The Hunter and the Trapped (3 page)

“Only George. And I hope you see nothing sinister in that.”

“Of course not.”

“There's no of course about it. It has become quite dangerous for a man to have a man for his friend.”

“You exaggerate.”

“No, really. You should hear the common room gossip. Quite astonishing.”

They dressed and Diana fetched two long iced drinks. They sat well away from each other, sipping dreamily.

Diana said, “You won't have to be so reckless from now on.”

“I'm never reckless. I'm most careful not even to risk compromising you. Isn't that what it's called?”

“I mean because Bill's mother is coming here.”

“Oh.”

He looked across at her with a faintly malicious smile twitching the corners of his mouth.

“No, darling, I mean it. She's having alterations done to her terrible old country house. Main drainage and main water have come at last to Little Fairing and she will benefit. But the whole place will be practically torn down and rebuilt or so I gather.”

“How astonishing. Has she lived all these years without a bath?”

“Of course not. There is a well and an old gardener who pumps every evening and a cart that comes every three months to deal with a cesspool.”

Simon began to look bored.

“All I meant,” persisted Diana, “was that you mustn't simply barge in whenever you feel inclined. You'll have to ring me up first and be very careful if she happens to get to the phone first. I'm afraid she'll be here for
weeks
.”

Simon still looked bored. Diana was not sure if he had taken in what she had told him. He had a disconcerting habit of simply not hearing things that did not particularly interest him.

“Did you hear that?” she asked, sharply.

Simon frowned and then laughed.

“That we shall see much less of one another in the very near future? Yes, I heard that.”

“Oh,
no
!” She was breathless with fear. “Only that we must be more careful. At the moment you aren't careful at all, really. If Bill wasn't such a …”

“If William wasn't William would you ever have become my mistress?”

The smile was on his face again. It hurt her to see how little he was impressed by her mother-in-law's imminent intrusion.

“It had nothing to do with Bill,” she said, in a low voice. “I was lost the first time I met you.”

This was an expected answer and again he accepted her words easily, lightly. Far too lightly, her heart told her with a vaguely jealous pang. His looks, his infinite easy charm, had spoiled him. His life was a perpetual walk-over where other people were concerned. Walked over, trodden under foot, but so lightly, so laughingly that the treading did not damage, only the lifting of the pressure, the passing on.

“Cheer up,” he said, putting down his empty glass and getting to his feet. “I'll manage.”

“To come?” she asked, aware that she was nagging, but unable to control it. “To come or to do without me?”

“A little bit of both,” said Simon, still smiling and moving now towards the door.

“Aren't you going to kiss me before you go?”

He hated the acid note in her voice. Would she never learn?

He waited near the door for her to come to him.

“I'm not good at affectionate exchanges,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders and looking into her eyes with a strange blank look in his own. “Passion I understand …”

“But love – no,” she answered, aware that all this had been said many times over.

She had no satisfaction from the meaningless embrace with which they parted, but she stood in the open door of the flat until she heard the lift arrive in the hall.

Simon was late in reaching George Clark's house where he had been invited to dine that evening. He had considered walking there from Welmore Street but after leaving the shade between the high cliffs of the professional rabbit warren, he had come into the full blaze of the late afternoon sun and had promptly gone out of his course into Regent's Park, where he had sat under a tree, forgetting the time until the lengthening shadows brought him unwillingly to his feet again. The buses now were crowded, with long queues of homing workers standing along the kerb. He took a taxi.

This was a move into which his nature often led him, though it was an extravagance he could not afford. On the whole he managed to compensate for it in a great variety of ways, from cadging lifts in other people's cars to frank borrowing of small sums which he usually failed to pay back.

George was aware of this habit. He saw the taxi draw up as he was watching at his window for Simon's arrival, so he went down at once to the foot of the steps, fumbling in his pocket for silver as he did so.

“You might …” began Simon, also fumbling as George came up. “He may not have change for a note.”

“Change, guv?” said the taxi driver, pulling out a mixed up mass of silver and paper.

