Hemlock and After

by Angus Wilson

  To his pleasure, his wife considered for a moment before she answered. She found such an idea difficult to fit into her daily existence of ordering and constructing.

  ‘No,’ she answered at last, ‘I don’t think so, Bernard. Gardening always seems to mean keeping things alive and getting them to grow. Perhaps I’m not ruthless enough.’

  ‘With weeds?’ he asked in his old Socratic quizzical manner.

  ‘Well, only because they stop the right things from growing.’

  ‘You’re very sure about the right things,’ he commented.

  Ella laughed. ‘Well, yes,’ she answered, ‘I suppose I am. But I don’t follow quite blindly, you know. Some flowers are absolutely foul. Double begonias, for instance, or prize dahlias. Any of those fat, waxy things. But then I never have them in the garden.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Of course, it’s quite true that I did all I could to keep that wretched euphorbia going,’ she added, ‘but I was really awfully pleased when it died.’

  Bernard made a decision. ‘Don’t you ever get a kick when you forget to water those precious gentians of yours and they die?’ he asked.

  Ella looked surprised. ‘I never do forget,’ she said. ‘It’s far too difficult to get them to grow at all in this wretched garden.

  ‘Bernard sighed.’ Yes,’ he said, ‘yours may not be the conventional approach, but it is, after all, the proper exercise of authority.’ Behind his open book he shrank into his chair, as though determined to emphasize his remoteness from her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Life-loving Ladies

  CELIA CRADDOCK preserved most of her old evening dresses of brocade, of real lace, or of the sort of velvet you don’t see now. She seldom wore them, indeed she seldom had occasion to do so. On Eric’s birthday, she put on the rose and silver brocade, because he had always loved it so as a child. If she suddenly felt that life was very good, a mood that came upon her quite genuinely but which she soon theatricalized out of reality, she would wear the grey-blue watered silk or the crimson velvet. Increasingly the dresses had become objects by which she could revive memories – memories that grew more sensitive, more nostalgic, more literary as time passed – dwell a little sadly on the lost hopes of the past, and end with a little hard core of bitterness about the present. She did not take them down from the hangers deliberately; but, going to her bedroom on some other errand, she would look at them, touch, stroke them, and eventually would find herself seated on the floor, surrounded by the billowing pools of rich material. Eric, too often, on such occasions would find her in tears. ‘Mimi darling, don’t,’ he would cry; and then, raising her lovely eyes so that the light would catch her tears and each would shine like a raindrop in sunshine, Mrs Craddock would smile and say, ‘No, Eric, don’t feel sad for me. They’re happy tears, dear, the nicest kind, that lie very near to laughter.’ Alan had always been too manly a child to concern himself with her clothes, nor would she have wished it otherwise. Like his father, he had that masculine blindness to what she wore, that made the occasional gruff compliment so strangely important to a woman when it came. But Eric had always been different – a funny little boy who knew everything she wore, shared her excitement over new dresses, touched and caressed the materials as she did. It had made them – sometimes she felt wrongly, but a lonely woman cannot always bear in mind these psychological dangers – such close companions when he was a child: two strange children, almost, in love with beauty. In these last years, it was true, Eric had begun to forget her dresses in a passionate interest in his own untidy clothes – an interest that somehow irritated her; it was, she felt, a little unmanly, but no doubt only a passing phase. Nevertheless it almost seemed that tears were needed before Eric’s old love could be aroused.

  On this hot June afternoon, the pretty rose-coloured bedroom, with its lovely pieces of old silver reflecting the sunlight here and there, seemed almost too enclosed, too stifling, for the recapture of the customary mood. Sweat mingled with Mrs Craddock’s joyful tears, Eric’s mood of gay solicitude was broken by the mopping movements of his handkerchief; it was as though they were really wearing the greasepaint for which the scene might well have called.

  Nevertheless, ‘the nicest kind, that lie very near to laughter,’ she said as usual and jumping to her feet. ‘Oh how wonderful it is to be alive, Eric,’ she cried. ‘Don’t ever lose the power to feel that.’

