by Angus Wilson
'Then you promise to come to my evening party on the twentieth,' she said. He saw no escape from acceptance. 'Good,' she said. 'Now write it down,' and she craned her long, dingy neck over him until he had entered it in his engagement book. 'Black tie,' she said. Black fiddlesticks, he thought. 'That will be quite perfect,' she remarked, 'because I have Armand Sarthe coming. You know him, of course.'
Gerald remembered the name as something unpleasant. 'By name,' he said.
'But he's a most distinguished historian,' she cried, 'and a medievalist too. He's written about Héloïse and Agnes Sorel. I'm amazed you don't know him.' Gerald recollected what he knew of Sarthe. He was one of those ghastly French writers of biographies romancées. He had seen copies of his books in Paris shops - Onze grandes maîtresses and Les causes célèbres du moyen âge. He was horrified.
'Oh!' said Marie Hélène, 'I quite forgot my aunt Stéphanie and my cousin Yves will be here by then. They wrote so charmingly of your visit to Merano. You quite won my poor aunt's heart - "un homme bien distingué", she wrote. And Yves, too, said you had so much in common with him. How unfortunate that you had that disagreeable business while you were there. I really can't feel sorry that that old woman has died. You know that she left nothing at all to my poor aunt after all these years.'
Gerald made no reply.
Marie Hélène gave him a sharp, mischievous look. 'At last Robin has stopped seeing Elvira Portway. I am so glad, because it was making him so unhappy.' When once again Gerald made no comment, she said, 'You were quite naughty, Father, to encourage it. But I forgive you.' She gave him a little mondain smile, shook hands once more, and went upstairs to the restaurant.
Gerald took a taxi back to Montpelier Square and demanded luncheon from a surprised and rather annoyed Mrs Larwood.
A few weeks later, as Robin was leaving the Works after a flying visit from the London office, he met Donald, neatly dressed in a blue pinstriped flannel suit and carrying a brief-case. 'You'll never forgive me this time, Donald,' he said. 'Here I am, actually down at the Works on the day of your lecture and I'm not staying for it. I really had intended to, but something's turned up at the last moment which means that I must go back to town.'
A fish seemed to flash momentarily behind Donald's glasses; it was the nearest he ever got to a smile. 'Perhaps we may hope that you will put in an appearance at the last lecture,' he said. It might have been a reference to the gracious presence of royalty or a don addressing an absentee undergraduate. In either case, Robin suspected sarcasm, but Donald's face showed no trace of hostility.
'I hope I shall see you and Kay at Marie Hélène's "do" tomorrow night,' Robin said. 'She's insisted on inviting brother John, but I hope to have a bit of news to take the wind out of his sails over the Pelican business.'
Donald's thin lips expressed satisfaction. 'I doubly look forward to the occasion now,' he remarked, and hurried fussily into the Works entrance.
Robin, as usual, took the wheel, his chauffeur beside him. Time enough to be driven about when he ceased to be the youngest director. He wished that Donald wasn't quite so prim. Of course, it was his background. No one respected these lower middle-class chaps who won all the scholarships more than Robin did, but inevitably it took them a long time to shake off their background. Donald was bound to be a bit genteel, for all his cleverness. All the same, Robin reflected, he'd taken that bit of advice he'd given him very well; he seemed to bear no resentment. He dismissed Donald from his mind with the comforting thought that there was another human being who had responded to the right sort of treatment.
He turned his thoughts to Pelican. It looked pretty certain now that the poor fellow was going to take the rap, but he'd pretty near brought his fellow directors round to accepting the idea of offering that executive post, with a few shares to give the chap a bit of incentive. John would be sure to crow over his disgraceful victory at the party; and then, Robin thought, he'd be able to announce Pelican's new appointment. Not that John would care so much, but it would be a moral triumph. With this sense of moral glow upon him, Robin turned and asked the chauffeur after his wife, but he did not hear the answer because he suddenly remembered Elvira. Robin was always suddenly remembering the fact that he had lost her, suffering a sense of void and defeat; nevertheless, though he hardly cared to admit it to himself, he felt a strange, new sense of ease in no longer having a divided life. The last few weeks of the affaire, with their accompaniment of scenes and tears, had proved very disagreeable. He had no talent for Sturm und Drang. Not, he reflected, that his passion had been less than other men's; he had suffered and was suffering deeply, but he supposed he was a bit of a fatalist, or, without boasting, a little more adult in his adaptation to life. Timothy would never know how much he owed in stability to his father's basically integrated character. Once again he glowed and asked the somewhat surprised chauffeur after his wife.
