The Pyramid Page 16

  Bounce bent her head and looked sideways, smiling. She clapped her kid gloves together.

  “Why, Mr.—”

  “Henry, Miss.”

  “You have a very good light tenor!”

  “Thank you Miss,” said Henry. “That’s a great compliment coming from a real musician like you. I’ll tell them that in Barchester and then they’ll have to let me in the choir. Indeed now, what would life be without music?”

  “Music,” said Bounce. “Ah—”

  This “Ah—” was not one of Mr. Dawlish’s rook caws but softer; and she added a sentence to it which sounded as if we were not in a car, but in church.

  “My father always says, ‘Heaven is music.’”

  Henry nodded his peaked cap vigorously.

  “You know the story about Dai Evans, Miss? When he went to ’eaven, it was a choir. There was fifty thousand sopranos, fifty thousand contraltos, fifty thousand basses, and only Dai Evans to sing tenor. They starts off with the ‘alleluia chorus’, and the conductor taps on the desk to stop them and says, ‘One moment before we go on. Just a little less tenor, Dai, if you please!’”

  This story affected Bounce much as Henry’s first question had affected us. She shook, and cawed, and put up a kid glove to pat the hair at the back of her head. But when she was still again, I saw that Henry had begun to shake too, with suppressed coughs, tuss, tuss, tuss.

  “I’m sorry, Miss,” he said when he stopped coughing. “It’s a touch of the old gas I expect. Now I tell you what Miss. It’s my ’alf day. So you give me what it’ll cost you in the bus—to pay for the petrol, like—and I’ll run you back with the kiddies to Stilbourne when you’ve finished in Barchester.”

  This ended our silence in the back seat; for we all clamoured that she should accept. She did so, laughing, on our behalf and we rolled through the suburbs of Barchester to the hired room at the Golden Ball.

  This first examination was to affect my relationship with Bounce for ever after. For when at last I played my ludicrous bit of Bach—da diddy da, da diddy da—I burst into tears of abject misery at the appalling sounds I made. Snivelling, then, I played a scale, putting my fingers on the shining places that would keep the notes in tune, however harsh. Yowling, I identified intervals with a kind of absent-minded certainty. Indeed, I told the examiner what note he played first, before he had sounded any interval at all, because I was so anxious to get the whole thing over.

  “There’s nothing to cry about,” he said. “And by the way, I think you may have Absolute Pitch.”

  So out I went, sniffing; and by the time I had dried up, we were ready to embark again.

  This time, Henry talked about cars.

  “You ought to ’ave a little car of your own, Miss. The ladies quite often drive them now.”

  Absorbed as we were in the pleasures of travel—and I in my modest pride at being the only examinee to cause a commotion—it was only when we were over the Old Bridge and rolling up the High Street to the Square that I paid attention to what the young man was saying.

  “Indeed, it’s no trouble at all, Miss. I’ll keep my eyes open and let you know when there’s a bargain. And I could teach you to drive in a jiffy, Miss. It would be a pleasure, Miss.”

  We rolled to a stop by the railing in front of the bow window. Henry hurried round, tussing slightly, to let Bounce out. She looked us over.

  “Millie. You have a long way to walk. You can come in and have a glass of milk and a biscuit. Mr.—”

  “Henry, Miss.”

  “You’ve been most kind. You must have a cup of tea before you drive back to Barchester.”

  I hurried across the grass to my father’s cottage, not looking back, so I cannot tell if Henry accepted or not. But when I told my parents I had been the only one to cry, they decided I was too highly strung for music examinations, even though I should not, therefore, obtain any certificates. I must, they decreed, learn music for my future pleasure, however eccentric this course might be; since it was clearly impossible for me to stop having music lessons altogether. The result was that a little of the strain went out of my visits to Bounce. She could not be expected to treat them seriously when they had no proper endpoint. She slept more often and longer. When she was not sleeping, she would talk, sometimes for as much as ten musicless minutes. I always nodded and agreed, for some reason. I could not disagree with her—could not. This obsequious agreement became a sort of straitwaistcoat.

  Henry Williams reappeared while we were still in high summer. He turned up by the railings in a two seater with a tall fabric hood and took Bounce away in it. A week, and several driving lessons later, when I went with my violin—jumping the chains round the shaven grass, the evening sparrow’s egg blue over the rosy roofs—the two seater stood on the cobbles with Henry beside it submissively. Mr. Dawlish lunged out of the front door, and tore open the iron gate, his white hair flying.

  “A sheer waste of money!”

  I stood there with my violin case, looking up. Mr. Dawlish turned, ten yards along the pavement, and shouted at the bow window as if it were a person.

  “You’ve got your music haven’t you?”

  Bounce came out.

