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  ‘I think enough has been said about that already,’ said George.

  ‘I don’t remember you being very active at the time,’ was her reply.

  *

  Dinner was the worst time for George, for then Ruth would ask Steven’s friend, Robert, with mock slyness, about what her son had been up to at Oxford.

  ‘I’m sure he’s found a girl; Robert, do tell me, he has, hasn’t he?’ she smiled intimately, leaning forward her face between her hands. Steven cringed, not for himself, but for Robert.

  ‘What about that little girl at Boots, Steven …’ said Robert attempting to make a joke of the conversation. To his surprise Ruth took it seriously and changed the subject.

  George reassured her afterwards.

  ‘No, darling, of course he wasn’t being serious, the young will have their jokes.’

  ‘I don’t like Robert. I think he may be a bad influence.’

  ‘Seems harmless enough to me.’

  Nevertheless George felt no inclination to drink and Ruth herself remained sober. One had to be thankful for small mercies, thought George sanctimoniously.

  *

  Christmas Day started well. They were drunk before lunch and sleepy by tea. At six o’clock Ruth started the drinks circulating again and George dutifully played some old 78s: My Ideal, She’s Wonderful and of more recent vintage, Everything’s up to date in Kansas City. This was a great success. Steven, though, suggested that his mother and George gave an exhibition dance. George, who had just drunk three whiskies too close together for stability, declined.

  ‘All right then,’ said Steven, smirking at Robert, ‘this is a “ladies excuse me dance”. Come on, Mumsie, get the old man on his feet.’

  George looked at him with uncompromising disgust.

  ‘Oh come on, George, darling, we’ll show the younger ones.’

  ‘Come on, George, don’t spoil the fun. Play the game,’ said Steven in a simpering voice.

  Ruth was already on her feet. There was no going back now. George wondered how many gins she’d had. They put on My Ideal again and tried to fox-trot. George held her firmly, trying to avoid seeing Steven over her shoulder. The dance ended without Ruth catching her high heels in the edge of the carpet. George sat down again relieved. Everybody laughed and they all had another drink.

  David had been given two new engines and a great many rails and didn’t appear until dinner, so there were no tiresome requests for backgammon.

  At dinner George looked across the bowl of flowers where Ruth’s white hands moved in the candlelight, doling out portions of lemon meringue pie. How much had she changed? Still good-works Ruth with the Christian soul and heathen flesh. A little more skin under the chin … after all she was forty-eight. Really remarkably few wrinkles. Of course her stomach …

  Steven was passing him a plate. George’s ‘thank you’ came mechanically while his mind went back over the past thirteen years.

  Brandy followed coffee and George sank further into his deep-wing chair, his hands folded over his stomach in those familiar surroundings of the drawing-room. The small marble clock on the mantelpiece, the mirror behind it, the flickering fire in the grate, all seemed to shimmer against the more sombre backcloth of mottled wall-paper and darkened portraits. Steven and Robert were talking softly on the sofa. David was unusually reading a book: a book George had given him for Christmas.

  The evening appeared to be fading out in good-humoured mellowness. Ruth, however, decided to watch the evening Carol Service on the television. There was something about the voices of the female members of the choir which seemed to be amusing Steven and his friend. Ruth was looking at them sideways. George winked at them good-naturedly, but mistimed it. Ruth was on her feet; her face flushed, her eyes shimmering.

  ‘Come on, old thing, only a joke,’ said George level-headedly.

  ‘In a religious service?’

  David looked away. Steven’s friend was looking at the carpet. George walked up to her, and held her firmly by the arm.

  ‘Better have a rest.’ He turned and said in a confidential undertone to Robert, ‘Had too much.’

  The three boys heard the clatter of cutlery being hurled down the passage as the choir of St. Margaret’s sang on. George’s voice got fainter as he retreated towards the lavatory. The noise of hammering fists testified to the firmness of the lock. Back in the drawing-room Steven walked slowly towards the television and turned up the sound, ‘Ding dong merrily on high …’.

