“As you probably know,” said Uncle Giles, “I owe your father a small sum of money. Nothing much. Decent of him to have given me the use of it, all the same. Some brothers wouldn’t have done as much. I just wanted to tell him that I proposed to let him have the sum in question back.”
This proposal certainly suggested an act to which, on the face of it, there appeared no valid objection; but my uncle, perhaps from force of habit, continued to approach the matter circumspectly. “It is just a question of the trustees,” he said once or twice; and he proceeded to embark on explanations that seemed to indicate that he had some idea of presenting through myself the latest case for the adjustment of his revenue: tacking on repayment of an ancient debt as a piece of live bait. Any reason that might have been advanced earlier for my becoming the medium in these negotiations, on the grounds that my father was still out of England, had been utterly demolished by the information that he was to be found in London. However, tenacity in certain directions – notably that of the Trust – was one of Uncle Giles’s characteristics. He was also habitually unwilling to believe that altered circumstances might affect any matter upon which he had already made up his mind. He therefore entered now upon a comprehensive account of the terms of the Trust, his own pecuniary embarrassment, the forbearance he had shown in the past – both to his relations and the world at large – and the reforms he suggested for the future.
“I’m not a great business expert,” he said, “I don’t claim to be a master brain of finance or anything of that sort. The only training I ever had was to be a soldier. We know how much use that is. All the same, I’ve had a bit of experience in my day. I’ve knocked about the world and roughed it. Perhaps I’m not quite so green as I look.”
Uncle Giles became almost truculent for a man with normally so quiet a manner when he said this; as if he expected that I was prepared to argue that he was indeed “green,” or, through some other similar failing, unsuited to run his own affairs. I felt, on the contrary, that in some ways it had to be admitted that he was unusually well equipped for looking after himself: in any case a subject I should not have taken upon myself to dispute with him. There was, therefore, nothing to do but agree to pass on anything he had to say. His mastery of the hard-luck story was of a kind never achieved by persons not wholly concentrated on themselves.
“Quand même,” he said at the end of a tremendous parade of facts and figures, “I suppose there is such a thing as family feeling?”
I mumbled.
“After all there was the Jenkins they fought the War of Jenkins’s Ear about.”
“Yes.”
“We are all descended from him.”
“Not directly.”
“Collaterally then.”
“It has never been proved, has it?”
“What I mean is that he has a relation and that should keep us together.”
“Well, our ancestor, Hannibal Jenkins, of Cwm Shenkin, paid the Hearth Tax in 1674 —”
Perhaps justifiably, Uncle Giles made a gesture as if to dismiss pedantry – and especially genealogical pedantry – in all its protean shapes: at the same time picking up his hat. He said: “All I mean is that just because I am a bit of a radical, it doesn’t mean that I believe tradition counts for nothing.”
“Of course not.”
“Don’t think that for a moment.”
“Not a bit.”
“Then you will put it to your father?”
“All right.”
“Can you get leave to walk with me as far as the station?”
“No.”
We set off together down the stairs, Uncle Giles continually stopping on the way to elaborate points omitted in his earlier argument. This was embarrassing, as other boys were hanging about the passages, and I tried, without success, to hurry him along. The front door was locked, and Cattle, the porter, had to be found to obtain the key. For a time we wandered about in a kind of no-man’s-land of laundry baskets and coke, until Cattle, more or less asleep, was at last discovered in the boot-room. A lumbering, disagreeable character, he unlocked the door under protest, letting into the house a cloud of fog. Uncle Giles reached the threshold and plunged his hand deep into his trouser, pocket as if in search of a coin: stood for what seemed an age sunk in reverie: thought better of an earlier impulse: and stepped briskly out into the mist with a curt “Good night to you.” He was instantly swallowed up in the gloom, and I was left standing on the steps with Cattle, whose grousing, silenced for the passage of time during which there had seemed hope of money changing hands, now began to rumble again like the buzz of distant traffic. As I returned slowly up the stairs, this sound of complaint sank to a low growling, punctuated with sharp clangs as the door was once more laboriously locked, bolted, and chained.
On the whole it could not be said that one felt better for Uncle Giles’s visit. He brought with him some fleeting suggestion, always welcome at school, of an outside world: though against this had to be weighed the disturbing impact of home-life in school surroundings: even home-life in its diminished and undomestic embodiment represented by my uncle. He was a relation: a being who had in him perhaps some of the same essence that went towards forming oneself as a separate entity. Would one’s adult days be spent in worrying about the Trust? What was he going to do at Reading? Did he manage to have quite a lot of fun, or did he live in perpetual hell? These were things to be considered. Some apology for his sudden appearance seemed owed to Stringham: after that, I might try to do some work to be dealt with over the week-end.
When I reached the door I heard a complaining voice raised inside the room. Listening for a moment, I recognised the tone as Le Bas’s. He was not best pleased. I went in. Le Bas had come to find Templer, and was now making a fuss about the cigarette smoke.
