by Angus Wilson
Mrs Curry smiled. ‘Well, dear,’ she said, ‘you’ve got plenty to follow. But never mind, old Mother Curry’s always there to help. It’s a good thing you’ve fallen into the right hands, you old baby. Later on, dear, maybe you’ll be able to help me in some of my little business troubles. It’s often very helpful to have a gentleman at one’s side, and one with such a lot of book learning too. ‘She turned to Ron.’ We don’t have to have any secrets from Mr Pendlebury, dear, he wouldn’t want to upset me, I know.’ She went to the sideboard for the whisky decanter, but before she had opened the cupboard door, it came upon her. She sat quite still on a chair, with her eyes closed, looking like a huge and obscene parrot, and let them pass – Bill, and Ron, and Hubert Rose, and Elsie Black and her Mummy, and a long line of others. What, will the line stretch on to crack o’ doom? All the love-starved and the needy, and all on bended knee.
CHAPTER THREE
Up at the Hall
THE Thursday on which Vardon Hall was officially opened proved to be the hottest day of the year in the South of England. Indeed the temperature recording at midday was higher than that for any of the previous ten years. Already at seven when Mrs Curry, who always rose early, looked out of her bedroom window, the heavy white heat mist was subsiding and the cattle were tossing and twitching against the assault of the summer flies. As she stood by the open window, drawing in great draughts of the morning air, Mrs Curry closed her eyes in ecstasy at the prospect of fun offered by such superb weather on so interesting a day.
Nobody afterwards could say exactly why everything got so out of hand as it did, though there were many who claimed some premonition of disaster. Mrs Craddock, for example, who habitually spent the morning hours in her bedroom with pots of tea and Fortt’s Bath Olivers and never came downstairs until eleven, declared that she had only left her bedroom under protest; though Eric, looking back to the morning’s events, was inclined to think that Mimi’s disinclination to make the early start necessary for their attendance at the ceremony had been the result of a lassitude induced in the whole family by the stifling, moist atmosphere of their home which, on such a morning, was like some cooling crater of primeval times. Mrs Rankine, too, was witness to a more local sense of unease. ‘Vardon,’ she told her husband at breakfast, ‘has so many moods for those who know it well. But I have never known it so angry. It’s as though, darling, something terribly primitive in the place has not been appeased.’ Her husband remembered her premonition afterwards, and told a group at the golf club that he ought to have known Stella well enough by now to have taken notice of what she said. It was not really clear what he could have done; indeed a less naïve person than Ralph Rankine, who had known Stella Rankine so well, would have remembered the innumerable occasions on which, possessed by Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Ramsey, and Mrs Ambrose all at once, she had been seized by an awareness of evil even more striking than this. Bill Pendlebury, too, with his mind so full of the Great Mother, was impressed by the challenge of some pretty deep forces when he awoke at ten; indeed he refused to meet the challenge and returned to sleep until midday. Bill, however, had both a bad hangover and the remembrance of his new financial anxieties to urge him from the day’s bright sunlight.
Of course, the general crumbling of good manners and lifting of emotional lids, which seemed to beset the visitors to Vardon Hall – both local people and those from afar – towards the end of the afternoon’s ceremony, can easily be explained by the cumulative effect of a long, hot afternoon of speeches and standing, and fractious children. This general peevishness was certainly not assisted, as will be seen, by the chaotic inadequacy of the arrangements for refreshments and the disorder due to the presence of so many builders and workmen. The primitive state of the reconstruction operations alone was a great shock to many who had expected a running organization, with tame poets and artists, to spring full grown before their eyes. Exhaustion and disappointment undoubtedly accounted for many of the little scenes and rows which spread like heath fire through the crowd after four o’clock, not only illuminating the central figures of the ceremony in a lurid glow, but lighting many a fierce little family feud that had seemed dead driftwood the day before.
