A Treasonable Growth

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  Edwina enjoyed her friendship with Mrs Crawford more than she had enjoyed anything before, and as far as sheer actual enjoyment went, more than her marriage. But Mary she was sorry for. It worried her terribly to see her getting vague and floppy and to hear her running herself down with the wilfulness of clockwork. And when Mrs Crawford joined in, giving encouraging twists to the denigratory mechanism as it were, she was nonplussed. Rectories are thrifty places where things are nursed along to their proper ends and the proper end of Mary Crawford should have been the chancel step. It was agony for Edwina to watch Mrs Crawford spreading soap on it.

  ‘What about Stella?’ demanded Mrs Crawford defensively one day and was told that Stella had ‘interests’. Mercifully the retaliation was not extended to include Richard or Quentin. If it had been Edwina would have been really in a plight. There were those things in their natures which she wouldn’t at all mind having changed, but she was certainly not going to discuss them with Florence Crawford. There was a fault, and Edwina knew it; a basic error, though nothing you could call cardinal, which, when everything else was added up, always produced an odd total and it wasn’t necessary to be a sibyl to spot it. Florence Crawford saw it; she wasn’t blind. Babies, she had decided long ago. Nothing to worry about from that quarter. Anyway, Mary was thirty-two.

  They were altogether now, as they had been so often in the past, in the over-furnished, under-aired drawing-room of The Portway. Luncheon had gone off very well. They all ate too much in the reaction against the frugal reaction towards Christmas gorging. Quentin stared at Mrs Crawford’s heavily-powdered throat. How reckless it was!—a sweeping, blushing isthmus of flesh the colour of mashed strawberries descending from her chin to a barely veiled disaster. Only a small gold pin, like Horatius at the bridge, prevented a fate unimaginable. It wrought with the scrabbled veil with determined, panting clasps. Round her neck Mrs Crawford sported a tumble of gold chains. They held her lorgnette, a tiny golden pencil, a little golden locket and a clackety heap of other trinkets.

  ‘We’ll take the coffee through—shall we!’ Edwina had suggested brightly.

  ‘Lovely,’ said Mrs Crawford insincerely. She hated moving. She could never do it without real consideration and effort. ‘I do so love your little drawing-room, Edwina.’ She lied this time in an attempt to comfort herself. The Portway generally made her feel desperately gloomy and the drawing-room most of all. It gave her claustrophobia. ‘If only Edwina could see how awful it is!’ she complained to Mary. The poorer people were, the more they furnished their rooms! But it was nice to be with dear Edwina.

  ‘I like this house altogether,’ she declared plangently. She walked across the hall, her fleshy back arched forward so that the chains fell out in front of her in bright swinging loops.

  ‘It is a pretty house,’ agreed Edwina, who thought it was. ‘The boys painted the dining-room? did you notice, Florence?’

  ‘Very practical,’ admitted Mrs Crawford. ‘D’you know that, Mary? Quenny and Dick painted the dining-room.’

  ‘They’re really both quite practical,’ said Edwina, ‘but it’s the latest thing for young men to appear not to be, you know.’

  ‘Now Stella‚’ said Mrs Crawford, sinking into an armchair, ‘you’re practical. You must talk to Mary. Not that I think of you as impractical, my dear,’ she nodded heavily in Mary’s direction, ‘but Stella with her story-books and things has got the right idea.’

  Mary bent over the little gilded cups. There was a soft bloominess in her movements. Her small white and pink hands touched the silver and porcelain with a deft tenderness. Her wrists were incredibly pale. ‘Do you mean I should get a job?’ she asked.

  ‘No point in that,’ retorted her mother quickly, refusing to be drawn.

  ‘Then you want me to write books?’

  ‘You know you don’t write,’ said Mrs Crawford, making it quite clear that whether one did so or not it was entirely a matter of choice. ‘Edwina knows what I mean.’

  ‘I thought Mary did all the gardening,’ interrupted Richard. ‘Doesn’t she do the flowers and the greenhouse?’

  ‘She needn’t,’ said Mrs Crawford shortly, ‘Humpson’s paid for that.’

