Growing Pains Read online

  Stephen came off beetroot-red, sweating like a carthorse and grinning in triumph at the best score, and by far the best innings, of his life. He swerved away to the scorebox, anxious, like every youthful batsmen who has just made his best score, to feast his eyes on the story of the innings in the scorebook, as if the sight of the neatly-pencilled figures somehow confers a greater degree of reality on the thing. Richard greeted him ecstatically, and made extravagant and physically improbable promises of the reward he planned for that night. They went happily into tea.

  After that the game was all anticlimax. Boston Ramblers, though a very fine batting side, could make little headway against such an unlooked-for target, on a difficult pitch against first-class bowling, and were eventually dismissed in the last over of the final twenty, at ten past seven, for a score of 166 which was far more creditable than it appeared. Stephen bowled twenty overs without a break, and was rewarded with three wickets. He bought the mandatory jugs, mentally hugging himself when Bill asked in an undertone if he could afford it, and that night Richard faithfully delivered all but the most impossible of the rewards he had promised.

  The following day they played away to Hemel Hempstead, old friends and rivals. Stephen was retained at first wicket down and hit a very fast 67, hitting three balls over the poplars beside the Grand Union Canal beside the ground, and one clean out of the ground, over the road and, via a vast plate-glass window, into the bar of the Heath Park Hotel, frightening several customers so much that they had to drink several additional pints to calm their nerves. “Jugsville,” called Bill ominously from the boundary, wagging an admonitory finger in Stephen’s direction.

  They won that match, too, by a narrow margin. Hemel Hempstead were friendly and hospitable as usual, but they got back to their own clubhouse in time for a drink. When they got there they found that there had been a telephone call, asking Bill to ring a number. Stephen happened to glance his way as he was talking into the phone, a big finger stuck in his other ear and the receiver shielded from the surrounding hubbub, and saw his face suddenly cloud over. He couldn’t hear what Bill was saying, but he managed to catch an occasional word, “…sorry to hear… yes, please pass on… really am very… of course…” Bill saw the enquiring look on his young face as he came away from the phone. “Bad news?” said Stephen, ready to sympathise.

  “Not good,” said Bill soberly. “Old John at Mahon. You remember John? Ran the boozer where we went on tour? Just after you came to the club, wasn’t it?” Stephen remembered it perfectly. The tour was one of the sweetest moments of his life. It had been in that pub that he had lost his virginity, delightfully and delightedly, to Graham Curtis, at that time his French master at school.

  “Seems John’s been canin it a bit too heavily,” said Bill sadly. “His quack’s just read him the riot act, an told him he’s gotta lay off the shandy, pronto, an get outa the booze business to boot. Parently his liver’s got about six months to live if he carries on layin into the stuff. Funny, that,” he mused. “Ida said when he finally kicked the bucket his liver’d have to be beaten to death, but there it is. Anyway, he’s sellin the hotel, an goin into retirement. It won’t be the same tourin there without him. Poor ol Fred’s cryin his heart out in the bar, John said. He’s just been told.” Stephen had a vivid mental vision of old Fred, the eighty-five-year-old barman at the hotel, and was suddenly filled with a deep, sorrowful emptiness at the passage of loved things. He was growing up this year, he reflected sadly.

  “Will we still go on tour there?” he asked Bill.

  “Shouldn’t think so,” muttered Bill. “Not now. Have to find somewhere else, I think. Always best — when a publican you’re very fond of moves, it’s never the same after, an you’re always makin comparisons, an they’re always to the new man’s detriment. We’re booked for Holland again next year, but I dunno what we’ll do about this year. I was gonna start makin the arrangements soon.” He clumped over to the bar to tell the others.

  Stephen sat sipping his lager, thinking back in a mixture of memories of his first tour with the club, some very sweet, some now become very sad. And as he sat thinking, an idea came into his head. He sat bolt upright as its ramifications crowded into his mind. Then he went in search of Richard, finding him chattering among a crowd of younger players. He forebore to interrupt right then, and passed on instead to the bar, where he bought himself a pint, insisted on getting Bill one, and waited until Richard was free.

