by Angus Wilson
Eric sat quite still, as though he feared that, if he stirred, the whirlwind of her determination might blow him out of the room.
‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘I don’t think there’s anything more, except addresses and that sort of thing.’ She tried once more desperately to be humane. ‘Where will you live in London? I should think Bloomsbury would be good. It’s reasonably cheap and near your place of work, and near to theatres and concerts, too, which is even more important.’
Suddenly Eric came to life. ‘Why didn’t Bernie want to see me in these last weeks?’ he said in a tense voice. ‘What made him so unhappy?’
Ella said nothing for a moment. Then, lighting a cigarette, ‘I think you’d better see this letter,’ she answered, and she handed him Mrs Craddock’s note.
When Eric had read it through, he gave an odd giggle. ‘Mimi has got herself in a stew, hasn’t she?’ he said. Then he laughed bitterly. ‘Thank you,’ he went on, ‘I shall accept your offer. I shall try to leave for London tomorrow.’
Ella nodded with pleasure at his decision. ‘It’s a foul letter, I’m afraid,’ she said.
Eric did not answer directly. ‘It was none of it true, of course. Bernie would have realized that,’ he said.
It cost Ella a lot to confirm Eric’s trust in Bernard, but after a pause, ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘Bernard knew you were on the right side.’
‘But why didn’t he ask me?’ Eric persisted.
Ella felt too much was being demanded of her. ‘What makes you think I should know?’ she asked.
‘I’m sorry,’ Eric replied. ‘I must be going.’
Ella announced, ‘I don’t think you’d better cycle back. I’ll put you on the London train, and send your cycle tomorrow by rail.’
When they reached Bantam station, Eric held out his hand, but Ella began to adjust the car window. ‘Good luck in London,’ she called to him.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I can come and see you sometimes.’
She fiddled with the gears. ‘You’ll be very busy, you know,’ she said gruffly. ‘Bernard expected that.’
Eric suddenly saw life without Bernie or Mimi. Ella noticed his upper lip trembling, she started the engine and was gone.
To her pleasure, she found on return that James and Sonia had left. Elizabeth was writing copy in the drawing-room.
‘Where have you been, Mummy?’ she cried. ‘Aunt Isobel phoned to say she would come down for the funeral.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Ella in a disinterested voice. She did not answer the question. ‘Has Bill phoned?’ she asked.
‘No, darling,’ Elizabeth replied. ‘You surely don’t mind, do you? We’ve had quite enough of his fragrant presence for a while to come, I should have thought.’
‘Of course, I don’t mind,’ Ella answered, ‘but I’ve got to see him quite soon. It means I’ll have to go to London. I must anyway to see Charles Murley, now that he can’t get down.’
‘I think Terence Lambert wants to come for the funeral,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Is that all right?’ She had told Terence that only with him there could she support it.
*
‘Of course, dear, I’m glad,’ Ella said. ‘You will explain to him that I shan’t be much in evidence, won’t you? But it doesn’t mean I’m not glad to see him. I shall always be glad to see him, you know.’
‘Did Daddy ever talk of Terence to you?’ Elizabeth asked. She felt that she had no right to be putting such a question, but she desperately wanted to know what Bernard had said, and she desperately wanted to talk of Terence in any case.
‘A little,’ said Ella. ‘He admired him very much.’
‘Terence admired him greatly. I wish I had understood Daddy as he did.’
Ella smiled. ‘You mean you wish you had liked Bernard,’ she said, and when Elizabeth was about to protest, ‘No, no, dear,’ she said, ‘these questions are bound to crop up now. Bernard you know, hated having failed so badly with you. We both did. We hated to see you getting lonely and bored.’
‘I know,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Daddy tried to tell me once. You mustn’t worry. I’ve got the mag, you know.’
‘Elizabeth dear,’ said Ella, ‘don’t be silly. That wretched paper’s been more than half of our worry for you. That’s why I was so pleased that you got on so well with someone Daddy admired so.’ There was a pause. Ella walked across the room and straightened a picture on the wall. ‘How fond are you of Terence Lambert?’ she asked.
