Love in Our Time (20 page)

“It's the widow I'm thinking of,” he went on. “She'd appreciate it, you know, if a few of his friends turned up. It means a lot to have a proper Mariner's funeral.”

“Not for someone who left the Order,” the man in the second row said decisively.

At that point Mr. Biddle's patience deserted him. He had been travelling all day and he was tired.

“All right,” he said, “if that's your final decision I'll wire the East Finchley Fleet to send out a Life-line. You can fight it out among yourselves afterwards.”

He turned and began to go down the steps from the platform. There was a long strained silence. Then as he reached the bottom the Captain stopped him.

“What time's the funeral?” he asked.

“Three-thirty, New Cemetery,” Mr. Biddle replied.

His voice was unsteady as he said it; and now that he had lost his temper he was trembling all over.

The Captain rang the ship's bell on the table in front of him.

“Volunteers for a Boat Crew for ex-Brother Sneyd's interment,” he said.

One by one the hands came up. Soon there were eleven of them; only three abstained.

The Captain turned to Mr. Biddle.

“We'll be there,” he said.

When Mr. Biddle got back to Mrs. Sneyd's it was nearly ten o'clock: he hoped as he rang the bell that he wasn't keeping her up.

But Mrs. Sneyd seemed quite glad to see him. “I've got a meal ready for you,” she said. “I expect you're hungry.”

“That's uncommonly nice of you,” Mr. Biddle replied. “I really only called round for my bag.”

By the time he had eaten—Mrs. Sneyd had something with him as well—it was ten-thirty. Mr. Biddle looked at his watch.

“I must be getting along,” he said. “I'm putting up at the Pyramid.”

“Why don't you stop here?” Mrs. Sneyd asked. “You could have our room. I'm sleeping in with Vi until I've got over it.”

Mr. Biddle started to refuse, but the prospect of the walk back to the Pyramid with his bag in his hand was not a pleasant one. After the walk from the station his feet still felt as though they might go back on him.

“Are you sure it won't be putting you out?” he asked.

Mrs. Sneyd said that she was sure.

“Well, then I'd like to very much,” said Mr. Biddle. “I shall be on the spot if you want me.”

Half an hour later, in young Violet's room Mrs. Sneyd turned out the light. She had ransacked every bed in the house to make Mr. Biddle comfortable. She herself was sleeping with Vi in a single bed.

“If this isn't the absolute limit,” she said. “Having old Biddle turn up on top of everything else.”

The Mariners were true to their word. They were there the next day eleven strong; and Mrs. Sneyd was furious.

She resented them from the moment she saw them getting off the tram-stop outside the cemetery gates.

“You would have thought they could have left us alone on this of all days,” she said under her breath to Mr. Biddle. “You would really.”

Mr. Biddle made no reply. He was holding young Violet by the hand—she had developed a passionate, adhesive affection for him—and he had caught a glimpse of something in the little mortuary chapel. What he had seen was eleven grown men in black coats proceeding to don the full regalia of the Order. That was something he hadn't reckoned with. Evidently they had wired for a dispensation from Headquarters and were preparing to bury Mr. Sneyd with full Nautical honours. When the Captain, wearing his gold chain and his plumed hat, removed a bosun's whistle from his pocket and proceeded to blow three shrill blasts on it as a signal for the Mariners' part of the ceremony to begin, it was too much for Mrs. Sneyd.

“Send them away,” she said miserably. “Send them away. This is
my
funeral.”

But her words were drowned in the full-throated roar of male voices.

“Upon life's ocean sailing,

In calm and in distress,

We hear our Maker hailing

The ships He doth possess.

“Amid the storm-waves' welter,

Beneath the frowning sky…

Eleven men standing elbow to elbow and with their heads thrown back were giving Mr. Sneyd the send-off of their life. The only thing that was omitted was the rocket. This, however, was reserved very strictly for ex-officers who died in office. And no matter how you looked at it, Mr. Sneyd, owing two years and three months' subscription, could hardly be held to have died that way.

