She disappeared again. Robert’s head and shoulders rose out of the bracken. One hand held a scarlet and sopping handkerchief to his face. The other was out of sight—probably still between his legs. Even then, he essayed a sort of nonchalant courtesy through the bloody linen.
“Frifling infury. Hofpital. Outfashients. ’Fscuse—”
He waded away. Evie was still hidden.
“Bobb—ee—Where are you?”
She broke out into the glade, came tripping along it, socks and sandals flicking this way and that. On the other side of the bracken the motor bike started and rattled away in a decrescendo. Evie stopped.
“There! How am I going to get home? It’s all your fault! And he’s going off to Cranwell tomorrow! It was the last—”
“Last what?”
She turned back to me. Her one eye was very bright, and she was breathing as quickly as I was. She gave a scandalized laugh.
“Boys are awful!”
“Spoilt his beauty for him at any rate.”
“Your shirt’s wringing wet—look. It’s sticking to you.”
“Cadet Officer Ewan, the Noseless Wonder. That’s what he’ll be.”
I caught another whiff of her, through the rank smell of my own sweat. I grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her close. My teeth had unclenched themselves but my heart had started to pound all over again.
“Evie—”
The woods swam.
“I’ll—I’ll drain the pond for you.”
Her paintbrushes shivered. Inside them, one eyeball rolled up. Her lips curled farther open as I bent towards them.
“Listen! There!”
I tried to draw her close; but she was stronger than Robert and shoved me away. She moved in a panic. From the valley, I could hear the church clock striking.
“Third time I been late this week!”
She plunged into the bracken and I plunged after her but my naked feet found a mass of thistles so that I danced and howled.
“Wait for me, Evie!”
“It’s surg’ry already!”
I pulled the more obvious of the prickles out, then crawled through, back the way Robert and I had come. His trousers and jacket still hung on the bush, and there was a shoe under it. I rolled down my own trouser legs and got my own shoes and socks on as quickly as I could. Evie was fifty yards up the road by the time I was ready to go after her. She would walk, then run for a bit with her bob flopping, then walk again. The most I thought I could salvage out of this encounter was an arrangement for another meeting, so I rode fast and skidded to a spectacular stop ahead of her.
“There’s a good idea! Don’t look round—”
She was hitching her skirt up nearly to her waist. She was wearing short white knickers under them with white embroidery round the edges. She sat astride the carrier of my bike and the carrier groaned.
“You are a pet! Hurry!”
By putting my full weight on one pedal, I could just about get the bike moving. We wobbled off up the road.
“I shall be ever so late.”
I exerted what strength I had left and started to sweat again. We worked up a fair speed.
“Oliver—I believe he left his jacket behind, as well as—I don’t know what Mrs. Ewan’s going to say! After we’ve got back, you wouldn’t like to—”
“To what?”
“Somebody ought to fetch them for him.”
I gave a kind of snarl, put up one hand to wipe the hair and sweat out of my eyes and nearly fell off.
“Careful!”
There was a sudden flood of light, so though my eyes watched the road under my front wheel I knew we were out of the woods and at the top of the hill. I sat back, allowing gravity to do the rest. The church clock stood at a quarter past the hour.
“Aren’t you going a bit fast?”
I put both brakes on. They dragged for a moment, then our speed increased again. I gripped them hard but they had no effect. I heard a shriek from behind me and then the rise of the Old Bridge approached us at about sixty miles an hour. As we struck it there came a grinding clatter from the carrier, a loud bang from my rear tire and a wail from Evie. The bike seemed to stop in its own length; and her weight nearly sent me over the handlebars. She detached herself from the carrier and stood for a moment, beating her bottom with both hands.
“Tore my dress I think—no. It’s all right.”
“Hang on a minute!”
“I got to go.”
“Can’t we—”
“P’raps. I don’t know. Thanks anyway for the lift.”
