by Jessica Mann
‘It is not only for his services to our beloved town that we honour Basil Hutber today.’ His voice was high and reedy, his face soft. He would have clammy hands. ‘No, Ladies and Gentlemen, honoured guests, fellow Carmellites, we gather to honour this man because he stands as an example to us of a manner of life we still cherish here. Perhaps we are old fashioned—’ (cheers from the audience). ‘Yes, we may be behind the times, but we are proud of it. The times should follow us.’ (Parliamentary sounds of ‘Hear, hear.’) ‘In Carmell we preserve an island of the good old standards, of honesty, probity, fidelity, family life, the rights of parents, the obedience of children, virtuous Victorian values . . .’
Lawrence had edged close to Zoe, and took her hand, whispering ‘Irresistible alliteration.’ The Corys were monogamous and Zoe had been faithful to Lawrence. If this sermon carried on she would think she had been misguided. But the mayor had reached his last paragraph and uttered some final flourishes before turning towards Basil, clapping him.
The new Freeman of Carmell rose. Unlike the other speech-makers he had no notes and his voice, conversational in tone, was clearly audible throughout the room. He spoke about his childhood in Carmell when it was still a small place, cut off by snow in winter and rarely visited by outsiders. ‘But they weren’t the good old days, you know.’
The worthies of Carmell believed axiomatically that old days were good. A slight collective unease shivered through the room.
‘Until the war,’ Basil Hutber told them. ‘It was the Great War that dragged the place into the world. Not many of you here today realise how things changed then. More than anything that came later, it was the influence of the war. You’ve been told that I was born in 1902. When I was in my teens, at the age when modern boys are thinking about A levels and university entrance and their chances of a steady job, I didn’t consider such things. We tell them to think about their future now, don’t we? I didn’t. None of us thought we had a future. We’d be called up and killed. We didn’t worry about it much, that was just the way things were. Had been for years, would always be as far as we could see. Then, when I was seventeen, it was over. The armistice. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It’s a pity we don’t mark the moment any more. Two minutes’ silence, all over the country, nobody moved, nobody spoke . . . anyway, there I was. Seventeen years old with a future before me. Do you remember that old cartoon, back in the days when people thought the poor liked being dirty? Give them baths and they’ll use them to store coal, that’s what they used to say. The cartoon: a man, his wife, a new bath. We put baths in all the houses we built in Carmell, baths and indoor toilets and drying cupboards . . . where was I? That cartoon. I felt like the man. “Nice little barf, Eth, what shall we do with it?” Nice little life, Basil, what shall I do with it? Well, you’ve heard what I’ve done with it so far. Some of it, anyway. I should think you’ve all heard more than enough, all those kind words – too kind. So I won’t go on about myself. I don’t like talking about myself and I don’t like thinking about the past. The future, that’s what matters. Look forward. I still do.’
Chapter Nine
‘I watched you on television,’ Tamara Hoyland said.
‘I am often on television,’ C.K.Isbister replied. She was on her dignity, and Tamara had been careful not to specify that the theme of her programme was women’s influence through men. She recorded a lot of material that she would not use about Miss Isbister’s work for the cause.
‘Of course you are a feminist yourself, Dr Hoyland?’
‘In theory; but I work in a profession where there isn’t any discrimination.’
‘All professions discriminate,’ Miss Isbister said darkly.
‘I can only say I haven’t noticed it.’
‘It sounds suspiciously as though you are saying, “I’m all right, Jacqueline.”’
Tamara asserted her commitment to the unarguable ideals of all egalitarians. She meant what she said; but in her own life had never needed to say it.
All the same, she recognised the validity of Miss Isbister’s argument, and knew that she had cause to complain of male unfairness. Her working life had been spent in the shadow of Xavier Murphy, whose theories (many of them, according to Tamara’s psychiatrist informants, seminal) were built on her results.
C.K.Isbister talked about her life as a young woman. She had graduated from Bedford College, London, and gone to work as Murphy’s dogsbody in 1927. She slaved; he thrived. She made discoveries and he announced them.
