In the Time of Greenbloom (35 page)

They were quite unable to reply but sat there together with dry mouths as the Bentley swept round a left bend into an ominously straight section of road.

“What's this coming up on the left Mick?
Good God, you should have warned me minutes ago. It nearly hit us
.”

“My dear Horab! If you can see a moving lorry at a hundred yards how was I to know that you could not recognise a stationary bus at fifty?”

“Is that a cross-roads or an island?”

“It's both,” said John.

“You go round it and then carry straight on,” interposed Michael quickly.

Greenbloom depressed the clutch in mistake for the brakes, the enormous engine in front of them screamed like a siren and in the nick of time he changed gear grabbed the handbrake
and slewed them round a concrete circle with a central sign-post. They expected him to stop on the far side so that they might collect themselves and see what had happened to Rachel and Kate Holly who by this time had ceased even their earlier pathetic shrieks. Instead, they began to pick up speed and as the needle on the dashboard floated slowly round past the eighty mark Greenbloom spoke calmly: in the dim light which illumined his chin and lips from below they saw that he was smiling with terrifying reasonableness.

“You know, you'll really have to try and give me earlier warning if you're going to continue to assist me, Mick. In daylight one can afford to relax a little round corners because the traffic slows one up; but driving at night is quite different from—” He leaned forward: “Hello, what's that house doing out there? Plumb in the middle of the—”

“
Fork right
!” Michael's voice broke into an adenoidal falsetto which threaded through the weaker cries wrung from Rachel and Kate Holly behind him. It was too late, they swept between two white gateposts with a lodge on the left of them, slid along a private drive which seemed to shorten visibly from the moment they entered it, and with Greenbloom rearing up as he stood on the brake pedal came to rest in the middle of a rose-bed outside a large country house. Greenbloom switched off the ignition and there was silence.

“Everyone must change places,” he announced. “I can't possibly continue to drive with things as they are. Where's my flask, Rachel?”

Kate Holly opened her door. “I'm walkin',” she said flatly. “You're not taking me another yard, front or back.”

“Don't be ridiculous! Don't you realise that but for my quickness in avoiding that building you'd all have been dead? If someone had had the wit to warn me a little sooner,” he did not even glance at Michael, “there would have been no danger at all, as it is—Rachel, for God's sake find my flask!”

“But the
damage
Horab! the damage!” she moaned.

“What damage? Did we hit something?”

Michael spoke, “Of course we did, it's under the car.”

Greenbloom groaned. “Would somebody mind telling me first of all what we hit and secondly what it is that is at present lying under the car.”

“I think it was a sundial or something,” said John. “It may have been a birdbath.”

“Thank God for my bumpers. I only had them fitted last Vac and they've proved a Godsend already. We will all have a drink and then we will see how they've stood up to it.”

“Don't you think it would be as well to get off this flowerbed first?” suggested Michael.

“Exactly.” He started the engine. “I shall need a little help, I had no time to notice if there were any obstructions behind us. Mick, you'd better get out and give me directions.”

“I'm afraid that's impossible,” said Michael. “Just for the moment my legs won't carry me.”

“Of course they won't. I keep telling you we've all had a very narrow escape. Where's that flask? Give it to Mick.”

Rachel handed it over and Mick drank and passed it on to Greenbloom.

“That's better,” he said. “Can you manage it now Mick? We don't want to be here all night and I suppose we'll have to explain to the owner. I'm going to suggest that he should have a notice put up at his gate giving motorists a clear warning of his concealed entrance.”

“It's
not
a concealed entrance,” said Michael wearily as he got out of the car and took up his position behind it.

Leaning out on either side Greenbloom and John watched him as he signalled to them.

“Straight back!” he called. “Straight back!”

Greenbloom fumbled at the gears and the car rumbled forwards over a small rockery and slid down into the drive facing the front door.

Greenbloom got out and rang the bell. In a few moments the light went on in the hall and the door opened.

