Complete Short Stories (13 page)

‘For God’s sake, Reggie, what’s the hurry? Have you murdered someone?’

It was Dick Semphill! I stopped struggling and gaped at him. ‘Come into this café and tell Alice and me what’s happened.’

I followed him in, still gaping, and sat down. ‘What on earth are you doing in Brixham?’ I asked, when I found my voice.

‘The regatta, of course,’ Alice answered.

‘But why aren’t you up in Lowestoft?’

‘That’s not till next month. We’ve been here since Friday.
Psyche’s
not distinguished herself yet, but there’s still hope.’

‘Psyche
? But she can’t possibly have sailed from Suffolk in the time!’

‘I don’t know what you’re driving at. She’s not been in the Broads since last year. You’re coming up there next month – at least we hope you are – and we’re going to have a wonderful time. By the way,
you haven’t yet told us whether Oulton Broad on the fifteenth suits you.’

‘Where’s Bunny?’

‘At school in Somerset. Murdoch will collect him when he breaks up.’

‘Dick – Alice, I believe I’m going off my head.’ I told them the whole story from the beginning, even making a clean breast of the matchbox business. They both looked thoroughly uncomfortable when I had finished.

Alice said: ‘Obviously,
it was a dream, but I can’t make out exactly at what point it began and ended. Listen: I’ll ring up the Yacht Club and find out if your Uncle Tim’s there.’

The ’phone was close to our table. Presently I heard her say: ‘You’re sure? Not since last Tuesday? Laid up with rheumatism? Oh, I’m so sorry. No, no message. Thanks very much.’

She put back the receiver. ‘It’s not so bad, Reggie,’ she said.
‘You haven’t let your uncle down. As a matter of fact, they don’t serve meals at the Yacht Club; and the only cellar there is the Commodore’s personal bottle they keep under the counter. So your dream didn’t end until Dick woke you up a moment ago. It was a bit more than a dream, of course; a sort of sleep-walk, probably due to worrying about that chap Borley. Lucky we met you. Do you mind turning
out your pockets, Reggie, dear? That may give us a clue to how long you’ve been away from your flat.’

I obeyed dazedly. Out came eight matchboxes of different sorts, seven pencils and, among other odds and ends, the return half of a railway ticket from Paddington, and an unposted letter to Alice herself, written from my flat and confirming the Oulton Broad rendezvous.

‘You came down here only
this afternoon,’ she said, showing me the date on the ticket.

There was also a bulky envelope containing all the documents
concerned with my winding-up of Borley’s affairs. Alice ran through them. ‘I see you duly delivered the wine to the Warden and Fellows of Wadham College,’ she said. ‘And here’s the itemized bill for the funeral at Kirtlington Parish Church. Oh, and a note from Squadron-leader
Borley of Banbury, saying that if you’d like any souvenir from his cousin’s effects before the auctioneer disposes of them, you’re very welcome, but will you please let him know as soon as possible. He wrote on Thursday; I don’t suppose you’ve answered him yet. Hullo, here’s a photostat of the will itself! What beastly wriggly writing! Yes, it’s witnessed by –’

Dick had kept quiet all this time.
Now he grabbed the will and read it. ‘It’s all right, Reggie,’ he said. ‘You’ve not gone nuts, and we won’t even have to get you psycho-analysed. You’ve merely been haunted – by a ghost which it ought to be easy enough to lay.’ Then he burst out: ‘You dolt, why didn’t you take the trouble to find out whether your friend Borley was a Protestant or a Catholic?’

‘I did take a great deal of trouble,
but nobody knew. Even the College couldn’t tell me, so I followed the line of least resistance and had him buried C. of E.’

‘Exactly. That’s what all the trouble’s been about ! You see now why in your dream he called you a damned thief?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Read the will again. Read it aloud!’

I read:

‘Not “
for Mr Reginald Massie
,” idiot; if he’d meant you he’d have written “the said Reginald Massie.” It’s “
for the Requisite Masses
”! Masses for his soul’s repose, don’t you see?’

