My Place in the Bazaar

by Alec Waugh

  1927

  England 1932—1939

  In the summer of 1927 I paid a second visit to Tahiti. Sailing from Marseilles towards Panama, I paused in the French West Indies and thus began a long association with the Caribbean that produced two novels; No Truce with Time and Island in the Sun, and a number of sketches and short stories that were collected in 1958 in a volume called The Sugar Islands.

  In 1930 a travel book of mine Hot Countries was a Literary Guild selection in the U.S.A. It introduced me to New York which soon became a second home for me.

  In 1932 I married and my life till the outbreak of war was based on England, with annual visits to New York. My wife bought a Queen Anne house in Silchester on the edge of the Roman city of Calleva. I maintained in London a small one-room pied-à-terre flat. During this period I wrote three chronicle novels in the Galsworthian manner about English professional life and a number of short stories, most of which appeared in Nash’s. Two of them were told in the first person.

  A Pretty Case for Freud

  I Noticed him in the first place because he was the only other person in the pavilion wearing a silk hat. I had the excuse of having come on there from a wedding. But I should have gone back and changed had I known how conspicuous I should be. It was ten years since I had been to the Varsity Match at Lord’s; and I was astonished by the change: by the empty stands, the absence of smart frocks, the lounge-suited atmosphere of the enclosures. A social occasion, for whose sake in remote rectories mothballs had been once shaken out of braided coats and wide-brimmed ‘toppers’ stripped of their tissue wrappings, was now a very ordinary cricket match in which the general public took little interest. As I walked in my sponge-bag trousers and shining hat through the long, high, many-windowed morning-room, I felt as antediluvian as the curved bats and pastoral portraits that adorn its walls: so antediluvian that as I took my seat beside the one other Edwardian survival, a hackneyed Latin tag—the tongue that it is a solecism now to quote—actually seemed appropriate to the occasion. I thought of Lord’s as the pre-war pages of Punch present it; of Lord’s as I had known it in the early ‘twenties; the tight-packed mounds; the coaches by the Tavern; the parade of parasols between the innings; colour, excitement, glamour; and now this: Homburgs and bowler hats in the pavilion, long terraces of white beside the screen.… Nos duo turba sumus, I thought, as I leant sideways towards my fellow relic.

  ‘I wonder,’ I asked, ‘if I might see your scorecard?’

  He turned; and I immediately forgot that it was a need for sartorial kinship that had decided my choice of seat.

  He was one of the most striking-looking men that I have ever seen.

  He was young: in the latish twenties; and handsome in a clear skinned way. But it was not merely his good looks that startled me. The impression that he made is not to be explained by any cataloguing of separate features; high forehead, grey-blue eyes, full mouth, long pointed nose. I was no more conscious of those separate features than one is of the pattern on a transparent lampshade. Just as there are two kinds of lampshade, the one whose object it is to transmit a softened light and the other that is a decoration, simply, a self-sufficient ornament requiring, like a stained-glass window, a light within it to reveal the intricacies of its design—it is a question of which matters, the lampshade or the light—so are there certain types of face, the one in which the personality is subservient to the featured mask of lip, brow, cheek, to which it gives mobility and meaning, the other in which you are so exclusively conscious of the personality behind that mask that you sometimes find yourself unable to describe the physical appearance of someone with the very texture of whose thought you are familiar.

  It was like that now. I was conscious not of a handsome face, but of a new person; of someone who was masterful but unworldly; practical but inexperienced; masculine but with that look of anticipation, of waiting to be fulfilled that you expect to find in a young girl; a combination of characteristics so self-contradictory that the obvious corollary to their catalogue would be: ‘What a mass of complexes. A pretty case for Freud.’ That was what you would have expected.

  He wasn’t though. He was of a piece, without self-consciousness; the kind of man who does not know what the word shyness means.

  I was curious, alert, excited. ‘I’ve got to find out who you are,’ I thought.

  In the lazy atmosphere of a cricket match it is easy to start a conversation. Only a small amount of perseverance is required to maintain it. The cricket was slow, desultory, undramatic. In a little while we were more interested in our talk than in the match. At any rate, I was. His talk had the same contradictory characteristics as his appearance. It was boyishly eager, yet at the same time authoritative. It was the talk of one who stood on the brink of experience, yet was accustomed to the exercise of authority. More baffling still, though his voice had a slightly mannered intonation, it had no trace of the drawl that you would expect to find in a fashionably dressed young man. He was a puzzle, right enough: a puzzle that I meant to solve.

  The hands of the turret clock pointed to five o’clock. Stumps would not be drawn till half-past six. In an hour and half I ought to be able to find out something about him, with any luck.

  Luck came my way.

  An exchange of ideas became an argument, a point at issue which could only be settled by the consultation of a particular book of reference. I had fancied the book was in the Pavilion library. It did not prove to be; or anyhow, we could not find it. I happened to have a copy at my flat.

  ‘It’s not five minutes’ walk away,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back there afterwards and have a sherry.’

  ‘Let’s go back now. This cricket bores me.’

