by Martin Boyd
The household at Westhill for the next few years must have been extraordinary if Arthur is to be believed. Austin and Alice would have been happiest living like one of those Italian families, of which the different branches all occupy apartments in the same palazzo. Westhill was not big enough for that. Even so in the summer time it was always bursting with relatives. Beds were made up in the room for developing photographs, in the studio my father built, and even for odd young men in the loft above the harness room, while the Flugels occupied the spare cottage. On one Sunday the party from Westhill filled an entire side of the local church. The cooks were always leaving as the hordes of grandchildren invaded the kitchen. My father had built a forge where he did wrought iron work. According to Arthur anyone standing on the lawn would hear, in addition to the crying of babies, the noise of hammering from the forge, of bassoons from Austin’s music room, of Wolfie at the drawing-room piano, and more distantly an irate cook raging at the children in the kitchen. Then from the stableyard of this slightly shabby house in the Australian bush would appear a grand carriage with blazons on the panels, driven by a groom in a bowler hat, or else a six-in-hand drag with delighted shouting postillions of seven years old.
This picture cannot be quite true, as all those sounds would not be heard from the same point, children of seven could not ride carriage horses at anything more than an amble, and myself and my cousin Deirdre von Flugel were both placid babies, and could not have been crying all the time. All the same there must have been some truth in it. Only the other day I called on a Miss Violet Chambers, a lady of eighty-three. She told me that she had stayed here in 1895. ‘It was such a happy house,’ she said. ‘There was so much life and fun there. Your grandfather was the most amusing man I have ever known. And the cherry plums!’ I came home and looked up the diary for that year, and found: ‘We all went to meet Vio Chambers at Narre Warren. Schmidt drove Laura and me in the landau. The rest went with Austin in the drag. He had harnessed six horses in a pyramid and was wearing a pink hunting-coat and a solar topee. The children rode their ponies. I thought Vio would prefer to drive with me, but she climbed up on the box beside Austin and blew the coaching horn. A hot but amusing day.’ The next day she writes: ‘Ernest Dell seems to be very taken with Vio. They spent the afternoon together picking cherry plums while we went for a picnic. She is a little old for him.’ Is there another sad Dolly Potts romance behind this laconic entry?
Alice for the most part was contented with the lively and amusing, if occasionally freakish life at Westhill, with her interest in her grandchildren and in the attractions between the young people like Ernest and Vio. She imagined that the fates which shaped her destiny and her character had about finished with her, that her role was now one of a looker-on, or of the onion woman, stationary in mid-air, not ascending to Heaven but performing a useful and not too uncomfortable function in sustaining her large family at a good height above the infernal regions of poverty.
Austin clearly did not want to return to Waterpark, and when after she had been back a year and he showed no sign of changing his mind, she had the carriages, and also some of the furniture and pictures sent out from England. A lingering hope had died. One day she wrote:
‘Today the carriages arrived from Waterpark. I sometimes think I see what the pattern of our lives ought to be. I believe I saw it clearly when I was first married. It seems impossible for us to carry out the design. Circumstances outside ourselves or our own natures pull it crooked. I cannot think of one person to whom this has not happened to some extent. Are we only put into the world to see what the design ought to be? In another life we may realise the possibilities we saw. Yet the design for me was not impossible. It was only prevented by circumstances.’
A few days later she had ‘a very nice letter from Lady Dilton. She said we were missed at Waterpark and hoped we would return. Sometimes I feel that it is quite foolish if not wrong to stay out here. We are amusing ourselves too easily. Lady D. said that A. T. had left his Rome apartment and had gone to live in Taormina. C’est tout fini.’
She could not think of Aubrey in any other place than Rome. If he was not there he was nowhere. Even at the meet at Boyton, when he laughed into her eyes, she saw behind him not the bare winter oaks, but the ilex trees on the Pincio, not the wide English pond, but the hanging water gardens of the Villa d’Este.
The fates had not finished with Alice. They had two more blows to deal her to reduce her to complete submission, to complete renunciation of the idea of any positive pleasure for herself, to the condition she was in when I first remember her, the white-haired old lady, the onion woman static in mid-air, bearing dutifully on her skirts the weight to which she was accustomed.
As ambition for herself faded, and then for her children, she transferred it to her grandchildren, and mostly to Bobby. She quotes his sayings more than any of the others. She hoped that one day he would reign at Waterpark, with all the best qualities of an English squire, but with extra adornments of wit and taste. She may too have dwelt with pleasure on the fact that he was not so very distantly related to Aubrey Tunstall.