The exhumation was not easy to wangle, hut I got it fixed up in the end. Then I handed over
the wine to the St Aloysius people at Oxford and they agreed to do the rest. And on Alice’s insistence, I wrote to Squadron-leader Borley, asking for the corkscrew as a keepsake. Since he sent it I haven’t pocketed a single matchbox or pencil – so far as I know, that is…

D
EAR
M
RS
H
AMPSTEAD
-H
ENDON
:

Mother asks me to answer about schools for your children when you come to see us in Majorca, because they are the same age as Richard and me.

First we lived in a village called Binijiny where they do nothing but grow tomatoes. I and Richard were sent to the Franciscan nuns, and I looked after him until he was old enough to do up his own buttons.
Then he went to the State school because the Bishop won’t let girls and bigger boys learn together, although at Binijiny there were only ten boys in the boys’ school and only four girls in the girls’ school. The Franciscans had the other eight girls, mostly with baby brothers. Richard’s headmaster got 800 pesetas a month, not quite £2 a week, which he couldn’t live on. So he spent his school
hours at home translating William Shakespeare into Spanish; but as he knew no English, he translated a French translation. He had learned French when he was a waiter-boy in a Marseilles Economical Restaurant which his uncle had; he didn’t like the life because his uncle used to buy the left-overs in the market, stinky fish and rotten vegetables, and say: ‘We must show our clients an example by
eating no better than they do.’ That’s how he came to be a schoolmaster.

You can see the Inspector’s car coming up to the Binijiny mountain from two kilometres away, and it always stops halfway to cool down the radiator; so Jaime Frau, the boy who knew the lessons best, used to teach the little boys, and Juan Grau, the boy who knew least, kept watch from the Calvary outside. The Master said:
‘This is good training for your careers, if you don’t like growing tomatoes. Jaime can be a schoolmaster like me and Juan can be a
guardia
like his father.’ Juan never missed the car and when it arrived the Master had rushed from his house to the school and was busy giving a lecture on the glorious days of Philip II – which is where history really stops in the school books until it starts again
with Franco and the glorious liberation of the
Patria
. So the Inspector who was a
Madrileño
had a lovely
arroz paella
at the
Fonda,
and lots of wine, and then lots of
licores,
and a cigar, and said that Binijiny had the best school in his district. Once he sent for ten
ensaimadas,
which are a sort of very light sugar bun in the shape of a whirligig, and said: ‘Now, my little
friends, see which
of you can eat the quickest. This will be a useful lesson to you in this island of bandits.’ When Juan Grau won easily, the Inspector shouted
‘Olé!’
and then grabbed Richard’s
ensaimada
and asked: ‘What is wrong with you, little English boy, are you ill? You have taken only one bite.’ Richard said: ‘No, sir! But we English can’t eat so fast as you Spaniards.’ Then the Inspector laughed and swallowed
the
ensaimada
himself at one gulp. Then he made Richard kneel down with his arms stretched out like the penitents on Holy Thursday and said: ‘Stay like that until you have given me back Gibraltar.’

Mother kept me with the Franciscans, because at the Girls’ State School there was too much religion and also politics. One day the Señorita of the Girls’ School saw me sitting on the convent steps
eating my lunch, and said in a loud voice that all Protestants will go to Hell and burn for ever. But Sor Juana came out and told the Señorita that I was top of the class in Sacred History. At the back of our arithmetic book which we had to use was the Spanish eagle holding the Falangist arrows in its claws, and that day Sor Juana told the little ones: ‘That’s the
Demonio
who comes for naughty
children.’ In Spanish schools one learns everything off by heart and chants it, and nobody explains what anything means, and nobody cares. Mother paid the nuns fifty pesetas a term for Richard and me, and they were very contented. We talked Majorcan in the playground. It is an easy language, a sort of Italianish French, but one has to shout it or they think you are ill and want to give you a purge.

