An Accidental Man (10 page)

The front door bell's violent ringing pierced his reverie so rudely that he could not at first think what had happened to him, it was like being shot. He felt instant terror. The police? The final accusation? Who could be calling on him at this hour and ringing his bell with such dreadful urgency?

Austin stood by the door.

‘Who is it?'

Someone spoke outside.

Austin opened the door. A man stood there. The man was Garth.

‘Come in, Garth,' said Austin. He held the door open and his tall son came in.

Austin went back into the sitting-room. Garth followed, dropping a brief case and a mackintosh and the evening paper with weary deliberation on to the floor. He gave his father a faint smudgy smile and then started to stare around him. He looked very tired and brown and in need of a shave. His clothes were greasy and tight-fitting like some sort of ancient uniform. How tall he is, thought Austin, he has lost all the soft looks of boyhood. How tall, how thin, how stern, how dark his hair, how hard his face, he is like an Indian.

Austin said, ‘My God!' and fell into a chair. ‘I didn't expect you till July.'

‘Didn't you get my wire? Things look different here. You've moved things.'

‘Yes. I didn't expect you till July.'

‘I decided to chuck it all up. Where's Dorina?'

‘She's visiting Mavis.'

‘Do you mind if I use the telephone?'

Garth lifted the telephone and dialled. ‘Is that the Air Terminal? Could I have enquiries, please? My name is Gibson Grey. I rang a little while ago about a suitcase. Yes, a dark blue suitcase, off the plane from New York. Yes, I see. Yes, I filled in that form. You'll let me know if it turns up. Thank you. Goodnight.'

‘What is it?' said Austin.

‘I've lost my suitcase. I put it onto a bus at London Airport, at the back you know, and then couldn't get on myself. I had to come on the next bus twenty minutes later, and then at the Air Terminal, you know, where that thing with the luggage goes round and round —'

‘Round and round?' said Austin.

‘Yes, you know, it's a circular thing and the cases go round until someone picks them up. Well, when I got there my case wasn't on the thing. Someone must have seen me miss the bus and pinched it. Or else it just stayed going round and round until it was obvious its owner wasn't there and someone took it away.'

‘I'm so sorry,' said Austin. ‘Perhaps it'll turn up. Was there anything valuable in it?'

‘Only a manuscript.'

‘A philosophical manuscript?'

‘No. A novel. Unfortunately it's the only copy. But it's of no importance. How are you, father, are you all right?'

I used to be dad, thought Austin. But of course I couldn't be now. How different Garth looked, a strange tall man in need of a shave, a visitor, an intruder, a judge. ‘I'm fine,' said Austin. He added, ‘I'm so glad you've come home.'

‘Home,' said Garth. ‘Yes, I suppose this is it. How are things, how's everybody, how is Ludwig, is he still staying with that Ricardo person?'

‘Yes. Oh, Ludwig's engaged.'

‘Who to?'

‘Grace Tisbourne.'

‘I'm sorry about that,' said Garth. ‘Sorry, I can't talk. I'm just crazed up by that aeroplane. If you don't mind I'll just make myself some scrambled eggs and turn in.'

‘I'm afraid there isn't any food in the house — at least, there was a loaf only I threw it away.'

‘Is there any milk?'

‘No, sorry, you see —'

‘Well, I'll just have a hot bath and turn in.'

‘The hot water's turned off,' said Austin desperately. ‘I'm sorry. You see, I'm just leaving on holiday.'

‘Where are you going?'

‘To the seaside.'

‘You're going to the seaside at midnight?'

‘Yes, why not?'

‘Well, can I stay here while you're away?'

‘Of course.'

‘Goodbye then. Forgive me, father, I really cannot talk. I'll carry your cases down.'

