The Man on the Bridge Read online

“No. My father’s dead. And my mother decided to stay on in Folkestone.”

  He relaxed; returned to that final swallow. “Well, now, enough of this weighty talk. I expect you’re hungry. I know I am.”

  The restaurant he’d spoken of was small and unpretentious. We had avocado, coq au vin, lemon meringue pie and Stilton. Two types of wine. It was all excellent and Cambourne made an entertaining host. He spoke knowledgeably on varied topics, including Pasternak giving up the Nobel award, the race riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill, the conference in Geneva on the ending of nuclear tests—and also a Guy Fawkes party which, under duress, he had been present at the night before. I found his conversation stimulating, even if, quite often, I hadn’t very much to say and at other times would have worried that I was thereby exposing my ignorance. This evening, however, that didn’t seem to matter. I thought it might be the influence of the sherry and the wine.

  It was half-past-ten when we left the restaurant. “Come back to the flat,” Cambourne said. “A couple of points we still need to discuss.”

  Once there, he offered me a liqueur.

  “I imagine you have to give—what?—a week’s notice.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ll do that tomorrow, naturally?”

  “Yes,” I said again, although I mildly resented the phrasing of his question. I wasn’t even sure that it had been a question.

  “Good. Then the week after next we’ll make a start on the picture.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Impossible to say.” Cambourne appeared to be assessing the play of light on his Benedictine. “Now, please, would you like to remove your clothes?”

  “Here?”

  “Why not here? I never finally engage a model without taking a look at her first. Or him.”

  “I’m going to feel very stupid.” But then it occurred to me I must be sounding coy. “I’m sorry. Yes, of course.”

  I undressed quickly—but not, I hoped, in some mere graceless scramble. I aimed for both dignity and nonchalance. I got down to my Y-fronts.

  “Those too,” he said. He asked me to assume half a dozen uncomplicated poses; but seemed scarcely to be watching.

  There came a knock on the door.

  James entered.

  “Will there be anything else, sir? If not I’d like to go to bed.”

  “No, nothing. Thank you, James.”

  “Then good night, sir.” He turned his eyes to me. “Good night, sir.”

  “Good night,” I muttered. And may you be murdered in your sleep!

  After the servant had gone Cambourne continued thoughtful.

  “All right, then. That’ll do. You can get dressed.”

  As I did so, I realized I was sweating. I hoped Cambourne hadn’t noticed. He sat flicking a finger against the rim of his glass.

  “Is the shop open on Saturdays?” he asked.

  I was puzzled. “Only in the morning. Even then, it’s pretty dead. Not much trade in Wigmore Street on Saturdays.”

  “But that still means, of course, you won’t be free.”

  “Well, no. Actually it doesn’t. We alternate.”

  “I see.” He looked across at me; I was more or less dressed by now. “I have a place in the country,” he said. “Near Guildford. This weekend a few friends will be coming down and I wondered if you’d care to join us.”

  3

  He had suggested we should meet the following evening at six—outside Somerset House in Lancaster Place—literally, a cricket ball’s throw from Waterloo Bridge. Apparently he had some earlier appointment near St Paul’s.

  (‘Waterloo Bridge’…the film that had reunited Vivien Leigh with Robert Taylor. And she was no longer the brazen, egotistical schemer of two years before—oh, not at all!—the complete opposite.)

  I spotted his car at once: a white Jaguar. I’d been half afraid James might be standing beside it, spotlessly trim in peaked cap, livery and gloves, waiting to hold the door open and even place a rug across my knees; but only Cambourne was there and he sat in the driver’s seat.

  “Sling your case in behind,” he recommended, after our initial greeting. “I can see you believe in travelling light.”

  “Tu te moques de moi?”

  “Seulement un peu.” He moved out gently into the stream of Friday evening traffic.

  “Anyway, it’s the smallest suitcase I’ve got. Contains nothing but a pair of socks.”

  A raw mist hung over the river. It felt good to be cocooned in our own little world of comfort and security. “Do you speak much French?” he inquired.

