Half of the Human Race Read online

  ‘Can’t argue with the treasurer,’ offered the colonel. The complacent finality of his tone seemed to induce a glandular reaction in Will. He felt about to combust with indignation, but strove to keep his voice steady.

  ‘Let me make myself clear. First, I don’t care how much he earns – he’s worth every penny. Second, the club hasn’t a hope of the championship this season if he doesn’t open the batting. Andrew Tamburlain is the first name on the team sheet. That’s it.’

  The note of obstinacy was unmistakable. The atmosphere at the table, so recently convivial, was now dropping towards a distinct chill. Du Boung made one more effort at diplomacy. ‘William, please, we understand your loyalty, and it does you credit. But we think young Revill could step in as opener – ’

  ‘Revill?!’ Will couldn’t believe his ears. ‘He hasn’t even made a first-class hundred. If you think you could replace Tam with Revill, you really have taken leave of your senses.’

  Lord Daventry appeared to have heard enough. ‘I must say, after what we’ve just been talking about, I’m disappointed by your attitude, Maitland.’

  ‘And I’m disgusted by yours,’ replied Will coldly. ‘If I’m to be captain of this club, then Tamburlain stays. Otherwise, I must oblige you to find someone else for the job.’

  An offended silence fell upon the table. Will folded his arms and fixed his gaze on the tablecloth, refusing to say more. He felt the blood throbbing at his temple, its pulse so insistent he wondered if the vein might pop. He supposed they would have expected opposition to their plan, but they surely hadn’t envisaged anything quite so adamant as this. At that moment, a waiter arrived with champagne in a bucket, his timing off by only five calamitous minutes. Daventry dismissed him without a word, then turned to Will.

  ‘Would you be kind enough to wait outside?’

  Will rose from his chair, dropped his napkin on the table and made for the door. He felt his step to be mechanical, a little like the slow walk from the crease after you’ve got out, with that terrible sense of self-rebuke companioning you right back to the pavilion. Outside, he stalked up and down the corridor as waiters and chambermaids padded past, oblivious to the deliberations going on behind the closed doors. Pausing before the framed landscapes hung on the wall, he pondered the gamble he had taken: they could strip him of the captaincy, and get rid of Tam anyway. What would he do then? Behind him, he heard the door open and Du Boung calling his name.

  He walked back in, a defendant returning to hear the verdict of the jury. Two of them had cigars in blast, their burnt chemical odour an affront to Will’s nostrils.

  ‘Sit down, Maitland,’ said Pawley, with a kind of weariness.

  ‘I’ll stand if you don’t mind.’

  The decision of this court … Daventry, with the air of a man handing down sentence, looked sternly at Will. ‘You’ve caused us great disappointment, sir – though it is yourself you have principally let down. I’m sorry to say that, given your intransigence, we must withdraw the offer of the captaincy.’

  That didn’t take long, thought Will. He swallowed hard. ‘And Tamburlain?’

  Daventry looked away, yielding the floor to Pawley. ‘I’m sorry, old chap. He won’t be kept on.’ So there it was: the worst possible outcome. Will wasn’t sure if it was the cigars or the impact of those words that were making his stomach lurch. There was one more bullet in the chamber. He knew then that if he used it he would have to mean it. And he did. ‘Very well. I’m glad at last to know what manner of men run this club. If a batsman of Tamburlain’s calibre is no loss to you, I can’t imagine what difference my departure will make.’ He walked over to the stand to take his hat, and his leave. Sensing their confusion, he said, ‘That, in case you were wondering, is my resignation. Good day.’

  He was almost at the door when he heard the scrape of a chair and Du Boung called, ‘William, a moment please –’ He had hurried to catch him at the door, and held up his hands in a gesture of placatory surrender. Pawley had also stood up. ‘Come, come, Maitland. Let’s not be hasty. We can discuss this further, like gentlemen.’

  ‘I think the time for gentlemanly behaviour passed when you charged me with the sacking of my closest friend.’

  ‘It’s not a sacking –’

  ‘Whatever you prefer to call it,’ said Will, sensing the moment on a knife-edge. ‘I’m sorry to present you with such a stark choice, but there it is. If Tamburlain isn’t offered a contract for the season, I want nothing more to do with this club.’

