by Angus Wilson
'You know, Donald,' she said, 'I believe that you are going to have a wonderful experience. You will find these men and women very alive, very receptive. And you will be doing a very good deed. I remember so well how my father used to tell me of the lectures that he went to when he was a young worker just arrived in Copenhagen. They taught him everything, he said. "Evening classes," he would say, "are the foundations of social democracy."' She smiled as one intellectual to another. Donald did not return the smile, but, as he had promised Kay not to quarrel, he said nothing.
'There you are,' cried John delightedly, 'Donald's Adventures in Webbland. I look forward to hearing how you deal with the Communists in your audience.'
Robin smiled. 'I doubt if Donald will find a lot of Communists at his lectures. I sometimes think half these Communists in the factories have been invented by Radicals like you, John, to make yourselves respectable. I don't know of any at the works. Oh! one or two, perhaps. A lot of the bloody-minded, of course, but that's not the same thing at all. And a few natural anarchists, who I must say,' he leaned back in his chair with broad-minded pride, 'have my fullest respect. They'll slap into you, Donald, I promise you, if you start anything tendentious.'
'Oh! Donald will confine himself to facts, won't you, darling?' Kay smiled with teasing affection at her husband.
'Selected,' said John with a laugh.
'Yes,' said Donald primly and a little angrily, 'but selected out of respect for human intelligence, not out of a desire to please.'
'Haha!' cried John, delighted at the prospect before them, 'I know, "We're not living in the nineteenth century." '
'Exactly,' said Donald. 'You may prefer John Stuart Mill and Robert Owen as bedfellows; others are happier with the living.'
Any remark of this sort made John forget his company. 'Oh! I don't think I should go for either of them if I turned necrophile.' Donald frowned; he never made jokes of that sort.
'Don't get across the unions, Donald, for God's sake.' Robin showed alarm.
Donald smiled. He had no intention of discussing trade unionism with either of his brothers-in-law at this stage. 'My lectures will be informative,' he gave a little laugh, 'designed to give me the maximum information.' Robin felt relieved - that sort of witty answer wouldn't harm anyone. 'Even increased information which has not been put through the usual worn-out mincing machine may do something to fill up the spiritual vacuum that threatens us,' Donald added.
It happened increasingly rarely that John thought or said anything that came from the conviction of his own experience, anything that was not part of his build-up. His mind, however, had strayed to people he knew, like Derek Kershaw. 'If you really care about this famous spiritual vacuum,' he said, 'I doubt if information is going to help. I think you will have to touch people at an unpleasantly personal level.'
'We have first-rate welfare officers,' said Robin.
'I wasn't thinking of welfare,' John went on.
'Shame! Heresy!' cried Robin; 'John Middleton turned against the Welfare State.'
John laughed. 'I'm sorry, I forgot my place as family clown,' he said.
Kay leaned forward. 'What were you getting at, Johnnie?' she said. It was not that she was interested, but that she knew a sister's place.
'Something we all guard desperately,' he said. 'The level at which we all prefer emptiness, because to fill it would mean facing something we prefer not to.'
'If,' said Donald, with distaste, 'that means anything at all, it sounds dangerously like the subconscious. I'm certainly not going to Middleton's as a psychoanalytic witch-doctor, if that was what you were thinking. The Church is the remedy for soul sickness and if they don't care to go to her, well, I'm not the keeper of other men's consciences. ...'
'See the scapegoat, happy beast, from every personal sin released. ... Am I my brother's keeper? No! lightly come and lightly go.' He had come on the lines so appositely at the time, Gerald remembered, in a Georgian anthology in Dr Winskill's room. And then Dr Winskill had echoed them to him. It struck him now that Dr Winskill had been a man not unlike Donald - embittered and uncertain, masquerading as mordant and self-assured. He had thought so highly of him at the time - a young, clever doctor so different from the ordinary G.P. Life, at least, had made him a less facile judge of character. Of course, it was chance that had brought Dr Winskill to their home, and chance always gives additional distinction to acquaintances, lending them the flattering air of'discoveries'.
