Hemlock and After

by Angus Wilson

  Bernard was recalled from his reverie by the sound of Sonia’s voice.

  ‘Personally,’ she was saying, ‘I’m so pleased that Eliot’s given his name to the scheme.’

  She was determined to take the sting out of her father-in-law’s tiresome folly before she changed the subject. It was a happy stroke, for few of those present had not visited The Cocktail party.

  Bernard’s admiration for her persistence roused him to support her. ‘Maugham as usual,’ he said, ‘has subscribed most handsomely.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve got Priestley,’ said Hubert casually.

  Bernard was not so easily caught. He ignored the remark. ‘Charles Morgan,’ he said, smiling at Hubert, ‘is unfortunately in France.’

  Sonia saw her chance to put out to sea, away from the treacherous rocks. ‘France?’ she mused, ‘how I wish I was.’ Apart from motor cars and the iniquities of the Government there was no topic more likely to engage the company at large than ‘abroad’. Before the war when motoring was easier and the Government was all right, ‘abroad’ had been very low down on their list of priorities. There had always been Switzerland, of course, and Cannes, or, earlier, Le Touquet, if you were being grand. But it was to the old paradises of the intellectuals of the thirties that the new middle-class rebels from welfare England now turned their eyes – Provence, Burgundy, the small Riviera towns, Corsica, with the additional pleasure of Italy, which had been politically verboten to the nineteen-thirties progressives, and above all, of course, the newly opened-up Spain.

  ‘Oh dear!’ said the barrister’s wife, ‘no abroad for us this year. I had so hoped to park Roger and Jeremy on their grandmother, but God wasn’t on my side. I had the most wonderful letter from old Madame Peyrin, too. She called Humphrey “a quite gracious gentleman”, which of course he was with her.’

  Her husband removed his pipe for a moment. ‘Anyone who can do truite en gelée as she can deserves all the gracious gentlemen she wants. I almost think I might make a trip on my own just for that trout.’

  ‘You wouldn’t get very far, dear, on your French. That, at least, has been some little recompense for the hell of having been at a girls’ boarding-school.’

  ‘Oh yes, you were all right in Tours or even in Burgundy with your French Oxford accent. But think how I came to the rescue in Marseille.’

  His wife giggled in remembrance. ‘Humphrey has the most wonderful imitation of the Marseillais, just like one of those jokes about Marius in the Paris vaudevilles.’

  ‘Derek’s just as hopeless about speaking,’ said another woman. ‘There was an awful moment when he insisted on taking over at Périgord and I thought I wasn’t going to get any truffles.’

  ‘And what about Italy?’ challenged her husband.

  ‘Soldiers’ slang,’ laughed his wife. ‘I feel sure half of what he said was simply filthy, if I could have understood it. All the same Cattolica was heaven – we’re going there again in September. Nanny’s going to. take the children. I wish I could get her to come to me permanently, but of course she’s getting frightfully old. I can see it in the way she spoils the children. When I think of the way she used to treat us as children!’

  ‘We have to go to Cattolica,’ said her husband, ‘because Sylvia’s fallen for the swimming professional.’

  ‘And what about you and the padrona? Oh! those dark Italian eyes!’

  ‘No holidays for us farmers,’ said the boyish farmer ruefully, ‘unless we take them in January.’

  The commuting county gentlemen felt slightly embarrassed. They could not really claim that their vegetables or their poultry interfered with their holiday plans.

  ‘What a shame!’ said the stockbroker’s wife. ‘I can just imagine how you’d adore Bandol. That glorious bougainvillaea I and the sun! We’re being very adventurous this year, someone’s told us of a wonderful cheap hotel at Ivica, there’s no need to speak Spanish. And, my dears, we’re flying. I shan’t have another stitch of clothing for years, but still….’

