Julia took off to the tap the saucepan in which she had scrambled eggs.
David began buttering a piece of toast. He cleared his throat. “This singing business...” He waited for Julia to come back to the table and sit down. “This singing—does it betoken bliss?” David glanced at the child, as though inviting him to learn something.
“A sort of resolute cheerfulness?” David persisted. He reached for marmalade, then, seeming to notice for the first time the egg on the plate before him, he pushed the jar aside. He loaded his fork with egg.
“We have to be resolute, don’t we, darling?” Julia said to Thornton. The boy smiled at his plate.
“Humming I can understand,” David said. “That’s spontaneous. You hum sometimes, don’t you, Thornton?”
“Sometimes.”
“There’s a big difference, though, between humming and giving a recital at the top of one’s voice. Do you remember the woman you heard at that concert we took you to?”
“Rather!” said Thornton. “I saw all the way down into her mouth!” For a moment he grinned happily.
“Daddy was asleep most of the time,” Julia said. “The lady must have seen all the way down into his mouth, too. I hope his tongue didn’t have its whisky overcoat on, don’t you?” She sounded fond and confidential.
Thornton glanced at his father and giggled uncertainly.
“Singing,” David told him, “is a rather queer thing. You’ll see what I mean if you keep your eyes open, old chap. Singers—those who make a habit of it, I mean—are all ugly. All of them. The throat muscles become unnaturally developed, you see. Their necks get to look like—oh, I don’t know—like... like athletes’ thighs!”
Julia, composedly pouring herself a cup of coffee, caught Thornton stealing a guilty look at her throat and smiled at him.
“Your daddy,” she said, “is very fastidious about keeping thighs in their right place.”
“I rather suspect, you know,” said David to the forkful of scrambled egg that he was assembling, “that your mother has musical ambitions. I’ve never heard quite so much night starvation sublimated into the Teddy Bears’ Picnic before.”
Thornton decided he had been given a cue to be funny. “Were you really starving all night, Mummy?”
Julia smiled at him. “He is a funny old daddy, isn’t he? Actually, his the one who gets peckish in bed, but even daddies have to learn that there’s a time and place for everything.”
David ate his meal hastily, but with close attention to the texture of the scrambled egg, most of which seemed to fail whatever test he was applying because he shunted it into separate piles around the rim of his plate and left it. He took bites from three slices of toast but finished none.
Thornton watched, making no start on his own food. When his father rose and went noisily through the hallway to the lobby, the child slipped down from the table and opened the back door.
David reappeared wearing a short suede car coat and a flat peaked cap in pink plastic.
“Oh, Christ!” murmured Julia. “We’re off to Disneyland.”
He strode through, ignoring her.
Thornton was latching back the long wrought-iron gate at the end of the drive. He already had opened the garage doors.
His father climbed into the big green Hastings-Pumari, grinned at the boy and made a gallant aviator sort of sign with one thumb. “Okay, old chap—chocks away!” He transferred the thumb to the starter button. The car gave a forward lurch, as if in pained alarm.
David scowled, wrenched it out of gear, and again pushed the starter button. He held it in for nearly half a minute. The engine failed to fire. The pulsating, grinding laughter of the starter motor brought Julia to the kitchen window. She smirked blandly.
The boy came running to the car. David tried to ask him who the hell had been playing with the thing but Thornton did not listen. “Choke!” he was shouting. “Have you got the choke out?”
David glared at the dashboard. Choke. That one. No, he hadn’t. Confused, he switched off the ignition. The boy looked over his shoulder.
“You’ve not switched on!” It was a cry of surprise, of delight, of triumph.
“If ever I catch you touching this bloody car again...”
Open-mouthed, winded by injustice, Thornton stepped back and pressed himself against the garage wall. The big car drew out and sped erratically towards the gateway.
Ten minutes later, the postman had brought the morning mail and Thornton was soothing his wounded pride with sachets of the Instant Old English Ginger Beer for which he had persuaded his mother to rush a coupon seven weeks previously.
For Julia there came in the same little pile of packets and envelopes an offer of comfort of a very different kind.
She read the letter through once, twice, three times. She examined it carefully. Then she read it again.
Finally, after making sure that Thornton was happily preoccupied and that Mrs Cutlock had descended into the area of table clearing and washing up, Julia went to her bedroom. She locked the door and sat down by the extension telephone. After long deliberation she picked up the receiver and dialled a Flaxborough number.
Response was almost immediate.
“My name,” she said, “is Mrs Harton. Mrs Julia Harton, of Oakland.”
“Ah, yes. Mrs Harton. Splendid.” The voice was cultured, friendly—avuncular, almost.
“You wrote to me.”
“I did, indeed. And you have responded. I do hope you are free for lunch.”
“Who are you?” She tried to sound cold and incurious.
“I did sign the letter, Mrs Harton. Don’t tell me that the old professional affectation hasn’t been quite subdued yet. A sign of immaturity, alas.”
“Affectation?”
“Illegibility. Prescriptions no one can read. You know?”
Prescriptions. Was he a doctor then? She didn’t ask, for fear of sounding näive.
“I take it,” she said instead, “that this letter of yours is supposed to be some kind of a joke.”
He chuckled softly, and with no hint of resentment. “Why should you think that?”
“Oh, come now, Mr...”
“Rothermere. Mortimer Rothermere.”
“...Mr Rothermere. It is your letter-heading which I assumed was meant to be funny. What are you—a pop group or something?”
Again the unoffended chuckle. “Nothing so bizarre, I assure you. Unfortunately, honest trade descriptions are sufficiently rare nowadays as to sound melodramatic.”
Julia was beginning to find the urbanity of Mr Rothermere challenging. Very seldom among her husband’s friends and visitors was she able to converse in a way that she considered did justice to her own education and natural intelligence. David associated almost exclusively with people from outside Flaxborough—bankers, property men and some rather odd characters he called efficiency consultants: all conversational cripples unless money or golf were the topic.