Gerald sat in his study, marking the History Finals papers. Everyone in Oxford had said what a problem the ex-Service officers were going to create, and now that many of them were in their final year everyone was saying how they had been no problem and how difficult it was going to be to get used to having children about again instead of adults. All that might be so, but the truth remained that many of them were past the age of assimilating historical facts or, at any rate, of serving them up again as little dishes with trimmings of epigram and 'original thought' cut to shape. And that was what History Finals demanded. '"Power follows trade routes."Discuss this statement in relation to the collapse of the Empire of Canute." "Feudalism is a pattern imposed upon medieval society by historians unversed in the difficulties of practical government." Discuss this view of feudalism in relation to English society in 1100.' It was all very well for him, he wanted to think about such things. But what did it mean for Wilkins, who had been a subaltern with him on the Marne and now must have a degree in order to invest his little spot of capital in a preparatory school? He wiped his small moustache with his handkerchief and noticed with annoyance that he was about to replace the handkerchief in his sleeve. All these hangovers of the war! The moustache should go. He suddenly felt the disgusting crampness of his study - no proper room for books or papers!
Inge appeared at the door. Her great height only further dwarfed the little room. 'I am ready,' she said. 'Baby has had his bottle, and cook will sit with the children in the nursery.'
Gerald looked at his watch. 'My dear, it's only a quarter to four,' he said.
'But the invitation says four o'clock.' Inge was always particular about punctuality.
'Oh, I doubt if we need get there before half past,' he replied, 'with these garden parties, you know. ...'
She did not know and her doll's face showed her increasing irritation with English customs. She had tried so hard to cope with the university world ...
Gerald, seeing her expression, said, 'You look very nice, Inge. That's a charming dress.'
Her blue eyes shone with delight. 'I made it myself,' she said. The cream shantung silk dress fell round her ankles in scallops edged with blue velvet, a broad blue velvet sash clung round her thighs, her broad-brimmed straw hat was trimmed with blue velvet cornflowers. 'I have not quite cut rightly the neck,' she said.
'It looks very nice to me,' said Gerald, 'but you don't have to make your own dresses, my dear, surely.'
'Oh! but I like to,' she cried. She hated to think of the lavish allowance that Gerald gave her; it seemed to make her so useless.
'We'll certainly have to get a larger house if you're going to wear hats as big as that,' he said, with a smile. 'They're not suited for this poky little study.'
'Oh! Gerald!' she cried, 'don't call your dear little study "poky". I am so proud of our first little house and you don't even like it.'
'Yes, I do, dear, but it just seems unnecessary to live in a doll's house when we can well afford something better.'
'We must not think of that. I am sure we must not think of that.' Her gargling singsong accent rose to heights of distress. 'You are just starting your life, Gerald, your new profession. You must live as though you were building up from nothing and not think of that money that you do not earn. And besides I, what should I do with a big house and servants to cut me off from my babies? And they to grow up as rich men's children. No, I could not bear it, Gerald, we must not speak of it.'
'No,' said Gerald, 'we mustn't.' Indeed, he thought, what would be t
he good, for they would surely talk of it tomorrow and the next day, as they had every day for the past year.
Inge came over and kissed him. 'I love you very much, Gerald,' she said. 'I will go and be with the children until you call me.'
'I think you're a very clever wife, you know, Inge,' he said.
'I - what is it your father says? - I contrive,' she said. His father's grumpy reference to 'all this contriving instead of living like a gentleman' was the joke they had between them, and Inge produced it often - to please Gerald.
The room after she had gone seemed very bright and hygienic, full of that clean smell of soap and lavender water she took everywhere with her. Gerald, however, was not to enjoy its brightness for long. 'We must always remember that if William brought harshness and terror to the subject English, he also brought law and order. As the chronicler says ...' But he did not read what the chronicler said or what the candidate said he said, for suddenly there came from upstairs a strange, high shrieking, that grew and grew in convulsive bursts, like a trapped rabbit, higher in note, more like a rat that some men had scalded for fun once in the trenches. Gerald turned sick at the memory of that.
