Hemlock and After

by Angus Wilson

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Bernard. ‘I hardly ever go there.’

  ‘Your brother-in-law’s got in proper with Mrs Curry. He better know how to look after himself.’ When Bernard did not reply, Ron said archly, ‘I don’t seem to appeal to you.’

  ‘No,’ said Bernard, ‘I think we might bring the conversation to an end.’ He walked across the drive, where the last motor cars were making their departure. As he crossed the lawn, he was met by a drunk Sherman with his band of friends.

  ‘You old horror,’ Sherman said, waving his hand towards the direction of Ron, ‘always getting what everyone’s after. But still we mustn’t be grouchy, after all it is your big day.’ Sherman’s friends were too awed by Bernard to do more than sway lightly; but peals of giggles came to him, after he had left them.

  *

  Hubert Rose was standing on the steps of the Hall as Bernard entered. He crossed over and stood for a moment looking at Bernard, his dark face embarrassed and agitated.

  ‘I liked what you said. Perhaps since all this has been so bloody, you might care to hear that.’ He spoke without his usual drawl, quickly and jerkily. ‘I’m glad that you should see how deeply one must go under in order to come up again. I hope that you meant it. Actually, of course, I know you did. You are the only completely respectable man among us, you see. I’m not respectable to myself, but I can respect others.’

  ‘I’m not respectable to myself. I hope I didn’t convey such an idea.’ Bernard was puzzled.

  ‘No, no. I understood that. That’s why I can speak to you, because it seems as though we were the same. But in fact, we’re not. I can know that, at least. But I’m with you against all the others, if understanding counts, and I would like you to know it, and how much respect I must feel from that very fact.’ He took Bernard’s hand and held it for a moment. Then he smiled ironically and said, ‘You’d better not make much of me, though. It’s probably only a piece of theatricalism caught on what, if I may say so, my dear fellow, has been a damned bad afternoon of amateur dramatics.’ He turned away, but before he finally left Bernard he added, ‘I’m afraid your daughter-in-law found it all rather a strain, which is one comfort.’

  Sonia was to find it all even more of a strain before the afternoon finally ended. Things had gone from bad to worse at the tea tent. Mrs Curry’s liberality to Ron’s mother had exceeded the one bottle of whisky to which she had confessed, and Mrs Wrigley had found great pleasure in bountiful distribution to the mixed body of local helps and hired waiters who were charged with dispensing refreshment. The earliest effects, operative when the crowd was at its greatest, had merely appeared in a somewhat jolly and off-hand inattentiveness and muddle. Soon, however, Mrs Wrigley had fallen into a very talkative, complaining state. It was at this stage that she had taken such a fancy to Mrs Craddock.

  Celia, of course, prided herself on her ‘common touch’, particularly with ‘characters’ like Mrs Wrigley; in Esher her ‘friends’, she was always most emphatic in stating, were the dustman, the milkman, and the old woman who dealt in second-hand clothes. She could speak to them, she always found, on a level of reality that suburbia simply did not understand. It was, she implied, an old Virginian tradition.

  ‘You look after your pretty figure, my dear,’ said Mrs Wrigley, as she handed Celia a cup of washy tea and a battered cream bun.

  Mrs Craddock was delighted. ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘I promise you I will.’ She spoke very seriously and emphatically, as though to a child, and with that roving glance at the assembled company which usually accompanies serious conversations with children.

  ‘Don’t ever have no babies,’ said Mrs Wrigley.

  ‘Gracious me,’ said Mrs Craddock, ‘I don’t think that’s very likely now.’

  ‘Children are that ungrateful,’ grumbled Mrs Wrigley. ‘I got eleven of them. Won the News of the World tray for it. But much good it’s done me. Three’s in Aussie, and my daughter over Ipswich way’s got the television. I might be dead for all they care.’

  Mrs Craddock’s lovely eyes glowed with the rich comedy of life. She put an arm round both her sons. ‘There you are, darlings,’ she said, ‘you have been judged.’ It was after this that Alan and Eric slipped away.

  If there was some discontent among the waiting customers during the next quarter of an hour, Mrs Craddock was oblivious of it. She laughed and agreed; and caught Mrs Wrigley’s rich little phrases and played with them like bright juggling balls. It was all the fullness of Françoise and Mrs Gamp, Mr Doolittle and Slipslop for a woman like her. Perhaps Mrs Wrigley showed signs of getting a bit obstetrical, but any true, genuine humour is after all worth its salt.

  ‘Dead drunk he was all the night,’ said Mrs Wrigley, ‘and little Ron come buttocks first.’ She looked at her new-found beautiful friend. ‘Don’t let them do it to you, dear,’ she said, ‘there’s ways and means. Now, if you was to take a rhubarb root regular….’

