by Martin Boyd
Dominic was shocked at this intrusion by a stranger into family intimacies. He also saw on Laura’s face that withdrawn expression she had when someone was impertinent. Repeating unconsciously a gesture of those of his forebears whom he most resembled, he bowed, took her hand and kissed it. She was delighted at the subtlety of the snub he had administered, and Mr Porson was not too coarse-grained to perceive it.
Though on rare occasions Dominic affronted his headmaster by an elegance of manners which was above him, he more often disgusted him by a common humanity which he thought below him. Dominic liked talking to all kinds of people, and with a faint touch of patronage, of which he was as unconscious as of his elegant manners, when he showed them, he would engage in conversation with either a butcher’s boy or a bishop, if one came his way. With his naive belief that all human contact was good, and that one’s relatives would naturally be pleased to see one, he would call at odd hours at people’s houses, and even arrived in the middle of a grand dinner party at our great uncle Walter’s, who was a High Court Judge, and expected an extra place to be laid for him. He had no idea that he was unwelcome and spent the evening in his scrubby clothes talking to all the jewelled ladies, who, however, were delighted with his company because of his dark and dynamic good looks.
One afternoon when Dominic had an exeat, he met the butcher’s boy who delivered the meat at Beaumanoir, with whom he had sometimes had conversations. He now asked him to drive him back to the school, as a reward for which he would give him his old penknife. When they came to the school gates Dominic insisted on the boy’s driving up to the door, where Mr Porson was saying goodbye to some wealthy parents, to whom he had just mentioned the young Langtons as examples of the good class of boys he had. A young Langton then descended from the butcher’s cart, and when rebuked with suppressed fury by Mr Porson, replied: ‘We’re all equal in the sight of God, sir,’ whereas the whole purpose of the school was to prove the opposite.
These might appear isolated episodes of no particular importance but they turned Mr Porson into one of the few people who really hated Dominic, though this had no apparent effect until the following year, when it did, I think, start him on an unfortunate phase of his life. In the meantime we had been for yet another summer holiday to Tasmania.
That original restless impulse which made our great-grandparents come to Australia, must have passed on to their descendants, as they could never stay long in one place. When they lived at Waterpark they spent half their time wandering about the Continent, and one sometimes imagines their spiritual home would have been a wagon-lit.
There is not the same scope for travel in Australia. One may journey a thousand miles from Melbourne, and the food, the architecture, the vegetation and the ‘way of life’ remain roughly the same. Tasmania is slightly different, more ‘English’ with its orchards and green valleys, and its late Georgian houses built by the convicts. When the family were seized by their congenital restlessness, this was where they were most likely to go. I went for at least six summer holidays to Tasmania before I was twelve years old, but the most vivid in my memory is the one we took in the summer following Austin’s death.
The clan travelled en masse, as in the previous summer, but this time the composition of the party was a little different. Dominic was with us and Alice had invited two of the Dell boys. She did this as a rather curious tribute to Austin’s memory. They never came in his lifetime when he would have enjoyed their company, and if his ghost was aware of their presence he must have been rather irritated than gratified at the belated invitation. The other addition to the party was Baba, who had not come last time in spite of the spontaneous geniality with which her future in-laws had asked her. She hated people to behave in a disinterested fashion as it obliged her to do the same. If anyone did a kindness from which they received no benefit, either in social advancement or a useful sense of obligation in the recipient, she said they were ‘silly.’
The end even of her pleasures was not in themselves, but in the extent they would enhance her position in the world. It was ‘smart’ to go to Tasmania, and she imagined that as a Mrs Langton she would have a brilliant social life there, dining at Government House and going to parties on battleships, as the fleet would be in, but the expedition was developing into a kind of school treat. She thought it was not ‘smart’ to have children, or at any rate to be seen with them in public. The Langtons maddened her by their neglect of their social opportunities. When she looked round the table at Beaumanoir, with its fine glass and china, and eighteenth-century silver brought from Waterpark she thought it quite crazy to fill it with more or less impecunious relatives rather than with social leaders from Toorak. She did not understand that the social leaders would not make Alice laugh, at least not in a manner that would be polite. In the same way she could not understand that the family did not go to Hobart in January because it was fashionable, but because it was cooler, and a marvellous place for fishing, sketching, picnics and excursions. She said insolently to Diana:
‘Why doesn’t Mrs Langton get rid of all these hangers-on and enjoy her money herself?’
