The mirror, which kept so much to itself, reflected the shape of his narrow, aquiline face, which a cardinal’s hat might so suitably have surmounted, and the deliberate, rather conscious gestures with which he peeled his pear. By comparison, Eustace’s half-face, a dusky D, looked rotund and undistinguished, and he averted his eyes from it.
“Tell me about your sisters,” repeated Stephen, as Eustace did not speak.
“I’m afraid I should have to go rather a long way back.”
“Never mind,” said Stephen. He dipped his long fingers into a finger-bowl of blue-black Bristol glass. “Pre-natal influences are often interesting, and always important.”
Eustace smiled. Stephen’s critics complained that if one made him a confidence he turned it to mockery. Eustace did not mind this; indeed, he sometimes felt relieved when one of his remarks was taken more lightly than it was uttered.
“I’m afraid it will be a long story,” he said, “wherever I begin. Compression isn’t my strong point. I could never write a précis.”
“Waste no time in self-depreciation, Scheherazade, but fill up your glass, and take up your tale. I am all ears for the recital. But first let’s move to what they call more comfortable chairs.”
Stephen was in the habit of putting inverted commas round a cliché; it was his way of discrediting those aspects of the commonplace, and they were many, which offended against whatever might be his pose of the moment.
Glass in hand, Eustace followed his host from the table.
“You take the sofa, and I’ll take the chair,” chanted Stephen, “this striped one. Don’t you think the colours accuse each other rather charmingly? The other we must leave for whatever ghost your recherche into the past may conjure up.”
Whose ghost would it be? wondered Eustace. His eyes were drawn to the shining crystal that was just not a skull, and immediately the empty chair seemed to be occupied by the outline of a figure, a dark, muddled shape to find in that precise, brightly coloured room, but one which took him straight back to his childhood.
“I suppose it all began with Miss Fothergill,” he said at length.
“‘It’ began?” asked Stephen. “What began, my dear Eustace? You must be more definite. Am I to assume that this Miss Fothergill was a kind of Eve?”
At the touch of criticism Eustace’s self-confidence crumbled, and he looked downcast and ashamed. “I can’t help it,” he mumbled. “It’s the way I talk. You’re not the first person who’s complained of it.... No, Miss Fothergill was a cripple. She used to ride in a bath-chair on the cliffs at Anchorstone, where we lived as children. She was, well, she was deformed, and I used to be afraid of her.”
“But what began with her?” asked Stephen. “To what, if I may put it so, did she give rise?”
“Well,” said Eustace, “without her, my life would have been quite different. I shouldn’t be here, for one thing—I mean, not here in your room.”
“In that case I feel very grateful to her,” said Stephen courteously. “But how did she know about me? Did she give you my address?”
Eustace smiled.
“You see, it”—Stephen frowned, but Eustace did not notice—“it was like this, and this is where my sister Hilda comes in.”
“Enter Hilda,” said Stephen.
“Hilda wanted me to speak to Miss Fothergill,” Eustace went on, “partly because she thought it would be a kind of discipline for me, and also on general principles, because the Bible said you were to visit the sick. She’s always had my moral welfare at heart. And so one morning, very much against my will, I did speak to Miss Fothergill, and pushed her bath-chair for a bit; and she was very nice about it and asked me to tea.”
“Of course you jumped at that,” said Stephen.
“Oh no, I was terrified. I can’t tell you what agonies I went through. However, before the fatal day came I went to the local dancing class, and there I met a girl called Nancy Steptoe, who persuaded me to go for a paper-chase with her instead of going to tea with Miss Fothergill.”
“Quite right,” said Stephen. “Bravo, Nancy. Of course, I should have chosen tea with Medusa. But then, I was never good at running—except away from the Germans, in the war.”
“Nor was I,” said Eustace. “That was the sad part. I got wet through and had a heart attack and was ill for weeks afterwards. They were all very angry and made me feel it was a judgement from Heaven.”
“As no doubt it was,” Stephen said. “But who were ‘they’?”
“Well, Hilda chiefly, and my aunt Sarah, who had been living with us since Mother died, and my father. It really was hard on him, having to pay for such an expensive illness. You see, we were very badly off.”
“I see the beginnings of a guilt-complex,” said Stephen. “Only, of course, Dr. Freud had hardly been heard of then.”
“Yes, I did feel guilty. I think I still do. And I used to have the most awful fear of consequences, and could hardly cross the road without asking somebody if it would be wise. But I’m growing out of that now.”
“I should hope so,” said Stephen. “But I still don’t understand why I owe your presence here to Miss Fothergill—praised be her name.”
“After I was ill,” said Eustace, “she asked me to tea again—don’t laugh—and for about a year or more I used to go regularly—two or three times a week—and read to her and play piquet. And then she died and left me some money.”
The lines of Stephen’s elegant dinner jacket (he always liked to change for dinner, however informal the occasion, though he did not insist on this for his guests) seemed suddenly to contract and stiffen. Leaning forward, he said:
“May I know how much?”
