The Centre of the Green Page 19

  The Colonel picked the journal up. He had often wondered during their holiday what Julian was writing in it. Whether it came to anything in the way of a travel article or not, he was sure that simply to have kept it up was a valuable piece of self-discipline for the boy, and another sign of how he had changed. He placed the book on the flat corner of the banister, and went to the kitchen to make the tea.

  The book was still there on the banister at the top of the stairs when he came back with the tea-tray. Absurd to find himself so conscious of it. Absurd to find himself actually having to resist a temptation to pick the journal up, and read a little. It couldn’t matter if he did. What was intended for print could hardly be private. Still, reading other people’s letters, diaries, private documents, that sort of thing—it was a temptation everyone experienced, but it was not something that chaps allowed themselves to do. The Colonel went on into his wife’s bedroom with the tea.

  He put down the tray by her bedside, and said, “Good morning, my dear”. Mrs. Baker was, as usual, already awake. She smiled at him, and said, “Quite like old times, Justin”.

  “Yes.” He found that he was still thinking about the journal. Annoying. He said, “Julian left his diary on the landing. He must have dropped it.”

  “Diary?”

  “He kept one during our holiday. Said he might use it later for a travel article or something. I don’t think it’s very personal or anything. Just impressions.”

  “What a good idea!”

  “I put it on the banister to be out of the way. Perhaps I’d better take it in to him. After all, we don’t know what’s in it. He mightn’t want it lying all over the house.”

  Mrs. Baker had intended to be particularly nice to her husband. It was even more irritating for her, therefore, to have to struggle with the irritation he had already begun to cause her. “Really, Justin!” she said. “Who on earth is going to read it? Leave it where it is, and I’ll give it to him when I take in his tea. You know he hates being woken too early.”

  The Colonel idled uncertainly by the window, unhappy at having provoked his wife by seeming to trespass on one of her special privileges; he should have remembered that she liked to take in the tea to Julian herself. He looked out at the lawn, and said, “Going to be fine again, eh? What a summer we’re having!”

  Mrs. Baker said, “Do you have to talk about the weather? Haven’t you ever got anything else to say?” The day, which she had intended to be the first spent repairing the fabric of their lives, was already going badly. There was her husband, fluttering at the window like a daddy-long-legs, uncertain and irritating and anxious to please. She must remember that it was not his fault. These few lonely weeks had unsettled her; they had frightened her. She must make an effort. Yesterday had been so pleasant for them all. If the effort were great enough—if, for instance, she were to begin by apologizing for her bad temper—today and tomorrow might pursue the same pleasant pattern. “I’m sorry, Justin,” she said. “I’m being irritable, and I don’t mean to be.”

  “That’s all right, my dear. I’ll just get dressed, and be out of your way, eh?”

  The journal was still on the banister where he had placed it. Well, it wasn’t important; it wouldn’t fall off, and nobody was going to steal it. Odd that Julian should have been able to drop a book of that size, and not notice that he had done so. Must be (he weighed it in his hand) quite heavy. What had Julian found to write about. Of course he had often been off on his own somewhere, but there were some things the two of them had done together, like going to the bullfight at Palma, which would seem quite different perhaps in Julian’s description. A chap like the Colonel might miss so much which a trained writer would naturally see. What harm could it do to browse?—to look for such descriptive sections of the journal, skipping immediately over anything that seemed at all private? What harm? But things were right or they were wrong, the Colonel believed; the question What harm? was irrelevant except in as much as harm was done to oneself by doing something one knew to be wrong. No harm could come of his reading Julian’s diary; nevertheless, one simply did not read other people’s diaries, and that was that.

  Of course, Julian had actually said, “We’ll read it when it’s finished,” or, “You can read it when it’s finished.” Something like that. That could be taken as permission. The journal must be finished now that the holiday was over.

  Nor would there be any question of concealing what he had done. Granted that there was something furtive and cheap about peeking at private papers, yet what if the Colonel were to admit quite frankly, “Oh, by the way, Julian, you left your diary on the landing. I had a quick look through; I hope you don’t mind. I thought it was very interesting.” Surely that would make a difference.