‘But life wasn’t all work,’ Tamara said, depressed by the sob story. ‘On that programme I watched you were talking about painters and parties, about having fun. Lady Digby, Rex . . .’
‘I knew them all. And do you know, it’s one of the consolations of decrepitude, seeing which of one’s generation are remembered.’
‘It must be rather a gamble, guessing whose letters it’s safe to throw away.’
‘It is memories that matter, not memorabilia,’ Miss Isbister said severely.
Being an archaeologist, Tamara was hardly likely to agree. ‘I expect my historical conscience is over-developed, though,’ she admitted, thinking of the traces she had left, often on purpose, for future excavators. ‘Have you guessed right so far?’
‘In many cases. Rex, since you mention him, he was a surprise. I never thought he was a great artist. He wasn’t sufficiently committed.’
‘But his work was very good.’
‘Yes, but he did it for fun. To please himself, and as well, pour épater les bourgeois. He didn’t want fame, that was a matter of indifference to him. He was more of a hobbyist. I speak as a psychiatrist, not as an art critic.’
Miss Isbister’s rooms, in a mansion flat in St John’s Wood, showed quite clearly that she was not a connoisseur, and that she had collected few mementoes. There were none of those purposeless little objects or faded photographs that other people accumulate in long lives. The reproductions on the walls (a Peter Scott of ducks, a Frith of Derby Day) looked as though they had been chosen for practical rather than aesthetic reasons.
‘Of course, being a man, Rex adopted the behaviour of an artist. The pleasures of masculine selfishness . . . poor little Stella waited on him hand and foot.’
‘Stella?’
‘His girlfriend. When I knew him, towards the end of the twenties when I was first working for Xavier, she always seemed a good example of female oppression. They had a tiny flat, no conveniences at all, and there the poor creature stayed while he went off and enjoyed himself with his rich friends. I went to see her once or twice. Very young, very dull, quite uneducated, but blinded by love. She wasn’t pretty, skinny little thing, looked good in the sacks we wore then, which is more than I can say for myself. She was a lady, I think, from her accent, but girls like that came by the dozen, and she knew it only too well. Yet I could detect a spark there, a potential, if only she had not been so terrified of losing him. Never went out, never made herself a life, never met anyone else. The willing slave type, it’s a recognised category. I hope for your sake that you aren’t a member of it.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Tamara said.
Miss Isbister began to cross-examine her about her lovers and her attitude towards them, using the non-judgemental voice of a soul doctor. Tamara parried and told nothing, either of her early experiments, or of her three years with the late Ian Barnes, or of the adventures she had enjoyed since his death. It was selfish, she knew. Miss Isbister would have enjoyed hearing the worst about men.
As though Tamara had passed some test, Miss Isbister said, ‘Perhaps I could recruit you to our new organisation for free women. We still need a catchy title if we are to compete with Watchwomen, but at present we are simply calling ourselves the feminist Left. One of our number thought of Bitchwomen.’
‘I wonder whether that would have a very wide appeal?’
‘We need something. The way our society is going – doesn’t it terrify you? Women are like slaves
, uncomfortable without their chains.’
‘I haven’t heard much about you,’ Tamara said cautiously.
‘We are still at the beginning. We are a resistance group rebelling against modern oppression.’
Tamara visualised the whole country, spotted with rival pressure groups. ‘Are you the President?’ she said.
‘My role is more advisory. They call me the patron. We don’t need titles and status.’
‘I am sure that the listeners will want to hear how you reached this interesting point in your struggle. But we should go back a little further first. Won’t you say something more about Xavier Murphy?’
Like the televised speech about pioneers of sexual freedom, the Xavier Murphy sentences were well rehearsed, and flowed fluently, sonorously on to the turning tape.
Chapter Ten
The filming schedule was killing in the New Year. Zoe was kept busy every moment of the day while Lawrence returned to the routine of unemployment in the sun. After a few weeks a formal offer from St Uny’s School arrived. Zoe was primping the public face on account of the watchers who waited at the studio gates even at this hideously early hour. Lawrence sorted the mail.
