It was clear that Albert, too well-behaved to say so explicitly, would have been glad to eject Dr Trelawney from the Bellevue. That was not surprising. I longed to set eyes on the Doctor again. It would be a splendid story to tell Moreland, with whom I had been out of any close contact since we had stayed at the cottage.
‘Used my uncle to see much of Dr Trelawney?’
‘They’d pass the time of day,’ said Albert. ‘The lady knew both of them, of course. They’d sometimes all three go out together on the pier and such like. Captain Jenkins used to get riled with some of the Doctor’s talk about spirits and that. I’ve heard him say as much.’
‘Was the lady called Mrs Erdleigh?’ I asked.
Uncle Giles had once been suspected of being about to marry this fortune-telling friend of his. It was likely that she was the link between himself and Dr Trelawney.
‘That’s the name,’ said Albert. ‘Lives in the town here. Tells fortunes, so they say. Used to come here quite a lot. In fact, she rang up and offered to help after Captain Jenkins died, but I thought I’d better wait instructions. As it was, we just put all the clothing from the drawers tidy on the bed, so the things would be easy to pack. We haven’t touched the Gladstone bag. Captain Jenkins didn’t have much with him at the end. Kept most of his stuff in London, so I believe.’
Albert sniffed. He evidently held a low opinion of the Ufford.
‘I’ll just give you your uncle’s keys, sir,’ he said. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I must see the wife now. She takes on if I don’t keep her informed about veg. Those silly girls never bring her what she wants neither. One of them’s having time off, extra like, old Mrs Telford persuading her to go to an ambulance class or some such. I don’t know what the young women of today are about. Making sheep’s eyes most of the time, that’s what it comes to.’
He moved off laboriously to Mrs Creech’s sick-bed. I thought the best system would be to deal with Uncle Giles’s residue straight away, then dine. The news of Dr Trelawney’s installation at the Bellevue aroused a cloud of memories. That he had not passed into oblivion like so many others Albert had met was a tribute to the Doctor’s personality. Even he would have been forgotten, if Uncle Giles had not recalled him to mind. That was strange because, as a rule, where others were concerned, Uncle Giles’s memory was scarcely more retentive than Albert’s. I wondered what life would be like lived in this largely memoryless condition. Better? Worse? Not greatly different? It was an interesting question. The reappearance of Mrs Erdleigh was also a matter of note. This fairly well known clairvoyante (whom Lady Warminster had consulted in her day) had once ‘put out the cards’ for me at the Ufford, prophesying my love affair with Jean Duport, for a time occupying so much of my life, now like an episode in another existence. Later, characteristically, Uncle Giles had pretended never to have heard of Mrs Erdleigh. However, rumours persisted at a later date to the effect that they still saw each other. There must have been a reconciliation. I wondered whether she would turn up at the funeral, what had been her relations with Uncle Giles, what with Dr Trelawney.
I had told Albert I would find my own way to the bedroom, which was some floors up. It was small, dingy, facing inland. The sea was in any case visible from the Bellevue – in spite of its name – only from the attic windows, glimpsed through a gap between two larger hotels, though the waves could be heard clattering against the shingle. Laid out on the bed were a couple of well-worn suits; three or four shirts, frayed at the cuff; half a dozen discreet, often-knotted ties; darned socks (who had darned them?); handkerchiefs embroidered with the initials GDJ (who had embroidered them?); thick woollen underclothes; two pairs of pyjamas of unattractive pattern; two pairs of shoes, black and brown; bedroom slippers worthy of Albert; a raglan overcoat; a hat; an unrolled umbrella; several small boxes containing equipment such as studs and razor blades. This was what Uncle Giles had left behind him. No doubt there was more of the same sort of thing at the Ufford. The display was a shade depressing. Dust was returning to dust with dreadful speed. I looked under the bed. There lay the suitcase into which these things were to be packed, beside it, the Gladstone bag to which Albert had referred, a large example of its kind, infinitely ancient, perhaps the very one with which Uncle Giles had arrived at Stonehurst on the day of the Archduke’s assassination. I dragged these two pieces out. One of the keys on the ring committed to me by Albert fitted this primitive, shapeless survival of antique luggage, suitable for a conjuror or comedian.
