Hemlock and After

by Angus Wilson

  ‘I’m not going to let you get away with it,’ said Bernard. He felt more and more like the Rector of Stiffkey. ‘Will you dine with me?’

  ‘Sorry,’ answered Terence, ‘as your dear Elizabeth would say, “No can do.” You must do something about that girl, Bernard. I’m invited to Violet Blackett’s and it’s the first time she’s condescended.’

  As they went down the very steep stairs from Terence’s converted Queen’s Gate, fourth-floor flat, Bernard said, ‘Please, Terence, don’t refuse to listen. Meet me later.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ said Terence. ‘All right, I’ll ring you.’

  ‘I shan’t be in this evening,’ said Bernard.

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ Terence grumbled. ‘I’m not going to say I’ll come round, because I may not feel like it, and I won’t say come here, because I may not want that either. I know,’ he laughed, ‘I’ll meet you at Leicester Square at about half-past eleven. You can save a couple of poor boys from fatal steps while you’re waiting.’

  Bernard refused to be daunted. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘I’ll be opposite the Empire.’

  *

  ‘We used to look very nice then, didn’t we, Charles?’ said Evelyn Ramage, as she showed the old snapshots to a group of gilded young men – the less young being the more gilded.

  ‘My dear Evelyn, you look if anything more beautiful now,’ answered Charles Murley, and he bent his long distinguished body to kiss her lips. It was a very long bend, for Evelyn was a very tiny woman.

  ‘Don’t advertise the loss of your faculties, Charles,’ said Evelyn, and she laughed with a hard, brutal-sounding note that showed nervousness and pleasure. ‘I looked the wizened old woman I am.’

  Charles raised his head in the air, the nostrils of his aquiline nose were dilating; he looked very like a camel. ‘Nonsense, sweetie,’ he said in that strange, blurted, stuttering speech which marks so many an ageing ex-beau of the nineteen-twenties; ‘you were and are divine.’ Some of the gilded young men took it up. ‘Pretty as a picture, dear,’ ‘Quite my most adored woman,’ ‘On from triumph to triumph, duckie, and you know it.’ Charles looked away in disgust. He found it annoying enough that Evelyn should surround herself with ephebi, but that they should associate themselves with his long traditional love-making with her was intolerable. Evelyn, perhaps, was no longer the urchin who seemed to have been running in and out of the legs of his love life since he came down from Oxford in 1922, but the appeal of her little, painted clown’s face with the ridiculous pencilled eyebrows and high cheekbones was still quite sufficient to make him feel a handsome young aesthete again – a decorative young man, but always a womanizer. The perfunctory, ill-concealed patronage of the compliments of these inadequate second-rate young men – privately he thought all homosexuals, except one or two very old friends, inadequate and second-rate, though civilized tolerance forbade him to say so – seemed as much an affront to his own famous reputation as a Don Juan as it was to Evelyn’s unusual looks. That she seemed so infatuated with these ninnies as to see nothing disrespectful in their treatment of her was the worst feature. It suggested to him that like so many of his contemporaries – Harry Norton a drunkard, Alice Lowndes always running after bruisers, poor old Janie shut up in her flat with her dark glasses, and Tim Rourke hanging about public lavatories – she was slipping downhill. He alone, of course, had a proper stable career at the Treasury and he smiled to think how much he had once envied them their freedom. Nevertheless, even if he was himself in no danger of slipping, his memories and his real affections lay with these friends, and Evelyn’s decline seemed to signpost the lonely road ahead.

  When Bernard and Terence appeared in the doorway, Charles turned aside to examine some new records of Evelyn’s; Bernard’s behaviour he felt as the worst blow of all. Terence, however, was soon in chattering conversation with two or three of his contemporaries, and Charles felt able to greet his old friend. ‘Bernard,’ he spluttered, ‘so you got the money out of us after all.’

  ‘An indecently small part of what I asked,’ Bernard replied. ‘I think perhaps of all the revolting bodies of Barnacle Tites to whom I’ve had to grovel this summer, the Treasury was the most degrading. Do you know a man called Crumplewheat or Cripple-witch or something? He seemed to regard any literary enterprise as a sort of polite fiction for a brothel. At first he looked down his nose as though I’d said a dirty word in church, and in the end he got very matey in a sort of “Do you know this one, old man” kind of way, until I thought he was going to pull out dirty postcards from the drawer of his office desk. It was all because I mentioned the word poetry.’

