The Road from the Monument

by Storm Jameson

  ‘You’ll find my notes on the desk, behind you,’ Gregory said. ‘Take them away with you and go through them. Then we can talk. Briefly, what I see is an inaugural meeting, public, addressed by some very great person. Then four days of private sessions — the painters, musicians, sculptors, writers, meeting separately to work out the last few details of the machinery as it affects each of them. Then, on the final day, a second public meeting, with a Report, and my speech — presenting the new-born I.C.F.A. to the world.’ He stared past Lambert’s shoulder. ‘For the Inaugural on the first day we might try to get Churchill — if the old boy is still up to it. If he’s not, then I thought the P.M.’

  ‘Churchill? Oh, impossible. And even the Prime Minister——’

  ‘Oh, you can’t do anything about it,’ Gregory said, with simplicity. ‘I’ll see to all that.’ He smiled very slightly ‘My dear boy, it’s not wise to set your sights low.’

  His contempt for Lambert’s perfectly reasonable doubts was so unconscious that to resent it would only have been silly. Besides, Lambert was well used to it. It even gave him a strange perverse satisfaction to let his friend come it over him in ways he would never have tolerated when they were young.

  He grinned and said, ‘Set them where you like. I suppose you’ll speak at the Inaugural as well?’

  A pause. ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? You must.’

  An expression Lambert knew well came into his eyes. A look of withdrawal and absence. He thought: Dear old Gregory, he’s made up his mind about something, but he hasn’t had time to make up his attitude…. He waited.

  ‘Don’t you think that it would be discourteous for me to make a speech on the first day? I do. I shall be the host, and a host’s duty is to shake hands with his guests when they arrive, and watch unobtrusively to see that everything is going well, before he dreams of putting himself forward. The final day is when I ought to speak. And I shall want — you must get them for me, Lambert — rather full summaries of what the visiting chaps are going to say during their four days’ sessions — they’ll have prepared their extempore speeches beforehand, you know. I ought to have them at least two, if possible three months ahead — so that I can tailor my own speech to come as a grand summing-up — a climax. Yes, a climax.’

  Has he, wondered Lambert, the faintest notion that what he is really concerned about is not any nonsense about courtesy, but to see to it that he, his speech, his role, is made supremely important? He is to be the great blazing jewel on top. His apotheosis overrides everything else in importance, the founding of I.C.F.A., everything. No, by God, he doesn’t know it…. He felt, as well as affection, something like awe, a sincere respect for the other man’s single-minded concentration on himself and his greatness. There really is something to admire in a man as determined to act his own biography well as a brilliant actor is to play Brutus or Hamlet or what you will. He has me licked, Lambert thought sharply.

  ‘Right,’ he said grinning. ‘I’ll see to it for you.’

  ‘It’s time we began thinking about forming a special Conference committee. Time we had it, in fact.’

  ‘Why? What to do, in heaven’s name?’

  ‘Why? My dear chap, who do you suppose is going to raise the money to house and amuse two hundred — at least — delegates in a proper manner? Well?’

  ‘Why not the Board? Let it do a job of work for once.’

  The Board of the Rutley Trust consisted of six persons: four of them were members of what, not too inexactly, you might call the cultural Establishment; there was the Master of a Cambridge college with a reputation as a classical scholar; there was the always so lively and authoritative Lady Emily Grosmont, and two mandarins of letters, one an O.M., the other a novelist with an inherited income, who also played the flute: the other two members were Arthur Blount and Canon Pulmer. It was supposed to deal with an entirely vaporous thing called policy.

  ‘The Board isn’t a shred of use here,’ Gregory said coolly. ‘We have no authority to spend Rutley funds on the Conference; we need a great deal of money, and the only people who can get it for us are the big chaps — industrialists and financiers. That world.’

  ‘Men like that won’t serve on a committee merely for us.’

  ‘Leave it to me,’ Gregory said.

  His half-smile annoyed Lambert. He thought: There are moments when I can see why people who don’t know him well think him conceited and arrogant. ‘How much money?’

