A Kindness Cup Read Free Page B

and big drays. There are people on bicycles bumping along the rough roads. Groggy from all this, he stands uncertain in sunlight, his bag at his feet. One should never go back. He decides this with vehemence and wonders then is he thinking of the psychic mistake of it or his own lack of charity. One does go back, he knows, again and again. One should forgive places as much as people.
    This place has much to be forgiven it.
    Terrible to sense the valetudinarian legs tentative along the footpath. But up here everyone saunters. He is relieved he does not look remarkable. It is a refusal to fight the heat which already is dealing him blow upon blow; rather a yielding to it. Already steam is rising from the baking township and its slow river. Already there is sweat along his hairline, the saddened back of his neck, trickling between his breasts.
    He feels reluctant to face his hotel yet, knowing its drabness already, the tired pots of fern, the bar-stink, the narrow bedroom with its spotted mirror. He walks on one hundred, two hundred yards and finds a tea-shop sluicing out the evening before. Rinsing the last stains of it, a thin girl has been doing penance with mop and bucket. She couldn’t care less about this elderly man with his thin face and thinner voice demanding tea. She isn’t forgiving anybody, refuses the credit of his smile, while slinging her bile across one table surface after the other with a rancid grey rag.
    But he tries.
    â€˜It’s twenty years,’ he volunteers, ‘since I’ve been here.’ (Where are the banners, the bunting, the tuckets sounding at left?)
    Shedeals savagely with the counter and crashes the glass jars of sweets to one side.
    â€˜Lucky you,’ she says.
    â€˜It seems to have changed a lot. You notice things after that time.’ But what has he noticed? Bicycles, drays?
    â€˜I don’t.’ She is grudging altogether. ‘Don’t notice any change, I mean.’
    â€˜You’re young,’ he says. ‘Things happen so gradually you never see them when you’re young.’ Except for young Jenner, he remembers. Always remembering young Jenner with terrible clarity. ‘Coming back after a long time makes you see, pulls the scales off your eyes.’ He is conscious that he is talking too much.
    Young Jenner sits opposite him at the rocky table and says, ‘Sir, do something. Please. You’ll have to do something.’
    â€˜Of course I’ll do something,’ he says and the girl pauses with her slop-rag and says, ‘What did you say?’
    â€˜Nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing.’ Jenner fixes him with his terrible grey young eye and says, ‘You mustn’t hedge. You’re the only one.’
    â€˜Me?’ He flexes his useless arms, thin at sixty and not much better at forty. ‘Boy,’ he says, ‘I could never have crossed the Rubicon. Never blasted my way across the Alps given an ocean of vinegar. But you are right, of course. It’s the mind that does the blasting. I must apologise, boy, for never being one of your muscle-bound footballers with their intemperate logic. I never matched up.’
    â€˜You matched up,’ says young Jenner. ‘Please don’t apologise.’
    â€˜Would you like,’ the girl asks, ‘a couple of aspirin?’
    â€˜No,’ he says. ‘No. I—it’s the heat, you know. Come from the south. Feelings run warm here.’ And he frightens her again, because she moves away a little distance before asking, ‘What are you up here for then?’
    â€˜It’sBack to The Taws week,’ he says.
    â€˜Oh that!’
    â€˜Yes, that. We’re infesting in droves, I suppose. Migratory slaters crept out from under our little rocks. Full of sentiment.’
    â€˜Sentiment!’ she scoffs. ‘Sentiment! Well, if that’s how you feel . . . My mum and dad talk about it. They’re part of it.’
    He looks up to