Hemlock and After

by Angus Wilson

  Bernard made no mention of this local aspect of his scheme. He could not, he said, but consider deeply the motives that had led to the inauguration of the new Vardon Hall. The needs of the arts in an age poised between private patron and state, the difficulties of housing, of leisure, of solitude in England today, the gulf between scholarship and creation, the absence of a meeting ground for writers, the dangers of coterie art, the hopes for a new humanism, all these seemed so clear, and yet, and yet … Motives were so difficult, so double, so much hypocrisy might spring from guilt, so much benevolence from fear to use power, so much kindness overlay cruelty, so much that was done didn’t matter. If the scheme failed, if the young writers ceased to write, it was of small account in time; better failure than deception, better defeat than a victory where motive was wrong. He seemed quite unable to leave the subject of motive, so that the more inattentive of his audience got the impression that they were involved in a discussion of some mysterious crime. He seemed to eschew all humour for fear of bitterness, though occasionally he fell into unconscious Freudian double-entendres. ‘So much that has been written would have been better left imprinted,’ he said. ‘One can pay too dearly for what one picks up in the Charing Cross Road, and not only in cash, but in more lasting ills.’

  Sherman, who was very drunk, screamed loudly, ‘Gracious!’ And his friends, who were fairly drunk, tittered wildly.

  Bernard declared, ‘If I seemed to be warning poets against an eternal valuation of their work, do not please suppose that I do not value a single verse of it more highly than anything any one of you here is ever likely to create. We are not given many chances of justifying our existences, but respect for the poet is one. If you are lucky enough to meet a young poet, love him very much, hold him very close to you, you may yet be saved.’

  Mrs Curry whispered loudly to Ron, ‘What a loving, passionate man he is!’ and the noise of Ron’s guffaw quite broke the trend of the speech.

  Occasionally, too, Bernard seemed to reach a personal level that held no communication for his audience. ‘There is always the possibility,’ he said, ‘that our most heroic self-sacrifice – and the conviction if it comes is a horrible one – may only be a comfortable evasion of duty.’

  Mrs Craddock, in the front row, laid a hand on an arm of each of her sons, between whom she sat so proudly, and cried, ‘Oh how dreadfully true! How dreadfully true!’ But her moment of drama seemed only to underline the meaninglessness of Bernard’s words for other members of the audience. For the rest, the speech dwelt mainly on defeat and the saving power of evil.

  ‘No culture that reposes on resistance and strength alone can survive,’ Bernard urged. ‘No culture that doesn’t accept its own decadence is real. I trust I shall not be convicted of false mystique if I dwell on the sweetness of the forces that oppose us, on the renewed life that may come from capitulation to their primitive power.’ An outburst of clapping from Louie Randall and a loud ‘Bravo’ from Isobel seemed to remove the sentiment from its mystical cloak and reveal it in its true political colours, for Bernard’s sister was known to most as a confessed fellow-traveller. The most unfortunate aspect of the speech, however, because the most public, was its effect on Ella. A few moments after her husband began speaking, she seemed to be galvanized into life, and followed every word with an earnest, almost lip-reading attention, which coming so suddenly upon her apathy during the earlier speeches lent an unhappy effect of pantomime to the group on the platform.

  It was, in fact, a disastrous speech, and it was also an unsuitably long one. Bernard apparently realized this, for when he had finished he bent for a moment’s conversation with other members of the platform. It was only when the young poet struggled to his feet that the audience realized that an item had been cut – and that item the speech of the only local councillor invited to sit among the great. As one stockbroker’s wife said to Hubert Rose, ‘Poor old Vardon isn’t getting much of a show!’ and Hubert’s reply did not really salve the wounds of local pride. ‘Well, after all, dear lady, these highly important men have found their way down to the damned place. It’d be asking a bit too much to make ’em hear all about the local amenities, don’t y’know?’

