Читать книгу Heirs Apparent - Philip Gibbs - Страница 8

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They did not walk further than Henley, and in a prosaic way took the train to Town after luncheon at the White Hart on the following day. From Paddington they taxied to Victoria and took different trains home, as their stations were on separate lines in Surrey.

The reason for this departure from the open road was Audrey’s ankle. She confessed at a late breakfast (ten o’clock) that it was badly swollen and unfit for further walking of a heroic kind.

“I’m a broken reed,” she declared with shame. “And to think that I played hockey for Somerville! I’m a disgrace to my sex.”

This humiliation did not prevent her from making an excellent breakfast nor from recovering her love of life and beauty when she lay back in a punt which Julian piloted with easy grace down Henley Reach. They lay up for a time under the lawn of Phyllis Court where geraniums were in bloom and Audrey dabbled her hands in the sparkling water, and delivered sundry remarks upon the jolliness of nature with occasional quotations from the poems of Rupert Brooke, Bliss Carmen, John Masefield, and E. V. Lucas. After that it began to rain so that the punt cushions were wet and the trees dripped upon them as they smoked cigarettes in a little backwater to which they glided for shelter, and a cold breeze caused Audrey to sneeze several times in succession.

“So much for England in May-time!” said Julian with sarcasm.

“Yes. You poet laddies ignore the brutal realities. I expect I’ll catch my death of cold,” remarked Audrey, as though it was all Julian’s fault.

“And that’s the girl who wanted to sleep out last night and play hide-and-seek with the moonbeams!”

A well-flung cushion at his head was the answer to that reminder of romantic aspirations. He dodged it and it fell into the river and Audrey squealed with joy as he fished it out with the punt-hook, all soppy. After that they had gone back to the White Hart, eaten a prodigious lunch (in spite of the ten o’clock breakfast) and caught the 2.15 to Town. They saw no more of Major Iffield and learnt from the waiter that he had motored off at half-past nine in his two-seater Standard, which had been repaired.

At Victoria Julian bought several illustrated weeklies which he put on Audrey’s lap as she sat in the corner of a third-class smoking carriage, opposite an old gentleman who regarded her with disapproval when she lit a cigarette from her own tortoise shell case.

“Keep in touch with me, Julian,” was her parting remark. “I shall languish in disgrace and gloom henceforth. No more binges. No more cocktails! No more adventure!”

“Heaps more adventure,” said Julian. “Anyhow I’ll come over and carry you off when that little old car is running again.”

“Promise? Honest Injun?”

She exacted the promise anxiously, as though it were of high importance.

“Parole d’honneur!” said Julian.

She held his hand a minute before the train moved off, and afterwards put her head out of the window and waved to him.

“Nice kid!” said Julian, as he sloped to the station bookstall, and bought The Light Car, Punch and a new novel of Compton Mackenzie’s. He smiled to himself at the remembrance of that walk to Henley. It had been quite amusing. A good episode. Standing without a hat waiting for the train to Guildford, he remembered that Audrey had left her pyjamas and things in the knapsack still slung over his shoulder and he laughed to himself at this forgetfulness. A few elderly people glanced at him with approving eyes, because of that laugh and his look of health and youth. Perhaps they remembered for a moment the Youth that had gone to a war and not come back. They did not guess that he had been sent down from Oxford, or had sent himself down, and that he hadn’t a notion what to do with life. He looked as though he commanded life, with smiling confidence.

Julian’s arrival home at the big house at Gorse Hill a week after he had left for a new term at Oxford surprised the servants who were laying tea on the terrace leading to the tennis lawn. One of them, old Mary, who had been Julian’s nursemaid in days which he only dimly remembered—his people were just advancing to prosperity and lived at Wimbledon after their early struggles in Brixton—announced her astonishment and delight.

“Lor’, Mr. Julian! Another ’oliday? Well, that’s a blessing for you, I’m sure.”

He enquired casually about the family movements before going to his room to wash and change. Mary was full of information, as usual, as to the psychological state of the people whom she served with fidelity, affection, and occasional outbursts of bad temper.

“Your Grandpa’s taking a nap in the study. Breaking up, in my numble opinion. He’s getting that irritable there’s no doing nothing with him. Thinks them damn Germans is up to trouble again.”

“Where are the others?”

