by Martin Boyd
Owing to the delay in their departure, they did not arrive in England until August, instead of in the early summer as they had intended, when Alice had hoped to remedy the omissions of her last trip to Europe and to make a Continental tour. But after a week or two in London, they went to Waterpark, just before the cubbing and Austin said it was not worthwhile going away. It did not occur to Alice to expect him to give up any of the hunting to fall in with her wishes. The Thomas Langtons obviously wanted them to stay, and it would have been difficult to refuse people who had shown them so much kindness.
Alice enjoyed living at Waterpark, and would have been contented there if she had not wanted to go abroad, and if she had not missed her children. She gives frequent appreciations of the restful, dignified house with its well-trained servants, and yet she never made any attempt to reproduce this at Westhill. She thought it admirable in Somerset, but she also thought it would be out of place nine miles from Dandenong, and there she allowed Sarah to continue with her dismal housekeeping. She had perhaps better taste than the Langtons, but was less of an artist. Arthur, if he had had the money, would have set out with the enthusiasm of a stage manager to have reproduced Waterpark at Westhill, and the dining-room would have been congested with rosy-cheeked English footmen. I myself, eighty years later, with a succession of erratic and ill-natured ‘cook-generals’ still make desperate efforts to create here the atmosphere of an English country house, and for the benefit of young relatives who probably think the whole thing ridiculous. We all try to recreate the conditions under which we have been happiest. I have been happiest in English country houses, so wherever I am I try to make that particular kind of snail’s shell. Alice, although she enjoyed every kind of cultured living, had been happiest in Australia, and so when there, was content with the Australian country ‘way of life,’ even Cousin Sarah’s version of it.
In the spring, when the hunting was over, she was determined at last to have some compensation for her separation from her children and for the patience with which she had endured the winter. Austin grudgingly took her to Paris. For him foreign travel was only associated with two wretched journeys, one taking his dying father to Rome, the other bringing his bereaved mother back.
Even in London he complained that nobody knew who he was. In Paris his anonymity was worse, whereas in Melbourne more than half the people he passed in the street were aware of his identity. He was a member of the Upper House of Parliament and of the best club, and he dined at Government House. These things may have been slight compared with membership of the House of Lords and the Athenaeum, and with dining at Buckingham Palace, but they put him on top of his own world. The only place in England where his self-importance was sufficiently gratified was at Waterpark. It may not have been such a wide recognition as he had in Australia, but it was more subtle. In Melbourne he knew that he was regarded slightly as a buffoon, and he played up to his reputation. At Waterpark the respect given him by the villagers extended to something beyond his personal character, so that he had a greater sense of security there. He was one of ‘the family’ connected with this soil for six centuries, and neighbours of far higher standing than the most important people in Melbourne received him as one of their own kind.
After a fortnight in Paris, Alice with wifely duty followed him back to spend the summer at Waterpark. She often went up to London. At this time there are hints in her diary, very slight and not even strong enough to need concealment in French, that she was not very contented, and that owing to his selfishness there was not complete harmony between herself and Austin.
At the end of August they were both in London, at the rooms in King Street, St James’s, where they always stayed. Austin had half promised Alice to travel on the Continent in the early autumn, but now that the partridge shooting was soon to begin he was sulky about fulfilling his promise, though he would have kept it. Alice, however, had met two Misses Urquhart from Melbourne who were just off to France. She thought it would be better if she went with them, and let Austin return alone to Waterpark. He was obviously relieved when she suggested this.
On the morning when he had arranged to go down to Frome by a midday train, they were sitting together at breakfast. The retired butler who ran the house brought in their letters. Alice, seeing that she had some with Australian stamps, took them eagerly.
That evening she wrote again in her diary one of those entries in tiny French, which are like the scars on the record of her life:
‘Cette journée est la plus terrible, la plus épouvantable de ma vie. Je ne peux pas croire que je continuerai à vivre. Tout s’est effoudré. Tout est ruiné. Je désespère d’avoir jamais une vie heureuse, même honnête et paisible. Ce n’est pas seulement l’avenir qui est sans espoir, mais les années passées sont devenues fausses et un rêve fol. C’est ça qui est le plus grand supplice. Je n’ai même plus de passé.’
