Hemlock and After

by Angus Wilson

  Bernard, as usual, had decided on his ‘line’ so long in advance that he brought it out with insufficient preparation.

  ‘You must get all this down while it’s still hot with you, Bill,’ he said. ‘Would you find it easy to write here? If so, stay.’

  Bill had been intending to lead up to this by elaborate paths. He was completely floored by so direct an offer, and immediately began to suspect patronage.

  ‘I don’t think all this comfort, you know, would help my particular little itch. All right for you. The bitch Goddess works with you. But if I’m to get the tick working – call it the divine fury, call it the creative urge, call it the subconscious, or what the devil you like –’ Bill specialized in these parades of alternatives. They presented an all-round, broad view of history. He had seen, it was suggested, too much of the world, read too much of the past to take account of the petty words that men used to describe their universal passions. ‘I have to work against the grain. No morning tea, no orange juice, but a pair of kippers on the primus stove. You know the sort of thing, damned uncomfortable, and certainly no special virtue in it as some of these W. H. Davies people seemed to think, but just my particular sort of poison.’ If Bernard was in this ’understanding’ mood though, he thought, he ought to be a honey for a loan. And really, he decided, he wished the old boy everything good; though a lot of his success was luck, he could write, which was almost like having wings these days. His children, too, were bloody awful bores, and as for Ella, well Ella this morning had been all right, but Ella last night, my God! Bill had the usual picaresque, sentimentalized view of domestic life as constant bliss, and he had, besides, been deeply shocked by Bernard’s face as he came towards him up the garden. Bill could not bear to see anything hurt; when anyone he came in contact with got hurt, he made a practice of moving on. He called it ‘travelling light through life’.

  ‘If you think I could help by being here for a bit,’ he said, ‘just say the word, you know. After all, Ella is my sister, and to be quite honest, I felt a bit ashamed last night, that I hadn’t shouldered more of the burden.’

  The subject of his wife’s illness was the last thing that Bernard wished to discuss at that moment, his brother-in-law the last man with whom he would discuss it at any time.

  ‘There’s nothing, thank you, that you could do, Bill,’ he said. ‘Time is what we have to rely on.’ It was his stock cold shoulder to kind strangers.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Bill. ‘I’m not such an oaf as to think that these things are all my eye or anything of that sort. But psycho-analysis was after all conceived in the old days of Vienna, when the Hapsburgs, pretty women, and neat ankles were going to last to eternity, and Freud naturally thought treatment could last as long. Unfortunately we don’t believe in eternity now, although they tell me the moment you’re atomized lasts a hell of a long time.’

  ‘Ella is no longer under a Freudian analyst,’ said Bernard.

  ‘I see,’ said Bill. ‘What about this shock treatment? The Russians use it extensively. I know they’re bastards, but they’re very keen on getting people back to work quickly, whatever’s wrong with them.’

  ‘Ella,’ said Bernard wryly, ‘is not a Stakhanovite.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit of the trouble?’ asked Bill. ‘I realize nerves are as real as hell, and I couldn’t feel more sorry for people in Ella’s place, but there is quite a lot to be said for pulling yourself together and all the old moral stuff.’

  ‘No,’ said Bernard, ‘nothing whatsoever.’ He was beginning to get very angry.

  Bill realized at last that he was being tactless. ‘Well, you know best,’ he said, ‘but I’m glad she’s your problem not mine.’

  It was a fatal remark. In Bernard’s present state of remorse about his wife, any reference to her which seemed to imply that she was a passive object in life rather than an active human being touched his conscience with red-hot irons.

  ‘Beyond the feet that Ella is your sister,’ he said angrily, ‘there has not, as far as I remember, ever been any occasion when you were called upon to show her any consideration. Please don’t trouble to do so now.’

  ‘There’s no need to throw my failure up in my face,’ was Bill’s almost conditional reply.

  ‘Your failure,’ said Bernard, ‘if by that you mean your material failure, has nothing whatever to do with it. If your material needs of the moment are troubling you, you know perfectly well that you have only to call upon either Ella or me.’

  As soon as he had said it, Bernard realized that it was quite indefensible, and, of more practical importance, it had probably made it impossible for Bill to ask for the loan which he presumably needed. Bernard was perfectly right, it had.

