by Simon Raven
As for Sandra, she had a whale of a war at the Savoy, and concluded it by marrying for the third time. She began by being something in the Red Cross, a position which, as she saw it, called for twice the number of expensive telephone calls that had been requested in the most hysterical hunts for pre-war luggage lost in transit. She, who in her time had sacked and engaged a whole regiment of secretaries over the wire, would surely be a very valuable asset in the Crown's defence. She also specialized in wildcat schemes of an impromptu nature; and it was during the third and most disastrous of these, on which she was busy with the energy of a herd of elephant and the foresight of a child of two, that she collapsed in a fit of nervous prostration. She was carried 10 her bedroom, where she stayed for four days in seven during the remainder of the duration, requiring the attentions of half a squad of nurses while she was upstairs and dislocating the organization of an entire Civil Defence District whenever she came down. Towards the end of 1943, comparatively minor losses in part of the slum properties led to her becoming really very ill indeed: and it was during this illness she first met two people who were to loom large in her life for the next few years.
The first was a Rumanian doctor called Fibula Trito, who alone succeeded in persuading her she could recover without the removal of most of her insides. He brought off a brilliant cure and became the most trusted among the effective physicians she employed. It was indeed largely due to her that he later abandoned general practice for the more lucrative realm of psychology. He had had the shrewdness to realize that her illness was vast but largely imaginary, and relied almost entirely on personality for his cure. The success was a surprise to him, but he at once realized that a perpetual smile and complete silence (which had the additional advantage of saving him the effort of speaking English) generated an atmosphere of confidence worth many grains of penicillin. Furthermore the money which would have been spent on penicillin could now be added to his fee. Finally, and best of all, his new technique was best suited to purely mental illnesses: to specialize in these would save the trouble and expense of elaborate equipment, while if such equipment should be really necessary, he could always recommend his clients (for a handsome commission) to colleagues who were also co-religionists.
Sandra's second meeting was with the Hon. Simon Fairweather, who happened to be a very remote cousin on leave in London and at a loose end. He was ten years younger than Sandra, and the last time she had seen him was in the nursery. As the youngest son of the tenth Earl of Plurimum he had been given the job (before the war) of running the family laundry, an occupation which was not so much demanding as merely monotonous and had provoked endless mirth in all his friends, who would send him their shirts to wash and then complain about the loss of imaginary buttons. But he had no money and therefore no alternative: and indeed he only came to see Sandra in the hope that this attention would lead to a remembrance (however slender) in her will, for she had put it about the family that her days in the Savoy were rapidly running out.
Something about this young man, whether his uniform or his obsequiousness, caught Sandra's fancy, so that she asked him to call again. This he did with a good grace and a bunch of expensive flowers. She noticed with approval that he had the same excellence as a sympathetic listener that had characterized poor Marshal Acre. The next time he came on leave he called several times, and Sandra, having by now learned from Trito that she would both live and retain her insides, suddenly asked him to marry her, promised him a large settlement, and said that he would be such a help in bringing up the children. Simon, who was daily expecting arrest for passing three large but worthless cheques, consented with avidity, and they were married the following week by special licence and in her bedroom.
Nor can her motives be said to have been altogether obscure. Here at last was someone who, having neither money to retreat with nor courage to shoot himself, couldn't get away, someone therefore on whom she could vent without interruption the resentment she now harboured against the entire population of grown males. They had treated her shabbily and must now provide a scapegoat. In Simon Fairweather she had a scapegoat with an unexceptionable pedigree, five thousand pounds worth of education, and a genuine if remote chance of inheriting an earldom.
And indeed it seemed she was right. A settlement, she had decided, was unsatisfactory, and Simon was in consequence receiving a handsome but easily withdrawable allowance. Unlike poor Faunus he could not retire into the shelter of his own resources: and he was much too weak-kneed to emulate the motiveless but undeniable courage of Earl Marshal Acre, Junior. Whichever way you looked at it Simon was there for life.
And for the matter of that he did not at first object. But then he still had his freedom. He was stationed in Yorkshire, where he was not indeed safe from Sandra's telephone calls but whither she showed no desire to follow him. If only he had thought a moment, he would have realized she knew a trick worth two of that. For within three months she had done her work; a major-general of her acquaintance had used his influence to place Simon in the War Office — a preferable alternative, the poor man felt, to being driven slowly insane by hourly calls from Sandra at the Savoy. Mrs Sandra Fairweather was once again turning the screw. What was more, she meant to get her money's worth. This was the first time she had had to pay out, she was paying out lucratively (what with the war and the doctors, she could scarcely call two million her own), and Simon must realize his responsibilities— responsibilities beside which those of his position at the War Office paled to insignificance. The major-general, who was just settling down to a well-earned period of peace, found his troubles had scarcely begun. At any hour he might be called on to give Major Fairweather leave of absence so that he might attend to some whim of his wife's — whims which ranged hilariously from mere dizzy spells to long weekends in Cornwall. For Mrs Fairweather was now fairly convalescent.
