Appleby Plays Chicken (2 page)

Pettifor, puffing at his ritual pipe, said that this raised rather a perplexing philosophical point. There was a respectful silence, while his flock waited for him to elaborate. But he said no more – merely sinking deeper into his chair and staring abstractedly into the fire. Pettifor had fits when his pupils didn’t seem to be in the forefront of his mind – a circumstance which always surprised them, for they owned all the healthy egotism of the young.

Ian Dancer said he saw nothing perplexing about the American conception of freedom. It simply deified the group. It was like Milton in
Paradise Lost
, declaring that freedom consisted in submission to his horrid old God.

What was wonderful about England, Leon pursued unperturbed, was the effortless self-confidence displayed by guys who stuck obstinately outside the bunch. For instance there was David Henchman. Look at him.

Everybody looked at David. And Timothy Dumble, shaking his untidy head, murmured ‘Pitiful…pitiful’, as if there was really something that should arouse compassion in the sight.

David, Leon said, didn’t participate in any activities on behalf of the college. (‘Never seen on the old Campus,’ someone called out jocularly.) He didn’t even attend JCR meetings. Yet nobody thought the worse of him. (Cries of ‘Don’t we?’ ‘David’s a rotten outsider,’ ‘David’s a harmless eccentric,’ ‘David’s an unspeakable pariah’.) But the vital point, Leon went on, was that David didn’t think any the worse of himself. It just didn’t occur to him that he was a rebel. If David disliked girls – which he wasn’t known to do – he would take it for granted that he was entitled to dislike them as much as he liked. If David was exclusively interested in perfecting the technique of photographing medieval documents – an activity which he had never come within a mile of – he would suppose himself at liberty to do nothing else 365 days of the year. Well, that was fine. It came of generations and generations of settled social order, with every man knowing the privileges and duties of his station. And Leon Kryder didn’t think it was a class affair; with a young English artisan, he supposed, it would be much the same. Yes, that was swell. But there was another side to the thing, all the same.

Everybody chuckled. There was always another side to the thing when Leon got talking. He was the most obstinately fair-minded man on earth. It was socially wholesome, he went on, that the community should take a pretty stiff toll of its non-conformists. On the one hand, it made the individual think twice before developing an uncooperative personality or sheerly egocentric aims. On the other hand it gave you a little elite, was tough.

‘You mean’, Timothy demanded, ‘that David gets away with it too easily?’

Leon grinned. ‘I guess I quit being personal at this point, Timothy. But if America is a land of mixed-up kids, England is a cosily appointed paddock for stricken deer.’

‘But what about the mixed-up kids, anyway?’ It was Ian Dancer, the youth who had cited
Paradise Lost
, that asked this. ‘What gets them going?’

‘Being required to live beyond their income, I’d say.’

‘A sort of moral income?’

‘Perhaps you could call it that. In the States we have this conformist slant, you see; and at the same time our ethos is competitive through and through. The result is a constant anxiety among our adolescents. Do they really belong to the group? Are they, as individuals, measuring up to it? They’re always hankering to be put through something, and have tangible proof that they’ve made their grade. Hence the fraternities and initiations and what-have-you that you folk find so silly.’

At this Pettifor roused himself from whatever he had fallen to brooding on. ‘There’s something’, he said, ‘in knowing what it’s like to pass a test. In fact one should keep in training for it. Get flabby, and you may meet a crisis. And that’s bad.’ He paused, and seemed aware that his pupils were looking at him in some perplexity, as if the context from which he was speaking wasn’t at all clear to them. He sat up, conscientiously determined to achieve lucidity. ‘Of course initiations and ordeals are scarcely an American discovery. The authentic American discoveries are very few – although as it happens great importance must be attached to them.’ He paused again, and everybody felt on familiar ground. Pettifor would leave this little conundrum for anyone to chew on who cared to, and go on with his main proposition.

‘Aren’t initiations pretty primitive?’ somebody asked vaguely.

Pettifor nodded. ‘No doubt. But the notion of passing into manhood by enduring a bad half-hour is very general. You get it outside primitive societies just as much as within them. Only it’s not always half an hour. You should put in a little time, my dear Leon, investigating some of our public schools.’ And Pettifor looked round his flock with the slightly wolfish expression one could occasionally detect on his lean features.

‘Ian, don’t you agree?’

‘My public school was a regular old Belsen, of course.’ Ian Dancer spoke with nonchalant pride. ‘But nothing to my prepper. And we weren’t passing into manhood then.’

‘You were passing out of the nursery. It’s another stage at which a brisk injection of confidence is needed.’

