“I’m coming. You can tell Staggers to get back on his box.”
“Very good, sir.”
Their visitor put on his cloak. He had reached a decision. “I propose,” he said, “to ask you to come and stay with me. Both of you.” He seemed to speak with hesitation. “But naturally only if you wish to do so. Please say nothing now. There will be a formal invitation; which if you wish to decline or ignore I shall entirely understand.”
At this moment Griselda recalled old Zec’s curious behaviour at the All Party Ball when Hugo Raunds was mentioned.
“We’d love to come,” said Lena casually.
He made no reply, but bowing slightly and saying “Your servant, ladies,” departed into the London snow.
Griselda and Lena followed him to the door. His carriage was an immense affair, with the familiar crest upon the door and at the base of the massive brightly polished lamps. Drawn by two proportionately immense black horses, with wild eyes, nostrils steaming like volcanoes, waving manes, and long undocked tails, it was governed by an immense coachman, so rugged and round and red as to overawe all possible comment. His red hair stuck out horizontally from beneath his huge tilted beaver. His red beard was snowy as Father Christmas’s. His red ear was curiously round, like the top of a red toadstool.
As the equipage drove away into the thickly drifting snow, Griselda and Lena perceived that on the opposite pavement, previously obscured from them by the bulk of the carriage itself, had accumulated, even in the teeth of the weather, a small cluster of passing Londoners. Rage and contempt were in every face and posture. Griselda had seldom seen any gathering of people so much under the influence of their emotions.
CHAPTER XXXV
Griselda had told Lena about Louise and said that she had mentioned the family which dwelt in the house they had entered on the day of Kynaston’s final picnic. Now she told her about Zec and his wife, whom for a long time she had forgotten; and of Louise’s words “Hugo is a very secret man.”
“You mean,” said Lena, “that after Mr. Tamburlane you’ve had enough of secret men?”
“Not altogether that. I don’t think Hugo Raunds is like Mr. Tamburlane, do you, Lena?”
“Not altogether, I should say.”
“I just thought that if we’re going to stay with him—are we, by the way?”
“It’ll mean coffins for beds and tooth mugs in gold plate.”
“If we are going to stay, perhaps we could find out just why people don’t seem to like him.”
“I don’t know that that’s any great mystery,” said Lena. “If you think what people are like. Still I agree we might dig about.”
But it was hard to know which piece of ground to turn first; so that by the time the invitation arrived, they had discovered nothing more about their host whatever.
They were invited to visit a house which seemed to be in the Welsh Marches; and no term was set to their stay. The brief letter ended with the words “Come and see for yourselves. Then please yourselves.”
“Hell of a journey in February,” remarked Lena, “and, I should say, doubtfully worth the expense seeing that we can’t both leave the shop for more than a day or two. Still, better than that mausoleum in Essex doubtless. I suppose I shall have to freeze in a skirt all the time as it’s a country family?”
“Louise said that Hugo Raunds lived entirely for clothes.”
“I can imagine what that means. Brittle women in models.”
“Surely not in Montgomeryshire?”
“Unlike us they travel wrapped in mink in centrally heated Rolls-Royces.”
“Shall we not go?”
Lena thought for a moment. Then she said gently “You go, Griselda. They’d only eye me.”
“I won’t go without you.”
“It’s much the best thing. You could do with a holiday, and I could look after the shop. Stay a long time if you find you like it. As long as you want to. You’re beautiful and it’s a kind of thing you need. One kind of thing. Sometimes, anyway. So, please.”
“You need a holiday too.”
“Less than you.”
Griselda put her arm round Lena’s shoulders.
“You’re good to me, Lena, I’m grateful.”
“You gave me half a shop. I’m grateful. I’ll look you up a train to Montgomeryshire.”
Of course Griselda had to change at Shrewsbury, but she had never expected to have to change at Welshpool as well.
Darkness had descended long before she arrived. The minute but not inelegant Welsh station seemed high among the mountains. A small but bitter wind crept murderously along the single platform. There was one oil lamp, and otherwise not a light to be seen anywhere. Griselda was the only passenger, but two figures awaited her on the platform.
