The Jury (11 page)

Mark Perryman saw Mr Coates without observing him. He had eyes only for Daphne, and he was at some pains to avoid looking directly even at her, curious though he was to know whether she was aware of the intention behind his choice of a restaurant. In the taxi she had said: “Where are you taking me, Mark?” But he had evaded the question by talking quickly of something else. And, now, his choice of a table was even more pointed, and it seemed hardly possible that she was so far gone in egoistic isolation that she could not see the point. One particular table, and no other, would content him: his guest was not consulted.

“You'll have a cocktail now, won't you?” he said, meeting her eyes squarely, and searching them. Her glance drooped, and he added, meaningfully: “They have rather a good mixture of their own here. A secret of the 'ouse, as Georges calls it, if you remember?”

She smiled self-consciously. “Let's have that then, shall we?”

Mark gave the order. “Well, here we are again, Daphne,
surrounded by the arcadian wall-paper.” She smiled again, but offered no remark. “By the way, what became of that young man of yours? You've never told me the end of that love-story, have you?”

Mr Roger Coates was examining the wine-list. His manner with the waiter was half-lordly, half-conspiratorial. He indicated his choice with his forefinger.

“Oui, m'sieur,”
said the waiter, lowering his voice to a discreet whisper. “A bottle of Number 57.”

“H'm. Half a bottle,” corrected Mr Coates. He met the eyes of his family. “In honour of Mother,” he explained gaily.

“Oh, don't get wine for
me,
Roger,” said Mrs Coates. “You know I never touch it.”

“Come, just a drop,” said Mr Coates. “I insist. You don't have a birthday every day. You children would like some ginger-pop, I expect, eh? Yes, garsong, two stone gingers. I haven't quite forgotten my young days,” he declared, searching Vincent's face for the reflection of the indulgent parent he felt himself to be. “I know what boys like.” But Vincent was looking elsewhere: for a moment, across the room, his scowling glance encountered Daphne's absent stare. Nothing had been said about a theatre, and seeing that it was already past eight the boy decided that no theatre was in prospect.

“It wasn't exactly a love-story,” said Daphne. “Too onesided for that.” Her glance wandered from Vincent's face, and suddenly, incredibly, there he was, Brian, watching her from the doorway with burning eyes.

“Really?” Mark could not keep irony out of his voice, and did not try very hard. “Yet I seemed to remember your saying——”

Daphne looked down at her plate. “What I said was mostly nonsense. Anyhow, that's all over.” Brian looked more than a little mad. What was he doing there? She wondered if he intended to make a scene. So like him to do that, she thought, with a little shiver.

“You've dismissed him?”

She did not answer.

“And did he take his dismissal like a gentleman?”

The waiter arrived with the cocktails. At last she dared to look up. That monitory melodramatic figure had vanished.

She faced Mark with a smile. “Of course, Mark. What else was there for him to do, poor lamb?”

As he heaved his suitcase into the rack, and arranged his sheaf of newspapers on the carriage-seat, Simpson was still thinking of the problem that had exercised him at breakfast, the problem which, with quite a sense of guilt, he had carefully concealed from sister Eleanor. It troubled and angered him to think how troubled and angry Eleanor would be if she had known what was drawing him away from her to spend a few days in London. As a psychologist he could have stated the case in terms of the current materialistic mysticism, as a biologist he could find no fault with his intentions, as a student of astrophysics he realized that his and Eleanor's domestic happiness was of negligible account in the sum of sublunary events, and not even the most severe moralist would have conceded Eleanor's right to resent the idea of her brother's marrying. There had been women in his life before—well, naturally, for he was within sight of his fortieth year—and Eleanor, though she had not been definitely told of these affairs, must have assumed, in a general way, that he had what she would perhaps have called an empirical as well as a theoretical knowledge of sex. But so long as he did not make a fool of himself, so long as he did nothing that threatened to disturb their pleasant quiet intellectual life together, she was the last person to complain, and he remained untroubled by any twinges of conscience. But for months now his thoughts had turned with ever-increasing urgency and frequency in the direction of marriage. Gilian wanted children, and he himself wanted Gilian to a degree that he had never experienced before. He wanted her from January to December, not for occasional honeymoons (these, contrary to all precedent, had increased rather than diminished his ‘fixation' upon her); and he wanted—this was the most disquieting feature of his plight—he
wanted no one else. When by some misadventure he heard the refrain of a popular song:

