The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon (26 page)

^{"Wait a minute!" said Sebastian, "perhaps I can do something."}

^{He pulled the borrowed raincoat closely round him and went up the stairs to where Geraldine was burrowing deeper into the embrace of the old woman who glared at him as though he was soliciting alms.}

^{"Sermon's my name," he began, rather breathlessly, "I pulled the little girl out but I think you ought to know that the young lady looking after her did everything possible to avoid the accident. I saw her walk into the water in an attempt to make the little girl come back to the beach."}

^{The woman gave him a searching glance and then dismissed him to devote her attention to the nursemaid.}

^{"How did she get out there in the first place? That's what I}

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^{should like to know! What were you doing to let her risk her life in search of a few shrimps ? What do you think I send you down here for? To sit and read about animal diseases? To sunbathe? To let the child go where she likes without let or hindrance? You ought to be thoroughly ashamed of yourself, Miss Grey, you hear me? When my son and daughter-in-law hear about this they'll be devastated, devastated, you hear ? Take her home at once! Take her home and give her a hot bath! Dawson! Where are you, Dawson?" as the poker-faced chauffeur stepped forward and touched his hat. "Take us all home at once, do you hear?"}

^{"But I say, you must listen . . ." began Mr. Sermon, dismayed by her manner and annoyed by her cavalier dismissal of a man whose groin ached from the impact of the child's heel, but before he could utter another word, Mr. Bignall joined issue, sailing into the group like a man-o'-war bearing down on a huddle of rowing-boats.}

^{"You are addressing the man who saved the child's life, Lady Wilkinson!"}

^{The old lady blew out her lips and made the kind efface she might have made after tasting a sour plum. If gratitude stirred in her it was not noticeable and Mr. Sermon found his indignation jockeyed aside by amazement at such incredible arrogance.}

^{"Him? He rescued her? Well, thank you, I'm sure, but what interests me is why she had to be rescued ? This young woman is paid a good wage to look after the child, instead of which she reads and gossips! She was gossiping to that very man the last time I called for her!" and as though in response to an afterthought she opened a vast handbag, plunged a fat, freckled hand into its depths and came up with a purse about three inches square. Fascinated, Sebastian watched her tuck her bag under her arm and extract a pound note from the purse. With a small part of his mind he knew that she was on the point of offering him a tip but his brain as a whole rejected this as a monstrous improbability. Nobody, he thought, could be so purse-proud and arrogant as that, and as he watched her unfold the note and smooth it between her palms he wondered what on earth she would do with it when it had lost its wrinkles. Then, as the woman's hand completed the smoothing process, the girl acted. She bounded forward, pushing between Mr. Sermon and her employer and}

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^{thrusting her body forward so vigorously that the old woman raised her hand as though she expected a blow in the face.}

^{"How dare you! How dare you, you . . . you disgusting old woman!" shouted the girl. "Mr. Sermon is a gentleman! Mr. Sermon wouldn't touch your filthy money, so don't offer it, don't you dare offer it, or I'll . . . I'll stuff it down your horrible throat!"}

^{Mr. Sermon gasped and even the stolid Mr. Bignall raised his eyebrows and murmured "Huh!" in an unexpectedly subdued voice. Some of the bystanders grinned and tittered but the majority succumbed to a sudden embarrassment and began to shuffle away in various directions. The old woman's face twitched, the child stopped snivelling and the chauffeur coughed gently, discreetly. Then, with great deliberation, Lady Wilkinson shifted her grip on the handbag, opened it, returned the note to its depths and gestured Geraldine towards the car, following her without a word. The chauffeur hesitated, glancing interrogatively towards the girl, who said: "Don't bother, Dawson, I'm not coming! Tell them I'll send for my things later!" and walked quickly away as a breathless boy tugged at Mr. Sermon's arm and handed him his clothes and towel.}