She scurried over the bridge and vanished down the other side. I examined my bike. The carrier and the rear mudguard had wrapped themselves round the wheel. The tyre was flat. I cursed and struggled with the wreckage. At last I managed to disentangle it, jerking the mudguard away from the tattered rubber. I pushed my bike bumpety-bump over the bridge. Evie was progressing up the High Street in the same way as she had come from the pond—a little run, then a walk, then a little run again. Suddenly she quickened her pace and kept it up; but she was too late. Tiny, birdlike Mrs. Babbacombe with her grey cloche hat and shopping basket had seen her. She ran across the road, grabbed Evie by the elbow and kept hold of it. They went up the street side by side, Mrs. Babbacombe making pecks and nags at her daughter’s shoulder. I thought with ungenerous satisfaction that Evie would have to think fast, to get out from under that one. I went bumping up the street and then turned in over the concrete apron of the garage to find Henry; but when I saw where he was I went on wheeling my bike in a semicircle to come out again. He was standing in white overalls, his hands on his hips, looking at Miss Dawlish’s little two-seater.
“Master Oliver—”
“Oh hullo Henry. I thought you were busy. I wasn’t going to bother you.”
Henry bent down and examined my back wheel. I looked over him at the two-seater and my feet froze to the concrete. It might have been sunk for a year or two in a swamp.
“Dyma vi,” said Henry. “That’s a bad split, indeed it is. You’ve been giving some other lad a lift, haven’t you? Well now. We shan’t get any more use out of that!”
I heard a soft hissing behind me. Captain Wilmot pulled up beside us in his electric invalid carriage.
“Hullo Henry. Is my other battery ready?”
“Not for another hour, Captain,” said Henry. “Just take a look at this!”
He went over to the two-seater.
“Hold on,” said Captain Wilmot. “I’ll stretch me legs for a bit. Don’t go, young Oliver. I want to hear about the team.”
He began to manoeuvre in the basketwork chair, grunting and gritting his teeth.
“Fix bayonets!”
Captain Wilmot was a war wreck, adequately pensioned, provided with transport, and a secretarial job at the hospital for which he was, as he said, remunerated with an honorarium. The shell that had buried him had also filled him full of metal fragments in unexcavatable places. The rude wits of Chandler’s Close, where he lived in the cottage opposite Sergeant Babbacombe, always said that he rattled far more than his chair. He was deaf in one ear from the shell. Cotton wool hung out of it. He secreted, heavily.
“I’ve got to get away. I—”
“For God’s sake! Stay where you are.”
He was testy. This was because he was getting out of his carriage. Whenever he was getting in or out of his carriage he was testy. Indeed, if you caught a glimpse of his face before he had rearranged it you could sometimes see a sort of animal savagery there as if the force that lifted him had been sheer hate. Yet he was fond of young people and of youth generally—perhaps because his own had been blown out of him before he had had any use from it; a junior clerk whose country needed him. He gave his services free to the team on the miniature rifle range at our grammar school. After endless manoeuvring he would sit by us as we lay at the firing point, giving advice and encouragement.
“Don’t pull, boy! Your foresight’s going up and down li
ke a bucket in a well! Squeeze—like this.”
Then you would feel a handful of your gluteus maximus massaged and squeezed for a few moments.
“Now what do you think of that, Captain?”
Captain Wilmot inched forward on his two sticks and examined the car closely.
“Been through a barrage by the looks of it.”
My feet were not frozen to the concrete. They were buried in it.
“Joy Riding they call it,” said Henry. “Young black-guards. I’d give them joy riding.” He opened the door and poked about inside. “Here. Look at this!”
He backed out and turned round. In his hand he held a gold cross and chain.
“Well now, a cross is a thing Miss Dawlish never wore in her life, I’m certain!”
Captain Wilmot leaned over Henry’s hand.
“Are you sure, Henry? I’ve seen it somewhere—”
Henry brought it close to his eyes.
“‘I.H.S.’ There’s writing on the other side too. ‘E.B. Amor vincit omnia.’ What would that mean, then?”
Captain Wilmot turned to me.
“Come on, young Oliver. You’re the scholar of the party.”
I was cold inside from fear, and hot outside from embarrassment.
“I think it means, ‘Love beats everything’.”
“E.B.,” said Henry. “Evie Babbacombe!”
He lifted his sad, brown eyes to my face and kept them there.
