Anthony asked who lived there now; and that special note of constraint which protests that you’re neither snobbish nor anti-Semitic infected Augustine’s voice as he named “Nathaniel Corcos, First Lord Tottersdown.” Very much richer than any previous owner, this one alone had made no attempt to alter the Abbey’s appearance: “The old boy feels it exactly suits his style—as a pure Sephardic Jew with a pedigree long as your arm and a fortune centuries-old whom everyone takes for a nouveau-riche.”
On arrival they found a crowd of hundreds milling around on the four or five acres of gravel, or fighting its way to a long white table where flunkies in gorgeous flunkery served hot punch: a tiny handful of horsemen surrounded by people with no idea what it meant, getting kicked. Younger hounds were barging their way through the throng like professional footballers: Whips and Huntsmen struggled vainly to get them under control, and cursed the silly women who tried to pat them and fed them on sausage-rolls. No wonder that Polly was left at home in a mob like this!
They caught one distant glimpse of Mary, on foot. Wisely she’d left her mount for the groom to hold till the final moment when hounds moved off; and now she was chaffing a tiny farmer who sat a Gargantuan beast which probably pulled the plough....
Then Augustine gave a sudden cry of delight, and darted away through the crowd towards the house. Hurrying post-haste after Augustine and blocked by a glowering Polly’s-age child on a Shetland pony so low he nearly fell over it, Anthony only acknowledged her “Damn you, look where you’re going you oaf!” by politely raising his hat without looking round. Then he found Augustine engaged with another young man, and clearly both overjoyed at the meeting—although this only showed in their twinkling eyes, and at first they hardly spoke (but when they did speak, both spoke at once).
For Augustine was not the only truant lately returned to Dorset. Archdeacon Dibden was Rector of Tottersdown Monachorum and this was Jeremy, just got back from a four-months spent in Russia and Central Europe. That was to be his last fling of freedom before getting swallowed up in the Civil Service, a fledgling Assistant Principal.... “Call me a ‘Postulant’ rather,” he’d just been insisting before Augustine joined them: “For what more strictly enclosed Contemplative Order exists than the English Civil Service?”
With him were Ludovic Corcos (the son of the house), who was one of his oldest friends; and an even more dazzling Gentile lady. Augustine’s attention was fully engaged, but she quite took Anthony’s breath: she couldn’t be more than her twenties, and visibly winced when Jeremy called her “My Aunt.”
When hounds had at last moved off, half of the crowd went home. The rest of them tried to “follow,” but didn’t know where to go: for the Hunt had instantly disappeared in a mist which made the occasional horn or the hound giving-tongue seem to come from anywhere, back or front. In twos and threes they slowly zig-zagged about, plodding in twenty acres of heavy plough until they succeeded in reaching the nearest fence—to find that beyond it lay thirty acres of heavy plough, where they finally stuck.
Watching the last of these plodders fade in the mist, “La nostalgie de la boue ...” murmured Jeremy: “Strange, that this British liking for playing in mud has only a name in French.”
“There’s probably something about it in Freud,” said Ludovic.
“Indeed there is!” cried Jeremy’s Aunt.
“Then his grandfather must have been married twice,” thought Augustine.
*
It still was too early for lunch, so Ludovic led them up to his den. He closed the stained-glass window, swept a scimitar off the sofa to let them sit and opened his limed-oak cocktail-cabinet.
“Mud and Blood—the English sportsman’s gods, his Heavenly Twins,” mused Jeremy: “Little wonder that under their aegis he won the War!” He paused while his good hand lifted the paralyzed one to clamp its fingers convincingly round his glass, then added, “At least in sports like sailing or mountaineering the life at risk is your own.”
“Chaps do get killed,” said Augustine.
“Not actively killed by the fox—more’s the pity.”
“Then what about pig-sticking?” Ludovic interposed. “There, if you take a tumble the boar himself disembowels you.”
“Ugh!” said Jeremy’s Aunt (by now they were all of them calling her “Joan”).
“The man with only his spear, the charging boar with his tushes—and hard, like stubbing your spear in the trunk of an oak.”