  “Enough to get by.”

  “Enough to get by where?”

  “I spent a holiday in Paris the summer before last.”

  “I’d say you need about as much French to get by in Paris during the summer as you do to get by in Swiss Cottage.”

  I watched a lighted train rattle over Hungerford Bridge. “Swiss Cottage during the summer or during the winter?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  “I like to get my facts straight. There are people who make such awfully wild assertions.” I said it lightly but felt nettled by his cavalier dismissal of four weeks in which I had spoken hardly one word of English. I paused. “You can try me if you like.”

  His look was gently derisive. “Oh, no. If I were you I really wouldn’t risk it.”

  “Scared?” I demanded.

  “What?”

  “As-tu peur?”

  “De quoi?”

  “Que mon français est peut-être meilleur que le tien.”

  “Do you aim to be thus provoking?”

  “Oh, I can get much more provoking than this. I think you’re trying to fob me off.”

  He sighed. “D’accord.” He considered a moment and then he began—very conversationally. He gave the impression his mind was as much on his driving as it was on what he might be saying. “Est-ce que l’idée t’est jamais venue de plaindre Icare? Moi, c’est ce qui vient de m’arriver. Qu’est-ce qui a bien pu le pousser à tant s’approcher du soleil à ton avis? Il ne savait donc pas qu’il tomberait sur un bec? Dédale avait bien dû le prévenir pourtant. Alors, il se croyait plus malin que tout le monde? Il jouait les crâneurs?…”

  I was already lost and this was only about half of it. Long before he’d finished I felt frustrated, foolish—almost victimized. I hadn’t understood, even, that he was talking about Icarus.

  “Did you really have to speak so fast?”

  “I wasn’t aware of speaking fast.”

  “And did you need to use such a quantity of slang?”

  “Again, I’d say it was colloquial rather than slangy. But would it help if I wrote it down?”

  “It might help more if you gave me the French for patronizing. And smug.”

  He did so. “Actually I’m sure you do speak fairly reasonable French. One day it could be excellent. And you have a good accent, too. That’s something to feel pleased about.”

  Praise indeed. And I didn’t want him to believe me huffy. “Seriously, however, if you could write it down I’d be grateful.”

  “But the problem is—shall I be able to remember?”

  I nearly said, “There you are, then! Called your bluff!” But on this occasion I exercised restraint. “The bits you can, perhaps?”

  We reached Merriot Park about an hour later. As we scrunched up the curving drive, the headlamps swept over lawn, trees and gravel. But I’d forgotten how dark it grew in the country and I couldn’t make out much of the house itself. I saw enough, though, to realize there’d been a picture of it in Cambourne’s flat. I had a hazy recollection of a long low building with a wing at either end and a clock tower in the centre. The building was painted in light beige and there were lots of dazzlingly white-framed windows.

  “I saw your picture of this last night,” I said. I was about to get out of the car.

  “And you may also have noticed it at the exhibition?”

  “Yes. Certainly.”
/>   The front door was opened before we reached it.

  “Hello, Tranch,” said Cambourne. “How’s the sciatica this week?”

  Tranch was possibly twice the age of James and I wondered if that accounted for the use of surname. He was thin and a bit stooped. Cambourne introduced me.

  “Poor Tranch gets back trouble so he mustn’t attempt to lift weights. But I reckon he could manage a pair of socks—even in a steamer trunk.” He himself had no luggage and Tranch insisted on carrying mine.

  “Do you want to freshen up first or will you come to meet my mother?”

  “I’ll come to meet your mother.” Then I suddenly thought of something. “Oh—do you change for dinner?”

  “Well, no … not tonight, at any rate.” He, like me, was wearing slacks, with an open-necked shirt and sweater.

  “Mrs Cambourne is in the library, sir. With Mr and Mrs and Miss Sheldon.”

  “Most of our guests won’t be arriving until tomorrow,” Cambourne told me, as we crossed the hall. “These Sheldons are distant cousins—Americans. I’ve never met them. They’re doing this cute little island of ours and tracing their genealogy. They’ve traced it all the way back to us. God damn them.”

