A Man of Forty Read online

  A MAN OF FORTY

  By

  GERALD BULLETT

  Contents

  I

  SPRING APPROACHING

  II

  THE FLOOD

  III

  A SUNDAY IN JUNE

  IV

  THE GREEN HILL

  V

  THE INQUIRY

  Part I

  Spring Approaching

  § 1

  Not long after midnight they slipped away from the party, he and she, and getting into a taxi were driven to the entrance of Orkney House, where he lived. This was young Swinford’s notion of seeing a girl home: to take her to the flat where he lived. Pushing his way round the revolving door he stopped to point an accusing finger at the neat uniformed young man who sat perched in the porter’s lodge.

  “You’re not Stevenage,” said Adam Swinford.

  The hall porter smiled tolerantly. He was fresh from his sleep, having only recently come on duty. “No, sir. I’m Jackson.”

  “Why aren’t you Stevenage?” demanded Mr. Swinford suspiciously.

  “It’s not his turn, sir. He went off at eleven-thirty tonight.”

  “Now that’s very interesting,” Mr. Swinford confided, leaning across the hall porter’s counter. “ I must have seen you before. But just because I’ve been to a party I don’t know you. But I know you’re not Stevenage,” he added shrewdly.

  Jackson’s smile became faintly apologetic, almost anxious. “ The young lady, sir—she’s waiting.”

  Adam Swinford wheeled round. “ My dear young friend, do forgive me!” Small and pretty she was : he could see that. And, by the look of her, she was beginning to wonder whether she had not better run away while she still had the chance. “ Don’t do that,” he pleaded, though she had not said a word. “ Do, on the contrary, come to my little snuggery and have a little drink.”

  He took the girl by the elbow and piloted her very efficiently up a flight of stone steps and along the corridor to his own front door. Though exhilarated by his many drinks he had a very clear idea of what he was doing.

  “Welcome to my hearth and home,” he said, opening the door with a latchkey. “ Separate entrance and no questions asked.” He stood aside to let her pass in, and then escorted her, through the tiny square hall, to the door of his sitting-room. “ Run along in and switch the fire on while I take off my coat. There’s a good girl.”

  Joining her half a minute later, he wondered whether it would be in order to kiss her again, without further delay. He had kissed her three times in the taxi, and on each occasion, with an exaggerated gaiety, had told her his name, Adam Swinford, as though to put everything on a proper and dignified basis. Three times he had pronounced it a.damned good party, and three times she had agreed with him. “ Lovely,” she said. And the second time, with careful articulation : “ Most pleasant. Most.” And finally : “ Ever so nice.” Dimly, through the golden mist that enveloped him, he perceived something odd, unexpected, about these answers, about this girl. Not in herself, but in relation to this late-lamented party. Three times in the taxi… but here, in one’s own den, nook, funk-hole, apartment, or whatever, it was a little different, wasn’t it? She had, after all, a pleasing touch of modesty : he, not she, had done the kissing. Moreover, she was not quite, well, not altogether ... in short, one didn’t quite see how she had come to be at the Buckrams’ squash : which made it (if you know what I mean, he said, explaining himself to an imaginary interlocutor) all the more important not to offend her.

  “In the taxi, yes,” he said. “ I mean to say, what are taxis for?”

  “Pardon?” said the young woman.

  “But here,” he went on, unheeding, “ the crystal purity of one’s motives might not be so frightfully manifest.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Call me Adam, darling.”

  “You’re ever so funny,” she assured him.

  “Or just darling alone, if you’d rather.”

  He sat down beside her on the chesterfield. It was a pleasant surprise, next moment, to find her in his arms : he didn’t remember how it had happened. Delicious little creature, and, what was more, alive. Definitely alive and breathing, with a warm soft body and lustrous eyes. Unusual type, too : delicate hint of bronze in the hair. Slim but not epicene. Oh, by no means. Anything but. Beauty more than adequate, he said to himself, with cautionary understatement. Fiery hair ; a hint of red in the eyes ; delicate fair skin. And young, very young. Take care of Nature’s Gift. Keep your husband’s love by using Somebody’s Skin-food.

