Love in Our Time (8 page)

“If you want one of those things,” he said, “you'd better have it. We might be able to get a bit of dancing in the evenings.”

Alice loved him for saying it like that; it was generous. She knew other girls whose husbands doled them out a
few shillings pocket money at a time as though they were children. There was something strangely humiliating about that sort of marriage: it was like being married to a cashier. And Gerald was so good-looking with it all. In his check suit—it had become his regular business suit by now—he had more the air of a guardsman in mufti than of a commission man on the advertising side. She felt happy every time she looked at him; and because she felt happy, she looked pretty too. And Gerald, for his part, felt that so long as she looked like that he couldn't decently deny her anything.

Mr. Biddle, however, was not so thoroughly convinced of the wisdom of the thing when Alice told him.

“If Gerald can't afford to pay for it outright,” he observed, “in my opinion you can't afford it at all.”

As he spoke he shook his head over the memory of many floundering Mariners, overladen with Hire-Purchase agreements, to whose rescue he had gone either with a Life-Line or a Boat-Crew.

“I've seen as many homes broken up by those instalment payments,” he said, “as I have by drink or betting.”

But Alice stopped him.

“Gerald wouldn't have agreed,” she said, “if we couldn't have afforded it. Would you, Gerald?”

Gerald ran his finger round the inside of his collar.

“Rather not,” he said.

“Well, I suppose it's none of my business,” Mr. Biddle agreed, his hand alighting on Alice's shoulder, which he began to fondle affectionately. “But the people who make the things have got more money than you have, and if you asked them which they'd rather have—your three and nine or one of their blooming wireless sets—they'd choose your three and nine.”

At that moment Gerald assumed command of the conversation. Mr. Biddle, he felt, had gone on long enough: he was availing himself of the parent's privilege to interfere. Only he was forgetting he wasn't the parent of both of them. Gerald congratulated himself again on the fact that so far as parents were concerned he was free. He tapped a cigarette rather defiantly on the back of his hand and addressed Mr. Biddle.

“You really needn't worry,” he said. “I've got the whole thing figured out.”

“That's fine,” said Mr. Biddle. “I wish I had your head for figures.”

They went through to dinner after that. It was an awkward, silent sort of party. There seemed to be large empty places between them. They sat amid the bleak forest of weathered oak and tried to pretend that they were all in agreement about everything.

“Where's that little china lady your aunt gave you?” Mr. Biddle asked at last.

“It's broken,” Alice told him. “It got broken the night of the party.”

“That's a pity,” said Mr. Biddle reprovingly. “You ought to have put it away before they came.”

There was another awkward silence after that. Mr. Biddle had said the wrong thing again and he knew it. He tried to right it by talking about the Mariners.

“They've elected your old Dad Commodore for East Finchley,” he began hopefully.

“Commodore of what?” Gerald asked bluntly.

“The Mariners,” Mr. Biddle told him. “Commodore of the East Finchley Fleet of the Royal and Ancient Order.”

“What do you have to do?”

“You join the Order and you'll find out soon enough,” Mr. Biddle replied. He enjoyed being secretive about the Order; individualists and unbelievers like Gerald provided him with his favourite kind of sport.

“But why can't you tell me?” Gerald persisted. “It isn't reasonable, to ask a man to join something when he doesn't know what to expect.”

“It isn't reasonable to tell a man before the Order knows what to expect from
him.”

“Well, how do they find out?”

“They watch him during the Probation and Apprenticeship,” Mr. Biddle said gravely. “It takes six months to get to the Initiation.”

“What happens then?”

Mr. Biddle was about to answer, but Alice interrupted him. “They go off and eat a lot of big dinners,” she said, “and have too much to drink and smoke too many cigars and think that they're doing something wonderful.”

Mr. Biddle waited till she had finished.

“That's a woman talking,” he said. “They're all the same. They're mad because they can't be Mariners, too. You'll think it funny in a year's time yourself.”

“Why shall I?”

“You may be one of us by then.”

“Not me.”

