The Centre of the Green (20 page)

Worse than the idleness was the jealousy. It tormented her, and that it should torment her tormented her, for she was a sensible woman, and knew that she ought not to give way to it. The idea of the Colonel’s “enticing
Julian’s affections” of his “turning Julian away from her” was ridiculous, the kind of thing one expected from some uneducated working-class woman who took her emotions from cheap novelettes and the
Daily Sketch
; nevertheless it was there. What relationship were they building
together
, her son and her husband? Would they return in alliance against her? Would their memories be of
experiences
shared in which
she
had no part?—laughing
together
, drinking together, opening their hearts together? Was it the Colonel now who was one of the gang?

Mrs. Baker had a pain between the eyes—not exactly a headache, just a pain between the eyes; she had it most of the time now, and was afraid to overdo the aspirin. Lying in bed at night, or in the early morning as she watched the sunlight moving over the carpet, she would say to herself,
I am too old to change
. She couldn’t change now. She couldn’t “love” Justin. She didn’t want to
depend
on him, or confide in him, or feel pride in him, or responsibility for him. She was too old. Matters had gone for too long on quite another tack. All she wanted was that things should remain as they had been. Let the Colonel be back home again, a husband by convention only, an occupation, an old man to look after, simply a physical presence in the house. Let the boys come down unwillingly to visit from time to time, and she would make do with that. Only let this silence, this gnawing jealousy, this aloneness be swiftly over.

It was to Mrs. Baker in this state of mind that the Colonel wrote his postcard from the beach at Deya. It read, “My dear, We are having a most enjoyable time together. You won’t know us when you see us again. Much love from us both. Justin.”

*

The Colonel and Miss Plumstead had walked a great many kilometres (as it seemed to them) along the main
road in the sun. The Colonel had taken a photograph of Miss Plumstead as she sat, in her linen dress and wide hat, on a low stone wall silhouetted against the open sky, and Miss Plumstead had taken a photograph of the Colonel in front of a palm tree, looking stern. They had diverged twice from the road, once to examine one of the watch-towers, which turned out to be disappointingly small and smelly, and once to explore what they had been told was an Archduke’s Palace, with a Moorish Garden, and stone arches; the palace itself had been locked, and a lizard on one of the arches had frightened Miss Plumstead, but they were agreed that the place was beautiful, if a little run-down. From time to time as they had walked along, there had been a distant hooting, and then a car had appeared swiftly round one of the bends in the road as the Colonel and Miss Plumstead scrambled up the bank or jumped on the wall for safety. But they had met no other people.

Now the time was twelve-thirty by the Colonel’s watch, and they had been three hours on their journey, with a break of ten minutes every hour. From the very beginning, the Colonel had explained that it was better on a long march to rest at definite times for definite periods; if you stopped when you felt like it, you would never get finished. Twelve-thirty was lunch time. They sat on a shelf some way up the grassy bank overlooking the road. Far away and below them, they could see the Mediterranean, while behind them the bank rose to what seemed to be the lawn of a large white house. The Colonel unpacked their lunch from the haversack he had been carrying. There was a bottle of white wine, a bottle of water, flat cold Spanish
omelettes
between bread, tomatoes, olives, oranges, hard-boiled eggs. “Goodness!” Miss Plumstead said, “We can’t possibly eat all that.” The Colonel said that they had better go easy on the
wine, because the day was hot and would get hotter, and they still had some way to go. Miss Plumstead bit into her
omelette
, took a gulp of wine from the bottle, and replied that they would take the bus back.

A car went by below them, and they watched it out of sight and into sight again, round the receding curves of the road, getting smaller with each new appearance. All around them, unnoticed unless one made a point of listening, there was the tiny constant
chirr-chirr
of insects. Miss Plumstead, bending to unfasten the white tapes of her rope-soled sandals, dislodged a small stone, which rolled down the bank and hit the road below. A bird called. Then, from somewhere above them, they heard the notes of a harp.

First there was a single note, then another, then another, as if each string were being separately plucked to test it. Then two
glissandi
followed in quick succession; then a number of little runs and linked chords, as a racer leaves his mark and runs two or three paces to be ready for the start. Miss Plumstead and the Colonel gazed in astonishment at one another. “What on earth——?” Miss Plumstead said, and the Colonel replied, pointing to the house above them, “It’s from up there somewhere. A harp. Somebody practising.”

“They can’t know we’re here, can they?”

“No. They can’t know.”

