Half of the Human Race Page 18

  Wheeling his bicycle down the slope of London Road, Will followed at a distance, reckoning that Tam should have some time on his own to calm down. The early-evening warmth was touched with an eager little bluster coming up off the sea. Gulls wheeled over the front calling plaintively, each to each. Tam’s hulking figure could be seen crossing the Parade and ambling alongside the rails of the esplanade. Then it disappeared as he took the wide steps down onto the beach, where the last few stragglers were packing up for home. The bathing huts had been hauled up and parked beneath the wall; some fishermen were fixing their nets for tomorrow. Tam slowed as he approached the point where a jagged corridor of coarse grey sand had opened up between the shingle and the sea. Across the horizon a soft blue sky had melted into blushing-pink striations, and the melancholy sun was withdrawing by reluctant degrees. Will, at the foot of the steps, stood watching the motionless figure staring out to sea.

  Although Tam glanced behind on hearing footsteps crunch over the pebbles, he said nothing. He continued gazing out, listening to the surf as it fizzed and seethed over the sand then slid back again. In the distance the head of a solitary swimmer rose and dropped on the grey-blue swell.

  Will began, ‘Your sister said you used to swim right out there – you and your mother both.’

  ‘She told you that?’ His voice was mild, musing. The violence in the pub might have been a lifetime ago. ‘I still love listening to the waves – last thing at night ’fore you drop off to sleep. Every other sound just gets on my nerves.’

  Will, trying to brighten his mood, cast about for another exception. ‘Come on. What about … the sound of a woman’s voice?’

  Tam looked at him curiously, as if there were some ulterior meaning in the suggestion. When he realised that Will had meant it quite innocently, he said, ‘That would depend on the woman …’

  Another silence lengthened, until Will casually nodded towards the horizon. ‘There’s a proper Turner sunset, don’t you think?’

  Tam didn’t reply. To judge from his thousand-yard stare he seemed to be ruminating on something else, and after a long delay he spoke. ‘You oughtn’t to have done it. Really you oughtn’t.’

  ‘Done what?’ asked Will, though he all but knew what.

  ‘Fallen on your sword. Not for me. I knew it near for certain, soon as I heard you hadn’t got the captaincy. If I’d known what you were –’

  ‘What makes you think I did?’ said Will, feigning ignorance.

  ‘Please don’t pretend,’ Tam said quietly. ‘I only wish it hadn’t been Middlehurst. That superior look as he told me – “You’re only playing because of Maitland” …’

  ‘Tam, I’m sorry. I just couldn’t captain a side that would treat you like that. You know I’d rather watch you make twenty than anyone else make a hundred.’

  A little smile twitched beneath Tam’s moustache. ‘It was a loyal thing to do. But maybe not a wise one.’

  Will wasn’t sure about it either, but saw no use in lamenting his quixotic behaviour. He had gambled with the committee to secure another season for his friend, and won – for what? Now that the cat was out of the bag, he couldn’t even enjoy the satisfaction of his sacrifice; indeed, it seemed he was being rebuked for it again. Tam, as if overhearing these thoughts, said with a chuckle, ‘Sometimes you can’t do right for doing bloody wrong. You’re a good man, Blue, you stuck by a friend. Too bad I couldn’t repay you. But they’ll make you captain one day. I’m only sorry I won’t be there to see it.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ said Will.

  ‘Well, this time I’ll walk before I’m given out. I won’t give them the pleasure of sacking me. We’ve one match left – after that, I’m gone.’

  ‘To play somewhere else?’

  Tam shook his head. ‘The game’s up. I should probably have called time a couple of years back, but I couldn’t bear to. Pride, I suppose.’

  ‘But another club will sign you up in a trice.’

  ‘P’raps. But I could only enjoy it if I were making runs. There’s no good in fooling myself – the eye isn’t there any more.’

  The dying rays of the sun had baked the waves to a molten gold. Will had a sudden intuition that this scene would be imprinted on his consciousness forever: the wobbling sun, the pink-hued sky, the platinum glint of the sea, these he would recall as the moment Tam announced his retirement. There must have been an expression close to shock on his face, because he now heard Tam’s flat, dry chuckle.

  ‘Look at you. It’s like someone’s died.’

