BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Blackmailer
A Man of Power
The Great Occasion
Orlando King (first published as Orlando King, Orlando at the Brazen Threshold and Agatha)
News from the City of the Sun
The Shooting Party
A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory
Deceits of Time
The Summer of the Royal Visit
Winter Journey
A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses
Contents
Introduction
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25
About the Author
Introduction
by Lucy Scholes
Set during the summer of 1914, in those final few months of peace before the outbreak of a war that marked a brutish, violent schism between the old ways and the new, Isabel Colegate’s Statues in a Garden is an unforgettable portrait of a single family – just one of many – poised on the brink of wreckage. Not that Colegate allows the bigger, broader tides of history to detract from the nuance of the particular story that she’s telling. ‘We are not trying to recapture an age as it was, we are not trying to write history,’ her narrator protests in the opening pages: ‘we are trying to remember the background for a fable. A private background for a private fable.’
In this case, that of the Weston household: Aylmer Weston – a man of ‘character,’ a Liberal politician and member of Asquith’s cabinet – and his beautiful wife Cynthia – a ‘famous hostess’ – who are preparing for the wedding of their eldest daughter, Violet. The Westons’ way of life is that of ‘the minor gentry’; they have a house in London, on Queen Anne’s Gate, and a small estate in Wiltshire, which provides the idyllic setting for much of the action that unfolds in this graceful but shocking tale. The Westons’ youngest child, Kitty, still lives at home, and their grown son, Edmund, and his cousin, twenty-eight-year-old Philip – technically the Westons’ nephew, but whom they adopted in his childhood on the death of his parents, Aylmer’s brother and his wife – make up the rest of the family. Distracted – both professionally, by the demands of the Irish question (the call, from Irish nationalists, for independence, an issue that increasingly preoccupied the British ruling classes in the early years of the twentieth century) and the annoyance of the Women’s Suffrage Movement; and personally, by Violet’s impending nuptials – Aylmer fails to recognise the danger to the stability of his way of life that’s lurks much closer to home. The rash, insouciant Philip is impatient to make his own money – and lots of it – so he convinces his uncle to invest a small fortune on the Stock Exchange. The outcome of this reckless scheme is bad enough, but in a move all the bolder and more destructive, it’s not just Aylmer’s money that the younger man has his eye on.
When it comes to her subtle, refined depictions of the obliviousness that so often accompanies lives of privilege and plenty, Colegate has few rivals, and Statues in a Garden is one of the finest displays of her considerable skills. But what makes this story all the more brilliant though is that despite the narrator’s assertion otherwise, Colegate absolutely captures the very essence of the age about which she’s writing; a period that, as we’re told on the novel’s opening page, was one marked by great upheaval, politically, socially and culturally:
Bitterness in politics, talk of civil war in Ireland, of a general strike in the autumn; suffragettes (arson, forcible feeding, broken glass, the Cat and Mouse Act); high feelings about the disestablishment of the Welsh Church, about Lloyd George’s new social legislation, about the Post-Impressionists, the Russian Ballet, Ibsen, about Mrs Patrick Campbell saying ‘bloody’ in Pygmalion. A world of possibilities, and social injustice of course, and a great deal of stolid overfed stupidity; and one could argue about what was an end and what was a beginning, but we are not concerned with that at the moment.
These are the talking points of the day, and accordingly they shift in and out of characters’ focus. Take, for example, the two suffragettes, ‘harbingers of violence in the violet dusk,’ who hurl a brick – wrapped round with a piece of paper bearing the slogan ‘VOTES FOR WOMEN’ – through the dining-room window of the Westons’ country house, interrupting the calm of the evening. Or young Kitty’s own fledgling attachment to the cause, fuelled by watching two policemen violently trying to remove a woman who’s chained herself to the railings outside the Houses of Parliament. ‘She was right. She had right on her side,’ the distraught Kitty rails at her governess, Alice Benedict. ‘It’s quite monstrous that they won’t give women the vote. In the face of tyranny you have to use violence. Oh why didn’t I do anything? Why did you stop me?’ In terms of the direction that this particular story takes though, such episodes are subterfuge, momentary distractions from the overwhelming crisis that’s approaching, yet that which no one sees coming. And it’s here, in making the connection between the individual and the national stage, the personal and the political, that the full reach of Colegate’s talents are realised. Thus, we watch the unmindful Aylmer blunder forward towards private devastation in parallel with the same somnambulant progress that the country – which is helmed, lest we forget, by him and his peers – hurtles towards war.