His sister Janet was playing golf with Cyril Buckland and was expected back to tea. But just as like as not, in Mary’s opinion, they might not show up till to-morrow’s breakfast. Fair daft on them jazz dances, both of them. Of course it wasn’t for her to interfere with the goings on of young people nor the ruin to their health. The mistress was paying an afternoon call at the Iffields. Wearing herself out with that society stuff. There had never been no peace since the good old Brixton days. The master was coming home by the train at 4.55 and the car was meeting him at the station. Worried, thought Mary, and wouldn’t make old bones. Never the same since Mister John was killed, and no wonder what with Lloyd George and the Germans and everything....

Julian was in his bath when his sister Janet arrived in the garden with Cyril Buckland. He could hear their voices talking nineteen to the dozen and Janet’s ripples of laughter. Poisonous fellow, Buckland, he thought. The son of Victor Buckland, the proprietor of his father’s paper, and the heir to the preposterous fortune the old man had made out of Jingoism, divorce and social scandal. Young Cyril had been wounded on the Somme, but not badly, before he took a cushy job at Rouen or somewhere. He told rather blue stories after dinner, but was all elegance and epigram with ladies present. There were stories about a chorus girl—oh, well, that was his affair.

Julian decided to get into flannels. He might put in a set at tennis after tea. Buckland certainly played a good game, though rather too showy for actual results.

Julian pitched his knapsack in a corner of the room and wondered when his bags would arrive from Oxford. He would have to plant some of his photographs round the room. It had been Jack’s room before he was killed outside Arras in ’17. Five years ago, when Julian was sixteen. He remembered the news coming home from the War Office and his mother’s grief. It had nearly killed her, and the governor had been hard hit too, though afterwards he seemed to find some comfort in the thought of Jack’s heroism and his own “sacrifice.” Julian was at school then, at Winchester. The news of Jack’s death had shocked him in a queer way. He had cried a little, he remembered, that night in bed, and then thought with a curious sense of inevitability, “My turn next. In two years I shall be old enough to join up. Then I shall be killed, like all the others.” After that there had been no lingering grief in his mind. Poor old Jack had been at Sandhurst and they hadn’t seen much of each other since childhood. His death put Julian level with some of the other kids who had lost brothers in the war and bucked about it. What an enormous time ago! All that was forgotten now, thank goodness!

As he chose his tie from a drawer containing a rich variety, Julian heard his father’s arrival by the well-known engine beat of an Armstrong Siddely. Presently his father’s voice sounded in the garden with a cheerful greeting to Janet and the rasper Buckland. His father always adopted a breezy cheerfulness with his family and friends, though Julian sometimes suspected that it was a kind of mask hiding anxieties, disappointments, and some inner fretfulness with fate, for causes unknown.

“Hullo, Jenny, my dear!”

“Hullo, Dad!”

“Mother back yet?”

“Sure to be here before long.”

There was a full assembly of the family on the terrace when Julian made his appearance, clean, cool, comfortable, in new flannels. His mother was at the tea table with its silver urn, assisted by a pretty servant maid, and Julian noticed that the mater, as he called her, looked ridiculously young, as usual. His father, still in city clothes, had undone the bottom button of his black waistcoat with a white slip, and was sitting back in a deck chair enjoying a cigar. Janet in a fawn coloured golf frock sat with a cup of tea in her lap, looking pleased with herself. Her coil of flaxen hair caught the sun, and gleamed like pale gold. Julian’s grandfather, a tall old man in a grey frock-coat and trousers newly pressed, sat up stiffly in a cane chair with his thin white hands clasping the ivory handle of an ebony stick.

Julian’s arrival on the terrace certainly created a sensation among some members of the family.

His father took the cigar out of his mouth and raised himself in the deck chair.

“You here, Julian? Anything the matter?”

Janet opened her blue eyes very wide, expressing astonishment.

“Nothing the matter,” said Julian calmly, though his fine skin flushed ever so slightly. “I’ve left Oxford. That’s all.”

“Left Oxford!”

The words were spoken almost together by Mr. Perryam and Janet.

Mrs. Perryam had shown no sign of surprise at her son’s sudden return, though she had a heightened colour, and a queer little smile in those violet coloured eyes which he had once thought were the most beautiful in the world. She had the look of a great lady and it was impossible to believe that she had once kept a little house in Brixton without a servant.

“I was at the Iffields’ this afternoon,” she said with a comical sideways glance at Julian. “Major Iffield told me he had seen you at Henley yesterday—with a friend.”

Julian nodded.

“I thought he’d pass the word along.”

“Rather rummy idea, wasn’t it?” asked his mother. “Walking back like that, I mean?”

“Nothing wrong with it,” said Julian.

“Well, I hope not, my dear. You boys and girls do amazing things these days.”

