Frederick turned to the window, and scowled down upon the noxious and depressing scene below. Sparing neither age nor sex in his detestation, he regarded the old ladies reading their library novels on the seats with precisely the same dislike and contempt which he bestowed on the boys’ school clattering past on its way to the bathing-houses.
“Then, checking up your statements,” he said, “I find that I am expected to go to tea with a woman who, in addition, apparently, to being a blend of Lucretia Borgia and a Prussian sergeant-major, is a physical wreck and practically potty. Why? That is what I ask. Why? As a child, I objected strongly to Nurse Wilks: and now, grown to riper years, the thought of meeting her again gives me the heeby-jeebies. Why should I be victimized? Why me particularly?”
“It isn’t you particularly. We’ve all been to see her at intervals, and so have the Oliphants.”
“The Oliphants!”
The name seemed to affect Frederick oddly. He winced, as if his brother had been a dentist instead of a general practitioner and had just drawn one of his back teeth.
“She was their nurse after she left us. You can’t have forgotten the Oliphants. I remember you at the age of twelve climbing that old elm at the bottom of the paddock to get Jane Oliphant a rook’s egg.”
Frederick laughed bitterly.
“I must have been a perfect ass. Fancy risking my life for a girl like that! Not,” he went on, “that life’s worth much. An absolute washout, that’s what life is. However, it will soon be over. And then the silence and peace of the grave. That,” said Frederick, “is the thought that sustains me.”
“A pretty kid, Jane. Someone told me she had grown up quite a beauty.”
“Without a heart.”
“What do you know about it?”
“Merely this. She pretended to love me, and then a few months ago she went off to the country to stay with some people named Ponderby and wrote me a letter breaking off the engagement. She gave no reasons, and I have not seen her since. She is now engaged to a man named Dillingwater, and I hope it chokes her.”
“I never heard about this. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. Merciful release is the way I look at it.”
“Would he be one of the Sussex Dillingwaters?”
“I don’t know what county the family infests. If I did, I would avoid it.”
“Well, I’m sorry. No wonder you’re depressed.”
“Depressed?” said Frederick, outraged. “Me? You don’t suppose I’m worrying myself about a girl like that, do you? I’ve never been so happy in my life. I’m just bubbling over with cheerfulness.”
“Oh, is that what it is?” George looked at his watch. “Well, you’d better be pushing along. It’ll take you about ten minutes to get to Marazion Road.”
“How do I find the blasted house?”
“The name’s on the door.”
“What is the name?”
“Wee Holme.”
“My God!” said Frederick Mulliner. “It only needed that!”
The view which he had had of it from his brother’s window should, no doubt, have prepared Frederick for the hideous loathsomeness of Bingley-on-Sea: but, as he walked along, he found it coming on him as a complete surprise. Until now he had never imagined that a small town could possess so many soul-searing features. He passed little boys, and thought how repulsive little boys were. He met tradesmen’s carts, and his gorge rose at the sight of them. He hated the houses. And, most of all, he objected to the sun. It shone down with a cheeriness which was not only offensive but, it seemed to Frederick Mulliner, deliberately offensive. What he wanted was wailing winds and driving rain: not a beastly expanse of vivid blue. It was not that the perfidy of Jane Oliphant had affected him in any way: it was simply that he disliked blue skies and sunshine. He had a temperamental antipathy for them, just as he had a temperamental fondness for tombs and sleet and hurricanes and earthquakes and famines and pestilences and. …
He found that he had arrived in Marazion Road.
Marazion Road was made up of two spotless pavements stretching into the middle distance and flanked by two rows of neat little redbrick villas. It smote Frederick like a blow. He felt as he looked at those houses, with their little brass knockers and little white curtains, that they were occupied by people who knew nothing of Frederick Mulliner and were content to know nothing; people who were simply not caring a whoop that only a few short months before the girl to whom he had been engaged had sent back his letters and gone and madly got herself betrothed to a man named Dillingwater.
He found Wee Holme, and hit it a nasty slap with its knocker. Footsteps sounded in the passage, and the door opened.
“Why, Master Frederick!” said Nurse Wilks. “I should hardly have known you.”
Frederick, in spite of the natural gloom caused by the blue sky and the warm sunshine, found his mood lightening somewhat. Something that might almost have been a spasm of tenderness passed through him. He was not a bad-hearted young man—he ranked in that respect, he supposed, somewhere midway between his brother George, who had a heart of gold, and people like the future Mrs. Dillingwater, who had no heart at all—and there was a fragility about Nurse Wilks that first astonished and then touched him.
The images which we form in childhood are slow to fade: and Frederick had been under the impression that Nurse Wilks was fully six feet tall, with the shoulders of a weightlifter and eyes that glittered cruelly beneath beetling brows. What he saw now was a little old woman with a wrinkled face, who looked as if a puff of wind would blow her away.
He was oddly stirred. He felt large and protective. He saw his brother’s point now. Most certainly this frail old thing must be humoured.
