“What’s his name?”
“That’s the catch,” said Simon. “I’ve forgotten.”
Barbara and Gaunt did not go up the hill after all. They watched Simon and Dikon clinging to the fence and slipping on the short grass and friable soil.
“I have decided that my leg jibs at the prospect,” said Gaunt. “Don’t you think it would be much pleasanter to go a little way towards the sea and smoke a cigarette? This morbid desire to look at sinking ships! Isn’t it kinder to let her go down alone? I feel that it would be rather like watching the public execution of a good friend. And we know the crew is safe. Don’t you agree?”
Barbara agreed, thinking that he was talking to her as if she herself were a good friend. It was the first time they had been alone together.
They found a place near to the sea. Gaunt flung himself down with an air of boyish enthusiasm which would have intensely annoyed his secretary. Barbara knelt, sitting back on her heels, the light wind blowing full in her face.
“Do you mind if I tell you you should always do your hair like that?” said Gaunt.
“Like this?” She raised her hand to her head. The wind flattened her cotton dress. It might have been drenched in rain, so closely did it cling to her. She turned her head quickly, and Gaunt, as quickly, looked again at her hair. “Yes. Straight off your face and brushed fiercely back. No frizz or nonsense. Terribly simple.”
“Orders?” said Barbara. It was so miraculously easy to talk to him.
“Please.”
“I’m afraid I’ll look very bony.”
“But that’s how you should look when you have good bones. Do you know that soon after we met I told Dikon I thought you had — But I’m making you self-conscious, and that’s bad manners, isn’t it? I’m afraid,” said Gaunt with a sort of aftermath of the Rochester manner, “that I’m accustomed to say pretty much what I think. Do you mind?”
“No,” said Barbara, suddenly at a loss.
It was years, Gaunt thought, since he had met a young woman who was simply shy. Nervous, or deliberately coy young women, yes; but not a girl who blushed with pleasure and was too well-mannered to turn away her head. If only she would always behave like this she would be charming. He was taking exactly the right line with her. He began to talk to her about himself.
Barbara was enchanted. He spoke so intimately, as if she were somebody with a special gift of understanding. He told her all sorts of things. How, as a boy in school, he had been set to read the “Eve of Crispian” speech from Henry V, and had started in the accepted wooden style which he now imitated comically for her amusement. Then, so he told her, something had happened to him. The heady phrases began to ring through his voice. To the astonishment of his English master (here followed a neat mimicry of the English master) and, strange to say, the enthralment of his classmates, he gave the speech something of its due. “There were mistakes, of course. I had no technique beyond an instinctive knowledge of certain values. But — ” he tapped the breast pocket of his coat — “it was there. I knew then that I must become a Shakespearean actor. I heard the lines as if someone else spoke them: —
“And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered.”
Gulls mewed overhead and the sea thudded and dragged at the coast, a thrilling accompaniment, Barbara thought, to the lovely words.
“Isn’t there any more?” she asked greedily.
“Little ignoramus! There’s a lot more.” He took her hand. “You are my Cousin Westmoreland. Listen, my fair cousin.” And he gave her the whole speech. It was impossible for him to be anything but touched and delighted by her eagerness, by the tears of excitement that stood in her eyes when he ended. He still held her hand. Dikon, limping over the brow of the hill ahead of Simon, was just in time to see him lightly kiss it.
Dikon drove back with Simon, completely mum, beside him in the front seat. Gaunt and Barbara, after a few desultory questions about the wreck, were also silent, a circumstance that Dikon mistrusted, and with some reason, for Barbara was lost in enchantment. One glance at her face had been all too enlightening. “Besotted,” Dikon muttered to himself. “What has he been up to? Telling her the story of his life, I don’t doubt, with all the trimmings. Acting his socks off. Kissing her hand. By heaven, if the place had a second floor, before we knew where we were he’d be treating her to the balcony scene. Romeo with fibrositis! The truth is, he’s reached the age when a girl’s ignorance and adulation can make a fool of a man. It’s revolting.” But although he allowed himself to fume inwardly, he would have resented and denied such imputations against Gaunt from any outsider, for not the least of his troubles lay in his sense of divided allegiance. He reflected that, Barbara apart, he liked his employer too much to enjoy the spectacle of him making a fool of himself.
When they returned to the house they found Mr. Septimus Falls and Mr. Questing sitting in deck-chairs side by side on the verandah, a singular association. Dikon had implored Simon to show no signs of particular animosity when he encountered Questing, but was nevertheless very much relieved when Simon grunted a word of thanks to Gaunt and walked off in the direction of his cabin. Barbara, with a radiant face, ran straight past Questing into the house. Gaunt, before leaving the car, leant forward and said: “I haven’t been so delightfully entertained for years. She’s a darling and she shall certainly be told who sent the dress.”
Dikon drove the car round to the garage.
When he returned he found that Questing, having introduced Septimus Falls to Gaunt, had adopted the manner of a sort of referee or ring-master. “I’ve been telling this gentleman all the morning, Mr. Gaunt, that you and he must get together. ‘Here’s our celebrated guest,’ I said, ‘with nobody to provide him with the correct cultural stimulus until you came along.’ It seems this gentleman is a great student of the drama, Mr. Gaunt.”
“Really?” said Gaunt, and contrived to suggest distaste of Questing without positively insulting Falls.
Falls made a deprecating and slightly precious gesture. “Mr. Questing is too generous,” he said. “The merest tyro, I assure you, sir. Calliope rather than Thalia commands me.”
“Oh, yes?”
“There you are!” cried Mr. Questing admiringly. “And I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Mr. Falls has been telling me that he’s a great fan of yours, Mr. Gaunt.”
His victims laughed unhappily and Falls, with an air of making the best of a bad business, said: “That, at least, is true. I don’t believe I’ve missed a London production of yours for ten years or more.”
“Splendid,” said Gaunt more cordially. “You’ve met my secretary, haven’t you? Let’s sit down for pity’s sake.” They sat down. Mr. Falls hitched his chair a little nearer to Gaunt’s.
“I’ve often thought I should like to ask you to confirm or refute a pet theory of mine,” he said. “It concerns Horatio’s very palpable lie in reference to the liquidation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It seems to me that in view of your brilliant reading of Hamlet’s account of the affair — ”
“Yes, yes. I know what you’re at. ‘He never gave commandment for their death.’ Pure whitewash. What else?”
“I have always thought the line refers to Claudius. Your Horatio — ”
“No, no. To Hamlet. Obviously to Hamlet.”
“Of course the comparison is absurd, but I was going to ask you if you had ever seen Gustav Gründgen’s treatment — ”