by C. P. Snow
Sixty years after, in her drawing-room with Humphrey that evening, it would have needed imagination, maybe romantic imagination, to feel that her face could have been as soft and tender-smiling as in the painting. There her arms were shown as slender but rounded. Now the bones were left. But in the painting the neat skull-like Hamitic head foretold the head of today, sculptured under the parted hair. The eyes, set deep in the skull, burning brown, hadn’t changed, though they stared more now that the flesh had dissolved away. Occasionally, Lady Ashbrook had been known to harangue pretty women who were sad that age was gaining on them, pretty women half a century younger than herself. She did so by a vigorous exhortation: Once a beauty, always a beauty. It was to be inferred, so the cooler of her listeners had reported, that she was speaking from direct experience of her own. Had she ever been a beauty? Not according to the standards of the nineteen seventies anyway, and some said not at all. But she had had the confidence of one, and that was nine points of the game.
‘Help yourself to a drink,’ she said to Humphrey, after she had sat down. ‘You know what you like.’
Humphrey did help himself, and to a distinctly stiff drink. He didn’t trust all the myths about Lady Ashbrook, certainly not about her reasons for existing so frugally. Humphrey, who had observed her for a long time, believed that she was, to say the least, somewhat parsimonious. He didn’t expect to be invited to have another drink that night.
She was sitting, still straight-backed, in an armchair which rested on the carpet in front of the extinct fireplace. He returned to another chair opposite hers, and started on what he had come determined to say.
‘You oughtn’t to live here alone. You know that, Madge. You must have someone here.’
Madge was the most incongruous of names for her, but for myth-makers she had glorified it.
‘Why?’
‘You oughtn’t to be by yourself.’
‘It makes no odds.’ Voice ungiving.
‘I wish you’d listen to sense.’ It was useless, he knew, to force or bully her, as others must have found, and so he became easier, not as over-hearty. He asked if there was anything he could do.
‘Nothing at all.’ Again she said brusquely that it had been nice of him to come, but she said it as though she felt weak for having asked him.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘It’s a tiring business, having those wretched tests.’ Suddenly, turning the subject, she went on: ‘How are you, my dear?’
‘Oh, I’m all right.’ He couldn’t let her divert him. He said: ‘Of course, there can’t be any news.’
‘Didn’t I tell you there couldn’t?’ She had rasped out in anger. ‘They said they’d have some next week. I suppose they’ll report to my doctor; that’s the way they do it. You know Ralph Perryman. They’ll tell him. He’s a good little man.’
This Dr Perryman had other patients in the vicinity, and was an acquaintance of Humphrey’s. In any normal sense, he was by no means little, but Lady Ashbrook tended to use the term about anyone she employed.
At a loss, Humphrey was asking about the hospital, but she gave a sarcastic smile.
‘Look, my dear,’ she said, ‘this is all boring. It’s boring for you. It’s quite as boring for me. There’s nothing to say. When there’s nothing to say, it’s better to say nothing. Let us talk of something else.’
Humphrey distrusted some of the myths which grew round Madge Ashbrook, but was sometimes surprised at the myths which didn’t grow. He couldn’t remember any of her admirers saying that she was a woman of absolute courage, yet that myth would have been true. Flawless courage, stark as she was showing now. Courage of any kind, including brute physical courage. In the war, as a middle-aged woman driving a car through bombings, she had been glacially brave, and made her soldier companions ashamed. The trouble was, it was a courage so stark that it wasn’t comforting for anyone like Humphrey, knowing what she was going through.
So they talked of something else. At the best of times her conversation wasn’t the most illuminating that Humphrey listened to, and that evening, though it might be gallant, it didn’t illuminate him at all. She had, as usual, only two subjects. On both her opinion was simple, acerb and positive. One subject was the Labour Government and the state of the nation. On that, there was just one thing which puzzled her. Of course, the country was being ruined. Were the people doing it communist, crooks or fools? She was inclined to think that there was a marxist conspiracy, possibly abetted by crooks. Her second subject was their common acquaintances, in particular the young women they both knew. It was some time since she had had much of a social life, but she kept a scathing eye on the people round about, particularly the young women. On this pet topic Humphrey had known her to be bleakly funny, but now she was trying too hard. She was not fond of women, and thought they were overestimated.
