by Angus Wilson
*
Mrs Wrigley took it very badly. Hers had been a respectable family. She could hardly believe it, when she thought of the way in which she had been so regular at chapel as a girl. She even took out the ‘Good Book’ from a dusty cupboard and set it on the table as a testimony to the godliness of her home. It only showed the ingratitude of children. One worked and slaved to give them a good home and this was the result. However, after Ron’s sentence she sold his suits – the very demons of his temptation – and after that she felt better. Two new records of Patience – bought with part of the proceeds of the sale – helped to solace her new loneliness.
*
Hubert was arrested in the rich, Ouida-esque setting of the chic drawing-room in which he usually received visitors. His behaviour to the police was as polite, as insolent and as Edwardian as to any of his ordinary callers. His calmness was superb. Despite the seriousness of the charge the police felt justified in not opposing bail. It was in the functional desert of the studio, however, in which he had received Bernard, that he was found dead the next day, hanging from a hook in that vast ceiling. He seemed a curiously lonely figure in his Edwardian tight trousers and brocade waistcoat, swaying in so ungainly a manner amidst the vast stretches of steel and glass.
*
James and Sonia only learnt by chance from Bill of the active part that Ella had played in this mass dealing-out of justice. He revealed it to them in a patronizing interpolation to his great eulogy of his own part in the proceedings. Even Sonia had to agree with James that his mother had behaved with admirable competence and public spirit. They could find no two expressions of higher praise, but then there were few things they so delighted in as primitive retribution. They bombarded Ella with invitations to play with the children; and Sonia did not even openly interfere when Ella told Nicholas that God was a person whom lots of people made up stories about because it made them feel better but that like Rumpelstiltskin and Humpty Dumpty he wasn’t a ‘real person’. She merely laughed and said didn’t Ella think that Nicholas must judge that for himself when he got a bit older.
Both James and Sonia kept advising Ella about the best means of coping with the large estates that Bernard had left outright to her with the request that she provide for the children and grandchildren on her death. Should she not, they said, invest in this, or sell that, security? Should she not get rid of the house, so big and difficult to run, and buy something smaller, more comfortable and modern? After all – and they reiterated this a hundred times – she had only herself to think of now; the money was no good unless she made sure she got exactly what she wanted out of it. Ella would have liked to talk of her satisfaction at Bernard’s legacy to Eric which relieved her of a responsibility that she hated. She would have liked also to have regretted that nothing had been left to Terence, which would have helped on her schemes for Elizabeth. She realized, however, that any mention of either of the young men would have upset James and Sonia greatly. They all found it possible to compromise by wondering at the legacy to Isobel – an elderly single woman, with a good salary; really! it was rather coals to Newcastle.
James and Sonia felt no embarrassment, however, in discussing the Curry case. The enormity of such things having happened in their village seemed particularly to impress them.
‘You have supplied, Mother,’ James said, ‘the link that is so peculiarly weak in our judicial system – the public-spirited citizen. The public as a rule consistently assists the offender in this age of sentimental values.’
‘The rot, of course,’ said Sonia, ‘set in with that stupid play of Galsworthy’s. He completely falsified the dilemma by making his convict a gentleman.’ She had conveniently forgotten her previous social admiration of Hubert.
‘I only did it because of the little girl, you know,’ Ella said.
‘Yes, yes,’ said James pompously. ‘No woman can be expected to act from abstract motives. But it only shows that if the occasion is well chosen, the general principle will be upheld.’
‘I wish,’ said Ella with a sigh, ‘that one could act in single things without involving so many others. Such a lot of wicked things get mixed up with any good one does. Bernard understood that so well; but then he didn’t only act in particulars, he maintained what’s important in his life itself.’
Sonia really could not forbear giving a hard little laugh, and was about to protest verbally; but she caught James’s eye and forbore. Ella’s natural feelings so soon after her bereavement must be respected.
‘I can hardly bear to think of Hubert Rose,’ Sonia said. ‘One knew that he was vulgar and superficial, but one couldn’t guess that he was degenerate also.’
‘I can hardly bear to think of him, too,’ said Ella. ‘I feel as though I’d killed someone myself. What sort of a home can the wretched man have had?’
