by Angus Wilson
'I told him I was simply an undergraduate staying there who saw nothing.'
'So it seems he realized when he read the reports and your name wasn't mentioned, and then Sir Edgar wrote a few weeks ago to say that you'd had a sprained ankle throughout the proceedings, so that put you out of court. I hope you haven't any vital evidence to contribute, because if so you'd better speak now or for ever hold your peace.'
Gerald smiled and gave Jasper another drink. 'How is your book getting on?' he asked.
It seemed hours to Gerald before Jasper left that evening, although there was time before his dinner engagement in which to begin the desperate brooding over Melpham that was to take hold of him during the coming week, breaking his newfound ease, flattening and fading the spring colours of the Park. In the end he was driven to the decision that he had avoided aimlessly for so much of his life, more determinedly since Christmas night. Even so, he would not perhaps have been committed had it not been for the advice of three people; and two of these had no relation to historical scholarship at all.
It was seldom that Kay came to see Gerald. It was seldom, to give her her due, that the housekeeping and baby care allowed her to come up from Reigate. After two years there she had found two or three other intellectually inclined young married women and they made a sort of social existence out of lamenting how little they were able to keep in touch with what mattered. She had arranged her life to revolve round Donald, baby, and home, and she was, in fact, almost entirely content, however much she followed the fashion of this little group. Yet, like many people, she was very conservative about her dentist. She had been to Mr Yeats for many years, ever since she was a child, and so when her teeth ached badly, she found someone to look after baby for the afternoon and came to London. Even so, had there been more time to spare after her visit, she would not have spent it in going to see her father, but Inge's lack of sympathy with Donald's difficulties at the office had put her into a very rare hostile mood towards her mother, and this mood in turn had given her an equally rare feeling of conscience towards her father. Nevertheless, such an access was hardly enough to accommodate her to a tête-à-tête with Gerald; she banked upon his being out if she called unannounced. She could salve her conscience by leaving a note. He was, however, in.
Gerald was delighted and terrified at seeing her. He cleared his mind of criticism of her dowdiness by putting it down to the visit to the dentist and fussed unduly over her extracted teeth until she said rather softly, 'Oh, for heaven's sake, stop, Daddy. Anyone would think I'd had all my teeth out.' Gerald tried to hide his soreness, but not so successfully that Kay did not feel irritated both with herself and him. She really wished she could return his affection even if she could hardly be expected to respect him.
She tried to treat him to her confidence by telling him about Robin's treatment of Donald. 'It's absolutely incredible, isn't it? It just shows how we can grow up with someone and know so little about them. But then I've always been so fond of Robin that I probably didn't notice. I knew he'd got a bit pompous, of course, but I put that down to Marie Hélène. I'd no idea he'd turned into a sort of petty Caesar. Donald says everyone there complains of it.' She stopped and waited for Gerald's comment, but as none came, she went on. 'It's so frightfully shortsighted too. Donald's obviously cut out for the job. All the other directors saw it at once. And he likes it. He even thought at one moment of suggesting that he stayed with them permanently, but, of course, he wouldn't think of it now. The meanest thing is the way Robin pretends that the job isn't important when he'd made all that fuss about it himself. Of course one ought to have realized. He's always been eaten up with jealousy. Look at the way he goes on with John.' She paused, and wondered if she should mention Inge's monstrous attitude, but even her annoyance at it could not bring her to criticize her mother to Gerald, so she ended, 'Well, I only hope Robin doesn't go too far. Donald can be a very dangerous hater.'
Gerald felt deeply embarrassed. He would have loved to curry his daughter's approval by siding with her, but he reminded himself of his new friendship with Robin. In the end he contented himself by saying that he had never viewed the scheme with favour.
It was the worst thing he could have said. 'Oh really, Daddy,' she cried, 'isn't that typical of you? Why on earth didn't you say something at the time? But no! let everything get in a mess and then say, "Well, I never liked it but I didn't dare to say so!" No wonder we've never been able to regard you as the proper head of the family.'
