‘Yes, sir, a nice, tender cutlet. And for this evening a nice bit of fish, a Dover sole, perhaps.’
‘No, I think a lemon sole. They don’t sit so heavily on one’s tummy, and they’re cheaper, too.’
‘I meant a lemon sole,’ said Copperthwaite.
‘Did he?’ thought Anthony, with his eyes bent on Copperthwaite’s broad retreating back, and his blue-black hair, which he kept short and trim, army-fashion. Does he remember my requirements automatically, or has he been thinking them up?
The sound of voices disturbed his cogitations. His daily help had arrived. ‘So you’re back?’ he heard her say, ‘like the bad penny, who always turns up.’ Anthony jumped out of bed and shut the door which Copperthwaite had left ajar, so he didn’t catch Copperthwaite’s riposte which was something about some bad pennies being there all the time.
Later, when Anthony emerged at breakfast time, they seemed to be billing and cooing.
Soon afterwards, when Copperthwaite was in his room, presumably unpacking his impressive suit-cases, Anthony said to Olive,
‘Copperthwaite has come back.’
‘So I see, Mr. Easterfield,’ she answered drily, and giving him a poke, or, as some would say, a back-lash, with the carpet-sweeper. ‘So I see,’ she repeated, ‘and how long for?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Anthony carelessly. ‘I’ve no idea what his plans are, or if he has any. You may know better than I do.’
‘I have nothing against Mr. Copperthwaite,’ said Olive, drawing herself up and reclining, so far as one can recline, on the pole of a carpet-sweeper.
‘I’ve nothing against him,’ she repeated, ‘but this I know, he’ll go when it’s his interest to go, and where,’ she added dwelling on the words, ‘it’s his interest to go.’
‘Then why,’ said Anthony, taking her up, ‘did he leave this much better job with the millionaire across the Square, and come back here, where he doesn’t get half as much money or half as much time off?’
This will be a facer for her, he thought. But it wasn’t.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said, starting off again with the carpet-sweeper, ‘I wouldn’t know what goes on in a man’s mind. It might be that this American—and not only Americans either,’ she added, giving Anthony a straight look, ‘was one of those who—well, I needn’t explain. Mind you, I’m not saying anything against Copperthwaite, but he may have felt the game wasn’t worth the candle.’
‘The candle?’
‘You know what I mean, sir.’
‘I don’t,’ said Anthony, although a faint flicker of enlightenment played across his mind—‘but if he didn’t do whatever . . . whatever they wanted him to do—isn’t that a good mark for him?’
‘I’m not saying it is or it isn’t,’ said Olive darkly. ‘With those sort of people you never know. Keep away from them, I say.’
‘But that’s just what he has done,’ said Anthony, rashly.
‘Time will show,’ said Olive, who was apt to repeat her more gnomic utterances. ‘Time will show.’
Anthony’s curiosity, never very keen, was whetted by Olive’s insinuations, and the temptation increased to ask Copperthwaite why he had left a job so much better than the one he had come back to. ‘Better not,’ he told himself, falling into Olive’s habit of repeating herself, ‘better not. All in good time, all in good time.’
The thunderous sounds of Copperthwaite’s unpacking suddenly ceased, and he himself appeared at the door of Anthony’s sitting-room. At least it must be he, this radiant figure dressed in the smartest chauffeur’s uniform, peaked cap in hand.
‘Would you be wanting me to drive you anywhere, sir?’ (Sir, now, not Mr. Easterfield, as of yore.)
‘Well, no, Copperthwaite,’ Anthony said, rising from his chair to greet this splendid apparition, ‘I’ve nowhere to go, and I’m not sure if the car’ (he hardly liked to mention this ignoble vehicle) ‘will be—well, will be in going order. You see, it hasn’t been used . . .’ He stopped, feeling that tactlessness must go no further.
‘I see, sir,’ said Copperthwaite, as if envisaging a great number of things. ‘Leave it to me. But first I will put on my working clothes.’ He sketched a salute to go.