  From their uncertain glances he judged that they were taking him seriously, at least. And why should they not? His loss as a captain was a mere inconvenience to them, but they would think twice about sacrificing his runs. The seven centuries he had scored last season had been vital in hauling M—shire up to sixth in the championship table. They would not be able to replace him in a hurry, and they knew it. Will was not going to flinch. Taking out his watch, he glanced at it and said, ‘I dare say you’ll want to discuss it. I shall be outside – for another five minutes.’ It was an arrogant touch, he knew, but his blood was up now. If this was to be his last association with the club he wanted to go down fighting. Back in the corridor he stood gazing once more at a heavily varnished picture of a stag hunt. As the minutes ticked on he became stoical: let them sack him, then, see if he cared. He moved to the window, where the afternoon light was sharpening the blue of the sky. The door opened again, and this time both the colonel and Du Boung emerged. The latter closed the door behind him; evidently Will was not to be invited back a second time. Oh well. With his record, some other county might pick him up, there was always a chance –

  The colonel approached, stroking distractedly at his toothbrush moustache. His eyes drooped a schoolmasterly disapproval at Will. ‘That was quite a gamble you took in there. Daventry thinks you’re a damned insubordinate and wants rid of you.’

  Will shrugged, as if His Lordship’s opinion were of no consequence to him. He sensed there was more to come. Du Boung, with the air of a man exhausted by his own reasonableness, shook his head. ‘I’m surprised at you, William, really I am –’

  ‘Please tell me what you’ve decided, and I’ll go.’

  Colonel Pawley’s rubicund complexion had deepened. ‘My God, I never thought to hear such insolence –’

  Du Boung made a tactical interruption. ‘The committee is very eager not to lose you, and to that end we are … prepared to make a compromise.’ Will cocked his head. The gesture asked the question.

  ‘Tamburlain’ – Du Boung’s voice sounded weary of the name – ‘will be offered a year’s contract. But, in the light of your attitude, we can’t possibly instate you as captain.’

  Will listened with an expression as impassive as granite. He realised that Du Boung had probably worked harder than anyone to salvage his career with the club, but at this moment he felt no warmth towards him or any of his colleagues.

  ‘Thank you for the lunch. I’ll see you at the Priory next month.’ He tipped his hat to them, and turned down the corridor towards the exit.

  * * *

  Back on the Parade, the bright innocence of the day Will had enjoyed not long before seemed to him now one of charmless banality. People still strolled along the esplanade, seagulls still wheeled and cawed, but he pounded the pavement with the distracted air of a man who had just mislaid his wallet. He must have been muttering to himself, because a couple of elderly promenaders looked askance at him as he stalked past. The further he walked the less real to him the previous hour or so seemed: the tumultuous interview he had just endured, the size of the gamble he had taken, and the shocking, wilful stupidity that had provoked it. Had he just dreamt the whole thing? The stink of cigar smoke on his sleeve argued that he had not. He turned off the Parade and began to roam the backstreets that sloped up from the seafront, the rows of early-Victorian terraces, the peeling stucco, the sudden boarding houses, the identical porches, the bay windows and their illusionless gaze. What a wretched, parochia
l, mean-minded place it was – no wonder the likes of Leach and Pawley lived here. That such mediocrities had a say in the running of a county cricket club! As for His Lordship, he should desist from poking his aristocratic beak into affairs he clearly didn’t understand. Even Du Boung he thought of as a Judas, all smiles as he offered him the captaincy while hiding the knife with which he was to stab his friend in the back.

  His aimless, fretful perambulation brought him eventually to the manicured gardens of Warwick Square, where the smaller of the town’s two railway stations stood. He had made an arrangement to visit Tam at his lodgings that evening, but now the temptation of a swift exit called him on. He stopped at a tobacconist’s next to the station, and picked a seaside postcard off the rack. He bought a pencil to go with it, and wandered into the waiting room. There was nobody else there but an off-duty signalman smoking a lonely cigarette. Will sat down, and after a few moments’ reflection wrote on the card:

  A false dawn. The proverb of counting chickens springs to mind. Purpose of the luncheon only to meet His Lordship (wdn’t call it a pleasure). Hope you’ll forgive if I cry off this evening. See you in a fortnight for nets, when I shall be in better spirits.

  Fondest,

  Will

  PS Remind me to ask about seagulls.

