“Take the next turn to the right,” shouted Mr. Ingleby to Edwin, riding ahead.
In the middle of a village drenched with the perfume of roses, Edwin turned to the right down a narrow lane. By this time his father had reached his level. “Here we are,” he said. They dismounted.
It was a small cottage with a green-painted porch and carefully tended garden in front of it. The place was built of the stone of the country and washed with the pinkish lime of the hills. In the garden roses and bright annuals were blooming, and a huge acacia, hung with ivory blossom, shadowed the garden gate. On the gate itself Edwin read a crudely painted name: Geranium Cottage. Mr. Ingleby smiled. “Your Uncle Will is very fond of geraniums.” They opened the gate and pushed in their bicycles. Everything in the garden was so meticulously orderly that to wheel them over the mown grass seemed sacrilegious. The porch, at which they waited, was full of choice geraniums. Their hot scent filled the air. Mr. Ingleby knocked gently with a polished brass knocker. Slow steps were heard within moving over a flagged floor. The door was opened, disclosing a stone passage that smelt of coolness and cleanliness. It was like the smell of a sweet dairy. An elderly woman, with a plump and placid face and grey hair, received them. All her figure except her black sateen bodice was covered with a coarse but snowy apron.
“Why, John,” she said. “It do be a treat to see you.”
She took Mr. Ingleby in her arms and kissed him. “Poor fellow, too,” she said. The embrace implied more than any of the condolences that Edwin had heard in Halesby.
“And this is Edwin,” she said. “Well, what a great big man, to be sure!” She proceeded to embrace Edwin, and he became conscious of the extraordinary softness and coolness of her face.
“Come in and make yourselves comfortable,” said Aunt Sarah Jane. “We’re used to bicycles in this house. Our Joe has one. He goes to work on it every day, and sometimes on a Sunday rides over to Clevedern on it. Come in, John.” Edwin followed his father into the living-room. It was clean, strikingly clean, and curiously homely. On the walls hung a picture of Queen Victoria, looking like a pouter pigeon in her jubilee robes, and another of the sardonic Disraeli. There were several padded photograph albums with gilt clasps, and other photographs decorated the mantelpiece and a side table. These were all accommodated in fretwork frames.
“Joe do keep us supplied with up-to-date photograph frames,” said Aunt Sarah Jane, following Edwin’s glances with a touch of motherly pride. “He’s like his father. Clever with his fingers.”
Edwin found that the photographs were familiar. His father was there: an ardent, younger father, with black whiskers and a determined mouth. A father confident in the virtue of self-help. His mother, too, in a tight-fitting costume of the eighties, with a row of buttons down the front from the throat to the hem. And, wonder of wonders, there was Edwin himself in a sailor suit. The discovery of his own portrait did something to destroy the illusion of unreality that occupied the place. Obviously he really belonged to it. For years, without his knowing it, his image had been part of this unfamiliar room. Even though he had not known of their existence he had evidently been a familiar accepted person to these people. Even their friends must have known him by sight. It was strange. It was pathetic. “I can see a touch of our Joe in him, John,” said his aunt, who had been examining him closely. “An’ there do be a look of your father as well.”
“Do you think so?” said Mr. Ingleby.