by Angus Wilson
Or a moment of untruth, or a moment of untruth that looks like truth, thought Gerald. His contempt for John rose to bursting-point at this piece of glibness. It was intolerable that this smart-alec son of his should follow up hunches and take action on risks, when his own life had been riddled and twisted with scrupulosity and weighed decisions. If John had been in his place, he would have been pursuing a wild will-o'-the-wisp half his life, upsetting the balance of the English historical profession, destroying the reputation of a remarkable historian like Stokesay and God knows what else on the evidence of a few words. And yet, he reflected, even if God did not know, he did. He had told himself all these years that these weighty results would follow any action he took; and yet, was it really so serious a matter? Was it not after all a small point of historical truth that mattered really very little to medieval specialists and nothing, but absolutely nothing at all, to anyone else? So much the more reason for taking no action on so little evidence. 'A moment of truth!' What did it mean? A moment of personal conviction that may have been the result of hostility or drink or imagination or any psychological quirk.
After all these years he remembered quite distinctly his momentary conviction that Gilbert was telling the truth; but how could he estimate the worth of his own convictions when he had changed so much in the years that followed? Gilbert was only a shadow now and his own personality as it was then would seem equally shadowy if it were not for the false, absurd ideas of the continuity of human existence.
The tables he could see still, with their little pink-shaded lamps and their Chianti bottles. They were probably still there today, unless they had suddenly invested in chromium in these last years. And the ill-scrawled, purple-marked menu. The Rendezvous, had it been, or the Chanticleer, or, perhaps, Pinoli's? anyway, one of Gilbert's famous little places in Soho. And the cockney Italian waitress, she couldn't have been more than sixteen, of whose seduction Gilbert boasted, probably truthfully. But Gilbert himself?
'My dear Middleton,' Gilbert affected the use of surnames even for his most intimate friends, 'don't, for heaven's sake, be the prize ass of all time. Can't you see it's the greatest thing that's ever happened? We've been asking to have our legs pulled for a long time now, with our deadly tame-cat ways and our cheap little suburban civilization. A world that's come to accept the dyspeptic rumblings of a lot of City business men and political old women for wisdom, a world that buys its painting at a guinea a yard and takes the cheeping of a lot of constipated half-men for poetry, is asking for one thing and one thing only - a mammoth practical joke. And, by God, we've got it. The biggest practical joke of all time, that'll let a hell of a lot of blood out of an overfed world, one that'll purge our wretched constipated culture for good and all. And you hope that it'll be over in a few months.'
His excited, high voice rose above the talk of the other diners and his hysterical laughter filled the room. His dark fringed hair had fallen over one eyebrow, and his dark eyes stared bloodshot, like a racehorse, in his long, high-cheekboned, white face. He was very drunk. 'No, no, Middleton, don't, for Christ's sake, be such a chump.' He reached across the little table and punched Gerald lightly in the chest. It was the affectionate, contemptuous gesture he had used since the days when he had flirted with Gerald at school.
Gerald, looking down at the thin, thick-veined hand, felt a repulsion for the friendship that should have ended with the school romance. 'How soon do you think it'll be before they issue us with uniforms?'
Gilbert looked at him through bleary eyes, unsteadily lighting a cigar. 'What does it matter to you, little Middleton?' he said.
Gerald, hearing the schoolboy form of address, thought, 'He's drunker than I realized; perhaps he'll get us thrown out and I can send him home.' But Gilbert seized the wide, braided lapel of his coat. 'You've got your badge. What more do you want?' he said. 'Inns of Court. You ought to be bloody proud. Didn't you hear what the sergeant-major said?' He called to the waiter. 'Bring this gentleman a double brandy. They're going to make heroes of us all. They're even going to make a hero of poor bloody little Middleton.'
You could quarrel with him now, Gerald said to himself, and be rid of him. You should have done so when he came down to see you at Cambridge; he bored and disgusted you then, yes, and you thought he was a great man with his avant-garde poems and his contributions to Blast, his talk of Nietzsche and Marinetti, And now you can't because of Stokesay and Dollie. You're tied to him, a comrade in arms, until death do us part.