“Here is Jenkins, sir,” said Stringham. “He has just been seeing his uncle out of the house.”
He glanced across at me, putting on an expression to indicate that the ball was now at my foot. The room certainly smelt abominably of smoke when entered from the passage. Le Bas was evidently pretty angry.
He was a tall, untidy man, clean-shaven and bald with large rimless spectacles that gave him a curiously Teutonic appearance: like a German priest. Whenever he removed these spectacles he used to rub his eyes vigorously with the back of his hand, and, perhaps as a result of this habit, his eyelids looked chronically red and sore. On some occasions, especially when vexed, he had the habit of getting into unusual positions, stretching his legs far apart and putting his hands on his hips; or standing at attention with heels together and feet turned outwards so far that it seemed impossible that he should not overbalance and fall flat on his face. Alternatively, especially when in a good humour, he would balance on the fender, with each foot pointing in the same direction. These postures gave him the air of belonging to some highly conventionalised form of graphic art: an oriental god, or knave of playing cards. He found difficulty with the letter “R,” and spoke – like Widmerpool – rather as if he were holding an object about the size of a nut in his mouth. To overcome this slight impediment he was careful to make his utterance always slow and very distinct. He was unmarried.
“Stringham appears to think that you can explain, Jenkins, why this room is full of smoke.”
“I am afraid my uncle came to see me, sir. He lit a cigarette without thinking.”
“Where is your uncle?”
“I have just been getting Cattle to let him out of the house.”
“How did he get in?”
“I think he came in at the front door, sir. I am not sure.”
I watched Stringham, from where he stood behind Le Bas, make a movement as of one climbing a rope, following these gestures with motions of his elbows to represent the beating of wings, both dumb-shows no doubt intended to demonstrate alternative methods of ingress possibly employed by Uncle Giles.
“But the door is locked.”
“I suppose he must have come in before Cattle shut t
he door, sir.”
“You both of you —” he turned towards Stringham to include him in the indictment “ – know perfectly well that visitors are not allowed to smoke in the house.”
He certainly made it sound a most horrible offence. Quite apart from all the bother that this was going to cause, I felt a twinge of regret that I had not managed to control Uncle Giles more effectively: insomuch that I had been brought up to regard any form of allowing him his head as a display of weakness on the part of his own family.
“Of course as soon as he was told, sir …”
“But why is there this smell?”
Le Bas spoke as if smoking were bad enough in all conscience: but that, if people must smoke, they might at least be expected to do so without the propagation of perceptible fumes. Stringham said: “I think the stub – the fag-end, sir – may have smouldered. It might have been a Turkish cigarette. I believe they have a rather stronger scent than Virginian.”
He looked round the room, and lifted a cushion from . one of the chairs, shaking his. head and sniffing. This was not the sort of conduct to improve a bad situation. Le Bas, although he disliked Templer, had never showed any special animus against Stringham or myself. Indeed Stringham was rather a favourite of his, because he was quick at knowing the sources of the quotations that Le Bas, when in a good temper, liked to make. However, like most schoolmasters, he was inclined to feel suspicious of all boys in his house as they grew older; not because he was in any sense an unfriendly man, though abrupt and reserved, but simply on account of the increased difficulty in handling the daily affairs of creatures who tended less and less to fit into a convenient and formalised framework: or, at least, a framework that was convenient to Le Bas because he himself had formalised it. That was how Le Bas’s attitude of mind appeared to me in later years. At the time of his complaint about Uncle Giles’s cigarette, he merely seemed to Stringham and myself a dangerous lunatic, to be humoured and outwitted.
“How am I to know that neither of you smoked too?” he said, sweeping aside the persistent denials that both of us immediately offered. “How can I possibly tell?”
He sounded at the same time angry and despairing. He said: “You must write a letter to your uncle, Jenkins, and ask him to give his word that neither of you smoked.”
“But I don’t know his address, sir. All I know is that he was on his way to Reading.”
“By car?”
“By train, I think, sir.”
“Nonsense, nonsense,” said Le Bas. “Not know your own uncle’s address? Get it from your parents if necessary. I shall make myself very objectionable to you both until I see that letter.”
He raised his hands from his sides a little way, and clenched his fists, as if he were about to leap high into the air like an athlete, or ballet dancer; and in this taut attitude he seemed to be considering how best to carry out his threat, while he breathed heavily inward as if to imbibe the full savour of sausages and tobacco smoke that still hung about the room. At that moment there was a sound of talking, and some laughter, in the passage. The door was suddenly flung open, and Templer burst into the room. He was brought up short by the sight of Le Bas: in whom Templer immediately called up a new train of thought.
“Ah, Templer, there you are. You went to London, didn’t you? What time did your train get in this evening?”
