by Angus Wilson
But he need not have feared. For though the grown ups continued to speak of the old ladies as ‘Johnnie’s friends’, the topic soon became a general one. Many of the things the others said made the little boy bite his lip, but he was able to go on drawing on his knee with the feigned abstraction of a child among adults.
‘My dear,’ said Johnnie’s mother to her sister ‘you really must meet them. They’re the most wonderful pair of freaks. They live in a great barn of a farmhouse. The inside’s like a museum, full of old junk mixed up with some really lovely things all mouldering to pieces. The family’s been there for hundreds of years and they’re madly proud of it. They won’t let anyone do a single thing for them, although they’re both well over sixty, and of course the result is that the place is in the most frightful mess. It’s really rather ghastly and one oughtn’t to laugh, but if you could see them, my dear. The elder one, Marian, wears a long tweed skirt almost to the ankles, she had a terrible hunting accident or something, and a school blazer. The younger one’s said to have been a beauty, but she’s really rather sinister now, inches thick in enamel and rouge and dressed in all colours of the rainbow, with dyed red hair which is constantly falling down. Of course, Johnnie’s made tremendous friends with them and I must say they’ve been immensely kind to him, but what Harry will say when he comes back from Germany, I can’t think. As it is, he’s always complaining that the child is too much with women and has no friends of his own age.’
‘I don’t honestly think you need worry about that, Grace’ said her brother Jim, assuming the attitude of the sole male in the company, for of the masculinity of old Mr Codrington their guest he instinctively made little. ‘Harry ought to be very pleased with the way old Miss Marian’s encouraged Johnnie’s cricket and riding; it’s pretty uphill work, too. Johnnie’s net exactly a Don Bradman or a Gordon Richards, are you, old man? I like the old girl, personally. She’s got a bee in her bonnet about the Bolsheviks, but she’s stood up to those damned council people about the drainage like a good ’un; she does no end for the village people as well and says very little about it.’
‘I don’t like the sound of “doing good to the village” very much’ said Eva ‘it usually means patronage and disappointed old maids meddling in other people’s affairs. It’s only in villages like this that people can go on serving out sermons with gifts of soup.’
‘Curiously enough, Eva old dear,’ Jim said, for he believed in being rude to his progressive sister, ‘in this particular case you happen to be wrong. Miss Swindale is extremely broad-minded. You remember, Grace,’ he said, addressing his other sister ‘what she said about giving money to old Cooper, when the rector protested it would only go on drink – “You have a perfect right to consign us all to hell, rector, but you must allow us the choice of how we get there.” Serve him damn well right for interfering too.’
‘Well, Jim darling’ said Grace ‘I must say she could hardly have the nerve to object to drink – the poor old thing has the most dreadful bouts herself. Sometimes when I can’t get gin from the grocer’s it makes me absolutely livid to think of all that secret drinking and they say it only makes her more and more gloomy. All the same I suppose I should drink if I had a sister like Dolly. It must be horrifying when one’s family-proud like she is to have such a skeleton in the cupboard. I’m sure there’s going to be the most awful trouble in the village about Dolly before she’s finished. You’ve heard the squalid story about young Tony Calkett, haven’t you? My dear, he went round there to fix the lights and apparently Dolly invited him up to her bedroom to have a cherry brandy of all things and made the most unfortunate proposals. Of course I know she’s been very lonely and it’s all a ghastly tragedy really, but Mrs Calkett’s a terrible silly little woman and a very jealous mother and she won’t see it that way at all. The awful thing is that both the Miss Swindales give me the creeps rather. I have a dreadful feeling when I’m with them that I don’t know who’s the keeper and who’s the lunatic. In fact, Eva my dear, they’re both really rather horrors and I suppose I ought never to let Johnnie go near them.’
