The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon (40 page)

^{She rummaged in a drawer until she found what she sought, a}

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^{box of tiny, heart-shaped sleeping pills and as she swallowed two with a glass of soda-water it occurred to her that they were Sebastian's pills dating from over a year ago and that never had she used this means to get a night's rest on account of anyone so utterly predictable as Sebastian Sermon.}

^CHAPTER
NINE

^{Mr.
Sermon in Damp Clothes}

^{the
long spell of fine weather broke towards the end of July and for the first time since he strode down the hill into Kingsbay Mr. Sermon saw Avalon under seeping skies and ragged hedges of low cloud, the harbour a sombre shadow behind a veil of mist and the twin headlands blotted out by thin, slanting rain. Day after day passed without a gleam of sunshine and visitors, hunched under mackintoshes, slouched along the esplanade looking as though they were victims of a monstrous confidence trick on the part of fate and their landladies.}

^{He spent a good deal of his duty periods in the deserted zoo, brewing endless pots of coffee with Rachel and sloshing out to the sheds in the yard under the cliff where the food for the animals was stored. He was foraging here one morning when he noticed a broad crack in the stone buttress that had been built into the cliff face beneath which the zoo premises were situated. Flood water from a network of culverts immediately above was already cascading over the twenty-foot retaining wall and the fissure between the blocks of stone seemed to him menacing.}

^{He went back into the zoo kitchen and told Rachel, afterwards putting through a call to the Town Clerk and asking for a squad of workmen to be diverted to the spot before the wall collapsed. Ben}

^{Bignall sounded snappish and out of sorts. "I can't send anyone down there until next week," he told Sebastian gruffly, "the Mill Brook is blocked at Crowley Bridge and water is a foot deep in Moorend Road. People have been ringing us day and night and if we don't take immediate action we shall have a rent strike on our hands! I'll ask Hesketh to come over and see what can be done in the way of sandbagging."}

^{Hesketh, the Town Surveyor, looked in during the lunch break and dismissed the wall fissure as a trivial matter. He was tired and short-tempered after a day and a night out at the Moorend Road flood and all he did was to send over a vanload of sandbags which Sebastian, Rachel and the two parking attendants filled and placed in position between store sheds and holding wall. It was back-breaking work and when it was done, and the parking attendants had left, he and Rachel sat for a long time over the stove listening to the monotonous drip of water in the yard.}

^{"I don't know what I'm expected to do if that wall collapses and the water comes down on us," Rachel complained. "What does one do with seventy to eighty birds and animals caught up in a flood ?"}

^{"Turn them loose, I imagine," said Sebastian, "all but the snakes, that is! Most of the cages are too heavy to load on to lorries unless we were lucky enough to find a dozen volunteers!" and he stood up, stretching himself and yawning. "Damn the wall! I'm for getting warm and dry, Rachel. How about you?"}

^{"I'm staying here tonight," she said briefly. "I'm not going to lock up and turn my back on the poor things with the wall in that condition!"}

^{He noticed then that she had erected a camp bed and put blankets beside the stove and wondered whether he should try and talk her out of remaining at the zoo overnight. She had the telephone of course, but if she needed help urgently it would take at Least twenty minutes to reach her at this end of the promenade.}

^{"Are you sure you'll be all right here alone?" he asked, and she shrugged her shoulders, a gesture that reminded him she had been far from her cheerful self during the last few days.}

^{Has the weather got you down to that extent ?" he asked, smiling, and she said, or snapped, "It isn't the weather, it's you!"}

^"Me?"