Eustace hesitated. He thought the sum would sound small to Stephen, and moreover he had always been told not to talk about his financial affairs. They were something to be kept to oneself, like one’s middle name at school. For other people to know gave them a hold over you; besides, it was bad form, and Eustace went in constant dread of being guilty of bad form. But it was against his nature to withhold anything, and there could be no harm in telling Stephen.
“It was eighteen thousand pounds.”
To his surprise Stephen did not seem at all disdainful.
“Eighteen thousand pounds?” he repeated. “Quite a tidy sum, as they say.”
“Well, it seemed so to us, though as a matter of fact, when I was told about it I was bitterly disappointed. You see, I had been led to believe it was much more.”
“You’re getting into the ‘it’ country again,” said Stephen, “May I say, in vulgar parlance, come off it? And may I know why you were so cruelly deceived in this very vital matter?”
Eustace flushed. “Well, my aunt was, and still is, an austere, puritanical woman; she would have refused the legacy if she could have legally, and if my father hadn’t wanted me to have it. As it was, she made him promise that I shouldn’t be told, and for some time—weeks, I think—I wasn’t. But they had decided to send me to school, and that made them treat me differently—in small ways, I mean.”
“I expect your being a capitalist influenced them too,” said Stephen.
“Do you think so? That hadn’t occurred to me. Anyhow, they all seemed so strange that I began to get the wind up, and thought there could only be one explanation—that I was going to die.”
Stephen nodded.
“Well, one day when I was feeling particularly depressed, Hilda and I went down to play on the sands, and I told her that I was going to leave her most of my possessions, as I was expecting to die. She got upset and angry, and just at that moment some children I knew came up on horseback, and congratulated me on having inherited a fortune. One said fifty-eight thousand pounds, and another, called Dick Staveley, said sixty-eight.”
“Dick Staveley?” said Stephen. “I seem to know that name.”
“You might. He’s a Member of Parliament now, I think, and is looked on as quite a coming man.”
“I believe his family are clie
nts of my father’s firm,” said Stephen, “and I seem to remember Dick in connection with some mild scandal—a love-affair in which someone had to be bought off. How old would he be?”
“About thirty-one, I should think.”
“That’s the man. But what was their reason for buoying you up, as they say, with false hopes?”
“I never knew,” said Eustace. “Probably rumour exaggerated the amount: I don’t think Gerald Steptoe—my first informant—was capable of inventing anything. And Dick may have said sixty-eight thousand because it sounded better—he was like that. However, after they’d gone I told Hilda I would divide the money with her.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought that otherwise she would have to be a governess.”
“You must have been very fond of her.”
“Money doesn’t mean much to children, but we’ve always been very fond of each other in a kind of way,” said Eustace. “She was ambitious for me—she still is. I doubt if I should have got my scholarship or anything but for her prodding me on.”
“Or Miss Fothergill’s legacy.”
“No. I owe Hilda a great deal.”
“And does she owe you thirty-four thousand pounds?” asked Stephen.
“Alas, no! When we got home and everything came out—about the legacy, I mean—I was bitterly disappointed. I’m not really avaricious, but I like the idea of a large sum, and I did then. Eighteen thousand seemed next to nothing. I didn’t know about interest. I thought we should just spend the capital year by year. But I felt in honour bound to give Hilda half.”
“Could you, being a minor?”
“That was the trouble. But to tell you the truth, I secretly felt rather relieved, and exceedingly ashamed of myself for feeling so.”
“So Hilda had to be a governess after all?”
“No, because Miss Fothergill’s money provided for my education, and my father was able to send Hilda to school.”
“How awful for her.”
“She liked it. Then the war came, and she trained as a V.A.D., but she didn’t get on very well with the other nurses, and I think she found the men a bit trying—you know what they’re like in hospital, especially when they’re beginning to feel better.”
“You mean, she found their attentions distasteful?”
“I—I think so. But they had a high opinion of her in the hospital, and got her transferred to an executive department, and she ended by almost running it.”
“How terrifyingly efficient she sounds,” said Stephen. “I think I should faint in her presence.”
“She isn’t, really,” said Eustace. “I don’t suppose she’s any more efficient than you are—perhaps not as much.”
He glanced at Stephen and then at the room which, in spite of its exotic air, had obviously been designed for utility as well as for decoration.
Stephen smiled one of his rare smiles.
“I may be efficient,” he said, “but you mustn’t say so. I’m trying to get the virus out of my system. It comes from my interest in money, you know. But I’m sure Hilda would despise me utterly—for that and for many other things.”
“Not if she thought you were un homme sérieux.”
“Is she—as far as her sex allows?”
“Oh yes. Since the war she’s been helping to run a clinic for crippled children. It’s called Highcross Hill. It was quite a small affair to begin with, but she took it in hand, and built on to it, and it’s going splendidly now.”
“Eustace, you surpass yourself. What a spate of ‘its.’ But where did she get the money to do all that?”
“Well,” said Eustace, “I suppose from me.”
“Ah! So you did divide the legacy with her!” exclaimed Stephen.
“Yes,” said Eustace, “when I came of age. I’d so often said I would—I felt I had to. Between ourselves, I didn’t much want to, when the time came. You see, I’ve always felt that I should never be able to make any money—I’m not built that way. People who can make money seem to me like miracle workers. Perhaps that’s why I set such store by it. I’m not interested in it—as you say you are; I just want to have it.”
