Hemlock and After

by Angus Wilson

  Mrs Curry’s visit was not, perhaps, the call on her love that Ella sought; nevertheless, it proved a step on the road. Had she known those round blue eyes and soft pink features better, she would have detected both anger and uncertainty. As it was, she was only surprised that someone so famed for their evil power should prove so ill at ease. Her reaffirmation of life had aroused an intense curiosity in its external manifestations. She blinked at the huge figure before her in undisguised interest, taking in every detail of the broken veins around the nose and on the cheeks beneath the layer of powder, the old-fashioned shoes with pointed toes, the flesh forced into bulges around the corsets. ‘Evil power’ indeed, she thought with scorn. How typical of Bill to make up all that nonsense about Earth Mothers. Why! she was just someone’s cook dressed up, certainly dishonest and probably a secret drinker.

  Mrs Curry, in her turn, was surprised to find the old looney, as she thought of Ella, so spry and tough. She let her weight with caution into the rather small Chippendale chair that Ella indicated, and spread her little mouth in a sweet smile.

  ‘We don’t really know each other, Mrs Sands, do we?’ she said, accepting a cigarette. ‘But we’re not strangers. We’re neighbours and neighbours must help each other.’

  Ella got up and stood by the fireplace looking down at Mrs Curry as though she were a new chair-cover sent on approval. But she spoke no judgement.

  ‘If neighbours can’t go to each other with their little difficulties who can, dear?’ Mrs Curry asked. ‘I wanted to have a nice little talk to you, as woman to woman.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ella, ‘why?’ Though she spoke loudly there was no hostility in her voice, only a questioning.

  Mrs Curry took refuge for a moment in licking her little lips, then she said, ‘So that there shouldn’t be any silly little misunderstanding. I like life to be happy and cosy, you know.’

  ‘Do you?’ said Ella. ‘Well, I’m afraid it isn’t.’

  ‘It can be if we make it. It’s just a question of live and let live, really, isn’t it?’ Mrs Curry reproved.

  ‘I’ve been rather out of the world for some time,’ Ella replied, ‘but I’m afraid I’ve found it more a case of die and let die.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ said Mrs Curry. ‘Things would get to a pretty pass if we all looked at it that way. I’m sure I don’t know what would have happened to dear Mr Pendlebury if I’d thought that when he came to me in his troubles.’

  ‘I can answer that,’ Ella said. ‘More troubles. My brother goes regularly from one trouble to another. But he always manages to get out of them.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s because there are people who believe in a loving world, to help him,’ Mrs Curry smiled. ‘Not that I regret the little bit of help I gave him. He’s such a dear old gentleman. He enjoys a little flutter, like we all do, and if he finds himself in Queer Street now and again, I’m sure no one would grudge him his bit of fun. I love to help sporty gentlemen. I was only too glad I happened to have a little nest-egg by me at the time. Of course I know the world, and I dare say he’ll forget all about it, now he’s gone away; but then Mr Sands will see to it that things are put straight.’

  ‘I shouldn’t count on that,’ said Ella. ‘If Bernard paid all Bill’s debts, we shouldn’t have a roof over our heads.’

  Mrs Curry’s smile was so sweet as she answered, ‘I think he would, dear, for me. We understand each other so well. Only I’m afraid Mr Sands takes poor Mr Pendlebury too seriously. He’s a dear old gentleman, but he’s a terrible fibber.’

  Ella laughed loudly. ‘He’s quite incapable of telling the truth, if that’s what you mean,’ she said.

  Mrs Curry stroked her lap rather demurely. ‘Nobody minds a little tarrydiddle now and again,’ she said, ‘so long as it doesn’t do any harm. But I’m afraid your brother’s been telling dreadful stories about me to Mr Sands and now Mr Sands has gone and made a lot of trouble for me with Mr Rose. I thought of going to dear Mr Sands myself, but then I thought perhaps it would be better if I came to you.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ella, ‘why? I thought you said that you and Bernard understood each other so well.’

  ‘Yes, dear, we do,’ said Mrs Curry, ‘but he’s made me a little angry believing such silly stories, and I might say something I was sorry for.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ella. ‘What are the stories?’

  ‘Nasty little stories about poor Mr Rose,’ said Mrs Curry, ‘just because he’s so fond of kiddies.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ella again. ‘Very nasty. I had no idea that Bill had turned into such a dirty old man. I’m quite sure, though, that Bernard would never listen to such tales.’

  Mrs Curry put her tongue into her cheek and gave Ella quite a hard look, before she answered. ‘I’m afraid he’s not quite himself,’ she cooed. ‘It’s such a pity, because of course they’re just the sort of nasty little stories that I’ve been so angry hearing about him. I’m sure he wouldn’t like it if I was to repeat all the silly little village gossip about his young friends. But then I don’t believe in scandal and disagreeableness, and I’m sure he’ll see how silly he’s been when you tell him what I’ve said.’

  Ella moved over to the door. ‘I’ve no intention of telling him a word of it,’ she said, ‘and if you decide to tell him yourself, I should be glad if you would do so somewhere else than here. I don’t wish to see you in this house again.’