  “ You’re very pretty, aren’t you?” said Adam Swinford. “ Correct me if I am wrong.” He kissed her, and she did not correct him. “ I know now what rural poets mean when they talk about smiling champagne,” he continued. “ The champagne inside me is smiling like anything. How about you, dear child? You’re a choice vintage : did you know that? That was a good party. Or a good bar, anyhow. Some schools of thought are inclined to regard the two statements as constituting one and the same proposition. I don’t know if you agree with them, darling?”

  She slipped out of his embrace and gave him a curious glance “ You like talking, don’t you?”

  “Do I? Perhaps I do.” He sobered a little, his ardour checked. “ Meaning you don’t like listening?”

  She leaned her head back among the cushions and closed her eyes. “ I think you’re ever so funny.”

  “Ever so,” he agreed. She sat up, opening her eyes wide. Repenting of his irony he said quickly : “ Do you know what? You’ve not told me your name.”

  She gave him a cherubic grin. “ No names, no pack-drills, so they say.” It was surprising. It set him wondering in a new direction.

  “So who say?”

  “Well, my dad used to, for one,” she answered, with perky satisfaction. “ It’s one of the remarks they used to pass in the army.”

  “Is your father in the army? How original!”

  “He was in the war1, wasn’t he, like everyone else? He’s dead now. Six months ago.”

  Adam frowned. It wasn’t playing fair to bring that sort of thing into the conversation. “ I’m awfully sorry,” he said. “ I was a child in the war, and you were a babe unborn. What did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t say. But as a matter of fact, it’s Miss Lily Elver, if you want to know.”

  He looked at her in silence, annoyed to find his gaiety already evaporating, and inclined to blame her for it. A few moments ago he had been conscious of being several points above par. He had found himself, as well as the girl, to be a charming and amusing person. And still did. And still do, he admonished himself. Especially you, Miss Lily Elver. Did they call you Miss in holy baptism, Lily? Well, never mind. What does it matter to me?

  But it did matter, a little, that she was not of his world. It put certain things out of the question which might otherwise have rounded off the day very cosily. It was dangerous to go outside one’s class for that kind of amusement; and, besides, one couldn’t let oneself down, could one?

  “Let’s have a little drink,” he said.

  He got up and moved across the room. His body felt agreeably unsubstantial, and walking had become an art—not a difficult art, but one that would have been difficult to anyone less clever than himself. He came to a standstill, and with his hand on the door of a built-in wall-cupboard paused to look back, momentarily forgetful of his purpose. Not a bad hole, this. Wonder what she thinks of it. It was in fact a large and pleasant room, furnished with modern simplicity but without modern affectation. You would never have guessed that its tenant slept in it. The only other room in Adam Swinford’s apartment (unless you counted the bathroom) was a minute kitchen, where he boiled the water for his breakfast coffee
each morning—the only meal he had in. This was his show room, his shop window : he put all he knew into it, himself included. It reflected his good taste (” impeccable “ was the word he preferred). It had a touch, a soupçon of a je ne sais quoi. He could have written it up very persuasively, in smooth, telling phrases; for that kind of thing was his job. He despised the job sometimes, but he liked the pay and he was rather good at it. It was understood between himself and his conscience that sooner or later he would blossom out as a poet, a painter, or even a musician : he believed he had a modicum of talent in all three departments. Meanwhile he wrote copy and arranged publicity for a firm of benefactors whose one wish in life was to spread health and happiness in English homes by the sale of their inestimable products : the money they spent every year on advertising, apart from Mr. Swinford’s salary, would have sufficed to keep a hundred families in comfort.

  “What am I doing here, Lily?” he said, feeling gay once more. “ Oh, yes, a little drink.” By good luck he found the brandy bottle and a siphon of soda water. Without consulting his guest he mixed a stiffish potion for himself and her. “ Here we are now! Drink this, darling. It’ll make a new woman of you.” Though she’s very sweet as she is. Dashed if she isn’t.

  “I don’t know if I ought to,” said Miss Elver, receiving the glass from his hand. “ Oh, look, you’ve spilt some.”

  “By the way,” said Adam, “ do you know the Buckrams well?”

  “All over my dress! You are awful, really!”

  “Very nice dress, too,” said Adam Swinford, looking at her bare shoulders. “ Make it yourself?”

  “What if I did?” she asked, tossing her head.

  “Clever girl, that’s all. Do you know the Buckrams well?”

