The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss
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and who let you in here?’
‘Oh, don’t you remember me? Vern? Vernon Jarvis, how are you?’
‘What are you doing in here?’
The young man fell back a step. He put a cautionary hand out.
‘We met at your party before you flew off to Singapore. I just bumped into that Miss Rowlinson outside, and she said to come in. I heard voices, so I thought—’
He was carrying a smart mock-leather executive’s attaché case, incongruous against his green denim-styled suit and fancy shoes with wedge heels. Despite the heat wave, he wore a fawn turtle-neck sweater under the suit, and a gold-plated ingot stamped with a zodiacal sign on a chain round his neck.
‘You’re the fellow with the brother who runs.’
‘Athlete, yes. Hoping to run in Moscow in the Olympic Games. We talked about that, remember?’
‘You claimed that sport had nothing to do with politics.’
‘You see, Mr Squire, I’m a great admirer of Teresa’s – of Mrs Squire’s wall trinketry. It’s real rinky-dink gear.’
‘Wall-trinketry, what’s that?’
Jarvis lowered the attaché case, hitherto held in a defensive position, and said with a touch of condescension, ‘The wall-trinketry. Those bugs and creepy-crawlies. Those bugs and creepy-crawlies she makes. I aim to invest in them. I’m a director of an exporting firm, and by my calculations—’
‘All right, all right. My wife’s in the breakfast room. I doubt if she’ll want to see you at this hour of the morning.’
Jarvis smirked. ‘Oh, she’ll want to see me all right.’
‘In future, ring the bell before you come barging in, understand?’
‘Yes, that’s quite clear.’ Jarvis smiled at him.
Driving away a few minutes later, Squire saw Jarvis and Teresa by the window of the morning room, deep in discussion. She was leaning against her desk, and did not even look up at the sound of the car. Poor dear, he thought. As if she hadn’t trouble enough without having that young oik to deal with.
The sudden death of her father, Ernest Davies, had shaken her. Ernest had been walking home from a friend’s house in Grantham one evening, when a car bore down on him as he crossed the road, and knocked him over. He had died in hospital a few days later. The car had been driven by his doctor, heavily under the influence of drink. Astrology had closed over Teresa’s head almost immediately.
He switched on the car radio.
He recognized the music at once. The Tom Robinson Band playing ‘Long Hot Summer’. He smiled.
Saturday morning traffic into town was heavy. It took him an hour to reach Norwich, but he was in no hurry.
The conversation had come back to him. Jarvis’s brother hoped to run for Britain in the four hundred metres of the Moscow Olympics. Squire, as a member of the board of anti-Moscow campaigners, tried to explain to Jarvis that the occasion would inevitably be used for propaganda purposes, like the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
‘No, no, Mr Squire, honest, you don’t see, neither my brother nor me are at all political. This is purely and simply a sporting event.’
‘Things aren’t so simple. It’s not what you are, Mr Jarvis, but what you lend yourself to.’
‘No, you’ve got it all wrong, Mr Squire. I know you like politics, but, see, I’m just a businessman, pure and simple, out to make an honest penny, and I hate politics. So does my brother.’
After a drive round, Squire found a parking place in Mancroft Street. Locking the Jag, he walked slowly through Tombland, enjoying the sunshine, stopping occasionally to glance in a shop window. At the bookshop, he walked in and gazed at the books, but saw nothing he wished to buy.
The offices of Challenor, Squire, and Challenor, of which William Squire was senior partner, were built of mellow Georgian red bricks, very similar to the bricks of Pippet Hall. The facade of the building was covered by a venerable virginia creeper, the leaves and suckers of which lapped at William Squire’s office window. William had officially retired the previous year, but still worked every morning, looking after old clients of many years’ standing, who refused to transfer their business to the brisk young partners who occupied the lower floors.
Uncle Willie’s office was at the top of the building. The floors below had been modernized, their small rooms broken down into an open-plan scheme which let in more air and custom, rather in the same way that the fields beyond Norwich – the title deeds to which reposed, in many cases, in the archives of Challenor, Squire, and Challenor – had been stripped of their hedges to let in more air and agricultural machinery. Squire made his way past empty desks and silent computer screens to the third floor.
Uncle Willie’s office was a small room on the side of the building, with a window from which the cathedral could almost be seen. Uncle Willie was pottering round smoking his pipe, with the rather sulky-looking Nicholas Dobson in attendance. Dobson was a nephew who had high hopes in the firm. He lived nearby. His expression suggested that he would rather be elsewhere on a hot summer Saturday morning, but he greeted Squire cheerfully enough.
Coughing, Uncle Willie rested his pipe in a marble ashtray and came round the desk to shake hands formally with his nephew.
‘You’re looking fit, Tom. Gallivanting round the world has been good for you. We’re heading for a drought, could be worse than last year, and that won’t please most of my clients.’ Willie bore a strong resemblance to his dead brother John, Tom Squire’s father. He too had a high-bridged nose and a pugnacious set to his jaw. The deep-set lines of the family face had visited him too. So had the clear skin. Although his hair was white, it remained thick.
Thomas thanked his uncle for seeing him on Saturday, although he knew that the old man, a widower for many years, often visited the office on Saturday mornings in order to keep the lethargy of old age staunchly at bay.
The years had hunched his shoulders. He regarded his nephew with a vaguely aggressive air, and then transferred his gaze to the open window.
‘How’s Teresa?’
‘She’s fine, Uncle. How are the cats?’
‘I’ve had Nickie spayed. She was turning into a regular kitten-factory. Madge, is she all right? Still staying with you? Terrible about Ernest. Madge makes a pretty widow, poor lady. How’s she taking it?’ As he spoke of Mrs Davies, he walked over to the window and looked out.
‘She seems cheerful enough. It’s Teresa who’s upset.’
‘In my experience,’ said Uncle Willie, still gazing out of the window, ‘widows are not too unhappy when they are left to pursue their own lives, though they may make a polite show of grief. It’s different for widowers.’
He turned and inspected his nephew, to see how the remark had registered.
‘Teresa’s having a series of nightmares. Always the same, though details differ. Sometimes it seems to be day, sometimes night. She is sitting or lying down when she sees a dark male figure outlined against the window. Someone is trying to break in. Sometimes she tries to scare him away, sometimes she runs from him, sometimes she wakes to the sound of smashing glass.’
‘Oh, she’s afraid of burglars while you’re away.’ He went over and picked his pipe up, as if the matter was disposed of.
‘There might be another explanation. She complains of back pain. She keeps talking about – well, cancer. She goes to Dr Bell. He gives her analgesics, and she’s gone to the Norfolk and Norwich for check-ups. All reports are negative to date.’
From the other side of the room, Dobson said, ‘They say cancer’s psychosomatic.’
‘Nicholas thinks everything’s psychosomatic, including taxes,’ Uncle Willie