  But he said it without rancour.

  Surprisingly, I didn’t take to Mrs Cambourne. Yes, I’d felt a little nervous beforehand—naturally—but because I liked the son I had expected to like the mother.

  And she greeted me charmingly.

  Yet the charm seemed synthetic. She reminded me of some fellow guest—at a far larger party than this—who was looking over your shoulder to see if anyone more interesting had just arrived.

  I knew that during this past summer she had turned seventy. Once, she must have been pretty—in a way, still was. Slim, elegant, she wore a long black dress adorned by a diamond brooch. Her hair was softly waved but of a pure and dramatic white. A gold-topped cane leant against the side of her chair.

  There were aperitifs before dinner and while the Sheldons and I were making bland conversation I wondered what Cambourne would have told his mother about me, when—presumably—he had telephoned.

  At table I was seated to her left. Following a minute or so of small talk, she made a remark which was slightly less conventional. “After dinner I intend to speak to you.”

  “Does that mean that during dinner you don’t?”

  “Amusing monkey! It means that during dinner my insufferable son will be present.”

  I said to Cambourne: “I didn’t know you had a brother.”

  There was polite laughter from the Sheldons. I was sitting next to Miss and opposite Mister. Mrs Sheldon was almost our hostess’s antithesis. She was plump and friendly and seemed keenly interested in everything she heard—although she herself didn’t actually say much.

  Neither did her husband: a stocky, genial man with thinning sandy hair and freckles.

  Their daughter was the most forthcoming. Plain but with a good figure, Elizabeth Sheldon would be twenty-one the following April. It was Mrs Cambourne who had asked her age.

  Mrs Cambourne had little hesitancy about asking anybody anything.

  “May I inquire what school you went to, Mr Wilmot?”

  I saw Cambourne look at her sharply and it appeared as if he were about to say something. I concluded from this that Mrs Cambourne had a hobbyhorse and I was right. She didn’t even wait for me to answer; yet for nearly half an hour—through most of the duck course—the talk was of public schools. Cambourne apparently hadn’t been to one but had studied at home under tutors until he went to Oxford in 1937; and Mrs Cambourne now seemed bent on justifying a decision which—although it must have been difficult to make, obviously—had nevertheless been put into practice well over a quarter of a century ago.

  “Maman,” protested Cambourne, “don’t you think all this could be a little boring for our visitors?”

  “On the contrary, Oliver,” said Theodore Sheldon immediately. “It’s fascinating. These are the sorts of insights into the British way of life we were especially hoping for. Isn’t that so, Mona?”

  Elizabeth Sheldon had to be told what fagging meant.

  “Fagging is the system by which older boys are allowed to make younger ones run errands,” explained Mrs Cambourne. “Shine their shoes, make their beds, clean out their rooms—all that kind of thing.”

  “It’s like having servants,” I said.

  I wondered if that was maybe going too far. But I felt irritated.

  “With the essential difference,” put in Cambourne equably, “that most servants receive a decent wage, good living accommodation, days off, et cetera; and don’t have to fit their shoe-cleaning, bed-making and various other chores into an already, no doubt, crowded enough scholastic programme. Therefore, I imagine, they find it less tiring. Added to which, servants apply for their jobs and are pleased to get them. Otherwise”—he gave me a sweet smile—“the parallel remains exact.”

  “And usually there is only a small amount of bullying,” added his mother, in the same light tone. “Tell me, Mr Wilmot, were you ever bullied?”

  “No, I can’t say that I was, Mrs Cambourne.”

  “Perhaps your size protected you?”

  “Perhaps it did.” There was a short but pregnant silence. “And, no, I don’t think I ever became a bully, either.”

  “But how did you feel about all that emphasis on games?” She seemed to hint at some sinister connection.

  This both amused me and shored up my determination.

  “In fact I very much enjoyed games. And those who didn’t … well, they generally managed to find some way around them. So where muscles weren’t exercised, at least ingenuity was.” Or, to put it just a little differently, madam—all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

  “Yes, I can believe you were good at games, Mr Wilmot. And I suppose you basked in a lot of hero worship? They made you a prefect, of course?”