‘I can’t see that Mama would be any happier living alone in peevish luxury,’ said Diana, with her last two words carelessly annihilating Baba’s whole conception of the good life, and not even aware that she had done so. Even the more muddleheaded of the family sprinkled their chatter with phrases which were gems of concise and vivid expression. Mixed with a good deal of drivel, the quartz which contained the gold, they were not appreciated outside the family, who took them for granted, like children wrecked on a desert island who play daily with the nuggets they find on the shore. In fact it was the intermittent sparkles of their conversation which increased their reputation for eccentricity, as much of it was an unconscious condemnation of the bourgeois standards of their listeners. Baba suffered most from these irritations.
So Alice, with the hangers-on, of whom I was one, set out for Tasmania, but we did not all travel together. The Craigs went by sea all the way round to Hobart in the Manuka, a new large ship. Uncle Bertie always knew about the latest thing, and either had it or used it, so that they gave the impression of advancing with the world. George and Baba went with them as she thought it better to travel with the rich. The rest of us crossed in the Loongana and went down to Hobart in the horrible reeling train.
The whole holiday simmered with family rows, and when the tension reached its climax Dominic was at the place where it snapped, though he was not the cause of it. The Manuka arrived in Hobart the morning after those of us who had come from Launceston by train. All the children of our party, the Flugels, two Dells and ourselves, trooped down to meet it, and as we wanted whenever possible to share the rich pleasures of the Craigs, we streamed into the saloon to breakfast, which quite spoiled Aunt Baba’s picture of herself as a fashionable lady travelling. We went back to our respective hotels and boarding houses, as we could not all squeeze into the same place and the Flugels had to go somewhere cheap, and we told our parents that Aunt Baba had been cross because we went to the ship. They were annoyed and said: ‘What impertinence!’ There was trouble when the invitations came. It happened that the A.D.C. had known the family in Somerset, and Aunt Diana and Wolfie were asked to dine at Government House and Baba was not. Steven was asked to dine on a battleship and Bertie was not. The rejected took it as part of a deliberate conspiracy to send the rich empty away. We children thought the dissensions between the grown-ups were very amusing and whispered about them in corners. There were also rows between ourselves about seats in coaches, or who was to go sailing with Steven in the yacht, which laden with aunts and children looked like a more respectable version of a painting by Etty. But there was not much rancour in these squabbles, and they merely added to the liveliness and enjoyment of our holiday, which was a succession of delights. We went on the little river steamer up to see the salmon ponds at New Norfolk, passing old villages and houses nestling in
their coves on the shores of the wide and beautiful river. We went in an absurd train, from which we could get out and run when it went uphill to a place called Sorrel, where we lay along the branches of the cherry trees and stuffed ourselves. We went in another steamer to the old convict settlement at Port Arthur, and climbed over the ruined church, the local equivalent of Glastonbury. We skimmed about the river in Steven’s little sailing yacht, hauling quantities of black-backed salmon aboard, which we caught with a spinner. On the slopes of Mount Wellington, the fruit growers allowed us to enter their gardens and eat all the gooseberries we wanted as there was no market for them. They were said to be starving. Baba, whose astute little eyes were watching the people we met to learn the pattern of smart behaviour, and who had probably heard of Marie Antoinette, said: ‘They can’t be starving if they have gooseberries. I adore gooseberry jam.’ She included callousness amongst the other cheap easy tricks of the social climber—pretending to forget the names of unimportant people, or being late for appointments with them, speaking a great deal of ‘the lower orders’ as if they were the chief affliction of humanity, and affecting a look of bewilderment when people said or did things which were not smart.
