Portrait of Elmbury (25 page)

Fred, as you know, used to pass our window on his way to the office, he was so regular in his hours that you could set your watch by him. And he always wore a buttonhole; and in summer he wore a straw boater (which was the fashion in those days) and in winter he wore a bowler hat. He was a perfect example of the creature of habit: so much so that he was a bit of a joke.

He had a sufficient, comfortable practice. He was unmarried. He had no apparent troubles, financial or domestic, no known love-affair, and no known vices; except the habit of having a small bet, well within his means, with Mr. Benjamin each day. He walked one day to Elmbury station and bought a ticket to the county town. He appeared to be cheerful and well. He was seen to get into the train; and since then he has never been heard of. A few years ago permission was given to presume his death.

Consider what a remarkable feat this disappearance was. Fred left his affairs in perfect order; he took no large sum of money with him (in fact the amount he was supposed to have in his pocket was one pound seven and sixpence); and he was qualified, as far as one knows, for no trade or profession other than his own. Professional qualifications are bound to a man's identity; if he loses the latter, the former are lost too. If he
started again as a lawyer he began at the beginning: a man with no name and no connexions and no money. The point is, if Fred lived,
how
did he live?—for he wouldn't even have been much good as a navvy.

Again, why should he choose to run away and what was he running away from? He hadn't embezzled his clients' money; he wasn't in debt; he hadn't got a nagging wife; his life up to the moment he disappeared had been smooth, untroubled, and supremely unadventurous.

On the other hand, he was not the sort of man whom anybody would be likely to kidnap or murder; and if he took it into his head to commit suicide (although he seemed perfectly sane and had no reason to do so) where did he manage to conceal his body, and why was it never found? Indeed, if Fred committed suicide, he committed the most ingenious suicide I've ever heard of; and Fred had shown no signs of being an original or ingenious man. A great deal of trouble was taken over the search for him. The rivers were dragged for weeks, the whole district was quartered, bushes, quarries, ditches, ponds, the police all over England published his description; and a very ordinary description it was.

His money at the bank accumulated compound interest; his investments, carefully managed by Mr. Tempest, grew bigger every year; but Fred never came back to claim them. There was a vague unsubstantiated report that he had been seen somewhere in South America; but that was never confirmed, and nobody took it seriously. Why should Fred want to go to America anyway?

But perhaps after all it was true. Perhaps one day there occurred to Fred one of those revelations, sudden, cataclysmic and complete, which happen sometimes even to ordinary men. I do not mean that Fred went mad; I mean that he became suddenly sane. I suggest that he said to himself: “This is perfectly absurd. Here I am, a man of thirty, and I've never done anything exciting in my life—scarcely ever travelled more than a few miles from Elmbury, in fact! And yet there are millions of places to go to and millions of new and strange things to see; there's even a place called Popocatapetl”—Clem had probably told him that
—“and it would be sheer folly to die without seeing places with names like Popocatapetl. It would be ridiculous, in fact it would be mad!”

So off he went to South America. At least I like to think that is the truth of it; but Mr. Rendcombe favours the grimmer alternative and believes that somewhere, in some bramble-bush, in some thicket, the white skull of Fred lies waiting to be discovered and grins at the sky, as if it were grinning at the excellent joke its owner has played on the stolid respectable Moores, the ponderous substantial Moores, who would never believe that a man could walk clean out of the world by way of a railway carriage.

As for me, I never go to Elmbury station, the funny little branch-line station among the allotments, without being reminded of the stories of Clem and Fred, and without recapturing for an absurd moment my childhood impression that it was the starting-place for all disappearances, the setting-off place for all adventure. The ancient station-master looks at his turnip watch and blows his whistle, the little fussy train puffs away, and I remember Fred catching his train, which bore him out of the world, and Clem missing his, with roughly the same results. Chuffle, chuffle, puff, the train rounds the bend on its way to the junction; and thus, I remember, it disappeared with Fred on board it, and thus Clem watched it disappear as he cursed its unusually prompt departure, and turned back resignedly towards the Swan.

