by Martin Boyd
Dominic, with whom, as I have pointed out, I had a degree of affinity, part of our souls being filled from the same pot, evidently felt as I did, but he must also, when he had assimilated what his eyes now showed him, have been filled with desperate indignation at the thought of Helena being handed over to this hunk of complacent flesh. His eyes passed on from Helena to Wentworth, and at once he looked as if his mental processes had stopped, and it was difficult to start them moving again. He did not speak immediately to Helena. There was an inhibition between them, and it was not until half-an-hour later, at the buffet which Baba had arranged in the dining-room, that I saw them talking together over their tea.
In two days we moved from the hotel to stay with various relatives. Steven and Laura went to stay with Uncle Bob Byngham, who had a house in South Yarra. Brian, who was now very ‘English’ looking, was asked to stay with George and Baba, and I went to Aunt Mildy’s new house in a quiet side street in Toorak. I was obviously the one to stay with a maiden aunt as I would show a proper regard for her china and chintzes. She was delighted to have me, and lavished on me attentions which, at first, I did not find suffocating. Because of this, during these critical three weeks, the action again was out of my sight, but I was aware that behind the strains of the motet something was happening, and this motet will, I fear, be less noble than the echoing music, the silver trumpets of the Bynghams.
Aunt Mildy, deprived all her life of an object of affection which was exclusively her own, tried to grapple me to her soul with every luxury, roast chickens, meringues, and a new blue silk eiderdown, saying as she showed me to my room, ‘Blue for a boy,’ though I was then nearly eighteen. To have all the comfort of a house directed towards myself was agreeable, but when I wanted to go across to the Craigs, or down to the Flugels at Brighton to be with the rest of the young people, she either brought out some luscious bait to detain me, or else said: ‘I will come with you,’ even if I was going to see my mother.
Dominic had been sent to stay with the Flugels and Aunt Mildy told me that this was to keep him as far away as possible from Helena in Toorak.
‘It might be dangerous if they met often,’ she said. ‘We mustn’t run any risks, as it’s a brilliant marriage for Helena.’
This statement created an obstruction in my brain, and I demanded angrily: ‘Why?’
Aunt Mildy spoke with awe, not only of Wentworth’s money, but of the importance of his family in the Western District. I was furious to think that my aunt should be so ignorant of social, equally with human values, as to imagine that Helena, her own niece, was making a brilliant match with a young man whose sole recommendation seemed to be a coating of both physical and financial fat. I could not explain her mistake to her without appearing ridiculously pompous, so I only went red and spluttered incoherently, and she said:
‘Now you are not being my own nice boy.’
It seems useless to deny that there is an element of snobbery in this book, but it would be misleading to write about that period and to leave it out, or to pretend that the different snobberies of today, which give less offence because they are more universal, and even more vicious, were practised then. Our parents were unusually careless of differences of class, and I have seen Laura, dressed in silk and feathers, with diamonds and white gloves and a lace parasol, returning from a Government House garden party, stop a man driving a herd of Ayrshire cows along a Toorak road, and discuss their points with him. But the different environments of our youth made us aware of social degrees. In spite of my interest in snobbery, like the interest of Colonel Rodgers in guns and scimitars, I did not like to see it practised, any more than Colonel Rodgers would really have liked to see Dominic, for example, cut off Brian’s head if he was annoyed with him, though he might admire the superb swing of the broadsword.
