The Pyramid (11 page)

My father and I looked at our plates, silent for different reasons.

Even by teatime next day, my mother was still
smouldering
; and I, with much to conceal, had nervous thoughts that jumped into downright apprehension when she broke into our silence.

“That girl was a long time in the dispensary, Father!”

“Yes. Yes, she was.”

“Well I hope you gave her some good advice. It’s time somebody did!”

My father wiped his grey moustache and nodded soberly. People occasionally came to him for advice. This, I believe, was because he looked more like a doctor than Dr. Ewan did, and had not the awesome aura of Dr. Ewan’s county status. People could
talk
to my father, they said; and indeed this was true, since he seldom answered them. Chewing the cud of an idea until he had extracted the last possible juice from it, he would appear to listen to them as they rattled on. This gave them an impregnable sense of his wisdom; and indeed, since he was effortlessly good and kind and methodical and slow, he may have been wise too. My special relationship as a son, made it difficult for me to judge.

“What did she want, then, Father?”

The cynical end of me triumphed for an instant over apprehension and saw my father offer Evie some opening medicine. But he was staring at the teapot and pursing his lips. I waited.

“She doesn’t think much of—people.”

I debated with myself whether asking what girl this was would convey my indifference; and decided sensibly against. But my mother was glittering and nodding meaningly.

“And that doesn’t surprise me! It doesn’t surprise me at all!”

“Beasts,” said my father. “All men are beasts. That’s what she said.”

“
Well
,” said my mother. “What d’you expect from a girl like that? Men are what you—”

I blew tea all over the table cloth. This small crisis was a great relief; and by the time my back had been thumped I hoped the subject might be changed. But I should have known that my mother in this strangely extended Mood would not be content with a word or two only; and that my father would have to comply.

“Go on then, Father. What did you say?”

My father wiped his moustache, passed a hand over his baldness, adjusted his glasses, and stared at the teapot again. I could hear my mother’s foot begin to tap.

“I said ‘No’.”

The tapping went on, and my father heard it. He amplified.

“I said no they weren’t. I said—
I
wasn’t! I said our Olly here—”

The tapping stopped. My father was gleaming and glinting sideways at me.

“I said that he had his faults of course, lots of them; but he wasn’t a beast.”

Then there was a pause. My mother looked straight at him and spoke in a still voice.

“What did she say?”

My father had turned back from me and was looking at his plate. He answered her vaguely.

“You know how it is, Mother. I get to thinking, and they—I can’t remember.”

My mother stood up, took the teapot and marched with it into the kitchen, banging the door to behind her. There was another pause; then my father spoke to me, softly.

“It’s the wedding, you see. After she’s been to the wedding, she’ll be—better.”

By the end of surgery I was waiting in the clump. Evie was late, but still she came, cotton dress and all, strolling up the path. I had pictured her in my feverish lubricity, humble and anxious and aware of her new status. But Evie was
smiling
, triumphantly, if anything, and she was exhaling again. She walked past me, securely, went through the bushes, through the alders, and sat down among the scrapes at the top of the rabbit warren. I hung behind, looking from her to the town and back again.

“Come back here, Evie!”

She shook scent out of her glossy bob and lay back in the sun. She stretched her arms wide, stretched her legs down together and the cotton dress rearranged itself. She laughed at the sky.

“Come on, Evie!”

She shook her head again, and tinkled a laugh, girlishly. I went and squatted by her.

“Look—what’s the matter?”

Evie turned on all the works, glinting at me and flickering her tangle of eyelashes. She sank her chin, stretched even further so that the top half of her body lifted away from the earth and I caught my breath. There was scent in it.

“Let’s go in the clump—and have some fun!”

Evie shut her eyes and collapsed. She lay like that,
unsmiling
.

“Here, or nowhere.”

“But—that’s the town!”

She lifted her head and stared at it, grinning on one side of her face.

“So it is—Mr. Clever!”

I cajoled, ordered, pleaded. Evie would not budge. She lay slack, unsmiling, stretched out and answered me always with the same phrase.

“Here or nowhere.”

In the end I fell silent and stared moodily at the brown earth and the dry pellets of rabbit dung. Evie got up and picked things off her dress.

“Evie—tomorrow—”

Tomorrow was the day of the wedding. I knew already what I should need, to stick like a plaster over the thought of it.

“See you here—in the afternoon.”

Evie smiled sideways at me.

“Of course, Olly. Why not?”

Then she went away, secure and perfect as a ripe nut.

It wasn’t until we were all three at the table and having an early dinner so that my mother could catch the bus into Barchester, that I understood. My mother was amiable and excited and talked as much as her food would let her.

“—and you needn’t worry about that girl any more, Father. She’s going away!”

“Oh?”