Two years ago we moved to Palma, which is a large city, and were sent to State schools near our flat. They never opened our windows and I had sixty in my class, mostly poor girls. There was no fireplace but the room soon warmed up even when there was snow on the mountains, and we sat three girls to every desk made for two. My Señorita was very sweet, but I got fleas and sore throats. One day,
when a steamroller passed, a window pane fell out and broke; and it never got mended, which was a good thing, of course. Richard’s boys in the school next door were lucky to have a playground where they played bullfights and ‘hit me harder’; we girls had to stay at our desks (taking turns to go to the
retrete
) and embroider. He got into trouble because his friends caught the steamroller in a booby-trap
and burst the water-main, so that the whole suburb was without water for a month. And he learned to throw stones at cars and insult policemen.

Mother took us both away and now we go to the two best schools in the Island. Mine is a convent, and we wear sailor suits and learn French and I am actually allowed out early to learn ballet – because my ballet teacher is a Catholic
refugiada
from the
Russians – but I have to be very industrious to make up. One gets ribbons and coloured scarves to wear for being that, and now I am so dressed up that the girls nickname me ‘The Capitán General of the Baleares’. Richard’s new headmaster is a priest who knows Piccadilly in London and says: ‘To everyone his own religion!’ and asked
Mother about Richard’s psychology before he went. He built the school
on an English plan with windows that go up and down, and lavatories with water; and he gives gymnastics and basket-ball. There’s an old grey cockatoo who knows the whole
Grado Elemental
book off by heart, and a huge black dog who wanders in and out of the classrooms. Mother pays a lot for us – more than £3 a month each, including school dinners and school books; but we are supposed to make valuable
friendships with the daughters and sons of rich businessmen. The playground language is Spanish, because the rich businessmen don’t like to have their children mistaken for ordinary Majorcans, even though they are. I think your children would be happy in our schools and soon learn Spanish, but they might not like having to eat bread and oil rubbed with garlic at dinner. We are accustomed to
it; but not to the
garbanzo
soup, which is filthy. When it comes round I ask the girls at my table: ‘Does anyone know the third person plural past definite tense of the verb
avoir
?’ And they shout it out, and it sounds like everyone being sick, and the nun gets cross.

Love from Margaret

P.S. I enclose the
Bulletin
of St Modesto of Bobbio’s College in case you are interested.

T
HE
C
OLLEGE
, in its stony immobility, gives signs of awakening life. Somnolent, it casts off the lethargy of a long summer siesta, and makes ready to receive you, dearest young collegians, to its throbbing bosom… At last it is the first week of October, and the end of our annual course in June becomes a retrospect of centuries.
The piles of exuberant text-books impatiently await the caress of your industrious hands, while over the now no longer silent cloisters and the already noisy classroom broods the benign and gentle spirit of our illustrious Patron, the incomparable Saint Modesto of Bobbio.

So to work, my friends !

If you are a student and are made to study, this is no sort of injury. Far contrariwise. Learning
and the results of learning are absolutely necessary for a man of superior station. If you study with all your forces you will amass a vast capital, on the interest of which you will one day be able to live in voluptuous ease. A student who abandons himself to beachcombing and the gipsy life, prejudices not only himself but his future sons and grandsons, and educated society in general.

With
this little prologue I shall present you to the students who have crowned themselves with glory by passing with distinction their Baccalaureat. Let the presentation take the form of a few distinct interviews:

Alonzo García

I found Alonzo rolling dice, left hand against the right, in the Hall of Seraphic Youth. He is a serious adolescent in white trousers and khaki shirt, as absorbed in his game
as when he played goal last spring in our football team that knocked such lumps of flesh out of our rivals of St Dominic’s.

‘Tell me, Alonzo – to what career will you dedicate yourself ?’

‘Well, at the moment, I shall respect my good Uncle’s desire that I should join him as a humble assistant in the business which has given him so portly a belly.’

‘Of course: he is a director of the Madrid
Bull Ring management, is he not?’

‘Exactly: he contemplates to present to the public more valiant and dependable cornupeds than ever were seen before in the history of Spain, and more valiant and brilliant artists of killing. If, in some modest way, I can contribute to the glories of the National Fiesta…’

‘You have chosen well, Alonzo. Moreover, I greatly applauded your organization of the end-of-term
bullfight, which was full of colour and passion. Everything for the Fatherland… Perhaps there will be reduced fees for your old teachers.’