not of medicine. Hubert was uncertain about his future.
‘This is the place,’ he said. We passed through high wooden doors into what appeared to be a builder’s yard. Bricks were stacked, lengths of plumber’s piping were tied together with cord. In a shed there was a circular saw. ‘This woman sells honey,’ Hubert said.
He knocked on a half-open door and a moment later a woman arrived with a honeycomb already in her hand. ‘I saw you turning in,’ she said. ‘How are you, Hubert?’
‘I’m all right. Are you well yourself, Mrs Hanrahan?’
‘I am of course, Hubert.’
She examined me with curiosity, but Hubert made no attempt to introduce me. He gave the woman some money and received the honeycomb in return. ‘I picked that comb out for them. It’s good rich honey.’
‘You can tell by the look of it.’
‘Is your grandmother well? Mr Plunkett no worse, is he?’
‘Well, he’s still ga-ga, Mrs Hanrahan. No worse than that.’
The woman had placed her shoulder against the door jamb so that she could lean on it. You could see she wanted to go on talking, and I sensed that had I not been there Hubert would have remained a little longer. As we made our way through the yard he said: ‘She lives in ignorance of Hanrahan’s evil ways. He died a while back.’
Hubert didn’t elaborate on Mr Hanrahan’s evil ways, but suggested instead that we go down to the sea. He led the way to a sandy lane that twisted and turned behind small back gardens and came out eventually among sand dunes. He held the honeycomb by one side of its wooden frame. Wind would have blown sand into it, but the day was still, late-afternoon sunshine lightening an empty sky. We walked by the edge of the sea; there was hardly anyone about.
‘What’s your cousin like?’
‘You’ll see soon enough.’
Hubert had a face to which a faintly melancholy expression seemed naturally to belong. But when he laughed, or smiled, its bony landscape changed dramatically, delight illuminating every crevice, eyes sparkling like excited sapphires. Hair the colour of wheat was smoothly brushed, never untidy. ‘Fancies himself a dandy, does he?’ a disagreeable teacher of Greek and Latin had once remarked.
‘I’m thinking of going to Africa,’ he revealed when we’d turned and begun to make our way back to the house.
Hubert’s mother and father had been killed in a car accident in England. ‘The last thing that happened before the war,’ Hubert used to say, regaling us at school with the story of the tragedy. On Saturday September 2nd, 1939, late at night, they had driven away from a roadhouse near Virginia Water and unfortunately had had a head-on collision with a lorry belonging to a travelling zoo. There’d been a cage full of apes on the back of the lorry, Hubert subsequently reported, which the impact had caused to become unfastened. He himself had been ten at the time, at a preparatory school in the suburbs of Oxford, and he told how the headmaster had broken the news to him, introducing it with references to courage and manliness. These had failed to prepare him for the death of his parents, because he’d imagined that what was coming next was the news that he would have to be sent home on the grounds that, yet again, the fees hadn’t been paid. Already there had been the wireless announcement about the declaration of war, the whole school assembled to hear it. ‘You will know no blacker day, Hubert,’ the headmaster had asserted before releasing the more personal tidings. ‘Take strength at least from that.’
We delivered the honeycomb to the kitchen. ‘Lily,’ Hubert said, by way of introducing the wiry little woman who was kneading bread on a baking board at the table. ‘Mrs Hanrahan says it’s good rich honey.’
She nodded in acknowledgement, and nodded a greeting at me. She asked me what kind of a journey I’d had and when I said it had been unremarkable she vouchsafed the information that she didn’t like trains. ‘I always said it to Hubert,’ she recalled, ‘when he was going back to school. I suffer on a train.’
‘Have you a fag, Lily?’ Hubert asked, and she indicated with a gesture of her head a packet of Player’s on the dresser. ‘I’ll pay you back,’ he promised. ‘I’m taking two.’
‘That’s seven you owe the kitchen, mind, and I don’t want money. You go and buy a packet after supper.’
‘I was going to say, Lily, could you lend me a pound?’ As he spoke he opened a green purse beside the Player’s packet. ‘Till Tuesday that would be.’
‘It’s always till Tuesday with you. You’d think the kitchen was made of Her Ladyships.’
‘If Lily was a few years younger,’ Hubert said, addressing me, ‘I’d marry her tomorrow.’
He removed a pound note from the purse and smoothed it out on the surface of the dresser, examined the romantic countenance of Lady Lavery, raised it to his lips, and then carefully secreted the note in an inside pocket. ‘We’re going dancing tonight,’ he said. ‘Did you ever dance in the Four Provinces Ballroom, Lily?’
‘Oh, don’t be annoying me.’
We smoked in Hubert’s room, a tidily kept place with Leonardo da Vinci’s
‘They’re trying to grow groundnuts in Africa,’ Hubert said. ‘I think I’d be interested in that.’
‘What are groundnuts?’
‘The groundnut is a nut they have an idea about. I think they’ll pay my fare.’
He was vague about which African country he referred to, replying when I asked him that it didn’t matter. There was another scheme he’d heard about, to do with supplying telephone-boxes, and a third one that involved teaching selected Africans the rudiments of hydraulic engineering. ‘You have to go on a course yourself, naturally enough,’ Hubert explained. ‘Personally I favour the nuts.’
He turned the record over. Sinatra sang ‘Begin the Beguine’. Hubert said:
