It was, Robert Grimshaw was thinking, very hard upon Pauline, too. He couldn’t be absolutely certain what she meant to do in case the General Election came before Dudley could make some sort of appearance in the neighbourhood of Cove Park. In the conversations that he had had with her they had taken it for tacitly understood that he was to be well—or at least that he was to be well enough for Pauline to run him herself.
But supposing it was to be a matter of some years, or even of some months? What was Pauline thinking of when she thought of the General Election that hung over them? Mustn’t it add to her suspense? And he wondered what she meant to do. Would she simply stick Leicester in bed and give it out that he had a temporary illness, and run the election off her own bat? She had already run Leicester down in their car all over the country roads, going dead slow and smiling at the cottagers. And there wasn’t much chance of the other side putting up a candidate....
Between his feet Peter was uttering little bubbles of dissatisfaction whenever Sir William spoke, as if his harsh voice caused the small dog the most acute nervous tension. Grimshaw whistled in a whisper to keep the animal quiet. “All these details,” Grimshaw thought, Pauline had all these details to attend to, an incessant vigilance, a fierce determination to keep her end up, and to do it in silence and loneliness. He imagined her to be quivering with anxiety, to be filled with fear. He knew her to be all this. But Sir William, having ceased to impart his social information, turned his brows upon his patient, and Pauline came from the back room to sit down opposite him by the fireplace. And all she had to say was: “These coals really are very poor!”
Silence and loneliness. In the long grass, engrossed, mere small spots of black, the starlings in a little company went about their task. From beneath the high trees came the call of the blackbirds echoing in true wood-notes, and overhead a wood-pigeon was crooning incessantly. The path ran broad down the avenue. The sounds of the wood-cutters at work upon the trees felled that winter were sharp points in the low rumble from a distance, and over all the grass that could be seen beneath the tree-trunks there hung a light-blue haze.
Having an unlit cigarette between his fingers Grimshaw felt in his pocket for his matchbox, but for the first time in many years the excellent Jervis had forgotten to fill it. And this in his silence and his loneliness was an additional slight irritant. There was undoubtedly a nostalgia, a restlessness in his blood, and it was to satisfy this restless desire for change of scene that he had come from his own end of the Park into Kensington Gardens. Peter was roaming unostentatiously upon his private affairs, and upon his seat Grimshaw leaned forward and looked at the ground. He had been sitting like that for a long time quite motionless when he heard the words: “You will not, I think, object to my sharing your seat? I have a slight fit of dizziness.” He turned his head to one side and looked up. With a very long, square and carefully tended grey beard, with very long and oiled locks, with a very chiselled nose, high dark brows and complexion as of marble, and upon his head a black cylindrical hat, wearing a long black cassock that showed in its folds the great beads of a wooden rosary, an Orthodox priest was towering over him. Robert Grimshaw murmured: “Assuredly not, Father,” in Greek, and silently the priest sat down at the other end of the bench. His face expressed aloofness, severity, and a distant pride that separated him from all the rest of the world. He, too, sat silent for a very long time, his eyes gazing down through the trees over the Serpentine and into immense distances. Robert Grimshaw looked distastefully at the unlit cigarette which he held between his fingers, and then he observed before him a man who might have been fifty, with watery blue eyes and a red nose, his clothes and hat all a mossy green with age and between his lips a misformed cigarette.
“You haven’t got a light?” Grimshaw said, and the man fumbled in his pocket, producing a greasy, blue box which he pushed open to exhibit its emptiness.
“Oh, well, give me a light from your cigarette,” Grimshaw said.
A hesitancy came over the man’s whole being, but reluctantly he surrendered the feeble vapour tube. Grimshaw took his light.
“Oh, here,” he said, and he drew out his bulky case, “that your last? Here, take one of mine,” and he shook his case over the extended palm. The cigarettes fell into it in a little shower.
“That’ll keep you going for a bit. Thanks, it’s nothing. I’m only obliged to you for the light. I wanted it.”