Free The Bachelors by Muriel Spark Page B

along to Isobel’s.’
    They
walked through the Temple courtyard to Martin’s car.
    ‘What
do you think,’ Martin said, ‘goes on in a man like Patrick Seton’s mind when he
looks back on his life?’
    People
frequently asked this sort of question of Ronald. It was as if they held some
ancient superstition about his epilepsy: ‘the falling sickness’, ‘the sacred
disease’, ‘the evil spirit’. Ronald felt he was regarded by his friends as a
sacred cow or a wise monkey. He was, perhaps, touchy on the point. Sometimes he
thought, after all, they would have come to him with their deep troubles,
consulted him on the nature of things, listened to his wise old words, even if
he wasn’t an afflicted man. If he had been a priest, people would have
consulted him in the same way.
    ‘What
goes on at the back of his mind?’ Martin enquired of the oracle. ‘Tell me.’
    ‘I
should think,’ Ronald replied after a meet pause, ‘that when he considers his
past life he suffers from a rush of blood to the head, giddiness and bells in
the ears. And therefore he does not consider his life at all.’ And having thus
described his own symptoms when a fit was approaching, Ronald fell silent.
    Martin
negotiated the traffic all along the Strand to Trafalgar Square. ‘I think,’ he
said then to Ronald, ‘that’s a terrifically good piece of observation. Do you
feel like coming along and cheering Isobel up?’
    ‘All
right,’ Ronald said.
    ‘Got
your pills?’ said Martin.
    ‘Yes, I’ve
got them on me.’

 
     
     
    Chapter V
     
    IF there is one thing a
bachelor does not like it is another bachelor who has lost his job.
    The
Hon. Francis Eccles, small, with those very high shoulders that left him almost
neckless, leaned over the bar of the Pandaemonium Club at Hampstead, whose
members were supposed to be drawn from the arts and sciences. No scientist had
yet joined the club in its twelve years’ existence, but the members at present
in the bar were fairly representative of the arts side: a television actor, a
Welsh tenor, a film extra who took peasant-labourer parts when they were
available, a ballet-mistress, and a stockbroker who was writing a novel.
    It was
not only the Hampstead representatives of the arts who frequented this club: many
who had left Hampstead occasionally returned to it. Walter Prett for instance,
the mammoth art critic of middle age and collar-length white hair, had come
from Camden Town; and Matthew Finch, having sent off the last of his week’s
tidings for the Irish Echo, had come to meet Walter here on the early
autumn evening that tiny Francis Eccles hunched necklessly over the bar so
sadly, having lost his job.
    ‘But
you don’t need a job, Eccie,’ said Chloe, the young barmaid. ‘I don’t know what
you want with a job anyway.’
    Without
exchanging a word or sign and by sheer migratory instinct, Matthew and Walter
removed their glasses over to the window-seat where they were separated from
the jobless nobleman by a grand piano.
    ‘Tell
me,’ said Walter to Matthew, ‘do I look any thinner?’
    ‘No,’
Matthew said, ‘you look fine.’
    ‘I’ve
lost eight pounds,’ Walter said confidentially, moving his snowy long-haired
head close to Matthew’s short blue-black curls.
    ‘Don’t
worry, you look___’
    ‘I’ve
got to lose two stone,’ Walter said very loudly. ‘Simply got to. My heart won’t
stand up to it.’
    Matthew
shied a little. ‘Were you not on a diet?’ he said.
    Walter’s
voice subsided. ‘I was, but it insisted on no beer, wines or spirits. I’d
rather be dead.’ Walter’s eyes bulged redly from the inner circle of his face,
for it was surrounded by outer circles of dark blood-pressured flesh. He sipped
his wine daintily through his face-wide lips. Matthew thought perhaps the glass
would be crushed in Walter’s great hand. Walter was liable to sudden outbursts
of temper for no reason at all. Matthew looked at him uneasily, his eyes
peeping from under