Mary laughed. ‘Don’t worry about that at least. Nobody would ever guess.’
‘Poor you‚’ replied Richard. He tightened his arm consolingly. Poor you because I’m behaving like an ass. We’ll forget it, shall we? It’s just what with Quenny going about like an exposed nerve, and Mummy in blinkers, and Stella being the world’s good sort …’
‘Where do you come in—is that it?’
‘Where do I?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you can tell me?’
‘Let go, will you,’ she said, ‘we’re just coming to the slippery part—’ She clambered on to a rock. Her coat was crushed where his arm had been. ‘It’s quite plain,’ she continued, ‘you come in when all that family of yours goes out. After all, there’s no earthly reason why one’s relations shouldn’t be dropped just a little, particularly since one can never be accused of having taken them up in the first place! What’s more, it’s not necessary to be heartless to do it.’
‘Well …!’ said Richard, who was dumbfounded.
‘I know what you are thinking,’ said Mary, bending over and brushing sand from the hem of her coat—‘the pot calling the kettle black and all that sort of thing. But it’s not quite the same. Not really.’
‘I disagree.’
‘Of course you do!’
‘I suppose,’ he said slowly, ‘I need love …’
‘You need a separate world,’ Mary agreed. The wind, rising slightly, filled up the space between her collar and her throat. She felt it uncomfortably, like a cold halter. They were picking their way through the ruined periphery of the outer fortification. It sagged across the beach like huge, dank hunks of fruit cake.
‘Do you have one?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said surprisingly.
‘It must be a very private one.’
‘Oh—it is!’
‘Then I suppose I must have one too …’
‘I doubt it from what you say. If you have it’s not much good to you since it obviously doesn’t present a refuge from the public one. But perhaps I’m wrong to insist on a private world in your case. I’m different. It’s essential to me—I couldn’t go on without it. You and Quenny—I hope you don’t mind me saying this—you and Quenny might mistake its purpose. I mean you might use it for a sort of bolt-hole. Well you did ask me…!’ She protested, seeing the frowning, bewildered look on Richard’s face.
‘Because we’re scared?’ he said. They had reached the tower and had followed its inwardly inclining wall until the wind was defeated.
‘Not scared, lazy‚’ said Mary. ‘You enjoy a kind of incompleteness—it’s an American trait, really. I can’t imagine where you both picked it up! You just can’t be bothered with being grown-up. It’s awfully dangerous to stuff all the fullness of life away in some old drawer, because you’ll need it badly one day and when you do it’s quite likely to come out all the wrong shape.’
‘Well!’ he expostulated.
‘Oh, I’m terribly, terribly sorry Dicky—I’m a lecturer; how awful!’
He had an urge to be cruel. ‘The same might be said of you—haven’t you stuffed life away?’
She considered for a moment. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t feel that I have.’
‘Why do you seem to care so little—about everything?’
‘I do care‚’ she said, rubbing her neatly gloved fingers against the rough brickwork. ‘Perhaps it would be more obvious if I were more vain.’
‘You’re vain about not being vain‚’ Richard replied as woundingly as he could. The Christmas miasma, the blank horizons wherever he looked, the feeling of fifth-rateness, filled him with a little-boy temper. He wanted to kick somebody, so it had to be Mary. Of course he was sorry the minute after.
Mary flinched to prove her vulnerableness then became very grown-up indeed.
‘I have no wish to quarrel, Richard‚’ she announced. She removed a glove to find her watch. It was back-to-front on her wrist and to see it she had to bring her arm up close. For a second her hand opened out, white and tendril-like, to the darkening sea. Each finger was capped humbly with a discoloured cross-hatching, the stigmata of her worthy interests, gros point and gardening. He felt he could almost hate her again for this, violently and irrationally.
‘Let me see‚’ he demanded rather wildly. He seized her hand and brought it round until the little dial glittered against his eyes. It said four o’clock. He remembered it vividly, because at that precise moment, without rhyme or reason, the hand was lying in his own and his mouth was pressing against hers. The unsuspected sweetness of her flesh shocked and amazed him. It was like kissing soft, damp, sweet flowers. In his rough grasp her mussed-up tweeds were more than ever an outrage to the body they sheltered. Velvet, he thought. He imagined it slipping against the round soft smoothness. Her face was as cold as stone. He touched it with his lips, then the rich bunchy hair near her ears. An outlandish notion occurred to him. He laughed gently. ‘People are just as young as they taste‚’ he said.