I'm tired of being fickle,

I'm longing to be true,

I want someone to love me,

And someone must be you,

I want you for my baby, dear,

And no one else will do,

he recognized, with a shock of dismay followed by a grin of self-ridicule, that in these lines his own state of mind was described with a frightful accuracy. It was a sobering thought, but far from likely to have a sobering effect on Eleanor. And if Eleanor had been his wife he could hardly have felt more responsible to her, more guilty at the thought of leaving her. This sense of guilt, he thought ruefully, was positively mediaeval; but calling it names did not frighten it away.

It said much for Eleanor that he should be haunted by a sense of her calm penetrating scrutiny even now, half an hour after having said good-bye to her at the door of their home, and notwithstanding that every revolution of the wheels took him nearer to Gilian. He was not, however, afraid of Eleanor. He was afraid of hurting her, and afraid of the boredom which she had the power to inflict on him. To escape that presence and that boredom he took a newspaper from the top of his pile and opened it. From the mass of close print his own name was the first thing to reach his eye. ‘Mr A. J. K. Simpson, the well-known scientific writer …' Something he had written was quoted, apropos of something else. His spirit purred within him. He was too intelligent to suppose that this kind of importance was important, but the momentary pleasure, the caressing of his vanity, lightened his humour and seduced him from his circling thoughts of Eleanor and Gilian, Gilian and Eleanor. Simpson had a journalist's knowledge of everything, but it was in popular science that he specialized. He had the knack, so much valued by editors, of inducing in the minds of ordinary intelligent inquisitive citizens the illusion that they came within a hundred miles of understanding Einstein. He discussed the
chemistry of food and the variation of species; if there was a comet in the calendar, or an eclipse of this or that, he was ready with his stuff six weeks in advance. He expounded Freud, interpreted Marx, and had sharp things to say about the conflict between science and religion. He waxed ironical at the suggestion, made by a distinguished mathematician, that God was primarily a mathematician, and was discreet enough not to publish his own secret conviction, which was that God might be more usefully envisaged as a kind of journalist. In short, he turned out a commodity that was much in demand, and made a modest living at it. And when he remembered his humble parentage, his very middle-class schooling, and the narrow suburban environment from which he had emerged, he felt obscurely grateful to his stars, found something romantic (though his sophistication forbade the thought) in the contrast between what could have been reasonably predicted of him as a boy and what he had in fact become. He had dreamed of being the kind of person that he now was, at a time when it had seemed even to himself a fantastic improbability. This work, this position in the world, this freedom from the limitations and snobberies of class, this was what he had wanted; and by an astonishing coincidence this was what he had got.

This morning, however, he was thinking not of his past but of his future; and it was therefore with the sensation of being flung to a great height, or being snatched out of a deep dream, that, glancing over his paper, he perceived a fragment of his past sitting opposite him. For twenty minutes he had had the carriage to himself—and no wonder, since the train stopped at seven stations in a fifty-mile run—but at the last stopping-place someone had got in. He had been vaguely aware of a dark, long-faced, square-jawed man in blue serge and a stiff white collar; and a bowler hat, strange flower of fantasy, had hovered on the fringe of his consciousness; but now, in this second glance, these particulars were lost in the plain incredible fact that here was Bonaker.

“Excuse me,” said Simpson. Twenty-five years is a long time, and one must be cautious. “Didn't you once live at Broad Green?”

“Well, yes, I did.” Bonaker looked at him half-suspiciously.
Then recognition dawned in his face and he shot out a large lean hand. “Simpson!”