  Mrs Curry waddled slowly out of the room. She turned at the door and stared at Ella.

  ‘Well!’ she said, ‘if poor Mr Sands does make the little slip we all expect him to, I shall know who’s to blame.’

  And now, thought Bernard, as he opened Charles’s letter, the Voice of the Great World outside.

  Dear Bernard, he read, I regretted so much that I could not he at the opening of Vardon Hall, but government, perhaps my last mistress, is also the most insatiate. Your speech was, from all I hear, an exhibition of pyrotechnics that has certainly lit fires still burning in many quarters I know of Seriously, what were you at? At a guess, the old game of making people think for themselves. I wonder if you realize quite what a dangerous process it is. To revive the last faint embers of thought in the Master of St Botolph’s deadened mind, or in the lichen-encrusted stone of the Bishop of Beckenham’s brain, was an act of incendiarism that would have graced a last-century nihilist. They won’t easily forgive being set alight so painfully. And to what end? So that those who have conscientiously tried to disguise from themselves the feeble little show they make as they strut on the stage of high office, who have tried, after all, if they can do no good, to limit the harm of their stupidity by sleeping comfortably, should be woken by your cries of ‘dust and ashes’. As if they didn’t know it, as if we all didn’t know it. Why do you imagine they rallied to your support? Don’t you see that they recognized as I could have told them all along, that here at last someone in their petrified world – a petrification, mind you, that works for the best in everyday matters – was doing something a bit outside the routine day-to-day business, a bit of extra, Sunday fancy-work which was both imaginative and practical? And what do you cry about yourself? Stinking fish.

  Well, you’ve got your stinking fish all right, and even from this distance it smells pretty high. Your morals are not my affair, but surely there was no need to put a seraglio on as part of the afternoon’s entertainment. Your politics, if you have any, are to my knowledge enough of the cocoa-and-high-thinking brand to have delighted dear old Beatrice Webb herself. But, like that courageous old simpleton, you seem to have got yourself caught up with the most unseemly mob.

  I don’t like artists in public life, and when the artist is as good at his art and as old a friend as you, I hate it. Not only because you inevitably mess things about, but because I don’t like to see you burn your fingers. But it isn’t too late to save the whole thing, if you’ll only come up to London and put on a show as I know you can. Come and dine with me and Lionel Dowding. He has a lazy mind and a showy one, but he likes saving causes
rather than destroying them, once he’s associated with them; and he’s brilliant at forming what they call now ‘climates of opinion’. If you won’t come for your own sake, buried as you are with guilt enough, in that Rosmersholm of yours, to keep an analyst working for a lifetime, come and help these wretched young poets you made all the fuss about. Will it move you if I tell you that Greenlees was almost in tears when I saw him on Tuesday? You persuaded them all to trust you with your ‘News from Nowhere’: you’ve no right to leave them standing, or worse still at the mercy of some careerist charlatan. What’s the good of seeing how good Greenlees’ stuff is – you were quite right about it, by the way – if you’re only going to dangle Utopia in front of his nose and then whisk it away because your own soul is sick?

  If you can lunch on Thursday or Friday I will guarantee to get Lionel Dowding and any others you think you would like.

  I used to think you were the only one left of us who still had some sense of using life for happiness. I wish I had been right.

  Bernard folded the letter carefully and replaced it in its envelope. Sitting down in the large armchair by the hall staircase he began to cry.

  When Ella came in from the garden she was at once appalled to see her husband’s distress and quite unable to deal with it. In the years before her illness they had approached each other’s grief by gruff or ironical overtures, almost exaggerating their shyness in order to compel an atmosphere of conventional self-control. With the situation once ‘in hand’ and all external emotion banished, they would then settle down to a sensible, comradely discussion. The most that Ella would have permitted herself was to stroke Bernard’s hair, the extreme of Bernard’s demonstration would have been a hand on his wife’s waist and an ‘It’s all right, my dear.’ In the years of her illness she could not have eased his grief, for she could not have fully realized it. But now the sight of that long-familiar grey head bent in private and uncontrollable grief seemed like an assault on her own existence. She was paralysed by an onslaught so different from those she had been fighting over all these years in her fantasy world. Picking up a letter from the hall table, she moved like an automaton to the lobby, taking refuge in routine performance of acts she would have carried out had there been no weeping Bernard to confront her.

  Bending to remove her goloshes, she caught sight of herself in the mirror over the little antiquated wash-basin with its single tap; she noted the untidy, straying, bleached hair, the lined face, and the stocky, spreading hips in their old tweed skirt. She realized with interest rather than emotion that she was not going to cry. Crying had become so automatic with past years that she found the change embarrassing. She opened the letter to distract her mind. No one but Elizabeth ever wrote to her and she felt genuinely puzzled by the unusual event. Charles, she thought, as she turned to the signature, that was no solution, she knew at once no one and so many who might be ‘Charles’.

