A Treasonable Growth

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  Mary began to lead the way to the stairs but Doctor Panton seized his hat, flung out an arm to see the time and said,

  ‘No need! No need! Much better if I didn’t, if you know what I mean. It might alarm her. Just keep her happy and later on we might do something about her weight. That should help a bit.’

  So she let him out after he had conveyed Doctor Fitzsimmons’ regrets. There was nothing else for it. How wrong he was soon proved itself.

  Mrs Crawford, expertly wise to her new dichotomy—this complete severance from the handicap of her lumbering person, which now lay screened from herself and from the world between a pair of the best Irish linen hand-stitched sheets and a jumble of new novels from the local branch of Smith’s Library, refused to get up. She couldn’t, she said, and in her new tough mental renaissance she was hardly to be argued with. An invalid soon discovers the way to words no healthy tongue would dream of uttering. Mrs Crawford tried her new demands out on Hibble first and was amused at her flinching. Then on Mary. But she took good care not to alienate Hibble in the process, determined as she was never to sink to being the misled recipient of the kind of confidences deliberately diluted to suit the sickroom. And Hibble, leaping like a flame to even this calculated warmth, industriously filled-in all that Mary had thought best to leave out. The tangible evidence of all this appeared in the form of a brooch which suddenly adorned the stern neckline of Hibble’s dress. It was not valuable, but it had been Mrs Crawford’s, and she had never been known to give jewellery away before, at least not to Hibble. Mary accepted this fact as a warning.

  Another sign of her mother’s intention to go all-out in her new career—for it was easily becoming that—was her insistence that her bedroom should be what she termed ‘more comfortable’. Actually it was a plea for elaboration. She came of an age set between the heavy confidence of the Seventies and the post Nineteen-nineteen experiments, a period which equated simplicity with poverty. She wanted things dragged in from other roms. They used to be in her own, she complained fretfully, although Mary could not recall when. She kept the shutters closed against the sea. She couldn’t bear it. It was so bright and lively, so actual. All day, dull or fine, she lay in the slatted light, only interrupting her reading to ring for Hibble. From the rosewood tallboy her early self looked down on her, a generous beauty in Court feathers and a fulsome train, sealed in an embossed silver frame. When visitors arrived—they were frequent, to Mary’s never-ending surprise—they, too, were forced to put up with the reduced light. Mr Yockery came most of all, wholeheartedly delighted that she should be so available and deriving from these visits the double joy that in certain instances it was actually an act of charity to receive pleasure.

  *

  For the next few weeks Mary was taken up with the essential differences of life at Meridian. The rooms, with only herself in them, began to tempt her with daring new arrangements. That over here, she began to think and the curtains kept right back to let every streak of light in, and not massed half-way across the pane as they were at the moment. A reassessment of the pictures? She rather hesitated to shift these around and excused her cowardice by telling herself that she hadn’t the time, although this was ridiculous since it became more and more apparent that it was Hibble and not she who carried the house; Hibble, who was beside herself with importance and tremulous with duties, and not only that, but able to be important. It showed mostly in her walk. She used to trot and now she loped. There was a fearful authority in that dragging stride which carried Hibble from floor to floor—usually with a large, round paper-mâché tray crammed with tea or cosmetics or just the latest letters for Mrs Crawford. The house became more and more ship-like, only this time a Homeric galley of which Mrs Crawford was the guiding, unwinking, all-seeing eye painted on the prow which, although excluded from any normal vision, could sense in an occult fashion the life flowing past it.

  Gradually a pattern was decreed and kept to. The mornings were Mary’s own. Luncheon was regular but seemed less so by the faintly derogatory way in which Hibble scattered it across the shiny table at the last possible moment, which compared badly with the hours she spent turning fresh napkins into fans and rabbits for Mrs Crawford’s tray and prettifying the food to go on it out of all recognition. Between tea and dinner, seated upon a pale cane nursing-chair, Mary read to her mother, at first self-consciously and then with relief and ease. A novel had ceased to be a mere entertainment and was now an uncommitted country in which they could meet, speak and yet not take sides. Difficult conversations were smothered at birth as fictitiously as possible. Mrs Crawford’s taste in such matters became quite bizarre and, Mary noticed, mildly salacious. Her library list, combed from the Sunday papers, puzzled the young lady at Smith’s. Father Yockery, who took broadmindedness to be a duty, concurred a little too wholeheartedly in all this. Their arid discussions could be heard like a rather bitter litany going on behind Mrs Crawford’s bedroom door. Sometimes Mrs Crawford laughed with unbelievable gusto and Hibble, setting down what she was engaged upon, would mutter, “Poor soul, it ought to make us count our blessings …’

  Edwina came and said innocently enough, ‘The boys send their love.’ She said it every time she called, totally untrue though it was. She played cards with Mrs Crawford and Mary, passing by to her own room, would hear them plonking them down with suppressed delight, like two naughty monitresses in a prep school cupboard.

