Statues in a Garden

by Isabel Colegate

  ‘I suppose it would spoil his weekend. I could try and leave it till the next day.’

  ‘Thank you. It would mean a great deal to me.’

  ‘I think I’ll go and get that drink.’

  Philip sat alone in the carriage watching the passing country side. After a time he thought, They were fools to trust me with the money in the first place.

  It was not quite a whole day in the end.

  There was Friday evening. Everything seemed as usual. Absurdly so. There were a few young people staying they had arrived earlier by car. Cynthia looked beautiful, was perhaps a little quieter than usual. So was Edmund, though Philip seemed in lively form. Aylmer was benign, at the head of the table, smiling at the conversation, encouraging the younger ones to talk, a typical Friday evening. And after dinner they walked in the garden a little because it was such a beautiful evening, and Philip and Cynthia walked side by side and he said, ‘I am very unhappy,’ and she said, ‘It’s too difficult, I don’t know what we are all meant to do.’

  ‘I must see you,’ he said.

  ‘Next week, in London.’

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Everything is the same as usual. Except that I am in love.’

  ‘I know. I am in love too.’

  Aylmer was walking with his mother down to the particular garden bench where she sat to feed her two tame squirrels, and they were there, even though it was beginning to grow dark Aylmer. went back to the house to get food for them and passed Cynthia and Philip on the way.

  ‘You look sad, you two,’ he said. ‘Come and see the squirrels, I am going to get food for them.’

  They began to walk down towards the bench.

  ‘It will be all right,’ said Cynthia.

  But after lunch the next day Beatrice asked to see Aylmer.

  I have sometimes thought that but for Beatrice everything might have been all right. Nothing might have happened. Because that is one of the things about grown up life: there are situations, people poised, something has been set in motion, and then, somehow, nothing happens, time passes, the situation dissipates into a hundred little sidelines, the people move, change, disappear, and nothing really after all has happened it has just been another moment in a shifting pattern, a particularly complex grouping of objects, having as far as one can tell no meaning at all.

  But I may be wrong about Beatrice, because hers was a very minor role. She was only the agent, and there are always agents.

  So here is Beatrice with her yellow face, confronting Aylmer across his desk. He is wearing a cricket shirt, open at the neck, and grey flannel trousers held up rather bunchily by an ancient leather belt, she is in her dark uniform, cuffs, cap and all. On this yellow face is malevolence, self righteousness, prudery, lasciviousness, and pride: the combination is ghastly. She is suffering, poor woman, but she is very unpleasant all the same.

  Aylmer smiles politely, thinking Good God, the woman must be ill.

  ‘Yes, Beatrice?’

  Holding a green glass paperweight comfortably in his hand, a good lunch just over, a summer afternoon outside, his books, his family, his country, his duty, his hopes. ‘Yes, Beatrice?’ Afterwards he will walk down to the river the children were talking of bathing. He will walk down with Cynthia to see them, looking at the roses on the way.

  ‘I wish to give notice, Sir Aylmer.’

  ‘Oh dear, Beatrice, I am very sorry to hear that. Have you spoken to Her Ladyship about it?’

  ‘No, Sir Aylmer. I thought it best to come to you.’

  ‘I see. Well, as you know, she usually deals with these things, and no doubt if there was some little difficulty which could be sorted out she’d be the best person to help you. But if you’ve definitely made up your mind.’

  ‘There was a particular reason why I preferred to come to you, Sir Aylmer. The reason for my giving in my notice has to do with Her Ladyship herself. There have been goings on.’

  ‘Oh really? Oh well, let’s not go into it, Beatrice. Let’s just say that.’

  ‘Such as I am not used to.’

  ‘Quite. Yes. I’m sorry to hear it.’

  ‘I have seen a lot of things in my time and felt it my duty to make no mention of it. But this is something different. I couldn’t stay in such a house, Sir Aylmer, not with things like that going on. It’s sin, outright sin. Such as I am not used to.’

  ‘Yes, I see. Well, Beatrice, if you’ve made up your mind.’

