“Or perhaps you think he’s an ordinary man with nothing queer about him?”
“He is a bit odd,” Prudence said slowly. “But so are you.”
“In the next two days I’m going to show you just what Morgan is. You’ll have your name in the papers.”
“My name in the papers!” Prudence repeated scornfully. “Exactly what do you think I am? A child of twelve?”
“All right then. You win. Tell your father. I’ll give up. I’ll leave Morgan to get on with it,” Harry said savagely. He picked up the loose floorboard and dropped it back into place, his face drooping into melancholy. He looked down at the hammer and chisel he still held, then let them slip from his fingers. He looked like a man who had climbed nearly to the top of a pit, and was sliding down again.
“I won’t speak to Father now. I’ll give you two days,” Prudence said in the clipped, decisive voice that Englishwomen use to intimidate foreigners on the Golden Arrow.
WEDNESDAY (3)
MORGAN walked halfway up Furlong Hill with Hester before he was overtaken by ill-health. He clapped one hand to his side, waved a hand weakly in the air, and leant against a tree for support.
“I can’t go on,” he said.
“What’s wrong, Morgan?”
“It’s a pain at my heart, that’s all. I suppose it’s nothing, really.”
“Have you ever had trouble with your heart before?”
“I’ve suspected for years that there was something wrong.”
Hester looked at him thoughtfully. In the short time she had known him he had suffered from his liver, his appendix, and his tonsils. She knew nothing of how to treat a hypochondriac invalid.
“Are you unhappy about something, Morgan?” she asked.
“Unhappy? I feel as though I was being knifed,” he said in a gasping voice.
“But is there something else troubling you, Morgan?”
He groaned. “My heart!”
She sat down beside him. “We must wait until you’re better.”
“Hester? Did you see some strangers in the village?”
“I didn’t notice. Probably. It’s August, Morgan,” she said impatiently. “The village is always full of tandem bicycles or foreigners doing England in a one-day coach tour.”
“Your father told me this was quiet country where strangers never came.”
“It’s not Father’s fault that England is small and everyone has a holiday in August. Would you like to come home and rest?”
Morgan rose, wincing, and hobbled painfully down the hill. The path plunged steeply through the woods. He looked at it nervously, as though he thought it had been mined.
“The country life is wonderful,” he said, groaning a little.
Hester turned her mind away from him. She saw that the blackberries had ripened early. She picked some, and ate them. She held out a handful, offering them to Morgan.
“They might be poisonous,” he said. “You shouldn’t go eating berries.”
“I thought you said you’d been brought up in the country. Where did you live, Morgan?”
“I was born in London. My father – well, I’m too old now to talk about my father,” Morgan said, hatred flashing across his face. “He wasn’t a careful man about money.”
“Lots of people aren’t, I suppose. Think of Harry.”
“Harry! I don’t want to think about him. I always thought I’d like to meet a poet. Harry isn’t my idea of a poet,” he said accusingly.
“Morgan, are you happy here? Are you sure you like living in the country?”
“All those fields to look at! Yes, I like it. It’s quiet, you see, Hester, I’ve got to have quiet. My heart…” He sat down again.
“Perhaps you should go to bed when you get home. And I’ll get Doctor Nelson.”
“No.” He stood up, and they went on.
About fifteen yards above the road Morgan stopped and clutched Hester’s wrist.
Three men were drooping along the road. They weren’t at all like the strangers who usually passed through the village, bent under rucksacks or excessively tweeded. They wore jackets of a markedly Edwardian style, trousers that were tight everywhere, and narrow, pointed shoes that seemed to be giving trouble.
One of them sat down by the side of the road and began to dust his shoes with his handkerchief.
“I limp so bad,” he said.
“Smell the country air,” another advised bitterly. “You haven’t breathed so good since you was a boy at Southend.”
“Five miles to the next pub,” the first said. “Turn right, turn left, turn right round, cross the field with the bulls, and I’d fight the field full of bulls to be back in Old Compton Street right now. What gave that foggy-boy the idea he was living here? Living! The country is the part of England they should dispose of, which is what I’m going to do when we get to that railway station.” He limped dejectedly behind the other two.
Morgan stared after them down the road. Hester, looking at him curiously, saw that he was standing erect and breathing naturally. His heart attack appeared to be over.
“Go on, Hester. Don’t wait for me. I think I’ll sit around and rest for a little,” he said in a strained voice.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” she asked doubtfully.
She was glad to leave him. She wanted to walk alone and think about Harry.
She crossed the road and went into the woods on the other side, her mind moving irresponsibly around Harry’s appearance, changing his clothes, seeing that his hair was cut regularly and his shirt was always clean. She thought of the attic room as her father had planned it, with a white floor and green rugs. She furnished it with a desk and some clean paper, and set Harry to work, writing a more jocund version of the Waste Land. In the autumn they went to Italy, and lived simply in a villa within reach of Florence.
She came down on the road again and walked through the village. Poetry didn’t earn much money, but there was satisfaction in being heralded at literary lunches and making experimental dashes into the poetic drama.
Moira Ferguson waved to her, and she smiled back from Stockholm, where the Nobel prizes were being distributed.
“Come in and have some tea,” Moira said. “Joe’s raging against Harry, and it’s much nicer for him to have a new listener.”
Hester made the correct social noises and then went in, although Moira Ferguson always made her feel immature and badly dressed. Joe treated her like a favourite niece, and the household was an entrancing but resistible specimen of the comfort associated exclusively with wealth.
The grey stone house had once been a farm, but the farmer had been glad to move out and build himself a red brick bungalow. The barn had been converted to a servants’ flat; the dairy to a squash court; and where the pigs had lain, gasping with gluttony on the straw, was now a rose garden.
Inside the house, in the corner by the fireplace where generations of farmers had sat mourning over night frosts, east winds, spring droughts, Uncle Joe now sat worrying about the weather. It was hot, it was hot even for August, and people were staying away from the cinemas he owned.
“Do they care?” he demanded passionately of Hester. “In the winter they come begging, they stand in queues, they go to my managers with tears in their eyes, two, only two, they beg, even at seven-and-six. Now, in the bad times, they keep the half-crowns in their pockets and walk in the park instead.”
“We have no money, Hester,” Moira said comfortably. “Just fancy, we are ruined.” She put a finger idly on the bell and a parlourmaid materialised with a tea tray.
“Moira is always thinking about money. It’s the curse of the age,” Joe boomed happily. “We can’t afford to keep the servants, she says, but we have two, only two. We want a holiday, we go to Bermuda, Gleneagles, anywhere we like. Money, money, money, she says. We must save. She wants a new skirt. Go to Paris, I tell her. Get Dior, Balmain, one of those, to make you a skirt. No, we can’t afford it, she says. Now if I wanted to play the violin, I would hire Menuhin to teach me, but not Moira. She would go to Miss Botts down the street. Money!”