When we came to Stourwater that Sunday morning, the first sight was impressive. Set among oaks and beeches in a green hollow of the land, the castle was approached by a causeway crossing the remains of a moat, a broad expanse of water through which, with great deliberation, a pair of black swans, their passage sending ripples through the pond weed, glided between rushes swaying gently in the warm September air. Here was the Middle Age, from the pages of Tennyson, or Scott, at its most elegant: all sordid and painful elements subtly removed. Some such thought must have struck Sir Gavin too, for I heard him murmuring at the wheel:
‘“And sometimes thro’ the mirror blue
The knights come riding two and two . . .”’
There was, in fact, no one about at all; neither knights nor hinds, this absence of human life increasing a sense of unreality, as if we were travelling in a dream. The cars passed under the portcullis, and across a cobbled quadrangle. Beyond this open space, reached by another archway, was a courtyard of even larger dimensions, in the centre of which a sunken lawn had been laid out, with a fountain at the centre, and carved stone flower-pots, shaped like urns, at each of the four corners. The whole effect was not, perhaps, altogether in keeping with the rest of the place. Through a vaulted gateway on one side could be seen the high yew hedges of the garden. Steps led up to the main entrance of the castle’s domestic wing, at which the cars drew up.
Mounted effigies in Gothic armour guarded either side of the door by which we entered the Great Hall; and these dramatic figures of man and horse struck a new and somewhat disturbing note; though one at which the sunken garden had already hinted. Such implications of an over-elaborate solicitude were followed up everywhere the eye rested, producing a result altogether different from the cool, detached vision manifested a minute or two earlier by grey walls and towers rising out of the green, static landscape. Something was decidedly amiss. The final consequence of the pains lavished on these halls and galleries was not precisely that of a Hollywood film set, the objects assembled being, in the first place, too genuine, too valuable; there was even a certain sense of fitness, of historical association more or less correctly assessed. The display was discomforting, not contemptible. The impression was of sensations that might precede one of those episodes in a fairy story, when, at a given moment, the appropriate spell is pronounced to cause domes and minarets, fountains and pleasure-gardens, to disappear into thin air; leaving the hero—in this case, Sir Magnus Donners—shivering in rags beneath the blasted oak of a grim forest, or scorched by rays of a blazing sun among the rocks and boulders of some desolate mountainside. In fact, Sir Gavin’s strictures on Stourwater as ‘too perfect’ were inadequate as a delineation to the extent of being almost beside the point.
I had supposed that, in common with most visits paid on these terms in the country, the Walpole-Wilson group might be left most of the time huddled in a cluster of their own, while the Donners house-party, drawn together as never before by the arrival of strangers, would discourse animatedly together at some distance off, the one faction scarcely mixing at all with the other. This not uncommon predicament could no doubt in a general way have been exemplified soon after we had been received by Sir Magnus—looking more healthily clerical than ever—in the Long Gallery (at the far end of which hung the Holbein, one of the portraits of Erasmus), had not various unforeseen circumstances contributed to modify what might be regarded as a more normal course of events. For example, among a number of faces in the room possessing a somewhat familiar appearance, I suddenly noticed Stringham and Bill Truscott, both of whom were conversing with an unusually pretty girl.
We were presented, one by one, to Prince Theodoric, who wore a grey flannel suit, unreservedly continental in cut, and appeared far more at his ease than at Mrs. Andriadis’s party: smiling in a most engaging manner when he shook hands. He spoke that scrupulously correct English, characteristic of certain foreign royalties, that confers on the language a smoothness and flexibility quite alien to the manner in which English people themselves talk. There was a word from him for everyone. Sir Gavin seized his hand as if he were meeting a long lost son, while Prince Theodoric himself seemed, on his side, equally pleased at their reunion. Lady Walpole-Wilson, probably because she remembered Prince Theodoric only as a boy, showed in her eye apparent surprise at finding him so grown-up. Only Eleanor’s, and her aunt’s, firmly-clasped lips and stiff curtsey suggested entire disapproval.