It wasn't very long before that fussy little train bore me away on the first stage of a long journey. What we now perceive to have been the first skirmish of the greatest war the world has ever known was taking place in Spain. I left Elmbury about Christmastime and went to Madrid. My reasons for going need not concern
this book. Curiously enough I wasn't the only man of Elmbury who made that journey. Bardolph, when he had served his two months for his enterprising theft of the policeman's bicycle, decided that England was too orderly a place for his opportunist temperament, falsified his age by ten years, and enlisted in the International Brigade.

The night before I left I went duck-shooting with the Colonel, and afterwards we spent the evening at the Swan. I remember that evening best of all the evenings, because in a sense it was the last; for somehow the place didn't seem the same when I got back to it.

Also, we shot a goose. It must have been the Colonel's last goose: a solitary grey-lag winging its majestic way across a lemon-coloured sunset, and turning suddenly for no obvious reason to pass right over our heads. We both fired at once and it came down like an inside-out umbrella to fall almost at our feet. It was a gift from the Gods; and to the Colonel, who died before the geese came back next season, it was a farewell gift.

Perhaps he knew this; at any rate he determined to celebrate it. He laid it on the bar in the Swan and said:

“Drinks all round! Who'll drink to our goose?”

“Reely, Colonel,” said Miss Benedict, “I must ask you to take the nasty thing away. It is making my clean bar all bloody.”

“Dear me, what language,” said the Colonel; and Miss Benedict blushed.

The grey goose was handed round and everybody guessed its weight. Badger Brown was there, and Mr. Chorlton, and the lawyer, and the cobbler and the Mayor, and Mr. Rendcombe, Wilfrid Jakes the gardener, and Mr. Benjamin dressed in his flashiest, for he'd just come back from his bit of business in Birmingham.

We all sat down and drank to the goose. The Colonel stretched his legs and we heard his joints crackling.

“It's the wet weather gets into 'em,” he laughed. “There's a lot of rain coming. The clouds are right down on Brensham; and you know the old rhyme: “When Brensham Hill puts on his hat, Men of the Vale, look out for that!”

Old rhymes, old proverbs, old wise sayings, are much loved of Elmbury men. They decorate and flavour their conversation with them as good wives decorate and flavour their dishes with thyme and marjoram, with mint and borage, with rosemary and angelica; and indeed the old sayings are somehow aromatic, evocative and nostalgic like the herbs.

The talk of the men in the Swan was always so spiced and peppered with proverb and rhyme, as if they were aware that they talked plain common sense and deliberately decked it with a sprig of poetry; and when I try to recollect what we talked about, on that last night of the Swan's ancient glory, I am aware of the flavour of it, pungent and aromatic in memory, although I cannot remember much of what was actually said.

I remember the Colonel talking about the habits of robins, which he loved, and telling us how they each had their own bit of territory jealously guarded against intruders, their own beat as it were: “Just like prostitutes,” said the Colonel, laughing his merry laugh. He described the robin at his back door in phrases rather like this: “You look at him from behind and he's a round-shouldered disillusioned business-man wearing a brown mackintosh that's too big for him. He's so dowdy that however many times you've seen him it's always a surprise when he turns round and you see his red waistcoat.” The Colonel's little blue eyes were as sharp as Gilbert White's; if he could have written as well as he talked we should have had another book as good as
Selborne
.

It was his custom to mix with his talk a number of old phrases and country expressions which in a long life he had picked up from his labourers and from the cottage-people and had made his own. On a drizzly morning, when the outlook was uncertain, he'd say: “ 'Tis a mizzling day, neither Jim Cook nor Mary-Anne.” If the wind was backing, he'd say, “The wind's going downhill.” He spoke of green woodpeckers as stock-eagles. (“The stock-eagles be rating, we shall have rain,”) and moles he always called Oonts. Molehills were Oonty-tumps, a phrase which he loved and which always made him chuckle. Yet he used these country terms not academically nor in affectation.
They had become part of his normal speech, they belonged to him just as he himself belonged to the countryside from which they sprang like the wheat and the grass.