  Burgundy, Provence, the Adriatic, the Balearics. Bernard felt as though he was transported back twenty or twenty-five years. Already, in his world, these places – Bandol, Cassis, and the rest – were said to have been ‘spoilt’ by 1936. It was just the same when they got going on ‘wonderful Regency pieces’ or ‘amusing Victorian trouvailles’. He hastily convicted himself of that worst of snobberies – chic snobbery. Happiness should be respected in any guise, and it was clearly their greatest safety valve from the self-pity and tension he had just been deploring. Nevertheless, to be honest he had to admit that he would not wish to be involved in these carefree Dornford Yates jaunts.

  Mrs Rankine, of course, went one better. She had been to Lascaux.

  ‘But perhaps the most impressive experience of all,’ she said with studied effect, ‘was not at Lascaux, wonderful though the cave paintings are, but at another group of caves where you sail on an underground lake. The complete silence, except for the sound of the oars, and the black, black water – I was terrified all the time, and yet I would have liked to stay there for ever.’

  *

  On the other side of the lawn, Ella had, at last, found a meeting ground with the Admiral’s wife in the arrangement of herbaceous borders. ‘It’s eliminated wire-worm completely,’ she was saying, ‘and last year I lost almost every one of my lupins. I’ve got a new apricot shade this year….’ Through the surface conversation which she could hear her own voice making, her consciousness now made contact, for the first time for many months, with an external image. Mrs Rankine’s words slipped slowly through into her mind until miraculously they fitted into her own obsessive fancies. A liberation seemed to have come from a great distance away, yet with it came alarm, for this grappling hook which was clawing at her mind might be dragging her from a known safety of private agony into unknown danger. She was aware at any rate that any response must be carefully chosen, translated into conventional communicating terms. For a moment her lined face and blurred eyes seemed to tremble and flicker, then the words came in a rush which she tried vainly to check.

  ‘The water, I suppose, must be very, very deep, and the ground beneath probably shelves, don’t you think?’ as if she didn’t know! ‘Arches, I mean, like the vault of the cave itself.’ She wanted to continue, but Mrs Rankine began to answer, so she sat quite rigid and tried to set her trembling lips in a smile.

  ‘I really don’t know,’ said Mrs Rankine, ‘it’s so deep, you know, that I’m not sure if anyone knows.’ She was a great reader of Virginia Woolf, and she saw the conversation as an important interchange by two women on a significant level.

  But for Ella, the question was not one of interchange, but of certainty. She felt cheated when Mrs Rankine said that no one knew.

  ‘What about the noise of the water gushing against the sides of the cave?’ she asked. ‘You said there was only the sound of the oars. But can that really be so?’ She spoke almost accusingly. ‘How long would the echoes last, if you called out? Did you drop a stone into the water? The ripples must stretch endlessly.’ She spoke like an eager child. It was Sonia’s voice that made her realize her failure to step carefully enough. She had failed in communication, she must retire again into her own world and repair the disorder that this seeming contact had created.

  ‘James,’ said Sonia, ‘I’m sure everyone’s dying for a cocktail. ‘It was, she knew, quite artificial, but there seemed nothing she could do to repair the damage. If she had disliked Ella less, she might perhaps have managed her more dexterously, as she had Bernard. Somewhere within her she almost hoped that her abrupt cutting through of this outburst would upset Ella’s balance completely. One could never tell with these half-crazy creatures. But though Ella’s equilibrium was not shattered, the mood of the party was finally broken. Mrs Rankine saw that her interesting feminine contact was an illusion. There was some measure of surprise on every face. No, really, they must get along, the children would be back from the gymkhana. At last, the family
were left alone.

  *

  As the last car turned the corner, Berthe, the French nurse, Sonia’s greatest treasure, came into sight with the two children.

  ‘Mummy!’ shouted Nicholas, as he ran towards them. ‘Granny! Miss Heppelstone fell from her horse and was badly hurt.’ It was the most exciting, interesting thing that had happened this week. Even little Jennifer, who could only say a few words, expressed her pleasure by repeating them over and over.

  Sonia’s chance to punish her parents-in-law could not have come more aptly. Her thin boyish face hardened, she seemed like a pecking sparrow as she bore down on the children.

