Ripeness is All Read online

  RIPENESS IS ALL

  Eric Linklater

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  A Note on the Author

  TO COMPTON MACKENZIE, ESQUIRE

  ISLE OF BARRA

  My dear Monty,

  I can think of three sufficient reasons for offering you the dedication of this small comedy. In the first place, your name on this page will advertise my good judgement in being, and having been for many years, a most warm admirer of your work; though indeed the great host, not only of readers but of writers, who have travelled by way of Sinister Street – if seldom to country so diversified as yours – makes such judgement seem, to the honour of your contemporaries, the merest commonplace. Secondly, we are about to become neighbours in some sort, and though the walls of our houses are as yet but little advanced, I look forward to the time when the way between us, doorstep to doorstep, shall be the Minch and the Pictland Firth; and in your non-existing tray, on your table as yet unbought, in your hall unbuilt, in your house not roofed, I drop this, your first visiting-card. Thirdly, I want to affirm my friendship for you. It is a large and delighted friendship; but if I do not protest it now, in public, and at a distance, it may go unspoken for long enough. For as soon as we meet again there will be talk on noisier subjects, more inflammatory subjects, on a multitude of very arguable subjects, and a host of inordinately comical subjects; we shall certainly not bother about a topic as quiet as friendship. Indeed, had a stranger listened to our last debating with Norman Sturrock, and Willy Mackay Mackenzie, and Moray Maclaren, he might well have thought we were each and all devoted enemies: for you have the gift of contagious passion in argument on subjects so remote and disparate as, if I remember rightly, Turkish mathematics and Jack the Ripper; and you and Willy and Norman are experts in the old Scots game of flyting. Let me protest my friendship, then, while the breadth of Scotland is between us, and let us soon dispel any memory of this sentimental admission in new controversy, in Edinburgh, Orkney, Barra, or where you will.

  Yours ever,

  ERIC LINKLATER

  Aberdeen

  January 1935

  Chapter 1

  Sergeant Pilcher was not one of those bull-mouthed swarthy red soldiers, common enough twenty years ago, who larded instruction with oaths and kept conversation buoyant on their flotsam of Hindustani and a flood of beer. He belonged to the new post-war army, whose virtues are those of the mechanic and the clerk, and whose vices are negligible. He wore his uniform with neatness so pronounced as almost to be nattiness, and his voice, explaining the detail of reversing arms to the thirteen men before him, had the precise inflections of a demonstrator in a chemical laboratory; but a demonstrator not too sure that the experiment was going to be a success, for the 4th Brackens – a Territorial battalion – were infrequently required to supply a firing party, and Sergeant Pilcher had had but little time to teach his men the necessary drill. This was their last rehearsal, a lesson thrust into ten vacant minutes while they waited for the funeral company to be paraded.

  The firing party stood with their rifles held out before them, perpendicular at the full stretch of their arms, and waited for the next command.

  ‘Now on the word Two,’ said Sergeant Pilcher, ‘I want to see you bring the butt of the rifle towards the body, passing it inside the left arm, and turning the muzzle over to the front. At the same time change the position of the hands, bringing the left hand to the small, and right hand to the point of balance, the rifle still remaining at the full extent of both arms.’

  Unless one is expert in handling the heavy service rifle this movement, that turns it upside down, is difficult to perform smartly, and Private Ling, a romantic young man who cultivated military drill in order to equip himself for a Fascist revolution, painfully struck his nose with the brass-bound toe of his butt.

  ‘Now,’ said the Sergeant, ‘on the word Three, give the rifle a cant under the left armpit, bringing the muzzle to the rear, sling uppermost, keeping the left elbow – ’Ere, what’s the matter with you, Ling?’

  Private Ling sniffed and answered, ‘My nose is bleeding.’

  ‘Fall out and wipe it,’ said the Sergeant. ‘You can take my hanky if you haven’t got one of your own,’ he added kindly.