‘That Kate Lefroy,’ she said dismissively. ‘She tries to do good. In that hospital of hers. I suppose she tries to do good to her ridiculous husband. Doing good!’
Madge Ashbrook was interested in people’s goings-on, but not over-concerned about their feelings. Kate Lefroy, who lived in a house on the other side of the Square, was a woman for whom Humphrey had affection, and in his imagination occasionally something more. It was not the morals of those she called ‘young women’ (they weren’t so young as all that) that she reprobated. With Humphrey, who knew something of her own history, she would have had too much sarcasm for that. No, where she found them deplorable was in their lack of style.
‘Style! It’s all gone,’ she said. ‘It won’t come back.’
Lady Ashbrook made one exception. She had noticed someone who had a little style. She’d also noticed the young man who seemed attached to her.
‘Now, he’s brilliant,’ said the old lady. ‘It’s to be hoped nothing comes of it. He mustn’t throw himself away.’
Sometimes, in Lady Ashbrook’s inspection of the human scene, it seemed that almost any woman, even one with a trace of style, was bad for almost any man.
There was a special and aggravated case, about which her voice became even deeper and more dismissive. Her grandson Loseby had somehow picked up a girl – she pronounced that word gairl in the old-fashioned way – who lived in Eaton Square. Contempt growling out, she went on saying that this gairl was totally unsuitable. Loseby was a nice boy, she told Humphrey.
Loseby was neither a surname nor a Christian name. It was a courtesy title. Her own son was now the Marquess, and this was one of the titles in the family. Regressing to another old fashion, she continually addressed her grandson by it in company, as though the period were the eighteen nineties, when she was born.
‘Totally unsuitable. Does anyone know who she is?’ In fact, Lady Ashbrook knew well enough. The girl’s father lived in luxury in Eaton Square. He was rich. That might have passed, but he was a Labour Member of Parliament, which made it doubly bad. He was being tipped for office, which was worse. The scandal sheets were also tipping him as a candidate for financial shenanigans, which was worst of all.
‘Nothing but a tuppenny-ha’penny crook,’ said Lady Ashbrook, on no evidence at all, and not reflecting that, if he were a crook, it certainly wasn’t for tuppence ha’penny.
‘The gairl’s not bad to look at,’ she said. ‘Good enough for a bit of slap and tickle, that’s all.’
After that peculiar denunciation, and almost without a pause, Madge Ashbrook stared across at Humphrey and said: ‘Do you know–’ She had a hesitation which was not quite the usual hiatus in her throat, and then went on: ‘Do you know, I’ve always been frightened of this.’
She hadn’t abdicated her authority, but Humphrey understood. It was as near a confidence as she could reach. She hadn’t abdicated her authority, but the certainty was gone. She wasn’t talking of her grandson’s affairs. She had broken the charade. She was talking of her own body. ‘This’ was cancer. Gallant as she was, she couldn’t speak the word.
‘I know,’ said Humphrey; and a
dded lamely, ‘It may not be true.’
‘It may not. What do you think?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s no use giving false comfort. I’ve no idea. It’s dreadful, but all you can do is wait. You said they’ll tell you next week, didn’t you?’
‘I don’t want to hear.’
She stiffened herself, and broke out in a harsh impatient tone: ‘This is boring. I told you it was boring.’ Tight with angry scorn, she returned to the qualities, or lack of them, of Loseby’s girl.
Soon Humphrey felt that he had done his duty, and could decently leave. No expression of hope, or even good wishes, would please her, but he said that he would see her soon.
Out in the Square, the night was still hot, but the air was free. He felt a kind of cowardly relief and shame, to be in the free air, out of the sight of fear and courage.
