by E A Dineley
‘I suppose you had your reasons.’
‘I considered he had lied. From the content of the letter I think it probable he hoped Smythe and I could be induced to fight one another and he get away unscathed. Perhaps he hoped Smythe would shoot me dead. I don’t believe he had any personal animosity towards me, but my death would be a great convenience to the friend he has who lives in the rooms below these.’
‘An Italian actress,’ Tregorn said, a little confused but still anxious to probe to the bottom of the matter.
‘Until of late, my mistress. It was by the way of an experiment, not particularly satisfactory. Do you think your father would have disapproved of my keeping a mistress and curtailed my allowance accordingly?’
‘How should I know?’ Tregorn said crossly, for he thought the question inappropriate. There was nothing unusual in keeping a mistress, but it surprised him that Allington should do so. He then wondered why he was surprised. He reached forward and picked up the book Allington had been reading as if it might help him solve a mystery, but finding it to be poetry he put it down again with a look of faint horror.
‘However,’ Allington was saying, ‘I don’t wish to take another, and as the alternatives are too disagreeable, it looks like celibacy.’
Tregorn, thinking the conversation taking an even worse turn, said, ‘Why not marry? If you could support a mistress you might support a wife.’
‘When I have a place of my own I shall consider it, but I’m not everybody’s idea of a catch.’
‘A place of your own?’ Tregorn was astonished, disagreeably so. ‘These rooms seem adequate, though not if you were married. You don’t mean a place out of town?’
‘Why not?’
‘What sort of a place?’
‘An estate.’
Tregorn stared at him. His stepbrother, for that is what he surely was, seemed to be stepping out of place if he thought he would join the propertied classes. The only thing he could think to say was, ‘Whatever for?’
Allington looked at him in silence but he then said, ‘You are the only person I know who has the temerity to ask me endless questions, but I suppose the Tregorns are the only people I have who could remotely be described as my relatives. What for? To keep a pair of greyhounds.’
Tregorn, realising he was having his leg pulled, said, ‘Could you really afford such a thing?’
‘I believe so, but not yet. It’s not, therefore, necessary for you to pay me an allowance.’
Tregorn jumped to his feet and started to pace about. ‘I won’t have it said I don’t support you now my father’s dead.’
His mind had gone back ten years, to the aftermath of Waterloo. His father had received a letter from an old and revered friend, in whose regiment Allington had spent much of his military career, accusing the family of neglect because no one had gone out to Brussels to look after Allington, whom the colonel had described as the most brilliant of all young officers. Agitated at the recollection, he said, ‘We were told you would die before anyone could reach you and for days that was said, even months, yet die you would not.’
Further words of this colonel came unwanted into Tregorn’s mind, fragments of that letter which he could remember word for word. To die on the battlefield is one thing. We all expect that. To die slowly amongst strangers is another.
Tregorn knew why the accusation of neglect had so rankled. It was because it was true. None of them had wanted to go out to Brussels. His own wife was expecting a child. His sister was newly married. It was extremely inconvenient to go to Brussels, especially if Allington was to die while they were on the road. The truth was, Allington had been away since he was fifteen, a boy in the Army. He had taken no leave and they had scarcely seen him again until he returned a war veteran eight years later at the age of twenty-three. Either way, they had made amends, gone to Brussels and fetched him home to St Jude, wresting him from the care of a major in the horse artillery. The colonel had travelled down to Cornwall. When he saw Allington he was so upset he had announced, out of Allington’s hearing, it would have been far better had he died, so there was no pleasing the fellow at all.
Allington said, ‘No, I lived. I have wondered why.’
‘Once we got you back to St Jude, we did our best.’
‘But in living, one should have a purpose. I thought I could go back to school, to read for the Bar, but I couldn’t do it. The sight of all that small print and I was sick as a dog.’
‘Why don’t those card games, the games of chess, which must agitate the brain, have the same effect?’
‘It must be some other part of my brain. I have wondered that too.’ Allington then added, to the discomfort of his stepbrother, whom he knew to be squeamish, ‘I have often seen brains on the battlefield. They don’t look as if they could be useful at all.’
Tregorn searched for an appropriate reply. His eye fell on the jar of sixpences. ‘What on earth is the point of those?’ he asked.
‘They are the exclusive property of Nathaniel Pride. Every evening he is sober I give him a sixpence. I allow him to take a glass of brandy with Arthur’s valet, but he must be sober. They are savings for his old age. He thinks they will be adequate for all his needs, but of course I shall have to do more for him.’
‘And if he is drunk when you are sick, what then?’
‘He knows better than to be drunk when I’m sick.’
‘I should find him a liability but you are indebted to the wretched fellow.’
‘I am, and he to me. Besides, he knows how to look after me. It would be unthinkable to have anyone else with me at such times. He is also my tailor.’
‘I noticed the cut of your coat. It may be plain, but it’s smart. You soldiers always are dandies. It’s a deal better than mine.’
Allington did not think it difficult to have a better coat than Tregorn’s.