  As soon as he saw Richard detach himself from his group and look about he called him. Richard came over, and saw instantly that Stephen was bursting with something to say. “What’s up?” he said anxiously.

  “Are you ready to go home?” asked Stephen, draining his glass.

  “Can be,” said Richard. “Why? What are you cooking up?” he asked shrewdly — he was very familiar with all Stephen’s moods and expressions.

  “I’ve just had an idea,” said Stephen, “and I think it’s a corker.”

  “Okay,” said Richard. “Let’s go.”

  7

  “It’s a good idea,” said Richard as they lay in bed that night. “But it’ll cost us a bit to get there. You’ll have to wait until that cheque of yours has cleared. And if I were you, I’d ring that solicitor, what was his name? Guilfoyle. Ask him if you really are in control. You don’t want to go barging in only to find you haven’t got any real power.”

  “I’d already come to the same conclusions myself,” said Stephen.

  For the next few days he possessed himself of such patience as he could muster. In the strong glow of pleasure induced by his fine start to the season and his growing awareness of his powers, he spent hours in the evenings hitting the cover off the ball in the nets at the club, occasionally varying the procedure by tossing his off-spinners ever higher and slower, to the delight of Bill McKechnie, who relished the prospect of going into matches with one of fewer than half a dozen genuine slow spin bowlers in the entire league.

  Every morning they walked into the town centre, where Stephen pushed his plastic card hopefully into the hole in the wall at his bank and swore vividly when the machine announced that his balance remained at its normal level. On Thursday morning, however, he at last saw the wonderful, almost unbelievable legend displayed in bright green numerals: for the first time in his life he had a balance at the bank in four figures. “One thousand, no hundreds and sixty-three pounds,” he crowed. “And forty-eight pence,” he added. He executed a short highland fling on the pavement, watched in astonishment by passing shoppers. Then he dashed into the bank, brandishing his cheque book. Richard tut-tutted affectionately to himself, removed Stephen’s card from the slot in the cash dispenser, where Stephen had forgotten it in his triumph, and followed him into the bank at a more sober pace, grinning.

  “Crikey!” said Stephen in some dismay as Richard held the little plastic card in front of his eyes. “Did I leave it there? Sorry, Rich.”

  “No need to apologise to me,” said Richard, feeling a bright glow of pleasure all the same in the automatic, unthinking acceptance of belonging to himself that Stephen’s casually-spoken words implied. “I’m not your keeper. Though I sometimes think you need one,” he added. But he took the sting out of the words with a grin.

  “How much shall I take out?” asked Stephen, making firm mental resolutions to be much more cautious in his handling of his new-found wealth.

  Richard considered. “I shouldn’t think we can possibly need more than about fifty quid, can we?” he said. “Say a hundred, to cover sudden emergencies. I’ve got about forty, so you only need to take out sixty.”

  “No,” said Stephen quietly. “You’re not spending anything on this trip, Rich.” Richard opened his mouth to protest, but Stephen cut him off ruthlessly. “No,” he repeated. “This one’s on the house. You can spend some of your own money later on, but not now. This is the first thing we’ve spent any of this money on, and I want it to be on me. On Graham,” he added, seeking to explain the importance i
t had suddenly assumed in his mind that he should use their little excursion as a means of repaying Richard for his innumerable kindnesses while paying a last homage to Graham at the same time. Richard understood, and accepted the gesture with his usual grace. Stephen considered Richard’s suggestion as he stood in the queue, and, when he reached the window, wrote a cheque for a hundred and fifty pounds, counting the sheaf of ten- and twenty-pound notes with relish and also, not quite able to help himself, a little ostentatiously before folding it firmly and slipping it into his trouser pocket.