A moment later, he could hear Inge's screams, and then, as the baby added the note of its cries, the noise became almost deafening. Gerald was half-way up the stairs before Inge's voice came to him, calling, 'Gérald! Gerald! Quickly! Quickly! Little Kay is burned.'
As he entered the nursery, Inge stood, staring in front of her, beating the palms of her hands on the table. Kay's small body was stretched on the hearth-rug, twitching and shuddering. Her screams were stifled now into convulsive sobs; her face was scarlet, and, stretched above her head, one small arm which ended in what seemed a gross, crimson insect against the buff rug - her swollen, reddened little hand. Gerald snatched her up and laid her on the sofa.
'Get the vaseline and bandages from the bathroom,' he shouted at Inge. Her deadened, doll's face seemed suddenly to come to life again - the stony blue eyes were suffused once more with their maternal light. She stood above the heaving body of the child - six feet of majestic, cow-like, blonde calm.
'No, Gerald,' she said, 'we shall not touch her hand. It is too bad. Get a doctor at once.' She knelt by the sofa, stroking the little face, assuaging Kay's terror. Thank God, thought Gerald, as he ran down the stairs, that I insisted at least on a telephone in this bloody house.
Dr Jacob was not there; his young partner Dr Winskill would come. Meanwhile they should apply a salt and water compress, but certainly no grease.
It seemed years before Dr Winskill arrived, years in which Gerald asked his wife, again and again, how? She could not tell - she was attending to Baby when it happened. But why a fire in June? It was not warm. Baby was cold. Where was the fire-guard? She had thought it was there. Kay had been crawling around Baby's cot, she had told her not to crawl around Baby, but she would do it. It was impossible to let little children play with babies.
Gerald burst out in anger. 'What do you mean? Kay's only a baby herself.' Yes, but John was the little baby. All this came, he cried, of her having no nurse, of her bloody obstinacy, her damned conceit. Inge gave no reply to these charges; she went on calmly tending the child. Even so, Gerald cried, it was incredible - so bad a burn. She had fallen, Inge said, it was God's mercy her face had not been touched.
Dr Winskill, when he arrived, also seemed to find it a little strange. However, he gave Kay an injection to make her sleep and within half an hour she was in hospital and remained there for over a month.
Yet it was Inge's reaction in the next few days that gave them no time to think of anything else. She refused to see any of the children.
A nurse must be found at once; she had been wrong: she could not go on. If Kay's state of health was mentioned, she burst into hysterical tears.
The spectacle was at once revolting and pitiable to Gerald. At first, he was enraged at her neglect of Kay, her utter selfishness; and then he was overcome with pity for her disintegration, her utter panic. He blamed his own weakness for letting her take on too much work. At the last, however, it was physical nausea that gripped him. Inge in collapse became somehow no longer a human being, simply a mass of red, crying flesh, either too revolting to look at or else too pitiable to bear. At the end of a week she became herself again, only relapsing when Kay's accident was mentioned, her blue eyes rounded in panic, her great doll's face dissolving into tears.
At last Dr Winskill asked to see Gerald. He sat in his consulting-room, his elbows on his desk, sliding a silver pencil backwards and forwards from hand to hand. 'You see,' he said, 'it was a terrible experience for Mrs Middleton. Terrible, of course, for you too, I know. But for her - well, I think you should realize that it may be difficult for her to reintegrate herself into her family life. A young woman in a foreign country, she has reacted, I think, by feeling peculiarly alone. You may think it strange for a doctor to speak in this way, Mr Middleton, interfering perhaps; but we can no longer separate the body's function from the mind's quite so easily as we supposed. The war, you know, has taught us a great deal about those delicate mechanisms we call human beings. You probably saw a good number of shell-shocked cases yourself. I don't know that Dr Jacob would advise you like this, but times change.'
