“Some,” David said, “of a sort.”
“No need to hurry. Best not to hurry. Still, it helps sometimes to have plans. The one thing I can’t stand is not to know what’s ahead of me. Uncertainty …!”
David looked at him curiously. Five years ago Ferdie Pratt had seemed to him a mature and confident man; not a very clever man, not a very sensitive one, but sure and solid and with much natural good sense about him. Beside him, David had felt shadowy and incomplete, and through that feeling, had sometimes found himself driven into a surprisingly intense antagonism. Now that seemed strange.
“Got any special uncertainty at the moment?” he asked, looking round the room for a towel to take with him to the beach.
“No,” Ferdie said.
“I thought perhaps you had.”
“Mind you, everything in the world’s uncertain,” Ferdie said. “We’ll never know what security is again.”
“Have we ever?”
“Ah, but we used to think we did, that’s the difference. … Damn these flies! D’you know how much gastric trouble is caused by the contamination of food by flies, David? Most people don’t take it nearly seriously enough. … As I was saying, it’s the feeling of security that counts. Once the feeling’s gone, you can’t face things any more. Whatever it is, money, work, even marriage and so on, you can’t do anything without that feeling. … But what are these plans of yours? D’you think you’ll go back to teaching?”
“Not if I can help it,” David said.
“You might easily do worse, you know. There’s certain to be an enormous demand for teachers for years to come.”
“So there is for coal miners—and that’s a job with fewer personal complications to it.”
Ferdie rose to it. “Surely you aren’t seriously thinking …”
“Well, no, I haven’t done much serious thinking about anything for some time. But no doubt I’ll start soon.”
“No hurry, no hurry,” Ferdie said kindly. “Best not to hurry after what you’ve been through. And it’s mighty nice to see you again, David.”
“Thanks, Ferdie.”
“It’ll be nice for Stella too,” Ferdie said. “Sometimes I think she’s lonely. She won’t play the piano nowadays, and that’s a bad sign, isn’t it? Don’t you think it’s a bad sign?”
“Well, I don’t know. Lots of women seem to give up that sort of thing when they marry.”
“It’s a bad sign,” Ferdie said.
“Come for a swim,” David suggested, feeling that Ferdie needed some distraction.
But Ferdie shook his head, fiddling with his newspaper. “As a matter of fact, I don’t swim much nowadays,” he said. “I get chills too easily. And I haven’t the time. We’re still short-handed at the office. … I say, David, you aren’t going to leave that thing lying about, are you?” He pointed at the revolver on the dressing-table.
“I suppose I shouldn’t.” Picking it up, David looked round the room again, then opened a drawer of the dressing-table and slipped the revolver inside. “It can stay there for the present,” he said.
“It’s just so that it doesn’t scare our old charwoman tomorrow,” Ferdie explained.
“Will she look inside a drawer?”
“Well, I hope not. But what made you hang on to it?”
“I don’t know. Too lazy to turn it in, I suppose. Or for sentimental reasons. It never killed any one.”
“I don’t hold with having things like that lying around,” Ferdie said. “There are so many queer people around nowadays—unstable people, people who seem to have been unbalanced by the war and lost all their normal standards of behaviour. Look at all the extraordinary things that happen—murders in Regent’s Park and so on. That sort of thing never used to happen. It’s because people have lost their feeling of security. And of course because of under-nourishment too. And there’s too much contamination of the food that we do get. Every one’s become extraordinarily unstable and dissatisfied. I say, David …”
David had started towards the door with his towel and his swimming shorts in his hand. Something in the tone of the last few words made him pause.
He found that all of a sudden Ferdie was looking at him with unusual intentness. There was an expression in his eyes that David thought he had not seen there before. It was as if, under the heavy load of habit, Ferdie were attempting, but hopelessly and with knowledge from the start of his certain failure, to create a moment of intimacy between them. Something in him seemed to be trying to reach out to David. But the instant that David looked at him, Ferdie had to draw back. Starting to flip, without much conviction, at a fly on the window-pane, he said, “Well, it was just something I wanted to say to you about Stella, but it isn’t important. I don’t want to bother you with things now.”
