“Come on, Evie!”
She shook her head again, and tinkled a laugh, girlishly. I went and squatted by her.
“Look—what’s the matter?”
Evie turned on all the works, glinting at me and flickering her tangle of eyelashes. She sank her chin, stretched even further so that the top half of her body lifted away from the earth and I caught my breath. There was scent in it.
“Let’s go in the clump—and have some fun!”
Evie shut her eyes and collapsed. She lay like that, unsmiling.
“Here, or nowhere.”
“But—that’s the town!”
She lifted her head and stared at it, grinning on one side of her face.
“So it is—Mr. Clever!”
I cajoled, ordered, pleaded. Evie would not budge. She lay slack, unsmiling, stretched out and answered me always with the same phrase.
“Here or nowhere.”
In the end I fell silent and stared moodily at the brown earth and the dry pellets of rabbit dung. Evie got up and picked things off her dress.
“Evie—tomorrow—”
Tomorrow was the day of the wedding. I knew already what I should need, to stick like a plaster over the thought of it.
“See you here—in the afternoon.”
Evie smiled sideways at me.
“Of course, Olly. Why not?”
Then she went away, secure and perfect as a ripe nut.
It wasn’t until we were all three at the table and having an early dinner so that my mother could catch the bus into Barchester, that I understood. My mother was amiable and excited and talked as much as her food would let her.
“—and you needn’t worry about that girl any more, Father. She’s going away!”
“Oh?”
“Going to her aunt at Acton. She’s been promised a job in a firm. They import timber, I’m told. A good thing too!”
“Good thing?”
“For her, I mean.”
My father masticated, gazing heavily before him. He wrinkled up his brow and shook his head.
“London. I don’t know. It’s a long way; and a young girl—”
He went on masticating and shaking his head forebodingly as if he were envisaging an endless line of young girls throwing themselves off London Bridge.
“Nonsense, Father!” said my mother, glittering and laughing. “She’s going to stay with her aunt!”
My father changed his shaking to a nodding, masticating slowly meanwhile, thirty-two times, or it may have been sixty-four. My mother stopped laughing and glittering and stared at the wall. When she spoke, she used something like the voice with which she announced her unnerving, her diabolical perceptions or intuitions; a voice matter-of-fact and basic, as from someone not quite my mother; but now, elated, even gay.
“Provided she’s careful, she’ll have no end of a time!”
I did the washing up, in an incomprehensible rage. I went out after I had finished, striding through Stilbourne away from the escarpment. I dived into the sexy woods, turned aside and broke out into fields again. It was said you could see the very tip of Barchester Spire from the crest of Pentry Hill and I circled the whole thing, before I climbed to the top. But there was a blue distance where Barchester and its spire might be. I turned round, moodily following the escarpment with my eye to our furry clump; and there was a tiny white speck at the top of the brown warren.
No fear! No bloody fear!
I went by way of Cockers, past the Racing Stables, through the fields of Little Farm, and climbed again. The white speck was still there. You could see it from half the county. I began to run clumsily along the edge of the escarpment, past Ansdyke and the Barrows, over Iron Gate and the Devil’s Hollow. I came thudding to the clump, the sweat running down my face, my hair smeared into it; and from the town I heard the church clock strike three.
“Evie!”
I collapsed beside her, my heart beating against the raw earth. She was sitting up, her legs crossed, her hands supporting her on either side. Stilbourne and all the spreadout county were shaking beyond her as if they had been running too.
“Evie—please!”
“Here or nowhere.”
I felt the eyes of Stilbourne on my back; but they were distant, they wore pebble glasses and we were two inscrutable specks. It was an irrational fear and embarrassment that laid a hand on my flesh but a real one. Evie understood this, laughing sideways triumphantly, so that I think even she was astonished and frightened, when I put one hand round her back, one on her breast, and savagely stopped her startled speech with my mouth. She neither resisted nor co-operated; and afterwards, when I was gasping face-downwards, she went away flushed, silent and ashamed.
