Hemlock and After

by Angus Wilson

  ‘What, in St Albans? This dump? I should think so. No; come over on a bit of business. Very nice too. What you do?’

  ‘I run a bookshop,’ said Eric.

  ‘Oh! not much to that, is there?’

  ‘We do very well,’ replied Eric, which, considering that Brandt & Ferguson was the best paying concern in Charing Cross Road, was truthful.

  But Ron was getting bored. This was by no means in his usual line, and he was uncertain of the moves. ‘Like a little walk?’ he asked.

  Eric hesitated. It was difficult to see a fellow-page here, but he was drawn on by desire and fright. He looked at Ron’s high cheek bones with their strange covering of thick, dark down, and at his sleek black hair. ‘All right,’ he said.

  He was disgusted at the precise, prissy tones in which he heard himself saying, ‘It’s lovely to be in the country.’

  ‘Do you like it?’ said Ron surprised. ‘I live in the proper country. You’d like it where I live.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Eric, ‘I thought you lived in London.’

  ‘Yes, I’m proper Cockney, I know,’ smiled Ron. He knew that one all right. That was a favourite one of old Ma Curry’s – Funny Cockney Boy. ‘Born in Stepney,’ he went on, ‘but we was evacuated, and I stopped there ever since.’

  ‘Where is there?’ asked Eric.

  ‘Little Vardon. You wouldn’t know it.’

  ‘Oh, but I do. At least, I’ve never been there, but I have a great friend who lives there.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Ron, with careful lack of interest. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘He’s a writer,’ replied Eric, ‘Bernard Sands. Do you know him?’ The encounter seemed safer now, less louche.

  ‘Oh yes, I know him. Special friend?’ Ron asked. His attempt at a suggestive smile undid him. He only knew one kind of leer where sex was in question.

  ‘He’s an old friend of my family’s,’ replied Eric determinedly.

  ‘I should think he’d like you,’ said Ron, undeterred.

  ‘Oh,’ said Eric. ‘Why?’

  Something in the sharpness of his tone urged Ron to retreat. ‘I should think anyone would. You look all right, you know.’

  Eric did not reply. Ron felt that the time had come to settle questions.

  ‘Want to go to a place I know?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s rather late,’ Eric hesitated. ‘Is it far?’

  ‘No. Ten minutes’ walk. I don’t do something for nothing, you know,’ he added after a pause.

  ‘I think I ought to get back really,’ Eric said, and turned back towards the Abbey.

  ‘Oh,’ Ron said. ‘Another time perhaps.’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Eric vaguely.

  ‘Christ, I’m thirsty,’ said Ron. ‘Got the price of a drink?’

  Eric extracted half a crown.

  ‘Make it ten shillings,’ said Ron, a faint note of professional begging whine in his voice.

  They were nearer the Abbey now, Eric felt safer. He laughed aloud. ‘I haven’t got ten shillings on me,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Ron sulkily, ‘well, make it five bob then.’

  Eric produced two shillings. ‘That’s four and sixpence,’ he said unnecessarily.

  ‘It’s not much,’ said Ron, but then he remembered that little piece of information. You never knew what might be useful. Old Ma Curry would pat him on the back for that. He looked at Eric. Come to that, he wouldn’t have minded.

  ‘You’re all right,’ he said, putting his hand on the young man’s shoulder. ‘You done your National Service?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Eric.

  ‘I bet it was the Navy,’ Ron guffawed.

  This sally, which he had thought up carefully as a compliment, was quite outside Eric’s comprehension. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Educational Corps. Have you done yours?’

  ‘Not me. I’m too wide for bloody service,’ boasted Ron. He had in fact been rejected on account of a defective lung. Outside the Abbey, Ron took Eric’s hand. ‘Pity we done nothing,’ he said. ‘The name’s Ron.’

  ‘And mine’s Eric’

  ‘Eric what?’

  With regained safety all Eric’s interest in Ron had vanished, he felt only the insolence now. ‘I’ve no intention of telling you,’ he said, and turned on his heel.

