A Treasonable Growth

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  *

  ‘And this,’ Bateson was saying, ‘is Big School.’ He flung wide a door like a guide announcing the Medici apartments. He climbed on a desk, struck a match and lit the gas. The room swam up out of the night. It’s really rather fine, thought Richard, in spite of a sour chilliness which spread a damp bloom over everything. Four long naked windows looked out to the street. There was something immensely theatrical in their moon-flooded bareness. A dais stood at the far end and on the dais, a pale, scratched table. To the right was an upright piano, its pedals trod to wafery gold. Over the piano was a photograph of Queen Alexandra wearing dozens of necklaces. A mouse sped into the skirting. Bateson grabbed a ruler and lunged at it wildly, then lifting a desk-flap he said: ‘There’s a particular squalor for every age; the immediate prepubescent for example. Take a look.’

  Richard saw a cooking-apple with large brown bites in it, a torn Euclid, a pen inexplicably impaling a Swan Vesta box, a truncheon of torn Wizards, a spongy publication called The Hangman’s Daughter; nibs, rubbers, a gnawed cap … a slab of unthinkable toffee.

  Bateson shook his head. ‘Nature morte indeed,’ he said. He closed the lid. ‘Now you know what you’re in for!’

  ‘How many pupils are there altogether?’ asked Richard.

  ‘Sixty-one.’

  ‘Oh yes, sixty-one—I remember Mr Winsley telling me now. I suppose that it’s full? It would have to be, I mean, to make it pay?’

  Bateson heaved himself up to his handsome height from where he had been lolling across the back desks. The gas arm hissed a warning just above his neat head.

  ‘You’re not trying to tell me that there’s money in it, are you, old boy? Listen to me; Copdock’s a goner. Finished. I mean it! It’s had its moments and there have been enough shekels rolling in to keep the Belle in gin and vermouth, but for heaven’s sake don’t be an ass and kid yourself with things like “seats of learning” and “Alma Mater”. All that you are going to find here are the rags and tatters of academic opportunism.’

  ‘You tell me what comes next then,’ said Richard, a little dashed, but amused.

  ‘Next,’ repeated Bateson. ‘Company, sharrrn!’ he bawled at the benign blackboards. ‘That’s what’s next.’

  ‘I don’t believe that—not entirely.’

  ‘I don’t want a bloody war,’ said Bateson, suddenly aware that it might appear that he did.

  ‘What is it that you don’t want, Bateson?’ asked Mr Winsley coming in unexpectedly. His white, narrow face was set with irritation. ‘Incidentally, have you two been properly introduced? Tom Bateson—Richard—er—Brand …’

  ‘We were discussing the war,’ explained Bateson.

  ‘But there isn’t a war.’

  ‘Ah, but there might be!’ retorted Bateson with mock enthusiasm. ‘Brand is clever, you know. He’s just been explaining the stained-glass window on the stairs. It’s by Forester or somebody who was a follower of Burne-Jones. Did you know that? Nobody ever told me.’

  ‘It’s a memorial to Miss Bellingham’s sister, Lady Abbott.’ said Mr Winsley.

  ‘It’s very good,’ added Richard, feeling it was time to praise something. He was about to say, ‘of its kind,’ meaning of its period, setting, place; but Mr Winsley was staring at them in turn, gathering up all the objections in reach and doing so with an ominous, pouncing kind of silence. He saw himself as a custodian of the past and it was something that he just wouldn’t put up with, this wilful toppling down of earlier values. When it was obvious that Richard meant what he had said Mr Winsley was a trifle mollified.

  ‘Before I forget it, Brand,’ he said heavily, the change to surnames the phantom of his disfavour, ‘Miss Bellingham wishes you to go to her room.’

  Richard was appalled. It was like waiting for an operation for months and months and then somebody saying, ‘Oh, and before I forget it … if you could just step along to the theatre we could do that little job now …’ His new-kid feeling came back with a rush. In the sparse interval caused by his astonishment Bateson turned out the light. Mr Winsley was talking to him, telling him where to go.

  ‘Don’t remain too long. You musn’t tire her.’

  Unnecessary, thought Richard. Well, get it over. But since she had waited so long, couldn’t she go on waiting until tomorrow, say? Bateson, whether out of inquisitiveness or kindness, followed him. That was a relief, but not for long.

