The Happy Prisoner (12 page)

“I didn't know whether you were allowed to see anyone, or which your room was and so on,” said Toby. He had a way of holding his head very erect with the chin tucked into his collar, and speaking in a clipped, half-strangled voice. He had the assured look of a man with an easy life, but his movements were rather formal amd ungraceful.

“He's just been demobbed,” said Mrs. North, patting his arm, “and he came straight along to see us. Now wasn't that nice? You'll stay to lunch, won't you, Toby? We have a family party in here on Sundays.” Her eyes roved the table, seeing whether it was properly laid. “Will you be too cold if I open the other window, Oliver dear? The atmosphere's just terrible. You shouldn't smoke so much in here, you know, Anne.”

“Sorry.” She threw the cigarette she had just lit over Oliver's bed ort to the lawn, where it smouldered, sending up a stalk of smoke.

When Oliver introduced her to Toby, he laughed inside himself to see them appraising each other. It made him feel very old, remembering the days when he himself had always been on the lookout for new material. How peaceful to be out of the restless, shifting game. Standing by his bed and talking to him, they both centred their attention on Oliver, but he could see that they were very aware of each other. He looked at the scene objectively, seeing it as a triangle of which he formed the apex and they the base. Although he knew both of them well, the lines of contact which they sent out to him were weaker than the line which already joined these two strangers. They stood in another world, the old world of drinks and parties and affairs and the extremes of fun and
ennui
. He was in his own new little
world, a vantage-point like a crow's nest, in which there was only room for himself.

Seeing Toby eyeing the hump under the bedclothes, Oliver talked about his leg. He found that new visitors were usually afraid to mention it unless he did.

Heather and David came down at one o'clock, both red in the face from a battle about washing hands. Heather went back for the baby and to powder her nose and do her hair again because she found Toby there. Toby said the correct things about Susan, and Heather fussed because the fire was too high. “You needn't have made such a furnace, Elizabeth,” she said crossly.

“Put the child farther away then,” Oliver suggested.

“Oh, don't
interfere
, Ollie,” said Heather, straightening up and pushing up her fringe, and Toby looked at her, turning his neck round inside his collar like a turtle. He had already noticed the difference in her.

Mrs. North kept pottering in and out of the room to see whether Violet and Evelyn had come in yet, wondering whether to wait or start without them. “It makes such a schemozzle with everyone coming in at odd times,” she said. No one had ever done anything else at Hinkley, but she had never given up trying to make her family as clock-conscious as herself. She had two watches, one on her wrist and one on her chest on a thin chain that got tangled with the chain of her pince-nez. She was always looking at one or the other and she could never pass a clock without glancing at it. As well as the travelling clock on her dressing-table, she had an alarm clock by her bed, which she took downstairs every morning, because she could not see the kitchen clock from the scullery. When she went for a walk, even just down to the village, she timed herself there and back as if she were a train, and sometimes went half a mile out of her way to see the clock in the church tower.

Violet and Evelyn came in just as she had decided to start without them. They brought with them Fred Williams, whom Mrs. North had forgotten she had asked to lunch. He was always ill at ease in the house, like a yard dog brought into the drawing-room, and he was not helped by the commotion of someone having to lay a place for him and going out to run another plate under the hot tap. He was a short-legged, long-bodied little man with a big head and a face saddened by a tremendous nose, red and shiny as a lobster's claw. His ears stuck out and his hair had been cut like a footballer's, clumpy on top and almost shaved round the back of his head. He was not fascinatingly ugly, he was just ugly. He wore an unfortunate suit of emeraldgreen
tweed, which his uncle had sent him from the Outer Isles several years ago and which would last for several years to come. On ordinary days, he wore breeches and gaiters and polo jerseys, which suited him, but this green suit was the uniform he wore for sociability and for business in Shrewsbury that involved going into offices. He also wore it on the rare occasions when he went to London, where it must have startled case-hardened waitresses and shone like a spring leaf in outer offices at the Ministry of Agriculture.

People like Anne and Toby paralysed him. They paralysed Violet too, so she was no help to him. She left him stranded in the middle of the room and went and straddled in front of the fire, biting her nails.