  “The what?”

  “The Buckrams.”

  “Are they people?”

  “Good guess, darling. They’re the people whose party you’ve just come from.”

  “Oh, them!” She giggled. “ I don’t know them. Why should I?”

  “Quite,” he said airily. “ Oh quite. So long as their drink’s good, why bother? I see your point.”

  “No, but I don’t. Really I don’t.” Proud of her exploit, she was on the defensive no longer. “ What’s more, they don’t know me.”

  The young man looked at her with a new admiration. She was well worth looking at. “ Do you mean to tell me you crashed?” He came and sat close beside her again.

  “Crashed?”

  “Gate-crashed.”

  “As good as. I didn’t have any old invitation. But my friend did. I went with my friend.”

  “Man or woman?” said Adam Swinford.

  “Now then! You needn’t be jealous, dear.” She put a soft warm arm round his neck. Her lips came surprisingly to life under his kiss. “ I went with my friend. Well, she’s not exactly my friend. She’s a lady I know. I made a dress for her too, if you want to know.”

  He didn’t want to know. He was no longer paying attention to what she said. By shutting his ears to her speech he was able to see her as a simple shepherdess in the Theocritan tradition: artless, virginal, lovely. For two minutes he kept her speechless. Then suddenly his hold slackened. She glanced at him in surprise, half resentful. His face was thoughtful, sombre.

  “What’s the matter now, pray?”

  “My God!” said Adam. “ That’s torn it!”

  “What’s torn what? My dress, I should think, by the way you go on.”

  He laughed : vexed with himself but determined to be amused. “ I’ve just remembered something, that’s all.”

  “Is she nice?” asked Lily. She moved out of his reach and stood up, as if to go.

  He laughed again. The transparency of her tactics amused him.

  “Today’s Friday, isn’t it?”

  “Well, it’s Saturday, if you want to know. Look at the time!” She pointed.

  “So it is. Same thing. I went to the party on Friday night and came home on Saturday morning.”

  “Have it your own way,” said Lily. “ Where’s my cloak, please?”

  “Now the point is,” explained Adam, facetiously elaborate, “ I ought not to have gone to that party at all. Why not, dear Adam? you ask anxiously. Because, darling, I had engaged myself to go into the country, to spend a week-end with certain friends. Alternatively, as the lawyers say, I could have rung them up, to say I shouldn’t arrive till Saturday.”

  “Why didn’t you then?”

  “I meant to. I forgot.”

  It was disconcerting, the suddenness with which, from time to time, a sad sobriety descended on him, quenching the lamp in his bosom. But as it came suddenly, so it went, and with its going the lamp was rekindled. That luminous core of irresponsible self-satisfaction bobbed up and down, swayed and revolved, flashed and vanished and flashed again, in the waters of his changing mood. Forgetting his broken promise to the David Bromes, he saw with dangerous clarity how attractive she was. Definitely beddable. And, up to a point, likeable. She didn’t go with his water-colours : at least her voice didn’t. But on the other hand ...

  “Who are they, these friends of yours?”

  He stared at her greedily.

  “ Oh, they’re relations of sorts.” He came close and put his arms round her.

  “Anybody I know, I wonder?”

  If only you’d hold your tongue, girl! Can’t you see how this chatter wearies me?

  “I don’t think so, Lily.” He gazed at her with sensual, sentimental ardour. The mixture as before.

  “Why don’t you?” she said, wriggling free of him. “ I might have.” She pouted. “ But you needn’t tell me if you don’t want to.”

  To hide his impatience he pretended to levity. “ The name, my dear young lady, is Brome. David Brome. Also Lydia, his wife Four in family. Does that content you?”

  She wrinkled her brow. “ I don’t think I know them. Is Mr. Brome your uncle or something?”

  “Something, undoubtedly. But not my uncle. A good fellow, David. But my uncle he never was, nor shall be. Not to deceive you, Lily, he is merely my mother’s cousin. That was the best he could manage.”

  Oh, let her go, let her go, he thought. What does it matter, anyhow? He fetched her cloak and put it round her lovely young shoulders. He felt a trifle noble. Also a trifle tired.

  “Well, my gallant little gate-crasher!” Dear me, quite the benevolent uncle. But he couldn’t, at this time of night, turn her out without ceremony. “ Look, shall I telephone for a taxi?”