  The poet, whose blue serge suit and row of fountain-pen heads in his breast pocket were all too reminiscent of the bank clerk of Hubert’s earlier warning, had not been mellowed by drink like the other speakers. He was less accustomed to it. He spoke very fast, with a stutter and a tendency to sudden falsetto. Few of those inside the house, and none of those in the garden, ever fully grasped that he was reciting from his own works. The words that came to them were therefore peculiarly incomprehensible. At intervals the amplifiers carried strange phrases to the tired crowd, adding to their sense of isolation or provoking hysterical giggles as a defence against their embarrassment. ‘Hyaena false or more’, ‘and artery for rice exchange’, or ‘Unloved, unsired, Nestorian stripped’ were teasers that even the most competition-minded preferred to greet with philistine laughter under such blazing sun. If it was for this that their largesse of spirit and pocket had been asked, there were few that did not feel the great cause to be undeserving.

  Nevertheless there was still enough element of awe, of incomprehensible glory, attached to the great figures who had come among them to have won the crowd’s favour when the speeches were over; enough self-satisfaction among the great themselves to have secured their attachments to the enterprise to which they had already showed favour; certainly enough relief on both sides that the speeches were over, to have saved the day had the arrangements for the entertainment which followed been less completely deficient.

  An attempt was made to prevent the unexpectedly large crowd stampeding to the tea marquees by a microphone request that some part of the visitors should inspect the house and grounds before seeking refreshment. It was an appeal that probably saved some lives, but did little to repair the ensuing confusion. Large numbers of people, it was true, were only too anxious to explore. Among the commuting gentry, those who had already visited at Vardon Hall wished to exhibit their familiarity, those who had not were urged on by social snobbery; whilst the visitors from London, especially Sherman’s small but vocal smart set, partook of that general contemporary passion for displaying a ‘sense of period’ which the National Trust has so successfully encouraged.

  *

  It was one of Sherman’s more outrageous friends who led the rush to the upstairs rooms, which were still largely derelict. ‘I must see how they managed the upstairs loos,’ he cried. ‘Do you think they’ll be the push or the pull, or the wonderful old pull up kind?’ Local visitors would have been daunted by the ropes which were intended to cut off the upper apartments, but Sherman’s friends were not, and soon a miscellaneous crowd began to drift upstairs after them.

  There was no question of drift, however, where Sherman’s party was concerned. They scampered about the corridors and empty bedrooms like so many mating mice. It was somehow, they felt, Edwardian – and what could be nicer – to behave rather badly in the bedrooms of a country mansion. Terence’s attempts to control them were voted entirely po-faced.

  Sherman himself was too drunk to care if Terence minded. ‘Oh hell!’ he cried. ‘If you think I’m going to sit still and play noughts and crosses, after listening to all that dreary crap, you’ve bloody well got another guess coming. You go down and join all the Girton girls in a little eurhythmy on the lawn, dear, we’ll just finish our Bacchic rout and go home.’ In and out of the cupboards, up in the attic and even under the baths they chased one another. It was break-up day at St Monica’s and no punches pulled.

  Mrs Curry, attracted by the girlish screams, faced the effort of the stairs to join in the fun, and was only the slightest degree put back by the unaccustomed nature of the fun she found. ‘Like a lot of boys let out of school,’ she said. It was only failure to bring her cards, one felt, that prevented her from advertising a rival tuckshop. ‘The boys’, too, adored her in her pale mauve muslin dress a
nd her ‘wonderful period hat’ with its osprey. ‘You’ll never get under the bath, duckie,’ they said. She was, perhaps, a trifle put out when one of them cried, ‘My dear, I do believe she’s the madam! Old world, that’s what it is!’ But she soon saw it was all just fun, and really she felt quite proud of Ron’s adaptability – he was giving the old one-two look left and right. ‘He’s such a loving boy’ she told Sherman.

  ‘You’re telling me, dearie,’ he replied in Cockney.

  The other visitors, however, began to drift downstairs again, determined not to put two and two together lest they made four. One solicitor’s wife, having opened a bedroom door on the oddest embrace, cried loudly, ‘There nothing here, to see anyway.’ The impression was not good.

  In a short while one of the contractor’s foremen and a party of assistants were on the scene protesting against this invasion of their still-undecorated territory. Mrs Curry seized the occasion of the general hubbub to remove herself from a scene that threatened at any moment to become unloving. If the reception of the workers by Sherman’s party was rather more mixed than the disregard they had shown for the local bourgeoisie, the judgement of the local labouring class was, with one or two unfortunately sophisticated exceptions, far more openly censorious. There was almost an open fight; though the foreman’s statement, after Sherman and his friends had retreated, ‘We’re not ’aving any of that muckin’ about up ‘ere,’ was tactfully vague in its application.