  One day a man came to count the rooms. He was quite incredibly thorough. By a single glance from his scuttling, porcine little eyes, Meridian and all that pertained to it was snatched away from her and made an annexe of the State.

  ‘Eleven bedrooms‚’ he said—greatly to Mary’s surprise. Described flatly like that the place became barn-like. ‘And downstairs?’

  ‘But you wouldn’t sleep them downstairs?’

  ‘All depends how bad it gets‚’ said the man. ‘That’s what you might call the best of these big old places—sleep them anywhere.’

  ‘But …’ she began.

  The man tapped the bitten metal end of his pencil against his front teeth. ‘Oh, you get an allowance‚’ he said. ‘Yes, yes, you get an allowance …’ But if she asked him they wouldn’t be billeting along the coast anyway. So it was just a waste of time his coming here, wasn’t it? But they knew best, he supposed. ‘Or they think they do!’ he shouted familiarly from the front door.

  He left her with a Goyaesque impression of the drawing-room floor like a kind of camp, with maternal figures squatting in each corner of it and sheltering their young beneath capacious shawls with stoic dignity. In the centre, with steam rising up from it and dimming the lustres, was a soup copper with Hibble serving from it. But when the man came again, this time to leave her some forms, she almost welcomed him. When one’s own affairs have slurred to a standstill there is always a sort of relief to be found in the topsy-turvy possibilities of the world at large.

  Then the very day she wrote to Helen Gascoigne begging her, rather than inviting her, to come over for a few days, by the second post and somewhat ostentatiously as it happened since it was the only one in the postman’s hand, she had a letter from Richard. Hibble came in like clockwork and said, ‘I’ll take it up.’

  ‘There’s only one, Hibble, and it’s for me.’

  ‘Will that young lady be coming here, then?’ Hibble stared greedily at the envelope.

  ‘Mrs Gascoigne?—Oh, I have no idea. This isn’t from her. I’ve only just invited her as a matter of fact—this morning. The postman took it away with him.’

  Hibble looked down and rubbed her palms together with a rustling sound. ‘About a week, I suppose—she wouldn’t want to stay much longer than that, would she?’ she said cautiously.

  ‘I said a week, but it all depends. We shall have to wait until she arrives. After all, she hasn’t said she will come yet, has she!’

  ‘She’ll find it cold after Africa.’

  ‘Anywhere would be cold after Africa.’

  ‘Th
e Mistress says she can’t remember her.’

  ‘Oh, what nonsense, Hibble—she often stayed here for weeks.’

  ‘Weeks once,’ said Hibble. ‘Weeks in years gone by.’

  ‘Well Helen remembers Mummy all right.’

  ‘She’s sorry she’s been taken so bad, I suppose …?’

  ‘Of course she is. What a silly question.’

  Hibble sighed deeply, made a profound noise that is, since there was only the vaguest movement of her long thin chest. Then she loped out into the garden to search for snowdrops to put in the weighted vase on Mrs Crawford’s tray. Mary jagged her letter open thinking all the time as she did so, I could burn it—there’s the fire—it could float right into it and be nothing in a second. Helen’s coming. So is the war. I don’t have to have this kind of misery. I am not committed to it. Anyway, he would only be writing to her out of some kind of politeness. His writing, rather bold, made a dark oblong down the page.

  ‘Dearest Mary; Don’t say you’re surprised. Indeed, don’t say anything but I like it here—news that will shake Quenny more than it will you. I suppose I ought to say something apologetic about not writing and will—if you will say it too. Hardly any news from Lafney. You know Mummy only writes letters to Stella—whom she sees every week. I think Mrs Crawford wasn’t very well when she last wrote, but that was ages ago and I expect she must be better now.

