Hemlock and After

by Angus Wilson

  ‘Mr Sands likes the door open, Mrs Nourse, and I like the hall clean.’ Ella’s voice was firm.

  ‘I do the hall Mondays.’

  ‘Good,’ said Ella; ‘well, this week we’ll do it today as well. And now I want Mr Pendlebury’s breakfast tray.’

  *

  At the far end of the kitchen garden rose a line of poplar trees, and beyond stretched two large meadows that might with exaggeration have been described as parkland. Bernard had had most of the oak trees in these fields cut down, despite the shocked criticism of his neighbours. He had found their picturesque, gnarled antiquity all too reminiscent of the spurious, elfin charm with which Arthur Rackham’s illustrations had so ruined the fairy tales of his childhood. Sheltered by the poplars from the east wind, he would sit here, when he was very happy, and gaze out over miles of flat land to the distant hills. The position was generally admired because it commanded so remarkable a view of the sunset, but Bernard preferred to sit there on a morning such as the present one, when the hard, blue, sunlit sky was clear but for a few wisps of cloud that moved swiftly with the strong wind. He ate an exactly ripe peach from the hot-house. He hardly remembered a time of more complete bliss.

  The exhausting preliminaries to the Vardon Hall scheme were at an end, and he had too few doubts of the scheme itself, or his ability to work it, to suppose that the trial years would be other than a success. He trusted that this essay in organization would still that itch for practical activity and reforming benevolence that seemed to assert itself so regularly and so forcefully in his life. He hoped that it would be assuaged for a good while. At fifty-seven he could not afford many more such exacting drains upon his creative energies, particularly since he noticed that his physical resistance was less complete – he tired easily and his heart murmured. To pretend, however, that the struggle to gain his own way had been wholly unpleasant would be untrue. He had, on the whole, enjoyed it; particularly in retrospect, now that victory seemed assured. Ella’s good days he now accepted as a sort of bonus in life, a slight damper to those fires of guilt which no rationalized personal morality could wholly extinguish. Tomorrow he would discuss the fruition of the Vardon Hall scheme with Terence who had planned each step of it with him. Tomorrow, above all, he would see Eric. He even looked forward to anticipating his brother-in-law’s request for money by some tactful gesture. If he remembered his recent preoccupation with evil, it was only to suppose it one more of the nervous symptoms which heralded literary pregnancy. He was probably about due for another novel.

  It was lucky for Bernard that he was a constitutionally lean man, for neither his vanity nor his flirtatious, sensual nature would have kept him, as old age approached nearer, from ‘going to pieces’. Spotted suits, scurfy hair, forgotten flybuttons, patches of stubble, and clotted bloodstains from shaving become both more usual and more noticeable as men grow older. In Bernard, they were not new. They had from youth been the neglected results of a total, energetic absorption in his immediate task. From youth he had been aware of them, and his vanity had set every charm of posture and movement to create a panache that would disguise them. Had he grown fat as he grew older, these tricks would no longer have sufficed, the untidy boy would have turned into the squalid old man. But with his lean, spare figure and his bony ‘interesting’ face, the large expressive eyes and the talkative hands could still set up a screen against malicious eyes that searched for signs of decay. It was rather his too-suddenly boyish movement, his too-consciously coltish gawkiness, that, set against the knowledge of his years, were liable to arouse ridicule or malice.

  Elizabeth was in as malicious a mood towards her father that morning as her brightly disguised boredom with life made possible. She had decided, after considerable argument with herself, to sit in judgement upon him. If she anticipated a certain secret, retributive pleasure from the task, it was, she had convinced herself, her duty; it was as yet obscured by the awkwardness of her peculiar errand. Bernard saw her approach with apprehension. There was a square ugliness about her jaw and her over-broad shoulders that the slightly too smart appearance, which the world of women’s glossies had imposed upon her, accentuated without improving. He would have wished anyone a thousand miles away at such a rare moment of blissful relaxation, but he was too happy to regard even Elizabeth with more than vexation.

  His divergence from sexual orthodoxy, though comparatively recent, was by now sufficiently fused with his personality to condition his general behaviour. With younger people, in particular, his natural boyishness was accentuated by a paederastic desire to bridge the years, which sometimes disastrously overstepped the boundaries of absurdity, particularly when it was not set in its necessary emotional framework, and, more often than he guessed, even when it was. He sprang from his deck chair as his daughter approached and sprawled on the grass, legs wide apart. Then turning lazily, as he supposed, on his side, he looked up at her with an amused, twinkling smile, and sucked at a piece of grass.