  ‘Oh —’ Gregory moved his fingers — ‘ten, fifteen, twenty thousand.’

  Lambert was startled into letting him see it. ‘You can’t spend that in one week!’

  Gregory laughed gently in his face. ‘Bedrooms at Claridge’s and so on and so on, a concert, a theatre, Covent Garden, a banquet. We’re not entertaining a gaggle of provincial lawyers, y’know…. Oh, I’m not making fun of you, my dear fellow…. By the way, one member of the Board will be angry if we get Churchill. Emily Grosmont detests him.’

  ‘If dear Emily gives us trouble we’ll have the pants off her,’ Lambert said, with a smile and a jocular twist of his nose. It gave him pleasure to use the faintly lecherous phrase about a woman whose pale elderly eyes seldom noticed him when they happened to rest on his face.

  Gregory looked away from him. ‘I don’t think there’s anything else, is there? What’s the time? A little early, but I think a glass of sherry…. D’you mind looking in that cupboard, you’ll find it there. Thanks, old boy. The very dry is in the square decanter. You can give me that.’

  Lambert poured the sherry, and took his to an arm-chair where he could spread his legs. He had just remembered something that amused him. ‘Did you ever hear of a woman called Evelyn Lamb?’

  ‘Of course. But is she still alive?’

  ‘You can call it alive. She got herself picked up by the police last night, wandering about the King’s Road. They thought she was tight. When it turned out that she was merely senile, gaga, they took her home. It was in every paper this morning.’

  ‘Not in mine,’ Gregory said. He frowned. ‘She used to be a ruthless lioniser — dinner-parties for fifty people, all of them at least notorious.’

  ‘I can tell you something about that,’ Lambert said, smiling. ‘She was going strong when I came to London. A man I got to know, a critic, was always going to take me to her house, and never did —’ from the look on his face, a momentary thinning of his long lips, this still had a sour taste. ‘Well, only two years ago I got a card from her, addressed to Rutley House, asking me to come that evening. I was at a loose end, you were away, my wife was away, and I thought: It’s taken her ladyship twenty-five years, but be damned to that. I wasn’t certain whether to dress or not, but I supposed I ought to, and did — full fig, white tie.’ He laughed without merriment. ‘My own fault, of course. I should have reflected. She was expecting me, but only God knows what had been in her cracked old brain when she sent the invitation; she lives alone in the house, it was filthy, there was a peculiar smell, as though she hid scraps of food under the rugs, and the old girl herself was as unsavoury as she could be. She’d laid out a dozen books she wanted me to look at — her own diaries I think they must have been. I don’t know, I didn’t stay long enough. I was out of the place in five minutes, of course. She came after me to the door, mewing and begging me not to go. What a show!’

  Gregory did not speak for a moment. ‘Did you keep the newspaper report?’

  ‘It’s in my room.’

  ‘Let me see it, will you?’

  Lambert stared. ‘If it interests you. Of course.’

  Gregory was silent.

  ‘She must have lost her money, as well as her wits,’ Lambert said easily.

  ‘Her friends, too.’

  ‘Oh, that. A woman of her snobbish sort hasn’t any.’

  Again Gregory said nothing. Lambert thought: He’s just about to do his stuff as the overworked great man. He got up to go away. As he was leaving the room, a servant came in with a message to
Gregory from his wife. Had he a moment to spare? If he had, would he come and see her before she left?

  Gregory stood up. ‘Come with me, won’t you?’ he said. ‘She’s going off to her nuns today.’

  ‘She doesn’t want to see me.’

  ‘She’ll be delighted.’

  ‘I’ll stay a minute,’ Lambert said.

  Beatrice was waiting, erect and fur-coated, in the drawing-room. She spoke to Lambert with the warmest friendliness, asked him to return some books to the library for her, asked briefly, absently, after his wife, held her hand out and said,

  ‘Goodbye, my friend. Come and see me before we leave for France.’

