‘No. Instead of that, I’ll tell you something. You wonder.’
There was another silence. Ian stirred in the darkness. He was so close that Mungo thought he could hear or sense the beating of his heart.
‘Precisely what do I wonder?’ Ian asked.
‘Just a moment.’ There was a fumble and a scrape, and Mungo had lit another cigarette. It spluttered for a moment in minute sulphurous explosions, so that his face came and went in a blueish light, and then became steadily outlined in a dim red glow. ‘Listen, Ian. I have a serious idea – honestly. That bad-hat Douglas Cardower—’
‘Steady on!’ Ian’s voice in the darkness was suddenly sharp and mocking. ‘I can do a spot of psycho-analysis too. Did you ever hear of the Myth of the Birth of the Hero?’
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’
‘Not a girl in Moray was safe from him. Don’t you remember? And Mungo Lockhart with ready-made notions about being a foundling. So I can tell you one fantasy your brain’s been nurturing. That we may be first cousins – with your romantic self on the wrong side of the blanket.’
‘The blanket makes quite a difference.’ Mungo was staggered for a moment by what struck him as an uncanny diagnosis. It was true that his imagination had exercised itself from time to time with just this novelettish-seeming notion. But now he recovered confidence. ‘You can be as frivolous as you like,’ he said severely. ‘I want to be serious.’
‘Sorry. It’s not a nice joke when one peers into it. Go on.’
‘Right! As a small boy you heard a lot about your recently deceased Uncle Douglas. He probably wasn’t talked about before you by the family. But there was the tattle of nurses and servants, and all that.’
‘You have the most idiotic notions of what’s called upper-class life. But continue.’
‘It was traumatic – all this about your frightfully wicked uncle. And when you’d learnt a bit more about how—’
‘All right. I grasp the argument. I was horrified.’
‘Yes – and fascinated as well. One part of you would like to measure up to Douglas. Not a girl in Wiltshire, or between Oxford and Bablockhythe—’
‘Don’t be so clever about it, for Jesus’ sake. Just finish.’
‘On the whole, horror and revulsion win. You put a brave face on it, and all that. But really you nourish an almost mediaeval sense of the sinfulness of sexuality.’ Mungo, whether trying to be clever or not, was pleased with this; he had a vague memory it was something somebody had said about Donne. ‘And that’s how it was with poor old Vera.’
‘Poor old Vera?’
‘Well, you used her as a kind of demonstration model. A tremendous bit of showing-off. Think of the turn you put on on the other side of that matchboard partition.’
‘It was a bit low, I suppose. By the way, I don’t apologise for things twice.’
‘And then off you went home that Saturday morning, and in Vera popped that Saturday afternoon. I think you really intended—’
‘Stop a bit.’ Ian spoke so quietly that it was surprising Mungo did stop. ‘I’m still not clear whether you think you’re just turning on an entertainment – a nightpiece confessedly in the highly imaginative Mungo Lockhart manner. So I’d better tell you I’m taking you seriously. In fact, I think there’s a good deal in what you say.’
‘Oh.’ Very illogically, Mungo was brought up short. ‘Well, when I said I had a serious idea, I meant it. But perhaps we’d better sleep on the thing. And wake up not remembering it.’
‘I think that if there’s more of the serious idea we’d better have it now.’
‘All right, then. There’s your Uncle David too.’
Through a silence which succeeded upon this Mungo decided that he was hearing not frogs but the cicada and dry grass singing – a much more poetical phenomenon. Ian was still saying nothing.
‘There’s your Uncle David,’ Mungo repeated rather obstinately. ‘Who’s still alive, and lives with Leonard Sedley. We’re going to visit them, I gather. I want to know about him.’
‘You seem to want to know a great deal about my family.’ Ian said this with a sudden irritability. ‘When they were born, and when they died, and what the parson said about them. I can’t think why.’
‘It’s in the interest of the analysis.’
‘Of some fairy-tale, you mean.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you what I think about Uncle David. I think he sounds a bit of a hush-hush job too.’
‘Your talents are wasted as an undergraduate, Mungo Lockhart. You ought to be a reporter sniffing out scandals for some low rag.’