‘Very fond,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He’s helped me so much. It’s all different.’ She hesitated. ‘I think I’ve been able to help him too,’ she added.
‘Why don’t you marry? You do believe in marriage, don’t you?’ Ella asked.
Elizabeth laughed loudly. ‘Of course, darling,’ she cried, ‘we’re not living in 1911 or something. But marriage with Terence … it’s so difficult to say.’ She gave a high-pitched laugh. ‘He’s what’s called “not the marrying kind”, I suppose.’
Ella came and stood by her daughter’s side. ‘Bernard wasn’t the marrying kind,’ she said.
‘And were you happy?’ Elizabeth’s voice was suddenly very hard.
‘Yes,’ said Ella, as though she had supposed her daughter too intelligent to have such conventional doubts. ‘Oh!’ she cried, ‘you’re thinking of these last years. That wasn’t because your father was as he was. No, that was my jealousy and weakness. You see I thought I had nothing. I hadn’t got you or James, because I’d been too frightened of losing Bernard if I gave in to motherhood. And then after Bernard became famous, I think I got frightened of losing him too. We’d been so happy with the school and in his early days of writing. Or perhaps I was afraid of losing myself. I nearly did, you know, later. At any rate, Bernard was so wanted everywhere, and there didn’t seem much point in me. He had his work and his friends.’
‘But darling!’ Elizabeth cried. ‘What nonsense! You were adored by all those masses of people that came to stay. James and I hated them. You seemed to be mother to everyone but us.’
Ella laughed. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I was happy in a way. The jolly, commonsense mother to all Bernard’s set, the one who saw that they changed their socks and ate good meals. With one or two like Charles, I suppose I really flirted and enjoyed it. It was something I could never have had with Bernard. But then the war came and that all seemed to smash up.’ Once again there was silence for a few minutes. ‘But that’s quite different with you and Terence. You’re not so demanding as I was. And then you say you have helped him, that he’s fond of you. My dear, you’ll be very wicked – wicked and stupid – if you bother about what his life has been. If you really love him and let him go, you’ll deserve to be as lonely as you probably will be.’ To have thought otherwise would have been a blasphemy against the whole of her own life with Bernard. She took her daughter’s hand into her own for a moment. ‘I’m going to write some letters,’ she said.
*
The morning after the funeral, Ella went to London. Although she was obsessed by the details of the schemes to which she was committed, and although deeper still there lay the horror of her resurrection to a life without Bernard, she felt nevertheless, for the first time since her recovery, scattered evidences of a pleasure in life itself that she thought had gone for ever. To be going to London at all was an event, to be going to lunch with Charles Murley was a peculiarly pleasant prospect. She regretted that she had no coat and skirt of which she really approved. She attempted a new hair style and even contemplated getting a new shade of lipstick before meeting him. The streets of London seemed all cleanliness and vigour after the green prison of the country in which she had so long been confined.
Charles found her appearance horribly aged, but in no time her charm had reasserted itself. She ate with gusto at the quiet Soho restaurant he had specially chosen for her, though she would much have preferred Claridges or the Berkeley.
It was only when they had almost flirted their way through luncheon and she had agree
d to a brandy, that she felt free to make her demands upon him. She had never been able to take any man but Bernard seriously, and although she was happy to flirt with or mother any of them if they liked it – even, on occasion, herself enjoyed doing so – she had usually ended by getting from them what Bernard needed. Today’s meeting was therefore a return to such relationships undertaken on Bernard’s behalf, if it was also the last.
