Slow Burner Read online

  They sat over coffee chatting between comfortable silences. Mary Parton was thinking that William had taken a great deal of trouble over the meal. William Nichol was thinking that he had been a widower long enough. He told himself that he was in his prime, but that in another ten years . . . a lonely, a boring retirement, a housekeeper . . . It had never been much to look forward to and today it seemed detestable.

  And she was a damned attractive woman. A very good skin, a body unfashionably unambiguous, blue eyes . . . To Vicenza, he caught himself thinking—he would take her to Vicenza. He would show her the Rotunda. He thought it the most beautiful object upon the earth and he would like his wife to share it.

  William Nichol put Mary into a taxi. He slipped a pound note into the driver’s hand as he gave him the address. He did it very neatly, unnoticeably, for he had given the manoeuvre thought: the note he had already put loose into the pocket of his overcoat. He wasn’t a man to muddle detail. He returned to Mary Parton. He smiled, neither assuming nor apologetic. ‘Next Monday?’ he inquired. ‘Here again if you enjoyed it.’

  ‘I should love to.’

  Sir Jeremy looked from his window across the almost silent river, thinking of the morning’s events in the Commission. Dog doesn’t eat dog—an error he reflected grimly, where senior civilians were concerned. They would eat all right. In a gentlemanly way, it went without saying, and with no noisy smacking of chops. But they would eat. A man went forward or he went back: it was terribly difficult to stand still. Elton was going forward and he, Jeremy Bates . . .

  Jeremy Bates was in a very critical position.

  For that had been made clear at the meeting. Wasserman had been an unexpected increment of strength, but Sir Jeremy did not consider that he alone restored the balance. And it wasn’t only at meetings of the Commission that he had been made conscious that he was in a difficulty. At the Club for instance—the Club, election to which was an accolade of professional survival. There had been nothing crude, naturally; no obvious cold shouldering. But Sir Jeremy was not insensitive to atmosphere, and the atmosphere told him that whilst there was as yet no rush to enlist as openly his enemy, there was a certain restraint in the air, a certain reluctance to do anything which might identify irrevocably as a supporter of Jeremy Bates.

  Sir Jeremy was by no means the first senior official to be wondering why a man embraced his profession when he need not. It was true that he had acquired a handle to his name, but he had known about that at least three years before it had been gazetted. That had rather taken the gilt off the gingerbread. And other men’s honours, lesser honours for lesser men—those letters after their names depreciated annually. And certainly it wasn’t money which kept him at the grindstone. Sir Jeremy would have smiled thinly at the suggestion, for he knew that in industry he could have earned twice his salary as an official. Amongst senior civil servants money had become, like the steps up the hierarchy of an Order of Chivalry, no more than a visible difference between rank and rank. Senior civil servants all lived roughly in the same way. Another thousand a year—it was nothing. Taxation took care of that.

  The Permanent Secretary knew all this; he had often considered it; but today he faced it, and there came to him, unwelcome, the naked thought of power. Horrified, he shied from it, but he forced himself to return. Refusal to examine he distasteful was one of his failings. But hardly that, he decided. He preferred to call it a sense of duty, a sense of dedication. He would have accepted the premise that men began in the Service for a variety of reasons; he would have rejected the conclusion that a public servant’s development, at least if he were to be successful, was moulded to an inescapable pattern. First the assumption that a civil servant was, on the average—it would have been automatic to qualify a generalization—was, on the average, superior to the general run of professional men. Then the suspicion, hardening .with the years into conviction, that the world outside Whitehall was managed with really startling untidiness—the world of business in particular. Later the feeling that his own Department could of all others least safely be dispensed with. ‘Finally and in middle life, for personal conceit was invariably fatal to early advancement, finally the private admission that he above all colleagues was perhaps best qualified to bear ,the burden.