‘Wait a moment,' said Austin. ‘I'm not going on holiday. Dorina's left me. I've lost my job. I'm going to let the flat. I'm going to take a room at Mitzi Ricardo's. It's all temporary of course. I'm terribly sorry. I mean Dorina hasn't really left me. It's all a mess. But it'll be all right, you see. I'm so sorry —'

‘Don't,' said Garth. ‘
Don't
.'

There was silence. Austin panted.

‘Must you go, father? It's so late.'

‘Yes.'

‘We'll talk later then.'

‘Yes,' said Austin, near to tears.

‘Oh by the way,' said Garth, ‘there was a letter for you downstairs. I put it in my pocket.'

Garth handed over a type-written envelope. Austin looked at the stamp and started to tremble. He hastily tore it open. It read as follows.

‘I haven't an idea what to do, it's worrying me out of my mind,' said Mrs Carberry to Mavis Argyll. Mrs Carberry was talking about her retarded son, Ronald. Ronald was ten. Mrs Carberry had four other children. Mr Carberry drank. ‘Of course I pray about it all the time, I pray when I'm working and all. But it doesn't seem to make it any easier to see what to do. Walter wants me to put him into that home, you know, the institution place, the child irritates Walter so, and sometimes I'm near agreeing just for peace sake. Walter was on at me again last night, he says it isn't fair to the other little ones to have a sort of loony in the house, not that Ronald's like that really, but he's disgusting, you know, and the others can't help being nasty and that makes him worse, and he's a real little hobgoblin sometimes, and with the eldest in trouble it's enough to do, but I can't let him go away, I just can't, I sometimes think it would break my heart, when I see his little simple face, it's not his fault he's so wearying. If he goes into that place he'll have no one to love him and he could die of that, and I'd be thinking of him every night, poor little boy, wetting his pillow with tears and wanting his mummy.'

The painters had just gone. Mrs Carberry, who helped out, was loading the washing-up machine. Her eldest son was in trouble with the police. Her husband was a tyrannical brute. Mavis thought, this woman has real troubles, not like my nervous evanescent woes. Yet Mavis's woes were real to Mavis and though she was sorry for Mrs Carberry she could not quite conceive as three-dimensional that awful world where children whined and a man shouted.

‘If only he could come here, Miss Argyll,' said Mrs Carberry, ‘just for a time. He'd be no trouble, the poor little mite. The welfare people would pay and he'd go to his special school like he does now and I'd see to him.'

‘It wouldn't work,' said Mavis. Mrs Carberry had suggested this before. Mavis hardened her heart. Mrs Carberry was offering her this waif. If once Ronald came to Valmorana he would never leave.

Mrs Carberry did not argue. She looked tired, vague, old, older than Mavis although she was probably fifteen years younger. Mavis was putting on weight, but she had kept her looks in an almost uncanny way. Mavis was fifty, but could look twenty-five. Dorina eternally looked eighteen.

Valmorana was Mavis's mother's old family home, a white, Italianate Victorian house in a quiet tree-hazy corner of Kensington. In her days of Catholic piety Mavis had wanted to give it to the nuns of the Sacred Heart. She was to have been a nun herself and Valmorana was to have been her dowry. But a valuable London property cannot with an impulsive gesture be pressed into somebody's hand. The nuns were canny, worried about the cost of maintenance, worried about possible litigation with the local authority, worried about Mavis's cousins who had written them a nasty letter. While negotiations were still going forward Mavis changed her mind about everything. She decided not to become a nun, she decided there was no God, she decided to have as many love affairs as possible, and did. Later still, appalling misery brought her back to the Sacred Heart door, godless but desperate. Her childhood Catholicism, distilled by utter loss of faith and now sweetened by disillusion with the world, awaited her in those musty dusky rooms where long black skirts rustled and distant doors closed quietly. Then again she would have given them the house. But the Sacred Heart nuns were shrewd and thrifty. Of course they wanted Valmorana. But they wanted it on their terms. They also wanted Mavis. After some months it somehow turned out that the house had become a girls' hostel of which she was the warden. The money came from the nuns, the local authority and rich Catholic friends. Mavis took the responsibility and the risks.

