What Happened at Hazelwood?

by Michael Innes

  Christopher was shy and intellectual. He was also something not easy to express, but I think it might best be called the flower of courtesy – that in the most substantial sense the phrase will bear. He was all gentleness and strength. An obligation was absolute with him. For anything in which he believed in the sphere of social justice he would have dropped configurational anthropology in the waste-paper basket and stood and died in his tracks. If I had actors and actresses behind me he had a long line of aristocratic eccentrics and philosophic radicals. We got on well. It looked to me like a marriage made in heaven. I look back and it is a sort of dream: Christopher disengaging himself from mobs of young men and knots of old ones; Christopher anxiously choosing wine at the George; Christopher absently punting up stream from Magdalen Bridge and talking of the Mundugurnor and the Tchambuli and the mountain-dwelling Arapesh. The Cher became the Markham or the Sepek as he spoke. He had been living for his first substantial piece of field work. And that was what happened. One vac there was a letter. Christopher had gone to New Guinea.

  Well, that was that. Christopher was not one to let you down. He would not have let down a beggar-woman for all the Mundugumor who ever hollowed out a canoe. He had decided that he didn’t measure up to me and walked straight out.

  I walked straight out too. Within a week I was doing dramatic art. And if anyone had there and then wanted a young and rather beautiful woman to play the part of Death I just wouldn’t have needed any training at all. But of course it wore off – in a way. I had a great deal of hard work and one love affair. The love affair was bad – commonplace but bad, so that I don’t think I could so much as bear to commit a note of it to a private diary. But oblivion does in a sense take such things. I pushed along. In four years I was playing Cleopatra in a rather arty production of Shakespeare at a coterie theatre. That was quite silly, of course. But it caught the eye of what I must call an intelligent producer. There was to be a Troilus and Cressida built up round me for the West End. And I saw at once that there was nothing silly about that. It was my chance to join the family and shake hands with Kemble and Garrick. The play was running and an assured success when Christopher turned up. He had been at the theatre every night. And eventually he walked in on me and asked me to marry him.

  By this time Christopher Hoodless was somebody too. When people talked of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead they sometimes mentioned him as well. Well, it seemed perfectly sensible. Brilliant young anthropologists do marry talented legitimate actresses. It is quite the sort of thing that happens. And in addition to being sensible it was delirious. All that. Dull sublunary lovers’ love didn’t seem to come in. And I just didn’t see anything sinister about this. I’d had enough of hasty sexuality in that one love affair.

  Christopher still stared – and sometimes from so far away that I felt it was a good thing that distance lends enchantment to a view. He might have been the poet Grey meditating his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. When one gets to this point in a story there’s nothing like a little joke.

  He got quieter – and then quieter still. One evening about a week before we were to be married we dined in a little place in Gerard Street that is all mirrors round the walls. Christopher said nothing at all. And then I saw him gazing at my reflection six depths of mirror away, and there was naked horror on his face. It was tough. I wanted Christopher, I wanted him so much that I would have taken him on any terms. But I knew he wouldn’t look at that. It was the simple truth that he wasn’t the sort who marry, he was the sort who go through a high window the night before.

  Well, I had a job getting Christopher out of where he’d got. Particularly as I wanted him. But I did manage it and he went back to his islands. Then I bolted to the country. I never guessed there could be such comfort in an old cocoa-drinking, puppy-raising, Girl-Guiding friend.

  We went riding and met Sir George Simney. He had a lad with him – it was Timmy – and from his features I thought it must be his son. ‘My groom,’ he said, and looked me straight in the eye. Well, of course I hadn’t been told that the Simney blood was there through the distaff side, and I supposed that he was boldly taking the air with his own illegitimate boy. There is nothing pretty about this, I’m afraid. But he looked at me, and somehow it was so much not Christopher –

  Anyway, that’s how I came to marry George.

  4

  And now to get back to these new Simneys – the ones from Australia waiting in the hall. It’s a very comfortable hall, with an enormous fire blazing in a great stone fireplace. Still, it will be civil to hurry out and make their acquaintance.