‘It was brisk, all right. But injection isn’t technically quite the right word. David remembers. He was at the same place.’

David nodded. ‘Yes – but I don’t recall that we positively competed over what we could take. That seems to me utterly idiotic. Just think of the waste of nervous energy Leon endured before he escaped to civilization for a while. There he was, with his natural aptitude for symbolic logic, or whatever it is. And he had to worry himself half round the bend wondering whether he was as tough as some half-wit in the same rooming house. A rooming house, incidentally, is what college boys live in over there. And our Leon was just another neurotic college boy.’

‘If you’re not the most insolent crowd!’ Leon, who was controlling an enormous flagon of cider, passed round the circle, liberally dispensing it. ‘And I don’t remember all that waste of nervous energy. I husbanded it, rather. I knew what I’d need over here. The sweetest of tempers, and what’s called a buoyant nervous tone.’ He paused before Pettifor. ‘How do I rate there, sir?’

‘Very creditably, Leon. Alpha-minus-query-minus. And they are certainly a tiresome crowd.’ Pettifor swept the rest of his charges with an appraising glance. Whatever his odd preoccupation tonight, he’d been continuing to follow the talk with some part of his mind. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘they really do seek knowledge of your astounding country. They’re hydroptic for that, you might say, as well as for this endless cider. Tell them…let’s see. Yes – tell them about playing chicken.’

‘But I’ve seen that! I’ve seen it on the flicks.’ Timothy Dumble announced this triumphantly. ‘It’s precisely this business of proving to yourself that you’re as tough as the other chaps.’

‘Is it done with a revolver?’ someone asked. ‘A revolver with one of the six chambers loaded?’

‘No. That’s Russian roulette. Chicken is done with cars. You line up a lot of cars facing a sheer drop over a cliff. Then you all drive for the edge, hell-for-leather. The chap who jumps out first is the chicken. It’s very simple.’

There was a moment’s silence, and then David spoke. ‘What about the cars?’

‘Americans have no end of cars – isn’t that so, Leon?’

‘Sure. They just can’t pile them over the cliffs fast enough, Timothy.’

‘Although I suppose chicken can be played only by the fairly substantial classes. Have you ever played it, Leon?’

‘Not that kind, I guess. But there are others, in which you hazard a higher ratio of lives per automobile. What you might call over here utility chicken. And you don’t need a cliff. A perfectly ordinary road will do.’

‘That sounds more our style.’ Ian Dancer’s dark eyes glinted above his pewter tankard as he threw off this. ‘Tell us more, Leon.’

‘You want a straight road, a bit of a slope, and handsome ditches on each side. You have four or five people aboard, all placed so that they can make a grab at the wheel. Off you go, with somebody steering only until you’ve got up speed. After that, the first man who touches the wheel is the chicken.’

David shook his head. ‘Not nearly so good as the cliff,’ he said. ‘Lacks drama, while continuing to promise mess.’

Ian put down his tankard. ‘You mean you wouldn’t care for it?’

‘Of course I wouldn’t care for it.’ David spoke a shade shortly.

Timothy nodded. ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘Chicken, if indulged in at all, should plainly be sumptuously dressed. Austerity chicken would be a bloody flop. Let’s go to bed.’

Old Pettifor was already on his feet. His business being with young men, singly and in groups, it is conceivable he had scented something he didn’t care for. Certainly he was uneasy. ‘To bed, to bed, to bed; there’s knocking at the gate,’ he murmured. ‘What’s done, cannot be undone; to bed, to bed, to bed.’

They stood up and watched him from the room. It wasn’t merely that he liked to mutter Shakespeare idly in his beard. He had reminded them of a brute fact.

But that night they played chicken, all the same.

Afterwards, David found he couldn’t clearly tell why. But he supposed Ian to have been at the bottom of it. There had been two elder Dancers up at Oxford a few years before; and they were still legendary. Perhaps Ian had a wild streak by way of family endowment. Or perhaps he just felt obscurely compelled to measure up to his brothers – who by this time were probably staid and prosperous young bankers or brokers in bowler hats. There was no doubt that the chicken idea had power to get under the skin.