She goes on to describe what happened at breakfast. She opened first the letter from Sarah as she knew that it would contain laborious but affectionate notes from the children. She read these and handed them across to Austin. She then turned to Sarah’s letter, and read aloud anything that she thought would interest him—there had been heavy rains, the camelias had been very fine this year, Maisie had begun riding lessons. Then she read out:
‘I suppose you have heard from Aunt Emma that Hetty has another boy.’
She felt Austin start and she looked up. He had dropped the children’s letters. He appeared upset.
‘That’s impossible!’ he declared.
‘It can’t be impossible, dear, if both Sarah and your mother tell us it is so,’ said Alice, surprised.
‘No one has mentioned it till now. We would have heard it was on the way,’ he muttered, angry and confused. He pushed back his chair and wiped his forehead with his table-napkin.
He gave Alice a glance, shamefaced and suspicious and left the room.
She put down Sarah’s letter unfinished, and sat for awhile, puzzled and apprehensive. She could not understand why he should be so disturbed. That curious glance he had given her before he left the room reminded her of something. It was when they were going for a picnic at Westhill and they came out and found him shouting at Arthur. He had given that same odd glance, questioning and ashamed. She distinctly remembered that afternoon—the damp aromatic gully, the bellbirds. She had asked Arthur why Austin was angry and he said it was because he had poked fun at the size of Hetty’s children.
Hetty’s children!
Alice felt as if the blood was draining away from her head. When two people have lived in the closest intimacy for over ten years, each little movement and glance may tell more than a volume of words. He had told her clearly in that glance before he left the room, that Hetty’s children were his own.
The implications of this were too great for her to grasp all at once. The blow was too heavy. Her first impulse was to escape, not to see Austin again until her mind was clear. She had put on her bonnet as she had intended going shopping immediately after breakfast to make some last minute purchases for her trip on the Continent. She went quickly from the house, closing the door softly behind her. She hardly knew in which direction she was walking, but she found herself opposite one of the entrances to Hyde Park. She crossed the road and went in and walked for a long time across the grass. At last she felt tired, and coming to a bench she sat down to consider her position.
It must have begun, she thought, on the ship, when she was ill, in the first year of their marriage. When she realised this, that it had begun so soon, the tears streamed down her face. She tried to think how it had happened, even to find some excuse for it. She was ill. She knew Austin’s strong appetites, what it would mean to him, after the first rapturous months of marriage, to find himself deprived of his young wife. And there at hand was Hetty, who had always wanted him, ever since she was a child in the schoolroom, and had snatched the cardboard crown.
Even so she could not understand how it had come about, and once or t
wice she thought it could not have happened, and that the whole thing was a trick of her imagination. She almost started up to return to King Street, to catch Austin before he left for Paddington and to conceal from him that she had held such grotesque suspicions. But she saw how it all fitted too well—his detour to Zurich when he should have been hurrying to Rome to help his mother. He would want to see his child, the baby which was supposed to be Percy Dell’s and premature. Hetty had gone to Switzerland so that no one should see how large and robust their ‘premature’ child might be. And this of course was the reason for her sudden marriage to Dell. As Alice sat there she was struck by new details of the whole sordid sequence, and shaken by fresh bursts of contempt and grief.
The entry in her diary for this day is entirely in French and deals largely with her bewildered emotions. Arthur provided a more detailed account of the affair, as I sat on his mother’s needlework chairs at another of those intimate dinners I had with him in the early 1920s, at his house in East St Kilda. I do not know why he told me, unless he thought that I was the most interested, and that family history should be passed on. It may have been simply that in his old age his love of gossip had grown stronger, his desire to startle more imperative, and having less contemporary rumour to draw on, he plunged recklessly into the past. Or, and perhaps this is the real reason, he thought that gradually this story might leak through to me, and he wanted me to know, if I was to be the repository of family history, that his brother had not been wilfully cruel and deceptive to his wife. When the story had leaked through to the older generation, their condemnation of Austin had been savage, and linked with ridicule of his eccentricities, the bells on his harness, his noises on trumpets and shawms, his often outrageous wit, so that one might easily gather the impression that he was an immoral buffoon. Arthur wanted me to know that this was not a true impression. He may also have thought that I might hear malicious tales about himself, about Damaris and her money, and so see his generation as altogether discreditable.