  *

  Those who had chosen, on this lovely day, to confine their explorations to the garden, were exposed to other less purely moral perils. Although, at first, the grounds were uncomfortably crowded, the heat, the exhaustion that followed the speech-making, and the obvious impossibility of gettingnear the tea tents soon caused the less determined to leave. Those who remained were left to enjoy the hothouses, the herbaceous borders, and the shrubbery with no more discomfort than is usual in viewing such things on public days. It was more than comforting to find the famous vine so small and fruitless, the delphiniums so inferior, and the shrubbery no more than a tangled mass of dusty St John’s Wort. There was general conviction among the visitors that they could have done better at home. They settled down to an afternoon of satisfied disappointment.

  Sonia, whose high hopes had been so sadly deceived, was in that overcharged, childish state which she had prophesied for her mother-in-law. Her social equilibrium was easily upset at large gatherings; her competence to cope with any particular group was constantly being disturbed by her fears for the others that were outside her direct control. With her little bird-like face flushed and excited, above her trim, cool figure in a simple, lemon-coloured silk frock, she attracted more than one of the elderly great. She was not, unfortunately, in the mood to give them the undivided attention they asked, and hopped from group to group, pecking little introductions at them like a mother bird feeding her young with worms. Sir Lionel Dowding, however, was almost importunate and resisted all her attempts to involve him with other guests.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘allow me to have had my fill of platitudes. If we sit down on those two very inviting chairs we can supply all these distinguished men and beautiful women with the brilliant romantic remarks that should, but never will, emerge from their lips. That handsomely built woman over there – if I was introduced to her, of course, I should immediately think her grossly fat – is telling that charming slim youth – once known, of course, he would give all the appearance of a rabbit – of the night when, beneath a hunter’s moon – let us hope, poor rabbit, that the expression does not alarm him too greatly – she slid from her mullioned window down the rope that led to the runaway match which so astonished the county. ‘Into the whimsical twinkling of his faded old eyes he began to insert the faintest suggestion of a leer. ‘Ah!’ he continued, as the rabbity young man began to speak, ‘see how hotly he is pressing his suit. “Repeat the adventure,” he is saying, “and with me.” But she is uncertain, she is held by the sacred bonds of marriage.’ As Sonia made no answer, he continued, ‘You don’t believe me, you think her hesitation is due to increased weight.’

  Neither the elaborate whimsy nor the leer were to Sonia’s taste, but she reflected on Sir Lionel’s position, not exactly political but ‘in everything’. ‘I was only thinking,’ she said, ‘how delightful it would be if we could persuade you to settle here and transform Vardon’s dreary round.’

  A quarter of an hour later she was happily absorbed. ‘My dear Mrs Sands,’ Sir Lionel was saying, ‘I will pay you out for introducing me to so many bores. You must dine with me and meet your hero in the flesh. Don’t blame me if it shatters for ever your charming faith in the party whose cause you support so warmly. Of all bores, let me assure you, the political bore is the greatest. Your hero, when I last saw him, was concerned with meat, so prepare yourself to talk of meat, or rather to listen to talk of meat – meat in all its aspects, imported, exported, undersold, oversold, beef, pork, mutton, and veal. You’ve prepared your own doom, you know. The only compensation I can offer is that I will serve you only the finest poultry at dinner.’

  It was a doom that Sonia had long sought, and she set herself quickly to clinch it with an exact date.

  Bill Pendlebury seemed more than ever bursting out of his best pinstripe suit when he interrupted them. Sonia found it difficult to believe that such vulgarity could accompany advancing years.

  ‘Something’s gone sadly awry with the gay whirl,’ he said. ‘The funeral baked meats taste a bit ashy in the mouth, don’t you think?’

  Sonia said coldly, ‘Sir Lionel Dowding, my uncle, Mr Pendlebury. The twenty-fourth, ‘she went on,’ would suit us very well.’

