‘Yes, but he doesn’t. Naturally he thinks you’re offended.’
‘Didn’t you tell him I was busy?’
‘Of course. Oh, yes. Played up the popular literary man for all it was worth. So he said, of course you were too important nowadays to remember your old friends.’
‘Damn it,’ I said, ‘what a tactless devil you are, Lathom. You needn’t have hurt his feelings.’
‘No, but look here. Why not come down? It’ll please the old boy no end, and as neither of the women will be there, there won’t be any awkwardness. It’s a damned good opportunity for being civil to him without involving your wife.’
‘Civil is a good word for it,’ I objected. ‘I don’t know that it’s particularly civil to plant myself on the man like that, and make him feed me and so on, without notice, when he probably doesn’t want me. Just at the weekend, too, when it’s difficult to get extra supplies.’
‘Oh, that doesn’t matter,’ said Lathom, ‘we’ll take some grub down with us. I was going to in any case. Everything has to be brought out there by a carrier twice a week. Frightful desolate hole. We’ll take a bit of beef and a couple of pounds of sausages. That’ll see us through all right.’
I considered it.
‘I say,’ said Lathom, suddenly. ‘Do come, old man. I wish you would. It’s all right there, you know, but I do get a bit bored at times. I’d like to have a yap with somebody who talks my language.’
‘If you’re fed up,’ I said reasonably, ‘why do you stay?’
‘Oh, well — I promised I would, don’t you see. It’s not bad really, but it would do us both good to have a bit of a change.’
‘Now, look here, Lathom,’ said I, ‘I don’t like the idea particularly. I’m not particularly puritan’ (I don’t know why one uses that phrase — I suppose it is easier to disown one’s decencies when one represents them as something grotesque in a black suit and steeple-hat), ‘but considering the way you behaved to Harrison, I think it’s rather thick to go and push your friends on to him. What you do is your own business’ (looking back on it, I seem to have extracted a great deal of satisfaction from this original thought), ‘but it’s rather different for me.’
‘Punk!’ said Lathom. ‘That’s all absolutely over. Finished. Washed out. It’s you who keep on digging it up again. Can’t you forget it and come down and help me out with old Harrison?’
‘Why so keen?’
‘Oh, I’m not particularly keen. I thought you’d like it, that’s all. It doesn’t matter. What are you doing this afternoon? B.M. again?’
I said, no; I avoided the Reading Room on Saturday afternoons, because it was so crowded, and asked him about his work.
He talked about it a little, in the same vague way as before, saying how difficult it was to settle to anything, and displaying some irritability with his sitters of the moment. His triumph at the Academy had made him fashionable, and fashionable women were all alike, it seemed; small-minded and featureless. One might as well paint masks. All of which I had heard so often from other painters that I put Lathom down as already spoilt.
I suggested that he should stay up in town and do a show with me, but he said he was fed up with shows. He had only come up to see his agent, and was catching the 4.30. Why didn’t I change my mind and come with him?
It ended in my changing my mind, and going. I hardly know why, except that I was only six mouths married and my wife was away, which, to the well-balanced mind, is no good reason for idle behaviour.
The express ran us down in smooth, stuffy comfort, and reached Newton Abbot dead on time at 9.15. I cannot say — though I have tried — that I remembered any particular incident on the way down. I hate talking on railway journeys, anyway, and Lathom did not seem very conversational. I read — it was Hughes’s High Wind in Jamaica — an overrated book, I think, considered as a whole, but memorable for that strange and convincing description of the earthquake. The thick heat and silence, and then the quick, noiseless shift of sea and shore, like the tilting of a saucer. Good, that. And the ghastly wind afterwards. And the child, not realising that anything out of the way had happened, because nobody gave the thing its proper terrifying name. That is very natural. I do not care for the part about the pirates. It is an anti-climax.
I know we dined on the train, but railway meals are seldom memorable. Lathom grumbled and left his portion half-eaten, and I said something about his acquiring a taste for hedgehog-broth and stewed toadstools — some silly remark which he took as a deadly insult.
