The Pyramid Read online

  If anything, getting my halberd down the stairs took longer than getting it up. For every member of the cast, while willing to be urged a little nearer the magic square on which we were performing the King of Hearts was mercilessly determined not to be thrust one inch further away from it, towards the cold night air. I got down at last and stood outside the Town Hall, wondering what to do. I leaned my halberd against a pillar and ran to the Crown, but Evelyn was not where I had left him. I poked my head and hat through into the saloon bar.

  “Have you seen Mr. De Tracy anywhere, Mrs. Miniver?”

  “He’s gone out.”

  “Will he be back?”

  “He’d better. He still owes for his drinks. Theatricals! I know them.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “One of the beer houses I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “I must find him!”

  “What d’you want him for, young Oliver? An old—”

  “It’s about the play. Something’s gone wrong!”

  “Oh I see. Well. Try the Running Horse where the stable lads go. And tell him I want the money for those drinks!”

  “Right!”

  “Because if he goes off on that last bus without paying—”

  “Right!”

  I fled down the High Street towards the Old Bridge. The Running Horse was almost empty but Mr. De Tracy was in the snug. He was leaning on the corner bar with his back and one elbow on it. When I burst in, he took one look at me and then started to shake from the knees up.

  “Evelyn! What shall I do?”

  It was remarkable how he could keep that pale, smiling, unchanged face while everything below his waist was writhing and shivering.

  “Evelyn! My halberd. Where the stairs joins the passage at the back. I can’t get it up!”

  The shaking enveloped him and tumbled the gentle words into the room.

  “He couldn’t get his halberd up the back passage. They’ll never believe it.”

  “What shall I do?”

  “You’ll have to enter from in front, then, won’t you?”

  This brought on a paroxysm of shaking; and at the very top of him his tiny tuft of plastered-down hair suddenly broke loose and stood straight up, like a horn.

  “But they’ll see me!”

  Evelyn did nothing but shake. His elbow slipped off the desk and he got it back on again. I ran out of the Running Horse, thudded up the High Street. I got my halberd from the pillar and went to the main entrance of the Town Hall. I managed to get my halberd through the doors into the dark auditorium without much noise, and stole along the lefthand side of the audience to the green baize beyond the piano. I lifted the bottom carefully, and sensibly, with the blade of my halberd then thrust the shaft after it. Almost immediately I encountered a slight resistance which ceased after a thump! so I crept headfirst under the baize, pushing my halberd in front of me. Inside the curtain there was a small light switched on, an upturned campchair, and a copy of the King of Hearts with a lot of blue pencil markings on it. I got my feet under me and knelt up. This side of the stage allowed a very narrow passage between the flats and the wall; and at the end of it was the locked door—or part of the locked door into the mayor’s parlour. Looking that way I understood why the resistance to my halberd had never entirely ceased and why, after the first thump, it had seemed to acquire a feeble life of its own, jerking and shaking against my grip and my thrust. A young man lay at the other end of the dark passage, backed against the parlour door, his head and shoulders hard against it, both hands grasping the blade of my weapon an inch or two away from his chest. He was very unreasonable and when I tried to get the halberd away from him he wrestled with it again, mouthing at me.

  “But,” sang the gnat voice of Mr. Claymore, “stay, your Royal Highness. We are not alone!”

  I was late after all and jerked the halberd away from the young man who most unfortunately let go of it at the same time. I was thankful not to fall backwards on to the stage and glad that only a few feet of halberd butt had inadvertently projected into the light. I turned round therefore between two flats, took a stride and drew myself up. I was facing Imogen and could not see Mr. Claymore anywhere. Looking round for him, I found him in front of me, but bent down as if he were inspecting the buckles on my shoes. Imogen flung out an arm and her eyes blazed at me.

  “Leave us!”

  I was so confounded by her anger, and cowed by the gesture that I slunk away off stage, my ears burning. I did not even hear what the audience were doing. I stood my halberd against the wall behind the cyclorama cursing myself for having forgotten to salute.

  The music began.

  I found that my heart had not fallen as far as it normally would when I contemplated one of Imogen’s perfections. It was as if Evelyn stood by my side. It was as if he still held his hand on my shoulder. The sweat dried on me. She had walked indifferently into a country to which I had access, of which indeed, I was native. In that landscape where notes of music, and all sounds were visible, coloured things, she trod with ignorant, ungainly feet. It was not just that she could not sing. It was that she was indifferent to the fact that she could not sing; and yet had gone, consenting to this public exhibition. She was so out of tune that the line of the song that should have been spiky as a range of mountains was worn down like a line of chalk hills. I listened, with Evelyn’s absent hand on my shoulder and through the sound of the Great Duet—gnat now allied to drone—I heard his voice.

  A stupid, insensitive, vain woman.

  They were two people whose ignorance and vanity made them suitable to, acceptable to no one but each other. It was a spyhole into them, and ugly balm to my soul. I listened; and I was free. I pushed my way against the tide down the stairs again and ran to find the man to whom I now owed so much. But he was not in the Running Horse or in any of the four other pubs on that side of the High Street. I came back towards the Town Hall, thinking that of course, he must be round in front, waiting for the final curtain.

