The Conyers party was scheduled to arrive about one o’clock, but the notorious uncertainty of motor-cars had given rise to much head-shaking on the probability of their lateness. However, I was loitering about the outskirts of the house, not long after the telegraph-boy had disappeared on his bicycle over the horizon, when a car began painfully to climb the lower slopes of the hill. It could only contain General and Mrs Conyers. This was an unexpected excitement. I watched their slow ascent, which was jerky, like the upward movement of a funicular, but, contrary to my father’s gloomy forecast, the steep incline was negotiated without undue difficulty. I was even able to open the Stonehurst gate to admit the vehicle. There could be no doubt now of the identity of driver and passenger. By that period, of course, motorists no longer wore the peaked cap and goggles of their pioneering days, but, all the same, the General’s long check ulster and deerstalker seemed assumed to some extent ritualistically.
‘It is always cold motoring,’ my mother used to say.
The car drew up by the front door. The General, leaping from it with boundless energy, came to meet me, leaving his wife to extract herself as best she could from a pile of wraps and rugs, sufficient in number to perform a version of the Dance of the Seven Veils. Tall, distinguished, with grey moustache and flashing eyes, he held out his hand.
‘How do you do, Nicholas?’
He spoke gravely, in a tone no different from that to be used with a contemporary. There was about him a kind of fierceness, combined with a deep sense of understanding.
‘We are a little earlier than I expected,’ he said. ‘I hope your father and mother will not mind. I drove rather fast, as your mother said you lived at the back of beyond, and I am always uncertain of my own map-reading. I see now what she meant. How are they educating you up here? Do you go to school?’
‘Not yet. I have lessons with Miss Orchard.’
‘Oh, yes. Miss Orchard is the governess who teaches all the children round here. I know her well by name. What children are they?’
‘The Fenwicks, Mary Barber, Richard Vaughan, the Westmacott twins.’
‘Fenwick in the Gloucesters?’
‘Yes, I think so – the regiment that wears a badge at the back of their cap.’
‘And Mary Barber’s father?’
‘He’s in the Queen’s. Richard Vaughan’s is in the ‘‘Twenty-Fourth” – the South Wales Borderers.’
‘What about the father of the Westmacott twins?’
‘A Gunner.’
‘What sort of a Gunner?’
‘Field, but Thomas and Henry Westmacott say their father is going to get his “jacket” soon, so he may be Royal Horse Artillery by now.’
‘An exceedingly well-informed report,’ said the General. ‘You have given yourself the trouble to go into matters thoroughly, I see. That is one of the secrets of success in life. Now take us to your parents.’
This early arrival resulted in my seeing rather more of General and Mrs Conyers than I should have done had they turned up at their appointed hour. First of all there was a brief examination of the Conyers car, a decidedly grander affair than that owned by my father, a fact which possibly curtailed the period spent over it. Since there was still time to kill before luncheon, the guests were shown round the garden. Permitted to accompany the party, I walked beside my mother and Mrs Conyers, the General and my father strolling behind.
‘Has your ghost appeared again?’ asked Mrs Conyers. ‘Aylmer was fascinated when I told him your parlourmaid had seen one. He is very keen on haunted houses.’
Her husband was famous for the variety of his interests. In this particular connection – the occult one – there was some story, probably mythical, about General Conyers having taken advantage of his appointment to the Body Guard to investigate on the spot some allegedly ghostly visitation at Windsor or another of the royal palaces. This intellectually inquisitive side of the General’s character specially irked Uncle Giles, who liked to classify irreparably everyone he knew, hating to be forced to alter the pigeon-hole in which he had himself already placed any given individual.
‘Aylmer Conyers may be a good tactician,’ he used to say, ‘at least that is what he is always telling everyone – never knew such a fellow for blowing his own trumpet – but I can’t for the life of me see why he wants to lay down the law about all sorts of other matters that don’t concern him in the least. The last thing I heard was that he had taken up “psychical research”, whatever that may be.’
My father, although he would never have admitted as much to Uncle Giles, was inclined to agree with his brother in the view that General Conyers would be a more dignified figure if he accepted for himself a less universal scope of interests; so that when the General began to make inquiries about the Stonehurst ‘ghost’, my father tried to dismiss the subject out of hand.
‘A lot of nonsense, General,’ he said, ‘I assure you.’
General Conyers would have none of that.
‘External agency,’ he said, ‘that’s the point. Find it hard to believe in actual entities myself. Ought to be looked into more. One heard some strange stories when one was in India. The East is full of that sort of thing – a lot pure invention, of course.’
‘I believe ghosts are thought-forms,’ said Mrs Conyers, as if that settled the whole matter.
‘If you are experiencing hallucination,’ said her husband, ‘then something must cause the hallucination. Telepathic side, too, of course. I’ve never had the opportunity to cross-question first-hand someone who’d seen a ghost. What sort of a girl is this parlourmaid of yours?’
‘Oh, please don’t cross-question her,’ said my mother. ‘We have such dreadful difficulties in getting servants here, and we are losing Albert as it is. She is not by any means a girl. You will see her waiting at table. Very hysterical. All the same, the maid we had before used to tell the same story.’