  Mrs Craddock’s laughter became a little more strained. ‘I really don’t think,’ she said, ‘that there’s much you can teach me.’

  Mrs Wrigley’s scaly hand seized at her delicate wrist. ‘Shameful, that’s what it is,’ she said, and though she began her reproach with a merry twinkle, her new friend’s attempts to remove her hand seemed to change her mood. ‘Lot of whores that’s what you all are now,’ she said. It was lucky for Mrs Craddock that the old woman’s attention, so quickly diverted, suddenly became aware of the disapproving, though dwindling, crowd. ‘Gloomy lot they are for a party,’ she said. ‘I wish I had my gramophone.’ Mrs Craddock, who had contemplated a rather shameful flight from life’s racy humour, felt able to retain her amused position, though at a slightly greater distance.

  She even hummed a tune, as Mrs Wrigley bawled, ‘But in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations, He remains an Englishman,’ though she did not feel prepared to vaunt her Virginian blood, when the old woman glowered menacingly in front of her and said, ‘We’re all English here, I hope.’

  It was somewhat of a relief, however, to see Eric approaching, accompanied by an enormous smiling woman in mauve.

  ‘Funny old thing,’ said Mrs Curry, ‘she’s having a real larky do. She’s not worrying you, is she, dear?’ she asked Celia.

  ‘Good heavens, no!’ Mrs Craddock replied. ‘No one who’s happy worries me.’

  ‘This is my mother,’ said Eric. ‘This is Mrs Curry who has the most peculiar ideas.’

  ‘He’s a naughty boy,’ said Mrs Curry, ‘but it’s easy to see where he gets his pretty looks from. Come along, dear,’ she added to Mrs Wrigley. ‘We’ll get Ron and have a nice comfy evening, just the three of us.’

  It was at this moment that Sonia appeared. She had been warned of the unsuitable scene by a number of the local gentry, whom she had met as they were leaving. Such embarrassment, coming on top of a row with Berthe and Nicholas, was more than she could stand.

  ‘Get out of here at once,’ she cried to Mrs Wrigley. ‘How dare you encourage this disgusting exhibition,’ and her accusation took in not only Mrs Curry, but Mrs Craddock also. ‘I have no intention of letting this be forgotten,’ she said.

  Mrs Curry smiled at her. ‘You don’t want to make a fuss, Mrs Sands,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t do at all for you with all your position here to think of.’ She took Mrs Wrigley’s arm, and the two fat old women waddled away.

  Sonia turned on Mrs Craddock. ‘How perfectly beastly!’ she cried. ‘Why can’t you stay in your own home?’

  ‘What a very rude lady,’ said Eric.

  Mrs Craddock raised her great eyes to her son’s face. ‘No darling!’ she said, ‘just dear English democracy, bless it!’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re here,’ said Sonia, ‘but you’d much better go. It’s getting very late.’

  At the sound of Sonia’s hysterical voice, Elizabeth detached herself from her mother. ‘Control yourself, Sonia,’ she said. ‘I’m so frightfully sorry, Mrs Craddock, I’m afraid my sister-in-law
’s had too much to do. It was terribly sweet of you to come so far. Would you like me to get you a car?’ She was glad to repair her earlier rudeness.

  Sonia rushed up to Ella. ‘You realize the appalling scandal these wretched people have caused,’ she cried.

  ‘No, dear,’ said Ella, ‘I don’t know who they are.’

  ‘This is Mrs Craddock and her son, Mummy,’ said Elizabeth loudly; ‘they’re great friends of Father’s.’

  ‘How very nice of you to have come,’ said Ella. ‘I’m afraid it’s been a very tiring afternoon.’

  ‘I’ve enjoyed every minute of it,’ said Mrs Craddock, as she and Eric departed.

  ‘Sonia, dear,’ said Ella, ‘you oughtn’t to have spoken like that to Bernard’s friends, or to anybody for that matter.’

  ‘Friends!’ cried Sonia. ‘Just another of his fancy boys, by the look of him.’ And when Ella made no reply, she shouted, ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know. Everybody knows. You don’t care, that’s all. You don’t care a damn how it hurts James and Nicholas.’

  Ella’s head trembled, and she murmured, ‘Of course, I know, dear.’ But Elizabeth towered in rage over her sister-in-law.

  ‘You bloody little bitch,’ she said, ‘if things don’t turn out just as you want them, you’ll hurt anybody to get your own back.’ Sonia was quite frightened by her sister-in-law’s manner. She literally ran away. Ella began to cry. It was at this moment that a young reporter with rather too long dark hair and a high-necked sweater appeared.

  ‘I just wanted to get a last photo,’ he said. Elizabeth sprang towards him in her rage. ‘What bloody cheek!’ she cried, ‘how dare you?’ She seemed about to knock the camera to pieces. It was Terence who held her back.

