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John Metcalf is widely considered one of Canada's best writers — especially in the short story form. The new collection Standing Stones: The Best Stories of John Metcalf brings together his greatest short fiction — three remarkable novellas and five critically acclaimed short stories — in one striking volume.

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Standing Stones

: Chapter one
After David had again wrested the heavy suitcase from his father's obstinately polite grip and after he'd bought the ticket and assured his mother he wouldn't lose it, the three of them stood in the echoing booking hall of the railway station. His mother was wearing a hat that looked like a pink felt Christmas pudding.

David knew that they appeared to others as obvious characters from a church-basement play. His father was trying to project affability or benevolence by moving his head in an almost imperceptible nodding motion while gazing with seeming approval at a Bovril advertisement.

The pink felt hat was secured by a hat-pin which ended in a huge turquoise knob.

Beyond his father's shoulder, looking over the paperbacks on the W. H. Smith stall, was a woman in a sari. David kept under observation the vision of the bare midriff and the ponderous hand of the station clock while pretending to listen to the knit-one-purl-one of his mother's precepts.

His father eventually made throat-clearing noises and David promptly shook his hand. He stooped to kiss his mother's cheek.

Her hat smelled of lavender, her cheek, or possibly neck, of lily-ofthe- valley. He assured her that the ticket was safe, that he knew where it was; that he'd definitely remember to let her know in the letter for which she'd be waiting if the train had been crowded; if he'd managed to get a seat.

The loudspeakers blared into demented announcement flurrying the pigeons up into the echoing girders. The onslaught of this amplified gargle and ricochet coincided with his mother's peroration, which seemed to be, from the odd phrase he caught, a general reworking of the Polonius and Mr. Micawber material, warnings against profligacy, going to bed late, burning the candle at both ends, debt, promiscuity, not wearing undershirts, and drink.

She gripped his hand.

He watched her face working.

As the metal voice clicked silent, she was left shouting, “THE SECRET OF A HAPPY LIFE IS . . .”

Mortified, David turned his back on the gawping porter.

She continued in a fierce whisper,

“. . . is to apportion your money.”

He returned their wavings, watching them until they were safely down into the tiled tunnel which led to the car-park, and then lugged his case over to the nearest waste basket, into which he dropped the embarrassing paper bag of sandwiches.

With only minutes to go before his train's departure, the barmaid in the Great North-Western Bar and Buffet set before him a double Scotch, a half of best bitter, and a packet of Balkan Sobranie cigarettes.

Flipping open his new wallet, he riffed the crisp notes with the ball of his thumb. The notes were parchment stiff, the wallet so new it creaked. Smiling, he dismissed the considerable change.

The Scotch made him shudder. The aroma of the Sobranie cigarettes as he broke the seal and raised the lid was dark, strange, and rich. He was aware of the shape and weight of the wallet in his jacket's inside pocket. Stamped in gold inside the wallet were words which gave him obscure pleasure: Genuine Bombay Goat. With a deft flick of his wrist, he extinguished the match and let it fall from a height into the ashtray; the cigarette was stronger than he could have imagined. He raised the half of bitter in surreptitious toast to his reflection behind the bar's bottles. Smoke curling from his nostrils, he eyed the Cypriot barmaid, whose upper front teeth were edged in gold.

He sat in a window seat of the empty carriage feeling special, feeling regal, an expansive feeling as physical and filling as indigestion. He crossed his legs, taking care not to blunt the immaculate crease in his trousers, admiring his shined shoes. A mountain of luggage clanked past, steam billowed up over the window, a whistle blew. And then the carriage door opened and a toddler was bundled in from the platform followed by a suitcase and parcels and carrier-bags and its mother. Who hauled in after her an awkward stroller.

Doors slamming down the length of the train.

“Ooh, isn't the gentleman kind!” said the woman to the toddler as David heaved the suitcase up onto the luggage rack.

“And these?” said David.

From one of the carrier-bags, a yellow crocodile made of wood fell onto his head.

The toddler started to struggle and whine as the train pulled out.

