A Treasonable Growth

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  Now here, suddenly, in a room remarkable for its deadness, she had been made naked in a rapid, expert, coarse, maskless assessment. She might have been a tart. She could call it an insult, or she could imagine it a compliment, though neither would be true. It was merely Bateson’s interest in a woman whom he could see had dressed herself with some intent to please. Bateson smiled and showed perfect teeth and Richard, dragging himself up from his lolling position against the brown marble fireplace, said hurriedly, ‘Oh Mary, this is Mr Bateson—remember?’

  They shook hands. Bateson’s fingers, surrounding her own like warm, pliant stone. There were no confusions in the contact; no obscurities; no tentative request that she should make allowances, no ambiguity and, of course, little understanding. Although this last did not cross her mind, fascinated as she was by so much maleness.

  ‘If I’d known we were going to have company …’ Bateson said. At ‘company’ his eyes, bright as pebbles in a brook, flickered in a way he would have liked her to believe was appreciation and which, normally, she would have flinched from in some kind of disgust: yet she didn’t.

  ‘None of us knew‚’ Richard grinned. ‘Mary decided to run over from Lafney and we thought we’d meet somewhere quietly, when the Winn—Mr Winsley caught me up and said come and have a drink before luncheon.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Bateson, ‘that’s just to satisfy themselves. You should have known that! I remember when I first arrived at this dump, the little woman there—’ he nodded gently in the direction of Mrs Winsley, ‘said, “Oh, Mr Bateson, why don’t you ask your sister over for the afternoon”—my sister’s an obstetrician believe it or not—and the way they milled about her when she did finally come you’d have thought she specialised in delivering dragons.—Sorry,’ he added, ‘now I’ve spoilt everything haven’t I? Perhaps you wanted to believe that they were nicer folk than that?’

  ‘No‚’ she said hesitantly, ‘no you haven’t; why should you?’

  ‘You might have taken it as more of a compliment—your being asked here, I mean.’

  ‘My inquisitiveness matched their own, I’m afraid. My mother knew the school when it was known as ‘Miss Bellingham’s Experiment’. I often wondered what it was like inside.’

  ‘So now you do‚’ said Bateson. ‘Surprised?’

  ‘Not really.’

  At this point Canon Ribbs thrust a jolly hand between them and said, ‘Good-bye! Good-bye! in an absurd partified voice and Miss Ribbs, following, half-backed from the room staring with all her might.

  ‘We must go too‚’ said Mary.

  ‘Go?’ said Bateson. ‘Where …?’

  ‘We’ve got to eat‚’ she answered, but in a jerky, unnatural voice for her. ‘No: we particularly want to see the castle and one or two other places.’

  Bateson screwed his eyes up in exaggerated disgust at this, in a way which generally had the effect of making others agree with him—his was, after all, the bright and exemplary world of the norm, and he its brightest and most exemplary arbiter. Others were clever, no doubt; but he was right. Statistics proved it. Their world, so hesitant with subtleties, foxed him frequently with its shades and half-tones, accustomed as he was to a simpler realm of pure, blatant colour. Coming all the way to Stourfriston to see the castle! In January—and with that edgy look … Old Brand’s going to have a spot of trouble in that quarter if he doesn’t look out, he was thinking to himself.

  Richard, impressed at once by Bateson’s attitude, was about to agree when Mary said surprisingly, ‘I happen to enjoy sightseeing, Mr Bateson. I do it for no other reason.’

  ‘When you’ve done all that, come back here and let me get you some tea.’ He turned to Richard, ‘Show Miss …?’

  ‘Crawford‚’ she said hurriedly.

  ‘Show the lady the way the dominies live, eh boy!’

  ‘No—thanks, I shall have to get back.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She watched as he seemed to be searching about his mind to discover some reason for her abruptness. ‘I must‚’ she added. ‘Good-bye, Mr Bateson.’

  ‘Be seeing you‚’ added Richard briefly.

  There was a gong and hurtling footsteps. Mr M’Tooley declared ‘very nice and let them hope it wouldn’t be the last time’—knowing full well that any further entertainment was more than unlikely. They had seen Miss Crawford and that was that. If they wanted to see her again she was sure to be in Country Life. That was the kind of girl Miss Crawford was, thought Mr M’Tooley. He hurried off to take ‘tables’, which meant supervising the loading of a stack of huge, chipped plates and shouting out things like, ‘sit up! Sanders—Pratt—Wiggborough—that lout there! And, For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful …’

  *

  They trailed about the town in the golden coldness, had their luncheon in a snug hotel whose walls boasted its warming-pans like preposterous medals and, later, in the museum, read the yellow tickets glued to fossils, corroded weapons, little late Roman plates, pots of Samien ware and dirty Victorian toys. Memories of the peaceful luncheon still closed them in. There had been a small, red-faced waitress with fat, bare, white arms and a crisp linen frill high up on each of them biting into a pump, smooth bicep. And there had been the release, too, from the tension of the horrible little party which caused them to be touchingly grateful for just each other’s company. The menu had said duck and nothing else, and this she decided was as it should be. It was right. There must be no choice. The day must take the course ordained for it, however trivial it might be. In the first place she had Bateson to forget, and as memorable as he was, she very soon forgot him. His upsetting downrightness faded under the many pleasant nuances of her present situation, and when she saw the expression in Richard’s eyes as he gazed at the Roman ornaments, a kind of eager attention begging to know more of their strangeness, she knew that she was right in loving him, and the disturbing image of Bateson melted away. They drank gaspingly over-chilled hock, which routed the Winsley’s sherry, ate the duck, smiled kindly at the waitress and were glad.