“Going to her aunt at Acton. She’s been promised a job in a firm. They import timber, I’m told. A good thing too!”

“Good thing?”

“For her, I mean.”

My father masticated, gazing heavily before him. He wrinkled up his brow and shook his head.

“London. I don’t know. It’s a long way; and a young girl—”

He went on masticating and shaking his head forebodingly as if he were envisaging an endless line of young girls
throwing
themselves off London Bridge.

“Nonsense, Father!” said my mother, glittering and
laughing
. “She’s going to stay with her aunt!”

My father changed his shaking to a nodding, masticating slowly meanwhile, thirty-two times, or it may have been sixty-four. My mother stopped laughing and glittering and stared at the wall. When she spoke, she used something like the voice with which she announced her unnerving, her diabolical perceptions or intuitions; a voice matter-of-fact and basic, as from someone not quite my mother; but now, elated, even gay.

“Provided she’s careful, she’ll have no end of a time!”

I did the washing up, in an incomprehensible rage. I went out after I had finished, striding through Stilbourne away from the escarpment. I dived into the sexy woods, turned aside and broke out into fields again. It was said you could see the very tip of Barchester Spire from the crest of Pentry Hill and I circled the whole thing, before I climbed to the top. But there was a blue distance where Barchester and its spire might be. I turned round, moodily following the escarpment with my eye to our furry clump; and there was a tiny white speck at the top of the brown warren.

No fear! No
bloody
fear!

I went by way of Cockers, past the Racing Stables, through the fields of Little Farm, and climbed again. The white speck was still there. You could see it from half the county. I began to run clumsily along the edge of the escarpment, past Ansdyke and the Barrows, over Iron Gate and the Devil’s Hollow. I came thudding to the clump, the sweat running down my face, my hair smeared into it; and from the town I heard the church clock strike three.

“Evie!”

I collapsed beside her, my heart beating against the raw earth. She was sitting up, her legs crossed, her hands
supporting
her on either side. Stilbourne and all the spreadout county were shaking beyond her as if they had been running too.

“Evie—please!”

“Here or nowhere.”

I felt the eyes of Stilbourne on my back; but they were distant, they wore pebble glasses and we were two
inscrutable
specks. It was an irrational fear and embarrassment that laid a hand on my flesh but a real one. Evie understood this, laughing sideways triumphantly, so that I think even she was astonished and frightened, when I put one hand round her back, one on her breast, and savagely stopped her startled speech with my mouth. She neither resisted nor co-operated; and afterwards, when I was gasping face-downwards, she went away flushed, silent and ashamed.

I stayed where I was, and at last looked down under my arm, trying to recognize the odd figure that moved here or there, almost beyond the edge of seeing. I got up and went crouched through the alders and only straightened up when I was down in Chandler’s Lane. I opened our front door as quietly as a thief. I debated whether I should not get out my violin and play at the gipsy music my mother so astonishingly urged me to practise. I thought I might play softly at first, then more and more loudly so that my father would never know exactly when I had come in—or even that I had been out at all. But I had a more immediate urge for reassurance, so I went to the dispensary and walked in casually. My father was standing by the long bench under the window. The top half of the window was open to the clump. He had not yet bothered to replace his binoculars in the leather case that hung behind the door. They stood by him on the bench, battered but serviceable. My mind did a simple sum. Magnify by ten. Ten into six hundred yards goes sixty times. Sixty yards.

There was a book on the bench before him. He shut it slowly, turned, came past me without looking at me. He took his white lab coat off a hook, put it on, and went as slowly back to the bench. He took a prescription off the wire file and peered at it closely. He looked up at some bottles then back at the paper. Suddenly he crumpled the paper in his hand and leaned on his knuckles, his head bent. There wasn’t a sound.

At last he straightened up, smoothed out the prescription carefully and took down a bottle. All at once I knew what was going to happen, could feel it happening, unstoppable as sex. I felt it in my shuddering, in the confusion of Imogen and Evie and the piano and Robert and my mother; in the fierce and fruitless struggle between my will and my hot eyes. I gasped out my oaths, half-strangled.

“Damn! Damn! Damn! Oh—damn!”

Furious and anguished and helpless, the water not falling, but jetting on my shoe, on the bench, on my hands—

“Damn! Damn! Damn!”

Head up, hands clenched, window elongating glossily, the dark underground lakes broken up, flowing and flowing—

“Damn! Oh damn—”

My father was turning his head from side to side as if it had been tied with elastic ropes and he an animal, not
knowing
how he had been caught.

“I had to know, you see—
had
to. After what she—” He put the bottle down, glanced at the window, then at his hands; passed one of them over his bald head. “Laughing and
laughing
. Hysteria, I thought. Laughing and laughing and—or sneering.”