  Hippias Simney, his son Gerard, and Gerard’s wife Joyleen… I see that in trying to get a flying start with this chronicle I have landed myself with rather a crowded stage at the start. Perhaps it would be better to begin again and have all the characters drop in one by one for a drink, as they do in well-made West End plays. But, no, I’m not going back. I want to go right through with this and have done.

  I went out and George followed me. Owdon made as if to come after us; then he hesitated and motioned to Timmy to come instead. Something had taken Owdon. He looked much as if he was to be made to walk the plank there and then. And I remembered that George had picked up this unsightly retainer in Australia. Perhaps Owdon had once relieved cousin Hippias of a watch and chain? It would amuse George to take and cherish a butler who had first contacted the family in that way. And yet that watch and chain would have been a good seventeen years ago, and if backed up by George the ruffian was unlikely to go to gaol for it now. Perhaps Owdon’s Australian past held some secret altogether more considerable.

  Hippias was a great florid man about George’s age and he was standing beside the fire with an ulster thrown back upon loosely-worn tweeds. When he spoke it was with the accent of a man who might have stepped out of a replica of Hazelwood in the next county. Only his mouth had gone tight and thin in some chronic refusal to be stopped with dust. There was something which I took to be typically colonial, too, about the focus of his eyes; he was looking at George as if with effort now; it was only a glance and then his gaze passed on further – rather, I thought, as if he were accustomed to converse with some blue pencilline of hills on a vast horizon.

  ‘My cousin Hippias,’ said George. ‘Hippias, my wife, Lady Simney.’

  This was formal enough, and there followed such constrained greetings as might pass between in-laws in a grocer’s parlour. Not that Joyleen was not an exception, for she started making her passes at George straight away. I suppose she had never met a baronet and thought of him as some terrific great lord of whom the best must at once be made. And George responded. It is difficult to compress what must be called a libidinous look into a split second; but that was what he gave Joyleen now – and then paid no more attention to her throughout the evening. And Joyleen was satisfied. She knew all the moves in her own silly game.

  ‘Hippias,’ said George – and his eye took in a pile of suitcases by the staircase – ‘we had no notice of this.’ He hesitated. ‘You’re welcome, of course.’

  I was a little surprised at George welcoming anybody (unless, indeed, it was on the strength of their bringing Joyleen) and I was very surprised indeed at something else. That fractional hesitation on George’s part – it was just like Owdon’s a few minutes before – was something altogether unfamiliar to me. Had George too filched a watch and chain? Well, Hippias’ next words pretty well implied that he had.

  ‘Notice?’ he said. ‘I don’t know that it runs in the family. We had none that you proposed to take up Dismal Swamp.’

  ‘Dismal Swamp?’ George looked momentarily blank and then burst out laughing. ‘There can’t really be a place called Dismal Swamp. And how could one take it up if there were? I can imagine sinking into Dismal Swamp. But not, my dear fellow, taking it up. And is this your boy? I remember him in his first riding-breeches.’

 
This was rather a long speech for George – and the speech of a man who was thinking something out. But the turning attention to Gerard Simney was deft enough. For Gerard was angry; he saw nothing odd in a place being called Dismal Swamp and resented this laughter; and now having an eye coolly turned on him he blushed like a fool. Joyleen looked at him and was plainly thinking him a fool; equally plainly she was making the important discovery that to live in the neighbourhood of a Dismal Swamp is socially disadvantageous. For my own part, I thought it might be possible to like Gerard as well as merely sympathize with him. He was older than his wife – something about my own age – but looked as if he still found life a matter of rather boyish bewilderment. I guessed that for some reason he must have had all his education in his own country and that being pitched into this older Hazelwood had rather got him guessing. And George was perhaps not altogether his idea of an English country gentleman. Certainly he was looking at his titled kinsman suspiciously as well as angrily. Had he noticed that swift glance of George’s at his wife? How often had I asked myself questions rather like that!