‘There is lunch,’ said Anthony humbly.
‘Oh yes, sir, I’ve arranged for that, and Olive has been quite helpful.’
He disappeared, and Anthony began to write some letters. What a relief to have Copperthwaite back! But when he thought of that magnificent uniform, and its probable cost, he began to feel uneasy. Ought not Copperthwaite, or he, Anthony, to return it to Copperthwaite’s late employers? No doubt the Americans could well afford it; but the cynical saying ‘Soak the rich,’ began to reverberate unpleasantly in his mental ear.
Should he say something to Copperthwaite? Should he suggest that the uniform ought to be returned? When Copperthwaite was in his employ, he had expressly wished not to wear a uniform; he inferred it would be a badge of servitude, and in any case too posh, too ostentatious for Anthony’s humdrum purposes. Anthony himself could imagine his friends saying, if they came to the door to see him off, as they sometimes did, and saw his second-hand, second-rate car waiting at the kerb, with a uniformed chauffeur—uniformed, and how!—‘We are impressed, Anthony, we really are impressed!’
No sound in the flat, but Anthony was restless, he went out and took a turn round the Square (if a square can be circled). His footsteps came slow, clogged by his thoughts. Shall I turn back? he asked himself, seeking for some sort of compromise between himself and the Moral Law. Shall I go up to Ramoth Gilead, or shall I forbear? Shall I tell Copperthwaite to return his ill-gotten gains to the Americans, or shall I leave it?
At the opposite side of the Square stood the Roland-Rex (by now he knew its contours only too well), drawn up outside the owner’s door. Sitting at the wheel, indeed asleep at the wheel, was a chauffeur, immaculate in a uniform similar to Copperthwaite’s. He looked like part of the car’s furniture, indeed like part of the car; he was the same colour, his figure might have been an extension, as a reproduction of its lines; his immobility a parallel of its own. Function for function, what difference was there between them?
Anthony completed the circuit.
No car outside his own flat; but he pressed the button; the garage-door swung open, revealing a set of loose boxes, so to speak, in which some of the tenants kept their cars. He remembered the number of his: 5A.
At first he saw nothing except his car, then, sticking out from under its bonnet, a pair of feet and leggings.
‘Copperthwaite!’ he called, hardly expecting an answer.
But after much wriggling, Copperthwaite came into view, so dirty in his overalls, so changed from his glorious appearance of an hour ago, that the transformation was hardly credible.
He struggled to his feet.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘I just wondered’, said Anthony, ‘how you were getting on?’
‘Very well, sir,’ said Copperthwaite, composing his face to disguise the slight irritation he felt at being disturbed at his work; “Very well, sir. But I’m afraid the car needs a good deal of attention. It’s been neglected, sir.’
Anthony said nothing.
‘Yes, sir, it’s been neglected, and of course a car doesn’t like being neglected.’
Anthony couldn’t resist saying,
‘Like human beings, I suppose.’
‘Yes, like human beings,’ said Copperthwaite, mopping his brow with a sweaty handkerchief, and without taking, or appearing to take, Anthony’s point. ‘But human beings can fend for themselves.’
He gave the car an over-all look, in which compassion, interest, and adoration—yes, adoration—were blended.
The sudden impulse that makes one ask a question that one would never, in ordinary circumstances and after due consideration, ask, made Anthony say,
‘Why did you leave that excellent job with the American gentleman on the other side of the Square? I thought—in
fact you told me yourself—it was your ambition to look after a Roland-Rex.’
‘So it was, sir,’ said Copperthwaite promptly, his eyes switching to Anthony’s battered car. ‘And shall I tell you why—why I didn’t go on there. I mean, because the money was good and the boss gave me all I wanted, including the uniform, which I didn’t want. It was because—’
‘Because of what?’
‘The Roland-Rex was a perfect car, no complaints.’
‘Then why?’
Copperthwaite gave Anthony a look that pitied such lack of understanding.
