The Big Fellow, page 7
Though he limped rather badly, Seyler was all energy and exuberance as he pushed open the swinging doors; breasting the bar he ordered two pots of beer, chiacking the tow-headed girl who served him about the American badge she was wearing. He looked, Peter felt, like a wharf-labourer who had been injured at his work and had got a little drunk on the strength of it. Studying his face, as he brought the beer over to a table in the corner, he reflected that Seyler had always looked a little drunk: it was partly the way his large eyes stood out from their sockets. Yet he had aged a good deal since the days when they were students together. His figure had thickened and his swarthy face was grooved with deep lines, but he was no longer the scarecrow he had been when he came down from the north and his dark eyes still had lightning in them.
Peter said impulsively as he sipped his beer, “You’ve been through it, Monty.”
Lighting a cigarette, Seyler looked at him steadily through the smoke.
“Have I? I suppose I have. So have you.”
“No,” said Peter. “Not the way you have. When I look back it seems to me I had a smooth passage. Late into the line and early out.”
“Then we won’t talk about it. Not any more than we can help. Good-bye yesterday, hail tomorrow—isn’t that the line? When I first came back they all wanted me to talk: ‘How did the Nips treat you?’…’Wasn’t it hell working on that Burma Railway?’—the same sort of questions from all round the compass. And for once in my life I couldn’t say a word. Tongue-tied, emotionally dead, stranded among people I’d lost touch with—it was like that for months. Then when I’d mastered the jargon again and wanted to let myself go there was no one to listen.”
“I know. It’s all over and done with now. Forget it.”
“Well, that’s all right with me. Scrap everything in the past that isn’t going to help build up the future. During those last days in Burma I kept a journal, using any scraps of paper I could find—thought it was desperately important, even at the risk of having my head struck off by some clumsy lout with a sword. A record of facts, feelings, cruelties I’d want to remember if I got through. The other day I looked over the dirty old pages and stuffed them in the fire. Auto-da-fé.”
There was a ruthlessness in his grin that jarred on Mahony. Seyler looked hard in the grain, as if he had shorn away every impulse towards self-pity and attained full command over himself. Beside him he felt sentimental and immature.
“That all it meant to you?” he said.
“What it means to me,” said Seyler, “is somewhere inside me. Sorted over by a couple of years’ reflection and the living things kept safe. No good mulling over feelings and resentments that have gone dead. Those days at Kuala Lumpur when the Nips first came over—the chaos, the cowardice, the lies that legends will be built out of: they were just war. Time to resurrect them if the wind starts blowing again. I had a compulsion laid on me up there that is more urgent. And now that I’ve come back and want to get a hearing …”
He stopped suddenly and looked at his companion.
“What are you doing, Peter?”
“Me?” said Peter lightly. “I haven’t really settled down yet. Since I came out of the Army I’ve been acting as secretary for Donovan.”
“Hell, that sod!”
Peter looked at him sharply, his face flushed with resentment.
“Why not? It’s a job like any other. I thought myself damned lucky to be offered it. What have you got against Donovan?”
Seyler did not answer for a while.
“Enough to sink him fathoms deep,” he said at last. “Him and the little crowd of shysters he’s connected with. You haven’t been looking at the Beacon, Peter?”
“No, what’s that?”
“Never mind. I can see it hasn’t carried far. When you first raise your voice you think everyone’s listening, and then you find they’ve all got cotton-wool in their ears. Yet there’s nothing for it but to go on talking … How about coming on to the Town Hall to hear the Austrian quartet?”
He made a movement to go, but Peter did not shift.
“What have you got against Donovan?” he persisted. “Politics, is it?”
“Politics?” replied Seyler, quizzically. “That includes nearly everything, doesn’t it? Absolute values and the price of beer. Maybe what I’ve got against Donovan does include nearly everything. You know my kink—to think in images. And when you can see everything that’s crooked embodied in a single figure … But if you’re tied up with Donovan I’ll keep my trap shut.”
