A Disturbing Influence (7 page)

Then I say: ‘Would you like to go for a spin, Molly?’

‘You’re not allowed to drive, are you?’

‘Oh yes. To the end of the drive.’ And into the sunset with you,
Molly Simpson. ‘Would you like to see what I can make the old Ford do?’

‘All right.’

The sun has gone briefly behind some dank-looking clouds. A small wind is testing itself in corners down at the garage. We look in the harness-room. Jane is there, polishing her bridle.

‘Are you going to let him drive you?’

‘Now you be quiet, Jane.’ I’ve had enough of your betrayals, sister, ex-co-driver. Silence.

‘He’s a maniac behind the wheel. You’d better take a crash-helmet.’

‘Oh, really, Jane. You know I’m perfectly safe.’

‘Is he a maniac?’ says Molly, her eyes grave and gay, daring me on, and timid.

‘Well,
I
won’t go with him any more,’ says Jane.

‘No, you’d rather play pat-ball or tennis, or whatever you call it. You’re too young to enjoy driving.’ That should crush her. ‘Let’s go, Molly.’

The back spring has been repaired. The car looks unusually dignified, I washed it this morning. It sits four-square and dumpy, reliable, like an old woman behind a market-stall.

I open the door for her, shut it gently. It has to be slammed to shut properly. ‘Excuse me.’ Slam. Skip round the nose, and in, slam, and ‘Here we are!’

I back with circumspection. There are tell-tale traces on the door of the garage. We turn in the yard. We are off. First gear, a brief harrumph, second gear down to the house, grinding a little. Now, safely beyond recall, we rev up and into third (three gears only, but good ones) and now St Stirling Moss and the blessed Mike Hawthorn and the venerable Donald Campbell be with me, and the gravel begins to spit against the mudguards.

‘Ah!’ The corner is nicely judged, just a whisp of a skid, and then, oh dullness and boredom and the end of the drive.

‘I’m not supposed to go any further.’

Two dull spots of rain on the windscreen. Big splatters of frustration. The white gate hangs open. Beyond is the river of life, the black magic of a tarred road.

‘Let’s go for a little drive. Just round the lanes. No one will know.’

‘But, Teddy——’

But it is too late, we are off, we move cautiously to the very edge of the gravel, the frontier-post of sixteen. I am a spy in the adult world of public highways, this slim black line between hedgerows, wandering past the Thomsons’ farm and the three cottages which are Mendleton, and the little chapel where the rector comes once a month to preach to himself between the cramping walls of a nineteenth-century manorial ambition.

‘Teddy, you shouldn’t have, you know you shouldn’t have!’

‘But I’m perfectly safe, Molly. No one will know. We’ll just go down to the crossroads and then come straight back.’

The crossroads are a whole long mile away. I drive with great caution, thirty-five—‘Look, I’m only going thirty-five’—then, well, yes, perhaps a little faster, and the needle creeps up to fifty and Molly says: ‘That’s too fast,’ so I slow down a little, and the road curves and winds like a stream searching for a river, and there, suddenly, is the crossroads.

Molly looks scared. ‘You shouldn’t have.’

I take her hand. ‘Don’t be silly, Molly.’

But she takes her hand away again and says: ‘Now don’t be stupid. I want to go back, please.’

‘We are going back.’

It is raining now, and the wipers are on, thlap, thlap, across the glass. As we round a bend, just before we are on home ground again, we see someone in the road, walking.

‘It’s Miss Spurgeon!’

Miss Spurgeon, Miss Spurgeon, your’re seventy and hale,
walking
your afternoon walk as every day of your long-nosed life, you have to be here, and it coming on to rain, and, naturally, to stop us and: ‘Why, if it isn’t Teddy Gilchrist and Molly Simpson.’

‘Hello.’

‘Do you think an old woman can trouble you young people to give her a lift back to Cartersfield? It’s raining quite hard and I came out not thinking….’

Disaster. Stark as the finger of God.

‘Of course, Miss Spurgeon, please get in.’

‘Thank you so much. You are sure you aren’t going anywhere, are you?’ and chatter and spinster and blather and oh God damn it why did this have to happen all the way, all the long black illegal way to the town, and please God, if You’re there, don’t let me be seen, I’ll never spray gravel again like gunshot, I’ll be good to my mother and father, just this once, God, please let me get away with it, I know I shouldn’t have, God, are You listening, and don’t let Molly say anything to give us away (‘Yes, Jane is fourteen now, Miss Spurgeon,’ ‘My, how you children do spring up, and your mother?’) and there’s only another mile, and, dear Christ in Heaven, I’d forgotten, there’s the main road to cross, and the traffic, my hands are slipping and sweating on the wheel, and it has, by God it has, stopped raining.