“That's what they all say.”

“Then why do they join?”

“Because they can't help themselves.”

Alice stopped them before Gerald had time to answer. She took her father by the arm and led him to the drawing-room. She was always trying to be nice to him—the very fact that he was there at all was proof of that—but
he seemed to do very little to co-operate; she always loved him passionately until he actually arrived and then he simply irritated her. Even his appearance made her cross. Since Mrs. Biddle's death he had given up caring about how he looked. Or perhaps he had never really cared and it had been Mrs. Biddle, even from her sick bed, who had seen that his tie wasn't frayed, and that his suits were pressed. He now wore baggier and baggier clothes and rounder and heavier boots. So far back as Alice could remember her mother had always grumbled to her father about his boots.

But in the warmer atmosphere of the drawing-room things became a good deal better. It was easier to relax. The upholstered cushions were gentler to the spirit than weathered oak. And the room did not even look gloomy. To go from the dining-room into the drawing-room was like going from an undertaker's reception office into his own private parlour; the room in short, had a heart. Moreover, Mr. Biddle was determined to be pleasant.

“Of course you're different,” he said to Gerald. “I never had any real education.”

“Oh, I dunno,” Gerald answered. “I suppose I was lucky.”

“And games are another thing. It would have done me a lot of good to have been able to play a round of golf at times. But when I was young I couldn't afford it and now that I can afford it I'm too old to learn.”

“Never get the time for it, in any case,” Gerald assured him. “Haven't used my clubs for over twelve months.” He paused. “I'm thinking of getting Alice to join a club when we've settled down a bit,” he said.

It was not true; but there was something oddly reassuring about even saying it; he liked to think of himself as the sort of man who could afford to get his wife to join a golf club.

They were sitting there talking when there came a knock at the front door. It was only a faint knock, almost as though a child had been playing with the knocker. But it was a knock all right.

“Is that the postman?” Gerald asked.

“Too late,” said Alice. “He always gets here by nine.”

“Shall I go and see who it is?” Gerald half-rose from his chair, but Alice intercepted him.

“You stop here and talk to father,” she said.

The two men relaxed as she went, and sat with the strained expressions of people who are trying to hear what is happening on the other side of a closed door, and trying also to appear as though they were not doing so. They heard Alice open the door and a man's voice say something. It was muffled and indistinct, merely a vague masculine remark. Then there was the noise of the front door shutting and they heard Alice say something else. Evidently, the stranger was actually in the house.

A moment later, the drawing-room door opened and Alice stood there. She wore that excited, startled expression of someone who has big news to break.

“It's your father, Gerald,” she said. “He's just come to London.”

As she spoke the figure behind her stepped into sight. There was not much room in the narrow Tudor doorway. But Gerald saw enough. He saw the pale, dispirited face, the ineffectual, irregular moustache and the dreadful knitted tie upon the stiff shirt front. Even the greenish gleam on the rubbed black cloth of jacket was visible on the lapels.

And worst of all, Mr. Sneyd senior, was apologising—apologising for having come so late, apologising for disturbing them, apologising for having come at all, apologising, in fact, for being Gerald's father. He came forward with his hat held in his left hand flat against his chest and the other hand thrust forward as though in the hope that someone would soon shake it.

“Ha—hallo, Dad,” said Gerald.

He came forward, a great lump in his throat. To his own surprise, he felt suddenly as if he wanted to cry at the sight of him.

“I know I ought to have sent you a telegram or something,” Mr. Sneyd began, “but I was just passing so I thought I'd look in.”

He smiled weakly as he said it; his excuse about passing down Boleyn Avenue—unless he had first deliberately gone out of his way to find it—made the whole thing appear somehow rather sly and shameful; Gerald wished his father hadn't said anything about it.

“Jolly glad to see you again,” Gerald tried to assure him. “Let me introduce you. My father-in-law, Mr. Biddle. This is Dad.”

