Uncle Giles’s affairs had, in fact, moved recently towards something like a climax. After nearly two years of silence—since the moment when he had disappeared into the fog, supposedly on his way to Reading—nothing had been heard of him; until one day a letter had arrived, headed with the address of an hotel in the Isle of Man, the contents of which implied, though did not state, that he intended to get married. In anticipation of this contingency, my uncle advocated a thorough overhaul of the conditions of the Trust; and expressed, not for the first time, the difficulties that lay in the path of a man without influence.
This news caused my parents some anxiety; for, although Uncle Giles’s doings during the passage of time that had taken place were unknown in detail, his connection with Reading had been established, with fair certainty, to be the result of an association with a lady who lived there: some said a manicurist: others the widow of a garage-proprietor. There was, indeed, no reason why she should not have sustained both rôles. The topic was approached in the family circle with even more gloom, and horrified curiosity, than Uncle Giles’s activities usually aroused: misgiving being not entirely groundless, since Uncle Giles was known to be almost as indiscriminate in dealings with the opposite sex as he was unreliable in business negotiation. His first serious misadventure, when stationed in Egypt as a young man, had, indeed, centred upon a love affair.
It was one of Uncle Giles’s chief complaints that he had been ‘put’ into the army—for which he possessed neither Mrs. Foxe’s romantic admiration nor her hard-headed grasp of military realities—instead of entering some unspecified profession in which his gifts would have been properly valued. He had begun his soldiering in a line regiment: later, with a view to being slightly better paid, exchanging into the Army Service Corps. I used to imagine him wearing a pill-box cap on the side of his head, making assignations under a sub-tropical sun with a beautiful lady dressed in a bustle and sitting in an open carriage driven by a coloured coachman; though such attire, as a matter of fact, belonged to a somewhat earlier period; and, even if circumstances resembled this picture in other respects, the chances were, on the whole, that assignations would be made, and kept, ‘in mufti’.
There had been, in fact, two separate rows, which somehow became entangled together: somebody’s wife, and somebody else’s money: to say nothing of debts. At one stage, so some of his relations alleged, there had even been question of court-martial: not so much to incriminate my unfortunate uncle as to clear his name of some of the rumours in circulation. The court-martial, perhaps fortunately, was never convened, but the necessity for Uncle Giles to send in his papers was unquestioned. He travelled home by South Africa, arriving in Cape Town a short time before the outbreak of hostilities with the Boers. In that town he made undesirable friends—no doubt also encountering at this period Mrs. Foxe’s father—and engaged in unwise transactions regarding the marketing of diamonds: happily not involving on his part any handling of the stones themselves. This venture ended almost disastrously; and, owing to the attitude taken up by the local authorities, he was unable to settle in Port Elizabeth, where he had once thought of earning a living. However, like most untrustworthy persons, Uncle Giles had the gift of inspiring confidence in a great many people with whom he came in contact. Even those who, to their cost, had known him for years, sometimes found difficulty in estimating the lengths to which he could carry his lack of reliability—and indeed sheer incapacity—in matters of business. When he returned to England he was therefore seldom out of a job, though usually, in his own words, ‘starting at the bottom’ on an ascent from which great things were to be expected.
In 1914 he had tried to get back into the army, but his services were declined for medical reasons by the War Office. Not long after the sinking of the Lusitania he obtained a post in the Ministry of Munitions; later transferring himself to the Ministry of Food, from which he eventually resigned without scandal. When the United States entered the war he contrived to find some sort of a job in the provinces at a depot formed for supplying ‘comforts’ to American troops. He had let it be known that he had made business connexions on the other side of the Atlantic, as a result of this employment. That was why there had been a suggestion—in which wish may have been father to thought in the minds of his relations—that he might take up a commercial post in Philadelphia. The letter from the Isle of Man, with its hint of impending marriage, seemed to indicate that any idea of emigration, if ever in existence, had been abandoned; whilst references throughout its several pages to ‘lack of influence’ brought matters back to an earlier, and more fundamental, stage in my uncle’s presentation of his affairs.
