Dulce Et Decorum Est (Naughty or Nice) (2 page)

Matthew led the way into the sitting room—then turned suddenly with a grin. “You know, I’ve just worked out who you remind me of. It’s been niggling at me since I first saw you.”

George’s heart seemed to pause mid-beat. “Oh?” he said as casually as he could.

“Isn’t it obvious? Dark hair, green eyes, svelte figure—you’re the image of Marmaduke!”

George’s laughter was probably a shade too loud, but relief tended to have that effect on him.

T
HE
rest of the evening had passed most agreeably. Miss Lewis, a nurse, had returned from her shift at the hospital and had revealed herself to be a sensible, pleasant young lady whose affections, it transpired, were already engaged by a young postman, so George felt himself in no danger of unwanted attentions from that quarter. Mrs. Mac’s cooking had proved to be as tasty as her portions were generous, and when George at last took his leave to return to his hotel for the final night, it was with a warm, pleasant feeling in his belly.

By midnight, however, the warmth had largely seeped away, replaced by an ice-cold sensation in the pit of his stomach that was no more welcome for being familiar. As he lay in the lumpy hotel bed listening to the gurgling of the pipes, George wondered what on earth he’d been thinking of.

It was small comfort that he was able to answer that question immediately. He’d been thinking of Matthew’s merry smile and welcoming manner. And he was an idiot. A man that friendly wouldn’t long be put off with George’s noncommittal answers and evasions when asked about his past. He should have stuck to impersonal boarding houses, where nobody cared who he was and what he’d done. How long would he be able to keep his shameful secret in the face of such good-natured curiosity?

Well, he was committed to staying now. He couldn’t in good conscience turn ’round and tell Mrs. Mac he’d changed his mind—and he certainly couldn’t afford to give up his position at the solicitor’s. Jobs were not so easy to come by, for his sort.

With that thought bringing him predictably little comfort, George pulled a pillow over his head and tried to sleep.

S
UNDAY
dawned bright and crisp, and George felt his mood lift in spite of himself as he looked out of the hotel window for the last time. He had little enough to pack and found he had time on his hands before he could start lugging his things over to Allen Street—Mrs. Mac’s exhortation to “come after church” not having been forgotten.

By eleven o’clock, however, he was fed up with twiddling his thumbs and made his way over there, hoping someone would be at home. His bags having appeared to mysteriously double in weight en route, he soon regretted his impulsive decision not to bother with hiring a cart. He decided firmly that if the house should turn out to be empty, he’d simply have to camp out on the doorstep until someone returned. Fortunately, his knock was answered by a tousle-headed Matthew, who beamed at George as if his arrival had made the day complete. “Come in, come in! I was hoping you’d be here early. Need a hand with anything? Mrs. Mac and Miss Lewis are still at church, but they should be back within the hour.”

George found himself smiling almost against his will. “I’m relieved to find you in, then. I did wonder if that’d turn out to be the one drawback of this place—being forced out of bed to go to church on pain of no Sunday dinner!”

“Good Lord, no! Mrs. Mac does drop the occasional little hint or three, but in general she’s quite understanding of the godless habits of young men nowadays. No, I’m afraid that for me, my Sunday lie-in is sacrosanct. Easter and Christmas, I’ll do my duty, but I claim the rest of the year off for good behavior. I’ll take it from your presence here that you’re of like mind?”

“Er, yes,” George agreed a little guiltily. It had been a long time since he’d felt comfortable in church.

“Excellent! I’ll take this bag then—good Lord!” he exclaimed, hefting it. “What on earth have you got in here—bricks?”

George grinned. “Well, you did have to pick the heaviest one. It’s books, actually. Unfortunately becoming a solicitor involves a fair amount of studying.”

“It’s a good thing I never had any leanings in that direction, then,” Matthew said as he lugged the bag up the stairs, which creaked more than ever under the load. “I’m sure all my old schoolmasters viewed me as some awful punishment for their sins in a past life.”

“Now that I doubt,” George said, laughing as he followed.

“Oh, but it’s true! Why do you suppose I went into advertising? It’s one of the few professions that requires neither education nor accomplishments!” Matthew put down the bag in the middle of George’s room with an exaggerated sigh of relief.

