Sensible Life

by Mary Wesley

  “Must be more than that now,” said Felicity.

  “No,” said Milly, as though pushing something away, “I don’t think she—”

  “Her father became a top dog in the Indian Civil Service, don’t you remember? One read his name in the papers at the time of partition in 1947. You must remember, very distinguished, one of Mountbatten’s right-hand men.”

  “Oh, really? I had not made the connection. So he’s that Sir Denys Trevelyan. Oh, I see. Rather an awful wife, I remember her.”

  “A misfortune which failed to impede his career.”

  “How interesting, how very—well—interesting. How silly of me not to have taken that in; Angus would have noticed. I do so miss Angus.”

  “Then he was in the papers again. People wrote articles about him and his wife.”

  “A scandal?” Milly’s mouth remained open.

  “No, no, odder than that. They decided to stay in India when everybody left. It was a sensation at the time. They said they could not see themselves settling in Cheltenham or Tunbridge Wells.”

  “People did find it hard. It must have been similar to being widowed, wrenched roots. Will they wither and die out there? I suppose the girl looks after them.”

  “I did hear,” said Felicity, “that she refused to join them, went her own way. Actually she—”

  “Oh, my dear!” cried Milly. “I remember now, the mother wrote to me. The girl had become a tart.”

  “Actually she works for some friends of mine in the West Country.” Felicity felt weary. She thought, Shall I forget this conversation and in years to come distil something quite else from it which will trickle onto the page like acid?

  “She must be quite old by now.” (That too could be stored.) “What a vast cross-section of people you do know, Felicity.”

  “I always think people are interconnected. I am interested in people,” said Felicity blandly.

  “To put in your books, you clever thing. But what am I up to, imposing my family worries which are of no earthly use to you? I shall get cracking, as my son-in-law says, and have a Christmas house-party as we did in the old days. I shall get splendid Joyce to help me, she knows lots of young people. It’s time I pulled my finger out, as my grandson says, the awful boy.”

  “Do you know what it means?”

  “He explained it. I said, ‘Dear boy, I was not born yesterday.’ Yes, I shall invite Joyce, she will be a great help. And it will be nice for her, she’s at a loose end between marriages.”

  “I thought you deplored divorce,” said Felicity, laughing.

  “I do, but Joyce is different. She’s an old friend. We used to stay with her stepfather, such a dear man, for the grouse shooting in Perthshire.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  WHEN FLORA READ OF Hubert’s marriage in 1949 to somebody called Victoria Raglan she was agreeably surprised to find herself unmoved. Victoria whoever she was would not experience the ebullient innovative passion she had shared with Hubert in Aix-en-Provence. The honeymoon would not be a first-time abandoned fling for Hubert, for he would—whether he remembered it or not—have her, Flora, as a yardstick. Victoria Raglan might well be prettier, and certainly richer, but she would not be the same. I was his first love, thought Flora; his first adventure. She did not then, nor had she ever, compared herself with Joyce. She knew about Joyce, had always liked her since the early days in Dinard. Joyce was fun; there was no lasting malice in Joyce. She thought of Joyce rather in the terms of a necessary sexual assault course to be surmounted by young men such as Hubert and Cosmo, just as, as boys, they had manoeuvred through the scholarship or common entrance to their public school. She was glad for Hubert, hoping he would be as happy in his marriage as he was successful in his career. She went out to call in the cows for the evening milking with a cheerful heart. As she ushered them into the milking shed she supposed that at some time prior to their meeting Felix, too, had passed through the hands of some skilful woman similar to Joyce. As the years passed she thought of Felix with less pain. Quite often in her thoughts he reverted to the cool recumbent lover of her early adolescence. When her employers sold their large farm to a merchant bank (Nigel’s bank, she noted with amusement), she agreed to move with them to the smaller property they were buying; she was promised a cottage of her own and more responsibility, and was content. It was after the move that she realised the new farm was within easy reach of Pengappah. She need not go near it; she need not be bothered. If she had wanted, she could always have reached it; it had never been so far as to be beyond reach. Yet one day, resolving to lay the memory of her painful eavesdropping and anguished flight, she took the bus and, getting off at the village, walked through the woods to snoop. The house was unoccupied, crouching in its clearing rather sad, its windows closed and blind, as she had first seen it with Hubert. The small garden was choked with weeds, the creepers Cousin Thing had planted in the ruined wing smothering the walls. The five baths were slimy with rotting leaves, the fish gone. The old couple Hubert had left in charge must be dead, she thought. It seemed natural to unchoke the watercourse, clean the baths, cut away a few dead branches. She enjoyed herself and came again from time to time on her days off. She got to know the house from an angle which was superimposed over the memory of Cosmo and Hubert’s drunken conversation, and her rage and hurt.

