Adrian Glynde

by Martin Armstrong

  “Perhaps it is, Minnie. Simplicity was never your strong point, was it?”

  “I was simple enough until I met you,” she replied, searching suddenly for her handkerchief. “It was you that forced me to be … to be …” She rose from her chair, her handkerchief to her eyes, and to Adrian’s horror began to whimper.

  “Run away to the nursery, old man,” said his father with a sigh, and Adrian went miserably towards the door.

  But his mother suddenly burst out into hysterical incoherence:

  “No!” she screamed. “No! You shan’t drive my child away from me.” She rushed over to Adrian, dropping her handkerchief on the way, and seized him in her arms. “I won’t stand it any longer,” she screamed. “You’re driving me mad. I’m going, and I’ll take him with me. I’m going, do you hear? Now, at once.”

  Still clutching Adrian, she made for the door. But Adrian, filled with fear and hatred of her, struggled and kicked and at last escaped and ran to his father.

  Then his mother turned furiously on his father.

  “There!” she shrieked. “There! Look what you’ve done now. You’ve turned my child against me.”

  She snatched the door open and it slammed behind her, and in a few moments they heard her footsteps in the room above. Adrian, after standing for a while silent and appalled, had suddenly burst into tears. His father’s arm closed round him. “All right, old man. Don’t you worry,” he said, and he sat down and took Adrian on his knee. “Let mother go. It’s only one of her moods.”

  He kissed Adrian, and then, putting him down, stood up himself. At that moment Janet entered with a pot of fresh tea. When she had gone, his father went to the teatable. “Come, let us have our tea,” he said. “Aren’t you ravenous? I am.”

  He poured out Adrian’s milk, handed him some bread and butter, then poured out a cup of tea for himself.

  As they began to eat they heard a door slam overhead; then hurried footsteps descended the stairs, crossed the hall; the front door opened and was violently closed.

  And then it seemed that a blessed silence fell upon the house. Adrian felt suddenly happy and care-free. He had looked across the tea-table at his father and smiled. “We haven’t had tea alone together,” he said, “since my birthday.”

  These things had happened years ago, and yet he remembered them with such clearness that they seemed more real than the things of to-day; and, living them over again as he had just been doing, he had been so absorbed by them that he had forgotten that he was sitting on the platform of Wilmore Junction and had not even noticed that he had finished the sandwich and got half way through the bun.

  Sparrows were hopping about on the asphalt round his feet, picking up the crumbs that the wind had blown to what they considered a safe distance. Adrian watched them, noticing for the first time how bold and decorative a sparrow’s plumage is, in spite of its sober colours. The wind flattened or ruffled their feathers and blew the little birds about like toy ships in a pond. There were a few crumbs beside his left shoe, and he watched a sparrow fussily trying to make up its mind to dart in and snatch one. It had gone thin with apprehension and was stretching out its neck to its full extent in an attempt to reach a crumb. Then its courage failed it and it swerved away. Adrian chirped at it, but that only increased its nervousness. At last with a sudden bold dash it grabbed a crumb and shot away with a loud flutter of wings, and, seeing this rashness rewarded, the others at once began to make cautious inroads till all the crumbs were finished.

  Suddenly there was a loud mechanical chirrup of pulleys followed by the hollow, woody sound of the fall of the signal at the top of the platform. With a rapid purr of wings the flock of sparrows vanished. Adrian opened his coat and took out his silver watch. It was twenty to two. The branch-line train would be coming in; and soon with a metallic clanking it coiled round the bend and ran lazily into the bay, the little tank-engine pushing behind.

  Adrian made haste to finish his bun: he did not like strangers to see him picnicking. He crumpled together the paper bag with the two bananas in it and pushed it into his overcoat pocket. He would eat them later, in the train. Five or six leisurely country-folk got out and drifted towards the station exit, and soon Adrian was alone again. The little engine unhooked itself and trundled off to have a drink. Adrian chose a carriage, hoisted his bag into it, and placed it in a window seat. Having done this, he climbed down on to the platform and went to watch the engine return and join up with the train again.

