Читать книгу Time and the Hour - Howard Spring - Страница 10

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Anthony’s glimpse of the strangely-dressed man walking along prosaic Manningham Lane with Chris Hudson enchanted him. How on earth, he wondered, had that dreary shrimp got to know so splendid a fellow? He began to run, for one thing because of his excitement, and for another because the occasional flake that had been drifting down through the afternoon had now changed to a steady fall of snow.

Manningham Park made a pleasant break in the grey stretch of the road. He turned left at the great entrance gates and then left again into Megson Street. Any boy living in Megson Street seemed to him privileged, and he was the only boy who lived there. It was a cul-de-sac with six houses on one side and on the other a builder’s yard. No traffic could pass through Megson Street, and between the stone setts of the road grass sprouted and in the summer dandelions bloomed. This gave the place a rustic air that pleased Anthony and his Aunt Jessie, but was a cause of friction between them and their neighbour Mrs. Wayland, who didn’t hold with dandelions growing in the road. “After all,” she said, truly enough, “this isn’t a gipsy encampment.” She would go out with a pen-knife and niggle away at the roots. She told Anthony that the very presence of the dandelions was enough to make him wet his bed. “The French,” she said, and she was an encyclopædia on the ways of the French, “call them pissenlits.” Aunt Jessie, told of this encounter, laughed and said she was ready to chance it, and on country walks she would gather the silver pom-poms of dandelion seed and at dead of night insert them between the setts. On the whole, she won that battle, and Megson Street was rarely without the bravery of dandelion gold in summer, but the poor things led a harassed life.

However, on that Sunday afternoon of March, summer gold seemed a long way off. It was five o’clock, and it was so quiet in the little tucked-in oasis of a street that you could hear the snow sighing as it fell. The linen blind of the Waylands’ house, next door to Aunt Jessie’s, was luminous, and In the Shadows was being tinkled on the piano. That was Lottie Wayland. She never played anything else, and to Anthony it sounded pleasant enough.

It was the general opinion in Megson Street that the widow Wayland gave herself airs. Her front window was the only one that was customarily lit up in the winter and shaded by a sunblind in the summer. “I can’t have the chintz in the parlour bleached,” Mrs. Wayland said. A charwoman was in there once a week, and if Mrs. Wayland ever entertained a neighbour to tea it was always on the day when the woman was present. This, Aunt Jessie said, was so that she might have a chance of saying: “Serve tea in the drawing-room, Barraclough. We’ll have the Sèvres.”

“She and her drawing-room and her Sèvres and her Lottie!” Aunt Jessie would snort. “To say nothing of her Marlborough House!” This was a fling at the name on the gate. All the other houses had numbers, but Mrs. Wayland lived in—or, as she would say, was in residence at—Marlborough House. She used printed notepaper which ignored dear little Megson Street altogether. “Marlborough House, Manningham, Bradford.”

If the front window of Aunt Jessie’s house was not lit, the front door was. And a pleasing religious light it made, Anthony thought: all those splinters of red and blue, green, yellow and pink glass stuffed higgledy-piggledy between the threads of a leaden cobweb. It had warmth and welcome. He went straight in and walked into the back room. “It’s snowing,” he said.

“Then come and get something hot into your guts,” said Aunt Jessie.

“What’s to eat?”

“Cabbage and point, and not even that till you’ve washed yourself. Get upstairs, and don’t keep your uncle waiting.”

Anthony knew that his aunt’s brusque manner need not be taken too seriously. He stayed where he was, warming his frozen fingers at the fire, happy in the comfortable jumble of the room.

What a clutter it was!—the walls especially. Hardly an inch of wallpaper could be seen for the photographs hanging there. Florrie Finch was not hanging. She stood alone, framed in silver, on the mantelpiece, and there she had been ever since Anthony could remember anything: a saucy-looking piece if ever there was one. With her shapely legs planted apart, she was wearing tights and a jerkin belted to a tiny waist. A hat adorned with a cock’s feather was on her head, and over her shoulder was a bundle that wouldn’t have held a dog’s dinner, attached to a stick sturdy enough to knock down a raging bull. There was a milestone, with a cat sitting before it. You could almost hear Bow Bells. A dashing hand had splashed across the photograph: “For dear old Jess. God bless her. Flo.”

