‘I’ve left my car in the stable-yard at the Hall,’ Gaston said. ‘Walk over with me. Or rather, since it’s such a lovely day, let’s make a detour through the park, Caspar.’
‘Yes, by all means.’ Caspar, if surprised, was also gratified. Here, he might have been feeling, was a busy man inviting his company. It seemed to Gaston that Caspar Ferneydale must be a lonely fellow in his own way. He had made a small name for himself in circles Gaston knew little about, but he must nevertheless strongly feel that his was a disregarded voice. So there was an element of benevolence in Gaston’s proposal. But a further feeling was at work. The minds of Riches and Ferneydales alike appeared clouded by a good deal of ignorance. And ignorance was always dangerous, and the struggle against it was what science was about. Gaston believed in achieving clarity – even, as now, within a domestic context with which his own connection was less intimate than he would have wished. But he was aware that there was a certain hazard in this, and that he must beware of behaving like some fatal Ibsenite character convinced that a truth must be brought into the open, come what may.
‘I had a chat with your father this morning,’ he said when he and Caspar had gained the park. ‘I gave him some account of Fulke’s villa in the Dordogne. It’s rather a pleasant spot, don’t you think?’
‘I’ve never been there – any more than my parents have.’
‘Well, it is a bit out of the way.’ Gaston said this easily, as a man might do who wants to pass lightly over some mildly embarrassing disclosure. This had the effect of a little drawing Caspar out.
‘As he has had the place for so many years,’ he said, ‘it sounds rather like a rift in the family, I suppose. But there’s nothing of the kind. It’s just a matter of a difference of interests, and of Fulke going his own way. When we were both younger – and particularly when we were undergraduates – he and I were a good deal in one another’s confidence. But I confess that to have rather faded out. Do you know, Charles? I believe it’s partly because I had ambitions for Fulke which he feels he hasn’t justified. Not that they weren’t his own ambitions. I wanted his name to be like Hardy’s, or somebody of that sort.’
‘Well, at least he hasn’t turned out a merely popular writer. Fulke is just on the fringe, wouldn’t you say? Just short of being received by the mandarins of criticism. Peculiarly galling, come to think of it.’ Gaston was now directing the walk he had proposed, and it was in the direction of the centre of the park. ‘I never had a brother myself,’ he said, ‘so I don’t know what brothers tell each other. Can you remember’ – this came from Gaston as a merely whimsical start of mind – ‘anything particularly astounding that your brother offered up as a confession to you?’
‘I think it was when he told me about having his first woman.’ Caspar Ferneydale produced this without a moment’s hesitation, since he too was a devotee of truth after his own fashion. ‘It was something horribly low and crude, but I suppose more young men have gone through it than not. He had a whore in Paris – but it was mixed up in some way I’ve forgotten with a glimpse or vision of much less unpolished ungodliness. Anyway, it set him mad about women. I think even my parents know how, in that direction, he was leading a pretty dissolute life. And I had hoped his marriage would put an end to that state of affairs. Or at least put a brake on it. I hope it has.’
‘I don’t recall Sophie Dix as ever having been likely to remain a charmer for very long. Good Lord! We’ve come quite a way. Here’s your ancestral lake, Caspar. I say – do you remember that bathing party?’
‘Very well, Charles. But I don’t think I’d care to repeat it now.’
This was an unsurprising remark. Even as a confessed duck-pond the expanse of water before them cut a poor figure. Its surface was scummy; any close approach to it would have been much impeded by hemlock and thistle; and something was happening in its inconsiderable depth which was occasioning a bad smell. The diving board had vanished. The little bathing hut was without a roof.
‘I don’t think anything of the sort ever happened here again,’ Caspar said suddenly and not without agitation. ‘Fulke got it up to please Penelope. I don’t know whether it did.’ Caspar paused on this. ‘I have a notion,’ he blurted out, ‘that he wanted to marry her. When she was a schoolgirl, remember! And there was something about a play. He went to see her in a play at school, although he hadn’t the shadow of an excuse for going near the place. He made up some cock-and-bull story about a great-aunt or something. But that somehow finished it. And in no time Fulke had married Sophie.’