  An answer that combined his boyishness and his authority; his readiness to accept new suggestions with his assumption that no wish of his would be contradicted. It did not occur to him that I might want to stay on and watch the cricket. Like a schoolboy on his way to a party he chattered without stopping till we reached the large, barrack-shaped apartment-house on whose highest floor I have a one-room flat where I keep clothes and papers, that I use as a kind of office pied-à-terre when I am alone in London.

  ‘Is this where you live?’ he asked.

  I nodded.

  He looked up inquisitively at its straight sheer surface, as though he were seeing this particular kind of building for the first time; as though he were a foreigner obtaining the material for a monograph ‘How London Lives’. As I opened the cocktail cabinet and set about the preparation of an ‘old-fashioned’, he deployed none of the diplomatically assumed indifference with which it is customary to take stock of a new room without letting it appear that you are conscious of being in one. With an unabashed curiosity he took a mental inventory of the room: its lighting, its shelves, its chairs, its pictures, the jumble of knick-knacks along the mantelpiece; then started on a tour of investigation, taking up a book, peering into an etching, lifting a cigarette-box; without comment, as though he were visiting an exhibition, till suddenly, with a note of real interest in his voice, ‘What’s that doing here?’ he asked.

  He was pointing to the framed original of a jacket design for one of my novels.

  ‘That? Oh, I’m responsible for that.’

  ‘You drew the picture?’

  ‘No—wrote the book.’

  ‘What, you, the author!’

  There was a surprised excitement in his voice that I should have found extremely flattering had not experience counselled me against a readiness to believe that here, at last, I was about to meet that perfect, that dream reader whom every novelist is convinced must exist somewhere, the one reader who has not only read everything that he has written, but read between the lines; for whose sake he has left ‘i’s’ undotted and ‘t’s’ uncrossed in the calm confidence that ‘anyway, he’ll know what I’m about’. I have learnt to distrust that sudden glow in the voice, that quick light in the eyes. A case of mistaken identity, I tell myself. The tribute of sudden interest i
s in fact intended for the Chairman of Chapman & Hall, or the author of Vile Bodies, or more probably for the horse-trainer at Newmarket. On those rare occasions when I really am the target at which enthusiasm is directed, it is usually to receive some such testimonial as: ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you for so long. There’s a mistake in that last book but one of yours that I’ve been longing to point out. On page thirty-seven you talk about Mildred’s gas fire, and in the last chapter you have coals falling through a grate. Now I wonder if anyone else has spotted that?’

  Previous experience did not encourage me to expect from my guest’s excitement a long, sympathetic, interpretive analysis of my short stories. I should have been disappointed if I had.

  ‘There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you. Was Julia Thirleigh really the model for your heroine?’

  ‘Well….’

  It is the kind of question that usually a novelist resents; resents because it is impossible to reply honestly. The answer is always ‘Yes and no’. No full-length character is ever a direct portrait; yet no character that is alive has not been drawn in part from life. A trick of speech has been borrowed here, a gesture there. The process of creation must start somewhere; must have some solid foundation in experience. But by the time the story is quarter finished, the novelist has forgotten his model altogether; his character has developed a temperament and destiny of its own, is a separate entity, has become, that is to say, created.

  Usually, at least, that is the way it happens. In the case of Julia Thirleigh it had been admittedly rather different; possibly because I had ‘put’ her into the kind of novel that is less a story than an argument, that requires distinct types to contrast different points of view. I needed a character to typify the débutante of the late nine-teen-twenties, the second edition of the Bright Young People, the London of the slump. And it was just because Julia is herself less a person than a type that, when I had finished the book, I was astonished to find how closely my finished character resembled the model which I had meant to employ merely as a first sketch: so closely that I did not see how a great many people could fail to recognize her. In such a connexion Julia was the very first name that would come to any moderately well-informed person’s mind. Through a decade when young women not only claimed, but asserted, their right to the same independence as their brothers, Julia was the most discussed of those Londoners whose activities are photographed week by week in the Tatler, Bystander and Sketch. She was not so much famous as notorious. She had avoided, it is true, any open scandal. She had not shot an unfaithful suitor, been convicted as a drug addict or cited in the divorce courts. To that extent she had been discreet. At the same time, she had been subpoenaed in a slander suit that had been heard in camera. It was at one of her bottle-parties in a top-storey studio that a free fight with gate-crashers had ended in a crumpled figure on the pavement and a comment from the coroner that only her most loyal friends held to be unjustified. There had been no open scandal. But the clothes she had worn, the company she had kept, the places she had frequented, her manner, her habits, her whole way of living had given her the kind of label that made her current coin in any argument. ‘Well now, take somebody like Julia …’ and when people said that, no one had any doubt of what was meant.

  Prudence as well as friendship counselled me to show my manuscript to Julia before I delivered it to my publisher.

  She returned it with a very typical remark.

  ‘I don’t use Blue-grass.’

  ‘Is that your only comment?’

  ‘My only criticism.’

  ‘There’s nothing there that you object to?’

  ‘Why should there be?’

  ‘Well …

  She smiled.

  ‘Is there anything in your book that people haven’t said about me and believed about me?’

