The great and comfortable lie of Adrian Cartwright was coming tumbling down around him.
It had begun earlier that Tuesday afternoon when, in the full assembled presence of his wife, parishioners and two small children, he had accidentally run into the love of his life.
Luckily, the hollow figure of Mrs Cartwright hove into view, grasping his arm and pulling him aside. He moved with her, pawing awkwardly at his cucumber sandwich, as is the sacred duty of all good vicars. Already he had begun to shake slightly, at the ends of his fingers, and already he looked at his wife and seemed to see her stiffen and petrify before him. She tightened her grip on his arm as she introduced him to the Healys, but it didn’t feel like love, or intimacy - rather an insistent tugging on those scratching hooks she had dug into him so long ago. He began to sweat, slowly and under the collar, and to fidget, jogging his knees up and down as he had done as a boy.
Adrian Cartwright looked across the hall, past the muttering crowds, and saw Him properly for the first time in thirty years. He noticed three things:
I. The Henry Mandeville who stood before him was different.
II. The Henry Mandeville who stood before him was wrong.
III. The Henry Mandeville who stood before him made a mockery of the boy with whom Adrian had fallen in love.
Bashfully elongated limbs had given way to a sort of stooping discomfort and the reluctant smile of a boy to a stern grimace that seemed to glaze those it touched, ineffectual and superficial. Somewhere inside Him, Adrian thought, there lived the schoolboy he had once known, blazer and boater wrapped inside the herringbone and pretension of this man. This Henry who stood in His body, and spoke with His voice, and bore His name, was a sacrilege and a desecration. Adrian wished he had never recognised Him. He excused himself from his wife and the Healys and half-stumbled outside.
Of course, he’d always known in some way that this day was coming. There was only so long two men could expect to be buoyed from institution to institution, from Their schools to Their universities to Their bar or Their church before it became mathematically improbable that they should not meet again. The trouble was, Adrian Cartwright had given up waiting.
Smoking outside granted some relief, but still he avoided the side of the hall on which he knew He stood. Even through the sandstone, this new Henry affected him greatly. Some lever had been pulled or some mechanism activated within him, and already he could feel the twisting and turning of those pulleys and ropes deep in the most distant depths of his aching heart. The love and the lust and the lips and the eyes and the Grecian urn came rushing back, and suddenly Adrian broke at the knees.
He drove home in fear and darkness.
Then, late that strange and divine night as he lay awake, lost and sunk in the depths of longing and despair, Adrian Cartwright was struck by a sudden and persistent compulsion to make boiled eggs and soldiers.
He didn’t know why, at first. But more than that, he didn’t wish to know, or to think, or to examine or comprehend, but rather to do and to feel.
The only bread they had in the house was stale and the eggs several days old, but he began anyway, careful not to crash the pots against one another and wake Mrs Cartwright, whom he knew to be sleeping upstairs, lonely and stiff on the left side of the bed.
When he tapped the teaspoon against the side of the first batch of eggs, and dipped the soldiers in the running yolk, he knew from where his compulsion came.
He inhaled the smell, and pulled the decades behind him.
That same smell that rasped and cut as it drew through his nostrils, that same smell that conjured half-empty school lunch halls, that same smell that conjured the Henry Mandeville he knew from the shell of the Henry Mandeville he now knew to exist.
They had served the same stale toast and the same expired eggs at that school every day for eight years. How he had cursed it then, and how he praised it now.
* * *
Before long, a white van had begun making regular deliveries to the house where Adrian now lived alone, and two men had been employed to unload several crates of unsold, stale and expired bread and eggs each day. The house’s inhabitant was rarely seen, drifting through the door perhaps once or twice a month to wander aimlessly in the garden or make idle conversation with the deliverymen.
* * *
In the small, unventilated room he had made in the bottom of his house, Adrian sat and considered himself. After a time, he wrote those words he had begged for the courage to speak to that old Henry, that true Henry, all those years and all those regrets ago.
“When old age shall this generation waste
Thou shalt remain, in midst of any other foe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou says’t:
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all
ye know on earth and all ye know.'"
He would never post the letter. There was work to be done.
“Nonsense,” he said, quietly, and pulled down the toaster lever.
