The Centre of the Green (22 page)

The handwritten matter above the photograph
described
in detail what Juanita and Julian had done
together
in the cave while the Colonel and Miss Plumstead were sun-bathing on the beach; the account may have been exaggerated. The Colonel turned over the page. There were other such pictures, other such descriptions. He remembered his own words to Julian in the train. “
Thought I was neglecting you. Bit selfish reall
” And Julian’s reply, “
Best thing you could have done. You let me work things out for myself
.” Here were the things he had worked out. Such things! The journal was a story of sickness and satyriasis. A squalid brothel in Terreno, where the girls wore cowboy hats made of cardboard, like day-trippers in Southend. The cook’s help at the
pension
. A succession of furtive encounters with dirty people, recorded with a disgusted violence of language, in which fact and fantasy were hopelessly confused. And in with all this were literary exercises of a different kind, in which the friendship between the Colonel and Miss Plumstead was described with the cruel false-objectivity of the satirist. Miss Plumstead’s large hat, the redness of her complexion, her devotion to the spirit of Chopin, her daily postcards, the elaborate way in which she tied the tapes of her rope-soled sandals, her laugh, her diction, her fondness for wine and table football, her little jokes
—all mocked. And the Colonel in his role of “the elderly admirer”—mocked. And jokes of an obvious kind—as to the impossibility of proving misconduct if Mrs. Baker were to want a divorce, since it was doubtful whether the Colonel could or Miss Plumstead knew how. All
dirtied-up
, the Colonel’s Indian Summer; nothing left of that.

The Colonel felt sick and dizzy, but he could not stop reading; he had to go on to the end. And the end, when it came, was in the form of a letter, a letter to himself:

The dizziness became more overpowering. It had all happened before. There was the same double vision, the same intensification of the light, followed by the same blackness. The Colonel cried out once, and fell forward on to the landing. As he fell, he hit his head against the sharp corner of the banister. Then he rolled downstairs, head over heels, heels over head, finishing
head-downwards
at the bottom. The blood from the wound in his temple stained the stair-carpet and dripped on to the rug at the bottom of the stairs. Doors opened. The Colonel, hovering just below the level of consciousness, could just hear his son’s voice, frightened and far away. “Father!
Are you all right? Father!” Then feet running down the stairs towards him, and then nothing at all.

*

Charles cut three and a half inches from the galley proof of an article on new methods of glazing. The
telephone
rang. He picked it up, and said, “Charles Baker!” and the telephone said, “Charles, is that you?”

“Yes, it is.”

“This is Penny.”

“Penny?” The processes of his memory moved slowly along its categories of people like an electronic brain on half-current. “Oh yes of course. Penny. How are you?”

“Very well, thanks. How are you?”

“Very well, thanks.”

“Charles, do you think you could leave the office for a moment? We could have a coffee or something. I’m at Holborn Underground—quite close.”

Several minutes, Charles and Penny were sitting together at a table in an A.B.C. Charles had bought a cup of coffee for each of them and a small tart filled with green jam for himself. Penny said, “Charles, there’s something I want you to do for me.”

“If I can.”

“First of all, about the baby. Julian and that girl.”

“The abortion?”

“She can’t have one. It’s too late. She’s got to have the child.”

“I see.” He bit into the jam tart, and it broke into two pieces. One piece remained in his hand. The other fell on to his trouser-knee, with the green jam downwards. He wiped the place with his handkerchief. “You want me to tell Julian?” he said.

“That’s one thing. Charles, this may sound a bit odd to you, but I’ve decided—well, I mean, Julian is the father after all. I’ve decided to adopt the baby.”

Charles looked up at her, and wondered why nowadays nothing surprised him. “Well, that’s surprising,” he said.

Penny finished drinking her cup of coffee, took a Kleenex from her handbag, and dabbed carefully at her lips. Charles noticed that her hand was shaking very slightly. “I suppose you think I’m probably not the ideal person to bring up a child,” she said. She began to pile lumps of sugar from the sugar-bowl one on top of the other. When she had made a tower of five, it fell down, and she began a different structure with a broader base.