‘Here’s one from Carmell.’
Zoe peered at her sleepy face. She drew a line under her eyes (‘Stacey Stewart’s lovely eyes would enchant the truth from any witness.’ Atlanta Post).
‘Basil really needs help now. He says he wants to ensure the school survives him. He might leave me a share in his will.’
Zoe was late as usual. She kissed the top of Lawrence’s head and glanced again in the mirror. ‘This will have to do. I look a wreck.’
‘He seems sure that I’m the man he wants.’
‘Pity, it would have been fun for you. But Carmell . . . the north of England . . . it isn’t on.’ Zoe gathered her bag, sun glasses, scarf and self-assurance. ‘I’ll try to be back for supper. Late, though. See you later.’ Her voice floated back as she ran to the limousine. ‘Have a good day.’
A good day. Later, when it was all over, safely past, Lawrence would learn to expunge those days, those weeks and months, from his memory. The months of unemployment. They became symbolised for him by a picture he had loved and grew to hate because it was during that period that he learnt it by heart.
It had been the first picture that Lawrence ever bought. He was a prefect at St Uny’s School, and had the privilege of pottering around the town instead of playing team games. There were two antique shops in the town then, one specialising in copper by-gones, china cottages painted with roses and Staffordshire dogs. At Bennetts, the other, unsprung wing chairs stood beside tattered, not yet fashionable papier mâché screens. Bennetts mostly supplied the trade.
Lawrence, aged seventeen, was worldly, world weary and, he believed, unshockable. He had been through his Beardsley, his Oscar Wilde and his anarchist phase. At present he despised enthusiasm and exercise, and when the English teacher said he was a cynic, he took it as a compliment. At that stage of his life, which ended when he was dragged on a skiing holiday and fell in love with speed and terror, he destroyed the photographs of himself scoring a winning goal and rowing in the winning eight, as well as his life-saving certificate. He replaced them on his study walls with reproductions of the work of Salvador Dali and Kandinsky. He read D.H. Lawrence and Freud and said that he wanted to experience everything. Because he was convinced that he was more sensitive and aware than anyone else in Carmell he always expected to recognise treasures in Bennetts that other clods had not noticed. He spent hours peering at the marks on the bases of saucers and checking the publication dates of dusty volumes. The folder in which he found the Rex drawing was full of hand coloured topographical prints and water colours of the moors, but between a purple Shap Fell and a ploughed field under snow he came upon this picture. It showed a civic ceremony of the type at which the pupils of Basil Hutber were sometimes paraded. The conventional scene was sketched in spider-fine cross hatching of Indian ink; conventional, that is, at first sight. A group of worthies stood around a memorial to the fallen of the Great War – a statue such as stands in so many English towns, and stood in Carmell too, of a Tommy in a tin hat holding his rifle, carrying his back pack, head bowed. At his feet the Mayor, the Town Clerk, the bemedalled officers and gentlemen, above the caption, ‘They died to save us all’. Only close inspection showed that the worthies were unworthy of the sacrifice. They were revealed by that cruel pen as objects of derision and disgust.
The subject was not typical of Rex’s work, though few shopkeepers would have recognised anything by then, in 1967, or have understood the significance of the little crown with which Rex signed his work. In this picture it was on the head of a mongrel that was lifting its leg against a corner of the memorial. The seventeen-year-old cynic was delighted by the iconoclasm, just as he had been delighted, three years before, to find all four of Rex’s books on his father’s shelves.
Later on, when Lawrence needed a subject for research, when writing a book was the only resource left for him, as for so many other unemployed graduates, Rex’s life and work seemed an obvious choice.
Rex: a footnote in the history of twentieth-century art, a name lightly sprinkled in the memoirs of his time, a blur in faded group photographs. Rex with the John children under a mulberry tree, nothing of him recognisable except the point of a long nose and a floppy sun hat. Rex, a pair of crossed legs and a trilby on the edge of a group posed around some Stracheys; Rex in deck chairs, Rex bent over a croquet ball, Rex in beach shorts.