If her convalescence was agony for Simon and the general, her eventual recovery was unmitigated torture. She would even arrive in person at the War Office to sweep the blushing major off to lunch until four o'clock — usually on the pretext that she must discuss with him the war damage sustained by her property, by which she appeared much troubled. By May '45 he knew every word in the title-deeds for the three slum-houses that had suffered.
He also knew another thing. If it meant penury and the family laundry for the rest of his life, if it meant he never wrote another good cheque for as long as he lived, he was going to leave Sandra. Soon he would be demobilized and the last vestige of an excuse for absenting himself would be lost. Whatever happened, he was going.
Nor was he without a certain instinct for self-preservation. He walked out of his wife's house in the autumn of '45, a day later, she noticed bitterly, than his quarterly allowance had reached his bank.
From that day on she turned in desperation to her two sons. For some time now she had been making rather sluggish arrangements to retrieve them. A week after Simon's departure she set out in person for America. The heat, as they say in that country, was on.
Heaven alone knew what she expected to find when she got there, but it certainly included affection. What she actually did find was two very good-looking little boys with American accents, extravagant habits, a complete ignorance of good manners, and a very guarded attitude towards herself. The first three, she decided, needed nothing more than a good preparatory school, the last a good dose of her own company. This latter they could have till Christmas, after which they could be despatched to a suitable school on the south coast. In the meantime she whisked them home in an aeroplane, opened the fenland house, and set about finding the first of many tutors.
It was now her sons' turn to join the swelling crowd of men about whom she had been disillusioned. The younger boy, it was true, was a nice, unintelligent child who tried to do what was expected of him. But the production of love de vacuo was beyond his power, the simulation of it alien to his nature. This, however, was not what really bothered Mrs Fairweather. For the younger son's case
had at least the compensation that, being essentially British by make-up, he was soon brought to conform in the matters of accent and manners; and added to this, it was not his love she really required.
It was the elder son, Terence Ambrose Fox, just over eleven years of age, who could have been the consolation for all she imagined she had suffered, but who was instead the final point of focus for the long-accumulated misery of her own ill-adjusted nature. He was a fine and handsome child with long, graceful limbs and a beautiful smile: he was intelligent and, for his age, very witty; but he was also selfish, captious and strong-willed, and any love he had was not to be bestowed on a mother he had seldom seen. As for his behaviour, it left much to be desired. He adored anything that came from America — whether clothes, books or firearms — a trait that was not in the least pleasing to his mother, who had had something of a reaction since the time of Marshal Acre. Again, he had all the contempt of the strong for the weak, a tendency which American comic-papers, with their insistence on violence, had considerably aggravated. He was grossly and unrepentantly extravagant. He was extremely lazy where he saw no good cause for using up energy. Indeed the sum of it all was simply and solely that he lacked moral sense: for he had already learnt that charm and intelligence can achieve most things, and he therefore resented being opposed on other grounds which he did not in the least understand.
Sandra threw herself into the battle with all her spasmodic intensity. Habit had, of course, gone too far for her to think of remaining very long in the same place, but her visits to the boys, whether at home or at school, became more frequent and more hysterical than ever. A succession of tutors made the holiday's seem like the flickering films of 1920, while the headmaster of their school knew barely a week's peace at a time. She would have crazes for investigating the food, the sanitation, the educational principles employed — anything and everything that might affect the condition of her sons and had the further attraction of being entirely beyond her experience. But while the younger boy, if he got no cleverer, was at least turning into a suitable subject for Eton, the elder remained as cynical and unsatisfactory as ever. He had by now discovered that a show of affection towards his mother was certain to achieve a lavish reward, and his ingenuous manner made such hypocritical build-ups fairly easy to effect: so that the let-downs, by contrast, were becoming increasingly violent and ferocious, and would use up, when they occurred, every shred of emotion in the house.
It was about then that the great deduction was made. Vanity precluded Sandra from believing that her son could be deliberate in his evasion of her possessive advances, nor did it permit her to acknowledge as her son, adopted or not, a boy who was deficient in moral sense. It only remained that he should have something wrong in a psychological way. Dr Trito was summoned and disaster ensued.
For Dr Fibula Trito's post-war practice had not flourished in correspondence with his hopes. In the case of Terence Fox he scented a basic annual income for several years to follow. To this end he made a profound diagnosis, suggested that the intermittent assistance of several other doctors he could recommend would be required, and with skill that can only be admired proceeded to hedge the wretched Terence round at once with suspicion and with sympathy. From now on he was watched and nagged, forbidden very reasonable pleasures and compelled to take others at once duller and more expensive, and subjected, in general, to a petty and appalling regime of immense latitude in some directions and absurd confinement in others. At first the boy was hurt, then he was amused; and finally he determined to exploit the circumstances to the best of his ability. This meant stringing along Trito with occasional relapses in order to prove he still needed attention. For a while all went well. Then in 1948, rather to Terence's annoyance Trito announced that, if Mrs Fairweather would take the responsibility, her son might now be sent to Eton.
