by Angus Wilson
Hubert took Bill’s arm. ‘Come and have a long talk to me about these interesting phenomena.’ His savoir faire seemed to Sir Lionel a combination of ostentation and arrogance, but it delighted Sonia.
Unfortunately Mrs Curry’s roving eye had seen the undesirable confluence and her large mauve form bore down upon them.
‘Hullo, Mr Pendlebury,’ she cried; ‘enjoying yourself? Oh dear! I do believe the dear old boy’s a wee bit tiddly. You come along with me, dear, and join all the boys and girls.’ When Bill drew his arm away from her, she added sharply, ‘Now you do as you’re told, my lad.’
Sonia rose from her chair. ‘Mr Rose is looking after my uncle, thank you,’ she said. ‘Pull yourself together, for God’s sake, Uncle Bill.’
Mrs Curry smiled graciously. ‘You’re quite all right, aren’t you dear?’ she said to Bill. ‘Old soldiers never die. You mustn’t speak to them like that, dear,’ she said to Sonia. ‘The gentlemen never like it. Naughty old thing, I expect he’s just merry because he’s in love. He’ll come with me all right. We’re old friends, business friends,’ and she led Bill away.
Sonia turned to Sir Lionel. ‘I must go and find my son,’ she said, but Sir Lionel had closed his eyes in pretended sleep and he did not intend to open them.
*
Nicholas held his grandmother’s hand very tightly. ‘I shouldn’t think anyone knows the names of all the flowers, should you?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes,’ said Ella. She was always very polite with children. ‘I expect some of the people at Kew do.’
‘All the flowers in Africa and Asia and Australia?’ Nicholas asked.
‘Yes,’ said Ella, ‘I think so.’
‘And in the North Pole and the South Pole?’ Nicholas urged.
‘There aren’t any flowers at the Poles, Nicholas,’ said his grandmother, ‘only ice. Thousands of miles of ice. It breaks away in square blocks, but it leaves clear edges.’ Her pale blue eyes gazed washily away over shousands of miles of ice. She tried to imagine the blocks of ice as equal squares, each floating away across the grey water, each the same in size and colour.
‘That’s a pretty flower isn’t it, Granny?’ Nicholas cried.
‘No, dear,’ said Ella, ‘it’s a coreopsis. It’s rather ugly.’
‘I like it very much,’ said Nicholas. ‘I like it better than all the other flowers. Mummy,’ he cried to Sonia, ‘Granny doesn’t like this flower, but I do.’
‘Perhaps Granny doesn’t like daisies,’ Sonia said.
‘It isn’t a daisy,’ Nicholas cried. ‘It’s a … What is it, Granny?
‘A coreopsis, dear,’ said Ella.
‘Well, whatever it is,’ said Sonia, ‘it’s time for you to go home, Nicholas,’ and she took the boy’s other hand. Nicholas clung to his grandmother, protesting tearfully.
‘We were going to see the shrubbery,’ said Ella. ‘There used to be a cage of silver pheasants. I think Nicholas would like their long lace tail-feathers.’
‘Nicholas,’ replied her daughter-in-law, ‘would like anything that will excuse him from doing what he’s told.’
It was with difficulty that Ella produced a smile of appeal for herself through her ravaged features and watery eyes. ‘It makes me very happy to have him with me,’ she said.
‘Will it also make you happy to see him grow up spoilt and whiney?’ Sonia asked.
Ella sighed and disengaged her hand from her grandson’s. ‘Bernard’s speech was so good. I have such a lot to think about,’ she said, almost addressing herself.
‘I’m glad you found it so,’ said Sonia. Pulling Nicholas by his arm, she moved away. ‘Berthe had no right to leave you wandering about on your own like this,’ she said; then turning her head she almost shouted at Ella, ‘It was the most appalling bilge that ought never to have been spoken in public.’
Ella picked a coreopsis and began methodically to pull the flower to pieces, petal by petal, then stamen by stamen.
*
‘Our Constitution,’ said James, and he bowed his fine head to the level of the little man beside him, ‘is purely a perfection of checks. In removing the University vote, they’ve removed one of the principal of these checks – the check of educated opinion.’ The weight of his father’s disgraceful speech seemed to lift from him in the flower-scented air of the garden. Walking beside the Master of his late college, he felt himself almost an undergraduate again, only, of course, more assured.
