Hemlock and After

by Angus Wilson

  ‘In practice I hate “more”,’ said Ella. ‘It’s something that happens to me physically and I can’t help it. But in theory I know it’s all the same – thought or deed. The theory’s right and I must bend the practice to it.’

  ‘Has that been with you all these last years? Has it, in fact, been the cause of them?’ Bernard’s sunburn was fading to grey.

  ‘No,’ said Ella. ‘At least not directly.’ She paused and then said abruptly, ‘We failed badly with the children, Bernard.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bernard. ‘Perhaps I was jealous.’

  ‘Of their youth, perhaps,’ Ella replied, ‘and I was jealous of their putting a stop to our fun together. I wanted you to be the small boy as much as you did yourself.’

  ‘We tried,’ said Bernard, ‘to be natural with them, not to be the conventional parents. Do you think now that we were wrong?’

  ‘No,’ said Ella, ‘only in motive, at any rate. Sonia’s disgusting with Nicholas and we were right. But I’ve come to think, Bernard, that we did the right thing for the wrong reason. That’s what you said in your speech.’

  ‘I had been thinking of other motives and other acts,’ said Bernard, ‘but you are right of course. With James and Elizabeth too, I feared to be cruel, or rather I feared to be responsible …’ He was going on, but Ella interrupted.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we feared responsibility.’

  ‘I, perhaps,’ said Bernard, ‘but you were so sensible.’

  ‘Oh! yes,’ said Ella bitterly, ‘about cod liver oil and wet shoes and piles, but they wanted love, not good sense. They were and still are lonely.’

  Bernard sighed. ‘I had not thought you cared.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Ella. ‘I don’t know that I do even now, for James. He has measured his small stature by finding Sonia enough. But Elizabeth need not have been the lonely, bright bore that she is.’

  ‘She has found companionship now, I’m afraid,’ said Bernard.

  ‘Oh!’ said Ella, ‘with that friend of yours. I ought to have seen, but new facts are still hard for me to grasp. But why afraid, Bernard?’

  ‘Because,’ said her husband, ‘Terence is as you say that friend of mine.’

  There was a long pause. In his descent to the grave and in her rising, such sustained effort had exhausted them. Grey and trembling, they seemed like ghosts.

  Ella deliberately walked to the window and turned her back on Bernard before she spoke.

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Ours has not perhaps been the ideal advertisement for such a union, but also it has been very happy, Bernard. If Elizabeth is as happy as I have been …’

  ‘I was thinking of Terence,’ said Bernard.

  Ella’s voice seemed to come across a desert of separation. ‘Are you jealous, then?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh! no,’ said Bernard. ‘All that is over or nearly so. But Terence is a very respectable person. He treads a safety line of decency with great courage. He is clearheaded and hard. I don’t think he can compromise, or it he does, he will be broken. Even in these last weeks he’s been contemplating,’ Bernard paused for a moment, ‘going to another person, a very worthless man, and I’ve been frightened of his being sucked down.’

  ‘Then,’ cried Ella, ‘what could be better than this with Elizabeth?’

  ‘For Terence his own course, for Elizabeth another man,’ said Bernard.

  Ella considered for a moment. ‘I think,’ she said at last, ‘we are not the people to judge. If they want one another, we must want it for them.’

  Bernard rubbed his eyes wearily and wiped the sweat from his forehead. ‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘As you say, how can I know my motives?’

  ‘Oh!’ cried Ella. ‘I don’t try to suggest that good men like you should not take action. Who else if the fools and knaves are not to beat us? Charles is right there, you know.’

  ‘I took action today,’ he said sadly. ‘God knows if I was right.’ And he told her the whole story of the intended seduction of the wretched Elsie Black.

  ‘My God!’ cried Ella. ‘How perfectly foul. But, Bernard, how can you know if they won’t go on with the beastly business, all the same?’

  ‘I don’t really,’ said Bernard, ‘but they won’t. Hubert Rose is a frightened neurotic ruled by superstitious fears, and I touched the centre of those fears.’

