Kept Page 7

  And so far there had been no reason to believe he was.

  The conditions of family life, which involve the adjustment more or less of personal to general considerations, follow usually a fixed routine. Those of the Vernon Somersets did certainly. Father and son arrived home usually at about the same time. But whereas the father went straight upstairs to change and have his bath, the son remained to talk of the day’s doings with his mother. Forty minutes later he went upstairs and his father came down to the drawing-room.

  Dinner was at eight. At a quarter past nine Vernon Somerset went into his study to attend to his private correspondence, no portion of which he ever allowed himself to attend to in his chambers; while Eric went up to his room for an hour or a half’s reading, at the end of which he usually came downstairs and played a game of bezique with his mother.

  On the whole they got on, the three of them, extremely well together; they were not jealous of each other, and they did not get on each other’s nerves. But on this particular evening Eric could have wished that his father were anywhere but in the same room with him. He wanted, he did not know why, to have his mother to himself. He did not want to tell her about Mrs Fairfield. But he wanted to be with her. By the mere fact of their being together, she would, he felt, realise intuitively something of what had happened to him, and realising it there would be between them during the next few difficult months a sympathy that no one else could give him and which he could not afford to be without.

  Between Eric and his mother existed such a relationship as is commoner between father and son or between brothers. Mrs Somerset belonged to a type that is becoming rapidly and regrettably extinct. Where so many mature women shingle their hair and dance at night clubs, she had hastened, rather than delayed, the approach of age. Where other women dyed their hair, she had whitened hers. She had preferred dignity to youth. She had the appearance and the temperament, if not the position of the grande dame. She was a tall, full-figured, stern-faced woman. She despised weakness in herself and others. She was never herself confidential, and she did not welcome confidences from others. By maintaining the appearance of detachment, she had attained detachment. Had she cared to define her attitude to life she would have found some such words for it.

  “We are,” she would have said, “animal by nature. Predatory and promiscuous. We have the instinct of survival and the instinct of self-protection. We need food, warmth, shelter, and a mate. By the rigid observances of certain conventions and modes of thoughts, we have contrived to decorate those needs and instincts. We have discovered that we can best protect our own property by protecting that of our neighbour. If no one plunders them, they will not plunder us. So we have policemen and parliaments and marriage services. Our predatory instincts are directed along a groove. We can still prey upon our fellows. But there are rules for plunder as there are rules for cricket. We prey upon our fellows within the conventions of our trade or our profession. By following those rules we maintain the appearance of dignity, and are able to forget that we are governed by the same instinct that drives the stoat to fasten its teeth upon the rabbit’s neck. There is beneath the surface of our lives a ferment of ugly appetites that we are the happier if we can ignore. The moment we abandon our conventions, we are plunged into a ferment of plunder and promiscuity. It takes very little to restore us to that state of nature from which we have slightly and temporally emerged. We must be on our guard.”

  But though she moved apparently on the surface both of her own life and of other people’s, she was capable of intimacies more highly flavoured than was possible to more expansive natures; an intimacy of intuition, of things half said and things withheld. You could make to her the most personal admissions provided they were made impersonally. Eric had never once spoken actually either of his troubles or his ambitions. Had never spoken, because there had been no need. She had understood what they were without his telling her, and he knew now that although Marjorie’s name would never be once passed between them, she would appreciate and accept the existence of a Marjorie in her boy’s life.

  “I’m tired,” he announced that evening as his father left the room. “I don’t think I’m going to read to-night.”

  “But I thought, Eric,” she said, “you had a brief to prepare for Thursday?”

  “There’ll be time for that to-morrow, mother.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Are you quite certain. You may, you know, get a lot of briefs from these people if you only do this one thing well for them.”

  “I’m sure, mother,” he answered, “that two games of bezique with you will do more good than all the textbooks in the world.”

  But he did not want really to play bezique. He only wanted an excuse to be with his mother and not to have to talk. He could pay no attention to the cards. He played out a small diamond when it was quite obvious that she had both knaves, and he made no attempt to guard his Queen of Spades.

  “Surely, my dear,” she said, at the end of the first hand, “that was extremely careless of you.”

  “Oh, no,” he said, “that’s the new tactics. It’s no good worrying about double bezique. It hardly ever comes off, and all the time you’re trying to get it you’re losing kings and aces.”

  “Well, anyhow, Eric, it’s lost you nine hundred points on this game.”

  He laughed gaily. “Ah, that’s only once,” he said. “You won’t get it again.”

  And though certainly she did not get double bezique again that evening, she managed to amass on quite indifferent hands a victory of some four thousand points.

  “I don’t believe,” she said, “you’re paying any attention to the game at all, you’re thinking all the time about that brief of yours.” Which was her way of saying, “Something’s worrying you, my dear, worrying you so much that you can’t work to-night. And though you don’t in the least want to play bezique, you want to be with your mother, and you can think of no other excuse for being with her. And she’s glad that it’s to her that you should be turning at such a time.” And Eric was grateful to her for leaving him his secret.

