by Alec Waugh
‘That was very silly of him.’
‘It was very natural. Angel Clare—that was the husband’s name—had thought he was marrying an innocent girl, the daughter of peasant stock. He had to reconstruct his entire picture of her when he discovered that she was not that at all, that she was the descendant of degenerate aristocrats, that she had already borne a child. He had fallen in love with her, not knowing her for what she was. He had to adjust himself to a strange woman. He could not do it.’
Julia looked puzzled.
‘Well, what about it?’
‘Don’t you think it might be just as much of a surprise to Martin to discover that you were completely without experience?’ She laughed out loud.
‘I suppose it’s by putting things like that in your books that you claim you’re a psychologist.’
I tried to explain to her. I argued that if Martin had fallen in love with her, believing her to be a certain kind of woman, when he discovered her to be another kind of woman altogether, she would have become a stranger to him, a stranger with whom, very possibly, he would not be in love.
She listened mockingly. Then she asked in great amusement:
‘What do you think’ll happen? Will he get up and leave me then and there, like the hero in that novel?’
‘It might spoil an idyll.’
She shook her head.
‘Novelists are nearly always wrong when it comes down to a problem in real life. You got me wrong. You’ve probably got Martin wrong as well. What are you suggesting that I should do? Say nothing?’
‘Yes.’
Into her face came a look of real indignation.
‘I’ve been saving up this secret for five years. If you think I’m going to miss the best chance I’ll ever have of spilling it, you’re stupid.’
She left me in a fine fury.
It was, in its way, a quite grand wedding. Julia had produced from
an estate in Norfolk an unsuspected and quite distinguished parent. Lady Bishopsbourne had seen to it that the family’s first public appearance in twenty years should not lack splendour. Rarely had the altar of St. George’s been more opulendy bowered with unseasonable blooms. The mansion in Chester Square which had been requisitioned from an exceedingly distant aunt, was feudal in its parade of footmen. Every acquaintance of any consequence had been invited. Curiosity had led to the acceptance of ninety-seven per cent, of the invitations. An attendance fully twice as long as the invitation list, sweeping like a tidal river in its armada of long, low, shining cars, forced the lorries and taxi-cabs of Belgravia into inextricable traffic blocks in the remoter reaches of Grosvenor Place. An entire floor was required to display appropriately the generosity of the guests.
Unquestionably it was a grand occasion. And there, at the end of the long L-shaped drawing-room was the young couple—so blissfully, so blindly absorbed in one another that only two glasses of champagne were needed to render me tearfully wistful over the fate that threatened them. Something must be done. They were such innocents! I had brought them together. I was in a way responsible for their future. I had pondered the problem during the long, inaudible address. I had believed myself to have discovered a solution—if, that is to say, I could find an opportunity to propound it; or rather, if I should have the courage to make the opportunity. A third glass of champagne gave me the courage.
I pushed my way through the crowd to Julia.
She welcomed me friendlily. Two days earlier she had been angry. But on a day like this she had forgotten that. Besides, it was I who was responsible for her happiness.
‘Julia, I must have one word, just one word, alone with you.’
She pouted. ‘Darling, not that again!’
‘It won’t take two minutes.’
‘Very well, then.’
She let herself be led away. I kept my promise: it did not take a minute. I knew exactly what I had to say. I had phrased it very carefully during the address.
‘You said that you’d been saving your secret for five years: that you wanted to make the most effective use of it. You’re right. You should. But let me assure you of this. Now is not the time. Within the first year of marriage there comes the first big quarrel, when each turns on the other and flings every available recrimination at the other’s head. On the outcome of that quarrel depends the course of marriage. You’ll want every possible weapon then. Keep your secret till then. It’ll torpedo any opposition.’
‘Is that really true: about the quarrel, I mean to say?’
‘Invariably.’
‘In that case, then, perhaps—’ She was half convinced; but there was still a pensive, puzzled look upon her face. She hesitated. Then suddenly she looked up, and with a brilliant flush, she asked me a question so naïve that I could have kissed her.
‘But on a point like that, could one really make a man believe one wasn’t what one was?’
I reassured her. ‘Him, you could.’
‘Oh, well, then in that case, perhaps—perhaps it would be best to wait.… And, thank you, anyhow.’
She turned away, caught up by her obligations as a bride: the cake to be cut, the toast to be responded to, the innumerable good wishes. She was only half convinced, but I was pretty sure that she would not say anything that night, nor the one after, nor ever, probably, till the time had come when their relations with one another were so firm-knit that no premarital confession could disturb it.
They were together now, he and she. As they stood answering the stream of congratulations, her fingers plucked at his trouser seam, signalling for the hand that crept down to hers.… They stood there, their fingers interlocked. It was very touching.
Perhaps no one nowadays would care to offer long odds on any marriage lasting, but these two had had as the prelude to this moment so much of self-doubt and of anticipation; there was so much for them to reveal to one another, so much of themselves to learn for the first time, so many things to share, that I would have been prepared to lay, well, seven to one on.