  THREE

  IN spite of his drunkenly inept behaviour several months before, George sober rarely brooded for long over such setbacks, they were all a small price to pay for the comparative luxury he lived in.

  He hadn’t done a day’s work since he left the Army at the end of the war and that was fifteen years ago. Ruth hadn’t been precisely beautiful when he’d met her, but as the rich wife of a peer she had had other attractions for an idle young man in his mid-twenties. George was flattered and incredulous when she fell for him. His war record was good, true, but he’d never previously had any notable sexual success. Several clumsy fumbling affairs which lacked nobility and decorum, two qualities to which he had especially aspired. From cinema usherette to peeress was a step in the right direction.

  His parents had done their middle-class best for him, he’d been sent to a public school, not one of the best, but nevertheless a public school. His career there had been short and uninspiring. He had not been expelled in a blaze of notoriety for stealing or perversion; his housemaster had merely suggested that the academic standards of the school did not seem suited to the steadfastness of his endeavour. It was the usual story: a succession of crammers tutored him for the Army exam but to no avail. He had just failed the first exams in the Estate Agency course, when Hitler dramatically changed the course of his life, and that of several million others, with the invasion of Poland. A few months later George was training to be an officer. His first action was in Egypt and it was there, at Sidi Barrani, that he won his M.C. It had been comparatively easy really. With six shots, one hand-grenade and five men he had captured five times that many sleeping Italians. Later on he was wounded in the back and legs at Alamein. The rest of the war was passed peacefully enough in a Yorkshire hospital and it was there that he met Ruth.

  As the lady of the nearest sizeable house, she emerged once a week from an old shooting-brake to enter George’s world of white corridors and sterilised floors, bringing fruit and homely small talk to the wounded.

  George, who had few doubts about the war lasting much longer, had a great many more about what would happen to him when it was over. Four years ago his father had put what remained of his meagre capital into a publishing company, which he had barely lived long enough to see bankrupt. The old man had been buried in Brompton Cemetery, leaving his widow a pension and a suburban house, and his only son £2,000: a sum which, George thought lugubriously, would last him little more than a year of unemployment. And as he looked over his raised feet at the rose garden outside the ward he thought about suitable employment. Unfortunately the only jobs suitable for an officer and a gentleman demanded influence, money, or, failing that, an exemplary academic record, none of which he possessed.

  The triviality of Lady Lifton’s conversation and the sight of her sensible economy war-time clothes did little to alleviate his depression. She would walk from bed to bed talking to the soldiers and soon even George realised that her time spent by his bedside was as long as that paid to four others put together. Her air of complacent security and well-being irritated him, as his inattentiveness well demonstrated. She pleaded with him to take more interest in the things around him. He could hardly have pointed out that, never having enjoyed circuses, the things around him were the least likely to entertain. The man in the bed to his right was paralysed from the waist down and had lost a large part of one of his cheeks, while the only mobile member of the ward clicked past mechanically on a metal leg at half-hour intervals to the lavatory. Ruth was
amazed at his rejection of the old clichés: ‘fighting to recover, learning to live again’. She talked to the Sister, who assured her that his pain was no longer great. George had already been out in a wheel-chair and had twice been taken to the bathroom: on the back of the door was a Union Jack and underneath the words ‘Keep Smiling’.

  But as the long days passed and the sun slowly inched across the wall from the opposite beds to the end of his own counterpane, he couldn’t help thinking about Ruth’s home life. What was the woman doing now? Was she in the bath? On a horse? In the kitchen? Did she have dogs? What did Lord Lifton look like? How old was he? George began to look forward to those visits, visits of a person who came into his world from the security of a happier and affluent place. The kind of woman to whom he might soon be delivering groceries. What would she be like then? She probably wouldn’t answer the door but would lean out from a high turret window, ‘Leave them there. Cook will collect them.’ And yet now she talked to him with more than compassion, even with interest. They were together as equals.