  But I was wrong for he was in the Square. I saw him from a long way away because he was almost under one of the sodium lights. He was holding the sharp points of the iron railing with both hands and hanging down from them. His spidery legs were folded, therefore; and as if the life of vibration and quiver was in them only, they still moved. His face, in profile against the railings, had not changed, was still pale, still wore its gentle smile. His legs were going for little tentative walks all by themselves, then coming back again as if they had realized they had left someone behind.

  I had seen this particular phenomenon in the quad at Oxford often enough to realize what had happened. Clearly he was not going to be present at the final curtain. There was only one thing to do.

  “Come on, Evelyn!”

  He neither recognized me nor noticed me. I got hold of him round the shoulders and lifted him up. All his energy now seemed concentrated in his hands and I had to prise them away from the spearheaded railings. I half led, half carried him down the High Street; and there was the Barchester bus, the last one, waiting emptily.

  The conductor did not much like the look of us, costumed as we were.

  “’As ’e been sick?”

  “He won’t be sick,” I said, laughing, “not Mr. De Tracy—will you, Evelyn?”

  Evelyn made no reply. I got him inside, for he was docile now, and weighed nothing. I sat him carefully and affectionately on the long seat just inside the door.

  “There you are!”

  As if he were some object suspended in water; or as if this was some action habitual to him and now inevitable, Evelyn moved both hands to his right cheek, drew his knees up towards his chin, and at the same time rotated to the right through ninety degrees. He lay there, curled close, his face, his smile, his spot balls quite unchanged, as if this way of looking at the world was as good as any other; and when the engine started, its movement made his body shudder as if this unusual view of Stilbourne was only the last in a whole series of private entertainments.


  The conductor was doubtful.

  “I don’t know as ’ow—”

  “He’ll be all right. By the time he gets to Barchester—”

  But it occurred to me as the conductor rang his bell that I had only assumed and did not know for certain that he wanted to go to Barchester. I ran after the bus, therefore, shouting:

  “Evelyn! Hey! Evelyn! You’re going to Barchester—”

  But the bus beat me, humping itself over the Old Bridge, and grinding up the road towards the woods. I turned back, wondering whether I should go home, get money and take it to Mrs. Miniver. However, the sight of lights going out in the Running Horse decided me that she would have to wait till next day; and if the money was an impoverishment to me, I could always get it back when I saw Evelyn again, or when he wrote to me. I went to the stairs at the back of the Town Hall therefore and found them deserted. I climbed them, to find the stage empty too, though a subdued sound of voices came from beyond the curtain. I applied my eye to a convenient hole and saw how the cast, stage hands, musicians and friends stood about, drinking coffee. They were in several groups that did not seem to have much interconnection; and I realized with relief that the SOS could not function again for at least three years. I opened the curtains and stepped down to receive my congratulations.

  STILBOURNE it said; but not as I had ever seen the name before. “Stilbourne” used to be traced in cracked and fading black on the signposts, which always leaned and sometimes pointed wholly in the wrong direction. Shrubby trees, elder, blackthorn or maple hid them, so that they only yielded their unneeded information to hedgers and ditchers. They decayed, waiting in the lanes for the stage coaches that would never come.

  This STILBOURNE could be read at a distance of half-a-mile. It stood by the motor road, white letters on blue; and I saw immediately that Stilbourne was like anywhere else after all. Satellites must scan or photograph it, in their mathematical progress from Omnium to Barchester, a small huddle of houses by a minimal river—a place surprised by the motor road, as a ploughman and his horses might be by a helicopter. My hands turned the wheel of themselves, and without conscious intention I found myself gliding down the spur to all those years of my life. Sure enough, there was the Old Bridge, humpbacked and grey and uneconomic like so much beauty. No one had widened it or smoothed out the hump—and swinglike I lifted over it, then stopped my car with the curved ascent to the little Square before me. I examined my heart for emotion but found none. The determination never to return, lest I should find my heart wrung or broken by dead things, this I found replaced by a no more than mild curiosity. I was wary perhaps, and willing to run away, if nostalgia became so sharp, so raw as to be unbearable, but the glass windows of my car made a picture postcard of the place. I could roll through it, detached, defended by steel, rubber, leather, glass.

  Yet not all the High Street was the same. The right hand side, almost from the Old Bridge to the Square had been swallowed by concrete, plateglass, chrome. It was Henry, of course. The lettering stretched up the street, Williams’s Garage, Williams’s Showrooms, Williams’s Farm Machinery; and there, on the park which now lapped against the river, were examples of those objects by which Henry had changed us, haybalers and combines, tractors, hedgecutters in vivid orange or blue so that it was obvious how he prospered. Huge concrete pipes lay by the river, presently to swallow it, so that Henry would then face about and front on the motor road. I moved forward and pulled on the concrete apron by the pumps; and what Mark and Sophy have elected to call a “Petrol Lady” came towards me. She was plump and blonde, wore a white overall with “Williams’s Garage” embroidered over the left breast.

  “Is Mr. Williams about?”