It was given a banana. It was pasty-looking and on its face was a sort of crust. Old food, perhaps. Possibly a skin disease. It started to mush the banana in its hands.

Turning away, David gazed out over the backs of old jerry-built houses, cobbled streets, cemeteries, mouldering buildings housing strange companies found in the hidden parts of towns visible only from trains: Victoria Sanitation and Brass, Global Furniture and Rattan, Allied Refuse. Clotheslines. The narrow garden strips behind the houses looking as if receding waters had left there a tide-line of haphazard junk.

The train cleared the neat suburbs, the gardens, the playing fields for employees, picked up speed, vistas of distant pitheads, slag-heaps, towering chimneys and kilns spreading palls of ochre smoke, all giving way to fields and hedges, hedges and fields.

Inside his head, like an incantation, David repeated:

The train is thundering south.

Beside the shape of the wallet in his jacket's pocket was the letter from Mrs. Vivian Something, the University's Accommodations Officer. The tone of the letter brusque. He had not replied promptly as he had been instructed so to do and no vacancies now existed in the Men's Halls of Residence. Nor were rooms now available on the Preferred List. Only Alternative Accommodation remained.

274 Jubilee Street.

The morning sunshine strong, the train thundering south, the very address propitious, Jubilee.

As the train bore him on towards this future, he found himself rehearsing yet again the kind of person he'd become. What kind of person this was he wasn't really sure except that he'd known without having to think about it that it wasn't the kind of person who lived in Men's Halls of Residence.

Blasts on its whistle, the train slowing through a small country station.

Nether Hindlop.

On the platform, rolls of fencing wire, wicker crates of racing pigeons, holding a ginger cat in his arms, a porter.

But at the least, he thought, the kind of person who bestowed coins on grateful porters. He still blushed remembering how on his last expedition to London he'd tipped a taxi-driver a shilling and the man had said,

“Are you sure you can spare it?”

And later, even more mortifying, after a day in the Tate and National galleries, he had sat next to a table of very interesting people, obviously artistic, in a crowded café in Soho. He'd listened avidly as they chatted about Victor this and Victor that and he'd realized gradually that Victor must be Victor Pasmore. And as they were leaving, the man with the earring had paused by his table and said in a loud voice,

“So glad to have had you with us.”

Even though he had been seared with shame and burned even now to think of it, he had in a way been grateful. He admired the rudeness and aggression and the ability to be rude and aggressive in public; the realm of books apart, he still considered it the most splendid thing that he had heard another person actually say.

But he found it easier to approach what he would become by defining what he was leaving behind. What he most definitely wasn't —hideous images came to mind: sachets of dried lavender, Post Office Savings Books, hyacinth bulbs in bowls, the Radio Times in a padded leather cover embossed with the words Radio Times, Sundaybest silver tongs for removing sugar-cubes from sugar-bowls, plump armchairs.

But how, he wondered, his thoughts churning deeper into the same old ruts, how did one change from David Hendricks, permanent resident of 37 Manor Way, ex-Library Prefect and winner of a State Scholarship, to something more . . . more raffish.

“Hold a woman by the waist and a bottle by the neck.”

Yes.

Somerset Maugham, was it?

Not much of a point of etiquette in his own teetotal home, he thought with great bitterness, where wild festivities were celebrated in Tizer the Appetizer and where women were not held at all.

“Whoopsee!” cried the mother.

The toddler was launched towards him, was upon him. He looked down at his trousers. He tried to prise the clenched, slimy fingers from the bunched material.

“There,” he said, “there's a good boy . . .”

“Not afraid of anything, she isn't!” said the woman proudly.

David blushed.

“Proper little tomboy, encha?”

David smiled.

And regarded his ruined knees.

The house stood on a corner; the front of the house faced onto Jubilee Street, the side of the house faced the cemetery on the other side of Kitchener Street. From the coping of the low wall which bounded the cemetery, rusted iron stumps stuck up, presumably the remains of an ornamental fence cut down for munitions during the Second World War. In an aisle of grass between two rows of tombstones, a small dog bunched, jerking tail, its eyes anguished.