  “Go inside, Oliver, and start playing.”

  Presently she came in after me, breathing heavily.

  I should have to guess much more about Bounce and old Mr. Dawlish and Henry, were it not for the astonishing delicacy of my mother’s perceptions. Like all the women in our Square she was a habitual detective. They, the women, were not satisfied with the railed-off enclosure before each house, nor with the spring-locked doors. They curtained the windows impenetrably. Standing back about a yard inside these curtains, they sent out what I should now call a kind of radar emission which was reflected from each other’s business. A curious element appears in this; that to a certain extent the emission was capable of piercing a curtain, so that to a woman, each family was dimly visible, while each thought itself protected. The men had greater freedom, but clumsier, blunter perceptions. Nevertheless, they could bring back evidence of value to the trained intelligence inside. Each meal, therefore, was a kind of cross-examination which might allow a picture to be built up. My frail little mother, then, might stand behind our muslin curtains for half an hour, watching to find what a new hat, a meeting, a gesture, an expression even, could reveal.

  “There goes the Eliott girl. She’ll be going to meet young Thomas down at the bridge because her mother’s still in hospital.”

  My mother had a secret weapon as well as radar. She had me. Not only did I penetrate Bounce’s house twice a week, I was used over an even wider area. It was natural enough that I should help sometimes by taking bottles of medicine or packets of pills to one house or another. I never realized how deep my mother’s interest was in whatever information could be extracted from me on my return. I was a kind of interplanetary probe, as ignorant of my mission as the machine itself must be. I remember in the days when Henry was teaching Bounce to drive, how I took a package to the house next to hers—Wertwhistle, Wertwhistle and Wertwhistle, Solicitors, whatever that might be. I went into a passage with nobody about; and while I was wondering where to go, a deep voice roared at me.

  “Come in!”

  I opened a door on a veiny-faced old gentleman who sat behind a table loaded with dusty papers.

  “Well? What d’you want? Getting married? Making your will?”

  I held out the packet.

  “It’s for my bloody son. No. I’ll take it. Here.”

  He fished in his pocket and threw two pennies on the desk. However, I knew I was not a Poor Boy. I backed away, shaking my head, and shut the door. My mother was pleased with me for refusing the pennies and gave me a threepenny-bit for myself. Encouraged by this, I whispered that Mr. Wertwhistle had used a very bad word; and she nodded as if she knew he would, and why. Then there was a large house at the end of the side in which Bounce lived which had no other occupants than two ladies. There was a mystery about t
hem that defied radar. When they had been dead for half a generation, I asked my mother about them but she would say very little.

  “They behaved very strangely. Very strangely indeed.”

  I went to that house once. As if she had been waiting for me, the younger lady met me on the doorstep, pulling the door shut behind her.

  “Tell your mother, Oliver,” she said stonily, “that this is number seven, not number eleven.”

  I suppose that was game, set and match. And ruefully I remember how the Ewans always gave me a present at Christmas. They also vibrated in time to the crystal pyramid.

  It is not surprising then, that my mother was interested in Bounce. I had described to her the angled stairs, the long corridor and empty rooms. At table she would sometimes embark on a monologue which was accompanied every now and then by my father’s noncommittal grunts.

  “Living by herself in that great house—”

  Great house? This only confirmed what I had found recur in dreams—Bounce existing in a dark emptiness, a house empty of life except for the grinning piano. Mr. Dawlish himself lived over his shop, perhaps because he didn’t like the house, or didn’t like the sound of music lessons, or simply thought his daughter ought to be emancipated.

  “She ought to let part of the house,” said my mother. “I don’t think a woman ought to live by herself like that. And the money—”

  “Come now, Mother,” said my father. “Dawlish has a considerable property. Very considerable. He’s all right.”

  Once, Henry arrived with the car while we were at table. My mother jumped up as soon as she heard the horn and peered through the curtains.

  “Another lesson,” she said. “That’s the third this week.”

  My father wiped his grey moustache and bent ponderously over his soup again.

  “That’ll cost her a pretty penny.”

  “Nonsense,” said my mother testily, “she’s not paying him anything.”

  “Really?” said my father. “Well that’s really kind. If everybody—”

  “Kind?” cried my mother—with the sort of passionate contempt she kept for people not fitted with radar—“Kind? It’s a sprat to catch a mackerel!”

