‘Oh I’m not bored—not enough to want the balloon to go up, if that is what you mean. I think Bateson is—he’s the coach at Copdock—I may have told you. Bateson feels that he has to make some kind of gesture …’
‘Not a rude one, I hope,’ interrupted Sir Paul surprisingly. ‘No, go on. I’m interested in this.’
‘There’s really not much point. I was only going to say something about the need of the male for the kind of glory which wars provide. It’s not a very original remark, I’m afraid …’
‘No,’ said Sir Paul, ‘it isn’t. But it won’t lose its truth because of that. Well, I can take it that you’re not a Bateson?’
‘Oh we get on pretty well.’
‘You wouldn’t if you were as consistent to your nature as he is to his,’ Sir Paul said flatly. Then he tugged himself up to a happier position and added hurriedly, ‘But there, I don’t know this knightly young man, so we’ll retreat to more common ground shall we? Tell me about Aunt Fred.’
That was quite in order, Richard decided. It was, after all, through Miss Bellingham that they had met and for the next little while she would have to be the unseen presence in their midst through whom their remarks would have to pass if they were to gain in roundness and substance. Without such a mutual personality about which to loop the haphazard strands of their opinion, they would have to make do with a system of questions and answers which would, in a very short time, play themselves out as the more readily given facts about one another were exhausted. It was Sir Paul who first saw the considerable advantage of retaining his aunt for such a purpose. He had had some difficulty in hiding his relief when it became apparent how far this cautious young schoolmaster was in her confidence. He added, ‘When I was twelve she absolutely fascinated me.’
‘Why ‘twelve’? What happened after that—did she let you down in some way?’
‘She let herself down,’ said Sir Paul carelessly. ‘—and that’s the worst thing of all! When people do that they are apt to give their whole acquaintanceship a bump. Don’t you agree?’
‘They might,’ said Richard slowly, ‘It all depends …’ On the acquaintanceship, he was going to say, but Sir Paul, interrupting, said,
‘Of course they do. That’s been proved enough times, God knows!—Here, help yourself; you seem to be getting behind. Some more of the meat? Well, take it. Have some more wine as well. No. Aunt Fred was well and truly—I was going to say massively—endowed at birth with everything you can think of, brains, money, most frightfully good health—everything, as I say. Not beauty, though. Poor dear, she’s always been more than plain, not to say hideous. But even there she was blessed in some way because she quite truthfully didn’t care. So one can never say that being behind the door when looks were given out has spoilt her life, or anything like that. If anything has ruined her life, it’s greed. Well don’t look at me like that! I don’t mean that the poor old creature has been going in for robbing or hankering or that sort of thing. Greed, after all, is mostly insisting on having what nature has ruled out so far as one’s self is concerned. Marriage for me would be the most ghastly gluttony, if you see what I mean. Aunt Fred was a born don. Remembering my grandfather Bellingham—though ever so slightly, you realise—I can only believe that her very conception was an academic act. She has always been one of those people who get things right the first time. She was never lead astray by some gallivanting hypothesis, or anything of that sort. She just knew what she was doing all the time. Her answers were always the same as those in the book—just imagine how much simpler life would be for all of us if we were only drawn to the correct solution every time! Well, being so brainy she decided on Oxford and one of the new women’s colleges of that time, and became so brilliant that her name was always quoted as a justification for them—the women’s colleges, I mean, of course. Then she became an educational experimentalist—there were dozens of them cropping up everywhere in the eighties. None of the teaching systems would do for her, so she invented one of her own. And when her father died she turned that horrible house at Stourfriston into a school. Mama, I know, was appalled. And when they heard that no one was ever whacked there, so were all the boarding-schools in the county. I fancy they must have believed in the dictum of every following having its compensations and that Aunt Fred’s doing without the cane was pretty ominous, to put it mildly. But she prospered. How, I can’t say. Mama and I never went near the place. If it comes to that, we never went near any school. We had governesses and things.’
‘Miss Bellingham has sometimes spoken of the Montessori method in teaching,’ said Richard, faintly bored.
