The Umbrella Man and Other Stories (30 page)

Clearly, Jelks loved his master; and just as clearly he hated the wife. Each time he did something for her he made a little sneer with his nose and drew his lips together so they puckered like a turkey’s bottom.

At dinner, our hostess sat her two friends, Haddock and La Rosa, on either side of her. This unconventional arrangement left Sir Basil and me at the other end of the table where we were able to continue our pleasant talk about painting and sculpture. Of course it was obvious to me by now that the Major was infatuated with her ladyship. And again, although I hate to say it, it seemed as though the La Rosa woman was hunting the same bird.

All this foolishness appeared to delight the hostess. But it did not delight her husband. I could see that he was conscious of the little scene all the time we were talking; and often his mind would wander from our subject and he would stop short in mid-sentence, his eyes travelling down to the other end of the table to settle pathetically for a moment on that lovely head with the black hair and the curiously flaring nostrils. He must have noticed then how exhilarated she was, how the hand that gestured as she spoke rested
every now and again on the Major’s arm, and how the other woman, the one who perhaps had something to do with horses, kept saying, “Nata-
li
-a? Now Nata-
li
-a, listen to me!”

“Tomorrow,” I said, “you must take me round and show me the sculptures you’ve put up in the garden.”

“Of course,” he said, “with pleasure.” He glanced again at the wife, and his eyes had a sort of supplicating look that was piteous beyond words. He was so mild and passive a man in every way that even now I could see there was no anger in him, no danger, no chance of an explosion.

After dinner I was ordered straight to the card table to partner Miss Carmen La Rosa against Major Haddock and Lady Turton. Sir Basil sat quietly on the sofa with a book.

There was nothing unusual about the game itself; it was routine and rather dull. But Jelks was a nuisance. All evening he prowled around us, emptying ashtrays and asking about drinks and peering at our hands. He was obviously shortsighted and I doubt whether he saw much of what was going on because as you may or may not know, here in England no butler has ever been permitted to wear spectacles—nor, for that matter, a moustache. This is the golden, unbreakable rule, and a very sensible one it is too, although I’m not quite sure what lies behind it. I presume that a moustache would make him look too much like a gentleman, and spectacles too much like an American, and where would we be then I should like to know? In any event Jelks was a nuisance all evening; and so was Lady Turton who was constantly called to the phone on newspaper business.

At eleven o’clock she looked up from her cards and said, “Basil, it’s time you went to bed.”

“Yes, my dear, perhaps it is.” He closed the book, got up, and stood for a minute watching the play. “Are you having a good game?” he asked.

The others didn’t answer him, so I said, “It’s a nice game.”

“I’m so glad. And Jelks will look after you and get anything you want.”

“Jelks can go to bed too,” the wife said.

I could hear Major Haddock breathing through his nose beside me, and the soft drop of the cards one by one on to the table, and then the sound of Jelks’s feet shuffling over the carpet towards us.

“You wouldn’t prefer me to stay, m’lady?”

“No. Go to bed. You too, Basil.”

“Yes, my dear. Good-night. Good-night all.”

Jelks opened the door for him, and he went slowly out followed by the butler.

As soon as the next rubber was over, I said that I too wanted to go to bed.

“All right,” Lady Turton said. “Good-night.”

I went up to my room, looked the door, took a pill, and went to sleep.

The next morning, Sunday, I got up and dressed around ten o’clock and went down to the breakfast room. Sir Basil was there before me, and Jelks was serving him with grilled kidneys and bacon and fried tomatoes. He was delighted to see me and suggested that as soon as we had finished eating we should take a long walk
around the grounds. I told him nothing would give me more pleasure.

*   *   *

Half an hour later we started out, and you’ve no idea what a relief it was to get away from that house and into the open air. It was one of those warm shining days that come occasionally in midwinter after a night of heavy rain, with a bright surprising sun and not a breath of wind. Bare trees seemed beautiful in the sunlight, water still dripping from the branches, and wet places all around were sparkling with diamonds. The sky had small faint clouds.