‘Oh, stop a moment, Teddy. I think it’s stopped.’

I believe in You, God, I really do.

‘Do you know, I think I’ll walk on again, if it’s really stopped. I don’t like to miss my walk. And you’ve been so kind already.’

‘Just as you like, Miss Spurgeon, but you mustn’t get wet.’

Get soaked to the skin, die of pneumonia tomorrow, Miss Spurgeon. All your long malicious life you have been spreading the vilest gossip, and often you’ve been right, though always for the most disturbing reasons, poking in muck-heaps and love-nests, Miss Spurgeon, and if you tell anyone about this … But of course she will. The damage is doomed, the sky has collapsed, it’s a leaky roof, patched up with blue, treacherous blue, blue holes, and God, I’m not quite convinced yet.

‘Yes,’ she is saying, ‘it was only a shower, there won’t be another for half an hour or so. I have plenty of time.’

And out she gets, all smiles and thank-yous, and she’s right, women like that always are, the sun is soothing down the rain-rumpled feelings, and the shower has gone off to London to see the queen and her people.

We turn in a gateway and go slowly, oh so slowly, back.

‘She’ll tell the whole town,’ I say.

‘You are an
awful
fool,’ says Molly.

‘She’ll tell everyone.’

‘About how kind we were.’

‘How she met us in the rain.’

‘So fortunately.’

‘Damn her.’

‘Thank goodness I’m going away tomorrow.’

Unkindest cut! In silence we pass the customs at the white gate hanging open. To slam it behind us, keep out the story, fight all Spurgeons to the death. Sentries, be at your keenest, keep her out, keep her quiet, kill her. Put up a huge notice:
MISS SPURGEON KEEP
OUT
. Cut out her tongue.

No sap now to lock brakes and tail-spin at the corner, the gravel susurrating smug and fat beneath the wheels, the puddles smacking their lips together. To the garage. So, disheartened, not even the trace of a manner left, Molly opens her own door, I am too
lacklustre
to notice.

‘I hope it’ll be all right,’ she says.

To the house. Mooning about, looking at old papers,
The
Tatler
, no one we know,
Country
Life,
The
Field.
My mother comes in two or three times, smiles brilliant and thin, goes out again.

‘You’re leaving tomorrow.’

‘Yes.’

I stand by the window. It begins to rain again. Too late, Miss Spurgeon is already telling it, over her tea. True love is always fettered. We are the victims of an environment. What am I going to do for the rest of these intolerable holidays?

‘It’s so sad,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘Oh, everything.’

A merciful release, the Simpsons’ Rover, black as a hearse, shushes to a stop at the front door. In the back seat a riding-crop, a jockey-cap.

‘I’d love to stop for a drink, but really we have so much packing to finish tonight.’

‘It’s very good of you to bring Molly out,’ says my mother.

‘I shall be thankful when they can drive themselves,’ says Mrs Simpson.

Gone the grave face, perhaps she has some deadly sickness, that is why she is so pale, I shall never see her again, this is my last glimpse of her, the rain settling in for the night and all eternity.

Oh, Molly, beware of the French with their sneaky ways, their easy greasy charm, the oil in their hair and their little black moustaches, for you are mine, Molly, and one day soon we will be married in Cartersfield church, and there will be twelve bridesmaids in silver-grey dresses for this day of rain.

But she is dying. They are taking her away to die. Of consumption, perhaps? Oh, don’t waste away, Molly, waste not and want not, love must not wither on a foreign soil. I shall treasure my last glimpse of your face so grave, carry it to the grave, mine or yours—no, yours alone—and there I shall kneel and weep for our love which might have been, which lasted a thousand reels and more in my projecting head.

*

Heat-wave. August the twentieth. I am sunbathing in the garden, reading Dylan Thomas. He understood life. ‘Never until the mankind-making flower-fathering and——

‘Teddy!’

Shall I answer?

‘Teddy!’

‘Yes!’

‘Come here. I want to speak to you.’

Sluggishly I go.

‘What is this I hear from Miss Spurgeon?’

Damned lies.

‘What, Mummy?’

‘She says she met you in the road in the car and you took her more than half-way home.’

‘Well, yes. You see——’

‘I shall tell your father.’

*

Ostracized from home and love, I sink with the sun, the exhausted day, chased from a heat-wave heaven by the fury of my black father, the night.