  After lunch, Bill went for a quick one to the local pub. The meal had been oppressive. Ella was disappearing into the distance again, and the fears that accompanied this readjustment made her at first silent, and then drove her upstairs to her bedroom. Elizabeth gave a bright, strained account of her morning’s shopping. Bernard said little, and then announced his intention of going that evening to the flat in London. Bill attempted a monologue on religion and its importance to the least religious men when in ‘tight corners’. ‘I suppose you can explain it by saying that they reconstruct their nurses, or Proust’s grandmother or whatever you like, but I don’t know that it gets you very far. The fact remains that over and over again, men who’ve completely forgotten about Allah or Jahweh or Baal-Peor or the fierce old gentleman in a frock coat and whiskers that they worshipped at the little Bethel….’ Nobody listened to him.

  He would have liked to have acted on his injured pride and left at once. But the fact was that he himself was in a very ‘tight corner’, although he found no particular balm in thoughts of God. The little manicurist with whom he had been living for the last six months had walked out on him, and with her had gone her manicurist’s weekly wage, and now there was hell to pay at the lodgings. There was no audience Bill liked better at such times to restore his self-esteem than a pub audience. The audience he found was Ron.

  ‘You missed a good party all right last night,’ said Ron.

  There was nothing about Ron that appealed to Bill. One of his favourite saloon-bar topics was the advisability of reviving the ‘cat’ for young spivs. However, since the barmaid gave the response of a deaf mute, he put aside prejudice.

  ‘I certainly wouldn’t have said no. Our little family party was a dead loss. Are you troubled with a family?’

  ‘No,’ said Ron. He was uncertain of his approach, but his great virtue on such occasions was directness. ‘You’d like Mrs Curry,’ he said, and added, ‘she’d like you too.’

  ‘Wouldn’t stop on there now,’ Bill ignored Ron’s remarks in his eagerness to construct the story that would relieve his sense of humiliation, ‘but I’ve got to get a little question of money settled. Never have money dealings with your family. Simply a matter of their signing a document, and there’s hell to pay. Question of getting the money for a niece of ours, too, poor little kid. I’d do it myself and say damn to them, if I didn’t happen to be so bloody short….’ The audience was inessential now, for Bill was in his stride.

  Ron took very little notice of the long rambling story, but when Bill paused, he said, ‘You come and meet Mrs Curry. You’ll like her and she’ll like you. I dare say she could find what’s needed. She’s very good with gentlemen who’re temporarily embarrassed.’ Ron said the phrase without irony; he had learnt it in the course of his business.

  Bill knew something of Mrs Curry and could guess the rest. His resentment to Bernard, however, and his pressing need made him put caution aside. Interesting type to see, he began to think, Wife of Bath, humanity built on the large scale, big faults and probably big virtues too, if he knew men and women.

  Mrs Curry was in the garden, cutting lavender, when they arrived. ‘I’m delighted to meet you, Mr Pendlebury,’ she said. ‘Is your sister a little better?’ She did not wait for the answer. ‘
I live so quietly here, I hardly see any of my neighbours. But we’ve a loving village, though we don’t see much of each other. I’m afraid it would be much too quiet for you. Last night’s little party made a change, just a few boys and girls, you know, having a little fun. Nothing like London, I’m afraid. Do you like flowers, Mr Pendlebury?’

  Bill began to explain, that though he didn’t know the name of one flower from another, he had always…. But Mrs Curry did not believe in wasting time. She was used to approaching the question of loans for strangers. ‘You don’t want to waste your time with old people like us,’ she said to Ron. ‘Shall we go in and have our little chat, Mr Pendlebury? I’ve got a bottle of fine old liqueur whisky. We’ll have a tiny nip while we talk about your little business, and you can tell me whether it’s any good.’

