Any Human Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

his pictures — mainly watercolours and drypoint etchings — looked at some of his prize books and talked about my latest essay (on
King Lear),
which I was rather pleased with but which he had pedantically ranked alpha-beta plus query plus. Then I noticed on his chimney piece a brass artillery shell casing, which was intricately worked with a complex embossed pattern. I asked him where he had bought it and he said it was a gift from a wounded French soldier he had befriended at a base hospital near Honfleur. As he talked it became clear from the context that he had also been convalescing at the same time from some wound or injury.
    ‘Oh, so you were in the war, sir,’ I said — a bit breezily, I admit.
    ‘Yes. I was.’
    ‘Whereabouts? What regiment?’
    ‘I prefer not to talk about it, if you don’t mind, Mountstuart.’
    And that was that — said very abruptly, too — and it rather took the edge off our cosy tea. With the mood now formal and somewhat chill I said I thought I had better catch the 4.30 to Abbeyhurst and he showed me to the door. You could see the spire of St James’s from his small patch of front garden.
    ‘Odd day to go to church,’ he said.
    ‘I had to see Father Doig on a personal matter.’
    He looked at me fiercely and I wondered what I had said wrong this time.
    ‘You’re a very intelligent boy, Mountstuart.’
    ‘Thank you, sir.’
    ‘Do you believe in your god?’
    ‘I suppose I do, sir.’
    ‘I’ve never understood how a person of real intelligence can believe in a god. Or gods. It’s all balls, you know — complete balls. You must enlighten me one day. Ah, there’s your bus.’
    Strange man, I thought on the way back. Not sexless, because he was leanly handsome enough, H-D, and sure of himself too. Very sure. Too uncompromising, really — perhaps that was it. Because it seems to me that to be human you have to be able to compromise. And sometimes there appears something inhuman about Mr Holden-Dawes.
     
     
    Good news on my return. A letter from Lucy, and Leeping told me he’d spoken to Beauchamp — who runs our house team — and I am to play in the scrum for our next match. As hooker. So it begins.
     
     
2 February [1924]
     
    Scabius has finally met the elusive and ineffable Tess. They worked on some giant of a shire-horse preparing it for a show — grooming it, varnishing its hoofs, plaiting its mane and tail with ribbons and the rest, spending a whole afternoon together. So, what was she like, we asked? Really quite shy, Peter said. We reminded him we were indifferent to her personality; it was her physical charms that intrigued us. ‘Well, she’s quite small,’ he said, ‘I tower over her. And she has this terrible frizzy corkscrew hair she’s ashamed of, always hiding it under hats and scarves. Quite well endowed in the bosom department, as far as I can tell. And she bites her nails, down to the quick.’ They seem to have liked each other well enough, however, and she had invited him back to the farmhouse for tea.
    Ben, in his turn, telephoned Father Doig and was told that, in the interests of absolute discretion, he should not come to the church at Glympton but rather meet in the house of one of his parishioners — a Mrs Catesby, who happened to live in Abbeyhurst itself — at times convenient to Ben. Thus Ben’s first encounter with Father Doig and the Roman Catholic Church is arranged for next Saturday afternoon in Mrs Catesby’s back parlour — a week from today.
    In the meantime, I have played my first rugby match as hooker.
    It was a wet, drizzly, cold afternoon as Soutar’s XV turned out on the south-east playing fields against Giffords’ XV. As both sides reluctantly stripped off and vaguely warmed up for the kick-off, it was apparent to me that we were the usual mix of lazy misfits, inept hearties and hopeless inadequates. Somewhere at the other end of the expanse of playing fields another match was going on and the routine shouts of