“Ludo!” Jeremy cried: “You little savage, don’t tell me you really enjoyed it!”
Inwardly Anthony boiled. Sure, he’d got wise in the end to Augustine’s corny notions of fun; but this Jeremy guy with his polio arm.... You’d take that Yid for the only White Man out of the bunch by the way the other two talked!
Meanwhile in Ludovic’s mind was revived that intoxicant, loose-reined leaping out of the dark of the Moorish cork-woods: out over boulders and sunlit palmetto, and galloping blind with eyes for only the jinking quarry in front where a fox-hunter wouldn’t have risked his horse at a walk. Boars have killed lions.... He silently smiled at his manicured nails as he dreamed of his twelve-and-a-half hand Barb and a Tangier boar standing ten-and-a-half with its back to the Rocks.... But then some sixth sense took him across to the window. At what he saw, looking down through the colored glass, he stiffened: that enigmatical huddled group on the gravel, which suddenly changed its hue as it crossed from the amber pane to the red.... He turned to his guests: “Forgive me a moment, Father may need my help. I’ll be back, but meanwhile fill up your glasses.”
He slipped from the room.
“Fill up your glasses....”
The Bedouin say that a man’s soul travels only as fast as a camel: the man whose body moves any faster must wait for his soul to catch up. Jeremy’d come home much too quickly, by train—and had left his soul far behind where the singing Danube giddies through the Visegrad Narrows. Spotting a Sliwowitz bottle he poured a man’s-size tot for himself, then poured out one for Augustine.
Augustine accepted it, lost in dreams of his chase by the cops in the Dusy: the Bearcat’s plunge from the dam—and who says the fox can’t enjoy it, at least in retrospect?
Anthony’s homesick eyes were searching the labels in vain for Bourbon....
Joan had only eyes for Augustine. He looked so uncannily like his cousin Henry, killed in the War only five days after they’d secretly got engaged.
21
At Mellton Gilbert was glad to be spending the day alone, with so much to think out. But first he’d some tiresome letters to answer; and then he remembered he’d got to consider his figure these days, so made his reluctant way to the ex-Mausoleum which housed his squash-court. There he changed into shorts and for twenty minutes or so woke the cavernous echoes, practicing shots. After that he took a shower (thank God the water for once was really hot!).
With Asquith losing his seat (thought Gilbert, starting towards the house), things were tricky indeed. That business of choosing a Party Sessional Chairman.... When some of them tried for Collins (the new Chief Whip) the Little Welsh Goat had turned very nasty; and when it was put to the vote got elected (Gilbert himself had abstained: he profoundly distrusted Lloyd George, but when hitching wagons to stars it is fatal to hitch to the wrong one).
He crossed the lawn, where Polly in scarlet leggings and gloves was exercising her latest puppy as well as her governess. Vaguely he waved his racket, but Polly was too taken up with her puppy at first to respond until Miss Penrose sharply reminded her: then she shouted something he didn’t bother to hear....
On the loggia Susan Amanda was braving the raw December air in her pram; but he passed his encapsulated baby without a glance, for Gilbert by now was hungry for luncheon as well as so busy distrusting Lloyd George—and Lloyd George’s latest Land Reform ideas in particular. Any meddlesome mucking-about with the age-old, delicate structures enshrining the tenure of land was something which Gilbert regarded with righteous horror; and who could know m
ore about that than Gilbert, a model land-owner himself? But this latest scheme would be virtual Nationalization: something disastrous for farmers—they’d all be hamstrung by County Committees and town-bred officials who couldn’t tell late-sown barley from quitch; and disastrous for landlords, since all they would get for their land would be Lloyd George “Bonds”—not even hard cash. As for any young man who wanted to break into farming, he hadn’t a hope: for this hare-brained “hereditable tenure” idea accrued to some sitting tenant’s unmerited profit and penalized everyone else.