There was an awkward pause. ‘The local committee are well out of it,’ said Sonia. ‘Supposing this had happened after they’d selected him as candidate. Not that they would have done anyway, darling,’ she added, taking James’s hand.
Ella looked at her son to see if he would protest, but he was purring like a cat, so she picked up her handbag and walked out of the house.
*
Elizabeth would have been glad to comfort her mother in any way she could, but she was nevertheless relieved that Ella was so competent to console herself. It allowed her to spend all the time she wished with Terence. At the very moment that Ella left her son’s home, Elizabeth was waiting impatiently for his arrival in a funny little 1870 pub, all coloured glass and gay vulgarity, that they had adopted for their own. Terence’s habit of arriving late was growing, she reflected. It wouldn’t matter, of course, if she didn’t always feel so certain that he had been knocked over by a bus. He obsessed her thoughts so completely in these last days that a mention of ‘Lambeth’ in an article she was proof-reading had sent her daydreaming by its likeness to ‘Lambert’ and she had almost destroyed a column about a new theatrical designer because she felt so angry that Terence’s great talents were not yet recognized. She had almost begun to hate this obsession, this longing for his physical presence because it made her so unable to be the amusing companion that she knew he wanted.
‘Here’s your pink gin, darling,’ she greeted him when at last he arrived. Terence made no reply.
‘Elsie’s boy friend’s got a new motorbike. Isn’t that good?’ she said. Elsie was the barmaid. Terence said, ‘Is it?’
Elizabeth’s stomach turned over a little, but she found herself going on exactly as she wished not to. ‘Of course it is. Jolly D. They’re going for a dainty spin out to Elsie’s Ma’s.’ When Terence said nothing, she lit a cigarette. ‘Shall it be one good dish or a real blow-out?’ They had long agreed that these were the only two possible kinds of dinner.
‘If I said I was going home now,’ said Terence, ‘it would be bloody, and if I stay I shall almost certainly be bloodier still.’
Elizabeth summoned all her strength to cope. ‘No, darling, if you really would rather go home, it wouldn’t be bloody at all. It would be silly not to,’ she said.
‘No,’ said Terence. ‘Please don’t try to be understanding and put it all off. It won’t help either of us really. I know I oughtn’t to have let it happen, but I also know that I can’t stand it much now and soon I shan’t be able to stand it at all. The same cosiness every evening, the same little warm jokes and happy matinées. I feel I could almost scream.’
‘Have you met somebody else?’ Elizabeth asked. ‘Some boy?’ she added with difficulty.
‘Some boy?’ Terence echoed scornfully. ‘You’ve got sex on the brain.’ He checked himself. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘that was silly and rude. But you see …’
‘No,’ said Elizabeth, ‘this means a lot to me, Terence, I’m not going to let a sudden mood of yours destroy it. I might fight for it, Surely, what’s gone up to now is worth fighting for?’
Terence looked suddenly very hard. ‘I shall have to fi
ght then,’ he cried. Then putting down his glass he said, ‘Look Elizabeth, I’m to blame, or at least, let me be honest, I blame myself more than you. Not for beginning, which is really what you mean by “‘what’s gone up to now”. We wanted it, we enjoyed it, and we ought to be glad about it. But for the way it’s drifted. I am to blame. I should have seen what you were making of it. In fact, of course, I did, but I did all the usual silly hoping and excusing. But I’m not going on with it. It’s not sex, or only partly so; I’ve liked that and it’s given me confidence. I’ve not been “changed” or whatever they call it, but I know now I’m not completely one-tracked. It’s what I want in life and the way I’ve got to go about getting it. Oh, this is squalid and tedious.’
‘My dear,’ Elizabeth cried, ‘I’m not going to get in the way of that. I’m not asking for any more than we’ve had already.’
Terence was silent for a moment. ‘No, duckie,’ he said at last, ‘I don’t think you are, or rather you’ll make yourself put up with it. But you’ll always be hoping and watching, and you’ll begin to hate it fairly soon. And even if you didn’t, I like you too much to want to see you a good-scout queen’s woman rooting pluckily in the background with a double gin for her fairy prince.’
Elizabeth grimaced with disgust.
‘You see,’ said Terence, ‘it won’t do. All I can do to help is not to say “What can I do to help?” I can’t, except by getting out now.’
