I tried, incoherently, to tell her just what I felt about Gabriel’s action.
‘I don’t see,’ she said, ‘why you should be so upset. Major Gabriel was only seeing if I could stand pain. Now he knows I can.’
Chapter Twelve
We had a tea-party that afternoon. A niece of Mrs Carslake’s was staying in St Loo. She had been at school with Isabella, so Mrs Carslake told us. I had never been able to picture Isabella at school, so I agreed readily when Teresa suggested asking the niece, now a Mrs Mordaunt, and Mrs Carslake to tea. Teresa also asked Isabella.
‘Anne Mordaunt is coming. I believe she was at school with you.’
‘There were several Annes,’ said Isabella vaguely. ‘Anne Trenchard and Anne Langley and Anne Thompson.’
‘I forget what her name was before she married. Mrs Carslake did tell me.’
Anne Mordaunt turned out to have been Anne Thompson. She was a lively young woman with a rather unpleasantly assertive manner. (Or, at any rate, that was my view.) She was in one of the ministries in London, and her husband was in another ministry, and she had a child who was conveniently parked somewhere where it wouldn’t interfere with Anne Mordaunt’s valuable contribution to the war effort.
‘Though my mother seems to think that we might have Tony back now that the bombs are over. But really I do think a child in London is too difficult at present. The flat’s so small, and one just can’t get proper nannies, and there are meals, and, of course, I am out all day.’
‘I really think,’ I said, ‘that it was very public-spirited of you to have a child at all when you have so much important work to do.’
I saw Teresa, sitting behind the large silver tea tray, smile a little. She also, very gently, shook her head at me.
But my remark went down quite well with young Mrs Mordaunt. In fact, it seemed to please her.
‘One does feel,’ she said, ‘that one doesn’t want to shirk any of one’s responsibilities. Children are badly needed – especially in our class.’ She added, as a kind of afterthought, ‘Besides, I am absolutely devoted to Tony.’
She then turned to Isabella and plunged into reminiscences of the old days at St Ninian’s. It seemed to me a conversation in which one of the two participants did not really know her part. Anne Mordaunt had to help her out more than once.
Mrs Carslake murmured apologetically to Teresa:
‘I’m so sorry Dick is late. I cannot think what is keeping him. He expected to be home by half-past four.’
Isabella said, ‘I think Major Gabriel is with him. He passed along the terrace about a quarter of an hour ago.’
I was surprised. I had not heard anyone pass. Isabella was sitting with her back to the window and could not possibly have seen anyone go by. I had had my eyes on her and she certainly had not turned her head or shown any awareness of anybody. Of course, her hearing was unusually quick, I knew that. But I wondered how she had known it was Gabriel.
Teresa said, ‘Isabella, I wonder if you would mind – no, please don’t move, Mrs Carslake – would you go along next door and ask them both if they wouldn’t like to come and have some tea.’
We watched Isabella’s tall figure disappear through the doorway and Mrs Mordaunt said:
‘Isabella really hasn’t changed at all. She’s just the same. She always was the oddest girl. Walked about as though she were in a dream. We always put it down to her being so brainy.’
‘Brainy?’ I said sharply.
She turned to me.
‘Yes, didn’t you know? Isabella’s frightfully clever. Miss Curtis – the head – was simply heartbroken because she wouldn’t go on to Somerville. She matriculated when she was only fifteen and had several distinctions.’
I was still inclined to think of Isabella as a creature charming to look at but not over-gifted with brains. I still stared at Anne Mordaunt unbelievingly.
‘What were her special subjects?’ I asked.
‘Oh, astronomy and mathematics – she was frightfully good at maths – and Latin and French. She could learn anything she put her mind to. And yet, you know, she just didn’t care a bit. It quite broke Miss Curtis’s heart. All Isabella seemed to want to do was to come back and settle down in this stuffy old castle place.’
Isabella came back with Captain Carslake and Gabriel.
The tea-party went with a swing.