‘Apologise for that, please.’
‘All right – I do. But you have those romantic notions about old families. Tremendously aware of kinship, and oppressed by a weight of tradition, and so forth. You want to drag me free of the tyrannous shadow of my uncles. That’s what you mean by blethering about heredity and your precious analysis. I’m not saying you haven’t got an idea. In fact, I also take back that you’re just constructing fairytales.’
‘Well, then – what about Uncle David? How am I to behave, for instance, when we go to Mallachie?’
‘My advice would be to veil your charms.’ Ian’s laugh came suddenly and harshly through the darkness. ‘It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? I’ve told you that when Uncle Douglas was at Bamberton my grandparents couldn’t keep maidservants. When Uncle David was there they couldn’t keep footmen.’
‘An even greater hardship, no doubt.’ Mungo, determined not to have this small disclosure exhibit itself in a dramatic light, perhaps overplayed a negligent note. ‘At least you explain why you don’t find Mallachie gay, and don’t much want to go there. But when your grandfather wants you to go, and even to take friends to the place, it’s my guess he’s right.’
‘I know he’s right. He alarms me – but I’ve more faith in his judgement than in that of anybody else I know.’
‘There goes the family constellation again.’
‘No doubt. But Mungo—do you know?—I’m not sure you won’t be runner-up.’
There was quite a long silence – Mungo having the grace to be rather overwhelmed by this. He knew that it wasn’t very seriously that Ian regularly denounced him as practically a zany. But of what he’d just heard he’d not had a notion. And he much doubted whether his talk of the past half-hour deserved to be called judicious. But at least it had been honest, or had owned an honest aim.
‘But,’ Ian went on, ‘you must have got on the right wavelength about Uncle David without my tuning you in like this?’
‘Well, yes – I suppose so. Somehow, it looked a fair guess.’
‘And I can see how it rates in your blessed analysis, so you needn’t give yourself the trouble of wrapping it up nicely in all that kindly humour. Uncle Douglas casts a shadow of sin and guilt over going to bed with a girl; going to bed with a girl therefore doesn’t feel quite as the books say; and so up bobs Uncle David and asks if it isn’t because I have quite a dollop of him in my constitution. That’s the diagnosis. And the treatment is to shake and bump and rattle the sufferer free from the spell of all avuncular ghosts, living or dead. Isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know about ghosts being living or dead. But, yes – that’s roughly it.’
‘Well, well! Who knows?’ Ian stirred in his sleeping-bag in a manner suggesting a relaxation of his whole six-foot-two. ‘And now we can go to sleep. Rome tomorrow.’
‘O.K. But, Ian, one thing. Leonard Sedley. Do you gather that he and your Uncle David—?’
‘Lord, Lord – who knows? Or cares a damn? They’re just two old men who are obviously dependent on each other, and as to how they first came together I haven’t a clue. And as to your own virtue, I don’t suppose you need really tremble for it. Everything’s fearfully proper at Mallachie nowadays. That’s part of the dreariness of the place. Uncle David is excessively religious.’
‘Religious? How odd! But, no – I suppose it’s not. What kind of religion?’
‘Spiky and High Church. He has a private chapel and a personal chaplain. Father Somebody, who wears a soutane and a biretta. It’s a terrible scandal.’
‘I should think so!’ Mungo considered this curious information for a moment. ‘Does Sedley join in their devotions?’
He got no reply. Ian had turned over once more, and fallen instantly asleep.
But Mungo himself lay awake for some time. Or perhaps it was only half-awake, for he was seeing some of those vivid evanescent pictures which often accompanied him over the threshold of sleep. He was seeing Robert Cardower, suddenly startled by a simple topographical statement. He was seeing Lord Auldearn looking at him, Lord Auldearn giving a sudden nod, Lord Auldearn so casually handing him a framed photograph of his favourite son, Douglas Cardower. ‘A well-grown lad – the tallest of the lot,’ he heard Lord Auldearn say.
