PART Ⅳ-5

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    But I had to see the pool at Binfield House.

    I felt really bad that mo<u>?９９ｌib?</u>rning. The fact was that ever since I struck Lower Binfield I’d been drinking almost tinuously from every opening time to every closing time. The reason, though it hadn’t occurred to me till this minute, was that really there’d been nothing else to do. That was all my trip had amouo so far—three days on the booze.

    The same as the other m, I crawled over to the window and watched the bowler hats and school caps hustling to and fro. My enemies, I thought. The quering army that’s sacked the town and covered the ruins with fag-ends and paper bags. I wondered why I cared. You think, I dare say, that if it had given me a jolt to find Lower Binfield swollen into a kind of Dagenham, it was merely because I don’t like to see the earth getting fuller and try turning into town. But it isn’t that at all. I don’t mind towns growing, so long as they do grow and don’t merely spread like gravy over a tablecloth. I knoeople have got to have somewhere to live, and that if a factory isn’t in one place it’ll be in another. As for the picturesqueness, the sham trified stuff, the oak panels aer dishes and co..pper warming-pans and what- not, it merely gives me the sick. Whatever we were in the old days, we weren’t picturesque. Mother would never have seen any sense iiques that Wendy had filled our house with. She didn’t like gateleg tables—she said they ‘caught ys’. As for pewter, she wouldn’t have it in the house. ‘Nasty greasy stuff’, she called it. A, say what you like, there was something that we had in those days and haven’t got now, something that you probably ’t have in a streamlined milk-bar with the radio playing. I’d e back to look for it, and I hadn’t found it. A somehow I half believe in it even now, when I hadn’t yet got my teeth in and my belly was g out for an aspirin and a cup of tea.

    And that started me thinking again about the pool at Binfield House. After seeing what they’d doo the town, I’d had a feeling you could only describe as fear about going to see whether the pool still existed. A might, there was no knowing. The town was smothered under red brick, our house was full of Wendy and her junk, the Thames oisoned with motor-oil and paper bags. But maybe the pool was still there, with the great black fish still cruising round it. Maybe, even, it was still hidden in the woods and from that day to this no one had discovered it existed. It was quite possible. It was a very thick bit of wood, full of brambles and rotten brushwood (the beech trees gave way to oaks round about there, which made the undergrowth thicker), the kind of place most people don’t care to pee. Queerer things have happened.

    I didn’t start out till late afternoon. It must have been about half past four when I took the car out and drove on to the Upper Binfield road. Half- the hill the houses thinned out and stopped and the beech trees began. The road forks about there and I took the right-hand fork, meaning to make a detour round and e back to Binfield House on the road. But presently I stopped to have a look at the copse I was driving through. The beech trees seemed just the same. Lord, how they were the same! I backed the car on to a bit of grass beside the road, under a fall of chalk, and got out and walked. Just the same. The same stillness, the same great beds of rustling leaves that seem to go on from year to year without rotting. Not a creature stirring except the small birds iree-tops which you couldn’t see. It wasn’t easy to believe that that great noisy mess of a town was barely three miles away. I began to make my way through the little copse, in the dire of Binfield House. I could vaguely remember how the paths went. And Lord! Yes! The same chalk hollow where the Black Ha and had catapult shots, and Sid Lovegrove told us how babies were born, the day I caught my first fish, pretty near forty years ago!

    As the trees thinned out again you could see the other road and the wall of Binfield House. The old rotting wooden fence was gone, of course, and they’d put up a high brick wall with spikes on top, such as you’d expect to see round a loony-bin. I’d puzzled for some time about how to get into Binfield House until finally it had struck me that I’d only to tell them my wife was mad and I was looking for somewhere to put her. After that they’d be quite ready to show me round the grounds. In my new suit I probably looked prosperous enough to have a wife in a private asylum. It wasn’t till I was actually at the gate that it occurred to me to wonder whether the pool was still ihe grounds.

