by Martin Boyd
‘14 Octobre. Samedi. S. Calixte. In the train. I was packing all the morning. Then Aubrey came and drove with me to the station. He gave me his last bunch of roses. When the train was about to leave he said: “You must come to Rome every year at this time.” I said that I would if I could, but that Austin wanted us all to go out to Australia and I was not sure when we would be back. I see no reason why I should not go to Rome once a year. He said: “Come back before next October.” Suddenly he said: “You haven’t thrown a coin in the Fountain of Trevi.” The train was beginning to move. I quickly took a coin out of my purse and gave it to him to throw for me. It happened to be a sovereign. I said: “Will that do?” He said: “It must. It must. Arrivederci!” I could only smile.
‘15 Octobre. Dimanche. S. Thérèse. It seems very lifeless back here in Lucerne. The baby has recovered after all. It was only Diana wanted me back to buy some music for Wolfie. Wrote a cheque on Frome for our P&O fares, also to Commercial Bank telling them to transfer the £900 when available to Melbourne. It is only a fortnight since A. met me outside St Peter’s. Wrote to Dolly Potts.’
13
The last chapter gives Alice’s account of what happened in Rome, but is it necessarily a true one? I do not mean that she deliberately falsified it. She was incapable of telling an untruth and she would have had no object in doing so. She wrote in her diary to preserve her memories. But she was obviously in a highly emotional state and afraid of making a fool of herself. She was not likely to see others clearly, or to read Aubrey Tunstall’s character accurately.
After all old Colonel Rogers did say that Aubrey, Damaris and Ariadne were bad hats. It is true that he called anyone a bad hat whose moral intelligence was above his own. But it was not only Colonel Rogers who spoke of them in this way. They were a sinister legend in our part of the country, though this may only have been because they lived in Italy and did not hunt. Beyond this I know no more than any other reader of the parts of Alice’s diary which I have quoted, but I think that these show some internal evidence in support of Colonel Rogers’s view.
It is fairly clear that Aubrey was short of money. When Alice met him at Boyton he had come over to see his trustees. When they passed Keats’s house he said: ‘Trustees are horrid people.’ He did not entertain Alice lavishly as on her former visit to Rome. On the contrary he appears to have had a large number of meals at her expense. He did not go into society. This may have been due to the time of the year, but also to shortage of money, and it is even possible that his private life had damaged his reputation, though one does not know whether, or how much this would have affected his position in Rome at that time. Alice only saw a youth of sixteen when she went to his apartment, wearing the outsize livery of one of the footmen he could no longer afford. She thought that the pictures were not so good. Her memory was right. He had sold his Old Masters and also his gold plate, so he did not ask her to dine, only to tea. Certainly he did buy her the marble amorini, which are now on a table in the room where I am writing, and he did give her flowers, but she only mentions three occasions, not every day. He may have regarded these things as an investment. He went off in the middle of her stay to see his sister in Florence, probably to borrow money on his prospects of securing Alice, and to postpone a crash until he had done so. She had seen him looking serious as he came out of the bank on the previous day. This may sound shocking, but people of his kind who find their position slipping are apt to do that sort of thing.
Aubrey’s sister-in-law Lady Dilton would have told him the previous year when he was in England, that Alice was now quite rich. He would not have heard of the boom bursting. Alice had been travelling about Europe for nearly a year without her husband who was in Australia. She had some of her family in Lucerne, but did not appear to be very much with them. He may have thought that she was far less attached than she was in fact, and that it would not be difficult to persuade her to throw in her lot with him, either just to share his apartment and restore his style of living, or even somehow to secure a divorce and marry him.
At the same time he wanted to be honest about it, and not to land himself in an intolerably false position. He was not physically attracted by women, and in those long talks he had with Alice, sitting about Rome on the sun-drenched October steps, he emphasised the validity of all love up to its proper degree. He was both justifying his own inclinations, and trying to explain to her that if they were to live together there were definite limits in his affections, and until she had grasped that he could not make his proposal. He did like her very much indeed. He had for her that affection which is the noblest part of love, but he had not the remaining part.
He must, on their last afternoon together, have thought that he had prepared the ground sufficiently to make his proposition. He had bought her, presumably with part of Mrs Dane’s loan, those vaguely symbolic amorini, though whose was the heart to be stamped on? He asks her to stay longer in Rome and at that moment she reveals that she is no longer rich, and he laughs. He was laughing ironically at himself, perhaps with relief, as he could not have enjoyed the game he was playing. He was kind with the kindness which is possible to people without very strong feelings. For the rest of the evening he was extremely gentle to her, although still dining at her hotel. His intentions were no longer the same. The temperature had changed, as she noted. Perhaps in a quiet defeated way he was content to have abandoned his scheme. The air was purer. When at the train he asked her to come back every year he meant it, at least more than most English people who scatter those vague invitations so generously. There was this unusual affinity between their souls and their minds, but it could not have been complete unless her own soul had been in the body, perhaps, of the youth in the footman’s livery which was too big for him.