Mary pulled herself free. ‘What?’
‘Never mind.’
‘But I do mind. What right have you to make me go on and on with all that advice, or whatever you like to call it, and then show yourself so alarmingly self-sufficient? You’ve made me feel like a natural history mistress who has come to grief over the birds and the bees! Why were you so beastly to me just now—you were, you know.’
‘Well at this moment you do rather sound like the natural history mistress—all this scolding.’
She stared at him uncertainly. She hardly knew what to think. These last few minutes had made him a stranger. All that had preceded it; their mutual childhood, their families, the sparsely featured parallels of their individual existences which had run side by side for so long, were all gone; quashed by this confused embrace.
‘We shall have to get back‚’ she said. ‘What was the time when you looked?’
‘But you looked too.’
‘It was just a gesture. I can’t see a thing without my spectacles.’
‘I should say it’s five.’
‘Heavens!’
He put out his hand. ‘Don’t rush—not now …’
Mary didn’t answer. Gradually, gently, as though finding herself very precious, she made her way down the tumbled masonry. Richard followed. Above their heads, the Martello tower, already brim-full of night, grew indefinite and dark in its outward shape and became one with all the neglected monuments of the earth. The wind piped shrilly through its meagre windows. A mile away, Lafney winked with lights.
‘It’s a horrible place‚’ he said, catching up with her.
‘What!’ She was surprised. ‘The dear old Martello?’
‘Hundreds of men died in it. They had cholera or something and the local people wouldn’t allow them any help.’
‘But when, Richard?’
‘After the Napoleonic wars, of course. You don’t think that it’s just an ornament, that place?’
To be truthful, she hadn’t thought of it as much more.
‘Urgh!’ she said, shrinking from his timing for the retailing of the fact, rather than its historic truth.
They walked along side by side until she thought it too grotesque. It made her feel like a housemaid on an evening out so she walked in front and Richard followed. Lafney lay ahead, a grey wedge of diminishing habitations locked under dripping slates. She thought of Stella and found herself full of envy. Her astuteness, her downright professionalism seemed to her all at once desirable. Stella had triumphed over messy things like love and friendship and could now look forward to a cheerful prospect of breezy flats and long, matey holidays. Oh, to be Stella! thought Mary. She felt common sense coming on like influenza. It was her age again, she decided. It was the sort of thing you might contract easily at thirty-two … Time … time! she sighed. Which reminded her; she must straw the funkias. Frosts could be expected now.
Back on the front, a star came travelling to meet them, a slow-travelling star regularly pausing t
o touch-off further stars. It was old Baggotty the lamplighter on his bicycle; a wambling municipal acolyte.
‘Goo’ night, Miss Crawford‚’ he said. ‘Mr Brand …’
They strolled back to The Portway, gravely apart, through a purple ravine of mid-Victorian dwellings. The glow from the drawing-room window was prophetic of the snugness inside.
‘Shall you go back to Copdock on Monday?’ she asked—as if there was a choice in the matter.
‘Next Monday‚’ he answered.
‘We’ll be seeing you before then though, at Meridian, I mean?’
‘Of course‚’ he replied, but too emphatically as though he must remind himself to be loving.
5
RICHARD made two visits to the Crawfords before he returned to Copdock and neither of them could really have been called a success. It was true that there had been only six days left. Florence was unerringly formal. She thought that by being so she was braking the scurrying wheel of change. She forbade one just ‘dropping in’. A call was a call, but a meal was a well-considered invitation.
‘But I don’t want lunch,’ he had insisted on the telephone. He heard Mary’s laugh, a bit stifled, but gay all the same.
‘And Quentin’s asked too,’ she said slowly, then waited to hear what effect this would have.
‘He can’t come,’ she heard Richard say with disappointing evenness. ‘He’s off to London.’