  Dear Ella, the letter began, I don’t know whether you like to receive letters. It is so long – too long – since we saw each other. Perhaps this world and its happenings are not to your taste. Robin Ferris and Lionel Dowding, however, both told me you were wonderfully well when they saw you. I hope so much that they were right. For you and for Bernard it is so important that you should be yourself. I remember well your directness and good sense in the bad old days when we all had such a good time. I find it difficult to convey to anyone now how good it was. As a result I find myself cherishing memories and links like an octogenarian, but really one might be eighty for the contact one has with the pleasure-haters of today. Many of our old friends, too, have been caught by the sourness, the hatred of life that seems so operative now. So Jew are left, but you miss nothing in not seeing them – most of them like poor Evelyn or dear sweet Alice Lowndes have clung to their little bit of fun until it’s sucked them under. I’m sometimes afraid that I’m getting prim, but drugs and nymphomania and all the rest of the détraqué habits do depress me. I cannot tell you how pleasant it has been to see Bernard holding all our old values and going steadily on coping and more than coping with life at the same time. That it should have been one of the old lot who organized the Vardon Hall scheme was a wonderful knowledge, especially when one thinks of the appalling arrivistes who usually get hold of any worthwhile ideas today. You will imagine, then, how sad I was to hear that Bernard had lost heart in the scheme, indeed had given the impression of not believing in it. To be honest, the impression that the opening day and his speech made on people was disastrous. I’m sure they’ve completely misunderstood. But he really must repair the damage, not only for his own sake, but for the many young writers who have counted so much on his help. I have written to ask him to dine with Lionel Dowding. One dinner would set things right again, I feel sure. Do urge him, my dear, to step out of his mood of exaggerated conscience. If he doesn’t use the authority that becomes him, all the little jacks-in-office and the ignorant arrivistes will sin. Do more than urge him to life; make him live again.

  Ella read the letter through carefully twice. Then she looked at herself in the mirror and made a little gesture of disgust. She walked back into the hall with deliberate, rather jerky steps.

  ‘I’ve had this letter from Charles Murley,’ she said in her loud voice. ‘I should like you to read it.’

  Bernard read the letter through and handed it back to her.

  ‘Charles’s concern is touching, but not very relevant,’ he said, and then added, ‘or rather, it is only relevant to his need to compensate for his own disappointment.’

  ‘Is he disappointed?’ asked Ella in surprise. ‘I thought he had everything. People must have changed while I have been away.’

  Bernard looked up in surprise.

  ‘Oh! yes,’ said Ella. ‘I have been away really as much as if they’d shut me up. But I’m back now, I think, for as long as I can see ahead at any rate. There’s an awful lot that wants doing, Bernard,’ she added.

  ‘A lot of thinking,’ Bernard commented.

  ‘A lot of action, I should have supposed,’ his wife said, and as though to emphasize the need she began to stump about the hall, altering the position of ornaments and re-doing the flowers. ‘That Mrs Curry mustn’t come here again, for example, and then we must see that you get to London and settle all this bother without tiring yourself too much.’

  ‘Has Mrs Curry been here?’ Bernard asked with anxiety.

  ‘Yes. She’s perfectly foul, Bernard, like that nurse we had for James and Elizabeth who told them those beastly stories. What was her name?’

  ‘Ellis,’ said Bernard smiling. ‘Mrs Curry’s not a stupid woman, you know, Ella.’

  ‘Low cunning,’ said Ella sharply. ‘They always overreach themselves in the end.’

  Again Bernard smiled. ‘She has,’ he said. ‘I’ve checked her for a while, I think. But she’s got a fertile imagination for evil.’

  ‘She’ll end up on the wrong side of the law,’ Ella remarked.

  ‘She’s never been on the right side,’ Bernard replied.

  ‘Then somebody must see that the law takes action.’

  ‘Sides of the law,’ Bernard said bitterly, ‘are hardly an issue on which I can take up a strong position.’

  Ella crossed to the mantelpiece and altered the position of a photograph of James and Elizabeth as school children. ‘You’ve never done anything foul,’ she said, in a voice that was somewhat unnaturally direct and easy.

  ‘The law would think so,’ Bernard said. ‘When I have imagined speaking to you of it, these were not the circumstances I saw.’

  ‘We are not children,’ said Ella, ‘to believe that we have no pill to swallow because of the jam in the spoon. Created circumstances cannot last. I know what you want to tell, at least as much as I want to know, and I suppose I shall always hate it, but the dead have no claims on the living, the resurrected must prove their right to restake a claim in life. In any case, you have sought and found affection which you needed, and I know that for you that must
mean new duties and loyalties which you have to fulfil.’

  ‘They would be accounted curious loyalties by most women,’ Bernard said.

  ‘Most women don’t indulge themselves by marrying children,’ Ella said sharply. Bernard winced. ‘Oh! my dear,’ Ella went on, ‘you have told me so often in the past that I took a romantic view of artists. There you have it. Besides, before the children were born, and even after, you were never exactly the usual man in your tastes.’

  Bernard was silent, then, ‘I had no idea of your seeing it.’

  Ella laughed harshly. ‘The ship’s boy at Lowestoft and that student in Montpellier,’ she said.

  ‘In eye and thought,’ Bernard said, ‘but never until these last days more.’