Gilbert lunched alone, then shut himself in his study and lit a rare cigarette to help him think.... That little Welsh crook had somehow smuggled a hint of this into the Party Manifesto, which Strachie declared had cost us a lot of votes in the agricultural West. This blatantly Socialist measure would have to be fought tooth-and-nail at the coming Party Convention, or else the “Liberal” Party must lose any rag of pretense to the name. He’d better join forces with some of those sensible chaps from the North: such men as Runciman ... Geoffrey Howard, of Castle Howard ... Charles Roberts, involved through his wife with the Carlisle Estates. These were sound Liberals all; and thoroughly sound about land, as well as hating Lloyd George.
Nobody really liked or trusted Churchill; but what a pity our arch-antisocialist should have left us just when we needed him most!
Pettier men might sneer at Winston, and call him a turncoat—indeed, a twice-over turncoat, because he had only crossed to the Liberal side in the first place just in time for the Liberal Landslide of 1906. But Gilbert was quite fair-minded enough to respect an integrity careless of cries of “Turncoat!” incurred on behalf of a Higher Loyalty.... Still, for himself he hoped that final sacrifice wouldn’t be called for—yet.
Gilbert had got thus far when a white-faced Wantage asked him to come to the telephone. Testily Gilbert told him to take a message; but Wantage insisted, the Master must speak himself. The call was from Tottersdown—something had happened, there’d been an accident.
Then a voice on the phone told Gilbert that Mary had had a fall. They wouldn’t know till the doctors had seen her of course, but she might have broken her back.
22
Mary hadn’t broken her back, she had broken her neck.
The cause of her fall was that glowering Polly’s-age child so low on her Shetland pony that Mary couldn’t see her before she began the jump, and had had to swing her horse half-round in the air as she landed. She fell on her head, and at first they had thought she was only stunned as she lay awry with her bowler-hat crammed down over her face; but then they noticed she didn’t seem to be breathing, and crowded round her telling each other to “Stand right back and give the lady some air!”
“Don’t be a fool!” said the child (who hadn’t even been touched): “Can’t you see she’s dead?”
“No I’m not!” (So Mary supposed she was saying, though only groaning hollowly into her hat.)
She even supposed she was struggling on to her feet, and was much surprised when she found that she hadn’t moved. Her head was dizzy, she didn’t know where she was but she felt no pain, and didn’t even feel bruised except for her face. She was quite unaware that she barely breathed: it was just she apparently couldn’t move, or feel—that neither pain nor volition could enter or leave her head, since the rest of her wasn’t there.... “I must be a cherub!” she thought; and passed right out just as somebody felt her heart and sent for a stretcher.
*
In Tottersdown Cottage Hospital, X-rays showed the seventh cervical vertebra cracked: she was “gravely ill.”
For hours Augustine and Gilbert sat in the medical smell of the Superintendent’s Office, each walled up in his own suspense and barely aware of the other; but then the doctor decided he’d have to allow them to see her now, or risk that they never saw her again alive.
When they reached the bed they found that pleasant, intelligent boyish face a swollen, unrecognizable black-and-blue with eyes too puffy to open. However she seemed to be conscious, and even endeavoured to speak though quite unable to make herself understood and dribbling over the sheet. When Gilbert tried to take her hand, he found her paralysis passed from the limp to a rigid stage like rigor mortis—as if her body already were really dead.
Yet the spark of life in her lingered on, and on. A few days later that rigor began to pass, the swelling and bruising began to subside: though even after her eyes could open again she still couldn’t properly see as they wouldn’t focus yet.
*
When a couple of weeks had passed and Mary was still alive (and had even begun to speak comprehensibly—just), the doctor began to call her a “hopeful” case. To Mary, he cheerfully talked about rest; but he told her husband and brother bluntly that though she now seemed likely to live the damage was done for good: the rest of her life would be spent in a chair.
He brought out charts. When that vertebra cracked, he explained, the dura mater (the sheath of the spinal cord) had got twisted and torn. Since the lesion was lower down than most of the brachial plexus she might recover the use of her arms: but certainly little more. Sensation as well as control was destroyed—except in time (perhaps) for her arms, and even some of her breast.... Meanwhile, however, she seemed to be making wonderful progress: her bladder already showed signs of working again unaided, which meant that the common danger of fatal kidney infection was almost past. In short, the autonomic system didn’t seem badly affected: she shouldn’t get gangrene or fail to digest her food, as the severed body was learning to work on its own.