‘I think you have no cause for alarm, Mrs Allingham’ put in old Mr Codrington in a purring voice. He had been waiting for some time to take the floor, and now that he had got it he did not intend to relinquish it. Had it not been for the small range of village society he would not have been a visitor at Mrs Allingham’s, for, as he frequently remarked, if there was one thing he deplored more than her vulgarity it was her loquacity. ‘No one delights in scandal more than I do, but it is always a little distorted, a trifle exagéré, indeed where would be its charm, if it were not so! No doubt Miss Marian has her solaces, but she remains a noble-hearted woman. No doubt Miss Dolly is often a trifle naughty’ he dwelt on this word caressingly ‘but she really only uses the privilege for one, who has been that rare thing, a beautiful woman. As for Tony Calkett it is really time that that young man ceased to be so unnecessarily virginal. If my calculations are correct, and I have every reason to think they are, he must be twenty-two, an age at which modesty should have been put behind one long since. No, dear Mrs Allingham, you should rejoice that Johnnie has been given the friendship of two women who can still, in this vulgar age, be honoured with a name that, for all that it has been cheapened and degraded, one is still proud to bestow – the name of a lady’. Mr Codrington threw his head back and stared round the room as though defying anyone to deny him his own right to this name. ‘Miss Marian will encourage him in the manlier virtues, Miss Dolly in the arts. Her own water colours, though perhaps lacking in strength, are not to be despised. She has a fine sense of colour, though I could wish that she was a little less bold with it in her costume. Nevertheless with that red-gold hair there is something splendid about her appearance, something especially wistful to an old man like myself. Those peacock blue linen gowns take me back through Conder’s fans and Whistler’s rooms to Rossetti’s Mona Vanna. Unfortunately as she gets older the linen is not overclean. We are given a Mona Vanna with the collected dust of age, but surely,’ he added with a little cackle ‘it is dirt that lends patina to a picture. It is interesting that you should say you are uncertain which of the two sisters is a trifle peculiar, because, in point of fact, both have been away, as they used to phrase it in the servants’ hall of my youth. Strange’ he mused ‘that one’s knowledge of the servants’ hall should always belong to the period of one’s infancy, be, as it were, eternally outmoded. I have no conception of how they may speak of an asylum in the servants’ hall of today. No doubt Johnnie could tell us. But, of course, I forget that social progress has removed the servants’ hall from the ken of all but the most privileged children. I wonder now whether that is a loss or a blessing in disguise.’
‘A blessing without any doubt at all’ said Aunt Eva, irrepressible in the cause of Advance. ‘Think of all the appalling inhibitions we acquired from servants’ chatter. I had an old nurse who was always talking about ghosts and dead bodies and curses on the family in a way that must have set up terrible phobias in me. I still have those ugly, morbid nightmares about spiders’ she said, turning to Grace.
‘I refuse’ said Mr Codrington in a voice of great contempt, for he was greatly displeased at the interruption, ‘to believe that any dream of yours could be ugly; morbid, perhaps, but with a sense of drama and artistry that would befit the dreamer. I confess that if I have inhibitions, and I trust I have many, I cling to them. I should not wish to give way unreservedly to what is so unattractively called the libido, it suggests a state of affairs in which beach pyjamas are worn and jitterbugging is compulsory. No, let us retain the fantasies, the imaginative games of childhood, even at the expense of a little fear, for they are the true magnificence of the springtime of life.’
‘Darling Mr Codrington’ cried Grace ‘I do pray and hope you’re right. It’s exactly what I keep on telling myself about Johnnie, but I really don’t know. Johnnie, darling, run upstairs and fetch mummy’s bag.’ But his mother need not have been s
o solicitous about Johnnie’s overhearing what she had to say, for the child had already left the room. ‘There you are, Eva,’ she said ‘he’s the strangest child. He slips away without so much as a word I must say he’s very good at amusing himself, but I very much wonder if all the funny games he plays aren’t very bad for him. He’s certainly been very peculiar lately, strange silences and sudden tears, and, my dear, the awful nightmares he has! About a fortnight ago, after he’d been at tea with the Miss Swindales, I don’t know whether it was something he’d eaten there, but he made the most awful sobbing noise in the night. Sometimes I think it’s just temper, like Harry. The other day at tea I only offered him some jam, my best home-made raspberry too, and he just screamed at me.’
‘You should take him to a child psychologist’ said her sister.
‘Well, darling, I expect you’re right. It’s so difficult to know whether they’re frauds, everyone recommends somebody different. I’m sure Harry would disapprove too, and then think of the expense … You know how desperately poor we are, although I think I manage as well as anyone could’ … At this point Mr Codrington took a deep breath and sat back, for on the merits of her household management Grace Allingham was at her most boring and could by no possible stratagem be restrained.