  She turned to her husband. Lambert withdrew, very satisfied, and quite unconscious — as was Beatrice herself — that she never spoke in this loud benevolent winning voice to persons she looked on as her equals. The truth of the matter is, he thought complacently, she’s far better-natured with me than with Gregory himself. I don’t know whether he’s afraid of her, or bored by the way she takes him down in front of people, or what, but that’s no marriage. Not what I call a marriage; no feeling of security, no easiness.

  I clean forgot to ask him how he felt, he thought, grinning. And he forgot to impress on me that he overworks. Good old Gregory.

  Chapter Three

  It was a fine day and still warm. He decided not to go back to the office at this hour, but to walk home. A long walk, but he needed time to sort out the ideas Gregory had thrown at him. His mind moves at twice the speed of mine, he thought grudgingly. Not only that — I have to fit legs to his ideas and set them to work.

  He had the warmest affection for Gregory. I know a deal about him, he thought, that no one else even suspects — except that old freak, Gate, and a few of our shrewd contemporaries in Danesacre, who persist in thinking of him as the son of a poor pensioned old sea-captain of no account: Danesacre takes damn little stock of a man who turns his back on it to make a name for himself in London — He may impress Londoners, he doesn’t impress us…. But I wonder if it ever strikes the dear old boy that one man in London finds his exalted way of living a little comical? When you come from nothing, need you be so rarefied? As we said at home, a lot of steam from a low spout….

  He smiled. Bless him, he’s a grand chap, for all his little quirks, and I owe him a sight more than he’ll ever ask me to repay…. He quickened his steps, to shake off a sudden inexplicable impatience. Strange it should be that way round, he thought: I always imagined it would be the other.

  It had been the other way, once. If, forty years ago, he had not run across the gravelled playground at Liggett’s — an impulse of, what was it? curiosity? pity?…

  He went from a dame’s school to Liggett’s, with four other ten-year-olds, all friends. They went in as a gang, they sat together in the lowest class, they played together; they were savages, and no one tried to interfere with them. Gregory Mott started the same day, but he had come from the council school and he had no friends at Liggett’s School for Gentlemen’s Sons. Lambert noticed him the first week, standing alone, a pale very slight boy, with a head that appeared too big for his body. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked, and the boy with him said, ‘Oh, him, he’s a freak.’ A few days later when he went out into the yard at the morning break, he saw four of the older boys tying an end of rope round the freak; they had lashed his ankles together, and his legs below the knee, and were trying to make him jump over a stick held at knee level. If he had moved he would have fallen flat, and even across the yard Lambert could see that tears were running down his cheeks as he stood there, helpless. A crazy impulse sent Lambert to run, arms flailing, at the tormentors. More surprised than anything else, they cleared off, and he began to untie the ropes. Then he realised that Gregory’s tears were part of a white heat of contempt and rage. Lout as he was, he had enough imagination to admire it. Instead of leaving Gregory, he waited beside him until he was calm and strolled with him across the yard, ignoring the sniggers of his friends, and waited for him after school, to walk home with him.

  The freak lived in a street of poor dark little houses near the harbour: as they reached his door he said sharply, ‘Don’t breathe a word to my father about what happened this morning.’… Lambert had no intention of putting his nose inside the house, no wish to have anything to do with an old fellow who was only one of Danesacre’s many retired sea-captains, poorer, more eccentric, shabbier, than most. He turned to make off. Looking at him with a smile Gregory said, ‘You were brave.’

  That was his first lesson in one of Gregory’s talents — not the least useful of them — his charm.

  At that time his father expected confidently that his son was going to succeed him as a solicitor in the firm he had inherited from his father. His mother was more ambitious. Only her heart knew why. Neither of his parents was in any decent sense of the word educated: the Bible apart, his mother read nothing but sentimental novels; his father read the Danesacre Gazette and his clients’ wills and the like documents. He was an astute man and they were very comfortably off — what in Danesacre is called warm. They disapproved acidly of his new friendship.

  ‘Why,’ he asked, ’do you dislike Gregory?’

