And of course, old Agatha was daunting. If she had known you long ago, she knew you still, and she would occasionally say things in her old grand manner. But she no longer, in either sense, made much of strangers. Shopland’s function and background appeared obscure to her. Sometimes she stirred uneasily at the sound of his voice, as if at a loss that he wasn’t taking round a tray or bringing in a scuttle of coal. And sometimes she fired off at him the sort of remark that would have been appropriate if addressed to an octogenarian neighbour in the county. “A man called Jevons is asking me to concrete his yard,” she said. “What do you do in a case like that?”
Shopland swallowed plum-cake and glowered. “Nobody asks me to concrete yards,” he said surlily.
“Then, as things are nowadays, you must have very forbearing tenants.” Lady Callaway took further thought. “But you must have concreted some yards. There’s a regulation about it, in the case of T.T. herds. Or so my agent tells me. He may be having me on.”
Shopland appeared startled by this colloquial expression from a decrepit aristocrat. “Very likely,” he said. “But the only concrete yard I’ve ever known was at school – and damned hard to fall on. Corporation Street Central.”
“That’s most interesting. And quite a bond.” Lady Callaway said this with a trace of her old captivatingly extravagant manner. “My nephew Lambert was there. A splendid school.”
“He was nothing of the sort.”
Shopland had flushed darkly. Sir Leonard judged that he was so much at sea as to suppose that the deaf old woman had been intending an impertinence. So he carried a fresh cake over to the young man. “You’ll have to speak a little louder,” he said amiably.
“Chowder?” This time Lady Callaway had undoubtedly misheard. “I don’t know. Jones, where is Chowder?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, my lady.” Jones, who was as old as Lady Callaway, had tottered in with a plate of broken biscuits. “Cook is anxious about him, my lady. She says Chowder is fallen off greatly from his stomach.”
“I saw our friend this afternoon,” Sir Leonard contributed gaily. “And he didn’t look less of a credit than usual to Mrs Lumley’s cooking.” He gave Jones a pat on the arm. “By the way, tell her I’ll be coming down to have a word with her.”
“Yes, sir. She’ll be delighted, I’m sure.” Jones retired gratified, and Sir Leonard turned tirelessly to the task of domesticating the uncomfortable Shopland. He could again assure himself that he had taken a liking to the impossible youth. For it wasn’t a bit, he saw, as if Shopland were a great oaf – a downright stupid young man whom that Midland university had despatched in error. He was clever, and indeed was probably not to be denied the much higher quality of intelligence. It followed that his rejection of ordinary civilisation proceeded not from a sluggish inability to assimilate other people’s ways but from some deliberate act of will. The young man was living up to what that interesting fellow Jung called a persona.
In fact – Sir Leonard realised with pleased understanding – Shopland was of a category of young provincial intellectuals of which he had been hearing lately but which he hadn’t yet with any degree of intimacy encountered. This was great fun. How sensible old Callaway’s testamentary dispositions had been! A more stodgy choice might have landed Sir Leonard with, so to speak, not the Corporation Street Central School but whatever Agatha had so weirdly confused it with. Yes, his companion in the investigation of the Closet Papers might well have been some conventional young man lately become, and complacently hopeful of ending his days as, a Fellow of All Souls. There would have been nothing to learn from that. Whereas the society of Shopland was going to be most entertaining and instructive. For Sir Leonard had no doubt that he would soon be on excellent terms with the young man. He had brought round plenty of shy and kittle youths before, and he didn’t see why he shouldn’t do the same with a boorish one.
So he carried the plate of biscuits to Agatha – a ginger nut, for which she had a passion, would absorb her for at least a quarter of an hour – and then dropped in a chair beside Shopland. “Are you writing anything just now?” he asked casually. He was conscious of being, in this question, thoroughly up to date. Until lately people like this young man – lecturers or whatever in the newer places of education – had aimed at being regarded as scholars; they edited texts, and inquired into “influences”, and dug up biographical information about the uncompromisingly dead. But now, Sir Leonard knew, they wrote things. He was all in favour of this. They were themselves, after all, much too sketchily educated to affect learning without absurdity; but they were young and clever and lively and discontented, which was just right for the producing of creative writing of a sort. Shopland undoubtedly wrote things. Sir Leonard accompanied his question with a charmingly inquiring smile.
