Henry and Cato Read Free

of ravaged tart,’ said Bella. ‘Like you, honey,’ said Henry feebly. It was agreed to be unlikely. Timid Henry shuddered from indiscriminate or hasty sex. One of the things which Bella had done for him was to make him feel that he had somehow been through ‘all that’ and come out spotless. What after all did he know about women? What big plump loud-voiced dark-eyed Bella had taught him; he was her pupil, her creation, probably her property.
    Henry took off his watch and altered it to London time. Half way there. He felt, as a very vague stirring in his bones, America begin to fall away. Not thinking of England or his mother he poured himself a quick Martini from the hip flask which Bella had thoughtfully provided. Presumably he was a rich man now. Of course he had not been exactly a poor man in the States except in the sense that he had somehow conditioned himself for poverty. His father, a rigid primogeniturist, had left everything to Sandy, the elder son: everything that is except a sum of money, not fabulous though not contemptible, which escaping Henry had left behind him untouched in a bank in London. Occasionally, when economizing with Russ and Bella, he thought of bringing the money over and spending it rapidly on riotous living, only somehow he had never found out how to live riotously. He could not discover in himself any talent for buying anything expensive: girls, fun, objets d’art. He did not want them if bought. Even the cornucopia of the American supermarket somehow turned his stomach. He never told the Fischers about the money. Naturally he had told Bella about Sandy at a faculty party the very first time he met her, and she had soon developed her classical theory about his childhood. Only of course it was not like that, it was not like that at all, and the truth was untellable.
    Henry’s father Burke Marshalson, who died when Henry was a boy, ought to have been Sir Burke Marshalson, or perhaps Lord Marshalson, only unfortunately there were no titles in the family. There had always been a legend based on nothing whatever of ‘grandness’, which Henry loathed with every cell of his being. Burke Marshalson spent his life tinkering with the property, which relentless governments were reducing. His wife Gerda, left a young widow, preserved the legend and did her best with the money. In this fictitious importance Sandy, the elder of the two children, had early clothed himself, or been clothed by the attentions of relatives and servants. When still a boy Sandy had inherited Laxlinden Hall, the park and farmlands, and the still substantial fortune needed to ‘keep them up’ for transmission in due course to his son. Henry, soon made aware that Sandy owned everything down to the very earth that tolerated Henry stood upon, used to pray daily for his brother’s death. Sandy always appeared to be the clever one, though he only studied engineering and even gave that up. He had identity, while all Henry’s qualifications failed to endow him with any credible being. Sandy patronized Henry and laughed at him and called him ‘Trundletail’, or ‘Trundle’ for short. He never even noticed Henry’s hatred. To Henry in America he sent Christmas cards, even birthday cards. No one had intended to be unkind to Henry and perhaps nobody had been unkind to him. He had just been born a bit unreal and second rate. ‘The little one is a puny child,’ he had heard his mother saying in a context where Sandy was being praised, and quick Henry learnt a new word.
    And now handsome six-foot Sandy was dead, and he had never married and never produced the longed-for heir. Inferior Henry was the heir. And now Henry was coming back to it all, back to ancient claustrophobic wicked cluttered Europe and quaint dotty little England and beautiful terrible Laxlinden and the northern light over the meadows. And his mother whom he had not seen since she visited New York five