    The old grounds of Binfield House had covered fifty acres, I suppose, and the grounds of the loony-bin weren’t likely to be more than five or ten. They wouldn’t want a great pool of water for the looo drown themselves in. The lodge, where old Hodges used to live, was the same as ever, but the yellow brick wall and the huge iron gates were new. From the glimpse I got through the gates I wouldn’t have known the place. Gravel walks, flower-beds, lawns, and a few aimless-looking types wandering about—loonies, I suppose. I strolled up the road to the right. The pool—the big pool, the one where I used to fish—was a couple of hundred yards behind the house. It might have been a hundred yards before I got to the er of the wall. So the pool was outside the grounds. The trees seemed to have got much thinner. I could hear children’s voices. And Gosh! there was the pool.

    I stood for a moment, w what had happeo it. Then I saw what it was—all the trees were gone from round its edge. It looked all bare and different, in fact it looked extraordinarily like the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. Kids were playing all round the edge, sailing boats and paddling, and a few rather older kids were rushing about in those little oes which you work by turning a handle. Over to the left, where the old rotting boat- house used to stand among the reeds, there was a sort of pavilion and a sweet kiosk, and a huge white notice saying UPPER BINFIELD MODEL YACHT CLUB.

    I looked over to the right. It was all houses, houses, houses. One might as well have been ier suburbs. All the woods that used to grow beyond the pool, and grew so thick that they were like a kind of tropical jungle, had been shaved flat. Only a few clumps of trees still standing round the houses. There were arty- looking houses, another of those sham-Tudor ies like the one I’d seen the first day at the top of Chamford Hill, only more so. What a fool I’d been to imagihat these woods were still the same! I saw how it was. There was just the oiny bit of copse, half a dozen acres perhaps, that hadn’t been cut down, and it ure ce that I’d walked through it on my way here. Upper Binfield, which had been merely a name in the old days, had grown into a det-sized town. In fact it was merely an outlying k of Lower Binfield.

    I wandered up to the edge of the pool. The kids were splashing about and making the devil of a here seemed to be swarms of them. The water looked kind of dead. No fish in it n<cite>藏书网</cite>ow. There was a chap standing watg the kids. He was an oldish chap with a bald head and a few tufts of white hair, and pinez and very sunburnt face. There was something vaguely queer about his appearance. He was wearing shorts and sandals and one of those ese shirts open at the neck, I noticed, but what really struck me was the look in his eye. He had very blue eyes that kind of twi you from behind his spectacles. I could see that he was one of those old men who’ve never grown up. They’re always either health-food ks or else they have something to do with the Boy Scouts—iher case they’re great ones for Nature and the open air. He was looking at me as if he’d like to speak.

    ‘Upper Binfield’s grown a great deal,’ I said.

    He twi me.

    ‘Grown! My dear sir, we never allow Upper Bio grow. We pride ourselves on being rather exceptional people up here, you know. Just a little y of us all by ourselves. No interlopers—te-hee!’

    ‘I mean pared with before the war,’ I said. ‘I used to live here as a boy.’

    ‘Oh-ah. No doubt. That was before my time, of course. But the Upper Binfield Estate is something rather special in the way of buildies, you know. Quite a little world of its own. All designed by young Edward Watkin, the architect. You’ve heard of him, of course. We live in the midst of Nature up here. No exion with the town down there’—he waved a hand in the dire of Lower Binfield—‘the dark satanic mills—te-hee!’

    He had a benevolent old chuckle, and a way of wrinkling his face up, like a rabbit. Immediately, as though I’d asked him, he began telling me all about the Upper Binfield Estate and young Edward Watkin, the architect, who had such a feeling for the Tudor, and was such a wonderful fellow at finding genuine Elizabethan beams in old farmhouses and buying them at ridiculous prices. And su iing young fellow, quite the life and soul of the nudist parties. He repeated a number of times that they were very exceptional people in Upper Binfield, quite different from Lower Binfield, they were determio enrich the tryside instead of defiling it (I’m using his own phrase), and there weren’t any public houses oate.

