Half of the Human Race Page 14

  Will’s reverie was interrupted by the clang of the Priory pavilion’s bell. He had his feet up against the iron rail of the players’ balcony, from which vantage he now watched Tam and his fellow opener start out to the wicket. He could always spot Tam a mile off from his casual, ambling gait. The previous week he had watched him pace in rather different circumstances, shouldering the corner of a coffin down the aisle. The vicar conducting the funeral had not known the deceased. Tam’s mother had succumbed, in the end, to pneumonia; the stroke of two years ago was the foreshadowing of a death which, he knew, would hit the son hard. Will, invited back to the family home a few miles out of town, found it barely more welcoming than the poky, miserable church they had just left. A relic of Victorian days, the house felt steeped in the crepuscular atmosphere of illness, dust and long-forgotten conversation. The room which was evidently ‘kept for best’ had been laid out with sandwiches and thimble-sized glasses of sherry, though even these meagre tokens of hospitality seemed to affront the dark, cumbersome furniture and heavy curtains, which stared in cold silence at those murmuring guests who had dared to help themselves. From the paucity of numbers, Will surmised that the late Mrs Tamburlain had either outlived most of her friends or else shed them through neglect.

  He felt so unnerved by the melancholy of the old place that he was already rehearsing his excuse to leave when a middle-aged lady, gentle-eyed and diffident-looking, approached him.

  ‘You’re Mr Maitland, aren’t you? Will?’ He smiled and replied in the affirmative, sensing that he had seen her before. She held out her hand. ‘I’m Beatrice – Drewy’s sister.’ It took him a moment to realise that ‘Drewy’ was Tam. He could not quite take in the fact that Tam’s actual name was Andrew.

  ‘I’m very sorry – about your mother,’ he said. ‘It must have been …’ Will didn’t really know what it must have been, but Beatrice filled in the blank.

  ‘A merciful release. She’d not been able to get about, you know.’ She offered this with a meekly apologetic wince. Will knew from Tam that his sister had nursed their mother in the final months, which perhaps explained her prematurely grey hair; he had assumed that she was the younger of the two siblings. She was now in reminiscent mood – ‘… had some happy times when we first moved here. She was an excellent swimmer, even into her sixties.’

  Will made a bland remark about the convenient proximity of the sea, and Beatrice gazed towards the window, beyond which the grey line of the Channel could distantly be seen.

  ‘Yes, she and Drewy would sometimes go for a dip when he was visiting from Brighton. I used to sit on the beach and watch them – they seemed able to swim forever. I would see their heads bobbing into the distance.’

  ‘It must be a comfort to have him back here again,’ said Will, trying to match her buoyant nostalgia with some optimistic reflection of his own. But now she stooped her head confidentially towards him and lowered her voice.

  ‘He’s putting a brave face on it, but it’s been … dreadfully hard. I’d be very obliged if you’d, you know, buck him up a bit.’ She paused, and again came that shy wince of regret. ‘He doesn’t have that many friends.’

  Will, secretly taken aback by this unsolicited disclosure, nodded with emphatic sympathy and said, ‘Count on it, Miss – um, Beatrice, I’ll look after him.’

  She beamed at him. ‘I think he’d like to get back to playing, really.’

  He had been pondering her words all week. It was now the last Thursday in June, and Tam was returning to the M—shire side a fortnight after his bereavement. Will suspected that his friend’s insistence on getting back might have had something to do with the fact that Revill, the stand-in as opening bat, had made a big hundred in his absence. Will was only now beginning to admit to himself that Tam’s game was in decline. His hundred on the opening day of the season – happily witnessed by Connie – had been his only major score of the summer. His eye, once snake-quick, was no longer dependable, he was troubled by a persistent knee injury, and his famous big hitting was more often landing in the outfielders’ hands than over the ropes. His slow eclipse had caused Will to wonder if his showdown with the committee back in April had been altogether wise. Might it not have been better, after all, if Tam had been gently persuaded to retire rather than allowed to string out another season in pain? For heaven’s sake, the man was practically middle-aged! Had he been less loyal to his friend and a little more hard-headed about his waning powers, Will would now be club captain instead of Middlehurst – who had just then plumped himself down on the balcony seat next to him. No word had passed between them on the matter, but a certain guardedness in his manner suggested that Middlehurst knew he had got the appointment by default.