‘Maria? She was only one of them. There were literally dozens. And all with the very best intentions. So were Aunt Fred’s, of course—simply marvellous intentions. And so have we all! The agony of biography is that it harps entirely on what one has done, without taking into consideration what one set out to do. When Aunt Fred goes they will say that for fifty-something years the poor dear ran a prep-school in Suffolk. No one will have the bad taste to say that her intention was to turn the whole idea of instructing the young upside-down. She could have, you know! But not from the turnip fields. She should have stayed at Oxford with all the port and talk! Too late now! Well that was mistake one—Aunt Fred’s first essay into acrimony, so to speak … Whether I divulge the second … will depend upon how our dusting goes—not to mention the results of my assessment of your discretion!’
Sir Paul then stood up and undid a packet of Sobranies and shuffled the cigarettes into a curved gold case. ‘Tales out of school—that’s fitting enough, don’t you think?’ He smiled and the too-ready sweetness in the curve of the lips showed, like an archaic Apollo, not so much a discarded morality, as an innocence of the ethical law altogether. The smile was brief. Sensing indiscretion, Sir Paul speedily clamped his strong, faintly stained teeth down on his lower lip.
Penchant arrived and, seeing they were smoking, said, ‘There was the cheese, Sir Paul, the Pont l’Évêque, Sir Paul, if you remember …?’ And Sir Paul said, ‘Cheese? We’re past cheese, aren’t we? No, thank you, Penchant, so you might clear.’ When Penchant had gone, the wagon crashing fretfully over the marble diamonds, Sir Paul asked, ‘How much burgundy was there left, did you see?’ And when Richard shook his head, ‘Well there was about half a bottle if I remember rightly, and old Penchant won’t touch a drop of it. Not that he’s an abstainer; he’s not even abstemious; but he’s as straight as a die—and they’re awfully straight things if all the rumours about them are true. Penchant’s honesty is nearly driving me mad. Or it was until I realised that it was his ‘thing’. Some people are funny over animals, or gardening or b-bus-conductors. And Penchant is thrilled to bits by his own integrity. Sickening, don’t you think!’
‘It might be even more sickening if you couldn’t trust him,’ Richard laughed.
‘Oh I don’t agree. Whatever you say about pilfering, you can never call it an ostentatious defect. If only he would pinch a drop of the wine! If only somebody would prick him and let the Seventh Commandment out! Do you know, the first day I was home he followed me from room to room as much as to say, ‘look under the rugs if you like, you won’t find a tack missing.’ I never saw anybody so eaten up with pride … But we ought to be getting back to work if we hope to get this plan of ours really going.’
The plan was to squeeze all the books into three sides of the library, leaving one wall of shelves as a sorting space for the various boxes of papers. Once Richard tried out a remark.
‘I expect you have brought most of the books from Sicily home?’
‘What——? No. No, how could I? And what would have been the point anyway? They belong where they are, just as these belong here. It bears out what we were talking about before luncheon, doesn’t it. Look your last on all things lovely …’
Richard was touched by this. Like most people who have never possessed very much, he over-valued possessions greatly. To have to forsake them seemed to him tragic
. ‘Did you leave everything then?’ he asked.
‘Not all, but most. Alessandro and I went through them, just as you and I are going through this lot, the only difference being that your composure makes it seem a less mournful task.’
‘Alessandro—he—he wept?’
‘Alessandro he howled! Poor Alessandro! He won’t like working in the factory in Syracuse a bit. I can’t help thinking though, that even he wouldn’t have been very upset by our present job. All these endless commentaries … You would have liked Papa. He was more your sort.’