“I knew I’d seen it before,” said Captain Wilmot. “Lives next door. Comes to me for lessons y’know. Correspondence and filin’ and all that. She wears it under her dress, down between here.”
“She used to work here,” said Henry, his eyes still on my face, “before she went to the doctor’s. I expect that’s when it got lost.”
“Of course,” said Captain Wilmot, “she doesn’t always wear it down under her dress. If she’s not wearin’ her beads, she wears it outside, down between here. Well, I must get on.”
He turned laboriously back to his carriage, saying no more about the battery or the team. He grinned at us, a grin that went savage as he lowered himself. He stowed his two sticks, turned the carriage in its own length and hissed away.
Henry continued to look at me. A blush started rising irresistibly from the soles of my feet. It surged to my shoulders, shot down my arms, so that my hands bloated on the handle bars. It filled my face, my head—till even my hair seemed burning with it.
“Well now,” said Henry at last. “Evie Babbacombe.”
The two oil-smeared lads who had been taking apart the engine of a lorry were standing and looking at us with grins only less savage than the Captain’s. As if he had four eyes instead of two, Henry wheeled on them.
“Do you lads think I pay you to stand about all day with your mouths open? I want those valves ready by half-past five!”
I muttered.
“Give it to her if you like. I’ll give it to her—”
Henry turned back to me. I unstuck one hand and held it out. He swung the cross above it by the chain like a pendulum, looked closely at me.
“You don’t drive yet, do you, Master Oliver?”
“No. No. I don’t drive.”
Henry nodded and dropped the cross in my palm.
“With the compliments of the management.”
He turned back and burrowed into the car. I wheeled my bumpety bike away, the cross clenched in one hand, my feet able to move at last. I had only one thought in my head as I went towards our cottage.
That was a near thing.
*
After I had put my bike away I went through into the dispensary, where my father was squinting down a microscope under the window.
“Henry,” I said, swinging the cross casually. “Henry Williams. Miss Babbacombe left this thing down there when she was working in his garage.” I threw it up and caught it effortlessly. “Asked me to give it to her,” I said. “I expect she’ll be in the reception room won’t she? I’ll just go through—”
I walked down the short passage and opened the door. Evie was sitting behind the desk and trying to inspect her left eye with her right one in a small round mirror. She saw me in it, instead.
“Olly! You musn’t come—”
“Here you are. Thought you’d like this.”
With an attempt at Robert’s nonchalance I tossed the cross on the desk. Evie pounced on it with a delighted cry.
“My cross!”
She put down the mirror and busied herself, fixing the chain round her neck. Her face went solemn and she bent her head. She muttered, made some quick movements over her breasts with one hand. In our local complex of State Church, Nonconformity, and massive indifference, I had never seen anything like them. She looked up at me and smiled suddenly with open mouth, one eye blinking. She whispered with a kind of gleeful accusation.
“Olly! You story!”
“What d’you mean?”
She pushed back her chair an inch or two, then sat, looking up, her hands grasping the edge of the desk. She examined me as if she had never seen me before.
“Evie—when can we—”
“That’d be telling, wouldn’t it?”
There was no doubt at all. Evie Babbacombe, ripest apple on the tree, was regarding me with approval and positive admiration!
There came a voice, resounding from the depths of the doctor’s house.
“Miss Babbacombe!”
She jumped up, patting back her bob, and went to the door into the surgery. She stopped by it and looked back. Giggled.
“You had it all the time!”