The young man confronting them wore black and smiled charmingly. “Sir?”

“Is anyone at home?”

“Sir Halcyon Summas left for the Riviera in February, sir, and is not expected to return until June when Lady Summas leaves for—” His cheeks stiffened in his attempt to counteract the increasing irreverence of his smile, “Lady Summas is in her Studio, sir.”

Greenbloom's head jerked up savagely. “In her
Studio
? At this hour?”

“Lady Summas writes—poetry sir,” said the young man with great restraint. “She gave emphatic orders that she was not to be disturbed.”

“She will
not
be!” said Greenbloom with a shudder. He straightened his shoulders.

“We have just had what might have been a very nasty accident which would never have happened if your main gate had been closed.”

The young man stepped out into the drive. “I'm very sorry, sir. Was anyone hurt?”

“Fortunately no. But some of my party, the ladies, were very shaken as you can imagine and we have only one small flask between us.”

From the background Mick loped up to them as they stood in the rectangle of light thrown from the hall on to the battered front of the Bentley. The others remained in the car straining their ears to catch the syllables of the conversation.

“It was an oversight about the gate sir,” said the Butler, “and I know that Sir Halcyon will be very distressed by the lodge-keeper's failure to close it.”

Michael interrupted. “I'm afraid we hit something in the middle of the rose-bed, it is impossible to see exactly what it was.”

“That would be the urn Sir—a Georgian one.”

“We'll have to see about that,” said Greenbloom shortly. “I will leave you my card. But first I feel the least we can do is to give the ladies a drink.”

“Of course, sir. If you'd like to come in—?”

“Thank you! We can't stay long though. We're on our way to Oxford.”

They followed him into a large drawing-room with a parquet floor and having removed the dust sheets, sat round a pie-crust table and ate the biscuits which accompanied a decanter of brandy pronounced by Greenbloom to be ‘reasonably good'.

Some ten minutes later they were once again on the road to Oxford.

This time Greenbloom had arranged them differently; and to John, sitting between his taut body, the pale face peering through the window like a night-hawk, and the soft rather odorous comfort of Kate Holly, their progress assumed an inevitability that was not only restful but in some way even safe. It was as though they had passed through some barrier of danger beyond which accepted laws ceased to operate.

He had seen the illusion of such safety depicted on films where traffic corners and obstructions of all kinds miraculously vanished at the ultimate moment against all expectation and allowed pursuer or pursued to reach their journey's end in safety; but because it was simultaneously perceived by all the senses and because no one knew whether Greenbloom was the hero or the villain, the present experience was entirely different. At the cinema it was usually the hero who was safe and the villain who came to satisfying grief; but Greenbloom might equally well have been chasing something with every good intention or fleeing from it with a black heart, and they whose lives might closely depend upon his role had no knowledge of the plot in which they were cast.

Yet John was certainly not frightened; the danger, whatever it may have been, now lay behind them; they had long ago overtaken it with partial impunity and now they were in a new country, the Greenbloom country, where whatever happened whether it were for an unreal best or worst was of no importance.

The realisation of this was quietly exhilarating and affected them all. Perceptibly, as they sped on through the night they began to relax, no longer troubling to follow the course of the road or to warn Greenbloom of approaching sign-posts
or traffic. Glancing behind him, John saw that Rachel and Michael, having lighted cigarettes, were no longer sitting upright but had subsided easily into the body of the car where they were sitting far apart from each other in a dreamy silence.

For his own part, he began to enjoy Kate Holly's closeness and leaned more heavily on her full shoulder as he reviewed the events of the day with the sort of dispassionate and increasing pleasure which precedes sleep.

Greenbloom was wonderful, he decided; he was a prophet like John the Baptist or one of the earlier ones, the Isaiahs and Jeremiahs so often quoted by the Prebendary and Rudmose; a man of the desert crying out wonderful things in a voice which was itself as dry and parched as the waste he inhabited.

