The Pyramid (2 page)

“Yes it’s me. Christ. You’ve been and gone and done it haven’t you?”

“What kept you so long for God’s sake? Well now you
are
here, let’s get moving.”

“Where’s your shoe? And your trousers?”

“Sunk, laddie,” said Robert, attempting nonchalance but having it interrupted by a sudden clatter of teeth. “Sunk without trace.”

“I know that car! It’s Bounce’s car! Miss Dawlish’s car!”

Robert turned the duke’s profile towards it.

“Never mind that. Let’s decide what to do.”

“But
why—
?”

Robert took a step forward and lowered his face towards me.

“It’s none of your business. But if you want to know, I was giving our young friend Babbacombe a lift over to the hop at Bumstead. I couldn’t take her on the bike in this weather could I? So I borrowed Bounce’s car for an hour or two. She wouldn’t mind would she? Only there’s no need for you to tell her.”

I understood that the son of Dr. Ewan couldn’t take the daughter of Sergeant Babbacombe to a dance in his father’s car. Didn’t have to think. Understood as by nature.

“I see.”

“Satisfied?”

He stood in the road, dancing and shivering, while I took off my shoes and socks. The water was very cold, but shallow. Robert, being Robert, had not realized that there are two ways out of a pond and he had spent his time trying to shove the car backwards up hill when with half the energy he could have pushed it straight through. We got it out on the road, and while I sat on the running board and put on my socks and shoes, Robert fiddled with the plugs and wrestled with the starting handle.

By the time I was tying my shoelaces he had given up, and stood, his profile between me and the moon.

“It’s no good, young Oliver. You’ll have to push.”

“Who? Me? Why don’t you push the damn thing
yourself
?”

“Be reasonable, laddie. Someone’s got to steer. You don’t drive, do you? Besides, you’re heavier than I am.”

“Well—strike me pink!”

It was true all the same. Robert might be three inches taller than I was, and act always as if the three inches were twelve, but he was only half as wide. Suddenly I was shaking with rage.

“Well—Christ! You can talk! Driving the bloody car slap into the bloody pond!”

I got up and savaged my hair.

“Temper,” said Robert. “If you want to know, I wasn’t driving it.”

“Then how the hell—”

“Do you want to stay here all night? However—we were pulled off the road under that tree up there for a spot of slap and tickle. Which reminds me—Half a mo’.”

He ran off round the pond and up to the tree at the top of a slight rise, came back with his arms full.

“Floorboards.”

“What the Devil?”

He opened the door of the two seater and started putting the boards back in. While he did this he spoke sometimes over his shoulder, as to a company of troops that was being jollied into an arduous but not dangerous operation.

“Not much room in these machines. Our young friend was sitting in the front seat and I took the boards out so that I could stand on the ground. Got it? Only we ran away—the old bus did. I must have sort of jerked the handbrake off with me arse, somehow. Now then, young Olly, heave O!”

It was possible, I found, by turning my back on the car, leaning against it and then thrusting with both legs, to move it up the road. Once it was moving I turned round and shoved at an angle of forty-five degrees to the horizontal. This was not too difficult. But then, without warning the car stopped dead, so that I fell spreadeagled on the rumble seat.

“Oh my guts!”

“Footbrake’s a bit fierce,” said Robert. “Hold on a moment. Olly. I’m dam’ chilly. There’s no denying it. Now we’re stopped I’ll just see if the old girl keeps a rug in the back, there.”

“You keep driving! If this thing stops again, I’m walking home!”

I could see his profile round the side of the car and he was getting out.

“I’m perishing.”

“Well, perish!”

It was mutiny. Silently Robert got back in, his teeth clattering, his shoulders, even his hands shaking. We moved off again.

I muttered.

“Bloody car. Bloody fool. Bloody footbrake—why the hell didn’t you put the brake on up by the tree?”

Robert had reached his own limit. He gave a kind of whinny of rage.

“Have you ever tried running backwards down a slope with your trousers round your ankles?”

“Bloody girl, then. Why didn’t
she
put on the brake?”

“How could she, with her feet up on the windscreen?”

I saw that. I pushed, grunting now and then.