My heart swells. My finger-tips sense every breadth of breeze. The yews huddle about me, sighing their traditional lament of evergreen darkness and death. Stillness like the moment before the world was made. There is no God, no Justice. You say I have no manners. Was it not well-mannered to help an old lady in a storm? Well, then …

The spire of Cartersfield church points a forensic finger at the stars. The cows stand absorbed in evening beneath the first scatter of twinkles. One bright glimmer. Perhaps it is Venus. She is going out, once and for all.

A draught of air, cool, like an inhalation of the earth. I walk back up the avenue of yews. Their roots are like the knuckles of skeleton giants. Dust beneath my feet. Where is the medieval lady who walks here? They say she is weeping for her lover, trampled beneath some Cypriot castle’s walls.

I will console you, lady. I too know what it is to suffer, to taste the bitter rind of misunderstanding, to be unloved. You may take my hand.

But you are not here.

I dawdle, stray wisps of music in my head, like a wind sighing
among the cobwebs in a deserted attic. I stop. I sink to the earth, stretch out, close my eyes. My lips meet a knuckle of root. Yews are poisonous. I kiss, but I do not bite.

After a hot day, after a hard day, what coolness beneath the yews. They have endured, they are insensate, not even animals. To live beyond the unendurable, that is the lot of man. I open my eyes to a deep grey dusk, here under the yews. Stars shine at the sunset end of the avenue. I roll over on to my back and stare up at the black impenetrable branches.

A
S YOU
may know, we have a by-pass round Cartersfield, and we can now sleep away our days without being disturbed by the thunder of passing lorries and the curses of their drivers as they try to overtake each other at eighty miles an hour along our High Street. Now when they built the thing they had, naturally, to seize land from the various patriots who owned it, compensating them with cash, a procedure which seems to me admirable in every way. Among the many plots seized near Chapman’s Wood was a corner of a field owned by Brigadier Hobson, and though he complained bitterly at the time about the loss of liberty of the subject involved in a compulsory purchase order, we all suspected that he was secretly delighted, since the only function of the field was to make a pleasant surround for his drive, and anyway there was still another field between him and the main road, and who, for God’s sake, ever objects to money? Besides, it was highly unlikely that he could have sold the field for the price the county gave him for one bit of it. And though, following the splendid example of Lady Eden and her remark about the Suez Canal flowing through her drawing-room, he went about saying he was having a main road put through his bedroom, this was so obvious an untruth that everyone just laughed, and he soon forgot the monstrous invasion of privacy of which he had complained.

Well, the by-pass was built, and everyone said how nice it was that you could hear yourself think these days, though the idea that
any of them have ever had a thought worth thinking is simply absurd. They are nice, dull people here in Cartersfield, and if they did actually think it would be, to use a phrase Hobson is fond of, simply frightful. When Molly Simpson decided to be a poetess and took up with those awful literary people in Slough and tried to start a Poetry Circle here, it was unspeakably frightful, so I know what I’m talking about. But that’s another story, and the point here is that it really was rather nice to be able to not-think in peace and quiet for a change.

Well, two or three years later Hobson and his wife, who is called Evangeline, poor woman, went off to the Alps for a fortnight and for what he called ‘a bit of walking’, though everyone else suspected that it would be a bit of drinking for him and a bit of quiet knitting for her while they listened to other people talking about the beauty of the gentians. I loathe Switzerland, and only people as wholly devoid of imagination as the Hobsons could possibly enjoy spending a fortnight there in summer, or so I consider. But off they went, and when they came back, around the end of July, it was, as usual, raining, in fact it rained throughout the Bank Holiday week-end with a deliberate dribbling malice.

But it wasn’t the rain that annoyed him. He’d got back to England after that tiresome train journey, he’d reached Cartersfield without losing a single piece of luggage, he’d picked up his car from Trinder’s Garage, and he’d set off to his home with that tremendous English satisfaction at being back in the land of the normal, where everyone understands what you’re saying, and there’s none of that vile insolence from damned foreign waiters. He drove along the by-pass to his driveway, and what he saw when he made the turn must have made him think for a ghastly minute that he was still a protesting victim of woppish and woggish loathsomeness. Because right next to his drive, a few feet beyond his fence, in the next field, there was a huge sign advertising some particularly offensive form of hair tonic, designed for adolescents so that they may win girls and annoy their parents. A young man was grinning
inanely down, with the comb still in his hand, his face about ten feet long and his teeth as white as a detergent advertisement, and to his left in big blue letters it said ‘
LOOK GROOMED FEEL
GROOMED BE GROOMED WITH AXELGREECE
’ or whatever the stuff was called.