But the day came when she wrote:
‘This morning I was gathering apples in the orchard. Bobby saw me and ran to help me. I was carrying them in my skirt and he said: “Grannie you will spoil your skirt,” and he went to fetch a basket. He climbed the tree and we gathered quite a lot and brought them in together. At luncheon Steven told him that he might ride Pride this afternoon, when I went to Harkaway to take some plants to Mrs Daly. Pride is bigger than his own pony and he has not been allowed to ride her before. I have never seen a boy so happy. His eyes were alight with happiness and his face was so rosy with its clear and flawless skin. He looked really beautiful. We were all pleased and amused to watch him, and he said such funny things. I drove with Schmidt in the dogcart. Bobby rode beside us, and sometimes he rode ahead and called to me to see how well he could sit on Pride. When we arrived back here and had pulled up at the front door, I told him how his father and the other children used to ride their ponies into the house and out through the lobby to the stables. I wish I had bitten off my tongue. He said “I will do it” and he put Pride at the steps, but she shied, and he fell off on the gravel. I expected him to get up, as the children are often thrown, but he lay there quite still. I carried him into the house and laid him on my bed. Tom Schmidt galloped for Dr Rayner. Steven and Laura had gone out sketching and I sent Schmidt to look for them. The doctor came and said he thought Bobby had a fractured skull. He did not recover consciousness and died before Steven and Laura returned. They said nothing. I went out and left them in the room with him. I sent Tom into Berwick with a telegram to Austin who was in Melbourne.
‘The children do not understand what has happened. They are very quiet and trying to be helpful to us. When they asked where Bobby was I said that he had gone to Heaven. Dominic said: “When will he be back?” I said that he would see him there some day. Dominic said: “Can he see God?” and I said “Yes” because I am sure that his angel does behold the face of the Father, as we are told. Dominic said: “I will ask him what He’s like when he comes back.” Brian patted my hand because he saw that I was upset. Austin arrived after dinner. He looked terrible.’
The above is an entry which I feel in a way that I should not have included, but Julian expressed surprise when I said that we were cursed. Even so this was a simple tragedy compared with what happened in later years. Or was it so simple? Was Bobby making expiation for one of the duque de Teba’s altar boys? We do not know, assuming a damnosa hereditas to exist, how it may work, whether the malefic stars strike the innocent natures from without, or rot the guilty from within. Bobby and Dominic, their two most evident victims, are buried in the same grave in the Berwick cemetery, the old man the younger brother of the boy.
Austin did not recover his spirits. He no longer took any pleasure in his horses, or in teaching the children to ride. He complained of feeling unwell, and got up in the middle
of the night. He told Alice that he did not want to go on living at Westhill, and she agreed to take a house near Melbourne. No one suggested returning to Waterpark. Austin went off house-hunting the next day. Another historical mystery—Alice let him sign a lease without first seeing the house herself. There was a week of packing, and then some of the furniture, with more that they had stored in Melbourne, was sent to their new home.
I think it was at this time that I was moved into the nightnursery with my brothers, so that my mother would still see three sons sleeping there, and not be harrowed by the sight of an empty bed. Every night we used to sing a hymn, often Bishop Ken’s evening hymn, which she told us was written at Heaven’s Gate, a wooded hill above Longleat, only a few miles from Waterpark. Often too we sang ‘Now the day is over’ which I think is beautiful in the absolute simplicity of its petitions, and its picture of the sleeping world. Perhaps these words of goodwill towards mankind, sung every night from his earliest years, awakened Dominic’s sensitive soul to its repudiation of the inhumanity of the modern world. Ten years or so later I was once with my mother at the evening service at Waterpark, when they sang Cardinal Newman’s famous hymn. Her eyes were full of sorrow and I was sure that the angel faces she had lost awhile were those of her children at Westhill, one through death and the others through growth and the inevitable changes in their natures. There was always too, in our ever depaysée family, the nostalgia for the other home, ten thousand miles away. In the Northern or the Southern Hemisphere there was no abiding city.
The house that Austin had taken was on the sea-front between Brighton and Elsternwick. Not long ago I drove an English visitor past it, and he burst out laughing. I did not dare to tell him that my grandparents had lived there. If I had told him, I would have wanted to explain how they came to live there, and it would have meant telling him nearly everything that is written in this book. It was of bright red brick. There were terraces and statues, oriel windows, battlements and turrets. It was called ‘Beaumanoir.’ It is inconceivable that Austin who owned both Waterpark, a genuine country ‘seat,’ and Westhill, a modest and pleasant house, could bring himself to end his life in this bogus baronial mansion, even more so how Alice could agree to live there.