  It was not altogether a fortunate performance, but it was all that Elizabeth could have wished to justify her long-debated disapproval.

  ‘Limbering up, Daddy?’ she said. ‘Doesn’t the uric acid make it difficult? Or don’t the deadly crystals give you their familiar message for the ageing?’

  Bernard threw his head back and roared with laughter too hearty to suggest that he cared for the joke. The strained brightness of his daughter’s speech confirmed him in his decision to try to probe and relieve the causes of her distaste for life.

  A conversation in which each party is concerned to expose and help the other is not an easy one. It is inevitably marked by an apparent lack of give and take.

  ‘Evelyn sent you her love. She asked me to one of her Do’s last Tuesday,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘Oh! I shouldn’t have thought Evelyn’s occasions were quite in your line.’

  ‘They aren’t. Her young men bore me silly. I just like Evelyn, that’s all. I suppose I’ve got a teesy-weesy missionary urge to rescue her from their clutches. That’s one of the things I don’t like about those pretty climbing roses; once they get their tendrils round anyone they suck them dry.’

  ‘I should have thought,’ said Bernard, ‘that if anyone battened it was poor old Evelyn. God knows she hasn’t got all that much to offer to her faithful young men. The boot seems to me very much on the other leg.’

  ‘Well I’m sure les boys would agree with you. They think they’re doing Evelyn a hell of a favour by lending their beauty and grace to her studio.’ Elizabeth’s tone was becoming sharper. She ended with a snap. ‘Since they profess not to be interested in women, I don’t know really why we need consider their opinion.’

  ‘My dear,’ Bernard was slightly nettled, ‘it’s anyone’s opinion. Poor darling Evelyn – and after all I’ve known her a good many years – has never built anything up inside of herself; the result is that at forty-five she’s left standing, with a badge for being such a good scout, and a bagful of spare maternal impulses. It’s the price that women, or men for that matter’ – Bernard did not wish to ruin his case by antagonizing Elizabeth – ‘pay in later life for being brittle and letting life bore them. It’s the cardinal sin, I think, to let life bore you.’ Bernard’s humanism was not the less violently held because he had lately begun to doubt whether it was a totally adequate answer.

  In the thrust towards ‘straight talking’, Bernard was getting much nearer to his objective than Elizabeth, and would probably have opened fire first had not Elizabeth’s embarrassment and emotion forced her to discard the methods of ordinary conversation, and resort to accusation. She had, of course, been boiling up for so much longer than Bernard.

  ‘Daddy,’ she said suddenly, in a hard, clear, self-conscious little voice, and her eyes stared straight and brave before her, ‘I heard something at Evelyn’s which I feel I must talk to you about.’

  Bernard’s stomach heaved rather sharply, and then he felt very tired at the prospect before him, but he only said, ‘Oh
?’

  ‘There was a man there, something to do with the theatre, rather an intelligent man, or perhaps it was because he was a bit older than the others that I found him easier. But like the rest…’ Elizabeth’s combination of genuine distress and head-girl histrionics had completely robbed her of her special bright slang. She could not even bring out the direct references which she had so determined not to evade when she had rehearsed the interview earlier that morning, let alone serve them up in her personal idiom in order to appear at ease. ‘Like the rest he didn’t know who I was, and he treated me, well, like any other queen’s woman, dear.’ She at last got out one of the terms, but it really made her seem more gauche than her straight embarrassment. ‘He remarked on your absence from the gay scene. I didn’t, of course, know that you were so often there….’

  ‘I’m not,’ interrupted Bernard. ‘It was Sherman Winter. And I think he did know who you were.’

  ‘He couldn’t have done,’ said Elizabeth sharply. ‘You see he went on to do what Granny would have called “coupling your name” with Terence Lambert’s, and in no uncertain terms. Quite honestly, I didn’t know what to do, but I think Evelyn must have heard, for she shoved us all round in a sort of lobster quadrille – only she may not have done, because she goes in for general post anyway. I lost touch with him, and, well that’s that, as they say on the films. If it was on the films I should go on and say, “Tell me Daddy, it’s not true, is it?” Only, thinking over various things and adding them up and so on, I realize, of course, that it is.’