Upstairs, in the room which had been known as the nursery until his eleventh birthday, but was now called his bedroom, Johnnie was playing with his farm animals. The ritual involved in the game was very complicated and had a long history. It was on his ninth birthday that he had been given the farm set by his father. ‘Something a bit less babyish than those woolly animals of yours’ he had said, and Johnnie had accepted them, since they made in fact no difference whatever to the games he played; games at which could Major Allingham have guessed he would have been distinctly puzzled. The little ducks, pigs, and cows of lead no more remained themselves in Johnnie’s games than had the pink woollen sheep and green cloth horses of his early childhood. Johnnie’s world was a strange compound of the adult world in which he had always lived and a book world composed from Grimm, the Arabian Nights, Alice’s adventures, natural history books, and more recently the novels of Dickens and Jane Austen. His imagination was taken by anything odd – strange faces, strange names, strange animals, strange voices and catchphrases – all these appeared in his games. The black pig and the white duck were keeping a hotel; the black pig was called that funny name of Granny’s friend – Mrs Gudgeon-Rogers. She was always holding her skirt tight round the knees and warming her bottom over the fire – like Mrs Coates, and whenever anyone in the hotel asked for anything she would reply ‘Darling, I can’t stop now. I’ve simply got to fly’, like Aunt Sophie, and then she would fly out of the window. The duck was an Echidna, or Spiny Anteater who wore a picture hat and a fish train like in the picture of Aunt Eleanor, she used to weep a lot, because, like Granny, when she described her games of bridge, she was ‘vulnerable’ and she would yawn at the hotel guests and say ‘Lord I am tired’ like Lydia Bennet. The two collie dogs had ‘been asked to leave’, like in the story of Mummy’s friend Gertie who ‘got tight’ at the Hunt Ball, they were going to be divorced and were consequently wearing ‘co-respondent shoes’. The lady collie who was called Minnie Mongelheim kept on saying ‘That chap’s got a proud stomach. Let him eat chaff’ like Mr F’s Aunt in Little Dorrit. The sheep, who always played the part of a bore, kept on and on talking like Daddy about ‘leg cuts and fine shots to cover’; sometimes when the rest of the animal guests got too bored the sheep would change into Grandfather Graham and tell a funny story about a Scotsman so that they were bored in a different way. Finally the cat who was a grand vizier and worked by magic would say ‘All the ways round here belong to me’ like the Red Queen and he would have all the guests torn in pieces and flayed alive until Johnnie felt so sorry for them that the game could come to an end. Mummy was already saying that he was getting too old for the farm animals: one always seemed to be getting too old for something. In fact the animals were no longer necessary to Johnnie’s games, for most of the time now he liked to read and when he wanted to play games he could do so in his head without the aid of any toys, but he hated the idea of throwing things away because they were no longer needed. Mummy and Daddy were always throwing things away and never thinking of their feelings. When he had been much younger Mummy had given him an old petticoat to put in the dustbin, but Johnnie had taken it to his room and hugged it and cried over it, because it was no longer wanted. Daddy had been very upset. Daddy was always being upset at what Johnnie did. Only the last time that he was home there had been an awful row, because Johnnie had tried to make up like old Mrs Langdon and could not wash the blue paint off his eyes. Daddy had beaten him and looked very hurt all day and said to Mummy that he’d ‘rather see him dead than grow up a cissie’. No it was better not to do imitations oneself, but to leave it to the animals.
This afternoon, however, Johnnie was not attending seriously to his game, he was sitting and thinking of what the grown ups had been saying and of how he would never see his friends, the old ladies, again, and of how he never, never wanted to. This irrevocable separation lay like a black cloud over his mind, a constant darkness which was lit up momentarily by forks of hysterical horror, as he remembered the nature of their last meeting.