“O.K.,” said George. He paid, his coins were added to the rest and thrust back into the man's pocket. George took his friend by the elbow and walked him quickly into the house.

“Late, as usual,” he said when he had got his visitor across the hall.

“Later than that, I'm afraid,” said Simon, showing no signs of contrition.

George called to his housekeeper and took Simon at once to the dining table. From long experience and a miraculous judgment Mrs. Tranter produced a perfect meal, unspoiled by the long delay.

“You don't deserve it,” George said. “One day I shall eat the lot at the stated time and you'll starve.”

“It isn't my fault I can't live by the clock,” Simon argued. “Anyway, you have your meal so bloody early.”

“Mrs. Tranter doesn't live in. She has to get away home. You have to be punctual at the college. Why victimise your friends?”

“It relieves the strain,” Simon answered, simply.

“It isn't as if you had no watch,” George went on. He was still feeling cross with himself for paying the taxi fare, which had been quite unnecessary, since Simon, just too late, had pulled some silver from his pocket and then dropped it back again. “You have a very fine watch. I don't know why your father gave it to you, knowing you never look at it. But you could make some attempt to do so.”

“I couldn't just now,” said Simon, eating steadily and with relish, for he had denied himself any lunch that day. “It's in pawn,” he explained.

“You're hopeless.”

They both laughed.

“Tell me the latest scandal at your dump,” George suggested, seeing that his friend was in good form.

“The college has been conducting its affairs with unusual discretion,” Simon answered. “The usual couples go about together as before but nothing new has developed to astonish us. My own difficulties have ended virtuously.”

“And what exactly do you mean by that?”

“The character I told you about, the elderly goat who has been plying me with patronage came suddenly to the point the other night. He had given me an exceptionally good meal – almost as good as this – at his own house and then, when we were discussing – his own special subject – he said, without altering the level of his voice in any way, ‘Well, dear boy, and when do we go to bed?'”

“What exactly did you answer?”

“I said, in the same kind of voice, ‘We don't, sir. Neither tonight or at any time.' He seemed to be rather shocked, but I went on to tell him that my tastes did not lie that way at all. Then I left.”

“Good for you.”

“Not at all good for me. He was worth a great deal of excellent information, delightful talk and splendid food. I shall miss him a lot.”

George got up from the table and while Mrs. Tranter cleared it and brought coffee he got out brandy and poured a generous tot for Simon and a small one for himself.

Simon was leaning against the mantelpiece as George went up to him. He put out a sly foot to trip his host, but George was prepared. He managed to avoid the snare, got the brandy glass safely bestowed and turned to exact revenge.

“Like a pair of schoolboys,” Mrs. Tranter reported to her niece when she got home that night. “At their age, gone thirty the both of them. Scrapping on the floor like a pair of silly teenagers. No harm in it, of course. Mr. Clark's a very nice gentleman and serious too, in the ordinary way. It never comes over him but when Mr. Fawcett's in the house.”

A little breathless from their exertions both men soon gave up, scrambled to their feet and sat down, hot and breathless, to sip the scalding coffee. George, who never got over his surprise at Simon's hidden strength, stared at his friend. His thoughts, less tolerant now, for he had suffered a mildly strained wrist, returned to Simon's latest preposterous anecdote. Was it true? Quite possibly. Equally, it might be an invention. Simon's vanity was immense and totally unselfconscious. It was constantly fed by these day-dreams, these scurrilous fantasies. And yet –

“So your latest doubtful friendship has gone the way of the rest?” he said. “I'm surprised at …”

“No names,” Simon interrupted, in a low voice, with a glance at the door.

“She can't hear and wouldn't take it in if she did.”

“I wouldn't rely on that.”

“Anyway, the affair is over?”

“There was no affair, but yes, it is over. No damage on either side. Just a pity, from my point of view.”

“You're very quick to brush off other people's feelings, aren't you?”

Simon frowned.