‘Yes, yes,’ said the little man, ‘but the constitution can’t be petrified. It must grow, you know, like any living organism.’
‘Grow,’ said James, ‘but not shrink.’ He felt pleased at the judicious and adult manner in which he could now face the learned, the sheltered.
The Master’s beetling sandy eyebrows drew together in a frown. Too many of his young men seemed filled with this illiberalism. ‘So you propose to give us all back our little extra vote?’ he said.
‘Certainly,’ James replied. University representation was one of the peculiar duties he had laid upon himself. Contact with important academical men like the Master would be a good card in his play for adoption as candidate. ‘With more than three-quarters of undergraduates receiving state aid, there’s no question of class or privilege, you know. Merely the reward of talent.’
The Master looked at the crumbling steps of the terrace. The peacocks would not be missed, he thought, while James strutted there.
‘Your father,’ he said gruffly, ‘knows how to reward talent. We have finer things at Cambridge than all this,’ and he waved his hand across the terrace and garden, ‘but your father plans to give talent leisure, and of that we have a very shrinking supply.’
Before James’s eye the garden was transformed as in a quick motion film – leaves turned brown and withered with the jerky speed of automata, flowers lost their colour, the air grew dry and scorching.
‘My father,’ he said grimly, ‘has King Midas’s touch.’
The Master raised an eyebrow. ‘I wish,’ he said, ‘that I could turn my young men into gold, it’s better than the dust of vocational education.’
James strove to silence his bitterness, but, ‘My father’s dreams,’ he said, ‘seem incomplete to a younger generation. I find it difficult not to remember that golden girls and lads all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust.’
‘Oh yes!’ said the Master. ‘I think your father understands that very well. It was, after all, the burden of his speech.’ He put out his hand. ‘Good-bye,’ he said, ‘we shall look forward to receiving our suffrage again from a member of the college.’
The voices of the local gentry as they talked their way through the shrubbery and the Dutch garden came as a pleasant relief to James after the raven’s croaking of the Master’s dying liberalism. Never more perhaps for him; but for the strong and the determined an infinite period of Burkean experienced administration.
The chatter of the local gentry exploring the hothouses came to him on a tonic wind – the voices of experience, competence, good sense, and reliability.
‘Well, I don’t suppose it will do any harm,’ he could hear one woman saying. ‘They may be a bit wild and woolly when they first arrive, but they’ll soon settle down. And if they don’t, they’ll be gone before this time next year.’ She had said the same of the Lithuanian maids, the billeted civil servants, and the visiting Australian cousins.
Mrs Rankine’s voice answering her was, perhaps, less reassuring. ‘I could never settle down, I’m afraid,’ she was saying, ‘in a place so full of ghosts – ghosts of happiness and miseries. Personality, and especially a family personality like the Vardons, is so persistent. It will be too strong for our poets’ imaginations. I had a great fear for it before, and now I feel sure. Unless, unless,’ her voice mused away into the distance and then reappeared. ‘They might, you know, and then of course all traces of the Vardons would die away.’ Pretentious woman, thought James, it was that sort of dissatisfied, aspiring person that weakened the solid mi
ddle classes of England.
But the words of the other woman seemed a reaffirmation. ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘you can’t kill stock like the Vardons just by taxing them out of their homes.’
James sat down on the terrace step and watched a small cockchafer making its way through the forest of the stonecrop leaves. He felt happy in the reassurance of those words and in the sun flowing over his cheeks like warm water. It was only in those moments of watching the activity of small things – birds or insects – that he escaped for a moment his biting ambition; in those moments, and in Sonia’s embraces. Suddenly the soft air and the comforting buzz of chatter were broken by a shrill scream and the noise of arguing, angry voices. He moved in quick strides round the corner of the house to find a small but growing crowd of visitors collecting around a hunched, seated figure.
Poor Mrs Rankine! Her premonitions had been all too completely realized. Absorbed by her interesting emotions she had trodden on an insecure duckboard and fallen seriously to sprain her ankle. Already, as James approached, the visitors and the workmen were dividing into hostile camps.