  The castle had exchanged its cruelty for some more furtive quality of casual meetings and shuffling assignations. Eros, who’s warm amatory delight figured so exactingly on both sides of a large twin-handled cup retrieved from beneath the local football field—lying there all that time, thought Richard lovingly, with the phantom of its wine still inhabiting it and the clownish game going on above—Eros, though debased, Romanised, possibly even Britainised, still showed the haunting perfections of that earlier joy which was in such direct contrast to the sniggering impropriety of these Sunday-suited youths seeking to kill a winter’s afternoon in the municipal museum. From looking at this, Mary had turned to slender phials of azure and virescent glass, each of them splintered finely with the gossamer cracklature of nearly two thousand years. There were trinkets taken from the graves of girls; pins and brooches and clips that had once held tunics tight on warm limbs, fillets and combs with no hint left of the bright heads they had nestled in; a boy’s sandal, dice, seals; the bibelots of the strong, the rich and the beautiful, whose trivial worth had proved itself more lasting than any of these; for the dead had lost all identity and their personalities had contracted until nothing remained but that which was heaped up so dully before them—a few calcined knuckles in a showcase. The central heating belched luxuriously on the ratepayers’ money. The attendant snatched clandestine delight from the News of the World. Two girls passed and then two sailors. A small boy wept and the woman dragging him went doggedly from case to case as if she were searching for the hardware counter in Woolworths. ‘Look, Kevin,’ she cried, ‘a gee-gee—a dolly! Oh, look!—a pretty picture …’ And the tears slid drearily from the child’s wet cheeks as he stared in hatred at Plantagenet playthings. After this they peered from narrow window slits down into the dry moat, which looked like a rough setting from which a jewel had been prised—a long bar of turquoise it should have been in this instance, flecked with swans,
perhaps, and dragging down into dark rushes the reflected geometry of the keep. Instead there were terrible little flower-beds, so neat they might have been perpetrated with a pastry-cutter. But to see these they had to climb a sill of herring-bone bricks which at once had the effect of isolating them from the prim rôle of individuals in a museum. The short step up from the level of the showcases carried them straightway from being woolly interpreters of history into history itself. Vaguely aware of this, they continued to stare from the slit, and the crouching masonry, like a grim souteneur, urged them together. They were quite hidden. Far away, they heard the rustling interest of those who, in an eventless present, were condemned to peer at the habiliments of the happiness of others; a wedding dress, the uniform a little captain had worn during the Peninsular victories, a sandal … a ridiculous helmet; a glove or two. The passage which led to these things skirted the deep aperture. But they were alone. Richard’s hand rested nervously and lightly on her arm. She felt a reeling, precarious joy. It was like the coming-down motion of a swing, exquisite, but sickening. Go on … don’t stop … a part of her begged, so she was astonished to hear herself saying, levelly enough,

  ‘Richard … do you really want to go on with this?’

  ‘Go on …?’ He was mystified.

  She repeated his words without expression. “Go on. Don’t force me to explain.”

  “So that’s what has been keeping you so quiet!’

  She let him believe this, although the thought had only just moment entered her head.

  ‘You know I have been happy today and if there was the least guarantee of any more days like it, I wouldn’t ask such a question. But there won’t be; you know there won’t be. It’s because, I suppose, most people meet, kiss and come to an understanding of each other in some progressive way. It’s an adventure. What is there adventurous about two people like ourselves trying to find something new to say—when we have known each other all our lives?

  Richard, leaning forward now as the bowmen had once said, ‘Surely that is the adventure. Anybody can find something to entrance them in a brand-new relationship—what is there in that? It’s us, ourselves and … and …’

  ‘Yes …?’ she insisted anxiously.

  He turned to face her. She saw the cool, fine line of his cheek in semi-profile and his neck, thicker than she had remembered it, aggressive even, the white skin vanishing abruptly into a dark poll of hair. His words could be tactful, but nothing could lessen the insolence of his being so much younger than herself, so that when she heard him add, “and because you are beautiful,” in the rather unsteady voice of a person unused to expressing compliments, she reacted with a faint, but apparent fretfulness. He drew back at once. If she only enjoyed practical things, then he would be practical!

  ‘There’s only one thing that will make it fail,’ he said quietly; “your evasiveness—that and the way you exaggerate everything—you know, Lafney and Mrs Craw—your mother and … and … about my getting this new job. It’s only a bit of schoolmastering after all. You thought the people in the bank pretty awful——’

  ‘I never said so.’