  ‘Bateson,’ called Mr Winsley (Bateson was obviously in favour), ‘Bateson, about that vaulting-horse. Oughn’t we to be able to fix it up a bit …?’

  Bateson disappeared through the patched baize door and Richard was alone. He found the room easily enough. It was just a matter of going up and up. He knocked warily at first and when there was no reply, more firmly.

  ‘Come in!’ It was faint. He wasn’t certain whether he heard it or imagined it. She was placing a book, face-downwards, on her lap. Behind her the tall oil lamp rose up like a moon. Her hair, bright in its death, rushed up towards it in an albescent flood. Richard couldn’t see her face.

  ‘Sit there, will you,’ she said.

  The chair was too small. Too low as well. His legs stuck up like scissors. By his side was a table quite mountainous with dusty letters and curling yellow bills on crazy spikes. Miss Bellingham held out a hand which, with its delicate orange and purple blotches and the watery shrine of her rings, was like a knot of withering blooms. Richard stood up and took it gently. He expected it to be as soft as flowers, but it was as hard as wood. Before he could sit again, she seized a tray covered with dirty cups and plates and said: ‘This is in our way.’

  He put it on a platform of encyclopaedias piled up on the floor and took good care when he came back to sit in the far-side chair. But not for long.

  ‘No, here, Mr Brand.’

  So he took the uncomfortable seat again.

  ‘I like to think that people are happy,’ she said. Two gnat-sized flecks of light in the twin hollows of her face showed that she was examining him.

  ‘I’m sure I shall be,’ answered Richard, thinking that she had sent for him to make conventional conversation about his appointment.

  ‘Why?’ asked Miss Bellingham.

  This was disconcerting.

  ‘Well I wasn’t really happy at the bank,’ he confessed.

  ‘What bank?’

  ‘Goodyear’s—at Ipswich. It was my first job—I—I wrote all about it in my application.’

  ‘I expect you did,’ Miss Bellingham answered tartly.

  The huge marble clock chimed ten. Richard felt extraordinarily tired. He felt, too, that his weariness must extend to everything about him, to the cramped room, to the old woman with her restless face. To the books, to the pictures slung against the walls with a tangle of cords.

  ‘Perhaps you would rather I came back in the morning … It’s late now …’ he began.

  ‘Now?’ she said, ‘Morning? What’s the difference to me? Can you tell me that?’

  Richard smiled to hide his slight embarrassment.

  ‘Unless you mean that you are tired!’

  ‘No, not at all,’ he protested. But he was. Deathly. Why, he couldn’t think.

  ‘The duties cannot be called onerous, Mr Brand. The secret is to work steadily, patiently, through the syllabus, with enthusiasm if you like, but not with fervour. The two are different, you know. I have always distrusted fervour. Young men who have that generally have bad breath as well! You must keep order, of course. Enforce the utmost politeness, because in the long run that is the most to be hoped for in the type of boy who passes through Copdock. What did Wordsworth say? “The youth, who daily farther from the east must travel, still is Nature’s priest.” Well, nobody could be more wrong at times than Wordsworth. Those smelly creatures you will be paid to instruct are grossly natural—and so quite un-priestly. It speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Why did I do it? Well, you may well ask that.’

  But Richard was too bewildered to ask anything. His eyes wandered about
the room in a game of their own. One long gilt, two maple, one chipped gilt, a looking-glass—that didn’t count; a freckling of miniatures in ebony rings …

  ‘You admire pictures?’ she asked. ‘That one there is a Samuel Palmer. Copy-cat,’ she added obscurely.

  It’s a good one,’ said Richard, straining to see it better without getting up.

  ‘How do you know—are you an expert?’

  He sank back uncomfortably, sensing mockery.

  ‘Well are you?’

  He shook his head. ‘I meant that I like it.’

  ‘And so what you happen to like is good?’

  ‘I don’t know, but isn’t that the way most people make their assessments …?’

  ‘Quite likely—and so accounts for the amount of bad taste in the world, I suppose.’

  ‘Perhaps if I saw it in the daylight,’ Richard said, stepping back from the conversational quagmire. He thought Miss Bellingham’s head nodded a little. He noticed her face for the first time. She had moved and the lamp rained down on it. There was a stain under each eye like a cicatrix and her neck was scrabbled together in some seemliness and held tightly in a stiff broderie anglaise band.

  ‘I have been young, of course, but never beautiful.’

