A Treasonable Growth

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  Richard on the other hand, driven on by what he thought was expected of him and by some simpler urgency, was thinking, ‘what we have come to is sad mostly because we can’t talk. All the time we fail to communicate. How could we put up with each other if we didn’t talk?’ Fatuously he said, ‘Well, a penny for them?’

  ‘Oh Dick …’

  The gap vanished. For a second—people were in sight—her head touched his and his mouth pressed awkwardly against her temple.

  ‘Oh my dear,’ she said, straightening herself, ‘you see what love does to me!’ Laugh it off as she would, she still saw them, the Rectory children and herself on apoplectic ponies skirmishing down the gorse path to the beach in search of amber. She tried to shut all this out by concentrating on the swirl of spiral iron steps on the nearest look-out tower and the bunting snapping round the weather-boarded yacht-club. But what finally dragged her back to the present was a raucously cheerful voice saying,

  ‘Of course you’ll like her. What, Rube! She’s one of the best! My friend Rube’s ever such a good sort. One of the best is Rube …’

  A thin girl was approaching, feverishly summery in a pink linen suit and clumsy white wedged-heeled shoes. There was a sailor with her and they were walking side by side with an obviously regretful independence, the sailor’s shiny bland moon of a face was expressionless as it assessed the girl. Richard, looking up too at that moment, was startled to see Daphne coming towards him and staring straight at him. He saw the sailor’s fat naked neck and the sailor’s arm bumping tentatively against Daphne’s flank. The arm was like the stuffed arm of a great toy in its hot serge sleeve. Daphne’s body prinked and wriggled as she chattered. At the seat all their eyes met. For a split second Daphne gazed at Richard with what amounted to a cheerful wonderment as she sorted him out expertly from all those fellers and chaps of hers. Then, with the barest distension of her eyes, she indicated that she had managed to fix the name, the place and the occasion to him. He thought, oh my God, she’s going to speak—But of course, she knew better than that. She had never been that kind of fool! She merely looked and saw, and the titillating effect the encounter had on her did not become apparent until she had gone some yards. Then, clutching at the sailor, she let herself go in a brief shriek of amusement—which the sailor must have taken for encouragement because when they moved on, his arm was bent round her waist in an inquisitive bolster.

  ‘Well, and what was there so funny about us?’

  ‘Us?’ He pretended not to understand.

  ‘I thought it was us.’

  ‘Are we funny then?’ he asked lamely.

  ‘Not remotely at the moment I shouldn’t have thought.’

  ‘Then they must have been laughing at themselves.’

  Mary said hmm! to that. ‘Just look at them; I shouldn’t think laughter was their emotion!’

  ‘As a matter of fact I wasn’t taking much notice,’ he lied.

  ‘Were you thinking of the school?’

  He nodded. It was true in its way. He never quite stopped thinking of Copdock, and Copdock included the ancillary considerations of Sheldon and his own work. ‘It’s been rather a peculiar term one way and another.’

  ‘It must have been. What … what really happened?’

  ‘Oh, about poor old Mr M’Tooley do you mean? He gassed himself. Just that.’

  ‘Did you get on with him?’

  ‘Oh yes. Of course. Although he wasn’t exactly a friend you know.’

  ‘But you liked him?’

  ‘Very much—we all did.’

  ‘Then—then why?’

  Richard shrugged. ‘It was all in the newspapers. None of us knew any more than that.’

  ‘I see. Poor man,’ she said very gently, wanting to know more, but unwilling to run the risk of seeming too inquisitive. She didn’t believe Richard. He was like Quentin, always so careful with information. Always content to let sleeping dogs lie. They both took precautions in getting their facts without making it look as if they rummaged for them. She sighed. This refusal to discuss things which Quentin and he cultivated stripped life of its intimacy. She loathed it. It was insulting, like offering her only an adaptation of his attention; the aspect of his attention he considered most suitable for her to understand.

  They walked slowly back to Meridian past coach-loads of trippers being tipped into the market place.

  ‘Quenny home, did you say, Richard?’