If this – using her protagonists as prisms through which we see the vicissitudes of their age play out – is, as her narrator claims, not the main ambition of this novel, it’s undoubtably the central thrust of the project to which Colegate next turned her attention: The Orlando Trilogy. The story therein – originally published as three separate volumes: Orlando King (1968), Orlando at the Brazen Threshold (1971) and Agatha (1973) – follows the fortunes of her titular antihero, a man who scales the greasy poles of power and privilege in the 1930s, and thereafter his daughter, Agatha, who’s forced to choose between her family and her country amongst the geo-political wrangling of the aftermath of the Second World War. Like the Westons before them, but much more obviously so, the members of the King family are ‘caught up in the course of history,’ their individual fates entangled with that of the larger country as a whole.
*
And this isn’t the only thread from Statues in a Garden that Colegate extends on into the works that followed it. The narrator here – an eyewitness to the events that unfold, though not, she takes pains to point out, one of the central players in the drama – recognises what she describes as ‘the human inclination for myth.’ It is ‘instinct,’ she explains, to ‘make little myths out of the deep discoveries of [our] lives.’ Taking its scaffolding from Sophocles’ Theban Plays, The Orlando Trilogy is nothing if not a masterpiece about personal, political and public myth-making. ‘We know the story of course, so nothing need be withheld,’ Colegate writes on the opening page of the first volume. ‘We choose a situation in the drama to expose a theme: passing curiosity must look elsewhere, we are here profoundly to contemplate eternal truths. With ritual, like the Greeks. With dreams, like Freud. Let us pray.’
One of these ‘eternal truths’ is the corruption and hypocrisy that lies at the heart of the British establishment. ‘They’re corrupt, inefficient, money-mad, immoral, unjust, based on falsehood. Their whole creed’s a pack of lies,’ Philip angrily educates a friend. Or, as Agatha’s step-brother Paul writes in the final volume of The Orlando Trilogy, ‘English and
smug are synonymous words.’ This is a subject that Colegate turns her attention to time and time again in her novels, and, as an interview with her that ran in Country Life magazine in 1998 pointed out, her insight into this particular ‘strand of English society associated with the landed gentry will be of interest to future social historians – in the way that Trollope, say, is today, as evidence of the society he knew.’ Indeed, it’s a world she knows – or once knew – first hand. Her father, Sir Arthur Colegate, was a Conservative MP, and both he and his wife came from families with country seats. Yet we might just as vehemently argue that what she depicts isn’t so much a long dead world, but merely our all-too-recent past, the tenacious vestiges of which are still hugely influential in contemporary Britain. Despite any notion we might have of the twentieth century as an era of social progress, the upper classes have, for the most part, maintained their stranglehold on politics, commerce and business. Colegate’s novels might well be period pieces, but we need only look to British Parliament today to realise that, tragically, very little has changed.
