Read Online Bilgewater by Jane Gardam - Free Book Online Page A

round the door I had not realised that I was in need of any salvation at all. Like the man who had had great possessions, I had been fine—or so I thought. I hadn’t known how much I needed a friend.
    A narrative and an equation are one, in that they are some sort of an attempt at a statement of truth, at what—as Hardy says—every one is thinking and nobody dares to say: so that in case you are thinking that I was a bit weird in my feelings for Grace Gathering, a bit steamed up like the third form girls get about mistresses or Puffy Coleman gets about the new boys—let me tell you quite coolly that I am not like that. I have a very good balance of hormones all distributed in the right places. The only thing that ever worried me was that I started brewing them so early and at—well I’d better admit it—even eleven, I couldn’t sometimes sleep for thoughts of Jack Rose.
    But I’m not funny. My wonder and delight at the sight of Grace, at Grace’s attention and friendliness to me were simply that I saw a wondrous hope in them that I might bask in them a little, might tag along. I might be associated. Something very promising had walked into Miss Bex’s Hamlet with Grace Gathering—a sort of hazy hopefulness, a sleepy, delicious content of the kind I had felt that evening long ago when Boakes had played the flute by the Fives Court, or that other afternoon when I had been walking along Madeira and Jack Rose had come along and said I could read
Ulysses
.
    In other words I saw that where Grace Gathering went there would be romance and that if I hung about perhaps some of it would come off on me. Romance I saw in its best Tennysonian or mediaeval sense. If a cynic of course like Terrapin were to read this he would say, “Ha—Bilge thought that Grace would attract boys and if she hung around she, Bilge, might get some of the left-overs.”
    But Terrapin held no threat for me. He was my evil genius of long ago. I hardly saw him now. The only two romantic episodes of my life he had squashed flat but there was no way he was going to get at this one. Grace would not even be aware of the Terrapins of this world, just as she would not be at risk from or aware of the romamic twaddle of dear old Uncle Edmund Hastings-Benson. Grace I saw as a figure far, far above coarseness or sloppiness—a figure of real Romance, a creature of turrets, moats and lonely vigils, gaundets and chargers, long fields of barley and of rye.
    And now I was to be associated with her. I imagined myself as I wandered over father’s House playing fields towards the cricket pavilion then back again along the road, past Grace’s house but not looking at it, back to my own home again, trailing a hand along the School House railings: I saw Grace Gathering in a floating dress and a tall cone of a hat with a flimsy bit of net fluttering behind it, drifting down to a river and lying flat out in a boat and the boat floating smooth, smooth, down the river into a pearly haze beneath bridges. And I heard Grace’s voice singing, singing, softer, softer and stopping, and then at the last bridge Lancelot himself leaning sadly over, sadly gazing.
    He said. “She had a lovely face
    The Lady of Shalott.”
    And beside him on the bridge stood I—Bilgewater. It was to me he said it.
    â€œAlas,” he said, “Grace Gathering. Dead, poor thing and not for me. Not
really
my sort of course,” he said—Jack Lancelot. “Not a girl one could
really
love, really get close to,” and he held out his pale doctor’s hand inside its mediaeval knitted-metal glove, Jack Rose did, and lifted my hand to his lips. “Oh Bilgewater! Marigold!”
    Together we walked off the bridge, together for ever with Grace Gathering’s great big white and gold body sloshing about under the bridge and tipping about on the tide.
    A narrative must be what everyone is thinking and nobody dares to