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‘I don’t know why. It just sounded rather nice and free and irresponsible. I suppose, though, when I come to think of it, that I haven’t got any assets much, either. I mean, Father gives me an allowance and I’ve got lots of houses to live in and clothes and maids and some hideous family jewels and a good deal of credits at shops; but that’s all the family really. It’s not me.’
‘No, but all the same –’ Bobby paused.
‘Oh, it’s quite different, I know.’
‘Yes,’ said Bobby. ‘It’s quite different.’
He felt suddenly very depressed.
They walked in silence to the next tee.
‘I’m going to town tomorrow,’ said Frankie, as Bobby teed up his ball.
‘Tomorrow? Oh – and I was going to suggest you should come for a picnic.’
‘I’d have liked to. However, it’s arranged. You see, Father’s got the gout again.’
‘You ought to stay and minister to him,’ said Bobby.
‘He doesn’t like being ministered to. It annoys him frightfully. He likes the second footman best. He’s sympathetic and doesn’t mind having things thrown at him and being called a damned fool.’
Bobby topped his drive and it trickled into the bunker.
‘Hard lines,’ said Frankie and drove a nice straight ball that sailed over it.
‘By the way,’ she remarked. ‘We might do something together in London. You’ll be up soon?’
‘On Monday. But – well – it’s no good, is it?’
‘What do you mean – no good?’
‘Well, I mean I shall be working as a mechanic most of the time. I mean –’
‘Even then,’ said Frankie, ‘I suppose you’re just as capable of coming to a cocktail party and getting tight as any other of my friends.’
Bobby merely shook his head.
‘I’ll give a beer and sausage party if you prefer it,’ said Frankie encouragingly.
‘Oh, look here, Frankie, what’s the good? I mean, you can’t mix your crowds. Your crowd’s a different crowd from mine.’
‘I assure you,’ said Frankie, ‘that my crowd is a very mixed one.’
‘You’re pretending not to understand.’
‘You can bring Badger if you like. There’s friendship for you.’
‘You’ve got some sort of prejudice against Badger.’
‘I daresay it’s his stammer. People who stammer always make me stammer, too.’
‘Look here, Frankie, it’s no good and you know it isn’t. It’s all right down here. There’s not much to do and I suppose I’m better than nothing. I mean you’re always awfully decent to me and all that, and I’m grateful. But I mean I know I’m just nobody – I mean –’
‘When you’ve quite finished expressing your inferiority complex,’ said Frankie coldly, ‘perhaps you’ll try getting out of the bunker with a niblick instead of a putter.’
‘Have I – oh! damn!’ He replaced the putter in his bag and took out the niblick. Frankie watched with malicious satisfaction as he hacked at the ball five times in succession. Clouds of sand rose round them.
‘Your hole,’ said Bobby, picking up the ball.
‘I think it is,’ said Frankie. ‘And that gives me the match.’
‘Shall we play the bye?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I’ve got a lot to do.’
‘Of course. I suppose you have.’
They walked together in silence to the clubhouse.
‘Well,’ said Frankie, holding out her hand. ‘Goodbye, my dear. It’s been too marvellous to have you to make use of while I’ve been down here. See something of you again, perhaps, when I’ve nothing better to do.’
‘Look here, Frankie –’
‘Perhaps you’ll condescend to come to my coster party. I believe you can get pearl buttons quite cheaply at Woolworth’s.’
‘Frankie –’
His words were drowned in the noise of the Bentley’s engine which Frankie had just started. She drove away with an airy wave of her hand.
‘Damn!’ said Bobby in a heartfelt tone.
Frankie, he considered, had behaved outrageously. Perhaps he hadn’t put things very tactfully, but, dash it all, what he had said was true enough.
Perhaps, though, he shouldn’t have put it into words.
The next three days seemed interminably long.
The Vicar had a sore throat which necessitated his speaking in a whisper when he spoke at all. He spoke very little and was obviously bearing his fourth son’s presence as a Christian should. Once or twice he quoted Shakespeare to the effect that a serpent’s tooth, etc.
On Saturday Bobby felt that he could bear the strain of home life no longer. He got Mrs Roberts, who, with her husband, ‘ran’ the Vicarage, to give him a packet of sandwiches, and, supplementing this with a bottle of beer which he bought in Marchbolt, he set off for a solitary picnic.
He had missed Frankie abominably these last few days. These older people were the limit … They harped on things so.
Bobby stretched himself out on a brackeny bank and debated with himself whether he should eat his lunch first and go to sleep afterwards, or sleep first and eat afterwards.
While he was cogitating, the matter was settled for him by his falling asleep without noticing it.
When he awoke it was half-past three! Bobby grinned as he thought how his father would disapprove of this way of spending a day. A good walk across country – twelve miles or so – that was the kind of thing that a healthy young man should do. It led inevitably to that famous remark: ‘And now, I think, I’ve earned my lunch.’
