Travels with my aunt / Путешествие с тетушкой. Книга для чтения на английском языке. Грэм Грин

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sink. It would serve very well for the home-made jam which I was promising myself to make next year – a man in retirement must have his hobbies if he is not to age too fast[26] – and the urn would have looked quite handsome on the tea table. It was a little sombre, but a sombre jar was well suited for damson jelly or for blackberry-and-apple jam. I was seriously tempted, but I remembered how kind my stepmother had been to me in her rather stern way when I was a child, and how could I tell that my aunt was speaking the truth? So I went out into the garden and chose a spot among the dahlias where the plinth could be built.

      Chapter 4

      I was weeding the dahlias, the Polar Beauties and the Golden Leaders and the Requiems, when my telephone began to ring.

      Being unused to the sound which shattered all the peace of my little garden, I assumed that it was a wrong number[27]. I had very few friends, although before my retirement I boasted a great many acquaintances. There were clients who had stayed with me for twenty years, who had known me in the same branch as clerk, cashier and manager, and yet they remained acquaintances. It is rare for a manager to be promoted from the staff of a branch in which he will have to exercise authority, but there were special circumstances in my case. I had been acting manager for nearly a year owing to my predecessor’s illness, and one of my clients was a very important depositor who had taken a fancy to me. He threatened to remove his custom if I did not remain in charge. His name was Sir Alfred Keene: he had made a fortune in cement, and my father having been a builder gave us an interest in common. He would invite me to dinner at least three times a year and he always consulted me on his investments, though he never took my advice. He said it helped him to make up his mind. He had an unmarried daughter called Barbara, who was interested in tatting, which I think she must have given to the church bazaar. She was always very kind to me, and my mother suggested I might pay her attentions, for she would certainly inherit Sir Alfred’s money, but the motive seemed to me a dishonest one and in my case I have never been greatly interested in women. The bank was then my whole life, and now there were my dahlias.

      Unfortunately Sir Alfred died a little before my retirement, and Miss Keene went to South Africa to live. I was intimately concerned, of course, with all her currency difficulties: it was I who wrote to the Bank of England for this permit or that and reminded them constantly that I had received no reply to my letters of the 9th ult.[28]; and on her last night in England, before she caught her boat at Southampton, she asked me to dinner. It was a sad occasion without Sir Alfred, who had been a very jovial man, laughing immoderately even at his own jokes. Miss Keene asked me to look after the drinks and I chose an Amontillado, and for dinner Sir Alfred’s favourite Chambertin. The house was one of those big Southwood mansions surrounded by rhododendron bushes which dripped that night with the steady slow November rain. There was an oil painting of a fishing boat in a storm after Van de Velde over Sir Alfred’s place at the dining-room table, and I expressed the hope that Miss Keene’s voyage would be less turbulent.

      “I have sold the house as it stands with all the furniture,” she told me. “I shall live with second cousins.”

      “Do you know them well?” I asked.

      “I have never seen them,” she said. “They are once removed[29]. We have only exchanged letters. The stamps are like foreign stamps. With no portrait of the Queen.[30]”

      “You will have the sun,” I encouraged her.

      “Do you know South Africa?”

      “I have seldom been out of England,” I said. “Once when I was a young man I went with a school friend to Spain, but my stomach was upset by the shell-fish – or perhaps it was the oil.”

      “My father was a very overpowering personality,” she said. “I never had friends – except you, of course, Mr. Pulling.”

      It is astonishing to me now how nearly I came to proposing marriage that night and yet I refrained. Our interests were different, of course – tatting and dahlias have nothing in common, unless perhaps they are both the interests of rather lonely people. Rumours of the great bank merger had already reached me. My retirement was imminent, and I was well aware that the friendships I had made with my other clients would not long survive it. If I had spoken would she have accepted me? – it was quite possible. Our ages were suitable, she was approaching forty and I would soon be halfway through the fifth decade, and I knew my mother would have approved. How different everything might have been if I had spoken then. I would never have heard the disturbing story of my birth, for she would have accompanied me to the funeral and my aunt would not have spoken in her presence. I would never have travelled with my aunt. I would have been saved from much, though I suppose I would have missed much too. Miss Keene said, “I shall be living near Kofiefontein.”

      “Where is that?”

      “I don’t really know. Listen. It’s raining cats and dogs.[31]”

      We got up and moved into the drawing-room for coffee. There was a Venetian scene copied from Canaletto[32] on the wall. All the pictures in the house seemed to represent foreign parts, and she was leaving for Kofiefontein. I would never travel so far, I thought then, and I wished that she was staying here, in Southwood.

      “It seems a very long way to go,” I said.

      “If there was anything to keep me here… Will you take one lump or two?”

      “No sugar, thank you.” Was it an invitation for me to speak? I have always asked myself since. I didn’t love her, and she certainly didn’t love me, but perhaps in a way we could have made a life together. I heard from her a year later; she wrote, “Dear Mr. Pulling, I wonder how Southwood is and whether it’s raining. We are having a beautiful sunny winter. My cousins have a small (!) farm of ten thousand acres and they think nothing of driving seven hundred miles to buy a ram. I am not quite used to things yet and I think often of Southwood. How are the dahlias? I have given up tatting. We lead a very open-air existence.”

      I replied and gave her what news I could, but I had retired by then and was no longer at the centre of Southwood life. I told her of my mother’s failing health and how the dahlias were doing. There was a rather gloomy variety in royal purple called Deuil du Roy Albert which had not been a success. I was not sorry. It was an odd name to give a flower. My Ben Hurs were flourishing.

      I had neglected the telephone, feeling so sure that it was a wrong number, but when the ringing persisted, I left my dahlias and went in.

      The telephone stood on the filing cabinet where I keep my accounts and all the correspondence which my mother’s death caused. I had not received as many letters as I was receiving now since I ceased to be manager: the solicitor’s letters, letters from the undertaker, from the Inland Revenue[33], the crematorium fees, the doctor’s bills, National Health forms, even a few letters of condolence. I could almost believe myself a business-man again.

      My aunt’s voice said, “You are very slow to answer.”

      “I was busy in the garden.”

      “How was the mowing-machine, by the way?”

      “Very wet, but no irreparable damage.”

      “I have an extraordinary story to fell you,” my aunt said. “I have been raided by the police.”

      “Raided…

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