His stepbrother then said, ‘I have the picture. My fellow and Pride can bring it up between them, I suppose. It was a damned awkward travelling companion.’
‘What picture?’ Allington asked.
‘Why yours, of course. My father’s last words to me, or nearly so, were, “Let Allington have the picture”. He was disappointed you wouldn’t allow him to have your Waterloo medal added. He would look at it and say, “Allington would not have the medal put on”. He was proud of you, in his own way. As he bought you your commission, I suppose he basked in reflected glory.’
Allington thought there could have been many better ways in which he might have been set up in life, but he only said, ‘The portrait? Oh dear, how impatient I was at having to sit for it, in that interim in 1814 between the campaigns in the Peninsula and Waterloo. You could keep it at St Jude.’
‘It is too handsome a thing. I should be tempted to purloin it.’
‘I suppose when I get my estate I shall have to have something to hang in it,’ Allington said, with a nearly imperceptible smile.
‘Why a whole estate? What is wrong with a little country house, a villa?’
‘I must have occupation.’
‘But surely you haven’t so much money you could buy one?’
‘Not yet.’
Tregorn reached for his hat. He said, ‘You continue to baffle me. I must go. Dreadful rabble on the stairs.’
‘Courtesy of my fellow tenant. He never pays for anything.’
‘Terrible, silly sort of fellow, but good-hearted.’
‘I am not sure I find him entirely so.’
‘Don’t come down with me. You will get a chill on your head or something. Lady Tregorn and I will always be pleased to see you at St Jude. You know that.’ Tregorn looked hard at Allington, as if looking could assist him in puzzling him out, ascertaining the state of his health, this man for whom he now felt responsible.
Allington suddenly said, ‘Are the lime trees flowering at St Jude?’
Tregorn had no idea. Though a countryman he did not necessarily notice such things. He said, ‘Now Allington, I will pay that allow
ance of yours, whatever your situation.’
Allington, from his window, watched his stepbrother go down the street to where the groom was walking the horses. In a moment his servant and Pride could be seen manhandling the picture, well wrapped, towards the door. Again he sat by the window, but now his mood had changed and he was sombre. He picked up the volume of Keats’s poetry, as if to recapture a lost moment, and started to read where he had left off:
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death;
Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain . . .
Allington said out loud: ‘Ah, but only if it were like that.’
He got out his pocketbook. It was bound in green cloth and was larger than was convenient, about six inches by four. Pride made special pockets inside his coats to accommodate it, with a button and a loop to ensure its safety. The pocketbook was not exactly an aide-memoire because there was little Allington forgot, but he liked to write things down in it, sometimes a single word, sometimes a reflection.
Now he wrote: John Keats died from consumption on 23 February 1821. Age 26. The squeezing of life from sick lungs, the coughing of blood.
He was aware of being so severely wounded at the age of twenty-three that he had been much more than half in love with easeful death. So many had died, with lesser injuries than his. For what had he lived, for what purpose, partially incapacitated as he was?
Pride came in and gave him a sharp look. He said, ‘You are not starting again, are you, sir?’
‘No, I’m better.’
‘What shall I do with this here picture?’
‘Lean it against the wall. I shan’t look at it now.’
‘Suppose I send round for Dan to bring you your longtailed grey. You could ride out to the country. You’re strong enough, that’s what I think. It would do you good. If you read all they books you’ll start thinking, and thinking ain’t good for you.’
Quarter Day had come and gone. It was July. Captain Allington had noted the going and the subsequent returning of his fellow tenant, with a slight cessation of the besieging forces of duns and creditors in the house in Half Moon Street.
It was a warm and sultry afternoon. He was seated at his desk, contemplating his accounts. He knew exactly what was in them. He could remember whole pages of figures without difficulty, but he liked to have his affairs in order, and order meant writing things down and making any necessary adjustments.
His one-time mistress he had paid two months’ rent and the wages for her servants. She was about to resume her career so that was to be the end of that. He stood up and went to his bookcase. His eye fell on a volume of Wordsworth. He took it down and went to sit in the window, opening the pages at random:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
So was it when my life began;
So it is now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The child is father of the man . . .
Here Allington stopped and laid the book down on his lap. ‘The child is father of the man’, he repeated to himself. ‘It is a wise father that knows his own child’. How complicated, the web of one’s inheritance and the stuff of which one was made. Had his childhood made him what he was? Or was he contrived entirely from that unknown being, Captain Frederick Robert John Allington, whose mother had been Spanish, which accounted for his appearance? That Captain Allington had died in Flanders fighting the French in 1793, a proceeding he himself had endeavoured to mimic more than twenty years later. The evidence of Spanish blood had been sufficient to convince him he was no son of Lord Tregorn. Even the soldiers, amongst themselves, called him ‘Spanish Allington’. It was not useful to cross-examine poets. They led one down unexpected labyrinths.
He got up and walked about the room. It was time he got out of London for a while. His portrait was there, leaned up against the wall. He still had not looked at it. Had he been cowardly for putting off the moment? He took a paperknife and carefully sliced down the wrapping, peeling it back. The process reminded him of a dressing eased from a wound.