And he was. With ruthless politeness he had turned in his trim Lafney harness and was away, fled to some mysterious address as unexplained as it was unenquired of … All Edwina had said was, ‘But how can you go to town dressed like that?’ This was because Quentin wore a kind of fancy-dress of very old clothes at home; his shirts gaped, his slacks slipped in grubby folds round his thin hips and he affected a disastrous hat. But he had waved her quiet. He had some things where he was going, he said, and since he had made a similar remark the previous summer before setting off to Edinburgh, Edwina imagined caches of suitable clothes existing for him all over the country. It was all a puzzle to her—and a worry. She liked him well turned-out—he paid high dividends in that sort of thing—and his affected sloth bored and affronted her. Her protest had no effect; that is how he went, over-muffled, with his delicate features poised above the dirty Trinity scarf like an ivory on a hassock.
Stella went too, but that was to be expected. She left in a swirl of impending activity, so that there must be no mistaking that hers was the full life. No day could ever be too long for her, no minute too precious. She stuffed both with her remorseless energy. She rushed off now, the slam of the car door as vociferous as her intentions; Harrods, a playlet for Children’s Hour, an invitation to visit Stockholm where ‘Christabel in Camberwell’ had been made into a play and was fantastically successful. The Austin leapt at her touch and headed knowingly for the flat in Ipswich, boisterous with its own private gale, where the cute china animals she collected flaunted their dinky scuts. ‘Give me air!’ beseeched Stella aloud to the monkey mascot bobbing from the windscreen wiper. A week-end with her brothers made fearful inroads on her tact, which was limited at the best of times. She was pleased about Richard’s job however. He had gone straight from school into an Ipswich bank, where his listlessness had become a byword. Not that he was lazy. He did all that he had to do. But his unconcealed boredom was so evident that it became almost an affront to those of his colleagues obliged to consider their job as the raison d’être for their earthly existence. ‘He isn’t settling down‚’ lamented Mr Jude, the manager, to Stella one day as they met in the Buttermarket. So she had had a little talk with Richard. ‘But you must know what you want to do!’ she had expostulated. ‘Everybody does—even if it’s deep-sea diving!’ But all Richard had said was, ‘might he have the window shut? Her flat was icy—did she know?’
And then there was Quentin. He never came near her and that she found was more worrying than being pestered. She loathed secrets of the smallest kind and to have a whole life tucked away, and a brother’s life at that in which she felt she had full shares, was maddening, to put it mildly. Well, now she was away from them both and that was a relief. Quentin would go on being Quentin, rhe supposed, and Richard would now feel that, with Copdock, he wasn’t outclassed in some way. She drove on, with heavy accomplishment, to Ipswich.
‘And Stella?’ asked Mary—‘but then I needn’t enquire … She’s buzzed off?’—this appearing to be so exactly the right way to describe her going.
‘Just this minute, as a matter of fact,’ Richard said.
‘Well I’m glad.’
‘Oh, are you?’
‘Very‚’ she said. ‘Very, very, very …’
‘Darling‚’ said Richard. The word jangled wildly on the line. He must ring off. The instrument was no longer a receiver but had become a kind of bakelite Dracula feeding on his words. If he held it up a moment longer its avid mouth would suck rash promises out of him. ‘Wednesday then. Good-bye.’
‘What?’
‘I said Wednesday—and thanks awfully, Mary …’
‘Dear Richard‚’ she said, sounding vaguely disturbed, and rang off herself, though very gently.
*
Do houses outstay their purpose like so much else?
