by Angus Wilson
“I shouldn’t criticise Renee and Jack too much if I were you, Harold. I’m sure the remedy’s in Captain Calvert’s own hands.”
Geoff intervened, “No, you’re wrong, Muriel. Once bitten twice shy. I’m not starting that poker game up again, not even if the Captain’s famous dividends start paying. What is it? Tin mines in Tooting or copper in Camberwell? I always forget.”
Looking at Harold’s perplexed face, Sylvia found it difficult to believe that he hadn’t cottoned on at once. But then, of course, it was years since he’d had first-hand experience of Arthur’s ways. Well, he’d got a shock coming to him. Meanwhile she set herself to move to Arthur’s defence. After all, whatever he’d done she wasn’t having him got at in public. But she needn’t have worried, Arthur had taken over his own case. Ignoring the Bartley’s remarks, he raised his voice to include the whole party in the anecdote he was telling Mark.
“No, he’s a very good fighting man, your Chink. We had a few labour-detachments of them with us in Flanders, you know. And they spoiled for a fight. Not like our ancient and honourable ally the Pork and Cheese. I was in charge of a crowd of Hun prisoners of war at the time. Order to protect them. Protect my Aunt Fanny! Well, the Boche ‘planes came over—it was late in ‘17—and straffed these poor bloody Chinks to hell. The next day I was sitting in the mess when the sergeant comes in, ‘Major Calvert, sir. Come at once. The Chinks have run amok!’ ‘Course when I came out the German prison compound wasn’t there. Blown to smithereens. Just a bit of wire and guts left. The Chinese were quite open about it, ‘German killee Chinese. Chinese killee Germans.’ They’d chucked a couple of bloody bombs at them. The colonel went mad when he heard about it ‘You must make an example of them, Calvert,’ he said. ‘If you’ll excuse me, sir, I told him, Til do no such thing. You can’t blame them. It’s their philosophy.’ Well, the long and short of it was that we had a hell of a row, but I managed to get the thing taken to higher ranks. In the end—laugh this one off—it got up to the C.-in-C., and gor blimey, if he didn’t come down on the side of yours truly. ‘Calvert’s perfectly right,’ he said, ‘it’s the Chinese philosophy. It’s all in Confucius.’ That’s their equivalent of Jesus Christ, you know.”
“No, I’m afraid I didn’t know, old man,” Geoff smiled at the others. “We’re not all as full of information as you, you know.”
“Well, you know now, my friend. Very just chap the C.-in-C. I always got on very well with him.”
“Oh yes,” Geoff laughed, “we know. You and Lord Kitchener were like that,” he held up two fingers together. “Swopped marbles as kids.”
“I’m afraid your knowledge of the war that made the world safe for you is a bit deficient. Kitchener was dead. He was, by the same token, one of England’s greatest men. But he’d been drowned by Lloyd George in ‘16.”
“Oh, I say,” Muriel cried, “we are going back to school. Don’t forget Geoff’s only a common cockney boy.”
“Dead! Well, that wouldn’t stop him, would it? So many of your pals have done their best work when they’re dead. The Captain was telling us last month about what he did for Bonar Law in the General Strike. Of course it was way before our time. When it was fire-watching with Douglas Haig. Well, even I smelt a rat there.”
“Yes,” said Muriel, “Lord Haig. The poppy man, you know. He’d been dead for years when the war broke out. . . .”
“So I looked up this Bonar Law bloke,” Geoff went on. “Well, if he was in the General Strike, he must have looked a nasty mess, he’d been in his grave four years.”
Sylvia looked to Arthur. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d seen him shrug that sort of thing off. But by her side sat a shrunken old man, like a humped wet rooster. His dejected look seemed to silence everyone; even the Bartley’s hostile jeering notes faded away into the air.
“And how is Mark?” Sylvia asked. Despite everything, and apart from her concern for Arthur, she felt in high spirits.
Geoff Bartley seemed to feel the need to atone to the company. “I’ve been hearing big things of you, Mark. Old Mackie talks of you as one of the white hopes of Electrometrico.”