‘It does sound odd.’ After a moment’s silent contemplation of the stagnant pool, Gaston risked an impertinent question. ‘Has Penelope talked much about all that?’
‘I don’t think she’s ever mentioned it. Perhaps she is unaware of what was happening, and has forgotten all about it.’
‘Will Fulke have forgotten all about it? I expect he has, being such a Lothario type.’
‘Somehow I think not. I have a queer memory – vague and I can’t document it – of Fulke’s feeling he had met with some major reverse; with the sort of thing that marks a man.’
Gaston again reacted with a period of silence. He was wondering whether this had gone far enough. But there were things he wanted to know; and there were things he was most curious to know whether Caspar knew. He decided on a frontal attack.
‘Caspar,’ he said, ‘you can’t be totally unaware that your brother’s sexual make-up isn’t quite the common one?’
‘What on earth do you mean, Charles?’ It took Caspar only a moment to realise that this was a completely dishonest response, and he substituted another. ‘How can you know anything about Fulke’s sexual constitution?’
‘Personal experience, Caspar. That water-party, for a start. It was certainly brought into being for Penelope – or for the Penelope who was to play Rosalind playing Ganymede. Your brother had nothing else in his head. All the same, he spared me a glance. He thought I was asleep, and he spared me a glance. I’d had it elsewhere once or twice before. As a boy.’
‘I don’t disbelieve you.’ Caspar spoke quite quietly now. ‘But it can have been no more than a hang-over from our bloody public school. Damn it, Charles! It’s notorious that Fulke has been sleeping with women all round the globe.’
‘I wouldn’t dispute that for a moment. But personal experience takes me a bit further. To my visit to Fulke’s villa, Le Colombier, a couple of months ago. He showed me one or two distinctly curious things, and it was again faintly by way of making passes at me. It’s rather weird to experience that, actually under a wife’s nose, and with a kid playing on the terrace outside. But you see the really amazing fact. It’s that Fulke simply doesn’t know what’s what. Do you understand? He’d got me flat wrong – and that after considerable casual acquaintance. The truth is that Fulke’s in a confused bisexual mess. He’s what Wilde or somebody wittily called a bimetalist. Actually, there was a scrap of alternative currency already in the house. A young secretary – supposed, incidentally, by your innocent father to be of the female gender. He was called Cyril.’
‘I believe there have been several of them.’ Caspar had opted for candour. ‘How about Sophie? Does she know? If so, how can she put up with it?’
‘Sophie’s so stupid she mayn’t know. Or perhaps she’s thinking of Silvan – who, incidentally, is a tough little brute. It can’t be a question of money. We all know that Sophie is quite the heiress in her own right.’
‘Charles, you’ve probably read a lot about this sort of thing. What happens to men such as you say Fulke is when they grow older?’
‘They just go on leading tormented lives. And I don’t think it can be said to be because of a sense of sin – or not of sin as you yourself probably conceive it. They retain that Don Juan urge to subjugate woman after woman, but there’s no deep emotional satisfaction involved. They’re in bed with an object: put it that way. But their hope of the both-ways thing, of a satisfying relationship both in bed and out of it
– of love, in a word – lies with other men. And they often turn to resenting the universe at large. Unless they’re lucky in their bonding and it turns to a permanent thing. It does sometimes happen that way.’
‘It’s horrible – horrible and tragic.’ Caspar Ferneydale was now deeply disturbed. ‘My parents must never know. And, although I bear Fulke no ill-will, I can’t stand the idea of his ever having given as much as a thought to Penelope.’
‘Penelope knows nothing about it?’
‘Of course not. How should she? If Fulke actually proposed to her, or something like that, it can’t be more than a vague memory of an odd occurrence in near-childhood. Fulke’s hardly ever in her head. I can swear to that.’