  Her son’s histrionic imagination was soon awakened to her call. ‘I shan’t, Mimi, I shan’t,’ he said, measuring a flowered brocade dress against her; ‘that was the dress, I knew it was,’ he cried, ‘the one you wore when you went to see Massine in Tricorne arid I cried because I was too small to go with you, and you gave me that jade pig that had lost one eye.’

  Mrs Craddock folded the dress and put it on the little white chair with the embroidered seat. ‘Yes,’ she said sadly, and then, ‘but your happiness mustn’t always look backwards, darling. Too many people are like that. They only believe in joy when it’s over.’

  ‘That’s what Bernie says,’ Eric remarked. ‘But I don’t think I could feel that. Perhaps it’s an easy trap when you’re old, but not when you’re young. In any case,’ he added, anxious to efface this impression, ‘how could I live in the past when you and Bernie are so good to me all the time?’

  Celia Craddock walked over to the window and stared out at the garden. ‘Bernard Sands is a very good man,’ she said solemnly. ‘It is generous and typical of him that he should tell you to find your happiness in the present. Only people, I think, who know what great unhappiness means are capable of that advice.’ Eric made no comment; he begin to put the dresses away in the walnut wardrobe. ‘I hope your company will give him some of the compensation for life that it has given me,’ Celia said.

  ‘You speak as though I was going away from home for good,’ Eric remarked.

  Celia did not notice the interruption: ‘And less, perhaps, darling,’ she said, ‘of the disappointments.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I shall grow wings just because I spend the week-nights in London,’ Eric answered, ‘and in any case I’m going there to be on my own, not to take up Bernie’s very busy time.’

  Mrs Craddock sat down at the dressing-table and began to polish her nails – she never used varnish. ‘I think you’re very wise, darling,’ she said; ‘it doesn’t do, you know, to live other people’s lives. One finds oneself suddenly left behind, and then it isn’t always very easy.’ She turned and looked at her son. ‘I wonder how life will treat you,’ she said. ‘It isn’t going to be very much more in my hands, so that I can just sit back and wonder. You could follow a road that would make you a rather important kind of person. Oh! I don’t mean materially,’ she added hastily; ‘I’m afraid you’re far too like me to be a “success”. And you could …’ She broke off and stared into space. Eric said nothing.

  When Mrs Craddock spoke again, it was in a lively, interested voice. ‘I do wonder what sort of a wife Alan’s going to bring home one of these days, don’t you?’ she asked. ‘I shall probably make all the mistakes. Poor Gran! I shall never forget the first day Gerald took me to Cromwell Road. She tried so hard to like me, poor dear, and she was so careful to say the right thing. But she stared and stared at my skirts – they were just beginning to get really short you know, and I had a creation that I thought was everything that’s lovely, a hideous thing all beads and fringing – and I knew from the look in her eyes that we’d never really make it work. An American, you know, she could never quite forgive it. Poor darling! She was an incurable snob; she’d never got over marrying into service circles. In the Croydon world of 1900, you know, that must have been the height of ambition. At any rate, Alan’s wife, whoever she may be, won’t be able to feel that I’m anything grand or imposing. No, no!’ she laughed in gay diminuendo. ‘I’m afraid it’ll be moral snobbery I shall suffer from. Alan is sure to choose someone terribly good and serious – all child clinics and Peckham centres – who will disapprove terribly of my useless life. A
t any rate, he’ll have a supporter at last. How anyone so serious and good and straight ever got born to me, I don’t know. He ploughs such a lonely furrow. I’m afraid he’ll never know how much I’ve admired his courage. Because, you know, darling,’ she looked so deep and straight into Eric’s eyes, ‘it’s the ploughers of lonely furrows who get there, who matter, and, yes!’ she flung out her arm, ‘who suffer less in the end. I do hope, darling, that all you’ve got to give the world won’t be frittered away in side-tracks and bypaths. The normal inevitably seems so boring to the young and talented, but it is unfortunately in the end so rewarding. But let what will be, be.’

  Eric recognized that the housemaster’s talk on the facts of life, which he had so long anticipated, had at last arrived. ‘I think perhaps that one can live only as one is,’ he said, and then added, ‘at least that’s what Bernie says.’ Confronted at last with his mother’s spoken disapproval, he could not resist the refuge in others that he had always sworn to avoid.

