A Man of His Time

by Phyllis Bentley

  ‘What’s your main crop, then, Cecil? Oranges?’

  ‘Apples.’

  Morcar felt vexed. A son growing oranges in South Africa was one thing, but to journey all those thousands of miles to grow fruit which you could grow just as well in Worcestershire seemed silly work. Just like Cecil, however.

  ‘And peas and beans and strawberries and lettuce and tomatoes,’ cried Fan with a mischievous look, correctly interpreting his reaction.

  ‘They grow well here, then?’ said Morcar, forcing an amiable tone.

  ‘Except for pests, cloudbursts, hurricanes, and drought, they do very well,’ said Fan as before. ‘Fan!’ Cecil reproved her.

  ‘Well, we may as well face facts,’ said Fan, tossing her head.

  Cecil’s face changed suddenly, irradiated by a smile. Morcar followed his glance to the doorway, and saw there a very charming little sprite, with long fair hair and dark blue eyes, delightfully clad in a fluffy white frock and neat white socks and shoes.

  ‘Who’s this, then?’ asked Morcar, smiling.

  ‘My youngest unmarried daughter,’ said Cecil.

  The sprite gave a merry laugh - a delicious trill, thought Morcar - and bounding over to her father stood leaning against the arm of his chair. Cecil put his arm round her and they both gazed at Morcar, looking well satisfied.

  ‘Cecil!’ said Fan reprovingly.

  ‘But how many children have you, then?’ inquired Morcar, bewildered.

  ‘Only two - one boy, one girl. This is Susan,’ said Fan. ‘The youngest unmarried daughter bit is a joke.’ (And a very familiar one, obviously, thought Morcar, to judge by its unsmiling reception.) ‘Susie, say hello to your grandfather, dear.’

  Susan bounded across to Morcar, and saying ‘Hello, Grandfather,’ in a small and piping but sweet voice, bent forward and kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘Well, you are a nice little girl,’ said Morcar, delighted. He had not hitherto enjoyed close acquaintance with any little girls and he found her soft warm cheek, her thick lustrous hair, the miniature perfection of her arms and hands and feet, quite enchanting. ‘Susan, eh? I must take your photograph to send home to—’ He paused, made an effort to recollect the relationship, and concluded - ‘your great-granny.’

  ‘Where’s Chuff, Fan?’ said Cecil, frowning.

  ‘He’s not back from the village, dear.’

  ‘I told him to be home by noon.’

  ‘He’ll be here soon, dear,’ said Fan soothingly.

  And indeed almost immediately a big well-grown boy in his teens appeared, hot and panting, in the doorway.

  ‘You’re late, Chuff,’ said Cecil.

  ‘Go and shower and change, Chuff,’ said Fan. ‘It’s nearly lunchtime.’

  ‘How old are the children, then?’ asked Morcar.

  ‘Chuff’s fourteen and Susan’s ten,’ said Fan with a grimace which showed what she thought of this disparity in time of conception.

  ’What is the boy called?’

  ‘His name is Charles Henry Francis, but we call him Chuff.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘Well, Cecil’s mother begged us to call him Charles, after her brother who was killed in the First World War,’ began Fan, a trifle testy. (At once the hideous scene of Charlie’s death rose vivid again in Morcar’s mind, where it had lain unforgotten for forty years.) ‘Cecil wanted to call him Henry, after you, and I wanted to call him Francis, after my own father. So we called him the lot.’

  ‘Well, you got it all in,’ said Morcar gruffly. He was touched but irritated to find that the boy bore his name.

  ‘C. H. F. Morcar - it’s quite nice,’ said Cecil.

  ‘Aye, quite euphonious,’ agreed Morcar. Where on earth he had got this word from heaven knew: Jonathan, he supposed. What a long way off the West Riding seemed from here.

  Chulf now came out, clean and well-brushed, and was introduced. He was a solid boy, reddish hair, well-built, with strong features and keen grey eyes; to Morcar there seemed something familiar about his appearance, and after considering this for a while he thought he discovered what it was.

  ‘He’s like your father, Fan. Colonel Francis Oldroyd,’ he said.

  There was a sardonic note in his voice, for Francis Oldroyd, once Morcar’s employer and later his Captain and Colonel in the First World War, had never been a particular favourite with him. ‘What he knew about textiles would go on a sixpence,’ he grumbled to himself.