  ‘Bedtime,’ she said sharply. ‘Vous êtes bien en retard, Berthe. II ne faut pas les laisser s’enfiévrer commecela. Now say good night, Nicholas.’ And then began the final torture of Bernard and Ella, as Nicholas and Jennifer made the rounds with courtly bows and little curtseys. ‘Good night, Father. Good night, Grandfather. Good night, Mummy. Good night, Granny.’ The simple, happy days on Frinton sands seemed so far away from this – ‘Shan’t be a moment, Bernard,’ James would call, and his sister Elizabeth, ‘Oh, don’t fuss, Mummy, get on with your book.’ The contrast between those carefree days and this little circus of neo-Victorian discipline with Sonia cracking the whip was almost more than they could bear. Bernard attempted to soften the spectacle by drawing the children to him and kissing them. But Ella felt too guilty from her recent disgrace. She just sat quite still and tried to smile.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Country Matters

  ERIC CRADDOCK leaned his elbows on the café table and stared at the mauve woollen wistaria set in the vase on the wall opposite. It was only a half vase and fluted. Like the rest of the walls of the café it was pink rough-cast shaded with silver. Nearby was a profile of a nineteen-thirties lady with a rakish black beret and golden hair running to a point on her cheekbone. He was, at present, in Florence, where the wistaria ran in thick dusty mauve showers from the balcony parapet on which his arms were resting. Though the youngest of Lorenzo’s pages, he was loved not only for his beauty, but for his talents, which spoke of something more than mere talent. His verses, which seemed to crowd upon him faster than his pencil could write – the pencil remained an obstinate modern yellow – were, of course, in some degree the natural outpouring of his youth’s fullness, but there were, Lorenzo said, sonnets here and there that were more than the overflow of boyhood’s beauty. His treble voice in madrigal was judged the loveliest in Tuscany. But it was a certain gentle grace, not only of movement and of manner, but of spirit, that distinguished him from the other pages – a grace that spoke of nobler birth than that union between a passing condottiere and a lady of the court which common gossip gave to him.

  Eric, biting into a hard meringue apparently made of plaster of Paris, began to giggle, and blew white sugar dust over the table. The nobler birth, he decided, was a little too much, and the treble voice. He wondered if his fantasy self would get younger each year, with hoops and marbles or whatever the boy of ten would have had at the court of Lorenzo, probably one of those olde worlde mummer’s sticks with a horse’s head. For oh! the hobby horse! Remember what a big boy you are, said Humpty Dumpty. Remember anything you like, but don’t cry. I am twenty-one and a half years old, exactly. You needn’t say exactually to me. But then, he reflected, it was exactly remembering what a big boy he was, not a boy any more at all, in fact, that did make him cry. Crying for my lost youth, he thought tragically.

  Carefully Eric arranged his belongings on the small table – road map, dark glasses, sketch book, and copy of Madame Bovary. He had read in a Reader’s Digest that the process of arranging one’s thoughts in good order was often helped by an equally careful ordering of external objects. Modern psychology, it had explained, was replacing the old-fashioned Freudian idea of the unconscious controlling the conscious by a simpler, more commonsense control of thought by action. Bernie had said it was all balls, but at the same time it was Bernie ‘who so constantly urged him to control and limit his fantasies by achievement. ‘From log cabin to White House, my dear,’ Bernie had said, ‘Fromisn’t done on a broomstick any more. And from bookshop to Millionaire’s Row is even less feasible, except via the bed, and then it would only last a couple of years at most, and be pretty hard work while it lasted. But a little work at French and German plus a little influence and charm will make you manager in the not-so-distant future, with a flat and more money on which to dream and wake up with a less nasty bump. So,’ Bernie had ended as always, making a face at him, ‘put that in your pipe and smoke it.’ So! Eric repeated to himself, in irritation, there’s the Abbey to see first, because that’s what you came for; not bothering to look up in the guide book about triforium or clerestory, unless your curiosity really bids you, and, at the same time, not standing in a daze – St Albans’ loveliest choir-boy drinking it all in – but really looking at things. Then there’s the sketch book, though he doubted if Bernie really thought much of his sketches. And, lastly, there was Madame Bovary, by which for part of the time he was moved, thinking of his own pinioned wings, and for part of the time disgusted, remembering that it was about a woman and thinking only ‘Silly cow! serve her right!’ Practically all of the time, however, reading Madame Bovary was somewhat of a bore because of the need to acquire a vocabulary. He noted with satisfaction that he had today forgotten the dictionary.

