The Cardboard Crown

by Martin Boyd

  But the most unfortunate effect of Westhill was to strengthen the association with the Mayhews, a disintegrating family possessed by a sort of dreary meekness, a mildew of the spirit. In fact as children we used to call Aunt Mildy, who came most under Mayhew influence ‘Aunt Mildew.’ Since I have been back at intervals I have been accosted in the streets of Melbourne by various seedy individuals called Mayhew who have claimed me as cousin. Yet they have all had an air of gentleness and good breeding about them, and they have greeted me so warmly, not because they wanted to borrow money, but because I was a symbol of a happier past, and these timid shabby Mayhews are still more presentable than half the ‘Leaders of Toorak society.’ As Arthur said: ‘No one can help having relatives who have come down in the world. It is a process of nature. What would be utterly humiliating would be to have relatives who have come up.’

  The most mildewed of them all was Cousin Sarah. Austin could not stand her and made forcible objections to her coming, but Alice had to have help and there was no one else. Austin called her ‘the Jinx’ and throughout the remaining forty years of his life protested against her intermittent attachment to the household. Long after she was an unavoidable necessity she remained, spreading a grey blight over all the opulence of their lives. If in later years, Alice was just setting out for some function in Toorak, at the last minute Sarah would scramble into the landau with a dipper full of eggs, or something wrapped in newspaper which she was taking to a sale of work. She always had the wrong wines brought up for a dinner party, not from stupidity but with the intentional malice of a tee-totaller. She could not order the most elaborate meal without giving it somehow the atmosphere of a schoolroom tea. Her words were always gentle and righteous and her deeds always full of spite. As a child I saw her, this black alpaca spinster, as a kind of dam holding back all she could from the stream of good things our grandmother delighted to pour on us. Mercifully, like the blowflies, she was a purely Australian affliction. She never reached Waterpark.

  If Sarah was the most mildewed of the Mayhews, Hetty was the least. She was entirely free from any blight of meekness or dissembling. She did not practise germ-warfare, but used instead a bulldozer to disintegrate the Langtons. She would invite herself and one of her children to stay at Westhill, leaving her mother to see that the general servant looked after Percy and her other boys. Herself impassive, like a large fowl squatting in a smaller bird’s nest, she created quarrels and tensions all about her. One day Alice wrote:

  ‘Hetty has now been here for over a fortnight. It is her third visit since Christmas. It is extraordinary of her to leave her husband for so long and it is not entirely agreeable having her here. Though with three children and only one servant she must have to do a share of the housework in her own house, here she makes no attempt to lessen the work she causes. She makes her room very untidy and the nurse complains about the extra child to mind.’ Then Alice changes into French and continues: ‘That is not really what worries me. I feel there is something peculiar about Hetty. At times I feel a sudden irrational dislike of her, almost a detestation which shocks me. I did not know I had such feelings. I wish she would go before I reveal it. The whole household is upset. Austin is in a very moody state. This evening I saw him staring at Hetty as if he hated her. I have never seen such an expression in his eyes and it quite frightened me. I could not stay in a house where my host disliked me. I am sure I should feel it, but she seems quite indifferent to our feelings. Once or twice Austin has grumbled to me, but at other times he will say nothing. It is almost as if he were afraid of her because she knows something about him. But what could she know that he would mind revealed? He has never done anything dishonourable. It would be impossible for him. Of that I am sure. But that is what worries me. All the time Sarah apologises for Hetty’s being here, but she does not ask her to go.’

  They had regular letters from Lady Langton in England, written on black-edged ‘foreign’ paper, criss-crossed in angular writing. At first everything seemed to go well. She had taken a small house in Brompton Square and they stayed at Waterpark for long periods in the summer and at Christmas. Arthur loved life in England. Long afterwards he would tell me incidents of those six years as if they were the only time he had really lived. He had good enough connections to bring him invitations to the kind of houses he liked. He was very presentable and amusing. His mother in her letters gave an exaggerated impression of his popularity in the artistic world, and of his brilliance as a painter. We always had the impression that he had known all the greatest writers and painters of the nineteenth century, but the only encounter of which he actually told me was that when leaving a club, he asked Swinburne to return him his hat which the poet, who was drunk, had taken in place of his own.

  Then came the spectacular announcement of Arthur’s engagement to Damaris Tunstall, the daughter of Lord Dilton, a neighbour at Waterpark. This might have been expected to please Austin, with his sense of family importance. On the contrary, it made him anxious about his inheritance. Although he spent so much thought and energy on Westhill, he had not forgotten that he was the heir to Waterpark. He thought that Arthur, with his charm and polish, might easily supplant him. Now that he was marrying a peer’s daughter he felt that he was almost certain to be considered a more suitable heir than his elder brother, and Austin was confirmed in this view when he heard that Thomas had let Arthur have the dower house at Waterpark, so that he might make some pretence of keeping his wife.

  The last of the long series of the lawsuits against the Draxes had just been won by Alice, and they were once more fairly wealthy. Austin suggested another trip to England, and Alice agreed. She wanted to see Europe, and she was even influenced by the prospect of escaping Hetty’s visits to Westhill. The children were to remain here in charge of Cousin Sarah. All arrangements were made for their departure when startling news came from England. The black edges on Lady Langton’s writing paper widened again.