  Would it convince Tam? he wondered. The tone of breeziness mingled with disappointment seemed right, but Tam was shrewd: he might suspect something was amiss. Well, he would never hear the truth of it from him, and the committee would want to keep mum about it, too. Perhaps, in time, Will would feel proud of his noble stand, but at that moment all he could think of was the honour he had effectively denied himself. To think that he had for just those fleeting minutes actually been captain. He wondered if he had set some kind of record for the shortest tenure in the club’s history. In the history of captaincy itself. A thunderous hissing at the platform outside and the irregular volley of carriage doors clunking shut interrupted his reverie. A question to the signalman revealed it to be the train to Charing Cross. Stopping to tip his postcard into the letter box he walked out and boarded a first-class carriage. He tried to rid himself of the preceding few hours as the branchline stations slid past his window, but as the outskirts of London began to thicken, the fateful confrontation was proving in his mind as tenacious and maddening as the peculiar stain on his lapel.

  A train travelling in the opposite direction nearly three weeks later deposited Connie on the platform at Warwick Square. As the pall of steam cleared she spotted Will scanning the alighting passengers, glance by glance, and felt rather touched by his look of furrowed anxiety. He had insisted on meeting her off the train, though she had expressed herself perfectly capable of taking a taxi. He raised his hat on finally spotting her, and she realised he had perhaps not expected his guest to emerge from a third-class compartment.

  ‘Miss Callaway!’ he said.

  ‘Constance,’ she corrected, smiling. She allowed him to relieve her of her small suitcase, and followed him out over a footbridge and into the square.

  ‘A change of plan,’ said Will over his shoulder. He gestured her into the taxi.

  ‘Oh?’ She arranged herself on the seat as he climbed in after her.

  ‘The good news is that we’re not dining at the Royal Vic. We’ll have luncheon at my mother’s. The bad news – well, you haven’t met my mother.’

  Connie laughed. ‘I’m sure she’s not as bad as all that.’

  Will smiled uncertainly, then said, ‘I’ve invited Tam along, too, so the good news sort of outweighs the bad.’ The taxi turned out of the square and along the seafront; Connie watched as the rows of shops and hotels reeled by. It was her first visit to the town since the week before the Coronation last summer. The taxi had temporarily stalled, as it happened, right by the Wellington, scene of their little difference of opinion. Strange to think of her contempt back then for his arrogant chauvinism, and now here they were, like a couple of fast friends. She turned and found him looking, slightly sheepishly, in the same direction.

  ‘Happy days,’ she said gaily.

  Their journey took them a mile or so north-east of the town, down a winding road that suddenly offered a sharp turn up a narrow wooded lane. The first sign that they were approaching the Maitland home was a notice on a white gatepost announcing it as private property. A break in the thickly set cypress trees and poplars allowed a glimpse of Silverton House, grey-stoned, three-storeyed, and fronting a wide crescent-shaped garden. The patchy crimson colour on the facade gradually resolved itself into a Virginia creeper. It all seemed very grand to Connie, who had no acquaintance with the rural gentry, or their houses. As the car pulled to a halt, she had an idea that an aged retainer would totter from the house to greet the young master. The front door did indeed swing open, but the girl who ambled out to meet them was plainly no member of staff. Will was paying off the cabman, so Connie introduced herself.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said, ‘are you by any chance –’

  ‘Eleanor,’ she replied brightly, extending her hand. ‘And you’re Constance. I hope you like fish pie.’

  ‘I’m sure I do.’

  ‘Good. It’s Tam’s favourite, you see.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he’s here yet,’ said Will, coming up behind them.

  ‘Actually, he is here. He’s on the terrace with Mother. I think they’re yarning about horses or something.’ She gave an exaggerated shrug, as if to absolve herself of responsibility for what the older generation talked about.

  ‘I’ll just show Miss Callaway round the place, then we’ll join you.’

  They proceeded into the entrance hall, their footsteps clacking on the tiled floor. In quick succession Will threw open doors, one revealing the dining room, another the drawing room, another a little lobby that led down to the kitchen. They lingered a while in the echoing hallway, where a grandfather clock croaked a froggy, metalled tut. Then they cut through a billiard room and up two flights of stairs, Will retailing the history of the house as they went (‘They say Tennyson stayed here sometime in the 1860s’) in a faintly responsible way. On a half-landing he paused, and they looked through a casement window onto the long back garden, with an old lead sundial in the middle and a brick path leading off to a tennis court and an orangery. A wild meadow could be seen straggling beyond.

  ‘We should go for a walk later,’ he said, ‘if it stays fine.’

  Connie raked her gaze over the aspect, then turned to him. ‘So just your mother and your sister live here?’

  ‘And the maid. It’s much too big for them,’ he said, picking up her implication, ‘but she can’t bear to sell it. It was her father’s, you see.’