So now, to explain better the nature of Helena’s engagement, I must give a brief sketch of ‘Melbourne Society,’ an active and virulent growth which many people, even in Australia, do not realize exists. Not long ago one of the surviving and witty ladies of the Toorak ‘Faubourg’ was complaining of the inadequate status of a new governor. I said that I had heard that the King wanted him to be appointed. She replied: ‘I don’t think the King understands Melbourne Society,’ and then she shrieked with laughter. At the time we returned to Melbourne, this society which provoked her amusement, appeared to have had a fairly recent access of ladies of large build. They were much richer than our friends and relatives, and were mostly the wives of squatters, as the sheep-farmers are called. We met them at parties but so far there had not been much intermarriage between our group and theirs. When they appeared at these parties they were described in the Sydney Bulletin as being ‘upholstered’ rather than dressed. Several of them were related to Wentworth McLeish, so Helena’s engagement had a certain social complexity. We were rather amused at Wentworth’s stolidity but pleased at being associated with such wealth. The upholstered ladies were annoyed that it had not been annexed by one of their own daughters, but still slightly gratified at being associated with those whom they had envied in their childhood.
Aunt Mildy took me with her one afternoon to the Craigs’ house to see Helena’s trousseau. Baba was there for the same purpose. There were a great many clothes laid out on the bed and hanging over chairs in Helena’s room. Baba questioned whether I should be allowed into a young woman’s bedroom, which made me blush at being a male, but Mildy said:
‘Oh, Guy is not like other boys. I’d trust any girl with him, anywhere.’
Helena laughed, and said: ‘I think he has a wicked look in his eye. I should be terrified of him in a dark lane.’
‘Why, he’s like a gazelle!’ declared Aunt Mildy.
‘Gazelles can be very frisky,’ said Helena.
Baba looked cross during this conversation. She may have conceived a dislike for the male sex, and most of her social activities were concerned with women. Once I saw in a fashionable Melbourne hotel, the astonishing sight of a number of women seated at a long table eating chocolate cakes and drinking champagne at five o’clock in the afternoon. Their hostess was Aunt Baba. Hoping to be invited to join the guzzle, I said cheerfully: ‘Hullo, Aunt Baba!’ but she greeted me as coldly as if I had intruded into a convent during the hours of silence.
I was allowed to see the dresses, at which Mildy exclaimed with little ecstatic cries of admiration. Baba went briskly round the room like a sergeant inspecting kit, and her highest word of praise was ‘smart,’ which also would have been the sergeant’s. Helena answered her questions about the dresses as if she had little to do with them, and she called them ‘the’ not ‘my.’
‘That’s the going away dress,’ she said, ‘the blue one on the chair. That’s the best evening dress.’
‘Is that the only dress you have for important parties?’ asked Baba.
‘No, the wedding dress will do for them too. The train comes off. And I still have my presentation dress which isn’t out of date. The other evening dresses are in the wardrobe. They are simpler, but I’ll show them to you if you like.’
‘Oh, we want to see everything,’ cried Mildy. ‘Don’t we, Barbara?’ It was one of the offences of the family that some of them continued to call Aunt Baba by her full name, which she thought less smart, and done to keep her at a distance.
When they had seen everything, Baba said rather grimly: ‘It’s a very smart trousseau. I wish I’d had one like it. I had to make most of mine myself.’
‘Oh, Aunt Baba!’ cried Helena, distressed by this admission. ‘But I’m sure you looked lovely. You always look very smart now. Anyhow,’ she added, half laughing, ‘you can have this if you like.’ She probably did not know what she meant.
‘Mind I don’t accept the offer,’ said Baba. ‘You could easily buy another, and after you’re married a dozen more, and Wentworth wouldn’t notice it.’ She went on, exceeding even the vulgarity she had s
hown at Waterpark when Lady Dilton called, to describe the riches of Wentworth McLeish, implying that they were the reason for Helena’s marrying him. It was true that Aunt Maysie, determined that her daughter should be well beyond the reach of the tides of poverty encroaching on the family, which had nearly engulfed Diana, had manoeuvred Helena into this engagement. Helena had no idea of this, and imagined that she was in love with Wentworth, who might have been thought quite a nice young man by those of simple requirements. Baba spoke as if Helena knew quite well what she was doing, and as if her motives were the same as Aunt Maysie’s.
