Читать книгу Old Pybus - Warwick Deeping - Страница 17

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Lance had left Noel Coward’s book of plays lying face downwards in the deck-chair.

He happened to be wearing tennis shoes, and in strolling along the terrace towards the Dutch garden he came within the range of those two voices. He was thinking of other things. Had he been asked the question he would have replied that there was but little likelihood of his being interested in anything that Uncle Conrad might have to say to his father. At that critical moment when he was about to pass in front of the library window, he had paused to watch the sunlight making a chequer on the grass under one of the cedars. He observed such things. It seemed to him that life might be spent in observing birds, and the effects of sunlight, and the changing colours of the year.

Somewhere, at the back of his consciousness, he heard Conrad’s thick voice saying:

“It made me look like a fool, caught with a woman like Ula Calmady.”

Lance came back to his realities. He had no intention of listening to his uncle’s confidences. The very suggestion that there should be any relationship whatsoever between Conrad and a woman could be nothing but an offence to a young man who had gone three times as a boy to hear Gwen Ffrangçon Davies sing in The Immortal Hour. Ula Calmady? The name had the flavour of a night-club, and Lance could associate his uncle with night-clubs. Well, it might be humourous. That fat bounder! And Lance was about to pass on when he heard something more singular. He could not help hearing it. With one of those flashes of intuition he realised that he had a right to hear it.

They were speaking of his grandfather.

But his grandfather was supposed to be dead.

Lance did not remember old John Pybus. As a very young child he had seen him but twice, and the memories had faded. There was no portrait of the old man in the house.