Читать книгу A Bed of Roses - Walter Lionel George - Страница 5

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'No, Molly, I don't think it's very nice of you,' said Victoria, 'we've been out four days and I've done nothing but mope and mope; it's all very well my being a widow and all that: I'm not suggesting you and I should play hop scotch on deck with the master gunner, but for four days I've been reading a three months old Harper's and the memoirs of Mademoiselle de I don't know what, and … '

'But what have I done?' cried Molly.

'I'm bored,' replied Victoria, with admirable detachment, 'and what's more, I don't intend to go on being bored for another fortnight; I'm going on deck to find somebody to amuse me.'

'You can't do that,' said Molly, 'they're washing it.'

'Very well, then, I'll go and watch and sing songs to the men.' Victoria glared at her unoffending companion, her lips tightening and her jaw growing ominously squarer.

'But my dear girl,' said Molly, 'I'm awfully sorry. I didn't know you cared; come and have a game of quoits with me and old Cairns. There's a place behind the companion which I should say nobody ever does wash.'

Victoria was on the point of answering that she hated quoits as she never scored and they were generally dirty, but the prospect of returning to the ancient Harper's was not alluring, so she followed Molly to the hatchway and climbed up to the upper deck still shining moist and white. Apparently they would not have to play behind the companion. Four men were leaning against the bulwarks, looking out at nothing as people do on board ship. Victoria just had time to notice a very broad flannel-clad back surmounted by a thick neck, while Molly went up to the last man and unceremoniously prodded him in the ribs.

'Wake up, Bobby,' she said, 'I'm waiting.'

The men all wheeled round suddenly. The broad man stepped forward quickly and shook hands with Molly. Then he took a critical look at Victoria. The three young men struggled for an absurd little bag which Molly always dropped at the right moment.

'How do you do, Mrs. Fulton,' said the broad man stretching out his hand. Victoria took it hesitatingly.

'Don't you remember me?' he said. 'My name's Cairns. Major Cairns. You know. Travancores. Met you at His Excellency's hop.'

Of course she remembered him. He was so typical. Anybody could have told his profession and his rank at sight. He had a broad humorous face, tanned over freckled pink. Since he left Wellington he had grown a little in every direction and had become a large middle aged boy. Victoria took him in at one look. A square face such as that of Cairns, distinctly chubby, framing grey blue eyes, was as easily recalled as forgotten. She took in his forehead, high and likely to become higher as his hair receded; his straight aggressive nose; his little rough moustache looking like nothing so much as a ragged strip off an Irish terrier's back.

While Victoria was wondering what to say, Molly, determined to show her that she was not going to leave her out, had thrust her three henchmen forward.

'This is Bobby,' she remarked. Bobby was a tall young man with a round head, bright brown eyes full of cheerfulness and hot temper. 'And Captain Alastair … and Mr. Parker.' Alastair smiled. Smiles were his method of expression. Mr. Parker bowed rather low and said nothing. He had at once conceived for Victoria the mixture of admiration and dislike that a man feels towards a woman who would not marry him if she knew where he had been to school.

'I hope,' said Mr. Parker slowly, 'that your. … ' But he broke off suddenly, realising the mourning and feeling the ground to be unsafe.

'Mr. Parker, I've been looking for you all the morning,' interjected Molly, with intuition. 'You've promised to teach me to judge my distance,' and she cleverly pushed Bobby between Mr. Parker and Victoria. 'Come along, and you Bobby, you can pick the rings up.'

'Right O,' said Bobby readily. She turned towards the stern followed by the obedient Bobby and Mr. Parker.

Captain Alastair smiled vacuously, made as if to follow the trio, realising that it was a false start, swerved back and finally covering his confusion by sliding a few yards onwards to tell Mrs. Colonel Lanning that it was blowing up for a squall.

Victoria had watched the little incident with amused detachment.

'Who is Mr. Parker?' she enquired.

