by Dennis Parry
I think that the same sort of familiarities probably went on with Andrew. Varvara was not essentially promiscuous, but she was an Ellison; as a family they wanted the best, and none of them would have thought it anything but common sense to explore the markets before deciding where to sell their goods.
I had tacitly assumed that contact with me and my cool British outlook would gradually wean Varvara away from her violent and melodramatic ideas. In fact the opposite began to happen. Continual exposure to a character like a superheated furnace was raising my emotional temperature to a point where fever distorted my judgment. I no longer thought it odd or unlikely that a conspiracy should be perpetually raging in the background of life; people put off their drab coverings and emerged as monsters or holy saints. I mention this because it helps to explain some of my more curious actions, and the slight fog which still hangs over my own and other people’s motives.
My obsession with Doljuk and the close idle existence of almost dreamlike luxury which I enjoyed no doubt contributed to my mental state. There was every temptation to lead a second life when the real one demanded so little effort. I felt like a fish in an aquarium. For a while it seemed as if the only threat, the big pike, whose shadow had once stirred our tank to alertness, was going to fade away completely.
For over a fortnight Cedric did not come near the house, and from Turpin I learnt that he was ill.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ I asked.
‘The usual, I s’pose.’
‘He has some complaint?’
‘Swimming in the ’ead,’ said Turpin vaguely. ‘Since a boy. That’s what they call it. ’s my belief, though, ’e goes proper queer at times. All of a sudden ’is mind gets a straight look at ’is nature and can’t stand it.’
‘Do you really mean that he has fits when he’s . . . not responsible?’
‘Well, sir, what d’you make of this? Many’s the time I’ve come quiet into a room when ’e thought ’e was alone. ’E’d be walking up and down talking to ’imself. And about ’imself, like ’e was another party. “Steady, Ellison,” I’d hear ’im say. “Steady. We’ve got to think this out. You weren’t given a first-class brain for nothing.” Then ’e turn round, so to speak, and be someone else praising up Mr. Bloody Cedric. “Reliable chap, Ellison, very sound. You always get a balanced view from Ellison.” ’
I am sure Turpin did not invent the habit. It chimed too well with Cedric’s obsessive self-absorption. Besides I did not need this evidence to believe that he was slightly mad. But whatever his precise affliction it did not last very long. Within a few days of this conversation his visits had recommenced. I returned from an afternoon walk to find Turpin in the hall, dabbing disgustedly at the hatrack with a housemaid’s brush.
‘What on earth are you up to?’
‘Oo sweeps a floor
As for God’s Law
Makes that and the action fine,’
said Turpin—‘I don’t bloody think!’ Without a pause he continued. ‘What do you s’pose? Mr. Bloody C. of course! Comes in ’ere and says the place is filthy and he’ll see ’is ma gets value out of keeping a pack of idle, greedy lackeys. I tell ’im I’m not a ruddy skiv . . .’
It was nevertheless noticeable that Turpin had not positively refused to obey the order. Yet he was a tough and independent old warrior. The fact reminded me that, despite various set-backs, Cedric wielded many of the powers of a master at Aynho Terrace.
Changing in irony to his society voice, Turpin continued: ‘Furthermore, sir, you are ’ighly privileged today. The old block ’as graciously brought ’is bloody chip along with ’im.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Miss Deirdre ’as bin released from the cotton-wool in order that she may pay us a call.’
‘To see her grandmother I suppose,’ I said indifferently.
‘She’s come round to make the acquaintance of ’er little cousin,’ said Turpin, mincing the words ferociously, ‘which will be so naice for them both—like ’Ell! One thing, the Bud isn’t ’aving any. ’E sent me up to fetch ’er from ’er room, but Ai regret to say she ’as locked ’erself in the convenience.’