“I grant you this man is not likely to suffer much from your refusal,” George went on. “He must have other resources. He is experienced and wealthy. I've no sympathy for him, certainly no pity. But I think you should stop leading people up the garden. As much for your own sake as theirs.”

As Simon stared at him George saw the shutter come down. A moment before his friend was looking at him with an amused, boyish, slightly cynical expression. Now a stranger regarded him from eyes sullen, withdrawn and coldly hostile. The man behind these different eyes, behind the shutter, was a secret unknown being.

“I don't mean to needle you,” George persisted, knowing he spoke against his own better judgment and quite uselessly. “I just can't help remembering that boy a couple of years ago. The one who emigrated suddenly in his last year without taking his degree.”

“What of him?” asked Simon, the stranger, calmly.

“Well, you certainly did harm to him.”

“I refused to have sexual relations with him. Was that harmful? Was that immoral? Should I have indulged his unnatural feelings? Laid us both open to criminal proceedings? My dear George, where is your common sense?”

“You should have seen what he was like at the beginning. You should have put him off from the start.”

Simon did not bother to answer. He simply gazed at the wall behind George's shoulder.

“I wish I had made you tell me his name,” George went on, more to himself than to the other.

“So that you could interfere?” Simon asked, coldly.

“So that I could perhaps have shown him he was not to blame or not deficient or merely unfortunate. So that I could have explained to him how lightly these things affect you.”

“Lightly!”

The shutter lifted for an instant and George had a glimpse of startled rage and a strange suffering. Then it fell again.

Simon got up, thanked his friend politely and prepared to leave. George was aware that he had gone too far. He regretted it, since this would be Simon's last visit for some time.

“Don't go yet,” he urged. “I shall be away now for three months. My firm's sending me to the U. S.”

“I hope you enjoy it,” Simon answered, still moving towards the door.

“It was the U. S., wasn't it – or was it Canada – that boy went to?” George said, trying to force a conclusion that would leave Simon free to continue the evening with him in friendship.

As there was no answer he finished, lamely, “I hope he found some peace of mind and friendship wherever he went.”

“I think he may have done so,” Simon answered, gravely. He said goodbye to George and thanked him with a bright smile for an excellent evening.

William Allingham drew together the various papers on his desk and sat for a few minutes looking at the pile before pressing the bell for his secretary.

He had just finished a session in his consulting room in Welmore Street. It had taken him three hours and consisted of six patients; two American business men, two elderly widows in need of occupation, two genuine chronic asthmatics.

Dr. Allingham's speciality was not an exacting one, though it provided him with an absorbing interest and used his undoubted ability, his keen brain, his abundant energy to the full. He was an endocrinologist, with a special interest as well in all forms of allergy, which took him rather outside his particular field into those of the chest and skin specialists. But it also kept him from being swamped by ageing women mistakenly set upon buying back a semblance of their youth. This might be and was, in some hands, a very profitable line, but not one that appealed to him. He preferred to work in general hospitals for the full number of sessions allowed and paid for by the National Health Service and to augment his income to the required figure with a private practice where each patient could have the maximum attention and investigation while being perfectly well able to pay for it.

Having collected his papers into a heap Dr. Allingham went through them slowly, extracting a page here and there, putting together reports that had strayed apart, occasionally pulling out an irrelevancy to crumple it up and throw it in the waste-paper basket.

Having finished this task he summoned his secretary and dictated to her a series of letters, most of them to the general practitioners who had passed on the patients to him, a few to experienced patients themselves who were waiting at home for the results of recent tests. After he had gone through the pile again in this way, the secretary left him to type out the letters and Dr. Allingham put away the notes and reports himself in their separate files in a large cabinet and locked them up. He then took the lift to his flat, knowing that Mrs. Stone would come up presently with the letters for him to sign. Though he shared her services with three other consultants and she acted as receptionist as well to all of them, she never seemed to be overwhelmed by her work. So now he had not even asked her to bring the letters up to the flat. He knew she would look into the consulting room first and then take the lift up.