  ‘No. He’s staying with Munsen-Orle—you know, that funny friend of his. They’re in London somewhere. As a matter of fact, we’re all supposed to be rather fed-up with Quenny for not coming home for Easter.’

  ‘Only supposed to be?’

  ‘Uh-huh. In the same way that we’re not supposed to be surprised if he manages to stay in Lafney more than four days together.’

  Mary smiled and said, ‘Poor Quentin! He’s the kind of person one misses.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Good Lord, no. You don’t miss people like Quentin. Even Mummy doesn’t miss him. He’s so—so detached. No that’s not the word. So irrelative, yes that is what I mean.’

  Somehow this vague talk of Quentin had the effect of drawing off their irritation with each other. He was a scapegoat and they dumped their differences on to him cheerfully. Meridian then came abruptly into view, filling up the end of the lane importantly with a panache of chimneys, finials and catalpa shadows. The clock on the church tower struck twelve noisily. Mary fiddled with her watch. She said, ‘Hibble’s away.’

  ‘Hibble—away?’

  ‘Well, and what’s so odd about that? Hibble goes away every Easter Monday. She goes to see her sister.’

  ‘Didn’t even know she had a sister.’

  ‘She has two, but one lives in Australia. The one she goes to see she describes as a “Norwich woman”. Look, dear, forget Ipswich and London and all that nonsense. Let’s be beautiful and rational. Come in and have a drink.’

  Silence greeted them in the cold flagged hall. The silence was like a little fog, hard to breath in. When Mary called out ‘Mother’ the silence puffed itself up as if it was outraged.

  ‘Perhaps she’s gone to the back-streets of Kingsway.’

  She glanced at him and saw that he was surveying himself in the pier-glass fixed to the huge branching hat-rack. Then she saw the note.

  ‘Such a glorious day,’ it said, ‘so Father Y. has persuaded me to take him to Long Melford (see church). Made up minds at last moment. Taken motor. Leave garage doors open so we don’t have to get out. Back for dinner. Dinner better be scratch. M.

  P.S. Coastal Evacuation committee fixed for 22nd. Tell Edwina if you see her—tell her it’s important. Fed cat.’

  She handed it to Richard, who said mockingly, ‘Goodness, what gay sparks!’

  ‘Would you like to have lunch in the garden?’

  ‘Mad—and uncomfortable, but let’s.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better telephone Edwina?’

  ‘I left them with an impression of indefiniteness.’

  ‘That’s settled then.’

  They went in the kitchen and she began to collect things. ‘Apples,’ she said, ‘cold chicken, bread and cake. Cake? Well well take it anyway. And wine—I think there’s something like half a bottle of Sauterne in that bottom cupboard. Cheese, apples—no, I said apples. What a mixture!’

  New honeysuckle streamed off the stable roof. New grass lifted in the orchard and showed dull blue shadows. The wall corner they chose would have been stiflingly airless on a really warm day, but now it nursed a blissful patch of stillness under the wind. They sprawled on old punt cushions which struck colder than the grass. Plum blossom drifted against the torn white breast of the chicken and floated on the wine. The apples still had loft dust in the crevasses of their wizened skins and the spoons and forks soaked up the light and looked precious and rare.

  When they were settled, Mary said, ‘You must wonder why I didn’t answer your letter …? I couldn’t, my
dear. I had to see you first.’

  ‘You didn’t want to write, “no”?’

  ‘I could not have written “no”.’

  ‘But you can say it. You are saying it. And do you know why you’re saying it? It’s because you don’t want to give up all this!’ He waved his arm to include the house and the trees and the small perfect stable-buildings. ‘It’s a kingdom. You’re somebody here and if you gave it up all the local biddies would say that you were mad—particularly if you gave it up for somebody like me. And there is something else. You would be showing them all that you have it in you to love—and you have, you know!’ he threw at her.

  ‘Have I?’ she asked wonderingly. ‘Do you want me, Richard? Is it really myself that you are demanding?’

  ‘It would mean that you must want me too.’

  ‘It is something which has never been in doubt, has it?—Although you drag the admission from me whenever you can. Perhaps you have never quite believed me. You have certainly never quite trusted me.’