“It’s not something I know very much about,” Charles said. “I don’t see why you shouldn’t be as good at it as a lot of other people. I suppose Julian will have to do something about money, because you’ll be giving up your job. I don’t think he’s got much at present.”

“More than that.” Penny dispersed the pyramid she had made, and began to arrange the lumps of sugar into a new design. “I’m sorry to be fiddling like this,” she said. “But I have to do something with my hands. I want you to tell Julian that I’m prepared to take him back.” Charles was silent, and Penny said, “You needn’t bother to wonder whether he’ll come. He’s not very
independent
. I’ve already found another flat, so he won’t need to meet Mr. Monney again, or the girl either.”

“I’ll tell him.”

Because Penny was under a strain she talked more loudly than usual, and Charles wondered whether the men in grubby raincoats who were scattered about the A.B.C. could hear her, and if they were interested. Penny said artificially, “I’m not being noble or forgiving or anything, Charles, so you needn’t frighten him with that. Just tell him it’s a matter of convenience. If you’re going to adopt a baby, it’s much easier if you have a husband. Get me some more coffee, will you? I’m terribly thirsty for some reason.”

Charles stood in line behind an Irish labourer, passed rapidly by the salads, overtook him as he considered all the different things one could have with chips, collected two cups of milky coffee, and returned to the table. Penny had lit a cigarette, and now occupied one hand with that, keeping the other below the level of the table. “Here we are,” Charles said. “If you’re not going to forgive, what are you going to do?”

“Forget.”

“Is that easy?”

“No.” Penny had become calmer as she waited, and, as it seemed, more sincere. She smiled at him seriously, not a Public Relations smile, but the smile of someone who makes a confidence, and is glad to make it. She said, “I’ve been doing rather a lot of thinking. I mean, at first all I intended to do was to—you know, arrange things, and I wasn’t very good at it; everything had been left too late, for one thing. Offering to adopt the baby was probably just a reaction at first, done on the spur of the moment. Only later as I thought about it, I didn’t change my mind. I realized that I did want to adopt the baby very much. I mean, since Julian left and I’ve been on my own, I’ve had much more freedom and in many ways I’ve enjoyed it, but you know, after a bit you begin to feel that only a part of you is alive. You’ve got to be necessary to someone.”

“Yes, I know.”

“And then I started thinking about Julian.”

“You think you can reform him?”

“No. Not really. It’s too late for that, isn’t it? I don’t know what makes Julian behave as he does. I suppose he wants—what do they say?—’security’. But if that’s what he wants, he’ll go on wanting it; I can’t give it to him. I don’t see how you can expect to get that sort of security from someone else. It’s something you have inside
yourself
,
or else you haven’t. I don’t think many people do have it. Not nowadays anyway. We have to get along without it as best we can.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

“Try to make things easier for him.”

“How?”

“By not minding so much. By accepting him as he is.”

“
Can
you do that?”

“You have to accept people if you’re going to live with them. You have to like them. After all, I wouldn’t have married Julian if I hadn’t liked him before I loved him, and it was only the loving killed the liking. You can put up with people if you like them, but because I loved him, I didn’t even try to put up with Julian. He’s so weak; I couldn’t accept that. All he wants is to live a quiet life, and for people to think he’s nice, and not make demands on him. I made demands all the time, just like his mother. He was frightened of me; he was frightened to come home in the evenings; I suppose I even took a sort of pride in that. I wouldn’t let him cover anything up, because I believed that there ought to be perfect truth between husband and wife, and the more I caught him out when he was lying, and forced him to tell the truth, the more he lied next time so as not to be caught out again. Oh, I’ve been thinking, Charles—just
remembering
it. I was always nagging at him, because he wasn’t the sort of man I could admire. But you don’t have to admire people; just accept them.”

Charles said, “I’ll tell him you want him to come back.”