And, for the first time, he got a positive response out of James Shopland. “A play,” he said.
“How awfully interesting! And I’m so glad.” Sir Leonard was off like a flash. “By which I mean, you know, to point my own strong sense that it’s in the theatre, if anywhere, that, today, the thing can be done.” He gave Shopland a keen but collaborative glance, which somehow indicated that, between two minds so well attuned, any pause to define the “thing” would be time merely wasted. “Tell me”—he leant forward, eager but relaxed—”what, to put it quite ingenuously, is it about?”
Shopland had flushed again. He gave this polished enthusiast a wary glance. “It’s about some Russians – the kind you would call commissars – having to make a forced landing in an aeroplane. It’s in some mountains. They manage to find their way to a monastery.”
“What an admirable idea!” Sir Leonard would have been prepared to say something like this even if he had judged the young man’s notion an inept one. But for the moment his approval was genuine. “Are your monks of any particular order?”
“Trappists. They keep their traps shut.”
“Oh.” Sir Leonard was uncertain whether this was a tasteless joke or fantastic etymological ignorance.
“They don’t talk at all – not once in the whole play.”
“The Russians do all the talking?”
“Yes – but the monks are equally important. They listen to the Russians.”
“The monks understand Russian?”
“Yes, of course. They’re very highly educated. Like Jesuits.”
“Or Benedictines?” For a moment Sir Leonard forgot himself and was indulgent. “How,” he asked hastily, “does the action develop?”
“The monks listen to the Russians. And the Russians watch the monks. The monks’ ideas are upset. They start wanting to get around and do things. The Russians, on the other hand, find themselves planning and talking less and less. They drift into long meditative fits – just walking or sitting about.”
“But the monks don’t begin sporadically to break into speech?”
“Certainly not.”
“In fact, the rest is silence?”
Shopland glanced at Sir Leonard with quick suspicion. “I haven’t quite got the resolution yet. It needs working at.”
“But I’m sure it will be remarkable when it comes.” Sir Leonard was all enthusiasm again. “When your play is produced, I shall look forward to seeing it very much.”
“My play won’t be produced.”
Sir Leonard gave a smile of radiant encouragement. “Oh, come!” he said. “Why ever not?”
“Because it isn’t muck.” Shopland lent this reply the effect of a sudden savage shout – and at the same time he banged his fist on a small table, so that the Rockingham tea-things on it jumped and rattled. “Because it isn’t bloody muck,” he repeated more loudly and more forcibly. “And because I don’t intend to make it bloody muck.” He paused, and when he spoke again it seemed to be as a consequence of some distasteful association of ideas. “When,” he demanded, “do we begin to look at old Lord Callaway’s stuff?”
Sir Leonard permitted himself a slight sigh. It was fascinating, of co
urse. But he saw that he was going to have uphill work.
And so it proved. What almost got him down – he found himself reflecting in the succeeding week – was not so much the mere fact of resentfulness being Shopland’s dominant note as the perversity with which the young man managed to have his resentments both ways. He resented Great Musters; it ought never to have been allowed to grow and flourish. But equally he resented its decline – or at least its decline as evidenced in such particulars as a defective hot water system and windows that wouldn’t open and doors that wouldn’t shut. Sir Leonard himself made do with these deficiencies, although he couldn’t pretend not to be, at times, aware of them. He was made aware too, that Mrs Lumley in the kitchen was far from being her former self; and he was even prompted to wonder whether the reported falling off in Chowder’s appetite might not be due to this – it had to be confessed – irritating circumstance. Shopland at least didn’t resent an indifferent sauce or a greasy soup. But he thought poorly of the quantity of what was provided, and he habitually carried away from table the air of one who will presently be gnawing chocolate in his own room. At dinner on his first night he had startled poor Jones by responding to her quavering inquiry as to whether he would take claret with the single indignant monosyllable, “Beer!” Sir Leonard liked to see young men drinking beer – but upon proper occasions and without somehow contriving to leave rings of it on fine walnut.