'Met him yesterday for the first time,' said Cairns, 'and really I can't say I want to know. Might be awkward. Must be in the stores or something. Looks to me like a cross between a mute and a parson. Bit of a worm, anyhow.'

'Oh, he didn't hurt my feelings,' remarked Victoria; 'but some men never know what women have got on.' Cairns looked her over approvingly. Shoddy-looking mourning. Durzee made of course. But, Lord, what hands and eyes.

'I daresay not,' he said drily. 'I wish he'd keep away though. Let's walk up.'

He took a stride or two away from Alastair. Victoria followed him. She was rather taken with his rough simplicity, the comfort of his apparent obtuseness. So like an uncle, she thought.

'Well, Mrs. Fulton,' said Cairns, 'I suppose you're glad to be here, as usual.'

'As usual?'

'Yes, as usual; people are always glad to be on board. If they're going home, they're going home and if they're going out they're thinking that it's going to be full pay instead of half.'

'It hadn't struck me like that,' said Victoria with a smile, 'though I suppose I am glad to go home.'

'Funny,' said the Major, 'I never found a country like India to make people want to come to it and to make them want to get out of it when they were there. We had a sub once. You should have heard him on the dead cities. Somewhere south east of Hyderabad, he said. And native jewellery, and fakirism, and all that. He's got a liver now and the last I heard of him was that he put his shoulder out at polo.'

Victoria looked out over the immense oily greenness of the water. Far away on the skyline a twirling wreath of smoke showed that some tramp steamer was passing them unseen. The world was between them; they were crawling on one side of the ball and the tramp on the other, like flies on an orange. Was that tramp, Bombay bound, carrying more than a cargo of rolling stock? Perhaps the mate had forgotten his B.S.A. fittings and was brooding, he too, over the dead cities, somewhere south-east of Hyderabad.

'No,' repeated Victoria slowly, 'it hadn't struck me like that.'

Cairns looked at her curiously. He had heard of Fulton and knew of the manner of his death. He could not help thinking that she did not seem to show many signs of a recent bereavement, but then she was well rid of Fulton. Of course there were other things too. Going back as the widow of an Indian officer was all very well if you could afford the luxury, but if you couldn't, well it couldn't be much catch. So, being thirty eight or so, he prudently directed the conversation towards the customary subjects discussed on board a trooper: the abominable accommodation and the appalling incompetency of the government with regard to the catering.

Victoria listened to him placidly. His ancient tittle-tattle had been made familiar to her by three years' association with his fellows, and she had learned that she need not say much, as his one wish was naturally to revile the authorities and all their work. But one item interested her.

'After all,' he said, 'I don't see why I should talk. I've had enough of it. I'm sending in my papers as soon as I've settled a small job at Perim. I'll get back to Aden and shake all that beastly Asiatic dust off my shoes.'

'Surely,' said Victoria, 'you're not going to leave the Service?' Her intonation implied that she was urging him not to commit suicide. Some women must pass twice under the yoke.

'Fed up. Simply fed up with it. Suppose I do waste another twenty years in India or Singapore or Hong Kong, how much forrarder am I? They'll retire me as a colonel or courtesy general and dump me into an England which doesn't care a hang about me with the remains of malaria, no digestion and no temper. I'll then while away my time watching the busses pass by from one of the windows of the Rag and give my daily opinion of the doings of Simla and the National Congress to men who will only listen to me so long as I stand them a whisky and soda.'

'It isn't alluring,' said Victoria, 'but it may not be as bad as that. You can do marvels in India. My husband used to say that a man could hope for anything there.'

Cairns suppressed the obvious retort that Fulton's ideals did not seem to have materialised.

'No,' he said, 'I'm not ambitious. India's steam rollered all that. When I've done with my job at Perim, which won't be much more than a couple of months, I'm going home. Don't know that I'll do anything in particular. Farm a bit, perhaps, or have some chambers somewhere near St. James' and dabble in balloons or motors. Some shooting too. All that sort of thing.'

'Perhaps you are right,' said Victoria after a pause. 'I suppose it's as well to do what one likes. Shall we join the others?'