Gilbert said, 'How will you like to be blown up, Middleton? Never mind. We'll go together. Let's make a compact and seal it later with a mingling of our guts.' He was shouting now, so that the little Italian owner was looking worriedly towards their table.
Gerald thought, 'I must calm him,' but in the same moment he said in a pompous voice, 'Look here, Gilbert, if you're not going down to see your father, I shall. We haven't got to report back until Monday. I shall catch the 10.15 tonight.'
Gilbert leaned across the table. He spoke in quite a low voice now, but with hysterical intensity. 'Shut up about my bloody father, will you?' he said. 'Shall I tell you what he is? He's a lecherous old fool. Oh yes, he is. Only he can't even do it. He muffed, it on his wedding night. Dear old unspotted virgin dad. But he took it out on my mother all right. Made her life ruddy hell just because he muffed it on the night of nights.'
Gerald said sharply, 'You've told me all this before. I don't want to hear it again.'
'I don't want to hear it again,' Gilbert mimicked him. 'But you must, little Middleton; it'll do your virgin heart good. Do you know why he muffed it? Because he thought that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. "My dear Gilbert,"' and he began to imitate his father, '"when I came to your mother I was a virgin. We men have no right, my dear boy, to ask of women what we're not prepared ..." No right, Middleton, no right! Well, he'll know about rights now. He and his sort that believed in scraps of paper. There's my rights and the rights of the people that have the guts and the brains. That's all the rights there are. The rest are the unwashed and the women.'
Gerald said, 'This is very second-rate stuff, you know, Gilbert.'
Gilbert took Gerald's brandy and began to drink it in gulps; drops ran down his chin and along his tweed coat until they came to rest on a leather button. 'You're a bastard and a bore with your civihzation and your tolerance and your tact. You'd like to have Dollie, wouldn't you?' he asked, leering at Gerald.
'It's not fear of you that stops me,' said Gerald.
'No,' cried Gilbert, 'it's far worse than that. You're frightened of hurting someone, her or yourself. If only you'd been a little higher or a little lower in the social scale, Middleton, you wouldn't have minded about adultery. Think of it. You could have had Dollie, and no one, not even yourself, would have thought the worse of you for it. You'd have had me to reckon with - the injured husband. But you've said already that you don't care about that. Unfortunately, Middleton, you were born a dear little civilized bourgeois - a gentleman.' He began again to mimic his father, '"A gentleman, my dear Middleton, is, above all, gentle." Well, that's all over since last week. There're only two kinds of women, Middleton, whores and breeding cows. Dollie's a whore, or she would be if she didn't know I'd knock the lights out of her if I caught her at it. My mother was a breeding cow, and all my dear father could give her was one son....'
Gerald got up from his chair. 'Look, Gilbert,' he said, 'I'm fed up with all this tommy-rot. I'm going.'
But before he had picked up his gloves, Gilbert seized his sleeve. 'I'll tell you something that'll keep you here,' he said, and smiled with a drunken, self-satisfied look of cunning. 'You think my guvnor's a great scholar, just because he reads Carolingian uncials or some other farting nonsense. How could he be a great scholar? He hasn't enough imagination to come in out of the rain. How could he understand the Middle Ages with his dregs of Darwinism, his Jesus Christ who's a decent Englishman and his Primrose League politics? He wouldn't know a Giotto if he s
aw one, and tell him the truth about a Romanesque carving and his poor little cotton-woolled soul wouldn't sleep for nights. If he thinks about it all apart from his "documents" and his origins of Parliament he probably sees a lot of starry-eyed pre-Raphaelite women with goitre, or else a crowd of red-faced lady dons morris-dancing on the village green. As for the Dark Ages! he wouldn't know a fraud if he saw one. I know because I've caught him out.'
Gerald, who had sat down to avoid a scene, wondered what nonsense was about to come. Gilbert, when drunk, was full of wondrous stories and elaborate leg-pulls. He decided to give him his head. 'Really?' he said. 'What was that?' But he need not have bothered: Gilbert in full spate heard nothing.
'The great Stokesay, and you, and all the ruddy crowd, thought that the little wooden fellow with the respectable-sized piece was part of Bishop what's-his-name's equipment for the long journey ahead of him, didn't you? Any fool with half a sense of what a man of God was like in those days would have felt the falseness of the thing. I know, because I put it there.'