^{Mr. Bignall pretended to ignore the little scene.}

^{"Change in one of our tents. On the house, huh!" he said, and Sebastian, now feeling cold and bewildered, followed his directions to a row of council bathing tents near the refreshment hut and escaped into one gladly as the last of the crowd melted away.}

^{When he emerged it was to find that Mr. Bignall had departed leaving a neatly-written message with the restaurant-hut attendant. The note ordered him to telephone the Council Offices at once and ask to be put through to the Town Clerk's office. Mr. Sermon pocketed the note promising himself that he would think twice before obeying the order for he had no desire at all to figure in a public acknowledgement of his action. For the moment all he was interested in was the girl and what was to become of her now that she had sacked herself and sacrificed all prospects of a reference. He climbed the steps slowly, still conscious of the ache in the groin and suddenly there she was standing beside a promenade shelter, beckoning and smiling.}

^{He was surprised to see her looking so cheerful. He had had the}

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^{impression that she was very much upset by the encounter with her employer but it was obvious that she had more buoyancy than most people, for she said, taking his arm in a friendly fashion; "I waited because I remembered that we haven't had a real chin-wag Mr. Sermon. I've got a sort of car in the park and I feel like a drink. Let me buy you one!"}

^{She led the way across the promenade to the car-park and pointed to her 'sort of car", a bull-nosed Morris at least twenty years old. "She passed her roadworthy test but you have to hold on to the door, I never seem to get around to having it fixed."}

^{Sebastian got in and they climbed the High Street to the moor. Conversation was impossible during the ascent, but when they reached the summit she pulled off the road and turned so that they could look down on the bay and enjoy the view that Sebastian had of the town the morning of his arrival. It was a familiar view now, so much so that he felt he had been living there years instead of less than a month, but he got the impression that she did not share his affection for Kingsbay and was glowering at the prospect, as he might look down on the Wyckham Rise estate as a place where dreams had no room to grow. He said: "Do you belong to this part of the country? Is Kingsbay your home town?"}

^{"Good heavens, no!" she said, emphatically, "I'm from Canada. Can't you spot the accent?"}

^{He could now that she spoke of it, a shortening of the 'a' and a barely noticeable slurring of consonants and it surprised him for she looked very English with her brown eyes, dark hair and fresh complexion, the kind of girl one might expect to find in a house with lawns, tumbledown stables and sporting dogs asleep on the terrace.}

^{"I've been over here sirce I was a child," she went on, "but ever since I grew up I've been meaning to go home. It's like everything else, somehow I never got around to it! I hardly ever get around to anything, Mr. Sermon. Daddy's dug in here and more English than the English but then you'd exoect that, seeing where he lives and works. I'll never get him to uproot himself now. If I do go home I'll have to do it on my own steam «,nd I don't think I'll ever raise the fare!"}

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^{"What does your father do?"}

^{"He's a Headmaster, you probably know the school, because it's quite near here, Barrowdene!"}

^{"Barrowdene! The. . . Barrowdene? The Public School?"}

^{"Why yes!" she laughed. "Am I such an improbable Headmaster's daughter?"}

^{"Yes, you are," he admitted, "and come to think of it, you're an improbable person altogether!"}

^{"I don't think I'm any more improbable than you, Mr. Sermon," she said, laughing.}

^{"Ah, but the difference is I wasn't in the least improbable at your age," he said, "in fact, I've only been improbable for a matter of weeks. Until then I was probably the most predictable man in Europe!"}

^{"How do you like it?" she asked, smiling, "being improbable I mean?"}

^{"I like it fine," he said, "and I wish I'd taken the leap years ago!"}

^{"Oh, don't wish that," she said, with unexpected seriousnesss, "I dare say you're enjoying it as a change but when it's part of your make-up it's a damned nuisance, take it from me! Sooner or later everybody you know loses patience with you and in the end you lose patience with yourself! If I'd had any say in it I should have made myself a very different kind of person, I can tell you! I should have settled for a quiet, demure little thing ecstatically happy with a husband who came home at 6 p.m. every night and gave me a couple of kids who occupied me until bedtime. There's peace in that kind of existence, you can grow old with dignity."}