Peter said abruptly that he was not. “You know well enough that medicine’s my main interest.”
“And you’ll go back to it?”
“As soon as I can make sure of the finance to see me through.”
“Good,” said Seyler. “You’ve a streak of your Uncle Hugh in you, Peter. Though he isn’t really your uncle, is he? Just someone you’ve adopted with the rest of the family. I was going to ask you to join in this little crusade of mine, but I guess it’s not your lurk. I’m not even sure that it’s mine: what I don’t know about running a weekly paper would sink a liner. But I’ve a little capital saved up, and more coming if prisoners-of-war ever get their pay. And, anyhow, there’s more to it than making a living … Say, is that woman behind the bar white or Chinese?”
Peter did not turn his head.
“What was the compulsion you talked about that was laid on you up there?”
“Did I call it a compulsion?”
“Something like that. As if you regarded your present job as a mission.”
“That’s my high-flown way of talking. I was a divinity student, remember; the catchwords stick, and perhaps something more. Up there I had a cobber named Gundersen. We bunked together, ate together, helped one another back from work when neither of us could have staggered the three or four miles through the dark alone. And lying in camp we turned our pockets out for one another’s benefit so that there was nothing about each other’s past we didn’t know. The chief thing that haunted him was why his father took his life; it began to haunt me, too. Even after I’d nutted the whole story out for myself; even after I’d helped bury Gundy on the edge of the jungle with a couple of Nip guards looking on. There are some things go so deep into you that they work up into a compulsion to act … Hey, it’s nearly eight o’clock! What about coming along?”
“No,” said Peter. “We’ll have another drink.”
He took the mugs and went over to the bar. It was an assertion of will, for he was beginning to feel the effect of Seyler’s old easy dominance and was angry at himself for surrendering to it. In spite of what they had been through, the few years of difference in their ages still counted. Yet there was more in it, he knew, than that. Seyler’s varied experience—as wharf-lumper, divinity student, prisoner-of-war—made him feel that he himself had been brought up in a sheltered world. And there was the exasperating echo of Sheila’s voice running on and on, confessing her indifference to him, her emotional dependence on another man. Conflicting feelings made a tumult in his mind.
“What have you got against Donovan?” he demanded, coming back with the beer.
Pricked out of his reflective mood, Seyler gave him a quick sidelong look.
“You’re still a boy, Peter. Still dreaming of an all-protective father.”
“Call it that if you like. I’ve grown up in Donovan’s home, and still feel a sort of loyalty to him.”
“That’s why I took a pull at myself. Don’t let’s talk about Donovan … You’ve had one too many, Peter.”
“No: let’s have this out. I owe a good deal to Donovan—and I’d be a fairly nasty sort of rat, wouldn’t I, if I swallowed every tale about him that was going around? But still, don’t think he has me in his pocket. He hasn’t. I can stand off and see him as he is.”
“You can?”
“Well, d’you think I could have spent nearly a year in my present job without realizing what being a politician means? I’m not such a sucker as you think I am, Monty. But these stories about rackets—I got fed up with them in the Army. Stories that if you traced them back never went much farther than the latrine.”
“Like the one about Mount Clutha,” Seyler put in quietly.
Peter looked at him sharply.
“Is that bobbing up again?”
“Aha!” said Seyler with a grin. “You know the Chinese proverb, Peter: ‘There’s no spot so dark as at the bottom of a lighthouse’?”
“What d’you mean by that?”
“Never mind, old boy. You feel you owe Donovan something—well, pay it by sticking to him. I can look at the big swashbuckler with a cool eye because I don’t live in his shadow.”
“No more do I. Damn it all, haven’t I told you I was cutting clear from him, from the whole set-up? But all these yarns about him being in mining rackets with the Hegartys—take it from me, Monty, they’re just the slush of young smart-alec journalists who hang about the corridors. There’s not a word of truth in them—not a word. Whatever you can say about Donovan, he doesn’t care two hoots about money. At the races he’d rather win a quid on a horse he picked himself than a hundred on someone else’s tip. Funny that these fellows who’re so ready to open their mouths wide won’t take the risk of putting their charges on paper.”