  ‘Bloody little pouff,’ said Ron aloud. Despite the hot June evening, Mrs Wrigley’s first action on getting back to the cottage was to light the paraffin stove. The smoke filled the stuffy, airless little room. Mrs Wrigley’s protuberant frog’s eyes smarted and watered behind her thick steel-rimmed glasses. The smell of the paraffin spread to blend with the rank odour of stale sweat, the clinging scent from the half-empty tin of sardines on the table and the sickening, periodic whiffs mingled from bad meat and dog mess somewhere near the sink. These Mrs Wrigley did not notice. She took off her worn old red leather hat – disintegrating relic of the craftwork of some proud gentlewoman – revealing a close cropped mannish head of grey hair. She did not remove the old mackintosh which she wore over her bulky, shapeless form, although she was sweating with the long climb up the hill from the village. She put the kettle on the rusty gas stove which had been bought from some of Ron’s winnings at the dogs only a year ago. While she waited for the kettle to boil she prodded with her boot at an old collie dog with sores that lay in a basket under the table. Then pouring the boiling water into a teapot full of dead tea leaves, she drew the sardine tin towards her and liberally sprinkled the contents with vinegar. Before she sat down to her meal, however, she turned on the wireless. Neither of the programmes being to her liking, she put a record on to an old gramophone with a greenish-white opaque glass trumpet. A high, trembling sound emerged which might perhaps have been more meaningful to a bat’s ear. It was, nevertheless, in some curious way, unmistakably the work of Gilbert and Sullivan. To the music of the Gondoliers she began to eat her tea. When the selection from the Gondoliers was ended, she played ‘Three Little Maids from School are We’, and then ‘The Ruler of the King’s Navee’.

  She was chuckling over this favourite song, indeed half choking in the attempt to laugh through the huge chunks of bread and jam with which she filled her mouth, when Ron came in. She gulped down half of the bread in her mouth and said, ‘Keep quiet, can’t you?’ though her son had made no noise.

  Ron’s dark grey drape suit, grey poplin shirt, and olive green tie – he had far too constant a vision of himself among the big shots of the films he had seen to indulge in American-style blouses or ties – made a curious contrast to the setting of the room. Though there had been times in the last three years when he had shown open cracks in his suede shoes, mud-caked, frayed turn-ups to his trousers and tears in his shirts at the collar bone, money was coming in nicely now on commission from Mrs Curry, from the proprietor of the local cinema who had other interests, from work on the side for one or two farmers, and from some odd jobs at greyhound tracks. What money came in went largely on clothes. Ron, preserving the creases of his trousers carefully, sat down to a tin of pilchards, then got up to boil a fresh kettle. Mrs Wrigley made no move to assist him, though she replaced Pinafore by ‘Colonel Bogey’, the only luxury she allowed herself from a strict fare of Gilbert and Sullivan. There were days, even weeks, when she spoilt Ron, devoting her time to giving him apple pies, and treacle suet, and mutton chops, but at present she was in one of her ‘moods’. She had enjoyed a Wesleyan childhood, and, through the dirty fog of feckless slum living – the long rag-and-bone years of Stepney, and the lazy, odd-job existence of the country – a little pea-picking, a little mending, a little charring – faint rays of moral precept, of Sunday school saws, would shine from time to time, and she would feebly and grumblingly attempt to reproduce something of the pursed-lipped, self-righteous matriarchy of her own girlhood home. ‘Penny wise, pound foolish,’ she would say, or ‘There’s none so deaf as do not choose to hear,’ or, more piously, ‘Honour thy father and thy mother.’ This last concept had been much with her recently, since she had read of
the wool boom in Australia. The mother of eleven children, two of whom were out in Aussie, she felt sadly neglected. ‘If they knew their duty,’ she kept on thinking, or ‘There’s such a thing as duty though some seem to have forgotten it.’ This mood of general resentment was kept aflame by the only employer she could still find to put up with her slovenliness and general dishonesty. Many a good jeremiad she had with Mrs Crawley, the incompetent mistress of a failing riding-school. Mrs Wrigley could not truthfully recall the very glorious past against which Mrs Crawley set the declining morals of today, but she suspected with good reason that Mrs Crawley could not either.

  On certain evenings, when this mood was on her and she felt her rheumatism, Mrs Wrigley would upbraid Ron for his lack of respect and lament her own spoiling of him. Then there would be rows, occasionally leading to blows, in which she was by no means always the passive partner. This evening she contented herself with silence. Ron, too, was in dreamy mood, ‘going places’ on his looks and personality. After a while, the ‘places’ to which he aspired passed beyond the limits of his fancy. He made his way upstairs to a world of hair creams, unmade bedclothes, and suits neatly kept – from whole suits on hangers to flannel trousers and ties in presses. The images were fewer than he could have wished in this sacred temple, but what ministrations and rites he could offer them were devoutly carried out. Each, after all, was but an imperfect image, a poor iconographie attempt to portray the Absolute – that Absolute which stared back at him with ‘lazy smile’ and ‘knock-out look’ from the mirror.