There were no facing houses on the other side of Jubilee; there was a canal, tidal the driver had told him, connecting with the docks.

The tide was out. Seagulls screeched over the glistening banks of mud. The smell came from the canal itself and from the massive redbrick brewery which stood on its far side.

Most of the tiny front garden was taken up by an old motorbike under a tarpaulin.

“Not Mr. Porteous?” she said.

“No,” said David, “I'm afraid not.”

She held the letter down at a distance, her lips moving. Wiry hairs grew on the upper lip. He suddenly blushed remembering that her house had been described as Alternative Accommodation and hoping that she wouldn't be embarrassed or hurt.

Her gross body was divided by the buried string of the grubby pinafore. Her hair was grey and mannish, short back and sides with a parting, the sort of haircut he'd noticed on mentally defective women in chartered buses. The torn tartan slippers revealed toes.

“They didn't mark that down,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“About the back double.”

“Double?”

“With the Oxford gentleman.”

“Oh,” said David. “You mean . . . ?”

“Yes,” she said. “They should have marked that down.”

He manoeuvred his suitcase round the hatstand and bicycle in the gloom of the narrow passage and followed her ponderous rump up the stairs. Reaching for the banister, grunting, she hauled herself onto the dark landing.

Even the air seemed brown.

“This is the bathroom,” she said, “and the plumbing.”

He sensed her so close behind him that he felt impelled to step inside. The room was narrow and was largely taken up by a clawfoot bathtub. Over the tub, the height of the room and braced to the wall, bulked the monstrous copper tank of an ancient geyser.

She was standing behind him, breathing.

He began to feel hysterical.

The lower part of the tank and the copper spout which swung out over the tub were green with crusty verdigris; water sweating down the copper had streaked the tub's enamel green and yellow. Wet, charred newspaper half blocked the gas-burners in the geyser's insides.

“If you wanted a bath, it's a shilling,” she said, slippers shuffling ahead of him, “with one day's warning.”

Following her into the bedroom, he stared at the vast plaster elephant.

Two single beds stood on the brown linoleum. The wallpaper was very pink. Pinned on the wall between the beds was a reproduction cut from a magazine of Annigoni's portrait of Queen Elizabeth.

“You can come and go as you please—the key's on a string in the letterbox—but we don't have visitors.”

David nodded.

“I don't hold with young ladies in rooms.”

“No, of course,” said David. “Quite.”

His gaze kept returning to the elephant on the mantelpiece.

Inside the crenellated gold of the howdah sat a brown personage in a turquoise Nehru jacket sporting a turban decorated with a ruby.

“Well . . .” he said.

Staring at him, doughy face expressionless, she unscrewed a Vicks Nasal Inhaler and, pressing one nostril closed, stuck it up the other.

He politely pretended an interest in the view.

Below him, a staggering fence patched with warped plyboard and rusted lengths of tin enclosed a square of bare, packed earth.

There was a bright orange bit of carrot.

On one of the sheets of tin, it was still possible to make out an advertisement for Fry's Chocolate.

In the middle of this garden sat a disconsolate rabbit.

When the sounds seemed to have stopped, he turned back to face the room. He looked round nodding judiciously, aware even as he was doing it that it was the sort of thing his father did. He had, he realized, no idea of how to conclude these negotiations.

“And this other person? The man from Oxford?”

“Mr. Porteous.”

“He's . . . ?”

“We had a telegram.”

“Ah,” said David, “yes. I see.”

“Cooked breakfast and evening meal included,” she said, “it's three pound ten.”

“Well,” said David, contemplating the elephant, “that sounds . . .”

“And I'll trouble you,” she said, “in advance.”

He shoved the empty suitcase under the bed.

The thin quilt, the sheets, the pillow, all felt cold and damp.

He thought of turning on the gas-fire but didn't have a shilling piece; he thought of putting a sweater on.

Jingled the change in his pocket for a bit, inspected the wallpaper more closely; the motif was lilac blossoms in pink edged with purple. It was five-thirty. He wondered at what time, and where, this evening meal was served, if “evening meal” meant tea in some form or dinner.

