She didn’t reply. Children were running into and out of the sea. Two men were paddling, with their trousers rolled up to their knees. A girl was sunbathing on a li-lo, both hands in the water, resisting the tide that would have carried her away from the shore.
‘My bathing-dress is in the house,’ Pamela said at last. ‘I could get it if you like.’
‘Would
She shrugged. Perhaps not, she said, and I wondered if she was thinking that bathing, as much as tennis, might be frowned upon as a breach of the Sabbath.
‘I don’t think, actually,’ she said, ‘that Hubert will ever go to Africa.’
Lily stood beside my deck-chair, a bunch of mint she’d picked in one hand. I hadn’t known what else to do, since Hubert had not come out of his room, so I’d wandered about the garden and had eventually found the deck-chair on a triangle of grass in a corner. ‘I’m going to read for a while,’ Pamela had said when we returned from our walk.
‘It’s understandable they never had to be so severe with Pamela,’ Lily said. ‘On account of her mother being sensible in her life. Different from Hubert’s father.’
I guessed she was talking to me like this because she’d noticed I was bewildered. The pettiness I had witnessed in my friend was a shock more than a surprise. Affected by it, I’d even wondered as I’d walked with Pamela back from the strand if I’d been invited to the house in order to become an instrument in her isolation. I’d dismissed the thought as a ridiculous flight of fancy: now I was not so sure.
‘It’s understandable, Hubert being bad to her. When you think about it, it’s understandable.’
Lily passed on, taking with her the slight scent of mint that had begun to waft towards me because she’d crushed a leaf or two. ‘He tried to beat me with a walking-stick,’ Hubert had reported at school, and I imagined the apprehension Lily hinted at – the father of the son who’d gone to the bad determined that history should not be repeated, the mother anxious and agreeing.
‘I was looking for you,’ Hubert said, sitting down on the grass beside me. ‘Why don’t we go down to the hotel?’
I looked at him, his lean face in profile. I remembered Pamela drawing the pattern on the sand, her silence the only intimation of her love. When had an intonation or a glance first betrayed it to him? I wondered.
Hubert pushed himself to his feet and we sauntered off to the lounge-bar of the hotel beside the railway station. Without asking me what I would like, Hubert ordered gin and orange. The tennis we hadn’t played wasn’t mentioned, nor did I say that Pamela and I had walked on the strand.
‘No need to go tomorrow,’ Hubert said. ‘Stay on a bit.’
‘I said I’d be back.’
‘Send them a wire.’
‘I don’t want to over-stay, Hubert. It’s good of your grandmother to have me.’
‘That girl stays for three months.’
I’d never drunk gin before. The orange made it pleasantly sweet, with only a slight aftertaste, I liked it better than stout.
‘My father’s drink,’ Hubert said. ‘My mother preferred gimlets. A gimlet,’ he added, ‘is gin with lime in it. They drank an awful lot, you understand.’
He confided to me that he intended to slip away to England himself. He was softening Lily up, he said, with the intention of borrowing a hundred pounds from her. He knew she had it because she never spent a penny; a hundred pounds would last him for ages, while he found out more about the prospects in Africa.
‘I’ll pay her back. I’d never not.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Anything would be better than the Dublin Handkerchief Company. Imagine being in the Dublin Handkerchief Company when you were fifty years of age! A lifetime of people blowing their noses!’
We sat there, talking about school, remembering the time Fitzherbert had dressed himself up in the kind of woman’s clothes he considered suitable for a streetwalker and demanded an interview with Farquie, the senior languages master; and the time the Kingsmill brothers had introduced a laxative into the High Table soup; and when Prunty and Tatchett had appropriated a visiting rugby team’s clothes while they were in the showers. We recalled the days of our first term: how Hubert and I had occupied beds next to one another in the junior dormitory, how Miss Fanning, the common-room secretary, had been kind to us, thinking we were homesick.
‘One
He held the man who served us in conversation, describing the same mixture of gin and orangeade as he’d had it once in some other bar. There had been iced sugar clinging to the rim of the glass; delicious, he said. The man just stared at him.
‘I’ll fix it up with Lily tonight,’ Hubert said on the way back to the house. ‘If she can’t manage the hundred I’d settle for fifty.’
We were still talking loudly as we mounted the stepped path between the rockeries, and as we passed through the hall. In the dining-room Mrs Plunkett and Pamela had clearly been seated at the table for some time. When we entered the old woman rose without commenting on our lateness and repeated the grace she had already said. A weary expression froze Hubert’s features while he waited for her voice to cease.
‘We were down in the hotel,’ he said when it did, ‘drinking gin and orange. Have you ever wandered into the hotel, Pam?’
She shook her head, her attention appearing to be occupied with the chicken leg on her plate. Hubert said the hotel had a pleasant little lounge-bar, which wasn’t the description I’d have chosen myself. A rendezvous for the discriminating, he said, even if one encountered difficulty there when it came to a correctly concocted gin and orange. He was pretending to be drunker than he was.
‘A rather dirty place, Dowd’s Hotel,’ Mrs Plunkett interposed, echoing what I knew would have been her husband’s view.