  I do not know exactly what happened. Arthur when exposing all the skeletons to me, naturally did not include his own, and Alice’s diaries give only the bare facts of this tragedy. There may have been nothing behind it, no skeleton, and yet from the reserved way in which people spoke of it I always had the impression there was. Perhaps there was nothing shocking, but it may have been thought that the affair was not very creditable. The family may have taken the attitude of those Italians mentioned by Samuel Butler, who say they are disgraced when they are only unfortunate.

  Damaris Tunstall was six years older than Arthur. She was a clever, ugly, artistic woman, and seems to have taken the initiative in courting. They went sketching together round Waterpark. It was probably thought discreditable because it was imagined that Arthur could not possibly be in love with her and that he must be fortune-hunting. Lord Dilton was very rich. So was Aubrey Tunstall, Damaris’s brother, who had been left a fortune by a maternal uncle and lived in Italy. So was her sister, who had married a rich man and also lived in Italy. But Damaris only had a sufficient income to keep them modestly. The allowance Lady Langton could give Arthur did not pay for more than his dandified clothes and his paints, and he sold few pictures. The Diltons were not very pleased about the match, but as Damaris was thirty-three they did not think her likely to do any better for herself, and Arthur did at least belong to a good local family, and one much older than their own. They regarded her marriage as just another eccentricity, as when she had made a voyage to China.

  Arthur and Damaris went on a honeymoon to Cornwall. There, three weeks after the wedding, she went out one afternoon, alone in a hired dogcart, and drove over a cliff. Herself, the horse and the cart were smashed on the rocks two hundred feet below.

  It was assumed that the horse had bolted, but Damaris was a good driver, and surely she could have headed it away from the cliff. There were hints at something, but I do not know what. Alice could not believe that Austin had done anything dishonourable and it is even more impossible to believe it of Arthur. He had of course no Teba
blood in his veins, and he had from no other source any Teba instincts. He might say the most outrageous things to entertain one, but even when he was ‘throwing Cousin Hetty to the wolves’ he did so because she herself had been cruel, and his reference was always back to the standard of the angels. Also judging from Damaris’s portrait, if there was any cruelty practised, it was more likely to have been by her than by Arthur, and it is likely that there was no skeleton in his cupboard at all.

  I do not want to insist too much on the influence of heredity, and so have withheld until after the account of Arthur’s marriage a fact about the Tunstalls, which by another thread draws them into the orbit of this story. They were related to Mrs Byngham. Again the connection was only dubiously gratifying as it was through Mrs O’Hara, Damaris’s maternal grandmother, who was the second daughter of the monstrous duque de Teba. This lady had quarrelled with her sister, each declaring that the other had married beneath her, and the two families had no contact. Seeing that not only Damaris, but later her brother and sister come under our notice, it is worth remembering that they were not free from Teba blood. There are some coincidences in our family, and some symbols almost too appropriate to be credible, and therefore I am suppressing them, but I shall give this example. The charges on the Teba arms are six snakes emerging from a basket. In the passage here hangs a shield with sixteen quarters, which Arthur emblazoned to remind us of our illustrious forbears, a rather mischievous gift to a family of young Australians who were already far too aware of them. In one of these quarters are the Teba serpents. They are the first things I see every morning as I go to the bath.

  To return to Lady Langton, she felt that again a period of affliction had come upon her, a recess of the tide of fortune. She felt a blow to Arthur more keenly than if it had been aimed at herself. She urged him while he was sitting stunned amid the wreckage of his world to continue with his painting, and to try to forget his loss in creative activity. It was then he admitted that he could never be a painter, that he was colourblind. It was very slight and only confused pale blues and pinks. By avoiding those tints as much as possible and by following more the labels on his paint tubes than his eye, he had managed to conceal the defect until now. Once or twice he had nearly been caught out, as when a fellow student said: ‘You never see a sky as pink as that.’ If he had looked at Arthur, he might have added: ‘And I’ve seldom seen a face so red.’

  Arthur told his mother he could not continue the effort any longer. His defect was sure to be discovered soon. The tragedy of his marriage had destroyed his spirit for the time being. Again Lady Langton thought it best in misfortune to retreat to Australia. This became a habit of the family, to use Australia as a refuge in time of trouble. Westhill particularly became a bolt-hole when things went wrong, so nothing much was ever done to the place after Austin’s first burst of activity. When here they were either depressed or practising economy, which was ultimately fortunate, as if they had been here in their periods of opulence they might have made the place uninhabitable with new wings and Gothic towers.