  Soon after this I saw the first time Bounce ever had the car to herself. It was one teatime. Bounce and Henry had returned to the house and then he had taken himself off to return to Barchester by bus. Bounce went indoors, leaving the car on the cobbles. We stood behind the curtains. Here and there round the Square, you could see how other people’s curtains quivered, or were even drawn aside a little. Bounce came out again, got into the car, made motions with her arms and the car began to tremble. A dense cloud of smoke formed behind it and the noise of the engine lifted to a scream. The car jerked forward two yards and stopped dead. Bounce climbed out and went into the house; and next morning Henry was back, lying on the cobbles in his shiny blue suit, his peaked cap hanging on the radiator. But the next time I went for a lesson, I had to wait as much as ten times sixty, until Bounce rolled up on the cobbles, then bounced into the room, mannishly gruff and very excited.

  “I’ve been right round the downs—oh almost as far as Devizes—by myself, Oliver! Think of that! It’s quite easy really!”

  She was making quick movements here and there, hands up. She exclaimed how kind Henry had been.

  “And all in his own time! Do you know, Oliver, I can’t get him to take a penny? He said it didn’t cost him anything—”

  I explained gravely, not only with a wish to agree, but also to use a new phrase that had delighted me, that he was “Using a sprat to catch a mackerel.” Bounce stood very still, went very quiet. She began to cross-question me more and more fiercely until she was very angry indeed. I could not think what I had done wrong; and when at last she sent me off things were no better at home for my account of the meeting made my mother even more angry than Bounce. I never understood their two angers and it remained one of the unforeseeable perils of interplanetary travel.

  It was at this time that I noticed something in Bounce’s face that I was to watch intensify. I suppose an anatomist would define it as unusually powerful sphincter muscles round the mouth. If she was being severe, or condemning something, her mouth would contract so that her lips were first bunched then pulled in. For an inch around them lines would appear, all leading to the centre. Year by year these lines of the sphincter deepened until they were permanently visible whether she was angry or not. If she was angry, the lines deepened into corrugations, and her mouth was like an implosion.

  No sooner had Bounce learned to drive than her father lunged finally out of our ken and was buried in the church-yard near the lych gate. I remember how soon after I had heard this I crossed the Square for a lesson and found Bounce’s house deserted. I was nervous of the dark hall, so I let myself into the music room with its shadows and massive shapes and dim keyboard grin. The fire was smouldering redly and I went near it for company. A click from the dying coal made my hair prickle and if there had been any light in the hall I would have fled. But I stayed where I was and presently I could make out the shapes of things. In particular there was a shape on the mantelpiece over the fire in which the face became clear to me, bit by bit; and at last I could see that it was Beethoven, with floating, bronze hair, compressed lips, and deep eyes that bored furiously into the tail of the piano. He was so clearly of the same sort as Bounce and her father, that he seemed to accuse me. While I was meditating this the carriage lights of Bounce’s car swept over the window. She came into the hall, paused, then opened the music room door. She went to light the gas and I moved forward in relief, knocking my violin case against the piano as I did so. She cried out, then whipped round—and there she was, staring at me under the gaslight out of eyes so wide there seemed to be no lids to them. She put one hand to her chest and sank on the organ seat.

  “You must never, never come into the music room unless I call you in!”

  I said I was sorry, humbly enough, and did not mind her anger much this time, what with the light and company; and presently we had our lesson. That same week, Henry Williams moved to Stilbourne. I cannot remember the exact occasion. It was merely the start of a new phase, in which we became aware of him as part of the scenery. At the top of the curved High Street, where it joined our Square by the Town Hall, was the smithy, separated from Bounce’s house by a little lane. A few yards down the lane was a gateway which led into the yard behind the forge. At the back end of the yard was a sort of cowshed with a loft. Henry lived in the loft as if he were a pigeon. Sometimes he helped the blacksmith, sometimes he cleaned Dr. Ewan’s car, or pumped up its tyres with a foot pump. When the market was held under the little Town Hall, Henry would be there among the stalls, helping generally, and generally available. Bounce parked her car in the yard; or rather Henry parked it there for her, since the lane was not ample enough for her manoeuvres. Henry serviced her car too, and cleaned it as if it were the crown jewels, so that it winked and shone. Half-consciously, I thought of Henry as belonging to Bounce because she treated him like that. She would stand in the yard between a heap of rusting iron and a tangle of nettles and talk loudly about the car as he cleaned it—talk gruffly from two yards away, but at the same time kindly, jovially, as if the car were a living thing and she was stroking it. Henry would work submissively and nod, until Bounce turned abruptly and bounced back to her house.

  I could not understand my mother’s pitying amusement. Why should not Miss Dawlish be devoted to her car? I should have been just as devoted in her place. But—and this was impossible to understand at all—my mother did not seem to like Henry. I on the other hand liked him very much and ultimately felt this to be another of my deficiencies. He would talk to me as I watched him, in his lilting voice, and he treated me with courteous respect. If he met me when he came to the dispensary for cough mixture, he always called me “Master Oliver”, tussing slightly.