  Meanwhile I was giving orders to Timmy and making a few decent remarks to Joyleen. After all, these people were welcome enough in a way. Even if they were just another dose of Simneys the mere fact that they were comparative strangers was something. They could scarcely be plunged straight into such undifying scenes as our dining room had just witnessed… I hate rows. And they would surely put some brake on them.

  Of course I was wrong. Indeed when I turned back from Joyleen I realized that I was. For George and Hippias were at it hammer and tongs about Dismal Swamp. I may as well say now that I have not yet really got the hang of it. Something called reticulation was always cropping up, and I suppose that this must be a method of irrigating large areas of land. My final impression was that the Australian Simneys had given George during his sojourn out there confidential intelligence of some development-scheme in which they were proposing to get rather shadily in on the ground floor. They had information they ought not to have possessed and were about to exploit it by buying potentially valuable land on the cheap. Whereupon George, knowing that they couldn’t afford to make an open row, had teamed up with some syndicate or other and done the buying first. This had rankled – it is apparently not the sort of thing the Australian landed gentry do – and now here were Hippias and Gerard proposing to make themselves belatedly nasty about it while digging well in to George’s cellar and larder. The situation was drear.

  Joyleen, naturally, was not much interested in this old family dispute. She was taking off her coat and at the same time looking at me defensively, much as if my eye was searching for traces of primeval slime about her person. She came from Bondi, she explained – and I gathered that this must be some dressy Sydney suburb. As for Dismal Swamp – and she glanced at her father-in-law and George, who were still slinging mud at each other in more senses than one – she had never so much as set eyes on it.

  ‘But,’ I said (for I wanted to get them washed and in to our interrupted dinner, and I was feeling rather cross), ‘if a place is like that, why ever should one not call it so? Would you prefer to call it Paradise, or Eden, or Windsor Park?’

  This just didn’t register on Joyleen. But Gerard spoke up at once. ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘There were three ways of giving names in Australia. One was to stick to the native ones. Some are quite pleasant, like Yankalilla and Paringa and Mallala. Even the grotesque ones, like Mudamuckla and Cobdogla and Nunjikompita–’

  ‘I like Nunjikompita,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not bad. And I rather relish Pompoota and Muloowurtie. They fit the places, somehow – and nobody remembers that quite a lot of them have surprisingly indelicate meanings. Well, that was one way, and quite a good one. The second was to remember the old folks at home. That gives Hazelwood Park. And it gives names like Clapham and Aldgate and Brighton and Edinburgh to little groups of shacks in the middle of nowhere. A sentimental method, and of course, after a time the effect isn’t even sentimental but just silly. The third method was the best. It was just to notice what a place looked like, or remember something that had happened there, or even just acknowledge what it felt like. That gives the real Australian names – the white ones to set over against the marvellous dark ones of the aborigines. Lone Gum, Emu Downs, Wattle Flat, Policeman’s Point, Cape Catastrophe, Wild Horse Plains, Mount Despair, Watchman, Disaster Bay, Dismal Swamp. Yes, these are the real ones. Our home – Hazelwood Park – is quite a mature old place in its way, and the furniture is English and must have been a bit old-fashioned in the time of Queen Anne. But is all that right? I can’t say that I’m sure it is. The house should be called Claypans or Stringies. And the furniture should be in some decent colonial style that can cope with our hardwoods.’ Gerard paused and nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s very satisfactory to have a place called Watchman.’

  Gerard, then, despite being a Simney, an Australian, and the husband of Joyleen, was a tolerably civilized human being – and, I thought, definitely nice as well. It was true that he seemed quite willing to be not less aggressive than his father in the matter of George’s ancient double-dealing. But I didn’t like him any the less for being prepared to square up to my husband. And here I come to something which shows that Hazelwood had of late rather been getting me down. Almost straight away I quite opened up to Gerard on some more or less tacit and instinctive plane. After all, he wasn’t a mere boy. And it didn’t occur to me to stop and reflect that his acquaintance with women was probably pretty limited – extending perhaps to no more than his pastoral neighbours, the frequenters of some sleepy Government House, and whatever contacts with Bondi had brought him his wife. It didn’t occur to me to remember that he had no sort of inoculation against those to whom had been given the doubtful gift of taking Cressida in their stride. Probably his perceptions and categories in the way of women were quite primitive: he saw them as necessarily either bedworthy and brainless or brainy but less bedworthy than a bedstead. Anything that cut across the categories would be an upset, naturally enough.