  *

  Before Bernard left for London, he wrote a letter of apology to his brother-in-law, enclosing a cheque for £50. Bill felt quite happy when he got back. Mrs Curry had been most understanding; as she said, she didn’t know him very well, but she wasn’t being as unbusinesslike as she probably seemed, because Mr Sands the novelist was good enough security for anyone. With Bernard’s cheque in his pocket as well, Bill felt quite restored. A smaller man, he decided, would pay Mrs Curry back immediately, but he was big enough to know the importance of courage and capital in gambling. It was only amateurs who met the odds against them with too little of the ready; professional punters now … Bill had a great weakness for horses and an even greater idea of his capacity as a professional punter. He’d put a couple of ponies on a good thing he knew of, and keep the other fifty in reserve in case the old girl turned nasty. Come to think of it, the old girl’s terms were both short and steep. He’d pay her off as soon as the race was over. Wouldn’t do for the old boy to have a stink down here, and it could be a very nasty stink.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Progressive Games

  BERNARD looked down from the window of the flat on to Bloomsbury lying embalmed in its Sunday death. The rows of scarlet and lemon dahlias, the heliotrope carefully tended, and the little green chairs carefully painted for Festival visitors decorated its stillness with a strange air of smartness – embalmed in best Sunday clothes, no doubt, to accord with the conventions of American visitors. From the ninth floor the sordid remnants of Saturday lost the squalor of greasy paper, refuse ends, dirt, and spit which they showed to the pedestrian and merged into a general impression of dust and litter. The district was dead but recently, and these seemed the tag ends of life’s encumbrance. But already the corpse was stirring into maggoty life – a paper-man distributing the sheets that, crumpled and tired-looking, would add to the stuffy Sunday muddle of bed-sitting rooms and lounges; knots of earnest foreign tourists collected for an ‘early start’ on hotel steps; disconsolate provincial families already straggling and scratchy at the day before them; a respectable nineteenth-century couple, who Bernard hoped might be Irvingites bent on worship in Gordon Square.

  The image of trickling, crawling death satisfied Bernard, after the terrors and claustrophobia of the night’s mingled nightmares and insomnia. He sat in his dressing-gown, drinking orange juice at the kitchen table. The model kitchen had the white hygiene of an operating room. But as he peered into the still-darkened sitting-room, at the dim outlines of sofas, innumerable lamps and endless rows of books, he determined that he would enclose himself here until he had drawn on his reserves of courage and calm.

  Almost immediately, the telephone rang. For a moment he thought of disregarding it, then the fears of obsessive affection broke down his resolve. He caught his breath for a second, and felt a slight pain round the heart as he heard Eric’s voice: ‘Bernie? I’m speaking from a call-box. There’s rather a thing going on at home.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Bernard, anxious not to betray his disproportionate anxiety.

  ‘It’s about the room. There’s suddenly a great thing about my not taking it.’

  ‘I see. Why, Eric? Last week you said your mother was so sensible about it.’

  ‘Oh, Mimi’s all right. She’s wonderful as always. But Alan’s been home and he’s on about her being left alone. I suppose it is rather awful….’ Eric’s voice trailed away.

  Bernard tried to sound neither angry nor stern, simply commonsensical. ‘Eric, we’ve discussed all that. Firstly, Esher isn’t far away. Secondly, no one wants to live in their own right more than your mother.’ This, of which Bernard was extremely sceptical, was his court card, so he played it with chosen casualness. ‘Thirdly, you can’t study properly at home. Fourthly, you yourself want a room, and that shows you need it.’ Had it not been on the telephone he would have put in a plea for his own wishes. It was lovely having Eric to stay at the flat, but with Terence, his own family and Eric’s to consider, it was also difficult.

  ‘Yes,’ said Eric, ‘don’t be cross. I’m going to stick to it. Only it is difficult, really it is. Alan keeps on about the expense.’

  ‘The expense? I thought that was all settled. We agreed that it was much better to tell your family.’

  ‘Oh! I have,’ said Eric. ‘Mimi’s so sensible about it. But Alan doesn’t like it a bit.’

  ‘I see,’ said Bernard in a depressed voice.

  ‘Oh, not like that,’ giggled Eric. ‘Alan wouldn’t think of that in a hundred years. You wait till you see him. No, it’s just that he thinks it’s all wrong not to be depending on yourself. I suppose he’s right really.’

  ‘Of course he isn’t. Eric, really! All that too we’ve gone into at very great length.’

  ‘Oh! I know. You’re absolutely right. It’s only that Alan makes me go all middle-class.’

  ‘Well, don’t.’

  ‘Bernie, you aren’t being very helpful. It really is awfully difficult down here.’

  ‘Does all this mean you can’t come to the Arts tonight?’