  She replied that young Mr. Williams was up in London but that old Mr. Williams might be in the office. So I got out of my car; and immediately my feet touched the concrete, I felt them become adolescent, with nowhere to go or hide. I recognized immediately that this visit was a mistake; but before I could return to the security of leather and steel and glass, I heard his voice behind me.

  “Master Oliver!”

  He held my hand warmly, firmly, and for a long time; not shaking it, but moving it gently up and down, as if we were communing on the sadness of things in general. I had time to notice how little his thin face had changed—tanned, perhaps, by winter Egypt or Marrakesh—so sad it was, round the sad brown eyes that seemed always on the point of overflowing. Only his hair was different. It was snow-white.

  “My dear Henry. You go from strength to strength.”

  “We do what we can.”

  “And the cars you’re selling! Nothing but the best.”

  “Well now, Sir, if you’d like to change?”

  But he had seen my car, past my shoulder. He let go my hand.

  “Well, now then!”

  There it was, confirming what was always indefinably audible in the run and juggle of his syllables, the almost parody Welshness of him, like a runnel clucking on the side of a mountain.

  “I can see why not, with a car of that superior description—well now!”

  My feet grew up a little. It was the first time in my life I was ever conscious of impressing Henry. His attitude was typical of the deep thing lying in him, the reason for it all, tarmac, glass, concrete, machinery, the thrust not liked or enjoyed but recognized as inevitable, the god without mercy. There was a tiny adjustment in his attitude. He was deferring to achievement without knowing precisely what it was; and I, my feet now firmly under control, was accepting this deference. I went with him to be shown round, contemptuous of the way in which our social antennae had vibrated; and it was only in the oldest part of the building, that I stopped before something that felt familiar even before I had worked out why. Here there were palms now, and potplants and soft lights, and among them, a turntable. On the turntable, brass radiator gleaming, coach lamps gleaming, old fuddy-duddy wheels newly tyred, hood folded back, was a vintage two-seater. It revolved with a crazy dignity like a dowager, presenting me now the offside, and now the radiator with the number plate below it.

  I cried out.

  “Bounce!”

  “She let us buy it when she knew she was not going to use it any more. You can imagine we did not feel we could quibble over the price.”

  “She’s dead, then.”

  “Miss Dawlish passed on—oh nearly three years ago. She lies where she would have wished, within earshot of the organ. Dear, good lady!”

  I had no more than half an ear for him. Nor was I examining the two-seater closely, though I seemed to. I was busy examining myself. These feelings, these emotions that seemed suddenly to expand in a luxury more suitable to the palms, the potplants—

  “She lies on the south side of the church, near the transept. We felt some tribute, some—memorial was appropriate. You can’t miss it.”

  “So Bounce is dead!”

  “You were always devoted to her, weren’t you? I remember, indeed! You’ll want to pay your respects.”

  I turned away from her car and looked at Henry. His eyes, as ever, were impenetrable in their frankness. You could never see round or through Henry. I felt myself, of all things, begin to blush as if I were a child again. I felt the power of his adult command.

  “Yes,” I mumbled. “Of course. Yes.”

  *

  I took my obedient feet away from him and marched up the curved High Street to the Square. There was much new paint. They had washed the pillars of the Town Hall and painted the balcony glossy white. The grass in the centre of the Square, between the Town Hall and the church, was being cut noisily by one of Henry’s machines so that half was disciplined, and the other half a diminishing oblong of mutinous daisies. The old chainrails round the grass had gone for scrap, and the posts with them. The old railings in front of each house had gone, too, but left their stumps in the stone. The familiar houses, bulged, leaned or slumped slightly out of true, had turned all Chelsea, with eggshell blue and one door of vivid yellow. I
thought, critically, but without much feeling, that Stilbourne had been prettied, like some senile old lady, made presentable for visitors. Between the grass and the houses, the glittering cars were parked with their bonnets at the verge, like cows at a drinking trough. My father’s cottage leaned against the doctor’s house, not like a place for living, but as a visible piece of country quaintness, photogenic and sterile. The chintz which flapped lazily in my bedroom window had nothing to do with me. Only the church remained the same, in its stark greyness. Someone was practising the organ; and this sound, combined with the chatter of Henry’s machine, reminded me of what I had come to see. I opened the lych gate and walked over the clipped grass between grey tombstones. I found Henry’s tribute easily, since it was white marble, no expense spared.

  *

  The first impression it gave, was one of sheer weight. There was a rectangular surround filled with white chips, and among the chips, a glass container of immortelles. At the head, was at least a ton of marble rhomboid; and, finest touch of all, this rhomboid had been carved with such a naturalistic representation of a harp, one might have thought the marble strings were vibrating in sympathy with the organ.

  I looked round, wondering what I was supposed to do. One should know the appropriate formula. Was I supposed to be praying? How did one show respect? How do you show respect to clipped grass, chipped marble, the sound of an organ? The truth was, I was feeling glad to be alive and a little compunctious at my gladness. I sat on a more modest tombstone, my legs apart, and stared at the inscription below the harp, as if concentration on her name would take the place of a more knowledgeable ritual.