The Merciless Ladies by Winston Graham
Early the following morning the little doctor again appeared, this time with permission for us to land and with the story in his broken English that during the night Connor had been operated on for peritonitis. We went ashore in the bright sunshine, and spent the next eight days in the neighbourhood of the International Nursing Home where Connor hovered between life and death.
While September slipped away we watched Connor fight his way slowly out of danger. In the meantime we kept an eye on the calendar. The Michaelmas Law Sittings began on 10 October. We had intended spending only a week in Madeira, whereas it would be at least a month before Connor was able to travel, and then it was very doubtful whether he would be fit to rough it in the Patience. Paul cabled Messrs Jude & Freeman and received the answer ‘ Expect about October Sixteen or Seventeen.’
In the end Connor himself provided the solution. He suggested that we and the Grimshawes should take the Patience home ourselves and that he should return at his leisure in November or December.
‘You’ve both got calls in London, and there’s no need to hang around for me. With luck we should get a month of tolerable weather yet. The brothers Grimm are first-rate navigators and you should be home by the first week in October.’
‘All the same, she’s your cutter’, said Paul. ‘We can wait another fortnight. You may pick up very quickly now.’
Connor shook his head.
‘Summer weather is unreliable enough, God knows; but the chance of trouble much increases when October comes. There are really two choices: (a) you leave for home this week in the Patience, or (b) you book a passage at your convenience and leave Patience here.’
‘What then?’ I said.
‘Then I’d either sell her on the spot or leave her in one of the harbours in the Canaries until next summer, when I could come out and fetch her.’
Paul looked at me and then back at the sick man.
‘Which would you do, Bill?’
‘I’d rather take the Patience home.’
‘So would I’, said Paul.
Connor nodded. ‘That’s what I hoped. Good luck. And this time you won’t have someone trying to navigate the ship and forget the pains in his belly. In the meantime will you ask the Grimshawes to come and see me.’
It was still early when we left the hospital: the sun was gaining in heat every minute, but a pleasant fresh breeze blew and we had ample time to stroll back to our hotel for lunch. The nursing home was east of the town and our hotel west of it, on the cliff overlooking the harbour and the sea, so we had a walk ahead.
‘This place’, said Paul, breaking a long silence, ‘ almost makes me regret not bringing a box of crayons. The colours are so rich. See the light there …’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Didn’t I what?’
‘Bring a sketch-book. You know, this holiday is the first time in my life I’ve seen you without some sort of a pencil in your hand.’
‘I feel I don’t want to bother … I’ve been painting without a break for seven years.’
We strolled along, and I stared absently at a tall man walking in front of us.
‘Where did inclination end and compulsion begin?’ I asked.
‘God knows. You can’t partition things off in life. At first you’re dead keen just to paint. Then you’re dead keen to paint really well. Then you’re all out to make a name. Then you’re all out to maintain it. Then suddenly instead of being all out, you’re all in.’
‘Career in a nutshell. But it doesn’t end there.’
‘No … one breaks and rests and begins afresh. But this holiday has been such a change … Life’s the size you make it, isn’t it? I suppose it’s at this point that the tussle with fate really begins.’
We had wandered down through the steep, twisting streets of the old town to the jetty and were now about to take the new road leading from the Pontinha, which runs across the Ribeiro Secco to the West Cliff. At that moment the back of the tall man whom we had been following for some time became familiar. There was also a tall girl limping at his side.
I muttered something to Paul and ran up alongside them. It was Sir Clement Lynn and Holly.
V
My grandmother used to say of a hot drink on a winter’s night that it ‘ warmed the cockles of your heart’. In a world where overt friendship is so common and the real thing so rare the experience of meeting true friends after a long interval is similar. They were returning at last from the protracted lecture tour and had broken their journey at Madeira in order that Sir Clement could meet a German physicist who had made his home there.
I introduced Paul and we strolled along talking at a good rate. Except that his hands and face were clean, Sir Clement was little altered. In the four years since we had last met he had developed a paunch, which lay strangely under a badly knitted pullover and seemed not to belong to him; one felt that at any moment he might reach up a hand and pull out a scarf or other detachable cause. In manner he had not changed in the least from the day I first met him when I was twelve years old: scrupulously polite, vague, long-jawed, deeply intellectual, and still with some inherent irresponsibility in his dealings with ordinary men. His knighthood was a slight embarrassment to him, like an ill-fitting collar-stud.
But Holly had changed – perhaps more even than the average girl between the ages of fifteen and twenty. For at fifteen she had been mentally precocious but physically undeveloped. I felt like someone who has left England in April and comes back in the middle of June. Not that she was pretty or ever would be, but in the interval summer had come.
We talked about their tour and about our voyage; I told them our troubles; they had heard Leo was engaged to be married; was it true, did I think? As if I were likely to know more than they did. How was Mummy managing without them? Her letters told one nothing except about the dogs. A great idea, coming here in one’s own yacht; it was like being a millionaire without the cost.
At their hotel we stopped, and I put in an invitation to dinner that evening before they did. We arranged to meet at seven-thirty.
Paul and I walked on to our hotel in silence.