  Sir Jeremy by now had arrived at the same word. He was happier to have done so, for the bare possibility that he could be a worshipper at the golden calf of power had shocked him. But now he had convinced himself that the thought had been unworthy. He began to think about the burden. The weaker it broke at once in a familiar pattern—nervous breakdown by one of a dozen fanciful names; a year’s leave of absence; return; the promotion which somehow never came; finally the sterile years of waiting for a pension and the minimum decoration appropriate to rank, a consolation prize presented with something between pity and contempt. And even the strongest, even himself, were driven to the extremes of their resources . . . The burden, the burden of the merciless days.

  Mentally Sir Jeremy shrugged. There was duty, he remembered, and the sense of dedication of what had become a lay priesthood; but also, he told himself with a cynicism unaccustomed, an element of habit, blind habit, and the instinct that nobody else could manage the matter so well. But the price was appalling. He had had a home once. Now he slept there, sometimes, at week-ends. His stepson had gone into business. Lady Bates, cool and distinguished, Lady Bates had become a theosophist.

  Sir Jeremy sighed. A burden almost unbearable . . . That infernal fellow Nichol! He carried it efficiently, he carried it with a success beyond question; but he carried it easily. And that was an affront. It told you unmistakably that you were killing yourself for nothing.

  Sir Jeremy had normally no time for introspection, but tonight as he watched the silent river he faced his hatred for William Nichol. Hatred was the word which had presented itself, and it had shaken him, for he knew that hatred was a horrible emotion, a compound of envy and fear. He could have denied that he was afraid of Nichol—that at least was certain. But now he was asking himself about envy, and the answers were short of conviction. Not material jealousy, he told himself. Nichol’s salary might be twice his own, for the tradition still lingered that a superlative technician might be paid without public scandal a great deal more than a superlative administrator. Sir Jeremy could put that aside without hypocrisy. He had enough to live on in the standard of comfort acceptable to his colleagues; he could say without affectation that he did not care about money.

  But he was conscious that he had not entirely answered himself. Suddenly his hands clenched. Damn it, the fellow threw it in your face. He grew carnations; he could take two hours for luncheon but arrive as the meeting sat down, alert, assured, positively sharpened by the vintage bottle which he had shared with some friend at that ridiculous club of his which mere Sir Jeremy Bates had no chance of joining. Not that he wanted to, he told himself too quickly: he would have been a fish out of water . . . Carnations. Good food and wine. Leisure. Somehow Nichol could always manage the time—time for gardening, time for golf. His wife, whilst she had lived, had adored him. Sir Jeremy thought again of Lady Bates, the cool, the distinguished lady who had become interested in what she called theosophy. He was tom by a moment of pain; his teeth set sharply. But this was horrible, this was humiliation. You lifted the lid for a second and the sight within appalled you. Back then, back to familiar ground. Back to accustomed thoughts and to premises acceptable. The burden—the burden was staggering, was it not? The public service the severest of masters. A sense of dedication alone sustained. Life was hard and life was earnest . . .

  ‘Damn him,’ Sir Jeremy said aloud, ‘he has no right to enjoy it.’

  What Russell had so briefly told of Mary Parton had been a summary of his papers; and a good one. But something more he knew and had suppressed, for he would have thought it in execrable taste to have alluded to it. It was not a matter which, as head of the Security Executive, interested him, though in the context of Mary’s marriage
to Ellis Parton he had realized that it was significant. But he had held his tongue, since he ! considered it none of his business. And certainly none of ‘ William Nichol’s.

  Nevertheless he was aware that Mary had accepted Ellis Parton after battle had taken her fiancé from her. If he had lived he would have been, now, a little less than Nichol’s age, and he had been something of Nichol’s type. He had been gay with the doomed gaiety of the junior officer in a regiment which prided itself that it was a little extravagant with the I lives of its junior officers. Arithmetically the odds had been against him and he had known it. He had not resented it, but he would not marry Mary. He had very little money and his way to make if he survived. If he survived. He had declined to commit her to the probability of a resourceless widowhood. Mary hadn’t agreed—she was in love and the future was far over the hill. But she had admired him the more. He had been a very nice young man.