  ‘Nor would you wish to condone it, Sir Aylmer, that I am sure of. They should be punished for it, as they will be in afterlife, that I do know. But I couldn’t stay with that going on I nearly packed my bags there and then, when I found them. But then I thought it my duty to stay and see you. Found them there sleeping, I did, in the broad daylight in the morning. Naked but for a sheet, the two of them, and all the room upside down. And if that isn’t sin I don’t know what is. Her and her own nephew that we all thought was like a son to her. Not but what I’ve had my suspicions. You get to know when you’ve suffered a bit yourself, you get an eye for treachery.’

  ‘Beatrice, I don’t quite know what you are saying, but I think you are unwise to excite yourself. I think it would be best if I just accepted your notice and we left it at that.’

  ‘It’s as you wish, Sir Aylmer. It’s nothing to do with me. It’s not my affair. If you think you can leave it at that with a thing like that going on in your own family, with your wife deceiving you with your nephew every time you turn your back, well and good, that’s what I say. It’s no concern of mine, that’s what I say.’

  ‘Please leave.’

  ‘I am only trying to do my duty, Sir Aylmer. I wanted to go there and then, as I said, but I thought, having been in the family all these years, I thought, I can’t let him go on in ignorance, I thought.’

  ‘I have asked you to leave. I accept your notice and I should be glad it you would be out of the house in an hour’s time.’

  ‘Of course it is impossible to expect gratitude, that I do realize. You don’t expect gratitude when you have seen as much of people as I have. But to be turned out of the house without so much as –’

  ‘Get out. Or I shall ring for James to carry you out. And then go away. If you are not out of the house by 4 o’clock I shall send for the police.’

  Cynthia was resting when Aylmer went to find her. She usually lay on her bed for half an hour or so after lunch and often went to sleep, but today she was awake.

  Aylmer came in and said, ‘Rather a beastly thing has happened.’

  She sat up ‘I can see it has. Tell me quickly what it is.’

  He sat down on the edge of her bed. ‘Beatrice came to see me. To give her notice.’

  ‘That’s not a beastly thing. It’s rather a good thing. She’s been very peculiar lately.’

  ‘I know. I think that’s what it was really. But she said some extraordinarily unpleasant things.’

  ‘Poor Aylmer. How horrid for you. Why did she go to you and not to me?’

  ‘Well, that’s the trouble, you see. The unpleasant things were about you.’

  ‘Were they indeed? The old beast. Never mind, don’t tell me, it will only annoy me. I suppose I have been rather sharp with her lately, but she has been so forgetful.’

  ‘She seemed to be trying to tell me something about you and Philip. I didn’t want to listen.’

  Cynthia had been sitting up in bed. Now she turned and slid out from under the covers. She had taken off only her shoes, and these she now put on, bending over them, one hand on the bed. Then she walked to her dressing table and began to rearrange her hair, standing in front of the mirror she had bought to replace the one which Philip had broken.

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She’s obviously completely twisted. I shut her up immediately, of course I’ve told her to be out of the house within an hour.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said she had found you both in here when she came to call you one m
orning. She said you were both in the bed.’

  Cynthia stopped combing her hair. After a moment she turned towards. Aylmer and looked at him. He returned her glance apologetically.

  She said, ‘I can’t tell you how glad I am that Beatrice said that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I have been wanting to talk to you about it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I need your help, Aylmer. Please help me, as you always do’

  ‘Of course,’ he was totally at a loss. She looked so serious that he had an idea that it might be something to do. With money.

  ‘This thing with Philip,’ she said. ‘I am in such trouble about it, and I am so thankful to think that now you will know about it and be able to help me.’ She sat down on a chair facing him, her hands clasped on her lap. ‘I have been in such a muddle.’

  He merely nodded.

  She went on ‘It seemed so simple. There was so much love, you see. And also there was the fact that I knew such things did exist in other people’s lives and didn’t make them stop being what they were, you know what I mean? But then when you came back it all changed. You remember the night you came back and I couldn’t sleep and walked about in the garden half the night? I was thinking about it, you see, having not allowed myself to think about it before I was realizing that it was a treacherous thing to have done, and that there weren’t any excuses after all. Can you see at all how it happened?’