All prophets dwelt in deserts and Greenbloom was no exception; he carried his own desert with him and even in the most opulent surroundings could spread it about him like a brown cloak. His rooms at Balliol were just a blind to hoodwink people and make them think that he was modern and rich. Really he was poor; a gaunt person in a rough robe who despised the wealth he had been given and who dwelt in a time and country of his own beyond the common imagining.

Obviously he was waiting for something; he had said so; “The rest of us must wait,” he had said, and he had meant it. He must be a prophet or he would not be waiting for something; all prophets were waiting for something and Greenbloom already had everything: jewels, girls, this Bentley, even a three-seater aeroplane if Michael were to be believed; yet he was still expecting ardently some other thing beside which all these possessions were of no importance whatever.

It was true he had admitted that he did not know exactly what he was expecting: it had apparently been something more than the stars for which he searched week by week; it had also been something more than the book he was supposed to be writing about Wittgenstein. The book, so vast, so inclusive which weighed him down whenever it was mentioned and had seemed distasteful to him whenever
Michael mentioned it. Lastly, his expectation, whatever it might be, evidently had no connection with the career he intended to follow after he went down from Oxford, because like the book he never referred to this except in the most vague and bewildering terms. Yet John was sure that the event for which he waited would ultimately rise clearly out of these three things, and the fact that Greenbloom was so unspecific about it only made him more truly a prophet. Prophets who were easily understandable were not prophets at all; they were just preachers or politicians, bores like Oily Albert and Mr Baldwin.

You could laugh at Greenbloom of course and it would do no harm either to you or to him provided that you knew the difference between a clown and a prophet. No doubt because whatever he did he was acting not only for the present but for the furtherance of some project which could only be concluded in the future, giftless people with no vision would see him only as a clown; but those who had such faith in him as John would laugh only with a respectful reservation. After all, what did an urn and a flower-bed matter when you were passing over them on your way to some horizon lighted with an unearthly light? That butler had respected him; had it been anyone else driving up in that rude way smashing everything that lay in his path and then demanding apologies, the butler would have been haughty and full of threats; but as it was, he, like John, had recognised Greenbloom's quality and had rushed to the pantry to get him biscuits and brandy and treated them all as though they had been very important friends of his employer.

It was lucky that Greenbloom liked John and was interested in him; he had been wonderfully clever in his handling of Michael, and obviously he would not have taken all that trouble to overrule him about the trip if he had not realised that John knew him for what he was and appreciated his secret. He would tell Greenbloom anything, he decided; far more than he would ever tell Michael. Greenbloom had discerned John's own dark desert and had entered it from the
East crying of the great light which one day would blaze upon it so that the way out of it might easily be found. Yes! Greenbloom was his friend, he would confide in him; he might, as a preliminary, even consider returning the money he had stolen if Greenbloom seemed to want it at any time, and certainly from now on he would immediately do anything he suggested. He only hoped that he would not grow tired of him and drop him after this one wonderful experience. If he could only find some means of continuing to interest him then he might ask him out again, possibly without Michael, and if
that
happened then the remainder of this last term at Beowulf's might be just bearable.

Sitting up, he leaned forward and peered at the dashboard clock; it showed that it was after half-past ten already and although they had reached the outskirts of Oxford some minutes ago he realised he could not possibly be back at the School before eleven o'clock, and at the very least that would mean a beating from Rudmose in the morning. He glanced through the windscreen. Greenbloom was driving as fast as ever; the houses and hedges were flashing past and ahead of them, as they leapt down the gentle hill into the town, was Magdalen bridge. He saw the tall tower of the College the fat stone balustrades of the bridge and, standing stock-still in the centre of it like a rigid statue, the dark shape of a single policeman. A moment later they heard the faint ghost of his whistle far behind them as they flew up the slope towards Carfax, ran straight over the red lights into the High, and, finally after several more turns drew up outside Mick's rooms in a little street somewhere near the Carpenter's Arms.