Bilgewater Read Free

generation if such, and no thanks to Uncle Edmund, he manages to produce.
    When this actress left, Uncle Edmund’s plight was pitiable. He pinned people down, he pressed them against walls to talk about it. Paula would put her head round father’s study door when we were deep in chess and cry, “Run—he’s coming!” and my father would be out of the back door and hiding in the Fives Court. Once when Uncle HB was very desperate he went off to see Puffy Coleman—the one who stands sideways—and when he found the door locked, the front door and the back door, too, he went round to Mr. Coleman’s back shed—I suppose he guessed Mr. Coleman had seen him coming and had gone up to bed and down under the blankets though it was mid-afternoon and a warm Spring. He took a ladder out of Mr. Coleman’s shed and put it up against the back wall of Mr. Coleman’s house. Mr. Coleman said that it was most unpleasant and eerie to hear the clump clump of the ladder getting into position and the scraping on the wall, and the two spikes of ladder appear between his bedroom curtains and the bounce and creak of Uncle Edmund Hastings-Benson’s mounting feet. Deeper down beneath the sheets he went as Uncle E. HB’s great big red face and huge hook nose and kind little blue eyes rose like the dawn behind the pane and tap tap tap—“I say, Coleman. Will you let me in? I’m afraid I really must talk to you. It’s about Mrs. Bellchamber.”
    Thus I have been no stranger to love, isolated though my life has been. The derangement love seems to cause has actually made me value isolation more as term has followed term.
    And I love the holidays.
    Let me describe how it is with me and father in the school holidays.
    My father is reading in the Fives Court and looks up to see if I am still there. When he sees that I am not, he wanders about in the rockery, then among the greenhouses and lettuce beds to see if I am there, keeping his fingers all the time in the place in the text—he teaches the Classics and reads them all the time for pleasure, too. On the journey he gets deflected once or twice, standing for long stretches of time regarding a caterpillar negotiating a stone, picking a sweet-pea and running a finger up and down its rough, ridgy stalk, walking out to the village shop to buy tobacco but forgetting the tobacco to watch water running down a drain. At most seasons of the year he wears long mufflers curled over into tubes. He has an invalidish look, fragile at the waist, snappable as a sweet-pea and this is for some reason lovable. If he notices anybody as he walks about he smiles at them and they look at him kindly back.
    Sometimes he finds me. If it is summer he most likely finds me in the School pool, swimming up and down. It is one of the most marvellously royal and luxurious things to do—most princess-like—to be legitimately and all alone in a school swimming pool in the school holidays. Up and down, up and down I swim, frog’s face, frog’s body, eyes shut tight, thinking how I would be the envy if they knew it of the whole of my Comprehensive who are all in the town making do with the Public Baths or the freezing sea.
    Up and down, up and down I swim, father standing across on the shore, like Galilee, watching the green water and the black guide lines wriggling like snakes as I pass over them. “There’s a poor beetle,” he calls. “Whisk it out. That’s right. Poor fellow.”
    Up and down the pool I go, spluttering bubbles. Soon my father starts reading again. After a while, still reading he wanders away.
    Once—just once—when I was about thirteen I remember opening my eyes and finding him gone and wondering in a very inconsequential way if my mother had had a rather unexciting life.

C HAPTER 2
    T hroughout the peace there has always of course been Paula and perhaps without Paula such peace would have been