His tone changed from friendliness to cajolery, at length to a whine; the voice which had been so well-bred was now the underdog’s voice which Mr. Pinfold remembered from their brief meeting at Lychpole.
“Do speak to him, Gilbert,” Margaret pleaded. “He’s really very worried.”
“So he should be. If your miserable brother wants me to reply he can address me properly, as “Mr. Pinfold”, or “Sir”.”
“Very well, Mr. Pinfold, sir,” said Angel.
“That’s better. Now what have you to say?”
“I want to apologize. I’ve made a mess of the whole Plan.”
“You certainly have.”
“It was a serious scientific experiment. Then I let personal malice interfere. I’m sorry, Mr. Pinfold.”
“Well, keep quiet then.”
“That’s just what I was going to suggest. Look here, Gil—Mr. Pinfold, sir—let’s do a deal. I’ll switch off the apparatus. I promise on my honor we’ll none of us ever worry you again. All we ask in return is that you don’t say anything to anyone in England about us. It could ruin our whole work if it got talked about. Just say nothing, and you’ll never hear from us again. Tell your wife you had noises in the head through taking those gray pills. Tell her anything you like but tell her it’s all over. She’ll believe you. She’ll be delighted to hear it.”
“I’ll think it over,” said Mr. Pinfold.
He thought it over. There were strong attractions in the bargain. Could Angel be trusted? He was in a panic now at the prospect of getting into trouble with the B.B.C.—
“Not the B.B.C., darling,” said Margaret. “It isn’t them that worry him. They know all about his experiments. It’s Reggie Graves-Upton. He must never know. He’s a sort of cousin, you see, and he would tell our aunt and father and mother and everyone. It would cause the most frightful complications. Gilbert, you must never tell anyone, promise, especially not cousin Reggie.”
“And you, Meg,” said Mr. Pinfold in bantering but fond tones, “are you going to leave me alone too?”
“Oh, Gilbert, dearest, it’s not a thing to joke about. I’ve so loved being with you. I shall miss you more than anyone I’ve ever known in my life. I shall never forget you. If my brother switches off it will be a kind of death for me. But I know I have to suffer. I’ll be brave. You must accept the offer, Gilbert.”
“I’ll let you know before I reach London,” said Mr. Pinfold.
Presently they were over England.
“Well,” said Angel, “what’s your answer?”
“I said “London”.”
Later they were over London airport. “Fasten your belts please. No smoking.”
“Here we are,” said Angel. “Speak up. Is it a deal?”
“I don’t call this London,” said Mr. Pinfold.
He had cabled to his wife from Rome that he would go straight to the hotel they always used. He did not wait for the other passengers to board the bus. Instead he hired a car. Not until they were in the borough of Acton did he reply to Angel. Then he said:
“The answer is: no.”
“You can’t mean it.” Angel was unaffectedly aghast. “Why, Mr. Pinfold, sir? Why?”
“First, because I don’t accept your word of honor. You don’t know what honor is. Secondly, I thoroughly dislike you and your revolting wife. You have been extremely offensive to me and I intend to make you suffer for it. Thirdly, I think your plans, your work as you call it, highly dangerous. You’ve driven one man to suicide, perhaps others too, that I don’t know about. You tried to drive me. Heaven knows what you’ve done to Roger Stillingfleet. Heaven knows who you may attack next. Apart from any private resentment I feel, I regard you as a public menace that has got to be silenced.”
“All right, Gilbert, if that’s the way you want it—”
“Don’t call me “Gilbert” and don’t talk like a film gangster.”
“All right, Gilbert. You’ll pay for this.”
But there was no confidence to his threats. Angel was a beaten man and knew it.
*
“Mrs. Pinfold arrived an hour ago,” the concierge told him. “She is waiting for you in your room.”
Mr. Pinfold took the lift, walked down the corridor, and opened the door, with Goneril and Angel raucous on either side. He was shy of his wife, when they met.
“You look all right,” she said.
“I am all right. I have this trouble I wrote to you about, but I hope I can get it cleared up. I’m sorry not to be more affectionate, but it’s a little embarrassing having three people listening to everything one says.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Pinfold. “It must be. I can see that. Have you had luncheon?”
