by Angus Wilson
Madame Houdet had heard it all so often before. In some, of course, it would have been wicked, but in Lilian Portway she preferred to think it was merely senile folly. She noted how her friend's head shook when she was excited. Soon all this senseless talk and pride would be broken, she would be like a little child and then she would need her friend as never before. Our Saviour had said Blessed are the meek, and, again, Blessed are the peacemakers, so she only said, 'You were a good mother, Lilian.'
'Perhaps,' said Mrs Portway, stopping as they reached the gate of their villa to pluck some evergreen for the house, 'perhaps. Yes, I was! I gave Hugh life! When he was only six, he knew the world. He was happy and at home in dressing-rooms and on public platforms as much as in his nursery at Melpham. That's why I shouldn't wish to have held Elvira, had she been ever so different to what she is. But, in any case, it wouldn't have done, Stéphanie. The girl has a common streak. Oh! I don't mean common as it's usually spoken. I have known fine people of simple origin - old Barker, for instance, our coachman; you've heard me speak of him.'
As he was one of the few people to whom Mrs Portway referred that fitted into Madame Houdet's category of'good' people, she said with relish, 'Ah! the poor, brave, paralysed man!'
Lilian Portway flashed her eyes in scorn. 'What does it matter if his body is paralysed?' she said. 'You can't paralyse the souls of straight, honest, noble folk like that. Elvira has none of it. She's her mother's daughter. There's a core of cheapness there for all her clever Bohemian talk. People would say that I shouldn't speak of my daughter-in-law so because she is dead, perhaps particularly because she died in an air-raid.' She paused dramatically before the door. 'When that bomb fell on the Café de Paris,' she said, 'what mattered was not on whom it fell, this person or that. On my son who was somebody, or my daughter-in-law who could never be anybody. What mattered was that it destroyed vitality, happiness, and life.' She flung the door open as though showing the way to a world of such riches.
Had she believed this, she would have been incurably insane, for the drawing-room which they entered was a centrally heated mausoleum. Signed photographs were everywhere - of Shaw, of Wells, of Irene Vanbrugh and Mrs Pat, of Gordon Craig and Granville Barker, of darling Christabel and dear old Flora Drummond; the famous photograph of the Duce had been consigned to the dust-heap, but D'Annunzio still threatened Corfu with his poet's head to remind Mrs Portway of Italy's glorious past. The signed copies of Shaw's plays stood on a table separate from the bookcase, and with them a photograph of Canon Portway with his parishioners, all dressed in their costumes for the Coventry Mystery Play. It was the wonderful past so eagerly sought by Mrs Portway in her memory, but standing there to greet her in photographic form it petrified her world of living ghosts into the mummified dead of the tomb. The photographs of Madame Houdet's past were there, too - Yves luscious-eyed with the white communion band on his arm, Yves ostentatiously virile in his conscript's uniform, Yves with the smallest of bathing-trunks showing off with a medicine-ball on the beach at Cannes, Yves superb in the uniform of Free France. Stéphanie Houdet, however, had no eyes for these cherished images, for she had caught a glimpse of the boot of a Lagonda in the garage and she knew that the reality was asleep upstairs. Lilian Portway's much-vaunted 'life' filled the house for her at least.
The post lay scattered on the table where Yves had searched it eagerly for possible evidence of cheques. There were three letters with English postmarks. Madame Houdet opened the one that was hers. 'Oh, such an elegant card from Marie Hélène,' she cried; 'she has such good taste.'
Everything Marie Hélène did seemed to her unusually smart since she had shown such smartness of another sort in winning the lawsuit.
'It seems to me in very poor taste to write at all,' said Lilian, 'after the way she has behaved.'
But Madame Houdet did not hear this. She was overjoyed that Marie Hélène had invited Yves. She had feared lest her obvious desire for this invitation should be ignored. 'It is a very elegant house, I believe. Yves will be happy there,' she said.
'I have no doubt,' said Mrs Portway drily. 'All the same, I'm surprised you should want him to stay in that house.'