Gerald did not arrive for the ceremony at all. At the moment when the six men in tight frock-coats were lowering his father into his final corner of England, Gerald was leaning up against a petrol pump watching a leisurely and unspeedable mechanic remove the cylinder head of his car.

As he stood there he told himself that it was his own fault: he must have overdriven the thing. He had allowed two and a half hours for the journey from London to Tadford, and he ought to have allowed three. It was Mr. Hubbard in I.P.P. who had made him cut it so fine. He had resented his going at all, and had insisted that he should go into the office that morning to see if a four-inch single for Tetter's Tooth Paste had turned up. In a way, it was Mr. Hubbard who was responsible.

“Be long?” Gerald asked.

The mechanic straightened his back for a moment.

“Mm,” he said.

“How long?”

“Dunno.”

“An hour?”

“Perhaps.”

“Do you think it might be more than that?”

“Might be.”

“How much more?”

“Dunno.”

After that Gerald walked over to the post office and sent a wire. “SORRY I CAN'T BE WITH YOU STOP” he printed out in capitals with the jagged, official nib on the inferior paper. “CAR BROKEN DOWN STOP WILL GET ALONG AT EARLIEST POSSIBLE.” When he had composed it he approached the girl behind the telegram counter.

“Can I send this to someone in a cemetery?” he asked.

The girl started.

“
Can you do what?
” she asked.

“Send it to a cemetery. There's a funeral going on,” he explained.

“I suppose you can, if you know the address.”

“I mean, will they deliver it to—to the grave?”

“I shouldn't think so,” the girl said. “You see you can't ride a bicycle in a cemetery.”

“O.K.,” said Gerald.

He crossed out the address and wrote in Mrs. Sneyd's number in Station Approach. It was only when he left the post office altogether that he began to question whether the wording of the telegram was really suitable.
Somehow it seemed more the sort of telegram one would send to a tennis party. He felt now that the words “Deeply Grieved” or “Heart-felt Condolences” should have been worked in somewhere.

The name of the place where he was stranded was Thruxton. It was a vague Midland area, a village that had outgrown itself and had just failed to become a town. It straggled along the Birmingham-Tadford road in a succession of dusty plate-glass shop fronts, small villas, vacant lots, public-houses (all closed until six o'clock), chapels, dingy little cottages, garages that looked as though they had once been stables, a chapel converted into the stucco brilliance of a Kinedrome, and a steam laundry. Gerald had never heard of Thruxton before but, by five-thirty when he was able to proceed, he felt that he knew the place better than anywhere else in England.

Over a cup of mahogany-coloured tea and a plateful of rough-looking cakes, he sat in the back room of a baker's shop and thought about the future. Before he was aware of it he found himself adding up sums on the tablecloth. One after another the totals came out wrong, and it was always wrong by whatever amount he thought of allowing Mrs. Sneyd. Looked at dispassionately the position was simply that he
couldn't
help her.

It wasn't even as though he could make a sacrifice and say that he would do without this or that; hire purchase and instalment payment doesn't let a man turn economical and suddenly cut down his expenses. And as he sat there he realised sadly that he didn't belong to himself any more. For the privilege of turning on a Majestophone wireless set in a Tudor villa he had bartered peace of mind and a free hand.

Gerald finally arrived in Tadford at seven-thirty and went straight round to the house. The road was everything that he had remembered it. With ten shillings off the average wage it would have come down pretty close to a slum, and with ten shillings on top of it, it would have been middle class. As it was, Station Approach just kept its head up despite the Board-Lodging notices and the fact that two of the houses, with scarcely any alteration at all, had been converted into shops. It was the sort of birthplace a man can look back on with pleasure only when he has made a conspicuously good thing out of life.

To his surprise, there were two cars outside number six; and then, as he got out on to the pavement, he saw that the front room was completely full of people. The window was blocked with rows of black shoulders, and the drone of voices carried right through on to the road. It was some time before they even heard him knock. There was certainly a party going on in there all right.

