Читать книгу Royal Regiment - Gilbert Frankau - Страница 10
Оглавление§ 1
The man who let himself out of the Garrison Church, Woolwich, on that first Saturday afternoon of February, nineteen hundred and thirty-six, could not remember the actual words of his prayer. He only knew that it had been long and fervent; and that the personal Deity in whom he had never ceased to believe was now giving him the answer out of his own finite mind.
“Praying’s good discipline”, said Rockingham’s mind. “It keeps one from getting above oneself. But God can’t be there to help slackers just for the asking. And if any nation ever asked for another great war, we have. So if we get it, and we’re not prepared for it, why blame Him?”
To which his mind added, for no reason he could imagine, “A nice beginning for a new reign”.
Men were still at their football on the green. Cheers carried to him where he stood under bare trees. A little car went by. In its back seat, a couple embraced. The next car had its radio playing.
“Panicker”, he chided himself. “Letting the Hawk’s croaking get on your nerves. Besides, there’s never a war—not a European one anyway—till the wheat’s in the ear.”
But did hawks croak? And who had written that poem about wheat and Camilla?
Gosh! He’d got it. Virgil. Coningsby’s translation. The book was kicking about somewhere or other. Probably at his mother’s. He could have a hunt for it, make certain this very afternoon.
§ 2
Noakes, who should have been on duty by the car, was just commenting, “That outside left of yours is no blinkin’ Bastin”, to a chance acquaintance, when he heard a motor horn blow a long blast followed by a short one, then three more long ones, then a short one and a long.
“That’s my B.C. spellin’ me ruddy name out in Morse”, he explained. “Habit of his. Thinks it’s funny.”
But he was across the asphalt at the double before Rusty Rockingham sounded the three dots of the final “s”.
“Sorry, sir”, said Driver (I.C.) Noakes, saluting. “Thought I saw you going for a walk, sir.”
“Didn’t I tell you to keep an eye on that despatch case of mine?”
“Yes, sir. In the dickey, sir. Locked up, sir.”
“All right. Jump in.”
It was Rockingham’s habit to take the most direct way between two points. He did so now, driving with his speedometer needle at an exact thirty straight through Woolwich town, past the Greenwich Hospital, and the Naval College where his brother William had served as a cadet, and the Observatory, till he came to the Marquis of Granby.
At that public house he turned right.
“Not very chatty this afternoon”, decided Noakes. “Something on his mind I should say.”
But for once that astute psychologist was wrong, because temporarily Rockingham’s mind—this also being a habit—had concentrated on the job in hand.
The horseman in him disliked and resented motorcars, which he drove only for convenience and with a peculiar dread of some fatal accident. Secretly this dread shamed him—being almost his sole complex. He would have to master it—he decided as he swung the wheel hard over and trod on his brake pedal to avoid hitting a peculiarly moronic cyclist—now that the battery was being mechanised.
All the same he experienced a positive relief when they came under the railway and safely across Westminster Bridge.
§ 3
It was almost dark by the time Rockingham pulled up exactly opposite the black door of his mother’s house off Smith Square. Noakes climbed out and rang. Kept waiting, he rattled the knocker—a highly polished, elaborately chased affair of old metalwork.
“Fanny’ll give him hades for that”, decided Rockingham, also dismounting. And Fanny did.
She appeared in the doorway, scarcely changed since his earliest recollection of her—a thickset old woman with a grim, obstinate face, beady of eye behind steel spectacles, a mob cap crowning her screwed-back hair.
“As though I’d nothing else to do but run up and downstairs”, she grumbled. But when Noakes would have carried the kitbag for her, she took it from him, snapping, “No, thank you. The less of your dirty boots I have on my carpets, the better”.
“Orders, sir?” asked Noakes then.
Smiling at Fanny, whose antics always amused him, and gripping his precious box, Rockingham said, “Take the car to the usual garage. I shan’t be needing it, or you, till Monday morning”.
“Thank you, sir. What time, sir?”
“Seven-thirty, sharp, please.”
“Gorblimey”, thought Noakes, saluting and clambering to the wheel. “All the way from Hoxton too.”
“Good-for-nothing scallywag”, grumbled Fanny, closing the door as he drove off. “Your mother’s in the drawing room. I’ve just taken the tea up. Give me that box and I’ll take it up to your room for you. She’s got to go out again afterwards. Some meeting or other. So you’d best hurry.”
Fanny’s orders were not to be disobeyed. Rusty Rockingham went ahead of her, up out of the narrow hall, overcrowded with furniture like the rest of the house, to the first floor. One of the Baxter prints hung a little awry on the dark wallpaper of the landing. Automatically, he stopped to straighten it before entering the room.
His mother sat in her favourite high-backed William and Mary chair by the fireplace over which hung the glass case that held his great-uncle Marmaduke’s sword, medals and decorations. Similar relics and the scrolls of his father and her youngest, the Honourable Mabelle Rockingham kept in a vitrine between the windows, which were draped with curtains of old French silk on gilt poles.
Picking his way through the curiosity shop of little tables, every one littered with bricabrac, he bent to kiss her on both cheeks, still fairly smooth, though the last decade had sagged their muscles.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Getting lamer, Tom.” Her eyes, a somewhat darker blue than his own, glanced at the stick which lay by her chair. “Doctor Lucius says he can’t do anything for my hip—and that I ought to take to spectacles. He’s a fool, in my opinion. Tea?”
“Thanks.”
She filled a Sèvres cup, holding the Georgian silver pot in a steady right hand, large enough of finger to carry off the three heavy rings she always wore.
“Help yourself to a crumpet before they’re cold.
“I have to go out”, went on Mrs. Rockingham, as her eldest son took a plate and helped himself from the dish on the Dutch tiles of the hearth.
“So Fanny has just informed me.”
“To a meeting of the Anti-divorce League. There’s more talk about making divorces easier. As though they weren’t easy enough already.”
“Always the little die-hard, eh, mother? There wouldn’t be any divorces if you had your way.”
“Not for people who marry in church.” She stuck out a chin almost the duplicate of his own. “Except on one ground. I see no reason why an adulterous wife should not be put away by her husband.”
“And an adulterous husband?” Her son’s smile—it seemed to Mrs. Rockingham—was the exact duplicate of his dead father’s.
“Even there, I think the law has gone too far. All this talk about the equality of the sexes is stuff and nonsense. It only makes for unhappiness. A wife’s duty is to produce children, and look after her home.”
The voice, like the sentiments it pronounced, was of an older day, well-modulated, deep in the throat, confident. But how far their mother really believed in her public pronouncements, none of her three sons ever quite knew.
“William and that Frances of his are coming to dinner”, she went on. “Geoffrey isn’t quite sure. But he thinks he can manage it. More tea?”
“Please. If Geoffrey does turn up we shall be the complete family party.”
They talked family till Big Ben struck five. One of the gilt clocks chimed in as the Honourable Mabelle Rockingham’s faithful retainer reappeared at the doorway carrying her seven-year-old mink and her new hat, to say, “It’s time you were off. I’ve just telephoned for a cab for you”.
Rusty helped his mother into her cloak, always a difficult task for the short Fanny. He accompanied her downstairs. Watching her hobble across the pavement and haul herself up into the taxi, he thought: “What energy. So many interests. No wonder she never feels lonely. And the only person in the world she’s ever been afraid of is this one”.
The only person of whom his mother had ever been afraid said, closing the front door again:
“I’ll put the telephone through to the drawing room in case Mr. Geoffrey rings up. You’d best stay there until I’ve unpacked for you. But I’ve the wine to put on the ice first”.