“How extraordinary!” said Simpson, shaking hands. The powerful illusion of having rediscovered a lost epoch kept him silent for a moment. He looked shyly away, savouring the miracle. To be thirteen again, to be back in that boy's skin and living in that boy's senses, the boy that was buried in himself! For here was Bonaker, unchanged except for his ridiculous accoutrements. “Last time I saw you,” remarked Simpson, “you were wearing an Eton collar.”

A gleam of humour shone in Bonaker's eyes, but his long saturnine face moved scarcely a muscle. “H'm!” he said, and in so precisely the old way as to make Simpson cry out (but in the secrecy of his mind only): He hasn't changed a bit. He's only a boy still, dressed up, pretending. What a preposterous hat!

After another pause Simpson spoke again.

“It's twenty-two years,” he said, almost breathlessly.

Bonaker made a silent calculation. “You're right. It's just that.”

“Do you remember …” began Simpson.

He himself remembered so much. Pictures of that time crowded upon him, and again and again he came back to the fact, which he found so deliciously reassuring, that Bonaker had not changed. Slightly battered, a wrinkle here and there, teeth not so good, but otherwise the same. He had always been sombre, shrewd, matter-of-fact, inclined to taciturnity; had always had that odd lanky square-cut build and that steady penetrating look. His eyes were the same dark brown with a touch of green, his hair still black, sleek, and well-ordered. There had always been that suggestion of gauntness about him. He had an air of detachment, but it was not a dreamer's detachment. Good-natured he was, but you wouldn't have called him genial. An odd, logical sort of chap, unhumorous, yet good company because of his dry way, and certainly no prig. His very lack of temperament made him somehow rather funny. These boyish judgements could still, thought Simpson, be sustained. But on the heels of that reflection came a memory somewhat at variance with the fancy picture he was building up of a reserved, common-sensible,
self-contained spirit: of that day when he and Prescott had sat in class whispering and giggling together about nothing in particular, and a little screwed-up note had come sailing across from Bonaker, a few desks distant: “Dear Sim, What are you and Prescott saying about me? Yrs sincerely, L. Bonaker. RSVP.”

There are grades and varieties in friendship. Prescott was his chosen companion, his kindred mind: he and Prescott shared a desk when they could and considered themselves injured when they couldn't. With Bonaker he had become acquainted by the accident of propinquity: Bonaker lived in a road contiguous to Simpson's ('avenues', they were called in the newly created suburb of Broad Green), so it was inevitable that they should walk to and from school together, twice a day. At a certain point of the journey they met Mr Stark, the first assistant master, and on one occasion Mr Stark so far unbent as to say to them, before striding on his way: “You boys are as punctual as Big Ben. I always set my watch by you.” Simpson felt greatly honoured by this condescension, and was puzzled when Bonaker, without the least ill nature, said coolly: “The funny old fathead!” It was equally inevitable that the two boys should sometimes ‘call for' each other in the evening, after their homework was done. Simpson would ring the bell, raise his school cap to Mrs Bonaker, and say: “Please, can Bonaker come out?” That was at the very beginning of the friendship; for one day, after Bonaker's mother had got used to finding young Simpson on her doorstep, she countered his formula with waggery: “I've got two in the house. Which one would you like?” Thereafter he asked politely for “Lionel”, though it cost him a great effort. Bonaker, when he called for Simpson, had no such difficulties to overcome; for Eleanor, the studious serious Eleanor who (ten years his senior) stood to Simpson
in loco matris,
had no time for joking with schoolboys. The meeting achieved, the two would go at once into the fields: fields none the worse, in their estimation, for being neighboured by new houses, and all the better, some of them, for having stacks of bricks or piles of planks lying about. And there were still, after all, trees to climb, and large ponds on which a decent-sized plank could be navigated. There was home-made cricket, there were
tadpoles, and there were numerous games of pretence which at this distance from school (they guessed, with good reason, that their school contemporaries would hold these pursuits to be soppy and babyish) could be played with complete safety and with solemn satisfaction. They wasted no time in considering what they should do. Decisions were instant and spontaneous: what one proposed, the other seldom failed to agree to.