As she so brilliantly illustrates, class, politics and power are inextricably entwined. In The Orlando Trilogy, she demonstrates just how very hypocritical and morally bankrupt the men in charge really are – those who like to talk about duty, responsibility, of the loyalty one owes one’s country and how important it is to play by the rules (though they, of course, are the ones who’ve set, and can shift, the parameters of the game). As one character sums the situation up most plainly and pithily: ‘Mr Orlando is a perfect gent. In other words a perfect shit.’ Such criticisms are also apparent here, but by and large Colegate’s chastisements are softer, and her tone more forgiving; Aylmer’s more guilty of ignorance than pointed deception, of resting on his laurels rather than outright hypocrisy. In response to the outburst from Philip quoted above, his naive friend protests: ‘But look here, what about your uncle? You can’t say all those things about him. I mean he’s a bit of a rebel, a bit of a revolutionary idealistic kind of dangerous politician, but no one’s ever said there was anything wrong with his motives.’ ‘He’s the worst of the lot,’ replies Philip. ‘The worst of the lot. He pretends to understand, he ought to, he thinks he does, but he doesn’t.’ The problem, of course, is that no amount of ‘benign authority’ or being ‘a good chap’ makes up for the misplaced beliefs held by Aylmer and his peers that they are the only ones with the right education, the right sense of responsibility, the right position in life, to be in charge. Take, for example, the ease with which he brushes aside his wife’s concerns. ‘But sometimes I wonder if the life we lead is, in a sense, real life. I mean, do we not live as if we had already made the world fit for people to live in as we do, when in fact we have not done that?’ she suggests. ‘But I think we have, as far as England is concerned,’ he counters, without hesitation. ‘Perhaps you are right,’ Cynthia concedes. ‘I’m sure I am,’ her husband insists. His sense of entitlement is absolute; but it is also the source of his undoing.
*
For a significant stretch of the twentieth century – from the late 1950s through the late 1970s – the upper classes weren’t deemed especially worthy of thoughtful artistic attention. Instead, filmic or literary portrayals of this breed tended towards the comic; stuck-up toffs as clowns and buffoons. Colegate wasn’t the only one whose work challenged this view, but her 1980 novel, The Shooting Party (along with its celebrated 1984 film adaptation, directed by Alan Bridges and starring, amongst others, John Gielgud, Edward Fox and James Mason) – which is set only months before Statues in a Garden, in the autumn of 1913, and details the events of a single weekend at Sir Randolph Nettleby’s Oxfordshire estate – was hugely instrumental in proving that portrayed properly, that is to say, in taking her subjects just as seriously as anyone else, but in so doing, stripping them bare, their shortcomings and failures exposed for all to see, there was just as much dramatic potential here as was to be found in portraits of the middle or working classes. It would be all too easy for Colegate to poke fun at her protagonists, to portray them as blustering, pompous men and cossetted, fragile women attempting to live by codes that are becoming more and more outdated by the hour, but what she does instead is reveal just how twisted out of shape so many of the formal rules that govern this world had become. ‘By 1914,’ Julian Fellowes explains perspicuously in his introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Shooting Party, ‘Colegate is saying, “being a gentleman” had more to do with choosing the correct shirt studs than honour, more to do with shooting well than truth.’ As the lauded screenwriter also points out, without The Shooting Party, there would have been no Gosford Park or Downton Abbey. Doubtless many who’ve enjoyed either the film or the TV series remain unaware of the debt Fellowes owes to Colegate, and so too Colegate herself is sadly nowhere near as well-known a writer as she deserves to be, but the fact remains that she’s played an integral part in contemporary popular culture’s notion of early-twentieth-century British upper-class life.
That The Shooting Party has been elevated to the ranks of a recognised twentieth-century classic – today it’s regarded as one of the most memorable and evocative swansongs to the privileged milieu of Edwardian England – while Statues in a Garden has, until now, languished out-of-print, might seem confusing. But timing, as we all know, is everything. First published in 1964, nearly two decades before The Shooting Party, despite its brilliance, Statues in the Garden was out of step with the prevailing mood of the moment. It wasn’t that readers in the early 1960s didn’t appreciate the book’s charms, or Colegate’s historical dexterity – ‘anachronism spotters will have a thin time,’ praised Frank Littler in his New York Times review on the occasion of the book’s American publication in 1966: ‘the age is recaptured, with a sureness extraordinary for a novelist of this vintage’ – her subject was simply not an especially fashionable one. ‘Women may enjoy it, as a diaphanous diversion,’ wrote Kirkus’ reviewer, clearly less unenamoured with Colegate’s own proficiencies than the subject under consideration.