I stayed where I was, and at last looked down under my arm, trying to recognize the odd figure that moved here or there, almost beyond the edge of seeing. I got up and went crouched through the alders and only straightened up when I was down in Chandler’s Lane. I opened our front door as quietly as a thief. I debated whether I should not get out my violin and play at the gipsy music my mother so astonishingly urged me to practise. I thought I might play softly at first, then more and more loudly so that my father would never know exactly when I had come in—or even that I had been out at all. But I had a more immediate urge for reassurance, so I went to the dispensary and walked in casually. My father was standing by the long bench under the window. The top half of the window was open to the clump. He had not yet bothered to replace his binoculars in the leather case that hung behind the door. They stood by him on the bench, battered but serviceable. My mind did a simple sum. Magnify by ten. Ten into six hundred yards goes sixty times. Sixty yards.
There was a book on the bench before him. He shut it slowly, turned, came past me without looking at me. He took his white lab coat off a hook, put it on, and went as slowly back to the bench. He took a prescription off the wire file and peered at it closely. He looked up at some bottles then back at the paper. Suddenly he crumpled the paper in his hand and leaned on his knuckles, his head bent. There wasn’t a sound.
At last he straightened up, smoothed out the prescription carefully and took down a bottle. All at once I knew what was going to happen, could feel it happening, unstoppable as sex. I felt it in my shuddering, in the confusion of Imogen and Evie and the piano and Robert and my mother; in the fierce and fruitless struggle between my will and my hot eyes. I gasped out my oaths, half-strangled.
“Damn! Damn! Damn! Oh—damn!”
Furious and anguished and helpless, the water not falling, but jetting on my shoe, on the bench, on my hands—
“Damn! Damn! Damn!”
Head up, hands clenched, window elongating glossily, the dark underground lakes broken up, flowing and flowing—
“Damn! Oh damn—”
My father was turning his head from side to side as if it had been tied with elastic ropes and he an animal, not knowing how he had been caught.
“I had to know, you see—had to. After what she—” He put the bottle down, glanced at the window, then at his hands; passed one of them over his bald head. “Laughing and laughing. Hysteria, I thought. Laughing and laughing and—or sneering.”
I stayed where I was, settled in misery, wickedness and defeat, wondering already what corner there was I could hide in, never to be seen again. My father cleared his throat and went on, in a voice curiously determined and strained by the determination.
“Young men don’t—think. I—You don’t know about that place, Chandler’s—Yes. Well. There’s—disease, you see. One’s not suggesting that one’s necessarily—been exposed to infection—but if one goes on like this—”
He took off his glasses and cleaned them with surgical care; and suddenly, for all his professed but indifferent agnosticism the voice of generations of chapel burst out of him.
“—this man what d’you me call him—these books—cinema—papers—this sex—it’s wrong, wrong, wrong!”
I stood, a heap of dung, yearning
desperately for some sewer up which I might crawl and reach my parents, kneel, be forgiven, so that the days of our innocence might return again. I stood, watching him make up prescriptions for all the ailments of Stilbourne.
*
After that I stayed indoors and played my cheap violin in place of the piano, hoping to do at least something that my parents wanted. I avoided Evie as if she had been one of the diseases my father had talked about; and indeed I saw her only once before she went. I was standing by the sitting-room window, my violin in my hand. I had played the passionate gipsy music with extreme care; and now stood, staring across at Bounce’s house, thinking ruefully how much she would have approved my dutiful practice, when Evie came along on the other side of the Square. My mouth opened slowly. This known, this detected, this fallen woman, had not changed in any way at all. Lips everted, mysterious smile, pert nose, glossy bob, knees motionless, she slid along, and as ever, bore the almost palpable aura of sex in the air round her. I watched her till she slid out of sight beyond the Town Hall. She was wrong, wrong, wrong; and so was I. I went back to my violin, to the extravagant oportamenti, and throaty vibrato of my gipsy music.
