‘Well, Paul,’ said his father, who had taken a sufficient dose of his mystical equivalent of Cascara, ‘how are you getting on?’ He got up from his tree stump and walked across the glade to where the boy was sitting. The passage of time had altered Herbert very little; his explosive beard was still as blond as it had always been, he was as thin as ever, his head showed no signs of going bald. Only his teeth had visibly aged; his smile was discoloured and broken.
‘But he really ought to go to a dentist,’ Judith had insistently urged on her sister, the last time they met.
‘He doesn’t want to,’ Martha had replied. ‘He doesn’t really believe in them.’ But perhaps her own reluctance to part with the necessary number of guineas had something to do with Herbert’s lack of faith in dentists. ‘Besides,’ she went on, ‘Herbert hardly notices such merely material, physical things. He lives so much in the noumenal world that he’s hardly aware of the phenomenal. Really not aware.’
‘Well, he jolly well ought to be aware,’ Judith answered, ‘that’s all I can say.’ She was indignant.
‘How are you getting on?’ Herbert repeated, and laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
‘The bark’s most horribly difficult to get right,’ Paul answered in a complainingly angry voice.
‘That makes it all the more worth while to get right,’ said Herbert. ‘Patience and work—they’re the only things. Do you know how a great man once defined genius?’ Paul knew very well how a great man had once defined genius; but the definition seemed to him so stupid and such a personal insult to himself, that he did not answer, only grunted. His father bored him, maddeningly. ‘Genius,’ Herbert went on, answering his own question, ‘genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.’ At that moment Paul detested his father.
‘One two-and three-and One-and two-and three-and . . .’ Under Sylvia’s fingers the mechanical butterflies continued to flap their metal wings. Her face was set, determined, angry; Herbert’s great man would have found genius in her. Behind her stiff determined back her mother came and went with a feather brush in her hand, dusting. Time had thickened and coarsened her; she walked heavily. Her hair had begun to go grey. When she had finished dusting, or rather when she was tired of it, she sat down. Sylvia was laboriously cornet-soloing through the dance rhythm. Martha closed her eyes. ‘Beautiful, beautiful!’ she said, and smiled her most beautiful smile. ‘You play it beautifully, my darling.’ She was proud of her daughter. Not merely as a musician; as a human being too.
When she thought what trouble she had had with Sylvia in the old days . . . ‘Beautifully.’ She rose at last and went upstairs to her bedroom. Unlocking a cupboard, she took out a box of candied fruits and ate several cherries, a plum, and three apricots. Herbert had gone back to his studio and his unfinished picture of ‘Europe and America at the feet of Mother India.’ Paul pulled a catapult out of his pocket, fitted a buckshot into the leather pouch and let fly at a nuthatch that was running like a mouse up the oak tree on the other side of the glade. ‘Hell!’ he said as the bird flew away unharmed. But the next shot was more fortunate. There was a spurt of flying feathers, there were two or three little squeaks. Running up Paul found a hen chaffinch lying in the grass. There was blood on the feathers. Thrilling with a kind of disgusted excitement Paul picked up the little body. How warm.
It was the first time he had ever killed anything. What a good shot! But there was nobody he could talk to about it. Sylvia was no good: she was almost worse than mother about some things. With a fallen branch he scratched a hole and buried the little corpse, for fear somebody might find it and wonder how it had been killed. They’d be furious if they knew! He went into lunch feeling tremendously pleased with himself. But his face fell as he looked round the table. ‘Only this beastly cold stuff?’
‘Paul, Paul,’ said his father reproachfully.
‘Where’s mother?’
‘She’s not eating today,’ Herbert answered.
‘All the same,’ Paul grumbled under his breath, ‘she really might have taken the trouble to make something hot for us.’
Sylvia meanwhile sat without raising her eyes from her plate of potato salad, eating in silence.
The End
