In the Time of Greenbloom (49 page)

He returned with the tea-cosied tray and put it on the desk as Mrs Foley closed the door. He poured out the tea meticulously, running it into the milk at the bottom of the cups and then handed one to John.

“Drink this!” he said, “and relax. Afterwards, when we have cleared up matters a little further, we must discuss your future. After
that
I think it would be a good thing for you to take a brisk walk before supper.”

“I think I would rather lie down or read a book sir.”

He sipped his tea and wondered what did it all matter. It had seemed certain and important; but if it was not certain it was not important. Nothing was important because nothing was true. He thought of Father Delaura ringing up like that; so quickly.

Mr Victor replaced his cup on his saucer. “Let us start by examining in order the points of evidence you will have to offer to the Police in order to convince them of the necessity for action; let us put ourselves in the
place
of the Police. After that, let us consider the possible effects of their action,
if any
, on the immediate future—on
your
future, John.”

“Yes sir.”

“I am beginning to think that Rooker's Close may not after all be quite the most suitable place for you …”

In the garden he saw the stand of the yew hedges surrounding the rose-bed and guessed at the scent of them. To talk in circles, to move in circles, as Mr Victor had said, was very soothing.

He closed his eyes.

Give them ear! and let the dead,
Interred no deeper than Antigone's lost tears
For Polyneices, rise again and choose
To travel with you further than the ears hear
Or the heart can lose
.

 

He put Father's bicycle away in the garage, unstrapped his satchel from the little grid at the back, and swinging it carelessly walked slowly down the drive to the cottage.

The others of course would all have passed the exam, they always did; and even if one or two of them
had
failed it would not greatly matter.
He
was eighteen, but their average age could not be much more than fifteen, and another year at the County School would not affect them in the least; their parents would scrape the fees together somehow and the news would spread through Benllwch, Bodorgan, or Pengross that John Hughes ‘
Chemist
', Nellie ‘
Chips
' or Owen ‘
Pie Bron
' had ‘
failed School Certificate, look you
!' There would be shakings of heads for a Saturday or two and then it would all be forgotten.

But if
he
had failed this time after all the money spent on him at the Abbey, Beowulf's, Rooker's Close and a year's ignominiously hard work under the seedy conditions of the County School at Llanabbas, it would be the end of him; either the Point or Father's sixteen bore.

He couldn't face even another term at the County School, let alone the prospect of a second year—even supposing he were given the chance of it. As it was, his age and his background had been as much an embarrassment to the School staff as they had been to the family and to himself; but neither the School nor the family could possibly know what it had been like for him to have to catch the School train every morning at ten-past seven, to sit wearing the school cap in the carriage listening to the stream of colloquial Welsh while trying to appear inconspicuous, though one was English, older than anyone else and, once, a Public Schoolboy.

If one used the gun there would be the difficulty of pulling the triggers: people usually managed it by rigging up strings or wires, but when that was done it couldn't possibly be made
to look like an accident; and he was damned if people were going to be allowed to despise his
death
.

It would have to be the Point then; just after the turn of the tide when the Race was at its fullest. For the hundredth time he visualised it: the casual wave to people by the springboard, the perfect knife-like dive, and the half-mile swim out to the Lighthouse. He would swim very beautifully so that they would remember it: the clear cold passage alongside the rocks out to the
Pwll Glas
, the Blue Pool, where he had so often fished for bream with Father in the earliest Anglesey days; and then on farther into the forbidden waters beyond the Lighthouse. Once he had reached these it would be unnecessary to do anything more; the current would take over. How many times he had sat above it on the rocks throwing the heads of sea pinks into the smooth water, watching them hesitate turning slowly round and round before they began to slide out gently at first, and then faster and faster, as the millions of gallons of the Bay's sea-water emptied itself into the frenzy of the Race.

In the past ten years two people had drowned in the Race, and at least three or four been rescued from it when
in extremis
. He of course was terrified of it: the whirlpools with their turning mouths, ample enough to suck down an elephant, the great smooth eiderdown hills, the sheets of green glass surrounded by hissing wave-tops, and the continuous roar which on still days could be heard even from the top of the ‘Mountain'.

It would be clean though and probably fairly quick, particularly if he put up no real resistance but drank in the thick water eagerly. He would just have to be brave during the first part as the current took hold of him; after that, he could give a few shouts and signals for the look of the thing and then abandon himself to the strength of it, somersaulting his body into its green and white folds like a child on the counterpane of its mother's bed.

Terrible that he wasn't really interested any longer in what people might say or anxious that they should care:
that
meant
that the idea was becoming real and truly personal; a private matter between himself—and
himself
.

Half-way down the drive he stopped. How could a decision rest between himself and himself? He must really be mad, a split personality, if he were beginning to think of himself as two people. Suicide was a single act between one person and—who else? God, of course; that's what
they
would say; but either there
was
no God or else there were a hundred gods all cancelling one another out; Mother's god, Rudmose's god, Victor's god, Greenbloom's god, Mrs Blount's god, Father's god, his brother David's god; in fact, a million gods, as many gods as there were people; a lunacy of gods, a revolting magnified concatenation of superhumanity clustered on the summit of some Olympus a little higher than the World. And who made Olympus? he asked himself. Men made it and peopled it with gods in their own image. Well, his god had better watch out or he would soon find himself without a worshipper just as old Rudmose's had done.