  Mrs Wrigley had finished her guzzling when her son came downstairs again. A full stomach and the airs of her favourite composer had put her into better, more talkative mood.

  ‘Where was you today?’ she asked.

  ‘Over St Albans way,’ replied Ron. ‘Little business of Mrs Curry’s.’ He spoke of his employer in a more dignified form when addressing his mother than when talking to himself.

  ‘Oh!’ said Mrs Wrigley. She found Mrs Curry and her affairs beyond her comprehension, and, since Ron was not prepared to enlighten her, she preferred to treat them in a non-committal way that suggested a detached superiority. ‘Didn’t see no one over there then?’

  Ron had already decided that the meeting with Eric should be kept to himself until he saw what its use might be. ‘No. Why should I?’ he replied.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said his mother. ‘Mrs Sands’ brother’s in the village. Arrived this afternoon. Wanting money, Mrs Crawley thinks. I’m sure I don’t know.’ Ron’s uncommunicativeness was making her ponder once more on the prevailing absence of sense of duty. ‘Where you going now?’ she asked.

  ‘Down to Mrs Curry’s,’ Ron answered; ‘she’s got a little party.’

  ‘Oh,’ said his mother meditatively, ‘I can’t see what she wants with a lot of parties. She’s religious, isn’t she?’

  ‘Who said so?’ asked Ron.

  ‘Well, she is, isn’t she?’ pressed Mrs Wrigley.

  ‘Yes,’ Ron answered. ‘But not what you’d understand.’

  ‘I understand religion all right. I was brought up to it. Which was more than you was,’ she added proudly. ‘Anyway I don’t have nothing to do with her. Always on about love. “We’re just a village of love, Mrs Wrigley.”’ The old woman mimicked Mrs Curry’s genteel coo. ‘Don’t see what an old woman like her wants with love.’

  Ron gave a guffaw. ‘Not much different to the rest of us if it comes to that,’ he said. ‘Don’t you start on Mrs Curry anyhow. The money what comes in here comes from her,’ and, with this parting shot, he made his way out of the cottage.

  *

  Mrs Curry presided at the piano herself, her somewhat fat, stumpy fingers hitting the notes a little jerkily, but with plenty of feeling. Her round blue eyes smiled and smiled through the silver photo-frames, the jars of pot-pourri and the lovely soft masses of delphiniums and campanula. Everything was very soft about Mrs Curry, from the soft rose light which played around her soft pink features – not a trace of make-up or scent, just a dusting of powder and the fragrance of lavender water – to the soft dove-grey silk dress with a touch of old lace at the shoulders and the lovely soft red hair delicately set in an old-fashioned water-wave. Her voice was quite a light mezzo-soprano.

  After a little sacred music there were usually one or two profane ballads – ‘And Did You not Hear my Lady come down the Garden singing?’ or, ‘I know a Bank whereon’ – because Police Inspector Wragg, who was such an old and valued friend, had a very fine baritone voice. While she accompanied the Inspector, Mrs Curry kept her eye on the company to see that everyone had plenty to drink. She smiled and nodded to the two girls from London and the German girl who worked at Mrs Rankine’s, to ensure that they replenished their glasses. She herself kept the same whisky and soda by her the whole evening, but she liked everyone else to drink liberally. There was always a slight hurdle when the Chapel gentlemen were persuaded to have their second, but after that they were usually only too happy to be ‘cosy’. Love and smiles and cosiness were what Mrs Curry most believed in. She had never cared for jazz music, though she occasionally permitted herself a little ragtime for old times’ sake, but there was an old dance tune of which she was very fond, it seemed to her to express so much that was valuable in life. Somehow, when she sang the words, ‘Sweet Love nest, all cosy and warm’, one got the feeling that there was something religious, or if not religious, what the Americans call ‘ethical’, a feeling of higher Values and robins’ nests in hedgerows and mottoes in poker work in the simple words. So it was, indeed, with many of the slow, precise, cooing words that came from those little rounded lips. Sometimes, for example, she would give Ron’s arm a little pinch and ‘Naughty boy,’ she would say, ‘he’s just a bundle of fun.’ There were only two choices open to the hearer, either he might take it as a pretty, playful expression of some general beauty in human nature and the world around, or else it was a statement of such extreme obscenity that the mind reeled before it. Mrs Curry’s words could never be taken in any ordinary sense.