Gerald had a sudden instant conviction that he was hearing the truth. His tongue seemed enormous in his mouth; he could not speak.
'Oh yes, I did,' Gilbert said. He was speaking quite softly now and with a sort of crooning pleasure. 'I found the thing on the other site, among the pagan graves, where you'd expect to find it. And, with a little help, I put it in Thingummy's tomb. I just thought there was half a chance in hell that the old man was the vain fool he turned out to be. He wouldn't have believed it if it hadn't been his excavation, and you, you fools, took the same line. Even that theatrical old fool Portway wasn't prepared to disagree with the great Stokesay. He smelt a rat, but he kept mum. After all, it was his excavation too, and his land on which the great discovery was made, even if it did dishonour his Church.' Gilbert shouted for two more brandies. 'We'll drink a health,' he said, 'to the day dear father gets the knighthood he wants so much, because that's the day I shall spill the beans.'
Gerald drank down the brandy and felt able to speak. 'Tell me the story again, Gilbert,' he said, trying to convey no decision as to the truth of what he had heard; 'I didn't follow it very well.'
Gilbert's face seemed suddenly to go dead. 'Oh yes, you did,' he said. Then he burst into a raucous laugh. 'You believed every word of it, Middleton. You swallowed it whole. I fooled you completely, my father's little ray of promise, his shining pupil, the brightest jewel in Clio's diadem. You believed it,' and once again he laughed loudly.
Gerald said, 'I know nothing about it. It isn't my period.'
Gilbert bowed mockingly. 'I beg your pardon,' he said, then, mimicking, he added, 'Of course, it isn't your period. How silly of me! You bloody historians and your periods, you're like a lot of women. Go on,' he said. 'Hop it.' His eyes closed and his head slumped on to his shoulders drunkenly.
Gerald got up and went out of the restaurant, convincing himself gladly that it was another of Gilbert's aggressive drunken jokes.
And so it might well have been, for everything went according to the usual pattern. On the Monday Gerald received the usual charming note of apology from Gilbert - only this one had seemed more than usually sincere, or were they all like that? There had followed three of the happiest months of their friendship. Gilbert had been amusing, interesting, even humane. They had found a common new enthusiasm in soldiering and under its impetus Gilbert seemed to have lost his bitterness or at least the play-acting hysterical aspect of it, even when he was drunk.
It was, however, that same night at Stokesay's after he had left Soho that Gerald first had sex with Dollie. Stokesay had been in bed when he arrived there and Gilbert had been quite right about Dollie - she had been willing and eager. As to her fears of Gilbert, her answer to that had been quite simple: 'Of course I'm frightened of him, Gerrie,' she had said. 'He's very mad, you know. But I'm not superstitious. As long as he doesn't hear of it, what's it matter?'
Even years later, when they were living together, Gerald had never told her how much his tension over Gilbert's account of Melpham had given him the courage to seduce her. Melpham was not a subject that would normally interest Dollie and he had always been at pains not to arouse her sense of guilt by any hostile reference to Gilbert. If they mentioned him it was in the terms of praise they had evolved to satisfy his father's hero-worship.
Gerald's attention was drawn back to the family by the sudden sound of his grandson's voice. Timothy had finished his book, and pulling his long gangling body from the armchair, he blinked at the family through his spectacles. 'I shall go to bed now, Mother,' he said. Crossing the room, he kissed first Marie Hélène and then Inge. 'Thank you for a very pleasant Christmas, Grandmother,' he said.
Inge took one of his hands and held it for a minute, looking up at his great height. 'So you have been improving your time,' she said, 'while we have been wasting ours in arguments. You are quite right. Life is not made for fighting and quarrels.' She was depressed at the degree to which her family kept out of the conversation. 'But you are the one who can answer our question, Timothy,' she cried. 'You are the philosopher. Now you will tell us. How does one know the truth about something? Do we know it in a flash - So! - or does it come to us very slowly like a tortoise? Is it a big thing or is it little things? There you are. A difficult question for a very tall boy.'