‘You mustn’t take too grim a view of it yourself, Caspar.’ It seemed to Gaston that he had been foolish in letting his zeal for getting things clear activate an anxiety which had hitherto been no more than slumbering in Caspar’s mind. ‘These things happen in families quite a lot. I come across them from time to time even in a quiet little practice like mine.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Caspar had halted, turned round, and appeared to propose returning to the vicarage without further word. But then he changed his mind.
‘Charles,’ he said urgently, ‘you won’t talk about these matters with Penelope? It’s just not fit that a woman—’
‘Quite so.’ Gaston cut in rather brusquely with this. ‘I can promise not to initiate any discussion of them with your wife.’
‘Then that’s all right,’ Caspar said. But he lingered for a moment before walking away. He had not, perhaps, been wholly satisfied with the form in which this promise had been given to him.
X
The years like great black oxen tread the world, And God the herdsman goads them on behind. Henry Rich might not have extended his appreciation of Yeats so far as to approve this image, which is scarcely compatible with an orthodox view of the activities of the Deity. But certainly at Mallows the years continued to trudge along, and it is possible that Penelope Ferneydale found them at least dun-coloured for the most part. Mr Rich published a book which had been ingeniously suggested to him by Dr Gaston as a species of occupational therapy: a small anthology of pieces, both in poetry and prose, English, French and Latin, in which the fact that all things flow held a prominent place. Fugit irreparabile tempus was the epigraph on the title-page, and Mr Rich gave the whole thing a further touch of learning by referring to it invariably as a parergon – a word which sufficiently curious persons looked up in their dictionaries and discovered to mean something like a by-product of graver labours. This rather dreary book was civilly noticed by a number of reviewers.
Caspar also produced his book, and it was received very well indeed in the circles for which it was designed. In fact Caspar looked like coming into his own at last, and it was therefore the sadder that he was killed in a railway accident within a few months of his work being published. Fulke came to the funeral, stayed for a decent number of days with his parents at the Hall, and returned to a life which nobody any longer knew much about. Fulke’s writing was declared by the critics to have deteriorated a little, and his fortune was known to have increased a great deal. It was asserted by some – but less on actual evidence than as an inherently probable conjecture – that he was now separated from his wife. Anything more scandalous than this found no circulation at Mallows.
That Penelope had been left childless as well as a widow was a state of affairs striking her father in two lights. It added to the calamity that his daughter should be without even one infant for whom to care. He grieved over this. Yet it was not an altogether unfortunate circumstance, if looked at from a dispassionate and realistic point of view. Penelope might have been left with three pairs of twins. And what came to her through the arrangements made at the time of her marriage, although not paltry, fell short of what might have been desired. It had to be Mr Rich’s hope that his daughter, perhaps in two or three years’ time, would make a second marriage more satisfactory than the first in point of material interest. There would still be plenty of time for her to bear children in reasonable number.
But this prudent and hopeful thinking did nothing to alter the present fact, which was that Penelope turned thirty was just where, a dozen years before, it had been predicted by some that she was only too likely to end up. She was the childless daughter of a widower of many years’ standing, and as that widower was the incumbent of a rural parish, she had more than half the chores of that parish on her hands. Mrs Ferneydale at the Hall helped, but with benevolence rather than activity. She commanded, that is to say, reasonable sums of money, which she applied to charitable uses under Penelope’s direction. But these were years in which rural life was changing in various ways; social relations were changing under the impact of social legislation; Penelope found it easy to feel something outmoded and even archaic in the role she was called upon to fill.