  Fan, however, as he expected, was pleased.

  The next few weeks passed very quickly for Morcar.

  First, of course, he had to view the farm, for which after all he had paid the purchase price, at the close of the last war. He noticed that Fan was not very eager about this, but, native of a great industrial conurbation set amid infertile hills, as he was, he knew so little about crops and trees that he had no idea whether it was well run or ill. Cecil employed three native ‘boys’; the ‘boss-boy’, John, was married to Eva, the household maid, and they lived together in a deplorable hut at the bottom of the garden. On ceremonial occasions - such as Morcar’s arrival - John donned white shirt and shorts and served at table. The relations between Cecil and his staff seemed reasonably friendly, Morcar thought, and Eva was delightful, kind, warmhearted, and efficient; but Fan was sharp with all of them.

  ‘You have to keep after them all the time,’ she said irritably.

  Certainly John and the other two seemed to stand about and laugh a good deal, but Morcar was an employer of labour himself and accepted the desire for a break as natural to all men.

  Once this inspection was over, Morcar thought rather to Fan’s relief, Cecil and his family laid themselves out to entertain him. They took him to a game reserve, where he saw a lioness (unfortunately couchant rather than rampant), impala, zebra, giraffes; they took him to Zulu dances; showed him weaver-birds’ nests and jacaranda trees with their pendent mauve blossoms; they took him out for picnics, braivleis as they called them - Morcar was not one who enjoyed alfresco eating, but accepted the custom of the country with easy good-nature. They dressed formally -Susie in delicious white gloves and tiny straw hat - and drove him into Jo’burg, as he learned to call it, to shop, and allowed him a day or two there by himself to visit one or two of his customers. They showed him the outside of a gold mine and told him all the traditional stories. They did not, in spite of his repeated urgings, take him to a native location, Fan urging distance, unpleasantness, lack of permission, and finally danger. They offered instead to take him to see Cecil’s maternal uncle, Hubert Shaw, who had an orange farm fifty or sixty miles away, but this Morcar drily declined. He remembered Hubert as a fairly harmless, insignificant member of the teeming Shaw household in days of old, but he did not wish to see Winnie’s brother and he thought he saw that Fan was glad of this decision. They declined to accompany him to the Victoria Falls - the distance was much too great, they said discouragingly; however, Morcar went off there by himself, and certainly, though he had seen Niagara, the spectacle was well worth while. When he came back after his week’s absence, the family’s company manners had worn off somewhat, and he was able to see their relationships more clearly.

  These were not too bad, he thought. They fell into a familiar pattern. The daughter turned to the father, the son to the mother. Whenever Cecil came to stoep or room, Susan crossed silently and swiftly to her father’s side; the pair exchanged a look of love and appeared content. Chuff on the other hand seemed always in need of Fan’s support and intervention. He was rather a sulky boy in Morcar’s opinion, and his manners and speech were not as pleasing as his sister’s, though Fan was always scolding him about them. His voice had broken and was deep and manly, and he was always bellowing ‘Mom!’ about the house - for a shirt, some money, or heaven knew what. Cecil was rather sharp with the boy, Morcar thought, but not to much effect, and in return Chuff was apt to be sullen, not to say rude, to his father. Once, indeed, after being commanded twice by Cecil to fetch a map of some kind
from another room, and not stirring from the floor, where he had extended another map, the command being repeated Chuff said: ‘Oh, all right!’ in a tone of such surly insolence that Susie, flying across to him, slapped his face hard. Chuff was astonished and dismayed.

  ‘Why, Susie! What are you about?’ he cried, scrambling to his feet and rubbing his cheek. ‘How could you hit me? I’m your brother!’

  Susie, scarlet, burst into tears, and the incident ended in brother and sister falling into each other’s arms and kissing. Morcar thought Susie’s rebuke deserved, but was glad to see genuine fondness between the pair.

  Out of the house, on picnics and so on, Chuff became a different lad; he was skilful with his hands, swift on his feet, and knew quite a lot about African fauna and flora. When engaged about any outdoor pursuits his face brightened so that he became almost good-looking. At any rate, reflected Morcar, there was already more energy, more decision in his young face than in his father’s.

