Full Term by J. I. M. Stewart

Author:J. I. M. Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Full Term
ISBN: 9780755133482
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2013-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

That afternoon I went to tea with Arnold Lempriere. This had become a weekly occasion, taking the place of our former perambulations of Oxford, which it seemed now improbable that he would ever resume. The vacation lay immediately ahead of us, when I understood it to be his custom to endure a week’s exile from Oxford in order to be with his sister in Northumberland over Christmas. Whether he was proposing to make the journey this year I didn’t know.

‘I never expected to see you with a dish of tea,’ I said – for I knew the old man liked to be rallied in this way. ‘You used to say you never touched the stuff. Just like our young kinswoman Fiona Petrie, who starts in on her whisky at four o’clock.’ Lempriere by no means approved of Fiona, whom he judged to have adopted an unwomanly course of life. He did, on the other hand, enjoy any invoking of consanguineous matters.

‘I hold no brief for tea,’ he growled. ‘But young Damian says my liver is coming away in little bits. If I don’t cut down on honest liquor in time, he says, it will be either the water wagon or the hearse. And which, he asks, would be worst? I like Robert Damian, thank God. The family’s of no antiquity, but one of them did well at Waterloo.’

‘Your tea’s very good tea,’ I said.

‘So it ought to be. Gall understands these things, I’m glad to say. I expect he was at Waterloo too.’ Lempriere gave his throaty chuckle at this joke, the only point of which lay in the fact that Gall, who was his servant, looked almost as old as himself. ‘This equipage belonged to my grandmother, and the fellow knows how to handle it.’

I looked at the utensils thus described, and concluded that the silver dated from the reign of Queen Anne. And Queen Anne – I thought with almost Junkin’s chronological haziness – mightn’t have been dead all that long when Lempriere’s grandmother first acquired the stuff. Lempriere himself looked very old and very sick this afternoon, but having an instinct for doing a thing in style he had got himself up in what was itself a grandmotherly way. He was sitting supported by cushions in a fireside chair, with a shawl draped over his shoulders and his hands in fingerless mittens against the winter season. He poured the tea with as much precision as if it had been a daily task with him since the turn of the century. But since his eyesight was failing the result wasn’t always quite right. Gall – habituated to hearing all sorts of absurd things said about himself – was vigilant in a corner of the big dusky room.

‘The lad Lusby,’ Lempriere said. ‘He’s coming to read aloud uncommonly well. Improves with practice.’ Lempriere paused virtuously, as if his only object in allowing himself to be read to was an honest endeavour after Peter’s better education. ‘Intellectually immature, but not a hopeless proposition by any means.

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