There was a very uncomfortable silence as they both reflected that she had gone too far. Gerald determined to make a desperate effort to retrieve the occasion. She had given him her confidence and he had failed, the least he could do was to return it. He told her of his problem over Melpham. 'It's not for public consumption, of course,' he said.
'I doubt if I know the public who could digest it,' she laughed. Nevertheless, she plied him with questions, and intelligent questions too. She remembered that Donald greatly respected her father as a scholar; here, at least, there was a matter in which she could talk to him without overtones of family history.
In the end he told her the whole story in far more detail than he intended and she listened respectfully. It was only when he got on to personalities - to his fears for Rose Lorimer, to his desire not to damage Professor Stokesay's reputation, to his memories of Gilbert's friendship - that she became impatient. 'But these are personal things, Daddy,' she cried. 'You simply can't take them into account. It's a question of intellectual honesty' - and her voice rose high. 'Oh, a small one maybe. But you say yourself you don't know where it may lead, what accretions of untruth - if it is untruth - may gather round it. This is a matter of historical truth, of course you must speak up.' Her round face had all that head-girl earnestness that had so moved and so frightened him when she was a child.
'But I haven't got any proofs,' he cried.
'Oh, I can see that,' she said. 'But you must go on searching until you've found them or until you're sure that they don't exist.' She smiled. 'It's a strange sort of task for you, isn't it? I doubt if you ...' she was about to say 'if you have the guts,' but she checked herself and added, 'I mean pertinacity's never been your strongest suit, has it?'
The visit of Elvira was not unannounced. She called up and asked if she could come round for a drink. 'Oh, no special reason,' she said. 'Do people have to have special reasons for visiting you? It's one of Robin's home-days and everyone else seemed so ghastly. So I thought of you. At least you've got good pictures on your walls.'
That, at any rate, thought Gerald, was not the incentive. She clearly didn't know one drawing from another.
She looked older and more blowzy. It came into Gerald's head that a less scrupulous man could turn her growing devotion to him into something less platonic; and immediately there followed the thought, 'Well, she'd better hurry, if her looks go downhill as quickly as this I shan't be interested.' He shut off the thought savagely, and then smiled as he realized that psychologists would probably say it had only come to him through repression.
Elvira accepted a drink, surrounded herself in clouds of cigarette smoke, and then said, 'You talk about something, please. Something that will last a long time. But not about me and Robin. I've got one of those awful obsession things that he's been killed in a motor smash and I want to ring up to prove it's only an obsession, but of course I mustn't.' Before Gerald could speak, she went on, 'Oh God! it is all so boring. Any fifth-rate psychology student can tell you that when you're always imagining your lover's death like I am Robin's, it means you really want to get rid of him.'
Gerald said, 'Isn't all that a bit far-fetched? There are so many possible explanations of these things. Why shouldn't it be the simple one?'
Elvira curled up in her chair. 'No, of course not,' she said. 'The Freudian explanations are quite obviously the true ones. We've just come to distrust them because a lot of silly people repeat them parrot fashion.'
There was a silence which Gerald bro
ke by saying, 'I'm not at all happy about all your "sensible" arrangements with Robin. I told him so the other day.'
Elvira stubbed out her cigarette angrily. 'I know,' she cried. 'It made me frightfully angry. I had so hoped you were a nice, uncomplicated person. It was very silly of me, of course, because we none of us are.'
Gerald braced himself to deal with her annoyance. 'Why does my talking to Robin show that I'm not uncomplicated?' he asked laughing.
'Oh, of course, it does. Freud again, so you won't like it. But you couldn't have acted like that just out of a straight motive. I've thought a lot about why you really did it.' She frowned. 'I think,' she said judicially, 'that it may have been because you were attracted to me and felt you shouldn't be and so you tried to compensate by being frightfully altruistic. I hope it isn't that, though, because although I like you very much, I've got an age limit. Anyway, I'm madly in love with Robin, so I don't want to go to bed with other people. Only, of course, I can't expect you to see that because your generation were all muddled up about love and promiscuity.'