At first examination, the Gladstone bag appeared to be filled with nothing but company reports. I began to go through the papers. Endless financial projects were adumbrated; gratifying prospects; inevitable losses; hopeful figures, in spite of past disappointments. The whole panorama of the money-market lay before one – as it must once have burgeoned under the eyes of Uncle Giles – like the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. Hardly a venture quoted on the Stock Exchange seemed omitted; several that were not. There were two or three share certificates marked ‘valueless’ that might have been stock from the South Sea Bubble. Uncle Giles’s financial investigations had been extensive. Then a smaller envelope turned out to be something different. One of the sheets of paper contained there showed a circle with figures and symbols noted within its circumference. It was a horoscope, presumably that of Uncle Giles himself.
He had been born under Aries – the Ram – making him ambitious, impulsive, often irritable. He had secret enemies, because Saturn was in the Twelfth House. I remembered Mrs Erdleigh remarking that handicap when I met her with Uncle Giles at the Ufford. Mars and Venus were in bad aspect so far as dealings with money were concerned. However, Uncle Giles was drawn to hazards such as the company reports revealed by the conjunction of Jupiter. Moreover Jupiter, afflicting Mercury, caused people to find ‘the native’ – Uncle Giles – unreliable. That could not be denied. Certainly none of his own family would contradict the judgment. Unusual experiences with the opposite sex (I thought of Sir Magnus Donners) were given by Uranus in the Seventh House, a position at the same time unfavourable to marriage. It had to be admitted that all this gave a pretty good, if rough-and-ready, account of my uncle and his habits.
Underneath the envelope containing the horoscope was correspondence, held together by a paper-clip, with a firm of stockbrokers. Then came Uncle Giles’s pass-book. The bank statements of the previous year showed him to have been overdrawn, though somewhat better off than was commonly supposed. The whole question of Uncle Giles’s money affairs was a mysterious one, far more mysterious than anything revealed about him astrologically. Speculation as to the extent of his capital took place from time to time, speculation even as to whether he possessed any capital at all. The stockbroker’s letters and bank statements came to an end. The next item in the Gladstone bag appeared to be a surgical appliance of some sort. I pulled it out. The piece of tubing was for the administration of an enema. I threw the object into the wastepaper-basket, with the company reports. Below again – the whole business was like research into an excavated tomb – lay a roll of parchment tied in a bow with red tape.
‘VICTORIA by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India &c. To Our Trusty and well-beloved Giles Delahay Jenkins, Gentleman, Greeting. We, reposing especial Trust and Confidence in your Loyalty, Courage and good Conduct, do by these Presents Constitute and Appoint you to be an Officer in Our Land Forces . . .’
Trusty and wellbeloved were not the terms in which his own kith and kin had thought of Uncle Giles for a long time now. Indeed, the Queen’s good-heartedness in herself greeting him so warmly was as touching as her error of judgment was startling. There was something positively ingenuous in singling out Uncle Giles for the repose of confidence, accepting him so wholly at his own valuation. No doubt the Queen had been badly advised in the first instance. She must have been vexed and disappointed.
‘. . . You are therefore carefully and diligently to discharge yo
ur Duty as such in the Rank of 2nd Lieutenant or in such higher Rank as we may from time to time hereafter be pleased to promote or appoint you to . . .’
The Queen’s faith in human nature appeared boundless for, extraordinary as the royal whim might seem, she had indeed been pleased to appoint Uncle Giles to a higher rank, instead of quietly – and far more wisely – dispensing with his services at the very first available opportunity. Perhaps such an opportunity had not arisen so immediately as might have been expected; perhaps Uncle Giles had assumed the higher rank without reference to the Queen. Certainly he was always styled ‘Captain’ Jenkins, so that there must have been at least a presumption of a once held captaincy of some sort, however ‘temporary’, ‘acting’ or ‘local’ that rank might in practice have been. No doubt her reliance would have been lessened by the knowledge that Mercury was afflicting Jupiter at the hour of Uncle Giles’s birth.