One was clearly the station factotum, though his aspect, demeanour, and even uniform seemed of an antique type. He came forward, touched his cap, and, though able to speak little but Welsh, bade Griselda Good evening, and took her bag. After a wait of only some seconds, the engine whistled, and the train drew out as if glad to be away.
The second figure was a woman. She was closely muffled in a hood and wore some long garment reaching to the ground. Her perfume hung on the cold air. She extended her gloved hand and, having confirmed Griselda’s identity, said “My name is Esemplarita. I look after things at the Castle. Hugo asked me to apologize for being unable to meet you himself. He turned his ankle yesterday fencing.” When Griselda had greeted her and expressed her regret about her host’s misadventure, the woman continued “We have to go down a narrow path to the lane, where the carriage is waiting. But Abersoch will go first with the lamp.”
Abersoch lifted the single lamp from its bracket and led the way.
“You go next,” said Esemplarita to Griselda.
They descended a cinder way which zig-zagged down a high bank to a tiny sunken lane below. At the bottom of the path Abersoch’s lamp fell upon a small black cabriolet with a gleaming horse.
“Good evening, miss,” said another Welsh voice from the box.
Abersoch opened the door and handed up Griselda’s luggage, which the coachman placed in a high-sided cage on the roof.
“Your ticket if you please, miss.”
Griselda had to grope by the light of Abersoch’s lamp, but in the end she found it and delivered it up.
“Not all of it, miss,” said Abersoch. He bisected the ticket and gave her half of it. “You may be wanting to go back.”
“Thank you,” said Griselda smiling. “So I shall.”
“It’s entirely up to you, miss.”
Griselda stepped into the carriage. The interior was pitch black and filled with Esemplarita’s scent. Esemplarita followed her in. There was scarcely room for two on the seat. Abersoch shut the door and again touched his cap, the light falling on his face as in an old-fashioned coloured drawing. The carriage began to move.
“I’m afraid the road is atrocious almost all the way.”
To Griselda this seemed to be true.
After a considerable period of compressed jolting silence, while Griselda tried to think of something to say, Esemplarita took up the conversation. “I believe you don’t know Hugo very well?”
“No. He’s really a friend of a friend of mine.”
“I know. Your friend gave Hugo a good account of you.”
“When?” Griselda’s heart was beating among the beating of the horse’s hooves.
“Some time ago. As you know, we’re not in touch with her at the moment. But I wanted to speak of something else. You have heard, of course, that Hugo’s life—and the lives of all of us—differ from the lives people lead nowadays?”
“I was told a little—by the friend we have in common. A very little. I have noticed—some small differences. I know almost nothing.”
“The Castle is, so to speak, enchanted. Your friend gave Hugo to understand that you might like to know about it; to see for yourself.”
“She was k
ind.”
“The opportunity is mutual. We want suitable people to visit us.”
“I see.”
“There are very few suitable people.”
“Can you define?”
The carriage had plunged across what Griselda took to be a series of deep diagonal ruts frozen to the unyieldingness of stone, before her companion answered “It cannot truly be defined. You will soon begin to see. There is only one thing.”
“Yes?”
“Your friend commended you for your acceptance of what life can offer. Your lack of surprise. You understand that?”
“Yes.”
“Lack of surprise is taken for granted at the Castle. That is what I wanted to say.”
“I see . . . I love your scent.”
“Thank you.” Then she added kindly “That is the sort of thing not to be surprised about.”
For some time they compared tastes in books and music. Then the carriage stopped.
“The Castle gates,” said Esemplarita.
Griselda could hear the clanking and grinding as the lodge-keeper opened them. Remarks were exchanged in Brythonic between him and the driver. Then the carriage proceeded on a much better surface. Griselda could hear the gates closing behind her.
The distance up the drive seemed very long. Griselda and her companion turned to the subject of edible fungi: how to find and prepare them, and which of them to eschew. Esemplarita explained that she had known nothing of these matters until she came to live at the Castle, but that now they had fungi with almost every meal.
