Джеймс Хилтон - So Well Remembered

He did not deny that Sarah had talked to him.

“All right,” he said temporizingly, “but don’t go and nag Sarah about it. She means well.”

“That’s not always a good defence,” she said, thinking of it suddenly, “when people do the wrong thing.”

She often gave him cues like that, as they occurred to her on the spur of the moment, hoping they might lead him into talk of the past. But they never did, and she wondered if he ever guessed that they were deliberately put out, and if he just as deliberately ignored them. One evening, however, without any cue at all, he began to talk of his years in prison. They were walking in the garden, with the stars especially bright in the frosty air, and that drew him to remark that the books he had read in prison were mostly about astronomy and philosophy. “You see, in prison, after the first period of getting used to it, which is rather dreadful, you slip into a mood of timelessness that isn’t either happy or unhappy, and in that mood—for me, at any rate—the things to think about were the timeless ones —the mysteries of life and existence that have sent many men into cells not very different from mine… the cells of monasteries, or the other kind where mad people are put. Not that I invented any special philosophy or had any special vision to match those I read about. I don’t have the tight quality of mind.”

“Neither do I,” she answered. “You liked that kind of book because you were in prison, but I’d feel in prison if I had to read that kind of book.”

“I know,” he smiled. “But a very kind and gentle prison. A prison within the other prison. It wasn’t so bad—although, as I said, my mind wasn’t exactly equal to it—because, after all, I’d only been a smart business man most of my life.”

“And not even so smart,” she said softly, taking his arm.

“That’s so. Well, let’s say just a business man. Perhaps that’s why I think now of the end of a man’s life as a sort of taking-over by a junior partner—some cheeky young fellow whom at first you thought of no account, but he grows and grows inside your affairs till he begins to touch them all—you’d like to get rid of him but you can’t, he’s the fellow you try to forget when you go to sleep, but he wakes you in the morning with his nagging and needling… the first step you take you know he’s still there, at your elbow, jogging and shoving and hurting like the devil… you’re at his mercy—his strength grows all the time at the expense of yours—he knows he’s going to have his own way in the end—it’s only a matter of time, and a horrible time at that… and from his point of view, of course, everything’s going exactly as it should—HE is healthy, striving, spreading—you are just an old decaying out-of- date thing he feeds on.” He checked himself. “Am I talking too much?”

“No,” she answered, transfixed.

“Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Not altogether.” She added quickly: “But I don’t mind not knowing altogether. You remember once I said I didn’t mind being bored. When you don’t mind being bored, it isn’t boredom, really. And it’s like that when you don’t mind not understanding—perhaps it means that you DO understand —a little.”

“I hope so,” he said, holding closely to her as they reached an uphill part of the path. “Now tell me some more about Cheldean.”

She racked her brains to think of a story because she knew that in some obscure way those yarns about school life took his mind in a pleasant direction, even if he did not always listen carefully; but she had already told him most that had happened, and now she could only think of something that had not happened. It was an incident she had once invented during a rather dull service in the Cheldean school chapel. The preacher was a local divine who came regularly and always devoted a large part of his extempore prayer to the weather; he was never satisfied with it and always wanted God to change it to something else, so that the slightest sign of floods, drought, a cold wave or a heat wave, gave him an excuse. One sunny Sunday after a week of consecutive fine days, he prayed most eloquently for rain —which the girls definitely did not want, since there was a school holiday the next day; and Livia, sharing this resentment, suddenly noticed a sort of trap-door in the roof of the chapel just over the pulpit.

What fun, she thought, if one had climbed up there with a bucket of water and, at the moment of the appeal, had poured it down over the preacher’s head! The thought was so beguiling that she had giggled quietly in the pew; but now, telling the story to Martin as a true one, she had him laughing aloud.

“What really made you do it?” he asked. “Just for a lark?”

“I wanted to see his face when he looked up,” she said, still using her imagination. “I thought he might think I was God.”

She had to invent the sequel of her own discovery and punishment, at which he kept on laughing. In doing so he half stumbled to his knees; and while she was helping him up Watson entered the garden from the yard. He gave them both a rather long and curious stare, and a few hours afterwards, catching Livia alone, asked how her father was. She answered “All right,” as she always did to that question.

Watson grinned. “Just a little drop too much sometimes, eh?”

“What do you mean?” Then Livia realized what he did mean and was immensely relieved. She had been afraid for a moment that he might have deduced some real illness, and his mistake seemed the happiest and simplest alibi, not only for past but possibly future events also.

She therefore smiled and retorted: “You ought to know the symptoms, Watson, if anyone does.”

From then on, Livia cared less about what was seen and heard, even though Watson’s knowing impertinences increased.

One evening Martin called her attention to a white dog walking along the path towards them, but she saw it was not a dog, but a piece of newspaper blown in the wind; but he still insisted it was a dog and stopped to touch it, then said it had run away. That made her realize how bad his sight was becoming, and she begged him to see some other eye doctor; perhaps a special kind of glasses or treatment would help; even if Dr. Whiteside were no use, surely there must be someone in Mulcaster or London… But he said no; it had all been diagnosed and prescribed for before; there was really nothing anyone could do about it—perhaps it would not get any worse. And he could still see many things perfectly well—colours, for instance. The red geraniums, the blue lobelias, the yellow sunflowers; he welcomed them all each day. That gave her the idea to put on a scarlet dress the next time she walked with him, and he was delighted. From which she promptly derived another idea, and that evening, though she was poor at sewing, she worked hard after he had gone to bed, cutting up an old patchwork quilt and making it into a multi-coloured dress to wear the following day. And he was delighted again.

She then thought he might like a real white dog, and asked Watson to get one; but when the dog appeared and was duly presented to his master in the garden, he wriggled loose and scampered into the clough. “There you are,” Martin laughed, when she fetched the animal back. “That’s what happened before. The white dog will have nothing to do with me.”

“Then I must be a white cat,” she answered breathlessly. She had noticed before that the silliest repartee of this kind seemed to lift his mood; it was strange, indeed, how much of their talk had recently been either silly or abstruse, seeming to skip the ordinary world in between. And as usual, the silliness worked; he was lifted. “Come along, little white cat,” he laughed again.