  But this is to run ahead (and is utterly beastly too). Meanwhile I took Joyleen to my room and was going to leave her with my maid while she tidied up. The probability of there being no more soup, the possibility of raising some from tins, the likely state of the fish after this sizable interruption: these were matters a little on my mind. But Joyleen seemed anxious not to let me go – I fancy Martin’s respectfully appraising eye scared her rather – and so I stood by the fire and watched her open an expensive leather case and begin to fish ineptly among a great array of cosmetics all labelled Paris in letters as big as would go on. Martin watched too, first with interest and then with pain, so that presently I thought it best to pack her off in search of sheets and pillowcases and towels. We seldom have spare rooms ready and waiting at Hazelwood, and this meant that in the next couple of hours there would be quite a job of work: coals to carry and dust-sheets to take off. And we are the sort of betwixt and between establishment in which that sort of thing ought to happen at a word, but in fact never does. So I daresay I was looking rather absent when Joyleen said abruptly: ‘Is this place very old?’

  She contrived to suggest that in the answer might lie an explanation of something that was troubling her. It was rather as if after being puzzled for some time one should say: ‘Is it possible that there may be something wrong with the drains?’

  ‘It was built during the Protectorate,’ I said.

  For a moment Joyleen looked blank. Then her expression became at once comprehending and defensive. ‘We have protectorates too,’ she announced. ‘New Guinea’s one – and I think some islands in the Pacific. They taught us about them at school.’

  ‘I hope,’ I said, ‘that you had a good voyage?’

  ‘Beaut.’ Joyleen spoke with sudden sincere pleasure, and her expression was both childlike and wholly without innocence. ‘There was–’ She stopped abruptl
y and once more looked blank. Presumably she had been on the verge of some indiscreet revelation.

  Well, I didn’t want that, so I took up the telephone and spoke to cook. When I turned back it was to find Joyleen staring in frank astonishment at a picture over the fireplace. It was a large Munnings – which was much more George’s idea of bedroom furniture than mine. ‘Horses!’ she said.

  ‘Why, yes – or a stockbroker’s dream of them.’

  Joyleen continued to stare. She wrinkled her pretty, silly little nose. Here, seemingly, was a problem indeed. Then, quite suddenly, she solved it.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Joyleen, ‘that you got this picture from Australia?’

  5

  For my new cousin, then, Houyhnhnms were a biological phenomenon to be met with only down under, and the Old World was given over wholly to Yahoos and motor cars. I said something about hoping to be able to mount her next day, and I don’t doubt that I succeeded in being horribly patronizing where I meant to be moderately friendly.

  And on this we went downstairs again. The position had not greatly changed. George, Hippias and Gerard were back in the hall, waiting for us; and the rest of the family, with the exception of Mervyn, seemed still to be in a state of suspended animation in the dining room. Mervyn had emerged in search of diversion, and he was looking at the newcomers with a quite unnecessary expression of urbane wonder, rather as a sophisticated Elizabethan gentleman, not himself given to extensive voyaging, might have regarded a brace of painted savages imported by Sir Francis Drake or Sir Walter Raleigh. Moreover he had summoned Timmy to him and on the pretext of making friendly offers to help with the luggage was keeping the sullen youth at his side – thereby designing, I don’t doubt, to exhibit a beguiling little genealogical problem as prominently as possible to any new kinsman inclined to comment or research. Like Bevis, I was all for birching Mervyn, and if somebody had held the young beast down I believe I could have done it with considerable satisfaction myself. But it is necessary to admit that Mervyn’s particular brand of offensiveness nearly always displays finish. I don’t think this is because he is particularly clever; rather, and in some devious fashion, it has something to do with his being particularly beautiful. I used to hate Mervyn’s beauty, although the same thing never at all worried me in Timmy. But that is by the way.