  Morcar also observed with some satisfaction that although Fan’s sharp tongue exercised itself rather too freely in exasperation on her husband, who received it with a mild endurance irritating to his father, Fan and Cecil were still in love or at least still loved each other. Cecil kissed his wife when he occasionally left her for the day, and she expected this and lifted her face willingly to him. She also kept up a loyal façade for him towards the children. A small example of this occurred one day when, on Fan’s telling Chuff that he and Susie must eat their supper alone together, as the grown-ups were going out, Chuff said:

  Is Oom Harry going too?’

  ‘Don’t let me hear you speaking Afrikaans, Chuff,’ said Fan sharply.

  ‘Why not?’ said Cecil in his mild tones.

  ‘It was only one word,’ Chuff defended himself.

  ‘Mr Morcar is your grandfather, not your uncle, in any case,’ said Fan, changing her position, under attack, at once (woman-like, thought Morcar) to more tenable ground.

  ‘Well, it’s difficult to remember, with you calling him uncle and Dad calling him father - I don’t know which is right,’ growled Chuff.

  ‘Your father is right, of course,’ snapped Fan.

  Through the days Morcar perceived that this loyalty, though often enough illogical in expression, was constant. So that in spite of some sharp marital altercations which drifted to his ears - just the sound, not the words - at night from their bedroom, he thought Cecil and his wife were not too unhappy together. It struck him that whereas in small matters Fan ruled, in large affairs Cecil got his way. In a word, these South African Morcars were a normal family, he thought, with all the blessings and banes consequent on that condition. One could not expect to find the courteous urbanity of a Jennifer and a Jonathan everywhere.

  With the outside relationships of the family, however, Morcar was not so well pleased. They had many friends, accepted many invitations to parties of many kinds. It was clear that the men liked Cecil, and the women, though they were a little afraid of Fan, liked her; they trusted her not to flirt with their husbands and respected the way she ran her household. Of these sentiments Morcar approved. But the talk at these parties was always the same: it dwelt continually on the ignorance and inferiority of the black Africans, the merits of apartheid, the disillusionment with England, the iniquities of the Afrikaners, the Boers. At first Morcar listened eagerly to these discussions, anxious to inform himself of on-the-spot opinion on these great questions, but the opinions were always the same and presently he grew weary of the ignorance, the arrogance, the illiberal blindness of people who on other subjects were kind and honest. At first, too, these hosts and guests remembered that he was just out from home, and modified their tone; but presently they forgot his presence, and reproached England bitterly for her desertion of the white cause, which they attributed to all sorts of mean and preposterous intrigues. One day the word cowardice was actually mentioned. Morcar started and coloured, and Fan made eloquent eyes of warning. There was an awkward pause.

  ‘I hope we haven’t offended you, Mr Morcar,’ apologized his host at length.

  ‘You have, as a matter of fact,’ said Morcar. ‘But never mind! I can take it.’

  His host stuttered a little. ‘It’s best for us to say what we think?’ he suggested.

  ‘Aye! If I’m allowed to say what I think, too,’ said Morcar. He glanced round the circle and enjoyed their look of alarm. ‘But never mind! I won’t,’ he said. His tone was that of a well-feared nanny menacing her charges, and his hearers were abashed.

  Only a few days later, however, at drinks in the home of a prosperous Afrikaner farmer - Fan had wanted to evade the invitation, but Cecil accepted - he had to listen to a sudden outburst of hate from his host on the subject of the British at the time of the Boer war, who had enclosed women and children in camps and starved them, so that they had nothing to eat but fungus from the grass.

  ‘Aye! That was bad management,’ said Morcar. ‘And some British people said so at the time.’

  His host proceeded to accuse the British of having inserted powdered glass into their prisoners’ soup.

  ‘Nay!’ said Morcar strongly. ‘That’s not true, I’m sure. Mushrooms I grant you, but powdered glass, never.’ Gazing straight into his host’s angry face, he added calmly: ‘We aren’t cunning enough, you know.’

  It seemed that he gained quite a reputation in the neighbourhood for his outspokenness, and, as always with the English - it’s their great redeeming feature, thought Morcar - his eccentricity was respected when it was found to be sincere. But he grew more and more tired - sick and tired, as he said to himself - of the unjust, heartless, inhumane arguments, endlessly repeated, which masked an ever-growing fear.