“But you must have to have a certain talent for it,” George protested. “I’m sure I couldn’t write advertisements to save my life.”

“You’d soon get into the swing of it if you tried. All you have to do is praise the product to high heaven and hint that it was developed by scientists with only slightly lesser powers of creation than the Deity Himself.” Matthew sprawled on George’s desk chair, watching curiously as the books he’d just carried were evicted from the carpet bag and lined up on the desk. “Do you really have to read all these?”

“Not every page of them, no—at least, that’s the impression I’ve got so far. Don’t forget, I’ve only been at Meyer & Little for a fortnight. No, most of these are just for reference—I picked a job lot of them up at a second-hand bookshop, ridiculously cheap, before I started.” He laughed. “Thought I might as well find out what I was letting myself in for.”

“What made you go into this line of work, then, if you didn’t know anything about it?”

George flushed a little. “Well, it was all a bit fortuitous, to tell you the truth. I needed a situation, and a, ah, friend of the family offered an introduction to Mr. Meyer. He seemed to think I wouldn’t be a total dead loss so, well, here I am.” George was aware of his heart beating uncomfortably fast by the end of his speech, despite the fact that it was essentially all true. He hoped desperately it wouldn’t look like he was lying—it would be awful to lose Matthew’s friendship when they’d only just met.

But Matthew just nodded. “It’s all who you know, not what you know, isn’t it? Nice when it works for you, but not so nice when it doesn’t, I suppose. Of course, I’m hardly one to talk—the head of my agency is an old friend of my father’s.”

“Is your father in advertising too?”

“Well, I suppose you could say so, in a way! Just the one client, though—but I must say Father makes far more extraordinary claims about his product than I’ve ever dreamed of!” He laughed while George frowned, puzzled. “Father’s a rector,” Matthew explained, grinning. “Sorry. I have this awful habit of making light of religion, but I’m not really as godless as all that. And while we’re on the subject, I do believe that’s the ladies of the house returning from church—shall we go down and advise them of your arrival?”

M
RS
. M
AC
and Miss Lewis had returned from church accompanied by a thin, somewhat ferrety young man. Matthew greeted him with a grin and a hearty clap on the shoulder, rather to George’s irritation. “Tom! Good to see you. Tom, this is George Johnson, our latest addition to the family. George, Tom Watkins, deliverer of letters and the future proud possessor of Miss Lewis’s lovely hand.”

Miss Lewis blushed prettily at this. She seemed to have shed her competent, sensible air along with her nurse’s uniform, but perhaps it was the presence of her fiancé rather than the somewhat frivolous floral dress she was wearing that had brought out her more feminine side. George nodded politely to Watkins and was disconcerted to be met with a very speculative look in those narrow, dark eyes. “Play football, do you, Mr. Johnson?”

Taken entirely by surprise, George stammered out an answer. “Er, no—well, rugger at school, you know, but—no.”

Watkins’s lips tightened. “Pity. You still on for this afternoon, Matt?”

“Of course, Tom! Wouldn’t miss it.” Obviously seeing George’s blank look, he carried on. “Tom’s roped me in to his local pub side. We play most Sunday afternoons—and haven’t been struck by lightning once,” he added in a louder, more mischievous tone, clearly intended to carry to the far side of the kitchen where Mrs. Mac was busying herself with the preparations for lunch.

“It’ll only take the once,” the landlady said darkly but without any real ill humor.

“If you’re not busy this afternoon, perhaps you’d like to come along and support us?” Matthew asked. “But I suppose you’ll be occupied with sorting your things out,” he answered himself with a genuine-seeming tone of regret.

George shrugged. “I really don’t have an awful lot of gear to sort out—I don’t see why I shouldn’t take an hour or two off to watch a game of football. It seems a shame to waste the good weather, in any case.”

“Good man!” Matthew beamed at him. “And you’re right about not wasting the weather. I’ve read in the papers it’s to turn cold soon.”

Watkins gave a rather vulgar snort. “Papers! Like they know anything about anything!”

“Scoff all you like, but I’ll be looking out my winter woollies, you can be sure,” Matthew said cheerfully.