  ‘Maitland,’ he said by way of greeting. Will noticed again his discomfortingly pale eyes and the determined jut of his chin; he had heard somewhere that the Middlehurst family owned half of Northamptonshire. They both stared out to the square, where Tam was cautiously seeing off the opening spell. Please make some runs, thought Will, for my sake. A couple of balls later his prayer seemed to have been heard. Tam had rocked back and slashed a loose one square past gully for four. The crack of the ‘Tamburlain Repeater’ resounded through the air.

  ‘Shot!’ shouted Will over the desultory applause. It was nearing midday, and the ground was still slowly filling.

  ‘Let’s hope he can get a few today,’ said Middlehurst, looking sidelong at Will, who heard his implication: runs from Tam were overdue.

  ‘He’s just had a bad trot,’ said Will, shrugging.

  ‘I was sorry to hear about his mother,’ he continued. ‘They were close, I gather.’

  Will only nodded. From his tentative manner he sensed that Middlehurst had something more he wanted to say. A minute or so later he was proven right. ‘Odd thing, you know. I happened to be in the Fountain last Thursday, and I saw Tam drinking in the saloon. On his own.’

  ‘No law against that, is there?’

  ‘No, of course not –’

  ‘And he has just lost his mother.’

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ said Middlehurst quickly, and waited for another broken volley of clapping – the end of an over – to subside. ‘But I wonder if you, as his friend …’ Will sensed what was coming, but a cussedness in him refused to help his interlocutor spit it out. Middlehurst gave a thoughtful sigh. ‘I wonder if you’d agree he might be … in difficulties. With drink.’

  ‘Difficulties? No, I wouldn’t say so,’ said Will, trying to keep his tone airy. ‘Tam has always liked a beer or two – as do I. It has never impaired his batting.’

  Middlehurst squinted in a way that withheld complete agreement. ‘You see,’ he began slowly, ‘I take into account the fact that it’s a sociable game, and of course a chap deserves a drink. But when I turn up to nets in the morning and smell alcohol on a man’s breath, it inclines me’ – his shrug was parsonical – ‘to doubt his worth to the team.’

  Will’s chuckle sounded lighter than he felt. ‘I imagine it’s from the night before!’

  Middlehurst closed his eyes and pinched the top of his nose to indicate he wasn’t taken in. ‘It won’t do, I’m afraid. I cannot have a player – however well regarded – turning up drunk on a match day. It’s entirely unprofessional.’

  ‘He’s never missed a game, though, has he?’ said Will.

  ‘Hardly the point. You know as well as I do that Tamburlain is not pulling his weight. Aside from that ton back in May he hasn’t made a score over twenty. Now, either I must talk to him –’

  ‘No – don’t do that,’ said Will, knowing that Tam would not respond favourably to any expression of authority, and certainly not from someone he regarded as unworthy of the captaincy. ‘I’ll have a word with him. If he is, as you say, in difficulties, I’ll report back to you. But I think your concern is misplaced.’

  He gave Middlehurst a tight smile of reassurance. He had absolutely no idea what he would say to Tam, but considered it imperative to let the
captain believe he was going to take the matter in hand. A brief silence intervened, broken moments later when a collective shout went up at the wicket: an lbw appeal against Tam. Will helplessly watched the umpire’s slow raising of the finger, and Tam, with a little shake of his head, began to walk. By the time he had reached the pavilion steps the scorers had changed the tins on the board: LAST MAN 14. Middlehurst looked round at Will, but said nothing.