So Evie disappeared; but it was years before I found out why. I was not the cause, though with a mixture of vanity and shame, I thought so. Nor was Robert with his motor bike, nor Captain Wilmot with his typewriter and braided whip. Duggie Dance might have been in the convulsions that killed him and Mrs. Dance wild with grief and hysteria, but she had two Stilbourne eyes in her head and a Stilbourne tongue in her mouth. What ejected Evie from our midst, in the direction of London Bridge, was the tiny smear of lipstick at the corner of Dr. Jones’s mouth. That was too much. Evie went, and the coloured picture of Stilbourne was motionless and flat again.
*
Yet Evie avoided London Bridge for I saw her once more, and in Stilbourne. It was two years later in the autumn and I was on the verge of my third year at Oxford and restless with the world since anyone could see a war was only just round the corner. I did not think I should complete my third year, and bleakly enough, saw myself walking into the barrage of another Western Front. Stilbourne Great Fair was on, that annual event which brought what small business the town had, to an exasperated stop. The fair was so old—Saxon, perhaps—that only a special Act of Parliament could have abolished it. Stilbourne’s exasperation was all the greater, since what had once been a row of stalls set up in the curved High Street, between our Square and the Old Bridge, had become a riot of swings and roundabouts and mystery rides and tunnels of love and chairoplanes, the only object of which was the sale of pleasure. It was Saturday Night. The sky was clear and moonlit and cold; but the steam from the competing machinery—that vast disharmony of a thousand pipes—had built up in pillars and mushrooms over the fair and the lights from flares shook down from them as though a war had already started. For three hundred yards were ranged the shooting galleries, roundabouts, sideshows, crockery-smashing, three darts for sixpence and a dip in the lucky bran tub. The lines, the gaudy flowerbeds of bulbs pulsed with the generators and the naphtha flares of the smaller stalls made the whole place bounce and quiver. One pavement was free, and it was by this route and this alone that one could escape from the fair and the clouds. I had returned, with a sophisticated nostalgia to assure myself that I could no longer enjoy the pleasures of childhood, and was finding with a mixture of irritation and amusement that I was in danger of enjoying them thoroughly. I strolled, hands in the pockets of my grey flannels, scarf heavily wrapped and hanging down behind and in front, along the free pavement. Here, the crash, the blare, the mechanical musics, the shouts and screams, thump of a wooden ball against a canvas screen, or pang of a bullet against an iron sheet were a little to one side, as if one had partly dissociated oneself from them. The pavement was empty, for it was still too early to find lovers standing in the alley openings or behind the tents; and drink had not yet fouled the pavement with spew. Just beyond the outclassed lights of the cinema I saw a girl coming down the pavement towards me. I could not mistake the bob, the motionless knees and demurely pacing feet. It was natural, after all, that I should see her again. Quite recently, Sergeant Babbacombe had emerged from the Town Hall in his picturesque uniform, rung his brass bell; bawled “Hoh yay! Hoh yay!” and burst before he could get the third O yay out. There was hardly room for us to pass each other. She stopped in front of me, smiling in the reflection from the pillars of steam.
“Hullo, Olly! What are you doing in this ghastly place?”
“Stroll. Just a stroll. And you?”
“Long weekend. I’m meeting some people.”
“I’ll leave you, then.”
I made to pass, though I did not want to. She stayed in front of me.
“Where you going now?”
“Home. This awful shambles!”
“I’ll walk with you.”
“I thought you were meeting some people!”
She put her hand up to her bob.
“It’s the sort of thing one says—”
Then we were silent, constrained, and looking each other over. London had done much for her. It was only an eighth of an inch here, a tailored curve there, a matter of material and cut, I suppose. It was a new kind of gloss; sophistication. She was wearing a severe suit of dark green, and brogues. Her hair was abandoned, yet under control—designed in its abandonment. In one thing, if only one, I was an expert and could read what I saw. Evie had hitched herself up a couple of degrees on our dreadful ladder.