  ‘Stephen Copperwheat,’ laughed Charles, ‘you do him a tremendous injustice. He knows a phenomenal amount about the Augustans, as a matter of fact.’ One of the minority of civil servants outside the Foreign Service to have a brilliant ‘civilized’ private life, Charles loved nothing better than to interpret the two halves of his life to each other.

  ‘Thank you for your subscription, by the way,’ said Bernard. ‘You’ll come to the official opening next week?’

  ‘I simply don’t know whether I can get away, but I long to hear more details of the great new Pantisocracy, or should I say the new Little Gidding?’ Their chances of further conversation, however, were prevented by Evelyn’s bearing down upon them with Terence in tow.

  ‘Bernard, my dear,’ she said, ‘you can’t let him go and live at Sherman’s. The poor lamb’ll be marked for life. And,’ she said, turning to Terence, ‘not any the more happily because it’ll be in unshowable places.’ Evelyn always feared that her young men would not remain faithful unless she showed herself fully conversant with the inner details of their private lives. It was a mistaken assumption.

  ‘I’m doing my best, Evelyn,’ said Bernard. He did not wish to pursue the topic in front of Charles. ‘You know Terence Lambert, don’t you, Charles?’ he said.

  Charles made an effort for Bernard’s sake, so: ‘Yes, how are you? I liked your cover for that West African book.’

  Terence was flattered. Though he had started as the least of Evelyn’s young men, whom many even of the homosexual set thought embarrassing to be seen with, he was by now in a position to establish himself as an accepted member of the group of Evelyn’s older, normal friends. Most of the butterfly spivs of the world from which Terence was successfully graduating would have passed Charles Murley over as a dreary bore, but Terence had profited by his intimacy with Bernard to gauge exactly the value of these older friends of Evelyn’s. He never, for example, bothered about Gordon Raikes, of whom most of his set stood in awe, impressed by a name they knew on the Third or The Critics, but he was keenly desirous of propitiating Charles, whom he knew to be an old stalwart and a dispenser of judgements which counted in the inner ring of the literary world, though his name was unknown beyond it.

  ‘If it hadn’t been such a ghastly book,’ he said. That judgement at least must be safe, he thought.

  ‘I liked it.’ Charles’s stutter was brusque.

  Terence could not have known that the author, now long settled in Jamaica, had once been a regular customer both at the ‘Basque’ and at the ‘Eiffel Tower’.

  ‘Desmond’s written this book about the West Indies, you know, Bernard,’ said Charles.

  ‘No,’ said Bernard, ‘I’ve been out of real life this last two months with all this nonsense. I must read it. One never thought Desmond would write, but if he did, one knew it would be good.’ With Charles, both Evelyn and Bernard slipped back easily into old loyalties and old phraseology.

  ‘Not popular, apparently, with the younger generation,’ Charles said.

  ‘Oh, but Terence, you’d have loved Desmond,’ said Evelyn. ‘I think he was the funniest man I ever knew.’

  ‘What did he do?’ said Terence who was rattled and ready to make gaffes.

  Bernard joined Charles and Evelyn in laughter.

  ‘Darling,’ giggled Evelyn, ‘Desmond lived – I know, Charles, but really wh
en people go so far away, I mean they might as well be, you know – Desmond lived, as I was saying, long before people began doing all the time.’

  Charles looked at his watch. ‘Must fly, sweetie,’ he said, kissing Evelyn in turn upon both cheeks. ‘Bernard,’ he added abruptly, ‘could you dine with me late at the Club, say a quarter to nine?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bernard, ‘I can think of nothing I should like better, Charles.’