“Yes,” Penny said. “Tell him that, and tell him about the child. Don’t frighten him, Charles.” She closed her handbag; she was ready to leave. “You don’t commit yourself, do you?” she said. “But don’t worry. I know this may not work. Only don’t you see that the important
thing is that it doesn’t matter so much to me now whether it does or not? And because of that, it may.”

*

“Chap’s ought to finish well,” the Colonel said.

Charles said, “The vicar’s downstairs. He’s been waiting rather a long time.”

“I won’t see him.”

The Colonel’s head was bandaged where he had hit the banister, and one side of his face was stiff.
Consequently
, when he spoke, only one side of his mouth moved properly, and the words were indistinct. “Tell him not to wait,” he said. “Sorry and all that, but I won’t see him.” He had been moved from his own little room into Mrs. Baker’s room, where there was more space to nurse him. Now Charles and his mother sat
together
by the side of the Colonel’s bed, with the District Nurse knitting at a decent distance by the window.

Mrs. Baker said, “Justin, it wouldn’t do any harm just to see him, after he’s taken the trouble to come. I mean, it is his job in a way. Of course, we know you’re going to get well, but——”

“Wouldn’t matter if I wasn’t. I won’t see him. It’s a matter of self-respect.”

“Or pride,” Charles said.

“Pride then, if you like. Nothing wrong with pride. Pride’s been a kind of backbone to me all my life. It’s been as good as God to me. Kept me going. I won’t be disloyal.”

Charles said, “Pride dies with people, Father, like their backbones. God goes beyond death. That’s what the vicar would tell you, anyway.”

“Do
you
believe in it?—all that stuff?”

“No. But the vicar does. He may be right.”

“You believe….” The Colonel fought with his need to ask the question, and lost. “You believe as I do?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Chaps ought to finish well. Your great-uncle Walter lived to be ninety-six. On his ninety-sixth
birthday
, he went out for a walk in the snow without his
overcoat
. Walked three miles across the fields. Too much for him. When he got back, he said, ‘James, draw the
curtains
. I’m going to die’. Then he did.” Against the grey of the Colonel’s face, his moustache hardly showed at all, except that it quivered a little with the heaviness of his breathing. “Mind you, it was easier for him, coming suddenly like that,” he said. “Don’t expect anybody would let
me
go out walking.”

“You’re not going to die, Father.”

“Don’t be a bloody fool. Of course I am.”

What a ridiculous thing to say!
Mrs. Baker thought. When one had a stroke, one recovered, to have another stroke later, and another, and another. Luckily she had strength and patience, and would contrive to nurse her husband through these attacks. Of course, it would make him more helpless.

“My will,” the Colonel said, “it’s with the bank. One thing. I’ve asked to be buried somewhere in the garden. Better than cremation. Go back into the soil, eh? That’s the way. Call it a whim.”

“Justin——”

“No church service, or any of that rot.”

Charles said, “It would cause talk, Father.”

“Can’t be helped.”

“Not much fun for mother, with all the village people gossiping. Do you care very much what happens to you after you’re dead?”

“No.”

“Then?”

“I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I … that I was frightened, and changed my mind.”

“Then you do care?”

“Suppose I do. If I were a stronger man, Charles, I mightn’t care, but I do. Perhaps it’s only pride after all, and not self-respect.”

“Perhaps it’s only obstinacy.”

“Perhaps.” The Colonel stared at the ceiling. “I’ve seen plenty of obstinate old men in my time,” he said. “You might say that the army has more than its fair share. I’ve known men killed because of it. Because of some obstinate old man who wouldn’t admit he was wrong.”

“It would give mother pleasure, and do you no harm,” Charles said.

The District Nurse said, “Such morbid talk! Now come along, Colonel Baker. We’re not going to have you planning your funeral yet awhile, if you don’t mind. You’ll only end by depressing yourself, and everybody else as well.” She made a little bustling movement into the room, repositioned a glass on the bedside table, and returned to her knitting.