In the end Griselda felt the carriage following a huge arc, as if going round the edge of an immense circus ring. Then it stopped again and the driver was opening the door.
Griselda realized that the Castle was not, as she had supposed, mediaeval, but Gothic revival at the earliest. The long front before her was decked with three tiers of lighted windows. Clearly Sir Hugo was entertaining largely.
When the coachman had rung the ornate bell, the door was opened by a footman. Griselda entered, followed by Esemplarita. The coachman was getting down Griselda’s bag to give to the footman.
The big Gothic revival hall was hung with paintings, and lighted with hundreds, possibly thousands, of candles, in complex candelabra descending from the ceiling, and storied brackets climbing the walls. There was an immense carpet, predominantly dark green; and involved painted furniture. At one end of the hall was a fire which really filled the huge grate and soaked all the air with warmth. Round the fire was a group of men and women. They sat or lay on painted chairs and couches and on the predominantly dark green floor. Griselda thought at first that they were in fancy dress. Then she turned and saw that Esemplarita was dressed like them. She remembered that she must not be surprised.
Instead she smiled. She felt as one returned to life. She was relieved of care and accessible to joy.
Esemplarita went round introducing her. Several of the names were known to Griselda. If she was not surprised, neither, it was clear, were they.
Then she heard herself greeted. She stood with her back to the the blaze, a huge portrait of Jeanne de Naples above her head, and saw her host standing at the foot of the wide staircase. He wore a dressing gown in mulberry silk and leaned on the baluster. Behind him stood a figure Griselda recognized. It was Vaisseau.
“Are you pleased?”
“It is beautiful.”
“It is doomed of course.”
“Of course.”
“You are smiling.”
“I am happy.”
The men and women round the fire had kept quite silent during this colloquy. Now a tall woman came to her and said “Would you like to change? There’s no need if you’d rather not. But if you’d like to, I could help.”
“Thank you,” replied Griselda. “I’d like to.”
ENVOI
Before many days Griselda found that happiness unfitted her for the modern world; and, though the master of the Castle, as she knew, often travelled, as on occasion did most of the others, decided to give her half of the shop to Lena, who, despite the warmest of invitations, persisted in her attitude that Wales was a waste of oracles and oratorios.
Griselda was happy, though cognizant that sooner or later the spell would be broken by public opinion and Order in Council; but whenever there was mention of Hero and Leander, about whom one of the others was writing a poetic drama, and indeed whenever her thoughts were idle, she knew that if only Louise were there, then indeed would she be whole.
MY POOR FRIEND
I was at the time employed by an organization which had been formed to advocate the use of small rivers, and even streams, for the generation of local electricity. Like many such bodies, the Society had been started by an enthusiast but had soon come to rely for the main part of its income upon business combines which stood to benefit, sometimes rather mysteriously, from any successes it might achieve. The inaugurator, a corpulent, middle-aged agricultural engineer with sparse red hair, named Wycliff Bessemer, had become convinced that the future of Britain depended upon the reinstatement of comparatively small, comparatively self-sufficient rural communities. He was bitterly aware of the irony of having to depend for a fighting fund largely upon impersonal cartels of electrical manufacturers and bellicose public works contractors.
Nor was this the only irony which came to weigh upon the basically prophetic but rather slow-thinking Bessemer, as time went on. It was difficult not to notice, for example, that nearly all the private members of the Society were markedly urban in background. I myself further noticed that most of them were far more interested in discussing endlessly the technical minutiae of electrical generation than in saving the nation. Bessemer may have missed that point because he was very much a man for electrical detail himself. In the end, I began to wonder whether, indeed, the genesis of the whole thing had not been an inflation by Bessemer of a personal hobby into a means of general redemption.
I became involved myself when I left ICI. That made the third such episode: I had already disagreed with Shell-Mex and even with the John Lewis Partnership. My then wife, Virginia, suggested that I might be happier in a much smaller enterprise: a bigger duck in a narrower pond, as she put it. After a few weeks of pretty desperate correspondence and going for interviews, I saw Bessemer’s advertisement, inserted anonymously, with only a box number, in the Daily Telegraph. According to the advertisement, a charitable organization with wide national aims sought what it called an administrative secretary.