2
On his way home, Humphrey could smell flowers from the window-boxes, tobacco plants, sweet peas, stocks, a refreshment on other summer nights, and on this one, too.
He had not been sitting long in his drawing-room when the bell rang, and just like the old lady an hour before he had to go downstairs and along a hall. The couple he had greeted in passing earlier were waiting outside the door. He took them through a back room down rickety steps into his patio garden.
This was the pair of whom Lady Ashbrook, departing from her general form, had approved. The man was in his late twenties, the woman a couple of years older. They were both tall, and he was as stringy as a distance runner. In the garden, her face was obscured in the half-light; his was long, intelligent, high-cheekboned, with a mouth ready to smile. His name was Paul Mason, and hers Celia Hawthorne. They were polite and at the same time easy-mannered, calling Humphrey by his Christian name as though he were their own age. Paul insisted on going up to the kitchen to fetch the tray of drinks. ‘You two wouldn’t be as safe on those stairs. They must be a rather useful hazard sometimes, mustn’t they, Humphrey?’
Humphrey grinned. Recently he had become used to Paul’s kind of conversation, and thought he caught glimpses of what went on beneath. Celia he had met only casually, and, while Paul had left them, Humphrey was observing her. She was pretty, in an unsensational fashion, so far as he could make out in the twilit garden, good skin, clear eyes. When he asked her a question, there was a pause before she replied, but then the answer was fluent enough. Her voice was high, light, sometimes as though absent from the scene. But once, after another of his questions entirely innocent, she gave a surprisingly, disconcertingly, full-throated laugh.
She was wearing a simple white summer dress. Humphrey found it increasingly mysterious that Lady Ashbrook should have decided, with the force of law, that she had style. Often Lady Ashbrook’s verdicts depended on class, but there could not be anything in that. Celia wasn’t anything like elevated enough to qualify on that platform. Humphrey remembered Paul saying that she was the daughter of a canon, ordinary professional middle-class, less privileged than Paul himself, whose father was an abnormally successful, and an abnormally flamboyant, barrister.
When Paul returned and put the tray on the iron table round which they were sitting, he poured their drinks, gin for Celia, whisky for Humphrey and himself. The garden was quiet; at last the long summer light was fading. Over the roofs to the east, in the direction of Westminster and the river, the moon had risen, clear silver in the unrefracting air. Roses gleamed ghost white at the end of the garden. That wasn’t far away from them, for the garden was very small, about fifteen yards by five. Since the ground had been methodically rationed, that was precisely the same as the size of the gardens visible from Lady Ashbrook’s back windows. But, for them all, the gardens were an amenity, and they felt secure from the clutter and the hubbub when they could take refuge there. Humphrey, not a gardener, had been heard to remark that it was fortunate roses grew anywhere, and bloomed several times a year.
That night, however, he had dropped out of the conversation having swallowed one drink and asked Paul for another. The other two were talking cheerfully, but Paul looked at Humphrey as he sat silent. After a while, Paul asked, quietly: ‘Anything happened?’
‘I was going to see old Lady Ashbrook when I met you.’
‘How is she? Is there anything the matter?’
‘I think she might say that.’ With Paul, Humphrey couldn’t avoid dropping into the same kind of sub-sarcasm; but the young man was too perceptive to brush off, and it was an easement to explain.
‘God Almighty.’ Paul’s expression had gone dark. ‘Is there anything we can do?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Would it be any good to see her?’
‘Whatever can be any good?’ Humphrey added: ‘You might try.’
‘Of course,’ said Celia, in her light detached voice, ‘she’s over eighty. It’s a good age.’
‘Born in 1894.’ Paul had a computer-like memory.
‘She must have come out before the first war,’ Celia went on reflecting.
‘Do you think that’s any consolation to her now?’
Celia’s responses were too cool for Humphrey and his tone was roughening.
Celia seemed to be speaking to herself: ‘It wouldn’t be a nice way to die.’
Paul began to talk of the old lady. Finding neutral ground, he said: ‘She is rather a period figure.’
