Fairness Read online

  We were interrupted by a violent yowling from the stockade, like a cat being stepped on.

  ‘Brainerd, bound to be.’

  Monsieur came through the little gate at a storming crouch.

  ‘Il a tombé, votre garçon. Il est idiot,’ he spluttered.

  My charge was lying in the sand in the foetal position, clutching his ankle.

  ‘Monsieur made me go up too high.’

  ‘C’est pas vrai,’ Monsieur shouted.

  ‘He did too.’

  ‘We’d better take him home,’ Helen said. ‘You take him under that arm, and he can hop on the other leg.’

  ‘I can’t hop.’

  ‘Yes you can, Brainerd,’ she said, and he shut up. She was engaged now and spoke in a voice of command, not loud, but in a way that seemed to commit her whole person and so carried conviction. As we swung Brainerd over the sand, she even knew a song about hopping which he consented to join in after a bit.

  ‘Is it all right to leave your own – whatever he’s called?’

  ‘Oh Tariq will be OK. Monsieur will be so scared of trouble he’ll make sure nothing happens to him.’ Her refusal to be impressed by Monsieur’s parade-ground manner was itself impressive. She seemed to possess a certainty about how other people would react. Perhaps that was the secret of action, to rely on stability of motivation, to believe that the same stimuli would always produce the same reactions. It was fear of the erratic and unpredictable in others that produced my own hesitancies. To get anywhere in life, you had to make the same presumption of regularity about people as you made about the natural world. And it was pleasant to be caught up in her certainty. We swung along through the lingering mist-skeins with a high cheerfulness. For a few minutes, even Brainerd forgot that he was the invalid of the century.

  But then the drag of the shingle on his sneakers revived his self-pity.

  ‘I can’t walk,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, you can, Brainerd, lean on my arm.’

  ‘Carry me.’

  ‘You’re too big to be carried.’

  ‘In war they carry people when they’re wounded.’

  ‘This isn’t a war.’

  ‘Carry me.’

  There was an impasse in the lingering shimmer of the mist and all I could hear was the shingle sliding off our beach shoes. Then over the top of the bank, I saw Bettine’s little stall which wasn’t usually there so early in the day and so posed no temptation until the afternoon beach trip. Brainerd saw it too and his eyes gleamed at the sight of the giant pink cardboard lollies and the white hatch with Bettine’s homely face peering out.

  ‘Can I have an ice-lolly?’

  ‘Of course you can’t have an ice-lolly at eleven o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘I can too. When we went to the minigolf Dad gave us an ice-lolly.’

  ‘Your mother says I mustn’t give you ice-creams because it’s bad for your skin.’

  ‘I can’t walk. Look.’

  Brainerd dug his toes into the pebbles so that only the laces of his sneakers were visible, hunching his shoulders to complete the posture of misery.

  ‘Brainerd,’ Helen said, ‘your mother hasn’t said anything to me, so would it be all right if I gave you an ice-lolly if you promise to walk all the way home without complaining?’

  For an instant, Brainerd’s natural instinct for contention tempted him to point out that this was a phoney argument, but wiser counsels prevailed.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘strawberry and chocolate, with nuts.’

  Behind us as we stomped up the slithery bank, we heard a wailing. ‘It’s not fair. I want an ice-lolly too.’

  ‘Timmy, you haven’t hurt your leg.’

  ‘It’s not fair.’

  ‘Timmy, come on.’

  ‘If I hurt my leg, will you buy me an ice-lolly too?’

  He laid himself down on his side with great care as though about to go to sleep on the shingle and then felt his ankle, wincing extravagantly before he touched it.

  ‘Timmy, don’t be silly.’

  Brainerd, by now reaching up to receive the lolly from Bettine’s plump hands, turned round with a grin of triumph to contemplate his brother writhing on the pebbles.

  ‘Oh all right then,’ I said and picked Timmy up and carted him over to the little stall.

  Brainerd’s face creased in despair.

  ‘It’s not fair, he hasn’t hurt his leg.’

  ‘When you’ve made an exception, you have to stick to it, otherwise you lose your authority,’ Helen said.