Voices.

Slap of slippers on lino.

He eased his door open a crack.

“Evening Post. Now that should serve her nicely, the Evening Post.

Six pages of the Post. Read the newspaper, do you? Not much of a fellow for the reading. Scars, though! Now that's a different story entirely. Did I show you me scars?”

Through the banisters, an old man's head with hanging wings of white hair. Behind him, a stout boy in a brown dressing-gown.

The boy stood holding a sponge bag by its string; his calves were white and plump.

“Now there's a dreadful thing!” said the old man, who was scrabbling about on his hands and knees with the sheets of newspaper manufacturing a giant spill. “A dreadful thing! Two hundred homeless.

Will you look at that! There, look, and there's a footballer.

Follow the football, do you? Fill in the Pools? Never a drop of luck I've had. Spot the Ball? But a raffle, now! A raffle. I fancy the odds in a raffle. A raffle's a more reasonable creature than Spot the Ball.”

He disappeared into the bathroom.

The front door slammed shaking the house.

Boots clumping.

Then the dreadful voice of Mrs. Heaney.

“PERCY?”

“WHAT?”

“PERCE!”

“Quick, now!” shouted the old man. “Quick! Holy Mother, she's in full flow!”

Matches shaking from the box, he secured one against his chest and then rasped it into flame. He set fire to the drooping spill.

“BACK, BOY! BACK!”

Body shielded by the door, face averted, he lunged blindly. The expanding sheet of light reminded David of war films. The old man's quavering cry and the explosion were nearly simultaneous.

Brown shoulders blocking the view.

Suddenly from below, at great volume, Paul Anka.

I'M JUST A LONELY BOY . . .

The old man was in the smoke stamping on the spill.

Ash, grey and tremulous, floated on the air.

In front of Mrs. Heaney's place at the head of the table stood a bottle of Cream Soda.

The kitchen was silent except for the budgerigar ringing its bell and stropping itself on the cuttlefish. The cooked evening meal was a fried egg, a wafer of cold ham, a quarter of a tomato, and three boiled potatoes.

The slice of ham had an iridescent quality, hints of green and mauve.

In the centre of the oilcloth stood Heinz Ketchup, Crosse and Blackwell's Salad Cream, HP Sauce, Branston Pickle, OK Sauce, Daddy's Favourite, A1 Sauce, a bottle of Camp Coffee, and a punctured tin of Nestlé's Evaporated Milk.

Sliced white bread was piled on a plate.

The old man bobbed and fidgeted darting glances.

The fat boy was called Asa Bregg and was from Manchester and had come to university to study mathematics. Ken, who had acne and a Slim Jim tie and lots of ballpoint pens, was an apprentice at Hawker-Siddeley. Percy, presumably Mrs. Heaney's son, glimpsed earlier in overalls, was resplendent in a black Teddy-boy suit, white ruffled shirt, and bootlace tie. What forehead he had was covered by a greasy elaborate wave. He was florid and had very small eyes. The old man was addressed as “Father” but David was unable to decide what this meant.

Cutlery clinked.

Percy belched against the back of his hand.

The old man, whose agitation had been building, suddenly burst out, “Like ham, do you? A nice slice of ham? Tasty slice of ham? Have to go a long way to beat . . .”

“Father!” said Mrs. Heaney.

“. . . a nice slice of ham.”

“Do you want to go to the cellar! “ Cowed, the old man ducked his head, mumbling.

The budgerigar ejected seeds and detritus.

David studied the havildar or whatever he was on the label of the Camp Coffee bottle.

Mrs. Heaney rose heavily and opened four tins of Ambrosia Creamed Rice, slopping them into a saucepan.

Percy said, “Hey, tosh.”

“Pardon?” said David.

“Pass us the slide.”

“Pardon? The what?”

Percy stared.

“Margarine,” said Ken.

“Oh! Sorry!” said David.

Crouched on the draining-board, the cat was watching the Ambrosia Creamed Rice.

The old man, who'd been increasingly busy with the cruet, suddenly shouted, “Like trains, do you? Interested in trains? Like the railway, do you? Fond of engines?”