  He felt like somebody discovered peeping. I must get out, he thought; hurry away from this guttering life. Toothpaste might drive the atmosphere of the room from his mouth, but how would he shake it from his clothes! All tomorrow it would nudge him, this sweet stale room so blatant in decay. Besides, she saw so much! Every particle of a thought was seized on by her greedy perception.

  ‘Whereas,’ she continued with a certain limited daring ‘you might be said to be both …’

  A gulf-like silence parted them. Unperturbed, Miss Bellingham leaned out of her chair and began to search about her in a rather desperate way. Her hands straggled feebly in the recesses of the upholstery and then through contents of a green velvet bag slung from clicking tortoise-shell handles at her side.

  ‘I’ve lost it,’ she said, ‘No, no—here it is.’ She pointed. It was on the floor, Sir Paul’s letter in its fine white envelope with the stamps stuck on anyhow. She took it from Richard and waving it at him said: ‘People are so kind to the really old; they tell them everything. It is because they expect to discover some discretion at the end. Being a writer you will have half an understanding of such things, Mr Brand.’

  ‘It wasn’t in my references,’ smiled Richard. He felt a bit better. He wondered how she had found out about his writing.

  ‘It would hardly need to be. We asked for no talent beyond those required for the working of the syllabus.’

  ‘I only wondered how you knew—how Mr Winsley knew?’

  ‘Oh, he guessed,’ she said. ‘He’s a great guesser. Not that you are likely to do much in the next few years; you’re not the type. Paul now, he’s my nephew,’ she squeezed the envelope and it cracked open, ‘he was always so much doing that he found inaction superfluous! A change, you must admit, to the usual order of things! He wrote Tiger-moth when he was fourteen …’

  Richard listened, but with half an ear. A wind had sprung up and wound itself dreamily about the window, bringing with it a welcome sense of isolation. It reminded him that he was free, that this room, Copdock, Stourfriston itself were only conventions; that beyond them were mountains and seas and illimitable hazards and rewards. It was like reading Shakespeare or like Quentin’s habit of saying ‘Where will it all end …?’ by which he meant a cry of mock despair, but which made Richard feel extraordinarily optimistic. Where? Why it might be anywhere! It was exhilarating. It was the other thing which made him sad; the unending regularity and what people called ‘security’. When the wind flagged he heard her voice. She became for him just a poor old woman chattering about the past and about her family. He paid little attention, although sometimes he smiled and nodded. She was talking about books. Had he read Sir Paul Abbott? What a question! God! what wouldn’t he give for that kind of ability! Now it was nephew again. Nephew and the celebrated Sir Paul, they grew one in the same breath; they parted. They were twin orbs moving across each other, illuminating then obliterating each other. Nephew was gold—very precious it seemed, by the way Miss Bellingham spoke of him. Sir Paul was purple (but only in the very best sense). They swam together in the stream of her talk and just when they might be said to be one and the same, nephew spun free; a relation only.

  ‘My sister’s only son,’ she explained with her eyes fixed on something over his head.

  Why am I so tired? Richard wondered. Sleep was fast becoming more than a nodding acquaintance. It had certainly been a long day. He found it hard to believe that parts of it were this particular day at all. Breakfast at Lafney for instance. Was that today? The bookies in the train? … Weren’t they years ago? But she was asking him something. He must grab at consciousness. He did so and the effect made him jerk forward in a way that it was impossible to hide. He felt for his handkerchief, straightened his tie—anything than let her see that he was dozing—and coughed.

  ‘If you see Matron,’ said Miss Bellingham, interrupting her more important conversation, ‘she’ll set you up with a gargle.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he muttered.

  ‘You see,’ she went on with extreme clarity, ‘Sheldon’s been shut up since nineteen-twenty-seven. There’s been a housekeeper of course, but there will be a great deal to do—much more than ordinary servants can cope with. You could catalogue, couldn’t you? He says, Pauly, you know,—well I’ll read it to you.’

  Miss Bellingham’s nephew and Sir Paul Abbott suddenly became one. Snap! It was incredible! Just wait, thought Richard, wait until I tell Quenny! They had both known about Sheldon, of course, and of it belonging to Sir Paul. But he had never lived there and the house, spread goldenly behind a deep screen of parkland, watched time and traffic trundling by, uncared for, uncaring, its beauty undiminished by neglect. Richard and Quentin had propped their bicycles up against the palings and stared at it and Sheldon had stared back from all its regular windows. Lady Abbott had been a Miss Bellingham then? Neither he nor Quentin had supposed that, although it was the sort of thing Quentin usually knew. Richard was now quite painfully awake. What was Miss Bellingham saying? Nothing. She was waiting. It was his turn. (But Quenny—wait till he heard! The best they could muster at March was a self-published poet, a Mr Gridbitter.)