What Brigadier Hobson said when he first saw it we none of us know, though most of us can make a pretty shrewd guess, but we do know that within minutes he was phoning Jack Solomons who owns the field which had been desecrated. Jack told us about it himself. He came roaring into the Brunswick Arms that night and ordered a double whisky and gave us what he was pleased to call ‘the low-down’. He was laughing so hard he kept spilling his drink, which upset Sam Palmer, the landlord, but between splutters we heard how Hobson had rung him up six times in the last hour, and that Jack had then left his receiver off the hook, not because he wasn’t enjoying Hobson’s explosions, but because he thought it would annoy the old man still more not to be able to address him directly. Then he left his house, and planned to spend the evening moving about from place to place, hoping, wrongly as it turned out, that Hobson would come after him with a whip, and that he would always be one move ahead.

‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ said Jack. ‘Twice he’s threatened to court-martial me, and once to sue me for spoiling his property. He talks like a sergeant-major who’s been reading some law book. You’d never believe the things he says.’

Everyone looked at him, and someone laughed loudly, but on the whole the reaction was indifferent.

‘How much do you get for that sign, Jack?’ said Sam.

‘A nice little bit,’ said Jack, and he laughed some more, though not quite so loudly as before, then he finished his drink and said: ‘Tell him I was here, will you?’

Then he went out. We could hear him starting up his Jaguar, and then he roared off to tell the story somewhere else.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Sam.

‘The Brigadier won’t be in here,’ said Harry Mengel, ‘not bloody likely.’

There was a general agreement.

‘Silly bloody fool,’ said someone, but as no one was quite sure which man he was talking about, no one took him up.

The truth was that no one cared very much for Brigadier Hobson. We tolerated him, and we let him think he was someone important, but we didn’t pay very much attention to him, and we laughed more at him than with him, not that he was much of a man for jokes. He used to come into the Brunswick Arms every Sunday morning after church for a glass of sherry. Sam always said that he was the only man in Cartersfield who ever drank the stuff, and that it was more trouble than it was worth keeping a bottle just for him, but then Sam was lying, of course, because there were always men dropping in, with blonde women of doubtful age tagging along behind them, on their way to or from Maidenhead, and the blonde women always asked for sherry, whatever time of day or night they might happen to be passing through. Anyway, Hobson didn’t spend much time in the Brunswick Arms on other days of the week, and when he did come it was inevitably to the private bar, never to the public one, so we hardly saw him. We’d hear him asking for his sherry and saying: ‘Good morning, Palmer,’ and Sam would wink at us and give him his drink, and then he’d put his head round the partition and say: ‘Good morning,’ and we would all say: ‘’Morning, Brigadier,’ and this always annoyed him, because he wanted us to call him ‘Sir’, but we were damned if we were going to do that, sherry or no sherry. Then his head would go back round the partition again, closely followed by his little white moustache.

But if we didn’t care much for Hobson, we weren’t exactly crazy about Jack Solomons, either. His family have always lived in Cartersfield, and when his father died we all felt quite sorry, because he was a nice man in a way—he ran the drapers’, and though you can never get anything you want in Cartersfield shops, he was quite friendly and open about admitting that he hadn’t got whatever it
was you wanted, and that he would really much rather you didn’t ask him to order it for you. Jack was smarter than that, he expanded the store, modernized it a bit, generally chivvied the place up, and now, instead of being a sort of funeral parlour hung with cheap suits, it’s a coffee bar hung with cheap suits, only without the coffee. And he actually presses you to buy something, which his father would never have dreamed of doing, and he goes out of his way to suggest that he can always order what he hasn’t got in stock. Now the whole point about a place like Cartersfield is that you can dream about getting yourself, say, a new suit, without ever thinking you’ll really do so. You go into a shop and look at patterns and rub cloth between your thumb and finger and nod sagely, and then you say: ‘I don’t think this is
quite
what I’m looking for, but I’ll think about it,’ and then you go away and don’t think about it, but you do feel virtuous because you have, after all, tried, and when you simply have to get a new suit, you go in and buy one off the peg in ten minutes like everyone else. You can go into a shop without feeling morally obliged to help the shopkeeper make his living, if you see what I mean. But when Jack took over from his father things began to change. And now you find yourself buying something much grander and more expensive than you really want, and though he sells good stuff it’s somehow uncomfortable. For one thing you feel a fool if you walk around in a smart new suit—people aren’t used to that sort of thing in Cartersfield—so you end up with a suit you never wear, still needing a cheap one, but no longer able to pay for it. Basically, I think, we’re the sort of people who like to buy things, but hate having them sold to us. That’s all we have against Jack, really, he makes us feel uneasy. And though we admire him for his push and his go and all the rest of that commercial cant, we don’t really like him. He belongs, perhaps, in a slightly bigger town. He’s tall, and his hands are always a little too clean, and he wears thick-rimmed glasses. It’s those glasses, perhaps, which make us uneasy. His old dad always wore gold-rimmed ones, and we don’t care much for change.

