The Oracles Read online

  He put the tray down and glanced at a magazine which lay beside her knitting, open at the headline: WHAT THE STARS FORETELL FOR YOU THIS WEEK.

  How can she? he wondered, and lost no time in looking to see what the stars foretold for him that week. What nonsense! He would have consulted the stars for Bobbins had she not come in, whereupon he moved hastily away and turned on the sink tap.

  Her eyes were blazing. She had been looking up ‘provincial’ in the dictionary.

  ‘I know I’m rustic and narrow,’ she said, ‘but I don’t like to see a man washing up. I think it’s a woman’s work. I daresay it’s different in London. Will you go and clear the lounge, if I may be allowed to call it that?’

  He shrugged his shoulders and obeyed her. Presently a great bumping of furniture was to be heard in that nameless room. A space approximate to the size of the stage had to be cleared.

  Christina whipped an apron over her dress and set swiftly to work on the washing up. Never in her life had anything so insulting been said to her.

  (1) Appertaining to the provinces. (2) Rustic, countrified, narrow, illiberal. (3) Something religious which could not possibly apply.

  Illiberal! When she had been an angel of patience all day. Narrow! What other woman in East Head would have put up with his behaviour last night? Rustic! Countrified! He had a hangover, he was in a filthy temper, and so he took it out of her. He was ashamed of being provincial, was he? So he made all this fuss about lounges, and in the circumstances, and listening to the Third Programme, and mooning round art galleries and going to get drunk with Martha Rawson! It was one thing to try to be a companion to him, but quite another to abet him in this kind of conceited nonsense.

  When she went into the hall the bumping had ceased. A voice in the lounge was dramatically snarling something about ‘the hell of Deveel’s Island!’ Dickie was rehearsing his part.

  She tidied some letters on the hall table and hoped that he would not make too many faces. It always embarrassed her to watch him act because he made such unnatural faces. Everybody said he was a splendid actor, but to her it was only Dickie making faces and pretending to be somebody else. She sometimes wondered if the wives of real actors felt like this. But real actors did not make faces or seem to be pretending.

  Dickie himself was quite certain that he could not act at all. He was only taking this part because nobody else was available, and the Lifeboat Fund was a good cause. And that, she reflected, was a nice thing about Dickie. He might have these exasperating ideas, but he was always obliging, and ready to take part in things, and very pleasant to everybody. Nobody could call him stuck up in his manners. Also he was unselfish. He had not wanted to act, and had hoped that they would let him look after the lighting. The switchboard in the Pavilion hall fascinated him. He would have loved to spend a whole evening manipulating the floats, the battens, the ambers, the blues and the spots.

  Ah, men! she thought, softened. Just babies really! He didn’t mean it. He was in a paddy. I’ll forgive him. But he’ll have to apologise quite a lot before I do.

  The front-door bell chimed and Dickie bounced out of the lounge. Upon the doorstep were assembled four people: Allie Newman; Mrs. Hughes, who had come to prompt; Mrs. Selby, the wife of the bank manager; and Mr. Prescott, the editor of the East Head Gazette. They all went chattering into the lounge. Something, said Mr. Prescott, had been struck after all. A tree up at Summersdown. The news had just come in.

  ‘Not that old tree in the field behind Swann’s?’ exclaimed Christina.

  Nobody seemed to know. She hoped not, for the poor little Swann children would miss it dreadfully. They had been so touching, with their ladder and that wobbly old chair. She was just upon the point of wondering what might have happened to the chair when the tree was struck, but Mrs. Hughes expressed a wish to go up and look at Bobbins, and the question was never posed.

  Dickie wandered round the room, offering cigarettes and smiling as hard as he could. He knew that they would not begin to rehearse for another twenty minutes. There was always this ritual of punctuality followed by an interval of aimless dawdling. Some mysterious canon of good manners imposed it. To be too prompt and businesslike would have been considered unsociable. It would be midnight, at this rate, before they all went away, and he wanted to make it up with Christina as soon as possible.