I think there was amongst us a feeling of hostility towards Aunt Baba, and perhaps towards Uncle Bertie, but we could not give much expression to the latter because of Helena, who was loved and admired by us all, not merely because she was very pretty, which most likely we did not notice, having apparently equally beautiful complexions ourselves, but because she was lively, full of schemes for fun, afraid of nothing, and kind. When she appeared the condition of life was heightened. She was the only one who could cast out Dominic’s devils. Whatever he had done or whatever his mood she ignored it, and spoke to him as cheerfully and naturally as to anyone else, while all the rest of us were eyeing him cautiously. He worshipped her and from the very beginning of our childhood we spoke of Helena and Dominic together. Anyhow, our hostility to Uncle Bertie was of a different kind from that we had towards Baba. It was not without respect and was largely due to his efforts to make us more hardy and disciplined, which were probably justified. He wanted us to return from our holiday with developed muscles rather than delightful memories.
It appears to me that as I proceed with this story I am revealing not only the events of that time, but a process in my own mind, which in turn affects what I record. When I first call up what happened in Tasmania, or at Westhill, or at Waterpark during my youthful years, I see the unaltered impression made on my childish mind, but as I write of them, my adult experience tells me that the people, except perhaps the other children, were not really as I saw them, and so I may give them in places a glaze of adult knowledge over the sharpness of a boy’s observation, in the same way that Poussin put a glaze over the bright colours of his pastorals, which the restorers now seem to be cleaning off, along with the dirty varnish. This may lead me to show Baba at times as a hard and shallow arriviste, and elsewhere as an unfortunate misplaced woman, her life misdirected by the false ideals of a vulgar mother, and deserving of much sympathy. She was, of course, both.
Again, though this glaze may bring out in truer depth the colour of my adult characters, it may falsify my picture of myself by toning down my crudities and eliminating those imbecilities and patches of morbid speculation which must have been part of my make-up, but after all, it is always more decent to tear off other people’s clothes than one’s own.
The great event and climax of the holiday was the Strawberry Fête at the Bower, an annual festivity at a kind of village half-way up Mount Wellington, where people ate a great many strawberries at a high price in aid of the little English church. Children know much more than their elders imagine, but as they misinterpret it, they often know less. Before we left the Bower we all knew that there was trouble between Uncle George and Aunt Baba, but we thought it was because she had again been rude to Diana, and that George did not care to see his sister, who in spite of her slight absurdities had far more good nature, sensibility and real intelligence than his wife, insulted by the latter simply because she had no money, the possession of which like all the family he regarded as desirable, but not as an occasion for respect. This may have sharpened his feeling against her, but its main cause was the following letter which came to me amongst his papers. It was still in the envelope which was re-addressed in Cousin Sarah’s spindly writing to The Bower Hotel, Mount Wellington. Dolly Potts had written to him more than a year earlier, saying that she could not go against her father’s wishes. A few months later he had married Baba. Now he had this letter from Dolly:
‘My dear George,
‘Perhaps you have heard that my father died peacefully in September. He was not ill for more than a week, for which I am thankful, but his death has left a gap in my life. My brother inherits Rathain, and I am going to live with my sister, Mrs Stuart, at Ballinreagh Rectory, Co. Mayo.
‘I hope that you are all well. I have not heard from you for some time. How often I think of those happy days at Waterpark, the happiest of my life, and of that wonderful but sadly ending holiday in Brittany. How amusing your father was, the most amusing man I have ever known, and your dear mother always so wise and kind. Please give my most affectionate remembrances to them, also to Laura and Diana and the children.
‘Forgive this short note, but I feel that I should let you know about my father.
‘Yours very sincerely,
DOROTHEA L. POTTS.’