‘What is so bewildering to me, Teresa,’ I said later that evening, ‘is the impossibility of ever knowing what any particular human being is really like. Take Isabella Charteris. That Mordaunt woman described her as brainy. I myself used to think she was practically a moron. Then again, I should have said that one of her special characteristics was honesty. Mrs Carslake, however, says that she’s sly. Sly! An odious word. John Gabriel says she’s smug and stuck-up. You – well, actually I don’t know what you think – because you hardly ever say anything personal about people. But – well – what is the real truth of a human creature who can appear so differently to different people?’
Robert, who seldom joined in our conversations, moved restlessly and said rather unexpectedly:
‘But isn’t that just the point? People do appear differently to different people. So do things. Trees, for instance, or the sea. Two painters would give you an entirely different idea of St Loo harbour.’
‘You mean one painter would paint it naturalistically and another symbolically?’
Robert shook his head rather wearily. He hated talking about painting. He never could find the words to express what he meant.
‘No,’ he said. ‘They’d actually see it differently. Probably – I don’t know – you pick out of everything the things in it which are significant to you.’
‘And one does the same to people, you think? But you can’t have two diametrically opposite qualities. Take Isabella, she can’t be brainy and a moron!’
‘I think you’re wrong there, Hugh,’ said Teresa.
‘My dear Teresa!’
Teresa smiled. She spoke slowly and thoughtfully.
‘You can have a quality and not use it. Not, that is, if you have a simpler method that gives the same results, or that – yes, that’s more probable – costs you less trouble. The point is, Hugh, that we have, all of us, progressed such a long way from simplicity that we don’t now know what it is when we meet it. To feel a thing is always much easier – much less trouble – than to think it. Only, in the complexities of civilized life, feeling isn’t accurate enough.
‘As an instance of what I mean, you know, roughly, if asked, what time of day it is. Morning, midday – late afternoon – evening – you don’t have to think – and you don’t need, for that, accurate knowledge or any apparatus – sundials, water clocks, chronometers, watches or clocks. But if you have to keep appointments and catch trains and be at specific places at specific times, you do have to take thought and devise complicated mechanisms to provide accuracy. I think an attitude to life might be much the same. You feel happy, you are roused to anger, you like someone or something, you dislike someone or something, you feel sad. People like you and me, Hugh (not Robert so much), speculate on what they feel, they analyse it, they think about it. They examine the whole thing and give themselves the reason. “I am happy because of so and so – I like so and so because of so and so – I am sad today because of so and so.” Only, very often, they give themselves the wrong reasons, they wilfully deceive themselves. But Isabella, I think, does not speculate – does not ask herself, ever, why. Because, quite frankly, she isn’t interested. If you asked her to think – to tell you why she feels about something as she does feel, she could, I think, reason it out with perfect accuracy, and give you the correct answer. But she is like a person who has a good and expensive clock on the mantelpiece, but never winds it up because, in the kind of life she leads, it isn’t important to know exactly what time it is.
‘But at St Ninian’s she was asked to use her intellect, and she has got an intellect – but not, I should say, a particularly speculative intellec
t. Her bent is for mathematics, languages, astronomy. Nothing that requires imagination. We, all of us, use imagination and speculation as a means of escape – a way of getting outwards, away from ourselves. Isabella doesn’t need to get away from herself. She can live with herself – she’s in harmony with herself. She has no need for a more complex way of life.
‘Possibly human beings were all like that in medieval times – even in Elizabethan days. I read in some book that a “great man” in those days bore one meaning only – a person who had a big establishment, who was, quite simply, rich and powerful. It bore none of the spiritual and moral significance that we attach to it. The term had nothing to do with character.’
‘You mean,’ I said, ‘that people were direct and concrete in their attitude to life – they did not speculate much.’