Further introductions took place. The Huntercombes were there—Lord Huntercombe was Lord Lieutenant of the county—and there were a crowd of persons whose identities, as a whole, I failed to assimilate; though here and there was recognisable an occasional notability like Sir Horrocks Rusby, whose name I remembered Widmerpool mentioning on some occasions, who had not so long before achieved a good deal of prominence in the newspapers as counsel in the Derwentwater divorce case. I also noticed Mrs. Wentworth—whom Sir Horrocks had probably cross-questioned in the witness-box—still looking rather sulky, as she stood in one of the groups about us. When the formalities of these opening moves of the game had been completed, and we had been given cocktails, Stringham strolled across the room. His face was deeply burned by the sun. I wondered whether this was the result of the Deauville trip, of which Mrs. Andriadis had spoken, or if, on the contrary, division between them had been final. He had not wholly lost his appearance of fatigue.
‘You must inspect my future wife,’ he said at once.
This announcement of imminent marriage was a complete surprise. Barnby had said, during the course of the evening we had spent together: ‘When people think they are never further from marriage, they are often, in reality, never nearer to it,’ but that kind of precept takes time to learn. I had certainly accepted the implication that nothing was more distant than marriage from Stringham’s intentions when he had so violently abandoned Mrs. Andriadis’s house; although now I even wondered whether he could have decided to repair matters by making Mrs. Andriadis herself his wife. To be able to consider this a possibility showed, I suppose, in its grasp of potentialities, an advance on my own part of which I should have been incapable earlier in the year. However, without further developing the news, he led me to the girl from whose side he had come, who was still talking to Truscott.
‘Peggy,’ he said, ‘this is an old friend of mine.’
Apart from former signs given by Stringham’s behaviour, external evidence had been supplied, indirectly by Anne Stepney, and directly by Rosie Manasch, to the effect that anything like an engagement was ‘off’. Peggy Stepney, whom I now recognised from pictures I had seen of her, was not unlike her sister, with hair of the same faintly-reddish shade, though here, instead of a suggestion of disorder, the elder sister looked as if she might just have stepped gracefully from the cover of a fashion magazine; ‘too perfect’, indeed, as Sir Gavin might have said. She was, of course, a ‘beauty’, and possessed a kind of cold symmetry, very taking, and at the same time a little alarming. However, this exterior was not accompanied by a parallel coolness of manner; on the contrary, she could in the circumstances scarcely have been more agreeable. While we talked, we were joined by Mrs. Wentworth, at whose arrival I was conscious of a slight stiffening in Stringham’s bearing, an almost imperceptible acerbity, due possibly—though by no means certainly, I thought—to the part played by Mrs. Wentworth in his sister’s divorce. In comparing the looks of the two young women, it was immediately clear that Peggy Stepney was more obviously the beauty; though there was something about Mrs. Wentworth that made the discord she had aroused in so many quarters easily understandable.
‘How long have I got to go on sitting next to that equerry of Theodoric’s, Bill?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been through his favourite dance tunes at dinner last night. I can’t stand them at lunch again to-day. I’m not as young as I was.’
‘Talk to him about birds and beasts,’ said Stringham. ‘I’ve already tried that with great success—the flora and fauna of England and Wales.’
&n
bsp; Mrs. Wentworth seemed not greatly amused by this facetiousness. Her demeanour was less friendly than Peggy Stepney’s, and she did no more than glance in my direction when we were introduced. I was impressed by Barnby’s temerity in tackling so formidable an objective. Luncheon was announced at that moment, so that the four of us temporarily parted company.