I turned away, to climb the flight of stairs to the higher floor on which was set out the imposing tribute to the young people’s prominence and popularity. Usually at such a wedding it is with some diffidence that I walk past the long high-piled tables in the hope that my modest contribution of book or brooch has not had its modesty too markedly accentuated by the adjacency of ancestral candelabra. But on this occasion I did not care. I felt that the advice I had just forced upon the bride was a more valuable wedding-gift than the studded circlet of the Bishopsbourne tiara.
‘Ambition’ Bevan
I Was responsible for his nickname.
I had found it for him before he had been at school a week.
He was my junior. But as the head scholar of his group, he had passed into a form that it had taken me a year to reach.
His existence had been announced to me by the headmaster’s wife a week before the term began.
‘I should be very grateful,’ she wrote, ‘if you would keep an eye on Bevan. As the only new boy to pass straight into the Upper School, he is bound to feel rather lost his first few days. He will be in the same dormitory as you, so it won’t be difficult for you to give him hints.’
The letter did not predispose me in Bevan’s favour. Nor did Bevan’s personal appearance. He was lankily over-grown, with a sallow complexion and a pimply chin. His collars were too high, his trousers were too short, his shoulders were spotted with a snow of scurf. He had filled his pockets with so many objects that the coat sagged sideways in heavy grooves. His hair fell forward from his crown, to be swept off the forehead with one sweep of a damp brush. He moved with a loose loping stride as though his ankles were in splints, with all the spring coming from his knees and hips. He wore powerful spectacles.
He introduced himself to me on the first evening after hall.
‘I’m Bevan: the chap you are looking after.’
I looked him over slowly.
‘Are you?’ I said. ‘Am I?’
&n
bsp; He took my remark literally. He peered at me with a bright, hawk-like eagerness.
‘Yes, that’s right, and the first thing I want you to explain is the system by which set subjects are organized in relation to form promotion. As far as I can see …’
Convention decrees that a new boy does not ask questions. He may only answer them. But Bevan was beyond convention. There was no side of school life on which I was not cross-examined. At first I thought he was timidly anxious to avoid mistakes. Later I fancied that he was just inquisitive. It was a week before I understood. Then I gave him the nickname that lasted him right through his time at Fernhurst. It was simply that he was ambitious; fantastically, overweeningly ambitious; that he was resolved to be a success and appreciated the value of discovering in advance the precise nature of the race that he was running.
Fantastic and overweening are the only adjectives that can describe ambition such as his.
A single example will suffice.
I had explained to him that when a boy had once reached the Upper Sixth, the form order did not alter; that prefectship was decided by a process of automatic seniority. He pondered that thoughtfully.
‘Then, in that case I must get ahead of anyone who’s likely to be a rival before either of us reaches the Upper Sixth. I’m ahead of the boys of my own year. I ought to be able to stay ahead of them. But it might suit me to go up to Oxford at eighteen. I mean to be Head of the School first. Now, I wonder if there’s any one from the year before that’s dangerous. There’s Parkes in Claremont’s. He’s in the Upper Fifth. I ought to try and catch up with him during the next year, and pass him while we’re in the Lower Sixth together. Then I shall be head of the school in the autumn of 1916.’
It was in September 1912 that he said that. I could not help laughing at such far-sightedness.
‘My dear Bevan, if people are going to start looking that far ahead, I might as well be wondering whether I or someone else is going to be Captain of the XI in 1917.’
‘And so you should. As far as I can see Evans is your chief rival.’
He was no less methodical in the planning of his private life. One Sunday afternoon I found him starting on a solitary walk.
‘All by yourself?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘As usual,’ he replied.
It was a strange admission. Most boys are shy of being seen alone. It makes them look unpopular. I felt sorry for ‘Ambition’.
‘I should have thought you’d have got to know one or two of the new men by now.’
‘I haven’t troubled.’
‘What!’
‘One has to be very careful about making friends. Unless your friends belong to the world in which you propose to move, you have either to drop them when that world has become accessible, or remain in a world that you dislike.’
‘I don’t follow that.’
‘No? I should have thought it obvious. There are larger and lesser ways of living. One should try and live in as large a world as possible.’
He spoke in a petulant, slightly patronizing, slightly irritated voice. But I did not understand: not then. I just thought, ‘Poor old “Ambition”. He’s potty.’
Which was how most of us felt about him. We thought him mad and left him to go his own way unmolested. Strangly enough, he was not bullied. Bizarre though his appearance was, there was nothing of the buffoon about him. He was guarded by an unapproachable, dignified reserve. He went up the school at the rate that he had prophesied, a solitary figure, too absorbed by his ambition to share the communal interests and enthusiasms of house and school. Every term he was the winner of some prize. It was all turning out to plan. But he never seemed particularly happy. Occasionally the eager hawk-like look came into his eyes. But for the most part his face wore a driven, preoccupied expression. He was invariably alone. He availed himself of the Sixth Former’s privilege of a study to himself—a privilege rarely taken. The only person in whose company he appeared with any regularity was a weedy, elegantly languid boy in another house, of no particular distinction in work or games, whose father was vaguely ‘county’, his grandmother having been the third daughter of a peer. Myself, I saw very little of him after those first weeks. We seldom met in the classroom or on the field. His eyesight made him a poor footballer, and a worse cricketer; while my scholastic career followed a desultory course to the safe harbourage of the history Sixth. We went up the school by parallel tracks, always just out of hailing distance of one another.