I found the pair of them in the morning-room. Deirdre Ellison impressed me less unfavourably than I had expected. She was a tall girl with a face whose structure tapered down from a broad forehead to a pointed chin. She had striking eyes, between hazel and green in colour, and her mouth was conspicuously well-shaped. This was as well, for she wore it in a demure simper which could have been very unattractive. She did not approach the classic nobility of Varvara’s features, but I could imagine some men thinking her more sexually desirable. She was the younger of the two by about a year and a half.
‘Ah,’ said Cedric, ‘this is my young friend David Lindley, who occupies an indeterminate but comfortable position in the household. . . .’
No doubt he knew through Nurse Fillis that I had had something to do with the affair of the green writing-case. His remark was deliberately intended to make me feel a sponger.
A few minutes later he tried to be nasty again. I had politely given him a cigarette; after which I offered my case to the girl.
‘I’m afraid David’s ideas are a bit too emancipated for us,’ he said. ‘Where we simple, old-fashioned people come from young ladies of seventeen don’t smoke. Do they, Deirdre?’
‘No, Father,’ she said with toneless humility.
Besides his annoyance with myself, I could see that Cedric was in a raging temper over the snub from Varvara.
‘Sit up straight, Deirdre. You’re lolling like an old sack.’
‘Yes, Father. Is this better?’
‘Have you left school?’ I asked her, to make conversation.
‘I never went.’
Cedric intervened: ‘Deirdre has been delicate and I have had her taught at home—in my opinion the best sort of education for a young woman, at any rate from the point of view of a responsible parent.’
He gave me a glance of mingled suspicion and lubricity, contriving to suggest that I wanted to bundle his lamb into some vicious Parisian establishment.
It was a parting shot. Within a few moments he announced that he had business with Mrs. Ellison and was going to her bedroom.
As soon as his back was turned Deirdre said:
‘Now give me a cigarette.’
‘But I thought you didn’t smoke.’
‘Then you must have believed I was a pretty fair little . . .’
The timbre of her voice had changed entirely. Now it was rough and contemptuous. But what shook me was her choice of the final word. She let the obscenity drop with studied satisfaction.
‘I beg your pardon,’ I said.
‘Don’t sound so scared, I was only relieving my feelings.’
‘You do it pretty drastically for a girl who’s not allowed to risk the corrupting influence of school.’
‘That crap!’ she said. ‘Father knows best—but he doesn’t know what some of his selections as governesses were really like. One bitch who taught me German had been on the streets in Hamburg.’ She narrowed her eyes and smiled in a way which was not wholly unattractive. ‘But perhaps Father did know after all.’
‘Steady on,’ I said, really shocked by the innuendo. ‘You’re only doing this to get your own back for being continually bossed.’
‘That’s not a very brilliant discovery. . . . Father says you’re frightfully conceited—always putting up mature attitudes and imagining you’re impressing people. But don’t worry: he says as bad or worse about everyone behind their backs.’
‘It’s a pity,’ I said, ‘he doesn’t realize how generally that’s known.’
She was silent for some seconds, puffing at her cigarette. From her amateur style of smoking it did not look as if her outbreaks of defiance were as many as she implied.
Then she said: ‘It’s my cousin who brings out the worst in him. The things I’ve had to listen to about her!’
‘What?’ I said
, curious despite myself.
‘Well . . . about how she’s an adventuress like my Uncle Fulk who stole money . . . and how she bullies Grandma—Father says he wouldn’t be surprised if she did the old girl in.’
‘Nonsense!’
‘Just what I think,’ said Deirdre, enjoying herself. ‘You see I can’t help noticing that one moment poor Varvara is supposed to be an arch-fiend and the next she’s a poor sucker in grave moral danger . . .’
‘Who from?’
‘Why, you, of course! Father says you want to compromise her so that she has to marry you and then you hope you’ll get a whack at the Ellison money.’
‘By God,’ I said, ‘what a family you are!’
Deirdre nodded without resentment. She made me feel slightly sick, but I could not dislike her. There was something pathetic and vaguely courageous about her awful malapert defiance: something for which the term resistance-movement was coined years later.