  ‘Sorry. It’s just – hard to believe –’ Will was struggling to command his voice, so heavy was his heart. The truth was, it did feel a little like a bereavement. Once the sun had set on a great sportsman’s career it seemed, eerily, that the life itself was over, too. The wind off the sea was making his shirt ripple, and he felt a sudden shiver. They started to walk back along the beach. From the Pier they could hear the distant oompah sounds of a brass band tuning up. Tam stopped for a moment to light a cigar, and Will caught a noseful of its charred aroma in the breeze.

  ‘What will you do?’ he said suddenly. ‘I mean, what are your plans?’

  Tam exhaled a fiery cloud of smoke, and shrugged. ‘Haven’t made any. I’ll write a resignation letter to the committee tomorrow, and then – who knows?’

  ‘Well, there’ll have to be a testimonial, of course. And a dinner, a slap-up dinner …’

  Tam nodded, though he seemed hardly enthused by the prospect. ‘I was thinking, p’raps, of a little fishing, the first Saturday after the season ends. We could hire a boat, if you like.’

  ‘Capital idea,’ cried Will, whose face fell the next moment on recalling a prior engagement. ‘Dash it – I can’t, I’m afraid. There’s a wedding in London I’ve been invited to. Miss Callaway – Constance, I should say – well, her sister’s to be married.’

  ‘Ah, Miss Callaway,’ said Tam, thoughtfully. ‘So you’re back on friendly terms?’

  ‘It would seem so. I had to grovel rather, but she forgave me in the end. Wilful girl, that.’

  ‘She’s got strength of character,’ said Tam, seeming to endorse his judgement yet subtly correcting it.

  ‘To tell the truth,’ said Will shyly, ‘I’ve grown awfully fond of her.’ The phrase sounded inadequate to his own ears – ‘fondness’ wasn’t telling the truth of it at all.

  Tam stared at him for a few moments, then said, ‘And does she return this feeling?’

  Will puffed out his cheeks. ‘I hardly know. Most of the time we get along quite amicably … but if the conversation turns to a woman’s rights, or whatever, you have to play pretty much on the back foot.’

  ‘Ah …’

  ‘I mean, you saw her that night at the gallery,’ Will said, with an air of clinching the matter.

  ‘D’you not admire her pluck?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose so. But that sort of behaviour, it’s dangerous – for her, I mean. I don’t care a rap for the fellow she soaked.’

  They had mounted the steps to the esplanade and were now heading towards the centre of town. Will talked on dreamily about Connie, until he noticed how quiet Tam had become.

  ‘Sorry, old chap. Here I am jawing on … Look, why don’t you come back for dinner? My mother would be glad to see you.’

  Tam shook his head absently. ‘Thanks, but – I said I’d call on Beatrice.’ His words had the ring of a carelessly improvised excuse, and Will thought better of pressing the invitation. The dusk light was turning grainy as they reached the end of the Parade. They parted with a handshake and Will was heading towards the tram stop until he suddenly remembered his bicycle, parked up on the front. Having doubled back he was hurrying along the Parade when, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Tam sitting on a bench facing away from the sea. His head hung down, and he was staring fixedly at his joined hands, as though in prayer. If he had looked up he would have seen his recent companion walking past, but he did not. Will was tempted for a moment to cr
oss over and interrupt Tam’s solitude, but then felt daunted by the sadness of it. He doesn’t have that many friends. Will wished he’d never heard that line, because now he couldn’t get it out of his head.

  Connie could not have been less beguiled by the wedding ceremony. From the moment the church organ vigorously pealed out Die Meistersinger, she had tried to settle herself into a trance of dispassion from which she could watch the proceedings unfold. It was not providing a very reliable screen against reality. She had kept telling herself that it was Olivia’s day, that the groom had been willingly chosen, that their match might prove to be as felicitous as any other. Fred had slow-marched Olivia up the aisle with a sweetly nervous air of propriety, but Connie had only to think of whose place her brother, perforce, was occupying and a hot tear welled in her eye. How dearly she wished their father were alive today. Would a man of Lionel’s narrow character and plump self-importance ever have survived the humorous scrutiny of Donald Callaway, or dared to ask him for his daughter’s hand? She thought not. However wedded to the ideas of prosperity and security Olivia might have been, Connie imagined that a bracing dose of their father’s plain talking would have withered Lionel’s prospects on the spot: he would have seen right through him. Too late, too late.

