Mr Tidson, who disliked to be called a silly old man, stopped listening, stuck out his bottom lip, refused to speak to them, and, on his way to the High Street, wedged the sandal among the rubbish already on a dustman’s cart. Then he wiped his gloved hands on his handkerchief, and went on to hear Stanford in F.
Chapter Four
‘All this while, therefore, we are but upon a defensive warre, and that is but a doubtful state.’
JOHN DONNE (Devotions XIX)
MRS BRADLEY was both pleasantly and unpleasantly preoccupied during the drive back to London. Her thoughts were engaged by Mr Tidson, Crete and Connie, and, to an even greater degree, perhaps, by the somewhat unfortunate Miss Carmody. Life, she reflected, is rich in situations which even the talking-picture world would regard with superstitious mistrust, and the Carmody household, comprising, as it did, the fantastic Mr Tidson, the astoundingly beautiful Crete, the discontented Connie and her troubled, respectable aunt, appeared to have something more in common with the surreal than with the real.
Connie at first filled her mind, because of her youth and the vague and anomalous position which she filled in Miss Carmody’s apparently ill-assorted household. There was something rotten in the state of Denmark so far as Connie was concerned. For one thing – the most obvious, perhaps – Miss Carmody, a mild maiden lady of more than middle age, was probably a trying companion for a girl of nineteen, and Mrs Bradley felt sure that Connie had immortal longings in her, if only for a young man or a job.
Thus speculating, idly enough, as the car travelled rapidly towards London, Mrs Bradley came to the conclusion that as Miss Carmody was not rich enough, possessive enough and invalid enough to require the constant companionship of a young girl, the most probable explanation of Connie’s dependent position was that the girl might be Miss Carmody’s own illegitimate daughter, difficult though it was to envisage that respectable spinster in the rôle of unmarried mother.
Miss Carmody, in fact, Mrs Bradley thought, seemed (at any rate at first sight) an object of sympathetic pity. Her limited income, her apparently unwanted and parasitic guests, and her doubts about Mr Tidson’s mental health, all marked her out as a member of the Bessie Mundy, Miss Barrow, Camille Holland class. She seemed a natural victim, one born to be the prey of the unscrupulous. In common with her historic counterparts, however, was she not also rather foolish, Mrs Bradley wondered? The expensive hotel, the wine-bills, the diurnal cocktails all seemed to indicate this. Besides, if she really suspected that Mr Tidson was mad, why had she brought him to Winchester?
Then there was Mr Tidson himself. Mrs Bradley wondered how serious Mr Tidson’s banana losses had been, and how long he proposed to support himself and his wife by living in Miss Carmody’s flat and on her money. Before the war, land on Tenerife had been worth a thousand pounds an acre, and yielded (so Mrs Bradley had always understood) a reasonable if not a substantial profit. Nevertheless, bananas, she supposed, although a fairly hardy, were still a perishable product. If Mr Tidson had been unlucky in bananas he might have lost a good deal of money, and he might not be altogether nice in the means he would choose to replace it.
There was something pathetic about Mr Tidson, however, no less than about Miss Carmody. If she were the unprotected spinster, he, surely, was the ‘little man’ of the advertisements, the comic strips, and the music-hall stage. It was tempting, and, somehow, easy to think of Mr Tidson as the victim of unfortunate circumstances. It was tempting to think of him as the dupe of trade rivals; as the victim of siroccos, monsoons and tornados; as the plaything of gods and half-gods; as the man on whom camels and asses died, and around whom bananas blackened and perished; a rather less picturesque and, of course, a childless Job.
Mrs Bradley cackled at this mental image, but she realized, too, that, whatever one thought of Mr Tidson, no picture of him could now be either satisfactory or complete without reference to his new toy, the naiad. Mr Tidson and the naiad were indissolubly wed; not less so than he and the green-haired, inscrutable Crete: and the latter marriage might be a good deal less pleasing to Mr Tidson than the former: there was that to consider, too.
The more Mrs Bradley thought about the naiad the less she liked her. A middle-aged gentleman of slightly eccentric mentality could cause a naiad to cover a progressive multiplicity of actions, including quite a number of sins. It was a fascinating field of surmise, in fact, to work out what sins in particular the naiad could help to screen.
On the subject of Mr Tidson’s mental condition Mrs Bradley was not depressed. He was sane. Even his frantic interest in the naiad was not necessarily evidence of mental collapse, although it might indicate some abnormal pre-occupations. Wishful thinking, as Mrs Bradley’s patients had often made abundantly clear to her, could take a variety of forms. Escapism was not a vice; it was often the only means the mind could formulate of retaining a hold on sanity. The naiad, however, although a charming conception, was one sufficiently bizarre to arouse suspicion. She was probably an unconsciously-formed image – a kind of mirror-picture – of Crete, Mrs Bradley thought.
Was Mr Tidson a jealous husband, then? – a cuckolded one? – a disillusioned, disappointed, cruelly-treated one? The possibilities were endless and all were interesting. One thing, however, was certain. If Mr Tidson had decided to create the nymph for his own amusement or to fill an emotional hiatus, he was not to be blamed because he intended to believe in her and wanted to see her. That he would certainly see her in the end (whether subjectively or objectively was a matter of little moment) Mrs Bradley most confidently anticipated.
She dismissed the naiad and turned her thoughts on Crete. Crete’s dresses and jewels had certainly not been bought with Miss Carmody’s money. It was an open question, Mrs Bradley decided, whether Mr Tidson’s banana losses had not, perhaps, been debts. She wondered whether the Tidsons might not have fled from Tenerife in a welter of unpaid bills!
It was good to get back to the clinic. She put in four hours’ work before she drove back to her house in Kensington to have dinner with Laura Menzies, her young, large, lively secretary, and to hear the news of the town.
‘How’s Herbert?’ Laura enquired, referring to the sailor, Mrs Bradley’s new patient. Laura was, in her own expression, ‘no mere hireling,’ but took a deep and (she was pleased to think) a constructive interest in all Mrs Bradley’s work.
‘Better than I expected,’ Mrs Bradley replied. ‘In fact, he is going to his service clinic almost at once. He’s making an amazing recovery. He certainly hasn’t been difficult. There is something else on my mind, child. I want to know all about a Mr Tidson, until recently of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Liverpool might be a happy hunting ground. Will you see what you can find out about him? I don’t know whether it’s really important, I’m sure, but he seems a rather odd little man.’
‘Shall I go to Liverpool, then?’ enquired Laura promptly. ‘And what sort of things do you mean? All about him seems a slightly tall order, but, of course, if you mean it, that goes!’
‘I do mean it. You must find out all you can. His Christian name is Edris; he has a semi-Greek wife, cold and beautiful, named Crete, and, so far as I can tell, no children. They lived in Santa Cruz, on the Canary island of Tenerife, where he had a banana plantation. He’s come home to England to live. He seems to have no money of his own, and he and his wife are living on a not-too-prosperous elderly spinster named Carmody. I want to know why. I want a picture of his financial position, his tastes, hobbies, extravagances, sins; whether he was popular or unpopular; whether he left any debts; and everything else you can think of.’