“Hours ago, in Paris. Of course there’s the difference of an hour.”
“I’ve had none. I’ll order something now.”
“How you hate her, Gilbert! How she bores you!” said Goneril.
“Don’t believe a word she says,” said Angel.
“She’s very pretty,” Margaret conceded, “and very kind. But she is not good enough for you. I suppose you think I’m jealous. Well, I am.”
“I’m sorry to be so uncommunicative,” said Mr. Pinfold. “You see these abominable people keep talking to me.”
“Most distracting,” said Mrs. Pinfold.
“Most.”
The waiter brought a tray. When he had gone Mrs. Pinfold said: “You know you’ve got it all wrong about this Mr. Angel. As soon as I got your letter I telephoned to Arthur at the B.B.C. and inquired. Angel has been in England all the time.”
“Don’t listen to her. She’s lying.”
Mr. Pinfold was dumbfounded.
“Are you absolutely sure?”
“Ask them yourself.”
Mr. Pinfold went to the telephone. He had a friend named Arthur high in the talks department.
“Arthur that fellow who came down to interview me last summer, Angel—haven’t you sent him to Aden… you haven’t? He’s in England now?… No, I don’t want to speak to him… It’s just that I ran across someone rather like him on board ship… Good-bye… Well,” he said to his wife, “I simply don’t know what to make of this.”
“I may as well tell you the truth,” said Angel. “We never were in that ship. We worked the whole thing from the studio in England.”
“They must be working the whole thing from a studio in England,” said Mr. Pinfold.
“My poor darling,” said Mrs. Pinfold, “no one’s “worked” anything. You’re imagining it all. Just to make sure I asked Father Westmacott as you suggested. He says the whole thing’s utterly impossible. There just isn’t any sort of invention by the Gestapo or the B.B.C. or the Existentialists or the psycho-analysts—nothing at all, the least like what you think.”
“No Box?”
“No Box.”
“Don’t believe her. She’s lying. She’s lying,” said Goneril but with every word her voice dwindled as though a great distance was being put between them. Her last word was little more than the thin grating of a slate-pencil.
“You mean that everything I’ve heard said, I’ve been saying to myself? It’s hardly conceivable.”
“It’s perfectly true, darling,” said Margaret. “I never had a brother or a sister-in-law, no father, no mother, nothing… I don’t exist, Gilbert. There isn’t any me, anywhere at all… but I do love you, Gilbert. I don’t exist but I do love… Good-bye… Love…” and her voice too trailed away, sank to a whisper, a sigh, the rustle of a pillow; then was silent.
Mr. Pinfold sat in the silence. There had been other occasions of seeming release which had proved illusory. This he knew was the final truth. He was alone with his wife.
“They’ve gone,” he said at length. “In that minute. Gone for good.”
“I hope that’s true. What are we going to do now? I couldn’t make any plans till I knew what sort of state I’d find you in. Father Westmacott gave me the name of a man he says we can trust.”
/> “A loony doctor?”
“A psychologist—but a Catholic so he must be all right.”
“No,” said Mr. Pinfold. “I’ve had enough of psychology. How about taking the tea train home?”
Mrs. Pinfold hesitated. She had come to London prepared to see her husband into a nursing-home. She said: “Are you sure you oughtn’t to see somebody.”
“I might see Drake,” said Mr. Pinfold.
So they went to Paddington and took their seats in the restaurant car. It was full of neighbors returning from a day’s shopping. They ate toasted buns and the familiar landscape rolled past invisible in the dark and misted window-panes,
“We heard you’d gone to the tropics, Gilbert.”
“Just back.”
“You didn’t stay long. Was it boring?”
“No,” said Mr. Pinfold, “not the least boring. It was most exciting. But I had enough.”
Their neighbors always had thought Mr. Pinfold rather odd.
“But it was exciting,” said Mr. Pinfold when he and his wife were alone in the car driving home. “It was the most exciting thing, really, that ever happened to me,” and during the days which followed he recounted every detail of his long ordeal.