This business of ‘influence’ was one that played a great part in Uncle Giles’s philosophy of life. It was an article of faith with him that all material advancement in the world was the result of influence, a mysterious attribute with which he invested, to a greater or lesser degree, every human being on earth except himself. That the rich and nobly born automatically enjoyed an easy time of it through influence was, of course, axiomatic; and—as society moved from an older order—anybody who might have claims to be considered, at least outwardly, of the poor and lowly was also included by him among those dowered with this almost magic appanage. In cases such as that of the window-cleaner, or the man who came to read the gas-meter, the advantage enjoyed was accounted to less obvious—but, in fact, superior—opportunity for bettering position in an increasingly egalitarian world. ‘That door was banged-to for me at birth,’ Uncle Giles used to say (in a phrase that I found, much later, he had lifted from a novel by John Galsworthy) when some plum was mentioned, conceived by him available only to those above, or below, him in the social scale.
It might be imagined that people of the middle sort—people, in other words, like Uncle Giles himself—though he would have been unwilling to admit his attachment to any recognisable social group, could be regarded by him as substantially in the same boat. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Such persons belonged to the class, above all others, surveyed with misgiving by him, because members of it possessed, almost without exception, either powerful relations who helped them on in an underhand way, or business associations, often formed through less affluent relations, which enabled them—or so he suspected—to buy things cheap. Any mention of the City, or, worse still, the Stock Exchange, drove him to hard words. Moreover, the circumstances of people of this kind were often declared by him to be such that they did not have to ‘keep up the same standards’ in the community as those that tradition imposed upon Uncle Giles himself; and, having thus secured an unfair advantage, they were one and all abhorrent to him.
As a result of this creed he was unconquerably opposed to all established institutions on the grounds that they were entirely—and therefore incapably—administered by persons whose sole claim to consideration was that they could command influence. His own phrase for describing briefly this approach to all social, political and economic questions was ‘being a bit of a radical’: a standpoint he was at pains to make abundantly clear to all with whom he came in contact. As it happened, he always seemed to find people who would put up with him; and, usually, people who would employ him. In fact, at his own level, he must have had more ‘influence’ than most persons. He did not, however, answer the enquiries, and counter-proposals, put forward in a reply to his letter sent to the address in the Isle of Man; and, for the time being, no more was heard of his marriage, or any other of his activities.
Settling down with Templer at school was easier than I had expected. Without Stringham, he was more expansive, and I began to hear something of his life at home. His father and uncle (the latter of whom—for public services somewhat vaguely specified—had accepted a baronetcy at the hands of Lloyd George, one of the few subjects upon which Templer showed himself at all sensitive) had made their money in cement. Mr. Templer had retired from business fairly recently, after what his son called ‘an appalling bloomer over steel.’ There were two sisters: Babs, the
eldest of the family, who towards the end of the war had left a husband in one of the dragoon regiments in favour of a racing motorist; and Jean, slightly younger than her brother. Their mother had died some years before I came across Templer, who displayed no photographs of his family, so that I knew nothing of their appearance. Although not colossally rich, they were certainly not poor; and whatever lack of appreciation Peter’s father may at one moment have shown regarding predictable fluctuations of his own holdings in the steel industry, he still took a friendly interest in the market; and, by Peter’s account, seemed quite often to guess right. I also knew that they lived in a house by the sea.
‘Personally I wouldn’t mind having a look at Kenya,’ said Templer, when I described the luncheon with Stringham and his mother.
‘Stringham didn’t seem to care for the idea.’
‘My elder sister had a beau who lived in the Happy Valley. He shot himself after having a lot of drinks at the club.’
‘Perhaps it won’t be so bad then.’
‘Did you lunch with them in London or the country?’
‘London.’
‘Stringham says Glimber is pretty, but too big.’
‘Will he come into it?’
‘Good Lord, no,’ said Templer. ‘It is only his mother’s for life. He will come into precious little if she goes on spending money at her present rate.’
I was not sure how much of this was to be believed; but, thinking the subject of interest, enquired further. Templer sketched in a somewhat lurid picture of Mrs. Foxe and her set. I was rather surprised to find that he himself had no ambition to become a member of that world, the pleasures of which sounded of a kind particularly to appeal to him.