^{"I know about the job Daddy offered you and I know you haven't accepted yet."}

^{"No," he said, unhappily, "I haven't, and your Father knows why I haven't. But leave me to sort it out in good time. It's a job for a married man."}

^{"You aren't married," she flashed out, "not really married! If Sybil won't live with you why should you regulate your life by her? You could land that job without Sybil and it's a job you've set your heart on! Fred wants you to have it but he can't keep it open indefinitely. If you don't make up your mind in a day or so you'll lose it, you can take that from me!"}

^{He said, slowly, "Are you sure of that, Rachel? Your father gave me until mid-August!"}

^{"He doesn't tell you everything," she said, sulkily. "He's under pressure from the Governors, I heard him on the phone to them last night."}

^{"You want me to accept very much, don't you?"}

^{"Yes, but it isn't personal!" she said emphatically. "I want it for your sake far more than mine. I stand by what I said when we were coming back from that walk a fortnight ago. I'd grab you if I thought I could but I don't, not really! No one will ever really get you away from that woman and that makes me mad! I want to see you stand on your own two feet and you've got a real chance to do it now but you won't, you're still hoping for a miracle! You are, aren't you Martin?"}

^{"Yes," he admitted, "I suppose I am. When your Father came up with the offer of that job I saw a chance of Sybil and I making a fresh start but I dare say you're right, she'll never bury herself down here, two hundred miles from the West End and her damned Amateur Circus!"}

^{"So you'll let this slip and eventually drift back?"}

^{He gave her a wry smile. "You don't know me as well as you think you do, Rachel." He studied her a minute wondering how much of her acrimony for Sybil stemmed from genuine affection for him, and how much from bruised pride dating from the afternoon on the Tor. He felt nothing for her now but comradeship and speculated on}

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^{the possibility that she might ultimately arrive at maturity if she became his mistress but rejected the fancy almost at once. She would live and die an adolescent, despite her marriage, her series of jobs, her gallivanting about the world in search of stability. It was not in her to mature and perhaps herein lay her appeal. He reached out and ruffled her hair but she did not respond to the gesture, remaining with head cupped in hands and elbows on knees staring into the stove. He left her for a moment to take a final look at the sandbag wall and on his way back stopped by the door.}

^{"I'll tell you what, Rachel. I'll give Sybil until Friday night. If she hasn't written, phoned or shown up by then I'll go over to school and tell your father to put me up for the interview!"}

^{She looked up, surprised: "What will you tell them?"}

^{"The facts; that I'm separated from my wife and likely to remain so. It may work if I impress them in other respects. People are pretty broadminded about that kind of thing nowadays. They have to be, don't they?"}

^{"if they turn you down I'll write to every Governor telling him what I think of him!" she said. "Will you ring me before you turn in tonight?"}

^{"I was going to in any case. Good night, Ray."}

^{Sebastian fought his way home and let himself into the empty house, turning on the electric fire and peeling off his wet clothes to drape them round the stove. He drank a whisky while he was waiting for the kettle to boil and went out to the wire letter-box to see if there was any mail. There was nothing from Sybil but Olga had written another fat letter describing her descent upon Rhodes. Mercifully there were no more snaps of Andrew the publisher.}

^{He read her letter over supper and found it rather twittery. Somehow this globe-trotting Olga did not seem the woman with whom he had shared this house for three carefree weeks and the realisation saddened him, for at the back of his mind Olga had always stood four-square as insurance against loneliness. He knew that he could never find the permanence and tranquillity he needed with Rachel and that her almost glowering passion for him would soon go grey and cold, like every other enthusiasm of her zigzag journey through life. Sybil, it seemed, was determined to hold fast to her way of life,}

^{a way that could never be his now that he had seen the other side of the hill and Olga- ? As in a series of rapidly revolving pictures he saw his life as Olga's husband, a source upon which she fed, intellectually and sexually, with demands made upon him no less exhausting for being amiable and conciliatory. 'I don't know,' he thought, 'I seem to have come full circle. When I left home I broke up the jig-saw pattern of my life meaning to remake it but now none of the pieces seem to fit! I'm stuck with antique selling and beach supervising when I really want to be a teacher, and I'm vacillating between Olga and Rachel when I know in my heart that I want Sybil, providing Sybil would let me lead. I've enjoyed myself these last few months but have I really learned anything that has a direct bearing upon the future? Only that I won't return to the old life, so it all ends in deadlock!'}

