A Treasonable Growth

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  Yours sincerely, Paul Abbott …”’

  *

  Stella arrived at six. She was the eldest of the Brand children by a number of years. In all, in her appearance, in her interests, her job and her far too desperate loyalties, she should, one felt, have added up to some dull accord. She was the kind of person you expect to find complete. She should have been a fugue, close-knit and sustained, against whose endless contrapuntal the wilder themes and grace-notes of her more erratic brothers might have soared with effect and impunity. But she wasn’t. Her own enviable poise was maintained by too much common sense. It excluded every scrap of the uncommon kind and she could be ungenerous and rather cruel without knowing it. From similar dark burnt-gold eyes as Quentin’s she saw only a workaday world which caused her few complaints. Quentin found her particularly bewildering. He wasn’t even certain that he liked her. Her huge sanity floored him. The difference was that he had a hundred answers to every question posed by life and Stella had but one. It was the obvious one, of course. Quentin now took good care not to ask his sister’s opinion of anything that really mattered to him, but he would endure, with a rather flinching smile, her blunt little observations on subjects he found expendable.

  Nor was she beautiful. All the Brand features were present in her neat, practical head; the squarish nose, the fine rich eyes—but when added up they amounted to an actual plainness. Clothes, make-up, even a faint interest in how she appeared to others, might have lessened this. But Stella didn’t care. Not remotely. Yet it still was quite mystifying that she wasn’t beautiful, that is, until you accepted the fact that beauty of person is a diffuse quality, a merging of bone and spirit, flesh, colour and the imaginative heart. Stella certainly kept all her wits about her, but nicely pigeon-holed. They didn’t coalesce into a personality. She used her mental equipment like so many efficient gadgets. And finally, she was never really changed by what she thought. Her reaction to practically everything was cerebral, certainly, but it was the cerebration which could be ascribed to a highly gifted carpenter. She had very lovely, very white hands.

  They heard her turn in at the gate in her small old, shuddering Austin.

  ‘I’m brimming with news,’ she announced. She flung her hat and rug down on the couch and hurried to the fire.

  ‘Don’t start! don’t start!’ called Edwina anxiously, running in and out with water glasses, side-plates and napkins. She adored Stella’s gossip. It was all gossip should be, surprising, accurate and straightforward—unlike Quentin’s unfathomable small-talk or, for that matter, Richard’s unwilling conclusions.

  ‘Help me,’ said Stella, ‘there’s lots more.’

  Among the laurels the Austin shone yellow-paned like a little lit-up room. The back seat was a mountain of papers, vacuum flasks, food tins, maps, books and leathery things. There was also a sparkling ebony-bright tin helmet marked W.

  ‘The typewriter,’ she said. ‘Carry that, will you, Dicky.’

  ‘You’re not going to work?’

  ‘I must. I’ve got to give a talk at Harrods.’

  ‘Harrods …?’

  ‘It’s called “Reading trends for adolescents”—it’s their National Book Week, or something.’

  Stella was famous. She lived in a windy flat in Ipswich and wrote stories for girls. They had been enormously successful. The actual grand sweep of her achievement still startled her. The ‘Petunia’ books had caught on. They had certainly accumulated. One every six months she found was nothing and now their titles made a long, solid slip in the publisher’s catalogues and a hefty wedge in the public libraries’ card indexes. Even more miraculous were the astonishing cheques drifting through her letter-box. Just for this! she would beam to herself, shuffling the day’s scrawling effort together as the constant breeze carried in the cheerful cretonne from the ever-wide window. She looked around her girlish eyrie. The plaster rabbits hunched along the mantelpiece glowed cosily. Stick by us. they seemed to say, and we’ll jolly well stick by you. For Stella there was small effort needed in complying.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked in her easy, rather rushed voice when they were at last all settled, ‘I’ve told Dicky just now—I’m giving a talk at Harrods.’

  ‘A talk at Harrods ..?’ Quentin rocked gently. A talk at Derry and Toms … ‘If it’s successful,’ he enquired, ‘shall you be taking it on to the Home and Colonial—or perhaps Swan and Edgars might like it. The possibilities are infinite …’

  ‘Everything isn’t funny,’ Edwina declared.