When at last she came to the door, Mrs. Sneyd was transfigured. In the midst of so much friendliness and conviviality, she had temporarily forgotten to feel miserable. Her eyes were still a little watery and red rimmed, but her whole appearance was different. She now wore an expression that was dazed and almost happy.

“Come on in,” she said delightedly. “We've been expecting you. I wouldn't let any of them go until you came.”

She let Gerald into a room that was blue with tobacco smoke. Through the haze he could see the massed figures of men he didn't know; somehow he felt that Mr. Sneyd should have been there. But Mr. Biddle was
among them, and his social genius had evidently worked again. They were all his friends by now. He introduced them enthusiastically one by one. And they were very polite. It seemed, in their eyes, to confer a special prestige on Gerald that, having missed the ceremony, he should still come along to pay his respects.

“I remember you when you were so high,” one of the mourners remarked suddenly. He was a tall man and he indicated something on the level of his knee. “It was just after your Dad went over to the Bon Marché.”

After that they all remembered Gerald as a boy. There was an embarrassing five minutes during which they competed among themselves for the honour of having known him first: their memories went back almost to the birth stage. It was obvious that they were all distinctly impressed with him as he was now; and remembering him as he had been, served to keep him in his place and maintain their self-respect.

It was young Violet who interrupted them. She had been out in the kitchen washing up when Gerald arrived and she felt she had been cheated in being allowed to miss a moment of him. She came into the room flushed and breathless, trembling to see the wonderful Gerald. There he stood talking to all these Mariners, the most influential men in Tadford among them, as though they were of no account at all, this amazing stepbrother of hers who had made a fortune in London and lived in a villa of his own and had a car and an enormous wireless set and a bathroom like a film star's. Being poor didn't seem bad at all with a prince like Gerald in the family.

“Hallo, Gerald,” she said.

He looked at her with some misgiving; he hoped
that she didn't think that he was going to become one of them again. And young Violet, in any case, was not the sort of child who attracted him. She had her mother's golden hair—a lot of it—and her mother's large, empty-looking eyes. She was like another Elsie. It was no fault of hers, of course, that she was at an awkward age, but the effect which she presented was that of a Hollywood juvenile film star, a little monster bubbling over with precocious feminine charm. She was dressed all in black velvet like a diseuse.

“Hallo, Violet,” he said.

“Hallo,” she answered, delighted to reflect that she had made a conquest. And then, for no reason, her delight and embarrassment overcame her. She just stood there colouring. “Elsie's in the kitchen,” she said at last.

“I'll go and see her,” said Gerald.

“I'll take you,” Violet answered shyly. She put her hand confidingly in his. It felt warm and sticky to the touch.

They met Lily, the musical one who was now in Woolworth's, on the stairs. She had changed a good deal in the last five years. She was now a smart, self-possessed young lady with a taste for artificial jewellery. It was the pearl and gem counter that she was stationed at; and, when she could afford it, she bought the choicest pieces for herself. Even in mourning she looked fashionable. She shook hands with him like a hostess.

“I'm so glad you've arrived,” she said. “We were all getting anxious.”

Gerald was about to explain himself—it seemed a queer business explaining himself to someone whom he remembered as a delicate, rather backward child, but
Lily had no time for him. “See you later,” she said and went through to the drawing-room. She was sixteen and partial to male company; and in there where Mr. Biddle was, was more than she had ever known of it.

The encounter with Elsie was not so easy. She made no pretence of being flattered that he had come.

“So you're here, are you?” she said. “I thought you'd probably changed your mind.”

“I don't know what you mean,” he said.

“Well, you don't exactly come here often, do you?” She tossed her head as she said it.

“If that's how you feel,” he answered quietly, “I don't think there's much point in me staying here.”

“Just as you like,” she said.

She turned her back on him as she spoke and called through to someone in the scullery beyond.

“Are you there, Fred?” she asked. “You'd better meet Gerald. He's going back home again.”