  He had thought about this while he was moving the furniture. There was nothing to be said, but possibly something to be done. As soon as he had got her to himself he would make love to her so manfully that she would be obliged to forget all about it. He had, perhaps, been careless lately. Last night he had left her to await him in vain, after promising an early return. That was enough to infuriate any woman. But he would make up for it. As soon as the door was shut upon the last of these bores, he would give her ample reassurance. Nor would she find him pathetic at all. He was looking forward to it. In fact he hardly knew how to wait.

  Now, at last, Mrs. Selby had actually mentioned the play and was complaining about a line in her part.

  ‘Do I say my little dot or my little doe? I’m supposed to be French, but they might think I was talking about an animal.’

  ‘Or pie crust,’ said Allie.

  ‘Not many people here will know what it means,’ said Mrs. Selby. ‘Couldn’t I alter it and say my little dowry?’

  Mr. Prescott looked solemn.

  ‘When I produce,’ he said, ‘I never allow the text to be altered. I think you’ll find it quite easy, Mrs. Selby, when you’ve got into the skin of the part.’

  Getting into the skin of a part was Mr. Prescott’s hobby-horse. He was fanatically attached to the Drama. He began now to lay down the law about it and Dickie heard these well-known maxims with relief, since they heralded the end of the social overture. They were still going on when a ring at the door took him out into the hall, to admit a late arrival.

  This was Mr. White, a newcomer to the town, a clerk at the gas-works. He was very much pleased to be acting in the play because he was anxious to know more people. He was already apologising when Dickie opened the door:

  ‘I hope I’m not frightfully late. The Johndarm doesn’t come in till the end, so I thought they could begin, without waiting for me. My landlady wouldn’t give me an early supper.’

  He gazed with humble admiration at Dickie, who was so important a person in East Head. Dickie smiled his nice smile and explained that they had not begun yet.

  ‘You’re with Ma Cox in Exton Street, aren’t you? She’s a terror. Everybody has to go to her at first, till better digs turn up. You won’t be there long.’

  White’s anxiety was allayed. Going to awful Mrs. Cox had not, after all, been so very stupid. Everybody had done it. He was treading the appointed path in this new community, and he was pleased to hear Mr. Pattison call her Ma Cox. Not every man in his position would have done so, or talked the language of smaller fry as though he might have been through it all himself. No wonder everybody liked him!

  After showing the Johndarm into the lounge Dickie stood in the hall for a moment, fighting off depression. Ma Cox! I don’t generally call her that. I said it on purpose to cheer poor White up. What a good fellow I am! Saying the right thing to everybody. Mexico …

  A door opened upstairs. Christina and Mrs. Hughes were returning from their inspection of Bobbins.

  ‘I shouldn’t have allowed it,’ Christina was saying. ‘But I shan’t let it happen again.’

  ‘It doesn’t do,’ said Mrs. Hughes, ‘to try to order them about too much, you know, dear.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve been very tactful. Very nice about it. That strengthens my position. But I won’t have Dickie getting in with people like that.…’

  Dickie, aware that he was eavesdropping, bolted back into the lounge. He took his part and retired with it into a corner, pretending to learn it. Not tonight, not just yet, could he make it up with Christina. I shouldn’t have allowed it.… That strengthens my position.… His ardour had completely evaporated. />
  ‘What awful faces Dickie is making,’ whispered Mrs. Hughes to Christina, who sat beside her in the window-seat. ‘Look how he’s scowling!’

  ‘He always does in a play,’ replied Christina, and added with a giggle: ‘He’s getting into the skin of his part.’

  3

  WETHERBY’S Pavilion had put sixpence on the rates, and all citizens of substance had therefore a strong motive for regarding it as an amenity. To patronise the Pavilion Café, especially during the morning, had become a matter of principle.