From this it appears that George, in those few days up at the Bower must have learnt that Dolly was free, and showed herself as clearly as it was proper for a ‘lady’ to do, that she was willing to marry him. At the same time he was forced to realize that he was tied to a woman who had only married him from an ambition which he thought grotesque and shoddy. His feelings must have been noticeable as Alice wrote in her diary: ‘I am worried about George and Barbara. Their relations seem far from harmonious.’ We children were aware of a change in George’s manner. He was absent-minded and often did not answer when we spoke to him. There was a slight scene outside the hotel on the afternoon we were assembled to drive back to Hobart in two four-in-hand drags and a landau. Steven was to drive one drag and George the other, while the man from the livery stables was to drive the landau, which had been hired for Alice. George and Baba had evidently had some row up in their room, and he came down first to take charge of his horses, which he drove a quarter of a mile along the road and back to get the feel of them before the rather dangerous drive down to Hobart, where the road was winding and narrow, with steep banks protected in places only by a wooden rail. It is possible that during the few minutes of this trial drive he had calmed down, as he hated real animosity and was naturally very good-tempered. He may have thought that the whole situation was just bad luck for both of them, that it was not Baba’s fault that Major Potts had died, and that the only course was to make the best of it. When he drew up again at the hotel and Baba came out, mustering all the grace he could, and indicating the place on the box beside him, he said:
‘Come up here, Baba.’
She was already angry with him. His calm assumption that whatever offensive things he had said to her in their room, and being almost certainly lucid and logical they were far more wounding than mere abuse, could be glossed over in this fashion, made her more so.
‘I prefer to go in the landau,’ she said. ‘It’ll be less like a school-treat.’
George’s eyes looked very blue in his crimson face, and he muttered: ‘Well, go to the devil, then.’ Everyone heard him, and the children exchanged sly glances and put their hands over their mouths to conceal their sniggers. He nodded to Dominic and Helena, who were hovering about to make certain of sitting together, to come up beside him. Dominic sat next to him as he wanted to take the reins on the level part, and Helena was on the outside.
Alice, as a snub to Baba, said she would go in Steven’s drag. Laura and I were with he
r, and as soon as our drag was full, Steven, rather disgusted with the little scene, drove off. The landau came next, but we soon left it behind. George’s drag, delayed by some discussion as to where Daisy von Flugel should sit, and also by the discovery of some forgotten luggage, set out last. But about half-way down the mountain we saw George’s drag close behind us, coming at a good pace, and Alice explained:
‘How on earth did he pass the landau?’
We could see that George was smiling grimly, and that beside him Helena and Dominic were leaning forward, their eyes bright and intent with excitement. Anger being short madness, George for the time being must have gone mad. He had passed the landau for the fun of giving Baba a fright, and now he was excited and wanted to pass us too, though he could not have wanted to put his mother, to say nothing of the rest of us, in danger. He had perfect confidence in himself which was normally justified by his good driving. Alice looked back anxiously and called up to my father:
‘Don’t let him pass, Steven. Keep to the middle of the road.’
There was now excitement in both drags, and we made bets, a bar of chocolate against a top, as to whether Uncle George would be able to pass. Steven now had the same kind of tight, excited smile as Uncle George. We came to a part where the road was widened by the earth to the right being cut away. George saw his chance and flicked his leaders. His drag swerved and lurched, and Helena who at that moment had put up her hands to clutch her hat, was flung out. She gave a loud squeak, and looking like something from an Italian votive picture, with her legs sticking out from the white lace froth of her petticoats and drawers, she went headfirst down into the gully which flanked the left of the road, and crashed amongst the saplings and brambles. This was startling enough, but quick as a flash there followed the incident which made this holiday more memorable than any other, and coloured for ever the attitude of the clan towards Dominic. He went after Helena. One can only write ‘he went’ as it was never finally agreed whether he jumped, or was flung off the box by the same lurch, or whether he fell trying to grab her skirt to save her. Whatever his impulse, he crashed heroically and uselessly into the thicket below.