  He looked as though he had become several stones heavier, staring at her from the edge of her bed. ‘I’m sorry. I just don’t know what you are talking about.’

  Her face was smooth with the calm of confession.

  ‘You know how much I have always loved him, and how it had never interfered in the least with what I feel for you. I let that mislead me. I suppose I didn’t understand my own emotions. But, you see, I have never had to distrust my own emotions before. I have always thought it was perfectly safe and right to follow them. But I see now that it was wrong, quite wrong. That is why I want you to know all about it. So that you can help me, so that we can see that no harm comes of it. But you will have to help me. Because I still have the emotions. I mean I have them worse than ever. You will help me?’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘I mean, keep me safe, from Philip.’

  He frowned heavily, ‘You mean, he has been bothering you?’

  ‘You haven’t understood at all.’ She clasped her hands more firmly together. ‘Please, Aylmer, try to understand. I am in trouble, don’t you see? I am in love with him. I can’t help it. But I want to do the right thing. I want you to help me.’

  ‘In love with whom?’

  ‘With Philip.’

  ‘You are in love with Philip,’ he repeated dully.

  ‘But I want you to help me. And to help him. If I had known I would never have done it. I didn’t know what it would mean.’

  ‘What what would mean?’

  ‘What we did. It seemed so simple.’

  He shut his eyes for a moment. Then he said, ‘You mean that Beatrice’s story was true?’

  ‘Yes. That’s why I need your help, you see.’

  ‘But that was incest,’ he said.

  ‘Incest?’ She looked surprised.

  ‘Yes. He’s your nephew.’

  ‘Oh, but by marriage only.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You are his father’s brother’s wife.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It is incest.’

  They sat in silence until she said, tentatively, ‘Does it matter what name we call it?’

  ‘It is not a question of calling it a name,’ he said in his heavy voice. ‘It is incest.’

  ‘Yes, I see But not a – well, what I mean is, not a very close sort of incest, surely?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘It is still incest.’

  Now it was she who looked baffled.

  ‘In my own family,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t ask you to forgive me or anything like that,’ she said. ‘Only to help me, to help us all.’

  He still stared at her.

  ‘Incest is committed by the lower classes in remote country districts,’ he said without expression.

  ‘Aylmer,’ she appealed.

  ‘It is impossible.’ He stood up and beat his hands together. ‘It is impossible, impossible. Tell me it is not true.’

  She only looked at him with concern.

  ‘Philip. Ah.’ He gave a sort of low intermittent shout. It was the noise that Members of Parliament make during each other’s speeches, a sort of ‘row row row row row.’ Then he said, ‘Philip I’ll find him, I’ll – ’ and went to the door.

  ‘Aylmer, please, this is all wrong.’ She ran after him and took his arm.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ he said, scraping the words up through his throat.

  He pulled the door open and rushed down the stairs.

  We were all sitting in the drawing room, where we had gone after lunch for a quiet hour or so before beginning more energetic amusements. Philip was reading in an armchair, Edmund talking in a desultory way about shooting to one of the young men, the rest of us sewing or reading or talking quietly.

  Aylmer burst in. He looked most terribly ill. None of us had ever seen him look like that before. He went up quite close to Philip and stood looking down at him, and trying to speak.

  ‘You have, you have,’ he began.

  Philip did not move, and after, one startled look at him turned his eyes back towards his book as if he were reading. His face went a sort of yellowish colour.

  Then Aylmer, failing to speak, turned and walked heavily out into the garden. Edmund was going to follow him, but by that time Cynthia had come in and she restrained him, putting her hand on his arm and saying, ‘No, Edmund. It would be better to leave him alone for a little.’

  So we left him alone.

  And in the evening Kitty found him dead in the river, floating face downward in the pool where she had gone to swim.