‘Yes, Hamlet, with his musings, his “to be or not to be”, was an entirely alien figure to his age. So much so that then and for long afterwards critics wrote condemning Hamlet as a play because of the fatal weakness of plot. “There is no reason,” one of them said, “why Hamlet should not kill the King in the first act. The only reason he does not do so is that if he had done, there would be no play!” It is quite unbelievable to them that there could be a play about character.
‘But nowadays we are practically all Hamlets and Macbeths. We are all asking ourselves the whole time –’ (her voice held suddenly a great weariness) ‘“to be or not to be?” Whether it is better to be alive or dead. Analysing the successful as Hamlet analyses (and envies!) Fortinbras.
‘It is Fortinbras nowadays who would be the little understood figure. Moving ahead, confident, asking no questions of himself. How many of his sort are there in these days? Not many, I think.’
‘You think Isabella is a kind of female Fortinbras?’ I asked, smiling.
Teresa smiled, too.
‘Not so warlike. But direct of purpose and entirely single-minded. She would never ask herself, “Why am I like I am? What do I really feel?” She knows what she feels and she is what she is.’ Teresa added softly, ‘And she will do – what she has to do.’
‘You mean she is fatalistic?’
‘No. But for her I do not think there are ever alternatives. She will never see two possible courses of action – only one. And she will never think of retracing her steps, she will always go on. There’s no backward way for the Isabellas …’
‘I wonder if there is any backward way for any of us!’
I spoke with bitterness.
Teresa said calmly, ‘Perhaps not. But there is usually, I think, a loophole.’
‘What do you mean exactly, Teresa?’
‘I think one usually gets one chance of escape … You don’t usually realize it until afterwards … when you are looking back … but it’s there …’
I was silent for a moment or two, smoking and thinking …
When Teresa had said that I had had a sudden vivid memory. I had just arrived at Caro Strangeways’s cocktail party. I was standing in the doorway, hesitating a moment as my eyes accustomed themselves to the dim lamps and the haze of smoke. And there, at the far end of the room, I saw Jennifer. She didn’t see me, she was talking to someone in her usual vivid animated way.
I was conscious of two sharply conflicting feelings. First a leap of triumph. I had known that we should meet again and here was my instinctive knowledge proved true. That meeting in the train was not an isolated incident. I had always known it was not, and here was my belief being proved true. And yet – in spite of my excitement, my triumph – I had a sudden wish to turn round and leave the party … I had a wish to keep my meeting with Jennifer in the train as a single isolated happening – a happening that I should never forget. It was as though someone had said to me, ‘That was the best you could ever have of each other – a short space of perfection. Leave it like that.’
If Teresa was right, that had been my ‘chance of escape …’
Well, I hadn’t taken it. I had gone on. And Jennifer had gone on. And everything else had happened in sequence. Our belief in our mutual love, the lorry in the Harrow Road, my invalid chair, and Polnorth House …
And brought back again, thus, to my original point of departure, my mind reverted to Isabella again, and I made a final protest to Teresa.
‘But not sly, Teresa? Such an odious word. Not sly.’
‘I wonder,’ said Teresa.
‘Sly? Isabella?’
‘Isn’t slyness the first – the easiest line of defence? Isn’t cunning one of the most primitive characteristics – the hare that crouches in her form – the grouse that flutters across the heather to distract you from her nest? Surely, Hugh, cunning is elemental. It’s the only weapon you can use when you’re helpless with your back to the wall.’
She got up and moved towards the door. Robert had slipped off to bed already. With her fingers on the handle, Teresa turned her head.
‘I believe,’ she said, ‘that you can really throw those tablets of yours away. You won’t want them now.’
‘Teresa,’ I cried. ‘So you knew about them?’
‘Of course I knew.’
‘But then –’ I stopped. ‘Why do you say I shan’t want them now?’
‘Well, do you want them?’
‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘You’re right … I don’t. I shall throw them away tomorrow.’
‘I’m so glad,’ said Teresa. ‘I’ve often been afraid …’
I looked at her curiously.
‘Why didn’t you try to take them away from me?’