  All at once, as though it were something doled out with the coffee, a fearful pedestrian languor invaded the room. There was silence, not a relaxing peace, but a dearth of interest as though a porridge of boredom had been poured over the delicate fare of conversation. And the sun, which until that hour had hung against the window with a token warmth, faded away into wet mist. It grew drearily dark. Edwina wondered if she should light a lamp or two. Instead, she poked the fire. A log turned over luxuriously like a sleeper and sent out a sudden dream of brilliance. The flames, no longer subservient to such a weakly, pleading sun, shot out gloriously, turning the piano into a box of nervous gold, firing the candle-sticks and jagging the plates and ornaments with limpid, running fissures. Mrs Crawford lay in her chair in a heap of helpless grandeur. Her chains slid and shone. Quentin sat on the dark carpet, curiously disembodied like a very old portrait in which only the hands and the waxen face can be seen. Mary leant forward, warm and rich as velvet. Her eyes were smudged away, yet this very indefiniteness added to their blueness. They were almost the only colour other than gold and black in the room. Outside, a grey sea made a grey sound as it slumped up the shingle. Richard stretched. His feet went on and on until he could barely see them. Oh God, oh God! he thought, what next? What a life!

  Mrs Crawford must have been afflicted with a similar despair for she, too, struggled to an upright position as though she had to defend something, or somebody. The gardener would do. Wasn’t he constant? Wasn’t he a dependable relic of that other world which had once moved so effortlessly on its well-greased axis? When you came to think of it, God how things had changed!

  ‘We’ll never get another Humpson,’ she reflected solemnly.

  ‘How right‚’ muttered Quentin, ‘two would be terrible.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Mrs Crawford said loudly.

  Feeling responsible for the cloud, Edwina struggled from her own particular morass in a last effort to divert.

  ‘I knew I had something to tell you, Florence. Sir Paul Abbott is coming home. He—’

  ‘But we saw it—it was in the personal column—I mean the Court Circular in The Times. Mary saw it and read it out.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Edwina rather dolefully. ‘I didn’t know it was news. I thought it was still gossip. Anyway, Dicky’s going there won’t be in The Times.’

  ‘Why?’ enquired Mrs Crawford, mystified. ‘Has he left the new school already?’

  ‘It’s not an actual job,’ said Richard. ‘I shall know more about it after I’ve had dinner with Sir Paul. He says to meet him on the twentieth.’

  Mrs Crawford didn’t attempt to hide her amazement. Nor yet her incredulity. She paused, open-mouthed, wonderingly, like someone who has been the frequent victim of ‘wolf! wolf!’ But Edwina hardly noticed. The room, till then so deep in weariness, now trembled with enquiry. Even she realized that she had made few statements in her life whose results had been so gratifying. Quentin didn’t help matters. He left the carpet and perched himself on the revolving piano stool from which, long and limply curling, he surveyed the company like a contemplative fern. He didn’t say a word, but watched everyone with an almost spiteful avidity.

  ‘There’ll be a great many people on the way home‚’ said Mrs Crawford as flatly as she could. ‘It’s a sort of reverse of rats leaving a sinking ship.’

  ‘But not in Sir Paul’s case, surely?’ said Stella.

  ‘Why not in his?’ declared Mrs Crawford in a tone that was as near to rudeness as she could get away with. The young people were beginning to madden her this afternoon. Why couldn’t they make themselves scarce …? It was Edwina who was her friend, not her extraordinary brood. ‘Because he’s a writer, I suppose you mean? Isn’t it ridiculous when you come to think of it, how any man could prefer New York to Sheldon! Sheldon was
where he belonged, and Sheldon was where he should have stayed. I’m told it’s a shambles because of the neglect. When I used to go there in old Sir Eric’s time …’

  ‘He doesn’t live in New York,’ said the fern putting out a tentative frond in an uncongenial climate, ‘he lives—or lived, we shall have to say now, in Marsala.’

  ‘Is that in France or Italy?’ enquired Mrs Crawford, as if she welcomed the information.

  ‘It’s in Sicily.’

  ‘I always understood it was New York,’ said Richard, politely taking sides—‘not Marsala, of course, but where Sir Paul lived.’

  ‘Well he doesn’t,’ answered Quentin abrubtly. The fern had lost its delicacy and had unravelled into a robust leaf which threatened to disturb the complacent air around it. ‘Did your letter come from New York?’

  ‘It came from London—from Brown’s. I told you.’