I took my outrage with me back into the dispensary. My father was still at the microscope, adjusting the slide with minute movements of his big fingers. I left well alone and went through into the cottage, wondering what to do. If Sergeant Babbacombe got her story out of her, by third degree or other means, he might not admire my imagined part in it as much as she did. This was an emergency. I had to see her before she went home; but I could think of no excuse for going back through the dispensary. On the other hand, if I stood sideways by my bedroom window I could see down into the Square and the steps of the Ewans’s house next door. As soon as she appeared, I could go down stairs again and through into our garden. If my mother was in the kitchen or scullery I could account for these movements easily enough. (“Just going to have a look at my bike.”) In the garden, I could accelerate, nip over the garden wall into Chandler’s Lane, pound along past the bottom of the Ewans’s garden, the vicarage garden and the three cottages where the lane turned down towards Chandler’s Close, then come back between the vicarage and the churchyard. By this means I should be entering the Square from the opposite direction and could meet her accidentally. I went to my station therefore, and stood close to the chintz curtains. It was long wait, but I could take no chances. Then, just when I was expecting her at any moment, I heard a heavy and martial tread approaching under my window from the other direction. Sergeant Babbacombe was coming from the Town Hall. He was not taking his usual route, past Wertwhistle Wertwhistle and Wertwhistle, Solicitors, Miss Dawlish’s bow window and the rest. He was coming along this side on a course which would lead him straight to our front gate. It was not my actions during the past twenty-four hours that put me in an instant panic. It was my intentions. For under the forward angle of his three-cornered hat, his face wore such a plethoric and parental animosity it took my breath away. His meaty fists swung low as he marched along, the metal studs of his shoes struck sparks from the cobbles. Then—as if she had been watching from a window too—Evie came tripping down the steps from the Ewans’s door. She was wearing a head square of white silk tied under her chin and the free corners flipped as she moved. She wore stockings of course. She was laughing and smiling, hands up by her shoulders, calves moving outward, bottom rotating a little. She tripped up to Sergeant Babbacombe, close, laughing up in his face, almost vertically up.
“Look, Dad! I’d left it in the Ladies’ Toilet at the surg??
?ry all the time! Silly me!”
He marched straight on. She got out of his way and turned to go with him. He was going far faster than she could, with his long strides, so every now and then she had to trip again, with a burst of gay laughter. Once in position, she felt for his hand, leaning sideways towards him, head on one side, her body stretching so that her silk square crept up towards his shoulder. He would get a stride ahead and she would trip again, still feeling for his hand. She got it at last. It stopped swinging. Without slackening his march, the Sergeant’s fingers shifted from her palm to her wrist. After that she no longer tripped, but kept up with him in a constant running movement of quick little steps. She had to.
I went downstairs, into the garden, and began to pace round our little lawn with my hands in my trouser pockets. Between my lust for Evie’s trim femininity and my fear of her bloodshot father were a whole host of other less immediately pressing considerations. Henry might drop a word somewhere; though I had a simple and unconscious faith in Henry. Captain Wilmot might drop one. Robert—and now that my rage was gone I was worried about him—Robert might be badly hurt. My own left ear felt warm still and my right eye, while not as bad as Evie’s, was nevertheless tender. It watered easily. Also there was Imogen. I came to a halt on the grass and stared at a belated bee which was fumbling over a spike of delphinium. I realized in a puzzled kind of way that I had not thought of Imogen for hours and hours. She came back into my mind and pushed my heart down as usual; but this time in a way that I was quite unable to understand. She made my pursuit of Evie not only urgent and inevitable; the mere thought of her quickened me to desperation. It was—and even then I felt the absurdity of it—as if since she had got engaged to be married I was forced into some sort of competition with her and him. I began to pace round and round again. I felt like a fly in treacle.
The next morning, when I was shaving, I saw Robert trot into the garden for a final pre-Cranwell bout with his punchball. The sight made me embarrassed. Our fight had been a typical one between his sort of boy and my sort, as described in all juvenile literature. He was clear cut, clean-limbed. He had a straight left. I was strong, square, and clumsy; an oaf, in fact. Despite this, I had won. Moreover, I had won in the way an oaf might be expected to—the only way indeed, permitted to him—by cheating. I had stuck my knee in his balls. It was useless to tell myself it had been an accident; for I knew that after he was doubled over, helpless, I had felt an instant of black malice, cruel joy, and sheer intention before I hit him with my fist. It was a bit more treacle. There he was, down there, dancing with his athlete’s limber movements round the motionless ball; and I could see that he had sticking plaster on his nose now, as well as his shins. Here was I, devious and calculating, with a different accent, and unable to drive a car. When I saw that he had finished his workout and was about to trot back to the house, I stuck my halfscraped face out of the window and waved my safety razor at him.