  ‘Not to me, but you did to Quentin. He told me.’

  ‘It’s only because I thought you were wasted there.’

  ‘And now I’m ‘wasted’ at Copdock?’

  ‘Of course you aren’t! I never said that.’

  ‘Not in as many words, but I could see you hated them.’

  She was bound to protest at this, it was so entirely untrue. They had astonished her, appalled her even; but that wasn’t hate. She saw how easily he was taken in; how easily he could accept the fifth-rate—something Quentin would never do. It wasn’t tolerance, it was licence. Tolerance implied broad limits, the other thing, none. Five years in such a place and Richard might soon become a fuddy-duddy like all the rest of them. He brought this trail of surmise sharply to a head by saying,

  ‘Except Bateson, of course. You liked him.’

  She felt the blood rushing to her face and hardly knew what to answer. This suppressed rancour—in a museum of all places—had to end in vulgarity—if it was to end at all; she realised that. But such an ending! She was about to reply when she noticed the expression on his face as he studied the passersby on the gravel paths below. What he had said was intended to be clear and unambiguous. She had liked Bateson. He had seemed to her wonderfully wholesome, coming in like that after all those other masters and their wives had been pecking away at her.

  ‘Of course!’ she said lightly. ‘And I expect the others are quite nice. I hardly spoke to anybody except Mrs Winsley, so how can I tell?’

  ‘Never mind about them‚’ said Richard. Her hands, hot from their clinging suede gloves, lay crumpled in his. He was kissing her and doing so with a kind of consolation, like somebody making amends to a cheated child. She might have been a shop-girl and he one of those tittering louts! If only she could explain—now! But when she half-raised her arms in a little desiring movement, he took her by the waist and for a nervous moment she was trapped helplessly by her own shudderingly exquisite fear which made her feel that she might collapse abjectly against the harsh Norman stones. She pulled herself away and struggling to sound normal and at ease, said, ‘Darling, we’re terrible fools—both of us. We get so cross. You go to Sheldon Tuesday I suppose?

  ‘Sugar … Milk …?’ he mocked gently. ‘You don’t have to be so polite you know. Yes, Tuesday it is.’

  ‘And you really want to do this?’

  ‘This?—or that?’

  That,’ she replied slowly. ‘Go to Sheldon and have all that is left of your spare time absorbed. Because it will be; those kind of jobs take up every minute.’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t quite understand what you mean. In fact I don’t quite understand what anybody means. I’m invited—or rather it is suggested, that I help a writer get a few books and papers straight. Why should this strike everybody as being so curious? Perhaps you can tell me because I’m afraid I don’t see it.

  ‘No,’ she said rather wearily, ‘no, you don’t. Why should you? And it isn’t curious anyway.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  She hesitated before she said, ‘It’s a kind of death which touches everything—dead causes, dead manners, dead affections—just deadness. That is all! And because these things can no longer go on under their strength, they batten on to the living.’

  ‘Then you think that Sir Paul is likely to ‘batten’ on to me?’

  He grinned to think of so brilliant a figure doing anything of the kind. Sir Paul Abbott’s detachment in a ganging-up world was too notorious for anybody to successfully accuse him of any limpet quality. If ever a man had described self-sufficiency, he had. He reached down from the Olympian loneliness of his prose to revive pleasures that had dropped into abeyance, restore the unfairly neglected and add each year, with unwearying constancy, some new and lively tribute of his own, splendidly bound and respectfully received by the current arbiters of style, since in this at least he outdid them all, scribbling them well under the table. Richard reckoned that he would be lucky if he saw Sir Paul at all. Sheldon was large and the click of a vintage typewriter coupled with bulky envelopes on the hall table at tea-time might be the only hint of that dedicated existence. He was beginning to dread the whole idea, not because of anything Mary or Quentin or anybody else, if it came to that, might have supposed, but because of his own feeling of inadequacy. This convinced him that Sheldon could only mean a short period of box-lifting, stamp-licking drudgery. Not that he minded. It was rather a relief.

  But she quenched these day-dreams by saying, ‘I didn’t mention names and I wasn’t thinking about Sir Paul.’

  ‘Who then?’

  Me, she ought to have said; herself. He was forcing her into competition with things and people beyond her powers and when she lost—as she was bound to do—would only despise her for it. Those witty old women! That famous old man! (Sir Paul was fifty-four, but that seemed immaterial to her
present way of judging things.) They were gleaming, many-faceted quartz, heavy with subtleties. And she was crystal—which is really very dull stuff because of its apparency. She could not conceal, nor trap, nor intrigue and so she would bore him as she knew she bored Quentin.

  ‘I was just being selfish, Richard,’ she explained humbly. If so much of her nature was on view, why attempt to hide this?

  ‘You force things along, don’t you …?’ he answered more kindly. ‘And you’re always raising doubts. Don’t think I’m criticising you,’ he added hurriedly, ‘I’m not—honestly. But why not let things come to us slowly and naturally—instead of us racing towards them? Don’t you think that’s best?’