Aunt Jessie would sometimes look long at this picture, and break away with a reminiscent sigh. “Gawd! She was a one!” For many years she had been dresser to Miss Finch. Then she had married Horace Pickersgill, twenty years her elder. There had been no children of the marriage, and Jessie’s sister, Mrs. Bromwich, having died soon after giving birth to Anthony, they had taken the boy on the understanding that George Bromwich would reclaim his property when it was of an age that would not embarrass a widower. But George Bromwich had so lacked parental feeling as to vanish, no one knew whither. During all of his twelve years, Anthony had known no home save this, no relatives save Aunt Jessie and her husband.

Standing there with the warmth tingling back into his fingers as though they were being stung by innumerable bees, Anthony looked, as he had so often done, at all those girls and men pictured on the walls: dandies and conjurers and clowns, coquettes and dreamy-looking queens: and noted that they had in common a hearty slap-dash writing and an extrovert fervour of greeting. All except one. From Florrie on the mantelpiece, to the sitting-room walls, to the staircase, to the landing, these players seemed to diminish in their interest and importance to Aunt Jessie. And in a corner of the landing, pinned above so utilitarian an object as the laundry-basket, was a youth whom you hardly saw in the daylight, for the landing was dark, but who, now that the gas was lit, suddenly caught Anthony’s eye as he paused outside the bathroom door. He knew by heart all the inscriptions on those pictures, and suddenly he remembered what was written in a small careful hand on this one: “To Miss Jessie Wilsher, with grateful thanks. Richard Hudson.”

When he was a tot, proud of being able to read, Anthony would decipher these inscriptions aloud; and he remembered that once, reading this record of Richard Hudson’s gratitude, he asked his aunt what he was grateful for. She looked up from her work at the laundry-basket and considered Mr. Richard Hudson’s picture for a long moment. Then she began to laugh with as hearty and knowing a look as Dame Quickly ever wore, and said: “A bit of the best, lad. But you wouldn’t know about that.”

Looking at the picture now, with the pricking in his fingers draining slowly away, Anthony found this name Hudson making him see again the opulent and exotic figure pacing along Manningham Lane, holding young Chris Hudson by the hand. He peered closely at the photograph. How different! And yet beyond doubt the same! Raw and awkward-looking, dressed in a lounge suit with a stiff stand-up collar, this was the chrysalis that had bloomed into the Regency butterfly. Forgetting to wash, Anthony ran downstairs and announced excitedly: “Aunt Jessie, I saw Richard Hudson this afternoon in Manningham Lane!”

“Oh, you did, did you!” said Aunt Jessie. “Well, go back and wash. I didn’t hear the water gurgling out of the drain.”

Uncle Horace looked up reluctantly from an article that gave him a faint hope that he was suffering from fibrositis, and asked: “Who is Richard Hudson?”

“No one you ever knew,” she answered rather shortly.

When Anthony came down again they ate their high tea: a meal too plebeian for Mrs. Wayland. In the Wayland house dinner was served.

Anthony might never have met Dick Hudson, or at any rate the meeting would have been postponed, if the symptoms of fibrositis had not increasingly suggested themselves to Uncle Horace’s imagination as he chewed his way remorselessly through cold beef and ham, stewed pears and pineapple chunks, bread and butter, cake, jam and parkin, which is a thick brown treacly slice. One thing Uncle Horace wisely avoided was an illness that would come between him and his fodder. As soon as the meal was finished he announced that he thought he had better go to bed. He didn’t say why, but crept away, clutching his hot-water bottle and warmed bed-socks, like a man with some pretty startling news that he intends to keep to himself for the moment. When he was at the foot of the stairs Aunt Jessie said abruptly: “I don’t suppose anyone will call, but if they do, don’t bother to answer the bell. I shall be out.”

Anthony heard these words with a sense of crisis, and so, it seemed, did Uncle Horace. His hunched and humbled figure went suddenly erect. “Out?”

“Ay. Now get up before those bed-socks are cold.”

“Supposing I get worse?”

She didn’t answer.

“Supposing I die?” he moaned ruthlessly, hunched again.

“I’ll draw the insurance money. Now off with you.”

She spoke with resolution, and after a moment’s pause, as if summoning forces that refused to come, he creaked painfully upstairs. To Anthony, the prospect of a lonely evening was depressing. “Will you be away long?” he asked.

“Put on your coat and hat. You’re coming with me. Galoshes, too. The snow’s heavier.”

That she should desert Uncle Horace in a moment of crisis seemed odd to the boy. That it should happen on such a night seemed to him odder still. He pulled on his overcoat with a growing sense of excitement.