  Bicycling back to his mother’s house after stumps that evening, Will felt at a loss. His volunteering to ‘have a word’ was not lightly undertaken, for Tam had always been the one he had consulted for advice – his elder and, in ways that mattered, his better. The idea of reversing roles on him seemed not merely impudent: it smacked of disloyalty. But who would do it if not himself? He doesn’t have that many friends. His sister’s observation had been haunting him ever since. Could it possibly be true? The ‘Great Tam’ was traditionally mobbed by admirers wherever he played; he had only to show his face at a pub in M—shire and someone would be at his side buying him a drink. He was a star, still. Yet only now did it occur to Will that Tam, while seeming to know everyone, was not actually close to anyone. Even he, who could call himself a friend, had never visited the family home until Mrs Tamburlain’s funeral last week.

  In fact, it was not his sole preoccupation at present. He had been wondering if Miss Callaway – Constance – would ever bestir herself to write to him again. He had received one letter from her thanking him for the weekend at Silverton House and ‘that glorious day’s cricket’ (her own words!) at the Priory, though he couldn’t help noticing that she had avoided any mention of his mother. Not that he blamed her. He would wince each time he recalled the frosty matriarchal glare she had directed at Connie over the lunch table. He had written, aware of pressing the correspondence towards absurdity, to thank her for her thank-you letter, and since then – nothing. Now, as he cycled along high-hedged country lanes, past hay carts and the occasional trotting cob, he began to formulate a little scheme that might resolve two problems at once. A family friend, trustee of a gallery in King Street, St James’s, had invited him to the private view of a group show – some loose gathering of ‘urban realist’ painters whom Will had never heard of – and would surely be amenable to his bringing a couple of guests. Remembering now the almost instant congeniality that had flowered between Connie and Tam that afternoon, Will realised he could extend an invitation to her on the pretext of ‘bucking up’ his recently bereaved friend: a noble and apparently selfless gesture of which Will would be the secret beneficiary. On arriving home he almost flung the bicycle against the wall as he hurried into the house and plucked a sheet of writing paper from the bureau, there to compose a casual (but actually very careful) letter to Miss Callaway.

  Her reply was prompt.

  Thornhill Crescent, N.

  29th June 1912

  Dear William,

  Thank you for your letter of the 27th inst. I was very sorry to hear of Tam’s bereavement – he talked so fondly of his mother during our walk that day. Perhaps you will be good enough to pass on my condolences?

  I am obliged to you for your kind invitation to the Beaufort Gallery viewing next month. By cheerful coincidence I happen to have received that same invitation under my own name. An acquaintance of mine is one of the artists to be exhibited there, and he has been most insistent upon my attendance! But this should not preclude my dining with you and Tam afterwards.

  Congratulations on your hundred – I read of it in The Times today, with great pleasure.

  With my best regards,

  Constance

  It was progress, of a sort. But he paused over the allusion to that acquaintance – most insistent, indeed? He didn’t care for the idea of any fellow insisting on her company, other than himself. It was a vexing conundrum to Will that the longer the lapse in time since their previous meeting the more alluring did Connie become in his mind’s eye. He liked to recall the moment he saw her on the platform at Warwick Square, the expression of wry amusement playing across her features as she detected his anxious scouring of the other arrivals. That was one side of her. But even stronger was the memory of her in the ladies’ room at the Savoy just after he had helped clean up her nosebleed. It was that look of alarm in her eyes, at once anguished and luminous, which appealed to his most chivalrous instincts – touched his heart, in truth. He wanted to ensure that she would never get into such a scrape again. Constance. Constance. And she had addressed him in her letter as William! It was really too stuffy of him to keep addressing her as ‘Miss Callaway’.

  * * *

  Connie loved the garden seat of the motor bus’s upper deck. True, not so pleasant when it rained, but during balmier days like this one it provided an incomparable vantage from which to survey the city streets. Her father used to say that the upstairs of a ’bus offered the best theatre in London. It was the chance to watch people unawares that fascinated. The one on which she travelled was just negotiating the evening rush-hour traffic around Regent Street, and the sight of a boatered gent risking his neck to dash across the thoroughfare, of a crossing-sweeper gently patting a cart horse, of a policeman on point duty showing off his repertoire of hand signals, of two elegantly attired ladies poised on the kerb and looking about them, plainly lost – she was beguiled by these fragments of life in simultaneous motion, hurrying on, heedless of one another. How could so many consciousnesses be contained in one world, she wondered, each of them believing themselves to be the centre of the universe?