  ‘H’m,’ said Ella, ‘you’re right, of course, because that’s why that woman was so angry. She was frightened too. But they ought to be punished, Bernard. You must act against them.’

  ‘I?’ said Bernard. ‘My dear, I am the last man with a right to act or to punish others. To protect the girl I have taken all the action that I have right to. A limited action, I know, but the only one that I can justify. I am not with the authority of the law, you know.’

  ‘You’re not frightened of what they can say?’

  Bernard looked hurt. ‘Can you think that?’ he asked.

  ‘No, no,’ Ella answered. ‘You’re tired and ill, that’s what it is. I must take action. I’ll get hold of Bill and make him tell me what he knows. He deserves to pay for his lazy selfishness.’

  ‘People pay, that’s all,’ Bernard said sadly. ‘Don’t let us start talking of deserving to pay.’ He lit a cigarette with trembling hand. ‘If you insist on taking action I shall, of course, have to play a part in helping you. I wish though that you did not.’

  It seemed to Ella a long time before he spoke again, for she knew instinctively of what he was going to talk, and she tried in vain to stop her gorge rising. ‘You see,’ he said at last, ‘I too have my superstitious fears. I had to save that innocent, but I do not want to take vengeance. How do I know where that action may lead or who it may hurt far beyond my control? And I too have my innocent to save, but God help me! I cannot hurt those he loves for although I know their motives to be wrong, I cannot fight them while I am unsure of my own.’

  Ella sat on the high-backed chair by the hall table. Her mouth twitched as she spoke. ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  When Bernard had done with the story of Eric, ‘Give me the letter the mother wrote to you,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ she said after she had read it, ‘she hates you a lot. It’s strange, I ought to be on her side. While you told me about her, even, I was. But the little knot that binds us is very tight. I fight for my own, if they’re hurt, and she must already have hurt you so much to be able to write as she does.’

  Bernard protested, ‘We can’t like each other, it’s true. The situation can’t allow it. But I see that she may be thinking she’s doing her duty. I know that it isn’t so, that her motives are fear for herself. But she may not know it. I can’t hurt her because of that. But I also know that she will suck Eric down and I ought to stop that. But how can I, when my own motives may be worse than hers?’

  ‘That may be, yes,’ replied Ella. ‘You’re probably right, as far as the boy’s concerned. I’m afraid I can’t reckon with that. But she has hurt you and that I do mind.’ There was a pause and then, ‘Yes, Bernard, we must help the boy to get away. If necessary we must show him this letter.’

  ‘Oh,’ cried Bernard, ‘I couldn’t hit people like that.’

  ‘It would be quite justified. She has no right to expect you to cooperate in such underhand treatment of him. If she believes he should not leave, she should have the courage to tell him so.’

  She walked over to her husband and put her hand on his arm. ‘In any case the main point is to help him to get away.’

  There was for the first time a false note in her voice. Bernard stifled his awareness of it. Everything, he thought, was all right, she was on his side. He smiled up at her. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘And now,’ said Ella, ‘what are you going to do about this letter of Charles’s?’ She had pandered enough, it was clear. ‘You can’t let all these people down. These young men depend on you.’

  ‘They should depend on themselves,’ said Bernard. ‘Vardon Hall is theirs now.’

  ‘Yes, but they n
eed your help and direction. At first, at any rate, to keep out the unholy army of climbers and jacks-in-office.’

  Bernard smiled wearily, for the first time he sought refuge in his body’s ills. ‘You forget that I’m a sick old wreck,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t do it all, I know,’ Ella answered. ‘You’ll need someone else. Someone intelligent and honest who understands you.’ She considered for a moment. ‘What about Charles?’ she asked.

  ‘Charles is a very busy civil servant,’ Bernard answered.

  ‘You also said he was unhappy,’ Ella replied. ‘This would give him something. Between you both you could do it. You must, Bernard.’

  With a deep sigh, he answered, ‘I’ll do my best, dear.’

  ‘Write to Charles tonight,’ she said. She bent over and kissed him. ‘We have a lot to do,’ she said. He put his arms around her and held her for a moment in a close embrace. Then, ‘I’ll make you a mushroom omelette for dinner,’ she said.