Nevertheless, though the situation deteriorated as the afternoon wore on, the premonition-mongers were not wholly without justification. There was a general sense of strain, of emotional conflict, and of hostility anxious for justification among a large number of the visitors from the very start of the afternoon. It was unfortunate, of course, that the morning papers should have carried news of one of those periodic worsenings of the world situation, which, however familiar, necessarily crack the uneasy paste of hope and optimism of which so much confidence is compounded, and destroy the overglaze of social manner. The confluence of world crisis and lovely weather, in particular, threw into sinister highlight the sense of individual impotence, as though both personal happiness and personal disaster burst unannounced from outside, like the fair promises and curses of the Mosaic Jehovah.
Isobel Sands, in particular, was almost hysterical over the news after she had read the auguries often leading daily papers in the train to Vardon. For her companion, Louie Randall, of course, the possibility of playing Cassandra among the heedless crowd – for so she imagined all bourgeois gatherings – was not only a dialectical duty but a rôle, prophesying atomic disaster as threatening to herself as others, which peculiarly satisfied her. Nor were the non-political untouched by the headlines. Terence Lambert, for example, who rigidly eschewed all reading of the news, was especially susceptible to political crises which spread beyond the newspapers into general conversation; his intense, solipsistic world of personal ambition was broken in a moment by the chance overheard remark of a carriage companion, and, behind the facade of his usual competent social manner, he was intent all the afternoon on securing confirmation or denial of his fears from one of the many celebrated people ‘in the know’ who were present at the ceremony.
But beyond all the maleficent effects of chance – of burning sun, cold war, absence of tea and sandwiches, ubiquity of workmen and planks and buckets of paint – there were certain mischievous happenings which could not be entirely explained without the introduction of conscious hostile human agency. The obstinate behaviour of some of the builder’s men, for example, appeared to go beyond a certain natural annoyance with the visitors who invaded the scene of their labours. It was remembered afterwards, with some misgiving, that Ron had spent many evenings in the pub at Crowther, to which the vagrant Irish workmen went from their nearby camp. Some of the rows at the tea tents too seemed more violent than was called for by the inadequate and slow service, which is not, after all, so unfamiliar a feature of modern life. Certainly Mrs Wrigley’s inefficient bulk appeared to dominate the urns and teacups more completely than might have been expected in an enterprise carried out by a well-known firm of caterers. Whether or not, in fact, there was some concerted plot, however humble and amateurish, to assist the fates in their accomplishment of Bernard’s disaster, it is impossible to say, but, as the afternoon wore on, some of those most concerned – Elizabeth, Sonia, Terence, even Bill – became convinced that there was deliberate enmity at work, and this conviction did not assist them in remaining cool-headed.
Bernard himself undoubtedly saw all the fragments, the threads of evil which had been weaving in and out of his thoughts during the preceding weeks, work together before his eyes, in the hard bright colours of the afternoon sunlight, into a huge tapestry of obscene horror. As the little patterns of hostility, of violence, and of cruelty took shape in rows and scenes and personal shame, they always seemed to coalesce around the saturnine arrogance of Hubert Rose’s sneer, or the blond malice of Sherman’s ‘camp’ chatter, or the gracious jealousy of Mrs Craddock’s careful charm, or the enveloping hatred of Mrs Curry’s sweet cooing. Yet it was not an external picture of concerted enemies that he saw, but the reflection of his own guilt, of his newly discovered hypocrisy, his long-suppressed lusts. Whatever
happened here, whatever collapse of his humanistic ideals, whatever disaster to those he loved, seemed to him now the price of all that had been revealed in his thrill at the arrested man’s horror. Against its inevitable issue in his own destruction he could not, must not, raise any protest. Among this whole crowd – the respectable, the successful, the great ones on the platform who had accepted the proper use of authority with its tempered, considered cruelty, or the crooks, the disappointed, the psychopaths who were committed to the open warfare of emotional bullying, undermining of the weak, trickery, and physical violence – he thought himself alone, the coward who had refused to face the dual nature of all human action, whose resplendent, eccentric cloak of broadminded, humane, individual conduct had fallen to pieces in one moment under the glaring neon searchlight of that single sordid test of his humanity in Leicester Square. He had foiled the test and must take the consequences.
