The Walking Stick
Authors: Winston Graham
CHAPTER ONE
The man had been eyeing me most of the way home, and even happened to leave the bus at the same stop; but as soon as I got off he lost interest and walked away hunching his
shoulders against the disappointment and the rain. I walked home, up Holly Hill, the wind beating against my back and legs. The road glimmered like wet polythene. I was late. It would soon be
dark.
We lived in one of those big early Edwardian houses, built without taste, but roomy and square and made to last. It had too many steps up to the front door, a semibasement, two floors above,
sash windows, an iron gate that wouldn’t shut, and an old street lamp immediately outside. This showed up the brass plate which read J. Douglas Dainton, MRCS, LRCP.
I opened the front door with my key and went in. They were both at home, and supper was nearly over. We always ate in the kitchen, winter and summer, and even when we had company. It was a long
trainlike room, with plenty of space for cooking at one end and eating at the other. It had most of the latest gadgets, for Erica loved gadgets: washing-up machines, mixers, toasters, infrared
grills, slicers, potato peelers, bottle openers, electric coffee mills, so that its business end looked like a stand at an Ideal Home exhibition. Cellophaned down one long wall were a selection of
paintings and crayon sketches done by all the children, but chiefly by my elder sister, Sarah, whose vision at an early age had been the most primitive and therefore the most prized. The other wall
had modern glass cupboards which were full of cooking spices and exotic Chinese teas and highly polished non-used copper moulds and steaming pans.
Apart from my bedroom it was the only comfortable room in the house.
When I got in, Dr J. Douglas Dainton, MRCS, LRCP, was just scraping the last of a Boursin cheese out of its silver paper and spreading it on a Ryvita biscuit. Propped against a toast rack was
The Informed Heart
by Bruno Bettelheim, which he was trying to read at the same time. Dr Erica Dainton, MB, ChB, was stirring her coffee and reading an egghead paperback I couldn’t see
the name of. When she saw me she pushed her glasses up her nose and said: ‘You’re so late. Have you been to a party or something?’
It was always her expectation somehow that I was going to break out into a gay life of my own.
‘No, there was some work I wanted to finish. Is there anything left?’
‘Of
course
. But it’ll be cold. The whole thing was served up before Minta left.’
My father looked across from his silver paper and smiled at me clinically. ‘You’re wet, Deborah. Thank God I haven’t to go out tonight.’ He picked up the clean knife he
was keeping for the purpose and turned over a page of his book.
I went to the stove and helped myself to the remains of a congealed stew. In silence I began to eat. My mother said: ‘Did you come by tube?’
‘No. Bus. It’s almost as easy.’
‘But so much longer, my dear, when you’re late.’
‘I like it better.’ She knew this already. She knew that I didn’t like confined places, tunnels, compartments, boxes, cupboards, caves.
‘Sarah rang up about half an hour ago. Asked to speak to you.’
‘Oh . . . What did she want?’
‘To invite you somewhere, I think. She’s never very forthcoming about these things.’
‘I expect she’ll ring again.’
‘Yes, she said she’d ring again.’
That rather exhausted the immediate conversation. As a family, although we talked a lot, we were never good on the trivia. When she saw I had nothing to say my mother gratefully pulled her
glasses down her nose again.
I flipped through the pages of the evening paper. Sotheby’s were in the news again with £7000 paid for a Meissen tea and coffee service of forty-four pieces. Prices went ever up.
There had been a murder in Kensington. The Minister of Health was advising doctors to exercise economy in their prescriptions. Wind and rain were forecast for the last week in April.
The telephone went in the hall. They both looked at me. ‘I expect that’s Sarah now,’ my mother said; and my father said: ‘If it’s anyone for me, say I’m out
and’ll call them back in fifteen minutes.’
‘Deborah,’ said the voice of my elder sister, when I lifted the receiver, ‘whatever time d’you get back these days?’
‘Thursday is sometimes a bit hectic. Why?’
‘I’m giving a party tomorrow to celebrate – just a couple of dozen people – eight o’clock. Any hopes?’
‘Well . . . thanks.’ I stared at myself in the dim hall mirror. I hadn’t combed my hair since coming in, and the rain had made rats’ tails of it. I looked an absolute
fright. ‘Did Erica suggest me?’
‘Of course not, you ape. D’you think I take notice of her suggestions anyhow?’
That was true. ‘What is it, a dance?’
‘In a three-roomed flat? But of course. With the band of the Grenadier Guards.’
‘Seriously. Shall I know anybody?’
‘Well, there’s me and Arabella. Fruits of the same womb. You’ll recognize me by the red rose.’
I plucked at a bit of skin round my thumb nail and then bit it.
‘Well?’ she said impatiently.
‘Thanks. Thank you, darling. I’d adore to come. What sort of clothes?’
‘Moderately smart. I’m sick of these sordid affairs where everyone comes looking as if they’ve been washed up with the local sewage.’
‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘What time did you say?’
‘Eight or thereabouts. Don’t eat because we’ll eat.’
After hanging up I was a minute or two doing something about the rats’ tails before going back into the kitchen. Late invitation for a party? Someone fallen sick? Bitchy. Give Sarah credit
for honesty: if she’d wanted me as a stop-gap she would simply have said so.
Pity there always had to be this thing between me and my family. They trying to compensate and be nicer than they wanted to be. Me on guard and not wanting them to be nicer than they wanted to
be.
I went back into the kitchen to my father and mother and told them what was on. Douglas was relieved that it wasn’t a call for him; Erica made a gallant attempt to be interested in what I
should wear, but after a minute or two, when I’d picked up the paper again, she went back to her egghead.
So silence fell, and Erica finished her coffee and Douglas made himself a pot of Soochong tea, and I scraped out the coagulated dish – not all to eat, but chiefly into the waste disposal
unit – and sat down with a cup of Maxwell House and we all read.
We had all had a tiring day.
My father at this time was fifty-eight, but I don’t think he looked it. He was a very hairless man, of head, eyebrow, chin, legs, chest; and even a photograph of twenty
years before showed him to have been just the same then. Otherwise he would have been very handsome, with a clear complexion, a fine profile and smiling frank blue eyes. I don’t really know
that he was more honest, more direct, more true, more trustworthy, more sincere than anyone else, but he gave this impression of
shining
candour. If there had been warmth in his eyes as well
he would have looked a saint. But there wasn’t warmth, or not much, or not much more than the professional man could afford to give off to each patient. To those who knew him well I think
even this much was a little too smoothly and evenly spread. You felt if you went to him medically you’d get much the same sympathy whether you had indigestion or angina.
In his youth he’d been a pretty good athlete, and he had kept his figure even today. He always looked astonishingly
clean
– even when he wore a dirty suit you got the
impression that his body was clean inside it; perhaps it was partly this lack of hair. His hands were always cool, like his voice. He never perspired. You could hardly imagine him ill or not in
command of a situation – though of course his command was that of someone on the General Staff, not in the field of battle.
Some people thought him lazy.
When the Welfare Service came in they were both quite young, with a growing family and practising together, since it was against Erica’s principles to give up her profession to raise
children. Douglas had taken one look at the new régime and had opted out of it right away. For eighteen years he had gone on with a tiny but rich private practice, claiming that he made as
much outside the Service for a quarter the work. Erica, reacting the opposite way, had at once gone into partnership with three women doctors with a shared surgery in the newer and less prosperous
part of Hampstead; no private patients were accepted, and the practice was conducted on strictly business lines, with each doctor having specified hours of work and leisure and no nonsense about
personal relationships between doctor and patient.
My mother was a tall woman and a clever one. She had qualified the year of her marriage. I’d heard her say: ‘Of course I adore children, but they have to be kept in proportion to
one’s own life. Otherwise at forty-five or fifty you’re a dead letter. It’s not civilized.’
My mother’s most stringent criticism was if a thing was not civilized.
She’d been good-looking too, but in a different way from Douglas, and, unfairly, it hadn’t been as durable. The fresh complexion was cottage-womany in a good light. Her curly hair
was grey and looked marvellous just after it was done each Friday afternoon. But by Saturday the texture was going and for the rest of the week it was as light and spiky as straw. Her big brown
eyes were narrowed with having to make constant decisions, and these constant decisions, because they had to be authoritative, had given her a bossy look.
I suppose you could say they both belonged to the Hampstead intelligentsia. They believed in asepsis, Freud, Aldermaston, the four-letter word, the Berliner Ensemble, the anti-novel, Joan
Littlewood, the
Observer
, co-educational day schools, and the use of Christian names between parents and children.
For Heaven’s sake, I’m not trying to be cynical or to suggest these things are necessarily either right or wrong; I’m only trying to describe my home as it was, so that what
happened can be seen against its proper background.
Perhaps some clever people will be able to see a connection. Or perhaps it was inevitable anyhow.
You could say in a sense that my father and mother were even old-fashioned in some things. After all they were married and had stayed married for twenty-nine years. At least from when I was old
enough to take notice, I don’t think they ever slept with anybody else. They never drank to excess, or took drugs more awful than the occasional secconal or rogitin – even when packaged
and supplied free by the manufacturers. If they were out of temper, their temper hadn’t a lot of bite (which is more than I can say of myself). They were never in debt, except to the bank.
They paid their taxes, schedule D and E respectively. They’d somehow reared three daughters, who were now all, or soon would be, respectably self-supporting. They performed a valuable service
for the community. And they took a month’s holiday abroad each year, always apart.
They were in fact two highly successful figures in urban society; and if they had any failure to irk their justifiable satisfaction, it was me.
I often wondered why it bothered them so much. I suppose they looked on it as a reflection on their own professional competence.