“
What
a lovely day!”

“Yes—isn’t it a lovely day!”

We spoke hardly another word during the walk; it wasn’t necessary. But he took me everywhere and I saw it all—the huge chessmen and all the rest of the topiary. The elaborate garden houses, the pools, the fountains, the children’s maze whose hedges were hornbeam and lime so that it was only good in summer when the leaves were out, and the parterres, the rockeries, the greenhouses with their vines and nectarine trees. And of course, the sculpture. Most of the contemporary European sculptors were there, in bronze, granite, limestone, and wood; and although it was a pleasure to see them warming and glowing in the sun, to me they still looked a trifle out of place in these vast formal surroundings.

“Shall we rest here now a little while?” Sir Basil said after we had walked for more than half an hour. So we sat down on a white bench beside a water-lily pond full of carp and goldfish, and lit cigarettes. We were some way from the house, on a piece of ground that was raised above its surroundings, and from where we sat the gardens
were spread out below us like a drawing in one of those old books on garden architecture, with the hedges and lawns and terraces and fountains making a pretty pattern of squares and rings.

“My father bought this place just before I was born,” Sir Basil said. “I’ve lived here ever since, and I know every inch of it. Each day I grow to love it more.”

“It must be wonderful in summer.”

“Oh, but it is. You should come down and see it in May and June. Will you promise to do that?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’d love to come,” and as I spoke I was watching the figure of a woman dressed in red moving among the flower beds in the far distance. I saw her cross over a wide expanse of lawn, and there was a lilt in her walk, a little shadow attending her, and when she was over the lawn, she turned left and went along one side of a high wall of clipped yew until she came to another smaller lawn that was circular and had in its centre a piece of sculpture.

“This garden is younger than the house,” Sir Basil said. “It was laid out early in the eighteenth century by a Frenchman called Beaumont, the same fellow who did Levens, in Westmorland. For at least a year he had two hundred and fifty men working on it.”

The woman in the red dress had been joined now by a man, and they were standing face to face, about a yard apart, in the very centre of the whole garden panorama, on this little circular patch of lawn, apparently conversing. The man had some small black object in his hand.

“If you’re interested I’ll show you the bills that Beaumont put in to the Duke while he was making it.”

“I’d like very much to see them. They must be fascinating.”

“He paid his labourers a shilling a day and they worked ten hours.”

In the clear sunlight it was not difficult to follow the movements and gestures of the two figures on the lawn. They had turned now towards the piece of sculpture, and were pointing at it in a sort of mocking way, apparently laughing and making jokes about its shape. I recognized it as being one of the Henry Moores, done in wood, a thin smooth object of singular beauty that had two or three holes in it and a number of strange limbs protruding.

“When Beaumont planted the yew trees for the chessmen and the other things, he knew they wouldn’t amount to much for at least a hundred years. We don’t seem to possess that sort of patience in our planning these days, do we? What do you think?”

“No,” I said. “We don’t.”

The black object in the man’s hand turned out to be a camera, and now he had stepped back and was taking pictures of the woman beside the Henry Moore. She was striking a number of different poses, all of them, so far as I could see, ludicrous and meant to be amusing. Once she put her arms around one of the protruding wooden limbs and hugged it, and another time she climbed up and sat sidesaddle on the thing, holding imaginary reins in her hands. A great wall of yew hid these two people from the house, and indeed from all the rest of the garden except the little hill on which we sat. They had every right to believe they were not overlooked, and even if they had happened to glance our way—which was into the sun—I doubt whether they would have noticed the two small motionless figures sitting on the bench beside the pond.

“You know, I love these yews,” Sir Basil said. “The colour of them is so wonderful in a garden because it rests the eye. And in the summer it breaks up the areas of brilliance into little patches and makes them more comfortable to admire. Have you noticed the different shades of greens on the planes and facets of each clipped tree?”

“It’s lovely, isn’t it.”