“It was late, sir,” said Templer, who seemed more than usually pleased with himself, though aware that there might be trouble ahead: he dropped his voice a little: “I couldn’t afford a cab, sir, so I walked.”
He had a thin face and light blue eyes that gave out a perpetual and quite mechanical sparkle: at first engaging: then irritating: and finally a normal and inevitable aspect of his features that one no longer noticed. His hair came down in a sharp angle on the forehead and his large pointed ears were like those attributed to satyrs, “a race amongst whom Templer would have found some interests in common,” as Stringham had said, when Templer’s ears had been dignified by someone with this classical comparison. His eyes flashed and twinkled now like the lamps of a lighthouse as he fixed them on Le Bas, while both settled down to a duel about the railway time-table. Although Templer fenced with skill, it seemed pretty clear that he would be forced, in due course, to admit that he had taken a train later than that prescribed by regulations. But Le Bas, who not uncommonly forgot entirely about the matter in hand, suddenly seemed to lose interest in Templer’s train and its time of arrival (just as he had for the moment abandoned the subject of Uncle Giles’s cigarette); and he hurried away, muttering something about Greek unseens. For the moment we were free of him. Templer sat down in the arm-chair.
“Did he come in when you were having a gasper?” he said. “The room reeks as if camels had been stabled in it.”
“You don’t suppose we should be such fools as to smoke in the house,” said Stringham. “It was Jenkins’s uncle. But my dear Peter, why do you always go about dressed as if you were going to dance up and down a row of naked ladies singing ‘Dapper Dan was a very handy man,’ or something equally lyrical? You get more like an advertisement for gents’ tailoring every day.”
“I think it is rather a good get-up for London,” said Templer, examining a handful of his suit. “Every item chosen with thought, I can assure you.”
Stringham said: “If you’re not careful you will suffer the awful fate of the man who always knows the right clothes to wear and the right shop to buy them at.”
Templer laughed. He had a kind of natural jauntiness that seemed to require to be helped out by more than ordinary attention to what he wore: a quality that might in the last resort save him from Stringham’s warning picture of the dangers of dressing too well. As a matter of fact, although he used to make fun of him to his face, Stringham was stimulated, perhaps a little impressed, by Templer; however often he might repeat that: “Peter Templer’s affectation that he has to find time to smoke at least one pipe a day bores me to death: nor did it cut any ice with me when he pointed out the empty half-bottle of whisky he had deposited behind the conservatory in Le Bas’s garden.” The previous summer, Stringham and Templer had managed to attend a race-meeting together one half-holiday afternoon without being caught. Such adventures I felt to be a bit above my head, though I enjoyed hearing about them. I was, as I have said, not yet sure that I really liked Templer. His chief subjects of conversation were clothes, girls, and the persecutions of Le Bas, who, always sensitive to the possibility of being ragged, tended to make himself unnecessarily disagreeable in any quarter that might reasonably be thought to arouse special apprehension. Besides this, Templer could not possibly be looked upon as a credit to the house. He was not much of a hand at the sort of games that are played at school (though his build made him good at tennis and golf), so that he was in a weak position, being fairly lazy at work, to withstand prolonged aggression from a housemaster. Consequently Templer was involved in a continuous series of minor rows. The question of the train was evidently to become the current point for Le Bas’s attack.
“Well, that all seems to have blown over for the moment,” Stringham said. “You ought to keep your uncles in better order, Jenkins.”
I explained that Uncle Giles was known for being impossible to keep in order, and that he always left trouble in his wake. Templer said: “I suppose Le Bas will go on pestering about that train. You know, I used to be a great pet of his. Now his only object seems to be to get me sacked.”
“He ought to be able to bring that off sooner or later with your help,” said Stringham. “After all he is not an absolute fool: though pretty near it.”
“I believe he was quite an oar in his youth,” said Templer. “At least he won the Diamond Sculls. Still, past successes at Henley don’t make him any more tolerable to deal with as a housemaster.”
“He started life as a poet,” Stringham said. “Did you know that? Years ago, after coming back from a holiday in Greece, he wrote some things that he thought were frightfully good. He sho
wed them to someone or other who pointed out that, as a matter of fact, they were frightfully bad. Le Bas never got over it.”
“I can’t imagine anything more appalling than a poem by Le Bas,” said Templer, “though I’m surprised he doesn’t make his pupils learn them.”
“Who did he show them to?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Stringham. “Henry James, or Robert Louis Stevenson, or someone like that.”
“Who on earth told you?”
“An elderly character who came to lunch. I believe he is an ambassador somewhere; or was. He used to run round with the same gang as Le Bas. He said Le Bas used to be tremendously promising as a young man. He was good at everything.”
“I can’t imagine he was ever much good with the girls,” said Templer.
“Maybe not,” said Stringham. “Not everyone has your singleness of aim. As a matter of fact do you think Le Bas has any sex life?”
A Question of Upbringing Page 3