  ‘Who said I ever had any? Anyway, you shouldn’t have made an exception in the first place.’

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Brainerd said, ‘I can’t walk.’

  ‘You promised, Brainerd,’ Helen said. ‘Timmy’s too young to know about promises, but you promised.’

  ‘Carry me,’ Timmy ordered, waving his red lolly, ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘No, you’re not, Timmy. You’re a very lucky boy. You’ve had an ice-lolly and you haven’t hurt your leg and you’re walking home.’

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Brainerd said again, but it was little more than a mumble for the sake of it, a musing sort of utterance not a clamour for action. And he let himself be half-carried along the shingle between us, carefully shielding the lolly with his fingers as he nibbled away with his buck teeth.

  It’s not fair: somehow the phrase twitches in my memory as I write it down and it takes me a minute or two to track down why. It was the philosopher W.R. Scrannel (1911–66) who used the phrase in one of his legendary lectures, or Scrannelogues as his disciples called them (I am not sure why I describe him so formally here, I came to think of him as almost a friend though an alarming one). After he had said it, he paused, one of those caustic pauses that kept his audience on the edge of their seats, before repeating the word ‘fair’ and adding with that sudden briskness of his that in the history of this little word lay the history of the past thousand years. All the beauty in the world, everything that Homo sapiens was capable of falling in love with, had once been expressed in that simple epithet. When we saw someone who was fair – him or her, there was no distinction of sex in it – the world was flooded with meaning. But now what were we left with? Fair shares for all. What once made the heart beat faster and constituted the best reason for being alive was now all about income tax and waiting lists. From irrational adoration to the rational distribution of resources, that was progress.

  Now that I piece his words together and recall the derisive rasp in his voice, I see that he could not have said all this in a lecture because it wasn’t really philosophy and it must have been over one of those feverish teas in his house at Pigotts Hill with his wife and daughter that he gave his version of how the world came to be disenchanted.

  ‘Oh God, what’s wrong with Brainerd? The ankle, oh he has such weak ankles.’ Jane Stilwell enfolded her son with passion. Her copper mane seemed to lasso his neck. In the dim light of the sitting-room, made dimmer by the stained-glass turret window on the corner, I became aware of two shadowy presences behind her, one so huge that he seemed to be as big as the china cabinet next to him and likely to unhinge its rickety glass windows and do terrible damage to the little figures of Norman peasantry which trembled on its grimy shelves.

  ‘These,’ she said, her eyes full of tears and with the limp figure of Brainerd sprawled across her bosom, ‘these are the darling Wilmots – Dodo and Tucker.’

  The huge man waddled out towards us, a distance of some six feet, but even so his progress was stately.

  ‘I’m Waldo, Dodo to my friends who think I’m extinct,’ he said putting out a hand the size of a small turkey. His wife, who looked eerily like Jane Stilwell down to the Presidential queue at the back of her hair, said, ‘Hi, I’m Tucker.’

  Helen shook hands with them in a brisk fashion, as though they were about the hundredth people she had had to shake hands with already that day. I could not help gazing on them with wonder. Dodo Wilmot was two hundred and fifty
pounds or thereabouts but with the weight evenly spread, so that he was huge first and only fat second. He was a legend, Jane told me, had made millions in anything there was to make millions in, real estate, hogs, farm machinery and, above all, minerals. He enjoyed a monopoly on the import of sponges and had came close to cornering some other soft commodity – what was it, cocoa, soya beans? – but not close enough, so that when the positions closed he was nearly bust. But minerals, that he was famous for.

  ‘Whadya say your name is?’ he enquired but more gently than the words implied, then repeated our names and said again, ‘Hi, I’m Dodo,’ before relapsing into a contented silence.

  At this point Helen woke up to who he was. ‘Have you decided where to start digging next?’ she said. To me this sounded too quick off the mark, a jump into something which needed more acquaintance, but Wilmot was not disconcerted.

  ‘No, young lady, we haven’t. They wanted me to take out a whole bunch of leases in Africa some place, but I’ve played that game before. I told them, you find me the rock, and I’ll pay you a fair price, but I’m too old to go digging again.’