  After he had arrived back in Melbourne it did not take Arthur long to recover his spirits. The scene of his dreadful experience was far away, in another world, and so it became less real to him. There was no association here to recall it, and the whole incident had been too short to leave a very lasting impression. Also he could not fail to be aware that he had no further worries about money. Perhaps that was why some people spoke with reserve of Arthur’s marriage. They thought he should not have made on it. Actually he did offer to return Damaris’s income to Lord Dilton, but he would not take it. Not many of those who were so honourable on Arthur’s behalf would have made the same gesture of offering a few hundreds, all he had, to a man with many thousands a year. It also suggests that Lord Dilton knew his daughter, and thought that Arthur had earned the money by his experience. In later years, when the circumstances of Damaris’s death were forgotten, Arthur gained a perceptible increase in importance from being the son-in-law of a peer. He returned with his mother to their house in East St Kilda. He tipped Mrs Mayhew out to live with Hetty, and arranged the portières and objets d’art he had brought out from Europe. There he settled down to a life of ordered routine which he followed for sixty years, gathering every kind of moss.

  Austin and Alice had postponed their departure to see Lady Langton whom otherwise they would have passed in the Indian Ocean. A few days after their arrival, Arthur and his mother came up to stay for a week at Westhill. One day during this visit they were all going for a picnic to that creek where Austin and his younger brothers had bathed on the day they first came there. Lady Langton wanted to hear the bellbirds. Austin had driven the wagonette round to the front door to collect the party, but only Arthur was ready. Austin asked him to hold the horses while he made some fixture to the harness. Arthur who was still bubbling with lively comment on Melbourne and everyone in it, began to amuse himself on the subject of the Dells.

  ‘What beats me,’ he said, ‘is how on earth Percy Dell fathered those children of Hetty’s. They’re like young bulls. I only hope they have more intelligence than either of their parents.’ Austin looked annoyed and Arthur thought that the groom had made a mistake in harnessing the horses. ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘Percy isn’t really a man. I believe that among certain primitive creatures the male is just a bit of protoplasm, a piece of jelly that the female uses to fertilise herself. Percy is just Hetty’s piece of male jelly, and I don’t suppose a piece of jelly can transmit its characteristics to its offspring, so Hetty has a clear field in which to reproduce her own bovine charms.’

  Austin, his eyes blazing, suddenly turned on Arthur.

  ‘Be quiet, damn you!’ he shouted.

  At that moment Alice with Lady Langton and the children came out of the house. They stood amazed, as though Austin often growled at them, it was half buffoonery. None of them had ever seen him so violently angry. His anger passed almost immediately. He gave Arthur a curious glance, suspicious, shame-faced and quizzical, as he climbed onto the box and took the reins from him. No one referred to the incident. The conversation was a little stilted until they came down the steep hill to the creek, and chose a site for their tea. While Austin saw to the horses, Lady Langton and the children went to gather twigs for a fire to boil the billy. Arthur stayed to help Alice to spread a cloth on the ground, and to put out the cups and the cakes.

  ‘Why was Austin so angry?’ asked Alice.

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Arthur. ‘It knocked me flat. I was being funny about Hetty’s enormous children. He says much worse things himself and he loathes the Dells.’

  ‘I don’t understand his attitude to them,’ said Alice. ‘He hates Hetty coming up so often to stay, and yet he won’t tell her not to. I suppose he was angry simply at the thought of them.’

  Lady Langton came back with her hands full of long strips of dry bark, and they did not continue with the subject.

  6

  A month later Austin and Alice sailed for England and for eighteen months Cousin Sarah reigned supreme at Westhill. I have already given some indication of her character and may give more later on, when I come to my own contacts with her. At present I shall only mention her effect on Mildred, who was about six years old when her parents went to England. Although there were four children left behind, it was on Mildred that Sarah lavished all her affection. Hitherto she had been a pretty little girl nicknamed Moo. Sarah called her her own little girl, and changed her pet name to Mildy, which somehow stuck. She encouraged her in ways of nauseating sentimentality, and worst of all she did not correct the accent Mildy caught from the servants. It is even likely that she encouraged her in this hideous twang, as she liked everybody to be humble. If she kept Mildy as common as possible, she would remain superior to her and able to retain her love. She would not lose her in a fashionable marriage. Sarah was not as unlike Hetty as she appeared on the surface. Her concentration on Mildy was fortunate for the other children as they were spa
red a great deal of unpleasant and mischievous attention, which even I, a generation later, did not escape when we stayed with our grandmother.

  Arthur used often to talk about Sarah and Mildy, using his favourite illustration.

  ‘All the Mayhews were conscious of their behinds,’ he said. ‘Hetty was proud of hers, but Sarah tried to pretend she hadn’t got one. She used to hold it in and the effort made her hold her chin in as well. I used to feel I was ravishing her even when I shook hands, she was so modest about her fingertips. The real trouble of course was that Sarah taught Mildred to hold in her behind, but she only taught her to do it physically. In Mildred’s mind her backside was as prominent, rotund and provocative as ever, and this conflict between the way she held her behind and her intellectual conception of it nearly drove your poor aunt off her head.’

  It may sound callous to go off to the other side of the world, leaving one’s children for so long, but it was a thing Australian women had to do if they were not to cut themselves off entirely from the country they called ‘home.’ Alice was certainly not indifferent to her parting with the children and she had thought of cancelling the trip at the last moment, but she hated any form of weak-mindedness, and she would have endured far worse things rather than show herself as vacillating.