  I have had a few good long talks with old Winsley and, do you know, he’s right! Copdock could be quite a school again. His idea is to make the four houses into two—Bloomfield and Montessori—I think I told you; put a youngish master in charge of each of them and then he says we’d see the difference at once. Except of course, it can’t be at once. It’s something to do with Miss Bellingham.

  Do you remember the skull? Well Bateson’s got it now—on a mantelpiece with two clocks, a letter-rack, a china dog, a glass fish and all his cups. You’d hardly notice it. I’m afraid that this isn’t the kind of letter I intended to write at all, but why tell you that, since nothing could be more obvious. The other letter would most likely have ended,

  Bestest love, R.’

  She wrote back and told him about her mother and about Helen Gascoigne’s possible visit, then noted with satisfaction how busy these facts made her single page look. She didn’t trouble to ask, ‘what about Sheldon? What about so many other things …’ The unexpected joy she experienced from his handwriting made her forget how skilfully off-hand he could be. When Helen came she made no pretence of screening from her a shadowy but definite happiness.

  Helen had been at school with her. Then, with dazzling rapidity, had married and held elegant sway in an impressive number of equatorial consulates. She was a lively, cheerful creature, quite maskless and so free of complexity that she could concentrate all her energies on being entirely selfless. There was nothing simple about her in the sense in which simplicity is generally admired. Her genius existed in her power to salute each day as it dawned, and an ability to get really worried about such things as hats, and yet never to appear trivial. When she did so there was a sameness about her which made her reliable, and yet this sameness, which, for all her poise, could have carried with it a very humdrum outlook, was more like that of a fine clock who shares its basic principles with any little time-keeper, yet contrives by means of a certain indefinable air to do so much more than merely giving off a dull and dutiful tick. Mary never saw Helen without noting this effortless perfection. Perhaps that was why they met so seldom. Such equability could only reflect her own hesitant inadequacies. One didn’t really go to people like Helen Gascoigne for advice, since ordinary distresses must seem to them not so much sad, as incredible. How on earth could such a thing have ever begun? they were more likely to wonder. How simply fantastic to let yourself in for it!

  Yet Helen must be told, of course. Mary steered her out into the garden for this. It was bright, but alarmingly cold—particularly after Tanganyika. But there had been a month or two in Cheyne Row in between and that was enough to cause Helen to stretch out her neat little arms in the dizzy bright air and cry against the faintly herring-smelling wind, ‘All this, darling. Divine!’ They picked their way across the wet grass and round each promontory of shadow which the cedar spread like a black map over the garden. The sun licked their cheeks with an elfin warmth and the sky was like very fine old blue glass. Gulls ravaged it with their petulance and the cedar groaned dismally. Helen was enchanted. It was a habit of hers to be so. She fluttered her hand appreciatively.

  ‘When was I last here?’ she demanded.

  ‘When you came back from Zurich.’

  ‘When I was eighteen—so long ago?’

  ‘Does it seem so long ago?’

  ‘Billions of years, darling. Now tell me why I’m here. Exactly why, mind you.’

  ‘I … I …’

  ‘Shush!’ said Helen. ‘Can’t you hear it?’

  ‘The town crier?’

  Helen shook her head, although it was true, there was a bell and some shouting going on down there in the main street. She stood still and listened again. Under the muffled ululation of voices and traffic the drag and fall of the waves could be heard as they laved against the beach, building up glistening cairns of shingle and destroying them again with a softly purling grief. Lower than this retained note of stones fretting and falling there was another sound, urgently repeated, shuddering and strong. Just boom, but boom with inexhaustible majesty.

  ‘That,’ said Helen.

  ‘That——? It’s only the sea.’

  ‘But does it always …?’

  ‘Always and always. I suppose it is rather dreadful when you come to think of it. It’s the sea eating up Lafney—at least that’s what the coastal-erosion people say.’

  ‘Heavens!’ murmured Helen. ‘No wonder you’re depressed. I should feel the same if my house was like the ornament on a piece of cake that was being nibbled at all the time.’

  ‘Oh Meridian’s quite safe. Absolutely. But surely you remember the outlines of old cottages we used to find when the tide went out and how they were once streets—up by the Martello? Oh you must, Helen. We bathed there dozens of times.’

  ‘I forget.’

  ‘Do you—much?’

  ‘No, darling, of course not. Only ‘boom—boom’ and things like that. Nothing else. Why only in the train this morning I stared out of the window at a meadow, just a meadow, mind you, and said, hullo, I know you. You were where we bull-rushed!’