  ‘Things must be worse than we thought,’ said Mrs Crawford, not without enthusiasm. She dismissed a winning picture of herself bossing a servile host of females at the Mansion House. The great rooms were functional with trestles. They sorted out surgical appliances, matched up crutches, devised strange slippers for shattered feet. The telephones buzzed, the Admiralty, the War Office—Balmoral perhaps—why not? Who is to limit dreams? She tore herself away from such a luring prospect with infinite reluctance. ‘Do you know, Edwina,’ she added in a tone of appropriate grief, ‘I simply can’t help wondering what we’ll all be doing this time next year …’

  ‘I know what I’ll be doing‚’ said Mary lightly, ‘cleaning up the borders.’

  ‘Let us hope you are right,’ her mother said darkly.

  ‘Oh I’m certain Mary’s right!’ said Edwina.

  ‘Of course Mary’s right‚’ insisted Quentin. Leaning back precariously on the piano stool, he lit a cigarette, then noticing Mary’s stare of unconscious intensity he flicked the silver case open again.

  ‘Do you?’ he asked.

  ‘No thank you, Quentin—never.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Never,’ she smiled.

  ‘You’re as bad as Dicky—he hasn’t any vices.’

  ‘That doesn’t make him deficient, does it?’ Mary turned slightly to include Richard in her amusement. He was the only one of the Brand children she didn’t actually fear a little. Quentin quite terrified her. His pastel-fine head and restless hands gave her the same apprehensiveness as when she dusted the Miessen cabinet. Sooner or later the situation would prove to be too delicate for her. The image would splinter in her too ponderous grasp and then there would be no more communication, no more talk; just a passing nod for old time’s sake. And Stella? Well, Stella was really admirable. It was what she intended to be, and would have been, except that her very determination prevented it. She was almost free of complexity. She didn’t have to adapt herself to the generalised codes and credences; she actually thought that way. She read the Daily Telegraph from cover to cover with pleasure and profit. She was a founder member of Readers’ Union and she listened to all the Proms on the wireless. She gave advice, but of that stalwart kind which is too apparent for any but the quite insensitive to act upon. Not that Mary hated Stella; she didn’t. She didn’t even dislike her. Her attitude was self-protective and rather withdrawn. Stella thought she was shy and a bit feeble, and patronized her a little on these accounts.

  So that left Richard—Richard who was young enough for Mary to have led by the hand round the garden of Meridian House and so was not even a playmate! There was the predicament which must always confront her where the Brand boys were concerned; her few extra years and their carefully sustained immaturity. It could never be bridged, not by herself, that is. It would mean the most awful energy and she simply hadn’t got it.

  ‘I went to Sheldon once …’ she said in her easy uncaring voice.

  ‘It was years ago‚’ said her mother quickly, ‘you couldn’t have remembered a thing.’

  ‘On the contrary, darling—everything.’

  ‘What, then?’ asked Quentin.

  ‘It was quite a long time ago—I really went to see the church, they say it’s haunted—and on a table just inside the door I found a book called The History and Antiquities of Sheldon in Suffolk by a Sir Gerald Abbott …’

  ‘Sir Stephen‚’ corrected Stella.

  ‘Well, Sir Stephen. Anyway the book made the house sound much more fun than the church, so I called.’

  ‘On Sir Paul?’ asked Richard, rather astounded.

  ‘On the housekeeper—Sir Paul wasn’t there even then—and she showed me round.’

  ‘Yes‚’ said Quentin, ‘and what did you see?’

  ‘Oh, nice things and ghastly things and a Gainsborough with a roly-poly Sir Paul lolling against a stile in a park and a Sargent of a terribly plain woman—’

  ‘The Belle’s sister‚’ interrupted Richard. ‘Miss Bellingham you know, of Copdock.’

  Mary nodded. ‘That’s right, I expect so.’

  ‘Is it a big house, enormous, I mean?’ asked Richard.

  ‘Quite enormous but not vast—not Chatsworth.’ Suddenly the torpid after-Sunday-dinner-ness became too much for her. ‘I’m going out, I think.’ she said. ‘Anyone coming? Do forgive me, Mrs Brand—Mummy, you don’t mind do you?’