Well, what he’d done was quite simple. Some frightful fellow, as Hobson put it, had come round trying to buy advertising space, or whatever they call it, in the fields along the new bit of road.

‘Had a letter from him myself,’ said Hobson. ‘Wrote and told him what I thought about the idea. Chap never answered.’

But Jack, never slow to see where the good things in life, such as his Jaguar, came from, was much more accommodating to the advertising man, a thickset sad-looking fellow called Richards, and before anyone knew what was happening Richards had arranged for the billboard with its sickening young man to be put up right away, thus giving, though not, I think, intentionally, a terrible shock to old Hobson as he made the turn off the by-pass into his drive.

Now I don’t know what Hobson did that night, after Jack left the receiver off, but next morning he was still exploding with an extraordinary regularity. It was as though the bile springs gushed four times an hour, on the quarter, or like one of those hideous banging things that the idiot children tie to my drain-pipe every Guy Fawkes Night. I have earplugs, actually, not that the idiot children know that, but not even earplugs could have silenced Hobson. So incensed was he that he was prepared to stoop, to let his principles slide, to make any and every effort to get moral support against Jack. He wanted, it seemed, to have him ostracized, or, as he put it, ‘exported’. We met, as it happened, outside the Brunswick Arms, and for five minutes he gave me a pithy and extremely unfair statement of the situation as he saw it, not that he could see very much that morning, blind as he was with rage.

When he’d temporarily calmed down, though the springs of bile continued to gurgle away, we went into the public bar, since I was leading the way. Hobson looked a little startled when he saw where he was, no doubt remembering hours in the sergeants’ mess, but he looked round and said ‘Good morning’ affably enough to the two or three soaks who were there.

‘Ah, Palmer. Good morning to you.’

‘Good morning, Brigadier,’ said Sam, trying not to look
surprised
to see Hobson and me together. ‘A glass of sherry?’

‘Make it two halves,’ I said.

At this Sam looked incredulous. The feud which Hobson and I had been conducting for several years in a desultory fashion was well known. We never actually came out and told each other to our faces that we hated each other’s guts, but our relations were, as they say, strained. We represent, in our different ways, the radical and the reactionary as far as these exist in a place like Cartersfield. Harry Mengel, who is an active radical, doesn’t really count, because he’s interested in national affairs. Hobson and I never lowered ourselves to discuss anything but local issues. However, there are occasions when left and right may join together to defeat the machinations of the centre, and both will, given a chance, cite the same general principles—preservation of the landscape, individual liberty and various other meaningless phrases designed to cover personal interest with a high-sounding mess of platitudes. When one is really furious about something, there is always some principle which one can use to gain the support of all those men and women who regard themselves as right-thinking. For sheer political humbug I don’t think the British
can
be beaten.

When we’d sat down at a table with our beer, and when Sam had stopped raising his eyebrows at me behind Hobson’s back, I said: ‘It’s a sign of the times, Brigadier.’ He failed to see the joke, so I said: ‘A bad business, Brigadier, a bad business.’ It’s one of my favourite phrases when talking to the protagonist of a particularly ridiculous row.

Hobson looked at me and snorted. ‘Bad? It’s absolutely monstrous!’ Then he lowered his voice and leaned across the table towards me, trailing, I noticed with detached delight, his cuff in a beer puddle. ‘I say, Drysdale,’ he said, ‘do you mind if I ask you rather a ticklish question?’

I felt like saying ‘No’, for the sheer hell of it, and in remembrance
of our past differences, but since I was, on the whole, on his side, and in any case wanted to know what kind of question he thought ticklish, I said: ‘Of course, Brigadier, anything you like.’

‘This fellow Solomons—is he—you know?’

‘I don’t quite follow your question, Brigadier.’

He blushed, for which I suppose I ought to give him credit, and then he cleared his throat and said: ‘I mean—is he—you know—one of the tribe?’