A Disturbing Influence (8 page)

‘Do you mean,’ I said, raising my voice, and enjoying myself watching him blush still more, ‘is he Jewish?’

He nodded and coughed.

Now if there’s one thing to which I am unalterably opposed it is racial prejudice of any kind, including any prejudice against my own mongrel breed, and if it had been anyone other than Hobson I might have got extremely angry. But since it was Hobson, and since it gave me yet another argument against him, for which I might later be grateful, I was only moderately angry. I didn’t, you see, expect our alliance to last. However, I held him in suspense for a moment or two, then I shook my head and said: ‘No, Brigadier. Jack Solomons is every bit as British as you or I.’

Hobson winced. He drank his beer and wiped his moustache. ‘Hmm. Name sounds Jewish.’

Well, I don’t know or care about anyone’s antecedents, and how can one be certain about a thing like that? It’s my own private belief that there will be no peace and quiet in the world until every man, woman and child is a complete racial stew, with fair hair, slanted eyes, black skin, hooked nose and aboriginal sin. And I also suspect that anyone who calls himself English is, as likely as not, fortunate not to know who his great-grandparents were. We all, I hope, have a little bit of foreign matter in us somewhere. Way back, perhaps, but somewhere.

So I said: ‘There’s no doubt about it, Brigadier. I knew his father and mother, and two more English people it would be impossible to find.’

‘Pity,’ said Hobson. Then he realized he shouldn’t have said it, and asked me if I’d have another.

So we had another, and this time he spoke at great length about the perfidy, treason, tastelessness and general caddishness of Jack Solomons.

‘It’s not,’ he said, ‘merely that this frightful thing is next to my own property, though I find that particularly offensive. It’s the whole question of saving the English landscape from vandals. I rang up the Council for the Preservation of Rural England this morning. Tommy Doyle has something to do with it. Entirely on my side, of course, entirely. He’s going to look into it. See what he can do. And then these things are dangerous, you know. People take their eyes off the road. Damned dangerous.’

‘Bloody dangerous,’ I said.

‘People can’t be allowed to go round putting up damned great billboards. Absolute disgrace. I’ve written to the Member. And the local paper. I rang up Harold Gwatkin this morning—he’s on the county council, you know—and he’s going to see what he can do. Have to use every means to stop this sort of thing.’

Now, as I’ve said, Brigadier Hobson and I would certainly never vote for the same man for any political office, even if I voted, which on the whole I don’t, except to register my disgust with the current bunch of politicians. I usually take the line that both sides are unspeakable, and that what we need is either some form of primitive anarchy or total government control, and I get a certain pleasure from hearing my self called ‘irresponsible’. But this time I was glad our MP was a Tory, and that Gwatkin, a notorious semi-Fascist who runs simply as an anti-Socialist (a pretty apt term for him, if you ask me), were on the currently governing side. I have never heard of Tommy Doyle except on that occasion, but no doubt he was one of the same crew, and anyway Hobson was always mentioning people of whom no one had ever heard, as though they were household names.

You may very well ask why I
was
on Hobson’s side in all this.
Well, basically, I regard advertising as the most obnoxious manifestation of a capitalist system, and while we continue to live under such a system I will fight advertising in every way I can, which is to say by giving my unflinching moral support to anyone who has more courage than I in denouncing it. I see no reason, I might add, why smug young men should be allowed to sit on their well-tailored behinds in London and decide what we all want to buy and how we want it to be wrapped up. The whole thing is a fraud, anyway. Whoever changed his brand of toothpaste because he saw another one advertised? I have used the same brand as long as I can remember, I have stuck with it through various abominations, through peppermint, chlorophyll, and everything else, and I don’t ever intend to change. Not that I like it particularly, but because I am sure it’s just as bad as the others, and why should I change? Advertising is, in my opinion, obtrusive, immoral, offensive, tasteless, undesirable and all the rest of it. So I was on Brigadier Hobson’s side.

I sat and listened to the old boy, admiring the effortless way in which he disguised his real motives behind some brilliant claptrap about patriotic duty. He must have been the only man in Cartersfield who didn’t realize that his only objection was that the billboard was so close to his drive.

‘I’m glad we agree about this, Drysdale,’ he said, and his eyes grew cloudy for a moment, no doubt thinking of some of the major issues on which we had clashed in the past—the bus-shelter, for instance, and the new public lavatory. I was thinking myself about how nice it would be to get back into opposition again. Hobson managed to make me feel like his batman when he spoke to me, and I am not, I like to think, the batman type.

