Страница 2 из 61
Probably the alarming entrance into this village has saved it from becoming another Clovelly or Polperro. Ladies with Ye Olde Shoppe ambitions would hesitate to drive through Coombe Tu
The Plume of Feathers faces the cobbled road of entrance. It is a square building, scrupulously whitewashed. It has no great height but its position gives it an air of dominance over the cottages that surround it. On the corner of the Feathers, the road of approach splits and becomes a sort of i
As Watchman drove down, he could see old Pomeroy standing there in his shirt sleeves. Watchman flicked his headlights and Pomeroy raised his hand. Watchman sounded his horn and a taller figure, dressed in the slacks and sweater of some superb advertisement, came through the lighted doorway.
It was Watchman’s cousin, Sebastian Parish. Then the others had arrived.
He drew up and opened the door.
“Well, Pomeroy.”
“Well, Mr. Watchman, we’m right-down glad to see you again. Welcome to you.”
“I’m glad to get here,” said Watchman, shaking hands. “Hullo, Seb. When did you arrive?”
“This morning, old boy. We stopped last night at Exeter with Norman’s sister.”
“I was at Yeovil,” said Watchman. “Where is Norman?”
“Painting down by the jetty. The light’s gone. He’ll be in soon. He’s started a portrait of me on Coombe Rock. It’s going to be rather wonderful. I’m wearing a red sweater and the sea’s behind me. Very virile!”
“Good Lord!” said Watchman cheerfully.
“We’ll get your things out for you, sir,” said old Pomeroy. “Will!”
A tall, fox-coloured man came through the doorway. He screwed up his eyes, peered at Watchman, and acknowledged his greeting without much show of enthusiasm.
“Well, Will.”
“ ’Evening, Mr. Watchman.”
“Bear a hand, my so
His son opened the luggage carrier and began to haul out Watchman’s suit-cases.
“How’s the Movement, Will?” asked Watchman. “Still well on the Left?”
“Yes,” said Will shortly. “It’s going ahead. Will these be all?”
“Yes, thanks. I’ll take the car around, Seb, and join you in the bar. Is there a sandwich or so anywhere about, Abel?”
“We can do a bit better than that, sir. There’s a fine lobster Mrs. Ives has put aside, special.”
“By George, you’re a host in a million. God bless Mrs. Ives.”
Watchman drove round to the garage. It was a converted stable, a dark building that housed the memory of sweating horses rubbed down by stable lads with wisps of straw. When he stopped his engine Watchman heard a rat plop across the rafters. In addition to his own, the garage held four cars. There was Norman Cubitt’s Austin, a smaller Austin, a Morris, and there, demure in the corner, a battered two-seater.
“You again!” said Watchman, staring at it. “Well, I’ll be damned!”
He returned to the pub, delighted to hear the familiar ring of his own steps, to smell the tang of the sea and of burning driftwood. As he ran upstairs he heard voices and the unmistakable tuck of a dart in a cork board.
“Double-twenty,” said Will Pomeroy, and above the general outcry came a woman’s voice.
“Splendid, my dear. We win!”
“So, she is here,” thought Watchman as he washed his hands. “And why ‘my dear’? And who wins?”
iii
Watchman, with his cousin for company, ate his lobster in the private tap-room. There is a parlour at the Feathers but nobody ever uses it. The public and the private tap-rooms fit into each other like two Ls, the first standing sideways on the tip of its short base, the second facing backwards to the left. The bar-proper is common to both. It occupies the short leg of the Public, has a counter for each room, and faces the short leg of the Private. The top of the long leg forms a magnificent inglenook flanked with settles and scented with three hundred years of driftwood smoke. Opposite the inglenook at the bottom angle of the L hangs a dart board made by Abel Pomeroy himself. There, winter and summer alike, the Pomeroys’ chosen friends play for drinks. There is a board in the Public for the rank and file. If strangers to the Feathers choose to play in the Private the initiates wait until they have finished. If the initiates invite a stranger to play, he is no longer a stranger. The midsummer evening was chilly and a fire smouldered in the inglenook. Watchman finished his supper, swung his legs up on to the settle, and felt for his pipe. He squinted up at Sebastian Parish, who leant against the mantelpiece in an attitude familiar to every West End playgoer in London.
“I like this place,” Watchman said. “Extraordinarily pleasant, isn’t it, returning to a place one likes?”
Parish made an actor’s expressive gesture.
“Marvellous!” he said richly. “To get away from everything! The noise! The endless racket! The artificiality! God, how I loathe my profession!”
“Come off it, Seb,” said Watchman. “You glory in it. You were born acting. The gamp probably burst into an involuntary round of applause on your first entrance and I bet you played your mother right off the stage.”
“All the same, old boy, this good clean air means a hell of a lot to me.”
“Exactly,” agreed Watchman drily. His cousin had a trick of saying things that sounded a little like quotations from an interview with himself. Watchman was amused rather than irritated by this ma
“Hullo!” said Watchman. “Our distinguished artist.” Norman Cubitt gri
“Well, Luke? Good trip?”
“Splendid! You’re painting already?”
Cubitt stretched a hand to the fire. The fingers were grimed with paint.