“What is it?” David asked.
“Another time will do,” Ferdie said.
“You may as well tell me now.”
“Oh, it’s only if you think there’s anything wrong with her.”
“In what way wrong?”
“Oh … is she worried, or anything? I get a feeling sometimes there’s something wrong. But she won’t talk about it. You might tell me later. You and she used to understand each other pretty well. But don’t let me keep you now. Go along and get your swim.”
David hesitated, but finding that Ferdie would not look at him again, muttered, “All right, Ferdie, I’ll see,” and went out on to the landing, down the stairs and out into the garden.
The strip of garden between the house and the road was only a narrow one, with high wooden palings round it. In the little, enclosed strip of garden, where chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies were in flower, the shadow of early evening had already fallen. Opening the gate, David found himself on a white and dusty road, with an untidy hedge of hazel and hornbeam facing him. In the hedge was a white gate. Standing at the gate, looking as if she had been waiting there for some time, was the woman in the light dress whom David had seen from his bedroom window.
She was standing quite still, holding in front of her the bunch of dahlias that she had been picking, and as David appeared, she looked at him so steadily that, for a moment, meeting that long stare, David had the feeling that it must have been for him that she had been waiting and that she was about to speak to him.
But no change of expression showed on her face as she looked at him, and she made no attempt to greet him. Confused, David turned quickly away and made for the stile he had noticed in the hedge some yards to the left of the cottage gate. Climbing the stile, he found a path skirting a meadow.
As he walked along the path he began, for no particular reason, to feel angry about a number of things. He felt angry with Stella and Ferdie for having problems which they did not conceal from him, and for having Mark Verinder for a neighbour. He felt angry with Verinder for still inhabiting the earth. He felt angry with the woman at the gate, who, he supposed, was Ingrid Verinder, because she reminded him of things that he wanted to forget more than he wanted to forget any other thoughts that had ever entered his mind.
Farther on down the path, on the other side of the hedge, he saw the roof of a wooden summer-house, and, as he passed it, he caught the clicking of a typewriter inside, under the touch of rather inexpert fingers. As he walked on, this sound was soon lost, but as soon as it ceased, David became aware of another sound, the soft, grinding surge of the sea, breaking upon shingle.
There is always a moment of shock in becoming aware of the closeness of the sea. David paused to listen; then, in a kind of excitement, he hurried on. It was only then that he noticed that there was a sea-tang in the air and that the only other sound he could hear, besides the stirring of the sea, was the high, wild crying of seagulls.
The path led through a small wood of pines and then out on to low cliffs, covered with dry grass and clumps of bramble. The beach below was a narrow shelf of shingle, broken by rocks. Scrambling down and undressing quickly, he slithered over the few feet of damp pebbles into the water and, as he struck straight out into it, was surprised by a sudden intense exhilaration.
He was a good swimmer. After the first few strokes, he felt an unexpected strength in his muscles. The sting of the salt seemed to prick new vitality into his nerves. Without his glasses, the whole world became a blue haze with the sea and the sky almost undifferentiated. For the first time for months, his blood seemed to move and flow instead of lying stagnant and his body to feel like his own instead of a lifeless and meaningless burden.
Yet he tired quickly, and as the familiar tiredness came, his exhilaration dropped into a corresponding discouragement. Turning, he swam back to the shore. He wanted to swim fast, yet felt unequal to it. He wanted to get his spectacles on again and to see clearly, for the shining, vague blue had become filled with menace. The cry of the gulls he could not see were like warnings being shrieked at him. This was how everything happened now. A few moments of hope and freedom, and then again came the feeling of frightened helplessness, or a fever of downright panic.
• • • • •
“But why have you got such a violent objection to meeting Verinder?” Stella asked. “You can’t dodge everybody all the time. It’d be far better for you to meet a few people than to sit in that pub twice a day.”
“I meet people in the pub,” David said.
“But d’you ever talk to them?”
“A little,” he said.
“I don’t believe you do; I believe you just sit in a corner by yourself and never speak to a soul,” Stella said.
“Why shouldn’t I, if that’s what I want to do?” he asked.
