Free A Period of Adjustment by Dirk Bogarde Page A

are
    â€˜I’m not. Not in the least. You are going to make a hell of a change to my life and I may not altogether manage to come to terms with things, but I will have a shot at it. Somehow we’ll make things work out, and I am not in the least fed up with you. You’re just a bloody nuisance but I do love you. Okay?’
    He allowed himself an exceedingly watery smile. ‘Okay. But I won’t have to go to live with them?’
    â€˜No. Not if I can help it.’
    He looked up in startled pain. ‘But you
can
! You can help it!’
    â€˜Yes. Yes, I can. Of course I can. I will. Now that really
is
a promise. Will that do?’
    He nodded his head slowly and I started the car.
    â€˜Do you think you are ready? Dottie and Arthur? We’ll have to get back to normal now. If we are going to work this out together, one of us has to be boss, stands to reason. And as I’m the oldest it’s better that it’s me. Agree? So let’s get on with it all. We have a hell of a lot of problems to face. Together. So no more whining about dying and belts. Right? Clear?’
    He wiped a hand across his face, rubbed his nose vigorously, shook his head and then nodded tiredly. I eased the car into the lane and we continued slowly on our way to the Theobalds’.
    â€˜That was bloody blackmail. You realize that? Crafty little bugger, you are.’
    â€˜It is quite easy, killing yourself,’ he said calmly and with a half-smile suggesting that it was nothing now to be considered. ‘Jones G.C. did it. At school. In the fourth year. There was a big fuss. But that’s what he did. In the gym.’
    â€˜Does anyone know why, exactly, such a young boy should do that? At fourteen?’
    â€˜No. I don’t know why. But it didn’t really matter. No one liked him much.’
    We drove on into the sunlight, spiralling dust behind us into the morning.
    Dottie Theobald was planting a rosemary hedge. I was looking at my watch.
    â€˜He looks a bit weepy. You give him a whacking?’
    She pushed a small spiky plant into a prepared hole. A long row of them going up the hill.
    â€˜No. Nothing as simple as that. I’m meeting his mother today in Nice to discuss a divorce and what we do with the house in London and all that stuff.’
    She pushed her straw hat to the back of her head, asked me to hand her another plant, tapped the trowel on the edge of a bucket briskly.
    â€˜Always a bit of a problem, that. Fortunately I have never had to deal with it personally, but God knows I’ve gone through it with a mass of bewildered kids the parents have dumped on us at prep school. Whose parents are coming to the Sports Day? Whose father will run in the egg and spoon? And worse, of course, Mummy has a new “friend”. Brought down for inspection. Usually a bit richer than Daddy. We were near Bourne End on the Thames, so it meant picnic hampers on glossy motor launches or shandy and smoked salmon at some smart-arsed riverside pub. You know?’
    We sat down together. She had found a half-filled sack of tourbe, and made a sign that I should squat on it. She perched, not altogether securely, on the rim of the galvanized bucket and I told her exactly what had happened twenty minutes before in the car. She listened quietly, now and again pursing her lips with distress, smoothing the blade of the trowel, nodding in agreement.
    â€˜I don’t know if I did it the right way. Or if I did
anything
the right way. I just did what I felt I had to do. Paternal stuff. Is that how it’s done?’
    She readjusted her hat, squinted into the sun. ‘I don’t know, yet, if it was the “paternal stuff”. I do know that it was right to do as you did. He’s too bright by far to try and hood-wink. I knew something had happened, so did Arthur. That’s why he carted him off to what we both call the “school-room”. Up there. With the round window. Keep him out