by Martin Boyd
‘Austin got her to the church and gave her away, a bit crumpled in body and soul. When she drove off after the wedding reception, I bet he mopped his forehead. A few days later, at Waterpark, he heard that they’d gone to Switzerland to live, and he thought a squalid incident was closed, but he mistook Hetty, and what was worse, he mistook himself.
‘At that time Papa was very ill, and in the spring he died in Rome. Mama was there alone and Austin had to go out there and settle things up and bring her home to England. If you’re in Rome you might go and look at Papa’s grave in the Protestant Cemetery and see whether it’s kept decently. It’s just on the left as you go in, up towards Shelley’s.’
‘I’ve seen it,’ I said, ‘when we went to Italy before the war. One of the Tunstalls is buried quite close to it. It’s rather a coincidence, two people from Frome, buried so close together.’
‘I know,’ said Arthur crossly, ‘it’s Aubrey Tunstall, my brother-in-law.’
I thought I had made some kind of gaffe, but was not sure what. Was Arthur annoyed at my referring even so indirectly to his unfortunate marriage? Or was he cross because I affected to know more than he did about his grand connections, his honour again like Sir Launcelot’s? Or were his feelings identical with mine when Julian spoke with detachment about my grandparents? I remember thinking old people were difficult, and now probably Julian thinks just the same of me.
‘Anyhow,’ said Arthur, ‘it was not much out of Austin’s way to stop at Zurich where Hetty and Dell were living, and where she was nursing her baby, and Austin’s of course, a few weeks old. Austin was only about twenty-two, the age at which people are most apt to get into scrapes. They have the judgment of a boy and the feelings of a man. He wanted to see his other child. He was proud that he had achieved two extensions of his personality in such a short time. I don’t know why. Any idiot can reproduce himself.’
Arthur paused again. This was probably the first time that he had related this story in full to anyone, and as he did so new aspects of it occured to him, and he found that now in his old age he did not quite hold the views he had thought he held.
‘And yet,’ he went on more thoughtfully, ‘it is perhaps right to be proud of fulfilling the natural law, to be a healthy part of the design of nature. However …’, his inborn levity returned, ‘you don’t want to overdo it. Austin had some of the instincts of a sultan. At Zurich he found Hetty looking the picture of animal health, the eternal lioness with her young, a bouncing boy who could no more have been premature than Henry VIII. Austin’s pride was a good deal damped by Percy Dell, who though I had always called him the protoplasm, wasn’t even that, poor wretch. He was bursting with sniggering paternal pride. He nudged Austin in a sort of “we fathers” manner. The worst thing Austin had to endure in his life was to hear his own children talked about, criticised, laughed at, or even praised as if they were another man’s—and such a man! All the family made jokes about the weakling Percy and his enormous boys. I dropped the biggest brick of all just after I came back from England. I went on about Hetty and the protoplasm when Austin suddenly turned on me in a blazing rage. I had never known him do such a thing, and I was staggered. In the evening when we were alone in that room full of bassoons which he had at Westhill he apologised and then he told me the whole story.
‘He was ashamed of it. He hated the endless deceptions, especially of Alice, and yet he couldn’t help being proud and fond of Hetty’s sons. Poor old boy,’ Arthur added reflectively, ‘from twenty-two till the end of his life, there was no escape. Whenever he was in Australia which he felt was his home, much more than Waterpark, he was afraid that a bomb might explode under him at any moment, that his life and all his affections might be wrecked. By nature he was the most straightforward man alive, yet he was always forced to acquiesce in deceit, and for ten years to practise it even against his wife. It soured his open and generous nature. He became suspicious, wondering who might know about the scandal. He blew himself up into greater importance than he had, and as a kind of defence compiled a book of all the people in Melbourne who had convict ancestors, but he didn’t keep it in Melbourne. It was in the library at Waterpark. D’you know what happened to it?’
‘I never saw it,’ I said. ‘It was probably sold with the house.’
‘Good God!’ exclaimed Arthur. This possibility distracted him further from the thread of his story, but not for long. He was determined now to tell me everything, and though occasionally he might be drawn aside by some irrelevant association, or be seized by some ribald conceit, he was more serious in manner than usual. He was justifying Austin to his descendants, and he went on:
‘Well, after Papa’s death they all came back to Melbourne. Mama bought this house and Alice took a house opposite Kilawly where those red-brick flats are now. Austin, with ten thousand miles between himself and Hetty, thought no more about her. He got a devil of a jolt when he heard that she was on the way out to Australia, bringing Dell and the baby, and a worse one when she settled only a couple of hundred yards away. Even then he didn’t think it would be anything worse than an uncomfortable reminder of what he’d rather forget. But Hetty didn’t want to forget. She hadn’t been in the house a fortnight, when she sent over a message by the milk-boy, asking if Austin would come over and fix some broken thing in the house, a tap or a door handle or something. It was a natural enough request for someone who had just moved in. Dell was in town for the day. When Austin arrived Hetty didn’t bother about the door handle. She had sent out their servant and nurse or whatever they had, and they were alone in the house. She took him into her bedroom to show him the sleeping baby, and she said: “Our son” and stood close against Austin. He was very emotional and though he didn’t like Hetty, she excited him. Almost before he knew what he’d done, it had happened again. He went home in a funk, disgusted with himself and furious with Hetty, determined not to let it go on. He did everything he could to avoid seeing her alone, but she kept sending over about the door handles.’