  Sometimes there would be traces of visitors—empty milk bottles, tyre tracks, tools left out to rust, a diminished log pile. One year, approaching Pengappah along the cliff, she heard voices. She looked down at the cove and recognised Hubert, sturdy and greying, seen from above going bald. He was playing with children who shouted to him, “Daddy, Daddy, look what I’ve found. Come and look, Daddy,” splashing by the edge of the water, trailing armfuls of kelp.

  “Don’t let them get wet, darling, remember they have stinking colds.” Victoria, once Raglan, now Wyndeatt-Whyte wife and goodness me three tots, lithe and maidenly in her wedding photographs on the steps of St. Saviour and All Angels, hanging onto Hubert’s arm, looking up at him full of trust, now sat on dry rock watching her family, knitting what looked like a sock.

  Flora, with her back to a gorse bush, watched Hubert build a sand-castle, surround it with a moat, deflect the little stream which had higher up run through the five baths to reach the sea, and make a complex of dams and locks. She heard him say, “No! No! Stand clear,” to his eldest child. “You’ll ruin it if you do that. Victoria,” he shouted, “could you keep Emma away? She keeps stamping on Julian’s dam.” Flora wondered, watching Hubert, whether he was as bossy with Victoria as he had been long ago with her. I could never have lived with him for long, she thought; that period in France was just right. I spoiled it by letting him bring me to Pengappah, just as I spoiled my train journey with Cosmo in the war. I was snappy and nervous. I should have got out at Truro, not given in to him, not stayed with him till he left. It was nice, though, she thought, retracing her steps along the cliff, to think Hubert and Victoria were using Pengappah. She was glad to see Hubert so well arranged in marriage. Making a detour to peep at the house, she was pleased by the substance and size of Hubert’s station wagon and by the sight of cases of wine in the back. Going home in the bus she thought of Hubert with pleasure and affection.

  It was another matter when she read of Cosmo’s marriage in the Chelsea registry office; he was laughing in the photograph. In the background Hubert and Victoria looked serious. It was difficult to read Milly’s expression.

  FIFTY-TWO

  “AND HOW WAS INDIA? You’ve got yourself a nice tan.” Cosmo took stock of his nephew, hoping that under a superficial resemblance to Mabs he was right to see a preponderance of Nigel’s solidity. “What will you drink?” he asked. They were lunching at his club; he was amused to see that Charles had put on a suit.

  “Water, please,” said Charles.

  (Dear me, what virtue!) “Teetotal?” Cosmo asked.

  Charles said, “Not altogether.”

  Cosmo said, “Your father put it aw
ay at your age. When under stress, that is.”

  “Not any more,” said Charles. “Mum makes him mind his liver.”

  “What a sensible woman she has become,” said Cosmo drily. “She used to glory in hepping him up with rows.”

  Charles said, laughing, “She still does. He likes it; it keeps him on his toes.”

  They ordered their meal.

  Cosmo seemed happy to sit in silence. Charles, rather strained, said, “Er—my mother tells me you want to talk to me, Uncle Cosmo.”

  Cosmo said, “Did she tell you what I mean to do?”

  Charles said, “Yes. It’s incredibly generous. I think you should change your mind.” He flushed under his sunburn.

  As well as wearing a suit he had had his hair cut, Cosmo noted with amusement, white skin edging his neck, forehead and ears. He must be trying to make a good impression. He said: “Shall you feel tied, trapped?” (Perhaps I am interfering with this boy’s life, doing him actual harm?)

  Charles said, “Oh no, no! It’s the most wonderful, the most—I can’t think how you can bear to give Coppermalt away.”

