The Scent of Water (16 page)

“Arthritis bothering you, Dad?” asked Charles solicitously.

“Nothing to mention,” said Colonel Adams cheerfully. “Tell me about this new thing.”

“You know that chap I told you about once, Tony Richards?” said Charles. “We shared digs together once. Well, he’s starting a garage and he wants me to go in with him. It’s a new thing for me but I think it’s a sound proposition. Now don’t smile, Dad.”

“I wasn’t smiling,” said Colonel Adams, and indeed he was not, for Charles’s new things were never any smiling matter. There had been so many of them that his father had lost count of them, and lost hope that the next would have more permanence than the last. And so, he thought, had Charles. But there was a doggedness about Charles. It was his saving grace. He always picked himself up and went on again. “Who is financing this?” he asked.

“Well, that’s the trouble. Tony is about as broke as I am. He’s gone off today to tackle an uncle of his. The old boy is something in the city and he’s got the dough.”

“And you’ve come to tackle me,” said his father; without bitterness, merely making a familiar statement.

Charles lit another cigarette and his hands were unsteady. “You can’t do much, Dad, I know, but if you could lend me enough just to keep me for a month or two I’d be very grateful. Just until we’re started. I’ll pay you back later, for this is a sure thing.”

Colonel Adams got up and moved on his two sticks to the writing desk in the corner of the room. He lowered himself to the chair that stood before it, laid his sticks on the floor and took his checkbook from a pigeonhole. He wrote out a generous check slowly and laboriously, for his fingers were as stiff as the rest of him. Everything he did nowadays took a very long time and each task seemed sometimes almost insuperable as he turned to face it. Well, that was old age and to be expected. He tore out the check. The small balance which he had at the bank was now practically gone and he did not know what he would do if Charles did not pay him back; and Charles had never yet paid him back. But he could do nothing else. He had given this man his life and he loved him. Raising his head he saw the photos of his other sons, that Emily kept on the top of the desk that she might look at them when she was writing her letters. Not so good-looking as Charles but decent men whose lives would have been his pride. And they were dead. He got up and journeyed back to the fire, smiling cheerfully at Charles, whom the slowness of the whole affair had reduced almost to screaming point.

“Good luck to you, boy,” he said as he gave him the check. “Starting back at once, or can you stay a day or two?”

“I’d like to stay a day or two if you and Mother will have me.”

“Good. I’ll smoke a pipe with you before I go to bed.”

Charles glanced around and saw that a battered radio that he had once given his parents was still in existence. He switched it on. “Do you mind?” he asked and his father shook his head. It saved them from having to talk. Tomorrow things would be easier. They settled back in their chairs, wrapping themselves in smoke. The light music that came from the radio, marred by the grating noises of the worn-out instrument, could hold the attentions of neither and their thoughts wandered miserably.

Colonel Adams remembered that it had begun right back in Charles’s idle prep school days, when he had failed to win a scholarship. The other boys had done so but his public school fees had had to be paid for with great difficulty out of the always inadequate family funds. He had done fairly well at first and his father’s hopes had risen, but when he was sixteen he had been expelled for misdemeanors of which his mother still knew nothing. She still believed he had been sent home because a mild attack of pneumonia had weakened his lungs.

Colonel Adams had not known what to do with this shamed and penitent and so charming boy back on his hands. For Charles was always penitent, even as life went on to the point of despair, yet always at the mercy of himself, hopelessly weak and yet with that streak of doggedness in him which enabled him always to go on. For the next four years he had tried various things. He had worked on a farm first and when dismissed had not told his father but had gone to London and worked as a waiter, a taxi driver, and finally as scene shifter at a repertory theatre where he occasionally played small parts. He was sympathetic and superficially clever and at first people liked him and he did well. Yet always his weaknesses reasserted themselves and he failed yet again. His worst failure had been the war. He had hailed it, and so had his father, as his chance to escape from himself. And for a while, lifted up by enthusiasm, he had done that. But when the real test came he broke. Only the influence of his father’s army friends caused the verdict of a court-martial to be no worse than dismissal from the army and incarceration in a nerve hospital. His shattered nerves were genuine and it was when he came out of the hospital that his drinking began to undermine his health.