'They are cousins,' said Madame Houdet simply. Then she asked, 'Where do your cards come from?' She longed to know whether there was one from Elvira.
Mrs Portway, realizing this, was mortified, but at least had the comfort of knowing that Stéphanie knew nothing of her own peace-offering, which had received no return.
'A wonderful rich, old-fashioned Christmas card from Barker,' she cried. 'All robins and holly! Exactly what one would wish him to send.' She hoped to imply a certain pretentiousness in such elegant cards as Marie Hélène sent. 'His daughter Alice Cressett must have chosen it. That splendid countrywoman! It seems strange to think of her living in London and married to a man whose name is in the papers.' The noble simplicity of Barker, of all the world of peasantry who were not 'common', seemed somehow out of joint when one of them should be mentioned in the news.
'And the other card?' said Madame Houdet. Much of the pleasure of their isolated life together lay for her in the invasion of privacy.
'That,' said Lilian in a voice of high scorn. 'An impudence from that scoundrel Frank Rammage. Some pretentious picture of blue horses.' She had so far forgotten this unpleasant bit of her past that she could only produce her anger by acting it, and her voice rang out as it had done when as Portia she withered Shylock. It was a poor performance: she had never played well in Shakespeare.
'Ssh,' said Stéphanie, horrified at the raised voice, 'Yves is sleeping.'
Lilian Portway sat down on a high-backed chair and leaned her elbows on the table, she cupped her chin in her hands and raised her long swan neck towards her friend.
'Stéphanie,' she said, 'Yves has got to behave himself this time he is here. No! don't interrupt me. I don't mind his being drunk with that ghastly old Italian woman if she's fool enough to spend her money on him. But if he wants to carry on in that way he should stay with her in Milan or Genoa or wherever it is.'
She knew perfectly well, but she could not bring herself to say 'Florence'. That she should have to stay up here in this remote place, while some vulgar industrialist's widow should live in her beloved city. When the doctors told her she could not return to Fiesole, she had cried as she had never done off the stage. Merano was only Italian in name to her. 'My heart simply will not stand these scenes,' she said dramatically.
Madame Houdet looked at her with the hatred she reserved for those who knew the true state of her relations with her son. She was about to burst forth in anger, when she was interrupted by a familiar voice.
'Oh my God!' shouted Yves in an American accent even more extravagantly French than his mother's English one. 'What the hell are you making all that noise for? Cheep-a-cheep, cheep-a-cheep. That's my mother all right. Why don't you put a pillow-case over her head, Mrs Portway? She'd be a hell of a sight more lovely as a corpse.'
Madame Houdet laughed, as always, at her son's Quilpish humour.
'It's not like the country, is it, Father?' asked Alice Cressett, as she wheeled the heavy, grunting man to the window of the front room, 'nor like the Cathedral Close neither.'
If Mr Barker could have done more than grunt, he might well have answered that it was not much like the town. It was indeed like nothing on earth except a stretch of arterial road on the very confines of London. In one direction could be seen the banks of gorse bushes which made lovely the dual carriage-way that led motorists on through the countryside without their having to realize it. Their loveliness seemed, however, a little spare and grim in midwinter. In the other direction, towards London, light industry was embodied in a splendid compromise between functional and more conventional English taste, in which a considerable expenditure of glass was surrounded by ornamental designs in green tiles. Loveliness, in this case, perhaps, was marred by a certain tendency to prettiness and fuzzing of outline. It was here that Mr Cressett's market-garden
flourished, or would have flourished under any management but that of Mr Cressett. At the moment, however, Mr Cressett's ineptitude was happily disguised by the dismantling due to Mr Pelican's bureaucratic muddle.
'He's thinking of the horses, aren't you, Father?' said Mrs Cressett.
In the days when old Mr Barker could still speak, he had been known to think of many things other than his profession of coachman; indeed that profession had long been behind him when paralysis struck him down. He had been valet and chauffeur and handyman to Canon Portway for many years after horse-transport had ceased to be the current mode of travel. In all that time he had thought and spoken a lot of drink and women and the degeneration of the times, and of money, especially of money. But, since he ceased to utter his thoughts, his daughter had decided that he thought only of horses. It seemed a pleasant subject for an old man to ponder on and had the additional merit of calling for no attention from anyone. As to money, Mrs Cressett herself was prepared to give her undivided thought to that subject.
