The Pyramid

 

I
t was really summer, but the rain had fallen all day and was still falling. The weather can best be described by saying it was the kind reserved for church fêtes. The green leaves were being beaten off the trees by the steady downpour and were drifting about in the puddles. Now and then there would come a gust of wind so that the trees moaned and tossed their arms imploringly, though they had been rooted in our soil long enough to know better. Darkness fell early—indeed there had seemed little light all day, so that the process was slow and imperceptible. But when it was complete, the
darkness
was intense beyond the street lights and the rain still fell through it. I had played the piano until my head sang—pounded savagely and unavailingly at the C Minor Study of Chopin which had seemed, when Moisewitch played, to
express
all the width and power of my own love, my own
hopeless
infatuation. But Imogen was engaged to be married, that was the end.

So I lay, dry-mouthed, and endured. The only thing that pulled me out of myself every now and then was the sudden sound of blown water, dashed over the panes like gravel. Eighteen is a good time for suffering. One has all the necessary strength, and no defences. Midnight clanged from the tower of the church, and before the twelfth stroke had sounded, the three sodium lights in the Square went out. In my head, Imogen drove his green, open Lagonda across the downs, her long, reddish hair flying back from her pale face—she was only five years older than I was. I ought to have done
something
; and now it was too late. I stared at the invisible ceiling, and she drove; and I saw him, so secure, so old, so huge in his ownership of the
Stilbourne
Advertiser
,
impregnable. I heard his gnatlike voice and suddenly he was struck by
lightning
. I saw it branch down, there was a puff of smoke and he was gone. Somehow, the lightning had rendered Imogen
insensible
. I was carrying her in my arms.

I leapt up in bed, staring at the window, and clutching the counterpane to my chin. The noise had been so loud, so sharp. It had rapped the glass almost to breaking point, as if someone had used an air-gun. I had hazy thoughts of blown branches or dislodged tiles but knew it had been neither—and there it was again, rap! I huddled out of bed, my hair pricking at the strangeness, went to the window and peered down into the Square. There was another rap close by my face, so that I ducked, then peered forward; and just outside the railings that separated our cottage from the cobbles round the Square I could see a white face glimmering. I eased up the sash and immediately the wind whipped the chintz curtains in my face.

“Oliver! Oliver!”

A wild hope made my heart turn over; but it was not Imogen’s voice.

“What is it?”

“Not so loud!”

The face bent down by our iron gate, opened it cautiously, then swam up the brick path and stopped under my window.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me. Evie. Evie Babbacombe. Can’t you see?”

“What—”

“Don’t wake anybody up. Come down carefully. Dress. Oh please be quick! I’m—”

“Wait a minute.”

I ducked back into the room and fumbled around for my clothes. I had seen Evie often enough, and for years; but I had never spoken to her. I had seen her sliding along the pavement on the other side of the Square with that unique walk of hers, body still, only the legs below the knees pacing past each other. I knew she worked next door, in Dr. Ewan’s reception room; knew that she had a long bob of glossy black hair, and a figure that rearranged the blue and white cotton dress—knew she was the Town Crier’s daughter and came from the tumbledown cottages of Chandler’s Close. But of course we had never spoken. Never met. Obviously.

I tiptoed down the stairs, in the dark, avoiding the third tread, and hearing a mellow snore from my parents’ bedroom. I lifted my mackintosh from its peg in the hall, then
unchained
, unbolted and unlocked the front door as carefully as if I had been a burglar at a safe. Evie was huddled close to the other side of it.

“You’ve been ages and ages!”

She was making a curious singing noise with her teeth. This close to, I could see that she had a scarf over her hair and was clutching her coat to her with both hands.

“Been as quick as I could. What d’you want?”

“Bobby Ewan’s in the woods with the car. He can’t move it.”

Whatever vague surmises or expectations had been floating on the current of my blood vanished abruptly. Bobby Ewan was Dr. Ewan’s son. We were neighbours, and I did not like him. I only envied him his boarding school, his prospective promotion to Cranwell, and most of all, his red motor bike.

“He’s nothing to do with me. Why doesn’t he try Henry Williams?”

“Oh dear.”

She sagged a little, swaying forward against me. Perhaps behind the clouds the moon had risen; or perhaps the clouds themselves were rising. But for whatever cause, there was a diffused light now, faint, and seeming to come from
everywhere
at once, or be inherent in the nature of the air. By this light I could see her in more detail. Her face was very white, mouth and eyes like black plums, with straggles of hair smeared across them. Water ran on her and dripped from her. She snivelled, gripped my biceps with her fingers, bowed her head against my chest.

“My heel came off, too. What Dad’ll—”

She jerked back her head in the beginnings of a sneeze and clapped both hands over her mouth. She convulsed silently. Farted.

“Pardon.”

The plums glanced up at me over her hands. Under them she gave an embarrassed giggle.