    ‘They talk of their Garden Cities. But we call Upper Bihe Woodland City—te-hee! Nature!’ He waved a hand at what was left of the trees. ‘The primeval forest brooding round us. Our young people grow up amid surroundings of natural beauty. We are nearly all of us enlightened people, of course. Would you credit that three-quarters of us up here are vegetarians? The local butchers don’t like us at all—te-hee! And some quite emi people live here. Miss Helena Thurloe, the —you’ve heard of her, of course. And Professor Woad, the psychic research worker. Such a poetic character! He goes wandering out into the woods and the family ’t find him at mealtimes. He says he’s walking among the fairies. Do you believe in fairies? I admit—te-hee!—I am just a wee bit sceptical. But his photographs are most ving.’

    I began to wonder whether he was someone who’d escaped from Binfield House. But no, he was sane enough, after a fashion. I khe type. Vegetarianism, simple life, poetry, nature-worship, roll in the dew before breakfast. I’d met a few of them years ago in Ealing. He began to show me round the estate. There was nothi of the woods. It was all houses, houses—and what houses! Do you know these faked-up Tudor houses with the curly roofs and the buttresses that don’t buttress anything, and the rock-gardens with crete bird-baths and those red plaster elves you  buy at the florists’? You could see in your mind’s eye the awful gang of food-ks and spook-hunters and simple-lifers with 1,000 pounds a year that lived there. Even the pavements were crazy. I didn’t let him take me far. Some of the houses made me wish I’d got a hand-grenade in my pocket. I tried to damp him down by asking whether people didn’<s></s>t object to living so he lunatic asylum, but it didn’t have much effect. Finally I stopped and said:

    ‘There used to be another pool, besides the big o ’t be far from here.’

    ‘Another pool? Oh, surely not. I don’t think there was ever another pool.’

    ‘They may have drai off,’ I said. ‘It retty deep pool. It would leave a big pit behind.’

    For the first time he looked a bit uneasy. He rubbed his nose.

    ‘Oh-ah. Of course, you must uand our life up here is in some rimitive. The simple life, you know. We prefer it so. But being so far from the town has its inveniences, of course. Some of our sanitary arras are not altogether satisfactory. The dust-cart only calls once a month, I believe.’

    ‘You mean they’ve turhe pool into a rubbish-dump?’

    ‘Well, there IS something iure of a—’ he shied at the word rubbish-dump. ‘We have to dispose of tins and so forth, of course. Over there, behind that clump of trees.’

    We went across there. They’d left a few trees to hid it. But yes, there it was. It was my pool, all right. They’d draihe water off. It made a great round hole, like an enormous well, twenty or thirty feet deep. Already it was half full of tin s.

    I stood looking at the tin s.

    ‘It’s a pity they drai,’ I said. ‘There used to be some big fish in that pool.’

    ‘Fish? Oh, I never heard anything about that. Of course we could hardly have a pool of water here among the houses. The mosquitoes, you know. But it was before my time.’

    ‘I suppose these houses have been built a good long time?’ I said.

    ‘Oh—ten or fifteen years, I think.’

    ‘I used to know this place before the war,’ I said. ‘It was all woods then. There weren’t any houses except Binfield House. But that little bit of copse over there hasn’t ged. I walked through it on my way here.’

    ‘Ah, that! That is sacrosanct. We have decided o build in it. It is sacred to the young people. Nature, you know.’ He twi me, a kind uish look, as if he was lettio a little secret: ‘We call it the Pixy Glen.’

    The Pixy Glen. I got rid of him, went back to the car and drove down to Lower Binfield. The Pixy Glen. And they’d filled my pool up with tin s. God rot them and bust them! Say what you like— call it silly, childish, anything—but doesn’t it make you puke sometimes to see what they’re doing to England, with their bird- baths and their plaster gnomes, and their pixies and tin s, where the beech woods used to be?

    Seal, you say? Anti-social? Oughtn’t to prefer trees to men? I say it depends what trees and what men. Not that there’s anything one  do about it, except to wish them the pox in their guts.