'Now you can put the paper down, Harold,' she said to her husband; 'we've all seen what John Middleton has to say about you.' As Mr Barker was no longer able to read, she presumably meant that she had seen it. 'Very nice. But that won't bring the compensation money back.'
Her slow country voice was matched by her slow, dignified movements. Alice Cressett was a big, regal, Junoesque woman. She was not wholly unaware of her queenly manner and dressed usually in purple. 'I told you not to be so quick in returning it,' she said, moving backwards and forwards through the room as she talked, laying the table for supper. 'But there you are, those that don't listen get no reward. It just means that encyclopaedia'll have to go back where it came from. You can't expect to use Father's money for foolishness.' Mrs Cressett always referred to the money which she administered as 'Father's money'. It made the old man happier, she said. It also made easier her refusal to assist her husband. 'I dare say he won't grudge you your half pint, will you, Father?' she added, 'though there's those that might. But don't think having your name in the paper's going to mend matters.'
Harold Cressett looked pitiable enough at any time, but, at the mention of returning his encyclopaedia to the booksellers, his dismal little rabbit face might have moved any heart less hard than his wife's. It could not be said that she had a heart of stone, for this usually implies some conscious rejection of pity. Mrs Cressett's heart was more likely made of wood, as people are said to be wooden-headed; she just did not notice other people's emotions. With her maternal figure and her slow, comfortable movements, this complete absence of feeling made people think that she was dependable. Canon Portway had thought it, Lilian Portway had thought it, Harold Cressett, a lonely middle-aged widower with savings, had thought it when he married her. And, indeed, she could be depended upon to go her own way, gathering any money that came within her path. Perhaps if a stone rolls slowly enough, it will gather moss, and what Alice Cressett gathered, she didn't waste on foolishness.
Even at the risk of his wife's annoyance, Mr Cressett could not leave the article in which his name appeared. He had always been very fond of reading. During his first marriage he had read most of the time. His first wife had run the confectioner's very competently and Mr Cressett had sat behind the counter and read.
He liked facts: articles that-gave the length and breadth of rivers and the rainfall in the world's capitals, reports of the largest goose egg ever laid or the number of peasants drowned yearly by the flooding of the Yellow River. In encyclopaedias he found his greatest pleasure. Old editions of Pears' or Chambers' pleased him best; he didn't care for the distracting photographs of the modern editions. And now his own name appeared in print, and with it some facts - the acreage of his market-garden, the amount of compensation he had had to return to the Ministry, even his own age. It was like an encyclopaedia article headed CRESSETT (HAROLD).
He hitched his fluffy grey flannel trousers even farther above his ankles than their normal short length and said, 'I wouldn't be surprised if there was a subscription got up for me after this article. Help towards re-stocking the place.'
'I don't see who'd spend their money like that,' said Mrs Cressett, placing a dish of very round home-made cakes on the table. Everything on the table was a bit like that - round, plain, solid, comfortable-looking, and hard. Mrs Cressett tended to make things in her own likeness.
'It says so here,' said her husband, and read from John's article: '"And now, as the Ministry informs us, everything is back to normal. Mr Cressett (at what cost of worry and anxiety officialdom does not state) has returned his compensation money, the Ministry has returned the market-garden. What or who these gentlemen are who have so kindly returned to Mr Cressett his own property is not made clear. That is a point that will be pursued further in these columns. But one thing the Ministry report does not mention - nothing is said of Mr Cressett's stock that he disposed of when he was so peremptorily told that he must leave his own land. Nothing is said of the tomatoes, the dahlias, and the cucumbers. Perhaps this is another oversight of Mr Pelican's department. It is an oversight that will be noted by other smallholders, to say nothing of the harassed housewife. They will wonder that the law which gave Mr Cressett compensation, however inadequate, for his land when some official decided to take it from him, does not allow him some compensation for a business that has been ruined by vacillation and muddle when some other official has decided to give it back." There!' said Mr Cressett triumphantly.