The man now seemed to be explaining something to the woman, and pointing at the Henry Moore, and I could tell by the way they threw back their heads that they were laughing again. The man continued to point, and then the woman walked around the back of the wood carving, bent down and poked her head through one of its holes. The thing was about the size, shall I say, of a small horse, but thinner than that, and from where I sat I could see both sides of it—to the left, the woman’s body, to the right, her head protruding through. It was very much like one of those jokes at the seaside where you put your head through a hole in a board and get photographed as a fat lady. The man was photographing her now.

“There’s another thing about yews,” Sir Basil said. “In the early summer when the young shoots come out . . . ” At that moment he paused and sat up straighter and leaned slightly forward, and I could sense his whole body suddenly stiffening.

“Yes,” I said, “when the young shoots come out?”

The man had taken the photograph, but the woman still had her head through the hole, and now I saw him put both hands (as well as the camera) behind his back and advance towards her. Then he bent forward so his face was close to hers, touching it, and he held it there while he gave her, I suppose, a few kisses or something like
that. In the stillness that followed, I fancied I heard a faint faraway tinkle of female laughter coming to us through the sunlight across the garden.

“Shall we go back to the house?” I asked.

“Back to the house?”

“Yes, shall we go back and have a drink before lunch?”

“A drink? Yes, we’ll have a drink.” But he didn’t move. He sat very still, gone far away from me now, staring intently at the two figures. I also was staring at them. I couldn’t take my eyes away; I
had
to look. It was like seeing a dangerous little ballet in miniature from a great distance, and you knew the dancers and the music but not the end of the story, not the choreography, nor what they were going to do next, and you were fascinated, and you
had
to look.

“Gaudier Brzeska,” I said. “How great do you think he might’ve become if he hadn’t died so young?”

“Who?”

“Gaudier Brzeska.”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

I noticed now that something queer was happening. The woman still had her head through the hole, but she was beginning to wriggle her body from side to side in a slow unusual manner, and the man was standing motionless, a pace or so away watching her. He seemed suddenly uneasy the way he stood there, and I could tell by the drop of the head and by the stiff intent set of the body that there was no laughter in him anymore. For a while he remained still, then I saw him place his camera on the ground and go forward to the woman, taking her head in his hands; and all at once it was
more like a puppet show than a ballet, with tiny wooden figures performing tiny, jerky movements, crazy and unreal, on a faraway sunlit stage.

We sat quietly together on the white bench, and we watched while the tiny puppet man began to manipulate the woman’s head with his hands. He was doing it gently, there was no doubt about that, slowly and gently, stepping back every now and then to think about it some more, and several times crouching down to survey the situation from another angle. Whenever he left her alone the woman would start to wriggle her body, and the peculiar way she did it reminded me of a dog that feels a collar round its neck for the first time.

“She’s stuck,” Sir Basil said.

And now the man was walking to the other side of the carving, the side where the woman’s body was, and he put out his hands and began trying to do something with her neck. Then, as though suddenly exasperated, he gave the neck two or three jerky pulls, and this time the sound of a woman’s voice, raised high in anger, or pain, or both, came back to us small and clear through the sunlight.

Out of the corner of one eye I could see Sir Basil nodding his head quietly up and down. “I got my fist caught in a jar of boiled sweets once,” he said, “and I couldn’t get it out.”

The man retreated a few yards, and was standing with hands on hips, head up, looking furious and sullen. The woman, from her uncomfortable position, appeared to be talking to him, or rather shouting at him, and although the body itself was pretty firmly fixed and could only wriggle, the legs were free and did a good deal of moving and stamping.

“I broke the jar with a hammer and told my mother I’d knocked it off the shelf by mistake.” He seemed calmer now, not tense at all, although his voice was curiously flat. “I suppose we’d better go down and see if we can help.”

“Perhaps we should.”

But still he didn’t move. He took out a cigarette and lit it, putting the used match carefully back in the box.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Will you have one?”

“Thanks, I think I will.” He made a little ceremony of giving me the cigarette and lighting it for me, and again he put the used match back in the box. Then we got up and walked slowly down the grass slope.