-line,” he said.

“So will I.”

It was Mr. Hill, the chemist, who spoke this time. He was a tall, pale man with a high, wax-like skull and neat, rimless spectacles. In his time he had done more than his share of sick-bed visiting in the Order; he had carried his queer professional odour of scent and antiseptics into a hundred strange bedrooms.

“Do him the world of good to see a few smiling faces,” Mr. Hill added.

“Have to fix a time, you know,” Mr. Vestry reminded them.

“Thursday's visiting day,” said Mr. Biddle. “Four till six.”

“I never get away by six,” Mr. Vestry objected. But Mr. Biddle was imperturbable.

“Leave all that to me,” he said. “The R.M.O. is one of us. He'll let us in if we get there any time before seven. I've got all that arranged.”

So the four men shook hands on it. It was after ten and the Harbour Sitting had gone on long enough. There still remained the business of closing the meeting, however, and Mr. Biddle rose solemnly to administer the Oath. “Inasmuch as it has pleased the Great Mariner to bring us safely to this day of grace,” he began speaking slowly and distinctly, “now at night-fall into His hands we commend our ship.”

Everyone stood round with bowed heads and then Mr. Biddle pulled them to attention.

“The Oath,” he said simply. They said it quietly and reverently after him—those seven, secret words which no Mariner since the Order started has ever revealed.

As he walked back home, Mr. Biddle kept congratulating himself on the way the evening had gone. At the thought of all the good they were going to do Mr. Sneyd simply by going there, his heart ripened. And then his mind wandered off on a familiar track and he thought again of the desirable stone-built bijou residence in Dorset that was going to be his one day. The more he let his mind dwell on it, the more it seemed something fairy-like and unobtainable, like a cottage in Atlantis.

“Only another year,” he kept saying, “and then I'm through with things.”

There was no denying it: the thought of life with no Miss Wachett tiptoeing around was very, very agreeable.

The R.M.O. at the hospital seemed rather surprised when Mr. Biddle phoned him up next day. He was not used to having the Mariner's pass-word spoken in his ear at ten o'clock in the morning. But he was extremely nice about it.

“Very well,” he said. “Any time till seven. You can say I said so.”

He rang off before Mr. Biddle could thank him. Mr. Biddle was rather surprised. He was not to know that the R.M.O. was one of the worst sorts of Mariners in the whole Order—a Mariner so bad that he was one of those who did not even wear the emblem of the order on his watch-chain; “blind” Mariners the Order called them.

Mr. Biddle had Mr. Sneyd on his mind for most of the day. And that evening he went round specially to see if Gerald had any late news.

“Seen your Dad?” he asked.

Gerald nodded.

“He's pretty dicky,” he said.

Mr. Biddle shook his head.

“That's bad,” he said. “He wants cheering up. He's lonely.”

“I'm going in again to-morrow,” Gerald told him.

“Don't worry,” said Mr. Biddle firmly. “I've got the whole thing in hand. One or two of us are going down on our own. You can have the evening off. Take Allus to the pictures.”

Gerald thanked him. He knew that his father would like a man of his own age to talk to. And it gave him particular pleasure that Mr. Biddle should go to so
much trouble. He insisted that he should listen to the new radio before he left. Gerald turned the knob and the set magically lit itself.

“How do you like it?” he asked when they had finally chosen a station.

“It's louder than most sets,” Mr. Biddle replied.

“But it's the tone that counts,” Gerald told him. “This set's got Balanced Frequency.”

“Has it?” said Mr. Biddle.

He did not know what Balanced Frequency was; and he suspected that Gerald did not know either. But he was glad all the same that Alice should have a set that had it whatever it was.

When he got up to go he managed to get in a few words with Alice in private. He was rather worried about her because she looked so pale and drawn. And Gerald, too, seemed unnaturally silent.

“My little Allus all right?” he asked.

“Just a bit tired,” she said.

“No worries?”

She seemed surprised.

“No, why?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing. I just wondered.”

He kissed her noisily on the cheek and left. It was evidently nothing, he told himself. No doubt they had had a quarrel or something. The idea rather amused him; it seemed so young and silly.