‘Idiotic,’ thought Bobby. ‘Why earn lunch by doing a lot of walking you don’t particularly want to do? What’s the merit in it? If you enjoy it, then it’s pure self-indulgence, and if you don’t enjoy it you’re a fool to do it.’
Whereupon he fell upon his unearned lunch and ate it with gusto. With a sigh of satisfaction he unscrewed the bottle of beer. Unusually bitter beer, but decidedly refreshing …
He lay back again, having tossed the empty beer bottle into a clump of heather.
He felt rather god-like lounging there. The world was at his feet. A phrase, but a good phrase. He could do anything – anything if he tried! Plans of great splendour and daring initiative flashed through his mind.
Then he grew sleepy again. Lethargy stole over him.
He slept …
Heavy, numbing sleep …
Chapter 7 An Escape from Death (#ulink_8201513c-5ceb-5925-be24-08123febc08c)
Driving her large green Bentley, Frankie drew up to the kerb outside a large old-fashioned house over the doorway of which was inscribed ‘St Asaph’s’.
Frankie jumped out and, turning, extracted a large bunch of lilies. Then she rang the bell. A woman in nurse’s dress answered the door.
‘Can I see Mr Jones?’ inquired Frankie.
The nurse’s eyes took in the Bentley, the lilies and Frankie with intense interest.
‘What name shall I say?’
‘Lady Frances Derwent.’
The nurse was thrilled and her patient went up in her estimation.
She guided Frankie upstairs into a room on the first floor.
‘You’ve a visitor to see you, Mr Jones. Now, who do you think it is? Such a nice surprise for you.’
All this is the ‘bright’ manner usual to nursing homes.
‘Gosh!’ said Bobby, very much surprised. ‘If it isn’t Frankie!’
‘Hullo, Bobby, I’ve brought the usual flowers. Rather a graveyard suggestion about them, but the choice was limited.’
‘Oh, Lady Frances,’ said the nurse, ‘they’re lovely. I’ll put them into water.’
She left the room.
Frankie sat down in an obvious visitor’s chair.
‘Well, Bobby,’ she said. ‘What’s all this?’
‘You may well ask,’ said Bobby. ‘I’m the complete sensation of this place. Eight grains of morphia, no less. They’re going to write about me in the Lancet and the BMJ.’
‘What’s the BMJ?’ interrupted Frankie.
‘The British Medical Journal.’
‘All right. Go ahead. Rattle off some more initials.’
‘Do you know, my girl, that half a grain is a fatal dose? I ought to be dead about sixteen times over. It’s true that recovery has been known after sixteen grains – still, eight is pretty good, don’t you think? I’m the hero of this place. They’ve never had a case like me before.’
‘How nice for them.’
‘Isn’t it? Gives them something to talk about to all the other patients.’
The nurse re-entered, bearing lilies in vases.
‘It’s true, isn’t it, nurse?’ demanded Bobby. ‘You’ve never had a case like mine?’
‘Oh! you oughtn’t to be here at all,’ said the nurse. ‘In the churchyard you ought to be. But it’s only the good die young, they say.’ She giggled at her own wit and went out.
‘There you are,’ said Bobby. ‘You’ll see, I shall be famous all over England.’
He continued to talk. Any signs of inferiority complex that he had displayed at his last meeting with Frankie had now quite disappeared. He took a firm and egotistical pleasure in recounting every detail of his case.
‘That’s enough,’ said Frankie, quelling him. ‘I don’t really care terribly for stomach pumps. To listen to you one would think nobody had ever been poisoned before.’
‘Jolly few have been poisoned with eight grains of morphia and got over it,’ Bobby pointed out. ‘Dash it all, you’re not sufficiently impressed.’
‘Pretty sickening for the people who poisoned you,’ said Frankie.
‘I know. Waste of perfectly good morphia.’
‘It was in the beer, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. You see, someone found me sleeping like the dead, tried to wake me and couldn’t. Then they got alarmed, carried me to a farmhouse and sent for a doctor –’
‘I know all the next part,’ said Frankie hastily.
‘At first they had the idea that I’d taken the stuff deliberately. Then when they heard my story, they went off and looked for the beer bottle and found it where I’d thrown it and had it analysed – the dregs of it were quite enough for that, apparently.’
‘No clue as to how the morphia got in the bottle?’
‘None whatever. They’ve interviewed the pub where I bought it and opened other bottles and everything’s been quite all right.’
‘Someone must have put the stuff in the beer while you were asleep?’
‘That’s it. I remember that the paper across the top wasn’t still sticking properly.’
Frankie nodded thoughtfully.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘It shows that what I said in the train that day was quite right.’