The loss of his friendship was a very serious one to the little boy. It had met so completely the needs and loneliness which are always great in a child isolated from other children and surrounded by unimaginative adults. In a totally unself-conscious way, half-crazy as they were and half crazy even though the child sensed them to be, the Misses Swindale possessed just those qualities of which Johnnie felt most in need. To begin with they were odd and fantastic and highly coloured, and more important still they believed that such peculiarities were nothing to be ashamed of, indeed were often a matter for pride. ‘How delightfully odd’, Miss Dolly would say in her drawling voice, when Johnnie told her how the duck-billed platypus had chosen spangled tights when Queen Alexandra had ordered her to be shot from a cannon at Brighton Pavilion. ‘What a delightfully extravagant creature that duck-billed platypus is, Caro Gabriele’, for Miss Dolly had brought back a touch of Italian here and there from her years in Florence, whilst in Johnnie she fancied a likeness to the angel Gabriel. In describing her own dresses, too, which she would do for hours on end, extravagance was her chief commendation, ‘as for that gold and silver brocade ball dress’ she would say and her voice would sink to an awed whisper ‘it was richly fantastic’. To Miss Marian, with her more brusque, masculine nature, Johnnie’s imaginative powers were a matter of far greater wonder than to her sister and she treated them with even greater respect. In her bluff, simple way like some old-fashioned religious army officer or overgrown but solemn schoolboy, she too admired the eccentric and unusual. ‘What a lark!’ she would say, when Johnnie told her how the Crown Prince had slipped in some polar bears dressed in pink ballet skirts to sing ‘Ta Ra Ra boomdeay’ in the middle of a boring school concert which his royal duties had forced him to attend. ‘What a nice chap he must be to know.’ In talking of her late father, the general, whose memory she worshipped and of whom she had a never ending flow of anecdotes, she would give an instance of his warm-hearted but distinctly eccentric behaviour and say in her gruff voice ‘Wasn’t it rum? That’s the bit I like best’. But in neither of the sisters was there the least trace of that self conscious whimsicality which Johnnie had met and hated in so many grown ups. They were the first people he had met who liked what he liked and as he liked it.
Their love of lost causes and their defence of the broken, the worn out, and the forgotten met a deep demand in his nature, which had grown almost sickly sentimental in the dead practical world of his home. He loved the disorder of the old eighteenth-century farm house, the collection of miscellaneous objects of all kinds that littered the rooms, and thoroughly sympathized with the sisters’ magpie propensity to collect dress ends, feathers, string, old whistles, and broken cups. He gre
w excited with them in their fights to prevent drunken old men being taken to workhouses and cancerous old women to hospitals, though he sensed something crazy in their constant fear of intruders, bolsheviks, and prying doctors. He would often try to change the conversation when Miss Marian became excited about spies in the village, or told him of how torches had been flashing all night in the garden and of how the vicar was slandering her father’s memory in a whispering campaign. He felt deeply embarrassed when Miss Dolly insisted on looking into all the cupboards and behind the curtains to see, as she said ‘if there were any eyes or ears where they were not wanted. For, Caro Gabriele, those who hate beauty are many and strong, those who love it are few’.
It was, above all, their kindness and their deep affection which held the love-starved child. His friendship with Miss Dolly had been almost instantaneous. She soon entered into his fantasies with complete intimacy, and he was spellbound by her stories of the gaiety and beauty of Mediterranean life. They would play dressing up games together and enacted all his favourite historical scenes. She helped him with his French too, and taught him Italian words with lovely sounds; she praised his painting and helped him to make costume designs for some of his ‘characters’. With Miss Marian, at first, there had been much greater difficulty. She was an intensely shy woman and took refuge behind a rather forbidding bluntness of manner. Her old-fashioned military airs and general ‘manly’ tone, copied from her father, with which she approached small boys, reminded Johnnie too closely of his own father. ‘Head up, me lad’ she would say ‘shoulders straight’. Once he had come very near to hating her, when after an exhibition of his absentmindedness she had said ‘Take care, Johnnie head in the air. You’ll be lost in the clouds, me lad, if you’re not careful.’ But the moment after she had won his heart for ever, when with a little chuckle she continued ‘Jolly good thing if you are, you’ll learn things up there that we shall never know.’ On her side, as soon as she saw that she had won his affection, she lost her shyness and proceeded impulsively to load him with kindness. She loved to cook his favourite dishes for him and give him his favourite fruit from their kitchen garden. Her admiration for his precocity and imagination was open-eyed and childlike. Finally they had found a common love of Dickens and Jane Austen, which she had read with her father, and now they would sit for hours talking over the characters in their favourite books.