  When the train started, he had the carriage to himself, and he sat looking out of the window and wondering tremulously what sort of a holiday he was going to have at his grandfather’s. Aunt Clara and Uncle Bob were driving from Yarn: it was a long way, and very likely they would not arrive till after him. The thought added to his anxieties. Who would meet him at the station? Perhaps, he thought with a little spasm of apprehension, his grandfather. He felt unsettled, unhappy. It was more like the end than the beginning of a holiday. When the train landed him at Abbot’s Randale an hour later he had quite forgotten to eat his bananas.

  II

  By dinner-time that evening Adrian already felt reassured. The strangeness he had dreaded turned out to be of a very different kind from what he had expected. Although he was still rather afraid of his grandfather he was also very much attracted by him, and instead of feeling alienated and dismayed by the unfamiliar life at Abbot’s Randale, he already found himself in various subtle ways interested and thrilled. He no longer regretted Yarn.

  The pleasant old Georgian house with its airy hall, its wide, leisurely staircase and the lofty, large-windowed rooms, was full of rare and lovely things, many of which Oliver Glynde had collected during the half-century he had lived there. The place seemed to Adrian a fairy palace. Its restrained richness enchanted him. He kept discovering that he was in the presence of beautiful things. The blue and silver brocade hanging in the hall and the great Oriental rug, a figured medley of fawn, straw-colour, and soft blues, with touches of faded orange here and there, fascinated him: so too did the red lacquer in the drawing-room—the great chest, its glossy scarlet decorated with golden leaves, flowers, and birds; the small scarlet writing-desk in the window, the great red and gold-framed mirror over the mantelpiece, all of them glowing against the silvery grey of the walls and curtains. The walls were bare except for a long hanging of coral-coloured silk brocaded with lilies and leaves of scarlet, pale blue, and pale green, and two pictures in heavy gilded frames in which grim, richly robed saints stood against a background of tarnished gold. A Chinese priest, a serene figure of gilded wood, brooding cross-legged on a golden throne, stood on a table in a corner of the room, and from the ceiling hung a glass chandelier that looked like the formal showers of a fountain frozen into a crystal immobility.

  One of his fears had been that he would feel lonely, one isolated boy among three grown-ups. With Aunt Clara and Uncle Bob he had always felt himself one of a trio, but he had feared that they would change when they were away from home, that they and his grandfather would be the trio and he himself would be left out. But this, he saw already, had been as false as his other fears. One of the nicest things about his grandfather was that he treated him and talked to him just as he did to the others, and Aunt Clara and Uncle Bob were just the same as they were at Yarn. There was no question of being grown up or not grown up; he himself was simply one of a party of four. The only difference was that Uncle Bob, instead of changing into an old grey flannel suit in the evenings, dressed himself up like Grandfather in a white shirt and dinner-jacket, and he himself too changed into his best suit with the black coat and waistcoat. As for Aunt Clara, she had always dressed for dinner, but here she was even smarter than at home. Adrian enjoyed the solemn formality of dressing for dinner and the spectacle of them all sitting, so grand, round the dinner-table. In the centre of the table stood a glass bowl like a green bubble, and round it were four green glass candlesticks like slim plants whose stems and leaves had become transparent; thei
r candles had lemon-coloured shades. On either side of him sat his aunt and uncle, and opposite to him, beyond the glass bowl and framed by the glass candlesticks, his grandfather, an impressive figure, with his shock of white hair, the thick grey brows under which the blue-grey eyes shone keenly in the candlelight on either side of his eagle’s beak of a nose, and the rather full, luxurious, yet fastidious mouth, unhidden by the grey moustache and pointed grey beard.

  From time to time Adrian glanced at him when he thought he wasn’t looking. He was terribly grand, he thought, with his large black bow and the faultless whiteness of his shirt studded with two pearls: and what made him look grander still was the dinner-jacket he wore—not an ordinary dinner-jacket like Uncle Bob’s, but a black velvet one.