While everyone was charging in and out with plates and food, and arguing about who should sit where, Fred stood awkwardly with his hands hanging, lunging forward to take a tray from a woman or put a mat under a hot dish just a second after Toby had already done it. Oliver called him over to talk about the farm. Since he had been ill, Oliver had reverted to his boyhood's inclination towards the land. When he was first grown up, his one idea had been to get away from Hinkley, up to the towns where life moved quickly and there were people to be met and money to be made. Now, his one idea was to keep away from pavements and alert young men in city hats. Fortunately, for his heart would probably never stand a London life again, his enforced tranquillity had given him an appetite for peace. He would have liked to become a retired country gentleman and potter through the Shropshire seasons, if he had any money to retire on. The thought that he ought soon to be earning a living was one of the few things he worried about, particularly when he was depressed. When he tried to talk to his mother about working again, she changed the subject, or told him how well her shares were doing, or what she had read in the paper about Service pensions. She would keep him a drone for the rest of, his life if she had her way.

Fred told him about his new fertiliser, of which he was as proud as if he and not I.C.I. had invented it.

“Tell you what,” Oliver said, “I wish you'd lend me some of your books on soil and fertilisers and that sort of thing. If I could learn something about it now, perhaps I might be some use to you when I get up.”

“That would be fine.” Fred looked uneasily over his shoulder at Mrs. North.

Oliver laughed. “My mother's been talking to you, hasn't
she? I believe she thinks I mean to go straight out and push a plough. No, but I thought perhaps I might be some help behind the scenes, take some of the bookwork off your hands and learn more about the job as I go along.”

Fred's nose and the line on his forehead where his hat pinched it flushed with pleasure. “That would be grand,” he said. “You could be the brains behind the organisation. I'm planning big things for this next year or two, if only I can get the men and some more machinery. I'm already after that land between here and the Wrekin. It would be a fine help to have you working with me.”

“Steady on, old boy,” said Oliver. “Don't forget I don't know much about the business. I should probably be more of a hindrance at first.”

“Oh.” Fred looked down, and Oliver, following his gaze, saw that he was wearing brown boots under the emerald-green trousers. “Oh no, it wouldn't be like that. After all, you've been decently educated and that. If chaps like me can pick it up, there can't be so much to it.”

He said this without any irony or sense of grievance. He always maddened Oliver by his blatant insistence on being an underdog. He was just going to tell him pithily about his public school and Varsity and explain why Fred was undoubtedly so much better educated than he, when Heather called from the table: “Do come and sit down, Fred, and let's get on with lunch. It's always the same in this house; the minute you bring in the food, everybody disappears.”

“Sorry, sorry.” Fred grinned nervously at Oliver and hurried over to the others. Mrs. North was carving at a side table and he hovered by her, wondering whether he were expected to hand things round.

“Oh, do sit
down
,” said Heather. “Everything's on the table. It's so silly if everyone jumps up and down all the time waiting on each other. Don't be neurotic, David, that isn't gristle.” Fred's nose came round like the beam of a lighthouse as he turned.

Evelyn patted the chair beside her. “Come on,” she said. “You're supposed to sit here by me.” Violet, holding her knife like a pencil, was at the end of the table on his other side, but she hardly took any notice of him. On the farm, although he was her employer, he never gave her any orders. She usually knew what had to be done, and if not, he would throw out suggestions rather than commands. He had not liked the idea of her working for him, until it was explained to him as patriotism.
Five years of labour and vicissitudes had made them able to work together without words. They were never heard to talk to each other about any subject unconnected with the farm, and then it was mostly in grunts and chin-scratchings. Fred had a slight Norfolk tang to his speech, a suggestion of Oi for I and a reversal of words like move and mauve. His accent was pleasant but slow, and it took a long time for him to tell you anything. He came to these Sunday lunches prepared with a few stories, but he seldom got more than halfway through any of them without interruption. Today, Toby shot a polite question out of his collar at him about the herd, and Fred put down his knife and fork and leaned across the table to tell him about the milk yield, but almost at once David spilled his lemonade, Elizabeth jumped up and scooted round the table to stop Susan falling into the grate, and Mrs. North went out to see whether she had turned off the oven.

Violet took advantage of the general commotion to help herself to the last three potatoes. Back from the kitchen, Mrs. North went over to inspect Oliver's plate.