  The firing party, their extended forearms sagging with the weight of their rifles, waited anxiously while he rubbed a spot of blood from Private Ling’s tunic. He returned with military precision to his post in front of them. ‘Three!’ he commanded. They tucked their rifles under their left arms, and would have felt a little happier had not a shower of rain, needle-like, assaulted them at this very moment. A variety of expressions upset the impersonal rigidity of their features that discipline dictated: ire and vexation humanized them, a shiver disturbed them, and the prospect of a cold, wet afternoon elicited, as natural as an eructation, a little muttering of blasphemy from the rear rank. Sergeant Pilcher, cherishing as far as possible the comfort of his men, promptly marched them into the drill hall, and in its hollow gloom earnestly explained, during the five minutes that remained to him, the complicated procedure of firing a salute.

  The cause of this activity – the body of Major Gander, C.B., T.D. – lay meanwhile, richly encoffined, flag-draped, crowned with roses and a sword, in the hall at Rumneys, lately his house and now, if rumour were correct, his legacy to his sister Hilary.

  Hilary Gander was one of those women whose unmarried state impugns the sagacity of men and condones, or rather justifies, the occasional extension of maidenhood into middle life. She was at once the most pleasant and most sensible of the Ganders. Her brown hair was strawed with grey, and her eyes were an agreeable blue. Her other features were good without being strikingly good, and her figure was sufficiently generous to show that maternity had been her natural function. That she had failed to achieve maternity was due to her unfailing common sense: she had never yielded, that is, to the romantic illusions which are the general preamble to marriage, and common sense, useful though it is in many ways, is starvation to a young man in love. She was a sound churchwoman, unaffectedly devout, more immediately concerned with works than faith, and happy in her ability to accept a mystical thesis without being really aware that it was mystical. She was intelligent though by no means intellectual, and her principal contribution to humour was good humour.

  She listened, while they waited for the arrival of the gun-carriage, to the Vicar’s animadversions on the weather.

  ‘I like weather to be appropriate,’ he said. ‘I like a grey November, a white Christmas, a rainbow April, and a fine sunny June. I have faith in the validity of the seasons, and I like my faith to be justified. This wind and rain, these bitter skies, are a kind of anarchy at midsummer. They annoy me intensely. They’re out of harmony with June, and I value harmony above most things.’

  ‘I think the weather’s quite suitable for the occasion,’ said Hilary. ‘I like a fine day for a wedding, but I much prefer a really miserable afternoon, like this, for a funeral.’

  ‘But the prospect for tomorrow is no better,’ said the Vicar. ‘My barograph is steadily going down, and Caroline’s garden party will be ruined. She
’s made most elaborate preparations for it, and she’ll be bitterly disappointed if it isn’t a success.’

  The Reverend Lionel Purefoy, Vicar of Christchurch in Lammiter West, was a handsome tall man, red-faced, a fox-hunter. The natural dignity of his appearance was impressive, but it was sometimes impaired by an overlaid pomposity, sometimes by unaccountable irritation, and his devotion to his wife, which was quite sincere and for which he was much admired, was largely due to her being the fifth daughter of the fourth Duke of Starveling. He was at his best when she was beside him, and when he was separated from her, though by nothing more than an intervening room, he would bring her name into the conversation, perhaps with unnecessary frequency, to comfort himself by reiterated assertion of his alliance to the daughter of four dukes, of his relation through her to a score of diminished titles, to a cousinhood of Rear-admirals and Major-generals and deputy Lords Lieutenant. In Rumneys more than in most places he felt the need for this circumvallation of kinsmen and pedigrees, and in Rumneys he was especially liable to irritation and compensatory pomposity.

  Now, with sudden spleen, with a quick freshet of anger in his blood, he turned away from Hilary Gander and surveyed the other mourners, the murmurous sombre coveys in the corners of the room, with upflung head and hostile eyes. A happy relief among so many black shapes were the scarlet and gold Staff badges of Colonel Swan, whom the War Office had grudgingly detailed to attend the funeral. The Vicar caught the Colonel’s eye. They turned their backs upon the coffin and began to discuss the weather.

  ‘Filthy day,’ said the Colonel. ‘I’d hoped to get a round of golf before going back to town.’

  ‘An abominable day. We’ve a right to expect better things in June. My wife’s garden-party tomorrow is going to be ruined. It’s in aid of the Brackenshire Association for Improved Slaughter-houses, and we’ve made really quite elaborate preparations for it. My wife has set her heart on its being a success, and I’m afraid she’s going to be sorely disappointed.’

