The Bachelors Read Free Page A

fourteen hours
at a stretch. But in latter years most of his fits occurred at home, in his room,
in his one-roomed flat in the Old Brompton Road; so that his friends came to
believe that he suffered less frequently than he actually did.
    Ronald
had settled down to be an amiable fellow with a gangling appearance, slightly
hunched shoulders, slightly neglected-looking teeth and hair going prematurely
grey.
    ‘You
could marry,’ said his doctor.
    ‘I
couldn’t,’ Ronald said.
    ‘You
could have children. Direct inheritance is very rare. The risk is very slight.
You could marry. In fact, you ought’
    ‘I
couldn’t,’ Ronald said.
    ‘Wait
till you meet the right girl. The right girl can be very wonderful, very
understanding, when a fellow has a disability like yours. It’s a question of
meeting the right girl.’
    Ronald
had met the right girl five years after his return from America. Her wonderful
understanding of his fits terrified him as much as her beauty moved him. She
was the English-born daughter of German refugees. She was brown, healthy,
shining, still in her teens and splendidly built. For two years she washed his
socks and darned them, counted his laundry, did his Saturday shopping, went
abroad with him, slept with him, went to the theatre with him.
    ‘I’m
perfectly capable of getting the theatre tickets,’ he said.
    ‘Don’t
worry, darling, I’ll get them in the lunch hour,’ she said.
    ‘Look, Hildegarde,
it isn’t necessary for you to mother me. I’m not an imbecile.’
    ‘I know
darling. You’re a genius.’
    But in
any case the trouble between them had to do with handwriting. Hildegarde had
taken to studying the subject, the better to understand the graphologist in her
lover. Hildegarde took a short course, amazingly soaking up, by sheer power of
memory, the sort of facts which Ronald had no ability to memorise and which in
any case, if he was called upon to employ them, he would have felt obliged to
look up in reference books.
    Thus
equipped, Hildegarde frequently aired her facts, her dates, her documentary
references.
    ‘You
have a better memory than mine,’ Ronald said one Sunday morning when they were
slopping about in their bedroom slippers in Ronald’s room.
    ‘I
shall be able to memorise for both of us,’ she said. And that very afternoon
she said, ‘Have you ever had ear trouble?’
    ‘Ear
trouble?’
    ‘Yes,
trouble with your ears?’
    ‘Only
as a child,’ he said. ‘Earache.’
    She was
by his desk, looking down at some handwritten notes of his.
    ‘The
formation of your capital “I’s” denotes ear trouble,’ she said. ‘There are
signs, too, in the variations of the angles that you like to have your own way,
probably as the result of your mother’s early death and the insufficiency of
your father’s interest in you. The emotional rhythm is irregular, which means
that your behaviour is sometimes incomprehensible to those around you.’ She
laughed up at him. ‘And most of all, your handwriting shows that you’re a sort
of genius.’
    ‘ Where did you get all this?’ Ronald said.
    ‘I’ve
read some text-books. There must be something in it — it’s a branch of
graphology, after all.’
    ‘Have
you practised interpreting various people’s characters from their handwriting,
and tested the results’ against experience?’
    ‘No,
not yet. I’ve only just read the books. I memorised everything.’
    ‘Your
memory is better than mine,’ Ronald said.
    ‘I’ll
be able to remember for us both.’
    And he
thought, when we’re married, she’ll do everything for both of us. So that, when
he remonstrated against her obtaining the theatre tickets, and told her he
could perfectly well get them — ‘I’m not an imbecile’ — and she replied, ‘I
know, darling, you’re a genius’ — he decided to end the affair with this
admirable woman. For it was an indulgent and motherly tone of voice which told
him he was a genius, and he saw himself being cooked for,