The Middleton Hall in which Donald gave his lecture was a large Lutyens Georgian building presented to the firm by the family in memory of Gerald's father. It served for all forms of communal entertainment. A bust of Gerald's mother stood on the platform by the side of an old grand piano. On the walls hung photographs of works dances and works football and cricket teams. At the far end of the room there was a large portrait of Gerald's father in rather bad modern Academy style.
Donald's audience was not so large as it had been for the first lectures, but even now there was a fair number - those who, in the manner of Cressett, thirsted for knowledge of any kind whatsoever; those who thought that their presence at the lectures of Robin's brother-in-law would be noticed and earn them promotion; and those who had hoped that they might trap Donald into some mistake and earn a reputation for standing no nonsense from the powers that be. There were still a few of the managerial staff and of the trade union officials who attended from a mixture of all three motives.
Donald's theme this evening was Industry and Ethics. He spoke first in praise of the medieval world in which industry and commerce, like all other human activities, found their place in an ordered scheme. He mentioned the ban on usury, and the fair wage. With gathering sarcasm he described the greater freedom, the more individual ethic that had come with the Reformation. He mentioned the blessings of exploitation, child labour, slum dwellings, and so on that had accompanied the free expansion first of commerce and then of industry - the substitution of man as an economic unit for man as an immortal soul. It was clear, competently told, and unashamedly partisan. His irony, however, grew deeper as he went on to speak of the liberal and socialistic ethics by which competitive man had attempted to palliate the results of his destruction of the Christian order. His greatest scorn was reserved for the sentimentalism of welfare ethics.
The smiles on the faces of those who hoped for some mischief from these lectures grew broad. One director pointedly walked out and a shop steward began to talk audibly to his neighbour. Donald paused and blinked at them through his glasses.
'I am not normally in the habit of indulging in homely stories. Nevertheless we have the best authority, that of scripture, for using the simple anecdotal illustration. So I will this evening tell you of a little incident with this very firm which demonstrates most neatly the points I have been trying to make. Christmas,' he said, and he gave an ironic smile, 'has tended, as you know, to change in this country from a feast of deep spiritual significance to a sentimental occasion vaguely suggestive of family good will. My own family is no exception to this prevalent spirit. Last Christmas my brother-in-law, Mr Robin Mid-dleton, your director, had an argument with my other brother-in-law, Mr John Middleton, whom you probably all know well, if only for his remarkable performances on the radio and on television. Now it so happens that the points of view taken up by these two men, both so eminent in their respective fields, coincide very exactly with the two main social philosophies which I have been describing to you. Mr Robin Middleton is the very able defender of the business ethic of free enterprise and open competition. Mr Joh
n Middleton is the no less expert standard-bearer of the liberal or radical attempt to palliate or remove the less attractive features of that individualist social order. Your director instanced, as an example of the necessary workings of modern industry, the means which a large firm - Middleton and Company - had been forced to use in order to put out of business an old-fashioned small manufacturer whose obstinacy and inefficiency were holding up the supply of goods. This man - Grimston I think his name was,' he looked up as though in faint surprise at the whispering which had begun in the audience, and continued, 'this Grimston was flooded with orders for various parts which Middletons knew he could not provide in the time allotted to him. In consequence he was forced into liquidation. When your director told us this story, Mr John Middleton immediately attacked the unethical, as he called it, nature of such behaviour' - Donald smiled to himself as he thought that this part of his reporting of the conversation was not entirely fair to John. It represented more what a radical reformer should have felt than what John actually did feel - 'He suggested various social remedies by which such unpleasant actions could be avoided. Mr Robin Middleton liked what he had been forced to do no more than his brother, but he correctly pointed out that it was necessary. If Mr Grimston's old-fashioned obstinacy had been allowed to persist, far more harmful results would have followed. Orders would have been lost, men thrown out of work, England's industrial prosperity weakened for the sake of one man. He argued from the head, Mr John Middleton from the heart. But the point that I wish to make, of course, is that the whole of this controversy could only arise in a system which has no moral foundation. ...' He led the lecture back to its general theme, but he noted with satisfaction that his audience's attention was still riveted upon the homely little illustration he had used.
