Chips Lovell (with whom I had formerly been teamed up as a fellow script-writer in the film business), who was inclined to call almost everyone of an older generation than himself either ‘Uncle’ or ‘Aunt’, and was always prepared at a moment’s notice to provide an a priori account of the personal history and problems of all his relations and acquaintances, had said: ‘Like every other Ardglass, Aunt Katherine only really enjoys pottering about.’ It was certainly true that Lady Warminster, as a widow, divided her time between her own ailments, real or imagined – opinion differed within the family on this point – and the writing of biographical studies devoted to the dominating, Amazonian women of history. Maria-Theresa, at the time of which I speak, had offered a theme sympathetic to the fashion of the moment for things Austrian. Lady Warminster enjoyed the reputation of having ‘got on’ pretty well with her stepchildren, even if no outstandingly warm sentiments existed between herself and any individual member of the family, except perhaps Blanche. In the past there had been, of course, occasional rows. Frederica and George found their step-mother’s way of life too eccentric to wish to play much part in it themselves; Erridge and Norah, on the other hand, thought her hopelessly conventional. Such divergence of view was only to be expected in a large family, and most of her own contemporaries agreed on the whole that Katherine Warminster, so far as her step-children were concerned, was to be congratulated on having made a fairly good job of it. For my own part, I liked Lady Warminster, although at the same time never wholly at ease in her presence. She was immaculately free from any of the traditional blemishes of a mother-in-law; agreeable always; entertaining; even, in her own way, affectionate; but always a little alarming: an elegant, deeply experienced bird – perhaps a bird of prey – ready to sweep down and attack from the frozen mountain peaks upon which she preferred herself to live apart.
Robert Tolland, seventh child and third son of his parents, was in the drawing-room at Hyde Park Gardens when, rather too early for the appointed time of the meal, I arrived there. He was a tall, cadaverous young man of about twenty-four, with his family’s blue eyes and characteristic angularity of frame. Of my wife’s brothers, Robert was the one with whom I felt myself generally most at home. He had some of the oddness, some of that complete disregard for public opinion, that distinguished Erridge (as I shall continue to call the eldest of the Tollands, since that was the name by which he was known within the family, rather than ‘Alfred’, or even ‘Alf’, preferred by his left-wing cronies like J. G. Quiggin), although at the same time Robert was without Erridge’s political enthusiasms. He was not so conformist – ‘not so bloody boring’, Chips Lovell had said – as his second brother, George Tolland (retired from the Brigade of Guards, now working in the City), although Robert to some extent haunted George’s – to Chips Lovell – rather oppressive social world. In fact, outwardly, Robert was just as ‘correct’ as George, to use the term Molly Jeavons liked to apply to any of her relations whom she suspected of criticising her own manner of life. All the same, a faint suggestion of dissipation was also to be found in Robert; nothing like that thick sea mist of gossip which at an early age already encompassed his younger brother, Hugo, but something that affirmed to those with an instinct for recognising such things at long range, the existence in the neighbourhood of vaguely irregular behaviour. Chips Lovell, whose stories were always to be accepted with caution, used to hint that Robert, a school contemporary of his, had a taste for night-club hostesses not always in their first youth. The case was non-proven. Robert would take girls out occasionally – girls other than the hypothetical ‘peroxide blondes old enough to be his mother’, so designated, probably imaginatively, by Lovell-but he never showed much interest in them for more than a week or two. By no means to be described as ‘dotty’ himself, there was perhaps something in Robert of his ‘dotty’ sister, Blanche: a side never fully realised, emotionally undeveloped. He sometimes reminded me of Archie Gilbert, that ‘dancing man’ of my early London days, whose life seemed exclusively lived at balls. Robert was, of course, more ‘intelligent’ than Archie Gilbert, intelligent at least in the crudest sense of being able to discourse comprehensibly about books he had read, or theatres, concerts and private views he had attended; conversational peaks to which Archie Gilbert had never in the least aspired. Robert, as it happened, was rather a keen concert-goer and frequenter of musical parties. He had a job in an export house trading with the Far East, employment he found perfectly congenial. No one seemed to know whether or not he was any good at the work, but Robert was thought by his sisters to possess a taste for making money. When I arrived in the drawing-room he was playing Iberia on the gramophone.