From anyone else, Gerald thought, I couldn't have taken that: but with her, at any rate, directness proves very disarming. Elvira drained her glass, and cried, 'Oh dear! What a nuisance! The one thing I asked was that we shouldn't talk about me and Robin.'
Gerald told himself that it would be indiscreet to talk to Elvira of Melpham. In the end, however, he did so. She was hardly more likely to speak to anyone to whom it mattered than Kay was; it would be a helpful means of taking her mind off Robin; and, anyway, he wanted to talk to her about it. No doubt that was a sublimation, he reflected, and then smiled as he thought what a cosy exchange of Freudian motives they could have made of any affaire they might have had.
Elvira, perhaps, was a little less quick in grasping the historical significance of what he told her than Kay had been. It was clear that English history was not included in her view of culture. She was no less attentive and interested, however, and no less adamant in her view that he must sort it out. 'Sort it out', indeed, summarized her approach, for she saw Melpham simply as a symbol of a conflict inside him that needed to be resolved. Unlike Kay, she disregarded the historical facts and concentrated solely on the personalities involved.
For her, Gilbert's alignment to the Wyndham Lewis anti-Bloomsbury group was quite enough to mark him down as a probable culprit. 'Oh! don't think that I don't know the faults of Bloomsbury,' she cried, 'but they had a kind of hard core of intellectual integrity. While all these others are what John and his generation would call crypto-fascists. Of course, it isn't really a question of politics but of basic mental honesty. All the same, Gilbert Stokesay's exactly the sort of person to hate scholarship or anything like that. Have you read his essays? He's the most ghastly egotist and he'd think that sort of practical joke was cosmic or something equally pretentious.' As to Processor Stokesay, she wouldn't hear a good word for him. 'You can call all that pro-Nazism plain vanity, but it wasn't. It was intellectual dishonesty again. Like father like son. I bet you he knew all about it.' On the other hand, likely as the Stokesays seemed to her to be culprits, she was most convinced of her own grandmother's guilt on personal grounds. 'Now her vanity,' she cried, 'is limitless, and look at all the kudos she got out of it, and I expect my great-uncle was quite as bad. On the other hand, she's frightfully weak. I know what you've got to do. You must go to Merano and bully the truth out of her.' And then rather illogically, she added, 'I'd rather like someone to go and see her, anyway. I couldn't possibly bear it myself. But I did hear from Robin, who'd got it from those relations of Marie Hélène's, that she had a sort of stroke after Christmas. Of course, she's made her bed and she's got to lie on it. But all the same, it would be rather good to get a first-hand account from someone dependable.'
Gerald was not finally convinced as to the course of action he should take, however, until he had seen Sir Edgar. It was not going to be an easy interview for him, he knew. Sir Edgar would recoil with disgust from anything smelling of scandal, particularly scandal that touched Lionel Stokesay; for, since he had always disliked the showiness of the great historian and was perhaps a little jealous of his powerful influence upon younger scholars, he did everything he could to disguise his antipathy, to dissociate himself from criticism of the dead man. In any case, his shyness, his strong conviction of moral rectitude, and his cautious approach to life would all be affronted by the story of troubled conscience that Gerald had to tell him. Yet Gerald also guessed that the old man would criticize him for not having acted sooner. Sir Edgar was slow to judge, but, his judgement once made, nothing would deter him from a speedy execution of his decision.
The interview proved as Gerald had prophesied to himself. Before Gerald was half-way through his story, Sir Edgar, like a tortoise feeding, shot his wrinkled old neck out of the hunch he had made of his body at the prospect of unpalatable words. 'Look here,' he said, 'before you go any farther, if you've got it into your head that the Melpham idol was a fake, you can forget it at once. I saw Cuspatt the other day and it seems they've made all the possible tests in the Museum laboratory. They're not tyros, you know. There's no doubt at all that the thing's genuine.'