“Father! “ Into the silence, Asa Bregg said, “I am. I'm interested in trains. I collect train numbers.”

The old man stared at him.

Even Percy half turned.

Ken's face lifted from his plate.

Asa Bregg turned bright red.

“I'm a member of the Train-Spotters Club.”

Alone in the room that was his, David stared at the plaster elephant.

He wondered how they'd got the sparkles in.

After the ham and Ambrosia Creamed Rice, he'd walked the neighbourhood—dark factories across the canal, bomb-sites, news agents, fish and chips, Primitive Methodist Church, barber, The Adora Grill, and had ended up in the Leighton Arms where in deepening depression he drank five pints of the stuff manufactured opposite his room, an independent product called George's Glucose Stout.

The pub had been empty except for an old woman drinking Babycham and the publican's wife, who was knitting and listening to The Archers.

At the pub's off-licence, as a gesture of some kind, he'd bought a bottle of cognac.

He arranged on top of the chest of drawers the few books he'd been able to carry, the standard editions of Chaucer and Spenser serving as bookends, and settled himself on the bed with Cottle's Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Reader. Skipping over some tiresome introductory guff about anomalous auxiliary and preterite-present verbs and using the glossary, he attempted a line of the actual stuff but was defeated by the conglomeration of diphthongs, thorns, and wens; he had a presentiment that Anglo-Saxon was not going to be his cup of tea.

Heavy traffic up the stairs, voices, a strange jangle and clinking.

Mrs. Heaney appeared in the doorway and behind her a tall man with blond hair.

“This is Mr. Porteous,” she said, “from Oxford.”

“David Hendricks.”

“How do you do? Jeremy Porteous. If I could trouble you?”

he said, handing the tightly furled umbrella to Mrs. Heaney. He dropped the canvas hold-all on the floor and, slipping off the coiled nylon rope and the jangling karabiners and pitons, tossed them and the duffle coat onto the bed.

He glanced round.

“Splendid,” he said. “Splendid. Now, in the morning, Mrs. . . .

ah . . . Heaney, isn't it? . . . I think, tea.”

“About the rent, Mr. Porteous.”

“A matter for discussion, Mrs. Heaney, if you'd be so kind, following breakfast. I've had rather a gruesome day.”

And somehow, seconds later, he was closing the door on her.

He smiled.

“There's a person downstairs,” he said, “called ‘Father'. Seemed to want to know, rather insistently, if I enjoyed travelling by bus.”

David grinned.

Advancing on the gas fire and elephant, Jeremy said, “There's a special name, isn't there, for this chocolate chap? The one on its neck?”

“Mahout,” said David.

Seemingly absorbed, Jeremy moved back a pace the better to view the elephant. He had a slight limp, David noticed, and was favouring his right leg.

“Pardon?” said David.

“‘A plate',” repeated Jeremy, “‘of Spam'.”

David wondered how it was possible to wear a white shirt in combination with an anorak smeared with mud and at the same time look as suave as the men in the whisky advertisements.

“What are you going to . . .” David hesitated “. . . read at university?”

“Actually,” said Jeremy, “I'm supposed to be involved in some research nonsense.”

“Oh!” said David. “I'm terribly sorry. I just assumed . . . What did you do at Oxford?”

“I spent the better part of my time,” said Jeremy, still intent on the elephant, “amassing an extraordinarily large collection of photographs of naked eleven-year-old girls with their ankles bound.”

David stared at the elegant back.

He could think of absolutely nothing to say.

The gas fire was making popping noises.

Desperate to break the silence, David said, “Have you been climbing? Today, I mean?”

“Just toddling about on The Slabs at Llanberis. Are any of these free? I really must rest these shirts.”

As he wrestled open a drawer in the chest, the mirrored door of the wardrobe silently opened, the flash of the glass startling him.

“Did you hurt your leg today?” said David, embarrassed still and feeling it necessary to ease the silence. “When you were climbing?”

