Balefanio - tmp0

It had seemed queer to hear her say to Mother: Does Father do this, and Father seems rather that. Soon after she'd finished her cigarette, she rolled

another one for herself, very neatly, taking the tobacco from a tiny red leather pouch. And this set the seal on her strangeness for Eric.

He'd kept glancing at his mother to see whether she was being similarly impressed, but of this he couldn't be sure. He had never been sure, from that day to this, what Mother really thought of Aunt Mary.

Eric passed out into the stable-yard, surrounded by the barns where a troop of horse was said to have been sheltered during the Civil War. Grass grew between the cobblestones, framed in the archway of the Clock Tower. Kent wasn't in the saddle-room. He must be having his dinner. Eric felt under the doorstep, where there was a hole, for the key. He opened the door, releasing the pungent smell of embrocation, the flavour of brasso and the mustiness of leather. He wheeled out his bicycle.

It was getting old, and had long been too small. He'd soon have to get another. Suppose he asked Mother for a motor-bike? Why, he could buy one out of the money he'd got in the Post Office. The absurdity of the thought made Eric smile. Not that he wanted a motor-bike—but Maurice had said the other day that he simply couldn't under­stand anyone having the money and not buying one. Maurice was always saving, but then he was always spending, too. And Eric knew that his cousins weren't well off.

For a long time he'd been very mistrustful of

them. They were strange, like their mother, but without, it seemed, her more reassuring qualities. Maurice especially, with his self-possession, his obvious sophistication, his pale handsome face, black hair and dark eyes that seemed wide open with politely unspoken surprise at the place they'd arrived at. They were at first frankly town chil­dren. They wondered what people did to get through the time in the country, and were anxious to be informed. They went about Gatesley and Chapel Bridge looking faintly puzzled, with the air that there must be more in all this than met the eye. Eric thought them supercilious. They had beautiful "party" manners. The first time they met Mother they made a very good impression. Later, she had seemed not to like them so much. It wasn't till the Christmas holidays that the Scrivens had really begun to take their place in Gatesley life. It had been decided to have a variety entertainment in aid of the Red Cross Hospital, and Aunt Mary had been asked to help. After a week of rehearsals she was in command. She didn't push herself forward, but nobody could help recognising that here was someone who had a natural gift for managing things of this sort. The show was a tremendous success. Maurice and Anne had both appeared in it. Anne sang. Maurice recited a poem and danced a hornpipe. Eric had thought them absolutely wonderful—as good as any trained actors, easily.

He now expected that his cousins would become more distant, more supercilious than ever. He was quite wrong. They were so frankly pleased and excited at their triumph that he—and many of their other critics in Gatesley and Chapel Bridge— realised that they had, after all, only been shy and anxious for a chance to show their goodwill. After the theatricals, Eric began, in fact, the gradual process of falling in love collectively with the Scriven family.

For he was in love with them, it was nothing less. In Aunt Mary's house he was a different being. The presence of his cousins seemed to give him power. He felt wonderfully calm and sure of himself; everything seemed made easy and pleasant. He stammered less, he believed—especi­ally when talking to Aunt Mary or Anne. He had been shy longer with Maurice, whom he admired so painfully, but at least he'd made no pretences. It would have been quite useless, anyway. Maurice knew him as he was—clumsy, bad at games without any sort of skill or elegance. Maurice knew that Eric couldn't throw properly, couldn't bowl overarm, could only swim breast-stroke, couldn't dive, could hardly have told you the names of six well-known cricketers, and was still completely in the dark, although he'd watched it and had the whole thing explained to him scores of times, about the proper adjustment of valve tap­pets and the engine timing. And the extraordinary

thing was, Maurice didn't seem to despise him for all this in the least. They all knew Eric as he was. And they seemed to like him in spite of himself.

Eric still, however, had violent spasms of jealousy and self-disgust in which he saw, through all their kindness, a conspiracy to conceal from him that he was merely being tolerated and pitied. At such times he suspected their every word, every gesture; watched them narrowly and jealously; was even inclined to be curt and ill-tempered with them.

But Maurice, as if he knew of this jealousy, al­ways turned its edge by making references, in front of Gerald and Tommy, to times when he and Eric had been together and the Ramsbothams had not been there. So that, if Gerald talked too much about the famous car they were building, in which they hoped to do a hundred, and which greatly inter­ested Maurice, Maurice would nevertheless keep chipping in with: "You remember last Friday, Eric, when you said" so and so.

Indeed, he never seemed to resent the claims Eric's admiration made upon him. And if, as once or twice, his conversation about women with the Ramsbothams had really shocked Eric—not but what he was quite used to it at school—because it jarred upon his conception of his cousin, Maurice would notice this at once. When they were alone, he would be oddly apologetic, propitiatory; saying seriously and frankly such things as:

"Do you think I'm awful, Eric?" "Do you get awfully bored with me?" Remarks which Eric didn't know how to answer.

Once he'd been stung by jealousy to a violent, hypocritical outburst. Maurice had repeated ah obscene limerick which genuinely amused him. Indeed, it had amused Eric. But it came from Gerald Ramsbotham. Eric, who'd had a rather humiliating afternoon, because they'd been playing cricket on the lawn and he was as clumsy as usual, suddenly lost all control of himself and broke out, in front of everybody, with something about being sick to death of all this filth. It was an almost in­credible scene. Stammering cut him short. He had walked straight out of the garden and ridden off home, his eyes full of tears of rage, hearing Gerald's laughter behind him. When he grew calmer, he'd been appalled at his behaviour. Of course, he'd never be asked over to Gatesley again. He took that for granted.

But the very next day, when Eric had been sit­ting in deepest gloom, Mrs. Beddoes had come in to say that his cousin was downstairs in the hall and would like to speak to him. Eric had hardly been able to believe his own eyes. There was Maurice; he'd biked over, called on his own account, without being invited—a thing absolutely without pre­cedent. And while Eric was beginning a prelimin­ary stammer, wondering how on earth he could

excuse himself, so hopeless of being able to do so that he nearly yelled: Get out of the house! instead, Maurice had begun saying how sorry he was about what happened yesterday, and he hoped Eric would forgive him—he hadn't meant to hurt Eric's feel­ings—he swore that he'd done it quite uninten­tionally—and so forth. And before Eric could get a word in edgeways, Maurice had ended up that if Eric had really quite forgiven them he must show it by coming to tea there that afternoon. Eric had looked hard at him to be sure that all this wasn't simply making fun of himself, but Maurice was perfectly serious. Obviously, though he didn't quite understand what all the fuss had been about, he'd made up his mind to placate Eric at any cost. And this had been all his own idea, as was shown by a chance remark of Aunt Mary's at tea that day. She hadn't known that Maurice had been over to the Hall. As for Eric—it was no use his saying anything now—he actually had to accept the posi­tion of being the injured party.