  ‘My dear Elizabeth,’ he said, ‘I’ve been looking for you all the afternoon. Don’t take on so, duckie. It’s all right,’ and then as she began to sob wildly, ‘Dear, dear Elizabeth,’ he said, and kissed her. He led both mother and daughter weeping from the grounds.

  The picture of Ella appeared in that week’s local paper, headed, ‘Novelist’s wife weeps at husband’s triumph.’

  *

  It seemed to Bernard a fitting end to the day’s agony when Bill came into his room that evening. ‘I’m pushing off now,’ he said. His eyes were very bloodshot and his speech was still slurred. ‘I made a bloody exhibition of myself this afternoon, I’m no bloody good to anyone, Bernard.’

  Bernard laid his head back against the armchair and pulled at his cigarette. ‘Being good to people,’ he said, ‘is a dangerously complicated process.’

  Bill swayed slightly on his huge legs. ‘Those young chaps who are going to live up at the Hall,’ he asked, ‘can they write?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Bernard.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Bill, ‘I thought so. Even that poet that talked all that balls. I can’t write, you know. I like doing it. They say that’s the main point, but it isn’t. I expect I write too much but I’m always thinking of things. That’s good work you’re doing, then, giving them a place to work in.’

  ‘It’s done and over,’ said Bernard. ‘It’s theirs now, or, perhaps, somebody else’s. Certainly not mine.’

  ‘You ought to be writing, you know, ‘said Bill,’ that’s what you’re good at. You wouldn’t be feeling like this, like all that you said up at that place, if you were writing.’

  Bernard smiled. ‘You know as well as I do, Bill,’ he said, ‘one writes what one has to say. At the moment, I see Nothing behind nothing.’

  Bill sat down and stared at his brother-in-law. ‘All this isn’t just because you like boys, is it? You don’t want to take any notice of what all these little people say, you know. Chacun à son goût,’ he said, and, though he had not meant to, he gave a salacious chuckle. Bernard, hearing it, said nothing. ‘I’m no good,’ said Bill, ‘no good at all and, as you well know, I don’t even get a kick out of admitting it any more. I’m badly in debt again,’ he added, ‘to that old bitch in the village. I talked a lot of cock, you know, about her – Earth Mother and all that. She’s only a cheap crook, really, a bit off her rocker, but that doesn’t make her any more than a crook. I always fall for any line that people shoot; I suppose I see the story in it. Ought to have been a journalist, really. I probably only swallowed it though because she gave me the chance to gamble.’

  ‘I’m sorry the debts are to Mrs Curry,’ said Bernard. ‘It’s put them in with a great deal of Danegeld, and I’ve not decided yet whether I must pay Danegeld. If I do, rest assured they’ll be paid.’

  ‘Don’t be frightened of the old cow,’ said Bill; ‘she’s got for too dirty a record to turn nasty over anything. She tried to pump me about you, but I wasn’t having any. She’s doing something damned nasty for that chap Rose at the moment. Little girl under age or something. I suppose any decent man would have taken action about it. But I travel light, you know, ‘he explained. ‘You could get them on it, Bernard, though. They’ve nothing tangible against you, have they?’

  ‘No,’ said Bernard, ‘nothing. Perhaps, if they had, I should be more free to live. I have it all, Bill, against myself. And so, you see,’ he added, ‘I, too, have to travel light.’

  BOOK III

  CHAPTER ONE

  In Sickness and in Health

  IN the weeks that followed the opening of Vardon Hall, Bernard lived a strange, confused existence. Night, through long hours of sleeplessness, became mixed with day; events that were separated by but a few days seemed months apart, as his weary consciousness was forced to live through the hours of darkness. Dreams, peculiarly vivid in the short periods of sleep that forced themselves upon him at the least expected moments, were inextricably mingled with the real world around him. A restless overflow of nervous energy would drive him to long, exhausting walks through the countryside, from which he returned too tired to sleep, eager only to escape the confinement of his bedroom in turns about the garden at those death-still, moonlit early hours when the trees cast great shadows across the level lawn.

  Ella had retreated far into her world of shapes and figures, and lay for hours in bed, weeping as the threatening darkness seemed once more to close in upon her, swallowing up her personality in a sea of unrelated fears. They might have been two different species, brooding, prowling in the narrow limits of their private hells, each as little concerned with the other’s trapped existence as a restless, pacing leopard with a she-bear sunk in torpor in a nearby cage.

  Meals, in such circumstances, were irregular and neglected. The house fell under the tyranny of the servants care. Bernard, for whom whole aeons seemed to be passing, wondered constantly that the garden was not choked with waist-high weeds and the house not buried beneath the century’s dust. Yet every morning the mowing machine and the vacuum cleaner brought unwelcome evidence of a world still fighting corruption, rankness, and decay, a world still demanding decision, choice, and affection. Every morning, too, he felt his stock of these commodities dwindling before the sudden rush demand upon his tired will.