Mrs Cressett paused; she was uncertain but interested. She took a napkin and tied it round old Mr Barker's huge, scarlet neck. 'If there's money coming,' she said, 'it won't go into this place, that's certain. I'm done with vegetables and flowers. We'll sell up here and go in for lodgers. That'll pay its way and more. We might go to Cromer. You'd like to go back to Norfolk, wouldn't you, Father?'
Mr Barker's staring eyes swivelled round in his great crimson moon face.
'I knew you would,' Alice said. 'But no more plants.'
She had wrongly supposed that Harold would know how to make a market-garden pay, and, when he faded, she had even tried a hand at it herself; but, countrywoman though she was, her talent lay in getting money out of people rather than vegetables; they were more susceptible to pressure.
She went to the sideboard and, taking a lace tablecloth from one of the drawers, she held it before her father. 'Mrs Portway sent me this,' she said. 'Real lace from Italy.'
'Ah,' said Mr Cressett, 'Mantua's the great lace-making town in Italy. It gave the name to ...'
But Mrs Cressett was not interested in Mantua. 'Seventy-five, Mrs Portway must be,' she said. 'Their thoughts go back kindly to the past at that age. She won't go for leaving that Elvira anything, by all accounts.'
Mr Barker's eyes swivelled round the other way this time.
'Father's right,' Mrs Cressett said, as she poured his tea into a saucer. 'It's no good to have false hopes. There's no justice in law, as we soon found when the Canon died. All that money to Rammage! Sinful it was, and shameful sin, if the truth's to be told.' She dried Mr Barker's walrus moustache with the napkin. 'Not that there was so much he left,' she said. 'Living at the end of the old man's life had been shamefully high,' and she gave a deep, throaty chuckle.
'Nothing from your blessed Maureen,' she said to her husband. 'What a way to treat her father. Well, if it's too far to send a present from Slough, it's too far to come over in fancy motor-cars, that's one comfort. There'll be no iced cake for that Derek of hers another time.'
Mr Cressett sighed; his daughter's quarrel with her stepmother seemed to have cut him off from his last link with the outside world.
'Well, come along to table,' said Mrs Cressett.
Gerald's Daimler sped along the Great West Road. 'I'm surprised that Portway girl was so restless,' he said to John. 'I thought all that sort of thing had gone out now. Female neurosis was the curse of my time. It's particularly infuriating when they're attractive like that.'
John said, 'Sh
e aims above her intellectual station.'
'Probably gets it from her grandmother,' Gerald said. 'A great actress, but like most of them had no real idea of what she was playing. Actually she'd have been a better actress if she'd been a bit more of a fool. She'd have just acted instead of trying to make sense of her parts. I'm not surprised the girl doesn't get on with her. I remember well when I stayed there what an egoist she was. Stokesay had just opened Eorpwald's tomb and she went round as though she owned the thing - "My tomb this and my tomb that". Actually, to do her justice, she did own it, or rather her brother-in-law Canon Portway did. They sold the stuff to the Museum for a very nice sum for those days. Most of her share went into the pockets of Mrs Pankhurst and her wild women. Lilian Portway had plenty of money of her own anyway. She was always a crank. Got a bee in her bonnet about Mussolini later on - the Shavian great man, you know. What's happened to the girl's father?' he asked.
'Her parents were killed in the Café de Paris raid,' said John. 'She's very unhappy really.'
It occurred to him to tell his father about Elvira's relations with Robin. He had decided now that this was the cause of her resigning, and so foolish an action could only spring from an undesirable relationship. Looking at his father's face, however, he decided against telling him anything - a confidence to Gerald appeared to him as something very strange, almost incestuous, certainly the sort of thing that would upset his mother.
'A pity,' said Gerald. 'Tragic beauty tends to be a bore.'
Silence settled upon them. As they approached Slough, John said, 'Do you think we would have time for me to see someone here?'
Gerald, surprised, looked at his watch, 'Well, you'll have to make our peace with your mother.'