‘I suppose she is to you.’ Humphrey gave a half-smile.
‘Come on. She must have been talked about as long as you can remember.’
Once more Humphrey echoed the young man’s tone: ‘I’ll give you that. One sometimes heard the name.’
‘Were there many men?’ By now Celia had ceased to be remote.
‘What have you heard?’
‘Well, she can’t help being a bit of history, can she?’
‘History can get things wrong, you know.’
‘But there were some men?’
‘Of course.’
‘You’re not on duty now. Don’t mind us,’ Paul said, looking at him with affection. ‘You’ve given that up, remember.’
‘Yes, please,’ said Celia, also with affection.
‘If you don’t take this for gospel…,’ Humphrey told them. ‘I don’t know all that much, anyway not for sure. I do know that she skipped from her first husband – bolted, she called it – after she had been married a couple of years. She had the one son. She was only a girl then. But she told me herself she was old enough to know better than marry Max. She hated him. Max was a stinker, she said. Madge has sometimes a simple eloquence of her own.’
A little earlier, Celia had been indulging in her full uninhibited sensual laugh.
‘What about the son?’ Paul said.
‘She hated him, too. And has gone on doing so. That being her only child.’
‘It sounds like the sort of thing that happens in dynasties. Too ferocious for the likes of us.’ Paul bent towards Celia, and then apologised for breaking into the story.
‘That’s all I’ve ever had from Madge herself. It’s on record, she married again pretty soon after Max divorced her. Ashbrook. You may have heard, everyone has always said that that was an idyllic marriage. One of the wonderful marriages of the twenties. Made for each other, everyone said. She was heartbroken when he dropped dead, they said. I may be too suspicious, but I have my doubts. I do know one other certain thing. Just by chance. While the perfect marriage was in the public view, she had an affair, quite a long one, with Hal Hillmorton. Well hidden, like most of that old operator’s goings-on. You couldn’t have known him. He died not so long ago. He’d have amused you, though. He’d have liked you,’ he said to Celia paying her a compliment, but one, he thought, which might have been true.
They had become comfortable in the dusk, with stories of Lady Ashbrook in her prime. The shades of mortal illness had receded. Emotions were not continuous, even for Humphrey and Paul, in whom they persevered more than was common.
What about Madge after her second husband’s death?
Oh, there had been other lovers, up to old age. At least Humphrey had heard legends, not just of minor affairs, but of two or three, each of which different authorities, confident and contradictory, claimed to be the great love of her life. A phrase, Humphrey said, which had been used of Madge Ashbrook quite often during her career, but which wouldn’t be used of anyone nowadays.
Something like confidences of their own – no, not confidences, but something like the first desire for them – were emerging in the dark. Paul hadn’t been married, but Celia had, and in law still was.
‘He left me. A couple of years ago,’ she said.
‘Did you arrange that between you?’ Humphrey asked.
‘No, he left me,’ she said, in a clear firm tone. ‘I didn’t skip like Lady Ashbrook. It might have been better for my morale if I had.’ She added: ‘By the by, he wasn’t a stinker. Unless I was, too.’
Humphrey told her that his first marriage had been a disaster. Children? Two by his second wife, son a doctor in a mission hospital, daughter doing social work.
Had she had children? One, a son, she told him – copying Lady Ashbrook. In fact, she must drive home to him soon. He was six years old, but she had someone reliable looking after him.
Humphrey stood at his front door and watched them walking towards Paul’s house, hand in hand, as he had seen them earlier that evening. Beneath the high lamp, they had a long and practised kiss, and she drove off. Until he had heard more of the circumstances, Humphrey had assumed that she would be spending the night with Paul. But he guessed, with some confidence, that they had been to bed before they called on him. They had the sheen of recently satisfied sex. He would also have guessed, with slightly less confidence, that this relation had started in bed, without much in the way of acquaintanceship, or anything like old-fashioned courting, and that now they were having to make discoveries and learn about each other. He had an idea that their wills had begun to cross.