At Newton Abbot we changed into the local, and dawdled through Teigngrace, Heathfield and Brimley Halt, taking over half an hour about it, till we were turned out, twenty minutes late, on the platform at Bovey Tracey. It was a quarter-past ten and dark, but the smell of the earth came up pleasantly, with a welcome suggestion of rain in the air. I stood on the platform, clutching an attaché case in one hand and the bag with the beef and sausages in the other, while Lathom transacted some occult business with a man outside. Then he came back, saying briefly, ‘I’ve got a man to take us,’ and we stumbled out to where an aged taxi thrummed mournfully in the gloom. Lathom bundled in, and I parked my bags at his feet.
‘What the devil’s that?’ he said crossly.
‘The grub, fathead,’ said I, following him in.
‘Oh, yes, of course, I’d forgotten,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s get going, for God’s sake!’
Being used to Lathom, I ignored his irritability. We jolted off.
The taxi had a churchyard smell about it, and I mentioned the fact. Lathom slammed the window down with an impatient grunt. I remarked, foolishly, that he didn’t seem very enthusiastic about the trip. He said:
‘Oh, don’t talk so much.’
It seemed to me that the prospect of seeing Harrison again had rather got on his nerves, and I looked forward to an exasperating weekend.
‘Vous l’avez voulu, Georges Dandin,’ I reflected, and lit a cigarette resignedly. The narrow road heaved and sank between dark hedges, but climbed on the whole, wriggling determinedly up and round to the ridge. A dim light or so and a cluster of black roofs announced civilisation, and Lathom roused himself to say: ‘Manaton — there’s a good view from here by daylight.’
‘We shan’t be long now, then, I suppose,’ said I.
He did not reply, and I suddenly became aware that I could hear him breathing. Once I had noticed it, I couldn’t seem to shut my eyes to the sound. It was like hearing your own heartbeats in the night — when they seem to grow louder and louder, till they fill the silence and keep you from going to sleep. The breaths seemed quite to rasp my ear, they were so heavy and so close.
‘Eh!’ said Lathom, unexpectedly. ‘What did you say?’
What had I said? It must have been ages ago, for Manaton was well behind us now, and the car was nosing her broken-winded way steadily down and down, with deep cartruts wringing her aged bones. I recollected that I had said I supposed we shouldn’t be long now.
‘Oh, no,’ said Lathom. ‘We’re nearly there.’
We bounced on in silence for ten minutes more; then creaked to a standstill. I put my head out. Dim fields, trees and the tinkling of a distant stream coming remotely up on a puff of south-west wind. No light. No building.
‘Is this it?’ I asked, ‘or has the engine conked?’
‘What?’ said Lathom, irritably. ‘Yes, of course this is it. What’s the matter? Push along — we don’t want to stay here all night.’
I wrestled with the door and edged out. Lathom close at my heels. He paid the driver, and the car began to move off, lurching on down the slope to find a place to turn.
‘Here!’ said I; ‘have you got the beef?’
‘Oh, hell,’ said Lathom, ‘I thought you had it.’
I plunged after the taxi, reclaiming the food, and came back to where Lathom was standing. His hurry seemed to bave left him. He was striking a match and having a little trouble with it. The car, a hundred yards off, choked, crashed its gears, burbled, choked again, burbled, choked, and came thudding up on bottom gear. It passed us, labouring and bumping, moved up into second, hesitated into top, and its red rear light vanished, showed, jerking, vanished and span slowly skywards.
‘Ready?’ said Lathom.
I did not point out that I had been patiently waiting for him to make a move, but grasped the bags and followed.
‘We’ve got a field to cross,’ he explained, holding a gate open for me.
We staggered along for a little. Then he stopped and I bumped up against him.
‘Over there,’ he said.
I looked, and saw a patch of extra darkness, between the darkness of some tree-stems.
‘There’s no light,’ I said. ‘Is he expecting you? I hope he won’t be annoyed with me for coming.’