  ‘We don’t dislike him,’ his mother said. ‘Your father and I feel that you could have a better friend than a boy out of Cliff Street. That’s all.’

  ‘He has to live in Cliff Street,’ Lambert said. ‘They have almost no money.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘It’s not Gregory’s fault.’

  ‘Of course not. But why make a friend of him? Why not one of the Turner boys you used to bring home? A shipowner’s son can be useful to you when you grow up. Gregory Mott is no use to anyone. You mustn’t look down on him, of course. That would be wrong. But there is no need to have anything to do with him.’

  ‘He ought not to be at Liggett’s,’ his father said. ‘Old Mott must be out of his mind to send him there.’

  ‘He’s very clever. Mr. Gate says——’

  ‘What Mr. Gate says is hardly likely to be important.’

  ‘I don’t like you to go about with a poor boy,’ said his mother, ’and I can’t understand why you want to. I won’t have you bring him here. Your father and I…’

  Did he understand it himself? Not then. Later — now — in part. There was the half-conscious pleasure of having someone to protect and patronise. Patronise in his thoughts only. At no moment, at no age, would it have crossed Gregory’s mind that he was in need of being condescended to — although, even then, even as a child, he took pains to please. He pleased Gate — whom everyone, including even the youngest boys, treated as a servant — by hanging on his words in class, talking to him about poetry, writing long essays. Queerly, it never occurred to any of the shrewd young savages round him that he was sucking up to a master…. Lambert thought: I suppose I felt easy with him — he was poor, he was frail, his suit was worn and cheap, he had no future. No competition of any kind with Master Lambert Corry.

  All true, he thought, but not the whole of it. There was something more. There was the power he used without knowing — then — that he used it; he never flattered, rarely praised, never pretended to like what offended his instinctive purity, never lifted a finger to ingratiate himself with older boys — or with anyone — and in less than a term he had charmed every person who counted in the school. Another incident like the cruel one with the rope would have been inconceivable.

  None of this, even if Lambert Corry had grasped it, could he ever have explained to his anxious mother and father. Anxious for him, for his future, driving him, grinding into his nerves, his young brain, his very bones, enough ambition, enough acid anxiety, to last a lifetime.

  Nobody drove Gregory. As they grew up in the school he did not slave and sweat fear over examination papers in the way his friend did. Yet he did equally well. Better.

  The day when news came that both of them had won university scholarships happened to be Gregory’s birthday. Lambert�
��s fell a month earlier. It was a hot windless July day. After tea the two of them walked out along the cliff-top and sat down on a shelf of rock below the edge, out of sight. In front of them lay an unwrinkled sea, smoother than the sky, reflecting light upwards; the only sign of the horizon was a feather of ship’s smoke hanging for minutes in the air, no ship visible. They sat for a time in silence. Lambert knew he was to go to Oxford, and excitement, the momentary relief from the pressure of anxiety, overrode shamefully his grief that Gregory was not going. For the life of him he couldn’t guess whether his friend minded or not.

  ‘Do you think you’ll like Sheffield?’ he asked.

  ‘Why not?’ Gregory said calmly.

  ‘It’s not — ’ he hesitated, half afraid, half for some reason wanting to prick him — ’well, not like going up to Oxford.’

  ‘Do you suppose it matters which university one goes to? I doubt it. What we do afterwards is the test. Are you really going to become a civil servant?’

  He made it sound like falling face downwards into a ditch. Vexed, Lambert said, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’

  Gregory looked at him as he often did, with a reserve that made itself felt. ‘I don’t know.’

  Suddenly Lambert knew that his friend was dissatisfied and disappointed. ‘Oxford will be nothing without you,’ he said warmly. ‘I wish to God you were coming with me. Don’t let’s drift apart. Write to me from Sheffield, and I’ll tell you everything about Trinity — and we’ll have the vacations.’

  Gregory’s look changed; he answered at once with the spontaneity, the quick trusting sweetness, he kept behind his reserve. ‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, after Sheffield. I’m going to write. Not any kind of writing — I want to be a great writer, as great as they come.’