  ‘There’s a difference between gossip and a thing said in print.’

  ‘If your publishers are afraid of libel I’ll write them a letter of absolution.’

  I could scarcely deny, in the face of that, that I had used Julia as a model, yet I was reluctant to admit that my character was a photograph. I hedged.

  ‘In a kind of way,’ I said.

  ‘You did? I’d always heard you did, but I wasn’t certain. You must know her, then?’

  ‘I was lunching with her yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday!’

  He regarded me with a strange veneration, as though I were haloed in such a light as had transfigured Moses on his descent from Sinai.

  ‘Yesterday! I can hardly believe it. I’ve heard so much about her, read so much about her. It’s strange to be meeting somebody who really knows her. Is she as beautiful as her photographs? She must be. They are all so different. Yet they are all beautiful. I suppose there are hundreds of people in love with her. There must be. Is she in love, herself? Do you think she ever has been in love, really? I suppose she must have been. At the beginning. But, I don’t think she can be, now. She must be waiting for the big thing; filling an interval; decorating an interval; that’s what you suggested in your novel.’

  I hadn’t. But I let that pass. The bubbling Niagara poured on. Was she happy? Was she lonely? Was she one of those who had faced the Gorgon and whose tears had dried? He used various similes. I barely listened to his questions. I was too occupied with my relief at having found a way of continuing and enlarging my acquaintance with this very astonishing young man.

  ‘If you’re so interested in Julia, why not come here on Friday at cocktail time? She’s coming.’

  ‘What … Julia Thirleigh … here!…’

  His great eyes grew wide with incredulous astonishment, like a four-year-old darkie’s when you offer it a silver coin.

  ‘She said she’d come but I’ll ask her to make a special point of it. I’ll need to know your name, though, if I’m to introduce you.’

  He looked surprised at that. But in a different way: as a school master might when a pupil makes an elementary mistake.

  ‘You don’t know? I’m Bishopsbourne.’

  Then I knew. Then I understood.

  During a decade when the careers of the blue-blooded classes have followed unpredictably erratic courses, few members of the aristocracy have been subjected to more unexpected somersaults of circumstance than the present and tenth Lord Bishopsbourne.

  When, in the April of 1914, he celebrated his ninth birthday as the Hon. Martin Forest he had an elder brother, a six-months-old nephew, three unmarried sisters, and a grandmother. His father, the seventh Lord Bishopsbourne, was one of the most amply endowed landowners in Kent. Martin was destined, that is to say, for the comfortably obscure existence of a second son. Within four and a half years, however, the accidents of war had deprived him of his father and his brother, the 1918 epidemic of influenza had proved too virulent for his nephew, and his grandmother had summoned the family solicitor to her presence.

  ‘Martin is now the tenth Lord Bishopsbourne,’ she said. ‘Death duties have been paid three times in as many years. I imagine the estate is almost bankrupt. But I want figures—the precise figures, please.’

  She was angular, thin-lipped, tight-stayed, her throat held high by whalebone. Her eyes were bright, and her voice was sharp.

  The family solicitor hesitated. He had prepared, during the quarter of an hour he had been kept waiting, a concise and persuasive little speech. The situation was bad, he would explain. Mortgages would have to be raised. It would be many years before the estate would be able to maintain its former standard. He would very strongly recommend that the estate should be placed upon the market. There were a number of war profiteers who would leap at the opportunity of obtaining a house with such traditions and associations. A very good price should be obtained. A smaller property could then be purchased, and a comfortable way of life assured. The arguments had been neatly tabulated in his mind. He hesitated, however, as those small bright eyes fixed themselves on his and the sharp voice snapped: ‘Figures—I want the precise
figures, please.’

  A great many other men had hesitated in that presence. Lady Bishopsbourne was a survival of those Victorian potentates of the hearth who, at a time when women possessed no political or legal status, had controlled their families with the unquestioned authority of a medieval monarch. ‘You may take away my property at marriage. You may deny me a vote and the right to plead in court; but’—the voice snapped and the keen eyes flashed—‘I will admit no contradiction, no interference in the conduct of my domestic interests.’ There were many such women in Victorian England. There are very few in our ampler Georgian day. Lady Bishopsbourne was one of them.

  The solicitor, hesitated, cleared his throat, began his argument. She cut him short.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Lady Bishopsbourne. ‘A man’s duty is to his family, to the traditions of his family. Martin will accept those responsibilities. The sooner he starts the better. He will leave Eton at Christmas. Latin and Greek will be of small use to him now. He must learn his job.’

  And so, at the age of thirteen, Martin was taken away from school to be placed under the guidance of an agent. Instead of memorizing Greek verbs, he pondered the problems of tithes, of soil, of crops and grazing. He exchanged the wide landscape of scholarship for the narrow compound of agriculture. He was living through the most dramatic epoch of modern history, but his interests were as blinkered as those of any medieval Trappist. He met no one of his own age and class. His days were spent with farmers, tenants, grooms, shepherds, with the middle-men through whom he sold his hops. In the life of what is called the ‘county’, his grandmother forbade him to take any part.