  ‘No, of course not, Bernie.’ Eric’s voice became plaintive. ‘That’s all that matters to you – this evening and tomorrow evening. But when it’s something important like the room, you don’t want to help.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m very tired. Of course I want to help very much. What can I do? Would it help if I saw your brother?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course it would. That’s what I’ve been trying to get you to say. I’d have got you to do so in half a minute, if I’d been with you. Oh! I do hate the telephone. Can you come down to lunch?’

  It was this mood of naive and happy self-revelation in Eric that most delighted Bernard. He replied, with genuine disappointment, ‘Well, not exactly. I’ve got to lunch with my sister, and she’s very touchy about being put off.’

  ‘Oh,’ Eric never liked the immediate impact of a negative. After a pause, he recovered and said, ‘Well, it’s sweet of you to say you’ll come, anyway. When will you?’

  ‘I’ll come straight on from Isobel’s. Say, tea-time – and then you can come back with me.’

  ‘Oh! that’s wonderful. I know Alan will fall for you.’

  ‘Well, I can’t say what I think about that until I’ve seen him.’

  ‘Oh, not like that,’ giggled Eric, ‘at least I shouldn’t think so. I suppose he might. But it wouldn’t be a very good idea, I don’t think. I must fly back now. Bobbie’s used every lamp post within miles and he looks furious at waiting. I hate dogs, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bernard.

  ‘Mimi will be pleased to see you. She loves you.’

  Bernard reserved his views on this, as he replaced the receiver.

  *

  Isobel Sands sat at her walnut escritoire. Three sorts of ink – blue, red, and green – were carefully arrayed before her. The examination papers – folios – and her own crib notes – octavo – were each in neat separate piles, weighted down with paper weights. When she had read through a page of examinee’s answers she placed it carefully face downwards on a separate pile. After she had read completely the answers of any one candidate, she ticked off his or her name on a printed
list at her side. She kept a silver box of cigarettes, a silver match box and a yellow and blue Hausmalerei jug of coffee within reach. She put two small green ticks against A. Rodham’s remark that in the last resort Manfred and Childe Harolde must be valued more for their place in the great continental Byron legend than for their intrinsic worth as literature; but against the same candidate’s statement that in Prometheus Unbound Shelley attacked through God the cruelty of man’s impotence before the Natural Order, she wrote in a small, neat hand, ‘Does not the key lie more in S.’ s own psychology, e.g. the father image?’

  She was profoundly bored, not so much with the candidates’ answers, which usually corresponded to the authorities – any divergence she attributed to imperfect understanding rather than original thought – but with the subject itself. As a professor of English Literature she had no doubt that the whole field lay within her control – not, she regretted, the more exact field of Anglo-Saxon studies which, to her disappointment, she had been foolishly persuaded to leave off after her tripos – but modern literature from Sir Thomas Wyatt, and, in particular, of course, her special study: The Romantic Movement. Though she never quite admitted it even to herself, she had ceased to respond to any work of literature soon after she began her academical career. She had got her First partly through devoted application, partly through an emotional absorption in poetry which had faded with her youth. Her doctorate thesis on ‘Natural Images in Lake Poetry’ had been completed largely through application alone. She had for many years re-read at intervals the major works of English literature in order to come to them with a fresh eye, but each year of such re-reading had brought less and less fresh ideas to her, and, when her little library was not available during the evacuation of the first years of the War, she had happily relinquished so unrewarding a labour, never to return to it. She read such new works of criticism as appeared and occasionally marked passages for inclusion in her lectures. Otherwise her reading was confined to journalistic works on politics or history that had a ‘left’ flavour. In her opinion there were two possible approaches to English literature: exact, almost numerical examination of verse structure and images, and the detailing of dates of birth, college entrances, or changes of address of authors – this approach she preferred for students unless, as was very rare, they were ‘particularly brilliant’ – or a philosophical approach, which suggested the underlying meaning of literature by the impressionistic use of a good deal of Hegelian terminology and a lot of figures of speech. Books with this approach she called ‘important’. Few ‘important’ works of criticism appeared nowadays, though she had been very hopeful about Wilson Knight, until she found some concrete statements in his work; these, she felt, were ‘rather shallow’. Of her own published works, a critical edition of the text of Lamia followed the first approach; ‘The Essential Sublimity’ and ‘Glittering Eye – An Analysis of Narrative Symbol in English poetry’, the second. At sixty, she usually said that literature now came second to life with her.