There was talk of the weather, of course, on that last night, and there were tales, I am sure, for there were always tales told in the Swan; and there was a long argument on some matter of local politics between the cobbler and the Mayor; and there was reminiscence about cricket and about Gilbert Jessop's big hits on to our pavilion roof. Mr. Rendcombe, backward-looking as usual, regretted that cricket was no longer what it used to be. It had lost its vigour, like the weather, the Mop, and local politics. “They don't hit the ball as hard as they used to,” he said. He shook his head sadly. “The sting's gone out of everything,” he said. Winters were milder, elections were duller, the Mop was less riotous, and batsmen played pat-ball: a wishy-washy world.

“Your uncle,” he said to me, “he could hit sixes. He could bang the ball about the field. Wilfrid Jakes'll remember fishing the ball out of the brook with a net on the end of a long pole— the brook which had little sallies planted along the edge of it— You recollect it, Wilfrid?”

“They be grown willows now,” said Wilfrid Jakes.

“Aye. That's fifty years ago,” said Mr. Rendcombe. “And Mr. Moore's uncle was a lad.” My old uncle had just died, and Mr. Rendcombe heaved an appropriate sigh. “He was a great loss,” he said. “Another of the old ones gone.”

One always had a sharp sense of mortality when talking with Mr. Rendcombe. After all, he wrote fifty obituary notices a year; it came natural to him to speak of graves and worms and epitaphs. And he was not by nature a gloomy man; it was a gentle and not unpleasing melancholy which he wore on those occasions when he talked of his old friends who had died. “Thinning 'em out,” he would say, with a shrug of his shoulders. “Thinning 'em out.”

“Another of the old ones,” he repeated now. “Aye: thinning 'em out.” He looked at Wilfrid Jakes, who was the only one of the company as old as he was. “He was a young spark, was Mr. Moore's uncle. We could tell a thing or two about him.”
He turned to me. “Ah, Mr. Moore, if you'd seen the times that Wilfrid and I have seen!”

Mr. Chorlton, in the corner, suddenly looked up. He glanced sharply at Mr. Rendcombe and then back at me. He raised his eyebrows. I had caught an echo somewhere, but I was slow-witted. Whatever was the purpose of Mr. Chorlton's glance I seemed to have missed the point. Mr. Rendcombe went on:

“You wouldn't have thought it, but he was a great one for the girls in his youth, was your uncle.” He chuckled. “Do you remember, Wilfrid, Jennie Greening that was old Greening's daughter from the Mill? The black-haired one? A little hussy! —Is she still alive, I wonder?”

Wilfrid Jakes nodded.

“She's getting on,” he said.

I was conscious of a memory just round the corner, just behind Wilfrid Jakes' or Mr. Rendcombe's shoulder there was a huge and significant shadow. Mr. Chorlton was smiling happily; but I was still groping in the dark.

“She must be,” said Mr. Rendcombe. And then I had it. It fell into place in my mind almost with a click. Mr. Chorlton glanced at me again and I nodded. He pulled out a pencil and began to scribble on the back of an envelope.

“Yes, yes, she must be,” repeated Mr. Rendcombe. I had a beautiful and terrible sense of the continuity of English life and English talk and English men; and Stratford, I remembered, wasn't very far away.

Mr. Chorlton passed me the envelope. In the familiar scrawl with which he had corrected so many of my Latin exercises he had written:

“Old, old, Master Shallow—Nay, she must be old; she cannot choose but be old; certain she's old. … Ha, that thou hadst seen that this knight and I have seen:—We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.”

It was closing time. I put on my coat and stood for a moment warming myself before the dying fire. I didn't want to leave; and I was conscious of my long journey on the morrow and of strangeness and uncertainty at the end of it. The embers were bright in the great fireplace, and the room was warm also with a glow of good fellowship. There were Christmas decorations over the mantelpiece, a sprig of holly above the bar, a big bough of mistletoe hanging as it happened over the Colonel's seat in the corner. I thought: “It'll all be different when I come back, and perhaps I shall be different too.” I said good-bye to Miss Benedict, and we shook hands. She said:

“Take care of yourself among all those foreigners.”

The Colonel was dozing, or had fallen into a reverie. His chin was slumped on his chest. I called out: