The Bachelors (12 page)

‘It was
confidential.’

‘Oh,
you should have made that clear when you told me. But I wanted Alice to know
what she’s got hold of in this Patrick Seton.’

‘Yes,
she seems to be in love with him.’

‘Did
you think so?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lovely
girl, isn’t she? And carrying a child inside her.’

‘Very
attractive.’

‘D’you
think I’ve a chance with her?’

‘Chance
of what?’

‘Well,
it would have to be marriage. She’s expecting the child, moreover. It makes her
more desirable; not many would think so, but I do.’

‘I
think you’ll have a chance after Patrick Seton has served a few months of his
prison sentence.’

‘Don’t
you think she’d be the sort of girl who would wait for him?’

‘Not
after she had heard his previous convictions read out in court.’

‘The
age of him,’ Matthew said, ‘and the look of him! What does she see in him, a
girl like that? You would never see such a match in Ireland except in rare cases
where the man had a bit of money and the girl was homeless.’

‘She is
obviously a soul-lover,’ Ronald said.

‘She’s
in love with his spiritualism, that’s what it is. He must know a few tricks.’

‘I
think he’s a genuine medium, from what I’ve heard.’

‘I hope
he doesn’t get his divorce. It might not come off. Then Alice—’

‘From what
I recall,’ Ronald said, ‘he isn’t a married man at all. At least, it wasn’t
declared the last time he was in court.’

‘He’s
supposed to have been married for twenty-five years; so Alice says.’

‘Well,
perhaps he lied to the court. But there’s usually a question of maintenance
orders. I distinctly recall his being described as a bachelor.’

‘What a
good memory you’ve got,’ Matthew said. ‘Thanks,’ said Ronald, and smiled at
himself in the glass window of a shop.

‘Why
should he talk about a divorce if he isn’t married, though?’ Matthew said. ‘Do
you think he intends to marry Alice at all?’

‘I’ll
find out what I can from Martin Bowles. He’s prosecuting counsel.’

Matthew
stopped walking and was looking out over the full-flowing river at the lights
on the opposite bank.

‘Have
you been eating lots of onions?’ Ronald said. ‘No, not since yesterday. Can you
smell them in my breath?’

‘Yes.’

‘Come
on, let’s have a drink to take it away before I pick up Alice. They don’t like
the smell of onions in your breath. Do you really think Patrick Seton is a
bachelor?’

They
sat in the public house and debated the question of Patrick’s being a bachelor,
and if so, why he had told Alice the story of a divorce.

‘Perhaps
he’s putting her off from day to day,’ Matthew said. ‘You could understand it;
her wanting to be married for the child, and him not wanting to marry at all.
He may be a bachelor like us in that respect.’

Ronald
silently contemplated the no-betting notice on the wall.

‘He has
no intention of marrying her at all,’ Matthew said, becoming fierily convinced
of it. ‘What do you expect of a spiritualist? His mind’s attuned to the ghouls
of the air all day long. How can he be expected to consider the moral
obligations of the flesh? The man’s a dualist. No sacramental sense. There have
been famous heresies very like spiritualism — they—’

‘Have
another drink,’ Ronald said, who was accustomed to long evenings of proof that
Matthew had emerged from his Jesuit school well versed in the heresies.

‘Take
the Albigensians. Or take the Quietists even. The Zoroastrians. Everything
spiritual. Down with the body. Against sex—’

‘Against
marriage,’ Ronald said. ‘All bachelors. Like us.’

‘I
think the spiritualists have sex.’ Matthew looked broodly at his knees. ‘I’m
afraid we are heretics,’ he said, ‘or possessed by devils.’ His curls shone
under the lamp. ‘It shows a dualistic attitude, not to marry if you aren’t
going to be a priest or a religious. You’ve got to affirm the oneness of
reality in some form or another.’

‘We’re
not in fact heretics,’ Ronald said, ‘under the correct meaning of the term.’

‘Well,
we’ve got am heretical attitude, in a way.’

