A Treasonable Growth

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,’ he answered, rising and pushing his chair out of reach of the faintly sickening heat playing on his back.

  Miss Bellingham’s cheeks quavered with a flaccid, half-controlled mirth.

  ‘In that mood‚’ she declared, ‘I should plump for Leviticus. Pauly knew Colonel Lawrence, I believe. Not well, you understand. That was assumed impossible.’

  Richard said that he thought there was something noble about the book as a whole.

  ‘Noble?’ she interrupted, pouncing on the word. ‘Now there’s a discountenanced adjective if ever there was! Tell me, Mr Brand, should you imagine that there will be a war?’

  ‘Well …’ he began.

  ‘No, don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t let an old woman drive you into that sort of dullness. Anyway what are such prognostications worth—yours—mine—anybody’s? If you will be good enough to open that cupboard you’ll discover my skeleton in the guise of some poorish sherry-wine. Glasses are behind. Do you know that I have spent a lifetime filching drink from my own pantry? I couldn’t enjoy it if I didn’t gulp it down at the wrong hour in the wrong place and with a weather eye open for the cook. Oh, the remorse we get from our shoddy little sins! Remorse for me, Mr Brand, has been a deal more salutary for keeping my weaknesses within bounds than any threat of the common law. Yet when I was a girl it was reckoned—at some dinner tables at least—that there was no more direct proof of ill-breeding than a capacity for shame. My great-grandfather was a miller and a Methodist, and he left enough scruples behind when he went to keep the family in anxiety for a century. To think that without him I might have inherited the moral armour of a reasonable woman! As it is—But why complain! Who, what are any of us, but the latest link in a chain of accidents?’ She nodded her great head sadly and her hair bobbed in the yellow gaslight like a petrified flower.

  Richard poured the sherry slowly from its squat decanter into two beautiful engraved glasses and as the wine climbed to its placid ellipse, he noticed from the corner of his eye Miss Bellingham’s hands go up and touch in turn her ear-rings and afterwards, her rings, twisting them round where the heavy stones had fallen to the fore.

  ‘Steady!’ she cried suddenly.

  ‘My fault‚’ he acknowledged, ‘they’re much too full.’

  ‘Much,’ she scolded. And then, ‘If Cadman knew I’d got hold of this …’ She stopped suddenly. ‘What actually happened?’ she asked in a measured, curious voice. The wine-glass glittered as she rolled its stem slowly between her trembling fingers. ‘Did he go to bed?’

  ‘When we came in,’ began Richard uncertainly, ‘we met Mr Winsley in the hall. He——’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Bates—Mr Bateson and myself.’

  ‘Never mind Bateson,’ she said tartly, Ike someone talking to a servant, ‘what was Cadman doing?’

  ‘Nothing. I mean he was just standing in the hall. He was wearing his dressing-gown and we thought that he was waiting for us to come in before he locked up. Then we could see that he was worried and the next moment I noticed Mr M’Tooley as well—he was over against the stairs …’

  ‘Oh my God!’ she interrupted in a despairing tone, ‘don’t go on. As if their names aren’t suffocating enough! Stop! stop! He said that I was ill—so you went to bed. Is that it? No, don’t answer. How sensible of you. He—Cadman this time—thought that I had a stroke? Those are the terms in which they think in relation to myself; a sharp turn of phrase that they imagine will adequately cover any of my poor little collapses! But I’m wonderfully well. Just look at me——’ Just then the merest caprice of a tremor shook her, provoked, perhaps, by the sound of the greater destruction she could be so bold about. The sherry slopped all over her rings and ran in a golden lane across the mottled skin of her wrists. ‘But go on‚’ she urged, drying herself with a scrap of rag. ‘Cadman came in with my message and there you were, all tucked up and reading Colonel Lawrence’s little book. What then?’