Sir Leonard did his best. He drank beer too, and with a certain contrived accent on not making a mess. But this proved an ineffective measure.
At least Shopland was good with the Closet Papers. He had a substantial, if in the main singularly un- affectionate, acquaintance with the relevant stretch of English literary history, and in his ill-tempered way he could work harder and longer than could Sir Leonard in his genial one. It was irritating, however, that he habitually referred to their joint activities as the day’s slumming. When this had been so often repeated that it could no longer be construed as mere inept facetiousness, Sir Leonard tried making it a matter of challenge. “My dear James,” he said – for he had firmly taken to addressing the recalcitrant young man with this degree of friendly warmth – “I’m all praise, you know, for what it’s now demonstrable to me that you’ll eventually achieve with and for our friend’s papers. But it isn’t, I’m afraid, growing on you as anything that could be called a labour of love?”
Shopland laughed shortly. “You’re telling me,” he said.
Sir Leonard assimilated this harsh vulgarism with his usual good grace. Presented to his dining club, poor Shopland could scarcely have survived. But Great Musters was a place which Sir Leonard held in a large sentimental regard. A youth who had been admitted to it must, if possible, be saved. “You’re able, you know,” he said. “I don’t need to tell you that. So if all this seems stuffy and old-fashioned to you, oughtn’t you to be taking a chance and going all out after whatever’s your line?”
Shopland flushed more darkly than he had ever done before. “I’ve told you I’m writing a play.”
“And this work on Callaway’s papers is just rather boring and distasteful bread and butter?”
“Just that. Although there’s damned little butter sometimes to old Jones’s bread. Breakfast today was pretty awful.”
Sir Leonard compressed his lips. He had been secretly a little critical of the breakfast himself. “It’s my feeling that work like this,” he gestured at the papers they had been examining, “is a legitimate and indeed excellent bread-and-butter expedient – always provided that one hasn’t, for reasons whether good or bad, a contempt for it.”
“Quite irrelevant. Take Anglo-Saxon. That’s a damned sight more futile even than old Callaway’s maunderings. But that didn’t prevent my nailing it and getting the right degree. As long as they hold the whip one has to go through their silly hoops. At least it keeps one in good condition for an effective pounce one day.”
“An effective pounce, James, preparatory to gobbling ‘them’, as you call them, up?”
“Just that.”
As he said this, Shopland looked straight at Sir Leonard and elaborately licked his lips. And Sir Leonard, who had been almost depressed, brightened at once. He felt that a gleam of humour, even of this alarming variety, might be a milestone in the development of his relations with his morose assistant.
But it was only a gleam, and during the next few days Sir Leonard’s mind began to move towards the conviction that Shopland would have to go. This wasn’t just because, in speech and attitude, he could fairly be termed outrageous. It was also because his extravagance in these regards – his referring, for instance, to Callaway’s reliquite as maunderings, or as the plumbing – came more and more to Sir Leonard as bearing the character of a quite desperate “turn”. Perhaps the play wasn’t going well; perhaps the Russians were refusing to meditate and the Trappists to feel the attraction of the practical life. Certainly Shopland was glum. He was a young man sadly uncertain of himself, and fighting off a deepening dejection by a progressive exaggeration of his elected aggressive pose. And Great Musters wasn’t going to help him. So perhaps he had better go away.