‘Well, all I can say,’ Ralph Rankine was declaring, ‘is that somebody’s been damned careless.’
‘It’s perfectly clear, sir,’ the foreman retorted, his mouth set belligerently beneath his tooth-brush moustache. ‘Visitors are warned to keep away from the constructional operations. I’m very sorry for the lady, but it’s entirely her own fault.’
‘I’m not concerned with your opinion about …’ Ralph began, but the foreman interrupted him.
‘Ah, but I am, sir,’ he said, ‘I have to protect my men from …’
‘You’d be a great deal better employed protecting the public from this sort of …’
‘If members of the public choose to disregard the notices put up for their benefit …’
Voices began to chime in from every side. Poor Mrs Rankine moaned with pain, as the district nurse, for whom the accident made the afternoon one of the most enjoyable of her life, directed the two young stockbrokers who assisted the injured lady to one of the many cars drawn up in the drive.
James suddenly felt a murderous hatred of the workmen, who appeared as conscious agents of his father’s mischievous misrule. He strode up to the foreman, his handsome face pink with fury.
‘Will you kindly make adequate arrangements to fence off this dangerous area,’ he shouted, ‘and then get your men out of the place before they succeed in killing someone.’
‘Perhaps it would be better, sir,’ the foreman replied, ‘if you were to mind your own business.’
‘It happens to be my business. I’m Mr Sands’ son.’
‘I can’t help it if you’re the son of old Joe Stalin. I’m working for the contractors and I take my orders from them.’
‘The contractors,’ said James, ‘if your limited intelligence can grasp it, are working for the committee of which my father is chairman.’
The foreman turned his back on James. ‘Come on,’ he said to the workmen who were standing near, ‘we’ve got a job to do. We can’t stand all day listening to this little lot blowing their tops off.’
It was only the restraining hand of Hubert upon James’s arm that prevented him from physical assault. Hubert’s sardonic grin was affability itself, as he said, ‘Dear old boy, no, definitely no.’
*
Mrs Craddock was delighted by Bernard’s speech, delighted by all the speeches; it was a field day for her, of course, and only made her realize why Eric was so anxious to be with his friend, and why it was so important that he should be. She told Eric and Alan so a hundred times and rather loudly. She hadn’t perhaps got all the points, but then she was out of touch with – she had almost said modern jargon, but that wasn’t the right word at all, of course – modern ethos would be better. Now Eric, of course, who had such opportunities of soaking himself in the thought of the day, could probably explain what Bernard – she felt she almost must call him Bernard now – had meant by such and such. But when Eric suggested a tentative explanation, she really could not resist a delicious little laugh. No, she couldn’t really say she did think that was what Bernard had meant. Smiling, she putherhand on Alan’s arm, confidentially she whispered, ‘What sort of picture the child makes out of the wonderful world he’s been taken up into, one really slightly shudders to guess at.’ Gradually, and with many gracious halts to admire this prospect of the house or to note that charming vista through the elm trees, she guided her somewhat unwilling sons until they had reached the group in which Bernard stood.
‘I’m not, you know,’ she said, ‘going to say anything, because it’s all clearly been said a hundred times before, a hundred times better, by a hundred other people. But it was very, very fine. It was something that we, or at least Alan and I – for Eric, thanks to you, is going on to richer and richer treasures – will have with us always.’
Bernard, introducing Celia Craddock to the company, attempted particularly to attach her to Elizabeth. Safe from the presence of the great, he hoped that she would feel less nervous, more free to shed her affectation.
‘Your father was wonderful,’ said Mrs Craddock in a stage whisper, ‘but he looks so dreadfully tired. Can’t something be done to save him from all of us? To let the poor darling rest?’
Before Elizabeth could reply that she saw no immediate means of doing this, Mrs Craddock signified by a smile and a shake of her index finger that ‘the poor darling’ was listening and their little intimacy must end.
‘This,’ she said proudly, ‘is my son Alan, and this, my son Eric, whom your father has so wonderfully helped with his friendship. It is, I’m afraid, our only excuse for being here on this distinguished occasion.’