  Next morning Eric arrived at the breakfast table at ten minutes to eight. Since six o’clock he had been awake wondering whether by any chance he could hope to receive by that morning’s post an answer from Mrs Fairfield. She will have got my letter, he told himself, by the nine o’clock post last night. She may have been alone. If she was, she will probably have written to me at once. In which case I should hear from her by this morning’s post. That is, of course, if she posted it at once, which probably she did not do. Almost certainly did not do. But she might have sent her maid out with it. If, that is to say, there is a maid. There may only just be someone who comes in in the morning to get her breakfast and light fires and tidy up.

  Usually Eric’s appetite at breakfast was capable of tackling a plate of porridge, a couple of fried eggs, two rashers of bacon, and a generous amount of toast. He was a two-meal man, and breakfast was one of them. This morning he found he could eat nothing. One need had displaced another. He could only sit and wait for the sound of feet on the stone steps and the clatter of the postman’s knock upon the door.

  In agonised impatience he watched the long hand of the clock creep round towards the quarter. How late it was. And there was his father completely unconcerned reading the leader column of the Times. It seemed incredible that any man could have the detachment to settle down to his breakfast or his paper before the post had come. Had his father, he wondered, ever felt like this. It was difficult now, looking at that high wrinkled forehead with its iron-grey receding hair, at those steady unemotional eyes, those colourless furrowed cheeks, difficult to look at him now and realise that thirty years ago he too had tossed through long wakeful nights in alternating hope and fear, hard to realise that he had once listened in agonised impatience for the knock on the front door that was to tell him whether the girl, who had become now a stern white matron, had answered that note of his; harder still perhaps to
realise that in 1950 he and Marjorie would be sitting as his parents were to-day, with a boy between them fretting impatiently for the post. He strained his ears for the sound further down the street of the double knock. Was that it? Perhaps. Or that? Twenty past—would it never come. And then at last, suddenly, without warning. Rat-tat-tat. Eric could hardly remain in his seat. He wanted to rush out into the hall and once and for all make certain. Why must one wait for a servant to rise tardily from his breakfast, walk all the way upstairs, exchange the usual inanities with the postman, open and read through twice such letters as there might be for him, and then at last sort out the remainder of the post upon a tray. What hours the man was taking. One ought either to have good servants or none at all. At last the handle of the door was turned. He raised his eyes quickly. There were about ten letters on the tray. More perhaps than usual. The tray was taken to his mother first. “How many, Fletcher?” she asked. “Three. Thank you very much.” That left seven or so, seven between his father and himself. One by one he watched his father lift the letters from the tray and place them beside his plate upon the table. Four left, three left, two left. Only one left. And his father was taking that. Not one letter for him. Then she hadn’t written. Oh, but his father was putting that last one back. Then there was one for him. As he lifted the envelope from the tray he closed his eyes, held it in front of them for a moment. Was it or wasn’t it? then he opened them to recognise a handwriting that in the course of the last two seasons he must have looked at in all some fifty times—the secretary of his cricket club.

  All that morning Eric’s thoughts refused obstinately to concentrate on motor vans and carts. He read the evidence over twice, searched for an authority or two, and wondered whether there was not some legal quibble that he might invoke in the defence. For it was quite obvious that the lorry had come far too quickly round the corner, that the greengrocer’s cart had a perfect right to be where it was, and that the company was liable. Was liable and ought to pay; but a clever barrister, he supposed, would find some method of presenting his case so that the jury would not be able to give a verdict of carelessness “beyond all reasonable doubt.” There must be a loophole somewhere. He wondered what the company would say were he to return the brief and write at the foot of it, “Sam, Sam, why weren’t there an alibi?” Be unamused probably, and never send him a second brief.

  Anyhow though it was not particularly likely they would again employ him. He felt certain he would mismanage the case most damnably. How could he prepare a defence when he could think about nothing but that letter? It was possible, of course, that she had been in last night, had got the handkerchief, had sat down and written to him at once, but had left the letter to be posted the first thing in the morning by the woman who came and did for her. In that case the letter would be reaching him by the one o’clock post. For six hours, that was to say, it might be lying waiting for him on the hall table. That possibility was more than he could face. One way or another he must know. It was half-an-hour’s journey from the Temple to his home; if he missed his lunch he could just manage to get there between one and two. Only a minute or two extra either way. He would say if anyone asked him that he had returned for some notes in connection with Thursday’s case that he had forgotten to take down with him in the morning. And then one way or another he would be able to get his mind clear for his work.