She did not speak for a moment. Then she said:
‘They’ve been a comfort to you, haven’t they? They’ve made you feel secure – knowing that you always had a way out?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s made a lot of difference.’
‘Then why are you so stupid as to ask why I didn’t take them away from you?’
I laughed.
‘Well, tomorrow, Teresa – they’ll go down the drainpipe. That’s a promise.’
‘So at last you’ve begun to live again – to want to live.’
‘Yes,’ I said wonderingly. ‘I suppose I have. I really can’t think why. But it’s true. I’m actually interested in waking up tomorrow morning.’
‘You’re interested, yes. I wonder who’s responsible for that. Is it life in St Loo? Or Isabella Charteris? Or John Gabriel?’
‘It certainly isn’t John Gabriel,’ I said.
‘I’m not so sure. There’s something about that man –’
‘There certainly seems to be plenty of sex appeal!’ I said. ‘But he’s the type I dislike – I can’t stand a blatant opportunist. Why, that man would sell his grandmother if he saw a chance of making a profit out of her.’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised.’
‘I wouldn’t trust him an inch.’
‘No, he’s not very trustworthy.’
I went on, ‘He boasts. He’s a flagrant publicity hound. He exploits himself and everybody else. Do you seriously think that that man is capable of one single disinterested action?’
Teresa said thoughtfully, ‘I think just possibly he might be – but if so, it would probably finish him for good.’
I was to remember that remark of Teresa’s within the next few days.
Chapter Thirteen
Our next local excitement was the whist drive. It was being got up by the Women’s Institute.
It was being held where such affairs had always been held, in the Long Barn of Polnorth House. The Long Barn, I gather, was something rather special. Enthusiastic antiquarians came to gloat over it, measure it, photograph it, and write about it. It was considered in St Loo as a kind of public possession. The inhabitants were proud of it.
There was a great hum of activity during the next two days. Organizing members of the Women’s Institute drifted in and out.
I remained mercifully segregated from the main stream, but Teresa occasionally introduced what I can only describe as particularly choice specimen
s for my amusement and entertainment.
Since Teresa knew that I liked Milly Burt, Milly was admitted fairly frequently to my sitting room and we engaged together in various miscellaneous tasks such as writing out tickets, sticking or gumming decorations.
It was while we were engaged on these operations that I heard Milly’s life story. As Gabriel had so brutally told me, I could only justify my existence by becoming a kind of ever-ready receiving set. I might be good for nothing else, but I was still good for that.
Milly Burt talked to me without self-consciousness – a kind of burbling self-revelation, like a gentle little stream.
She talked a great deal about Major Gabriel. Her hero worship where he was concerned had increased rather than diminished.
‘What I think so wonderful about him, Captain Norreys, is that he’s so kind. I mean when he’s so busy and so rushed and has so many important things to do, yet he always remembers things and has such a nice teasing way of talking. I’ve never met anyone quite like him.’
‘You’re probably right there,’ I said.
‘With his wonderful war record and everything, he isn’t a bit proud or stuck-up – he’s just as nice to me as to somebody important. He’s nice to everybody – and he remembers about people and if their sons have been killed or if they’re out in Burma or somewhere dreadful, and he always knows the right thing to say and how to make people laugh and cheer up. I don’t know how he manages it all.’
‘He must have been reading Kipling’s If,’ I said coldly.
‘Yes. I’m sure he fills the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run if anybody does.’
‘Probably a hundred and twenty seconds’ worth,’ I suggested. ‘Sixty seconds wouldn’t be enough for Gabriel.’
‘I wish I knew more about politics,’ said Milly wistfully. ‘I have read up all the pamphlets, but I’m not really good at canvassing or persuading people to vote. You see, I don’t know the answers to the things they say.’
‘Oh well,’ I said consolingly, ‘all that sort of thing is just a knack. Anyway, to my mind canvassing is quite unethical.’
The Rose and the Yew Tree Page 10