‘. . . and you are at all times to exercise and well discipline in Arms both the inferior Officers and Men serving under you and use your best endeavours to keep them in good Order and Discipline. And we do hereby command them to Obey you as their superior Officer . . . according to the Rules and Discipline of War, in pursuance of the Trust hereby reposed in you . . .’
The great rolling phrases, so compelling in their beauty and simplicity, might be thought inadmissible for the most heedless, the most cynical, to disregard, so moderate, so obviously right in the circumstances, were their requirements, so friendly – even to the point of intimacy – the manner in which the Sovereign outlined the principles of her honourable service. Uncle Giles, it must be agreed, had not risen to the occasion. So far as loyalty to herself was concerned, he had been heard on more than one occasion to refer to her as ‘that old Tartar at Osborne’, to express without restraint his own leanings towards a republican form of government. His Conduct, in the army or out of it, could not possibly be described as Good. In devotion to duty, for example, he could not be compared with Bracey, a man no less pursued, so far as that went, by Furies. There remained Uncle Giles’s Courage. That, so far as was known, remained untarnished, although – again so far as was known – never put to any particularly severe test. Certainly it could be urged that he had the Courage of his own opinions; the Queen had to be satisfied with that. In short, the only one of her admonitions Uncle Giles had ever shown the least sign of taking to heart was the charge to command his subordinates to obey him. Even after his own return to civilian life, Uncle Giles tried his best to carry out this injunction in relation to all who could possibly be regarded as subordinate to him. Being ‘a bit of a radical’ never prevented that; the Sign of Aries investing him with the will to command, adding that touch of irritability of disposition as an additional spur to obedience.
While I thus considered, rather frivolously, Uncle Giles’s actual career in contrast with the ideal one envisaged by the terms of his Commission, I could not help thinking at the same time that facile irony at my uncle’s expense could go too far. No doubt irony, facile or otherwise, can often go too far. In this particular instance, for example, it was fitting to wonder what sort of a figure I should myself cut as a soldier. The question was no longer purely hypothetical, a grotesque fantasy, a romantic daydream, the career one had supposed to lie ahead as a child at Stonehurst. There was every reason to think that before long now the tenor of many persons’ lives, my own among them, would indeed be regulated by those draconic, ineluctable laws, so mildly, so all embracingly, defined in the Commission as ‘the Rules and Discipline of War’. How was it going to feel to be subject to them? My name was on the Emergency Reserve, although no one at that time knew how much, or how little, that might mean when it came to joining the army. At the back of one’s mind sounded a haunting resonance, a faint disturbing buzz, that was not far from fear.
By the time these disturbing thoughts had descended on me, I had begun to near the bottom of the Gladstone bag. There was another layer of correspondence, this time in a green cardboard file, on the subject of a taxi-cab’s collision with a lorry, an accident with regard to which Uncle Giles had been subpoenaed as witness. It went into the waste-paper-basket, a case – as Moreland would have said – in which there was ‘nothing of the spirit’. That brought an end to the contents, except for a book. This was bound in grubby vellum, the letterpress of mauve ink, like that used by Albert in his correspondence. I glanced at the highly decorated capitals of the title page:
The Perfumed Garden
of the Sheik Nefzaoui
or
The Arab Art of Love
I had often heard of this work, never, as it happened, come across a copy. Uncle Giles was an unexpected vehicle to bring it to hand. The present edition – ‘Cosmopoli: 1886’ – was stated to be published ‘For Private Circulation Only’, the English translation from a French version of the sixteenth-century Arabic manuscript made by a ‘Staff Officer in the French Army in Algeria’.