He began by ‘throwing Hetty and Sarah to the wolves’. It is not quite accurate to say that he disliked them. He had had so much fun mimicking them that he had quite an affection for them; as if they were a literary creation of his own. He spoke to them kindly when he met them, and in his later years as we have seen, often met Hetty for luncheon. It was not conscious hypocrisy. He did like them when he saw them. When he did not the idea of them filled him either with hilarious ridicule or scorching indignation.
‘The thing about the Mayhews,’ he said, ‘was that they had no taste—at least the women hadn’t. The boys were nice gentle creatures and should have been girls, and Hetty and Sarah the men. In that family the natural order was inverted.’
Arthur was speaking at a time when ignorances were assumed which made this kind of remark possible.
‘The trouble was that though Hetty should have been a man, she could never have been a gentleman. But even if Hetty wasn’t a gentleman, Austin was, and I don’t know how they could have gone on like that. They say that being at sea has a certain effect, I must say it wasn’t my experience. I felt deathly. Of course …’ he looked at me sideways, and again asked: ‘D’you know about this?’ Again trying to make my voice sound indifferent I said: ‘No.’
We were back where we had been a few months earlier, when his disclosure had been interrupted by my answering the telephone to Cousin Hetty. Arthur had drunk most of a bottle of claret and now gazed meditatively at his glass of port. He was thinking more of past events than of me, and was not particularly aware of my identity.
‘I don’t believe that Austin would ever have done it off his own bat,’ he said. ‘People don’t realise what Hetty was like. She may be an intimidating old woman, but as a girl she was terrifying. If you danced with her you felt that you were being dragged into the womb of the eternal mother. And that was if she didn’t care a fig for you. If she was determined to have you she must have been irresistible, not because of her charm but because of some super female magnet with which the Almighty had fitted her. Austin hadn’t a hope. How the devil they managed it on that little sailing ship I can’t imagine. They may have got into a lifeboat of course,’ he said pensively. Here Arthur forgot that he was describing events which had cost him life-long unhappiness, and gave himself up to speculating as to how the actual seduction might have been performed. Some of his conjectures were funny but not printable. Suddenly his indignation overcame him.
‘And all the time,’ he exclaimed, ‘Alice was lying sick in her cabin, a bride of six months, carrying her first child. And that beast …’ He stopped with a slight gasp. ‘If Alice had discovered it then I think it would have killed her. I believe that she did find out, many years later, and she was never quite the same again. I only hope that she didn’t discover all the details, how soon it had begun. I never knew how much she knew. I could only admire the way she behaved when she did find out. Your grandmother was practically faultless, and yet she never condemned anyone. It may have been because of her own mother. I don’t know—but she was so kind …’
Again Arthur stopped and caught his breath. Whenever he heard of innocent suffering, or of any injustice he was powerless to remedy, he found it difficult not to cry, and he had to stop speaking for a moment. This is a characteristic of many Langtons. They could not bear to think of people suffering. In Dominic this trait, fortified by Byngham vigour and Teba passion, became a searing anguish. Sir William could only bring himself to sentence a man to death by concentrating his thoughts on the murderer’s victim. Arthur himself used to perform quixotic acts of charity in wretched povertystricken homes. To the astonishment of his relatives there turned up at the funeral of this witty, malicious and self-indulgent aesthete, a crowd of indigent working-class people whom he had from time to time befriended.
