Free 1982 - An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd Page A

changed.”
    “Pity,” Felix said under his breath. He could happily have done without the Bathes. Eustacia, though Albertine’s twin, did not possess even her modicum of prettiness and was a surly moody person at the best of tunes. Nigel Bathe, her husband, complemented her sourness with an endless stream of grievances and alleged injustices which he claimed the world at large was always visiting on him. Wrongly totalled mess bills, unfair allocations of duty, uncongenial postings and the like. The list was endless. It took very little time for the Bathes to depress the tone and atmosphere of any gathering.
    Felix drained his sherry and was about to get a refill when Henry Hyams attracted his attention by loudly calling his name and raising his hand as if he were trying to halt a stream of traffic. Henry Hyams was a large portly man who filled his dinner suit to capacity. The fat on his neck bulged over his stiff collar and he looked hot and trussed up. He had very small pale blue eyes, a waxed moustache and his thinning hair was brushed forward over his forehead and stuck there in a curl with hair oil.
    “Yes, Henry?” Felix said patiently, modulating his voice in respectful falling tones.
    “Oxford, Felix, Oxford.”
    “Yes, Henry?” Felix repeated, this time on a rising note.
    “What’s it all about, man? What’s it all about? Not entering the church are you? Mmphwaw!” He gave a snorting bark of laughter.
    “Certainly not,” Felix answered promptly.
    “Felix is going up to read, um, modern history,” his mother interrupted. “That is right, dear, isn’t it? I was so pleased to hear it was modern.”
    “ Modem history! ” came an outraged bellow from the doorway. “I’ll give you modern history!”
    Everyone whirled round in alarm. It was Major Cobb.
    Felix was always surprised that his family were by and large reasonably tall when he saw his father. Major Cobb was a small man who had once been powerfully built. Some evidence of those early endowments was still visible, but since leaving the army he had grown dangerously fat. Tonight, Felix thought, he looked like a tiny, black and white, angry box. He was wearing—inexplicably—black knickerbockers and white silk stockings, buckled shoes, a tail coat, dickie and stiff wing collar with a white bow tie. Across his left breast jingled a row of medals. He looked like a diminutive ambassador about to present his credentials at the court of Saint James’s. He was almost completely bald, but, against the fashion of the time, retained colour of old piano keys, as if he were just recovering from an illness or about to be seriously afflicted by one. He had heavy bags below his eyes and his upper lids were plump wattles. The swagged folds of flesh left only thin slits for him to peer through. A thoroughly unpleasant looking man, all in all, Felix thought. He prayed earnestly that his own old age wouldn’t leave him similarly disadvantaged.
    He stamped into the centre of the room flourishing a rolled up newspaper and hurled it into the fire. This gesture would have had more symbolic force if the fire had been lit. As it was it just rebounded from the fire back and struck the gaping Charles just below the knee.
    “That damned villain, Carson!” the major said. “He ought to be boiled in oil!”
    “Hamish!” Mrs Cobb shrieked. “Calm yourself! The children are here.”
    “Modern… wretched history. I don’t know. Where will it end?” He glanced wildly round the room as if noting its occupants for the first time. “Home Rule, syndicalism, militants, suffragettes. I spit on them all! ” he seethed.
    Felix turned away. He’d seen these displays too often to be fearful or even impressed. Little Charles, to whom the last remarks had been addressed, looked as if he had just been sentenced to Sir Edward Carson’s fate.
    “No point in getting steamed up, Hamish,” Henry Hyams said jovially. “Seven-day wonder stuff, don’t you know.”
    The major was