The dining-room was hung with sixteenth-century tapestries. I supposed that they might be Gobelin from their general appearance, blue and crimson tints set against lemon yellow. They illustrated the Seven Deadly Sins. I found myself seated opposite Luxuria, a failing principally portrayed in terms of a winged and horned female figure, crowned with roses, holding between finger and thumb one of her plump, naked breasts, while she gazed into a looking-glass, supported on one side by Cupid and on the other by a goat of unreliable aspect. The four-footed beast of the Apocalypse, with his seven dragon-heads dragged her triumphal car, which was of great splendour. Hercules, bearing his clubs, stood by, somewhat gloomily watching this procession, his mind filled, no doubt, with disquieting recollections. In the background, the open doors of a pillared house revealed a four-poster bed, with hangings rising to an apex, under the canopy of which a couple lay clenched in a priapic grapple. Among trees, to the right of the composition, further couples and groups, three or four of them at least, were similarly occupied in smaller houses and Oriental tents; or, in one case, simply on the ground.
I had been placed next to Rosie Manasch, who was, at the moment of seating herself, engaged in talk with her neighbour on the far side; and—curious to investigate some of the by-products of indulgence depicted in this sequence of animated, and at times enigmatic, incidents—I found myself fully occupied in examining unobtrusively the scenes spread out on the tapestry. There had been, I was dimly aware, some rearrangement of places on my right-hand side, where a chair had remained empty for a moment or two. Now a girl sat down there, next to me, to whom I had not yet, so far as I knew, been introduced, with some muttered words from Truscott, who had instigated the change of position—possibly to relieve Mrs. Wentworth from further strain of making conversation with Prince Theodoric’s equerry.
‘I don’t think you remember me,’ she said, almost at once, in a curiously harsh voice that brought back, in fact, that same sense of past years returning that Stringham’s enquiry for matches had caused me at the coffee-stall. ‘I used to be called Jean Templer. You are a friend of Peter’s, and you came to stay with us years ago.’
It was true that I had not recognised her. I think we might even have exchanged words without my guessing her identity, so little had she been in my thoughts, so unexpected a place was this to find her. That was not because she had changed greatly. On the contrary, she still seemed slim, attenuated, perhaps not—like the two other girls with whom I had been talking, and round whom my thoughts, before the distraction of the tapestry, had been drifting—exactly a ‘beauty’; but, all the same, mysterious and absorbing: certainly pretty enough, so far as that went, just as she had seemed when I had visited the Templers after leaving school. There was perhaps a touch of the trim secretary of musical comedy. I saw also, with a kind of relief, that she seemed to express none of the qualities I had liked in Barbara. There was a sense of restraint here, a reserve at present unpredictable. I tried to excuse my bad manners in having failed at once to remember her. She gave one of those quick, almost masculine laughs. I was not at all sure how I felt about her, though conscious suddenly that being in love with Barbara, painful as some of its moments had been, now seemed a rather amateurish affair; just as my feelings for Barbara had once appeared to me so much more mature than those previously possessed for Suzette; or, indeed, for Jean herself.
‘You were so deep in the tapestry,’ she said.
‘I was wondering about the couple in the little house on the hill.’
‘They have a special devil—or is he a satyr?—to themselves.’
‘He seems to be collaborating, doesn’t he?’
‘Just lending a hand, I think.’
‘A guest, I suppose—or member of the staff?’
‘Oh, a friend of the family,’ she said. ‘All newly-married couples have someone of that sort about. Sometimes several. Didn’t you know? I see you can’t be married.’
‘But how do you know they are newly married?’
‘They’ve got such a smart little house,’ she said. ‘They must be newly married. And rather well off, too, I should say.’
I was left a trifle breathless by this exchange, not only because it was quite unlike the kind of luncheon-table conversation I had expected to come my way in that particular place, but also on account of its contrast with Jean’s former deportment, when we had met at her home. At that moment I hardly considered the difference that age had made, no doubt in both of us. She was, I thought, about a couple of years younger than myself. Feeling unable to maintain this show of detachment towards human—and, in especial, matrimonial—affairs, I asked whether it was not true that she had married Bob Duport. She nodded; not exactly conveying, it seemed to me, that by some happy chance their union had introduced her to an unexpected terrestrial paradise.