  He had not escaped the arithmetic of his splendid regiment.

  Mary Mullens was already in a women’s service. She had not fancied a commission, though she would not have found it difficult to obtain one. Women officers, she had decided, a little unfairly, were of two classes: there were the careerists : and there were the male impersonators. Mary was neither. And when Robert had been killed all she had desired was : such escape as in war-time could be arranged. India, she knew, was alive with women officers, but it would be easy to obtain a posting un-commissioned. She had asked for India and had been sent to Delhi.

  She had detested it. Delhi, then, was a huge headquarters, swollen, impersonal and miles from fighting. Its enormous staffs were busy with their respective empires, empires which had come to them unexpectedly, late in life—their last chances. For most of these men were professional failures; men passed over for command with troops; men pushed into a staff college and even through it years after they had failed in competitive entry. The few exceptions, the fighting men, the staff officers of a recognizable class, despaired. They cast their considerable energies into getting themselves transferred. Mostly they succeeded, for they weren’t very popular.

  Mary was sensitive, and she had recognized at once the unmistakable odour of the second class. She had disliked the civilians, too. She had despised their unawareness, an unawareness swinging, somewhere in 1942 and in a night, into an apprehension almost as ill-founded. Even Indians had been a disappointment. She had been told on her passage, and often enough for the cliche almost to have acquired a meaning, that Indians were the Irish of the Orient. In any case she had been prepared to like them. But she had not been able. She had made the allowances, the adjustments which she was more than intelligent enough to know must be made; but Indians had defeated her. They were polite, but uneasy; they smiled but they did not smile; they were subjects with the certainty of independence before them, but equality they had still to contrive, for they were still resentful of a material inferiority which for generations had consumed their confidence. Perhaps, Mary decided, that was why they talked so much, so interminably, about spiritual values.

  With peace she had returned to County Clare, to the accelerating decay of which Russell had spoken. She had found it a narrow and an unrewarding existence—never a life. Mount Ennis was falling to pieces. Literally, for there wasn’t the money to maintain it. Even the fishing had gone for good, and that, in County Clare, was something more serious than a lateish Georgian mansion one wing of which couldn’t even be entered because it was unsafe to do so. Nevertheless it had been upon the river that Mary had met Ellis Parton.

  She had gone down in the evening because her mother, in that casual way of hers, had wondered whether the sea-trout were still as good, split and grilled with butter, as they had been. Mary had been by no means sure that she had still any right to take a fish from that water. It was true that the agreement with the hotel did not say that she could not, but neither did it say that she could. That wasn’t the sort of thing which, locally, would be particularized, and of course she was an undeniable Mullens. Still, the owner of the hotel had been abroad for a good many years; he had been to America where, he did not mind telling you, he had made, the money to buy the hotel. But he did not tell you how. Mary remembered that his name was O’Brien and that his forefathers had been upon this land before her own had ventured from their native Weald. Still, tie bad been to America: she could not be sure that he would take it for granted.

  Old Lady Mount Ennis wouldn’t have thought of that.

  Nevertheless Mary had gone down to the river. Her thoughts had been upon the pot, and the methods which she proposed to employ appropriate to that end. She looked at the water and she looked at the sky; then she walked up the bank to another pool. A stocky man, neither young nor old, was fishing it, and she had seen at once that he knew his business. He was fishing with a heavy greenhart rod, its sections taped together. His reel was far from fashionable. But Mary caught her breath, for this man was an artist. He was after the salmon, not the sea-trout, and his fly went out in an elegant parabola, light and exact. Other men could do that; but power was here, and restraint, and a complete authority. Mary was conscious of an act of drama: the man was a poet. She dropped behind a bush the canvas shopping bag which she did not wish this splendid fisherman to see; she waited until he decided to change his fly, for one did not interrupt Leonardo to pass the time of day. Then she wished him good evening.

  ‘Good evening,’ Parton said. He did not seem surprised to see her. ‘I hope I’m not on somebody else’s water,’ he added. ‘I’m from the hotel, you see.’ His speech held a hint of the Doric.