  ‘Is it far to the Abbey?’ he asked the cashier, although he knew it was just around the corner. From his mother, Eric had learnt the wonderful gift of drawing people out. By Bernie, he had been absolved from the guilty fear that this gift would no longer be wonderful if it was practised out of simple curiosity. It was, however, neither sheer desire for power nor pure curiosity that actuated Eric in his constant, darting flight of casual, brief intimacies. True, he sought the click of admiration, but he was only eager for it so long as he was held attentive to see how and when it would come; nevertheless there was, beyond this, not a positive belief that the important friendship was lying mysteriously round every corner, but a negative void which only a magical chance meeting could fill. He dared not, therefore, let anyone go by untried.

  It was not, perhaps, surprising that his casual questions, often so inappositely produced, sometimes gave the effect of idiocy.

  ‘Facing you, right outside,’ said the cashier resentfully. She was seldom particularly busy, but she was always awake to the selfishness of holiday makers, who took this too much for granted.

  ‘Oh! Golly!’ cried Eric boyishly. ‘Any idiot might have guessed from the name “Abbey Café”. I hope most of your customers are a bit brighter.’

  ‘Oh! that’s all right,’ said the cashier. ‘As a matter of fact we had just the same name when we were out on the Watford Road.’

  ‘Oh, have you only just come here?’ said Eric. ‘I thought the decorations were new. So many cafés look as though they wanted a lick of paint. I hate eating my food in dark, dismal places.’

  ‘Six months next Thursday,’ answered the cashier. ‘It does look pretty, doesn’t it? The silver seems to give the pink a bit of life.’ She could see he was artistic.

  ‘I think it’s charming’, said Eric. He got quite a kick out of that sort of lie.

  What a good-looking boy, thought the cashier. There was something very distinguished about his dark eyes and fair wavy hair. A bit young, of course, but very sophisticated.

  ‘It was all done by a real artist,’ she said; ‘I can’t tell you what it cost!’

  Eric saw almost automatically that here was not his El Dorado; meanwhile his vanity had registered the click.

  ‘I can well believe it,’ he said, pocketing his change, and, with one of his best smiles, he left the café.

  Ron Wrigley was leaning against the railings of the Abbey lawn when he saw a young chap go by who gave him a quick but searching stare. He slowly finished squeezing a blackhead on his chin, then putting his hands in his pockets, he turned at his leisure and watched Eric
walk up to the west door. ‘Oh yeah!’ he thought. ‘I thought so. Not with all those beyootiful waves and that walk, you can’t tell me.’ Not that the old sweat-shirt and flannels looked very promising, but he had finished his little business for the day and there was an hour before the pubs opened. In any case, Ron, like Eric, was given to casual acquaintance, when he’d nothing better on. Man, woman, or child for that matter, you never knew what there might be in it.

  He let his mouth fall slightly into a lazy smile – or that’s what they’d told him it was – and half closed his eyelids over what he knew from the familiar mirror was an insolent, knock-out look. He took out a cigarette and strolled over to Eric, who was trying vainly to study the details of the porch.

  ‘Got a light?’ he asked, in glottal Cockney. Eric fumbled nervously for his matches. Here was an acquaintance of which he felt in advance both too sure and too unsure.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Ron. ‘First time you seen it?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Eric. ‘It’s very fine, isn’t it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Ron smiled sexily. There was a pause. Then, ‘Do you live here?’ asked Eric.