May We Borrow Your Husband? (15 page)

When she was safely out of the carriage I bent towards the basket and asked him a question. I had never before carried my researches quite so far.

‘What's yours?' I said.

He blew a thick white bubble, brown at the edges. There could be no doubt at all that he was saying, ‘A pint of the best bitter.'

‘Haven't seen you lately – you know – in the old place,' I said.

He gave a quick smile, passing it off, then he winked again. You couldn't doubt that he was saying, ‘The other half?'

I blew a bubble in my turn – we spoke the same language.

Very slightly he turned his head to one side. He didn't want anybody to hear what he was going to say now.

‘You've got a tip?' I asked.

Don't mistake my meaning. It was not racing information I wanted. Of course I could not see his waist under all those pink-rabbit wrappings, but I knew perfectly well that he wore a double-breasted waistcoat and had nothing to do with the tracks. I said very rapidly because his mother might return at any moment, ‘My brokers are Druce, Davis and Burrows.'

He looked up at me with bloodshot eyes and a little line of spittle began to form at the corner of his mouth. I said, ‘Oh, I know they're not all that good. But at the moment they are recommending Stores.'

He gave a high wail of pain – you could have mistaken the cause for wind, but I knew better. In his club they didn't have to serve dill water. I said, ‘I don't agree, mind you,' and he stopped crying and blew a bubble – a little tough white one which lingered on his lip.

I caught his meaning at once. ‘My round,' I said. ‘Time for a short?'

He nodded.

‘Scotch?' I know few people will believe me, but he raised his head an inch or two and gazed unmistakably at my watch.

‘A bit early?' I said. ‘Pink gin?'

I didn't have to wait for his reply. ‘Make them large ones,' I said to the imaginary barman.

He spat at me, so I added, ‘Throw away the pink.'

‘Well,' I said, ‘here's to you. Happy future,' and we smiled at each other, well content.

‘I don't know what you would advise,' I said, ‘but surely Tobaccos are about as low as they will go. When you think Imps were a cool 80/ – in the early Thirties and now you can pick them up for under 60/ –. . . . This cancer scare can't go on. People have got to have their fun.'

At the word fun he winked again, looked secretively around, and I realized that perhaps I had been on the wrong track. It was not after all the state of the markets he had been so ready to talk about.

‘I heard a damn good one yesterday,' I said. ‘A man got into a tube train, and there was a pretty girl with one stocking coming down . . .'

He yawned and closed his eyes.

‘Sorry,' I said, ‘I thought it was new. You tell me one.'

And do you know that damned baby was quite ready to oblige? But he belonged to the school who find their own jokes funny and when he tried to speak, he could only laugh. He couldn't get his story out for laughter. He laughed and winked and laughed again – what a good story it must have been. I could have dined out for weeks on the strength of it. His limbs twitched in the basket; he even tried to get his hands free from the pink rabbits, and then the laughter died. I could almost hear him saying, ‘Tell you later, old man.'

His mother opened the door of the compartment. She said, ‘You've been amusing baby. How kind of you. Are you fond of babies?' And she gave me such a look – the love-wrinkles forming round the mouth and eyes – that I was tempted to reply with the warmth and hypocrisy required, but then I met the baby's hard relentless gaze.

‘Well, as a matter of fact,' I said, ‘I'm not. Not really,' I drooled on, losing all my chances before that blue and pebbly stare. ‘You know how it is . . . never had one of my own . . . I'm fond of fishes though . . .'

I suppose in a way I got my reward. The baby blew a whole succession of bubbles. He was satisfied; after all a chap shouldn't make passes at another chap's mother, especially if he belongs to the same club – for suddenly I knew inevitably to what club he would belong in twenty-five years' time, ‘On me,' he was obviously saying now. ‘Doubles all round.' I could only hope that I would not live so long.