I pictured this French Staff Officer sitting at his desk. The sun was streaming into the room through green latticed windows of Moorish design, an oil sketch by Fromentin or J. F. Lewis. Dressed in a light-blue frogged coatee and scarlet peg-topped trousers buttoning under the boot, he wore a pointed moustache and imperial. Beside him on the table stood his shako, high and narrowing to the plume, the white puggaree falling across the scabbard of his discarded sabre. He was absolutely detached, a man who had tasted the sensual pleasures of the Second Empire and Third Republic to their dregs, indeed, come to North Africa to escape such insistent banalities. Now, he was examining their qualities and defects in absolute calm. Here, with the parched wind blowing in from the desert, he had found a kindred spirit in the Sheik Nefzaoui, to whose sixteenth-century Arabic he was determined to do justice in the language of Racine and Voltaire. Perhaps that picture was totally wide of the mark: the reality quite another one. The Staff Officer was a family man, snatching a few minutes at his beloved translation between the endearments of his wife, the rompings of a dozen children. . . . Rimbaud’s father, perhaps, who had served in North Africa, made translations from the Arabic . . . . The ‘Rules and Discipline of War’ must in some degree have been relaxed to allow spare time for these literary labours. Possibly he worked only on leave. I turned the pages idly. The Sheik’s tone was authoritative, absolutely self-assured – for that reason, a trifle forbidding – the chapter headings enigmatic:
‘. . . Concerning Praiseworthy Men . . . Concerning Women who deserve to be Praised . . . Of Matters Injurious to the Act of Generation . . . On the Deceits and Treacheries of Women . . . Concerning Sundry Observations useful to Know for Men and Women . . .’
On the Deceits and Treacheries of Women? The whole subject was obviously very fully covered. Sincere and scholarly, there was also something more than a little oppressive about the investigation, moments when the author seemed to labour the point, to induce a feeling of surfeit in the reader. All the same, I felt rather ashamed of my own lack of appreciation, because I could see that much of the advice was good. Disinclination to continue reading I recognised as a basic unwillingness to face facts, rather than any innate fastidiousness to be regarded as a matter for self-congratulation. I felt greatly inferior to the French Staff Officer, whatever his personal condition, who saw this severely technical sociological study, by its nature aseptic, even chilling in deliberate avoidance of false sentiment and specious charm, as a refreshing antidote to Parisian canons of sensuality.
Uncle Giles’s acquisition of this book must have been one of the minor consequences of having Uranus in the Seventh House; that was the best that could be said for him. It reminded him perhaps of ladies like the garage proprietor’s widow, manicurist at Reading, once thought to be under consideration as his future wife; possibly it was used as a handbook in those far off, careless days. In any case, there was no reason to suppose Uncle Giles to have become more straitlaced as he grew older. I put the volume aside to reconsider. There was work to be done. The clothes were packed away at las
t in the suitcase, the papers spared from the waste-paper basket, returned to the Gladstone bag, the two pieces of luggage placed side by side to await removal. As Albert had remarked, Uncle Giles had not left much behind, even though further items would be found at the Ufford. By that time the gong had sounded for dinner.
I took the Sheik Nefzaoui’s treatise with me to the dining-room, which was fairly full, single white-haired ladies predominating, here and there an elderly couple. No doubt the seasons made little difference to the Bellevue, the bulk of its population living there all the year round, winter and summer, solstice to solstice. I was given a table in the corner, near the hatch through which food was thrust by Albert. The table next to mine was laid for one person. Upon it stood a half-consumed bottle of whisky, a room-number pencilled on the label. I wondered whether my neighbour would turn out to be Dr Trelawney. That would provide an excitement. I hoped, in any case, that I should catch a glimpse of the Doctor before leaving the hotel, contrive some anecdote over which Moreland and I could afterwards laugh. I had nearly finished my soup – which recalled only in a muted form Albert’s ancient skill – when a tall man, about my own age or a year or two older, entered the dining-room. He strode jauntily through the doorway, looking neither to the right nor left, making straight for the table with the whisky bottle. Hope vanished of enjoying near me Dr Trelawney’s mysterious presence. This man was thin, with fair to reddish hair, pink-faced, pale eyebrows raised in an aggressive expression, as if he would welcome a row at the least provocation. He wore a country suit, somehow rather too elegant for the Bellevue’s dining-room. I experienced that immediate awareness, which can descend all of a sudden like the sky becoming overcast, of the close proximity of a person I knew and did not like, someone who made me, at the same time, in some way morally uncomfortable. For a second, I thought this impression one of those sensations of dislike as difficult to rationalise as the contrasting feeling of sudden sympathy; a moment later realising that Bob Duport was sitting next to me, that there was excuse for this onset of tingling antipathy.
Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 2 Page 60