  A schoolboy echo again—Owning up like a man. And it was the silliest schoolboy logic to suggest that the intention of confession made the crime permissive. The Colonel discovered that, although he could by no means justify what he intended to do, yet he was going to do it. One had rules for living, but one couldn’t expect to be able to live by them always. I wanted to give it back, he thought resentfully. But his wife had prevented him from doing that. He took up the journal. Bloody things! If only they still had locks on them! He put the book down again on the banister, and turned back to his own room. But really it couldn’t possibly do any harm. He wouldn’t take it into his own room, but simply browse through it out here where anyone could see him. Julian had placed some sort of marker between the pages, so that they fell open quite naturally at the photograph of a girl.

  It was not a snapshot. It was a photograph of the sort which is sold furtively to tourists. The girl was naked, and she squatted on a couch or ottoman with her legs drawn up and held wide apart. In matters of character, the photographer perhaps had little skill; he had induced his subject to bare her teeth and smile, but the effect was not enticing nor did it suggest lust. Behind the girl was a shabby backcloth, showing a romantic landscape with palms and a waterfall. Beside the couch was a plant in a pot. Julian had written neatly beneath the picture in block capitals the words, “LIKE JUANITA IN THE CAVE”.

  The handwritten matter above the photograph described in detail what Juanita and Julian had done together in the cave while the Colonel and Miss Plumstead were sun-bathing on the beach; the account may have been exaggerated. The Colonel turned over the page. There were other such pictures, other such descriptions. He remembered his own words to Julian in the train. “Thought I was neglecting you. Bit selfish reall” And Julian’s reply, “Best thing you could have done. You let me work things out for myself.” Here were the things he had worked out. Such things! The journal was a story of sickness and satyriasis. A squalid brothel in Terreno, where the girls wore cowboy hats made of cardboard, like day-trippers in Southend. The cook’s help at the pension. A succession of furtive encounters with dirty people, recorded with a disgusted violence of language, in which fact and fantasy were hopelessly confused. And in with all this were literary exercises of a different kind, in which the friendship between the Colonel and Miss Plumstead was described with the cruel false-objectivity of the satirist. Miss Plumstead’s large hat, the redness of her complexion, her devotion to the spirit of Chopin, her daily postcards, the elaborate way in which she tied the tapes of her rope-soled sandals, her laugh, her diction, her fondness for wine and table football, her little jokes —all mocked. And the Colonel in his role of “the elderly admirer”—mocked. And jokes of an obvious kind—as to the impossibility of proving misconduct if Mrs. Baker were to want a divorce, since it was doubtful whether the Colonel could or Miss Plumstead knew how. All dirtied-up, the Colonel’s Indian Summer; nothing left of that.

  The Colonel felt sick and dizzy, but he could not stop reading; he had to go on to the end. And the end, when it came, was in the form of a letter, a letter to himself:

  “Dear father,

  This will teach you not to read other people’s diaries, even when they’re left about for you. What a pit
y you won’t be able to admit it. But I’ll know. I’ll only have to look at you. You think you’re so much above temptation. Now you know what it’s like. I give in to temptation all the time. It gets to be a habit, even when you don’t enjoy it. So you mustn’t think I made all these things up to tease you. I did them all. You thought you could change me. Well, you can’t. Nobody can. I get worse.

  I get worse.

  I GET WORSE.

  Your loving son,

  JULIAN.”

  The dizziness became more overpowering. It had all happened before. There was the same double vision, the same intensification of the light, followed by the same blackness. The Colonel cried out once, and fell forward on to the landing. As he fell, he hit his head against the sharp corner of the banister. Then he rolled downstairs, head over heels, heels over head, finishing head-downwards at the bottom. The blood from the wound in his temple stained the stair-carpet and dripped on to the rug at the bottom of the stairs. Doors opened. The Colonel, hovering just below the level of consciousness, could just hear his son’s voice, frightened and far away. “Father! Are you all right? Father!” Then feet running down the stairs towards him, and then nothing at all.