‘Indeed? Did she? Did she?’
‘I must say I think there is something peculiar about the house myself,’ said my mother. ‘I shall not be altogether sorry when the time comes to leave it.’
‘What about the people who let it to you?’
‘The fellow who built the place is dead,’ said my father, now determined to change the subject, come what may. ‘The lease was arranged through executors. We got it rather cheap on that account. He was in the Indian Army – Madras cavalry, I believe. What do you think about the reorganisations in India, by the way, General? Some people say the latest concentrations of command are not working too well.’
‘We want mobility, mobility, and yet more mobility,’ said General Conyers, ‘in India and everywhere else, more especially since the Baghdad Agreement. If the Germans continue the railway to Basra, that amounts to our recognising the northern area of Mesopotamia as a German sphere of influence.’
‘How much does Mesopotamia matter?’ enquired my father, unaware that he would soon be wounded there.
‘Depends on when and where Germany decides to attack.’
‘That will be soon, you think?’
‘Between the Scylla of her banking system, and the Charybdis of her Socialist Party, Germany has no alternative.’
My father nodded respectfully, at the same time a trifle ironically. Although, in principle, he certainly agreed that war must come sooner or later – indeed, he was often saying it would come sooner – I am not sure that he truly believed his own words. He did not, indeed, much care for talking politics, national or international, unless in the harmless form of execration of causes disliked by himself. Certainly he had no wish to hear strategic situations expressed in classical metaphor, with which he was not greatly at ease. He had merely spoken of the Indian Army as a preferable alternative to discussing the Stonehurst ‘ghosts’. The General, however, showed no sign of wishing to abandon this new subject.
‘One of these fine mornings the Germans will arrive over here,’ he said, ‘or walk into France. Can’t blame them if they do. Everyone is asking for
it. We shall be squabbling with the Irish, or having a coal strike, or watching cricket. In France, Cabinet Ministers will be calling each other out to duels, while their wives discharge pistols at newspaper editors. And when the Germans come, it will be a big show – Clausewitz’s Nation in Arms.’
‘Able fellow, Clausewitz,’ my father conceded.
‘You remember he said that war was in the province of chance?’
‘I do, General.’
‘We are a great deal too fond of accepting that principle in this country,’ said General Conyers. ‘All the same, I thank God for the mess we made in South Africa. That brought a few people to their senses. Even the Treasury.’
My father, equally unwilling to admit the Boer War to have been prosecuted without notable brilliance, or that the light of reason or patriotism could penetrate, in however humble a degree, into the treasonable madhouse of the Treasury, did not answer. He gave a kind of half-sneer, half-grunt. I think my mother must have thought there had been enough talk of war for the time being, because she suggested a return to the house. The hour of luncheon was in any case approaching. I departed to the nursery.
‘Everyone’s in a taking today,’ said Edith, herself rather ruffled when I arrived at table. ‘I don’t know what has come over the house. It’s all your Uncle Giles coming to stay without warning, I suppose. Albert says it’s just like him. Now, don’t begin making a fuss because the gravy is too thick. I haven’t given you much of it.’
In the subsequent rather sensational events of the afternoon, I played no direct part. They were told to me later, piecemeal; most of the detail revealed by my mother only many years after. She herself could never repeat the story without her eyes filling with tears, caused partly by laughter, perhaps partly by other memories of that time. All the same, my mother always used to insist that there had been nothing to laugh about at the moment when the incident took place. Then her emotion had been shock, even fear. The disturbing scene in question was enacted while Edith and I were out for our traditional Sunday ‘walk’, which took its usual form that afternoon of crossing the Common. We were away from home about an hour and a half, perhaps two hours. Meanwhile, my parents and their guests had moved from dining-room to drawing-room, after what was agreed later to rank as one of the best meals Albert had ever cooked.
‘Aylmer Conyers does love his food,’ my mother used to say.
When announcing that fact, she would speak as if kindly laughter were the only possible manner of passing off lightly so distressing a frailty in friend or relation. Indeed, the General’s pride in his own appreciation of the pleasures of the table was regarded by people like my parents, in the fashion of that day, as a tendency to talk rather more than was decent of eating and drinking. On this occasion he had certainly been full of praise for Albert. Possibly his eulogies continued too long entirely to please my father, who grew easily tired of hearing another man, even his own cook, too protractedly commended. Besides, apart from anything he might feel about the General, the impending arrival of Uncle Giles had justifiably set my father’s nerves on edge, in fact thoroughly upset him. As a result he was very fretful by the middle of the afternoon. He freely admitted that afterwards; feeling, indeed, always rather proud of being easily irritated. Mrs Conyers and my mother, come to the end of their gossip, had begun to discuss knitting techniques. Conversation between the two men must have dragged, because the General returned to Near Eastern affairs.
‘We haven’t heard the last of Enver and his Young Turks,’ he said.
‘Not by a long chalk,’ agreed my father.
‘You remember Skobeloff’s dictum?’
‘Quite so, General, quite so.’
My father rarely, if ever, admitted to ignorance. He could, in any case, be pretty certain of the calibre of any such quotation offered in the circumstances. However, the General was determined there should be no misunderstanding.