  Mrs Crawford budged a little in the depths of her chair. To go out; how futile! she implied. But do, do if you must. Don’t consider me; that would be too much! ‘Don’t be long‚’ she said.

  ‘We’ll walk to the Martello‚’ said Richard, rising as well.

  Pleased, surprised rather, Mary said, ‘All right, let’s.’

  *

  They walked along the front. The sea, so upright when viewed from the town heights, was supine on the level. It faltered sluggishly at the breakwaters before gathering its strength to rip up the shingle in a little spurt of boredom. Its voice was slub—and then slub-slub as it parted at the tide points. At each retraction the beach clucked and clinked as its flints shifted, exasperated, it seemed, by their endlessly nudging propinquity. Groynes humped themselves up out of the water, black and hirsute with rubbery weeds. Summer was only an orange crepe sole, a rag, still striped and blue; the blanched T of a child’s spade, a belt; a coconut scalp with matted dun hair. This on one side, their left, as they made for the Martello. On the other side were the hotels with towels sausaged-out along the ledges where the sashes joined to keep the wind away. Inside, the bedding would be curled up in an obese slumber of its own. Cut-glass vases would be stowed away in cupboards. The windows, bellying forward, caught at each facet of the cold. Peering in the biggest of them, the ‘Royal Snape’, Richard saw the inflated furniture sprawling across the carpet like spruce whales; fat couches and chairs, desperately floral, wallowed in an Axminster flood. I think I hate this place, he thought; I think I do….

  ‘I suppose we have to go all the way to the Martello?’ said Mary.

  ‘I suppose we do‚’ he replied. ‘But why, don’t you want to?’

  ‘We might get blown away.’

  ‘Will you be cold?’ he asked, at once solicitous. He felt hot still. The close room, so lately deserted, still hugged him.

  ‘Not a bit,’ she fibbed. ‘I just thought we might find it rather dismal, that’s all.’

  ‘If we go the other way, it will only be another kind of dismalness.’ He meant Church Road.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed.

  They trudged on in silence in the pearly light until they reached the place where the ordinary path joined the sea-wall and where, if you wanted to go on, you had to walk Indian-file. Perversely, the wind which was cutting up and down the blank streets, was almost non-existent on the gaunt neck of shingle leading to the Martello tower. Richard went in front. Walking exactly behind another person can be as curiously rewarding as watching them asleep. Richard’s striding, balancing back-view amused Mary at first; then it obsessed her. That is, she couldn’t see anything else—only his gawky walk and the breeze prising up his hair
in a solid mass and the way one arm kept flinging itself towards the sea and the other kept still.

  ‘It’s a silly question‚’ he suddenly cried, shouting rather and half-turning round—there wasn’t a soul nearer than the men in the lightship glued for ever to the skyline,—‘but do you wonder, Mary, if we shall ever be any different—me, you, Quenny; Lafney if you like?’

  ‘What do you expect me to say at this minute! I’m far too busy keeping my balance.’

  ‘On the wall …?’

  ‘On the wall!’ she laughed. ‘I know,’ she shouted back, ‘horses—it’s the only way if you want to talk.’ She caught up with him and precariously eased herself abreast.

  ‘Watch out! You’ll fall …’

  ‘Not if you hang on …’

  We can’t, he wanted to protest. It’s not just a matter of size, it’s a matter of time. You can’t go back to another age, another condition; it won’t fit.

  ‘Don’t be pompous, Richard,’ insisted Mary. ‘Hang on—or I really will go over the edge!’ She was laughing rather breathlessly as their arms caught at each other’s waists. The position was absurd. It was far from companionable and farthest of all from being ‘horses’. Once she looked convertly to see if he was angry, but his head inclined non-committally towards the sea and in its winter-vague profile there was little to be read. She felt a tension, but put it down to this childish, foolish impulse of hers, although she was wrong about this.

  ‘How the hell do you stand it?’ he burst out. ‘Hometown! All the awful fuss kicked up by nobodies going nowhere!’

  ‘Shussh!’ she said. ‘You can’t be wild at such close range!’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Stand what, anyway?’

  ‘Well, this afternoon for instance—all the fiddling afternoons if it comes to it.’

  ‘How do you?’ she retaliated, feeling uncomfortable.

  ‘That’s it!’ said Richard. ‘I can’t—I don’t. I’m really snarled-up inside all the time.’