'I'm sure,' said Gerald. 'As you will see from my story, that isn't the point. I have no doubt that the figure is a genuine Anglo-Saxon idol. The only one to be found in English soil. That's what makes the whole thing so ironical. But it may very well not belong to Eorpwald's tomb. If what I suspect is true, it was found at Bedbury in the pagan cemetery. Gilbert Stokesay, incredible though it may sound to our modern ears, was practically in charge there. Stokesay was only too flattered that his beloved son should want to take part to interfere with anything he did. I suspect that when Gilbert told me he had placed the idol in the Melpham tomb he was speaking the truth. He brought it over from Bedbury and put it there. I have such a strange conviction of having thought so at the time he told me.'
'My dear Middleton, you're trying to tell me now that Stokesay's son was a lunatic.'
'No,' said Gerald, 'only a particular kind of man at a particular time.' He tried then to explain to Sir Edgar, as far as he understood it himself, Gilbert's outlook on life. He spoke of his hatred of his father, his wild devotion to his mother, his hostility to contemporary culture, his Nietzschean idea of a practical joke.
A film of weariness crept over Sir Edgar's eyes. When Gerald had finished, he said, 'I see. Gilbert Stokesay was killed in the war, wasn't he? I can't help thinking, you know, Middleton, that a lot of that generation were lost souls from the day of their birth, poor fellows.' It was clear that a full appreciation of the point of view of Gilbert Stokesay was quite beyond him. 'But even if what you suspect is true, with Stokesay's son dead, there could be no evidence now.'
'I don't know. There may have been people who helped, or who found out afterwards and for one reason or another kept quiet. That's what I must find out,' Gerald said.
Once he was convinced that Gerald had a case worthy of consideration, Sir Edgar's criticism changed its tack. 'I'm afraid I simply don't understand, Middleton,' he said, and his eyebrows beetled over his bright little eyes, 'why you haven't spoken before. You owed it to Pforzheim and even more to our own Museum chaps to give them some warning of this. Thank heaven Pforzheim hasn't made his report on Heligoland yet! You've run the risk of putting him in a very awkward position. Quite frankly, I think your behaviour's been indefensible.'
Gerald tried not to look resentful, he strove to allow his real desire for the old man's understanding to be unclouded by the irritation that he felt at its not being immediate. 'I have so little evidence,' he said, 'and so many people that I care about are involved in the repercussions - Stokesay himself, Rose Lorimer, the general reputation of the English historians. Do you think it's been easy even to reach this point? Besides, how far would Pforzheim listen to what is only really a personal hunch?'
Sir Edgar's face softened. 'I understand, my dear boy,' he said. 'It all explains a lot to me about your attit
ude to things in these last years. All the same you must say something to Pforzheim. It's all too likely he'll dismiss the story. These Huns are very obstinate, you know. But he'll probably modify his statement at Verona. If you like, I'll have a word with Cuspatt, just to alert him, you know.'
'So you think I should pursue the matter?' Gerald asked.
'Yes, Middleton, I'm afraid so. It's an unpleasant business. More like some detective's job. But you say there are people who may know more - Portway's sister-in-law and others - you must see them. They may not know just how important the matter is. Laymen are very ignorant. Let me know how you get on.'
'It's damnable,' Gerald said, 'all this coming when I want to get on with editing the History.'
Sir Edgar smiled. 'For a man of your years you have a curious expectation that life runs smoothly,' he said.
Before Gerald left, he tried to hurriedly excuse himself again by speaking of the family difficulties that beset him. He started to speak of John's double life, but Sir Edgar checked him. 'My dear fellow,' he said, 'your private affairs don't concern me. I don't mean that unkindly, but these things are better kept apart. In any case, I can't help you in anything like that. I have only one answer - my trust in God. And you're old enough to have considered all that for yourself. I will say one thing though: as historians we've got to tell the truth about the past as far as we know it, but that's quite a different thing from searching into the truth of people's lives here and now. All this prying and poking about into what other people prefer to keep hidden seems to me a very presumptuous and dangerous fashion. But then I'm a very old man. It doesn't much concern me any longer.'