Mr. Biddle was the first to arrive at the hospital. He left Finchley at five-thirty carrying his small parcel and toiled down to the Angel by tram. The farther into town he went the more sorry he became for Mr. Sneyd; it must be dreadful, he reflected, to be lying there alone
in that long, bleak ward in the midst of this smoking wilderness of chimneys. The anticipation of Mr. Sneyd's joy at seeing them cheered him up however. Being the Good Samaritan, he had long since discovered, had a pleasure all its own.

He sat down on a bench in the hall and waited. It was an impressive hall with a bronze memorial plaque to dead St. Martin's men and a closed-in desk for the porter like a small sedan chair. Mr. Biddle sat down patiently and almost dozed.

Then Mr. Vestry arrived. He was wearing a black coat and striped trousers himself and was carrying an attaché-case. The porter took him for a specialist and saluted. He soon saw his mistake, however, when Mr. Ankerson joined them. For Mr. Ankerson had the flushed untidy look of a man who has been hurrying because he is late, but has still managed to slip in a drink on the way. His bowler hat was on the back of his head and the collar of his coat had brushed his hair up the wrong way. He looked more like a man going to the Cup Tie than a hospital visitor.

It was left to Mr. Hill to restore the balance. He brought with him an atmosphere of antiseptic compassion. His clothes and tie were black; at first glance he looked like a man in permanent semi-mourning.

Then Mr. Biddle took charge.

“Dr. Seton-Gordon said we might go up,” he explained, and they began to mount the broad winding staircase.

When they arrived on the third floor, the Sister seemed surprised to see them.

“It's after visiting time, you know,” she said briskly. Mr. Biddle explained that they had Dr. Seton-Gordon's
permission and the Sister seemed momentarily to be defeated. But only momentarily.

“Not more than three visitors at once,” she said. “One of you will have to remain outside.”

In the ordinary way it would have been hard to find a milder and less bellicose man than Mr. Biddle. In his own affairs he was often little better than weak. But when acting on behalf of others he was a different being; he was invincible.

“Oh, no, Sister,” he said. “One of us won't have to remain outside. Dr. Seton-Gordon told us that we could all go in.”

He was determined that Mr. Sneyd's happiness should not be diminished by even one absentee.

“I shall ask Matron,” she said, and left them.

Mr. Biddle watched her go down the corridor and into a room at the end.

“Come on,” he said … .

They found Mr. Sneyd asleep when they got there. He was lying on his back propped up against a kind of frame. Asleep, he looked younger; the lines across his forehead and beside his mouth had been miraculously smoothed out. The bedclothes rose and fell to the regular faint clockwork of his breathing.

Mr. Biddle stood over him and contemplated the sleeping face.

“He's having a nap,” he said.

“I can see that,” said Mr. Vestry.

“It seems a great pity to wake him,” Mr. Hill remarked despondently.

“If you take my advice you'll leave him as he is,” Mr. Ankerson advised. “He's having a good dose of Dr. Shut-Eye.” He humorously blew the unconscious
man a kiss and caught the leg of the bed a heavy, jolt as he turned away.

“Sshh,” he said hurriedly. “Sshh.”

But the shock had roused Mr. Sneyd. He sat up on his elbow and stared blankly in front of him. For a moment, his brain did not seem to register. He looked as surprised as if he had found himself in the National Gallery. And now that he was awake the lines on his face returned. They etched themselves in before their eyes; he was soon a wretchedly sick old man again.

“Just brought a few of the Order along to see you,” said Mr. Biddle encouragingly.

“I want my wife,” said Mr. Sneyd weakly.

“She isn't here,” Mr. Biddle explained. “We're from East Finchley. We've dropped in to cheer you up.”

Mr. Sneyd regarded them without conviction. “I want them to send for my wife,” he said. “That's what I want … .” He was looking at Mr. Biddle as he spoke. Then, quite suddenly the light of recognition came into his eyes. “Hallo, Brother,” he said.

Now that the ice was broken Mr. Biddle introduced them all in turn. “I've brought you some fruit,” he said and deposited the brown paper parcel on the small table beside the bed.

“That's very good of you, Brother,” Mr. Sneyd answered. “But Sister's very strict about outside presents. She doesn't allow anything, not even grapes.”

Mr. Biddle was disappointed, but he did not show it.