‘Well,’ he went on, ‘one may understand Austin’s succumbing on the ship because of the sea air and Hetty’s snatching him into a lifeboat every night after dinner, but I’m jiggered if I know how he could keep it up all those years. He must have been afraid of her. In fact he told me he was. Then she found that she was going to have a child. That was a couple of weeks before they reached Plymouth. She set to work rapidly in another direction and grabbed Percy Dell as a form of insurance. You’d think that would sicken Austin for ever, as he was naturally as straightforward as it’s possible to be. In spite of Percy Dell, she still wanted to get Austin, wanted him to clear out with her. She made several attempts before she finally married Dell. She persuaded her uncle Mayhew to take her up to London to a lecture by Thackeray. She then pretended to be unwell and went to bed in the hotel. The Mayhews went off to hear Thackeray and she sent a message to Austin, who she knew would be in London on that night, to come round to her. She tried like blazes to make him clear off with her then and there, and threatened to tell everybody and force Alice to divorce him. He said that he’d tell Alice everything himself, and that she wouldn’t divorce him. She couldn’t anyhow unless he abandoned her. That was the only thing that held Hetty back. She wasn’t sure that Alice wouldn’t forgive him. She contented herself for the time being with raping him in the hotel bedroom. You see, he didn’t really like her, but he couldn’t resist her vile body.’
I had tried to lead Arthur back to the point he was at on that evening when Cousin Hetty telephoned, but I was hearing more than I had bargained for. I was half fascinated, but really thought it would be better if the knowledge of these ancient scandals were to die with the last of the generation to which they belonged. But Arthur was in his stride. It was evident that he knew much more than he had originally admitted. When he first spoke to me on this subject, he pretended that various fictions were true, that Percy Dell for example, was the father of all Hetty’s sons. Bit by bit he had revealed a little more, like an Oriental dancer discarding her numerous veils, until this evening I was to see truth uncovered.
‘It’s a pity,’ he said, ‘that Austin didn’t go back to Waterpark the next morning and make a clean
breast of it to Alice. If he had all the horrible business of the next ten years would not have happened. Those so-called Dells would never have been born.’ He paused, and twisted his wineglass. ‘It’s odd, you know,’ he reflected, ‘that though their origin is scandalous, those boys have done very well. One can hardly say it would have been a good thing if they hadn’t been born.’
It was true that if the Dells had not existed the importance of our clan would have been diminished. Except for Arthur’s brother Walter who became a High Court judge, they were our most prominent, wealthy and successful relatives. Hetty, never forgetting that she was the daughter of a dean, sent two of them into the Church. One became Bishop of Yackandandah, and the other an archdeacon. Her third son made a fortune on the Stock Exchange and had a fashionable wife and a mansion in Toorak. The fourth became a General in the 1914 War, was knighted and actually killed in battle. His statue stands in the St Kilda Road. It is annoying when we pass this only to be able to say: ‘That is our cousin’—when he was really our uncle, but like Sir Launcelot’s, our honour rooted in dishonour stands. Arthur seemed puzzled by these considerations and reluctant to continue, but then he said:
‘Even if good does come out of evil, it doesn’t justify the evil.’ Having reassured himself, he again took up his story. ‘The next shot Hetty made at him was ten minutes before her wedding. Austin had to give her away as Papa was ill. He tried to get out of it, as it was too appropriate to be decent, though there was no-one he would have more gladly given away, to the devil himself, if necessary. In fact he would rather have given her to the devil. To bestow someone on a piece of protoplasm doesn’t guarantee that you’re rid of her. He and Hetty were the last to leave the vicarage at Datchet for the church. She had arranged that. She came downstairs all orange blossom and white lace and again asked him to go off with her at that very moment. Her clothes were packed for going away. It wouldn’t take her a minute to change her dress. They only had to drive to the train instead of to the church, where her miserable piece of jelly was already waiting at the altar. Austin must have felt like death, but he wouldn’t go. She flung her arms round his neck and crushed all her white satin. When he told her she was ruining her wedding dress she moaned: “I am only a bride for you.” She had a deep moaning voice when she was young, but it was by no means weak.