Alice never went back to stay in Rome, and one wonders whether Aubrey threw her sovereign into the Fountain of Trevi. In his financial state it would have been painful for him to do so, and to know that it would be fished out by some urchin as soon as his back was turned. Or is this too low an imputation? Is it not better to believe that the Fountain of Trevi does not always work?
In spite of the above it is possible that my illness, combined with Aunt Diana’s selfishness, saved Alice. If Aubrey had discovered, as he might have in another two days, that her income, though halved, was still about twenty times what he had left, he might have continued with his design. So I may now once more, and with greater complacency, invoke the ghost of my grandmother, receding into Paradise. Whatever I may be doing now, think what I did for you then, offering the sufferings of that frail flower, my tiny body, to save you from dreadful scandal. It is true that I may also have deprived you of years of autumnal bliss, but does autumnal bliss of that kind happen unless there has also been a summer, not merely a single, distant spring day?
And by this infantile sickness I saved not only my grandmother, but the entire family from ruin. For if she had gone off with Aubrey he would certainly have squandered her fortune, as he had squandered his own. My father, uncles, aunts, cousins and their wives and children would have been left penniless, all fishermen and tobacconists. I, instead of buying brocade and aubusson for Westhill, would be selling daphne and boronia at the corner of Little Bourke Street. Aunt Mildy alone would have realised her ambition, as she lurked in a doorway or paced her beat nearby.
I was once at a detective play in London. At the end, when the villain was discovered and arrested, a woman in front of me said: ‘Well, I don’t believe he did it.’ Whoever reads this is at liberty to take the same attitude, to disagree with the author about his characters. As I have written earlier, if Mildred or Dominic had compiled this book, the story would be very different. Mildred would have magnified the bouquets to beds of roses, as in the novels of Mrs Glyn, while Dominic would have seen Aubrey as spending agonised nights of prayer, wrestling with his temptation. Perhaps we would all be wrong. Aubrey may simply have been an ordinary man of good principles, immensely enjoying Alice’s company, but as de
termined as she that their friendship should be above reproach, though nowadays it is unusual to contemplate such a possibility.
The trek began again, farther south, but first my father and Uncle George went back to Waterpark to pack up the smaller personal belongings left there. Alice must have intended to be away a year or so. Dust covers were put on the furniture and a caretaker and his wife installed. The way they drifted apart from this house is curious. When they left for Brittany a year earlier, there was no suggestion that they would not be back in a few weeks. A kind of spell seems to have come upon them, drawing them farther and farther towards the south in aimless wandering. They were like those peasants of whom Tolstoy writes, who suddenly abandon their homes and all that they have, to journey to ‘the warm rivers’ which exist only in their imagination. Alice was at least twice in Paris during this year. It would have been nothing to her to run across to England and see how things were at Waterpark. To be so close to one’s home and not to go to it is almost uncanny, like something that happens in a nightmare. When I read in her diary that Steven and George had gone to Waterpark, if only to pack, it was a relief, as if a breach had been made in some thick and maddening cobwebs.
There is no explanation of why they stayed away for so long. It was surely not cheaper to keep the whole family in foreign hotels, and I cannot help resenting the fact that I was allowed to be born in one, instead of in the ancient home of our family, in spite of my Venetian lace cap and Madame Miradoux de la Primaube’s bouquet. My parents, although nowadays in Australia they would be thought typically English, were Australian enough not to give the same importance to things of this kind, as people in whom tradition is quite unbroken.
It is possible that something had happened to make them feel uncomfortable at Waterpark. Did they think it a disgrace not to have signed Dolly Potts’s marriage settlement? Or had Austin said something outrageous to a duchess in the hunting field? As Australians they may have felt more under criticism than if they had been at Waterpark all their lives.
A Cornishman once told me that when he was a boy he caught a seagull, and clipped its wing so that it could not fly away. After a while the feathers grew and he forgot to clip them again. It flew back to its companions who killed it. In its captivity it had acquired some human taint which they sensed was hostile. My family were captive seagulls, both at Waterpark, and even more, as time went on, in Australia.
Again there is another explanation for this long absence. After they had ‘chummed’ Austin and Mildred to Marseille, they thought that they might as well stay in the South of France for the winter. Then, when the summer came, Alice could not bear to return to England until she had been to Rome. But she could not go to Rome in mid-summer, and Aubrey might not have been there. Perhaps only half-conscious of her motive, she planted the whole family at Lucerne, as a kind of chaperone in the centre of Europe, whom she could accustom to her innocent flights to various capitals, until on that triumphant day, the Feast of S. Izarn, she wrote to Honble. A. Tunstall, telling him she would be in Rome on Thursday.
However, at last, after five months, the party left Lucerne. Although the season was well over, quite a number of people came to see them off, this strange little contingent of colonials, who had settled amongst them, added myself to their number, and now passed on. They stayed a few days in Milan and Florence where Bobby seeing a procession of young noblemen in evening dress, said: ‘Look at the waiters going to school.’ The next halt was Rome. My parents and the Flugels had never seen Rome and wanted to stay there. Alice with George went straight through to Naples.