Bessemer told me later that he had received more than six hundred answers, and I still do not really know why he offered the job to me. I suspect, from my later knowledge of him, that it was mainly laziness. The pay offered was only slightly more than half what I had received from ICI, and there was no welfare, but Virginia said I should seize the chance to escape from the commercial rut. As she would be involved in considerable sacrifice herself, to say nothing of the twins, it seemed to me likely that she really had an insight into my true needs. I daresay she had. It proved to be odd and frustrating work, but I have not come upon anything else which has suited me better.
The administrative secretary was the universal factotum: he had to do virtually everything. The only other staff which could be afforded was a part-time typist: either a married woman with all the edges rubbed from her wits, or a very young girl, at once precocious and useless, seldom even a sexual temptation. I should say that during my time there were as many as fifteen or sixteen replacements.
Bessemer himself had his agricultural work to do, and his temperament by no means afforded a surplus of general energy. Weeks on end would pass without my hearing from him at all. Then I would receive five or six quarto pages of the Society’s paper closely typed by Mrs. Bessemer on both sides in single spacing. It was usually a mixture of three ingredients: complaints and very impracticable suggestions which had been made to Bessemer by members of the Society who were personal friends of his, and had therefore gone behind my back,
or at least disregarded me; instructions to do this or that which even Bessemer could not have asked for if he had been as much in touch with the day-to-day situation as was the general office; and long paragraphs of what Bessemer frequently referred to as his philosophy, but was seldom more than grumbling and rambling. The general office, needless to say, was an upper room off Grays Inn Road. I used to think that, if it hadn’t been for the limitations of the typist, I could have done something more lucrative there between whiles, such as run a correspondence course in dinghy sailing or in How to Succeed.
I did think that, and it was inevitable, but I must not give the impression that I was sceptical about the Society’s aims. I was not, nor am I now. Virginia was quite right in thinking that I needed an outlet for idealism, and Bessemer’s ideal was well argued, well informed, well founded. Britain would indeed, in my opinion, be a better place if she would carry out Bessemer’s program. She would be mistaken if she entrusted the direction of it to Bessemer, but pioneers seldom qualify as executives. I soon came to see why. What really did make me sceptical, what in the end almost broke me up, was contact with Parliament, or rather, with the House of Commons, the filter of all public action, of all idealism, all personality, all hope.
Who cares what I think on such a subject? I used to bind on to Virginia about it for hours at a time, for months on end, but what one says to one’s wife cuts no ice outside the home, almost by definition. I am compelled to say a little about it now, because only so can I indicate what seemed to me to mark off Walter Enright from the run of M.P.s—apart from the fact that, for one reason and another, he was the only M.P. I could ever have called a friend, a private and personal friend, that is, as distinct from a public friend. Nor am I implying that all M.P.s are queuing up even to be one’s public friend. Far from it.
I entered into the Society’s employ at the time when the executive council was set upon establishing a “parliamentary committee,” which might press the cause at Westminster. When I arrived, I supposed that the executive council, though probably seldom to be seen, must be composed, or largely composed, of persons whose names were known to the public. This last, I soon realized, was not the case: apart from one Liberal ex-mayor of a town in the Home Counties, and one fairly distinguished but very senior naturalist, it contained no one whom the public was likely ever to have heard of. I was right, however, about the executive council’s invisibility. Nearly a year passed before my first council meeting, and when it took place, only about a third of the people appeared who were entitled to attend. Bessemer did almost all the talking, except on the subject of the parliamentary committee. That was something which everyone thought very important, and I made quite a mark for myself by saying that a committee was nearly in being. Most of the work had been done, in reality, by my predecessor before he had left for South Africa, but it is often more difficult to follow in another man’s tracks than to engrave one’s own, so I did not think the praise I got excessive.
The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories Page 28