‘Not in
fact. But does it worry you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you
want to marry?’

‘No.’

‘Then
you’ve got a problem,’ Ronald observed and went to fetch more drinks.

‘I
suppose an heretical attitude is part of original sin,’ Matthew said as soon as
Ronald returned within hearing. ‘You can’t avoid it.’

Ronald
said, ‘The Christian economy seems to me to be so ordered that original sin is
necessary to salvation. And so far as remaining single is concerned that
applies to a lot of people.’

They
walked to Battersea where their attention was caught by the sound as of a horse
galloping. They looked up a side street in the direction of the sound and found
it to come from a man lying on his back outside a pub. His legs were kicking
out and his heels clop-clopped on the pavement. A few people had gathered in
the roadway and a young policeman circled round the man as if he were a tiger.

‘Is he
drunk?’ Matthew said.

Ronald
went over to the young policeman. ‘Turn his head to one side,’ he said, ‘or he
might damage his tongue.’

‘Are
you a doctor?’ said the policeman.

‘No,
but I understand fits. The man’s an epileptic.’ Ronald took his own wedge of
cork from his pocket and handed it to the policeman. ‘Stick this between his
teeth. Then kneel on his knees and try and get his boots off.’

‘There’s
an ambulance coming,’ said the policeman. ‘He could bite his tongue in the
meantime,’ Ronald said. ‘There could be a lot of damage. I’d shove in the wedge
if I were you.’

The
policeman knelt and grasped the man’s head. He tried to thrust the wedge into
the frothing mouth, but the man’s convulsions kept throwing the policeman off.

The
policeman looked up at Ronald. ‘Would you mind trying to get his boots off,
then, sir?’

‘I
doubt if I cam do it,’ Ronald said. He was greatly agitated, for if there was
one thing he did not like to see it was another epileptic. The thought of
touching the man horrified him. ‘Matthew!’ he called out. ‘Come and lend a
hand.’

Matthew
approached and, as Ronald instructed, threw himself upon the man’s jerking
knees. The policeman jammed the wedge between the teeth. Ronald felt for the
shoes as one thrusting his hands into flames. He shut his eyes, and felt for
the laces, loosened them, threw the shoes aside so violently that one of them
nearly hit an onlooker, and sprang back from the kicking figure.

The man
was still jerking when the ambulance arrived, and he was lifted up by two men
in hospital uniform and taken away.

‘Did it
upset you?’ Matthew said as they went down to look at the river.

‘Yes,’
Ronald said.

‘Will
you be all right?’

‘Oh
yes, I’ll be all right.’

Matthew
went off to telephone to his sister and then to read a novel called
Marie Donadieu
in Lyons’ Corner House until it should be time to go and meet Alice, while
Ronald walked part of the way home, and then, feeling unsafe, took a taxi the
rest of the way. There, he resisted taking his phenobarbitone, shaky though he
was, for on occasions of extra stress he rather cherished the feeling of being
more alive and conscious than usual, he cherished his tension and liked to see
how far he could stand it. This evening he got ready for bed without any
intimations of an approaching fit, and although he had his little drugs ready
to take, he did not take them, and managed to get a living troubled sleep
instead of a dead and peaceful one.

Chapter VII

‘WHAT is the size of the
chalet?’ Patrick breathed indifferently.

Dr. Lyte
said, ‘Oh, large enough for two. There are four or five rooms, but as I say it
is very difficult of access. You are only a kilometre and a half from the
frontier on the one hand and only three from the bus stop on the other, but
that’s as the crow flies. If you aren’t a fairly good climber you would have to
be a crow.’ He laughed. Patrick did not. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it, really I
wouldn’t,’ said Dr. Lyte.

‘No, it
sounds just our sort of thing,’ Patrick whispered. ‘Isolated. Mountains. We’ll
take it on for three weeks as soon as this wretched case is either squashed or
over.’

Dr. Lyte
reached across his desk, lifted the silver lid of his inkpot and let it drop
again. He looked at his short white hands. He lifted his card-index box and
placed it down again a quarter of an inch from its previous position. He
fidgeted with his blotting paper. He said to Patrick, ‘Suppose the case does
come off?’

‘Alice
and I will go abroad immediately after the case.’

‘But
if…’

Patrick’s
blue eyes looked out at the sky above the roof. So blue, he thought, so calm. A
muscle in his small chin twitched. ‘I’m quite confident of being acquitted,’ he
said in his murmur. ‘I may not be sent for trial, even. The police keep asking
for time. No evidence. I’ve been remanded twice.’

Dr. Lyte
said, ‘I don’t know, really, why you haven’t skipped away in the meantime. Why
don’t you go abroad?’

Patrick
coughed. ‘I feel I must stay and see this unfortunate occurrence through.’ His
shoulders moved resentfully. ‘Do you think I’m afraid to — to — how shall I put
it? — to stand trial?’

‘No,’ said
Dr. Lyte.

‘We’ll
take over your chalet then,’ Patrick said. ‘Alice and I. One way or another,
that will be before the end of the year.’

‘I don’t
recommend it in November or December, ‘said Lyte.

‘Alice
likes the cold weather. Alice doesn’t like tourist seasons. Alice likes the
snow. Will it be snowing?’

‘You’ll
be cut off. Supposing Alice were to take ill, in her condition? Really, you
must wait till the spring. March would be all right, perhaps. April, certainly.
But November, December. Have you ever been to a lonely part of Austria in
November?’

‘We
shall be taking your chalet for a month.’ Patrick smiled a little at Dr. Lyte’s
protests; and the doctor, who did not like to be smiled at in this way, said, ‘I’ve
a good mind to refuse you.’

‘Have
you now?’ Patrick said. ‘Have you?’

Dr. Lyte
thought of his practice and his wife and his house at Wembley Park, his
daughter at Cambridge and his married daughter; he thought, also, inconsequentially,
of the field attached to a Kentish Georgian rectory which he had recently
acquired; he thought of his professional friends, his cottage in France and his
chalet in Austria. There was nothing he could think of that he wanted to lose,
and he regretted the evening he ever set foot in Marlene’s Sanctuary of Light.
(‘One hopes it will become a Sanctuary of Lyte in every sense, ‘some man had
remarked on hearing his name on that one occasion, but the remark had shocked
Marlene.) To say this doctor thought of all he could lose is perhaps to put too
blunt a point on it, for he felt these things deeply, and all in a second or
two while Patrick smiled a little with melancholy.

‘You
know,’ said Dr. Lyte, ‘that Alice can’t stand up to anything strenuous. Ober-Bleilach
will be strenuous. The climbing—’

‘I’ll
see she doesn’t do too much. I’ll see she takes her injection every day.’

‘You’ll
have to take a supply of insulin with you, ‘Lyte said.

‘Yes.’

‘A good
supply,’ he said. ‘You can’t depend on local supplies. It’s a remote place.’

‘Yes.
She knows how to look after herself.’

‘Are you
sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘You
were saying the other day,’ said the doctor, ‘that you thought Alice might be
negligent about her insulin.’

‘No, I
don’t think so now. At least, I’ll see that she isn’t. If she’s going to take
too much of the stuff or too little she’ll do it whether we go away or not.’

So she
will, thought Dr. Lyte, and he actively dispersed an uneasy idea that had
begun to form in his mind.

‘We’ll
take that chalet,’ Patrick said as if his mind were on something else.

‘Let’s
discuss the details, then, after the trial. You know, Patrick, I’ve got a
roomful of patients waiting to see me.’

Patrick
discerned a touch of defiance. He was aware that Dr. Lyte possessed, in
relationship to himself, a mixture of emotions, including various shades of
fear, and so, to encourage them, Patrick said, ‘I keep on getting through to
that control who is so familiar with the unfortunate occurrence in your past
life. I can’t help it. I keep on getting — or rather he keeps on getting
through to me. He keeps on reminding me—’