  With the departure of Charles, Bernard’s company was in demand by other of Evelyn’s old friends. Though he had, in fact not entered this twenties circle until 1928 or so, when its peak was already passed, he and Ella had soon become intimates of Charles, Evelyn, and a number of others, and with the diminution of the circle he was now regarded as one of its earliest members. It was, in fact, a circle which stood him in far better stead with his younger friends than the dowdy remnants of the nineteen-thirties progressive world of which he had been a far more integral unit. Terence, in particular, had delighted in Bernard’s place in this ‘amusing’ group of people, whose intricate web of personal values and esoteric morality were not only important to him as code groups to the cypher of social success, but absorbing also as a complicated puzzle on which to employ his wit. He had used his native plausibility and address to forward himself with them with considerable success. It was, therefore, all the more painful to him when Bernard, as today, after exchanging a few intimate civilities – a mixture of such apparent incompatibilities was the accepted hallmark of conversation among the twenties survivors – slipped away to join the languorous but staccato gossip of the golden spiv group. Like many of the things which teased Terence in Bernard’s behaviour, he attributed his refusal to ignore the ‘camp’ end of the room to sentimentalism. He supposed that since Bernard knew many of these ‘beautiful’ young men to depend upon their wits and their social success to maintain themselves, he thought himself obliged to lend them his support as a brother homosexual. Having himself at last, after great struggle, almost succeeded in leaving the golden spiv world behind, Terence did not realize that it still possessed great attractions for so comparative a newcomer as Bernard. There was first, of course, the simple attraction of youth, no matter how over-advertised or how tarnished. There was also a special interest for Bernard in this particular homosexual borderland between respectability and loucherie during his present preoccupation with the nature of evil. He found in these young adventurers a state of moral anaemia which he never tired of trying to diagnose. They were hard and calculating yet often without enough energy to pursue their calculations. They made among themselves small groups of intimates to provide each other protection against the toughness of society which their own climbing invited. Yet they were so constantly measuring the degree of affection which they could dispense to these chosen intimates without risking the charge of hiding conventionally and therefore ludicrously warm hearts beneath their tarty exteriors, that their deepest intimacies were themselves only shells. They pursued their complicated ambitions largely from a laziness which forbade less energetic ones. If the extremely intricate web of attenuated, self-conscious personal relationships which made up their lives had been spun in any meaningful shape, it would have required a moral system, however Machiavellian, whose working out would have been far beyond either their mental powers or the persistence of their concentration. They spun the web, in fact, with elaborate, meaningless, day-to-day threads, which fascinated Bernard by their complete lack of moral shape and their continuous personal, and therefore moral, consequences. Above all, however, Bernard asserted his powers to bridge the gap between the two ends of Evelyn’s salon out of affection for her. Completely though she assumed or often actually was in total ignorance of this gap, it grew yearly and with each year the ‘queer’, more louche, more cosmopolitan element drove out, like the tough tree rats whose grace disguises them as grey squirrels, the older, more effete, more established, more indigenous, fauna. If it lasted a few years longer, thought Bernard, Terence would be scuttling over the side with the rest of the old order; he himself would remain to make havoc with the destructive invaders. It was after all only a question of which kind of rat you preferred to be, he decided bitterly.

  Terence had hoped that Bernard would have left before Sherman arrived to collect him, but his hopes were deceived. Sherman, it is true, put in his appearance at the last moment. He would never have gone to Evelyn’s but in pursuit of Terence. If the has-beens, as he thought of the older group, had been theatrical he might have enjoyed a little corpse-baiting; as for the young men, in general, the stage world offered him sport enough; but, until Terence was under lock and key, he continued to make his way with considerable ill grace to Middleton Square, whose lovely Georgian architecture, Evelyn always hoped, disguised her sinking income. He thought with a certain relish of the retribution which these tedious journeys laid up for Terence.

  ‘Darling,’ he greeted Evelyn, ‘the Call of the Wilds. Here you are, dear, on your lone prairee, with Kensal Rise or Highgate or somewhere nice and handy for a really deep burial. How you do round up the same little dogies, dear, too! But not, Bernard, as one might have thought from your last night’s aspect, the last round-up.’

  Terence separated himself from an important ‘catch’ to remove Sherman before harm was done – ‘If you really could let me see those Firbank letters. On Tuesday? No, I should adore it.’ He smiled good-bye and rushed across the room.

  Evelyn was rather self-consciously engaging the company, while Sherman, his pink face unusually flushed, was gesticulating to Bernard. ‘Really, my dear,’ he was saying, ‘fun’s fun, and I like mine feelthy, but you can’t really suppose I would have dished the dirt if I’d guessed.’

  ‘You would and did,’ said Bernard, smiling at Sherman’s discomfiture.

  ‘Now, now,’ said Terence, ‘tempers. Bernard, my dear, what have you been doing to Sherman to make him blush?’