‘Charles,’ she said, holding the great brandy glass in her small, freckled hands, ‘I want you to take Bernard’s place on the Vardon Hall Committee.’ And when Charles began, ‘Ella darling, above all things, you know, I should adore to serve you, but …’ she said, ‘No, Charles, wait until I’ve finished before you ask to be excused. Bernard’s greatness, what people will know of it long after we’re both dead, lies in his books. But this scheme was a good thing to have done, it was the last thing he did and he cared about it. These people, too, the younger writers, depended on it, and in a sense, I should think, it’s one of the few useful things done for literature in England today. It mustn’t fall into the hands of those foul people – the tuft-hunters and the formal deadheads. Bernard wanted to let the people who worked there run it for themselves, and if he’d lived he’d have seen that they did. The rest of the committee are far too lazy or too frightened. They’ll appoint the first petty tyrant who wants to make a name for himself so that they don’t have to worry any more. Charles, it mustn’t happen. If you go on the committee – and they’ll be glad to have you – you can see these younger men through the first year, and then they can cope on their own.’
‘My dear, even if I had the time, I doubt if the committee would have me for a moment.’
‘Give me some of their names, Charles,’ she said, ‘and I’ll see that they do.’
‘Darling Ella,’ he cried, ‘I believe you would.’
Ella smiled. ‘Of course I would,’ she said.
It was enchanting, Charles thought. He had no idea how he could possibly fulfil such a promise, but to be brought back in peace to his past like this, and by one of the figures whom he had long struck out of existence; he could not resist it. Probably she would cease to be so concerned with it in a few weeks, she had clearly not yet come to grips with her grief; meanwhile, it would make her happy.
‘Very well, darling,’ he spluttered. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Thank you, Charles,’ she said. ‘It will be so nice to see something of you again.’
It was only when they parted and he bent from his great height to kiss her, that she remembered his tiresome habit of disarranging one’s hat.
Her next errand lay in a very different quarter of London. It was only after ringing for ten minutes at the door of the peeling stuccoed house off the Vauxhall Bridge Road, that a pouchy-eyed woman with peroxide hair opened to her.
‘I want to see Mr Pendlebury, please,’ Ella said.
‘Second floor up on the right;’ the woman was suspicious.
Ella had never seen the more sordid aspects of her brother’s life. She realized, as she climbed the stairs, that it had been easier to imagine and then to dismiss them. Conscience, in these few minutes, bit rather fiercely, as she remembered her periodic affirmations that Bill’s belief in his writing was justified. It had been pleasant to assert one’s faith in one’s brother to sceptical audiences; and easy to agree with a little shrug of realism that he would never fulfil his hopes. She dreaded the remorse that the actual appearance of the squalor to which he had descended might bring to her.
The trays of half-eaten meals, the litter of crumpled newspapers, the cigarette ends, and the stale air that filled his room brought her, however, not remorse, but remembrance. This was nothing new to her, only the echo of her own past neurotic misery.
In her surprise, she could find no approach save a return to their youth. ‘Hullo, my dear,’ she said.
Bill’s histrionic sense was more alive to the occasion. He sprang from the broken armchair in which he was buried beneath books, newspapers, and ash.
‘My God!’ he cried, ‘this is my lowest point. That you should have to come up here to see me, and I haven’t even had the decency to write. I can’t expect you to believe me, I know, but it’s knocked me harder than I would ever have believed. One doesn’t meet so many men of stature in this puking little world, and his greatest thing was that he never made one feel small.’
Ella swallowed her disgust. It was not impossible, she thought, that Bill might even have felt something of what he said. He was getting old and death might well have touched what little nerves of feeling the years of selfishness had not insulated. The familiarity of his excessive speech, however, hardened her resolve to make her demands of him.
‘Well, Bill,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to put your sympathy into action. I need your assistance and I intend to have it.’
‘Good God,’ Bill cried, ‘if you came here to kick me on the bottom, it wouldn’t be more than I deserved.’
‘That would be easier, I think, than what I’m going to ask. I want you to go to the police and tell them all you know about Mrs Curry and Hubert Rose and their friends. And if you don’t know enough about that, tell them anything you know that will put as many of those foul wretches in prison as possible.’
When Bill began to protest, she sat on the side of the huge brass bedstead, swinging her legs.