  In the old days the morning rendezvous had been the Mandalay in Market Street. There a dark and stuffy labyrinth of small, low-ceilinged rooms, smelling strongly of coffee, and lit by rose-coloured lamps, had provided a background for the natural pattern of local society. Friends forgathered, lovers trysted, news was exchanged and plans were hatched, in twenty secluded corners. Much went on, and not all of it was laid bare immediately. The first news of pregnancies was whispered over these coffee tables, and so, in oblique murmurs, was the truth about fatal diseases. It was to the Mandalay that invalids and the bereaved first ventured, on the return of health or spirits. To be seen there, to be welcomed, was a signal of recovery.

  In that narcotic atmosphere there were more reconciliations than quarrels. Scandals were doubtless born and circulated, but, at certain tables where the kindest hearts presided, spiteful rumours were frequently contradicted, denounced and slain. For the Mandalay had its natural rulers, unelected and unappointed, as are the rulers in all truly free communities. What some thought mattered more than what others thought. This was as inevitable as the weather and there was as little appeal against it. Character was recognised and received deference.

  The Pavilion Café was less kind to human needs. Nobody could creep into it or hide in a corner. Nothing could be arranged in a whisper. All that went on was instantly revealed. Patrons seemed to lose identity and stature as soon as they came into that large, light place. Sitting uneasily round the steel tables, their shopping bags beside them, they looked disconcertingly like the women in a sketch which Wetherby had submitted when the plans for the Pavilion were first under dis-discussion. They had enjoyed a good laugh over this sketch, which substituted blank pink eggs for faces; but it had proved prophetic. The eager eyes, the sharp noses, the pugnacious chins, which had clustered round the Mandalay lamps, were all fused into a featureless uniformity by Wetherby’s great north window.

  Here there were no leaders. Everybody was as much reduced, diminished, dwarfed, drained of life, as everybody else. Only Martha Rawson, who always had a special table reserved for her, maintained a kind of individuality.

  Sunshine and shadow scudded over the dancing waves outside. It was a restless place, too lofty, too bare, too much exposed to distant prospects of sky and water. A perpetual shrill chatter washed through it, mingled with faint sea music, and the cries of gulls. The steel chairs were not as comfortable as the Mandalay wicker, nor was the coffee particularly good. Sometimes they felt a vague sense of loss as they sat there, hooting at one another. But they did not clearly understand what had been done to them.

  Alan Wetherby might be a brilliant architect, but he preferred his buildings to be empty. The intrusion of humanity was always, to him, a pity. He could never quite stomach the notion of worshippers in his cathedrals, audiences in his theatres, or families in his flats. He made no bones about his dislike for the human race; but it had, as yet, occurred to nobody that the designs of a misanthrope might exert a malign influence. Only the older women whispered occasionally that there had been more going on at the old Mandalay. They felt that the tide of life in this wonderful Pavilion of theirs was weak and aimless, compared with the strong, secret currents that they had known. A few heretics there were who asserted that the Pavilion did no good to the town. Nobody had actually gone so far as to say that it did harm, for nobody had taken Wetherby’s faceless citizens seriously.

  ‘There’s that man!’ said Martha to Don, soon after they had arrived at their table on Tuesday morning.

  ‘Take no notice,’ he advised. ‘We don’t want him coming over here.’

  ‘I should think not!’

  ‘He is coming, though.’

  ‘Intolerable! Nobody could have been more snubbing than I was when he rang up last night.’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s the type you can’t snub.’

  Archer’s appearance on Sunday night had taken them by surprise at a moment when they were already confused. They had not acted quickly enough. The party seemed to go better after his arrival. Everybody had begun to talk and laugh, at what they could not now remember. They felt that some great disaster had been averted. It was not until Monday morning that the truth dawned upon them. Don had been indisposed all day, and Martha’s headache had prevented her from going up to Summersdown for news of Conrad. In the sick, sober light of day they began to ask themselves why Archer had turned up like this and why, in disregard of all decency, he had insisted upon presiding at Conrad’s party.