Gerald, remembering his children's reactions to her treatment in the past, was not surprised that Timothy did not apparently resent the immense patronage of her tone. 'A difficult question?' he said. 'I should have thought it was quite simple, if you know all the facts. It's just a matter of getting every detail in its right place, isn't it? Making the right pattern.' His mind was still with his book and he spoke with impatience. 'Well, good night,' he said and was gone.
Gerald noted as some balm to his feelings that Robin had received no further separate recognition than he had. Many people in his position, he supposed, would seek an ally against the family in Timothy, whose reserve suggested so much hidden criticism. He was not sentimental enough to suppose that it would be difficult to break down his grandson's defences, to win his confidence. But what would he find except one generation's sceptical perception of its elder's follies? And what had he to offer in return? It would be pleasant to redress the balance of the old generation by calling in the new, but the thing savoured too much of Inge's emotional dishonesty, her vicarious living. And to say that the young liked her advances was no justification for betraying his own emotional integrity. Besides, he thought, young men and youths offered nothing but boredom; brash and pert, or shy like Timothy, what they had to say was ultimately callow. If there had been a granddaughter now, it would not have been necessary to listen, her presence alone would have given him life. But as it was... callow rubbish. Making the right pattern... getting every detail right. But what if there was no pattern, pray, but only a blur of half-remembered details? His arrival at Melpham, for instance, on the day of the discovery. ...
Gilbert had written first from Melpham, 'I believe I am to congratulate you on obtaining a remarkable First in Tripos. So at any rate my father has told me. He, by the way, intends to invite you here, so I give you warning. Do not feel that you have to accept. My father's admiration for your scholarship is great enough to withstand the shock of refusal; so is my friendship. However if you wish to come ... the country is pleasant, if flat; the excavations belong as yet to the physical rather than to the intellectual disciplines, but my father seems confident of "important finds" and I shall use all my hitherto latent historical talents to produce them. History, by the way, I now see to be even more of an artisan skill than I had supposed in my most contemptuous moments - at least as you professionals play it. You will be the guest - if you have no more rewarding plan - of the owners of Melpham House - as we are. They are rich cultural snobs who are prepared to kill any number of fatted calves - the food is only passable - in return for finding their marshy and unprofitable estates to be one of England's "historic treasure-grounds". To be serious,
the Portways quite interest me - they show the last decadence that plutocracy has reached in our declining civilization - money without the confidence of its power. The brother, as well as being the local archaeologist, is a modern Churchman, which means, as far as I can see, an attachment to any and every belief save the dogmas of his own religion. He has revived all manner of old-world customs here - or rather invented them, for I swear that no activities of the past could be so idiotic as his. He is forever setting up maypoles, producing mystery plays, and dancing on greens: and, as he has good looks of a theatrical kind, the local ladies swoon at the sight of him. There is behind all this mummery a peculiarly mischievous and foolish sort of egalitarianism based on some romantic notion of medieval society - in short, the cloven hoof of William Morris. As a result of all this neglect of his proper duties, of course, he is a very respected figure in the Church, indeed a canonry is in the air. His sister-in-law, your hostess, is the "great" Lilian Portway and very conscious of it. I thought her at first one of the most odious women I have met - an absurd example of that outdated enormity "the New Woman". She is a "great beauty" in a large, willowy sort of way that would have delighted the late Sir Edward Burne-Jones (is he, by the way, dead? If not, he should be) and does delight the "advanced" theatre public that flock to the plays of Shaw. In addition she has been in Holloway for the "cause" and speaks on public platforms. Can you think of a more unpleasing combination? However, down here, it must be said, she is less of the feminist and more feminine - she plays in fact the gracious hostess with a dilettante interest in the excavations. She proves, too, to have an agreeable if uninformed enthusiasm for Nietzsche which is creditable. After all, one has to remember that these women's antics are only the product of male permissiveness. However, I get a good deal of amusement twisting both their "advanced" tails, particularly the egregious parson's. No one of interest lives about here. So you will have to content yourself with your Fabian Maecenas hosts. There is a pretty enough girl who visits. Another enormity - a sports girl. She is on the way to being a tennis champion! However, I suspect that she is susceptible to masculine discipline. Her father is a retired colonel, whom she calls "an awfully jolly old boy". Apprehension of boredom has so far prevented me from putting her claims to the test....'