The Stranger from the Sea by Paul Binding

Author:Paul Binding
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2019-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Friendship’s Changing Faces

Never earlier would I have believed that Will’s presence, and in the same house as myself, could prove bane rather than blessing. In South London I had cherished every moment I spent with him out of the office. But down here in Dengate he wasn’t the old Will of London. Or—terrible, disloyal thought, perhaps he was! Could it simply be that, back then, I had been so patently his junior, so unabashedly in need of an elder-brother guide and protector, and he too vain and lazily good-natured to refuse the role, that I hadn’t been able to see the extent of his indifference to almost all feelings of other people except their admiration, actual or potential, for himself? I should, I now told myself, have recalled more often our visit to Limehouse, that second dark event I still needed to confess to somebody but had, out of self-protection, suppressed so that it returned only in the occasional bad dream or involuntary twinge-like thought.

Now I see that my resentment of Will—from (to be truthful) Sunday night’s supper to the Saturday morning he left Dengate (to be in time for a cricket match in Streatham on Saturday afternoon)—was inseparable from my severance from Hans. Fear of Will’s finding out about our intimacies had beyond doubt played a huge part in my determining on this. But it would be incorrect—as well as dishonest—to blame him for what I myself had set in train.

But Will’s own behavior was in itself vexing. Take his dealings with Mrs. Fuller herself, my landlady, his hostess. I ought to have known from his very appearance on the Furzebank lawn—togged up in his nattiest—that he had charmed the mistress of Castelaniene, for how else to explain that she had, almost on sight, offered him her private visitor’s bedroom (her late husband’s dressing-room). And Sunday’s “light collation,” during which he’d told stories of himself as a man well-known in both worldly and radical circles, was the first of no fewer than five other evening meals. Mrs. Fuller no longer absented herself from her own table, but attired herself specially to grace it, sticking an absurdly large comb into her Grecian hair and draping over her shoulders a shawl I had not seen before—and I thought I knew them all. Sitting there I allowed my attention to stray—I had plenty, too much indeed, to think about, including the to me reproachful absence on Tuesday and Thursday evenings of Hans Lyngstrand, apparently feeling unwell again, and having his meal brought up to the Mercy Room by Sarah. That suited Mrs. Fuller and Mr. Postgate just fine, they could indulge in sophisticated badinage to their heart’s content. And this young man who had so persistently mocked all forms of snobbery now encouraged Beatrice Fuller to talk about herself and her stupid petted early life, early visits to France, including a trip to Monte Carlo itself, her girlhood friendship with fascinating old Lady Winchelsea, and one never-to-be-forgotten experience the two of

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