  Stella explained.

  As they bickered, Richard ate silently. All through the meal Sir Paul’s letter sent out a crisp morse in his pocket. He would have liked to tell Stella before she was led away into Quentin’s fantasy of the oblique and the embellished from which she would return believing nothing. Or to get the news in before his mother thought of it. But Edwina was eating hurriedly with one eye on the clock.

  ‘It’s an awful pity,’ she said, ‘just when you’re all home together, but I’ve got to leave you for an hour or so. I’ve promised to attend a meeting, an evacuation committee at the Infirmary. I shan’t be long.’

  This was just the sort of remark to have set off Quentin’s nervous, whooping mirth. ‘“An evacuation committee,”’ he repeated, ‘“at the Infirmary ..”’ Yet he didn’t. Instead a curious change came over him. His face grew suddenly tormented. ‘All these ridiculous preparations!’ he cried, ‘all this interference! Why can’t everybody talk of something else?’ For a moment he hesitated, unable to go on, then, with his face oddly white and set, he hurried from the room.

  ‘But …’ said Edwina helplessly.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ said Stella in a particularly comfortable voice. ‘It’s really,’ she added with unusual discernment, ‘because he feels all these directives personally—you know, all the gas-masks, conscription talk, evacuation, trenches in Hyde Park. Poor Quenny! the ladders are being propped against his precious ivory tower!’

  ‘He’s entitled to his life,’ said Richard, not meaning to be sententious, but suddenly seeing Quentin’s predicament very clearly.

  ‘We all are, dear,’ replied Edwina vaguely. It’s my fault, she thought. I’m clumsy. How funny they were when you came to think about it; not Stell, of course—just the boys. If only she knew what it was all about. If only someone would tell her! She sighed because she knew no one ever would. The fact that she would be always in the dark, however, allowed her a little self-justified anger. ‘Why, anyway, should Quentin think of himself so very particularly? If he couldn’t bear the word “sandbag”—why should we? One had to!’ Castigating Quentin was such a luxury so far as Edwina was concerned, that having begun it she used it as an opportunity to wail a bit herself. ‘He’s exasperating!’ she declared. ‘You’ve no idea what it means to have him in the house for a month! I feel as though I’m putting up with the ways of a foreigner—funny little ideas, you know.’

  But even as she spoke, Edwina felt her affection, a unique one in Quentin’s case, rising within her in a violent sap of warmth and love. But she was still rather furious, so that when her compassion, rising higher, met a descending force of reason, she merely grew irritable and her eyes smarted till she had to dab them, and her voice, rambling on rather wildly, went on accusing him in a tone of blunted tenderness.

  ‘I’ll have a word with him,’ said Stella when she could. ‘It’s not surprising that Quenny gets het-up at times—I do myself.’

  ‘I don’t believe that!’ said Edwina in a voice she knew must sound appallingly jolly all at once. ‘If only we were all like you—how wonderful!’

  ‘Aren’t we counting some perfectly awful chickens before they’re hatched?’ Richard asked. ‘I think I’ll go out. See you soon.’ He felt he must get out of The Portway at all costs.

  ‘There, now—Dicky’s gone!’ lamented Edwina. ‘It was me. I did it….’ She searched for her handkerchief and found it, which was a great comfort. ‘Well, I have to attend the evac
uation committee.’ Feeling so very responsible for the conversational cloud, she felt it only right to point out that her argument had been backed by realities.

  ‘Off you go then,’ said Stella, who had a positive flair for being impossible.