When Mungo woke up next morning it was to the conviction that he was in the possession, after all, of something other than a fantasy of his own devising. He was in possession of hard knowledge. But fortunately it was knowledge which could have no practical repercussions in the world. It wasn’t a thing to make public. And Ian still didn’t know – or he surely wouldn’t have come up with the possibility as no more than a drowsy and idle joke. Perhaps he’d have to know. But Mungo wasn’t at all sure he wanted him to. For weren’t they – the two of them – just right as they were?
They packed up and drove to Rome – where Elizabeth Cardower was charming and Mary Cardower enchanting. But the enchantment told Mungo only one thing. Anne Cardower hadn’t, as he’d told himself, been a brief madness. It was the romantic reading of the matter that was right. He was in love with Anne still.
Part IV
Scotland
Chapter Fifteen
Mallachie Castle stood in the middle of a wooded park of 1200 acres, and the park in the middle of Mallachie Forest, which was many times larger than that. Apart from Mallachie Mains and the cottages attached to it, the nearest building was a ruined priory, and the nearest after that an abandoned railway station. The Castle itself retained no appearance of being a place of strength, although substantial remains of the fifteenth-century Tower of Mallachie were entombed in the middle of it. It was a large low whitewashed mansion, in the construction of which its nineteenth-century architect had been held on a tight rein so far as embellishments of the Balmoral order were concerned. From every window in the house the view ended, whether at a farther or a nearer remove, in dark and densely-marshalled hosts of fir and pine. And because Lord Brightmony retained in his seclusion some interest in arboriculture, and because his factor obstinately resisted the pursuit of this on other parts of the estate, small plantations of one sort or another were constantly creeping across the park and towards the house, like the vanguard of an encircling army. It might have been said that Birnam wood was coming to Dunsinane.
Nothing, Mungo thought, could be more of a contrast to Stradlings, where in every direction the eye was drawn through casual colonnades of beech trees to the rolling vistas of the down. And if Mallachie in its outward appearance suggested immurement on a heroic scale, everything in its interior was equally claustral in effect – including the monkish proprietor of the place, whom it was almost impossible to conceive as having emerged from the same womb as his brother, Robert Cardower.
Mungo had never in his life before been inside a great Scottish mansion, but he couldn’t believe that many were like this. Wherever there was stone to uncover, it had been uncovered and whitewashed to match the exterior of the building. Tons of plaster and panelling must have been bashed and ripped away to achieve this effect. There seemed not to be a carpet or a rug in the house; where the floors weren’t again bare stone they were raw scrubbed wood, with here and there a strip of rush matting of a dismal pseudo-mediaeval sort. The pictures all had religious subjects. But whereas some of them one might have met at Bamberton (including Murillos, Riberas, and Zurbarans which testified to a lively eye in some Cardower who had followed Wellington around Spain), others were hideous modern colour-prints of the kind to be bought in ecclesiastical knick-knack shops. Mungo’s own room displayed, opposite the bed in a position much corresponding to that labour of Indian piety in Howard 4, 4 which had interested Vera, one of those well-groomed and pomaded Christs, himself faintly luminous like a deep-sea fish, who points to a supernumerary and radioactive heart pinned over his chest. Some of the pictures in the more public rooms (not that there was a public) had little lights burning in front of them.
Through this scene of things Ian’s Uncle David restlessly wandered for a good part of the day, muttering out of a missal or breviary held before him. Sometimes – and this could be quite startling – he produced a loud pious ejaculation. At other times he could be heard in his chapel, droning his way through penitential psalms. According to Ian, the chaplain, Father Balietti, was not only at his wit’s end in devising penances; he was also required to reinforce his ghostly counsels with vigorous performances as a flagellator. Mungo, although as a psychiatrist he admitted the a priori likelihood of this, didn’t really believe it. It appeared that, some years before, Ian had insisted to his father that Uncle David was mad; his father had passed on the persuasion to Lord Auldearn; Lord Auldearn had somehow contrived to insinuate a couple of eminent mad doctors (as he called them) into Mallachie; and the mad doctors had pronounced Lord Brightmony to be not only sane but a man of notably interesting conversation as well. As a consequence, the heir to the marquisate of Auldearn retained the agreeable status of an aristocratic eccentric.