Now the music began. It was a dance. Precise, formal, elegant, the music made a pattern in
time
, a long curving line like the wake of a ship in water; as each note carried the line forward, its predecessors began to dissipate and disappear. The Colonel and Miss Plumstead sat silently listening. Too soon the music stopped. The dance was over. The last note lingered for a while, making its own ripple in the memory, and then was gone.

“I wish it hadn’t stopped,” Miss Plumstead said.

“It’ll begin again.”

“It’s like—like an open-air concert, just for us.”

“Yes.”

“I wish we could clap or something. I wish we could go up and see who’s playing, and say thank-you.”

“Do you, Myra?” the Colonel said. “I’d rather stay here and listen. Whoever it is, she’s not playing for us. We might embarrass her, you know. It’s better like this.”

“She?”

“I thought it might be a woman.”

“I thought it must be a man.”

“Did you?” They smiled at each other shyly, and the harpist began playing again, a slow sad piece of music, a formal elegy for the past. It was September music, October music, November music. The Colonel looked back at a Justin Baker he had almost forgotten, an
ambitious
over-earnest person, given, he remembered with surprise, to sudden bursts of physical energy, to eager talk with friends, to pride—given to pride in his talents and appearance. Well, he would not be sentimental about that; it had not come to much. He looked at Miss Plumstead, and saw that in the corner of each of her eyes a tear was forming. The tears grew, came to fullness, and trickled down the sides of her nose.
How selfish of me
, he thought,
not to realize that she
——He reached over, and clasped her hand. “Don’t cry, Myra,” he said.

“It’s silly. I can’t help it.”

“I know.”

They sat together on the bank beside the road, their half-eaten lunch on the grass between them, and held hands while the harpist played on and on. The Colonel looked up at the sky. High above—so high they could not hear it—a jet plane was flying. It made a vapour trail, a straight line that cut the sky in two. Some day one of those planes would fly over the Arctic Circle right round
the world, bisecting the sky completely so that the two halves would fall apart, letting in the dark upon the world below. Let that come when it would. Meanwhile the Colonel looked down again at the green grass and the brown earth, at the dusty road and the twisted olive trees and the sea. He looked again at the middle-aged lady with the flushed face and peeling nose, dressed in a wide hat and a crumpled linen dress and sandals laced as the young people lace them, and he tightened his grip on Miss Plumstead’s hand, and listened completely to the music. There were ten days more to spend in Deya before the holiday was over.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Home and Out

T
he Colonel said, “You know, Julian, I had a sort of idea you mightn’t want to come back.”

“Stay out there? What could I have done?”

“I don’t know. Silly of me. Just an idea.”

“I’ve got to—well, sort of tidy things up a bit, you know, Father. I mean that was one of the reasons for going in a way, wasn’t it?”

“Of course.” Gazing across the carriage at his son as they talked together, watching him covertly between conversations, the Colonel felt proud of what he had done. The holiday had made such a difference in Julian. He was
cleaner
-looking, with his hair bleached by the sun and the salt water, and his skin a healthy brown, and his eyes confident and clear. He sat up straight in his corner seat, and as he watched the countryside go by or met his father’s gaze in easy friendship, you could tell that he took an interest in life again. Of course there was still, as he said, a mess—the devil of a mess—to be cleared up. There would be no short cuts, no easy answers; it was a nasty business, no doubt of that. But at least the boy felt a responsibility for it, and was ready to make a start.

The train travelled from Southampton to Exeter (Central) by way of Salisbury. Thereafter they had only an hour’s journey from Exeter (St. David’s) to Newton
Abbot. The platform at St. David’s smelt of old fish. Perhaps Mrs. Baker would be at Newton Abbot to meet them. The Colonel felt a discomfort in his stomach, and found it difficult to drink the tea Julian brought him from the Refreshment Room. Life had to go on, of course; it wasn’t all holidays and—and harp concerts. “You must come and see me whenever you come to London,” Myra had said, but holiday friendships could not be presumed upon; they were evanescent by nature.
Whenever you come to London
—what reason had he for doing such a thing?

“You know,” he said, “I got a bit worried sometimes. Thought I was neglecting you. Bit selfish really.”

“Best thing you could have done. You let me work things out for myself. I’d only have resented you
otherwise
.”

“Suppose you’re right.”

“Of course I am.” Julian smiled. Suddenly the Colonel realized that he had a reason for apprehension as well as for regret. How would Teresa take the change in Julian? How much would she resent it, because it was not her doing? She should be happy, of course, but chaps weren’t really made like that; it would take a bit of swallowing. “Julian,” he said, “when we get back … your mother….”

“Yes?”

“If you could show you’re glad to see her——”

Julian smiled. “But I
shall
be glad to see her.”