‘Too much of a good thing,’ he said. ‘I have simpler tastes.’
I was reminded of Stringham’s disparagement of Buster on the ground that he was ‘too grand’; and also of the reservations he had expressed regarding Templer himself. Clearly some complicated process of sorting-out was in progress among those who surrounded me: though only years later did I become aware how early such voluntary segregations begin to develop; and of how they continue throughout life. I asked more questions about Templer’s objection to house-parties at Glimber. He said: ‘Well, I imagine it was all rather pompous even at lunch, wasn’t it?’
‘Buster seemed rather an ass. His mother was awfully nice.’
Even at the time I felt that the phrase was not a very adequate way of describing Mrs. Foxe’s forceful, even dazzling, characteristics.
‘Oh, she is all right, I have no doubt,’ said Templer. ‘And damned good-looking still. She gave Stringham’s sister absolute hell, though, until she married the first chap that came along.’
‘Who was he?’
‘I can’t remember his name. A well-known criminal with one arm.’
‘Stringham certainly seemed in bad form when she was there.’
‘She led his father a dance, too.’
‘Still, he need not join in all that if he doesn’t want to.’
‘He will want to,’ said Templer. ‘Take my word for it, he will soon disappear from sight so far as we are concerned.’
Armed, as I have said, with the knowledge of Stringham’s admission regarding his own views on Templer, I recognised that there must be some truth in this judgment of Stringham’s character; though some of its implications—notably with regard to myself—I failed, rather naturally, to grasp at that period. That was the only occasion when I ever heard Templer speak seriously about Stringham, though he often used to refer to escapades in which they had shared, especially the incident of Le Bas’s arrest.
So far as Templer and I were concerned, nothing further had taken place regarding this affair; though Templer’s relations with Le Bas continued to be strained. Although so little involved personally in the episode, I found myself often thinking of it. Why, for example, should Stringham, singularly good-natured, have chosen to persecute Le Bas in this manner? Was it a matter for regret or congratulation: had it, indeed, any meaning at all? The circumstances revealed at once Stringham’s potential assurance, and the inadequacy of Le Bas’s defences. If Stringham had been brutal, Le Bas had been futile. In spite of his advocacy of the poem, Le Bas had not learnt its lesson:
‘And then we turn unwilling feet
And seek the world—so must it be—
We may not linger in the heat
Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea!’
He was known for a long time after as ‘Braddock alias Thorne’, especially among his colleagues, whose theory was that the hoaxer had recently left the school, and, while passing through the town, probably in a car, had decided to tease Le Bas. Certainly Stringham would never have been thought capable of such an enormity by any master who had ever come in contact with him. Not unnaturally, however, Le Bas’s tendency to feel that the world was against him was accentuated by an experience in many ways humiliating enough; and he persecuted Templer—or, at least, his activities in this direction were represented by Templer as persecution—more energetically than ever.
Finally Templer’s habitual carelessness gave Le Bas an opportunity to close the account. This conclusion was the result of Templer leaving his tobacco pouch—on which, characteristically, he had inscribed his initials—lying on the trunk of a tree somewhere among the fields where we had happened on Le Bas. Cobberton, scouting round that neighbourhood, had found the pouch, and passed it on to Le Bas. Nothing definite could be proved against Templer: not even the ownership of a half-filled tobacco pouch, though no one doubted it was his. However, Le Bas moved heaven and earth to be rid of Templer, eventually persuading the headmaster to the view that life would be easier for both of them if Templer left the school. In consequence, Peter’s father was persuaded to remove him a term earlier than previously intended. This pleased Templer himself, and did not unduly ruffle his father; who was reported to take the view that schools and universities were, in any case, waste of time and money: on the principle that an office was the place in which to learn the realities of life. And so I was left, as it seemed to me, alone.