Although Arthur’s face was solemn and almost tearful as he told me this, he could not resist his instinct to put it in a ridiculous light. He loved to fix on some commonplace article like a door handle, and turn it into an obscene symbol.
‘He said he wouldn’t go over and mend her bloody door handles, but Alice actually forced him to, saying it would be unkind to refuse. He half-felt that this gave him a kind of excuse, and off he went again. He was probably feeling like it at that moment, and people aren’t consistent in their feelings, especially about that sort of thing. Then she told him that she was going to have another child by him, and he felt trapped, especially when the baby was born and it was the spitting image of Austin. There is no Langton blood in the Mayhews, and Austin is a pure Langton—he doesn’t take after Mama, but the fact that they were cousins was used to explain the likeness of Hetty’s boys to Austin. What I can’t understand is how Hetty managed to have children only by Austin all the time he was in Australia. I suppose she played some gynaecological trick on Dell which the ordinary man doesn’t know about. The poor devil didn’t even deserve to be called a protoplasm. Even after this second child was born Austin tried to break with her. It was like trying to break from the clutch of a gorilla. That is the real reason why he persuaded Alice to buy Westhill and move into the country. If they hadn’t done that Mama wouldn’t have agreed to go to England again, so Hetty has had far-reaching effects.’ Arthur paused, thinking of his own marriage, perhaps wondering what he would have done if he had not married Damaris Tunstall and inherited her money. As he told me this story it became evident how much our misfortune and our good luck were dependent one on the other.
‘The move to Westhill nearly blew up the whole show. Hetty was furious and said, what she was always halfthreatening to do, that she would declare the true father of her children. She imagined that the result of this would be a double divorce and that Austin would have to marry her. Austin was not so sure that Alice would now forgive him if she knew
of it. He was no longer guilty of a single uncontrolled impulse. She was as likely to be governed by justice as by mercy. Hetty couldn’t be certain, either, what Alice would do. She might forgive Austin, while Dell might divorce herself and she’d be left in the lurch. It was only because he emphasised this probability that Austin managed the move to Westhill without an explosion. But that wasn’t the end of the business.
‘I think that Austin, having got away with it for so long, had almost persuaded himself that other people knew about it, and condoned it—even Alice. He couldn’t realise that when she persuaded him to stay the night with the Dells, as a convenience when he went to town, she had no inkling of his relationship with Hetty. Alice wasn’t used to dealing with moral thugs and that’s what Hetty was. She used to invite herself to Westhill for weeks and squat there with the insolence of a brigand. There are far more near-criminals in the world than we imagine. Alice was indignant and wretched about it, but she didn’t know how to cope with anyone who ignored all the rules of decent behaviour. Your Uncle Reggie Byngham said the other day: “One can’t argue with a dishonest bookie on a racecourse.” Alice probably felt the same about Hetty, squatting in her drawing-room as if she owned it—almost deliberately provocative and not minding if there was a bust-up.
‘This state of affairs lasted up to the time Mama and I came out from England. Austin must have known that I didn’t know about it, and yet on that afternoon at Westhill when I laughed at the size of Hetty’s sons, he couldn’t believe that I wasn’t pulling his leg, though he also knew perfectly well that if I had known it was the last subject on which I’d pull his leg. It’s that sort of confusion that puts people in a rage. To get rid of the confusion he told me the whole story that evening. A few weeks later he and Alice left for England. I don’t know how he got away from Hetty, whether there was a final bust-up or what. I think there must have been, as when they came back, although they had a house in Melbourne, they never went near the Dells. The boys used to go up to Westhill, but I don’t think Hetty ever went there again—or not for years. I think that Alice discovered the whole thing when they were in England. She looked different when she came back and of course when once Alice knew Austin was free to break with Hetty.
‘There was one thing which was very funny. When Austin had been away a year, Hetty had another boy—Harold. This time it was the protoplasm’s. There was no mistaking it either, apart from Austin’s being away. You only had to look at the poor little devil. Beside his brothers he was like a white mouse beside a lot of prize stallions. Austin must have laughed when he saw him, but of course we never referred to the subject again, after that night at Westhill.’
Arthur chuckled and sipped his port, proud to think his stock had proved so immensely superior to lesser breeds within the law. Then he suddenly switched back to his sylphides and pioneers mood.
‘What I want you to understand,’ he said, ‘is that your grandfather was one of the kindest and most honourable men of his time. He never did a cruel thing, except this that I have told you, and he did not do that willingly.’
Arthur in the last minute or two had unconsciously revealed his own attitude to women. They meant so little to him that he thought that Austin would be amused at a woman, whom he must have regarded as a kind of wife, producing a child by another man. Also he put every bit of the blame on Hetty. He may have been justified in doing this, but can a man of Austin’s physical and moral development be held to have no responsibility for his actions? It is unlikely that he would have claimed such immunity.