  But there was no letter, and as the bus carried him back past Knightsbridge down Piccadilly he decided that if he did not hear from her that night he never would hear. For it was the sort of letter that if one did not write at once, one never wrong And, indeed, after these two disappointments he had begun already to give up hope, in much the same way that a person who has rendered himself liable to a complaint the symptoms of which can only appear between the third and seventh days after infection, will during che second day endure agonies of anxiety, but half-way through the third day, although he has but embarked a few hours into the period during which the recognition of any symptoms have been possible, cheerfully consider himself immune. If anyone two days earlier had asked Eric when he would expect to receive an answer to a letter posted in London at half-past two, he would have answered, at the earliest by the last post on the following night. But because it had been humanly possible for him to receive an answer during the morning of the following day, and because he had been twice disappointed, he abandoned all hope of receiving a letter by the first post at which an answer had been probable. You cannot kill the same thing twice. And Eric’s hope had sustained, if not annihilation, at least two very severe concussions. He worked steadily and successfully during the afternoon on the preparation of his case. He endured without discomfort his father’s presence and conversation during dinner; and afterwards, in a mood of almost philosophic calm, he began to prepare a note on the wisdom and the effects of Sulla’s Corn Laws. He did not even listen for the postman’s knock. And his fingers only a little trembled when at half-past nine a letter was brought to him addressed in a feminine and unknown hand.

  It was a card informing him that, on July 11th, Lady Manon Granta would be at home at Everton Hall from 10 o’clock, and that there would be dancing.

  “Lady Manon,” he thought. “Perhaps I shall meet her there.”

  Chapter VII

  Lord’s

  When all has been said that must be said of the cold and rain and mist of Wembley’s summer, this at least must be conceded it. The sun during Lord’s week shone and the sky was blue, and Ransom Heritage, as he watched the opening of Oxford’s second innings from the eighth row of the mound, had cause to regret that he had not taken the advice of Giles and preferred a single to a double-breasted waistcoat. He was hot, confoundedly hot. And there seemed no prospect of growing cooler. He turned round in his seat and reexamined, in search of a familiar face, the clustered crowds about him. Unless he met someone soon who would amuse him, he was going home. For amuse him, the cricket most certainly would not. There are few less exhilarating spectacles than the attempt of a beaten side to make a draw of a match that has still a day and a half to run. He searched, but he found no one, no one at least to whom he felt inclined even temporarily to attach himself. “I am going to walk round,” he thought. “There’ll be shade at any rate behind the stands.”

  And indeed it was to walk round rather than to watch cricket that you came to Lord’s on ’Varsity and Eton v. Harrow days. The cricket was rarely worth the watching, whereas invariably the people were. It was amusing, too, to observe how completely, in this sixth season since the War, London had returned to its old pre-war customs. They had said in 1919 that the silk hat had gone for ever, that never again would men make themselves uncomfortable to watch cricket, and certainly in those immediately post-war years there had been felt hats and straws, even in the members’ seats. They had been worn, though, by men reacting against five years of uniform. The old men had been faithful to the old tradition, and the new men who had no khaki summers to react against had followed the example of their fathers; while for the others, the impulse to reaction was petering out. There were changes, of course. There was a wider range for preference. You could wear boots or shoes; wing collars or double collars, bow ties or Ascot ties or fours-in-hand, and you could have one button or two buttons on your coat. The silk hat, though, the silk hat that was the symbol of formality, that had returned.

  As indeed in all other things, formality was returning. White gloves at dances for example, and white ties at restaurants. They had said in 1919 that the dinner jacket for the next twenty years was to be the correct dress for all but the most formal functions, and, indeed, in 1920 you were over-dressed if you wore tails at a theatre. To-day you would scarcely find a young man anywhere in public after eight in a black tie. It was amusing the way it had come back, come back through that halfway house two summers ago of the white waistcoat and black tie. It had been the last rally, that crasis, of the dinner jacket. And it had gone down, as it was inevitable that it should go down, before the eternal de
sire of young people to adorn themselves.

  Slowly, with long, languid strides, Ransom sauntered behind the new stand towards the score board. It was time, he was beginning to feel, that he turned in again to the pavilion for a gin and ginger. On a day like this there was nothing to be done but drink. A gin and ginger, an hour or so in the cool upon the roof, and then back and change in time to take Marjorie out to dinner A gin and ginger!

  “At last!” A heavy hand had descended on his shoulder and a familiar voice was rumbling in his ear. “There have you been,” it said, “cantering down the course, leaving the poor old war-horse gasping at the post. I thought I’d never catch you. Do you know my brother David, a young Oxonian?”

  David Merivale was both taller and slimmer than his brother. Slimmer and fairer, with uncoarsened if unformed features. In his attire he combined the fashions of Carfax and Piccadilly. His trousers were of grey flannel. They were clean and were creased half-way up the leg. He wore a black, short-skirted coat, with a black and white crêpe handkerchief in his breast-pocket. His shirt was flannel and pale blue; his collar was ungathered by any pin; his tie was of silk, black, and was loosely tied. His appearance was curious, but not unpicturesque.

  “I must apologise,” Simon explained, “for my small brother. I remonstrated, but it was unavailing. ‘In my city,’ he said, ‘we dress like this. ‘I pointed out to him that this was not his city. But he retorted that, if I came down to his dressed, as he describes it, urbanly, he had every right to come to mine dressed,—well, you observe how he is dressed, Brother.”

  David Merivale replied with a lugubrious smile. He had heard the same comment made, and in exactly the same words, five times that day already, and it had ceased to be amusing. That was the worst of Simon’s form of