  Then he glanced at Uncle Bob. It was extraordinary how grand dress clothes made people seem. He had always looked upon Uncle Bob, with his fat, ruddy, cleanshaven face, his contented brown eyes always ready to smile, his brown hair and brown country clothes, as a rough, brown, floppy sort of man. But Uncle Bob in dress clothes, with hair brushed and ruddy face refined almost to pinkness, seemed to be the same kind of person as Grandfather, though so different from him in looks. It pleased Adrian to see Uncle Bob like this and to notice, too, how very much he and the old gentleman liked one another.

  Aunt Clara, who had been talking a moment ago, had fallen into a reverie and sat, bare-necked, bare-armed, in black silk, before her empty plate, with eyes mildly gazing at nothing. It was strange to catch her thus off her guard. Adrian, for the first time in his life, examined her face, feeling almost as if it were a face he had never seen before. It was a long, narrow face, made longer and narrower by the hair brushed upwards and backwards from the high brow. Her nose was long and had something of the aquiline incisiveness of her father’s, but the mouth had none of the luxuriousness of his: it was narrower and sterner, the eyes less piercing, and the eyebrows thinner and arched in a slightly disdainful surprise. But the disdainfulness of the brows and the grimness of the mouth did not trouble Adrian, who knew how kind the eyes beneath the brows could be and how ready the mouth was to curl humorously or soften into an indulgent smile for him. She was wearing the pendant he especially admired, the large single diamond slung on a narrow chain about her long neck, and there was the sparkle of another in the black silk at her breast.

  Stock the butler, a silent black and white satellite, circulated in the semi-darkness behind their chairs about the shining table. Behind his grandfather Adrian saw the vague gleam of silver on the dark sideboard.

  And suddenly he remembered how, one night years ago, when his father and mother were going out to dinner, he had sat in the drawing-room with his father, waiting for his mother to come down. His father was in dress clothes with white tie and white waistcoat, and Adrian still remembered how handsome he looked. His mother, as usual on these occasions, was late, and his father, silent and preoccupied, kept glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. At last there was a light step on the stairs, the door opened, and his mother stood in the doorway in a wonderful dress of pale silky yellow. With her pale golden hair, her pale blue eyes, and her small, exquisitely neat figure, she looked like a fairy princess.

  “Am I all right?” she asked, smiling and turning slowly round till she faced them again.

  Adrian and his father gazed at her, entranced, and his father, in that delightfully comic way he had of saying so much less than he meant, had replied:

  “H … m! Yes, perhaps you’ll do.” Then he had turned to Adrian. “What do you say, old man?”

  Adrian had nodded judicially. “Yes,” he had answered, “she’ll do,” and all three of them had burst out laughing.

  His grandfather’s voice broke in on this vision of the past.

  “But I can never understand,” he was saying, “why sherry should have gone out of fashion. A first-rate sherry is a finer wine than the finest port, and that,” he added, “is saying a very great deal, because a good vintage port is a noble wine. But a port, to be good, must be very good. Your ports from the wood are a horror. One shudders at the bare thought of their insufferable fruitiness: whereas even a tolerable sherry is worth drinking.”

  “I quite agree,” said Uncle Bob. The man who invented the proverb Any port in a storm had no palate for wine.”

  “My dear Bob!” said Clara faintly, raising her eyebrows a little higher.

  “And the best of all sherries are the pale sherries,” said Bob.

  “Undoubtedly,” said Oliver Glynde. “The darker they get, the more closely they approach to something which is not sherry. Some of your pale sherries are, of course, extremely dry—almost too dry for my taste, though occasionally I can enjoy a glass of the very dry, more especially with a biscuit, in the middle of the morning when I am working and don’t want to be bothered with luncheon. But a pale, rather full sherry is the best of all. I drew a bottle two days ago, so that it should be ready for your arrival, of a sherry so pale that it is hardly more than straw-coloured, but anything less pale than the flavour can hardly be imagined.”

  With eyes thrown up and both hands raised, Oliver Glynde made a gesture of ecstasy. “Your great-grandfather, Adrian, bought it forty years ago from a wine-merchant in Canterbury who had bought it fifteen years previously at the selling-up of a country-house in the neighbourhood. Its origin and name were unknown, but the cellar-book of the house had shown it to be twenty years old when the wine-merchant bought it. How old does that make it?”