  George smiled at her for the first time on her next visit and noticed too, the shape of her face, the angle of her cheek-bone, her auburn hair and dark-brown eyes. He wondered, too, what lay beneath that loose-cut coat and skirt.

  Yes, he had read the book and eaten the grapes, even the bad ones. His legs were definitely better.

  Perhaps when he had recovered he might come and stay with Lord Lifton and her for several weeks?

  The visit never took place; before that there had been the returned pressure hand in hand, the faster breath and the half-fearful stare into each other’s eyes, which said many things but one above all.

  Ruth’s infidelity took place a week after George’s release from the nursing-home and two months before the end of the war.

  The ‘Lamb and Flag’ was a small pub outside Ely in the flat Cambridgeshire countryside, far enough from Yorkshire to be safe. How well George had behaved. How gay and how carefree he had been. They had signed the book as Mr. and Mrs. Byron because George had thought it funny. How the girl at the reception had blushed when Ruth laughed. A woman called Myrtle got terribly drunk that evening; her husband had been killed in Italy. She had been sitting on a stool at the corner of the bar and George had said ‘That woman’s had too much’. Ruth agreed, although she didn’t notice. Then Myrtle had fallen off the stool and George’s leg had prevented him being quick enough to stop a spaniel licking her face while she was on the floor. He had carried her to a sofa and afterwards helped her upstairs. And all this with his legs hardly healed. Ruth sat by in silent admiration. ‘And so embarrassing too, the way her jersey came up at the back when you lifted her, but you were so good, George.’ Goodness was a quality that Ruth admired.

  The night itself was a success.

  *

  Lifton in a fit of impulsive anger had refused a divorce. George saw that there was more than a little method in his madness. Had Lifton gained the custody of his children he would have been obliged to pay for their education. A task which the size of his income rendered impossible. Steven had been nearly five at the time. They had all gone to live in a London flat and Ruth, whose private income was considerable, had engaged a cook and a nanny. George had moved in first and the others joined him two weeks later. It was then that Ruth had realised that she was pregnant; she was uncertain by whom. For the sake of the child’s legitimacy, Lifton agreed to be the father in name. Besides, as Ruth argued to herself, George might not be with them for ever.

  Meanwhile George did his best to leave no grounds for this uncertainty. He decided that the time had come to spend his £2,000 profitably. He bought small pieces of furniture, china, and clothes and more clothes for Ruth and Steven. She in turn provided him with silk shirts and handkerchiefs, two new suits and frequent visits to the theatre. They saw few people but remained happy. George had discovered her to be a rich woman while still at the hospital, and the discovery had increased his determination to invest his meagre patrimony with extravagant care. His recklessness after Lifton’s parsimony achieved the desired effect. Ruth sold the flat and bought a house near Sloane Square. George was soon installed with all solemnity as a permanent fixture. It was in this house that David was born.

  In spite of a life that exceeded George’s wildest dreams of extravagance, Ruth was not happy in London. She missed the country and hated the gossip. George, who then felt insufficiently sure of his position to object, acquiesced in the move to Cornwall and Trelawn. After this Ruth rarely came to London. When George left Trelawn to go anywhere he usually did so alone.

  They had been at Trelawn for twelve years now.

  FOUR

  DAVID went back to school two days after his fifteenth birthday on January 20th. Steven had already left for Oxford.

  George was glad when the holidays were over. The last week had been particularly trying. Steven and Robert had waged an unceasing war on the rabbits, who in spite of myxomatosis were returning in ever-increasing numbers. George thought David distinctly cissy for his years and had persuaded him to come on one of these onslaughts. Quite often the rabbits were shot and only injured. This happened on this particular occasion. Steven had picked up a wounded animal by its back legs and had broken its head against the top of a fence-post with as little feeling as one might break an egg on the edge of a cup. The rabbit’s front legs went on moving first quickly and then more and more slowly as though trying to escape. Only after the fifth blow when its head was no more than a mass of bloody pulp did its legs finally stop. David watched apparently unmoved and then walked off in the direction of the house. George followed his dwindling figure as he moved away slowly up the drive that rose towards Trelawn with its pseudo-gothic battlements framed by trees. The rest of them said nothing, killed a few more rabbits and went back to lunch.

