Читать книгу The Meadows of the Moon - James Hilton - Страница 15

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Despite her sympathy for Michael, Fran found it difficult to dislike John. He seemed extraordinarily anxious to make her life at home easy and comfortable; he even (and it was like him that his idea of help should be so practical) offered to have her study refurnished and redecorated if she were intending to use it a great deal.

“I’m relieved to know that you’re not going to turn me out to earn my own living,” she said, pointedly.

“You can earn your own living if you like,” he answered, smiling. “Just go round the kitchens now and again and take an interest in the more ordinary details of the household. I’ve been meaning to ask you for a long while.... Mother, you see, doesn’t do that sort of thing very well, and I haven’t the time.”

She agreed to do as he suggested. He went on to talk about efficiency and economy, but she interrupted him. “I’ll help you willingly,” she said, “so far as the house is concerned. But don’t think I agree with your ‘efficient’ method of dealing with Michael, because I don’t.”

“All right.” He nodded quite imperturbably. “That’s frank, anyway. And I’ll be equally frank when you do something that I don’t agree with.”

Meanwhile, on a far stranger and more ethereal plane her friendship with Michael prospered. As always, she did not know why she liked him so much. Even his faults attracted her—his rash, impulsive ways, his tendency to judge hastily and wrongly, his unfair and contemptuous hostility towards John. “Old Percentage,” he called him. “He hasn’t a thought above material success. That’s why he can do nothing with me—because our standards are different. Really, in his heart, he must be frightened of me.”

Often during July and August they motored about the countryside in the old two-seater Delage. Michael drove, and his driving was like most other things that he did. He used to crawl very slowly along the country lanes and put on speed alarmingly at the outskirts of towns; he had also the habit of deciding to turn down attractive-looking side-roads just too late to negotiate the curve easily.

One afternoon they went picnicking to Myvern with the car. The day was burningly hot, and for that reason the drive along the cool, tree-shaded lanes was especially entrancing. They explored the old and ruined abbey, had tea by the roadside, and set out for the return journey about five o’clock. Michael’s spirits were immensely high. As always when he was happy, he talked grandly, flamboyantly, even ridiculously; he composed extempore verse as he went along; he shouted wildly to passers-by, and generally behaved as though he were slightly drunk. He had been talking about John, and the entire lack of poetry in John’s make-up. That had led him to say: “He wouldn’t understand poetry unless he saw it quoted on the Stock Exchange.” And that, in turn, had led to one of those swift and explosive ideas that seized him almost bodily. He kept shouting, as he drove on: “Fran, that’s an idea.... How to make John interested in the Muses. Float them.... Quote them.... Article on Chaucer in the Financial Times. ... Sharp Rise in Elizabethans.... Tennyson’s Dull.... Pope and Dryden’s Firm after the Carry-Over....”

“Look where you’re driving, Micky,” she said, warningly.

“Heavy Bear Account in Brownings,” he yelled, and at the same time gesticulated with both hands. The moment was unwise and ill-chosen, for the car suddenly swerved out of control and plunged over the edge of the road into a ditch several feet below.

Fran was pitched out first; she fell into a pool of sandy mud. Michael followed her, but into a much less hospitable bed of nettles. Almost simultaneously the front tyres blew up and the wings and bonnet crumpled like a child’s tin toy. Fortunately the speed had not been excessive, and neither Fran nor Michael was badly hurt. The first thing they did when they picked themselves out of the wreckage was to laugh. For the moment the whole affair seemed grotesquely funny, a sort of Rabelaisian practical joke; Michael took hold of Fran’s hands and roared with merriment.

Then, almost immediately afterwards, the reaction came, and he sank down on a tuft of grass by the roadside and burst into tears. He wasn’t hurt, beyond sprains and nettle-stings, but his nerves were on fire after the shock.

Fran came to him and gave him comfort as a mother might have comforted a small child. She was so much stronger than he, and yet, as she came physically near to him, she was conscious of a power he possessed over her—the strange compensating power of the weak to charm and allure. “Micky ...” she whispered, “Micky....”

“I’m not hurt,” he gasped. “Not much, at any rate.... I’m just thinking of what John will say.”

She became stormily protective. “Don’t worry about John. I’ll deal with him.”