  “I can bear it,” said Cosmo. “Besides, as your father will tell you, it’s the only way to keep Coppermalt in the family. Death duties cripple. But tell me about India. I cannot discuss business while I am eating. Where did you go?”

  Charles said, “All over, it’s wonderful. I was there a year. I could talk about it for a week.”

  “Please don’t do that; condense.”

  “That is what I want to do. Hubert has promised to help me place articles, he is very kind—”

  “So he should be. He ‘arrived’ long ago.”

  “He suggested that I write a book. I’d like to go back and see more; there is so much, and so many different peoples.”

  Cosmo said, “So one hears.”

  Charles thought, God! I am boring him. I’ve never known him well; he’s stiff and difficult. “Oh, by the way, before I forget, Mum said I must tell you about the pockets of old Raj hands who stayed on; you know some of them.”

  “I do?”

  “A couple called Trevelyan. Mum says Granny and Grandad had their daughter to stay at Coppermalt when you were young. Dad remembers her; he says you and Hubert were in love with her, that if it had not been for getting himself engaged to Mum he would have had a stab himself.”

  (Bloody cheek! Nigel with his short legs.) “First I’ve heard of it,” said Cosmo, with chill.

  “Anyway,” Charles rushed on, “there they are, these old things, must be at least as old as Granny, living in rather a super house they built for themselves. In some style, too, up in the foothills, the Himalayas—”

  “Not the Nilgheri?” Cosmo teased.

  Charles said, “Sorry, I’m a fool—”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, these old—they look like preserved fruits; they still have servants, boss them about. They grumble that ‘nothing is what it was, of course,’ but they are not going to budge. It’s a sort of time warp. The Indians are either extremely tolerant or find them amusing. What excited Mum and Tashie, who was at dinner—Henry had gone to Brussels for a couple of nights—was that this old Mrs. Trevelyan still writes to the same dressmaker they both went to and Granny too, it seems, to order a dress a year which she then gets copied cheap by the Indians. Some old woman in Beauchamp Place.”

  “Rue de Rance,” murmured Cosmo.

  “What?”

  “She was in the Rue de Rance above the boucherie chevaline.”

  “Come again?” Charles looked lost.

  Cosmo said, “Nothing. What else?”

  “Oh, just that, you know Mum and Tash, they next started a hare about finding the girl you all loved. They have a guilt thing about her. They’d like to see what she is like now. Then Joyce said, ‘The trail has gone cold.’ Oh!” said Charles. “Perhaps I should not have mentioned Joyce. Have I put my foot in it? She was at dinner, too. Sorry.”

  “Not at all,” said Cosmo. “Joyce is an old friend. She was a childhood friend of us all. You should have seen her teeth at fourteen.” He laughed. “Would you like some stilton? It’s excellent.”

  “No, thank you.” (Why did I have to mention Joyce? Should Mum still be friends with Joyce? Still friends when Uncle C. has divorced her? What does he mean, see her teeth? I don’t understand his generation’s morals.) “No cheese, thanks.”

  “Coffee?” suggested Cosmo.

  “Yes, please.”

  “Cigar?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  (It would be cruel to ask him whether he fucks.) “Coffee, please, waiter. Do you smoke pot?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Glad you admit to one vice.”

  The waiter brought coffee.

  “Now then,” said Cosmo. “You must be dying to get to the point and I must get off to Bodmin, for the Assizes. You do not, I gather, wish to work in the City like your father, or live in London. As well as wishing to travel and write, you are not uninterested in country matters. You could learn to manage an estate. Do you feel able to grapple with Coppermalt? With your consent, I propose to make Coppermalt over to you; you will, I trust, let my mother live on there until she dies. I have no children, but if I live another whatever years are necessary, death duties will be saved. I hope you will be as happy there as we have all been, and find a girl to be happy with. I have made an appointment for you with my solicitors. Did you ever hear how, when Hubert got the keys and deeds of Pengappah, the solicitor hanged himself? It was not funny but it makes some people laugh. It shocked Hubert, he drank a whole bottle of whisky. Anyway, mustn’t digress, the whole thing should be wrapped up in no time. That’s the lot, I think.” Cosmo pushed back his chair and stood up, anxious to leave.