He went off without accepting my offer of a third drink, but I stayed and had a chat with Sam. As a landlord, Sam hears every side of every question, and never gives an opinion, though it’s usually quite clear what he thinks.

‘Jack says the Brigadier can’t touch him,’ he said, polishing a
glass in rather a detached way, as though he knew all the answers but didn’t want to embarrass me with them, since I might not find them to my liking.

‘Don’t tell me you’re on Jack’s side, Sam.’

‘I don’t take sides,’ he said, still polishing. ‘I’m in trade. I don’t mind an advert. Cheers the place up. Outdoors is different, perhaps. I haven’t thought about it.’

This meant that he was on Jack’s side. And he had a point, I suppose. His bar would have been a very dreary and dank place without those Schweppes girls and Guinness animals all over the walls.

‘What do you think will happen?’ I said.

‘It’ll all die down in a week or two,’ said Sam. He nodded at the bottle of sherry. ‘Ever tried that stuff?’

‘I hate sherry. The headmaster always serves it before dinner. Not that he asks me more than twice a year. It turns my stomach.’

‘Well,’ said Sam, ‘he’s a pretty sour man, the Brigadier. I don’t reckon that stuff helps him any.’

‘I dare say it doesn’t. Cheers, Sam. I must be going.’

‘Don’t be gone long,’ said Sam, automatically. I don’t know where he picked up the expression, but it’s one of the things that make me suspect Sam of having a doubtful past.

Thinking about the whole business, it seemed pretty clear that Sam was right, though, about Hobson’s inability to do anything. And as it turned out all his allies failed him. The CPRE let him down, Gwatkin let him down, the Member was away on a fact-finding tour of the grouse moors by the time Hobson’s letter reached him, there was no one left who gave a thought to the matter after about a fortnight. Except Hobson and me. Even Harry Mengel, who had been, for ideological reasons, strongly on our side to begin with, lost interest and went back to his shop and a girl called Joan Cartwright whom he was trying to seduce, in his usual impetuous way, by rushing her up to London a couple of evenings a week.

‘Hell,’ he said one morning, when I went in to get some
cigarettes, ‘the thing’s bloody awful, of course, but it’s better than a petrol station. Jack Solomons would put one up like that if someone suggested it to him.’

‘Oh my God,’ I said, ‘don’t even suggest the suggestion. Hobson would have a heart attack.’

‘Well,’ said Harry, unsympathetically, ‘he is getting on a bit, isn’t he?’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘I know it isn’t,’ said Harry. ‘Look, I’ve got more important things to do than natter with you all day. Do you want these cigarettes or not?’

So there we were, Hobson and I, an island of decency, as it were, in a sea of indifference, and I knew that at any moment the issue of the carnival would come up, and then we would return to our usual positions of hostility, our little island neatly partitioned. There was talk of putting flags out across the streets, an idea which filled me with horror and disgust, but which was certain to appeal to all the worst in Hobson. You only have to mention the queen or the flag and he starts stiffening his back, and if you’re lucky you can see the lump bulging in his throat. We have our carnival in the middle of September, and a splendid thing it is, in a way, with everyone turning out and trying to be polite to each other, and an atmosphere of calm self-content. But recently there had been an attempt by certain dastardly commercial interests to widen the scope of the thing, to turn it into a county affair, generally to muck it up. And I have always been of the opinion that Cartersfield is a much nicer place when it keeps to itself, that men with blonde women don’t add to the town’s attractions, that any attempt to bring in visitors undermines the whole ethic of the place. I am, you might say, a Little Cartersfieldsman. Flags across the street seemed to me then, and seem, for that matter, now, a desecration and worse still, only a beginning of something much worse. Besides, I detest flag-waving and any other form of hysterical patriotism. If a great victory has been won a small flag may not be out of place, but to deck the
narrow thoroughfares of Cartersfield with bunting just for the sake of the carnival is absolutely absurd. On this, though, Hobson couldn’t be trusted. Almost certainly the thought of flags would blind him with patriotism, and creeping commercialism would have crept another few inches. So I didn’t think our pact would hold up very much longer, since it was now the middle of August, and the question of bunting would come up at the next meeting of the Carnival Committee, of which he was chairman.