“Keep moving, Olly! That’s better. We’re nearly at the rise. Still—she’s a really sporty girl, that young Babbacombe, I give her that.”

“Why?”

“She tried to steer.”

Suddenly the weight of the car decreased. It stopped, as I heard Robert pull on the handbrake.

“What the—”

“We’re there. Get in.”

We were at the top of the hill where the road led out of the woods down into Stilbourne. I could make out the church tower, the huddle of houses and dark shapes of trees. I climbed in beside Robert, and settled myself. I muttered, he shivered.

“God knows how I’ll push her up the High Street!”

“You’re not going to have to,” said Robert, the duke’s profile lifted against the sky, “because there might be a copper about. Here we go!”

One hundred and twenty seconds later I had to admit that either Robert’s school, or his family, or possibly even
Chums
and
The
Boy’s
Own
Paper
had given him some standards that I found not wholly contemptible. With no lights, and no engine, we leapt off the top of the Old Bridge like ski-jumpers. We shot up the High Street and across the concrete apron of Williams’s garage, turned right between two sheds, then left to the open space where Robert had found the car the evening before, all under the impetus of gravity. Even then we stopped with a jerk that flattened my face against Bounce’s
windscreen
. When I got my breath back I felt an unwilling respect for him; but we were too angry with each other for anything but the stiffest and most glacial farewell. Without speaking, we tiptoed resentfully round the Square. Robert stopped outside our gate, turned to me, and whispered coldly down from an extra twelve inches.

“Well. Thank you for your help.”

I whispered back.

“Not at all. Don’t mention it.”

We parted, and set ourselves to our individual problems of noiseless entry. The church clock struck three.

The sun woke me, as it crawled on to my face; and instantly I remembered everything—the car, Robert, the three plums, one of them lifted, a whiff of scent. I knew, with youth’s intuitive optimism, that something was not ended.
Something
had begun.

And there was more. The window of our bathroom not only looked out over our garden, but the Ewans’s garden too. It was possible, even probable, that I should see Robert keeping fit there, and be able to crow over him. Grinning, I hurried to the bathroom. Sure enough, as soon as I looked out of the window, I saw him trot down the path, in shorts and singlet, beating the air fiercely with the padded gloves. He went trotting to the punchball rigged in the stables and struck it smartly.

“Haa!”

He danced away from it, then round it, then in again.

“Haa!”

The punchball made no reply, only quivered a bit each time he hit it. He danced away, dared it to come after him, then trotted off down the path with the handsome
movements
of the trained athlete, knees up, gloves up, chin down. As he turned to come back I saw that his shins were heavily armoured with white sticking plaster. He went back to the punchball. I opened the bathroom window, lathering myself vigorously, and began to laugh. Robert faltered, then attacked the punchball with fierce in-fighting.

“Any more for the Skylark?”

This time Robert did not falter. He ducked and wove. As I scraped away with my new razor, I sang raucously.

“We joined the
nay-vee
to see the world—”

Robert stopped boxing. I stared cheerfully at the brow of the hill to the north of Stilbourne, the rabbit warren spilt down the slope, the clump of trees at the top, and continued to sing.

“—we saw the pond!”

Below the immediate line of my vision, I could see that Robert was giving me a Look. It was the sort of Look that kept the Empire together, or quelled it at least. Armed with that Look and perhaps a riding crop, white men could keep order easily among the clubs and spears. He walked with great dignity into the house, duke’s profile high, attention straight ahead. I laughed loud and long and savagely.

My mother expostulated fondly at breakfast.

“Oliver dear, I know you’ve passed all your examinations and you’re going to Oxford, and heaven knows I’m glad for you to be happy—but you were making a dreadful noise in the bathroom! Whatever will the neighbours think?”

I answered her indistinctly.

“Young Ewan. Laughing at him.”

“
Not
with your mouth full, dear!”

“Sorry.”

“Bobby Ewan. It’s such a pity that you—Still he’s been away at school most of the time.” This telegraphic style was entirely comprehensible to me. It meant that my mother was regretting the social difference between the Ewans and
ourselves
. She was thinking too of the incompatibility that had magnified the difference and exacerbated it. As small children, socially innocent, so to speak, we had played together; and I knew things about that play which had reached neither Mrs. Ewan nor my mother. We had hardly been out of our
respective
prams.