Austin did not want to be eccentric, but he often saw only one aspect of a situation. If for example he wanted to cart turnips and the only available horse vehicle was a brougham, he would use it rather than make several laborious journeys with a wheelbarrow. A mischievous fate too often presented him with a brougham as the sole alternative to a wheelbarrow. He now thought it would be pleasant to bathe in the morning directly from the house, and the only available house with a sea-frontage was ‘Beaumanoir.’ Alice too may have thought it would be nice to walk out on to the sea-shore, and the house may have appeared less grotesque to her in the nineties, than it does to us, half-way through the next century. As children we thought it was glorious, and loved to climb into the dusty turrets, and to turn on the fountains in the fernery. When she wrote to her friends in Europe she must have felt that after ‘Waterpark House, near Frome’ it was somewhat humiliating to have her writing-paper headed: ‘Beaumanoir, Higgins Street, North Brighton, Vic.’
It was under the heavy ornamental plaster ceilings of Beaumanoir that she was reconciled with Hetty. Arthur was present. ‘They had of course met often in other people’s houses,’ he said, ‘but Alice had never received Hetty, who had not been to Westhill for twenty years. Now she wanted to see what Beaumanoir was like. When she wanted a thing she always went for it. She did not even do it as an outrageous lark. She was entirely without humour, which made people think she was very amusing. She did everything like a steamroller. I was with Alice one afternoon when a servant came in and announced Mrs Dell and Miss Mayhew. She was clever enough to bring Sarah, whom Alice could not very well refuse to see, and who shortly afterwards came to live with them again. Hetty came in on the servant’s heels. She was quite unsmiling and her eyes were like black agates. She looked at Alice suspiciously to see how she was taking it. A momentary flash came into your grandmother’s eyes, as she was not the kind of person with whom one took liberties. Then I saw an extraordinary, really quite beautiful expression come into her face, and she took Hetty’s hand and led her to the sofa. When we are old, and things have not gone very well, we feel kindly towards the people we knew when we were young, even if they were then our enemies. And Hetty, though at that time she still had a sort of champion wrestler’s physique—really Austin must damn nearly have risked his life—she looked so hang-dog, that Alice wanted to give her back her self-respect. After that she lunched with your grandmother every Friday.’
At Beaumanoir also, one day Alice wrote: ‘George arrived at tea-time. He had heard from Dolly. She says she cannot go against her father’s wishes.’ It was then five years since they had parted at Nantes. Not very long afterwards Major Potts died, leaving Dolly, for whom he had demanded such a large settlement, with a tiny pittance, as he left nearly all he had to his son, to ‘keep up’ his name. By that time Aunt Baba had married George for his money.
In the last summer of the century Austin had reached the stage of complete indifference to public opinion. Every morning he walked across the garden to bathe. He wore only his pyjamas to the beach, and nothing into the sea, even when he bathed on horseback, which he liked to do. The unwarrantable assumption was that no one could see him. He then came back to the house and still wearing his pyjamas had grilled steak and beer for breakfast. He drove about a good deal and arrived at awkward times at other people’s houses. All this year there was a look of excitement in his eyes, and the red of his face was not very healthy. Again he began to complain of feeling unwell and he walked about the house at night. The doctor advised that he should go for treatment into a private hospital, as nursing homes are called here. His condition did not improve and they decided to perform what in those days was a very difficult operation, under which he died.
Slowly, as Alice recovered from the shock, she began to realise that she was completely free. Throughout the months following Austin’s death are many allusions to plans forming in her mind. She thinks of taking Diana and Wolfie back to Europe to compensate them for the hard time they have had. She has more money now. Or should she take Steven and Laura and settle again at Waterpark?
She tries to imagine what it would be like to arrive in Taormina. How would Aubrey welcome her? She examines her face in the glass, and writes: ‘I look much older than I did six years ago.’ It was no good. She could not go back in time. She could not repeat an experience. Too often we are given what we asked when we no longer have the power to use the gift. She had to go on to the next phase, for her the last, that of the static onion woman, waiting for the angel himself to remove the weight from her skirts, and to pull her up into the skies. For her there was no more vital experience. All that had ended on the evening when she wrote:
‘Mr Hughes, the surgeon, rang up to say that they were going to operate on Austin early this afternoon. Steven had come down and we waited anxiously to hear the result. The operation was unsuccessful and A. died under the anaesthetic. Mildred went in a hansom to break this news to Diana and to Maysie. Steven rang up George at his club. Mr Hughes came out to see me. I asked him what were A.’s last words—if he had said anything. Mr Hughes smiled, and said he could not tell me. He told Steven. A. said that if the surgeon did something to him under the operation he would punch his nose when he came out. I had to smile at the last funny thing he said. It was so shocking, and so courageous. Goodbye my dear, Goodbye.’
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