Elizabeth looked at Eric. There was, she thought, something infinitely dreary in his ‘tousled mop’ of hair, his emerald shirt, and brick-red tie. She almost forecast a nasal, cockney accent; and compared him unfavourably with Terence.
‘Distingué’s the word, surely,’ she said to Mrs Craddock with a smile. ‘I’m afraid it couldn’t be less my cup; as the pansy general said, when asked about the war,’ and she turned her gaze on Eric, ‘“My dear, the noise and the people.”’
Mrs Craddock gave the laugh she used to put awkward people at their ease; and Elizabeth flushed pink to the base of her throat.
‘Does all this,’ asked Mrs Craddock, and she waved her arm with its bracelet of antique charms, ‘pall so easily for those who’ve always had it? Will you get tired of it so quickly, Eric?’
Her son gave a squeak of laughter. ‘I shan’t have terraces and hot-houses in my bed-sitting-room, Mimi darling,’ he said, ‘though I might have a silver pheasant.’ With his eye on Elizabeth he turned to Bernard. ‘Could I, do you think, have a silver pheasant in Bramham Gardens, Bernie?’ he asked.
‘Certainly not,’ said Bernard; ‘vile incontinent creatures.’
‘It’ll have to be the koala bears then,’ cried Eric. ‘They’ve been house trained for years. Bernie,’ he continued, turning to Elizabeth, ‘thinks woolly bears on the mantelpiece horribly middle-class. What do you think?’
‘Not my column,’ said Elizabeth savagely. ‘You want the March issue on those little things that make all the difference to your boudoir.’
‘Elizabeth works on one of our great women’s papers,’ Bernard said, ‘making important contributions to the evolution of English prose.’
Mrs Craddock looked quite wide-eyed. ‘If the comparison does not appear too blasphemous, I should like to say that, for an ordinary woman like myself, this is uncomfortably like meeting God. Miss Sands, my dear,’ she turned to Alan, ‘is probably that very terrifying young lady whose columns remind me of my painful duty to my appearance every time I sit in the dentist’s waiting-room.’ She smiled at the general absurdity of Elizabeth’s presence among so many fine minds.
Elizabeth smiled too. ‘I hardly think so,’ she said; ‘my little racket is advising the older woman on how to look her best.’
Mrs Craddock tried to feel above such ordinary bitchiness. Turning from the juvenile sphere, she placed her small hand in its black lace glove on Bernard’s arm. ‘You turned us all over to the button-moulder this afternoon, my dear friend,’ she said. ‘Poor Peer Gynt! poor humanity! We got the trouncing we deserved. I wonder,’ and she seemed the bovine Madonna, looking out on a sinful world with great, compassionate eyes, ‘I wonder how many of us understood. I wish I could feel sure that I had.’
Bernard made no direct answer. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘that much of it was an interior monologue. If you’ll excuse me, I must speak to my sister. Elizabeth dear, get Mrs Craddock some tea.’ Celia Craddock’s gaze at his retreating figure was quite stony.
*
Bernard, remembering his confidence to his sister, was disturbed to see her in animated conversation with Terence. He need have had no such fear; whatever Isobel’s political indiscretion, she had the honour of a schoolgirl where affairs of the heart were concerned. She would have blabbed state secrets, had any state been so foolish as to entrust them to her, to the first spy she met, but let the least emotional confidence be locked in that ample bosom, and, cross her heart, might she die if she sneaked, no dormitory bully or prying fellow don would ever get it from her.
When Bernard approached, Terence was deep in attention to a political harangue from Louie so that Isobel was able to draw her brother aside and whisper, ‘That’s your friend, isn’t it, Bernard? I knew I was right. He’s a very distinguished young man, dear. Louie likes him very much.’ Indeed Louie was delighted; she had not been listened to so earnestly by anyone outside the Party since Mac Arthur’s dismissal. She had carefully preserved her Left Bank student get-up for this bourgeois gathering, substituting only a pale sulphur silk square for the jade green scarf. For Terence, her boyish appearance was outstandingly more attractive than that of any other woman present.
‘Liberty’s the most sickening claptrap of all,’ she was saying. ‘Liberty to conscript, Liberty to keep millions on starvation level, Liberty to sit back on solid dividends and pour out woollyminded platitudes.’