The real fault where Meridian was concerned was that its functions were abused. Its pleasures—and its sole reason for being built at all was to give such things—were frankly seasonal. It was a summer house. It could even be (with a little give and take on both sides, such as well-considered fires, wind-breaks under the south rowan spinney and its windows all shut up tight as a tomb), a spring house. But never an autumn house, and never, never a winter house. Its bellying plaster and affected impermanence was a mood and even in summer, to live in it day after day, climbing its shiny leap of stairs; banging its pretty, frail doors by their handles of oval, fluted brass; meeting too frequently the wreathed Pompeiian faces on conduit, lintel and chimney-piece and altogether encountering a surfeit of grace wherever the eye might turn, was apt to carry with it a sense of prodigious waste. There was too much key-pattern. One expected to run into Sir William Hamilton so frequently that it became frustrating not to do so. It was too apparently tasteful, in fact too gluttonously so. To live in it year and year out was like a solid diet of ptarmigan, or emptying something or other to the drains—Château Yquem perhaps. And yet it wasn’t a big house, nor even truly splendid of its kind. Brighton is covered with such structures, and so is Hove. But in Lafney, where such architecture as there was crawled parallel to the shingle in a triple rash of grocer’s Victorian, Meridian flashed like a jewel. There it sat, on its tuffet of lawns, beaming with its pre-meditated distinction. Its function was to be marine and marine it would be for as long as one rain-grey slate hugged another. Stealing noises from the immense poplars flanking its walls, Meridian re-diffused a delicious whisper-from-the-conch, creak-o’-the-rigging, yell-of-the-cormorant mood. Florence Crawford’s taste may have mauled the interior a bit but it remained all-glorious without; pink and grey, with a porch as Greek as Euston and two tidy rows of wobble-paned windows.
Richard, however, saw it with disappointment. It was just one more thing that had turned out to be shabbier; less lovable that he remembered it, if only for the reason that it had once been so greatly loved. He looked up the sun-spattered garden front to see Mrs Crawford plunging along the terrace. Her right arm was extended agreeably to the sea. She might have been the over-afflicted Mrs Jordan making a last desperate appeal to her single-minded Hanoverian prince, except that Mr Yockery was too tall, too bending, too pin-like altogether for the latter’s excessive rôle.
‘Blast!’ thought Richard, ‘Old Yockers …’
The Reverend Francis Benedict Yockery, A.K.C., had taken up all that had been laid down by the Reverend John Brand at the latter’s early death. Not only the parish duties, but a welter of chairmanships, a morass of committees; the Archaeological Society, the Cottage Hospital and, more than these, a paternal interest in Edwi
na’s children. ‘Send them to me‚’ he advised her, ‘in their hour of need …’ But it turned out that their needs were small. In fact Quentin and Richard had proved to be almost offensively out of ‘need’. Mr Yockery watched them grow up with increasing disapproval. Had Edwina only listened—for he blamed her, of course—how very different might not her sons’ characters have been! So many admirable traits, observed by Mr Yockery when they were really young, had stopped dead in their tracks, so to speak. So much promise of the angelic kind, all gone, all gone! Take Quentin, who had proved a really promising brass-rubber; why had he so frankly declared at fifteen ‘that he couldn’t look another Crusader in the face’—such a silly remark, anyway, Mr Yockery had decided at the time. As for Richard, there had been very real ground for hopes there. He had served the Eight o’clocks regularly and immaculately until, at almost the exact same age, he, too, had defected.
Mr Yockery might hardly have noticed it except for an innocent little pleasure he permitted himself. He enjoyed searching through the choir’s cassock pockets as those demure garments hung from their pegs in the rich violet gloom. It was surprising what he found—not that he minded, he only needed to see. Bits of string, bits of plasticine, cigarette cards, gnawed indiarubbers, spongy segments of the Sexton Blake Library; in all an innocuous enough haul, endearing rather than distressing. He put it all back neatly and went away convinced that his knowledge of human nature had been thereby increased, if only by a hair’s breadth. But one day in Richard’s cassock he discovered The Garden of Khama, and if that didn’t show which way the wind was blowing, what did? Sexton Blake was ‘healthy’. But Indian poetry … and in the vestry. He had wagged his narrow head sadly.
‘If ever those boys need a father’s guidance, it’s now,’ he told Edwina severely.
‘You can try,’ she had answered. And he had, and failed—utterly.
Robbed of one patrimony, Mr Yockery tried another. He was very High, point-lace and incense, processions and a distribution of persuasive pamphlets to explain such things. The inhabitants of Lafney were on the other hand insular and prodigiously memoried when it came to their Puritanism. They suffered the rector’s tan and purple statues, his gold, board-like cope, his ardent prostrations and even a Mass bell, but when he demanded a spiritual parenthood and expected them to address him as ‘Father’, they rebelled.
A Treasonable Growth Page 7