Free Love in Our Time by Norman Collins Page A

himself of the parent’s privilege to interfere. Only he was forgetting he wasn’t the parent of both of them. Gerald congratulated himself again on the fact that so far as parents were concerned he was free. He tapped a cigarette rather defiantly on the back of his hand and addressed Mr. Biddle.
    â€œYou really needn’t worry,” he said. “I’ve got the whole thing figured out.”
    â€œThat’s fine,” said Mr. Biddle. “I wish I had your head for figures.”
    They went through to dinner after that. It was an awkward, silent sort of party. There seemed to be large empty places between them. They sat amid the bleak forest of weathered oak and tried to pretend that they were all in agreement about everything.
    â€œWhere’s that little china lady your aunt gave you?” Mr. Biddle asked at last.
    â€œIt’s broken,” Alice told him. “It got broken the night of the party.”
    â€œThat’s a pity,” said Mr. Biddle reprovingly. “You ought to have put it away before they came.”
    There was another awkward silence after that. Mr. Biddle had said the wrong thing again and he knew it. He tried to right it by talking about the Mariners.
    â€œThey’ve elected your old Dad Commodore for East Finchley,” he began hopefully.
    â€œCommodore of what?” Gerald asked bluntly.
    â€œThe Mariners,” Mr. Biddle told him. “Commodore of the East Finchley Fleet of the Royal and Ancient Order.”
    â€œWhat do you have to do?”
    â€œYou join the Order and you’ll find out soon enough,” Mr. Biddle replied. He enjoyed being secretive about the Order; individualists and unbelievers like Gerald provided him with his favourite kind of sport.
    â€œBut why can’t you tell me?” Gerald persisted. “It isn’t reasonable, to ask a man to join something when he doesn’t know what to expect.”
    â€œIt isn’t reasonable to tell a man before the Order knows what to expect from
him.”
    â€œWell, how do they find out?”
    â€œThey watch him during the Probation and Apprenticeship,” Mr. Biddle said gravely. “It takes six months to get to the Initiation.”
    â€œWhat happens then?”
    Mr. Biddle was about to answer, but Alice interrupted him. “They go off and eat a lot of big dinners,” she said, “and have too much to drink and smoke too many cigars and think that they’re doing something wonderful.”
    Mr. Biddle waited till she had finished.
    â€œThat’s a woman talking,” he said. “They’re all the same. They’re mad because they can’t be Mariners, too. You’ll think it funny in a year’s time yourself.”
    â€œWhy shall I?”
    â€œYou may be one of us by then.”
    â€œNot me.”
    â€œThat’s what they all say.”
    â€œThen why do they join?”
    â€œBecause they can’t help themselves.”
    Alice stopped them before Gerald had time to answer. She took her father by the arm and led him to the drawing-room. She was always trying to be nice to him—the very fact that he was there at all was proof of that—buthe seemed to do very little to co-operate; she always loved him passionately until he actually arrived and then he simply irritated her. Even his appearance made her cross. Since Mrs. Biddle’s death he had given up caring about how he looked. Or perhaps he had never really cared and it had been Mrs. Biddle, even from her sick bed, who had seen that his tie wasn’t frayed, and that his suits were pressed. He now wore baggier and baggier clothes and rounder and heavier boots. So far back as Alice could remember her mother had always grumbled to her father about his boots.
    But in the warmer atmosphere of the drawing-room things became a good deal better. It was easier to relax. The upholstered cushions were gentler to the spirit than weathered oak. And the room