  ‘That isn’t true. If I doubt, I doubt myself. I can’t see myself. Never have been able to. I am reflected in other people all the time. Sometimes I try to make up all these reflections into a whole me, but I can’t.’

  She tried to be casual. ‘There’s nothing to worry about in that. It is really rather a kind way to behave. Only a brute would want to blunder about the world not caring how his personality affected other people.’

  Richard didn’t answer. She watched his strong brown fingers crack open the pink joint of a chicken-leg. His nails glistened with fat and it occurred to her, grotesquely, how it was that the body could sustain its appetites when the mind was in turmoil. Poised between a fascinated revulsion and an intense tenderness she saw his teeth busy at the bone and the line of bewildered absorption in his almost closed eyes. For all this, she knew he tasted nothing. ‘Then,’ he said—and still capable, she noticed with unhappy amusement, of nicking away at the silvery white meat—‘you won’t—you can’t marry me? Is that it?’

  ‘How could we, Dick …’

  ‘You won’t!’ He shrugged his shoulders violently as if he could slough kindness like a skin.

  ‘It is only because I can’t that I won’t. You are too near to me. It’s not your fault, but I can only see you out of focus. It’s because we’ve been so close all our lives. There’s no judgment. I’m too old to do anything without judgment now.’

  This made him laugh.

  ‘When was it you began to see me all blurred? Come on—you’ve got to tell me! At Christmas? The Martello Tower day? Don’t tell me you were thinking in such terms then. You were way ahead of me if you were!’

  ‘No,’ she answered remotely. ‘No, not then exactly. I saw myself that day. I counted myself up—arithmetically if you like. I had never done that before. I wanted to see what I was and if I dared love you.’

  ‘And so now the grand total has proved too much for you? I was bizarre—excessive? In fact you found it in damn bad taste, because it didn’t fit in with your life in this house and your being Miss Crawford of Lafney. You and your mother have both got along so well on the rationed out affection you’ve been used to that when the real thing comes along it only strikes you as vulgar! Why not admit it—you’re happier as you are?’

  ‘You seem to be forgetting that when I got the grand total, as you call it, I had to include, not only myself, but you as well.’

  He caught at her full meaning. ‘What is it that you know about me? I thought you said I was a blur? How have I become so transparent all at once?’

  ‘Darling, you seem to think I’m searching for your failings. Can’t you see it’s your goodness which intrigues me?’

  Happier now, he said, ‘My goodness?’

  They both laughed then, each willing to drag themselves free from this awkward analysis, but for different reasons. Their bickering had the effect of drawing them together. Some unconscious influence, perhaps the way in which they shifted to keep in the warmth of the weak April sun, brought their bodies round so that instead of sitting vis-à-vis, they made an angle of nearness at one corner of the picnic cloth. Like figures in a Giorgione landscape, they constituted a pulsating nearness, connected, yet untouching. Richard sprawled stiffly in half-profile. His legs made a long, indignant L away from Mary’s drooping shoulders and the scrunched-up folds of her skirt sweeping around her on the grass. Her hands were pressed against the ground for support. Reaching out, Richard covered the hand nearest him with his own. There was a slight ungraceful tumble as she leaned back in an effort to establish her shoulder against his. This recklessness had all sorts of consequences, chiefly in her mind. But a more immediate result of her losing her balance caused her to forget these for the moment.

  ‘Oh my dear, all over your shirt! It’s my fault. I am sorry!’

  ‘Where?’

  She touched the place on his shirt where the wine was ringing out in a wider and wider circle. He pressed her hand down until the moist cold disc made by the wine disappeared, conquered by the warmth of her palm on his chest. He kissed her.