It was a pardonable vanity. To have reappeared in Rome, accompanied by three children, a son-in-law and daughter-inlaw, five grandchildren, two nurses and three perambulators, would have been an intolerable anticlimax. After a week the family joined her in Naples, and they all went on to Brindisi, where she makes an odd little entry in her diary:
‘19 Novembre. Dimanche. Ste. Elisabeth. The Arcadia came in at eight o’clock this morning. I bought a fan, some silk caps and a picture and we all went on board before luncheon. Had a telegram from A. T. “Arrivederci a presto.” The last time I was here I had some chocolate in the hotel with Mr Rudyard Kipling.’
This name, suddenly unfurled like a Union Jack at the exit from an enchanted garden, closes Alice’s European experience for ever.
14
Six weeks later they were back at Westhill, the bolt-hole. They had first spent a week in Melbourne. Alice is seldom illnatured in her comments, and one can only guess her feelings from what she does not say on arriving at the final goal of that trek which began with the flight to Brittany fifteen months earlier. Austin met them at Adelaide. ‘The children remembered him quite well.’ Who could forget him? Mildred, dressed more for a garden party, than for Port Melbourne pier at ten o’clock in the morning, met them there. They drove through a pouring shower and a cold wind to Lady Langton’s house in East St Kilda. In the evening Arthur gave a family party to all the relatives to welcome them back.
‘It wasn’t a success,’ he told me. ‘Alice had been away so long that all the untravelled relatives expected her to put on airs—a thing she never did in her life—but she was a little depressed at the sight of them, and by God, I don’t blame her. Your mother and Diana, with all her high-souled rot, did look and behave like ladies, but you couldn’t say the same for Mildred, and even Maysie had become very bourgeoise. If women are happily married they just become second editions of their husbands. Mildred and Maysie weren’t by any means the worst. There were some ghastly Mayhew wives, and Walter’s girls had that provincial refinement which considers le monde qui s’amuse vulgar, like University people and New Zealanders. They looked at Diana as if she were a barmaid. Diana did provoke them with her Paris clothes and her air of bewilderment. Then Hetty was there looking like the proprietress of a Methodist maison tolerée, with her pugilist’s shoulders and her jutting jaw, and her black opaque eyes. I didn’t ask her. Mama did, but it was sheer effrontery for her to come. Nobody talked of anything but the financial crisis. Alice must have felt inclined to go upstairs and burn her cheque-book. She had just come back from years spent in the most beautiful and interesting places in Europe, but no one would let her utter a word. They were determined that she should not be allowed to patronise them. As if she wanted to!’
Alice only makes a brief reference to this party: ‘A great many relatives present. They all seem to have lost money. Percy Dell asked me to lend him £45 for two months. I said I would. His son Horace looks very unpleasant. It is strange to be here.’
The captive seagull had been away too long. Not only had it become suspect to the flock, but the flock itself had become alien to the seagull. Before they came up to Westhill she filled in the last page of that diary with the French headings. It must have been like using the last jewel of some precious chain of which the principal stones were lost.
‘31 Decembre. Dimanche. S. Sylvestre. Went with Austin to the new cathedral. I do not like it at all. It is so hard, striped and confused. No repose for the eye anywhere. They should whitewash it and hang up some good tapestries as at Arles. It needs softening. Sermon on the financial difficulty and trouble of this past year.’ As she listened to this financial sermon in the new striped cathedral, did she find that it was the heart and not the eye for which there was no repose, and did she try to imagine that she was in the duomo at Milan, or in Santa Croce, or in St. Peter’s where the cardinal walked in procession in his petunia cope, and Aubrey waited outside between the colonnade and the fountains?
Everyone but the Flugels came up to Westhill. Alice behaved rather like a modern government in times of crisis. Her own income was halved so she halved all the allowances. It was theoretically just, but it was disproportionately hard on Wolfie and Diana, who had nothing else to live on, and who for the past two years or more had been used to having their living expenses paid for them. They took a tiny wooden cottage in Balaclava, where even Diana’s Paris clothes and d
iamonds did not give her much chance to patronise her cousins. They were so poor that their poverty became a legend in the family, and though later they were quite comfortably off, the Craigs always pretended to believe that they had not enough to eat. Wolfie had to begin music lessons again, but after the boom he could find few pupils, and for awhile he did actually tune pianos, though he said: ‘It is not good for a composer to tune pianos.’ Arthur when he told me this, had been guilty of that subtle form of falsification of history which consists of giving wrong dates to true events. When I questioned his statement he was ashamed to insist on the point.
It is strange that Alice allowed her favourite daughter to become so poor. History again becomes irrational. Her too rigid sense of justice may perhaps have prevented her from treating Diana differently from the others. She may have been rather disgusted with the selfishness the Flugels had shown in London and elsewhere. Or is it possible that she had not forgiven Diana for hurrying her back from Rome to Lucerne, two days before it was necessary?