She did not regain her faith and she sometimes hated the religion of her childhood with a spitting passion. But she led perforce, and with every wry reservation, a sort of dedicated life. The enterprise was a modest one, she never accommodated more than two or three girls at a time, and though always busy she was never overworked. Her clients, muddled, illiterate, often delinquent, always pious, interested her but usually did not touch her deeply. She was efficient, and smiled covertly when the good nuns spoke of ‘grace'. She enjoyed her efficiency and enjoyed, like a voluptuary, her regained innocence. During the wild years she had woken every morning to some guilty problem. Above any pain except that of guilt one can hope to climb by seeing what is above, by seeing that there is something above. Guilt and remorse had trapped her during those years. Now she woke to clarity, to an emptiness full of the urgent needs of others. She had achieved, by accident and in a second-rate way, what she had once desired as a high spiritual prize, a life that was like water, a sort of colourless see-through blow-through existence, full of tasks and without ties.

Well, there was one tie of course and that was Dorina. Valmorana was Mavis's by entail under the will of her mother who had died long ago. Mavis's father had married a second time, again a Catholic woman, and again one who died young. In fact Dorina's mother perished in childbirth and Mavis had to act the little mother. Dorina was a good deal younger and had been still at school during the wild years. She had been a funny little girl, prim and secretive and taciturnly self-sufficient. After their father's death she had had somehow, only Mavis could never fully attend to it at the time, a rather miserable adolescence at several uninspiring schools, handed around in the holidays. There had been strange incidents. ‘I am afraid your sister attracts poltergeists,' one headmistress had complained severely to Mavis, who had her own ghosts to contend with. In fact Dorina's presence at Valmorana provoked incomprehensible electrical storms. Pictures fell. Windows cracked. A noise like a grand piano falling down the stairs occurred once without visible cause. However when Dorina was eighteen these phenomena ceased.

Dorina left school and came to live permanently at Valmorana in the early days of the hostel. Though intelligent she had never managed to pass any exams. She was often vaguely ill and was regularly suspected of tubercular tendencies. She helped a little in the house, she took a typing course, she worked part-time in a library. On the whole she did nothing much, managing to create in the midst of hurlyburly a quietness of her own. She was the spirit of the garden, the spirit of the stairway, always somehow passing by with flowers in her hand. The tough inmates laughed at her, but treated her as a mascot.

Often she exasperated Mavis, often she touched her. Mavis knew that her sister was not happy. Sometimes looking at those secretive eyes she wondered if all Dorina's ghosts had not somehow been simply drawn inside her. There were strange things still. What went on inside? Did Dorina regard Mavis's girls as interlopers and false children? Was Mavis mother even now? Mavis had never made a proper home for her. Was it even possible that Dorina felt resentment about money because she herself had been left penniless? Of course the sisters loved each other and Dorina's art could sometimes make things seem idyllic. The nuns, who on the whole kept out of the way, made little sorties to try to get hold of her, but she vaguely eluded them. She seemed even more calmly godless than Mavis. She never worshipped or seemed to feel either the need of it or the guilt of abandoning it. Her spiritual world was other.

All sorts of plans were made for her but she soon rendered them all hazy and inconclusive. Dorina's attention to it could make any plan seem incoherent. It was in any case obvious that marriage was her lot and Mavis devoted time and thought to a selection of suitors. Dorina was passive. Mavis invited young men. The idea of Dorina married caused her various kinds of pain. She sometimes invited Austin too, and he sometimes came, not of course as a suitor, that idea never entered her head, he was much too old and generally hopeless, but because he was Matthew's brother and she was sorry for him. Dorina was sorry for him too. Being sorry for Austin was a sort of occupation for both of them. Austin, who had a general talent for inspiring pity, had officially ‘gone to pieces' after Betty's death. Unfortunately this was just the sort of thing likely to interest a young girl.