‘How is Isobel?’
He threw the newspaper he had been reading to the ground and jumped to his feet, giving at the same time one of those brilliant smiles that suggested nothing could have come as a more delightful, a less expected, surprise than my own arrival in the room at just that moment. Although I was not exactly taken in by this reception, Robert’s habitual exhibition of good manners never failed to charm me.
‘Pretty well all right now. She is emerging tomorrow. I am going to see her this afternoon.’
‘Do please give her my best love. I ought to have gone to see her in the nursing home myself. Somehow one never gets time for anything. What a bore it has been for you both. I was so sorry to hear about it.’
He spoke with solicitude, at the same time giving the impression that he was still, even at this late stage, unable wholly to conceal his wonder that someone should have chosen Isobel-or any other of his sisters-as a wife; nice girls, no doubt, beings for whom he felt the warmest affection, but creatures to be thought of always in terms of playing shops or putting their dolls to bed.
‘Who will be at lunch?’
‘I’ll tell you. But shall we have the other side of this record first? I am playing them all in the wrong order. I love Les Parfums de la Nuit. I think that is really the bit I like best.’
‘Do you adapt your music to the foreign news, Robert?’
‘Rather suitable, isn’t it? Now that the Alcazar has been relieved things seem to have become a bit static. I wonder who will win.’
He closed the lid of the gramophone, which began once more to diffuse the sombre, menacing notes adumbrating their Spanish background: tawny skies: dusty plains: bleak sierras: black marble sarcophagi of dead kings under arabesqued ceilings: art nouveau blocks of flats past which the squat trams rattled and clanged: patent-leather cocked hats of the Guardia Civil: leather cushions cast upon the sand under posters promulgating cures for impotence and the pox . . . these and a hundred other ever-changing cubist abstractions, merging their visual elements with the hurdy-gurdy music of the bull-ring . . . now – through this landscape – baked by the sun, lorries, ramshackle as picadors’ horses, crawled uphill in bottom gear and a stink of petrol . . . now, frozen by the wind and hooded like the muffled trio in Goya’s Winter, Moorish levies convoyed pack-mules through the gorges veiled in snow . . .
‘I expect you have heard about Erridge,’ said Robert.
‘That the Thrubworth woods will have to be sold?’
‘Well, that, of course. But I mean his latest.’
‘No?’
‘He is going out there.’
‘Where?’
Robert jerked his head in the direction of the shiny wooden cabinet from which Debussy quavered and tinkled and droned.
‘Spain.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Can you imagine.’
‘The International Brigade?’
‘I don’t know whether he will actually fight. As you know, he holds pacifist views. However, he will certainly be on the opposite side to General Franco. We can at least be sure of that. I can’t think that Erry would be any great help to any army he joined, can you?’
The news that Erridge contemplated taking a comparatively active part in the Spanish civil war came as no great surprise to me. Politically, his sympathies would n
aturally be engaged with the extreme Left, whether Communist or Anarchist was not known. Possibly Erridge himself had not yet decided. He had been, of course, a supporter of Blum’s ‘Popular Front’, but, within the periphery of ‘Leftism’, his shifting preferences were unpredictable; nor did he keep his relations informed on such matters. The only fact by then established was that Erridge had contributed relatively large sums of money to several of the organisations recently come into being, designed to assist the Spanish Republican forces. This news came from Quiggin, who like myself, visited from time to time the office of the weekly paper of which Mark Members was now assistant literary editor.
The fortunes of these two friends, Quiggin and Members, seemed to vary inversely. For a time Quiggin had been the more successful, supplanting Members as St John Clarke’s secretary, finding congenial odd jobs in the world of letters, running away with the beautiful Mona, battening on Erridge; but ever since Mona had, in turn, deserted Quiggin for Erridge, Quiggin had begun to undergo a period of adversity. From taking a patronising line about Members, he now – like myself – found himself professionally dependent upon his old friend for books to review. The tide, on the other hand, seemed to be flowing in favour of Members. He had secured this presentable employment, not requiring so much work that he was unable to find time to write himself; his travel book, Baroque Interlude, had been a notable success; there was talk of his marrying a rich girl, who was also not bad-looking. So far as the affair of Mona was concerned, Quiggin had ‘made it up’ with Erridge; even declaring in his cups that Erridge had done him a good turn by taking her off his hands.