  The final flight of stairs took them to a pair of attic rooms, one of which was to be Connie’s for the night. Its window sat right beneath the eaves, and the lowering slant of the ceiling made it seem perhaps more cosy than was comfortable. The air felt musty and unstirred. Will placed her suitcase on the chaste single bed, with its faded floral eiderdown, and then pushed open the window. He cleared his throat apologetically. ‘It was originally a servant’s bedroom, I think.’

  ‘It’s lovely,’ she said simply.

  Having waited while she had a quick wash, Will then led her down again and through to the terrace, where a maid was depositing a jug on the table between Mrs Maitland and Tam.

  ‘Um, Mother, this is Miss Callaway …’ From the moment she stepped forward Connie was alive to the unsmiling scrutiny of this matriarch, who held forth her hand for the visitor to shake.

  ‘Miss Callaway. A pleasant journey from London, I hope?’

  ‘Oh yes, thank you. I had a smoker all to myself.’

  Mrs Maitland’s eyes just perceptibly widened. Will hurried on. ‘And this, as you know, is Andrew Tamburlain.’

  Tam had stood up to greet her. ‘Miss Callaway. I recall you from last summer – at the Wellington?’

  ‘Indeed, yes. How d’you do?’ she said, covering her surprise. She now remembered passi
ng him on her way out of the hotel, but she never thought for a moment he would remember. ‘I happened to see you first at Lord’s some years ago. Your big hit over the pavilion.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Tam, nodding, ‘Will told me you saw that … you must have been very young at the time. Well, I always liked playing at Lord’s – I scored my first county hundred there.’ Now it was Will’s turn to be surprised. In his experience Tam hardly ever responded so genially to strangers reminiscing about the Lord’s hit: he always believed it had overshadowed his more deserving achievements.

  ‘Some barley water, Miss Callaway,’ Mrs Maitland cut in, ‘or perhaps you would prefer a glass of wine?’

  Connie sensed that the latter was offered in a rather ironic spirit, to go with her cigarette smoking. ‘Some wine, thank you.’ Will stepped forward to pour a glass of hock for their guest, and noticed the bottle was already half empty. Tam, the old toper. ‘I do like your house,’ said Connie, hoping to soften up her hostess. ‘The meadow over there – is that yours, too?’

  ‘Yes. Most of what you can see from the house is ours.’

  ‘How nice to have a tennis court!’

  ‘Do you play, Miss Callaway?’ asked Tam.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Connie with a sad little laugh, ‘I’m hopeless at sports. But I do love to watch.’

  ‘Eleanor is a superb tennis player,’ declared Mrs Maitland airily, as if the accomplishment admitted no contradiction.

  ‘Lunch is ready,’ said Eleanor, who from the slight flush in her cheeks had evidently been helping to prepare it. ‘I hope you’re all hungry – there’s heaps.’

  They repaired to a conservatory, where a fish pie was steaming at the centre of an oval table. A knocking sounded distantly from the hall.

  ‘That’ll be Mr Fotheringham – with immaculate timing.’

  ‘I was wondering where he’d got to,’ said Eleanor, who dropped her voice confidingly to Connie. ‘Wouldn’t be like him to miss a feed.’

  The appearance at the conservatory door of a balding, bespectacled and unarguably corpulent gentleman explained her remark. It transpired that Mr Fotheringham was the family lawyer, and a regular guest at the Maitland table. Connie already felt a secret relief at his arrival, for his bulky placement to Mrs Maitland’s right at the table (Tam was to her left) had put a saving buffer between herself and the hostess. Will, with a quick encouraging smile, came to sit by Connie, briefly introducing the lawyer and filling up their glasses in turn. He was beginning to wonder if he should have organised the lunch just à deux; it might have been more relaxing for her – and him, come to that – without his mother’s wrong-footing approach to hospitality. But then he had wanted her to meet Tam, and he couldn’t face the Royal Vic, so lunch at home seemed the sensible choice. As he watched her converse with his sister, he found that his susceptibility to her had by no means diminished since their encounter back in March. The intelligent, animated expression in her dark eyes, the swan curve of her neck and the generous fullness of her mouth were still working a spell. True, he hadn’t noticed her hands before – long and bony, like a farmer’s wife’s – but that anomaly only made her seem more vividly human to him. He tuned back in to the conversation: Connie was recounting to Eleanor, with careful omissions, the story of her bumping into Will at the Savoy.