Templer was not a great hand at letter-writing after his departure; though an occasional picture post-card used to arrive, stating his score at the local golf tournament, or saying that he was going to Holland to learn business methods. Before he left school, he had suggested several times that I should visit his home, always qualifying his account of the amusements there offered by a somewhat menacing picture of his father’s habitually cantankerous behaviour. I did not take these warnings about his father too seriously because of Templer’s tendency to impute bad temper to anyone placed in a position of authority in relation to himself. At the same time, I had the impression that Mr. Templer might be a difficult man to live with; I even thought it possible that Peter’s dealings with Le Bas might derive from experience of similar skirmishes with his father. Peter’s chief complaint, so far as his father was concerned, seemed directed not towards any violent disagreement between them in tastes, or way of life, so much as to the fact that his father, in control of so much more money than himself, showed in his son’s eyes on the whole so little capacity for putting this favourable situation to a suitable advantage. ‘Wait till you see the car we have to use for station work,’ Peter used to say. ‘Then you will understand what sort of a man my father is.’
The invitation arrived just when the mechanical accessories of leaving school were in full swing. Later in the summer it had been arranged that, before going up to the university, I should spend a period in France; partly with a view to learning the language: partly as a solution to that urgent problem—inviting one’s own as much as other people’s attention—of the disposal of the body of one of those uneasy, stranded beings, no longer a boy and hardly yet a man. The Templer visit could be fitted in before the French trip took place.
Stringham’s letters from Kenya reported that he liked the place better than he had expected. They contained drawings of people met there, and of
a horse he sometimes rode. He could not really draw at all, but used a convention of blobs and spidery lines, effective in expressing the appearance of persons and things. One of these was of Buster selling a car; another of Buster playing polo. I used to think sometimes of the glimpse I had seen of Stringham’s life at home; and—although this did not occur to me at once—I came in time to regard his circumstances as having something in common with those of Hamlet. His father had, of course, been shipped off to Kenya rather than murdered; but Buster and his mother were well adapted to play the parts of Claudius and Gertrude. I did not manage to get far beyond this, except to wonder if Miss Weedon was a kind of female Polonius, working on Hamlet’s side. I could well imagine Stringham stabbing her through the arras. At present there was no Ophelia. Stringham himself had a decided resemblance to the Prince of Denmark; or, as Templer would have said: ‘It was the kind of part the old boy would fancy himself in.’
At first sight the Templers’ house seemed to be an enormously swollen villa, red and gabled, facing the sea from a small park of Scotch firs: a residence torn by some occult power from more appropriate suburban setting, and, at the same time, much magnified. It must have been built about twenty or thirty years before, and, as we came along the road, I saw that it stood on a piece of sloping ground set about a quarter of a mile from the cliff’s edge. The clouded horizon and olive-green waves lapping against the stones made it a place of mystery in spite of this outwardly banal appearance: a sea-palace for a version of one of those embarkation scenes of Claude Lorraine—the Queen of Sheba, St. Ursula, or perhaps The Enchanted Castle—where any adventure might be expected.
There were a pair of white gates at the entrance to the drive, and a steep, sandy ascent between laurels. At the summit, the green doors of a row of garages faced a cement platform. As we drove across this open space a girl of about sixteen or seventeen, evidently Peter’s unmarried sister, Jean, was closing one of the sliding doors. Fair, not strikingly pretty, with long legs and short untidy hair, she remained without moving, intently watching us, as Peter shut off the engine, and we got out of the car. Like her legs, her face was thin and attenuated, the whole appearance given the effect of a much simplified—and somewhat self-conscious—arrangement of lines and planes, such as might be found in an Old Master drawing, Flemish or German perhaps, depicting some young and virginal saint; the racquet, held awkwardly at an angle to her body, suggesting at the same time an obscure implement associated with martyrdom. The expression of her face, although sad and a trifle ironical, was not altogether in keeping with this air of belonging to another and better world. I felt suddenly uneasy, and also interested: a desire to be with her, and at the same time, an almost paralysing disquiet at her presence. However, any hopes or fears orientated in her direction were quickly dissolved, because she hardly spoke when Peter introduced us, except to say in a voice unexpectedly deep, and almost as harsh as her brother’s: ‘The hard court needs re-surfacing.’
A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement Page 7