‘So they’re the rest of the Lynns’, he said at last. ‘They’re in a different league from the brothers, aren’t they? Not that Bertie is too bad … But these two – these two are the genuine thing. Like father like daughter, eh?’
‘She’s doing pretty well at Oxford’, I said. ‘What time she spends there.’
Paul stared at an elderly woman with mascaraed eyelids, dressed in flowing draperies and carrying a pet dog.
‘What was he knighted for?’
‘Services to science. I think it was something to do with the wave theory of matter.’
Paul scowled at the woman to show that she offended his aesthetic sense.
He said: ‘I’m so damned ignorant of everything except a few social graces and how to paint pretty women in a pretty way – sometimes.’
‘You’re miserably illogical.’
‘Oh, I suppose so.’’
‘You set out to specialize. Everything else must go by the board. And now you’re complaining because your education hasn’t been more varied. And you set out to be a success. Nothing must stand in your way. You made that clear often enough, in all manner of ways. Well, now you’ve got there, all I hear is moans of discontent. You began by despising the people concerned with success, and now you’ve come to despise the state itself.’
He was silent for some time.
He said: ‘The first part of that isn’t quite true. I’m not altogether discontented. But in a sense I’ve come to a dead end; because the Marnsett picture was a flash in the pan. I can break other new ground. But it won’t be easy. Or I can go on repeating. I can with the greatest ease go on endlessly repeating. That’s simple. Terrifyingly simple.’
We were near our hotel now and looking down on the shallow curve of the bay. The sea was a brilliant aquamarine dotted here and there with the white of small craft and the yellow and gr
Paul mopped his forehead. ‘And the second part isn’t true either. I don’t despise success. Why should I? It’s given me all I have. I’m independent of fools and rogues. I enjoy comfort and good food and drink. I like having plenty of money and being my own master and mixing with other successful men just as much as I ever did. And I don’t despise them either. I’d be a bigger fool to do that. Most of them have had to work hard to get where they are and most of them have to work hard to stay there. Most of them have a better right to the title than I have. Most of them have made the best of the brains and intelligence and artistic gifts God gave them. And I like their attitude towards life; they’re tolerant and astute and disillusioned and kindly. And they don’t care in the slightest whether you were born in Blenheim or Bermondsey or went to Harrow or Borstal. In fact, the second would be an added attraction. The snobs I have to pander to is another matter; but one of the really satisfying things is that I hardly need consider them now.’
He had been talking rapidly but now he stopped.
‘Go on’, I said.
He looked at me. ‘Did I tell you I spent the month of July in Paris?’
‘No. I wondered at the silence.’
‘I spent the month just wandering around – looking at pictures, other people’s pictures. And visiting studios, other people’s studios. What I saw didn’t make me any more proud of myself.’
‘You’ve been there before.’
‘I lived there – for a short time. I must have gone about with my eyes closed. I was too young, or something. I spent my time whoring, sitting talking with other students at corner cafés, learning a bit of French – and of course painting. Painting out of myself, and being taught now and then, but not seeing, not really learning as I should have done. Look at it this way: you’re a reader, I’m not: did it never happen to you that you opened some of the great writers before you were ready – so you didn’t take them in, the sentences didn’t mean much, so you turned back to The Magnet and The Boy’s Friend?’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘That’s how I’ve been feeling these last two or three months.’
After a bit I said: ‘Perhaps it’s what Henri Becker was driving at long ago.’
‘What?’
‘About serving God and Mammon.’
‘Hell, that’s too much of a simplification.’
‘I wonder, Paul’, I said, ‘how many of those artists you so much admired in Paris were living as comfortably as you are – or if dead were not miserably poor when they were alive.’
We turned in at the gates of the hotel.
‘Oh, I know, I know’, he said, his voice suddenly lighter. ‘One gets moments of passing disillusion. No one with imagination escapes them. But don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m not going to hold on to what I’ve got.’
I wondered if these words were addressed to me or to himself by way of reassurance.
‘I shall be getting as self-engrossed as Leo’, he added. ‘And as long-winded. It’s a habit that must be sharply discouraged. What time did the Lynns say? … D’you think Sir Clement would tell me something of his wave theory over dinner?’
‘Unless you want to miss your dinner I wouldn’t ask him.’
VI
Holly arrived in an almost smart dinner frock which made her look more mature than ever. She had somehow become comely without losing those characteristics which I should always associate with her, the lanky youthfulness, the good grey eyes and the expressive mouth. The straggly hair seemed to have a new life and gloss about it, and light horn-rimmed spectacles had replaced the old steel goggles which had never been the right size. There was a warmth about her which the other Lynns lacked. She might not be good-looking, but she was going to be very much better looking than one would have expected five years ago.
‘I’d hardly have recognized Holly’, I said to her father. ‘I might have passed her in the street.’
‘I wouldn’t have given you the chance’, said Holly.
‘Yes’, said Sir Clement, heaping unnecessary sugar on his grapefruit. ‘I suppose she has grown.’
‘Daddy measures my change by inches’, said Holly gently. ‘It’s the sort of phenomenon he can understand.’
‘My dear child, I do appreciate that you were twenty years old the month before last—’
‘By the slide rule.’