  Richard watched her briefly before replying. She would set great store by this answer, he thought. Here was the hand of friendship being proffered; a twisted—even a fleeting hand, but still a hand possessing that kind of inner warmth which he found so peculiarly valuable. Her method of presenting it had been eccentric in the extreme, but that was because, rather than run the risk of a rebuff by stating her terms in clear-cut black and white, she had chosen to tempt him with this playful chiaroscuro of her talk. He realised her shrewdness at once. She had managed—in so short a time—to ‘sum him up.’ He would have resented this vigorously from most people, but not from her. Selfishly or not she was making great efforts to enthral him and he supposed by rights he ought to be horrified. Instead he discovered himself thinking of her with the most tender regard. She had found out what he loved most, which were words, not deeds, and from her huge repository of old talk and avid reminiscence, she had raked out a few outlandish samples for his wonder. If he accepted the conditions it might still be some time before they could be easy with each other. Her massive banter would have to die away gradually like thunder. But he fully understood this. She could take no risks—she hadn’t the time. She was too old, as well as too clever, to lay herself open to mockery and hurts of that sort. Only one thing was certain—he felt this as he watched the slow, mandarin transitions of the wine-glass as it swayed from one knotted, yellow fist to the other—hers would be the only gift worth the taking amongst the rag-bag offerings of Copdock. Moreover it would be a kindness on his part and, who knows, he might even enjoy climbing up the choking, furry stairs now and then to listen to her shaking up the bizarre pourri of her experiences.

  ‘I came,’ he said simply.

  It was her turn to reflect. It might be a trap. She found him tremendously polite. She faced him, staring at his extreme youthfulness, as he sprawled under the hissing gaslight jutting from the chimney which supplemented the blue glass table-lamp at her side. The stuttering yellow of both lights merged above his head in a smudge of dirty gold.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Brand‚’ she replied very calmly.

  After that he found it easy to visit her, but because he had read somewhere of the gusts of amusement caused by a young man’s patience with old women, or because he didn’t care to delve too deeply to seek the reasons for his own devotion, he was at first discreet about these visits. Even sly.

  When he wrote to Mary he took care that she only got what she might expect to get from him in the way of descriptions and even affection. He was cautious, non-committal—life was opening up for him in too many directions all at once and it was essential that he should know exactly what new ground lay before him. He did not wish to race forward blindly, nor get lost and, most particularly, not to get submerged. In this way he had all Quentin’s refinement of selfishness, yet not enough of Quentin’s pride. A great deal of his spirit was expended in self-apology. So when, in his letter, he attempted to convey the broad effects of the school and his baffled respect for Miss Bellingham, the result was a mixture of hedonism and flatness which Mary interpreted, correctly, as a mere blind. Life, it seemed, was dreary enough at Copdock, but not so dreary that her company was actually longed for. There was a sharp old woman to listen to, not to mention the possibilities lurking at Sheldon, and the company of one of those matey young men with colourless hair and eyes which look as if they had torn themselves somewhat reluctantly from the contemplation of a peak in Darien, to drink Bass with.

  Mary read the letter dully, two or three times, unwilling to concede that there was no more in it than what he had written.

  ‘I wish you could meet her‚’ he had begun. ‘She’s amazing. A kind of half-amused oracle who will only tell you about the more trivial side of all the people she has met because she assumes naturally that you have read everything they have written. It’s usually writers, but with an occasional politician thrown in for good weight. And she makes a colossal effort to please when she talks. I expect she would call it something like “the art of awakeni
ng a sense of privilege in others”, except she wouldn’t be so pompous. I’m afraid she’s rather crazy and I suppose, rather wicked. But listening to her when she’s really got going sends me into a trance of admiration. The most imaginative scraps that I can possibly write are like grocery-lists against what comes out of her fuddled wit. She drinks—or says she does. But I must tell you more about all this when we meet.

  ‘What else—nothing much. The boys are appallingly well behaved, in fact really limp. You soon realize that most of them are conscious of some trivial sense of superiority by their being at Copdock. It’s considered one-up from the “Grammar”, though God knows why! Twenty live in and thirty-one are day-boys. They play games and call themselves by houses: “Bloomfield”—after the poet; “Tattingstall”—after an O.B. who did well at the Dardanelles; “Montessori”—after the method (which is also about the only creed Miss B has ever believed in); and “Abbott”—after you-know-who. But there’s no proper division and it’s all pretty futile.