The story of the Grimston deal travelled rapidly through all grades of Middleton and Company, so that when Robin went to the office next morning he was greeted by very irate co-directors. He sent at once for Donald, but was told that he had not come to the office that morning - he had booked a day's leave some weeks ago. Telephone calls to Donald's home received no reply.
As an immediate result of the little indiscretion, the proposal to employ Mr Pelican was turned down by a large majority vote at the board meeting. It was therefore in no pleasant mood that Robin returned home for Marie Hélène's evening party. He almost thought of telling his wife that he would not be present, but with the collapse of everything else, his relations with her were becoming of paramount importance to him. Anyway, he reflected, he was never expected to play a large part on these occasions, simply to see that the domestic wheels went round without any grinding while Marie Hélène did the talking and entertaining. This time, he decided, the Houdets could take on his job; they'd been at the house now for a fortnight and showed no signs of departing; they could at least do something useful for their keep.
It was hardly a fair judgement of poor Madame Houdet. From the very first she had set herself the task of becoming indispensable to Marie Hélène's housekeeping. The household, it was true, was already run with true French economy, but even so Tante Stéphanie had a great deal of pleasure in discovering odd extravagances or minor acts of waste. In this way, she had soon quarrelled with Marie Hélène's servants, but as they were all either Italian or German, they did not give notice but preferred to skirmish out their days. For Madame Houdet it was simply her old life on a larger scale, and the Hampstead house rang with her bad Italian and worse German as had the villa at Merano. She soon found a Catholic church and a priest or two into whose housekeeping she could pry. Her veil, her smart black, and her make-up became as familiar on the slopes of the Heath as they had on the picturesque Tyrolese walks of Merano. At first she deplored the lack of objects of charity in welfare England, but at the end of a fortnight she met a slightly dotty colonel's wife in the Vale of Health and from her she heard something of the difficulties of the retired and the old. After that, she was entirely content, and retailed to the household in the evening stories of ex-officers unable to leave their rooms for lack of shoes and ex-headmistresses shivering in coalless bed-sitting-rooms. It was not the sort of talk which either Robin or Marie Hélène cared to hear, but with a good deal of courage she made them listen and even on occasion part with money for her objects of charity.
For Marie Hélène, chère Tante Stéphanie came as a godsend. She was too frugal by nature to relinquish domestic economy entirely, but for some time she had been finding that housekeeping interfered sadly with her new role as a hostess of culture and elegance. Now she could hand over the keys and know that, if anything, more cupboards than ever would be kept locked from the servants.
Mother and son had both arrived with the fixed determination of not leaving unless and until either of the two women - Marie Hélène or Elvira - who had profited so greatly at their expense, should have paid handsomely to secure their departure. Indeed, the Houdets were hardly in the position to leave, for they had realized most of Stéphanie's little capital and all of Yves' Lagonda to equip themselves suitably for the visit. Madame Houdet had found her niche; Yves' role was a more difficult one. He had determined in advance that there were various possibilities open to him: he would become Marie Hélène's well-paid lover, he would acquire a rewarding sinecure in Robin's firm, he would turn Elvira's sense of guilt into good hard cash or, perhaps, if all then failed, he would become Elvira's well-paid husband. As it seemed likely that all these offers would be made to him, it was only a question of seeing that they were accompanied with the maximum monetary reward.
By the eve of Marie Hélène's party he had been in London for three weeks and he had received no more than his board, two cheques for ten pounds from Robin, one for fifty pounds from Elvira, and three ties from Marie Hélène with the suggestion that they were more suitable for England than the ones he at present sported. If for a moment his vanity had been hurt, he soon found reasons for the delay of his schemes. Marie Hélène, in a moment of cosiness bred of admiration for her aunt's economies over the maids' food, had confided the story of Robin's affaire with Elvira. Yves then attributed Elvira's failure to make due restitution of her grandmother's money to her hatred of Marie Hélène. He saw in Robin's neglect of his business abilities the jealousy of a failed lover and husband. The slowness of the women's response to his advances he attributed more generally to the hypocritical climate of the country. He looked to time and continued effort to repair all the omissions. To these schemes he added possible money-making projects connected with spying on Robin and reporting to either his wife or his ex-mistress; and certain pressures that he might apply to Gerald, whose disturbed manner at Merano gave promise of some rewarding secret. Meanwhile he invested his seventy pounds in taking out an elderly, rather tarty stockbroker's widow from Bromley. He had met her on the boat and her conversation suggested that, although she would need playing slowly, she would prove, once landed, to be as comfortable in rentes as she was in figure.