  ‘What are you doing, Waldo Wilmot, going on about goddamned rocks when there’s a poor child lying here with a broken leg?’

  ‘Charles’ll take him down to the hospital in the wagon, honey, and tell them to bill me.’

  ‘I won’t hear of such a thing,’ Jane said.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll have to pay,’ Helen said, as they wrapped Brainerd up in a blanket and I helped to carry him to the car with Jane scurrying along behind.

  ‘Well, isn’t that great?’ Wilmot seemed at peace with the world. He said goodbye to Brainerd and turned back to Helen with benevolent curiosity. ‘How come you know so much about my little business?’

  ‘I’m a chemist, and I’m particularly interested in geology and metallurgy too.’

  ‘Well, we’ll have to see if we can find you a job. We need some attractive scientists in our company. Most all of them are bug-eyed monsters.’ He laughed, and to my surprise she laughed with him, not in the least offended, but hadn’t she said her particular interest was biochemistry?

  He patted the seat beside him in the dark corner of the little sitting-room, and talked to her, about his new project from what I could catch as I bustled about at his wife’s direction, collecting her racing glasses and telling Françoise the maid to look after Timmy. Now and then I glanced at them sitting side by side, Wilmot with his bulk turned towards her, his huge paw emphasising some key point in his spiel while she sat facing front, as though resisting some entreaty which he should have known better than to try.

  ‘Hey time to go,’ Wilmot suddenly called out to us. ‘We got the other car out back. You come racing too, Helen, and we can talk rocks.’

  ‘Sorry, I can’t, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You not a horse person, Helen?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘You look like you have a real nice seat for a horse. I can always tell.’

  ‘Not me,’ Helen said. ‘Anyway I’ve got to pick up Tariq. Mrs Farhadi’s taking him to have his verrucas done.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be Minna Farhadi, would it? We’re best buddies with the Farhadis from way back.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘He’s a terrific character, Farid. He tried anything on you yet?’

  ‘What, oh no, so far he’s been very polite, rather formal really.’

  ‘You just wait, Helen, believe you me. It’s only a matter of time.’

  ‘Dodo, can it.’ Mrs Wilmot threw in this reproof with leisurely disdain. She did not sound annoyed.

  ‘She’s from Texas, my wife, she’s old-fashioned, can’t get those southern Baptist preacherfolk out of her mind.’

  With her chunky gold bracelets and scarlet and orange silk shirt and her great flounce of hair the same brindled copper as Jane’s, Mrs Wilmot did not look like someone whose head was buzzing with old-time religion, but you could never be sure. Church historians were now coming to the belief that far from being marginal ascetics the early Christians had been well-dressed, middle-class family people, many of them comfortably off.

  The other car was a modest Renault. Wilmot enveloped the steering wheel, his bulk spilled over the seat, the hand-brake sprouted out of the dashboard and burrowed deep into his belly. By shifting his massive left shoulder through the open window, he allowed enough space for his wife to breathe in the passenger seat.

  ‘Oh Dodo, why did you tell Charles to take the wagon?’

  ‘This is a fun car, Mother, a real fun car.’

  Inland, the mist lingered. It straggled about the midget poplars and the stream which wound along the little valley behind the town. We passed timbered farmhouses, and crumbling walls and gable-ends with fading ads for St Raphael and Cinzano, and orchards of that deep damp green they had even in midsummer, the apples with only the faintest flush of red on them. Wilmot drove slowly, stopping for every peasant on a bicycle or clutch of hens at a farmyard gate. Each time he braked he exclaimed with a slow exhalation of pleasure, ‘Well, isn’t that great?’ His delight sounded so easy and natural that there was no condescension in it. He just seemed to like slow things.

  In a dusty little village smelling of manure, we turned sharp left at a slate-hung belltower with a clock chiming noon on it, and began to climb the gentle hill above the village, doubling back on ourselves, towards the sea.

