Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

‘Don’t call him Mr. Anderson, he’s Charlie,’ said Reg. ‘Of course he does, don’t you, Charlie? Looks like a dog’s dinner in ‘em, too, I’ll bet… Wonder how I’d look if I wore ‘em up the Mount?’

This caused roars of merriment, during which Charles asked Lily, who was next to him, what the Mount was. ‘It’s where Reg works,’ she whispered, but did not explain further.

Maud did, whispering in his other ear. ‘It’s a cemetery. Reg works for an undertaker.’

Charles smiled. At last he saw an opening and claimed his audience by the way he spoke up. ‘I can understand, then, why Reg has such a sense of humour. What work exactly do you do, Reg?’

‘I’m in the office,’ Reg answered, not quite comfortably.

‘You don’t do any—er—spadework then?’

‘SPADEWORK?’ Reg was at first genuinely puzzled, and puzzlement made him look sullen. After a pause he said truculently: ‘I ain’t a blasted gravedigger, if that’s what you mean.’

Charles was still smiling. ‘No? I just thought that some of your jokes sounded a bit as if they’d been… disinterred.’

At Cambridge or Beeching it would have raised a laugh, but not in Ladysmith Road. Evidently Reg’s jokes were funny and Charles’s weren’t. Indeed a somewhat chilly silence supervened till Mrs. Mansfield broke it by a gentle rebuke to all: ‘Really, I don’t think we ought to laugh about things like that.’ (But they HAD laughed, when Reg had first brought up the subject by mentioning the Mount!) Charles was bewildered even more than disconcerted, and from then on made no further attempts to challenge Reg in the field of humour. It was perhaps some consolation that Reg also seemed put out, and presently left to take a walk with Bert.

Conversation was easier after that, and Charles gladly accepted an invitation from Mr. Mansfield to tour the garden. It could not have been more than a hundred feet long and twenty across, but it took Mr. Mansfield half an hour to name and explain the various plants and flowers. He hadn’t spoken much at all inside the house, but the garden made him garrulous. Charles, who loved gardens, warmed to the man’s obvious pride and quiet satisfaction. Presently Mr. Mansfield pulled out an old-fashioned watch and checked the time. ‘Dunno ‘ow you feel, Mr. Anderson,’ he said hesitantly, ‘but round about now I usually ‘ave a little stroll. Just ourselves, mind you—I don’t ‘old with takin’ ladies along, not on Sundays, anyway.’

Charles was very willing to escape, and Lily looked equally pleased to see him on such good terms with her father. The two left the house and walked half a mile to the end of Ladysmith Road, then right along Mafeking Road to Roberts Road, then left as far as the Prince Rupert, a modern sham-timbered but decent-looking pub.

‘Dunno why they call it the Prince Rupert,’ commented Mr. Mansfield, as they pushed through the doors. ‘I never ‘eard of no prince named Rupert.’

Charles had, but he did not want to seem learned. ‘Looks a nice place,’ was all he said.

‘Not too bad—and quiet, mostly. It’s what you might call the local round ‘ere, for those that ain’t teetotallers… What’s yours, Mr. Anderson?’

‘Thanks, I’ll have a bitter,’ said Charles, beginning to feel more at home than for hours. ‘But I wish you wouldn’t call me Mr. Anderson.’

‘I know… the others kept callin’ you Charlie… Ah, good evenin’, Milly, two bitters for me and this gentleman… Some’ow, though, I thought they wasn’t treatin’ you quite respectful.’

‘RESPECTFUL?… Nonsense—why should they? I’m no older than any of them, except Lily.’

‘Well, yes, that’s true, but after all you was a stranger, and that Reg —‘e shouldn’t rightly ‘ave carried on the way ‘e did… Mind you, ‘e soon calmed down afterwards—you got your own back all right, only I think you ‘urt ‘is feelin’s.’

‘I hope not. I certainly didn’t intend to.’

”E’s a nice smart young feller,’ Mr. Mansfield continued. ‘Always ready with a joke—and—like you said, only you was bein’ sarcastic —he ain’t in a job where there’s much fun, in a manner of speakin’.’

‘I’m really sorry if I did hurt his feelings,’ Charles repeated.

‘Oh, ‘e’ll get over it. Lily’ll tell ‘im you didn’t mean no ‘arm.’

The two bitters arrived, and Mr. Mansfield raised his glass to Charles. ‘Well, Charlie…’ He paused to let the name achieve significance, then added: ”Ere’s to us and our dear ones…’

Lily walked with him to Linstead station later, and on the way they had their first slight tiff. It was about Reg, whose discomfiture after Charles’s single crack at his expense seemed to have aroused her sympathy. Like her father, she thought Reg’s feelings had been hurt, but Charles felt in no mood to apologize again as he had done once already at the pub. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘here’s a fellow digs at me all afternoon and I take it—bad jokes included. Then I make one joke about him and he goes off in a huff.’

‘Not BAD jokes,’ she objected. ‘Reg has his faults, but he never says anything blue in front of ladies.’

‘BLUE?’

‘I mean the sort of jokes men tell to each other. Reg tells them to dad, but only when they’re on their own.’

‘I see. I didn’t know that’s what “blue” meant. And you didn’t know what I meant by “bad”. I meant silly jokes, not blue necessarily, just jokes that aren’t amusing.’

‘Almost as if we didn’t speak the same language,’ she said gaily. ‘Anyhow, Charlie, they made everybody laugh.’

Charles had to admit that they had, and that his own joke hadn’t, and that any further development of that issue might bog down in a philosophical impasse. Was laughter a valid empirical test of humour? If there were no one to see it, could a joke ever be said to exist at all? It was a bit like the nominalist-versus-realist arguments of the medieval scholars. But all that he could hardly go into with Lily, and by this time the fact that they were at odds was beginning to trouble him, as also her suggestion (shrewd or na ve, he wasn’t sure which) that they didn’t speak the same language.

‘Oh, Lily,’ he exclaimed, taking her arm (they were on the platform and the train was due and he couldn’t endure the thought of separating from her on clouded terms)—‘we’re not going to quarrel about it, are we?’

‘Of course not.’ And of course they were not. ‘But I can’t help being sorry you were bored.’

‘I wasn’t bored at all.’ He had to get back into the argument. ‘It’s just that a fellow of Reg’s type always makes me shut up in company. I just can’t compete with them.’

‘I know. He IS a bit noisy sometimes. Poor old Reg—he’d like to have had your advantages, going to Cambridge College to study. He’s really clever, everybody says, but he had to leave school at fourteen. If only he’d been properly educated it would make all the difference.’

‘I don’t believe it would,’ Charles could not help replying. ‘I’ve met fellows like Reg at Cambridge and I can’t get along with them there either. You mustn’t think education changes what people are like.’

‘Then what does it do?’ she asked, again either na vely or shrewdly, and he had no time to speculate, for the train was coming in. He pressed her hand. ‘Even if I knew an answer it would take me all night to give it to you.’ He found a compartment and leaned out of the window to kiss her. ‘Maybe you’d better come up to Cambridge and see for yourself… Yes, why not? That’s a wonderful idea. Come the weekend after my examinations, then I’ll be free and won’t have anything on my mind. Leave on the Saturday and I’ll get you a room at the Lion or somewhere—there’s a good train back on Sunday evening… Will you, Lily?’