  *

  Bernard went to his room early after the meal. He felt heavy and exhausted with the programme of common activity that lay before him. Ella had returned to give him safety and comfort, but his conscience, his beliefs, his tattered humanism were now compounded through and through with alien motives and decisions.

  He sat for a time at his desk in the great beamed bedroom that lay under the thrall of the vast flickering shadows thrown up by the firelight. He had the letter to Charles to write.

  Taking up his pen, Dear Isobel, he wrote, I have been so sad that our meeting should have ended on such an unhappy note. It was dear and good of you to come down and wish me so well, and it was very foolish of me to let an unimportant argument prevent me from expressing my gratitude.

  If I cannot believe as you do, you must not think that I have ever ceased to be on the side of the oppressed, the weak, and the misfits, I have lived long enough to know that many of them are so from their own doing, that many of the strong and fortunate are finer people, hut still I must stand with the unfortunate. We shall not see anything of what we wish come in our lifetime, and, of what happens after we are gone, we are free to make what pleasant dreams we will. If I am right about those you believe in, you will be the first to denounce them, I know. If I am wrong, you will forgive me and understand why.

  I have thought so much about you and how wonderfully you have coped. Neither you nor I were born to be teachers. By the lucky fluke of being able to write, I got out. Surely it is time you did the same. Your life is a very full one, full enough to do without the grind of work that has gone stale on you. If you should think of retiring, perhaps we could start your new-life by a trip abroad together. I should like that.

  I am tired now and cannot write sensibly. Let us meet soon. My good wishes to Miss Randall, if she will accept them.

  All my love,

  Bernard.

  When he had addressed and stamped the letter, he padded downstairs and left it for the postman to collect in the morning.

  It was dark in the room when he woke in bed, only the dying embers of the fire showed life. The folly of eating mushrooms possessed him as he felt his way across to the washbasin for his soda mints. A sudden violent thrust of pain through his side brought him to a standstill. He moved back towards the table by his bedside to reach for his digitalis tablets. But as the pain lashed across his chest and filled his throat, as he sank back into red-hot darkness, he was content that he had not kept the tablets in his pyjama pocket as the doctor had told him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Epilogue

  THE daytime had become almost a pageant of histrionic roles for Celia Craddock. Every movement of her body, every tone of her voice, combined to fortify her in these roles which her emotions invented in their fight against her conscience. Whatever doubts she had of her sincerity in her letter to Bernard, whatever distaste she felt for the underhand scheme she had proposed in order to hold him and Eric to her will, were blurred and lost in the intensity of her play-acting. She moved simply, graciously, about her household tasks – a mother who, despite all her healthy desire to live for herself, had courageously pushed aside her lazy distaste for interference and her hatred of circuitousness in order to save her son from unhappiness. If she put on a kettle, it was done quietly, a little sadly, for the shabby tricks to which life forces us to descend, but radiantly, proudly, for the strength and the wisdom in her that had allowed her to accept such little shabbiness where life had become too big for her poor human conscience. If life, in fact, had proved too big for her moral values, she had at least proved as big as life by setting them aside. As she made flaky pastry for the chicken pie – she would at any rate spoil Eric a little in these hard growing-up days when a mother had to stand by silent and see him suffer – she was Elizabeth Tudor or Catherine of Russia who, with a little moue of disgust for the smallness of humanity, set scruple aside in the greater cause of statecraft.

  But night was not so kind. With the early morning light of four or five o’clock, she woke to a world in reverse. Now she saw only a mother who, from her own selfish grasp on life, had stooped to dishonesty and indulged her sense of power to keep from her son what she had missed for herself. In vain she told herself that she was a woman of the world, not a Buchmanite to harp on unadult dreams like absolute honesty. In vain she told herself that any other mother would long, long before have revolted against so unhealthy a relationship for her boy. Her will, her ego, were too exhausted in those early hours to play their daytime rôles. She knew that a conventional outraged mother would have spoken directly and honestly in her anger. She knew, in fact, that she had herself long accepted the ‘unhealthy’ relationship, but that she had never been willing to resign the future to her son.