So little, indeed, did I see of him that I had to think twice before I could place the writer of a letter that I received a year after the war, on the notepaper of the Oxford Union. The handwriting was ornate; so was the style.
‘I am now,’ it informed me, ‘for my faults, follies and lack of courage, directing the embryo literary enthusiasms of putative poets. As their controller, adviser, mentor, I from time to time cajole, flatter and otherwise intimidate those from the larger world “whose foreheads wear Apollo’s wreathed crown”, into succouring, guiding and generally supporting their uncertain ambits with counsel, exhortation, and such animadversions on the craft and aims of letters as may seem appropriate to their broader knowledge. May I therefore as a simple Osric, courtier in this cloistered city, humbly supplicate a Prince of Henrietta Street to pass rapiers of dialectic with an ill-harnessed Laertes of the Alpha and Omega Society on the 29th May?’
On a third reading I realized that this was an invitation to take part in the debate of a literary society of which Bevan was the secretary.
‘Well!’I thought.
It was not so much the phraseology of the invitation as the fact that Bevan was responsible for it that surprised me. I had pictured his Oxford career in very different terms: long hours in the Bodleian and the lecture-room: a permanently sported oak. It astonished me that ‘Ambition’ Bevan should be wasting his time on literary societies.
If his letter has surprised me, his appearance did even more. He had been sixteen when I had seen him last. He had by then out grown his untidy coltishness, but I did not expect to be met at the station by a willowy, elegant, almost distinguished figure in a pale blue jumper and a green tweed jacket, who peered at me through horn-rimmed spectacles and spoke in a high, slow and very mannered voice.
Nor had I expected to find in Bevan’s room a photograph of himself in uniform.
‘I never thought they’d pass your eyesight,’ was my comment.
‘Nor did I.’
‘Did they send you overseas?’
‘I got gassed and wounded.’
‘Didn’t all that upset your plans a little?’
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘I hardly think so. I am reading a short course, you see.’
I raised my eyebrows.
‘I had always pictured you as a Fellow of All Souls.’
He laughed at that.
‘Fellowships, that nursery nonsense!’
He spoke disparagingly of scholastic achievement. A man, he argued, must be educated, must be informed on men and manners. But the scholar lived in blinkers. What was the point of slaving to get a first in Greats only to become a glorified Treasury clerk? One might get a long row of letters after one’s name. But what did that amount to? It wasn’t what a man did but what he was, that mattered. He spoke airily, condescendingly. It all sounded very odd, coming from ‘Ambition’ Bevan.
I asked him if he saw any of the other men from Fernhurst who were up at Oxford then. He shook his head.
‘We’ve nothing in common. I never bothered to make friends with any of them there, why should I here? Fernhurst: well, after all …’ he hesitated. He did not want to say anything against his old school. But that pause struck a very precise note of tolerant disparagement. It was as though he were saying, ‘Fernhurst was a small school. Really prominent men could only regard it as a stepping-stone.’ ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘Barlow’s the only one I see at all. I don’t know if you remember him? In Claremont’s.’
I nodded. I re
membered him. The tall languid figure in whose society alone Bevan had appeared to take much pleasure.
‘I see quite a bit of him. He’s, of course … well, how shall I put it? …’ He pursed his lips in the attempt to find the correct phrase of qualified denigration, failed, shrugged his shoulders. ‘He’s a restful companion. It’s pleasant week-ending with his people. But, come now, don’t let us waste our time talking about Barlow. There’s so much I want to ask about your life in London. Tell me, what sorts of people do you see?’
As he put the question that old hawk-like eagerness came into his face, as though once again he were asking me to map out for him the geography of the road he had to travel.
It was a question that I did not find it particularly simple to answer.
‘As many different kinds of people as possible,’ I said. ‘A novelist ought to be like the centipede, with a foot in a hundred worlds.’
My answer was clearly not of the kind he wanted.
‘Yes, yes; of course, that is the great advantage of being a writer. You can go anywhere, yet you are received. Tell me now, which of the younger writers would you say counted most?’
‘Hugh Walpole sells a lot.’
‘I don’t mean that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean really counts. What writers, for instance, would be invited to a reception at Londonderry House?’
‘I haven’t the least idea.’
‘What!’ He stared at me as though I were an unclassified disease. ‘You don’t know?’
‘Why should I?’
‘Merely from the professional point of view. I should have thought that you would have been curious to know how your rivals and contemporaries were faring.’
‘I don’t see that invitations to Londonderry House have anything to do with that.’
‘No? I should have imagined that even in these commercial days a writer would have valued the privilege of mixing with the big world.’