  At last the day of his departure drew near. He bought handsome presents for Fan and the children, tipped Eva and John so generously that they laughed with glee. The day came. He packed, he said goodbye to the children; the car - ‘dirty as usual, but I expect it’s difficult to keep clean in this red dust,’ thought Morcar - was brought round, the luggage loaded; Fan, dressed for town, climbed in.

  There’s no need for you to come, Fan,’ said Cecil. His tone was rough, and more commanding than Morcar had heard it.

  ‘But I want to come, Cecil!’ exclaimed Fan. She seemed really hurt, and short of incivility Cecil could not but yield.

  They rode in silence until they were almost at the airfield, when Fan, leaning forward from the back seat, said urgently to Morcar:

  ‘You haven’t told me much about Jennifer and David’s boy, Uncle Harry.’

  ‘Jennifer busies herself with cultural committees. She’s serene, but still locked in grief.’

  ‘And what about David’s son? David was my half-brother, after all.’

  Morcar had refrained from speaking much of Jonathan because he did not wish to reveal the contrast between that civilized, well-educated boy Jonathan and Fan’s rather loutish son. So now he said shortly:

  ‘Jonathan’s a fine lad. Clever, you know, like his father. Tall. Dark.’

  Is he like David in appearance - or my father?’

  ‘Not very.’

  ‘He’s nearly two years older than Chuff.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Is he a nice boy, Uncle Harry?’

  ‘Thoroughly nice,’ said Morcar. He remembered the CND incident. But in this illiberal land it would scare people out of their wits. Best not mention it. ‘Naturally he has some of these modern ideas,’ he said hesitantly.

  ‘Naturally,’ agreed Fan, a trifle relieved, it seemed to Morcar, to find that the paragon Jonathan was not absolutely perfect.

  They reached the airport; Cecil parked the car before having the luggage unloaded - a foolish thing to do, thought Morcar, as porters had to be summoned from a distance. Cecil looked white and strained, and Fan too appeared ill at ease.

  ‘Where is your overnight bag?’ exclaimed Fan as they stood in the reception hall. ‘It’s not here.’

  Morcar was at once awar
e that the small bag in question had lain at Fan’s feet in the car, and that to leave it there was a manoeuvre on her part to get rid of Cecil and gain a few moments alone with himself.

  ‘Here it comes,’ thought Morcar, remembering his first impression on arriving in Africa, that Fan was for some reason uneasy about his visit - an impression never entirely dissipated. ‘Best hear it,’ he thought. ‘No, it’s not here,’ he said aloud, looking round as if in search. ‘I must have left it in the car, I’m afraid. Cecil, will you fetch it, lad?’

  Cecil gave Fan an angry glance, but perforce departed.

  ‘Uncle Harry,’ began Fan immediately as soon as he was out of earshot, ‘I must tell you. Cecil won’t tell you, and he doesn’t want me to tell you. We’ve argued and argued about it.’

  ‘Well, get on with it, then,’ urged Morcar drily. ‘We’ve not much time.’

  ‘We’re in great trouble. We owe a lot of money. We’ve had two terrible harvests. That’s why we couldn’t take you up to the Falls. We couldn’t afford it. We’re afraid we shan’t be able to keep up the children’s schooling.’

  ‘How much do you need?’ said Morcar bluntly.

  ‘A thousand pounds,’ wailed Fan, crying.

  ‘All right. Don’t fret. You shall have it,’ said Morcar.

  ‘Cecil will kill me if he thinks I’ve told you,’ sobbed Fan. ‘He’s so proud, you see.’

  ‘Well, dry your eyes. Don’t let him see you crying. Here he comes. We’d best not be talking together,’ said Morcar, as Cecil appeared in the distance. He gave an explanatory wave to his son and walked off briskly to the men’s lavatory.

  Luckily he always carried his cheque-book about his person. He drew it out, wrote a cheque to Cecil for two thousand pounds, dated it the previous day, folded it, dirtied the creases a little, and stowed it into an inner compartment of his wallet. Emerging, he saw Cecil looking very white and determined, clearly saying ‘No!’ to a tear-stained Fan as clearly imploring him to confide in his father.

  ‘Fan, do you mind leaving Cecil and me alone together a minute?’ he asked soberly.