  ‘When would Sir Paul like me to see him?’ he asked.

  ‘It could only be on a Sunday, couldn’t it’ retorted Miss Bellingham pointedly. ‘What am I to say—that you would like to? That you will?’

  ‘I should like to very much,’ answered Richard.

  ‘Then I shall just say that.’

  ‘Will you? Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t be too ready with your thanks.’

  ‘But it’s exactly the kind of thing I should love to do,’ he protested, not at all nervous of her now, but unhappy about the ease with which she switched from consideration into malice.

  She let his eagerness pass. She placed her cold, hard little fingers together and bent them weakly in and out. ‘Now tell me,’ she said, ‘you write too? Or you want to? Is that it? We’ll get this point straight first, shall we? You’re a writer, an embryonic one, if you like, but that’s better than being the other kind—manqué, you know. But there, you’re too young to be manqué anything as yet. Do you hope to be married Mr Brand?’

  ‘Blast, blast!’ he thought. She was remorseless. There were old women like that in Lafney. There was nothing they couldn’t ask. He smudged any directness in his reply by rising and stroking the chair cushions straight. The clock said ten-to-eleven.

  ‘Then don’t leave it too long,’ she insisted in a vague, accusative voice. ‘Pauly put it off and put it off—and now there’s nothing to stop him traipsing across the world a hundred times if he wanted to. Nothing affectionate, you know.’

  In the silence that followed, Richard walked gently to the door. The dying fire winked
across furniture and pictures. Miss Bellingham in her tangle of stuffs—the formal sheen of the top half of her dress, the crochet shawls—sat motionless. Yellow lamplight poured across her hair. The walls were lively with photographed eyes. Stunted hyacinths in an earthenware bowl sent up a few sweet nodules of bloom in their black ring of earth. The carpet was spattered with letter-paper. Is there anything more? he wanted to ask, knowing there could be very little.

  ‘Are you off, Mr Brand?’

  ‘It’s late,’ he answered gently.

  ‘I trust that you will like Mr Winsley.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘And Mr Bateson’s your neighbour, I’m told.’

  He waited.

  Miss Bellingham wagged her snowy head, a pensive gesture at once marquise and senile. Her hands began to pluck at Sir Paul’s letter, slipping from her lap. She crammed it back into its envelope.

  ‘Well then, that’s settled, is it? Well take it you’ve come—and come to stay.’ She shrugged as a wisp of humour possessed her. Holding up her hands, she held out her skinny fingers wider and wider until they looked like stripped fan-sticks. ‘Not to say, outstay,’ she added mordantly.

  Richard didn’t notice Mr Winsley at first. It was dark on the landing. Then he heard a sound like outraged mice. It was Mr Winsley’s nails in a furious tattoo against a window-pane. A second later he had brushed past him, said nothing, flung wide Miss Bellingham’s door without knocking and disappeared. Walking slowly, Richard went down all the carpetless stairs until he found his own room. It was icy.

  3

  EDWINA BRAND paused when her duster reached the automatic calendar. She stared at it and the calendar returned her gaze with a dull malachite intensity. Of all the rubbish in this room, she thought irritably, that thing wins hands down by its utter futility! How could one have any faith in a date that one had brought about oneself? A stud was pressed and a day, a month, a year even, fled by; indicating no predecessor, intimating no future. This morning for instance it said ‘Friday 4th January 1939’—but who was going to prove it? It would have to be on the purest assumption that she would have to believe that Sunday was the sixth when the Crawfords were coming. Quentin had given it to her, she recalled; a birthday or a Christmas. She lifted it to see. ‘For Mummy from Quenny on her 100th birthday. X X X.’ That was Quentin, even then! He told one nothing. She passed on, dusting idly, not very well, hardly shifting things; books, shepherdesses, silver cups—the last fairly explicit regarding its origins (Trim House, R. L. Brand, 1934), mats, more books, and photographs in living frames. Then she arrived at a looking-glass and observed herself very privately.