“Look, Evie—what d’you want me to do?”

“Help him get the car out of the pond.”

“The pond!”

“
You
know where—straight on through the woods at the top of the hill—Oh please—Olly! Nobody must know. It’ud be awful—”

“That’s between him and his father—silly young ass!”

Robert was three months older than I was, and Evie, three months younger.

“You don’t understand Olly—it isn’t his father’s car!”

“Serve him right then.”

“Oh Oliver—I thought you would!”

She came forward, close against me. Her breasts pressed against me; and as if she could exhale it at will, I caught a whiff of scent that stopped my breath. Her coat hung wetly and there wasn’t much clothing under it.

“I got to be in by midnight—”

“It’s past, now.”

“I know. If Dad finds out—”

For all the chill and wetness of the night, my heart had begun to go thud, thud. My arms put themselves round her. She was shivering steadily.

“All right.”

She squeezed my arms.

“Oh Olly you are a real sport!”

The bottom one of her three plums lifted and gave me a cold peck. She pushed me away.

“Be quick. You could go on your bike.”

“Haven’t got a light. I’ll run—and Evie—”

“What?”

“Shall we—I mean—we could—”

She seemed to rearrange herself—put one hand up as if she would push back her draggling hair.

“We’ll have to see, won’t we?”

Then she was away, hobbling through the Square and thinking up her story.

I made sure I could get back in, carefully closed our iron gate and tiptoed away. When I had left the house far enough behind me, I began to run, past the Town Hall and down the High Street towards the Old Bridge. The gusts seemed lighter but there was still plenty of rain and by the time I was passing Henry Williams’s garage it was running from my face down my neck. Yet for all my disinclination to help Robert Ewan I was happy and excited. My mind’s eye saw, not the wet and draggled Evie, her face reduced to three plums in a patch of white, but Evie in her summery dress, pacing along on legs which—though some might think they were too short for perfect beauty—nevertheless reached the ground, and would do. Would do for what? The answer seemed obvious in Evie’s case. She was our local phenomenon, and every male for miles round was aware of her. Perhaps it was not the breathlessness of perpetual sex that kept her lips always apart and everted, but her nose, so inadequate for breathing through, yet so perfect for pertness. Her hair would toss cloudily in a dark, shoulder length bob, as she paced, thighs motionless, legs only moving beneath the knee, her body trim and female in its walking-out uniform—a cotton frock, white socks and sandals. I had never had the luck to inspect her closely in daylight, but my furtive glances, as she passed had acquainted me with her eyelashes, too. Pounding through the darkness and rain towards the Old Bridge, I found myself thinking of paint brushes—not the delicately smoothed instrument of the artist, but the childhood one, scrubbed so hard in the dish of colour that the matted hairs are spiky and stick out all round. As I thought of those furtively glimpsed eyelashes—no, those
handfuls
of small paint brushes that flickered so delectably round Evie’s eyes—I pounded harder. I never noticed the rise to the crest of the Old Bridge. Evie had none of Imogen’s sacred beauty. She was strictly secular.

Nevertheless, the steep hill up to the woods brought me to a walk, and my senses. After all there was Bobby Ewan with his motor bike and his famous school and conscious
superiority
. There was Sergeant Babbacombe, too. When I thought of the sergeant, I stopped dead. If he knew that I had kissed—been kissed by, at anyrate—his daughter after midnight, he was likely to break my neck. Worse, speak to my parents. The courses were comparable. Sergeant Babbacombe, caretaker of the Town Hall, Keeper of the Pound, Beadle, Town Crier and any number of other offices left him by our derelict history; Sergeant Babbacombe might be a figure of fun in his eighteenth-century uniform as Town Crier; thinking of him as her father, I saw rather his huge chest, meaty fists and plethoric face with its eyes so belligerently popping. I winced as I inspected for the first time an age-old question. How do such fathers have such daughters?

Then—as if she were present—I caught in my nostrils that sudden whiff of scent, and the Sergeant diminished to nothing. I hurried on up the hill, my wet trouser legs stuck to my shins, my hair dripping into my eyes. Still, there was less rain and less wind; and before I plunged into the tunnel of trees I saw a bright patch above them where the moon was trying to break through. Behind me in the valley, the church clock struck one.

There was a little more light as I neared the open area by the Leg-O’-Mutton pond. I could make out the shape of a two-seater near the edge furthest from the road, but
surrounded
by water. Robert Ewan moved out of the darkness under a tree and stood in the road, waiting for me.

“Young Olly?”

As I came close, I saw and heard that he was shivering more woefully than Evie; but he was making a determined attempt to ignore it. He was slight and bony, three inches taller than me, with a thatch of sandy hair and the Duke of Wellington’s profile. He was clutching a mackintosh to him; and a pair of white, naked knees showed below it. Below the knees again and all down his shins were black marks, and below the marks, crumpled socks. He only had one shoe on.