‘No, Bill,’ she said, ‘you’ve got to do it. I realize now that you knew this bloody story about the wretched girl when you were with us last week. You tried to tell me something about it mixed up with a lot of nonsense.’
‘I told Bernard of it quite directly,’ said Bill, ‘the night I left you.’
‘I see,’ said Ella. ‘Well, tired and ill as he was, he did something about it. We agreed the night he died that it was not enough, that we must do more. But you, Bill, you hadn’t the guts to do anything. You could have done it your own way, but you didn’t. You’ve lost that right now; you must do it my way. You must tell the police and after that, whatever they want you to do, you’ll have to do.’
‘I don’t think Bernard had quite your admirable British love of the law,’ Bill said. ‘Perhaps he knew men and women too well to believe that shutting them up was going to cure the world’s evils.’
Ella had been thinking with anxiety of this view which she and Bernard had always held so strongly; its statement in her brother’s mouth so sickened her that she dismissed it finally from her mind. Her next approach was indicative of her growing distaste for Bill.
‘I shan’t let your help go unrewarded,’ she said. ‘You can’t go on living like this, you know, Bill. It is something I ought never to have allowed. Bernard’s will has left me well off, far too well off for my plain needs. You must let me give you an income. It’s what you’ve always needed if you’re to write as you want. I believe in your writing, you know, so that it won’t be insulting you. Of course there’s a limit to what I can do, and if you decide to let the money push you further downhill I can do nothing to stop you. But you must do what I ask you now.’
*
When Bill told his story to the police inspector it was amazing, in fact, how completely he entered into the role of the public-spirited man. Perhaps it was the little income that was now assured to him that made him see the attraction of travelling through life with rather more luggage.
*
Mrs Curry was arrested in the act of sending some cosy snaps of ladies with wooden legs to one of the more lonely and love-needing of her correspondents. Such struggling emotions of fear, of anger, and of thwarted power boiled and swirled within that huge bulk that an unaccustomed shivering shook the great mountain of flesh, as with difficulty it was fitted into the police car. Nevertheless by the time she reached the station her sweetness had been restored. Throughout the long dreary weeks of trial and appeal her eyes once more shone forth to recall to the dusty sordid courts a happier, sweeter world of sunlit skies, of bluebell woods, and of quiet, dignified gardens
with delphinium borders. Somehow, however, the courts atmosphere proved sadly resistant to the messages of love and beauty which were offered. Sweet wood-doves cooed in her voice, quiet lakes rippled in her smile, but the story of threats, of lies, of cheating, and of cruelty flowed on. Love, it may have been, had brought together the collection of pimps, of blackmailers, of greedy shopkeepers, and bribed garage mechanics: it was fear, however, that made them speak in court. Mrs Curry had always been fond of that music-hall song in which a judge addressing a young lady says, ‘You’re a bad, bad woman, but you’re damned good company.’ The judge’s address to the jury was sadly different. It might have been, he said, that the sickening exhibition of sanctimoniousness and moralizing which the accused had offered them from the witness box had prejudiced some of them against her. They must, however, put all that out of their minds. The facts, and the facts alone, must form the basis of their verdict. Never, perhaps, had judge had so ample an opportunity for moralizing.
It was only when the sentence – a sentence that by its severity surprised even some of the lawyers present – was passed and the touch of the wardress’s arm on Mrs Curry’s arm urged her below, that a look of such hatred came from those liquid blue eyes as to disturb even the judge’s excellent digestion.
*
Ron was taken in the heart of his shrine, trying on a new knock-out suit that Ma Curry had just given him for his loyalty. It was difficult to persuade him to leave his worship. He clung to his bed in hysterical screaming and kicking. During the trial, however, he was all that justice could have required, anxious to tell all that he could, difficult only to stem in his voluble incrimination of all and sundry. He was rewarded for his cooperation with a far lighter sentence. It was only when he left the box that his somewhat restored spirits allowed him once more to indulge the old ‘one two’ as he looked up at the judge.