  “You wanna be careful, son,” said a smallish, very tough-looking man with a drooping moustache, wearing clothes liberally spattered with the detritus of the building site. “There’s an awful lot a people’d mace you for a fiver in this town. It ain’t good policy to show off your wealth, what with hard times an all.” Stephen looked up at him in alarm. He saw the grin of understanding on the man’s face, and flushed. Then he found the grace to smile, a little shamefacedly, and offered the man a word of thanks. He kept a hand in his pocket, fingers curled reassuringly round the wad of notes, all the way back.

  They went triumphantly home, drank a last mug of tea, then Richard carefully eased his mother’s small, cherry-red Volvo out of the garage. There was one nasty moment when he almost eased it into the side of his father’s vast BMW. When he had got over the bout of jitters that this induced, he asked Stephen to get out and see him out into the road.

  “Christ, that was a near thing,” said Richard with feeling as he got back in the car after closing the garage and locking it. Stephen studied him as he put the car in gear and pulled away from the kerb. Once in the open road he regained his confidence, and they set off at a lively speed for Bognor Regis, which Richard’s father’s road atlas told them was the nearest place of any size to their destination. “Would he have gone berserk?” asked Stephen.

  Richard pursed his lips as he thought about it. “No,” he said eventually. “I don’t think so. He’s a very tolerant and reasonable man. So he never goes berserk, as such, about anything. But I think scratching the paint on the BMW’s probably just about the one thing that would take him as near to berserk point as he’ll ever get. He loves that car. You’d think he’d given birth to it himself. I’ve got a theory that he wanted to be a racing driver when he was a kid, and never quite got over it. The way he drives that bloody great thing I sometimes think he still thinks he is a racing driver. Anyway, hurting the car is just about the one thing in the world I wouldn’t want to have to confess to when they got back. Almost anything else, short of burning the house down, I could face him over. But that… that would cost.”

  They drove on in a comfortable silence, which Stephen broke by asking if he could put the radio on. Richard turned his head very briefly, and bestowed a look on him that was seven-eighths made up of fathomless love and affection and one-eighth genuine, very slightly irritated puzzlement. Stephen caught the look, but couldn’t read it, and looked a little puzzled himself. “Honestly, Stevie,” said Richard. “When will you learn that you don’t have to ask my permission to do things? Don’t you know by now that you can treat anything of mine as your own? You don’t have to ask. Not ever.”

  Stephen glanced at him, still puzzled. “Only being polite,” he said defensively. “I don’t want to take you for granted, Rich. You of all people.”

  “There’s taking for granted and taking for granted,” said Richard, trying and failing to get past a lorry rumbling along at twenty-eight miles an hour. “The wrong kind you’d never do to me, I know, and the right kind I want you to do. Understand me?”

  “I think so,” said Stephen, not understanding at all, but loving his friend and wanting to please him by saying the right thing.

  “Well, put the radio on, then, and remember,” said Richard finally.

  Stephen switched on the radio, and twiddled the knob until he found Radio Three. He had never had much interest in classical music until Graham had taken him to his first ever orchestral concert in Geneva. Listening to the Orchestra of the Suisse Romande, with Graham to talk knowledgeably about the music in the interval and after the concert, had made a very deep impression on the boy, and given him a taste for music that he had never suspected.

  He had taken every opportunity since that evening to listen, and was acquiring knowledge of the subject rapidly. He suspected that half the appeal was the opportunity it afforded him to indulge in unsentimental memories of the kind, loving friend who had introduced him to it.

  The car was filled with the thunderous glories of the last movement of Sibelius’s second symphony. Stephen immediately felt a prickling of tears behind his eyes. Sibelius had been one of Graham’s favourites. Richard knew that, shot a quick, anxious glance sideways out of the corner of his eye, and saw Stephen’s wet eyes. “Graham loved this,” said Stephen, and Richard relaxed and was glad, because his voice was steady and level, the regret in it contained and unhysterical. The symphony came to its majestic end a few minutes later, and, unexpectedly, Stephen chuckled. “What’s up?” asked Richard.