DOCTOR CROMBIE

A
N
unfortunate circumstance in my life has just recalled to mind a certain Doctor Crombie and the conversations I used to hold with him when I was young. He was the school doctor until the eccentricity of his ideas became generally known. After he had ceased to attend the school the rest of his practice was soon reduced to a few old people, almost as eccentric as himself – there were, I remember, Colonel Parker, a British Israelite, Miss Warrender who kept twenty-five cats, and a man called Horace Turner who invented a system for turning the National Debt into a National Credit.

Doctor Crombie lived all alone half a mile from the school in a red-brick villa in King's Road. Luckily he possessed a small private income, for at the end his work had come to be entirely paperwork – long articles for the
Lancet
and the
British Medical Journal
which were never published. It was long before the days of television; otherwise a corner might have been found for him in some magazine programme, and his views would have reached a larger public than the random gossips of Bankstead – with who knows what result? – for he spoke with sincerity, and when I was young he certainly to me carried a measure of conviction.

Our school, which had begun as a grammar school during the reign of Henry VIII, had, by the twentieth century, just edged its way into the
Public Schools Year Book.
There were many day-boys, of whom I was one, for Bankstead was only an hour from London by train, and in the days of the old London Midland and Scottish Railways there were frequent and rapid services for commuters. In a boarding-school where the boys are isolated for months at a time like prisoners on Dartmoor, Doctor Crombie's views would have become known more slowly. By the time a boy went home for the holidays he would have forgotten any curious details, and the parents, dotted about England in equal isolation, would have been unable to get together and check up on any unusual stories. It was different at Bankstead, where parents lived a community life and attended singsongs, but even here Doctor Crombie's views had a long innings.

The headmaster was a progressively minded man, and, when the boys emerged, at the age of thirteen, from the junior school, he arranged, with the consent of the parents, that Doctor Crombie should address them in small groups on the problems of personal hygiene and the dangers which lay ahead. I have only faint memories of the occasion, of the boys who sniggered, of the boys who blushed, of the boys who stared at the ground as though they had dropped something, but I remember vividly the explicit and plain-speaking Doctor Crombie, with his melancholy moustache, which remained blond from nicotine long after his head was grey, and his gold-rimmed spectacles – gold rims, like a pipe, always give me the impression of a rectitude I can never achieve. I understood very little of what he was saying, but I do remember later that I asked my parents what he meant by ‘playing with oneself'. Being an only child I was accustomed to play with myself. For example, in the case of my model railway, I was in turn driver, signalman and station-master, and I felt no need of an assistant.

My mother said she had forgotten to speak to the cook and left us alone.

‘Doctor Crombie,' I told my father, ‘says that it causes cancer.'

‘Cancer!' my father exclaimed. ‘Are you sure he didn't say insanity?' (It was a great period for insanity: loss of vitality leading to nervous debility and nervous debility becoming melancholia and eventually melancholia becoming madness. For some reasons these effects were said to come before marriage and not after.)

‘He said cancer. An incurable disease, he said.'

‘Odd!' my father remarked. He reassured me about playing trains, and Doctor Crombie's theory went out of my head for some years. I don't think my father can have mentioned it to anyone else except possibly my mother and that only as a joke. Cancer was as good a scare during puberty as madness – the standard of dishonesty among parents is a high one. They had themselves long ceased to believe in the threat of madness, but they used it as a convenience, and only after some years did they reach the conclusion that Doctor Crombie was a strictly honest man.

I had just left school by that time and I had not yet gone up to the university; Doctor Crombie's head was quite white by then, though his moustache stayed blond. We had become close friends, for we both liked observing trains, and sometimes on a summer's day we took a picnic-lunch and sat on the green mound of Bankstead Castle from which we could watch the line and see below it the canal with the bright-painted barges drawn by slow horses in the direction of Birmingham. We drank ginger-beer out of stone bottles and ate ham sandwiches while Doctor Crombie studied
Bradshaw.
When I want an image for innocence I think of those afternoons.

But the peace of the afternoon I am remembering now was disturbed. An immense goods-train of coal-waggons went by us – I counted sixty-three, which approached our record, but when I asked for his confirmation, Doctor Crombie had inexplicably forgotten to count.