Elizabeth laughed hysterically. ‘Mummy,’ she cried, ‘was saying how we ought to marry. Isn’t that silly?’
‘No,’ said Terence, ‘or rather, only because she shouldn’t have said so without knowing me.’
‘What will you do?’ asked Elizabeth.
‘What I was going to do before, I suppose,’ said Terence. ‘It was partly fear of Sherman’s cesspit that led me into this.’
‘Thank you for “this”,’ said Elizabeth bitterly.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Terence. ‘I shall go now, because otherwise I’ll say a lot more such things.’ When Terence had left Elizabeth took herself off to a cinema and cried her eyes out.
As the last of the committee were leaving the flat, Isobel put a hand on Louie’s arm. ‘Stay and have some coffee with me,’ she said, ‘there’s something I want to tell you.’
Louie sat on the kitchen chair, while Isobel brought the good, strong coffee to the boil.
‘Verreker’s impossible,’ she said. ‘I’d like to get rid of him, only the Pacifists are rather important.’ Isobel made no answer. ‘Margaret Tasker has no conception of when to raise things,’ Louie went on. ‘Of course, we all agree that the Women’s Guilds aren’t of the slightest …’ Isobel was making so much noise with the cups that she stopped in the middle of the sentence. ‘What was it you wanted to tell me?’ she asked with a sigh.
‘Oh nothing important really,’ Isobel was clearly agitated, ‘only something purely personal.’
‘Oh,’ said Louie flatly. ‘What is it?’
‘Well,’ said Isobel, ‘I’ve decided to resign my chair.’
‘Resign?’ said Louie. ‘Good heavens! whatever for? You’ve got five years to go yet.’
‘Yes,’ said Isobel, ‘that’s why it seems worth while. If it was only two years it would only be a sort of gesture.’
‘But whatever are you going to do?’ asked Louie.
‘I thought,’ said Isobel, ‘that we had agreed there was infinite work to do at the moment.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Louie, ‘but yours is rather an important position. You’re not just a lecturer like me.’
‘I know,’ Isobel replied, ‘but that seems to make it worse. I simply haven’t any right to use my position to go on teaching young people what should be important and alive, when it’s been dead to me for so many years. Especially when there’s so much I think more vital.’
‘It’s taken you a long time to make up your mind,’ commented Louie, laughing.
‘All the more reason to act quickly now,’ said Isobel. ‘You see that I’m right, don’t you? Think of all I shall be able to do now. I shall be free to speak completely as I wish.’
Louie blew on her boiling coffee. ‘Quite honestly, no, I don’t think you’re right, ‘she said.’ I understand what you mean. God knows I should get sickened wading through all that stuff. But … Well, look, you say how much more you can do, but what you do won’t carry anything like the same weight. On the Peace Committee, for example, an ex-professor’s not much, but a professor’s just what we need.’
‘I see,’ said Isobel. ‘It’s not what I do or say, then.’
Louie laughed again. ‘You do believe in the personal element a lot, don’t you?’ she said.
‘Yes, I suppose I do,’ Isobel replied. ‘At least I try not to do useless, dishonest things when I realize that they are so.’
‘I should have thought giving the weight of your position to the Committee was useful enough.’
‘And killing the enthusiasm of the young?’
‘English Honours students?’ Louie laughed.
‘I thought,’ said Isobel, ‘that you believed so much in Education.’
‘Of course,’ cried Louie, ‘one can’t emphasize enough that the failure to implement the Act is one of this Government’s most shocking betrayals.’
‘I see,’ said Isobel slowly. ‘Perhaps my brother was right.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘I’m sorry you don’t like my decision,’ she added, ‘but I’ve got to stick to it.’
*
Eric left the bookshop at six exactly. He carried his bathing trunks rolled up in a towel. He had been working so hard in the past few nights that he felt a certain moral satisfaction in the indulgence of a free evening. Life in London had acquired so strangely self-defensive a character from the beginning. It was like, he thought, all the Kiplingesque phrases which his headmaster had used in leaving-day speeches, phrases which Bernie had called the ‘cheerless athlete’s conscience’. He was forever ‘proving himself worthy’ of Mrs Sands’ kindness and trust, ‘living up to’ what she had said Bernie had expected of him; above all, refuting Mimi’s sarcasm and laughter in the ‘painful’ scene which had ended his life at home by ‘showing he had the guts’ she had refused to grant him.