  George remembered that Steven had enjoyed shooting rabbits when he was as young as eleven. Then with a penknife he would slit open the envelope of the stomach and, holding the rabbit up, watch the still-palpitating intestines fall out and lie quivering on the ground. His interest might have been purely scientific, George felt. But David had always been revolted. An event which George remembered with especial distaste had been when David found a small bird a few summers back, caught in a patch of melted tar on the tennis court. He had tried to wash it off with paraffin but without success. Why the hell he hadn’t killed it then George couldn’t guess; the bird’s breathing had grown difficult as the tar slowly dried on its warm body. George had put the shotgun into David’s hand. At six inches there was very little left.

  The day after the rabbit episode the cook elected to give them a meal that they rarely had in spite of their opportunities—rabbit pie. A dish which George secretly admitted was not one of his favourites. But David’s blunt refusal to eat it seemed to be little less than sentimental.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, boy, if everybody behaved like that we’d all be vegetarians. We’d be eaten out of the country by animals.’

  ‘I don’t like rabbit pie and I won’t eat it,’ had been the answer.

  Ruth, who had also found the pie unpleasant, further aggravated George by mentioning the forced breeding of animals.

  ‘I suppose that goes for rabbits?’ said George sarcastically.

  ‘Anyway darling, if he doesn’t like eating meat why should he? I don’t see what’s so funny about being vegetarian. I once knew several …’

  ‘Well, what’d they say to him at school I’d like to know?’

  Ruth really was far too soft with the boys, always had been. If she’d been a bit firmer with Steven earlier on, he wouldn’t be as impossible as he was, reflected George bitterly. And as for those food cranks … George remembered one called Rathbone, whom Ruth had known in London shortly after the war. Such a jolly fellow with his tiny sparkling eyes and boyish humour. Cold showers every morning, never had a cold in his life. His toothlessness he had sworn was nothing to do with his diet: a gum infection when young, or so he said. A fine
sense of humour too when it really came to it. They’d had a corgi puppy that piddled in the brim of his hat when it fell off the hat stand in the hall. He didn’t come so often then. Probably thought flowers grew in detergent. George smiled and said:

  ‘An uncle of mine once had a pig called Betty; fed it sugar and sweets every day. He doted on the animal. But in the end he killed her. Used to say, “I never knew how much I loved her till I tasted how good she was”.’

  Nobody seemed amused. George went over to the sideboard and poured himself a drink in the disapproving silence that followed. Of course it wasn’t the boy’s fault he was so sensitive. After all the war blunted most of us, George reflected dully. Used to be pretty sensitive myself. Cried when our pet cat was run over. Dreadful really … you take something for granted and suddenly it isn’t there any longer. His father had buried it with its collar and label on. That was the worst bit, it was so useless somehow that collar. What use was an address now, any more than the bits of cat’s fish in the fridge. Still once you’ve seen more dead men than you’re ever likely to see dead cats, you don’t think like that any more.

  One visit to Margate on Bank Holiday’s the next best thing. All those raw meat shoulders and loose white fleshy stomachs should be enough to make the most sentimental man doubt the sanctity of human life, let alone that of the animal creation. George sat down at the table again, wise in his detachment. Perhaps he’d tell David about the cat some day. He’d already told him about the men.

  *

  That evening Ruth talked to George about David. He was so unlike Steven, much darker with a high forehead not unlike George’s, and eyes the same dark brown as Ruth’s.

  ‘I don’t think he’s happy at school. We used to know him so well and now he’s so quiet and withdrawn,’ she looked at a small photograph of him taken in London holding a toy steam-roller, and then back at George. ‘Perhaps he ought to have gone to a local school and come home at the week-ends. I thought he might have made a pianist but it wasn’t to be.’