  This strange, double motif was carried out in much of the decoration of her house. Around the drawing-room, with its motley collection of chintz-covered couches with gay cushions, marqueterie tables, and lately imported striped chaise-longue – for Mrs Curry loved everything beautiful – there were hung upon the walls numerous bad watercolours. Some of these showed the last dying influence of Turner’s later phase and were quite innocuous, but another portrayed a field of dancing daffodils into which a little girl had strayed without her clothes, or yet another a bluebell wood, misty and shimmering, in which two tiny naked children sported. ‘So you’ve fallen in love with my daffs?’ Mrs Curry would say, and then quite suddenly, ‘Poor little thing, she’s lost her frillies.’ Upstairs in the bedrooms the same theme was repeated more childishly. A little boy with a torn nightshirt trailed a teddy bear upon a lead – ‘With a little bear behind’ it was called; or, more coyly if possible, a little girl all stomach stood naked in the falling snow – ‘I nude it was cold’ read the title. It was quite horrible to hear Mrs Curry say, ‘Naughty little things, they want a smacked bot, don’t they?’ But her pièce de résistance was a little china girl in a bathing costume lying on her stomach. This object had a removable lid revealing the buttocks. ‘So you’ve found my naughty little imp,’ Mrs Curry would say, and then taking the lid from the embarrassed visitor she would remark, ‘Let’s make her comfy again, dear. Now she’s all tucked up for the night.’

  While the Inspector was singing, Ron slipped in. Mrs Curry’s mouth rounded, as though she was swallowing a fondant, but she continued playing. But, as the last vibrating, manly notes faded away, she left the piano and put her hand on Ron’s shoulder. ‘You’re a wicked boy to be so late,’ she said. Ron gave what he called his ‘old one two’ look. ‘I went into the pub for some fags,’ he said, ‘and got talking to that old chap, Mrs Sands’ brother. Wanted to come on here, but I wasn’t having any. He was properly pissed all righ
t.’ Though Mrs Curry would never have uttered a dirty word, she had a wonderful faculty for passing them over, which put a lot of men at their ease. She dug her nails a little into Ron’s arm. ‘You old silly,’ she said, ‘I should have been glad to see him.’ From the hard angry look in her eyes, Ron could tell that he had made a bad mistake. ‘I heard something about old Sands at St Albans today that’ll make you sit up,’ he said to make up for his error. She was potty mad about the Sands family ever since that Vardon Hall business. Mrs Curry’s eyes melted. ‘What was that, you funny old thing?’ she asked. ‘Never you mind,’ said Ron, all pinch and mischief; ‘I might tell you later, if you’re a good girl.’ He was annoyed at losing control of his secret, and after all he was not sure what, if anything, there was in it.

  Mrs Curry made a mental note that Ron should pay for his impudence, but, meanwhile, her guests must be cared for.

  She motioned a young man in flannels and a sports coat to the piano. A master at the local grammar school, he had come originally as an occasional visitor, but Mrs Curry had helped him when he was in difficulties over a bad run of luck at racing and he was now one of her ‘regular boys’. A big, red-faced man now sang, in imitation of Sir Harry Lauder, ‘Keep right on to the end of the road’. Mrs Curry included pluck and grit in her catalogue of virtues, but she laid greater emphasis on the softer ones like love and comfiness. The singer, however, was a Scots engineer who was very helpful to her with advice on investments, and she greeted his song with a special little clap of her hands. She noted with pleasure that Mr Warner was quite carried away by the song. There were tears in his eyes, and his hand, which rested on Use’s knee, was shaking. A little music brought out the best in all of us really, she thought. It was nice to know someone so successful had such a warm heart, just a big baby like all men probably, just a bundle of love. She’d been almost frightened to ask him down from London–a gentleman with so many business interests, but he had offered his help over her domestic service bureau – ‘Everyone placed so happily’ – whilst she had long been drawn to the correspondence clubs in which he was concerned – bringing lonely people together, with their funny little ways and whims, and making them cosy and happy. Ah! well, it showed how wise she was not to listen to people who wanted her to buy a big house, just because she had a little nest-egg put away. People didn’t want grand places, they wanted peace and quiet and everything snug. The cottage and the bungalow at Angmering were all she needed. Of course, if she hadn’t been cheated out of Vardon Hall….