‘Because there was nothing I could do for it. Nothing ever went wrong with it, it didn’t need me, I couldn’t—I couldn’t mix myself with it—it was a stranger, if you know what I mean. I sat there like a stuffed dummy—the car could have looked after itself, and almost driven itself, without me—’
He stopped, and gave another look at Anthony’s shabby old roadster.
‘Your car isn’t a Roland-Rex, sir, but as long as you are in it you will be driving with me as well as in it.’
Anthony found this remark obscure.
‘Well, of course I shall be driving with you, because I can’t drive myself, but what do you mean by, I shall be driving with you, as well as with it?’
‘Because I am the car, sir.’
*
Anthony tried to fathom this out.
‘Does the car mean all that to you?’ he asked incredulously.
‘It does, sir. It means a great deal to me, as you do, though not in the same way—begging your pardon, sir.’
Anthony heard the church bells ringing.
‘Good gracious, it’s Sunday!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m all out in my dates—I wasn’t expecting you till Monday.’
‘Yes, but one day doesn’t make much difference, does it?’
‘Of course not.’ Anthony wondered where Copperthwaite had spent Saturday night. ‘But when I was walking round the Square I noticed that your . . . your late employer had another chauffeur.’
Copperthwaite shrugged his shoulders.
‘Oh yes, Mr. Duke doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet, and there are plenty of blokes who will give up their weekends if they see a good job in prospect, and a uniform too.’
The bells sounded louder. Eleven o’clock could not be far away.
‘Well, I must be off’ said Anthony to Copperthwaite’s retreating form, which was edging itself, feet first this time, as if some octopus power, stronger than himself, was sucking him into the tentacles of the car’s dark underneath.
Rapture began to glow on Copperthwaite’s upturned face.
‘If you are going to church, sir,’ he said, wriggling from shoulder to shoulder, ‘say a prayer for me.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Anthony, ‘but what would it be?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, sir, you know more about prayers than I do, just a little prayer for me, and a big prayer for the car.’
‘But isn’t it past praying for?’
‘No, sir, not as long as I’m here,’ and with that Copperthwaite’s tired, dirty, but jubilant face disappeared under the bonnet.
An answer to prayer, perhaps?
PARADISE PADDOCK
Marcus Foster acquired his house, Paradise Paddock, with the maximum of discouragement from his friends. ‘We looked at ninety-eight,’ one of them said. ‘We spent the best part of a year house-hunting, and every single one of them had something hopelessly against it. Either it faced the wrong way, or it had a cellar full of water which would have to be pumped out, or it had no water at all, no electricity and no gas, or it was so far from anywhere that such important things as food could never be delivered, and staff, supposing one could find them, would never consent to stay, and anyhow there were no suitable quarters for them to stay in, and—well, at last, when we were quite desperate, we found Wrightswell, which was so much too big that we had to pull half of it down.’
Marcus was utterly at a loss, for he felt that where his practical or comparatively practical friends, the Larkins, had failed, he was most unlikely to succeed. When he surveyed the length and breadth of England, sometimes with a map, sometimes relying on his imagination, he didn’t know which way to turn.
But turn he must, for the people who had let him their house, for the period of the war, now wanted it back.
Where could he go? He was a bachelor and an orphan, aged fifty, by no means rich but not too badly off. The thought of all England lying before him, studded with houses, each of which had some vital drawback, appalled him. And what of Henry and Muriel, the couple who had served him well for so many years, in spite of Muriel’s chronic melancholia and Henry’s occasional outbursts of temper, where would they go?
Marcus was not without friends, and he decided, with an unconscious foresight, that he had better try to find a house that was near to some of them. In the town of Baswick, in the west country, he had several good friends. Baswick must be his first house-hunting ground.
How to start about it? Marcus found the name of a house-agent in Baswick, and applied to him.
Marcus’s quest had at the same time, vis-à-vis the vast area of England, a limitation which might be a hindrance but also might be a help. He wanted a house by the river, where he could row his boat. Boating was his favourite pastime—boating of a relaxed, unskilful, unprofessional kind, just plodding along a river, in a skiff with a sliding seat, thoughtless, mindless. But something from the movement and from the rustle, heard or unheard, of Nature around him, gave him a peace of mind which he couldn’t give himself.