“Enjoy your lunch, darling?' she asked, beaming to see it clean.

“Always do on a Sunday. Whatever else they may say about you, Ma, you certainly can roast beef.”

“As a matter of fact, Elizabeth cooked the lunch today,” she said. “I was doing out my larder.”

“Well, I expect you taught her.”

“Oh, sure I taught her. Won't you have a little more, darling? It's cutting so rare now.”

“Couldn't.” Then, as her face fell: “All right, I'll have another potato if you like.” She hurried joyfully back to the table and halted, crestfallen, as Evelyn sang out: “Vi's just pinched the last three!” She was a silent and businesslike child at meals, but she never missed a thing. Her pale, well-bred little face concealed a mind quite Cockney in its observation.

“Oh, Violet,
really,
” said Mrs. North. “You are—” She was going to say greedy, but she altered it to thoughtless. It was bad enough to have a daughter who behaved childishly when visitors were there, without calling attention to it by treating her as a child as well. To cover her, she tried to turn it into a joke by saying with a smile: “I suppose you couldn't ask whether anyone wanted any more, hm?”

“Thought you'd all finished,” said Violet, putting down the gravy boat so that it dripped on to the table. “I was starving. Didn't have any breakfast.”

“Not much you didn't,” said Heather. “I saw you in the kitchen with a great hunk of bread,
and
some of the children's milk
and
the golden syrup tin out,
and
you were dipping your buttery knife into it.”

“Saves the washing up,” retorted her sister.

“As if you ever did any,” said Heather bitterly. David gave a scream of laughter and knocked over the salt. He loved quarrels; they excited him. Oliver had heard this kind of conversation a thousand times since his childhood. It was very dull. He saw Anne and Toby exchange amused glances. Fred was looking embarrassed. He kept clearing his throat as if he were going to say something and then being unable to think of anything to say. When he saw Heather, still muttering, begin to clear away the plates, he jumped up so quickly that his chair fell over backwards and nearly decapitated the baby. Heather gave a little scream and the knives on top of the plates she held clattered on to the floor. Violet's old Labrador inched her way out on her stomach from her hiding-place between Violet's spreadeagled feet and began to lick the knives. When Heather had picked up the chair and moved Susan farther away from the table, she looked up flushed from her kneeling position by the basket and worked off her shock in anger at Fred.

“Terribly sorry, terribly sorry,” he stammered, hovering on the outskirts of the circle that was trying to jolly Susan out of her fright. “But it didn't touch her, did it? Is she all right? Ah, there's a good little girlie!” She screamed louder as he bobbed his great nose down at her. In desperation, he tore off his wrist-watch and held it to her ear, as he had seen people do.

Heather knocked his hand aside. “Don't be a fool,” she said. “She's much too young for that. I do wish you'd be more careful, Fred. You might have killed her. You're as clumsy as Vi.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Violet from the table, where she was leaning back, cleaning out her mouth with her tongue. Toby had risen to help, but Anne pulled at his sleeve and told him to sit down. “She won't feel any better if she sees that yellow tie,” she said, and he laughed his austere, choked laugh. He thought her amusing. They talked to each other while they waited for the Norths to settle their troubles and get on with the next course, and then Anne remembered Oliver and went over to the bed to see how he was getting on.

“Gives one a bit of a head, you know, this kind of thing.” He nodded towards the group at the fireplace.

“Poor darling,” she said vaguely, “it must do.” She played a scale down his pyjama sleeve, watching her fingers, and then
looked up at him with one of her sudden rippling smiles. “Did you really mean it, darling, what you said before lunch about being perfectly happy?” She wanted to make quite sure that she had done all she could to fulfil the obligation which had sent her down here. She felt she had got off too lightly. Oliver laughed at her, kissed her hand and sent her back to Toby. Mrs. North saw the hand-kiss and stood for a moment in thought, turning her pince-nez from one to the other of them. Anne had certainly seemed much nicer this time. “A very sweet person,” she had told Oliver last night when she came in to try and find out whether he were still in love with Anne. Oliver should not love anyone just now, but if he had to, it could be worse. Prepared to make the best of anything that would make him happy, she gave a little shrug and set herself in motion again to organise the next course.