Arthur pushed back his chair and we went into the drawing room. He walked with his head a little on one side, looking like a man whose private life is disreputable, but who is reverently performing some ecclesiastical function. He lighted the tiny lamp behind the glass miniature of Alice, and then sat down and played the Chopin prelude in G. As I listened to him I no longer had that feeling of old-world tranquillity which I generally had in this room when Arthur played the piano after dinner. I thought that it was rather shocking of him to tell me all this about my grandfather, and yet Austin had died when I was six years old. He is the dimmest memory—not anyone in whose eyes I had recognised a fellow human being. He is only that portrait in the lobby which I discussed with Julian, and a ghostly giant with a hunting crop. Also when people are as old as Arthur was when he told me these things, and when they are as intelligent, and have drunk a little wine, they are apt to see humanity sub specie aeternitatis. He was relating to me history and human behaviour, and was hardly aware that he was talking of a man on whose moral nakedness it was not seemly that I should look. Because of Arthur’s lack of self-consciousness, I was not embarrassed, and now I thought that perhaps the only thing I should not have heard was his subdued exclamation: ‘Poor old boy!’ I felt that in those words he revealed the sadness of his own life, and his affection for the brother with whom he had played all the games of childhood in those early days which to him, even more than to myself, must have seemed the sunlit morning of the world. It was a sadness I could not share, and therefore I thought which I should not see.
Since that dinner with Arthur, thirty years ago, I have had access to other sources of information, and now I have the diaries, from which it is clear that the birth of Cousin Harold, which he thought must have amused Austin, really shocked and shattered him, not merely because it was the occasion of Alice’s discovering the situation. It revealed to him fully the immorality of his own relationship with Hetty. He had believed in his simple fashion that Percy Dell really was some kind of eunuch. It was easy, looking at him, to think that he was not properly a man. When he had to face honestly the fact that he had been sharing Hetty with this miserable specimen, he was revolted. He saw her as an adulteress not because of her relations with himself, but with her husband. On that morning when he caught the train to Frome, he must have been in a wretched and anxious state of mind. Alice had not come in before he left. He was almost certain that she knew, and yet he dared not do anything which might reveal the facts, if she did not know. At the last minute he scribbled a note: ‘I have to go to catch the train. I hope you have a good holiday.’ He sent for a hansom and drove off to Paddington.
It was all these events related by Arthur which Alice must have reviewed as she sat in misery in the park. She had never forgotten the details of that first voyage to England, and she recalled those oddities in Austin’s manner during its later weeks, which had caused her to write the first of those tiny French entries in her diary. She went on through all the events of the last ten years—the time when they lived near the Dells in East St Kilda and later at Westhill. She lived again through those long visits from Hetty, when she had squatted there as if she owned the place, and no doubt she felt she did own it as she owned Austin. Alice’s indignation when she realised the full meaning of those visits, their vile impudence, was so great that she felt she could not bear to see either of them again. Then there was Austin’s burst of anger against Arthur, who had been poking fun at the Dell boys. The meaning of the whole thing was clear. It all fitted, right up to this morning, when she had read out Sarah’s letter. She stayed in the park till the late afternoon, her reason convincing her that it must be true, her imagination repudiating the convictions of her reason.
7
‘Il y a déjà trois semaines depuis que j’ai quitté Austin et je ne sais encore que faire. Je me sens le coeur déchiré, que ma vie est tombée en ruines, mais il me semble sage d’oublier et de tout pardonner. Il faut aussi penser aux enfants.’
This is a sample of the entries in Alice’s diaries during her three weeks tour with the Misses Urquhart. Until they parted there is hardly any reference to those two ladies except that one of them made herself tiresome complaining about the poor quality of the tea. They visited the towns immediately to the south and east of Paris. This was Alice’s first experience of mediaeval France, and one to which she had been looking forward all her life, but she was so numbed by her own wretchedness that she could
not respond to it. This inability was an added injury—to be given what she had longed for at the very moment she was unable to enjoy it. She remembered Lady Langton’s words about periods of an adverse fate. She felt that her fate was not merely adverse, but malignant. Occasionally she made an attempt to appreciate what she saw. She wrote:
‘The little city of Troyes is like a jewel with its many beautiful churches.’ Of Chatillon: ‘When I went into that dark narrow church on the hill I almost felt the ghosts of Charlemagne’s knights emerge from the walls.’ Each of these entries is followed by others in which she returned bewildered to her own problems. At Vézelay she escaped from the Misses Urquhart and sat for a whole afternoon on the ramparts, looking down on the summer hills and fields, but thinking of nothing but herself and Austin.
At last they were back in Paris. They had arranged to return to England together, but Alice felt too undecided to face Austin yet. She believed that if she were to join him at Waterpark, it would mean that she had accepted the situation. She told the Misses Urquhart that she would stay in Paris a little longer.
‘But wouldn’t it be very marked, dear Mrs Langton,’ said the elder sister, ‘for you to stay alone in Paris?’