Baswick was on a river.
The house-agent, a red-faced beefy-looking man, said, ‘I think we’ve got just the place for you. It’s called Paradise Paddock. It was occupied by the Army, and perhaps still is, but we’ll go and see.’
Marcus, certain that the expedition would be a wash-out, jumped into the car, and in a quarter of an hour they were there.
It was a mill-house, the river dammed up on one side and flowing freely, but not too freely, on the other. So much Marcus took in, before, crossing a little bridge, they stood in front of a paint-blistered front-door, and the agent rang the bell.
A lady answered it, dressed in the casual clothes of an artist, as in fact she turned out to be.
‘Yes?’ she said.
The agent advanced a step or two.
‘I understand this house is for sale,’ he said.
‘Well, I’m the owner of it,’ she replied, ‘and I can assure you it isn’t.’
The agent was by no means taken aback.
‘I’m sorry, Madam,’ he said, ‘I must have been mistaken.’
‘Not to worry,’ said the lady. ‘Since you’ve come out here, perhaps you would like to see over the house.’
It had been built at different times, and on different levels; not a room that had not a step up to it, or a step down. Not only that, they seldom faced each other squarely, they eyed each other widdershins. But Marcus liked them all.
He told the owner so. ‘I’m so sorry you don’t want to part with the house,’ he said, when the tour was over, ‘but I quite understand.’
‘I didn’t say I didn’t want to part with it,’ the woman answered, ‘I only said I was the owner of it—I and my husband—and that it was not for sale. But we might change our minds, given a suitable inducement.’
‘Well, perhaps you will let me know,’ said Marcus, with a caution that was usual with him, for he hated decisions, and could only make them on the spur of the moment, or not at all.
‘I can let you know now,’ the woman said. “We are prepared to sell it, if you will name a sum.’
Marcus glanced at the agent, whose porphyry-coloured face became for a moment mask-like, before he said, ‘I think £5,000 would be a fair price.’
‘Oh, surely,’ the woman protested.
‘The house isn’t everyone’s choice, as perhaps you know,’ said the agent, giving her a look. ‘I don’t say it’s damp, but it well may be
, since there is water all round it. I doubt if you would get a higher offer.’
‘I must ask my husband,’ she said, showing them the door.
It hadn’t occurred to the innocent Marcus that she was meaning to sell it all the time.
When he took possession, he brought with him the furniture and objets d’art that he had been collecting during the war years. At first they made the house, or some of it, look habitable. Later, when he had been toying with them and moving them this way and that, it looked less so. One thing that he couldn’t find a suitable place for was a turquoise-coloured beetle—obviously meant to be Egyptian for it had a cartouche on its back, but too large, he thought, to be a real scarab. He had bought it at an antique shop for a few shillings.
A friend, who had travelled much in the Near East, took a different view.
‘One never knows,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the look of it and I should get rid of it, if I were you.’
Marcus, who was superficially superstitious, and hated to see a single magpie, or the new moon through glass, or to spill the salt, or break a looking-glass (which, happily, he had never done) was fundamentally anti-superstitious, and thought one shouldn’t give way to it. . . .
‘How have things been going here?’ his friend asked.
‘Oh, quite all right,’ said Marcus, with an assurance that his expression belied. ‘One or two people have had troubles. A friend of mine fell downstairs and broke a bone in her hand, and the gardener fell down some steps which were rather greasy—it rains so much here—and had to have some stitches put into his elbow. But these things happen in the best-regulated establishments.’
‘But you have suffered no inconvenience?’ asked his friend, surveying the curious little object, with its rudimentary antennae, which looked as if they might wave.
‘None,’ said Marcus.
‘All the same,’ said his friend, ‘I should get rid of the creature, if I were you. It isn’t a creature, of course, but it looks rather like one.’
Months passed that were not uneventful, and his friend again came to stay.