He stooped and picked a red wallflower from beside the drive: very beautiful, so beautiful that the scent of it hurt him as he pushed it through the hole in his lapel. It was good camouflage, would make him look as though he thought he might have been quietly successful in the Exam, would discomfort Mary who did not like him to look pleased with himself, clean and spruce; who preferred him when he was hangdog, in a black and dangerous mood under whose influence he might do or say some unpremeditated thing which would arouse Mother to a white fury and precipitate one of the rows that were so essential to them all. Yes the wallflower was a good idea; like incense it could cover the aura of his thoughts so that no one would discern them; and it was appropriate too for the party at Porth Newydd in the evening; would make them think that all was well and that he was looking forward to his week-end.

He pushed open the front door and hung his satchel in the cloakroom. Good! Greenbloom
had
arrived and presumably his poet friend as well. There were two white suitcases,
marked with the initials H. G., standing beneath the coats together with a very battered one fastened with a leather strap and covered with French labels. He looked at the name:

MR JANE BOSCAWEN-JONES
C/O THE GOAT HOTEL
LLANGOLLEN

Extraordinary name for a man; but then of course poets were different. How, he wondered, had Boscawen-Jones managed to persuade his parents to christen him Jane so that when he grew up he could become a poet. What would he look like? Shelley? Rupert Brooke? Keats? Would he be Welsh or English-Welsh? Mick knew very little about him, only that he was Greenbloom's newest discovery and that shortly the private press which Greenbloom had recently started would be publishing a book of his poetry.

In fact, they were supposed to be staying at Plas David, paying Mary ten guineas a week each while Boscawen-Jones completed some of the verse ‘
in this beautiful country house only one mile from the little bay of St David where home cooking and unhotel-like comfort, combined with every care for your well-being in every way, are the marks of our unique hospitality
'—he remembered the glowing wording of Mother's brochure the year Mary had gone into the guest-house business.

At another time the prospect of two such wild guests would have excited John; but now, with the results of the exam looming ahead, and the knowledge of his impaired prestige with the family, he felt only awkward and detached, unanxious to try and impress either of them with any facet of his character, too steeply involved in his own recurrent despair to want to ‘show off' even by silence.

He walked through the raftered dining-room into the long drawing-room which jutted backward from the front of the cottage to the Dog Field and the vegetable garden. The left-hand windows were open and boxes of sunlight streamed across the room on to the tired covers of the armchairs on to
the baby ‘Grand' and the little Dresden mirror with its crisp confection of flowers and cupids on the opposite wall.

Like the wallflower glowing in his lapel these things filled him with a pain that was at once dear and almost intolerable, reminding him of the reality of a happiness which he wished had never existed so that he might not now know the full extent of his present misery. Under the impact of it, he realised that if in fact he did make the swim to the Race in a few weeks' time, then these inanimate things would be the real though indirect instruments of his death: a wallflower, a Dresden mirror, and the rosewood curve of a Bechstein piano. Such things should never have been allowed the constancy denied such people as himself; but should themselves have changed as he had changed, slowly and completely, since first he had seen them as a child in the grey and silver drawing-room of the Beddington vicarage fifteen years ago.

Inclining his head to sniff once more the scent of the wallflower, a line of poetry he had once read somewhere spoke clearly in his mind:

“
And now that my disease is made most manifest to me,
I fear the throwers by the wall—
Remembering dead flowers and fires
.”

From the piazza outside the windows he heard the rattle of a tea-cup and the clipped syllables of Mary's words:

“Well if they're all going over to Porth Newydd surely they won't want dinner at the Plas first? In any case it's very unfair on the staff, Michael taking them off into Benllwch like that the moment they arrived. I didn't even know that they
had
arrived until I came over and saw their cases in the cloakroom. What did they want in Benllwch, Mother?”

“Yes, it was very naughty of them.” Mother was indulgently full of China tea. “But I couldn't stop them; apparently this awful friend of his had run out of typing paper—”

“Surely you didn't believe
that
! They've gone to the Rhosybol Arms and they'll come back demanding dinner
at the last minute just as we're starting on the washing-up of all the other guests.”

“I told them
distinctly
that they'd have to be back by seven if they wanted a meal before they went over to Porth Newydd. Horab wants John and Michael to have dinner with them and that will save Nanny.”

“No, I can't do with any extras, there's not enough tongue. I'm budgeting very carefully this quarter, Mother. If we had a licence I could afford to be lavish with the food, but as it is—”

“Don't be short-sighted dear, you can charge an extra guinea each for a dinner like yours, and Michael and John can make up with the ends; serve it up in the kitchen and see that Betty gives the right helpings to the right people.”

“But I don't want
them
over there. I have no say in the last-minute guests as a rule, but as far as my own brothers are concerned—you really don't understand the extra work it entails. I want to have everything finished before George arrives at eight-thirty—we're going to go down to the Bay and put out the lobster pots at low tide.”

“Well! You'll have to look slippy,” Father's voice broke in plaintively. “Low tide's at eight-fifteen tonight.”

“Shut up Teddy!” said Mother.

“I was only telling her that if she wants to get the pots out this evening she'll have to catch the ebb—What about bait? They like a bit of rotten herring; Have you ordered bait from—”

“Oh be quiet!” said Mary. “Why must you always interrupt—What was I saying?” She paused. “John's not invited over to Lady Geraldine's is he?”

“Yes, she particularly wants all the men she can lay her hands on, six of The Wycombe Abbey girls arrived for the summer holidays last week-end and she's at her wit's end to entertain them, the poor darling.”

“But you're not letting them go, surely?”

“Yes dear! Why did you want him for anything?”

“No; but I don't think he
ought
to go. He spends far too much time loafing about over there in the holidays and in any case I want him to help with the washing-up.”

“I think it might be good for him, he's been looking very pale lately—”

“Hhph!” Mary's ejaculation came through the window like a rifle crack. “You know why
that
is.”