  ‘I saw old Yockers going down the High Street on Wednesday. Expect he was visiting his ancient sister, or working out an escapade for the Archaeological Society. “A transitional sedilia”. Can’t you just hear him!

  ‘I go to Sheldon on Tuesday. Afraid the Belle’s colourful obscurities about the place (and about Sir P.) have rather intimidated me …’

  She skipped lightly over half a page more of this friendly stuff and then read with increasing irritation; ‘Yes, of course, come over—but wouldn’t it be better to wait until the weather clears up? That’s all I meant by what you term my “casualness”. It’s freezing here. Nothing to do—nowhere to go. True, there is a terrible kind of visitors’ room at the School, but you should just see it! Slippery sofas, bell shades and the very latest Dornford Yates on a Benares table. There is my room, of course, but you’d hate that even more, even if you were allowed into it. Let’s make it Sunday then. I can do that. Meet you Sunday. Hmm? Bestest love, Richard.’

  8

  WRITE to him at once, common sense told her. Say, ‘of course you wouldn’t dream of arriving in Stourfriston on a terrible winter’s day and that, anyway, it would be selfish to interrupt his settling in. Oh and yes, how glad she was that he liked Miss Bellingham. She sounded intriguing, fascinating … (revolting old woman) and … that she loved him—was he too far gone in his maze of doddering eccentrics to realize that? She loved him … loved him! But instincts are not necessarily actions, indeed they very rarely are. Perhaps on the whole they dare not be. Whatever the reason for her dilatoriness, Wednesday drifted by without the letter getting itself written and Thursday too. In fact Thursday hardly occurred to her at all until she looked back on it from Friday and was then appalled that a day could vanish like that, the entire featureless twenty-four hours of it! Hustled out of her vagueness by this merciless drifting of time, she scrawled a note to Richard to say that he was not to mind the weather, nor the visitors’ room. She was coming. The drive would be nice, and she wanted to see him. So that was that. She also added that Mr Yockery was to lunch at Meridian on Sunday—as though that were anything unusual—so her mother wouldn’t be left alone. Then, having posted the note, she immediately began to wonder how such a simple, harmless little jaunt was to be proposed to Mrs Crawford without it appearing absolutely outlandish in her eyes.

  Mrs Crawford excelled in a ruthless ability to nip the illusions of others in the bud. She prided herself on having forestalled any amount of suffering by promptly applying her bleak methods to any situation ‘bolstered up’, as she called it, with emotion. Emotion in itself she found deplorable—‘a pity’. She must have seen it as a balloon, something bulbous which fed on the too fertile imagination, since her way of destroying it was always sharp and cruel. If she were completely truthful she would say that emotion in those very near to her was an embarrassment and if it happened to be sexual emotion—and it frequently was—then it became unthinkable. Her witty pincers would suddenly lash out to make short shrift of any nonsense of that sort. She possessed two criteria for assessing level-headedness in her friends; their current reading and their attitude towards food. Her own taste in books was faultless. She read a great deal, mostly novels and biographies, and never came adrift when the ideas changed as so many of her friends did, so that some of them, particularly Edwina who liked to read absolute rubbish, were apt to regard her as an intellectual. She wasn’t a bit. She read well, because she couldn’t help it—any more than she could help the curious trundling dignity of her walk, or her rather declamatory voice. She had what one can only have without really knowing it—style. But even more than reading, she enjoyed her food. She ate with an interest and concentration which some people decided was repellent, but which was actually French. People who didn’t eat—Mrs Crawford meant forage about the table in a certain way, accept the menu in restaurants with reverence or talk recipes—she found unrewarding. With Mary she used mealtimes as a barometer. If Mary ate, even if it was only in her usual rather thankless manner, then there was nothing to fear. Should she ‘pick’, then she had a cold or a notion and either must be nipped in the bud.

  She was picking, Mrs Crawford noticed, this morning. It was Sunday. The church bells clashed goldenly across the paddock and for the first time since Christmas it was delightfully fine. The sun flooded its way into the tall, narrow windows of the dining-room and was splashed palely over the carpet and brought out the gold in the satinwood chairs.