  Charles said, “I am at a loss for words.”

  “Good.”

  “May I ask a question?”

  “Which is?”

  “Why do you not want to retire to Coppermalt when you stop working? I know you have no children, but you love the place. It seems so—”

  Cosmo thought, I like this boy, he’ll do. “One should never go back to where one has been happy,” he said. “The beautiful memory is in danger of getting overlaid. Case in point: I recently went back to a place in France where I remembered being extremely happy. It has been gobbled up by progress; it is unrecognisable. I found a café proprietor I remembered as an ebullient young man in love with his pregnant wife, old, stuck in a wheelchair. The gunsmiths had metamorphosed into a gift shop. My God, I beat it. Any other questions? As I say, the solicitor has it all. It’s been nice. Give my love to Mabs.” He was in a hurry to get away.

  On the steps of the club Charles, shaken by his need to render thanks in some adequate fashion, blurted out: “Why did you marry Joyce?”

  A smile spread across Cosmo’s face. “To teach my mother not to interfere perhaps, not to try and manage my life?” Charles, watching him go, thought, He seems detached. Can he be lonely? Then, forgetting Cosmo’s detachment, he made haste towards the nearest telephone to ring up the girl with whom he was in love, break the good news and ask her to marry him.

  FIFTY-THREE

  COSMO LOCKED HIS BRIEFCASE in the boot and got into his car. Although this was the third or fourth car since his divorce, he rolled the window down to let air in and any residue of scent out. He opened the window from habit. On the rare occasions he thought of Joyce, it was to reproach himself for stupidity. There’s no surer way to lose a good friend than to marry her. High-spirited, bouncy, generous Joyce had in middle age and close proximity become a bore; and as for sex, so good in experimental and lusty youth, that had switched to something akin to aerobics. But now, after the Bodmin Assizes, he had a free weekend. He would dawdle back to London, bird-watch on the way. Should he head for Slapton Ley and the Exe Estuary for migratory birds, or chance the cliffs of North Devon? He drove as far as Launceston enjoying his indecision. It was agreeable, he thought, to have no ties, not to have to rush ba
ck to wife and family as did, for instance, Hubert, always in a hurry to fit in the children’s holidays or Venice or Paris because Victoria must go between the children’s half-terms, and still constantly travel for his own work. No wonder he was threatened with ulcers. Cosmo rolled up the window.

  Heavy rain squalls hit the windscreen. Late September brought equinoctial gales; the north coast might be too rough. He would cut south from Launceston; stay in a pub, perhaps? He could spend the night at Pengappah. He was welcome, as were all Hubert’s friends, to collect the key in the village and make himself at home. But I am not at home there, Cosmo thought irritably. I have never felt at home since Flora told me she had heard us discussing her. Then he thought, It is eighteen years since that happened. Hubert is married and has found success; I have married and divorced; I have a good practice. I have no room for sentimentality. I must take a pull and be sensible.

  Thinking this, Cosmo remembered his father. Had he not, during that awful row that Christmas at Coppermalt (patched up, of course, but unforgettable), said something about Flora being sensible? One wondered, thought Cosmo, driving through the rain, who under their veneer of ordinariness was sensible. I cannot claim good sense, he thought; it was stupid to marry Joyce, cheaply cruel to my mother. I have often been idiotic. Look at that trip I made to Brittany; nothing could have been stupider. St. Malo destroyed in the war is rebuilt. There is a barrage across the water where we crossed in vedettes, the beach beyond St. Briac is built up with villas and a concrete car park covers the site of our picnic. Even giving Coppermalt to Charles has not erased anything. I remember the silky feel of the water when Hubert and I drifted down the river that hot day. The sight of Flora undressing, and catching her unaware in the water. Sometimes I hear her voice or remember the salt taste of her eyelashes when I kissed her on the last night of her visit. Or finding myself, as I occasionally do, getting out of a taxi at Paddington, I remember the feel of her wrist as I held her. It is ridiculous. I remember it all. I am fifty years old yet I am frequently tempted to seek out Irena Tarasova. Nothing could be simpler but I am afraid. Then he thought, more cheerfully: I make my living from other people’s lack of sense; who am I to complain?