And during these years nothing much seemed to happen. People were growing older, no doubt, but only in Mr Rich’s case could this be called very evident. Charles Gaston, who had so injudiciously brought to the surface of Caspar’s mind circumstances which had only vaguely been troubling it, found himself distinctly unsettled by Caspar’s death, and in fact revived thoughts about Caspar’s widow which would have been entirely idle had Caspar lived. Then – too soon, perhaps, and from his own sense that the years were slipping treacherously by – he asked her to marry him. Penelope’s reply was instant and seemingly convinced. It was not her intention, she said, ever to marry again. If she thus saw herself as an inconsolable widow in the Victorian taste it was possibly because she had before her the example of her father, with whom widowerhood seemed now to be a settled thing. Slowly after this, however, her secret feeling came to approximate to that of a princess (or a vicar’s daughter) entranced in a tower, obscurely expectant of what didn’t turn up. It was a kind of existence in which, paradoxically, those years seemed less to linger than to slip unobtrusively by. On Sundays she frequently found herself joining in a hymn asserting that the daily round, the common task, should furnish all she ought to ask. Several remote relations, hitherto not much bothering about the Mallows Riches, became aware they had a duty to her, and once or twice in a twelvemonth she would pay a family visit, or join in a continental holiday with people she only slightly knew.
Mrs Martin, who had long ago evinced a disposition to look purposively ahead in Penelope’s interest, was the one person to seek some radical change in the situation, and to keep in mind the fact that her former pupil was still a young woman, with a life to live which might somehow be advantageously changed from the life she seemed settled in now. The crux of the problem appeared to Mrs Martin’s mind to be the vicar. Time, once more, and a certain advancement in her material circumstances following upon deaths and bequests in her family, had turned her into a person of property, and therefore of greater consequence in Mallows and the small world around it. Were she minded, she could even act with some degree of eccentricity without attracting censure. Eventually she decided that nothing but good – meaning Penelope’s good – would result were she to supplant the enchanted princess as the mistress of the vicarage and presiding lady in the parish. Elderly people, long known as intimate friends, frequently enter upon mutually supportive and convenient marriages. There was no reason why she should not become, even at this late hour, the second Mrs Henry Rich.
Or there was no reason except Henry Rich himself, a man now older than his years and settled in his ways. But Mrs Martin felt this to be no insuperable obstacle. The main difficulty lay in divining Penelope’s inner mind were such a radical change to be revealed as on the domestic carpet. In fact it had to be discussed with Penelope before any action could be taken. Mrs Martin, whose thoughts were never of a facile order, was far from underestimating the difficulty and hazard of this. In the end she discussed it first with Dora Quillinan.
Dora had by this time made the career she had promised herself, and in a business
world still unhabituated to seeing a woman’s name in a list of company directors. She probably knew more about James Ferneydale than anybody else did, but she seldom made him a topic of conversation during her visits to the vicarage – which she was still not too preoccupied to pay every now and then. When consulted by Mrs Martin she agreed that something should be done, and that the doing of it could fall well within her own range of activity. She could, as she expressed it, ‘float’ Penelope into agreeable and reasonably remunerative employment in no time at all.
‘But that isn’t quite my idea,’ Mrs Martin said. ‘Penelope still isn’t too well off in her own right, but she has quite enough to make do without seeking employment. What I’d like to free her for is a successful second marriage. I had hopes, you know, of Charles Gaston. But that seems to have hung fire.’
‘Then Penelope needs a wider field of choice. A job would put her in the way of meeting eligible men in a way that just doesn’t happen at Mallows. Ideally, Mrs Martin, her getting a job, and meeting up with the right suitor, and learning that you and her father were proposing to get married, should tumble more or less on top of one another in that order.’
‘I see the force of that, Dora.’ Mrs Martin also felt uneasy about it, and quickly discovered why. ‘I’ve been forming a plan,’ she said. ‘And I’ve drawn you into that plan – which turns it into a conspiracy. I doubt whether one should make plans for other people at all, however much their welfare means to us. Plans should be about things like houses and dividends and literary projects and planting roses. You understand me?’
‘I certainly understand you. Making plans for people is a kind of reification, I suppose. Treating them as pawns, or at best as kings and bishops. But it’s not an argument that impresses me. I’m more conscious of the fact that any plan takes a measure of time to work out, and that then some unsuspected factor barges in and changes the whole scene. That’s always happening in business.’
A Villa in France Page 15