“He won’t much longer. I don’t think I’m stopping there. I’ve almost made up my mind to join the Hunger Relief Committee. Perhaps in one of the North African countries.”
“Good for you!”
Mark looked surprised as the rest of them, for the exclamation came from Sylvia in an almost exact imitation of Shirley’s accent. She wondered at herself, for she really knew nothing about it. It was just that Mark didn’t bother to fit in with all this smug lot.
“I’m glad you’re happy about it, Mother. Good God! Mark. Is this what your friends the Forresters have encouraged you to? Let Jimmie Forrester go. I should admire him for it. No doubt he’s an excellent sales representative, but they can be spared. But if people like you, trained technicians, give up, we shan’t have any surplus with which to feed hungry Africa. For God’s sake, man, where’s your logic?”
“Your Dad’s right, you know, Mark. Look, if you go on at Electrometrico, from what I can make out from old Mackie, you’ve got a good chance of coming out a three thousand a year man. All right! Feed hungry Africa then. That’s how I’ve done it. God knows all Muriel and I do for charity. Orphans, blind, cancer, old folks, you name it, we’ve given to it. But I made my lolly first.”
“That isn’t quite what I meant, Geoff, but. . .” Harold said.
“No, Geoff, you don’t understand. Mark’s an idealist. After all he’s only taking after you, Harold. You oughtn’t to be so down on him.”
“Yes, I don’t know whether Harold’s the best example for the boy, Muriel. No offence, Harold. But you do let things run away with you. At the moment, for example, you’re being an awful bloody fool, in my opinion.”
“Now Geoff, you know you promised me not to bring that up. Anyway it’s confidential.”
“All right, I know, darling, but I think it’s our duty to say something to Harold. Well, look how Muriel’s taken the lead. But there’s such a thing as going too far. . . .”
“Count me out on this, Harold, I don’t agree with Geoff. I’m on your side. Though it’s only right perhaps that he should warn you.”
“It’s like this, Harold. You don’t want Carshall to lose the meadow. And you’re right. But Jock Parsons and all the local outfit don’t agree. And they’re not going to like it better for hearing it from a County Council man. And the County Council aren’t going to be happier to have one of their men getting in wrong with the Development Board. They’ve quite enough quarrels of their own on their plate. . . .”
“The truth is, Harold, since Geoff has gone so far, the Education Committee’s more than concerned about it already. I don’t know that I should tell you, but as one of the school gover-nors . . .”
“Is that all? Oh, you don’t have to worry, they’ve told me already. It seems that in the County Education Committee’s opinion my misguided zeal over Goodchild’s Meadow threatens to undermine much of the valuable goodwill that I’ve built up in the fifteen years that I’ve been Headmaster at Melling. The cheek of it. . . .”
“It is only their opinion, Harold. They’ve a right to that,” Muriel spat bean shoots over the table cloth in her excitement.
“They’ve a right to say nothing. It’s a matter of personal conscience. Anyway I’m apparently only undoing the good work I was responsible for in the first place. All right, it’s entirely my own affair.”
“Oh really, Harold, as Governor . ..”
But Geoff, vigorously shaking soya on his prawns as he spoke, silenced his wife. “No, Muriel, it’s nothing to do with rights and wrongs. It’s simply a question of your own future, Harold. You’re tops as Headmaster. Everyone knows that. But nobody’s indispensable. Apart from anything else, think what a loss it would be to Carshall if they moved you.”
“Goodchild’s Meadow’s a cause on which Beth felt very strongly.”
“Mother wouldn’t have wi
shed you to risk your job, Dad.”
“How very little you know your mother, Ray. She would never have given way to common blackmail.”
Suddenly they were all urging caution on him. And then into the middle of their din Harold’s fist crashed down on the table, making the dozen or so dishes rattle and splash.
“I don’t want anybody’s advice, thank you very much. If nobody believes in principle any longer, I do.”
His tone was so fierce that they were all silenced. Muriel drew herself up straight in her chair and speared a water chestnut delicately with her fork.
“Well, Judy, how did the exams go?”
Judy seemed to Sylvia to have turned into a young woman overnight when her exams ended. She answered Muriel in the grandest way. “Not at all badly, Mrs. Hartley, thank you. There was one beast of a question in the French paper about Corneille; the Unities and all that.”