  ‘He asked Evelyn after Elizabeth,’ said Bernard, ‘and I was saying what a pleasant afternoon she’d had repeating to me all his little stories about you and me.’ He felt delighted at presenting Terence with the story so opportunely: how wise he had been not to use it earlier that afternoon.

  ‘Of course I had no idea who she was,’ said Sherman.

  ‘Do we have to have this beastly little melodrama?’ asked Terence, his lips set in anger. ‘I shall make excuses for you at Violet’s, Sherman. Just for tonight I’d like a little air that isn’t straight from the sewer. See you later tonight, Bernard.’ He kissed Evelyn and left the room, pursued by an expostulating Sherman.

  *

  ‘You fuss too much about power, Bernard,’ said Charles Murley, leaning forward on the slippery horse-hair armchair and reaching for his whisky. ‘We’ve known Tim Murdoch and Bobbie and old Bartlett for years, both of us. Bobbie’s pretty poisonous, God knows, and Bartlett’s a fool, but they aren’t any different, just because they’ve got comfortable rooms at the House and at Trinity.’ His speech after the relaxation of a good dinner was less stuttering, more like the drawl of his youth. ‘The same, after all, is true of Copperwheat. I knew him when he came straight from Liverpool. I respect him as much now as then, and no more. They and their masters aren’t quite the same as they were a hundred or so years ago.’ He waved his cigar at the portraits of Palmerston, Grey, Durham, Melbourne. ‘Like the rest of us, they see bogies in the night. Of course those chaps did in their youth with Bonaparte, but I never believe they really did in’ 48. In any case the bogies weren’t quite so real.’ He pointed at a bust of Haldane. ‘That’s the first one that saw them properly as we do. Good man, that. But they’ve had to be tougher since then, and that probably does make them a bit more frightened, a bit nastier, a bit more ready to pinch the secretary where it hurts. Yes, I’ll grant a slight inclination to misuse power, and it disgusts me. But what you seem to get so excited about appears to me the simple and proper use of authority. Naturally they were cautious of a scheme like yours, they have to look after l
arge sums of public money or college funds. If the idea looks like succeeding in a year’s time, they’ll see that it goes on succeeding, but they can’t take risks. I really can’t see why you should expect them to.’

  ‘I suppose I’m naturally anarchic,’ said Bernard with a certain satisfaction. ‘I’m not particularly happy with those in authority, although I get on with them all right. And I don’t think they like me, really. It gets worse rather than better as I grow older.’

  Charles was about to remark on the penalties of second-rate aberrations in middle life, but he checked himself. ‘You lecture them too much,’ he said laughing. ‘You’ve never stopped being a school teacher, Bernard, and you try to teach these people what they know perfectly well but prefer to forget.’

  ‘It’s a good thing somebody is honest with them who’s in a position to be so.’

  Charles felt himself getting angry. ‘I rather dislike all that cant about honesty, ‘he said.’ That’s what I can’t stand about Gide. You people want the pleasures of authority without any of its penalties.’ He sat back in his chair for a moment. ‘How’s Ella?’ he asked. ‘I’d like to run down and see her one day. Is that a thing she’d like?’

  ‘I’m sure she would,’ answered Bernard. ‘Some days, of course, she’s still very unwell. Intensely frightened and unhappy, you know. But in the main she’s hideously bored, I’m afraid.’

  Charles smiled. ‘It sounds like a simple diagnosis of life today. Mine at any rate,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘With authority to exercise?’ asked Bernard.

  ‘Yes, even with authority,’ said Charles. ‘It might be all right in America. But here we can’t do anything. We can only sit back on our dignity and our longer experience and say, “We know better”, “Well well, we know” or “We could an’ if we would”. It’s probably more comfortable really, because bloody little can be done about most of it anyway. Of course, that’s not perfectly true,’ he added. He did not care for defeatist talk, especially before Bernard. ‘A lot has been done. But our part’s inevitably rather small. I have my other interests, of course. Did I tell you I’d started on my work on Seurat again? I went over to Paris this spring. A dreadful little man called Langlois from Nancy has got hold of those drawings they found and is making a fearful mess of the attributions. It could be frightfully interesting, but one’s kept so infernally busy, and, then again, once you’re in on what’s happening, it’s difficult to cut loose.’