  “I suppose so.” She glanced timidly at the clock. “ Coo, it isn’t half late!”

  Her tone was flat, disappointed. She stared at the carpet, then raised her eyes to look at him. “ Well, you’d better say goodbye then, if you want to.”

  He made no movement towards her. They looked at each other in silence. There was shyness in her eyes and a faint smile on her lips. So that’s how it is, he thought, smiling to himself. The silence gathered and quickened. Whether he would or no, he was caught in the net of his own simple vanity; for her transparent unwillingness to escape from him was a challenge he couldn’t let pass.

  He came towards her with a quiet and controlled deliberation, and very gently, with an almost tentative air, removed the cloak from her shoulders and dropped it on the chesterfield.

  § 2

  This David Brome, whom Adam is to visit, what is he, what his personal quality, his environment, his habit of life? I see him as a rather large, fairish man ; by temperament a lover of idleness, by force of circumstances industrious and precise ; good-tempered, easy-going, tolerant, but a secret worrier. At sixteen, after a sketchy suburban schooling, he was planted by his father in the Civil Service, where he underwent, stage by stage, the normal process of evolution from inky-fingered red-eared junior to head of a not very important sub-department. In all that part of his history, the major part in point of time, he has been passive, or, if active, mechanically so. The same, almost, could be said of his marriage. That has been a mild a
ffair, part of the accepted inevitable pattern. There have been moments of excitement, a quiet happiness, a dulling of the painful ecstatic dream, and through it all a growing together, a mutual engrafting of two lives. He sees this, sometimes as a sublime, sometimes as a highly inconvenient fact. He has a wholesome respect for all natural processes, and he knows that a real marriage, like a tree, is the product of slow growth, time and habit being of its essence. He knows, too, or in sober moments thinks he knows, that the thoroughgoing romanticism to which he’s secretly addicted is a juvenile (shall we say adolescent?) simplification of life. Anyhow, here he is, at forty plus, beginning for the first time to be himself and wondering what precisely that will involve. For he is now, superficially, a free man, having with a conscious if somewhat anxious audacity retired from the service long before his normal term. With perhaps only half his life lived, his time is now his own—and Lydia’s, and little Paul’s. He lives on his modest means in a house in the country ; though it won’t be country long, now the railway company and the builders have decided to “ develop “ it. Three or four acres to mess about in, and the option of buying a five-acre field adjoining. Lydia is a passionate gardener, and would, if she could, be a farmer as well. She is lean, sunbrowned, cheerful, sisterly. She is also efficient and managing. She is proud of the fact that her husband has apparently read all the books in the world, and equally proud of herself for being too sensible and practical to have done so. She has the habit of quick judgment, especially of people. She never meets a new person, man or woman, without at once fixing a label to him and putting him into a pigeonhole.

  Wait a minute, though : is this true of Lydia, or is it only what * David, in moments of nervous despair, thinks of her? I must be careful about that. And so must Brome : it’s the kind of mistake he’s prone to. Yet Brome’s simplicity is of the heart rather than the mind. For he has a mind, active and cultured, like his father before him. He is shy but not inarticulate. There is something he hides, something he is half-conscious of hiding, though it is hidden also from himself : something that appears in his eyes, and at the corners of his mouth, when he remembers with a sort of panic that he is over forty. At such moments, though he doesn’t know it, he looks fourteen ; for it was at fourteen (and I think he will have forgotten this) that he caught sight of (shall we say?) Helen of Troy, short-skirted, her hair in two plaits, and carrying a tennis racquet. And at such moments he is haunted by the desolate conviction that he has missed something—missed, in a sense, everything—though in fact, when be comes to tot things up, he seems to have all that a man of simple tastes could reasonably wish for. His mother died when he was a child. That doesn’t trouble him, for he can’t remember her ; but perhaps this very fact, I mean his not remembering, constitutes a something missed. He does remember, and even now regrets, his failure to get to Oxford. If his father could have afforded to keep him at school another two years, David might—there was a chance—have got into his father’s old college on a scholarship. Put like that it sounds very remote and hypothetical; but at the time, for some days together, he entertained the crazy hope ; and I suppose those days have left a small mark on him somewhere.