I stayed where I was, settled in misery, wickedness and defeat, wondering already what corner there was I could hide in, never to be seen again. My father cleared his throat and went on, in a voice curiously determined and strained by the determination.

“Young men don’t—think. I—You don’t know about that place, Chandler’s—Yes. Well. There’s—disease, you see. One’s not suggesting that one’s necessarily—been exposed to infection—but if one goes on like this—”

He took off his glasses and cleaned them with surgical care; and suddenly, for all his professed but indifferent agnosticism the voice of generations of chapel burst out of him.

“—this man what d’you me call him—these books—cinema—papers—this sex—it’s
wrong,
wrong,
wrong
!”

I stood, a heap of dung, yearning desperately for some sewer up which I might crawl and reach my parents, kneel, be forgiven, so that the days of our innocence might return again. I stood, watching him make up prescriptions for all the ailments of Stilbourne.

After that I stayed indoors and played my cheap violin in place of the piano, hoping to do at least something that my parents wanted. I avoided Evie as if she had been one of the diseases my father had talked about; and indeed I saw her only once before she went. I was standing by the sitting-room window, my violin in my hand. I had played the passionate gipsy music with extreme care; and now stood, staring across at Bounce’s house, thinking ruefully how much she would have approved my dutiful practice, when Evie came along on the other side of the Square. My mouth opened slowly. This known, this detected, this fallen woman, had not changed in any way at all. Lips everted, mysterious smile, pert nose, glossy bob, knees motionless, she slid along, and as ever, bore the almost palpable aura of sex in the air round her. I watched her till she slid out of sight beyond the Town Hall. She was wrong, wrong, wrong; and so was I. I went back to my violin, to the extravagant oportamenti, and throaty vibrato of my gipsy music.

So Evie disappeared; but it was years before I found out why. I was not the cause, though with a mixture of vanity and shame, I thought so. Nor was Robert with his motor bike, nor Captain Wilmot with his typewriter and braided whip. Duggie Dance might have been in the convulsions that killed him and Mrs. Dance wild with grief and hysteria, but she had two Stilbourne eyes in her head and a Stilbourne tongue in her mouth. What ejected Evie from our midst, in the direction of London Bridge, was the tiny smear of
lipstick
at the corner of Dr. Jones’s mouth. That was too much. Evie went, and the coloured picture of Stilbourne was motionless and flat again.

Yet Evie avoided London Bridge for I saw her once more, and in Stilbourne. It was two years later in the autumn and I was on the verge of my third year at Oxford and restless with the world since anyone could see a war was only just round the corner. I did not think I should complete my third year, and bleakly enough, saw myself walking into the barrage of another Western Front. Stilbourne Great Fair was on, that annual event which brought what small business the town had, to an exasperated stop. The fair was so old—Saxon, perhaps—that only a special Act of Parliament could have abolished it. Stilbourne’s exasperation was all the greater, since what had once been a row of stalls set up in the curved High Street, between our Square and the Old Bridge, had become a riot of swings and roundabouts and mystery rides and tunnels of love and chairoplanes, the only object of which was the sale of pleasure. It was Saturday Night. The sky was clear and moonlit and cold; but the steam from the competing machinery—that vast disharmony of a
thousand
pipes—had built up in pillars and mushrooms over the fair and the lights from flares shook down from them as though a war had already started. For three hundred yards were ranged the shooting galleries, roundabouts, sideshows, crockery-smashing, three darts for sixpence and a dip in the lucky bran tub. The lines, the gaudy flowerbeds of bulbs pulsed with the generators and the naphtha flares of the smaller stalls made the whole place bounce and quiver. One pavement was free, and it was by this route and this alone that one could escape from the fair and the clouds. I had returned, with a sophisticated nostalgia to assure myself that I could no longer enjoy the pleasures of childhood, and was finding with a mixture of irritation and amusement that I was in danger of enjoying them thoroughly. I strolled, hands in the pockets of my grey flannels, scarf heavily wrapped and
hanging
down behind and in front, along the free pavement. Here, the crash, the blare, the mechanical musics, the shouts and screams, thump of a wooden ball against a canvas screen, or pang of a bullet against an iron sheet were a little to one side, as if one had partly dissociated oneself from them. The pavement was empty, for it was still too early to find lovers standing in the alley openings or behind the tents; and drink had not yet fouled the pavement with spew. Just beyond the outclassed lights of the cinema I saw a girl coming down the pavement towards me. I could not mistake the bob, the motionless knees and demurely pacing feet. It was natural, after all, that I should see her again. Quite recently, Sergeant Babbacombe had emerged from the Town Hall in his picturesque uniform, rung his brass bell; bawled “Hoh yay! Hoh yay!” and burst before he could get the third O yay out. There was hardly room for us to pass each other. She stopped in front of me, smiling in the reflection from the pillars of steam.