“You’re my slave.”

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are. My father’s a doctor and yours is only his dispenser.”

That was why I pushed him off the wall into the Ewans’s cucumber frame, where he made a very satisfactory crash. Not surprisingly we drifted apart after that, and what with school and motor bikes and careful parents, the most we ever did was to snipe at each other with our air guns, aiming always to miss. Now I had kissed Evie Babbacombe—well, more or less—and had seen Robert make a fool of himself.

“Oliver, dear—I do wish you wouldn’t whistle with your mouth full!”

After breakfast I went as casually as I could to the
dispensary
, where my father was making pills, in the
old-fashioned
way. I stood in the doorway that led from our cottage into the dispensary thinking consciously for the first time how much more like a doctor he looked than staid Dr. Ewan, or the junior partner, reedy Dr. Jones. Such a visit was not usual, and my father looked round ponderously under his heavy brows but said nothing. I leaned against the wall by the door and wondered what excuse I could find for going through into the reception room where Evie would be working. Perhaps, I thought, my father would agree that I needed a thorough overhaul; and indeed, my heart seemed to be acting up in an unusual manner. But before I had got round to saying anything, Evie—who must have been equipped with antennae like my mother—appeared at the end of the passage. She was wearing her blue and white cotton dress, and respectable stockings under her white socks; for of course she could not sit at the desk in the reception room with bare legs. She had one finger on her lips and was shaking her head severely. Her face was different. The orbital area of her left eye was swollen so that on the left side her paint brushes were motionless, their tips projecting in a rigid line. The right side made up for this inactivity; but I had little time to inspect her in detail since she so clearly had a message for me. The finger on the lips, the shaken head—that, I could understand. Don’t say anything to anybody about anything! Sensible enough and not really necessary; but those weaving motions with both hands at her throat as if she were trying to avoid strangulation, that hand then so fiercely
stabbing
with the fore-finger in the general direction of the Square—and now the head, nodding this time, the bob flying—.

Evie stopped moving. Listened. Disappeared into the reception room, the door closing without a sound. My father was still making pills. Casually, I lounged back into the cottage and sat myself at the piano. I played, thinking. It was always a useful cover. What did she want with the Square? And who was going to strangle her? Sergeant Babbacombe was the obvious candidate but was hardly likely to do it in the doctor’s reception room. Perhaps she wanted me to go out into the Square so that she could pass me a message—say, in the High Street? It would be hours before she could get away from her desk. But she could make some excuse or other. What was more and more delightfully evident was that Evie Babbacombe wanted to meet me. Not Robert. Me!

I strolled into the Square, and stood, hands in pockets, inspecting the sky. It was bright blue, in a cooperative sort of way. I waited, hoping she would appear and that I could follow her to whatever private place was suitable for such a meeting, but the minutes lengthened, then dragged, and still she did not come. What came at last, was Sergeant
Babbacombe
. He marched out from under the pillars of the Town Hall and stood at attention, facing the length of the Square to the church. He was carrying his brass handbell and wearing his Town Crier’s dress—buckled shoes, white cotton
stockings
, red knee breeches, red waistcoat, cotton ruffle, blue frock coat, and blue, three-cornered hat. He rang the
handbell
, staring belligerently over his chest at the church tower. Then he bawled.

“Ho yay, ho yay, ho yay! Lost. In Chandler’s Lane, between the chaplofese and Chandler’s Close. Hay gold cross hand chain. With the hinitials hee bee. Hand the hinscription ‘Hamor vinshit Homniar.’ Ther finder will be rewarded.”

He rang the bell again, lifted his three-cornered hat
towards
the sky and uttered the loyal shout.

“God hsave-ther KING!”

He put his hat on, turned right, and marched off with steps of regulation thirty inches towards the corner of Mill Lane to do it all over again. Hee bee! Evie Babbacome! I saw it all. The cross was to be found and returned to her in strictest secrecy. Not a word about woods or ponds. Probably not a word about a hop at Bumstead. I knew exactly what I was to do.