  “Though not on my first day.”

  “And did you become school captain?”

  “Yes, I did.” That wasn’t true; but in such a context I found it irresistible.

  She smiled. “I have often heard—I wonder how far you might agree with this—that public school life is dominated by the social struggle. To achieve popularity, I am told, position and power become the overriding factors. In the pursuit of success, boys are prepared to curry favour not only wherever but however necessary.”

  Although she had faintly yet unmistakably emphasized the first syllable of the penultimate word, she gazed at me innocently—and expectantly.

  I hesitated.

  “Well, even if you’re right, Mrs Cambourne, maybe you’ll admit that it’s not such a bad thing, after all? Public school then becomes a microcosm of the world at large. A good preparation for adult life.”

  At this, her son butted in. “My God! Someday he’s going to be as cynical as I am.”

  “Oh yes, Oliver, you can laugh, but with all due respect to Mr Wilmot I think it remarkably sad. Is this the attitude of young people in general? Elizabeth, my dear, what do you feel about it?”

  “I feel … it’s honest,” answered Miss Sheldon, after a pause.

  “Oh, I don’t think any of us could dispute that. Honest it certainly is. But all the same—isn’t it a shade regrettable?”

  “Well, I’m not sure, Mrs Cambourne, what it is you’re referring to. If you mean that it’s regrettable the situation should be like that—why, yes, I suppose it is. But if you also mean it’s regrettable Mr Wilmot should be able to recognize it’s like that—well, there I can’t agree with you.”

  I was impressed. Not only had I acquired an ally but acquired one who was articulate in the teeth of opposition.

  “Borne down on every side,” cried Mrs Cambourne, gaily. “But tell us, Oliver, whom do you consider right?”

  When Cambourne replied, it was practically a drawl. “I suggest you and Mr Wilmot should each have your bottom smacked and be given fifty lines.”
/>
  “Oh, what a fine teacher you would make!” laughed Mrs Sheldon, clapping her hands. “Oliver, do you think you might enjoy it—being a teacher?”

  Cambourne gave a shudder. “That very thought could turn me bilious!”

  His mother gazed at him despairingly.

  “No, but please do tell us, darling! You know how I dislike any argument to be left hanging.”

  I reflected that, to set against this, she certainly didn’t mind a bit of woolly thinking. What was it, precisely, that her son was being asked to pronounce on?

  He shrugged. “Well, all I can say is, my love, you’ve always had both feet planted firmly in Utopia. It’s one of your most endearing characteristics.”

  It took me a moment to work out that he had actually come down on my side—on mine and Miss Sheldon’s.

  “Oh, and by the way,” he went on. “Seeing things, Maman, as they should be, rather than as they are, you too might have enjoyed ‘My Fair Lady’.” He glanced in my direction. “For those, however, who pride themselves on viewing the world more realistically I’m afraid I can’t find any such excuse.”

  This was preposterous—as he very well knew. Yet I refused to be drawn in: for one mealtime I’d had enough. And since the Sheldons had seen the show on its Broadway opening night, I was for the moment more interested in listening to them (especially Elizabeth) than to either of our hosts. But while the naming of attendant celebrities was in progress I happened to glimpse an unguarded exchange of looks between Cambourne and his mother. It was as if he were apologizing for having had to adjudicate against her. Regret and forgiveness were meted out in that same instant, and something else that went beyond the requirements of either apology or absolution.

  In one way, I was sorry to have witnessed it. It made me feel an interloper.

  4

  We rose from the table at ten-ish and returned to the library for our coffee, because that’s where the best fire was. With the coffee, Cambourne, Sheldon and I had glasses of Cognac. Cambourne happened to mention that Armagnac was subtly different, then said he’d buy a bottle tomorrow, to enable me to judge for myself. He spoke of this in a particularly languid tone—possibly to hide the fact he was being kind. I wondered if Pygmalion, too, had sometimes sounded languid.