  The answer was not hard to discover. He had not come, as they first conjectured, in search of Elizabeth. In spite of what had happened, he meant to reassert his claim on Conrad, and to become once more the sole vendor of Swanns. Two years ago he had doubtless believed himself to be indispensable, and had expected his former friend to collapse without his good offices. The Venice award, and other indications of a waxing reputation, had taught him his mistake. Conrad was a valuable asset. So he had come to oust the Rawsons, to rob them of the fruits of patronage, by some blackmailing measures best known to himself. Conrad’s absence must have been a severe blow to him and he should be sent about his business, if possible, before Conrad came back.

  They did their best to ignore his approach, but the unsnubbable creature came right up to their table, pulled out a chair, and sat down upon it.

  ‘I thought …’ began Martha.

  ‘Sorry to intrude,’ he said. ‘But I’m off at midday and I must see you before I go. They told me I’d find you here.’

  Martha looked at Don, mutely commanding him to do something. He avoided her eye. He was not a man of action. A waitress hurried up to take Archer’s order. The Rawson table always got prompt service.

  ‘This gentleman,’ stated Martha, ‘is not at my table.’

  ‘That’s all right, Gertie,’ said Archer. ‘I’ll order later.’

  Don was forced to assert himself. He rapped out:

  ‘We have nothing to say to you. Nothing at all.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that. However … I’ve something to say to you. This Apollo. It should have gone to Gressington this week. But now he’s gone away …’

  ‘We will see that it goes,’ interrupted Martha. ‘You needn’t trouble yourself about that, Mr.… Mr.… er … er …’

  ‘Archer’s the name. I think you know all about me. My point is this; it’s not going to Gressington. I went up there myself, yesterday afternoon, and had a look at it. It was in the shed all right … and I don’t think it should go.’

  ‘I fail to see what say you have in the matter,’ exclaimed Martha.

  ‘I’ve Swann’s authority. He wrote to me. You can read his letter. I think you’ll allow it gives me the right to decide.’

  ‘I very much doubt it, Mr. Archer. We are Mr. Swann’s most intimate friends, and he has complete confidence in us.’

  ‘Why do you think it shouldn’t go?’ asked Don.

  Martha frowned. He ought not to have asked that, as though Archer’s opinion merited any attention.

  ‘It’s no good,’ muttered Archer gloomily.

  ‘That may be a matter of opinion,’ she told him. ‘I don’t think that your disapprobation need prevent it from going to Gressington.’

  ‘You’d better read his letter to me.’

  ‘I think, perhaps, that might be as well.’

  ‘In that case, may I have my coffee?’

  Martha signalled to the waitress. Archer produced Conrad’s letter and blandly offered
it to Don, from whom Martha immediately snatched it.

  ‘Oh!’ she cried.

  This exclamation was wrung from her by the address at the top of the paper. She flushed angrily. Conrad might be a genius but he was no gentleman. She had maintained him, and his wretched family, for two years. She had bullied several people into buying his work. She had pushed him into entering for the Gressington competition. And what did he do? He stole her notepaper and wrote a treacherous letter upon it, a letter which demolished her right to be called his most intimate friend. Her own notepaper, she kept thinking as she read the letter, and not a word about herself from beginning to end!

  Archer sipped his coffee, over which he made a face. A good many people were covertly staring at him. Somebody who had been at the party recognised him. The story crept from table to table: this was the husband.

  ‘Conrad wasn’t … himself when he wrote this,’ cried Martha, slapping down the letter. ‘I shall take no notice of it.’

  ‘Do I read it?’ asked Don plaintively.

  She pushed it across the table and continued:

  ‘He would never have written it if he had been in his right mind. Therefore I think it gives you no authority. I shall personally see to it that the Apollo does go to Gressington.’

  ‘I can’t stop that, of course,’ said Archer. ‘But if he doesn’t turn up to speak for himself I shall do my best to see that it’s never exhibited over his name. I shall go there, if necessary. I know the people there. I know the adjudicators. I shall show them this letter and explain the circumstances.’