But Terence had now been playing this game for a year, and sensed interesting possibilities altogether remote from Windsor. He accordingly did his best to get expelled and had an entertaining time in the process. Meanwhile an agitated house-master prolonged the farce for as long as possible in view of the wealth and position of Mrs Fairweather, the peace of mind of the younger boy (who arrived two halves later), and out of genuine sympathy for what he conceived to be a difficult but not incurable illness of the soul. He was a great one for the Psyche and the two-horsed chariot, and continued to back the loser.
This poor booby's patience was long but not eternal. The incident of what McTavish called 'humiliating' a number of boys had finally set the seal on Terence's Eton career, and one day he appeared in London, fresh and unrepentant from this engaging jeu d'esprit, to face a palpitating Sandra (previously warned by telegram) and a very thoughtful Trito, whose secret estimate as to the duration of Terence's stay at Eton had been correct to the nearest two months.
It was now that Sandra well and truly lost her head. With a minimum of negotiation, her name and wealth would have procured Terence instant entry to any public school other than the first six in the land. To be sure the episode would have required a little explanation to her friends; but by sending the boy to Switzerland, where Trito knew of a very suitable instit— or rather school, she finally stamped him 'sacked or supered' for life. Not that he cared, or for that matter, that anyone bothered very much as things run nowadays. But it made one thing very plain—Sandra was losing her grip. From now on her friends settled comfortably down to the spectacle of a decline. Once the doctor had the first say — they all knew the symptoms.
To do Trito justice, Terence was very, happy in Switzerland. He made a number of friends of varied nationality, wide interests, precocious intelligence and precarious morals. It was quite possibly the best thing that could have happened to him. But it did not improve his attitude towards Sandra (who was quickly recognized and rationalized as a basically common phenomenon among the parents of the Summit School, near Zurich); and when she arrived to spend Christmas at St Moritz (accompanied by Bellamy, Trito, Mr and Mrs Valley, and a trained nurse with an enormous notebook) the vigorous young hooligan she found awaiting her filled her with every species of frustration and dismay. Nor had things improved by the following April. Still, Trito said that au fond the situation was on the mend (an expression he used to cheer his clients up during prolonged periods of atrophy) and, in any case Terence would be spending nine weeks at home in the summer. Steps could be taken then. So it was at this juncture, with the arrival of Terence at Kensington Air Station appointed for 6 p.m. on July 5, just two weeks away, that Esme found himself engaged as private tutor to the eldest adopted son of the Honourable Mrs Sandra Fairweather, née Fox.
IV
It was hardly to be expected that the arrangements for Esme's appearance in London should be left unaltered. Indeed it was a miracle they were only altered once.
The day previously fixed was a Wednesday. On the Monday Esme, who was spending a long and accompanied weekend in a pub at Brighton and had thought he was entirely beyond reach, was astonished to receive a telegram from Mrs Fairweather in which he was asked to ring her private number that night and no matter how late he might come in. It was a salutary general lesson for him that anyone who had a telephone and no regard for expense could trace anyone else in time. (The head-porter of his college had overheard the weekend rendezvous being made; the college was the first place Mrs Fairweather had tried; and the good man's natural discretion had soon been reduced to quavering capitulation.) Esme might also have deduced — as in any case he very soon learnt — that no one was safe from Mrs Fairweather while anything less than the Atlantic Ocean was between them.
There was nothing for it. He rang the number, uncomfortably aware that he was well the worse for drink.
'Mr Sa Foy here,' he said, 'I — '
'Ah,' said a voice like all the furies in concert, 'having a little jaunt in Brighton, eh?'
'Yes,' said Esme.
'Well, I hope you're having fun,' said the voice more malignantly than ever, for Mrs Fairweather re
sented not knowing where people were even if she had no legitimate claim on them, 'but the thing is this. There's been a telegram from Terence saying he's coming a day early. Meaning tomorrow.'
This, Esme reflected, meant she was laid open to spending twenty-four hours alone with him. By the sound of it all she would prefer a bank holiday on the waters of Acheron. Caught again.
'But of course,' he said, 'if you'd like me to — '
'What about Brighton?' said Mrs Fairweather, who, having gained her point, was always ferociously considerate in retrospect.
'That's quite all right, I assure you. In any case — ' careful, careful, there's capital to be made out of this, '—I can easily cancel all my engagements. Except lunch on Wednesday, if that's all right.' One must put a price on oneself.
'I suppose so.' Ferocious consideration seldom extended to actual concessions.
'Tomorrow evening at five then? 6, St Ambrose Gate?' said Esme.
'If you please. I think it's perfectly divine of you,' she concluded without sincerity. Esme had made less capital than he might have. As usual he had been too emphatic about his own unselfishness.
He arrived the following afternoon, after a trying scene with the other half of his accompanied weekend, who wanted them to have tea with her mother. This was obviously a grossly inconsiderate request, in view of the nervous strain Esme was under — as he himself pointed out. But it was at least an open question whether the strain hadn't been increased more by the subsequent quarrel than it would have been by a week of having tea with people's mothers.