  *

  Charles cut three and a half inches from the galley proof of an article on new methods of glazing. The telephone rang. He picked it up, and said, “Charles Baker!” and the telephone said, “Charles, is that you?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “This is Penny.”

  “Penny?” The processes of his memory moved slowly along its categories of people like an electronic brain on half-current. “Oh yes of course. Penny. How are you?”

  “Very well, thanks. How are you?”

  “Very well, thanks.”

  “Charles, do you think you could leave the office for a moment? We could have a coffee or something. I’m at Holborn Underground—quite close.”

  Several minutes, Charles and Penny were sitting together at a table in an A.B.C. Charles had bought a cup of coffee for each of them and a small tart filled with green jam for himself. Penny said, “Charles, there’s something I want you to do for me.”

  “If I can.”

  “First of all, about the baby. Julian and that girl.”

  “The abortion?”

  “She can’t have one. It’s too late. She’s got to have the child.”

  “I see.” He bit into the jam tart, and it broke into two pieces. One piece remained in his hand. The other fell on to his trouser-knee, with the green jam downwards. He wiped the place with his handkerchief. “You want me to tell Julian?” he said.

  “That’s one thing. Charles, this may sound a bit odd to you, but I’ve decided—well, I mean, Julian is the father after all. I’ve decided to adopt the baby.”

  Charles looked up at her, and wondered why nowadays nothing surprised him. “Well, that’s surprising,” he said.

  Penny finished drinking her cup of coffee, took a Kleenex from her handbag, and dabbed carefully at her lips. Charles noticed that her hand was shaking very slightly. “I suppose you think I’m probably not the ideal person to bring up a child,” she said. She began to pile lumps of sugar from the sugar-bowl one on top of the other. When she had made a tower of five, it fell down, and she began a different structure with a broader base.

  “It’s not something I know very much about,” Charles said. “I don’t see why you shouldn’t be as good at it as a lot of other people. I suppose Julian will have to do something about money, because you’ll be giving up your job. I don’t think he’s got much at present.”

  “More than that.” Penny dispersed the pyramid she had made, and began to arrange the lumps of sugar into a new design. “I’m sorry to be fiddling like this,” she said. “But I have to do something with my hands. I want you to tell Julian that I’m prepared to take him back.” Charles was silent, and Penny said, “You needn’t bother to wonder whether he’ll come. He’s not very independent. I’ve already found another flat, so he won’t need to meet Mr. Monney again, or the girl either.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  Because Penny was under a strain she talked more loudly than usual, and Charles wondered whether the men in grubby raincoats who were scattered about the A.B.C. could hear her, and if they were interested. Penny said artificially, “I’m not being noble or forgiving or anything, Charles, so you needn’t frighten him with that. Just tell him it’s a matter of convenience. If you’re going to adopt a baby, it’s much easier if you have a husband. Get me some more coffee, will you? I’m terribly thirsty for some reason.”

  Charles stood in line behind an Irish labourer, passed rapidly by the salads, overtook him as he considered all the different things one could have with chips, collected two cups of milky coffee, and returned to the table. Penny had lit a cigarette, and now occupied one hand with that, keeping the other below the level of the table. “Here we are,” Charles said. “If you’re not going to forgive, what are you going to do?”

  “Forget.”

  “Is that easy?”

  “No.” Penny had become calmer as she waited, and, as it seemed, more sincere. She smiled at him seriously, not a Public Relations smile, but the smile of someone who makes a confidence, and is glad to make it. She said, “I’ve been doing rather a lot of thinking. I mean, at first all I intended to do was to—you know, arrange things, and I wasn’t very good at it; everything had been left too late, for one thing. Offering to adopt the baby was probably just a reaction at first, done on the spur of the moment. Only later as I thought about it, I didn’t change my mind. I realized that I did want to adopt the baby very much. I mean, since Julian left and I’ve been on my own, I’ve had much more freedom and in many ways I’ve enjoyed it, but you know, after a bit you begin to feel that only a part of you is alive. You’ve got to be necessary to someone.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “And then I started thinking about Julian.”

