I went down the sloping passage and into the dining-room, a broad, rather low-ceilinged affair with a beautiful seventeenth-century heraldic stone fireplace I had uncovered behind Victorian brickwork. Here Magdalena, Ramón’s wife, a tubby little woman of about thirty-five, was laying bowls of chilled vichyssoise round the five places at the oval table. The windows were open, the curtains undrawn, and when I lit the candles their flames swayed slightly without breaking. A breeze from the Chilterns was just managing to reach as far up as here. The air it brought seemed no cooler. When Magdalena, muttering quite amiably to herself, had departed, I walked to the widow at the front of the house, but found little relief.
There was nothing to see, only the empty room reflected in the large square pane. My pieces of statuary stood in their places: a good copy of a Roman terracotta head of an old man on a pedestal beside the door, a pair of Elizabethan youths looking vaguely towards each other from rectangular niches in the far wall, busts of a naval officer and of a military man of the Napoleonic period above the fireplace, and a pretty bronze of a girl, probably French and of the 1890s or just after, on another pedestal in front of the window at my left, placed so as to catch the morning sun. As I stood with my back to the room I could not make out much of her, but from all the others that oddly exact balance between the animate and the inanimate, constantly maintained when they were viewed direct, seemed to have departed. In the glass of the window they looked newly empty of any life. I turned round and faced them: yes, once more human as well as mineral.
With the A595 just too far off for individual vehicles to be heard, and no one, for the moment, moving about in the forecourt, everything seemed quiet until I listened. Then the murmur of voices became audible from downstairs, but, again, none could be distinguished from the rest. I said to myself that if a minute went by without any sort of separate sound emerging, I would go to the cupboard in the bedroom and give myself another drink. I began counting in my head: one—thousand—two—thousand—three—thousand—four—thousand … The thousand business helps one to attain the correct rhythm, and by using it over the years I have reached the point at which I can guarantee an accuracy of within two seconds per timed minute. This is a useful accomplishment in such situations as having to boil eggs without the aid of a watch, but usefulness is not really the end in view.
I had reached thirty-eight thousand in this count, and was preparing to congratulate myself on entering the last third of the course, when I heard a clearly differentiated and half-expected sound from the drawing-room across the passage, a mingled groaning and clearing of the throat. My father, having heard Magdalena’s departure, but not wanting to have it thought that he was acting directly on this signal, had decided that it was time for him to stir himself and come to table. He had deprived me of my drink, but there was a case for saying that that was just as well.
I heard his step, slow and steady, and after a moment the door opened. He said something wearily unfriendly as he found he was being preceded over the threshold by Victor Hugo, who got under his feet even more than most people’s.
Victor was a blue-point Siamese, a neutered tom-cat now in the third year of his age. He entered, as usual, in vague semi-flight, as from something that was probably not a menace, but which it was as well to be on the safe side about. Becoming aware of me, he approached, again as usual, with an air of uncertainty not so much about who I was as about what I was, and of keeping a very open mind on the range of possible answers. Was I potassium nitrate, or next October twelvemonth, or Christianity, or a chess problem—perhaps involving a variation on the Falkbeer counter-gambit? When he reached me, he gave up the problem and toppled on to my feet like an elephant pierced by a bullet in some vital spot. Victor was, among other things, the reason why no dogs were allowed at the Green Man. The effort of categorizing them might have proved too much for him.
My father shut the door firmly behind him and gave a neutral nod in my direction. I rather take after him physically, being quite as tall as he and as little inclined to run to fat, and his dark-red hair-colour, still vivid in places among the white, is mine too. But his large high nose and broad hands, as powerful as a pianist’s, have in me been replaced by something less assertively masculine from my mother’s side.
The neutrality of the nod he had given was a none-too-usual alleviation of the unspecific discontent with which he nowadays looked as if he regarded the world. Here was somebody else whose life I did not understand. The weekday routine, mitigated by a lie-in on Sunday mornings, was a tight one: whatever the weather, off at ten sharp into the village ‘to have a look round’ (though whatever there was to be seen there never varied, at least to a townsman’s eye like mine or his), pick up a packet of ten Piccadilly and The Times (which he would not have delivered to the house) at the corner shop, into the Dainty Tea-rooms for a coffee, a chocolate biscuit and a thorough read-through of the paper and along to the Queen’s Arms at midday precisely, there to drink two Courage light ales, make a start on the crossword puzzle and chat to ‘one or two old buffers’ about topics I had found it hard to define when I, on an occasional slack morning, accompanied him on his round. Back to the Green Man at one fifteen on the dot for a cold lunch in his room, and then an afternoon dozing, finishing, or trying to finish, the crossword, and reading one of the crime-and-detection paperbacks I would have got for him in Royston or Baldock. By six or six thirty—here a little latitude was permitted—he would be in the drawing-room, ready for the first of two drinks before dinner, and ready for conversation too, I suppose, because he never took anything in there with him, not even the crossword. But Joyce and Amy and I all had other things to do than go and talk to him, and he would fall back on sending for the evening paper, as tonight, or on gazing at the wall. Whenever I happened to look in and found him like this, again as tonight, I would feel slightly defeated: I could not force him to read, set him acrostics to solve, demand that he learn Latin or take up mechanical drawing, and he would less soon watch television than, in his own phrase, have a lump of vegetable marrow shoved into his skull instead of a brain.
He looked round the dining-room now with a more directed frown than usual, on the point, conceivably, of establishing just what it was about his environment that he found most disagreeable. His eye fell on the dining-table and moved along it.
‘Guests,’ he said with unlooked-for tolerance.
‘Yes, Jack and Diana Maybury are coming in. In fact, they’ve already—’
‘I know, I know, you told me this morning. Funny sort of rooster, isn’t he? I mean peculiar. All this I’m the most responsible and efficient general practitioner in the whole bloody country and a great friend of everybody’s and that’s all there is about me. I don’t think I like him, Maurice. I wish I could say I did, because he’s been very good to me, I mean as a doctor, I’ve no fault to find with him there. But I don’t think I really like him as a man. Something to do with how he treats that wife of his. There’s no love lost there, you know. Understandable enough. That way of hers of going on as if how bloody marvellous you are considering you’ve got no arms or legs. Well, at my age I more or less expect that style of thing, but she does it with everybody. Oh, very attractive, of course, I can see that. You’re not, uh, by the way…?’