  “Seventy-five,” said Adrian promptly.

  “Yes, seventy-five. I hope I may live to be as old and as magnificently well preserved. My father christened it Canterbury Pale. A port of that age would be undrinkable. Mere cedar-pencil and as thin as a rat.” He glanced at his daughter. “You remember the Canterbury Pale, Clara? You’ve drunk it more than once.”

  Clara’s narrow mouth curled into a charming smile. “I am not likely to forget it, Father.”

  The old man’s eyes twinkled. “Ah, Clara! Like your dear mother, you always had a taste for sherry. Saintsbury is quite right. ‘When ladies do know anything about wine,’ he says, ‘there is no mistake about their taste.’”

  “In that, as in everything,” said Clara, “one can learn only by experience, and in the matter of wine most women have lacked the opportunity. If there had been equality of opportunity, Father, women, at least until they took up smoking, would have been finer judges of wine than men, who spend half the day treating their tongues as if they were haddocks and herrings. But now women have become as disgusting in that respect as men, and every drawing-room and boudoir reeks of bonfires.”

  Oliver shook a finger at his daughter. “Beware of detachment, Clara. Faith, we are told, can move mountains, and nitric acid will burn a hole in a five-shilling piece, but these things are innocuous trifles compared with the devastating effects of applied detachment. It is the greatest of all disintegrators. The finest cigar, regarded with detachment, is undoubtedly a portable bonfire of dead tobacco leaves, but the finest sherry is equally a bunch of grapes which has been stepped on by a Spanish peasant and has, in consequence, gone bad, and a picture by Botticelli is a mess of tinted slime buttered on to a plank. Detachment will take the life and poetry out of anything. Poetry has rescued beef from the mere cow, mutton from the mere sheep, and caviare from the abomination of mere fish-spawn; and the most revolting corruption, when transformed by the title of Stilton cheese, becomes a dainty fit for princes and bishops. But that, mind you, is not to say that poetry, by revealing the new aspects of cow, sheep, and fish-spawn, detaches them from the old. It regards serenely every aspect. The princes and bishops may shrink from bringing a microscope to the luncheon-table on Stilton days, but your true poet—who, so far as I know, does not exist—would wield both microscope and cheese-scoop simultaneously, regarding his helping of Stilton not with horror but with ecstatic wonder, seeing behind lactic acid, maggot, and mite to the fountains of creation.” He glanced with twinkling eyes at Adrian across
the green bowl. “Have you ever seen Stilton through a microscope, Adrian?”

  “Yes, I have,” said Adrian.

  “And eaten it too?”

  Adrian smiled. “Yes, but not on the same day.”

  Everybody laughed, and Adrian, reassured and flattered, felt that by this brief exchange he and his grandfather had suddenly been drawn closer together.

  In the drawing-room afterwards Adrian began to feel extremely sleepy. It already seemed to him a week since he had started from Waldo that morning. The old lady whose conversation had comforted him in the train had sunk already into the limbo of things forgotten, and his troubles and fears at Wilmore Junction and during the rest of the journey had faded to no more than pale phantoms in the warm light of his new security. As he nestled into the corner of a deep armchair a little detached from the others, their talk came to him in alternate waves of sense and nonsense. The great mirror over the mantelpiece blurred into a cloudy cavern of mellow effulgence, and the shattered ice of the chandelier seemed to swing towards him and then recede, lose focus, and change to a thickly clustered constellation of stars whose iridescent rays grew and shrank, shrank and grew, with the come and go of his consciousness. He felt himself sinking through delicious depths. Then with an effort he roused himself and found Aunt Clara’s eyes upon him. The other two were talking.

  “Isn’t it bed-time?” Her lips shaped the words inaudibly, her brows accenting the query.

  Adrian shook his head decisively, smiling a plea for indulgence. Aunt Clara smiled back and conveyed wordlessly that he appeared to be very sleepy, but that to-night he might do as he liked. Adrian voicelessly assured her that he wasn’t sleepy in the least, and next moment he was enveloped by the soothing drone of the two men’s voices and the warmly looming yellow cave over the mantelpiece. He lost foothold, swayed, and sank into sleep.