  ‘Not at all. This is all their water now.’

  Ellis Parton looked at her with interest. ‘Now?’ he asked. ‘And it was yours before?’

  He was rather quick, Mary thought. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we sold it to the hotel.’

  ‘Then I’m grateful to you. I can’t afford the expensive waters, and this is wonderful value.’ Parton moved to his creel; he had been told in England that it was always policy to ingratiate the natives. ‘May I offer you a fish?’ he asked. He was polite, but he did not give the impression that the gift would give him pleasure. Mary was conscious of this, but she thought of her mother. ‘You’re very kind,’ she said.

  ‘Not at all.’ Ellis Parton had a horror of appearing generous; he had never examined the instinct, but it held him firmly. But he had offered a gift, and he began to play it down. ‘It’s nothing, really,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep one for my supper. The rest will simply go to the hotel.’

  Mary was silent.

  There are no salmon, in any case,’ Parton went on. ‘I had one on, but I was clumsy. But I took some sewin this morning. You’re welcome.’ He took a fish from the basket. Surprisingly his voice dropped half a tone. ‘Lovely beasts, aren’t they?’ he said. He looked at the sea-trout with what was almost affection. ‘Beautiful.’ His voice returned to normal. ‘You have a bag with you, I think.’

  Mary was surprised and embarrassed. The bag, she had hoped, and its horrid contents, she could recover later. ‘You must have eyes in the back of your head,’ she said. It sounded very trite.

  ‘No. But I saw you before you saw me, I fancy. You had a bag with you then. To tell you the truth I thought you were a local?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I know you’re not being very kind. These aren’t my party clothes, but you’re telling me I look terrible.’

  ‘I hadn’t meant to do that,’ Parton said levelly. He seemed to feel that something else was expected of him. ‘You must remember that this is a difficult country for the stranger. You can’t tell a duchess from the girl who makes your bed. You’re not a duchess, by the way?’

  ‘Of course not. I’m Mary Mullens. My mother and I and two sisters live in the house about a mile down the valley. And that’s about all there is to know of us.’

  Ellis Parton looked at her coolly. ‘I rather doubt that,’ he said. He seemed to be hesitating, weighing somethin
g. Finally: ‘I’m Ellis Parton,’ he said, ‘and sometimes I catch fish but more often I do not. If tomorrow is one of my lucky days, shall I bring you one?’

  ‘It would be very kind. Mother would be grateful.’

  Parton handed her the sea-trout. ‘Could you find your bag yourself?’ he asked. His voice was ironical. ‘I would like to flog the next pool a little before the light goes.’ He touched his hat and turned on his heel. ‘You know,’ he said, unexpectedly again, over his shoulder, ‘fish were put into rivers primarily to be eaten. The classier sort of fisherman pretends to the contrary, but I’m not one of them. Your bag is behind that bush, by the way. Until tomorrow, then.’

  ‘Au revoir,’ Mary said. ‘Mother will want to thank you.’

  She recovered her bag and walked home slowly. She was thinking that she had never before met anybody like Ellis Parton and she could not make up her mind about him.

  Quite soon she was obliged to. She discovered that he had extended his stay at the hotel; and extended it again. He called every day with fish or, when it rained, which was often, with flowers; he made himself very agreeable to Lady Mount Ennis. He had a sharp and acid humour and he could be decidedly amusing. Lady Mount Ennis had lived in County Clare for forty years, but she had not forgotten a wider world. Ellis Parton stimulated her. She liked him and said so.

  She said a good deal more. Lady Mount Ennis at this time was a woman of sixty. She stood erect, her fine white hair superbly coiffeured, her cool blue eyes as bright as ice. She was a lady to whom a spade was never, but never, an agricultural implement. Mary found her directness much less galling than the shamefaced circumlocutions of her own contemporaries. ‘He isn’t a gentleman, of course,’ her mother said, ‘but you might do a great deal worse.’