Certainly they weren’t encouraged by Leon. The thing went through in the face of a sort of grim anger that was something quite new in him. He had declared instantly that he wouldn’t play. Then he had gone off and had some carefully casual conversation with the landlord, who was working late cleaning up the bar. He came back and said briefly that he now knew a bit about doctors, district nurses, hospitals, and ambulances. This did have a chilly effect, but it failed to stop the prank from going forward. Ian – this was David’s guess – had taken it into his head to exploit a sort of smothered feud that existed oddly between the entirely good-natured Timothy and a man called Arthur Drury, who was entirely good-natured too. These two never jeered at each other, but stuck to an elderly politeness; probably neither could have explained in what the mutual irritation lay. Anyway, Ian had worked on it. David hadn’t attended to the drift of the talk. He simply knew – out in the inn yard and a clear moonlight – that the game of chicken was essentially a challenge between Timothy and this chap Drury, but that others were involved, including himself after all.

‘You’ll probably pile up your car,’ he said prosaically to Timothy. ‘And it won’t be honest to fudge up a claim on your insurance company.’

Timothy made no direct reply. He was the son of wealthy and indulgent parents – a fact to which he hated the slightest allusion. He flung open the doors of his big ancient tourer. ‘Muck in, chaps,’ he said. ‘We’re going to find a hill.’

Arthur Drury and Ian scrambled in beside him, and David found himself in the back with the two remaining members of Pettifor’s reading party. One of these, Tom Overend, he knew quite well; they had gone to tutorials together the term before. The other was a mere infant called Ogg – a freshman from another college, who was on the party only because he was Pettifor’s nephew. Ogg hadn’t yet done his National Service, but had grown a beard instead. He ought to be at school still, David thought, and a prominent member of the Field Club. He certainly oughtn’t to be in this damned car.

‘Drive on, chaps – drive on!’ Ogg shouted this out so loud that there seemed a chance of his waking the whole pub. His voice was full of happiness. He was seeing life.

They drove through the village and out into open country. Finding what they wanted didn’t prove easy. Most of the roads, narrow and winding, ran not between ditches but between high banks. An uncontrolled car trundling between these might be turned over; but more probably it would simply scrape and bump to an inglorious stop. When they caught a glimpse of anything else, it was of fields empty in the moonlight. Everything was alarmingly still. The only sound from outside the car was the chug-chug of Leon Kryder’s motorbike behind them. Leon was following, presumably, to do what he could. David, twisting round to have a look at him, was vaguely reminded of something sinister in a film. They swept round a bend and Leon vanished.

‘Are we really going to be complete idiots?’ Tom Overend asked this in David’s ear. His voice was carefully not suggesting anything.

‘It’s quite crackers, if you ask me.’ David spoke casually too. ‘And this infant should be in its cot.’

‘What’s that, old chap?’ Ogg’s face, flushed with excitement, was turned to him.

David felt a sudden spurt of anger – he wasn’t certain at what. ‘I said you ought to be in your cot,’ he repeated brutally. ‘Tucked up. Not out with the big, rough boys – rot them.’

Ogg laughed wildly in his absurd beard. He was too keyed up to be offended. ‘Turn right!’ he suddenly yelled. ‘Turn right, Timothy. There’s a clear run downhill. I remember it.’

The three men in front had been muttering together. It sounded like a quarrel. Perhaps Timothy and Arthur were at last blasting each other openly. But now Timothy swung the wheel and they were at once on a broader road that ran downhill before them into dimness. Ogg, blast him, had been right. David turned again and saw Leon swing after them. A Death-Rider in that fantasy of Cocteau’s – that was it. Something between a speed cop and an AA patrol – and waiting to convoy you to a nether world.

‘You lot, behind – stand up and get so you can grab the wheel.’ Timothy continued to gaze straight ahead as he spoke, but David knew that he was now looking quite cool and placid. ‘I’m going to hold on till we get a bit of momentum, and then let go. After that, we wait for our preserver. Don’t we, Mr Drury?’

‘Yes, Mr Dumble. We do.’

David didn’t know whether to laugh at them or curse them. They might have been acting in some ridiculous college play, and trying to obey the producer’s instruction to sound insolent. As for Ian, he had edged himself forward and sideways to allow the three behind to lean over the front seat, so that David caught a glimpse of his face. It was quite white and his mouth was moving oddly. And yet he wasthoroughly daredevil – a hard rider who was due, David remembered, to ride in some Point to Point or other next day. You never knew what would take whom how. It occurred to David that he had no notion how he looked himself. But how he felt was another matter. It should be possible to inform himself of that. The answer, he found with some surprise, seemed to be pretty well covered by the word exasperated – or even by the extremely modest word cross. He glanced at Ogg. Ogg was exalted. The bearded brat might have been getting ready to gallop into the valley of death and save the guns – or whatever it is that people so gallop for in phoney poems. David wished he could get round behind Ogg and restore him to reality with a boot in the bottom. But that wasn’t practicable. And now Tom Overend was talking again in his ear.