Mr. Perryam did not seem to follow the drift of this conversation.

“What do you mean by saying you’ve left Oxford, old boy?” he asked anxiously. “You mean for a day in Town or something?”

“No,” said Julian, with a bored look. “Down for good. They would probably have sent me down anyhow—for one or two dances I put in after hours—but I took the matter into my own hands.... Cup of tea, mother?”

“Well, I’m blowed,” said Janet. “You are a freak, Julian!”

“Hard luck, old man!” said Cyril Buckland, grinning at Julian and brushing up the little moustache on his upper lip. “Not that there’s much in it. I was sent down from Cambridge before the war and it didn’t blast my reputation, as far as I know.”

“Do they provide you with reputations at that village in the Midlands?” asked Julian with the insolence of Oxford to the rival University.

Cyril Buckland, who was five years older than Julian, looked slightly annoyed at this gibe, but passed it off with an air of good humour.

“Not original, laddie. Try another.”

Julian’s grandfather, who had been listening with a look of strained attention, dug his stick into the gravel of the terrace and spoke in a querulous voice.

“I can’t think why you young men and women don’t take things more seriously. It’s all tennis and golf and the picture palaces, and flying about in motor cars. Why can’t you stay in the same place a bit? Gadding about, rushing about, never satisfied! When I was a young clerk in the Board of Trade, and courting your grandmother, Julian, I used to hurry back from work to mow the little lawn at Herne Hill, and then study French or something after supper. I used to read Emerson, Carlyle, Darwin, John Stuart Mill, to improve my mind and serve my country. Now that the war’s over you young men don’t seem able to settle down or think of the future. Of course I know you think I’m an old fool—”

His voice trailed off into a melancholy wail.

“No, we don’t, Grandpa,” said Janet. “You’ve a lot of wisdom in your old noddle, only it’s a bit out of date. Drink up your tea, there’s a dear.”

Mr. Perryam was looking at his son with the same air of anxious enquiry. He was a fair-haired, florid-complexioned man, with a touch of grey on each side of his temples.

“I can’t quite understand,” he said in a vexed way. “Do you mean to say you have deliberately abandoned your University career, or wrecked it by some kind of rag?”

“It amounts to that, if you call it a career,” said Julian, helping himself to some gooseberry jam.

Mr. Perryam threw his cigar into one of the flower-beds.

“I do call it a career,” he said, breathing rather hard. “I wanted you to take a good degree and do well at the Union and all that. I counted on a brilliant future for you.”

“Oh, Lord!” said Julian.

Mr. Perryam did not like that “Oh, Lord!” and his face flushed rather angrily.

“Why not? I’ve given you chances which I couldn’t afford as a young man. I had to pick up my education as I went along. I had to read hard after reporting jobs. I’d have given my right hand to go to Oxford.”

“It isn’t worth it,” said Julian. “It’s a much over-rated institution. A kindergarten.”

“But my dear fellow—”

“Now then, you two!” said Mrs. Perryam, in her cheery way, “Don’t let’s have a dog-fight over the tea-table. It’s rather rough on our guest here.”

“Don’t mind me,” said Cyril Buckland. “I want to be regarded as one of the family.”

He glanced at Janet with an air of gallantry, and she made a little grimace at him, but blushed very charmingly.

“Well,” said Mr. Perryam, with a rather weak laugh, “I don’t want to play the domestic tyrant. Not in my line! You know I only want your happiness, Julian, old boy. We had better have a talk about this later.”

“Must we?” asked Julian, without enthusiasm.

His father did not answer, but left the tea-table whistling with sham cheerfulness. But he had a worried look, and Julian noticed that he was getting a little flabby, with a heavy way of breathing. It was his work on that infernal paper which debauched the mind of the English public.

Julian’s grandfather made another speech without apparent reference to the immediate situation.

“Of course we’re playing the fool with the Germans. In my opinion there’ll be another war in twenty years. This poison gas they’ve invented would choke London before you could get an antidote. Why, even this garden would be blasted so that not a leaf could grow! And nobody seems to mind! Young men are idling about without definite aim. The whole world is flouting the will of God. I was only reading in the papers yesterday—”

Mrs. Perryam laughed and patted him on his bony old knee.

“Never you mind what you read in the papers, Grandpa. It’s all a pack of lies. Except in The Week, of course!”

“Ay, lies,” said the old man. “That’s the trouble. Everybody’s lying. As if I couldn’t see through it all!”

“I’ll take on the Perryam family at tennis,” announced Cyril Buckland.

Julian and Janet accepted his challenge.