Much to my surprise Varvara stalked in.
(I heard afterwards what had happened. Cedric had made a complaint to his mother. One of the few things which Mrs. Ellison would not tolerate, at any rate in her own sex, was overt bad manners. She had sent up her personal maid to knock on the lavatory door and express the strong hope that Miss Varvara would shortly be down to meet her cousin.)
‘I’ve been longing to meet you for ages,’ said Deirdre.
‘Not so,’ replied Varvara cryptically.
She took the other’s hand and wrung it as if it were a hen’s neck.
‘But you’re so smart!’ said Deirdre concealing her pain. ‘I’d heard—’
‘That I was a she-ox from the desert,’ said Varvara. ‘And you rejoiced.’
Deirdre, like many home-bred children, particularly females, had acquired a veneer of precocious social assurance. But Varvara bludgeoned her way through it in a couple of sentences. Deirdre suddenly looked as if she might burst into tears.
‘Oh dear, have I said the wrong thing?’
Unfortunately Cedric chose that moment to reappear. The sound of his daughter’s voice touched off his managerial instincts.
‘What’s the matter, Deirdre? What have you been saying?’
‘Nothing, Father.’
‘Then how could it be the wrong thing?’
‘I was just rather silly.’
‘Were you showing off?’
‘No, Father.’
‘I’ve had to speak to you before about that.’
This sort of slow baiting was very unacceptable to Varvara’s nature.
‘Your daughter spoke charitably and socially,’ she said, ‘to cover up a rough word of mine.’
An expression of bewilderment, followed by one which closely resembled gratitude, spread over Deirdre’s face. It had obviously never occurred to her that frontal opposition was also a way of dealing with her father. I felt, alas, that the lesson might be rather dangerous as applied to anybody who had to live in financial dependence on him.
I thought we were in for a damned unpleasant scene between Varvara and her uncle. But suddenly Cedric made a retching noise in his throat and swayed visibly. He took a couple of quick steps and flopped down in the nearest chair, putting his head down between his hands.
‘What’s the matter, Father?’ said Deirdre with a more genuine-sounding concern than I should have expected. ‘Is it one of your attacks?’
There we are, I thought, if that doesn’t just round off the picture! I should have realized without the need for a demonstration that when Cedric could not sufficiently assert his will by force he would fall back on an appeal to pity. ‘Wicked child, do you want to kill your kind papa—who will not be with you for long anyhow?’
Despite his recent illness, this seemed a very reasonable diagnosis, and it was not my fault that it turned out to be a little too smart.
After a couple of minutes Cedric got up, still looking somewhat groggy. He muttered a brief apology and then left accompanied by Deirdre.
‘On the way home,’ said Varvara, ‘perhaps he will die.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘When he lay in the chair I hoped the blood would start out of his nostrils.’
‘Really,’ I said, ‘it’s time you learnt to lay off this face-bashing attitude. It sounds perfectly ridiculous in England.’
‘You have murderers here also.’
‘The only person your uncle is likely to knock off is his wretched daughter. He’ll send her crazy, if he doesn’t look out.’
The fact that on impulse Varvara had defended her cousin did not mean that she trusted her.
‘They are in league,’ she said.
‘You wouldn’t think so if you’d heard what she was saying about him.’
‘That was to put you off your guard. The cubs scratch the tiger to sharpen their claws, but they are not quarrelling.’
‘Have it your own way,’ I said.
I was preoccupied with a discovery which I had just made. Life is very unjust, but a high proportion of bad men manage to pay themselves out in this world: they do it simply by breeding in their own likeness.
8
I had almost forgotten my uncle’s cable, and it came as a surprise when I was called to the telephone and heard his voice at the other end. He had to spend that day at the India Office, but in the evening I went round and dined with him in his Kensington hotel.
After we had chatted for a while, he asked me how I was enjoying myself at Aynho Terrace.
‘Not too boring, I hope.’
‘Not at all.’
‘I was afraid you might be a bit short of company.’