  Stephen laughed again. “We used to play a game,” he said. “We used to select cricket teams made up of composers from all the various countries — French composers, Russian ones, English, Viennese, and so on. Sometimes we’d pick a team of violinists, or pianists — you know the kind of thing. Anyway, he always used to say that Sibelius should be umpire, because no one would ever argue with someone with a bald head that size, would they? And then he’d always say ‘Mendelssohn, aged eleven, is scorer.’ It became a kind of catch-phrase of his.” His eyes softened at the memory of a silly game played in innocent fun, and the stocky, attractive man, hard, combative but at the same time gentle and affectionate, with whom he had played it.

  There was only one way the conversation could possibly go after that, and they selected cricket teams, to an accompaniment of Schubert piano sonatas, all the way to Bognor Regis. There they stopped and asked their way, having to stop half a dozen people before they found one who knew the obscure hamlet for which they were heading. Eventually, however, they found someone who not only claimed to know the way but also sounded as if he really did. They followed his directions on their road atlas, and drove off again. Half an hour later they came to the village they were looking for. Squarely in the very heart of it was a green that might have been lifted from any one of a thousand tourist guides, complete with thatched cottages, a sprinkling of rather larger houses in the style of Queen Anne, and some lofty trees putting out their first green dusting of foliage. Richard parked the car at the side of the road along one side of the triangular green. The boys got out and looked across the green to where, as picturesque as all its archetypal Old England setting, stood Stephen’s pub.

  They stood looking at it for some minutes on end, trying to assimilate the fact that Stephen was its owner. But the realisation wouldn’t sink in. The idea that he actually owned this beautiful piece of picture-postcard English heritage was somehow more difficult to take in than the knowledge of vast sums of money.

  It was a very large pub, two storeys high, of authentic Tudor half-timbered construction, all angles and corners, with tall, decorated Elizabethan chimneys at each end. It had been beautifully maintained, and gleamed in brilliant white paint to emphasise the irregular black ship’s timbers that criss-crossed it. To one side there was a large car park, covered with heavy orange gravel, with high sleeping policemen across the mouth to prevent its users from entering and leaving too fast and churning the gravel into tyre-ruts. In front of the building was a wide paved area, fenced off by a low fence of pointed white wooden palings. The area was gay with small white tables and garden chairs, topped off by big umbrellas in icecream colours. Everything looked in immaculate repair.

  Behind the great building they could see the tops of a lot of ancient trees swaying in the constant breeze from the south. As they stood in the mild spring sunshine they became aware of a sound, faint but not distant, and never fading, always there be
hind the birdsong. It took them a moment or two to recognise it as the murmur of the sea, which lapped the south coast less than a quarter of a mile away beyond the pub. “Well,” said Stephen, and suddenly realised that he was speaking in a hushed whisper. “We shan’t get anywhere just standing looking at it, shall we?” he went on in a normal voice. “Let’s go and have a pint of my beer, shall we?”

  * * *

  They sauntered across the short, springy grass on the triangular green, across the road, and through an opening in the wicket fence. They saw that the pavings beneath the tables were scrubbed, and that there wasn’t even the suspicion of moss peeping between the big irregular slabs. They paused there for a moment to look up at the large, tasteful sign. “The Crown Hotel,” murmured Stephen to himself. It had a ring to it that none of the dozens of Crown Hotels he had seen and drunk pints in up to that moment had ever had. He repeated it, twice more, rolling the words in his mouth and savouring them. Then they moved on, halting again before the wide, low front door to admire the massive timbers of the frame, and the equally enormous oak door, studded with huge, star-headed nails blackened by time while the timbers of the door itself had become bleached almost white.

  They inspected the narrow flower beds that ran along the front of the building, showing little signs of flowers that early in the year, but neatly tended, with no stones visible in the rich black soil. Some kind of creeper was trained round the whole of the great doorway, and there was an old-fashioned boot-scraper to one side. They looked at the board above the lintel, and read the white lettering on the black paint, hoping to see Stephen’s name there, but the notice informed them only that one Thomas John Whitfield was licensed to sell beers, wines and spirits. They looked at one another, finding, somewhat to their surprise, that it needed an effort of will to push open the heavy door and enter their own property. “Let’s go,” said Richard.