  *

  Richard walked slowly from the house along the top road until it joined the Town Steps. The night was brilliant, though the moon was hid. And almost warm except for brief jabs of an icy wind thrown up from the sea. There was a bench at the top of the Steps. He flopped down and stared at the glittering sea. The Town Steps, forty or fifty of them, swept away in a torrent of shallow treads, the long steep flight broken into at intervals by platforms made of black flints. A narrow chasm sundered the cottages at the foot of the steps, cutting through not only the cliff face, but also the grim red-brick terraces which ran in triple alignment to the beach. Looking left he could just see the Moot Hall, its Tudor chimney-stacks monolithic against the stars. The sea seemed to be both below and above him, a great jetty breast of water pressing up to the firmament. Coasters, looking sacred in their anchored stillness, balanced perilously on the horizon, their illuminations, larger, lower stars. Richard could just make out the danger signs. The Greek letter held high over the deep had a curious bitterness. As well as warning, there was something kill-joy in its angularity. It should have been a good place in which to think, he thought, looking down at the huge glinting bar of water topped by its enormous dome of night. But he couldn’t think. He could only remember, which is a different thing. Also it was too cold. He got up and walked slowly to Church Road.

  There was a warmth about Church Road no weather could alter. It turned in a slight arc away from the bleakness, the skidding shingle and the January wind, suffering a more tolerable gloom cast by holm-oaks and yews and the extravagance of its gothicized villas. The clipped shrubs were traps for the sou’easters and trembled incessantly with a victim cold. But in summer everything was reversed and Church Road provided a cool alley of rigid shadows beneath the conifers. It was oddly colourless, considering the blazing vividness of the sea front, though hardly ever misty or indeterminate. Only here and there would be a flower drawn up by the shade to a prodigious height to nod above a stately gate. Sometimes the gates, ajar, would reveal a short harsh sweep of gravel cutting through the poor blond grass. There would be a weather-vane, a sundial (Horas non numero nisi Serenas or, more blatantly on Alderman Sproutly’s house, ‘Time is money’) a hothouse, or sawn-down tubs flauting stunted orange trees. The road had other, nicer distinctions as well. No guest-house advertisements ever marred its sombre gardens and only rarely, an agent’s board. Its residents never drifted. They stayed and stayed. They were Lafney’s true anchor in a sifting society. Their roots were deep even if they consisted mainly of the turnip kind. The smell of permanency drifted out across the gardens from expansive bay windows; a mixture of much-polished belongings, too-treasured and over-guarded as well as the more stagnant essence of trivial snobberies. The rectory was in Church Road. In whatever way Edwina thought of it, The Portway on the Long Terrace must always seem quite a come-down. Not that she cared; but the Church Road people did. To have lost her husband was quite sad, they thought, but to be obliged to give up Church Road was a tragedy pure and simple. Edwina grinned and bore it and fitted her massive mahogany into tiny rooms, receiving more sympathy for this than for the death of her husband. The Church Road people called and called. It seemed that they would never tire. Suddenly Edwina rebelled. She gave up not only Church Road but Church too. Everyone thought she must be ill, but she wasn’t. She was reading novels—hundreds and hundreds of them. They improved her conversation greatly, which in turn inaugurated her great friendship with Mrs Florence Crawford. The secret of their friendship was that they had absolutely nothing in common, a fact they had neither of them suspected until Edwina’s spiritual backsliding.

  But Richard, as he trudged along, was on much earlier ground. He remembered struggling to keep in step with his father, a scrunched-up surplice under his arm, and sometimes there was Quentin, too, walking precisely and delicately, not kicking up the pine-needles like himself. He dragged the toe of his shoe along the choked gutter now and was pleased with its little harvest of larch cones, yew dust and the lacy skeletons of lime leaves piling up on top of it.

  At the church gate he stopped. The tombstones looked elegant in the moonlight, rosy when they were of granite, and a pale damp blue where they were marble. The church itself, so exaggerated and underlined with night, with pinnacles prinked with stars and all its windows swagged with shadows, was most enticing. He tried the door and it was locked, so he walked round the gravestones instead. The Reverend John was buried near the vestry wall. ‘John Launcey Brand, M.A., for thirteen years rector of this parish … Until the day break …’ It was rather frightful when you came to think of it, reflected Richard, that when the poor old man was thought of at all, it was in a somewhat horticultural connection. ‘French marigolds …?’ Edwina would wonder. ‘Would they make a nice border—they wouldn’t hide the book, at any rate …’ (There was a large white alabaster volume to contain the Reverend John’s brief credentials). Or, lamenting the nasty rain-stained chips of marble, ‘I do wish we’d had grass and crocuses …’ Although the Reverend John’s name leapt from page after page of yellowing registers, letters, or the mussed-up records of the diocese, all direct pronouncement of his existence lead inevitably to a seed catalogue. He might have been Ada Poulsen. Actually, at that moment as Richard looked down, his father was a wiry ring of variegated holly.