The place was undeniably dreary – perhaps most of all to one who, like Sir Leonard, remembered its old days. Lady Callaway existed for the most part in a state of senile reverie, but from this she made sorties which seemed designed rather to harry than to entertain her guests. Jones teetered and tottered around, performing after a fashion the duties of half a dozen servants who had vanished long ago. Somewhere in the depths of the house her sister, who must also be in her later seventies now, was understood to assist Mrs Lumley. The only other domestic was a mentally-deficient girl called Grace, who went round dusting things and making beds. Sir Leonard had a notion of having several times come upon Shopland stalking Grace. It was natural, considering that she was the only person in the house who had been born in the same century as himself. But it couldn’t, in view of Grace’s near-imbecility, be called proper; and when Sir Leonard eventually came upon the pair tumbling about the library floor in a catch-as-catch-can wrestling and spanking match, he felt that he had to speak an admonitory word. He did this with a friendliness that managed almost to be gay. But Shopland went off glowering and Grace in tears, so that it was an uncomfortable episode all the same. It couldn’t of course be helped. Sir Leonard was a man of strict, indeed of chivalric, honour. If an under-housemaid needed protection – well, the job had to be done. But he wasn’t the less cordial to Shopland half an hour later. Indeed, that evening he excelled himself in being nice to everybody. He sent a kind message to Mrs Lumley about the rice pudding. He carried a tray for Jones with so easy a gallantry and such a sense of the fun of the thing that the poor old soul scarcely felt the awkwardness of it and answered quite coherently his solicitous question about her sister’s rheumatism. Had Chowder been in evidence – only Chowder wasn’t – he would have made arrangements that the faithful creature should have a bone. Instead, he sent Grace half a crown to buy sweets, and then settled down to the business of being cheated by old Agatha at piquet. A dispassionate observer might well have felt that not since the novelist Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, had England known a gentleman so resolved to move uniformly well through a variety of trying situations. If only – the same observer might have gone on to reflect – the uncouth young James Shopland had been willing to regard Sir Leonard Vause as an exemplar, what might he not have learnt of the conduct befitting a scholar and a gentleman! Unfortunately Sir Leonard’s efforts had no success in toning Shopland up; on the contrary they seemed if anything to get him down. That night he was subdued rather than sulky, and his expression was not so much angry as desperate. And at bed-time, when Sir Leonard turned to him to speak his customary cheerful word, he was startled to notice that Shopland, slumped in a shadowy corner of Lady Callaway’s drawing-room, appeared to be having a good cry. Perhaps, Sir Leonard thought, pretending not to notice, it was a literal exhibition of what is called being bored to tears.
He was sorry for the poor lad, and resolved to be even more undeviatingly charitable towards him next morning.
Chapter Two
Unlike many elderly people, Sir Leonard was a heavy sleeper. Providence, as if in reward for the vivacity and affability of his diurnal demeanour, commonly passed him straight into oblivion hard upon his final tot of whisky, and returned him to a clear consciousness and an untroubled conscience at the first tinkle of his morning tea. On this particular night, however, sleep eluded him for some time. It was in vain even that, switching on his bed-side light, he read a number of those very short chapters into which the elegant mind of Turgenev has disposed his incomparable fictions. At length, Sir Leonard had to turn out the light again and resign himself to vigil.
It was an uneasy vigil. Addressing himself with his accustomed lucidity to an analysis of this distress, he was at first disposed, not unnaturally, to refer it to the continuing general uncomfortableness of life with his young friend. He recalled with contrition that he had said something unkind to Shopland at their first meeting; he wondered whether, all unconsciously, he had a little adulterated the clear spring of his subsequent benevolence with astringencies that might be felt to come disagreeably de haut en bas. At least he had the inner assurance of being the aggressive youth’s well-wisher, and this assurance he proceeded to fortify by turning over in his mind various ways in which his benevolence might be given practical effect. What could be done for Shopland? What would be the best thing for him? Not – Sir Leonard seemed yet more clearly to discern – that he should continue to toil over the Closet Papers of the late Lord Callaway. Shopland indeed had the right equipment for this, but it had to be confessed that he came a little short of the right temperament. He was an interesting young man, and Sir Leonard had been delighted to make the acquaintance of one so authentically (he supposed) of the latest generation. But as a resident colleague amid the undeniably irritating deprivations, inefficiencies, and desuetudes of Great Musters, he frankly left something to be desired. And labour on a project so uncongenial and in an ambience so alien simply wasn’t fair to the lad himself. It would be a good idea if he could be sent to the United States.
The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories Page 14