At first, Helena, leaning against the dressing-table, listened to her with the faint detached smile with which she had shown her trousseau, but when she took in the implication of what Baba said, her blue eyes widened with astonishment. Then she suddenly looked, not so much angry as enlightened. But Baba went on:
‘The McLeishes are good sound stock. They’ve no rotten Spanish blood to make them kill horses and carry on with servant girls.’
I was outraged at this reference to my brother and indirectly to myself. Baba saw this and said carelessly: ‘You’re all right. It doesn’t show in you.’
My anger was nothing to Helena’s. Baba had roused her heroic loyalty to her own kind, that quality she shared with Dominic. Baba, ignoring the look in Helena’s eyes, went on with heated stupidity, imagining that she was hammering the last nails into the coffin which held the love between the two cousins, whereas she was splitting the fragile wood and allowing it to break free and spread its wings in new life.
Helena suddenly turned and left the room.
Mildy also was vexed. When a situation shocked her or others of the family out of their external silliness, they could show dignity and sense. On the night when Dominic was out on Tamburlaine, Diana shed her affectations to behave with prompt responsibility. Perhaps to retain their sanity the Langtons should always live in a crisis. Mildy was just as pleased as Baba at Helena’s engagement, but she clothed it all in the wild and brilliant tissues of romance which floated in her brain. She now said:
‘I do not think that Helena liked your imputing sordid motives to her marriage, Barbara.’
Baba snorted, but she was taken aback that Mildy should have the strength of mind to administer a rebuke. In an uncomfortable silence we went down to the drawing-room where Helena was standing by a bureau, licking and closing an envelope. She had an air of suppressed excitement, but she said calmly:
‘The tea’s coming in. Mummy said not to wait for her.’
A parlourmaid brought in a tray and put it on a table in a bay window, but Mildy said it was cold, and we took our cups down to the other end of the room, where there was a fire. We sat on sofas covered with a black-and-white striped chintz over which sprawled huge pink cabbage roses, a fashionable pattern in that year, the time of the Gibson girls. Mildy, with that tact and good sense she could call up when necessary, kept the conversation away from the wedding, and asked me questions about Waterpark, and the changes since she was there in the ’nineties. Then, once more overlaying her good sense with her silliness, she said:
‘I would have liked to come over to see you, but I couldn’t leave my darling Willy.’ She referred only to her new house, which she had called Willara, perhaps so that she could give it this masculine nickname.
Helena went back to the bay window to pour out more tea, and I went with her to carry the cups. While we were standing with our backs to the room, she took from somewhere in her dress the envelope she had been sealing as we came in. She said to me quietly:
‘Will you give this to Dominic tonight?’
I said I would, and she said, ‘Promise?’ I nodded, and she added, smiling, ‘Cross your breath?’ the guarantee we used in our childhood’s games.
I would have done anything for Helena, as she had that splendid courage which is not merely a grim setting of the teeth, but gay and in the most dangerous moments on the verge of laughter. But there was nothing masculine about her. She was not one of the strange uniformed hybrids admired of recent years, of whom the duc de Lauzun, the greatest eighteenth-century connoisseur of beautiful women, would doubtless have written as he did of Madame de Salles, when she came to return his call in a dragoon’s uniform with leather breeches: ‘This was quite enough to disgust me with a woman for ever.’
I gave the mystic guarantee and we carried the teacups back to our aunts. Aunt Maysie returned home just as we were about to leave, and Mildy stayed on to talk to her, so it was nearly dinner time when we arrived back at Willara. The letter in my pocket prevented my giving my full attention to Aunt Mildy, who as a result became a little peevish. I had imagined that I would have time to go along to South Yarra before dinner, to Uncle Bob Byngham’s house where I knew that Dominic was dining with Laura and Steven. I did not think clearly what could be in a letter from Helena to Dominic. I only knew that I had solemnly promised to deliver it that night, and I would have to do so, even if it entailed journeying to Brighton at midnight, if I could not reach South Yarra before Dominic left. There were only a few more days to the wedding, and although I knew that Wentworth would be a deathly husband for Helena, I only half wanted the marriage to be prevented, as I was already affected by the overpowering veneration for wealth which thickened the air of Toorak. I was, as we so often are in our youth, and also in later life, in a cloud of unknowing, not realizing the implication or effect of half the things I did.