‘Is something the matter?' I asked.

‘The school has asked me to resign,' he said, and he took off the gold-rimmed glasses and wiped them.

‘Good heavens! Why?'

‘The secrets of the consulting-room, my dear boy, are one-sided,' he said. ‘The patient, though not the doctor, is at liberty to tell everything.'

A week later I learnt a little of what had happened. The story had spread rapidly from parent to parent, for this was not something which concerned small boys – this concerned all of them. Perhaps there was even an element of fear in the talk – fear that Doctor Crombie might be right. Incredible thought!

A boy whom I knew, a little younger than myself, called Fred Wright, who was still in the sixth form, had visited Doctor Crombie because of certain pains in the testicles. He had had his first woman in a street off Leicester Square on a half-day excursion – there were half-day excursions in those happy days of rival railway-companies – and he had taken his courage in his hands and visited Doctor Crombie. He was afraid that he had caught what was then known as a social disease. Doctor Crombie had reassured him – he was suffering from acidity, that was all, and he should be careful not to eat tomatoes, but Doctor Crombie went on, rashly and unnecessarily, to warn him, as he had warned all of us at thirteen . . .

Fred Wright had no reason to feel ashamed. Acidity can happen to anyone, and he didn't hesitate to tell his parents of the further advice which Doctor Crombie had given him. When I returned home that afternoon and questioned my parents, I found the story had already reached them as it had reached the school authorities. Parent after parent had checked with one another, and afterwards child after child was interrogated. Cancer as the result of masturbation was one thing – you had to discourage it somehow – but what right had Doctor Crombie to say that cancer was the result of prolonged sexual relations, even in a proper marriage recognized by Church and State? (It was unfortunate that Fred Wright's very virile father, unknown to his son, had already fallen a victim to the dread disease.)

I was even a little shaken myself. I had great affection for Doctor Crombie and great confidence in him. (I had never played trains all by myself after thirteen with the same pleasure as before his hygienic talk.) And the worst of it was that now I had fallen in love, hopelessly in love, with a girl in Castle Street with what we called then bobbed hair; she resembled in an innocent and provincial way two famous society sisters whose photographs appeared nearly every week in the
Daily Mail.
(The years seem to be returning on their tracks, and I see now everywhere the same fact, the same hair, as I saw then, but alas, with little or no emotion.)

The next time I went out with Doctor Crombie to watch the trains I tackled him – shyly; there were still words I didn't like to use with my elders. ‘Did you really tell Fred Wright that – marriage – is a cause of cancer?'

‘Not marriage in itself, my boy. Any form of sexual congress.'

‘Congress?' It was the first time I had heard the word used in that way. I thought of the Congress of Vienna.

‘Making love,' Doctor Crombie said gruffly. ‘I thought I had explained all that to you at the age of thirteen.'

‘I just thought you were talking about playing trains alone,' I said.

‘What do you mean, playing trains?' he asked with bewilderment as a fast passenger-train went by, in and out of Bankstead station, leaving a great ball of steam at either end of No. 2 platform. ‘The 3.45 from Newcastle,' he said. ‘I make it a minute and a quarter slow.'

‘Three-quarters of a minute,' I said. We had no means of checking our watches. It was before the days of radio.

‘I am ahead of the time,' Doctor Crombie said, ‘and I expect to suffer inconvenience. The strange thing is that people here have only just noticed. I have been speaking to you boys on the subject of cancer for years.'

‘Nobody realized that you meant marriage,' I said.

‘One begins with first things first. You were, none of you, in those symposiums which I held, of an age to marry.'

‘But maiden ladies,' I objected, ‘they die of cancer too.'

‘The definition of maiden in common use,' Doctor Crombie replied, looking at his watch as a goods-train went by towards Bletchley, ‘is an unbroken hymen. A lady may have had prolonged sexual relations with herself or another without injuring the maidenhead.'