  There was a silence. Bernard felt a throb in his throat that might have led to tears. It was a reaction that made him feel both tired and old. ‘Well, yes, of course, it is,’ he said at last. ‘I shouldn’t have chosen Sherman Winter to present it to you, but that’s my fault. And again I could say technically that it’s not true about Terence. But, essentially, in relation to what you mean, yes, it is true.’

  ‘I simply don’t understand how any of it could have happened,’ said Elizabeth, ‘but that isn’t my affair.’

  ‘No,’ said Bernard, ‘it isn’t. Though, if it’s relevant, I could say I’ve made my attitude on the subject perfectly clear. In Night Gleaning and, again, in my essay on Goethe.’ It was at times like these that the former schoolmaster showed most clearly in Bernard.

  ‘Oh, theoretically, I know.’ Elizabeth was impatient. ‘It would have been pretty awful if you hadn’t. I’m not medieval or something. I quite like queers if it comes to that, so long as they’re not on the make like Evelyn’s boys. I’d abolish all those ridiculous laws any day. But then, I don’t believe in capital punishment, or at least I’m not sure, but if I didn’t, I wouldn’t immediately commit a murder.’

  Bernard said nothing. The unexpected silence pushed Elizabeth into voicing thoughts she had been suppressing.

  ‘It’s not very pleasant for James or me,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t see that it concerns either of you,’ Bernard replied, then he added hastily, ‘No, that’s nonsense. It obviously must condition your attitude to me, and it might, of course, be a serious nuisance to you. For that reason, I’m glad that you know, and, as I’m sorry you should have heard in the way you did, I suppose the conclusion is that I should have told you myself.’

  Elizabeth felt almost sorry for him. ‘That would have made it worse if anything.’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ said Bernard. ‘Any attempt to merge two quite different social patterns is bound to have some embarrassing moments.’ He was about to add a remark about the payment for living in a transition period, but he reminded himself that this was not a history class. ‘But it would have been better to face them than this. As to you and James, I’m afraid I must say that I did consider the effect my life might have, and I chose to accept its possible harm to you. Harm to others is after all implicit in most decisions we take, and has to be weighed up when taking them. In this case, I thought that apart from prejudice, and that I’d already decided not to consider, the dangers to my family were not as great as the importance of my new life to me. A selfish, but to me necessary, decision.’ Bernard remembered that these decisions had once been real and painful experiences to him, but he could not recall directly one single sensation he had undergone in making them. As a result, he felt that he could only use flat words which sounded even to himself like the cant that others would certainly call them. He struggled for a moment to break through the tough wall of failed contact and resentment that lay between him and his children. ‘It would be too impossible a demand for sympathy to say that my family were the most painful aspect of what was a very unpleasant period of decision.’ That, too, of course, was insincere; for since it had also been the time when he was in love with Terence, it had been a very mixed unpleasantness.

  ‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth, ‘it would. I have no concern with how you made the decision. You had, as you said, a perfect right to decide, and what happened to us had little to do with it. I didn’t mean to say that about James and myself. It’s the sort of egotism that’s bound to come into one’s mind, but it shouldn’t have been voiced. We’re all quite separate adults and we can’t rule our lives and wants by what’s going to shock the others, unless we care so much that it will hurt us.’

  Bernard had never felt closer to Elizabeth; he would have liked to touch her, but feared her reaction. ‘If only,’ he said, ‘you seemed to want something, one would know better where one was. Oh! James, I know, has his ambitions, but I judge “wants” a bit higher than that. But you, Elizabeth?’

  ‘How do you know what I want or don’t want?’ Elizabeth cried in real anger. ‘It would be jolly d. for you, wouldn’t it?’ Her customary speech was returning with anger. ‘My little head on your shoulder, “Help me, Daddy dear, to find life’s place for little me.” And you, the great Understander, you could say, “Tell me where it hurts, baby daughter, where’s the great big pain?” You lost the right to that dainty little scene a very, very long time ago,’ she ended bitterly.