  She stepped off the ’bus just past Piccadilly Circus, and made her way down Jermyn Street. An early-evening sunlight dappled the plane trees in the garden of St James’s Square, and she shielded her eyes against the dazzling lozenges of brilliance that were refracted through the leaves. Around the next corner a busy termitary of men in evening dress had formed around the porticoed entrance of a baronial Georgian house: the Beaufort Gallery, she presumed. A taxi pulled up, disgorging a trio of toppered gents with a lady whose bare shoulders were festooned in a dramatic white feather boa. For a moment Connie thought she knew her, but then dismissed the idea. Their social circles would not have overlapped. A residual shyness caused her to hang back while the toffs trooped in; she followed them half a minute later.

  Brigstock had advised her to arrive early, and now she saw why. The rooms were already forested with people, their brayingly loud voices floating right up to the cornices. She accepted a glass of wine from a liveried waiter, and wandered upstairs in search of the painter. In the upper gallery she edged her way around another scrum; the walls of this room were mostly hung with dark-toned pictures of music halls and nudes disporting themselves in dingy bedrooms. The Brigstock signature. She had seen little of him since their visit to the music hall back in December. The embarrassing encounter that morning in his flat and his own aptitude for disappearing for months at a time had kept a distance between them, though the invitation to this evening’s event had been couched in his familiar friendly way.

  She had paused at another cluster of his canvases when her eye was drawn to a small painting of a woman, directly facing the viewer, her head propped against her fist and a faint smile tweaking her mouth. She stared, rapt, at the portrait for some moments. The paint had been applied in Brigstock’s loose, free manner, but there could be little doubt as to the identity of the subject. Just then, a shadow at her side interrupted her scrutiny.

  ‘Enjoying the show?’ It was Tam, dressed in a sombrely immaculate suit with a pin carefully speared through his plump silk tie. His dark hair was oiled back from his forehead, and his salt-and-pepper moustache trimmed.

  ‘Hullo there,’ said Connie, recovering herself. ‘I’m sorry, I was just rather absorbed by … this.’ She gestured at the painting of the woman. Tam leaned in to take a closer look, and Connie smelt a musky, sweetish cologne on him. He craned his head round at her, and then back to the portrait. He squinted.

  ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’

 
; ‘I think so. He didn’t tell me he was …’

  They both stared at it again in silence. Eventually, Tam drew back, and said with an approving nod, ‘He’s got your expression just right.’

  ‘D’you think?’ she asked, trying not to sound too delighted. He was peering at the signature at the corner of the picture.

  ‘DAB?’

  ‘Denton Brigstock. He lives near to the shop where I work. In Camden.’

  Tam nodded, considering. ‘He’s good. But then, the sitter would have inspired him.’

  Connie laughed at his grave gallantry. Then, remembering, she dropped her voice to an undertone. ‘I was very sorry to hear about your mother. William told me –’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, bowing. She saw his jaw tighten. ‘I thought I was prepared, but these things still … give you a shock.’

  ‘I know they do,’ she said, fixing on him a look of earnest sympathy. ‘I lost my father nearly four years ago, and hardly a day goes by when I don’t think of him.’ Tam looked down, and Connie felt she had said the wrong thing. After a respectful pause, she continued. ‘I did so enjoy that day at the Priory – seeing you and Will make all those runs!’

  Tam narrowed his eyes in reminiscence. ‘What a day that was. I got to thinking you were a lucky charm for us. The next morning, after you’d gone, I got out in the first over.’

  ‘But still – you’d made about 130 by then.’

  ‘Aye. The one decent score I’ve made all season.’ He shrugged, as though it didn’t especially bother him. He plucked fresh drinks for them from a waiter’s tray. Connie, sensing the need for cheerfulness, tried a different tack.

  ‘It must be wonderful to earn a living at something one loves. Were you – did you always think you’d be a cricketer?’