“I hurt it,” said Jeremy, dropping on his bed toothpaste, toothbrush, towel, and a large green book, “not minutes ago, and quite exquisitely, in what is probably referred to as the hall. On a sodding bicycle.”

He added to his toiletries a pair of flannel pyjamas decorated with blue battleships.

“Good God!” he said, pulling back the quilt, patting further and further down the bed. “This bed is positively wet.”

“Mine feels damp, too,” said David.

“Yours may be damp,” said Jeremy. “Mine is wet.”

He hurled the rope and the climbing hardware into a corner.

“Wet!” he shouted, striking the bed with his furled umbrella, “Wet! Wet! Wet! “ He seemed almost to vibrate with rage.

He pounded on the lino with the umbrella's ferrule.

“Can you hear me, Mrs. Heaney? Are you listening, you gravid sow?”

He stamped so hard the room shook and the wardrobe door swung open.

“WET!”

He glared about him.

He snatched at the string between the beds.

It broke.

With a loud clung, the gas-meter turned itself off.

He stood beside the bed with his eyes closed, one arm still rigid in the air holding the snapped string as though he were miming a straphanger in the underground. Light glinted on the gold and onyx cuff-link. Slowly, very slowly, he lowered the arm. Opening his fingers, he let the length of string fall to the floor. Eyes still closed, he let out his pent breath in a long sigh.

He limped over to the window. He swept aside the yellowed muslin curtains. He wrenched the window high. He limped to the mantel. He hurled the elephant into the night.

David realized that he, too, had been holding his breath.

The edges of the curtains trembled against the black square.

David cleared his throat.

“Would you,” he said, reaching under the bed, “would you like a drink?”

“Ummm?” said Jeremy, turning, wiping his hands with a handkerchief.

“A drink?”

“Ah, brandy!” said Jeremy. “Good man! It might help in warding off what these beds will doubtless incubate. Sciatica, for a start.”

“Lumbago,” said David.

“Rheumatoid arthritis,” said Jeremy.

“Mould,” said David.

Jeremy laughed delightedly.

Digging into his hold-all, he came up with a black case that contained telescoping silver drinking cups which, with a twist, separated into small beakers. He caught David's expression and said, “Yes, a foible, I'm afraid, but I've always been averse to the necks of bottles. Equal in the eyes of God and all that sort of thing, certainly, but would one share one's toothbrush? Well, bung-ho!”

Along the rim of the beaker, David saw the shapes of hallmarks.

“‘Lumbago',” said Jeremy. “Don't you find that certain words make you think of things they don't mean? ‘Emolument', for example.

Makes me think of very naked, very fat, black women. Something I read as a stripling about an African king's wives who were kept in pens and fed starchy tubers—so fat they couldn't get up—just rolled around—and oiled all over, rather like . . .” his hands sketched a shape “. . . rather like immense seals . . . What was I starting to say?”

“Lumbago,” said David.

“Yes,” said Jeremy. “I wonder why?”

There was a silence.

“So!” said Jeremy.

David nodded.

Jeremy held out his cup.

“What are you going to do?” said David.

“In the morning,” said Jeremy, “we shall fold our tents. What was that woman called?”

“Mrs. Heaney?”

“No. The lodgings woman.”

“The Accommodations Officer?”

“She's the one. Cornbury? Crownbury? We shall proceed against her.”

“But I thought—well, from her letter, that there wasn't anywhere else.”

“Nonsense.”

“Are you just allowed to leave a . . . ?”

“Who,” demanded Jeremy, “who got us into this—this lazarhouse in the first place? The responsibility is purely hers. We shall question her judgment with indignation and bitterness.”

“But . . .”

“With voluble indignation and bitterness. We shall demand reparations.

Silver,” he said, “is so comforting to the touch, isn't it?”

David held up the brandy bottle.

“Well,” said Jeremy, “yes.”

“But you see . . .” said David.

“See what?”

“I paid her a week's rent.”

“Always,” said Jeremy, “try to postpone payment. On the other hand,” he said judiciously, “never bilk.”

“Well,” said David, “now that you've . . . I mean, she's not likely to return my . . .”