Colegate writes from a point of view at one with that of her readers: bolstered by hindsight, fully aware of the terrible fate that lies waiting for her protagonists. Towards the end of the novel, she describes Violet’s wedding by means of the photographs that were taken that day: the bridesmaids, caught mid-gait, walking unsteadily across the lawn in their ‘heavy white satin dresses,’ hampered by their fashionable hobble skirts; a ‘splendid’ image of old Mrs Weston, Aylmer’s mother, a relic from the Victorian age, swathed in black silk, decorated with diamonds and leaning on an ebony cane; and various snaps of the guard of honour, the men from Violet’s new husband Wilfred’s regiment. Later, we’re told, Violet annotates one of these, first adding all the boys’ names, then ‘what became of them in the war, so that we read, “Tpr. Townsend (wounded 1914), Farrier French, Tpr. Moyniham (killed 1915), Cpl. Potter, Farrier Newbolt (reported killed 1918),” and so on. Cpl. Harper is very handsome. He apparently got through unscathed; but Cpl.-Major Thorp, who is nearly as good-looking, is “killed 1914”. As a matter of fact they are all rather handsome.’ The poignancy of nestling their tragic, untimely fates here, right at the heart of the celebration that provides a focal point for the novel, is a masterful move. And in asking us to contemplate the scene by means of a series of static images, Colegate also encourages us to understand the novel as a whole as a sequence of tableaux from a lost past.
It is, of course, the knowledge that this is the end of something that makes any portrayal of this final, glorious summer always so sun-drenched and carefree. ‘The sun shone all summer. Everybody knows that,’ reads the very first line here, an opening that never fails to remind me of that of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953), another tale of lost innocence, set amongst the country environs of the upper classes during the halcyon hot, humid summer days of the first year of the twentieth century: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ This too, it seems, is the sentiment at
the heart of Statues in a Garden, and in capturing this private story – that of the scandal and subsequent tragedy that strikes at the heart of a particular privileged, moneyed family – Colegate also captures a now long-since vanished era.
Lucy Scholes, January 2021
1
The sun shone all summer. Everybody knows that.
A few hundred yards to the east of the house was a deep narrow valley, running from north to south, with wooded slopes and a thin stream at the bottom. On one of the slopes the undergrowth concealed wild strawberries they ripened to a rare sweetness, being protected from the birds. In the night the vixen, who had two cubs in the coppice on the other side of the field, would pause in her hunting on the overgrown path between the strawberries and take the ripe ones into her delicate mouth, one by one. They had seen her from the house some times, slipping across the field at dusk.
Lady Londonderry saw Cynthia Weston, driving in the park.
‘Of course I am not really speaking to you,’ she said ‘Because of Home Rule. But I don’t think anyone is looking.’ (They were). ‘How is your pretty Kitty?’
‘My pretty Kitty,’ said Cynthia. ‘Full of funny ideas, not at all like Violet. But I’ve got a nice girl coming as a sort of companion governess. She’s become too much of a handful for poor old Miss Grainger. I suppose the year before coming out is always an awkward one. But here is Philip How unexpected.’
Philip, her nephew and adopted son, rode up on a new horse he was exercising in the Row, and Lady Londonderry, waving a greeting to him and a farewell to Cynthia, was driven off be tween the ranks of green park chairs and the people in hats, who were talking and gazing.
London 1914. People said there was too much money about, the old standards were going (Rand magnates, American heiresses) Bitterness in politics, talk of civil war in Ireland, of a general strike in the autumn, suffragettes (arson, forcible feeding, broken glass, the Cat and Mouse Act), high feelings about the disestablishment of the Welsh Church, about Lloyd George’s new social legislation, about the Post-Impressionists, the Russian Ballet, Ibsen, about Mrs Patrick Campbell saying ‘bloody’ in Pygmalion. A world of possibilities, and social injustice of course, and a great deal of stolid overfed stupidity, and one could argue about what was an end and what was a beginning, but we are not concerned with that at the moment. We are not trying to recapture an age as it was, or to write history we are trying to remember the background for a fable. A private background for a private fable.
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