  ‘Does he?’ said Celia. ‘He’s right of course if one can be sure what people are. I wonder though if it’s quite so easy to tell, especially with the young. Poor dear! how he must wish that it is so. Because, of course, if it’s not, he’s in for such a lot of terrible unhappiness. Youth can be very cruel, especially to those who’ve asked more of it than it can give.’

  Eric felt curiously elated by the sense of power which her analysis gave him, especially as he normally feared, with some reason, that it was he who would be left on the shelf. ‘I don’t think, Mimi, ‘he said,’ that I would wilfully hurt anybody.’ Curiously, the operas, the concerts, the opportunities for study and reading that London usually spelt for him had receded, leaving only a prospect of emotional recrimination and guilt, that was half alluring in its drama and half disgusting in its anticipated exhaustion.

  Celia walked over and kissed his forehead. ‘No, darling, I don’t think you would,’ she said. ‘If I seem to have thought so, it’s only because a side of me – a quite selfish side – will miss you terribly. When one gets older, it’s not very easy to keep one’s standards up, if there isn’t anybody about who matters enough to do it for.’ Mrs Craddock’s face twitched slightly as she said this. A horrible vision of the reality of what the words might mean pierced the drama with which, she had surrounded herself.

  ‘I shall always be here at week-ends,’ cried Eric, ‘and in the week, too, of course, if you want me particularly.’

  The surrender made his mother feel guilty. Was it, perhaps, only an audience for the tears near to laughter that she was demanding? ‘No, darling,’ she said, ‘it’s all settled. I wouldn’t have you give it up now for worlds. You need the opportunity it offers you – to see more of what’s worth seeing, to meet people, and,’ she smiled kindly, ‘to have less excuse for neglecting your studies.’

  Eric received the statement literally. ‘Oh! I wouldn’t give the idea up,’ he said; ‘it’s too important to me. There’s so much that we’ll both be able to get on with on our own, so much,’ he added, putting his arm round her waist, ‘that we’ll have to discuss on those week-ends you refuse to believe in.’

  Mrs Craddock never made rough, abrupt movements, but her waist seemed to shrink away from her son’s arm and her voice when she spoke was dead and flat. ‘May be,’ she said, ‘may be. We shall see. Shall we go out into the garden? This vie de boudoir is a trifle stifling.’

  They passed the magnolia tree, around whose base lay the last fallen petals, brown and cracked with the sun’s heat. Poor brown dried-up little Missie Magnolia! Where now is the tender young girl in her muslin ball-frock listening so shyly on the veranda to the distant spirituals of the happy, adoring coloured folk?

  The dear mulberry tree, so old, no one could say how old, seemed unlikely to bear fruit this year. One can fight and fight to keep a tradition, a way of living, going, and then, suddenly, why, one asks oneself; what for?

  And the Judas tree? Why! Mrs Craddock could hardly for-bear to cry out, ‘Look, Eric, look! The Judas tree!’

  Eric was unable to support the constrained silence any longer. ‘Come and look at the Bolshies,’ he cried. It was his mother’s own time-honoured name for the Muscovy ducks. They had chosen the poultry so carefully together; as Mrs Craddock said, ‘If I’m going to rear creatures for profit, at least I insist that they shall be decorative.’ And there they were, on the other side of the two beech trees, so decorative in their subtle colours and strange shapes that Eric could never see them without feeling gay – the flat, waddling Muscovy ducks in their white and green-black plumage, with their scarlet wattled beaks, the black glistening feathers of the Minorcas, shining with red, green, and gold lights all at once, the shimmering speckled Plymouth Rocks, and, above all, the absurd Silkies, white or grey-buff, with their frilly Victorian drawers and their fringes of soft, soap-suddy feathers.

  Mrs Craddock threw them a handful of scraps from the box that hung on a nail at the side of the fowl house door. She watched the frothy scurrying of feathers, the craning necks, the gobbling beaks; she watched, too, the delighted twists of her son’s willowy figure. ‘I can’t have it done here,’ she cried. ‘Dodd will have to take them to his own yard. I can’t have such a disgusting, messy business done here.’

  ‘Mimi!’ cried Eric in horror, ‘whatever do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you can’t suppose, darling, that I can look after them when you’re away.’