Certainly, Bernard’s inadequacy, his unexpected apathy on his ‘great’ day had a good deal to do with the bad impression of the whole enterprise that was formed by the important visitors. They had travelled obligingly from London, or Oxford, or Cambridge in the discomfort of the day’s great heat and they had expected, not unreasonably, a grateful reception from the man whose scheme they had come to honour. Few of them remained after the speechmaking; but the poor impression made by Bernard’s speech, and by the general flatness of his behaviour, upon those who left early, was a fertile soil for the strange rumours and distorted stories of those who stayed long enough to witness, if only as observers, the odd scenes and quarrels that marked the end of the afternoon. There was no general condemnation, let it be said, certainly no impression so bad that it could not have been repaired by energetic conduct, but the tenor of opinion at College High Tables and in London clubs or literary parties during the subsequent week suggested that the whole scheme had been too easily accepted and that open support should be withheld until time could allow of a reasoned judgement. The rumours, too, if not conflicting, seemed unconnected. Thus a well-known novelist might find himself agreeing with a Professor of Literature that Bernard, if not a fellow-traveller, was certainly the perfect material for Communist propaganda; though the novelist’s own belief had been that the scandal lay, not in the political field, but in an indefinable, though very definite, impression of sexual indiscretion, of the unnecessary crossing and dotting of t’s and i’s, which were perfectly well known, but not to be advertised. It did not take long, however, for these different rumours to coalesce, so that Charles Murley, who had been unable to attend at the ceremony, received a serious enough impression of Bernard’s danger from the conversations he heard to feel it necessary to write letters that were to have great importance for both Bernard’s and Ella’s future. As for local opinion, that was far more condemnatory; for, without the excuse of trains or distance, most local people were forced to stay to the close and so witness the unfortunate events that ended the afternoon.
Bernard and Ella entertained twenty of the more important guests to luncheon before the ceremony. On the whole the meal passed off well. The firm of caterers, which was to prove so inadequate in the tea marquees, did creditably in the provision of food and drink. A meal of smoked salmon, cold duck, and praliné ice, with champagne or hock, satisfied the appetites of the distinguished guests, who were hungry after the journey, whilst allowing them to patronize from the backgrounds of college or club kitchens. ‘An exceedingly adequate, unpretentious meal,’ the great Sir Lionel Dowding said to his neighbour, with his special brand of humour. ‘Exactly the thing before a country romp of this kind.’
Bernard, perhaps, was already a little too fatalistic about the future of Vardon Hall to satisfy the importance which his guests naturally attached to an enterprise that demanded their presence. ‘If it’s really needed it will survive,’ he said, and, turning to a somewhat sad young poet who had been invited to represent ‘the coming young writers’ for whom the scheme was devised, he said, ‘If it turns out to be of use to you, you’ll fight for it. If it doesn’t, clear out before the weeds start_to grow in the paths, and the springs of the chairs get lumpy.’ As Sir Lionel said, ‘Sands gives us the nicely balanced alternatives. But one can’t help thinking that the ringing, if strident, tones of an Arnold or a William Morris crying “This place will be what I make it”, would have encouraged the wretched young scribblers more.’ However, apart from the topic of Vardon Hall, Bernard was an amusing, easy host, anxious to see that his last official contact with his distinguished colleagues should pass urbanely.