‘After all,’ said Quiggin, ‘Mona has left him too. Poor Alf has nothing to congratulate himself about. He has just heaped up more guilt to carry round on his own back.’
After Erridge’s return from the Far East, he and Quiggin had met at – of all places – a party given by Mrs Andriadis, whose sole interest now, so it appeared, was the Spanish war. Common sympathy in this cause made reconciliation possible without undue abasement on Quiggin’s part, but the earlier project of founding a paper together was not revived for the moment, although Quiggin re-entered the sphere of Erridge’s patronage.
‘I correspond a certain amount with your brother-in-law,’ he had remarked when we had last met, speaking, as he sometimes did, with that slight hint of warning in his voice.
‘Which one?’
‘Alf.’
‘What do you correspond with him about?’
‘Medical supplies for the Spanish Loyalists,’ said Quiggin, pronouncing the words with quiet doggedness, ‘Basque children – there is plenty to do for those with a political conscience.’
The whole business of Mona had made some strongly self-assertive action to be expected from Erridge; to be, in fact, all but certain to take place sooner or later. After leaving Quiggin, with whom she had been living during the period immediately prior to my own marriage, and setting sail with Erridge for China (where he planned to investigate the political situation), Mona had returned to England only a few months later by herself. No one had been told the cause of this severed relationship, although various stories – largely circulated by Quiggin himself – were current on the subject of Mona’s adventures on the way home. She was the first woman in whom Erridge was known to have taken more than the most casual interest. It was not surprising that they should have found each other mutually incompatible. There was nothing easy-going about Mona’s temperament; while Erridge, notwithstanding passionately humane and liberal principles, was used to having his own way in the smallest respect, his high-minded nonconformity of life in general absolving him, where other people were concerned, from even the irksome minor disciplines of everyday convention.
By leaving her husband, Peter Templer, in the first instance, Mona had undeniably shown aims directed to something less banal than mere marriage to a comparatively rich man. She would certainly never have put herself out for Erridge in order to retain him as husband or lover. What she did, in fact, desire from life was less explicable; perhaps, as Templer said after she left him, ‘just to raise hell’. She had never, as once had been supposed, got herself married to Quiggin, so no question existed of further divorce proceedings. The Tolland family were less complacent about that fact than might have been expected.
‘Personally, I think it was the greatest pity Erry failed to hold on to Minna, or whatever her name was,’ Norah said. ‘She sounds as if she might have done him a lot of good.’
Only George and Frederica dissented from this view among Erridge’s brothers and sisters. More distant relations were probably divided about equally between those who resented, and those who thoroughly enjoyed, the idea of Erridge making a mésalliance. Lady Warminster’s opinion was unknown. Possibly she too, in secret, considered – like Strindberg – any marriage better than none at all. Erridge himself, since his return from Asia, had remained alone, shut up in Thrubworth, occupying himself with those Spanish activities now to take a more decided form, refusing to attend to other more local matters, however pressing. The question of death duties had recently been reopened by the taxation authorities, the payment of which threatened a considerable sale of land to raise the money required. Only Norah, in face of opposition, had effected an entry into Thrubworth not long before this, reporting afterwards that her eldest brother had been ‘pretty morose’. No one knew whether Erridge had achieved any degree of success in getting to the bottom of Far Eastern problems. Probably China and Japan, like his own estate, were now forgotten in contrast with a more fashionable preoccupation with Spain. To someone of Erridge’s views and temperament, finding himself in the position he found himself, the Spanish war clearly offered a solution. Robert agreed in seeing nothing surprising in his brother’s decision.