“Oh, I don’t like the sound of the unities, whatever they may be. Do you, Geoff? The things they teach at school these days! Still, I suppose a nice long holiday now.”
“Yes, I hope to go to France. A friend of mine, Caroline Ogilvie, knows of a marvellous French family near Blois— De Clamouarts. They have an old family chateau. It looks quite heavenly from the photos. People say that as long as you go to the Loire, it doesn’t matter about the sort of family you stay with. But as Mrs. Ogilvie says, that would be all right if it was simply a question of accent. Everyone knows that the purest French is spoken in Tours. But there’s still the whole question of the nuances of the language. You can only get that from really good families. The De Clamouarts speak the French of Racine.”
“That should be extremely useful to you in the France of today.” Harold had found an outlet. “The appalling snobbery ...”
But the new Judy, as Sylvia saw, was not to be easily beaten.
“You just aren’t up to date, Daddy. De Gaulle’s France is much nearer to the seventeenth century. . . .”
“There’s no need for clever debating points. You know perfectly well what I mean.”
“It isn’t a debating point. That’s exactly the illusion the English have had about De Gaulle all along. And look what it’s cost us. . . .”
“I’m not discussing politics. I’m merely saying that I don’t intend to pay large sums for my daughter to spend her time with a lot of French snobs who haven’t even grasped that they’ve had a Revolution.”
“Oh, Daddy, really . . .”
They were as close now and as separated from the rest of the party in their quarrel, as Sylvia and Arthur had been in their jokes.
Both Ray and Mark groaned.
“And people ask why I left home!”
“Go on, lovey, it’s your birthday, make them stop.”
To Ray’s surprise, Sylvia said loudly, “They’re lovers’ quarrels, aren’t they really? Judy’s probably a bit in love with her Dad. It’s a phase that lots of girls go through.”
The remark silenced Harold and Judy for a moment, and, indeed everyone else too. Then as an afterthought, Sylvia laughed and said, “And Harold’s playing hard to get?”
Ray exploded, “Lovey!”
Mark guffawed.
Harold decided to treat it humorously, “Go to the De Clamou-arts or de Clamooers, Judy. I don’t care whether they speak the French of Charlemagne. I’m not having it said even by my venerable mother in her cups on her birthday that I’m playing hard to get with my own daughter.”
Muriel summed it up, “She’s getting proper shocking in her old age, isn’t she? But there you are, a birthday has its privileges.”
So they all drank Sylvia’s health. And to please Harold and thank him for the dinner, she agreed to try a plate of lychees and cream, although when it came she had the greatest difficulty in getting the stuff down; if there was one thing she couldn’t stomach it was anything jellified, and jelly with stones!
It was Judy’s comment that really upset her.
“I’m pleased Daddy’s come round, of course. But I don’t know where you picked that idea up from, Gran. I’m surprised at anyone with your good sense accepting all that. Sex is such a terribly easy answer to everything, isn’t it? Miss Chapman was telling us in essay-period last term that Freud was never analysed himself. So the whole thing falls to the ground really.”
Sex! As if she’d meant anything of the sort; and she was sure Shirley hadn’t: It really made her wonder what sort of mind Judy had got under that prim little miss exterior of hers. No wonder she made such a hullaballoo when Arthur came out in his birthday suit. The sooner the girl had a boy friend she thought, the better, if that sort of thing was on her mind all the time.
Ray and Mark suggested a drink at “The Falcon” to round off the evening with, as their share of the treat. Muriel excused herself because of a rotten headache that had come on suddenly; she always seemed to get one at Chen Fu’s, it must be the smell from the kitchen. Shepherded by an anxious Geoff into their Humber, she said her thank-yous and good-byes and many happy returns with her head back on the tartan seat cover and her lilac eyelids closed.
“They had gone all royal tonight, hadn’t they?” Ray said to the disappearing big black car.
Again to Sylvia’s surprise, Mark of all people said, “Poor old Geoff! I shall never marry one of those dolls that get themselves up like tarts. They give nothing when it comes to the point.”