Ella, too, was at her best, recalled for a short while to life by the presence of one or two friends from the past; and, if at moments she seemed abstracted or was over-excited by Professor Graham’s account of his ascent of Kilimanjaro, the general opinion was that she was still a charming, astute woman, whose illness had been grossly exaggerated. Ironically, however, it was the success of the luncheon which indirectly led to the first faint notes of discord in the afternoon’s performance. It was a little after a quarter to three before the principals arrived at the Hall, although the ceremony had been advertised to begin at ten past two promptly. Sonia’s over-zealous efforts had, in any case, persuaded most of the local notabilities to arrive by two. It was therefore an impatient and peevish crowd that awaited the speakers. It was also far too large a crowd. Here again Sonia’s missionary activity was much to blame. Bernard, in the days of local hostility to the scheme, had expected little support from the neighbourhood, and his recent apathy had done nothing to repair this out-dated estimate. As a result the two main rooms and the great entrance were already filled to capacity half an hour before the speakers arrived, and the suffocated, packed crowd were not altogether friendly to the notabilities who had to forïce their way through to the platform. Indeed it took some uncomfortable minutes before it was realized that these new arrivals were not just latecomers attempting to reach the front seats. Cries of ‘If you don’t mind, sir, I should be very glad …,’ or ‘I don’t know whether you’re aware that you’re pushing this lady,’ were mingled with more direct complaints such as, ‘Any bloody fool can see there’s no empty seats’ and ‘it’s easy enough to knock children over, you know.’ There was even some purely physical skirmishing from which an authority on the literature of the twenties emerged rather battered and a brilliant woman broadcaster without her glasses.
Outside on the terrace and the drive the crowd was even more dense. Though gossip later undoubtedly exaggerated the numbers, there were certainly sufficient to overflow on to the lawns, and it was thus that the first serious altercation arose between the crowd and one of the builder’s foremen, who had received particular instructions from a Georgian-loving member of the committee that the lawns were to be held sacrosanct. An improvisation of amplifiers was quickly arranged to allow those outside to hear the speakers. It was, perhaps, unfortunate that this was not a total failure, for complete inaudibility would have allowed the visitors to stroll through the grounds, hold picnics, or depart for home. As it was, the speeches were clearly heard for five minutes at a time, then became indistinct or inaudible, then deafening, and, worst of all, were given forth in strange, sub-human explosions that provoked a suppressed, hysterical laughter.
The effect of luncheon upon the speakers was most satisfactory to themselves. Isolated upon the comparative cool of the platform, with the scents of the summer garden coming in from the open windows on each side of them, they lapsed into a gentle, mellow, if somewhat boring, delivery, reminiscent of more spacious garden parties. This was in some degree satisfactory to their audience who expected the speeches to be comfortingly platitudinous where they were not incomprehensibly learned. If they too, like the speakers, had been able to dream away among memories of the cluck of croquet balls, of the wafted scent of heliotrope and the murmurous haunt of flies, for which indeed, in their Ascot hats and gowns and well-cut flannel suits, they had come dressed, they would have been well content; but for those inside it was more like some
terrible indignity of the Japanese upon the white rulers of Singapore, and for those outside, a heaven-sent chance to relax ruined by sudden, nerveracking assaults upon their ears. For the few who could hear with comparative ease and in comparative comfort, the Oxford speech, despite its somewhat difficult passage of Pushkin, was judged the wittiest; the Cambridge speech, despite its Aeschylean demand upon a largely non-existent knowledge of Greek, the noblest. The theological flavour of the two prominent writers who spoke was accepted for its resemblance to the customary political exhortations to stand firm in face of peril; whilst the Under-secretary, who lent some air of Government support to the occasion, was liked for his many poetic quotations which he pronounced in a manner happily reminiscent of a popular radio preacher. Had the seating and auditory arrangements been more adequate, the speeches would have been a great success; as it was, the importance of the speakers was sufficient to flatter the audience into benevolent toleration.
A clear, humorous, highminded speech from Bernard would have saved the occasion. Indeed it was expected from his reputation as a fluent, witty, yet astringent speaker. He seemed, at that moment – so distinguished, so wise and sad, so familiar a figure – to be the country’s own ambassador to the great world outside, the link between a live and important district with all that was best in English life today, a barrier between a tranquil, age-old countryside and the muddy flood of modern life outside. He was almost a symbol of the commuting trains that took so many of them each day to play their part in the busy life of London and brought them back to replenish their souls with the keen breezes of field and hill. If he was presenting Vardon with a great cultural enterprise, he was also giving the world of culture a much needed breath of Vardon’s wholesome air.