Both mother and son regarded the coming soiree with awe; but while Tante Stephanie, splendid in black satin and appliqué jet, with one of Mrs Portway's lilac chiffon scarves to cover her décolletage, proposed herself a retiring role in seeing that none of the food was eaten by the servants, Yves, superb in midnight-blue smoking, a legacy of his Italian widow, saw every opportunity to shine.
He addressed himself aggressively to Robin as they awaited the arrival of the first guests. He was one business tycoon to another. It was not at all what Robin cared for in Marie Hélène's lovely gold-and-white Regency drawing-room, where the arts were intended to exercise a rather genteel, flattened-out, convenable supremacy.
'What's your wastage, Middleton?' Yves asked, and before Robin could inquire the meaning of this somewhat cryptic question, he followed it up with a machine-gun fire of searching business questions intended to flatten Robin out, lay him stone dead with their ruthless drive, their dead-hit punch, their incredible grasp of detail. 'What do your absentee figures show?' he asked. 'What's yo
ur pension load? Have you got a record of your pay-out in widows' benefits? Where's your man-hours production graph taking you? What's your loss in toilet time?' These and many other questions which had once so depressed him from an American colleague in the air force he now worked off on Robin and, without waiting for a reply, he cried, 'Good God! man, a guy's got to ask himself these questions. You need an efficiency expert to give your place the works.' And when Robin looked dejected, he patted him on the elbow. 'That's all right,' he said; 'your worries are over. From today you're going to be lucky. I'm going to save Middletons thousands.'
Marie Hélène, tightly swathed in crimson velvet, her bosom deadly yellow as a Japanese corpse's beneath the fires of her opal necklace, held up her hand in horror. 'No business talk, Yves, please,' she cried. 'You will ruin my soirée.' And in hard, flat tones, she said, 'Do you think that Anouilh is passé? I find a terrible lack of esprit in his last play. I'm afraid he has quite lost his elegance.' She gave it to him as a copy-book model for the evening.
Yves looked her over. 'Mais tu es ravissante, ma chère cousine,' he said, 'absolument ravissante.' He took her hand and, raising her arm, he planted small kisses all the way up its scrawny, yellow inner side. Marie Hélène had only just time to snatch her arm away before the first guests were announced.
Thick and fast they came, filling the Hampstead double drawing-room, covering the gold-and-white couches, sitting bolt upright on the little Empire chairs, staring over each other's shoulders into the gilt mirrors, leaning on the two unused harpsichords and the hardly used grand piano, threatening the bad Sèvres with their elbows, swallowing quantities of champagne, gobbling up lobster patties and vol-au-vents from Fortnums, debouching in elegant pairs into the little garden with its walnut tree and its iris pool.
The more cultured of Robin's business friends were impressed by the representatives of British Council and Arts Council and Institut Français and a hundred other councils and institutes; all these bureaucrats of modern culture were equally impressed by the business friends; and everybody was impressed by the odd French or English poet or sculptor or violinist. Dotted among them here and there were B.B.C. officials - programme-planners, features-producers, poetry readers - and an odd publisher or two; these had a professional appearance of not being very impressed. Only perhaps Mrs Jevington, at once wife of a wealthy barrister and an 'interesting' sculptress in her own right, floated about in a haze of impressing and being impressed until she was silly with conflicting emotions. But impressed or impressing, everybody was superbly flat and dead; even when they had drunk a great deal of champagne and had begun to cut the air with that peculiar harsh sound of cultural voices - English, French, competent English-French, and grotesquely incompetent French-English - raised in conversation competition, they never betrayed themselves into saying anything that could possibly mar the tedious triviality with which they clothed serious subjects or the deadly heaviness with which they discussed the trivial. Marie Hélène's bony shoulders quivered with the success of it all.