“Here’s one that will,” said Seyler lightly.
“Gammon, Monty.”
“No; look for the complete story of Mount Clutha in my little rag during the next few months. Told objectively, with all the documents available … But don’t let us argue about it now. I respect your loyalty, Peter, but not always your knowledge of the kind of world you move in … Come along to the concert at the Town Hall.”
He drained off the last of his beer and lit a cigarette, turning towards the door. Peter hesitated a moment or two before following him. He was feeling a sharp conflict of loyalties, and Seyler did not seem inclined to make concessions. That assurance of his, that unwillingness to allow any gap between his beliefs and his actions … In his dark beret and untidy tunic he looked an insignificant figure, but there was something in the way his large head was set on his shoulders that made people half turn and look at him in the street. It had been the same, Peter remembered, when he was a student. They had begun by laughing at his chunky figure in sandshoes, at his incomprehensible verse, at the kind of questions he asked; but they had ended by gathering around him whenever he opened his mouth and by taking all he said for gospel.
“What used to interest me in men,” he was saying, “was their ideas. Now it’s the character behind them. Living with a crowd in a prison camp you don’t take much account of the opinions other fellows fling at you, but their little daily actions matter a hell of a lot. And you can’t help speculating about them. What makes this one a squirt, grabbing at anything that’ll help to prolong his miserable life, and that one a man of spunk, ready to give his last few grains of rice to a sick mate? It’s not any belief they hold or the way they’ve been brought up that accounts for the difference.”
Donovan, Mahony was thinking. Why the devil should I defend Donovan. An all-protective father. Time I drove that notion out of people’s minds, out of my own.
“I remember when I was on a working party in the first days at Changi,” Seyler went on. “We had a Korean guard. Quiet fellow, easygoing, had picked up a bit of English somewhere and listened to our barrack with a sort of amused detachment. Coming back from the docks one afternoon he let us stop at a bit of green to kick a football about. The bashing he got from the Nips afterwards was murderous. Enough to make a mush of his spine. Next day, though, he stopped at the same patch and suggested with a twinkle that we have another game. Quite ready, poor coot, to take another bashing. Almost asking for it. What put that core of courage and goodwill into him? It’s the sort of question I’ve been asking myself about human beings for years. It’s the only one I’m really interested in now.”
They had come to the door of the hall, which was closed till the first item had finished. A few latecomers waited on the steps and in the portico, among them a dapper elderly man in a light overcoat, whom Peter recognized as the stranger Sheila had been talking to when he came in that afternoon. With him was a woman in black with a silver-spangled head-covering.
He knew her at once: it was the woman who had approached him the day before seeking an interview with Donovan. But why had her face remained so vividly in his mind, coming back to him in odd moments, touching a nerve of memory? The slightly snub nose, childlike blue eyes, wide, rather sensuous mouth whose smile radiated warmth and generosity. She turned her head in response to some remark of her companion’s, and suddenly it was as if the whole scene had changed and he was standing, a youngster of five or six, by his mother’s dressing-table, looking at a photograph in a silver frame while she brushed her hair.
Chapter VII
Brentford? Sheila Donovan was thinking as she spun along with her father through the outer suburbs to join the main road to the west. Why does he want me to take him there? Peter would have driven him; it would have been the natural thing to have asked Peter. Is it just an excuse to get me alone and have it out with me?
She braced herself for the coming conflict. There was a nervous tension in her that made her ready to project herself into a dramatic scene for relief: she had always drawn an inner nourishment from such scenes, especially those with her father. It was as if he were the only person who could bring out her full emotional powers.