“Oh, yes. Yes.” A moment of confusion. The Colonel had taken it for granted that Julian would be as reluctant to be back again as he was himself. It was presumptuous of him to have thought so. Now he was ashamed.

As the train ran along the sea wall at Dawlish, and in and out of the tunnels to Teignmouth, and turned inland by the river to Newton Abbot, the Colonel remained silent. He was confused, and a little ashamed, and there
was also doubt, nagging at the back of his mind to be admitted. He found that he did not believe that Julian would be glad to see his mother again; he acknowledged to himself that perhaps this was because he did not want to believe it, but the doubt was there nevertheless, and of this doubt also he was ashamed.

*

There was a moment’s awkwardness at the station, since both the Colonel and his wife hung back a little from their reunion, but Julian smoothed everything over. He dropped the suitcases on to the platform, and came forward to kiss his mother, and soon they were walking down the road to the bus station, and once they were in the bus, Julian sat next to Mrs. Baker, with the Colonel on the seat behind. All Julian’s conversation on the way was of his pleasure in being back, and of how beautiful the Devonshire hedges and fields looked after the
dried-up
landscape of Majorca, and of the long talk they must have together when once they were home. The Colonel felt rather left out of things, and when they reached the cottage, he went off for a look at the garden. There was a lot of work to be done there, he noticed. Plenty to keep him busy.

Perhaps he ought not to go back into the house at once. He’d take a walk down to the village—give them a chance to talk a bit. Stupid that he should feel so flat. Chaps can’t be on top of the world the whole time; you have to expect a bit of a let-down, especially after a holiday. The important thing was that he had
done
something
. He tried to recapture and treasure for a while in his mind the pride he had felt at the change in Julian—not, of course, that he himself had done much, only, dammit, when he thought of the difference between Julian as he was and Julian now, like the Before and After pictures in the newspapers, well, he’d had some
part in making that change, and, with so little else to be proud of, might reasonably be allowed to be proud of that. It occurred to Colonel Baker that it wasn’t only Julian who had changed.
An Indian Summer!
he thought bitterly; an Indian Summer, when a plant you had thought dead suddenly puts out a ragged blossom. Things had come to a pretty pass with him if such a small thing—the merest holiday friendship, born of politeness and contiguity—could affect him so. It wouldn’t do. He held up his head angrily, and blinked, quickening his pace down the road to the village. He didn’t need anyone else; he was too old for that. He had managed to live out time so far without giving away to that need, and with determination he would last the rest; indeed, not giving way was what kept him alive, as well as his reason for living. At the cross-roads, the vicar, a retired Bank Manager from Sutton Coldfield who had come late into the church, drove suddenly round the corner on his Vespa. “Hullo, Colonel!” he cried. “Keeping fit, eh? Glad to have you with us again. We must have a talk sometime,” waved his arm, and swept on with a squat, precarious dignity.

Meanwhile Mrs. Baker had found Julian changed
indeed
, but delightfully changed. On the station platform, he had been the first to kiss; she had not needed to invite it. And in the bus, when usually he would have hung back and so forced her to sit next to her husband, he had steered her instead to an inside seat in the front, and had sat down at once beside her. It was like old times again. Here they were in the kitchen—
her
kitchen—making tea together, and drinking it, and washing the crocks, and rattling on. She heard all about Myra—“dear Myra Plumface”, as Julian said—the silly, boring, middle-aged woman, who had monopolized the Colonel—“Poor old father! His head was quite turned. It was funny to see
him, only sort of sad too, you know.” Still, at least this had allowed Julian to wander off by himself rather a lot, which was all for the best really. “Father’s all right in his way,” he said, “but you know, I haven’t really got much to say to him. I mean,”—with such a wicked smile—“it was wonderful having him along, but I’d have gone right up the wall if I hadn’t been able to get away sometimes.”

So they had a really good talk about the holiday. “And what have you been doing while we’ve been away, luv?” Julian said, “I expect it’s been terribly dull for you.” Mrs. Baker admitted that she hadn’t known what to do with herself for much of the time. “I stopped in bed rather a lot,” she said. “It’s better having your father back. It gives me something to do.” Then Julian said, “Well, you’ll have me to look after too for a bit. I mean, until I get things tidied up, and make a fresh start and all that. I’ve been thinking a lot about the things you said to me before I went away.”