‘The road to Constantinople leads through the Brandenburger Tor.’
My father had visited Munich, never Berlin. He was, therefore, possibly unaware of the precise locality of the monument to which Skobeloff referred. However, he could obviously grasp the gist of such an assertion in the mouth of one he rightly judged to be a Russian general, linking the aphorism immediately in his own mind with the recent Turkish request for a German officer of high rank to reorganise the Ottoman forces.
‘If Liman von Sanders——’ began my father.
He never finished the sentence. The name of that militarily celebrated, endlessly discussed, internationally disputed, Britannically unacceptable, German General-Inspector of the Turkish Army was caught, held, crystallised in mid-air. Just as the words left my father’s lips, the door of the drawing-room opened quietly. Billson stood on the threshold for a split second. Then she entered the room. She was naked.
‘It’s always easy to be wise after the event.’ My mother used invariably to repeat that saying when the incident was related – and it was to be related pretty often in years to come – implying thereby criticism of herself. Her way was habitually to accept responsibilities which she considered by their nature to be her own, her firm belief being that most difficulties in life could be negotiated by tactful handling. In this case, she ever afterwards regarded herself to blame in having failed to notice earlier that morning that things were far from well with Billson. My mother had, it was true, suspected during luncheon that something was amiss, but by then such suspicion was too late. Billson’s waiting at table that day had been perceptibly below – a mere parody of – her accustomed standard. Indeed, her shortcomings in that field had even threatened to mar the good impression otherwise produced on the guests by Albert’s cooking. Not only had she proffered vegetables to the General in a manner so entirely lacking in style that he had let fall a potato on the carpet, but she had also caused Mrs Conyers to ‘jump’ painfully – no doubt in unconscious memory of her father’s hoaxes – by dropping a large silver ladle on a Sheffield plate dish-cover. Later, when she brought in the coffee, Billson ‘banged down’ the tray as if it were red-hot, ‘scuttling’ from the room.
‘I made up my mind to speak to her afterwards about it,’ my mother said. ‘I thought she wasn’t looking at all well. I knew she was a great malade imaginaire, but, after all, she had seen the ghost, and her nerves are not at all good. It really is not fair on servants to expect them to sleep in a haunted room, although I have to myself. Where else could we put her? She can’t be more frightened than I am sometimes. Then Aylmer Conyers stared at her so dreadfully with those very bright blue eyes of his. I was not at all surprised that she was nervous. I was terrified myself that he was going to begin asking her about the ghost, especially after she had made him drop the potatoes on the floor.’
In short, Billson’s maladroitness had been judged to be no more than a kind of minor derangement to be expected from her for at least twenty-four hours after her ‘experience’, although, as I have said, listening in the first instance to the story about the ‘ghost’, my mother had been pleased, surprised even, by the calm with which Billson had spoken of the apparition.
‘I really thought familiarity was breeding contempt,’ said my mother. ‘I certainly hoped so, with parlourmaids so terribly hard to come by.’
Albert’s announcement of impending marriage was scarcely taken into account. Probably Billson’s passion for him had never been accepted very seriously – as, indeed, few passions are by those not personally suffering from them. Possibly I myself knew more of it, from hints dropped by Edith, than did my mother. On top of everything, the prospective arrival of Uncle Giles had distracted attention from whatever else was happening in the house. However, even if the extent of Billson’s distress at Albert’s decision to marry had been adequately gauged – added, as it were morally speaking, to the probable effect of seeing a ghost that morning – no one could have foreseen so complete, so deplorable, a breakdown.
‘I thought it was the end of the world,’ my mother said.
I do not know to what extent she intended this phrase, so far as her own amazement was concerned, to be taken literally. My mother’s transcendental beliefs were direct, yet imaginative, practical, though possessing the simplicity of complete acceptance. She may have meant to imply, no more, no less, that for a second of time she herself truly believed the Last Trump (unheard in the drawing-room) had sounded in the kitchen, instantly metamorphosing Billson into one of those figures – risen from the tomb, given up by the sea, swept in from the ends of the earth – depicted in primitive paintings of the Day of Judgment. If, indeed, my mother thought that, she must also have supposed some awful, cataclysmic division from on High just to have taken place, violently separating Sheep from Goats, depriving Billson of her raiment. No doubt my mother used only a figure of speech, but circumstances gave a certain aptness to the metaphor.
‘Joking apart,’ my mother used to say, ‘it was a dreadful moment.’
There can be no doubt whatever that the scene was disturbing, terrifying, saddening, a moment that summarised, in the unclothed figure of Billson, human lack of co-ordination and abandonment of self-control in the face of emotional misery. Was she determined, in the habit of neurotics, to try to make things as bad for others as for herself? In that, she largely succeeded. There seemed no solution for the people in the room, no way out of the problem so violently posed by Billson in the shape of her own nude person. My father always confessed afterwards that he himself had been utterly at a loss. He could throw no light whatever on the reason why such a thing should suddenly have happened in his drawing-room, see no way of cutting short this unspeakable crisis. In telling – and re-telling – the highlights of the story, he contributed only one notable phrase.
Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 2 Page 50