Her hostility, her rancour, ate into everything he did. They hung like a cloud of duty over his studies, robbing them of all the intrinsic interest which Bernie had revealed in them. They banned him from all the concerts, shows, and parties to which Bernie’s friends or his own colleagues at the bookshop invited him. They drove him to casual contacts in vain to break his loneliness, although he had determined to avoid such a casual life as frustrating and time-wasting; yet only among strangers could he get away from the memory of her unhappiness, her collapse before the lies of the letter she had written, her pleas that she had been denied life’s pleasures, her charges that he was about to take them at her expense.
If, he reflected, Mimi had been driven to deception by her jealousy of Bernie, her greater hostility to Mrs Sands ‘intervention had broken her into a pathetic figure of tearful appeal and impotent anger. If he was to survive, he had been forced to resist both appeal and fury, yet he had seen too clearly the pathos of her wasted life in that ‘scene’, and its memory clogged his own hard-won freedom. Eric was ill adapted for ‘hard winning’, for refusal to answer letters of appeal, for tenacious opposition. If only, he thought, Mrs Sands had not shown him that letter, he would have effected his escape without the violent wrench of Mimi’s silver cord; or would he? Bernie, at any rate, would never have brought it about so violently. Bernie, too, would have dissipated the gloom of his life in London with giggles and mockery. He missed Bernie every hour. Death was indeed a final thing.
The Reverend Bill MacGrath sat on the edge of the swimming bath and waved to Eric. He was, of all Eric’s new casual acquaintances, the one who looked most like sticking – the one, at any rate, who was most determined to stick. Backwards and forwards they swam – three lengths of the
baths in race – despite the Rev. Bill’s forty-five years, his strong overarm crawl won him victory. Mena sana in corpore sano! And would old Eric like to come back for a cold supper at the Rev. Bill’s flat – only a cold supper, mind, none of the delicious fleshpots that he was used to with his swell friends, but a bit better perhaps than the sort of scraps a chap was liable to make-do with in digs. Eric did not listen a great deal to what the Rev. Bill said, but he felt cheered by his determined kindness. The supper, he reflected, when they sat down to it, was really only very little better than he would have got for himself. But now the Rev. Bill, in pinstripe suit and no dog-collar, was getting down to some good talk. Athlete though he was, the Rev. Bill was very keen on things of the mind. Not, of course, that he pretended to be an alpha man himself, but he enormously admired them. Not only thought but the arts – literature, perhaps, not so much, he had so little time for reading – but music – Eric and he must ‘do’ some symphony concerts together – and painting. Italy had opened the Rev. Bill’s eyes and ears, there was no doubt of that; opera – Verdi and Puccini – out of doors, that was so grand. Eric should have seen some of the fellows out there, great tough chaps, lapping it up. For the Rev. Bill was first and foremost an ex-chaplain of the Eighth, with plenty of talk about the Desert Rats. But when the talk turned to the visual arts, the Rev. Bill’s tone changed. What did Eric think of this, for example? Only a reproduction, of course. But wasn’t the figure absolutely splendid. Some people said there was nothing more completely right – artistically right, you know – than the figure of a young boy. Certainly these really big chaps, like Donatello and Michelangelo, seemed to think so.
‘But Michelangelo was queer anyway,’ said Eric.
The Rev. Bill’s laugh was a little hollow. Of course he knew Eric didn’t mean anything by it, but didn’t he think that word was rather a pity, implying as it did something abnormal. He meant to say that love between man and man, or he would prefer to say the companionship of an older chap and a lad could be such a damned fine thing. A kind of complement, if he was making himself clear – a harmony of body and spirit. David and Jonathan, he went on, and Achilles and Patroclus, and Shakespeare and Southampton, too, you know. The truth was that, although the Rev. Bill was a very modern parson, his technique of seduction was derived from his own original experience and issued from a very old-fashioned world of Edward Carpenter and the Shropshire Lad. He couldn’t help thinking, he said, when they’d been stripped down at the baths and going all out to win against each other in that race – and by Jove, he’d enjoyed the contest, every stroke of it – that Eric reminded him of a little statuette he’d seen at Urbino, or was it Cremona?