    Ohing, I thought as I drove down the hill, I’m finished with this notion of getting bato the past. What’s the good  to revisit the ses of your boyhood? They do. ing up for air! But there isn’t any air. The dustbin that we’re in reaches up to the stratosphere. All the same, I didn’t particularly care. After all, I thought, I’ve still got three days left. I’d have a bit of pead quiet, and stop b about what they’d doo Lower Binfield. As for my idea of going fishing—that was off, of course. Fishing, indeed! At my age! Really, Hilda was right.

    I dumped the car in the garage of the Gee and walked into the lou was six o’clock. Somebody had switched on the wireless and the news-broadcast was beginning. I came through the door just in time to hear the last few words of an S.O.S. And it gave me a bit of a jolt, I admit. For the words I heard were:

    ‘—where his wife, Hilda Bowling, is seriously ill.’

    The  instant the plummy voice went on: ‘Here is another S.O.S. Will Percival Chute, who was last heard of—’, but I didn’t wait to hear any more. I just walked straight on. What made me feel rather proud, when I thought it over afterwards, was that when I heard those words e out of the loudspeaker I urned an eyelash. Not even a pause in my step to let anyone know that I was Gee Bowling, whose wife Hilda Bowling was seriously ill. The landlord’s wife was in the lounge, and she knew my name was Bowling, at any rate she’d seen it in the register. Otherwise there was nobody there except a couple of chaps who were staying at the Gee and who didn’t know me from Adam. But I kept my head. Not a sign to anyone. I merely walked on into the private bar, which had just opened, and ordered my pint as usual.

    I had to think it over. By the time I’d drunk about half the pint I began to get the bearings of the situation. In the first place, Hilda WASN’T ill, seriously or otherwise. I khat. She’d been perfectly well when I came away, and it wasn’t the time of the year for ‘flu or anything of that kind. She was shamming. Why?

    Obviously it was just another of her dodges. I saw how it was. She’d got wind somehow—trust Hilda!—that I wasn’t really at Birmingham, and this was just her way of getting me home. Couldn’t bear to think of me any longer with that other woman. Because of course she’d take it frahat I was with a woman. ’t imagine any other motive. And naturally she assumed that I’d e rushing home as soon as I heard she was ill.

    But that’s just where you’ve got it wrong, I thought to myself as I finished off the pint. I’m too cute to be caught that way. I remembered the dodges she’d pulled before, and the extraordinary trouble she’ll take to catch me out. I’ve even known her, when I’d been on some journey she was suspicious about, check it all up with a Bradshaw and a road-map, just to see whether I was telling the truth about my movements. And then there was that time when she followed me al<u>?</u>l the way to Colchester and suddenly burst in o the Temperael. And that time, unfortunately, she happeo be right—at least, she wasn’t, but there were circumstances which made it look as if she was. I hadn’t the slightest belief that she was ill. In fact, I knew she wasn’t, although I couldn’t say exactly how.

    I had another pint and things looked better. Of course there was a row ing when I got home, but there’d have been a row anyway. I’ve got three good days ahead of me, I thought. Curiously enough, now that the things I’d e to look for had turned out not to exist, the idea of having a bit of holiday appealed to me all the more. Being away from home—that was the great thing. Peace perfect peace with loved ones far away, as the hymn puts it. And suddenly I decided that I WOULD have a woman if I felt like it. It would serve Hilda right for being so dirty-minded, and besides, where’s the sense of being suspected if it isn’t true?

    But as the sed pint worked inside me, the thing began to amuse me. I hadn’t fallen for it, but it was damned ingenious all the same. I wondered how she’d managed about the S.O.S. I’ve no idea what the procedure is. Do you have to have a doctor’s certificate, or do you just send your name in? I felt pretty sure it was the Wheeler woman who’d put her up to it. It seemed to me to have the Wheeler touch.

    But all the same, the cheek of it! The lengths that women will go! Sometimes you ’t help kind of admiring them.

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