“I was sorry about your father.”
Evie bowed gravely.
“Have you got a car yet, Olly?”
So much for the Sergeant.
“Us? No.” I grinned down at her. “Take a look at me! I’m expensive!”
Evie laughed and exhaled a bit.
“You look so solemn in glasses!”
Deftly she reached forward with both hands and tweaked off my spectacles. The night blurred.
“Hey! Damn it!”
“That’s what I do to my boss when—Now you look like young Olly again.”
“Give ’em back, will you? I can’t—”
“All right. Keep your hair on.”
She came up close, scented and solid, and fixed the supports behind my ears. I caught my dedicated breath as if it had been reminded of something unconnected with the Inert Gases. Evie moved back again.
“Bobby used to take Bounce’s car.”
“Well. I’m not Bobby, am I?”
“No. I see that.”
The paintbrushes flickered. She turned, pacing up towards the Square, and I followed at her shoulder.
“D’you still play the piano, Olly?”
“Now and then. Haven’t much time, you see. D’you still sing?”
“Who? Me? Whatever for?”
We reached the Square. Evie looked at it, then stood facing me.
“What d’you do with yourself, Olly?”
“My dear Evie! I couldn’t possibly explain—”
All the same, I did. I spoke of an idea that had entertained me as if it were already actual. Crypton is inert, they say. But if one teased it sufficiently, a matter of temperature and pressure, a spark gap in a sufficiently dense cloud of crypton and another element—One might produce entirely unnatural substances, if the word was admissible. Now crypton—
Evie looked up at me, her eyes wide.
“Well, well, well. Old Olly! You are clever!”
I was surprised and pleased. Unquestionably London had done a lot for Evie. I had a wild thought of showing her round the labs, but dismissed it, since my status there was not precisely as high as I had suggested. The wildness spread, as I glimpsed our cottage next to the doctor’s house and I even thought of inviting her in. But commonsense immediately reasserted itself.
“Oh I don’t know! As for you, Evie—you’re looking pretty good.”
She exhaled all round us both, in the sodium light.
“Have you got a girl, Olly?”
br /> Smiling, I shook my head, then pressed my cheek where there might be a spot coming. Evie’s reply was astonishing. She nodded solemnly.
“You’re still a bit young for it, aren’t you?”
“I’m older than you are!”
I thought for a moment, feeling the money in my pocket, and decided on the only possible compromise in this situation, since I did not want to lose Evie at once, her exhalation and admiration. While I was thinking, Evie revolved on her heel, searching the Square. She came back to my face.
“There must be someone!”
“What d’you mean Evie?”
“Someone alive!”
It was a frivolous remark, I thought, with the fair going on behind us.
“We could go and have a drink—”
Evie opened her purse and examined it; but I reassured her. The money for next term was in my account already. I was wealthy, not yet having discovered the truism that money cannot be spent twice. Together we went towards the Crown. I held the main door open for her and it closed behind us with a soft thump, cutting off the noises of the fair. Here, in the entrance hall, there was no smell of oil and food and sweets and sweat, no flares or pulsing lights; only the respectable smell, faint but all-pervading, of dust and linoleum. We went through into the saloon bar, crossed the Axminster carpet and sat ourselves by the bar on the high, varnished stools. Mrs. Miniver was coiled behind her arms and the counter, staring at a dim view of Edinburgh Castle. She uncoiled briefly in a professional welcome, gave Evie her scotch and water and me my pale ale, then coiled up again. I looked round me. The last time I had been in the Crown was with Mr. De Tracy nearly two years before, a notable occasion. Now, four town councillors were armchaired round a low table in the far corner and arranging something about next week’s meeting. A man and woman were sitting in the other corner, saying nothing and watching their drinks glumly.
“Cheers, Olly!”
“Bung ho.”
One of the town councillors limped slowly away to the gentleman’s cloakroom.
Yes, I did have a spot coming. I fingered it in a long silence.