He smiled, and tapped on his desk with his pencil. 'You yourself have been deeply upset by it all. You resent your wife's hysteria; am I not right? Perhaps you contrast it with your little girl's bravery and the probable fact that her hand will always be affected. The fact that she is too young to speak for herself makes you feel that you must ask again and again how it happened.' He leaned back in his revolving-chair. 'Don't!' he said. 'Remember that if she's too young to speak, she is also, thank God, too young to remember for long. If you continue to question your wife, I can't answer for the effect on her mind, nor, if I may say so, on yours. You believe that there was some negligence, and since you can find out nothing, you think even worse things. You simply must forget about it, I beg of you. Even if Mrs Middleton was for a moment careless, we have all of us been so, but most of us are luckier in the results of our momentary forgetfulness. I always think,' he removed his tortoise-shell spectacles, leaned forward, and stared at Gerald with weak, swimming eyes, 'I always think, when such troubles come upon us, we should bear in mind the old saying, "Am I the keeper of my brother's conscience?"' And he smiled a watery smile of comfort.
And so Gerald had asked no more. Inge had reintegrated herself into family life all right. Perhaps, Gerald thought bitterly, she had over-compensated a little. He had gained his wish for servants and a nurse, and Inge had learned to accept their income, developing a special sort of 'simple' hausfrau form of life that was peculiarly designed to spend any money that was going. Kay had learned to accept her withered hand and to admire her mother. The unspoken questions remained, however, as a barrier of silence between him and his wife, and with them remained a certain physical nausea that would make him accept anything to avoid the sight of that great bulk shapeless with misery, those frightened doll's eyes. Even now he closed his own eyes to check the memory as Inge's voice came to him.
Inge whispered, or rather she made her lips into the shape suitable for whispering and then spoke at her normal pitch. 'Oh! you don't know,' she said, 'how sad it makes me that he publishes nothing, and then to have retired two years before his time.'
'Oh! I imagine,' said Robin, 'that he enjoys life. Pottering about and buying his drawings. I know nothing about them, but Marie Hélène says it's a wonderful collection.'
'He has remarkable taste,' said Marie Hélène shortly. She did not approve of this belittling of the head of the family in his presence, even if he had gone to sleep.
'But that is no life for a man,' Inge cried, 'to potter and buy drawings.'
Marie Hélène's sallow face became quite flushed with embarrassment. 'I should not care to make any easy judgements about scholarship,' she said. 'It is quite elegant that a distinguished scholar en retraite should become a
buyer of drawings - I suppose.' It was one of her few linguistic mistakes that she often said 'suppose' for 'think'.
'I'm afraid,' said John judiciously, 'that he's always tried to make history a substitute for life. And, of course, it won't work.'
'I should think it's much more likely that the routine of college administration and so forth killed all the energy he needed for scholarship,' said Donald. 'A professor's life is little better than a high-grade clerk's nowadays. It's your "life", John, that destroys reality, not the other way round.'
'But a professor is such a distinguished position,' Marie Hélène protested.
'Oh!' said Kay, 'to give Daddy his due, he couldn't live on distinction. He's far too much of a lost Soul for that. No, I think the truth is quite a different one. You see, his work was so frightfully good, or so I'm told. You think so, Donald dear, don't you?'
'Within its own limitations, absolutely first class,' said Donald primly.
'Well, there you are, you see,' Kay cried. 'He's a perfectionist. He daren't write anything more in case it isn't good. First class or nothing. I admire him for it.'
'Well, I'm afraid that I do not,' said Marie Hélène in a shocked voice. 'Life consists, I believe, in accepting one's duty, and that means often to accept the second best.'
Gerald with great effort withdrew his attention. When a man has sunk, he decided, to the level of overhearing the judgements of his dear ones, the least he can do is to act upon the ethics judged suitable for such a clumsy stage situation. It was, after all, the predicament which he had been preparing for himself in all these years of quietism, to use a nice word for failure and weakness. Wordsworth's old village men - the leech gatherers and what-not - had at least received encomia on their vegetable piety as they sat by in dumb, senile virtue: but then, poets were kinder than families, and less perfunctory. It was only the perfunctoriness that hurt him. It was kind of Kay, but hardly percipient, to think that he had not accepted the second-rate. If his family were a second best as he thought them, he had asked for it, because in marrying Inge, he had elected for exactly that....