  ‘But Dodd will look after them. He’s coming twice a day on purpose. I’ve arranged to pay him specially.’

  Mrs Craddock smiled wearily. ‘I’m sorry, dear,’ she said, ‘but looking after the house will be just as much as I can manage. I can’t have the extra responsibility of worrying whether Dodd’s doing this or that for the fowls.’

  ‘But there won’t be any responsibility, Dodd has always fed them in the morning. It’s only a question of his coming in the evening too.’

  Mrs Craddock put her arm round her son’s waist, but it was now his turn to break away. ‘Oh dear! oh dear,’ she said, ‘you don’t like paying life’s price, do you? But I’m afraid you’ll find that there won’t always be an adoring mother to take the edge off the blows. It’s just one of the prices of growing up,’ she laughed on a loud, hard note. ‘You go to Bernard Sands and London, the Bolshies go to their heavenly home. Shall we call it all the massacre of innocence?’

  *

  Hubert Rose had to meet all sorts of people in the pursuit of his career. If it could not be said that they ever liked him, they always went from his company satisfied that they had acquitted themselves well with so clever, so rising a man. Only, perhaps, those who were so securely entrenched in their position that they did not conceive of any mischief being done them could afford to regard his cleverness and assurance with complete distaste. Other men, even though it might be they who were conferring favours or bestowing benefits, felt faintly grateful to him for allowing them to escape with their self-esteem comparatively undiminished. Hubert was always affable, yet always showed that he had sharp claws; his affability appeared so much greater when he did his associates the favour of keeping the claws sheathed. Though he could not entirely conceal his contempt for them, he made great play with his good fellows in not revealing it more. On the rare occasions when he flayed his victims, he did so in public as a general warning against mutiny.

  It was all the more surprising, then, when he turned on the junior partner of the principal contractors in Roddingham, the large South Midland industrial town to which Hubert’s affairs often took him. There could not have been less feeling of insubordination in the air. They had discussed during the morning a neat plan for flooding a small competitor, who had seemed recalcitrant about selling his business, with orders beyond the power of his commission. It had been a scheme close to everyone’s heart, and they had adjourned to the Metropole for drinks in a haze of bonhomie.

  ‘If things go on as they are,’ said the senior partner, ‘we ought to be in power by the spring. Wha
t do you feel about it, Rose? You always know what’s afoot.’

  Hubert took the compliment as his right. ‘Oh, my dear fellow,’ he said, putting a thumb into the pocket of his canary waistcoat, ‘I say what the Gallup Poll says, you know. What’s the use of all these marvellous scientific systems, if we aren’t going to believe’em. All the same, I wouldn’t be too optimistic. The great voice of the people can make itself heard in such damned silly ways.’ He implied a slight rebuke of the speaker’s facile optimism, yet somehow bestowed an encouraging pat for his loyalty in maintaining it.

  ‘Do you think you’ll put up yourself?’ asked the borough surveyor.

  ‘Simply can’t say, you know. Everything’s a bit in the melting pot. Wouldn’t mind having a bash, if the election wasn’t such an infernal bore.’

  ‘Question of a good agent, isn’t it?’ asked the senior partner.

  ‘Oh, we’ve got a first-rate man,’ said Hubert. ‘No, I simply meant all the answering of a lot of idiotic questions that have nothing to do with the issues at stake.’

  The junior partner, who always supplied the note of good-natured chaff, said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, think of all the fun you’ll have kissing the kiddies. That’s the thing to win the working woman’s heart.’

  It could not have been solely the somewhat antiquated conception of electioneering implied by the joke that annoyed Hubert so much.

  ‘Have you ever spoken to a working woman?’ he asked.

  The junior partner was understood to say that he had certainly intended no disrespect to a courageous body of women, immense sense of responsibility, greatest check on their menfolk in times of industrial unrest.

  ‘Most of that,’ said Hubert, ‘is cant. But whether it is or not, that sort of joke is peculiarly ill-judged at a moment when national unity is, to put it very mildly, a life-and-death matter.’ He replaced his glass on the bar counter. ‘Joe Chamberlain,’ he said, ‘did the Conservative Party a very doubtful service when he saddled us with the experience and integrity of the great English trading community.’