Yet for the last seventeen years he had kept going with his father’s help and since the war they had never lost touch with each other. When Charles had been in the hospital Colonel Adams had visited him with untiring patience, and when his other boys had died he had tried to bear his grief without bitterness. He did not deceive himself into thinking that Charles felt much love for him or for his mother, for he came to see them only when he wanted money, but his son’s need of him was a link that he valued; without it he would have lost the boy. He cherished a notion that if he did not actually lose Charles he might yet one day save him. In harboring that notion he knew that in all probability he deceived himself, but without some small deception somewhere the strongest man can scarcely live. Not in old age.

The music ended and Charles got to his feet. “You like to go to bed early, Dad, I know. I’ll get some fresh air before I turn in.”

His father smiled at him. It was not closing time yet. After Charles had been to Appleshaw and gone away again Jack Beckett, by special arrangement with Colonel Adams, sent the bill for his drinks to his father. It was a pretty large bill but Charles was generous and liked to stand drinks all around. Jack was silent about this private agreement between them and always would be. The inhabitants of Appleshaw had summed Charles up pretty accurately, though his parents had confided their troubles to no one and he himself was always on his best behavior when he visited them, but they did not talk about him to each other, for there was an unexpressed conspiracy between them to keep Charles dark. It was a way in which they could express their affection for his parents, a form of loyalty to them.

“Go and get your fresh air, Charles,” said Colonel Adams. “It’s disgraceful, the early hour your mother and I turn in. Lock up behind you when you come back.”

Charles went out into the wonderful freshness of the night. The first stars were out but the afterglow was still in the west. The trees, in full leaf now, were outlined against it in rounded shapes of velvet darkness. The grass in the meadows was ready for cutting and every light stir of wind brought the scent of it. Charles walked slowly and in desolation. The ugly sound of his footsteps in the silence was as intolerable to him as the nagging headache that beset and confused him. The state of his health scared him at times and tonight fright pushed against him like the walls of a den that had grown too small for the beast inside. When this nightmare sensation came upon him he knew he must get a drink quickly, and he quickened his pace.

“Charles!”

Hovering at the gate of Orchard Cottage in her light dress she looked like a moth in the dusk, and like a moth that had settled on his arm he wanted to shake her off, for he was tired of her now and tonight every desire he had ever had was fused and narrowed down to this one thirst for a drink. But he had inherited his father’s courtesy and held to it with stubbornness. He wasn’t quite a swine yet, he would tell himself. He moved toward her. “How are you, Valerie?”

“Not very well,” she said plaintively. “I’m so tired always. You’re looking wonderful, Charles.”

In the dusk he did look magnificent, and as she had never noticed in him anything she did not want to notice, Appleshaw’s conspiracy of silence upon the subject of Charles had kept him enveloped in the veil of romanticism she had dropped over him at their first meeting. Had anyone told her that she had led a sheltered life and was not yet adult she would have been outraged. Yet it was true. She had married a good man very young, he had taken care of her, and the quiet places where he insisted upon living had given her no opportunities for anything beyond the loveless virtue that had sickened Charles of their affair almost as soon as it was well started. She had imagined herself romantically in love with him, she still thought she was, but what she loved was the fantasy picture of a faithful wife denying herself the grand passion of a lifetime for the sake of a worthless husband whom she was too loyal to desert. Charles, who from long experience was shrewd about women, had found her out very soon and had not attempted to pursue the affair to the usual
dénouement
, for which he was very well aware she lacked the courage. And she was scarcely worth the effort. He disliked effort and she was negligible. All he wanted to do now was to end the thing with the minimum of unpleasantness.

They stood one on each side of the gate and her hands were on his shoulders. They rested lightly and were white and thin. And her face too was white in the frame of dark hair. In the dusk she had beauty and the last flicker of his old feeling for her unexpectedly spurted up. He saw them suddenly as a tragic couple, suffering through misfortune rather than from fault, and his self-pity reached out to enfold her with himself in its pitiful satisfactions. He stepped over the low gate and took her in his arms and they clung together.