None of the published volumes in which Rex’s name appeared in the index was informative about him. For a few years he had been an acquaintance of some of the writers and artists who seemed to represent a particular period in the view of posterity. Nothing was said about his own life or provenance, or even whether that single syllable was his own name. When dates were given, his birthday was left blank, and nothing of him seemed to be known, except that he had died in a fire at his weekend hide-out in the Chilterns in 1929, and that his work, banned in Britain, even after the repeal of the Defence of the Realm Act whose provisions it had offended, seemed to disappear too.
When Lawrence first discovered Rex’s books on his father’s shelves Allan had been a little embarrassed himself. They had, it seemed, been found among the books (Bibles, Methodist hymn books and model sermons) of his foster-father Herbert Cory; deplorable, natural, astonishing – and not, above all, to be mentioned to Gwen Cory, the widow. Times had changed. Allan said that Lawrence could keep them with pleasure, but better not let his teachers, mother or step-brothers and -sisters find them.
But now Rex was no longer a cause for embarrassment anywhere, least of all in California. Lawrence hung his water colour without fear of shocking anyone. By modern standards it was not vicious or obscene, just amusing, witty, fun.
Lawrence came to detest the picture there, because nothing was fun for a man society rejected.
‘Nonsense,’ Zoe would protest. ‘Do stop talking about junk heaps and discard piles. You’re writing a book, it will be a hit.’
Zoe was always positive. Her energy and outward-looking capacity for pleasure had always been her principal charm for a man who took things carefully and thought of himself as dull. Lawrence longed to be expansive, but nature had not made him so. He was persistently amazed that Zoe had chosen him, and always afraid that she might change her mind. In comparison with the glamorous people she spent her working life with, Lawrence found it impossible to believe that she could prefer him. Zoe said that he was her prop and mainstay, or that he was the still centre of her whirling world. Second-hand words from forgotten sources often popped up from her store of memorised lines.
The prop and mainstay waited in a rented house while Zoe and her world whirled. He moped.
Until it was well past, Lawrence did not diagnose his state. He suffered from a neurosis more common in women than men, since women are more often housebound. Later he defined it: incipient agoraphobia, a fail
ure of willpower, lack of energy and purpose, depression. He stuffed himself with food, wandering into the kitchen and standing beside the counter, not sitting down, as though he could cancel out his actions by discomfort. Then he would grab at dried fruit or sugar lumps, press them into his mouth, chew until his jaws ached and his stomach was bloated with food that he did not even like. Every morning he determined to eat frugally. Every midday he consumed enough to fatten a cannibal’s victim. Returned to his desk he would try to marshal facts and arguments with half his mind remembering what food was left in the refrigerator, and almost involuntarily would go back to spoon cold, congealed left-overs into his mouth. He would feel sick and disgusted and still carry on until the food was gone.
The experience had something in common with childbirth. A merciful dispensation caused the memory to fade so that much later, living a different life, Lawrence would remember his own aberrant behaviour intellectually and no longer understand the emotions that had caused it. He would remember that unemployment was boring, but forget the feeling of that unassuageable, pervasive, inescapable ennui, when nothing seemed worth doing and there was nothing to do.
Chapter Eleven
During the February half-term St Uny’s School was empty except for the Headmaster himself, who stayed in his house and ‘did’ for himself in the face of protests from half Carmell and from his family. ‘You could at least have someone to stay, or go for a holiday yourself,’ they said. But Basil Hutber liked his own company and never took holidays. Except for visits to his sister Viola before she left her seclusion and began to visit him, he had not left Carmell that his son could remember. ‘I just like it here,’ he always said.
So it was only confirming Rainsford and Gillian’s dire warnings when Basil Hutber, alone on the premises that Sunday, had a stroke. He had been writing letters, and a pile of stamped and sealed envelopes was beside him, including one to his sister at her cottage in Whitaker Episcopi and some paid bills. His hand had smudged a sheet of paper on which he had begun, ‘My dear Lawrence, By the time you . . .’