  At what point does innocence begin its cancerous gnawing at self-respect? Triteness being so frequently true, perhaps it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all … Yet for all that, it is supposed to be the recollections of sexual experience which at the last make up the greater reproach amongst the weaknesses of an ordinary life. A few look back on this side of their existence with self-congratulation; more with complacency. But whatever affirmations about such things publicly, it is fairly certain that more tears are shed on earth over what has been withheld than for what has been given—however rashly or incautiously. What comfort is there in a view of love as the betraying worm, when a view without love is so writhing, so etiolated that it merely grows into a worm of a more shameful breed? Virginity—except in the instance of the religious nature, in whose case it is never neglected, never retreated from or left to seethe and proliferate in its own fungus-like loneliness—repels when it doesn’t ravish. Its progress from all that is desired to all that is detested is rapid and sure. Calling it purity doesn’t help, since purity implies insistence and determination of a sort—also the chance to have been impure.

  Mary knew that she was now seeing Richard with a far greater confidence than at any time before and that with this confidence came an equality which had recognisable roots in their common innocence. Intellectually as well as in the nuance aspects of his not quite reputable charm, in his being so young, and, most of all, in his variety of selfishness, he exceeded her in every way. Even ten years ago, when she had been Richard’s age, she had never had the necessary restlessness to shine. He shone. It was the thing about him which fascinated her. Quentin shone too, but more luridly. Richard, though, went on reminding her of the young man at the ridiculous hunt ball when she was eighteen. Her wanting him seemed to have something to do with that brief incident. Perhaps it was true and people did comb the world for those unconsciously similar to their first lovers. Giving herself to Richard was, in her imagination, desperately like giving herself to that fair, unintroduced young man then. Except, the thing which made her desirable then, filled her with fear now. The historic absence of love becomes a disfigurement. Mary knew it. Being so complete, all she could offer would be some kind of incompleteness. And what she dreaded more than anything else was the sight of herself pursuing desire beyond the reaches of her own self-respect. She couldn’t marry him. It grew more and more obvious that his offer of marriage contained no real consideration of it. Yet for months now she hadn’t been able to bear the thought of any other woman being anywhere near him. Even Miss Bellingham worried her—that tenacious old creature! She moved until it was her face and not her hand which was pressed against the wine-stain on his shirt.

  The sharp, locked angle of the bloomy wall stretched smooth naked plum-wood branches along with it, each branch transfixed to lanes of crumbling pink mortar. Further down were more fruit-espaliers. Her eyes follo
wed the pattern of nodular twigs, blackened thongs and sagging wires abstractly. She heard Richard saying, contritely,

  ‘How we kill ourselves when we talk …’

  ‘We do, don’t we.’

  He kissed her cheek and her mouth.

  ‘It was your living I wanted,’ he said sadly. ‘Surely you can see that it is your refusal to live which is so … so horrible? Surely you can see that? You take sides with the past. Things like this house. And when you say you want your life, what you mean is that you want your routine. Your friend Helen has been making you sensible.’

  ‘My friend Helen, as you call her, wants me to burn my boats!’

  ‘You never said. Good old Helen.’

  ‘You think I’ve not gone into things, don’t you? I have. I’ve thought of everything.’

  ‘What is it that you look for in me—and cannot find?’ he asked slowly.

  ‘I shan’t answer that. Instead I’ll say that what attracts you in me is my “stillness”. I think it’s something men often look for in women. Later on they come to hate it. You would hate me for it.’

  Except for his saying, ‘How critical you are! I’m never that critical about you—’ he refused to be serious about the rest of her argument. Instead he took her in his arms. The fretful surface of her ordinary world grew still and placid and the giving in to simple physical impulses revealed to her mental depths she knew she need never enter again. In quite overwhelming control now, she slipped from his arms and jumped up lightly from the bruised grass. The monoplane they had seen hovering earlier over the sea, was now entering the small wall-locked universe of Meridian. It circled, then throbbed out of consciousness. Mr Gilder, who sold whelks and whiting from a handcart, yelped abruptly far down on the roadway. It was a fruit-stone of a moment, engraved all over with minute conceits. Fainter still came the sound of children on the beach, each cry muted and purling and climbing into the air like a tendril. All this against the claiming silence in which Richard released her and the faint purposeful slurring of their shoes on the gravel as they each attempted to take for granted the enormity of the intention which led them to Meridian House. Only when they came to the rosewood snake of the banister rail, and he saw the pretty shallow treads winging up into darkness, did Richard say.