  22

  Here is Philip in what seems to be a room in Hell. Move a little this way, pushing through the crowd, and you will see him better, through the smoke and the fire coloured light, dancing violently, with his hair fallen over his white face and his eyes frenzied, possessed by the music no, desiring to be possessed by the music but not possessed. And he is sweating, that is sweat on the white face, not tears, for though his eyes were watering that is only because of the smoke, and the sweat is understandable because the heat is terrible in this hellish night club, and he is dancing ragtime with the same ungainly over enthusiasm with which his grandsons fifty years later throw themselves into the Twist. (He has several grandsons, bright-faced public schoolboys of a now rather outdated type, trusting to their grandfather’s name to get them jobs in Lloyds or a decent firm of stockbrokers). But of course he is not driven by their simple love of noisy exercise, it is less than a week since Aylmer died, and Aylmer’s death was fairly heavy on his mind for longer than that.

  Horgan had a name, James, but even the girl called him Horgan. At least she was hardly a girl, being nearer forty than thirty. She was called Leslie, and lived in a flat in Bayswater with her seven-year old daughter. She had been more or less bequeathed to Horgan by a former associate of his, a Lebanese import export man whose companion she had been for some years during his visits to London. This Mr Harouni used to spend eight months of the year in London and the other four in West Africa with his wife and children. Now in his old age he was handing over his business to his sons and retiring with his wife to the Lebanon. He had suggested to Horgan that the latter might care to take an interest in Leslie because she was likely to be lonely and because he himself would prefer more varied sexual amusements during his now briefer and less frequent stays in London.

  Horgan paid the rent of the flat in Bayswater but did not move in there because that would have meant an intimacy of which he was by now temperamentally incapable. He stayed in his hotel, but visited Leslie nearly every even
ing on his way back from the office. She usually cooked him dinner – she was quite a good cook – and sometimes he took her to a musical show or for a drive in a hired car out into the country. It was as near to regular domesticity as he wished to get, and she made no complaints if he was too busy to see her for several days. The arrangement pleased him.

  ‘A man needs a woman,’ he said to Philip. ‘A regular woman. Keeps him in trim. But you don’t want to waste time and energy messing about chasing them. You want a steady convenient arrangement that’s to everyone’s advantage. She gets something out of it, I get something out of it. That’s good business.’

  Philip wondered what they talked about, since he regarded Horgan when it was not a matter of figures as probably the dullest man in England, but when he had seen them together once or twice he understood that they did not exactly converse. She talked about her family, her little girl’s exploits at school, her mother’s quarrel with her aunt in Manchester, her brother in law’s stomach troubles. Horgan half listened, occasionally putting in a sceptical comment on someone’s behaviour. When he felt like talking he talked about his business, and Leslie half-listened, occasionally putting in a question to keep him going, or sounding a dutiful note of admiration. They seemed well enough contented with each other.

  Philip returned to London immediately after Aylmer’s death was discovered. He simply left the house, and in the crisis no one really saw him go. When he went to his office the next morning the papers were already full of the news of the Cabinet Minister’s mysterious death, together with the first suggestions of the rumours which soon briefly occupied London – was it accident, suicide, murder? Was it the suffragettes, the Irish, or the prelude to a nasty political scandal?

  Horgan said, ‘See your uncle kicked the bucket.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Philip.

  ‘Bad luck,’ said Horgan. ‘Nothing to do with politics, was it?’

  ‘No,’ said Philip.

  Horgan asked no more questions, either then or later. Philip thought at first that it might be delicacy on his part, then he wondered whether it might be embarrassment, because of some idea Horgan might have that Aylmer’s losses over Cape Enterprises had contributed to his suicide, later he realized that Horgan asked no questions because he was not interested in knowing the answers. This absence of curiosity about anything not immediately connected with the manipulation of money seemed to Philip marvellous. It was also, for the time being, soothing, and Philip resolved to spend as much of his time as possible with Horgan. He found that by being with him he came to know the workings of his mind, and to admire them for their efficiency and speed. At the same time he saw that Horgan, in spite of his idea of himself as a man who ‘thought big’, lacked imagination, and this Philip thought should be his own contribution to their association. As his knowledge increased and his suggestions became more useful, he was pleased to notice the adaptability which Horgan displayed, and the ease with which he absorbed Philip’s ideas, showing no sign of resentment or offended vanity. This was the beginning of a long partnership.