“Because I’m sure it’s bad for you.”
“It isn’t.”
“But you ought to start seeing people,” she said. “You ought to stop being so afraid of them.”
“I’m not afraid of them. I simply don’t want their company,” he said.
“But you’d find you’d like it, if you’d try it.”
“Why should I try it when I’m quite all right without it?”
“Oh, David—!”
“For the Lord’s sake, don’t worry about me, Stella! I’m quite all right as I am.” He picked up a newspaper and unfolded its pages before him as a screen. As he did so, he heard Stella sigh sharply.
David had been with Ferdie and Stella for a fortnight. It had been a difficult time for all three of them, and though David felt contrite for the distress which he could see both Ferdie and Stella felt because their sympathy seemed to be of so little use to him, he found himself completely unable to respond to it with any of the show that would have satisfied them. Somewhere inside himself their kindness supported him and helped him and he tried to tell them so, but he had grown into a habit of detachment which would not yield when he wanted to speak with feeling. What he said sounded cold and unconvincing, and he could see them thinking that he was only offering formal thanks for hospitality. By their faces, when sometimes he walked into a room and found them together, he knew that they discussed him continually, and he suspected irritably that they kept planning new ways of trying to handle him for his own good.
But he liked the pub. He went there almost every day after lunch or after dinner and stayed till closing time. He drank whisky when they had it. Occasionally he wondered if this was in fact the kind of thing that it was wise for him to do at the moment, but a new and complete inability to get drunk reassured him.
“But listen, David—”
He lowered the newspaper. Unwillingly he made himself meet Stella’s eyes. He made himself smile at her.
“Please, Stella,” he said, “just let me go my own way for a bit. I know what I’m doing.”
“I wonder if you do,” she said.
“I do, really.”
She had picked up a piece of knitting. Smoothing it out over her lap, she looked at it, frowning. Worry or some disappointment made her face look sullen.
“It makes it awfully difficult for us, that’s the only thing,” she said.
“Difficult for you?”
“Of course. People keep asking about you. They want to meet you.”
“Can’t you simply say I’m not well?”
“When you’re well enough to go swimming every day and to spend every evening in the pub?”
“You know that’s quite different.”
“Yes, but
they
don’t know it’s quite different.”
“Who are
they?”
“Oh …” Stella was looking at her knitting as if it were a mass of mistakes, then she began slowly to count the stitches.
“Who are they?” David repeated.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I don’t mean to bother you.”
“D’you mean Verinder?”
“Oh, other people too.”
“Who?”
“Oh, Winnfrieda Fortis, and Deirdre Masson, and Giles Clay. … But it doesn’t matter. Now you’ve made me lose count. …”
David stood up. They were in the garden, under the trees, with their coffee-cups, which they had taken out there after lunch, on a tray on the grass between them. Stella, wearing light blue slacks and a shirt of deeper blue, was sitting on some cushions on the ground, her legs curled under her. David had been sitting on the wooden bench against the oak tree.
“Listen, Stella,” he said, “I’ll meet any one you like except Verinder.”
She looked up quickly. “Will you? D’you mean that?”
“Yes.”
“But why not Verinder?”
“For the simple reason that he caused the death of the only woman I’ve ever really cared about.”
“David!”
Now that he had said it, oddly enough, there seemed to be no reason why he should not go on. There was even some satisfaction in it, tinged with a faint cruelty towards Stella, for he realised that when she recognised how little she had ever known of all this that had been so important to him, she would feel deeply hurt. Besides that, she would feel hurt in her feeling for Verinder, whatever that might be.
“D’you remember Lizbeth?” he asked.
“Lizbeth Rivers—the girl you knew at college?”
“Yes.” He leant back against the oak tree. “She was drowned, you remember.”
“Yes, I remember. … Were you in love with her, David? I never knew that.”
“Yes, I was in love with her,” David said.
“Oh Lord—how terrible. Why did you never tell me?”
“I don’t really know. Perhaps because it lasted such a short time, her being in love with me as well, I mean. She was older than I was—she was doing research under Verinder, working for an M.A., when I hadn’t got my degree yet. She was much cleverer than I was—”