Sometimes David asked Connie something, or put his hand on hers or on her knee, but he was happy to let her gossip with Gordon, the old friends reunited. They had the whole world of home to talk about. In Gordon’s earnest attention to her, and his occasional shrieks of laughter, I quickly saw something else – that he was no threat to David, who looked on them both, almost smugly, as people devoted to himself. In fact Gordon, in his way, was more feminine than she was. Connie, with her coat thrown back on the chair, her hair down and feet sturdily apart, was reaching forward for her pint of stout, while Gordon centred his gin and tonic on the damp cardboard mat and made a private gesture with his tongue to tell her she had foam on her upper lip.
David had been eyeing the shove-ha’penny board and towards the end we all had to have a game. We huddled round the small bar-room table, I with the bland resignation of the born loser, but encouraged by the occasional astonishing pressure of Connie’s bust against my arm. We smiled as the slipping and lazily revolving coins coasted over the board, smooth-worn old halfpennies with the profiles of Edward and George in helpless indignity as they swivelled and smacked off the frame at the top of the run. The right side of the board was faster than the left, and the middle was almost sticky. It was a question which was the cleverest way through, to bring the old coin up short in the topmost band, or to sail on past and deflect back into a good position. I was happy, briefly, to make an ass of myself, while Gordon made wild comic shots right off the table, followed by a grope between our legs on the grimy floor, David already lining up his next shot. It was a study in competition, and its avoidance. Evert played with the uncanny precision of the first-timer: the coin hovered and then halted between the lines as if drawn to a magnet. David gave us a valuable talk on the physics of inertia, but he wasn’t nearly so good. He muffled his shame in quick heavy embraces, so that Evert had to shake him off to play, and at the end his wounded pride was almost concealed by a staring grin of congratulation. Gordon had kept score and announced the final order: ‘5th Green, 4th Pinnock, 3rd Forshaw, runner-up Sparsholt, winner Dax!’ He squeezed Evert’s arm, and it struck me he’d taken a shine to him on this second meeting: some hinted feelings had passed between these two men, and I wondered if they might not bury their shared passion for Sparsholt in a much more suitable tendresse for each other.
8
‘What nice cups you have,’ said Jill.
‘Oh, yes, they’re Meissen.’ She had seen them several times, and had never appeared to notice them. ‘Of course I’m flattered – I know you like your tea-things a millennium or two older.’ Jokes were always a risk with Jill, but she made a comic moue I hadn’t seen before, a little snubbing of the nose which struck me as a momentary foretaste of intimacy, in its unguarded gestures and feelings. She was in a new mood, more trusting and intriguingly less sure of herself. I set the low table in front of the fire. Behind me on the hearthstone the electric kettle had shifted from its first sharp sighs and creakings into a more enthusiastic rumble. ‘I brought them from home,’ I said.
‘You have nice things then,’ she said – and in her smile at the cup, with its tiny picture of pink hills, I saw a further prospect opening, in which I took her down to Devonshire with me to see other things we had, and to meet my mother.
‘A few passable pictures, I suppose,’ I said, ‘but nothing exceptional. Don’t forget my grandfather started as a humble grocer’s boy.’
She surveyed this fact with a touch of complacency. When I’d made the tea she said, ‘You’ve never asked me about my family,’ so that her own reticence appeared almost to be my fault.
‘Well, I’d love to hear about them, Jill dear.’ I was charmed to watch her enter such personal territory for the first time – more than I was by the story itself.
‘I had a difficult upbringing,’ she said, tucking her chin in to suggest the unforgotten stress as well as her firmness in facing it.
‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, as I took the place beside her on the little sofa. She budged up slightly but kept on talking.
‘By difficult I mean harsh and loveless and . . . confusing.’ I thought she might have been describing a historical era, not the girlhood whose closing years she still inhabited.
‘From the start?’ I said.
‘It was reasonably happy at first – I think you know my father was a solicitor, and my sister . . . well, I had a little sister.’
‘You had?’ – I turned sideways as I listened to her, and laid my left arm along the back of the sofa.
‘She was knocked down by a van and killed, when she was six.’
‘Ah, I’m sorry . . .’
‘My father blamed my mother, and my mother frankly rather hit the bottle.’
‘She felt she was to blame.’
‘Well, she was to blame, she was with her at the time. This was in Fordingbridge,’ she explained.
‘You must have been a great consolation to them.’
Jill sighed emphatically but said nothing for a moment. ‘I was away at school, and when I came home for the holidays I found my father had left.’
‘Oh, I see . . . so just you and your mother . . .’
‘Indeed. And before long my mother was quite unable to look after me. She sent me away to an aunt in Lancashire.’ I don’t know why I was smiling at this terrible precis of her family history. I laid my right hand consolingly on her wrist; she looked blankly at it for a second and then swiftly sat forward to reach her cup. ‘I never had anything of my own,’ she said, in a petulant tone, and took several quick, dissatisfied sips of tea.
‘And what of your parents now?’ I said. ‘Your mother must—’
There was a rap on the door and Peter Coyle came straight in. ‘Aha!’ he said. ‘My dears . . . well, well.’ His smile was awful but flattering too. For some reason I justified myself:
‘You know Jill’s taking tutorials from Marley at Corpus, so I asked her to look in afterwards.’
‘Very naturally,’ said Peter.
Jill herself seemed conscious of the imputation in the air. ‘I haven’t seen you for ages,’ she said. They’d never much cared for each other, but I could tell Jill was pleased he’d come in. Whether because she liked to be seen with me, or because it put an end to our tête-à-tête, it was hard to say.
‘I’ve been so hideously busy,’ Peter said, walking round the tea table with continuing mild amusement at what he’d found, ‘painting the sets for this bloody Triumph of Time. And any number of other things,’ he added slyly as he turned away and took off his hat and coat. ‘Is there more in the pot?’
‘There are more cups over there,’ I said, rather sullenly, and my tone itself made him chuckle. He served himself, topped us up too, and looked sharply at Jill.
‘Well, since you’re here, Jill darling, perhaps I’ll draw you.’ It was quite as if she had barged in and not him.