He had said practically nothing to her since the night, nearly a week before, when she had casually broken the news at dinner that she was planning to get back to the American forces and that it seemed likely she would succeed. He had sat silent, wrapped up in himself, almost as if the announcement had not penetrated him. It had been her mother who had fussed and protested, now growing indignant, now a little hysterical, now relapsing into spells of wounded silence. In return, she herself had been flippant and unrelenting. She was aware of the stone she had flung spreading its ripples through the quiet backwater of the family life; of the McCoy women and Adela Hegarty discussing it and all its implications, of fluttering conversations over the phone, secret meetings between her mother and her aunts, the whole question of her relations with Michael being dragged out and pawed over.
“There’s no doubt about her motives; it’s simply a case of possession … He never had any serious intentions; anyone could see that … That girl’s quite ruthless and knows she can push Macy to the limit; he’s never given her a decent spanking in his life.”
And perhaps there would be a dry comment from Aunt Judy, who had always looked upon her with an unloving eye: Anyway, Sheila’s at last taking an interest in someone other than herself—that’s a development.
Once they had been titillated by the idea of her marrying an American; now they seemed to think she was letting the whole family down. But the only opposition she really took into account was her father’s. There was something ominous in the way he avoided the issue between them now, making jaunty remarks about her driving, about the way she cut in ahead of other cars on the road, about the horses he had intended to back at Eagle Farm that afternoon; and then throwing the stump of his cigar out of the window and settling down to a brooding self-absorption, his big body heavy with somnolent power. She felt her own body draw in upon itself defensively. But she did not really care, now all her thoughts and impulses were moving in the one direction, how even her father was affected by her going. And she could meet any pressure he brought to bear on her with a will as inflexible as his own.
Ragged suburban allotments, with iron-roofed houses standing high on spindly piles, changed to open paddocks, to fields of stubble, to forest country where the road climbed through cuttings of whitish clay, the thick growth of saplings opening up now and then to give glimpses of the dun river-country below—country where the feeding cattle showed as dark spots in the tall bleached grass and an occasional homestead roof twinkled like a fragment of glass caught by the morning sun. Sometimes the screech of a sawmill rose above the car’s dull purring, and they flashed through a little township where a dozen dusty trucks were parked in front of the single pub, where women with shopping-baskets gathered at the store and post-office, and a splash of red announced a filling-station. They had left the bitumen, but the road had the solid surface of one built in other days to take military transport.
Surprised by the ease and assurance with which the girl swung round the hairpin bends, Donovan emerged from his doze to say curiously, “Seems you know this road pretty well, Sheila. You didn’t tell me.”
“Didn’t I? But how could you expect me to tell you all the roads I’ve been over.”
“Driving brass-hats about in wartime, eh?”
“There was a landing-ground and air-force camp at Brentford. I must have done the journey at least a dozen times. They’ve a Boys’ Home there now, haven’t they?”
“I suppose you’d call it that.”
She began to talk jerkily of other things, for she had been sunk deep in one particular memory, and it almost seemed as if her father, with his abrupt questions, had divined it and was intent on bringing it out into daylight. It had been the sight of a low-roofed pub a few miles back, of a windmill and an orange orchard filled with weeds, that had set her dreaming … Those orange-trees with their spiky branches … His arm around me when I slipped on the long grass … The light shining out as we struggled through the wires.
She was back in the emotions of that evening fifteen months before when she had started out with Michael from Brentford in the dropping dusk. Had he really wanted to get back to town so urgently, or had he known all along what would happen, as he sat beside her in the front seat, laughing at the rabbits that squatted transfixed in the car’s glare ahead of them, covering her shoulders with his heavy greatcoat when she shivered, slipping easily into intimacies about his home life in Minnesota, finally going off into a doze with his arm behind her and his head on her shoulder? Then, when the crash came, his lazy aplomb, taking it all as a joke, making plans to camp in the crippled car, remembering suddenly that there was an old pub not far along the road where they could find lodging for what remained of the night and root out some garage-man at daybreak.