A portrait of a young man in a Light Dragoon regiment ought to be neither remarkable nor painful, but painful it was. It jerked him backwards to what he had been, to lost youth, let alone lost health. The uniform was buttoned across the chest so there was nothing more than a rim of the brighter colour against the sombre blue of the jacket. He was bare-headed, cradling the felt shako in his arm, its short plume of red and white barely visible. There was a hint of the lavish gold shoulder belt, the epaulettes and the girdle, but little to distract from the face.
Allington said, in much the same tone as he used to the duns that flocked round Arthur’s door, ‘Good day, stranger.’
His younger self looked back at him with impatient eyes.
He remembered his mood at the time, impatient at sitting in the Bond Street studio, impatient with having a new uniform, impatient at the loss of his campaigning life and impatient at not being shipped straight to the wars in America. His stepfather had achieved for him the one thing that made him the envy of his fellows, a transfer to a cavalry regiment, but, unlike his fellows, he did not want it. He could not afford it. Lord Tregorn had paid for the uniform and insisted on the portrait, but he needed more horses, a charger, and the sort of allowance necessary for living with a smart set of officers. It was at this juncture he slid into the habit of raising the stakes when he played a game of whist or chess. It was not a perfect arrangement but it enabled him to pay his way.
How young he was, and what risks he had taken. The adventure, the constant activity, how much he had loved it. Looking at the picture, he wished he had been painted, if he had to be painted, in the brown uniform of an officer in the Portuguese service, but it would not have accorded with the grand notions of his stepfather, for whom he might have been some sort of plaything, to be shown off when suitable. He began to think of his company of Portuguese caçadores. Where were they now? Tending their olives, their vines, their sheep and goats, or so he hoped.
Pride came in. He took one look at the picture and burst into tears. After a moment he tried to summon some feeble self-control but, aided by alcohol, he only wept the more.
Allington said, ‘Go to your room, Pride. I shan’t want any assistance. You may occupy yourself by writing to your mother.’
This was the ultimate punishment and they both reflected on Pride not getting his sixpence. Allington, irritated by the world in general and more particularly by himself and his own servant, took himself away to the boxing salon to give serious punishment to the punching bag, a cure for a variety of ills.
Pride, sent to his attic bedroom, made an attempt to obey orders. He sat in a mild alcoholic haze and reread the last letter from his mother, which had run thus,
Dearest Nat,
I am hoping you keep well. I do though in my seventyfifth year. Your sister Sarah keeps well and also the children.
I hope you do your duty, Nathaniel, and do not go near the gin shops of which London abounds. Your blessed father, so long now with the Angels, never could mention your name, which he did rarely OWING TO DISAPPOINTMENT, without tears and your going for a common soldier. However, the Good Lord had you in His scheme of things, for you to look after a poor invalid, who can hardly raise himself from the bed, though I never would have thought you a natural at such things and he so stern a master you may never visit your old mother who must ere long be upon her deathbed.
I hope you are getting a proper night’s sleep.
Your ever-affectionate Mother
Susan Pride
Her last sentence arose from Pride once having written, in an expansive moment, when extolling his labours on behalf of his master, that he slept on the floor by the b
edroom door in order to be always at hand. His mother wrote to him at the beginning of every month with sentiments that varied little and always including the welfare, or otherwise, of his sister Sarah and her children, with whom she lived. Her notion of Captain Allington’s state of health sprang directly from her son’s repeated assurances that his master was too much of an invalid ever to be left. Pride, chewing his pen, had a pang of conscience as a vision of Allington’s present activities with the punching bag, let alone long days spent fox hunting or riding the grey round the countryside, rose before him, but the fib served its purpose very well in keeping him apart from his mother. What was more, he reflected, it was not wholly a fib, for it was hard to tell exactly when his master would be as prone as in the vision old Mrs Pride had of him.
He now wrote:
Dear Mother,
Glad you are well and Sarah and all. You don’t seem near deathbed and would be best not to mention it in case of bringing it on. Do think my father with the Angels would be proud of his son Nat, now I never do go to the gin shop and am a proper gentleman’s gentleman and no mistake. Gentlemen can’t get their clothes on their backs unless you stand by an’ hold all their things out one after another like they were babies so Mr Arthur’s man tells me from downstairs but Captain Allington being a soldier ain’t like that. Lord Tregorn, brother to my master, should change his tailor. I wished I could have his coat off him to take a tuck in the sleeve. He sent the picture of the captain and it made me cry to see him like he was when I knew him first and he not much more than a boy and light-hearted. I could no more touch a bottle of gin were it right there in the room for the way he looks at me out of that picture. Of course there is no gin it not being a gentleman’s drink and besides which Captain Allington taking no alcohol for it effecting his head very badly which makes him very singular, gentlemen being quite drunk on the whole. Captain Allington puts all my money in the bank so I can’t be tempted and when I am old I need not go on the Parish.