  But Bill had felt neglected all the afternoon and was working round to be snubbed. ‘Have you ever heard the gods angry, Sir Lionel?’ he asked. ‘Take my word for it, they are this afternoon. The Vardons were the darlings of the gods – wild, lawless, and proud as the devil,’ his invention ran ahead as he spoke, ‘murder, rape, incest, the whole bag of tricks. And this afternoon we’ve come along and denied the holy places – a lot of nice little ladies and gentlemen with our culture and moderation, my brother-in-law’s humanism and the bishop’s Christian virtues. I don’t fancy these young writers’ chances of getting anything written in this scene of sacrilege, even if they could write.’

  Sir Lionel was furious at the interruption; he lay back in the deck chair and closed his eyes. ‘My imagination,’ he said, ‘unlike your uncle’s, Mrs Sands, refuses to function in this heat.’

  ‘My husband’s family,’ said Sonia, ‘will bore even Hell by their fancies.’ She calculated that direct rudeness to Bill would increase Sir Lionel’s good opinion. To moderate her remark, however, she smiled up at her uncle. ‘Get us some ices, Uncle Bill,’ she added, ‘and we’ll hear all your gloomy prophecies unmoved.’

  Bill was on the aggressive. His huge frame looming over Sir Lionel, he swayed uneasily from foot to foot. ‘Perhaps,’ he said defiantly, ‘you think I despise these young fellows because I’m jealous. But it isn’t that at all,’ his speech was jerky, yet slurred. ‘I can’t write for toffee, I know that, but I know what it ought to be like. Like your father’s, you know,’ he said, turning to Sonia.

  Drink and self-pity combined with a reverence for his own sudden sincerity to bring tears to Bill’s eyes. Sonia prayed to God that this disgusting drunken old man might die where he stood.

  Sir Lionel took out his cigarette case. He offered it first to Sonia, then to Bill. ‘Will you have a cigarette, Mr Pendlebury?’ he asked. ‘The flies seem unusually troublesome this afternoon. I hope Sands has laid in an adequate store of “Flit” to keep his protégés free from their attentions.’

  Sonia said, ‘He’s found the most superb Italian cook to look after them. Everybody round here will be brushing up their culture to get invited to dinner.’

  Bill leaned forward unsteadily and took his niece’s hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘unpardonable outburst. Curious, you kn
ow, how the soul finds need for expression. Call it confession, call it free association, call it “sharing” or just the truth drug: Dostoyevsky was right, we all need a spiritual purge now and again.’

  Sir Lionel’s long yellow fangs gleamed maliciously at Sonia as he turned to her. ‘Has your uncle no Sir Andrew to support his carousals, Mistress Olivia?’

  Bill’s tears rolled down his fat red cheeks. ‘I’ve behaved disgracefully,’ he said, ‘and there’s no catch that I can sing that will make up for it.’

  ‘You can make up for it best by going home to bed,’ said Sonia.

  Bill kissed her hand and began with great care to walk off. He had hardly moved a yard when Hubert Rose descended upon Sonia.

  ‘My dear Sonia,’ he said, ‘how insufferably dreary the old place seems without the Vardons.’

  Sonia’s relief was great. ‘Sir Lionel Dowding, Mr Rose,’ she said.

  ‘I was to have met you last week at the Russells, Sir Lionel,’ began Hubert, when he was suddenly confronted by an enormous red-faced old man who stared at him like an owl.

  ‘You agree with me about the gods, don’t you,’ said Bill. ‘I know you’ve got your little sacrifice tucked away. I wish I had, but she’s left me. For manicuring, you know. Be careful of that.’ Then looking very knowing, he added, ‘But yours would hardly be of the age for that. Oh for God’s sake,’ and he looked quite comically anxious for Hubert’s approval, ‘don’t think I’m censorious. Just the opposite. As I told my sister. Older than time. Little Saint Hugh,’ he began to mumble incoherently, then ended loudly, ‘All the same, you be careful of them – the Christians and the respectable – remember that millstone.’

  *

  Hubert’s long heavy body shivered slightly. But with quizzically raised eyebrows directed at the others he said very seriously, ‘My dear Sir, of course I agree. Both about the gods and the millstone.’

  ‘That,’ said Sonia icily, ‘is James’s uncle. He’s drunk and we had hoped he was going away.’