Mr. Singh smiled. It was just such a smile as the sun god might bestow, broad, benign, lighting his whole handsome face and displaying the kind of teeth possessed by American adolescents, shiny, white, and even. 'Thank you. Sometimes, although I have been in this country for thirty years, I feel I dwell in a new age of enlightenment.'
Gwendolen smiled back helplessly. She made an offer the like of which she hadn't extended to a casual visitor since Stephen Reeves disappeared from her life. 'Would you likesome tea?'
'Oh, no, thank you. I am here only for a jiffy. Let me come to the point. While you were unwell and not in residence, I see your gardener working away, a most industrious young man, and I say to Mrs. Singh, look, this young man is just what we need to set things to rights here. And that is why I come to you. For the name and, please, the telephone number of your gardener, in the hope that he requires more work.'
Various emotions fought each other. in Gwendolen's head. She hardly knew why she had felt a sinking of the heart when a Mrs. Singh was mentioned, though she could understand the astonishment and incipient anger that rose in her at the same time. She sat up straighter, wondering fleetingly if he might take her for ten years younger than she actually was and said, 'I haven't got a gardener.'
'Oh, yes, indeed, madam. You have. Perhaps it has slipped your mind. I understand you have been indisposed and in a hospital. That was when he was here. No doubt you engaged him and he came to begin the work in your absence.'
'I did not engage him. I know nothing about it.' Impossible to delude herself. He was looking at her pityingly as if he saw her not as ten years her own junior but as an old woman suffering from senile dementia. 'What did he look like?' she asked him.
'Let me see. About thirty years old, fairish hair, a Britishf ace, blue eyes, I think, and handsome. Not as tall as I or'-he sized her up critically-'as you, I would respectfully say,madam.'
'What exactly was he doing?'
'Digging the garden,' said Mr. Singh simply. 'He dug in two places. The ground, you know, is very heavy, like rock, like'-he ventured a flight of fancy-'adamantine stone.'
He even spoke, she thought, the same language as she did. If she had known him sooner, would he have replaced Stephen Reeves in her affections? 'The man you're talking about,' she said, her anger surfacing again, 'is my lodger. He lives upstairs,on the top floor.'
'Then I apologize for troubling you.'
Mr. Singh got to his feet, affording Gwendolen another sight of his tall soldierly figure, his height, and the boardlike flatness of his stomach. She wanted to cry, 'Don't go!' Instead she said, 'His name is Cellini and he is not permitted access to my garden.'
Another smile, but sad this time. 'I won't say I'm not disappointed.No, please don't get up. You are a convalescent lady and not, if I may say so, quite in the first youth.' He caught sight of himself in one of Gwendolen's many fly-spotted, desilvered mirrors. 'Who is?' he said more tactfully. 'Now I say good morning, thank you for your trouble and I let myself out.'
With his departure the sun went in. Anger remained, hotter than before. She would lie in wait for Cellini now, drink black coffee, do anything to stay awake until she heard him come in. The thing, the letter, and now this, she thought. She'd get rid of him and find a nice quiet lady, not in the first youth. Oh, the hurt the phrase had done her! Even though he bracketed himself with her in that category. But Cellini. She would evict Cellini just as soon as she could.
Chapter 23
He had begun to walk home, but when he was passing a bus stop and a bus came, he got on it. It was too wild a day for a walk to be enjoyable. A few yellow leaves were already fallingfrom the plane trees, whirling past the windows of the bus.Something seemed to be pinching his spine with iron fingers and whatever it was stabbed his lumbar region as he was getting off on the corner of St. Mark's Road. The rest of the way he had to go on foot, the pain subsiding a little with enforced movement.
Cars were as usual parked nose to tail all along the residents' parking in St. Blaise Avenue, and he noticed what he had had no need to notice before. One of them, an ancient Volvo, had a For Sale sign in its windscreen and underneath, the price: ?300. Volvos were good cars, supposed to last for years, and this one appeared quite well cared for. He was walking roundi t, looking in the windows, when a woman emerged from one of the houses on the St. Blaise House side and came up to him.
'Are you interested?'
Mix said he didn't know, he might be. Though no longer young, she was quite good-looking with the kind of hourglass figure he liked.
'It's my husband's. We're called Brunswick-Brian and Sue Brunswick. Brian's away but he'll be back on Wednesday. He'd go with you on a trial run if you'd like.”
'You're not a driver yourself?' He wouldn't have minded going on any sort of trial run with her.
'I'm afraid it's years since I was at the wheel of a car.'
'Shame,' said Mix. 'I'll think about it.'
Padding across the hallway in St. Blaise House, his hand pressed to the small of his back, he noticed that the drawin groom door was ajar and he peered in. Old Chawcer was lyingo n the sofa fast asleep. He began to climb the stairs. Though cold in comparison to what it had been, the weather was brighter and the sun had come out. Sunbeams striking the walls of the stairwell showed up every crack, hairline as well as wide, the flyspots on the crookedly hung pictures and the flies that had got in between the print and the glass and died there, the cobwebs that clung to frames and cords and light fittings. He wondered where Reggie's ghost went in the daytime and told himself no tto think about it unless he had to. The pain in his lumba rregion sharpened. If it didn't improve he'd have to go to the doctor.
The first thing Gwendolen thought of when she woke up was Mr. Singh's revelation. Mr. Singh htmself was not for her and she knew it, while Stephen Reeves was. Momentarily she had been carried away by his looks and his charm but, anyway, she didn't approve of cross-cultural marriages-miscegenation,they had called it when she was young-and the wife was a considerable stumbling block. The unknown and unseen Mrs. Singh she dismissed as a 'tottering native woman in a veil.' What Mr. Singh had told her now excluded almost everything else from her mind.
While she was absent, and not only absent but ill in the hospital,that man, that lodger, had been in her garden, twice been there, and dug holes in the flowerbeds. Once upon a time, in the days of Chawcer prosperity, a real gardener had attended to horticultural matters, the beds had blossomed with lupins and delphiniums, zinnias and dahlias, the shrubs had been trimmedand the lawn mown to a velvet carpetlike texture. To some extentGwendolen saw it like that still, or she saw it as allowed togrow a little shabby, but nothing that a handyman and a lawnmower wouldn't set to rights in an hour or so. And into this small paradise the lodger had ventured with a spade-almost certainly
For all that, she would very likely have attempted the stairs,taking them slowly and with rests at every landing, but for Queenie 'Winthrop arriving as she was making up her mind. She heard the door open, hoped it might be the lodger to save her climbing fifty-two stairs, and had her hopes dashed by Queenie's voice calling, 'Yoo-hoo, it's only me.'
Gwendolen wondered how long they were going to keepthis up, she and Olive, calling on her with presents every day.For weeks perhaps, for months. Forever? She didn't want anymore chocolates, cereal bars, pears, or grapes. The bottle of port Queenie took out of her shopping trolley was far more acceptable and Gwendolen,