  ‘At Snape—at the edge of the marsh, but that was years ago!’

  ‘I was twelve,’ said Helen. ‘Exactly. You were twelve, too, and Stella was either eleven or thirteen, but whatever it was, she was sure to have thought it better.’

  ‘Stella—was she there?’

  ‘She was,’ said Helen. And then, taking hold of the soft, lustrous bulb of her chignon between her long white fingers, ‘I’ll tell you something, darling, Stella always scared me stiff!’

  ‘Rubbish, you weren’t ever scared!’

  ‘I was of Stella. Do you know, she once tried to convert me—that was when I was fourteen and she was thirteen or fifteen. We were on our way to see you—the long way round and she ran through my sins like wildfire. She knew them all, everyone.’

  ‘Well she’s quite changed now. You’d hardly know her.’

  ‘Oh I’d know her all right,’ said Helen. ‘You see I buy all her books—for old acquaintance, you know. But I shall have to stop soon. She’s so prolific. Not to mention the queer looks I get from people when they find dozens of dormitory epics in every bookcase.’

  There was a pause during which two or three booms shuddered against the sea-wall and a gull fell down the glassy sky with lackadaisical grace and then Mary said heavily, ‘I believe she’s doing very well …’ She had patted away at this lissome shuttlecock of a conversation long enough and now that they were approaching the real reason for Helen’s visit, she felt she had to get to the point at once. The talk had been liturgical
anyhow. Both suspected its general direction. Its answers were foresworn.

  ‘Mr Brand died, didn’t he?’ Helen watched a ship with steady eyes. She had settled for the rôle of fundamentalist.

  ‘Oh a long time ago.’

  ‘I remember something. Tony may have read it out from The Times. Who is rector now?’

  ‘A Mr Yockery.’

  ‘Nice?’

  ‘Oh, Helen, “nice”!’

  ‘Well is he?’ demanded Helen, hanging on to cheerfulness for a hairsbreadth more.

  ‘No, nasty. He’s a friend of Mummy’s and I expect you’ll meet him.’

  They leant forward against the sudden flaring, tearing wind. Helen hankered a little for the snug beaver coat she had recklessly flung down across her bed. Now and again she toppled a worm-cast with the toe of her very expensive shoe. The hush then the rush of the sea seemed to be pressing itself physically against her temples. She felt remote, like a somnambulist on a headland. In a minute she might tumble down … down … And yet she was not afraid. Mary’s fecklessness worried her a little—she didn’t care to call it anything other than this—but surely … at her age. No? That was cruelty. What had age to do with it? When she met Tony she was seventeen—just. And all they could find to say were things about her age, as though that in itself could alter what she felt in her heart, or at her very finger-tips even when he happened to be near. She had been lucky as it turned out. She had married Tony and from that moment the years had been as limpid and as certain and as fresh as a mountain river without even the slightest effort on either of their part to make them so. They were in the grip of circumstance from the moment they met. That the circumstance was happiness had been nothing but the merest chance. But she could truthfully declare that neither Tony nor herself was smug. Incredulous, yes—and often; as people must be who have woken up to find the fruits of the earth plopping down at their feet, but not blinded nor oblivious to the misery of others. When their friends were miserable they felt they could shake them. Helen, for instance, could not but help remarking to herself ever since she got off the train, the unforgiving and rigid quality of Lafney. Its stiff ways had pounced upon her the moment she had struggled out with her luggage on to the platform. The porter looked, the other passengers looked, the girl in the bookstall, the taximan—they all looked. And just when she thought she was free of this remorseless scrutiny, when the taxi had ground its way past the rattling rhododendrons, Meridian itself took up the stare. She felt it eyeing her from the second she set foot on the front steps. Commonsense told her that it must be because of poor Mrs Crawford lying up there on the first floor with so little to do except peek between her shutters, but this didn’t make the situation any more palatable. The fact was, she hadn’t been in the house five minutes before she had made up her mind to take Mary out of it. Only for a holiday, of course. She’d take her back to Cheyne Row. Then she wondered about the man. Who could it be? Someone not eligible for the rusty gates of Meridian evidently. Else why all the fuss? Perhaps one of the fishermen, something foolish and romantic—although she hoped not. That sort of thing never did work out. But whoever it was, he would be strange and extraordinary. Mary would be sure to make that mistake. She looked round at Mary following her along the narrow, sluggy path which would lead them out on to the cliff.