‘Like big-game hunting in Edwardian days,’ said Robert, ‘or going to the Crusades a few years earlier. There will be one or two newspaper paragraphs about “the Red Earl”, I suppose. Bound to be. Still, Erry gets remarkably little publicity as a rule, which is just as well. For some reason he has never become news. I hope he doesn’t go and get killed. I shouldn’t think he would, would you? Very well able to look after himself in his own way. All the same, a man I used to sit next to at school was shot in the street in Jerusalem the other day. In the back, just as he was getting into a taxi to go and have a spot of dinner. But he was a professional soldier and they have to expect that sort of thing. Rather different for someone like Erry who is a pacifist. I can’t see the point of being a pacifist if you don’t keep out of the way of fighting. Anyway, we can none of us be certain of surviving when the next war comes.’
‘What will Erry do?’
‘I suppose there will be a lot of the sort of people he likes out there already,’ said Robert. ‘His beard and those clothes will be all the go. He’ll hang about Barcelona, lending a hand with the gardening, or the washing up, to show he isn’t a snob. I think it is rather dashing of him to take this step considering his hypochondria. Of course, George would at least make some effort to keep up Thrubworth properly if he inherited. I say, I hope everyone is not going to be late. I am rather hungry this morning.’
‘You haven’t told me who is coming yet.’
‘Nor I have. Well, the guest of honour is St John Clarke, the novelist. I expect you know him of old, as a brother of the pen.’
‘As a matter of fact, Robert, I have never met St John Clarke. Who else?’
‘Blanche, Priscilla-George and Veronica-Sue and Roddy.’
‘But why St John Clarke?’
‘I gather he more or less asked himself. His name is held on the books, you know. He used to turn up occasionally at Aunt Molly’s. I remember Hugo being sick over him as a child. Probably St John Clarke sheered off the place after that. Of course he may be going to lend a hand with the Maria-Theresa book. I have only just thought of that possibility.’
Lady Warminster used sometimes to announce that she was receiving ‘help’ with one or another of her
biographies from some fairly well-known figure – usually a distinguished politician or civil servant – although it was never explained what form this help took. Probably they adjusted the grammar.
‘They tell me about punctuation,’ she used to say.
This intermittent publication of an historical biography had in no way brought Lady Warminster into the literary world, nor could her house be said to present any of the features of a ‘salon’. A well-known author like St John Clarke was therefore an unexpected guest. At the Jeavonses’ everything was possible. There was no one on earth who could occasion surprise there. Lady Warminster, on the contrary, living a very different sort of life, saw only relations and a few old friends. Even minor celebrities were rare, and, when they appeared, tended to be submerged by the family. Blanche and Priscilla entered the room at that moment, bearing between them on a tray a jigsaw puzzle, newly completed and brought downstairs to be admired.
When people called Blanche ‘dotty’, no question of incipient madness was implied, nor even mild imbecility. Indeed, after a first meeting it was possible to part company from her without suspicion that something might be slightly amiss. However, few who knew her well doubted that something, somewhere, had unquestionably gone a little wrong. Quieter than the rest of her sisters, good-looking, always friendly, always prepared to take on tedious tasks, Blanche would rarely initiate a conversation. She would answer with a perfectly appropriate phrase if herself addressed, but she never seemed to feel the need to comment on any but the most trivial topics. The world, the people amongst whom she moved, appeared to make no impression on her. Life was a dream that scarcely even purported to hold within its promise any semblance of reality. The cumulative effect of this chronic sleep-walking through her days – which far surpassed that vagueness of manner often to be found in persons well equipped to look after their own interest – together with her own acceptance of the fact that she was not quite like other people, did not care at all that she was different, had finally established Blanche’s reputation for ‘dottiness’. That was all. The impression of being undeveloped, unawakened, which perhaps in some degree Robert shared, may have caused both to prefer rather secret lives. Publicly, Blanche was almost always occupied with good works: girls’ clubs in the East End; charities in which her uncle, Alfred Tolland, was concerned for which he sought her help. Blanche’s practical activities were usually very successful so far as the end in view, although she herself never troubled to take much credit for them. Nor did she show any interest in getting married, though in her time not without admirers.
Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 2 Page 29