But there could be no doubt that somewhere inside Ian’s skull his Uncle David roamed as a disturbing presence. Lord Auldearn had probably known this when he had pretty well commanded his grandson not to dodge the duty of presenting himself at Mallachie in due season. Mungo had known it when he had pitched at Ian in the darkness outside Perugia the analysis which had become known between them as the theory of uncle-eclipse. (Lord Robert, Mungo considered, was too lightweight a character to eclipse anyone, which explained Ian’s whoring after two disastrous uncles to stand in on the job. But this highly scientific embroidery of his case Mungo didn’t pass on to his friend.) Ian himself knew it. It accounted for extravagances like the flagellation story, and one or two others so outrageous that Mungo, not easily distasted, had simply had to tell Ian to shut up.
Mungo himself was disturbed by Lord Brightmony. He had never met religious mania before, and it was uncomfortable in itself, although probably harmless enough. But what chiefly troubled him about Ian’s uncle was the manner in which he seemed to exemplify the protean nature of family resemblances. Robert Cardower and his son Ian were remarkably like each other; Robert was not in the least like his brother David; but there were times when David revealed a startling likeness to Ian or vice-versa. Whether Ian himself was aware of this or not, Mungo didn’t know. In any case, it was like a tantalising piece of bad logic.
There was something more. Lord Brightmony – tall, dark, and cadaverous – had an eye as glittering as the Ancient Mariner’s. But after a day or two in his company (and Lord Brightmony was punctilious and correct in the entertainment of his young guests) Mungo realised that he possessed no more than what had to be called a sideways knowledge of this. Apart from the one or two occasions upon which civility absolutely required it, Lord Brightmony had never looked at him. If he conversed indoors, that piercing gaze was fixed upon the floor, the ceiling, or the nearest edifying picture; if in the open air, upon the ground, the heavens, or the middle distance. Mostly it was downwards, which is what prudency prescribes. Mungo supposed that in this Lord Brightmony was acting under the instructions of his spiritual adviser, and it was with a jolt that its implication came to him. He might have been suddenly meeting the Baron de Charlus out of Proust.
Father Balietti was all silver crucifix and bulging belly, rusty skirts and supple speeches. Mungo didn’t take to him at all. According to Ian, Balietti’s hold over Uncle David didn’t p
revent Uncle David’s leading him a dog’s life. At seasons of special sanctity he was banished from the table at which Uncle David and Leonard Sedley dined, and had to stand at a lectern and read theological works aloud: afterwards, a cold cutlet would be sent up to his room. Perhaps Father Balietti had hopes of a milder regime at Mallachie in his declining years. He treated Ian with obsequious respect, and Mungo with an only slightly modified version of the same thing. The poor chap hadn’t much of a hope, Mungo thought. However it might be with Lord Robert, when Ian became sixth marquis (which seemed to be what the book of rules for these matters prescribed) poor old Balietti would be out on his ear.
But if Ian hated Balietti, he also hated the whole thing – hated it so much that Mungo was inclined to call morbid the sense of family duty that had brought him to the place. Perhaps without Mungo he wouldn’t have come at all. Perhaps this was one reason why Ian’s grandfather had rather oddly said that he particularly wanted Mungo to be taken to Mallachie. But Mungo could now tell himself that there had been a more substantial reason as well.
So here they were. It was the first week of August, and they had arrived after spending nearly a fortnight at Fintry. The summer term had ended with Mungo’s obtaining (to his professed utter astonishment, but not quite so much astonishment as that in his secret heart) a First Class in something called English Moderations. Ian, whose History course didn’t involve such a test at this stage, had treated the achievement pretty well as his own, and caused its celebration in a considerable quantity of champagne. The success was having a bad effect on Mungo’s studies. He concluded that, having rung that sort of dons’ bell early and once, there was no great point in striving to ring it again two years later. So he had shoved aside his books and begun to write a novel. At Fintry much of Ian’s energies had gone loyally into the effort of persuading Miss Guthrie that this was a rational and laudable course of conduct. Ian and Mungo’s aunt had taken to each other. But there wasn’t much on which they agreed.
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