  The demands arrived most usually by the morning mail, for even Sonia had been daunted by the death-like response her visits had received. Terence had telephoned during a Soho meal with Elizabeth, and Elizabeth after a visit to Kew with Terence; but this unexpected and repeated combination produced no more than a wearied register from Bernard, while Ella only found in Terence’s name another obsessive word to distract her energies from their determined fight.

  For Bernard, tramping resolutely in stout brogues and heavy, high-necked sweater through the light, misty rains that had followed the intense heat of the preceding month, the familiar countryside had become a desperate need, an opiate urgently craved to dull the pains of the human conflicts that were racking his exhausted mind. Conflicts, so carefully brought out, so lovingly delineated in his novels, where they so inevitably and easily led to the climaxes and resolutions that released him from the strain of creation, now seemed an enveloping mesh of personal memories and guilts that offered no co
nceivable solution that could ease his soul. It would have been simple, of course, to have retrieved and recomposed the fragments of his stable existence, scattered in the morbid moods and unfortunate events of the last weeks. He had met far more difficult practical situations with resolution in the past. A little positive affirmation, a few decisive actions would quickly dispel the atmosphere of mistrust and scandal that had gathered around him. The very activity required for rebuilding confidence in his direction of Vardon Hall would have gone far to dispel his depression and his distrust of himself. Eric and Terence needed guidance no less because he now distrusted his own motives in giving it; the difficulties of providing such help were but little increased by the collapse of those screens around his private life which, in any case, comfort rather than honesty had urged him to preserve. The vulgar threats and innuendoes of Mrs Curry’s petty Alsatia could not stand for a moment against a well-directed retributive stroke. It was even likely that, with his old life once more firmly established, the ugly, dirt-smeared corners in the dark twisted passage of his will, which he had glimpsed again and again in the preceding weeks, only to see so clearly in the neon lighting of Leicester Square, might then have been cleared and scoured to take their place in the daylight world of his conscious existence. But he found in himself no belief or will adequate to support the task.

  The surging rustle of the wind as it swept the oats, the strange loud popping of the rain as it beat upon the dry wheat ears, fat furry caterpillars found upon the shining wet roadway, the sudden bigness of an owl in a countryside of small creatures, the tropical giant white convolvulus trumpets among the depressingly modest wayside flowers of England – such sudden and intense visual and aural contacts seemed his sole defence against the human flood that surged about him. Yet the countryside, too, had its Wordsworthian threat of moral stirrings. Through wood, hedgerow, and field alike, memory found its way to menace his security. The beech trees echoed with the loneliness of James’s and Elizabeth’s childhood as the wood-doves cooed their mourning. The distant whistle of a train or the far-off bark of a farmyard dog – so often, in the past, faint, sad sounds that yet drove home the happiness of solitude – now seemed only to speak of the false comradeship with which he had protected himself from his children’s hearts. The sudden harsh shriek of a jay mocked at his pride in his fearless candour with his lovers. He could trace now no kindness in his teasing exposure of Eric’s ignorance, or in his witty rebukes of Terence’s vulgarity; he could see only the white, frightened face of the arrested young man changing to the pink flush of Eric’s embarrassment or the wincing tick of Terence’s cheek, and could detect only his own answering shudder of pleasure. He found bunches of willow-herb and campion dying by the roadside where some children returning from school had idly picked and dropped them; and he instantly longed to take magic flight to London that he might offer to Isobel the love and apologies that might revive their dying intimacy. He would startle the rabbits from the lush, rain-soaked fields, as with a cumbrous, unconvincing jauntiness he climbed the gate bars – for he felt a constant need to assure himself by movement that the machine of his body was not grinding to a standstill. Seeing their headlong flight – all ears and quivering white scuts – he would wonder if so to watch the young poets and writers scamper and quiver in dismay as he told them that their hopes were at an end, their trust in him ludicrous. Vardon Hall, a play that would not be put on, could perhaps calm for ever his fevered need to smash the images of love and kindliness before which he had worshipped so long in self-deceived, conventional homage. Once, in defiance of his body’s long-learnt urge to save the weak, he forced himself to stand by while a weasel sucked the brain from a quivering rabbit. What was one more rabbit compared to the satisfaction of the snakelike creature’s tensed lust? But he could find no bond of kinship that recalled the brotherhood seal of Hubert’s handshake. Perhaps, he reflected – for he did not spare himself his customary mockery, though its sting made no impact upon his present mood of dramatic hysteria – the rabbit, like Hubert’s small girl victim, had too little appeal to his paederastic taste to make its suffering a test of the true source of his humane ideals.