  As noises from the outside world told her that day was beginning again, her will would once more begin to come to life, and in those early, in-between hours a compromise would be effected between conscience and desire. If, perhaps, her motives were selfish, we can none of us examine motive too closely; if she did not feel the conventional mother’s antagonism, that did not make the assumption of it the less necessary. In a little while the scheme would have worked – Bernard would not have written, Eric, after the miseries of life’s lesson, would have accepted the future. Her motives would then be buried beneath the issue, the happy issue of a son saved from moral danger. God – if one could believe in Him, she thought with a little laugh – would once more have moved in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.

  She had unfortunately planned without considering one important thing – Eric’s own feelings. If Bernard could be restrained, she had taken it for granted that the child would act according to her scheme. But, as Eric mooched in the garden, or dealt with the bookstore’s customers in a haze of unhappiness, as his daydreams failed him and his night fears increased, he became seized by a hysterical desire to see Bernard, to demand his reasons, if necessary to force from him a confession of that lack of loyalty and affection which his silence seemed to declare and at which Mimi hinted.

  *

  He got on his bike on Sunday morning; and all Mrs Craddock’s cares over the chicken pie and mayonnaise were wasted, for he was not back for lunch, and he was still not back at dinner.

  *

  Ella was pottering in the garden when he turned in at the drive. Bernard’s death had left her with only one possessing thought – to carry out the plans they had devised together on that last evening – only so, she knew, could she absorb the agonies of regret and sorrow and fear that were inside her. But to do so she had to escape for a while from the family sympathies and hostilities that had filled the house since he had died.

  It took a few moments for her myopic gaze to recognize Eric in the sweating, flushed, wind-blown figure that descended from the bicycle. For a moment physical nausea threatened to engulf her as she thought of his place in Bernard’s life; and then she dwelt with determination on the misery that Bernard had felt at that woman’s letter, the things he had hoped so much to
do for the boy.

  ‘Oh! how do you do? I want to see Mr Sands,’ Eric cried on a high, excited note. ‘I’ve heard nothing from him and I was afraid he might be ill again.’

  ‘He was,’ said Ella. ‘He was very ill.’ Curiously, she found herself angry that the boy had not written to Bernard in those last days. ‘He died,’ she said in a hard voice, ‘last night.’

  Eric’s flush rushed from his face, his hands trembled, the bicycle fell into a lilac bush. When he rose from picking it up, he was crying.

  ‘I had so much I wanted to talk to him about,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Ella, ‘so had I.’

  They both stood for a moment in silence. Then Ella said abruptly, ‘You’ve ridden here too quickly. You need a rest and some food. In any case, I want to talk to you about all the things Bernard intended to do for you. He was very fond of you, you know,’ she added lamely. ‘We can’t talk in the house,’ she went on, ‘it’s full of family. Put your bicycle round the corner there and wait a minute. I’ll get the car and we’ll go in to Bantam. I don’t think it’s too late for the “Crown” to find you something to eat.’

  They sat in silence as the car sped along the country roads, and even when the food had been ordered in the too-oak dining-room, Ella said, ‘I don’t want you to talk until you’ve had something to eat.’ The result was that Eric, in his shyness and anxiety, ate the cold ham and brawn far too quickly and got indigestion. After he had drunk a cup of bluish coffee, Ella began to tell him of what he must do. She spoke quickly and firmly to prevent him from interrupting. She felt that any intrusion of his personality might antagonize her and so prevent her from carrying out Bernard’s aims. Bernard, she understood, wished him to live in London. That was, of course, quite right; it never did for children to live with their parents. In addition, she believed, he needed extra qualifications to get a job suitable to his ability. Bernard had thought highly of his ability. Extra qualifications meant evening study, and that could never be done with the strain of long train journeys. What financial help Bernard had offered would, of course, be forthcoming. She made an effort not to appear too formal; she would be glad to give it, she said. The sooner the better, she went on. He must get his room at once. Had he a bank account? It would be better so, then there would be less financial dealings.