This was unexpected as it was unflattering. This was what one got for not having heard of Mont-what’s-his-name and Eddie. Well, if that was the kind of help he’d better get in touch with Quentin—except, of course, there was one drawback; Quentin didn’t dust. A little vellum volume dropped into his hand. ‘Three Shrieks against Perdition’ he read, ‘The Pope, Satan’s Catamite’ by Master Prynne; ‘Containing also ‘The Naughty Priesthood of England’s Tears’. He handed it down to Sir Paul who put it with Biglow on Heffers as an odd book. Then, from his advantageous position on the shiny yellow steps, he looked down on the tall, unhurrying figure with a sudden dislike. All unknowing, Sir Paul worked on, dragging books from heap to heap; mountains of Who’s Who, blood-coloured as they should be; a wall of Crockford’s Clerical Directories, sable as the Cloth itself; all the Early Fathers, the prolific findings of the Early English Text Society, Archaeologia, the Seldon Society, and the transactions of a score of other such institutions; banging the volumes fitfully against each other to exclude a little choking dust and, now and then, pulling himself upright and gripping the small of his back. His hair made a short arabesque above the white, tight skin of his forehead. His ears, too, were strangely plastic and colourless in shape and texture. They were neat and slightly convex and bent back against his head and their tips were hidden by the coarse, bunchy hair springing away from his temples. The interiors of his ears were taut, glistening and shelly. Richard could not help comparing them with Miss Bellingham’s ears and the terrible interest with which they often appeared electrified as they hung away from her head like listening toadstools. And nothing could be less ‘Bellingham’, he decided, than Sir Paul’s jaw; hers so ruminative, so ceaselessly concerned; his set and white and stark with a stillness that could not have been more still had it pertained to the dead. Across this refrigeration of the rest of his expression, Sir Paul’s eyes drifted endlessly. They were gold, rather than brown, and their habit of seeing all they could made them seem just the least but untrustworthy—particularly in England, where such personal integrity a man is presumed to possess is judged by the blankness of his stare. About the whole of Sir Paul’s person generally, there was something fruit-like, a glowing ripeness in the unathletic flesh which once may have had its attraction, but now made him look suspiciously well preserved. He moved about with a constant air of expectancy. Life, for him, was never on the level. It was the heights and the depths. Any moment, one felt, that for him the door might open and a glorious reunion take place, or he might look out of the window to see a cardinal’s procession crossing the park, or the telephone might ring, or a trumpet sound and that Penchant would summon him to the first and some more awful authority to the other. His hands fidgetted helplessly. They alone of all his person seemed utterly overcome by the sheer uncertainty of life.
‘I suppose one could say ‘show me your books and I can tell you what you are’. Would you say there was any truth in that?’ asked Richard.
‘I’d certainly say it.’
‘Well then, I can quite honestly say that Fm not like Sir Eric!’
‘Why? Because of this?’ He waved his hand round the room. I can assure you Papa wasn’t the least bit like this! Good Lord! He would have been surprised! No, these are only the public shelves. A house of this size always has two libraries and this just happens to be the one people were shown into …’ Sir Paul gave a short laugh and Richard wondered whether he had imagined the note of regret in it. ‘No …’ he continued slowly, ‘Papa had his subtle side, although there’s precious little left to prove it.’
‘They were lost then—the other books?’
‘Burnt. Mama burned them.’
Richard was shocked. Lady Abbot—the Belle’s sister capable of that sort of thing! Didn’t that rather alter everything?
As though conscious that it might, Sir Paul said, ‘Tolerance doesn’t run in families, you know, like a Roman nose.’
‘I was just thinking that Miss Bellingham would be the first person to be upset by that kind of behaviour.’
‘You’re quite right. She was. But she put it all down to what she called the ‘fearful alliance’—She meant the marriage itself. Although they were sisters, Mama and Aunt Fred were never the adoring kind, you know. How could they be, with one of them trying to live up to Sheldon and the other just on the fringe of being great most of her life? I’m afraid that to Aunt Fred, Mama was just another baronet’s wife and to Mama, Aunt Fred was just another crank. They had forgot to be sisters quite early on. I did rather wonder if I should be telling you all this …’
Richard wondered as well. But he was soon to learn that there was little, if any, difference between Sir Paul’s scarcely noticing a person and his entirely befriending them. The elaborate etiquette got up by society for its protection against human warmth was quickly swept aside when Sir Paul wished to advance, and remained impenetrable when he did not. Quite often a victim of this extreme friendliness, feeling himself committed to a greater intimacy than he had at first intended, would attempt to go back on his first reaction to Sir Paul’s embrasive smile and would seek refuge in the safe old social abracadabra of ‘how-do-you-do’ and ‘what will you have’ and ‘how do you like Naples, Funchal, Inverness, Paris … San Francisco …?’ Either this, or they were flattered into a rapid exchange of Christian names and confidences of the sort they would have thought twice about before telling them to a priest. Richard floundered between either course. Sir Paul’s charm was remorseless. Like the headlamps of an approaching car, when it was turned on it blinded one helplessly. One either had to turn one’s back on it or succumb. Sir Paul looked up suddenly. The Adam’s apple under the stretched skin of his throat rose and fell, tender, nervous and sad.