The hard frost had given place to fog and intermittent sleet. The house was as cold as ever but Mr. Pinfold was content to sit over the fire and, like a warrior returned from a hard fought victory, relive his trials, endurances and achievements. No sound troubled him from that other half-world into which he had stumbled but there was nothing dreamlike about his memories. They remained undiminished and unobscured, as sharp and hard as any event of his waking life. “What I can’t understand is this,” he said: “If I was supplying all the information to the Angels, why did I tell them such a lot of rot? I mean to say, if I wanted to draw up an indictment of myself I could make a far blacker and more plausible case than they did. I can’t understand.”
Mr. Pinfold never has understood this; nor has anyone been able to suggest a satisfactory explanation.
“You know,” he said, some evenings later, “I was very near accepting Angel’s offer. Supposing I had, and the voices had stopped just as they have done now, I should have believed that that infernal Box existed. All my life I should have lived in the fear that at any moment the whole thing might start up again. Or for all I knew they might just have been listening all the time and not saying anything. It would have been an awful situation.”
“It was very brave of you to turn down the offer,” said Mrs. Pinfold.
“It was sheer bad temper,” said Mr. Pinfold quite truthfully.
“All the same, I think you ought to see a doctor. There must have been something the matter with you.”
“Just those pills,” said Mr. Pinfold.
They were his last illusion. When finally Dr. Drake came Mr. Pinfold said: “Those gray pills you gave me. They were pretty strong.”
“They seem to have worked,” said Dr. Drake.
“Could they have made me hear voices?”
“Good heavens, no.”
“Not if they were mixed with bromide and chloral?”
“There wasn’t any chloral in the mixture I gave you.”
“No, But to tell you the truth I had a bottle of my own.”
Dr. Drake did not seem shocked by the revelation. “That is always the trouble with patients,” he said. “One never knows what else they’re taking on the quiet. I’ve known people make themselves thoroughly ill.”
“I was thoroughly ill. I heard voices for nearly a fortnight.”
“And they’ve stopped now?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve stopped the bromide and chloral?”
“Yes.”
“Then I don’t think we have far to look. I should keep off that mixture if I were you. It can’t be the right thing for you. I’ll send something else. Those voices were pretty offensive, I suppose?”
“Abominable. How did you know?”
“They always are. Lots of people hear voices from time to time—nearly always offensive.”
“You don’t think he ought to see a psychologist?” asked Mrs. Pinfold.
“He can if he likes, of course, but it sounds like a perfectly simple case of poisoning to me.”
“That’s a relief,” said Mrs. Pinfold, but Mr. Pinfold accepted this diagnosis less eagerly. He knew, and the others did not know—not even his wife, least of all his medical adviser—that he had endured a great ordeal, and unaided, had emerged the victor. There was a triumph to be celebrated, even if a mocking slave stood always beside him in his chariot reminding him of mortality.
Next day was Sunday. After Mass Mr. Pinfold said:
“You know I can’t face the Bruiser. It’s going to be several weeks before I can talk to him about his Box. Have a fire lighted in the library. I’m going to do some writing.”
As the wood crackled and a barely perceptible warmth began to spread among the chilly shelves, Mr. Pinfold sat down to work for the first time since his fiftieth birthday. He took the pile of manuscript, his unfinished novel, from the drawer and glanced through it. The story was still clear in his mind. He knew what had to be done. But there was more urgent business first, a hamper to be unpacked of fresh, rich experience—perishable goods.
He returned the manuscript to the drawer, spread a new quire of foolscap before him, and wrote in his neat, steady hand:
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
A Conversation Piece
Chapter One
Portrait of the Artist in Middle-age
About the Author
[TK]
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Contents
Welcome
Dedication
Foreword
Chapter One: Portrait of the Artist in Middle-Age
Chapter Two: Collapse of Elderly Party
Chapter Three: An Unhappy Ship
Chapter Four: The Hooligans
Chapter Five: The International Incident
Chapter Six: The Human Touch
Chapter Seven: The Villains Unmasked—But Not Foiled
Chapter Eight: Pinfold Regained
About the Author
Ad Card
Copyright
Copyright
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Evelyn Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
(Series: # )
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