  ‘You’re not eating,’ accused Mrs Crawford. Sunday’s was what she liked to describe as a ‘good’ breakfast; toast, fruit, bacon and eggs—everything. ‘Mary—did you hear what I said? Why aren’t you eating?’

  ‘Me—not eating—Oh, aren’t I——?’

  ‘And you’re not dressed——’

  This meant that there wasn’t that special tidiness about her which spelt church. She had put on a suit of plum-coloured corduroy which, modest in the good little shop in Upper Berkeley Street where she bought most of her clothes, had turned out to have far too much dash about it for Lafney. But she had remembered Richard’s crinkle of distaste at the Shetland tweed she had hardly taken off since the cold snap began, and also his affection for colour.

  ‘Not for church,’ she said,’ because I’m going to be wicked for once. I think it must be the sunshine—’ She saw it suddenly as an alibi, as a vast, glittering excuse to ward off her mother’s ready snub. ‘I thought I’d have a little outing—take the car—you didn’t want it, did you, Mummy?’ How easy it was. How simple! And when she came to think of it, how right. Why should her every action be scrutinized, catechised! A tiny ghost stole up out of the past, insubstantial even for a shadow. The fair young man at a hunt ball with his playful gallantries, the careless momentary happiness of it—and then the sensible strength with which Mrs Crawford severed the wispy link which had so briefly brought them together. ‘What do you think‚’ Mary heard her croak in her rich, loud voice to old Lady Stowupland, ‘Mary kept them buzzing at the East Anglian Harriers! Quite the belle, Gracie, I assure you. You should have seen them!’ When they got home there had been a ‘little talk’.

  ‘You could have told me before. Why didn’t you?’

  Thinking of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, Mary said, ‘Oh I couldn’t be certain,’—there was the dust of truth in this.

  ‘I can only believe you to be most extraordinary, most extraordinary,’ Mrs Crawford insisted in an aggrieved tone. ‘When you knew Father Yockery was coming to lunch, you airily announce that you’ve taken it into your head to go off for the day in the motor! Where?’

  Already she was bustling into that flair she possessed for indignation, the aptitude for which left her curiously undisturbed. Words would fly and her colour mount, but her knife and fork (these outbursts would invariably be co-ordinated with breakfast or dinner); would pursue an industrious policy of their own, so that a secondary battle of rancour versus nourishment would ensue. Then she would complain that her health was being ruined by the thoug
htlessness of others and rise and ring the bell viciously for Hibble to present the next course. On the whole such scenes were scarce, if only for the reason that it took more than one to make them. If Mary got on with her meal in a flinching silence then Mrs Crawford’s accusations would shuffle to an apologetic stop, and a terrible muffled hush would descend like a carpet, during which Hibble would respond to orders given her in a small, silly, fretful voice which was quite unrecognisable compared with her mother’s normal tone. Hibble, revelling in the un justness of the young and the righteousness of Mrs Crawford, would drag herself about the room like a gaunt Niobe, intent on showing by every mournful gesture the intense disapproval her tongue was prevented from giving expression to. But if Mary argued the meaningless bickering might be extended until bedtime, though never further. As Mrs Crawford once said, when Mary sought to justify her point of view from the evening before, ‘But that was yesterday.’ So their mild rows didn’t go on and on.

  However, Mary had no wish to say anything this morning. The clockwork protests would reach their zenith and then subside in small flung-away spurts of self-pity, but she would remain invulnerable. The brightness of the day protected her, the suggestion of warmth, the furled yellow buds of the potted daffodils, the pretty white room with its ornate lozenged ceiling, the rich shifting of her red velvet skirt and the comparative ease with which she had got away with her plans. So happy was she, in fact, that she felt she couldn’t even bear her mother’s irritation to run down in the usual way. She had to rise and go to her, bend lightly and kiss the top of her head. Hibble, who was staring at she manoeuvred the hatch, was horrified. That’s a Judas trick if you like! she said to herself.

  ‘Darling,’ said Mary, ‘what a fuss!’