“Life,” said Jeremy, climbing into his pyjama bottoms, “is very much a balancing, a trading-off of this against that. It's a simple question, surely? The question is: Are you the sort of person who lives in a place like this? To which,” he said, working a khaki sweater down over his pyjama top, “one hopes there can be but one reply.”

He reassembled the bed and spread his duffle coat over the quilt and on the duffle coat spread two sweaters and his rope.

“I find sleep impossible,” he said, “without weight.”

Whistling “We Plough the Fields and Scatter,” he went out with toothbrush and towel.

David sat on the bed enjoying the brandy, enjoying the weight and balance of the silver cup, savouring Jeremy's use of the word: we.

Thinking about the amazing fluctuations of the long day, he decided that the flavour of events was exactly caught in the casual connective of biblical narrative: And it came to pass . . .

The wallpaper made him feel as if he were sitting inside a friendly pink cave.

He was, he realized, drunk.

Jeremy returned whistling the hymn about those in peril on the sea and started to work himself under the layers of bedding. He asked David to pass him the book, a large paper edition of The Wind in the Willows with illustrations by Ernest Shepard.

“I say,” said Jeremy. “Would you . . . I mean, would it be a terrible imposition?”

“Would what?”

“Just to read a few paragraphs?”

“I haven't read this,” said David, “since I was a child.”

“Oh, but you should!” said Jeremy with great earnestness. “It never lets you down.”

“From the beginning?”

“No,” said Jeremy. “Let me think. Oh, this is lovely! There's the field mice singing carols to Ratty and Mole at ‘Mole End'—that's always very nice. But . . . I know! Let's have the part where Ratty and Mole go to visit Toad. Remember? Where the motor-car wrecks Toad's caravan? Yes, here it is.”

He passed over the book.

He closed his eyes, composed his hands.

“Most kind of you.”

David began.

The old grey horse, dreaming, as he plodded along, of his quiet paddock, in a new raw situation such as this simply abandoned himself to his natural emotions. Rearing, plunging, backing steadily, in spite of all the Mole's efforts at his head, and all the Mole's lively language directed at his better feelings, he drove the cart backwards towards the deep ditch at the side of the road. It wavered an instant—then there was a heart-rending crash—and the canary-coloured cart, their pride and joy, lay on its side in the ditch, an irredeemable wreck . . .

Toad sat straight down in the middle of the dusty road, his legs stretched out before him, and stared fixedly in the direction of the disappearing motor-car. He breathed short, his face wore a placid, satisfied expression, and at intervals he faintly murmured “Poop-poop!”

17 s t an d i n g s t on e s The Mole was busy trying to quiet the horse, which he succeeded in doing after a time. Then he went to look at the cart, on its side in the ditch. It was indeed a sorry sight . . .

The Rat came to help him, but their united efforts were not sufficient to right the cart. “Hi! Toad!” they cried. “Come and bear a hand, can't you! “ David, turning the page, glanced over at Jeremy. His eyes were closed, his breathing deepening.

“Glorious, stirring sight!” murmured Toad, never offering to move. “The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today—in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped—always somebody else's horizon! O bliss! O pooppoop! O my! O my!”

“O stop being an ass, Toad!” cried the Mole despairingly.

“And to think I never knew!” went on the Toad in a dreamy monotone.

David looked up.

With a long sigh, Jeremy had turned on his side.

His breathing deepened into a snore.

The coiled rope was balanced on the hump of his shoulder.

“All those wasted years,” David continued, reading aloud in the pink bedroom, “that lie behind me, I never knew, never even dreamt! But now—but now that I know, now that I fully realize! Oh what a flowery track lies spread before me, henceforth! What dust-clouds shall spring up behind me as I speed on my reckless way! “ Jeremy's exhalations were a faint, breathy whistle.

David closed the book.

The edges of the curtains trembled against the black square of the open window.

He switched off the light.

He pulled the quilt up to his chin and lay in the darkness listening.

Somewhere far distant in the night, in the docks perhaps, perhaps slipping its moorings and preparing to move out down the river to the sea, a ship was sounding and sounding.