‘Do you know Bob?’
‘I just met him years ago with Peter.’
‘Have you seen Peter lately?’
‘Not for about a year. He has been doing very well in the City, hasn’t he? He always tells me so.’
She laughed.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘He has been making quite a lot of money, I think. That is always something. But I wish he would settle down, get married, for instance.’
I was aware of an unexpected drift towards intimacy, although this sudden sense of knowing her all at once much better was not simultaneously accompanied by any clear portrayal in my own mind of the kind of person she might really be. Perhaps intimacy of any sort, love or friendship, impedes all exactness of definition. For example, Mr. Deacon’s character was plainer to me than Barnby’s, although by then I knew Barnby better than I knew Mr. Deacon. In short, the persons we see most clearly are not necessarily those we know best. In any case, to attempt to describe a woman in the broad terms employable for a man is perhaps irrational.
‘I went to a party in your London house given by Mrs. Andriadis.’
‘How very grand,’ she said. ‘What was it like? We let the place almost as soon as we took it, because Bob had to go abroad. It’s rather a horrid house, really. I hate it, and everything in it.’
I did not know how to comment on this attitude towards her own home, which—as I had agreed upon that famous night with the young man with the orchid—certainly left, in spite of its expensive air, a good deal to be desired. I said that I wished she had been present at the party.
‘Oh, us,’ she said laughing again, as if any such eventuality were utterly unthinkable. ‘Besides, we were away. Bob was arguing about nickel or aluminium or something for months on end. As a matter of fact, I think we shall have to sue Mrs. Andriadis when he comes back. She has raised absolute hell in the house. Burnt the boiler out and broken a huge looking-glass.’
She reminded me immediately of her brother in this disavowal of being the kind of person asked to Mrs. Andriadis’s parties; for the setting in which we found ourselves seemed, on the face of it, to be perfectly conceivable as an extension of Mrs. Andriadis’s sort of entertaining. Indeed, it appeared to me, in my inexperience, that almost exactly the same chilly undercurrent of conflict was here perceptible as that permeating the house in Hill Street a month or two before. Dialectical subtleties could no doubt be advanced—as Stringham had first suggested, and remarks at Sillery’s had seemed to substantiate—to demolish Sir Magnus’s pretensions, hierarchically speaking, to more than the possession of ‘a lot of money’; in spite of various testimonials paid to him, at Hinton and elsewhere, on the score of his greatness in other directions. However, even allowing that Sir Magnus might be agreed to occupy a position only within this comparatively modest category of social differentiation,
such assets as were his were not commonly disregarded, even in the world of Mrs. Andriadis. Her sphere might be looked upon, perhaps, as a more trenchant and mobile one, though it was doubtful if even this estimate were beyond question.
In fact, I was uncertain whether or not I might have misunderstood Jean, and that she had intended to imply that her existence was at a higher, rather than lower, plane. Some similar thought may have struck her too, because, as if in explanation of a matter that needed straightening out, she said: ‘Baby brought me here. She wanted someone to play for her side, and Bob’s aluminium fitted in nicely for this week-end, as Theodoric knew Bob—had even met him.’
The concept of ‘playing for her side’ opened up in the imagination fascinating possibilities in connexion with Mrs. Wentworth’s position in the household. I remembered the phrase as one used by Stringham when enlisting my own support in connexion with his project of ‘going down’ from the university after a single term of residence—the time, in fact, when he had asked his mother to lunch to meet Sillery. However, the status of Mrs. Wentworth at the castle was obviously not a matter to be investigated there and then, while, in addition to any question of diffidence in enquiring about that particular affair, Jean’s initial display of vivacity became suddenly exhausted, and she sank back into one of those silences that I remembered so well from the time when we had first met. For the rest of the meal she was occupied in fragmentary conversation with the man on her right, or I was myself talking with Rosie Manasch; so that we hardly spoke to one another again while in the dining-room.
Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 1 Page 40