“I suppose the money accumulated while you were at school?” said Stephen thoughtfully.
Eustace looked rather uncomfortable.
“Well, not very much; you see, my education cost a lot.”
“Not more than four hundred pounds a year, I should imagine, even at Haughton,” Stephen remarked. “Haughton the haughty, Haughton of the haut ton. Unless you were charmingly extravagant and plastered the walls of your room with Old Masters, there would still be over two hundred a year left over for a rainy day, as they say.”
“Yes,” said Eustace doubtfully. “But it didn’t turn out like that. However, I’m glad to think they all lived in easier circumstances and my father was able to enjoy some luxuries before he died. He had a gay nature, and wasn’t meant to be a beast of burden, harnessed to family responsibilities.”
“I didn’t realise you were the head of the family,” said Stephen.
“My father died of Spanish influenza two days after the Armistice, and just after we had moved to Willesden, where we are now. Before that we lived in Wolverhampton. We’ve had several homes, but Anchorstone was much my favourite. I haven’t been there since we left in nineteen hundred and seven, twelve years ago.”
“How old were you then?”
“Eleven.”
“That makes you twenty-three, nearly a year younger than me. How absurd that we should both be undergraduates. But I’m so glad we are—let’s have a drink to celebrate our advanced years before I continue the inquisition. But perhaps you’re tired of answering questions and would rather ask me some?”
Eustace said no, he welcomed the opportunity of talking about himself. It was not often that he found such an interested listener. He began to think of more things that he might tell Stephen, things that he had told no one else. He had already told him some—the reason why Hilda had given up being a nurse, for instance, and the reason, or a hint of the reason, why his legacy was not now so considerable as it might have been. But not much about himself, and it was easy, thought Eustace guiltily, to be confidential at other people’s expense. Still, Stephen never repeated anything; he might make fun of you to your face but he was absolutely discreet, a rare virtue in Oxford, where tongue sharpened tongue.
“Will you, as they say, say when?” he asked, standing at Eustace’s elbow with the whisky decanter and a glass.
“Stop, stop. I’ve got to sit up and do some work when I get back.”
“Work, work, the word is always on your lips, Eustace, but I never see you doing any, I’m glad to say.”
“I put it away when you come, of course,” said Eustace. “I take it out when Hilda comes.”
“I think I shall send for her.”
“You won’t have to,” said Eustace. “She’s coming down next week. I shall ask you to meet her.”
“Oh no, I should make a very bad impression. She would leave by the next train. You must invite some of your smart friends, Antony Lakeside and His Royal Highness.”
His Royal Highness was a very minor foreign royalty whom Stephen had encountered in Eustace’s room on the occasion of the prince’s one visit. Antony Lachish, whose name Stephen chose to miscall, was a freshman of ancient family and winning manners who went through Oxford like a ball of quicksilver, staying with this clique or that only long enough to make his loss felt. Eustace, as Stephen knew, was already beginning to expect the slight sense of heartache which occurred when this bright apparition faded.
“Oh, they wouldn’t do at all,” he said. “She’d think them playboys. I should like to introduce her to some of my solider friends.”
“Thank you, Eustace.”
“Hilda’s not at all like me, you know, in any way,” said Eustace, as though this was a supreme recommendation. “She’s very beautiful, for one thing.”
“Oh, that’s too much,” said Steph
en. “All the time you were talking—forgive me, Eustace—I envisaged her as plain, a Salvation Army lassie. I could have said, when she reproved me for being worthless and idle, a drone from the capitalist hive, ‘Well, Hilda, plain speaking and plain faces often go together.’ Now I shall have to arrange to be called away from Oxford when she comes. I have an idea your younger sister would be more indulgent to my shortcomings. You haven’t told me about her.”
“Oh, Barbara,” said Eustace in quite a different tone from the one he used when speaking of Hilda, “she’s like an india-rubber ball. Nothing worries her and nothing depresses her. She goes her own way. The odd thing is that Aunt Sarah, who was very strict with Hilda and me, and still is in a way, doesn’t seem to mind what Barbara does. I suppose she doesn’t expect so much from her. She’s not eighteen—she’s only just left school—but she’s actually persuaded my aunt to let her have a latch-key, and bring the youth of Willesden in to dance in the evenings, with the carpet turned back, you know, and a gramophone, and all the movable furniture stacked in the hall and on the stairs. She would never have allowed Hilda or me to do anything like that—not that we ever wanted to.”
“I should hope not,” said Stephen with a light shudder. Controlled and inscrutable as it was, sometimes almost mask-like, his face registered distaste at the idea of Barbara’s pleasures.
Eustace found himself taking up the cudgels for her. “I suppose the zeitgeist runs stronger in her than in us,” he said. “She enjoyed hockey and lacrosse, you know, and all those things. She’s somewhere in the middle, and not at either of the ends.”
“Aren’t you fairly central, too? Wouldn’t you call yourself W.C.?” asked Stephen, who sometimes admitted into his conversation a flourish of stately impropriety.
Eustace and Hilda Page 27