  4

  ON Sunday Edwina rose early, that is at eight, and began as she always did, to rush through the day. She had never quite got used to her alarming freedom. Soon the tufty hats would bob past the window and the bell would toll, but not for her. There was no help for it—she just didn’t care! All that passed away with the Reverend John.

  The Crawfords came at about half-past twelve, Florence first, so assured, so bouffant, so sweepingly marine (she was Rear-Admiral Crawford’s widow), that she looked like a figurehead on leave. There was the same undeviating purpose about her and one felt that she hadn’t so much lived her life, as weathered it. Mary followed.

  Mary Crawford was a waster, there was no doubt of it. She allowed her days to trickle away. She poured life into the ground, as it were, negligently, hardly touched. She had some beauty, but she could never see it. She seemed to exist only for her own deprecation. She had been wonderfully modest as a young girl and had been much commended and praised for being so. It was right at the time, as well as being rather miraculous. But later on, instead of dropping it and promoting herself a little, she did the reverse. Her self-examination had grown so huge, it was like the narcissus legend in reverse, and now she couldn’t see her face for her faults. This mortification or wilful blunting of her good points extended to her mind as well. And her clothes were a wilful disaster, baggy tweeds in whose humiliating contours she rejoiced, like a saint in a hair shirt. Mrs Crawford helped Mary in all this—which isn’t hard to believe, since such a monumental indifference could hardly have resulted from a single nature.

  Florence had her reasons, which, whatever they may have been in the past, were now unblushingly selfish. Having got Mary through what she called ‘the treacherous twenties’, she saw less reason than ever she did before why Mary should marry. If she had ever shown any sign of having wanted to, it would be a different matter. But where was the urge? Had anybody ever seen it? Florence doubted it. If the idea ever came up now, it would be gimcrack—not the real thing at all. In fact, she was doing Mary a Christian service in stalling it. She would be wretched, unhappy; Florence knew she would! Anyway, why should she give up her company now? It would be most unfair. And it was all so worrying, she told Edwina. Alliances which would have been thought pathetic in her own day, now cropped up in the press with depressing frequency. There was a time, she recalled, when a mother could sit back and be secure in the knowledge that her old age wouldn’t be
just a desert of boringly dutiful letters if she had preserved one daughter from the scrum and got her safely through to her thirties. But now she often read of women of forty and over getting married—and for the first time! It was clear that she would need all the fortitude she could muster. The men were to blame, she supposed. Their object in marriage could not be quite the same as it was when she was a girl.

  They lived in a large curved house of saffron plaster—the sort of house which was advertised as a ‘watering-place residence’ at the time of Copenhagen. It was on a hill above Lafney and a slight convexity on the sea side gave it an air of rather wistful impermanence. Both Richard and Quentin knew Meridian House well. And Stella could even remember having tea with Rear-Admiral Crawford, a fact which at once invested her with some brooding, epic quality in her brothers’ eyes. It whisked her out of their decade once and for all. Stella was in some way veteran, they decided. She had taken tea with the bas-relief in the south aisle; that sunken cheek, flaccid even in marble; that niggardly chin already browning with age. Stella had seen it move, heard it munch ‘All little girls like seed-cake’. She hadn’t. She was six and she loathed it, but for Quentin’s sake she remembered all she could and retailed the story with a fond retrospective aplomb—like old Countess Guiccioli summoning up Byron. Quentin used to peek through his fingers during the Magnificat, absorbing the Admiral’s thin nose, his breast puffed out with stony honours and the elegant blindness of his polished eyes. He imagined him, a thin, disdainful figure, on the bridge, on the small lawn at Buckingham Palace, at the races: but wherever it was, never without the proud, tacking majesty of Mrs Crawford in his wake. ‘True and faithful’ read the inscription, which was generally assumed to be patriotic.