A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

“I don’t know. A couple of hours or so. I enjoy looking at him. Do you mind?”

“No, I’m glad. I enjoy looking at him, too.” She came from the pantry with a bowl of eggs balanced on one hand, a jug of milk in the other. Simon left his grinding to take the eggs from her, and being so near, leaned impulsively and kissed her cheek, without apology or explanation. Phil smiled at him. “It’s all right, Simon. I know what happened to you, when you were afraid Paddy was gone for good. But do you know what happened to him? A fifteen-year-old bubble burst, my dear, and we’re none of us ever going to be the same again. Miss Rachel got annoyed because Paddy was cheeky to her, and because she thought he didn’t appreciate his good home as he ought. So she told him he only enjoyed it on sufferance. He knows now that he—” She couldn’t say: “He isn’t ours.” because it wouldn’t be true; it would be more monstrously untrue now than it had ever been before. “He knows we adopted him. That’s what happened to Paddy.”

Simon put the eggs down very carefully on the kitchen table, and straightened up to turn upon her the gravest face, and the least concerned for the effect it might be producing upon the outside world, that she had ever seen him wear. After a long moment of quietness he asked in a voice that was avoiding strain with some care “Did she tell him he was really mine?”

Phil smiled. He hadn’t chosen the words as a challenge or a claim, in a sense he hadn’t consciously chosen them at all, but they still indicated his implicit belief in their truth. “No, she didn’t. But she told me she could have. After all this time, why did you tell her?”

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I suppose I simply wanted somebody to know, just so that I could talk about him and be understood. Preferably somebody who’d feel sorry for me, to tell the whole truth. But I never meant this to happen, Phil. I suppose it’s because of what I told her that she had this thing in her mind, a stick all ready to beat him with when he offended her. I’m sorry! I never thought of anything like that.”

“I know, I’m not blaming you.”

“But since he knows so much—I don’t know that I’d feel there was anything now to stop me from telling him the rest.” He turned on the gas ring and put on the kettle with steady and leisurely movements. A fine spark of intent had kindled deep in his eyes, and that meant mischief. The faintest hint of the usual bold quirk twitched at the corner of his mouth, and again his face had a wayward acquisitiveness about it. Tamsin’s hackles had risen at sight of that debonair and much-admired face with which he pursued his dearest objectives, but it hadn’t taught him anything.

“You won’t have to bother,” said Phil. “I’ll tell him myself.”

“You?” He was surprised into a genuine laugh.

“I haven’t much alternative now, have I? You must know very well that the first thing he’s going to ask me, when he gets round to thinking about it seriously, is: Who am I? Of course I shall tell him.”

She turned and looked at him sharply, and saw exactly what she had expected to see, the sleek glow of triumph and speculation and hope warming his face into golden confidence. She closed the oven door with a crisp slam.

“Look, Simon, wake up, while there’s time. It isn’t going to do you any good, you know.”

“Isn’t it? Phil, you’re positively inviting me to see what I can do. Aren’t you afraid I’ll sneak him away from under your nose even now? Don’t you think I could?”

“I know you couldn’t,” she said steadily. “I don’t think you’d even try, if I begged you not to. But I’m not begging you—am I? I don’t have to, Simon, that’s why. You couldn’t get him away from us now whatever you did, fair or foul. You’ve had a long innings, charming the birds from the trees, and getting golden apples to fall into your lap whenever you smiled. You can’t realise, can you, that it isn’t going to last for ever? The high days are over, Simon, middle age is only just round another corner or two. You’d better start settling for what you can get, because the long holiday’s running out fast. And whatever you do, you won’t get Paddy.”

For a moment it seemed to her that his brightness had grown sharp and brittle, and his eyes were staring at something he would rather not have seen. Then they took heart and danced again.

“What will you bet me?” he said with soft deliberation.

Remembering the long years of friendship through which Tim had followed him around patiently, picking up the things Simon dropped and putting together the things Simon broke, she wondered for a moment if her motives were as pure as she would have liked. But if it was vengeful pleasure that was prompting her to invite him to his downfall, why was this moment so sad, so strangely the shadowy reverse of the serenity and joy that made this morning a portent and a prodigy? And why should she feel so much closer and kinder to him than she had ever felt before?

“I should be betting you Paddy, shouldn’t I?” she said, gently and quietly. “What more do you want?”

Paddy opened his eyes and stretched delightedly, and then remembered why everything felt and looked different to-day. Not necessarily better or worse, not yet; just different. And as if in answer to a call which had certainly never been uttered except, perhaps, in his mind, Phil was suddenly there in the room, bringing him a clean pair of slacks and a shirt from the airing cupboard.

“Good morning, mudlark! How do you feel this morning?”

He felt strange; larger than usual, more responsible, and more subdued. Big with all the things he had to think about. But beyond all question, he felt good. Good, in a state of well-being; and good, virtuous.

“I feel fine. Is it really that time? And I’ve got to go to the police station, haven’t I?” He sat up, solemn-faced, remembering.

“Mummy!” The sudden charged softness of his voice warned her what was coming, but he was longer about framing it than she had expected, and the end-product, when it emerged, was a revelation.

“Mummy, who was I?”

Her heart gave a leap of joy and triumph. She thought: Poor Simon! She laid Paddy’s clean clothes on a chair, and came and sat down on the edge of his bed. Flushed and bemused from long sleep, he faced her earnestly and trustingly, and waited for an answer. It mattered, just to the private thinking he had to do about himself; but it couldn’t affect what they had between them now.

“You know,” he said, “what I mean.”

“Yes, I know. Your mother was a very nice girl, a good friend of ours, Paddy. She was only twenty-one when she died, from some illness that came on after you were born. And her husband—your father—You know him,