At this point they were shooed out of the kitchen by the ladies and took up residence in the sitting room until called back to dine. George was relieved to find the preparations for lunch didn’t take long—he soon grew weary of Watkins’s conversation. The man seemed to have an inordinately large chip on his shoulder, and George strongly suspected him of having socialist leanings. Matthew, of course, took it all in his stride, seemingly unbothered by Watkins’s rantings about injustice. Perhaps it was simply that he’d heard it all before.

“Vicar was in good form, wasn’t he?” Miss Lewis remarked as they sat down to their Sunday lunch. “You missed a good sermon,” she added pointedly to George and Matthew, having apparently inherited her mother’s faintly evangelistic tendencies.

“Oh? What was his message today?” Matthew enquired politely, cutting up potatoes with his fork. George noticed that the meat on his friend’s plate had arrived already cut into edible-sized pieces.

“All about how Advent is the coming of the Lord, and we should be making sure we’re ready for his arrival.” Miss Lewis speared her peas daintily and forbore to comment on her fiancé shoveling them up as though he were eating with a spoon.

“And how should we do that?” Matthew asked with a grin. “Sweeping the floors and getting out the good china?”

She rolled her eyes at him. “No, silly!” Watkins gave her a dark look, presumably for displaying such familiarity with another man. “We should be thinking on our sins, for it’s certain the Lord knows all about them.”

“Mr. Watkins, how long has your team been playing together?” George broke in, a little desperate to change the subject. Watkins’s eyebrows chased his receding hairline, but he nevertheless launched into a monologue on the exceedingly dull history of the Red Lion Sunday Football Club that carried them safely through until dessert.

After lunch, they drank their tea in the sitting room. Despite his low opinion of the papers, Watkins seemed perfectly content to bury his nose in one, occasionally barking out a scornful laugh at some article or other but otherwise contributing little to the conversation. Mrs. Mac and her daughter chatted about wedding dresses and the likelihood of obtaining roses in April. Matthew entertained George with tales from the advertising agency, including the awful repercussions when a client’s name had accidentally been substituted with that of a rival: “Poor Penworthy was already clearing his desk drawers and looking at the Sits Vac when old Carpenter burst into the office to tell him his sins were forgiven. Apparently they’d landed the rival account—which happened to be worth three times as much as the one that had been lost—and the client was insisting that it be handled by the genius behind the erroneous advertisement!”

“So all’s well that ends well, then?” George said, smiling.

“Absolutely—although Penworthy’s now under strict instructions to have all copy signed off by Mr. Carpenter before it goes out!”

The football match, it transpired, was to take place on the playing fields of the local grammar school. As Allen Street, Matthew explained, was situated between the fields and the Red Lion pub, he would be changing into his kit at home rather than lugging his things up to the pub to change with the rest of the team. Accordingly, as Watkins departed, Matthew and George headed upstairs, Matthew to change and George to shift a few things about in his room while he waited.

Matthew’s cheery knock upon George’s door a quarter of an hour later was met with a less than cheery response, however. “I say, are you all right?” Matthew asked. “You look like you’ve lost ten shillings and found a sixpence!”

“Worse,” George replied, holding up the crushed remains of what had once been a rather fine Waterman pen. “I managed to lose this before lunch—and found it just now by stepping on it.” He grimaced. “It’s not the pen, so much—it’s that my father gave it to me just before he died.”

“What rotten luck. I am sorry.”

Matthew’s look of honest sympathy was a comfort, but George found his mood reluctant to lift from the somber turn it had taken. He had so little to remind himself of his father. “Never mind,” he said, forcing a smile. “Let’s get you to that football match before kick-off.”

Miss Lewis electing to remain home with her mother, it was some consolation that George was able to enjoy the walk to the playing field accompanied only by Matthew, who was very fetchingly attired in a red-and-white striped shirt and short trousers that revealed a shapely yet strong pair of calves. An inch or so of lightly haired skin showed above the tops of his socks, giving a tantalizing hint of what remained hidden.

“What position do you play?” George asked as they strolled down the street.

“Midfield, usually, although I sometimes go in defense—it depends who turns out. Luckily for me, although I played rugby at school like you, I used to play football for a village team before I left home. After all, I’d hardly be much use as a scrum half these days!” His right arm—what was left of it—waved in illustration.