  There seemed nothing more to say. It occurred to Elizabeth that not a word had been said about her mother, yet in the preceding week it had always been as her mother’s defender that she had planned this démarche. ‘It’s Mummy you should have thought of,’ she cried. Bernard sat cross-legged on the grass, tearing a dandelion head to pieces. The deep lines in his sunken cheeks seemed to threaten a general subsidence of the whole flesh that would leave only his enormous dark eyes staring from the skull.

  ‘I will not discuss that with you,’ he said bitterly. And then once more he added, ‘No, of course that’s absurd. You have a perfect right to ask it. But remember, what I say has nothing to do with “a defence”. My relations with Ella exist above ideas like defence or apology. Some years ago, Ella began to go away from me. Of the first of those years and the agony of them I can’t speak; I think, by some mercy, I don’t very well remember them. I tried to follow her, but I know now that’s impossible.’ He was about to add, ‘You preferred to stay away’, but he checked himself in time. ‘I didn’t change because of that, at least not integrally. I remained a person who is kept working, kept alive, kept whatever you like, by emotional and physical contact. You know all that, however little you like it. It’s the answer to what you’re asking,’ as if, he thought, the problems of the years could be answered in a phrase. ‘As to the choice of my life, Ella is a woman wholly without prejudice.’

  Elizabeth considered for a moment, then she spoke slowly, ‘I suppose you think all that. You’ve just done what you like, really, and then turned it into a sort of best-selling problem novel. Our talk hasn’t been much use, has it? I shall act on Mummy’s side,’ she added, ‘and now I shall go into Bantam and do the weekend shopping. I’d rather you didn’t come with me.’

  After she had gone, Bernard got up and walked into the kitchen garden. He followed with his eye the box hedge that surrounded the square plots of gooseberry and currant bushes. If he went to the right – talked to Ella today, when she was wit
h him, and explained to her what had happened – if he went to the left – went to London and talked to Terence in clear, intelligent terms about his difficulties, and then bathed his wounds in his affection for Eric – it would all come round to the same point. A square wasn’t much help, and there was no straight line. He was still considering when his brother-in-law bore down upon him.

  Of Bill Pendlebury’s ‘going to pieces’ there could be no doubt. His red, beery moon face, beneath the bald, grey-tufted head, oozed good nature or would have done but for his small, pouting, disappointed mouth. His old grey flannel trousers stretched barrel tight across his pot belly and broad buttocks, but even the old-school scarf tied round his waist could not bring them to a point where the top flybuttons could be secured. His short legs were like swollen baroque columns beneath his huge, broad trunk. For all his beer-sodden, over-indulged body, his broad shoulders and huge hands still had a gorilla strength. His eyes were small, very sensual, very intelligent and somewhat sly.

  ‘Here are the old bastard’s letters I was talking of last night,’ he said, and his voice surprisingly was soft, blarneying, caressing. ‘This one to Barney Barnato is absolutely characteristic – the note of patronage of the respectable rogue to the unpresentable pal, the doubtful facts and figures of the claim-jumper turned administrator – a more bloody cooked-up set of figures I’ve never seen even in a bucket-shop circular – and on top of it all, the wonderful Imperial moralizing note, the “God gave us our burden and we must shoulder it’ ‘tone, that was obviously the bit of cant or idealism in Rhodes, call it which you will, that we all need to make us tick. Now you can see why I must do Rhodes; he’s such a full-size, all-round saintly bastard. Not one of those damned literary neurotics like Henley or Kipling who went in for Empire to make up for their lack of balls.’

  For all the conscious element of toughly virile enthusiasm in Bill’s manner, he was in fact constantly carried away by new subjects. He had a devouring interest in new personalities and facts, but once he had filled them with preconceived ideas about the past, his interest began to wane. He had made his dramatic picture, confirmed his beliefs, and was ready to pass on. Unfortunately, it was usually in this waning stage that his biographies were written and their resulting machine-made, over-simplified presentation was as much a disappointment to him, with his memories of the early enthusiasm and the detailed preparatory work, as it was a comparative flop with the public. Originally a ‘rolling stone’ by inclination, with a genuine curiosity about unusual people and places, he had through failure and lazy indulgence become a professional purveyor of picaresque, sentimental cynicism. He played almost consciously the seedy rogue, and his stories, his much-aired worldly shrewdness, and his touch of humour had the pathetic uncertainty of presentation that comes from having used them too often as a means of cadging. He prepared himself for the snubs of the successful so carefully that he inevitably received them.