‘Let’s call it a day,’ he said.
He tugged a frayed bell-pull and Mrs Penchant came this time, a short, fat, happy little woman, as contented as a tea-cosy. When she began to thrust books and things about to make a space for tea-cups Sir Paul said, ‘Oh not in here, Mrs Penchant. The dust is killing us.’
‘There’s a fire in the gunroom, Sir Paul.’
He hesitated. ‘In there then.’
Later, when they were settled in a funny, too tall room, which had certainly once been a gunroom, but was now a mere apology for one, with streamers of flame unwinding themselves from a fire of hornbeam stumps and terrible portraits of Regency stallions all round them and the dull blue perpendicular guns glinting in their glazed rosewood cases and the floor covered with nursery rugs and the ledges crowded with photographic groups of apoplectic shooting parties of the eighties and nineties; Sir Paul continued his earlier remarks. He pointed to one of the yellowish-brown photographs and said, ‘There’s Papa.’ His finger rested on a gangling young man in a billycock hat hemmed in on both sides by serge-skirted, grim faced women. Richard saw a good-looking face as blank as a mask. He could see no resemblance. ‘That’s a most remarkable photograph,’ said Sir Paul defensively, ‘It’s Papa when he was thirty and it was taken in eighteen-fifty-one.’
‘He would be amazed if he could see what had happened to his nice secure world.’
‘He never even felt the beginning of the going of it. He died in nineteen-nine. Wasn’t he lucky!’ Sir Paul turned away from the photograph. ‘Suppose it doesn’t happen,’ he said. ‘Supposing the Prime Minister’s right and we have plucked something called safety, well, then what?’
‘For ourselves I suppose you mea
n. Well I quite truthfully hadn’t thought of my new appointment as anything the least bit temporary, but now that I come to think of it, it’s pretty obvious that I should have thought twice about Copdock if it had seemed likely that I might be spending half my life there.’
‘You’re just filling in time—like our friend Bateson?’
‘Perhaps, though not in quite the same way.’
‘No, you’ll always lack Bateson’s directness.’
Richard objected to this. He still found it pleasant to indulge in little dreams of various ways to improve himself. He hated the idea that his personality had been poured into its mould years ago and had already taken shape. Quentin was disarmingly clever, so he would eventually be the same—there was always heaps of time in these fantasies—Bateson had this enviable sunny quality and he had already decided that he would take steps to develop in that direction, when here was Sir Know-all telling him that it was impossible. It was even worse than that, because it meant that Sir Paul had been busily thinking about him all the while they had been in the library. Far from making feel him complimented, it reduced him to a cautious shyness.
‘I expect you’re right,’ he said abruptly. ‘Old Bateson’s a pretty straightforward type.’
‘You must forgive me if I occasionally make these personal assessments,’ Sir Paul said in a vague, absent voice. ‘Habit can be very tiresome at times. After a while one’s mind seems to become entirely wax and the senses, helplessly impressionable. The difference between yourself and our friend Bateson is that you can fully understand what I mean and he won’t ever!’
It was a compliment and Richard accepted it rather gratefully. His being denied Bateson’s peculiar kind of honesty had made it seem for the moment that he must be quite pathetically unlike Bateson. Now it was plain that Bateson was pathetically unlike himself. He would not have been able to follow this obscure talk, for example. It would have irritated him profoundly. Richard wasn’t absolutely certain that it didn’t irritate him, but at least he didn’t go about expecting the world to be black and white and becoming baffled and angry when it became obvious that it wasn’t.
A Treasonable Growth Page 22