When Gilbert asked how soon he could have her home, the doctor pointed out she would need a nurse for the rest of her life of course; and said that he knew of one he could specially recommend, who was used to spinal cases....
Frankly, Gilbert was marvelous: even Augustine was forced to admit he’d misjudged him when Gilbert—the arrant careerist—told the doctor he’d never resign the intimate care of his wife into other hands: for the rest of her life he would nurse her night and day, and sacrifice everything else. True he had little nursing knowledge as yet but surely could learn; and what a paralyzed wife would have need of most was love.
*
So Runciman, Howard and Roberts were left after all to fight Lloyd George on their own; and Gilbert informed the Whips they must write him off as a Liberal vote in the House. They could but respect his decision, but begged him at any rate not to resign his seat—it was much too precarious.
Meanwhile he studied medical books and badgered the Matron to teach him that kind of jiu-jitsu which nurses call “lifting.” However, the doctor insisted still that there must be a proper professional nurse in charge in case complications arose; but when Mary was moved to Mellton at last and the nurse arrived, that only served to show how right Gilbert was. There was little she didn’t know about nursing, but almost nothing she knew about anything else—and if Gilbert had not been constantly there as well, her talk would have driven intelligent Mary mad.
Indeed as it was Mary had “glooms” which were next thing to madness, spells of a nightmare confusion which couldn’t tell life and death apart. In these “glooms” her protective belief in total extinction at death should surely have saved her; but now that collapsed in the face of a bodiless conscious state so like the traditional soul-after-death. Perhaps its roots had never been more than emotional, deep in forgotten childhood terrors of hell: for now these ancient terrors raised their forgotten heads. Again and again they caused her to “dream” wide-awake she was dead, and helplessly being sucked into hell like a child in her bath down the plug-hole.
Augustine had rescued his pictures from Paris to hang in her room. The Renoir and even Cézanne were all right; but in Mary’s “glooms” the late Van Gogh made her worse, and it had to be moved. In her glooms there was one thing only could bring her back to reality: Susan Amanda’s weight, the first thing her arms had faintly begun to discern; and the baby’s warmth on a partially-sensitive breast.
Gilbert was blissfully happy: it seemed like a second honeymoon having Mary entirely dependent upon him at last. And at night it gave him a strangely elated feeling I can’t describe to be handling Mary’s body while Mary slept without it possibly waking her. Added to which, that awkward question of whether the errant Liberal Party deserved his support any longer was decently shelved: this couldn’t have come at any more opportune time.
Nowadays Joan was settled at Tottersdown running her widowed half-brother’s house, and in general keeping him company now that Whitehall was just about to swallow up Jeremy. Ludovic, Joan and Jeremy called at the Chase to inquire; and Gilbert was struck by the beauty of Joan just as everyone else was.
*
Before he landed, Augustine had meant to indulge his nostalgia for Wales as soon as Christmas at Mellton was over; but Mary’s accident stopped him. Meanwhile his agent was urging him: dry-rot had started in part of the Newton roof and it ought to be seen to at once, so now that Mary seemed out of danger he made up his mind to go there at least on a fleeting visit. But little time could be spared there enjoying the salty fresh air: for the first few hours at least must be spent with the expert he’d sent for, crawling about in the Newton rafters.
There they found dry-rot fungus far more extensive than first supposed. It was going to cost the earth to get rid of, for after such long neglect it would mean re-roofing at least one wing—of a house that size! The only alternative seemed to be pulling the whole wing down; but that would leave him with only a measly twenty-nine bedrooms as well as new kitchens to build, and the cost might be even larger. Augustine had never spent more than a tenth of his income, yet even so....
The land at Newton was strictly entailed and none, he knew, could be sold: he was lucky indeed in possessing another perhaps more viable property. This had once been a minor country estate on the fringes of ancient Swansea, which Swansea had swallowed and built-on and now was a thriving part of the town. The ground-rents brought him in little; but soon the earliest leases must start falling in (which would one day make him a very rich man indeed by the standards of West Wales gentry); and meanwhile, money could surely be raised....
The Wooden Shepherdess Page 19