One evening about that time, when hope seemed gone for good, Hobson took the totally unprecedented and dangerous step of asking me to dinner. This was meant to be, I suppose, a mark of great honour, since they hardly ever entertained except on an exchange basis with other ex-officers and their wives in the neighbourhood, and certainly never undistinguished schoolmasters such as myself. I pondered a bit before accepting, and finally did so with reluctance, mainly because I wanted to know what the inside of his house was like. Mrs Hobson’s cooking, it was widely reported, did not go much beyond iron rations, with a strong emphasis on corned beef, and since there was no conceivable way in which I could return the hospitality, the whole thing was deeply embarrassing. However, banking on a rupture of relations in the near future, I put on the unworn suit which Jack Solomons had sold me and set off to Hill Crest, the Hobson home.

As it turned out, the popular estimate of Mrs. Hobson’s cooking was pretty accurate. She gave us what seemed to be mutton stew, in which I searched with less and less hope for something more edible than parsnip, my most detested vegetable. Hobson was very gloomy that evening, and chewed away to himself, so I had to try and talk to Evangeline, who was wearing a high-necked bottle-green dress, and whose hair still wasn’t quite grey enough to make her as distinguished as she no doubt hoped. The general festivity of the occasion can be judged by this sample conversation.

‘Are you a gardener, Mr Drysdale?’

‘No, Mrs Hobson. I have never much cared for flowers.’

‘Oh. I am
very
fond of them.’

‘I suffer from hay-fever.’ (This was a lie, of course, but I felt I had to make some excuse for my blunder.)

‘I hope you don’t mind the roses. Do they bother you?’

‘Not at all, not at all.’

‘My sister has the same trouble. She lives in Kent, you know. She surfers appallingly, she says, during the hop-picking season.’

‘She never picked a hop in her life,’ said Hobson, startling both of us.

‘Really, dear, I didn’t
say
she picked them herself. I simply said she suffers terribly from hay-fever in the picking season.’

‘Terrible people from London go down and pick ’em,’ said Hobson. ‘Frightful job.’

‘I believe it’s very hard work,’ I said.

Hobson chewed for a moment, then said ‘Hops’ with great bitterness.

Well, as you can imagine, that ended that conversation, and the evening trailed on in much the same way, with me glancing covertly at my watch, Mrs Hobson doing her best to find some common topic, with a total lack of success, and Hobson treating us both as though we were junior staff-officers at the dinner-table of a famous general. And I simply couldn’t eat the parsnips.

However, after dinner things cheered up a bit, mostly because Mrs Hobson pretended she had to do the washing-up, thus leaving us together with some whisky. Why she made the pretence I really don’t know, since everyone in Cartersfield knows exactly who works for whom, and it is no secret that Mrs Badham comes in every morning to do Mrs Hobson’s housework for her, but I dare say the poor woman wanted a rest after her conversational labours. Anyway, there we two sat, looking at the unlit fire and wondering when the winter would descend and whether it was really correct to say it had ever left the previous April. Although the outside of Hobson’s house is impeccably Victorian, even to the extent of having a turret, inside it’s the most horrible mixture of styles. The
great tragedy of the Hobsons’ lives was, and still is, their son Hubert, who is never mentioned. He was, however, still mentionable, and perhaps even lovable, though it is hard to believe it, at the time the Hobsons retired and moved into Hill Crest. Hubert was then about twenty-five, as far as I can remember, and he had already appalled his father by keeping out of the war on account of flat feet or asthma or one of those dodges. In the way that only really nasty young men do, he had gone into the interior decorating business. The interior of Hill Crest was one of his earliest creations, and he had, no doubt, done his best, which was simply awful. What with Regency wall-paper, William Morris chairs, pouffes all over the place, velvet drapery and chi-chi by the ton, he must have cost his parents a good deal of their capital, and I must say that if I had been Mrs Hobson I would much rather have spent the money on a good cook. No two walls were the same colour, and most of the chairs were designed for a human buttock a good deal smaller than is normal and decent. Poor old Hobson, who would have been much happier in something simple, like a dog-kennel, moved round the house with an air of great distress. But his wife made what can only be called a sporting attempt to live with it, and by the time they’d decided the thing was really too hideous to endure they could no longer afford to have it put straight again. In fifty years’ time, perhaps, Hill Crest will be sought out by connoisseurs, but definitely not at the moment.