  The air became clear, the sky blue. Over the tops of the hawthorn hedges, beyond the pine trees and the slate roofs of the little town, I could see the pale line of the beach, and I could see the sea. ‘Isn’t that great?’ Wilmot said. He turned the car down a gravel avenue between perfectly clipped lime trees. We fell in at the tail of a queue of limos gleaming in the breakthrough sun. Gliding down this kempt avenue towards the glinting sea, we seemed to have chanced on the road to an unsuspected sort of heaven, one which was no distance at all really but you had to know the way. At the end of the avenue, the ground fell away and spread out below us and we saw the white rails curving round in the shape of a frying pan with the stands at the end of the handle: a row of green-and-white pavilions with flags fluttering above them and the white oval of the paddock rails behind. ‘Isn’t that great?’ Dodo sighed.

  ‘It says Owners Car-Park Right,’ his wife said.

  We got out, and I heard the car’s springs sigh their relief as Dodo decanted himself on to the grass.

  ‘Firm,’ he said digging his heel into the green turf. ‘Going’s good to firm. They’ll go a hell of a gallop. You OK? Did I drive too fast for you, you look like you just saw a ghost.’

  Which I had, three ghosts, to be exact. For there standing together leaning with their backs against the paddock rails, mulling over their race cards, were the companions of my father’s youth, the drinking companions of his middle age, today in light summer wear and straw hats rather than British warm overcoats and soft brown hats, but still with that laconic unhurried air of racing men.

  ‘I know that face. How are you? How’s your dear father?’ Boy Kingsmill removed his panama with a mock flourish to the ladies, smoothing his tarmac hair with the other hand almost at the same time, as though the smoothing was also an accepted part of the greeting process. ‘Well, this is a pleasure,’ he said as he passed round our little party, with that obsequious foreknowing way my father loved to dwell on – Boy can’t buy a box of matches without making the woman behind the counter think all his past life has been a preparation for that moment. Boy might have been camping out on this patch of downland for months in the hope of catching a glimpse of me. When Jane came panting up to our little group a few minutes later (there turned out to be nothing wrong with Brainerd’s ankle by the time they got to the hospital), he bent over her hand and bussed it lightly.

  ‘What a darling blazer.’

  Jane Stilwell liked to praise other people’s clothes. She did it with a special little whoop in her voice as though she could hardly believe her eyes. Hard to
say what had caught her fancy here – the full sun on the heavy gilt buttons, the thin almost tropical texture of the cloth, the suggestion of fade about the purple-blue.

  ‘Boating jacket, officers for the use of.’ Boy held out his sleeve for her to stroke. ‘The bluebottles, the mouches bleues they called us over here. Our lot got badly cut up in the bocage. I was laid up with a broken ankle at the time as luck would have it.’ Boy waved a hand, introducing his two friends. ‘You remember Captain O’Neill?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said.

  It must have been twenty-five years at least since Frogmore O’Neill and my father had competed on the scales to see who could make the weight for the ride of a lifetime, on Ampersand, the surest sweetest chaser of his day. But Froggie was long past all that. Popping out of his crinkled linen suit, he had even more the look of a frog in a children’s story. Something magical like a pearl or a registered letter might plop out of his letterbox mouth.

  ‘Putting up a few stone overweight these days, I’m afraid,’ Froggie said patting his paunch and removing his cracked panama from his sweating brow.

  ‘And Cod, you remember Cod Chamberlayne, the punter’s friend?’

  ‘Now then young man, I don’t cross the frigging Channel to be made game of.’

  ‘On the rails back home, Mr Chamberlayne is an institution,’ Boy explained.

  ‘Ought to be in an institution if you ask me,’ Froggie said. ‘And so should anyone who bets with him. Best thing the French ever did, keeping out chaps like you.’

  ‘I am ’ere on ‘oliday, ladies and gents. I intend to make a study of the Pari-Mutuel though I can’t see the fun in it myself.’

  ‘You’re a bookie,’ said Dodo Wilmot. ‘Well, isn’t that great?’

  Cod bowed, acknowledging this tribute with some grace. He too had grown monstrous, the fishy quality of his features now almost blotted out by blubber, although the pout of his mouth and the dull cold eyes remained gadoid. He wore a long smock-like jacket of cream linen almost down to his knees and a dung-coloured straw hat pushed back off his brow. With his sheeny chestnut walking-stick he had the unbuttoned look of an Impressionist painter walking in his garden.