  She found that this line of thought was upsetting her, and decided to concentrate her gaze on the trio of young cousins – Alice, Jecca, Flora – sporting bridesmaids’ veils and myrtle wreaths. Their exuberant scattering of rose petals along the aisle had provoked a little pant of laughter from Connie’s aching throat. Next to her, she felt her mother’s tense monitoring of the wedding service, like a circus spectator hypnotised by the precise step of a high-wire artist. The officiating cleric droned on over the obedient heads of the bride and groom. During one of the hymns, Connie cast a glance back through the forest of congregants in search of her cousin Louis. He was three or four rows behind her, unnoticingly roaring out the words; but she felt a little jolt of pleasure on seeing his neighbour, Will, who hoisted his eyebrows in silent communion. She smiled in reply, then returned her attention to the nuptial inevitabilities.

  Will spotted the glistening in Connie’s eyes and ascribed it to an onrush of sisterly affection. He had arrived at St Andrew’s, the parish church in Thornhill Square, with the helpless air of an intruder, and spent some awkward minutes loitering in the churchyard pretending to be absorbed by the inscriptions on the lichen-coated gravestones. Relief came on hearing a voice hail him from across the way.

  ‘Fancy seeing you here!’ cried Louis, his friendliness carrying a note of enquiry. They had not seen one another since their encounter at the Priory the previous summer. Will shook hands, and gestured in a vague way that seemed to cover the entire unpredictable nature of guest lists.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Oh, tolerably well,’ said Louis, thumbs in the pockets of his waistcoat. ‘Things don’t change a great deal in East Molesey,’ he added, with a satirical twang on the name of his native suburb. ‘I don’t need to ask how you’ve been getting on.’

  Will was nonplussed for a moment, wondering how far the report of his friendship with Connie had spread. But Louis turned out to be referring to his recent successes at M—shire.

  ‘It’s not been too bad,’ Will shrugged.

  ‘“Not too bad?”’ Louis echoed incredulously. ‘Hang the modesty, old fellow. You topped their batting averages again! The hundreds this season – five, was it?’

  ‘Six,’ Will admitted. ‘I suppose you heard about Tam retiring?’

  Louis put his hand to his head mournfully, like a music-hall mime. ‘Sad to think of him going,’ he said. ‘But it must have been hard for him these last seasons.’

  ‘Yes. He was struggling with a knee injury.’

  ‘Hmm, I’m sure, but that wasn’t what I meant. I dare say Tam’s real soreness was watching you day in, day out. Tough for any sportsman, I suppose, to be eclipsed by his protégé – particularly when your style is so similar to his.’

  Will was taken aback by this casual intuition, and would have pursued it further if another of Louis’s friends hadn’t at that moment interrupted them. Had it really been painful for Tam to watch the young pretender emulating his batting feats? He had never seemed anything but delighted by Will’s success.

  This ambiguity preoccupied him for most of the service. Only the sudden climbing peals of Elgar’s ‘Imperial March’ finally woke him again to his surroundings. Olivia and Lionel were returning down the aisle, arms linked, casting anxiously proud glances on either side. The bridesmaids stepped in their wake, followed by the two families. As Connie passed close, Will felt an unaccustomed hollowing-out of his chest. The hat she wore, trimmed with tiny roses, was pretty enough, but her face beneath it seemed to have taken on a complicated new lustre; her jaw looked softer, her skin paler, while the circumflexes of her eyebrows were a poignant frame to the chocolatey-dark eyes, still gleaming from her staunched tears. She had also done something with her hair that made the ends curl up in girlish scrolls. The concerted effect was almost cartoonishly beautiful. She was gazing determinedly ahead, allowing no one to catch her eye. Only her mouth, fixed in a distant smile, might have suggested that the ceremony just gone had not been an unalloyed delight to her.

  As Will joined the shuffle of exiting congregants, he sensed a quickening in his blood, and deeper within a headlong lurch, like seasickness. The sight of her just now had been the final push overboard. He was falling – no, he had fallen, irretrievably – in love. I love Constance Callaway. He said the sentence in his head, and repeated it. The tender shock of this realisation both panicked and spurred him. But to what? It wasn’t only that he desired her, though the physical yearning that had ambushed him just then was powerful enough. He also felt an impulse (a noble one, he thought) to protect her against the perilous inclinations of her temperament – to save her from herself!

  Out in the churchyard more rose petals were being flung around by the giggling bridesmaids. He found himself in a jostling scrum of guests all trying to offer their congratulations to the happy couple, Lionel’s metallic voice piercing the air (‘So kind of you …’). Will raked his gaze over them in search of Connie, but beneath the unwitting disguise of their headwear it was difficult to distinguish one lady from another.