“Come with me and have a drink,” he whispered urgently. She looked up, for it was not the whisper she had been expecting. “At the pub? No. Paul’s there. Charles, what are you doing on Wednesday?”

“Nothing particular.”

“Then let’s go out together. I’ve told Paul I’m going to the hairdresser but I needn’t go. I’ll pick you up in the morning in my car. We’ll meet in the lime avenue, as we did before, and have another of our great days. Do you remember that day in the autumn when we picnicked in the woods? Do you remember, Charles?”

“I remember,” said Charles tenderly and wondered if she was referring to that tedious day when they had sat on hard beech roots in an east wind, drinking coffee that tasted of the thermos, and she had told him the story of her life. It was curious how he always seemed to be sitting on a hard seat in a draft when women told him the story of their lives. A self-absorbed woman was impervious to discomfort, a man never. “Not a picnic this time,” he said firmly. “I’m in funds at the moment. We’ll eat at some decent place and then see a movie. All right?”

“Heaven,” she whispered. “Ten o’clock on Wednesday?”

“Right,” he said and kissed her again, cursing himself for a fool. It had been easier to say yes than no and he always mechanically did the easy thing, even when it meant walking straight back into the situation he’d just been trying to get away from. Anyway it would get him away from his father’s company. “Bye-bye till Wednesday, then, if you’re sure you won’t come along to the pub?”

“But Paul’s there.”

“What of it? Is he one of those jealous blokes who pull a woman around by the hair if he catches her in another man’s company?”

“No, but I’ve been so careful to keep you apart. You’ve never met him.”

“I’d like to.”

“Why?”

“Curiosity.”

She was horrified. To her there was something indecent in the thought of lover and husband confronting each other. In the magazine stories she read they were always kept in watertight compartments until the fatal day when the husband came home too soon from the office and there was trouble. She didn’t want trouble. She wanted the twin glow of romantic passion and romantic martyrdom to wrap about her chilling spirit. “No, Charles,” she said.

“Bye-bye,” he said again, withdrawing himself gently from her clinging arms. In the lane he stopped to light a cigarette and she called to him again, but he seemed not to hear and went on to the pub. She went back into her cottage with shaking knees. Now there was bound to be trouble.

The pub was pleasant at this hour but Charles was scarcely aware of it until he had grabbed a drink from Jack Beckett and downed most of it. Then, his elbow on the counter, he looked around him, returning friendly greetings. He liked Appleshaw and he liked this pub. It was as near home as anywhere he knew. When he was away he often saw it as he saw it now, with the lights on and the dusk deeply blue beyond the uncurtained windows, the haze of tobacco smoke drifting up to the rafters, a ring of kindly faces smiling at him and the huge striped mound of Percy the cat heaped on the counter. He smiled around upon them all, Jack Beckett, Joshua Baker, Bert Eeles, Tom Archer the squire’s chauffeur and one or two others. The tall man with the dog he did not look at again after the first glance, for his mind recoiled from him with fear. Not of the man himself, for in that one glance he felt the quick pull of attraction, but of the fact of suffering. He’d suffered in the war, piteously and without courage, and now the thing seemed to be always lying in wait for him. Just when he was most lulled to safety it would confront him again in the sound of the ambulance bell, faces in a doctor’s waiting room, a dentist’s instruments. His body was at all times a timid mass of quivering nerves and he drank to quiet them, staving off the outcome. One could always stave things off for one more day.

And now here was this man Paul Randall moving toward him with his drink in his hand and speaking pleasantly. It was odd that a man who had suffered so much should have such an air of well-being. The recoil and the attraction broke over Charles together, with Paul’s inexorable advance upon him, and then he was through and in quiet water, in pleasant conversation with an agreeable stranger.

“Odd I’ve never come across you here,” he said. “And I’m here most evenings when I’m at Appleshaw.”