^{"Indeed, you can't," he argued, thinking of himself, "that's the one thing you can't do! You begin to panic every birthday and each night, as you're going off to sleep, you feel that's one more day wasted!"}

^{As he said this he was aware of a curious affinity with the girl, for here was someone rooting for tranquillity as he rooted for adventure and change, and somehow it made them partners and fellow-travellers so that they were able to arrive on common ground with the minimum of talk.}

^{"Here we are discussing one another's compulsions," he said,}

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^{"and I don't even remember your name! The one I'm using right now is 'Martin', I've changed it along with my background. What is your name?"}

^{"Rachel," she said, "Rachel Grey. Grey is my maiden name and I've gone back to it. I didn't like my husband's name, it was Follet-Smith. Double-barrelled names always irritate me. I think most people invent them like famous ancestors and even the genuine ones seem pretentious. That was one of the things Steve and I quarrelled about, I would persist in signing myself 'Smith' and introducing myself as 'Smith' over the phone!"}

^{She leaned back and tried to stretch her long legs in the cramped space under the steering-wheel. "That's enough about me, tell me more about your dramatic abdication from the Prep. School!"}

^{"No," he said, firmly, for the factual recital of his flight was beginning to bore him. "You tell me more about yourself. How did a girl with a father head of a famous school like Barrowdene come to embark on a career of assistant matron, or nannie for that matter ? And what happened in between, apart from your marriage to Mr. Follet-Smith? Oh, and why do you go about with a book on veterinary surgery?"}

^{"Oh, it's all a frightful muddle," she said lightly, "and when I look back it seems a fearful waste of time, not the least bit like I planned when I was seventeen and starry-eyed at Montreux! One ought to settle for reality making nonsense of dreams, of course, but I think mine must have gone far wider of the mark than most girls', particularly the kind of girl I met over there. I think it was in Switzerland that they started going wrong. Oh I liked it at Montreux at first, but that was probably because I love mountains. We used to ski a good deal and I made lots of friends, but I didn't learn anything, not even conversational French. You see, I'm a very lazy person-intellectually that is-and I suppose I also acquired expensive tastes in Switzerland. Most of the girls had wealthy fathers and we've never had more than just enough to get by. I was a bit conscience-stricken about this when I came home, that's why I took the job at Napier Hall."}

^{"How old were you then?"}

^{"Nineteen when I left. I tried two more Prep. Schools but I}

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^{absolutely hated the life. Men can be tiresome enough but thirteen-year-old boys! All those bleeding knees and gaping socks! Besides, I suppose I rather hoped I'd meet a real man on the staff, but I never did, they were either tired old failures or self-opinionated young boors. Mind you, I felt sorry for some of them, you for instance, but that only made the background more depressing. I went home for a spell and then took an art course in London. In some ways that was worse."}

^{"In what way?"}

^{"It was all so hopelessly phoney. Most of the people I met had no more real love of art than I have for quantity surveying! They used it as a kind of sloppy backcloth for acting out their personalities, or the personalities they thought they had! They used to spend hours and hours convincing themselves that they occupied advanced outposts in politics and philosophy and artistic appreciation. They were so full of fads that it was like . . . like living in a mental hospital, where everyone is pretending to be a cherry tree or Savonarola or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs! I soon found out I couldn't paint, tho' I wasn't bad as a potter. I stuck it out for almost two years and then I got a job as a stewardess on a South American line. That was fun in parts but it got to be very exhausting. I don't mean the work, I mean the all-in wrestling with the crew and passengers. The only way to get by was to learn ju-jitsu, so I did, but the only time I used it was on a Bolivian who had a seat on the Board. That's just me. I was paid-off while he was still in sick bay. It was soon after that I met Steve."}