  ‘Too bad,’ said the Colonel, ‘too bad indeed.’ And he looked at his watch.

  Stephen Sorley, nephew of the dead man, stood with his friend Wilfrid Follison before the fireplace and disputed with his cousins, Katherine Clements and Jane Sutton, the charge of selfishness they had preferred against him for the extravagance with which he absorbed the heat. Fie was a pallid plump young man, with smooth black hair and very red lips, and he might have been handsome were it not for a thickly-rooted snub nose. He was tall and broad and too fat for his twenty-seven years. He was richly and carefully dressed – he wore a black satin stock, a watch-chain with a pendant jewel, a couple of rings – and he stood astraddle before the fire, and contemplated his fine white hands, and ignored his cousins’ expostulation. But Wilfrid, a slim pretty fair-haired youth with long eyelashes and a sweet bubbling voice, defended him and cried indignantly, ‘Stephen’s quite right to keep warm as long as he can. He had a terrible cold last month, and he isn’t properly better yet, and he oughtn’t to be out at all in weather like this. But he’s terribly conscientious, and he said it was his duty to come to the funeral, and nothing I could say would stop him. It’s perfectly hateful of you to grudge him a place by the fire, and want him to stand in some draughty corner where he’ll just catch another cold, and then Mrs Barrow and I will have to nurse him for weeks and weeks.’

  Jane shrugged her shoulders. ‘Oh, all right,’ she said. ‘Stay there if you want to, Stephen, but it’s damned silly to toast yourself like that just before going out.’

  ‘Whatever I do now I shall be miserable in half an hour,’ said Stephen, ‘so I might as well be comfortable while I can.’

  Jane was a bulky girl with a broad chest, a weather-beaten face, and thick muscular arms and legs. She was captain of the Brackenshire Ladies’ Golf Club. She walked like a heavy-weight boxer, and except for her skill in approach-shots, putting, and the like, she possessed few of the arts of life. Because she had no taste in dress she valued her friendship with Stephen and Wilfrid, who helped her to choose clothes that would minimize the rugged opulence of her figure. Wilfrid had once knitted for her a silk jumper of alternating leaf-green and jade-green diagonal stripes, in the hope that this clever lineation would, like the zebra’s among trees, or the dazzle-painting of a tanker in war-time, make her line, size, and shape less obvious. The jumper had been only moderately successful in its purpose, but Jane had never ceased to be grateful to Wilfrid for his good intention. Now, for his sake, she abandoned her attempt to shift Stephen from his place in front of the fire: even if she did succeed she would only make room for Katherine, and Katherine, babbling like a brook and shallow as a brook, was one of those women with whom men flirt at sight and whom women hate at sight: a despicable creature, thought Jane, glancing enviously at Katherine’s pale mourning maquillage and exquisite funeral attire. She crossed the hall to speak to her cousin Arthur.