Harold took the remark broadmindedly. “I think that’s a bit crude, Mark, but there’s something in it. God knows Muriel does everything she can to fill her life and I respect her for it, but there’s a basic dissatisfaction somewhere, hence all these imaginary aches and pains.”
“Neither she nor Geoff Bartley can take anything on the chin. They haven’t a sporting instinct between them.” Arthur was quick to make the point.
But Harold had given up the Cranstons for Arthur’s sake and that was enough.
“You’re a bit inclined to think that nobody’s a sportsman but yourself.”
“My dear boy, I’ve had a very long experience of the card tables and I know Sheeny sharpers when I meet them. . . .”
“The Hartleys are not Jewish, Dad, and even if they were . . .”
“I don’t care what they are,” Judy said, “I wish Muriel would learn some idea of colour. What did she look like?”
Something snapped in Sylvia. “Oh, shut up all of you. They came to my birthday party and I think they’re very nice people.” If wasn’t strictly true, but she couldn’t stand all this belly-aching.
Things went better in “The Falcon”. Harold met an old boy of Melling School with his new wife; Arthur found Mr. Bolton to talk racing with; Ray and Mark joined up with a party of young friends who’d dropped in for a drink before going to the Mecca; even Judy chatted happily with a younger girl in the party who’d been at the County High until last year. Sylvia sat back with a glass of white port and let herself be comfortable as she thought of the next day’s picnic.
She was reflecting how nice it was going to be to have a talk with Tim, although she still felt a bit shy with him, when she saw Mr. Corney come into the bar. He was obviously looking for someone. His quick little black eyes seemed to search every corner at once. What a nervous little chap he was, she thought. She caught his eye and he came over.
“Well, Duchess, and how does your grace come to be in this humble hostelry?”
“They’re giving me a birthday party, Mr. Corney.”
“Sweet seventeen and never been kissed.”
“No, sixty-five, I’m afraid.”
“What, ‘sixty-five and still alive’? Well! Oh dear, what have I said? Better luck next year, then it’ll be sixty-six and out for kicks.”
“Oh dear! No. Much too late for that. But there’s life in the old girl yet.”
He was silent. He really seemed quite absent-minded and his eyes still searched round the crowded room.
“Had your holidays yet?”
“What me? Oh no. We’re going to Cannes, or at le
ast I hope we are.”
“We?” Sylvia gave him a teasing look.
“Ray and another young chap. Why, hasn’t Ray said anything? Well! Funny that! It’s the third year running. It’s ever so gay in Cannes. Just the place for three bachelors gay.” He gave Sylvia a look she didn’t know how to take.
“There you are. All you young people. I’ve never been out of England.”
He was still only half with her, so she added, “Ray and Mark are over there with the youngsters. Go and join them.”
“Me? I don’t know any of Ray’s posh friends, here or in London.”
“Of course you do. That’s Priscilla White, the blonde who played the wife in Look Back in Anger. And that’s Terry Knowles, the good-looking dark boy. Don’t they make a handsome trio? A dark and two fair. Like that ad for beer. He played Cliff, that was Ray’s friend in the play. They were very good together.”
“So I hear,” he said sharply.
“Didn’t you see it then?”
“Oh no. Much too highbrow for me. I’m Ray’s low friend, you know.”
He looked so dejected that Sylvia couldn’t cope with it.
“Well, let’s both go over and talk then.”
Ray was a bit off-hand with Mr. Corney. “You know Wilf Corney,” but he didn’t say the names of the others.
“Well, I hear it’s the Duchess’s birthday party.”
“That’s it, Wilf,” Mark answered for his brother, “we’re all blown out from Chen Fu’s rice.”
“Oh! Chen Fu’s. Did you Foo Yung Dan? That’s the one I go for.”
He giggled.
Ray burst into a laugh, then scowled. He turned his back on Wilf Corney.
“You know, Pris, I still think Dad directed it wrong in the third act when you come back. He had me right upstage . . .”
“What goings on!” Mr. Corney’s smile was malicious. He turned to Terry Knowles. “I hear you and Ray are doing the piece next time without Miss White.”