The time passed pleasantly in this way, until Julian said he thought he’d better wash off some of the grime of the journey, and change. He left his mother, and went upstairs, but he did not proceed at once to the bathroom. Instead he sat for a long time in his own room, writing in his journal. Here and there in the body of the daily narrative he had left blank spaces, and he now filled these by sticking in them photographs which he took from a rather dirty brown-paper envelope he had been keeping in an inside pocket. When he had finished writing, and the photographs were in place, he drew two thick lines beneath the last day’s entry, using a
Penguin
book as a ruler. Then he blotted the page carefully, closed the book, and sat thinking. He left the desk, and went into his father’s room, where he placed the book on the bed, changing its position several times as if it were a
cushion. But this would not do; there was no reason for it to be there. He tried several places in the room, but was satisfied with none. Finally he dropped the book casually on the landing in a position about equidistant from his father’s door and the door of the bathroom. He let it lie there as he returned to his father’s bedroom, opened the door to come out, saw the book, mimed his surprise at seeing it, picked it up, held it for a while dubiously, then opened it and began to read. Finally he carried the book back with him to his own room, saying aloud, “Not yet, I think,” pronouncing each word as if it were a separate sentence.

Now he would have his bath. Half naked in the
bathroom
, he examined his face in the mirror. This was his face, but it was also the face which people saw, and the two were not at all the same. He knew how to fool people, and he would. “Jolly evening,” he said. “Jolly, jolly, evening!” The secret of success was to be what people wanted you to be; it was the old, tried Dale Carnegie method, and it always worked. He stripped, and lay in the warm bath water, lying with only his head above the water level, luxuriating in the water and in the fantasies that proliferated in his mind.

*

The door to the doctor’s surgery opened, and a
middle-aged
lady came out. Fifteen minutes earlier, she had been one of the group of patients who still sat in the waiting-room on the leather bench or the upright wooden chairs turning over the pages of magazines, but now she avoided looking at them, and hurried self-consciously out into the street. A voice from the other side of the door called, “Next”. Penny said, “That’s us, I think,” and went in with Betty Monney to see the doctor.

The doctor’s desk was placed directly beneath the window, so that when he sat, as he now did, completing
one of the Ministry’s forms, he could not see the people entering the surgery. He said, “Good evening. Name, please,” without looking round, and Penny replied, “Elizabeth Monney. She is on your list.”

The doctor’s chair was of the revolving sort, and he revolved it to face them. He was a man of middle age, brown and broad and tweeded, and still preserved his Irish accent in spite of fifteen years of practice in
south-west
London. “Which one of you’s sick?” he asked.

Penny said, “Well, it’s——”

“It’s not you?”

“No.”

The doctor turned his attention to Betty. “She’s
pregnant
, is that it?” he said. “Beginning to show. Who are you? Aunt? Older sister? You’re not her mother, I take it.”

“My name is Penelope Baker.
Mrs
. Baker. I’m on your list as well.”

“That tells me nothing. What kin are you to the girl?”

“Her father asked me to bring her. Her mother’s dead.”

“I see. How old are you, Betty.”

“She’s seventeen.”

“Well, that’s not too young to bear healthy children, praise the Lord. How long has she——?”

“About four months.”

“Well, I don’t suppose there’s any doubt about it by now, but I’d better examine her anyway. Perhaps you’d care to wait outside. I’ll call you when I’m ready for you.”

Betty looked up quickly at Penny, and then looked down again at her own hands, which she kept folded in her lap. Penny said, “It’s all right, Betty,” and the doctor said, “Sure it’s all right. This won’t take a moment, my dear. It’s just to make sure.” Then Penny went back into
the waiting-room. A young Siamese in a checked shirt rose quickly from his chair, and then hovered where he was, as he saw that Penny had come out alone. Penny found herself blushing, partly because the doctor’s
curtness
had angered her, and partly from embarrassment: really, he might just as well have let her stay. She said, “I’m afraid we’re not quite finished yet,” took the top magazine from the pile on the table, and sat down as composedly as she could. She opened the magazine, set herself to concentrate on its pages, and discovered that what she had was a copy of
Chick’s Own
two months old. She did not care to exchange it, however, but sat there while the time went slowly by, and at last the doctor opened his surgery door, and said, “Will you come back in now, please, Mrs. Thing?”

“She’s fine and well,” the doctor said. “Coming along very nicely. I’m going to give you a note to the Clinic. I don’t do babies myself. Haven’t the time for it.”

“Doctor….”

“Yes?”

“I wondered….” Penny turned her head to look at the girl, who sat on the hospital bed by the wall, gazing intently at the two of them. What had Betty told him? Did he know about Julian? “I don’t know whether——” she said. But it was a foolish thought of hers; Betty would not have told him about that, and even if she had, it made no difference. Penny had come here to do a job. She had promised her help to Mr. Monney, and she had not been of much help so far. “I’m afraid we didn’t just come here for an examination,” she said.