  Arthur Gander was standing at ease – in the military sense of the word, that denotes not ease but a rigid composure – before the flag-draped coffin. He cultivated a soldierly bearing that his appearance did little to assist, for he was short in stature, bald in front and behind – a median waft of hair separated the occipital bareness, which was quite round, from the arid horseshoe in front, on which a few isolated hairs still weakly grew – and his slightly protuberant eyes were velvety and brown. A closely growing cropped moustache did something to counteract their mildness, and a Socratic nose, indicating the robustness of his constitution, excused his little basin-shaped paunch. So much for the exterior: of the inner man, of his mind, of his spirit, of the flux of his emotions, it is less easy to speak, for he was very subtly compact of honesty and dishonesty, of noble perception and trivial performance. He stared at the coffin, and in his imagination this corruptible, this clay that would soon be dust and once had been a soldier, had put on its incor-ruption and was already a unit in that eternity-serving army whose muster-roll is the battle-honours of England: he saw the Major as fellow-ghost with veterans of the Peninsula and older shades from Malplaquet: he beheld, as on a parade ground, company behind company into the darkness, the armies of England in khaki and in scarlet, splendid in the Hussars’ pelisse and seven feet high in Grenadier caps, in steel harness, in leather jerkins, pike-bearing, carrying long-bows, carrying Saxon swords: he descried continuity from Battle Abbey to the last battle of Ypres, and he perceived, as engagements in one mystical campaign, Agin-court, Oudenarde, and Seringapatam; Alma, Dargai, and Arras, and the Somme. – Yet seeing all this he still had vision left to see himself standing soldierly beside a soldier’s coffin, and his velvety brown eyes were alert to watch the effect of his disciplined immobility on any who should notice it. His attitude invited attention. It proclaimed that he also had been a soldier, that he, mourning the dead Major, knew grief more poignant than the other mourners. He frowned a little, contracting his features to harsh significance. Nothing, at this moment, would have given him more pleasure than to hear someone whisper, ‘Look at Arthur! How well he carries himself, as though he were on parade!’ – And the proper answer would have been, ‘He is mourning a lost comrade. It is a soldier’s grief that his attitude bewrays.’ But no one, at least in his hearing, made so understanding a comment. His reverie, indeed, was untimely interrupted by Jane who asked, as loudly as the circumstances permitted, ‘Hullo, Arthur. What’s the matter? Trying to see how long you can hold your breath?’

  Arthur was saved the task of replying to this foolish question by a warning sibilation. Hilary was the first to say ‘Hush!’ Others repeated it, and a slight hissing ran through the room as though from a flock of resentful geese. Silence succeeded.

  So that he and the 4th Brackens need not, in this inclement weather, stand by the grave too long a while, the Vicar had decided to read part of the Burial Service before they left Rumneys. His vestments gently rustled. ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life,’ he said. His voice carried a churchly echo, and like homing doves the words came through the qui
etness of the hall. He read the ninetieth Psalm: for the alternative contains the words ‘Every man living is altogether vanity’, and Mr Purefoy thought such extravagant humility, suitable though it might be for Jews, inappropriate for Englishmen. But he enjoyed reading Domine refugium, and the doves became eagles at ‘the glorious Majesty of the Lord our God be upon us: prosper Thou the work of our hands upon us, O prosper Thou our handy-work.’

  He turned the pages and read the Corinthian mystery. He asked the statutory riddles. Bearers raised the coffin and carried it out to the gun-carriage that had just arrived, where the wind raised the skirts of the flag, and the rain darkened the red cross upon it, and Sergeant Pilcher’s men gravely presented arms. The civilian mourners hurried into their motor-cars, and the whirring of electric starters, the purring of engines, competed with the wind in the trees and nearly defeated the subdued staccato of military commands. In the road, beyond the debouchment of the drive, stood the escort clumsy in their greatcoats: there were a nominal company of the 4th Brackens, Gunners, Engineers, a Field Ambulance section, and a detachment of what had once been the Brackenshire Yeomanry, and now, its glamour gone but its efficiency increased, was an Armoured Car Company. They were all Territorials, and few of them did not feel the injustice of being rained upon, and coldly blown upon, when they had already sacrificed part of their Wednesday half-holiday to give the funeral its proper honour: Major Gander had been President of the local Territorial Army Association.

  The procession was formed, and the muffled drums, mournful beyond words in such weather, beat their march between wildly fluttering hedges. The firing party, their brows constricted with thought, endeavoured to visualize the part they were about to play. In the motor-cars the weather continued to be the principal topic of conversation, and the Major’s will, whose provisions were as yet known only to Mr Peabody, his solicitor, was so absorbing a subject for private speculation that none complained of the monotony of meteorological discussion. At the Churchyard the lesser mourners, those more remotely sorrowful, waited under their umbrellas: they stood like a spawning of giant black mushrooms, a tropical growth of dingy cryptogams, and felt dampness invade their shoes, but stayed resolute to show themselves at the obsequies of a wealthy neighbour. The drums came nearer. The soldiers trod heavily along the broad path between the tombstones. Sergeant Pilcher shepherded his firing party into their proper position by the grave, and told them in discreet tones not to be flurried when the moment came for them to load, for he would give them plenty of time to execute his orders. They listened gloomily, resting on reversed arms, and felt the rain trickle down their necks.