I could feel during dinner Aunt Mildy’s dissatisfaction with my response to the delicious meal she had provided, though this may be a glaze of adult knowledge over a youthful memory. When we emerged from her pretty little ‘dining-alcove’ into her more spacious ‘living-room’ (she thought it very up to date to use these words) where the walls were hung with Steven’s and Brian’s landscapes, but not with Dominic’s brooding nudes, and where her share of the spoils of Beaumanoir was displayed in loving prominence, I began to fidget, and at last said:
‘Aunt Mildy, I’d like to go to see Mummy this evening, if you don’t mind.’
‘But you’ve been out all the afternoon, dear,’ she objected.
‘Yes, but I haven’t seen Mum since Sunday. I shan’t be long. I’ll just run up to Toorak Road and get a tram. I’ll be back in less than an hour.’
‘You could ring up.’
‘Yes, but I want to see her.’
‘Oh, I thought we were going to have a nice cosy evening,’ said Mildly plaintively. ‘I was going to play MacDowell’s Sea Pieces for you.’
Somehow I got away, feeling irritated with Aunt Mildy for trying to stop me, but guilty at leaving her. I also felt guilty at delivering the letter, though I would have felt worse if I had not done so.
Uncle Bob and his wife Aunt Lucy, Steven, Laura and Dominic were still sitting over their dinner when I arrived. Miss Vio Chambers who had just returned from England was also there, and it was a little party. Steven and Laura seemed vexed at my uninvited intrusion, but Uncle Bob said genially: ‘Come in, my boy, and have a pear and a glass of port.’
I wanted to deliver my letter and get back, but Uncle Bob had put me at the opposite side of the table from Dominic, and I could not sneak it into his hand or his pocket. At last I said: ‘I’m awfully sorry, but Aunt Mildy’s alone, and I must go back.’
They laughed at me, as the old do at the young when they behave oddly. Laura said:
‘Darling, you can’t walk into someone’s house in the middle of a dinner party, eat a pear and then go home again.’
‘I just wanted to see how you were,’ I said.
‘Is Mildy starving you?’ asked Steven.
‘Oh, no, I have lovely food,’ I protested. They were puzzled at my arrival but willing to let me go. I tried to make a significant face at Dominic, and said: ‘Will you walk to the tram with me?’
I’ve no doubt I was also contorting appealing ey
ebrows at Laura, because when Steven said: ‘No. He can’t leave the table like that,’ she answered: ‘Lucy won’t mind for five minutes, will you? Let him go.’
When we came out into the street I handed Dominic the letter, and said: ‘It’s from Helena. She made me promise to give it to you tonight.’ In the darkness I was aware of the sudden bewilderment that came over him. He stood for a minute without speaking. Then he said, calling me by a name which he had given to me in my childhood, and which came from a character on some blue illustrated plates we used in the nursery:
‘I don’t think I’ll come to the tram with you, Pompey. Good night.’
He went back into the house, and I did not see him again for seven years.
CHAPTER XIII
ON THE morning of the wedding day Aunt Mildy was fussing about her clothes. At that time women’s dresses were very elaborate, and Mildy took full advantage of this to cover herself in clouds of chiffon, which if it had not been blue, would have given the impression that she was really the bride. To fill in the time I went across to see my old school at Kew, where I had been so happy before we left for England. Only two or three of the boys who had been there with me were still at school. I had to explain who I was, and though they were quite polite, they had little to say, and seemed touched with xenophobia. I then went to see Canon Wildthorne, the headmaster, of whom I had so often thought with affection while we were at Waterpark. Again I had to explain who I was.
‘Langton?’ he said. ‘Yes, that’s right. You weren’t with us long. You left to go to China or somewhere, didn’t you?’