  ‘Hullo there.’ Will turned to find Fred, who appeared somewhat dazed by his recent duties in loco parentis. They shook hands, and Will saw a brief glimmer of Connie in her brother’s dark brow. He made some blameless compliment on the bride’s radiance.

  ‘Yes, she looks jolly happy,’ Fred agreed, then looked earnestly at Will. ‘I say, in the absence of … do you suppose it’s my job to give the groom a bit of a man-to-man about, you know, taking care of my sister?’

  Will, unaccountably touched, assured him that a man-to-man at this stage would be of doubtful utility. Fred nodded, puffing his cheeks out with relief. ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘I wonder where your sister’s got to – Constance, I mean.’

  ‘Oh, she’s gone ahead to the reception – make sure everything’s shipshape. But we’ve arranged carriages to take the guests. You’re coming, I hope?’

  ‘I wouldn’t miss it,’ said Will, who had privately begun rehearsing what he should say to her.

  The house, which had been lent for the occasion by one of Lionel’s banking colleagues, was a large, stolidly unattractive red-brick mansion off Holland Park Avenue. Connie paid off the cab and hurried up the steps through the wide double doors. Large potted palms stood sentinel within. Liveried staff were scuttling around the entrance hall, and on enquiring she was given directions to the cloakroom. Her footsteps clopped echoingly over the glazed parquet of the ballroom, where a string quartet were just setting up their stands. Without an audience, the room seemed to crouch in a deferential hush of anticipation. At the top of the staircase she found a wood-panelled corridor, and the WC. The windowless closet was gloomy, but she saw to her relief the nacreous glea
m of a mirror on the wall. She dipped her face to it enquiringly, and winced at the sight of her tear-smudged eyes. She attended to them with a handkerchief for some minutes.

  There was a useful ambiguity about tears at a wedding, she thought; they were by tradition interpreted as an overflow of happiness. Lionel, on the church steps, had accepted her kiss with an airy complacency, little suspecting the pangs of doom that were afflicting his new sister-in-law at that moment. His induction into the family felt to her more like an invasion. Connie had then looked searchingly at Olivia, her face now liberated from her veil and flushed with nervous excitement. About Lionel she didn’t wish to speculate, but she knew, almost for a certainty, that her sister was a virgin. Did Olivia have any idea of what she was committing herself to? Their parents’ marriage had been more or less a mystery to her. She recalled her father once quoting, out of his wife’s earshot, the words of John Stuart Mill on matrimony. Connie had later read the passage for herself and recorded it in her diary: ‘Marriage is really, what it has been sometimes called, a lottery: and whoever is in a state of mind to calculate the chances calmly and value them correctly is not at all likely to purchase a ticket.’

  Her tears had lent her eyes the unforeseen benefit of a liquid gleam. She felt a little calmer now, and practised a smile in the mirror, as if readying herself for a taxing performance. It was Olivia’s day; whatever she thought of Lionel was, for the moment, immaterial. From the top of the stairs she could hear the deep bowed notes of a cello warming up, and the violins’ stuttering pizzicati. She spotted a door slightly ajar at the end of the corridor, and, still nursing her sense of solitude, she approached and pushed it open. The room was dark within, dominated by a billiard table and its long hooded shade, fringed with little tassles; a thick, unvisited stillness clung to the air. She walked over to the shutters and released a catch, drawing back the double panels with a creak. Motes of dust shimmered in the light, which flung an almost electric sheen upon the green baize of the table. A huge fireplace stood in blackened disuse, and a stuffed stag’s head protruded mournfully above. The dark panelled walls had been so deeply varnished that Connie could see the blurred outline of her reflection. She walked around the billiard table, stroking its smooth felt surface as she went. A painting in an elaborate gilt frame showed, to her surprise, an aristocratic lady against a feathery pastoral setting; she wouldn’t have imagined such a portrait – a Gainsborough, was it? – in this clubby, masculine atmosphere. A coquettish hauteur beamed from the woman’s face. Reaching the other set of shutters, Connie unfolded them, too, and now this new source of light revealed what she had missed on the opposite wall: the answering portrait of a country gentleman, a rifle in his crooked arm and a hound at his heels. The lady’s husband, evidently. His unillusioned gaze seemed to rebuke Connie for her naivety – no lady, for all her position and wealth, would occupy such a room without her lord and master. Down below she heard voices, and looking out onto the terrace she spied the earliest guests, laughing and drinking and already forming their own little groups. At that moment the door opened and a young maidservant walked in; she jumped in fright on seeing Connie.