It was precisely this introduction that he hadn't been looking forward to. He had always kept his family as quiet as possible. There were reasons—private, domestic reasons—why he hadn't been home again after he had left it nearly ten years before. He had even let it be known pretty widely that he hadn't got a family. And now this had happened. Mr. Biddle might be sloppy and bulging and unfashionable. But at least he looked well fed; well fed and prosperous and comfortable; there was even an air of undistinguished success about him. Altogether, he looked like a man who had come
out on the right side of life. But Mr. Sneyd was so obviously the other sort. He didn't look well fed at all. He drooped. He just stood in front of them and sadly proclaimed his unsuccess. Even in his manner, he was a model of self-depreciation and disesteem. He looked sideways rather than forwards, smiled foolishly in a daze of false politeness at a lot of things that were not jokes, and kept shifting from one foot to the other as he spoke.

“Very pleased to meet you, sir,” he said to Mr. Biddle. “I've just met your charming daughter.”

As he shook hands his coat fell open and revealed the crude, copper-coloured watch chain that ran across his waistcoat. It looked very different from the handsome gold one which Mr. Biddle wore.

Mr. Biddle shook hands and said nothing. He allowed his eyes to run up and down the stranger, and he felt sorry for him. He knew perfectly well that no one looked like that if the Bank manager and the employer were still on his side. Then his gaze fell on the plated watch chain and on the little medal that was hanging from it.

A moment later Mr. Biddle was standing stiffly to attention gravely saluting Mr. Sneyd.

“Good evening, Brother,” he said. “I'm glad to make your acquaintance.”

“That's very kind of you, Brother Commodore,” replied Mr. Sneyd. “Very kind indeed.” He drew his right hand across his forehead—it came away wet and shiny—and sat down.

“Do you mind if I sit,” he asked. “I'm a bit tired. It's the travelling, you know.”

Mr. Biddle himself moved up for him.

“Which is your Ocean, Brother?” he asked.

“Tadford,” Mr. Sneyd replied. “What's your Fleet?”

“East Finchley.”

There was a pause. Alice was looking hard at Mr. Sneyd. She was trying to discover whether there was any point of resemblance between the thin, disappointed man on the couch and her own husband. And, as she looked, she saw it. The way the eyebrows met the nose was the same. It needed only a lifetime of anxiety and insecurity to change the young man by the mantelpiece into the old man on the couch.

Then Gerald spoke and the resemblance was broken.

“How—how's the family?” he asked awkwardly.

“They're getting along,” Mr. Sneyd replied. “Elsie's married.”

“Who's she married?”

He knew as soon as he asked it that it was a foolish question. He didn't in the least want to know. He remembered Elsie only as a dollish and affected schoolgirl who had been thrust into his home when Mr. Sneyd, after his wife's death had committed his indiscretion of marrying a widow. He still thought of her as a precocious creature of twelve with wide, robin's-egg blue eyes and a lot of crisp, yellow hair.

“He's in the Co-op,” Mr. Sneyd told him. “On the retail side.”

“Good,” said Gerald. “I'm glad she's married.”

He congratulated himself that it was no worse; from what he could remember of Elsie it wouldn't have surprised him no matter what she had done. But there were still Lily and young Violet. Young Violet had always been the favourite—she was Gerald's half-sister; but it was Lily, Mrs. Sneyd's younger child by her first marriage, who was known to have the brains. She was,
Gerald remembered, artistic and delicate. It had been planned that she was going to devote her life to music; she had had lessons twice a week from an L.R.A.M.

“How's Lily?” he asked jocularly. “Has she got married yet?”

“Lily's in Woolworth's,” Mr. Sneyd replied. “She's getting on all right.”

“And young Violet?”

“She's fine.” Mr. Sneyd spoke with real enthusiasm about her. “She's a knowing little thing all right.”

There was another pause—a longer one this time—and it was Alice who broke the silence.

“Can't I get you something to eat, Mr. Sneyd?” she asked. “You look tired out.”

Mr. Sneyd started. It was almost as though he was not used to being addressed kindly. But he said he had just eaten. He made a great point of it, as though it were something to be proud of.