‘By the natural sequence of somatic development as the term is generally understood. By the passage and measurement of man-made time.’
‘You can add a thing up different ways’, I said. ‘You can put it that a butterfly is so many weeks older than the chrysalis, but that doesn’t exhaust the subject.’
‘Or so many younger than the caterpillar’, said Holly. ‘Have you ever painted a caterpillar, Mr Stafford?’
Paul looked surprised. ‘ No …’
Holly said: ‘Nobody ever seems to paint insects properly. They’re too small to bother about.’
‘What is your special line, Mr Stafford?’ Sir Clement asked.
‘Mainly portraits’, said Paul, looking pleased someone didn’t know.
‘Of course, you saw something of Leo when he was in London, didn’t you? I remember his saying you had introduced him to some of your friends. I remember him speaking of the Hon. Mrs Holderness, was it? Or was it Montgomery?’
‘Montgomery’, said Paul. He looked at Holly. ‘ I’ve always fancied that my masterpiece will be a full-length study of an earwig.’
‘Caterpillars are my favourites’, said Holly. ‘Those big furry ones with eyebrows.’
‘You mustn’t mind my daughter’s views on painting’, said Sir Clement. ‘I have found her with peculiar notions even on important subjects.’
This was definitely the remark of the evening.
‘Coming here from New Orleans’, Holly said, ‘Daddy’s cabin was very noisy and he was put off his work by a dance band and other things. We’re leaving the day after tomorrow in a banana boat, so that should be quieter. I’ve told him he should wait until we reach England; there’s plenty of time then.’
Sir Clement said: ‘It’s really a question of working while things are fresh in one’s mind. Notes are never the same. And besides, I am fifty-three this year, which gives me the bare expectation and no certainty of another seventeen years. No certainty at all. Seventeen years, that’s, let me see, around a hundred and forty-eight thousand nine hundred and twenty hours. Roughly dividing that into half leaves a general maximum of seventy-four thousand four hundred and sixty hours for work. I hope to progress a considerable way, but there’s no guarantee I shall have that length of time and certainly there’s no incentive for listening to those semi-negroid discords which dance bands make.’
‘Well, bananas should be quiet enough’, Holly said. ‘You can’t even make a noise eating one.’
‘Why don’t you come home with us?’ Paul said. ‘We’ve the room and the quietness.’
She looked at him directly for a moment, then transferred her bright eyes to me. ‘ Do you mean that?’
Surprised at this reaction, I said: ‘If we’d a commodious steam yacht of about a thousand tons we’d be only too happy … You haven’t seen our gilded dinghy.’
‘There’s a spare cabin’, said Paul. ‘With two bunks. It’s as cramped as the devil, but there’d be nothing to disturb you.’
‘Except being bobbed about like a pea in a can and probably being sick for a fortnight’, I observed.
Sir Clement dabbed his bald head with his table napkin. ‘Very warm in here. When I was a boy’, he said, ‘I went to Australia in a three-masted barque. I remember being sick, but it soon passed. The captain was a Glasgow man. He used to quote Burns when the weather turned bad.
Drumossie moor, Drumossie day,
A waefu’ day it was to me!
F
My father dear and brethren three.
Their winding-sheet the bluidy clay,
Their graves are growing green to see.
Are you making this as a serious proposition, Mr Stafford?’
‘We can’t go, Daddy’, said Holly. ‘ Bill doesn’t want us.’
‘Ridiculous’, I said. ‘Withdraw the statement!’
‘Oh, I’ll withdraw it’, she said, ‘if you’ll invite us to come.’
I looked at Paul. How far he had seriously meant the suggestion I couldn’t be sure, but now he seemed in earnest. They were all smiling at me.
‘Unfortunately’, I said, ‘I’m the only responsible person at this meal. You’re all a lot cleverer than I am, but so far as common sense goes you’re twelve-year-olds.’
Holly said to Paul: ‘I love Bill when he’s being fatherly.’
Paul put his head back and laughed. ‘Give it up, Bill. They know you’re shamming.’
The trouble with a lecture tour is that one has to wear things’, said Sir Clement. ‘It would be a great relief not having to wear things. We should necessarily travel light?’
‘One suitcase each at the outside.’
He beamed. ‘My papers will just go in one case.’
‘Make it a waterproof one’, I said.
‘Would you really mind, Bill?’ Holly asked.
‘Mind?’ I said.
‘Good!’ said Paul. ‘I think it might be arranged.’
‘It’s arranged that we should like them to come’, I said. ‘But at the risk of seeming fatherly again, I must point out a few of the provisos. First, let the idea be slept on tonight; see what second thoughts the morning brings. Then these two – children must be given a thorough opportunity of inspecting the cutter, and perhaps of taking a short trip in her to give them every excuse for backing out. Then if enthusiasm still remains at the same level John Connor must be consulted, since it’s his yacht. Finally, I suppose we should get the views of the brothers Grimm, whether they would feel like tackling the journey with two more passengers … that is, with a net increase of one. They’re all points to be considered, but the most important is whether you two have the slightest notion of the sort of voyage you may be taking on.’