‘Mrs. Ellison has her niece staying—the one from China.’
My uncle whistled. ‘That ought to liven things up.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Fair inference from heredity.’
My memory went back to the days in Brittany.
‘Didn’t you once tell me that you’d met her father?’
He nodded.
‘On my great cloak-and-dagger odyssey—the one your aunt describes so excitingly. As a matter of fact I think Ellison was the only exciting thing about it.’
‘Did you go to Doljuk?’
‘No. He travelled down to meet me in Kashgar.’
‘Why?’
‘It was arranged,’ said my uncle with deliberate vagueness.
‘Do you mean that he was some kind of . . . British Agent?’
‘Now you’re getting like Edna. I can almost hear the rustling behind the arras. No. Ellison’s energies were directed to the great cause of Ellison. But he was very helpful to me. And his support was worth having in those parts.’
‘Perhaps you’d like to meet the daughter,’ I suggested.
My uncle assented but without quite the enthusiasm which I had expected. He was nearing the age when reminiscence is more enjoyable than fresh experience.
In the event it was just as well that he did not set any particular store on the occasion. Varvara had accepted an invitation to Sunday lunch, and earlier that morning I accompanied her to the Orthodox Church in Moscow Rd., for I had become curious about the creed to which she responded with so much fervour. I myself was impressed. I can still smell the incense and see the agonized Byzantine faces that looked down from the niches of the eikonostasis, and hear the sung litany, now plangent, now rounded and smooth like a blood-ruby. Beside me Varvara chanted in a voice which did more credit to her heart than her ear.
Afterwards the spiritual temperature fell sharply. As we stood outside on the pavement, I said:
‘We might as well go straight along to the hotel.’
‘What hotel?’
‘Where my uncle’s staying.’
Varvara gave an affected start of recollection.
‘Holy Christ,’ she said, ‘I have forgotten the date of your damned uncle! Goodness how sad!’
‘Just as well I came along to remind you.’
‘You see, David,’ she said, grasping me b
y the hand as if she were about to tear an espalier off a wall, ‘unfortunately I have pledged myself to another.’
‘Before or after I spoke to you?’
‘Long, long before,’ said Varvara with a pellucid candour which carried no conviction.
‘I suppose we’re being thrown over for Andrew and the Ritz?’
‘I cannot spoil his party.’
‘What about my wretched uncle’s? It’s just as bad for him.’
‘Ah, no,’ said Varvara with gentle reason. ‘You see, you are wrong about the Ritz. This party is in Andrew’s flat.’
‘What the hell difference does that make?’
‘Andrew’s food would be wasted,’ she said. ‘But your uncle will suffer no loss for what is not served in a hotel.’
I don’t know whether this was a flash of hard Doljuk logic or of the spirit which had made her grandfather conserve his eyewash. At the time I was too annoyed to speculate.
‘You’re behaving like a slut.’
There in front of the House of the Lord, where with glistening eyes she had lately extolled the virtues of forgiveness, Varvara gave me a heavy cuff on the side of the head. It hurt and I realized again, with a tinge of humiliation, how strong she was.
I think that perhaps my uncle looked on this trip to England as a holiday from women. At any rate he waved aside my vicarious apologies.
‘She only sprang it on me after we came out of church,’ I said resentfully.
He began to laugh.
‘Church!’ he said. ‘That’s an odd idea to associate with one of Ellison’s family.’
‘She’s very religious.’ Spitefully I added: ‘In a hysterical way.’
‘I suppose it’s reaction,’ said my uncle. ‘Frankly the only thing I didn’t like about Fulk was his militant godlessness. Besides it was a bloody nuisance to me personally. The main object of my cloak-and-dagger trip was to get together the handful of our countrymen who inhabited those regions, and to pump them. Unfortunately, I was naïve enough to imagine that it would promote goodwill and confidence if I collected them all at the same time. Two of my sources were missionaries, and Ellison could hardly open his mouth to them without jeering.’