  “You think you can reform him?”

  “No. Not really. It’s too late for that, isn’t it? I don’t know what makes Julian behave as he does. I suppose he wants—what do they say?—’security’. But if that’s what he wants, he’ll go on wanting it; I can’t give it to him. I don’t see how you can expect to get that sort of security from someone else. It’s something you have inside yourself, or else you haven’t. I don’t think many people do have it. Not nowadays anyway. We have to get along without it as best we can.”

  “Then what are you going to do?”

  “Try to make things easier for him.”

  “How?”

  “By not minding so much. By accepting him as he is.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “You have to accept people if you’re going to live with them. You have to like them. After all, I wouldn’t have married Julian if I hadn’t liked him before I loved him, and it was only the loving killed the liking. You can put up with people if you like them, but because I loved him, I didn’t even try to put up with Julian. He’s so weak; I couldn’t accept that. All he wants is to live a quiet life, and for people to think he’s nice, and not make demands on him. I made demands all the time, just like his mother. He was frightened of me; he was frightened to come home in the evenings; I suppose I even took a sort of pride in that. I wouldn’t let him cover anything up, because I believed that there ought to be perfect truth between husband and wife, and the more I caught him out when he was lying, and forced him to tell the truth, the more he lied next time so as not to be caught out again. Oh, I’ve been thinking, Charles—just remembering it. I was always nagging at him, because he wasn’t the sort of man I could admire. But you don’t have to admire people; just accept them.”

  Charles said, “I’ll tell him you want him to come back.”

  “Yes,” Penny said. “Tell him that, and tell him about the child. Don’t frighten him, Charles.” She closed her handbag; she was ready to leave. “You don’t commit yourself, do you?” she said. “But don’t worry. I know this
may not work. Only don’t you see that the important thing is that it doesn’t matter so much to me now whether it does or not? And because of that, it may.”

  *

  “Chap’s ought to finish well,” the Colonel said.

  Charles said, “The vicar’s downstairs. He’s been waiting rather a long time.”

  “I won’t see him.”

  The Colonel’s head was bandaged where he had hit the banister, and one side of his face was stiff. Consequently, when he spoke, only one side of his mouth moved properly, and the words were indistinct. “Tell him not to wait,” he said. “Sorry and all that, but I won’t see him.” He had been moved from his own little room into Mrs. Baker’s room, where there was more space to nurse him. Now Charles and his mother sat together by the side of the Colonel’s bed, with the District Nurse knitting at a decent distance by the window.

  Mrs. Baker said, “Justin, it wouldn’t do any harm just to see him, after he’s taken the trouble to come. I mean, it is his job in a way. Of course, we know you’re going to get well, but——”

  “Wouldn’t matter if I wasn’t. I won’t see him. It’s a matter of self-respect.”

  “Or pride,” Charles said.

  “Pride then, if you like. Nothing wrong with pride. Pride’s been a kind of backbone to me all my life. It’s been as good as God to me. Kept me going. I won’t be disloyal.”

  Charles said, “Pride dies with people, Father, like their backbones. God goes beyond death. That’s what the vicar would tell you, anyway.”

  “Do you believe in it?—all that stuff?”

  “No. But the vicar does. He may be right.”

  “You believe….” The Colonel fought with his need to ask the question, and lost. “You believe as I do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Chaps ought to finish well. Your great-uncle Walter lived to be ninety-six. On his ninety-sixth birthday, he went out for a walk in the snow without his overcoat. Walked three miles across the fields. Too much for him. When he got back, he said, ‘James, draw the curtains. I’m going to die’. Then he did.” Against the grey of the Colonel’s face, his moustache hardly showed at all, except that it quivered a little with the heaviness of his breathing. “Mind you, it was easier for him, coming suddenly like that,” he said. “Don’t expect anybody would let me go out walking.”