^{He did what he usually did on these occasions, deliberately shelved the problem until something should happen to compel re-assessment. He took up a book he had borrowed from the Barrow-dene Library, a history of the Dukes of Burgundy, and settled down to read, but he was very tired after all that sandbag filling and was soon fast asleep in the famous arm-chair, the heavy book open on his knees, his reading glasses balanced on the end of his nose. The little clock chimed ten, then ten-thirty but he did not hear it.}

^{It was the telephone bell which brought him stumbling to his feet. It had settled down to a steady burr-burr and somehow he knew that it had been ringing for some time. Bemused, and shedding book and glasses en route, he blundered into the hall and grabbed the receiver. Rachel's voice reached him and he recognised desperate urgency.}

^{"Martin? Oh, thank God! Are you dressed? Can you come right away? The wall is down and water is coming into the yard like Niagara!"}

^{"Have you phoned the Surveyor's office?"}

^{"There's no one there, everyone is up at Moorend Road, if . . .", and then the telephone went dead and he stood a moment staring at it and saying, "Listen . . . listen, Ray!" before he realised that there would be no reply.}

^{He thought, savagely, 'Damn it, I must get help from somewhere!}

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^{What about the police?', and then, as he jogged the receiver, the picture of Rachel waist-deep in flood water and surrounded by terrified animals projected him out of the front door and into the teeth of a raging south-westerly gale, without cap or coat and wearing a pair of loose-fitting carpet slippers. The one thing he did grab as he rushed past the hallstand was the torch that Olga kept there for lighting strangers down the porch steps to The Coombe.}

^{It was the wildest night he ever remembered, tumultuous with threshing rain and a wind that came bellowing over the western headland like a maddened giant determined to flatten everything in his path. Gusts screamed through the elms on the edge of the links and slates crashed from the steep roofs of The Coombe cottages, a fragment striking him on the shoulder as he ran down the hill, holding his torch outstretched like a rapier and losing both slippers in the loose pebbles at the foot of the gradient. He did not stop to retrieve them but hurried on barefoot along the glistening pavement of the Esplanade, thankful that down here there was a glimmer of light from the widely-spaced street lamps. To his right the sea crashed to the foot of the wall and twenty-foot showers of spray soared over with every other wave, drenching him before he had gone fifty yards. Where the seafront curved he remembered to take a short-cut across the parking ground but he forgot the presence of Symes' motor-coaches, parked in line near the eastern exit. The feeble gleam of his torch on the bodywork brought him up short but not in time to avoid a collision and he bumped knee and chin on the vehicle, recoiling and shouting a curse into the storm. Then it occurred to him that the accident might have been providential for transport would be a Godsend over at the zoo and he scrambled into the driving seat and groped in the glove pocket for the ignition key that Symes' men usually left there for relief drivers in the morning. It was there and he started the engine but failed to locate the panel light, so that he had to try every knob and switch before he found headlights and windscreen wiper.}

^{A moment later he was off, sweeping round in a half-circle and shooting between the exit posts at full throttle. He handled the bus as if it was a small saloon, driving it full-tilt along the esplanade to the patch of yellow light that showed inland from the last lamp-post,}

^{and when he arrived in the gravel yard of the zoo he remembered to swing round in the wide arc and ram the gear into reverse so that the rear faced the building. Then he jumped out and sloshed through a foot of swirling water to the main door but it was locked so he returned and ran round to the side entrance.}

^{The scene here was chaotic. There was a light burning in the kitchen and in its glow he saw what had occurred in the yard. The holding wall was now less than three feet high and there was a twenty-foot subsidence on the bank immediately above. A torrent was rushing through the rent with such force that it was obvious the timber structure below would be overwhelmed in a matter of minutes. Even now the store sheds were disintegrating and a mass of flotsam was swirling about in the yard. He plunged through to the back door, the water reaching his thighs and banged despairingly on the panels, calling Rachel's name at the top of his voice.}