by Simon Raven
‘I shall be showing Fielding Gray and the rest that I am a man of mettle and purpose, who despises and rejects all they have to offer.’
‘Why are you so keen to reject them? You thought well enough of them once.’
‘Because at bottom they are trivial,’ said Jeremy.
‘They seem to me… Tom Llewyllyn and Fielding Gray…to have devoted themselves very seriously to difficult and demanding occupations. What is trivial,’ said Peter Morrison as was, a man who in his own estimation had done the same, ‘about that?’
‘Llewyllyn is an historian and an academic administrator: history, in the world as it is, is a useless luxury; and as for his administration, it is almost entirely done for him by his Secretary. Fielding Gray writes fiction,’ said Jeremy, ‘which is to say he invents lies. Hardly, my lord, a very serious form of endeavour.’
‘What a howling prig I have for a son. I much preferred you when you were footling with silly girls at Cambridge, spending my money – as it then was. A light-minded and light-fingered cad, but at least with a bit of sparkle and merriment about you.’
‘Yes,’ said Jeremy. ‘They always say that Saul of Tarsus was a very jolly fellow in the days of the tavern and the garden. The trouble was, they say, that after he passed through Damascus and started calling himself Paul, he became boring, disagreeable and censorious. You will forgive me, sir, if I compare great things with small. My new course of life begins tomorrow – Monday. So I shall not see you again before you go, Father. Go well. Breakfast for me at six as from tomorrow,’ he said to the Chamberlain; ‘his lordship’s, of course, at the usual time.’
He then rose and left the room though the pudding had yet to be served.
‘Is he serious,’ said Luffham, half to himself and half to the Chamberlain; ‘or is this some very elaborate joke?’
‘Let us put it like this, my lord,’ said the Chamberlain. ‘I know that Mister Jeremy has engaged himself to work under instruction at Pettifer’s Hundred from tomorrow morning. I also know that he has telephoned to several leading newspapers in order to try to interest the editors of their feature pages or colour supplements in what he calls a “new form of social and spiritual enterprise on the land”.’
‘Have any of them bitten?’
‘That’s more than I can say, my lord. I can only hear what is said this end. But to judge from the tone of Mister Jeremy’s voice, he did succeed in interesting a certain Mister Alfie Schroeder of the Billingsgate Press.’
‘…And so when Grandpa got back from the Boer War,’ Fielding was saying to Carmilla and Theodosia, ‘he decided it was time to settle down. His wife, Gretel, was the daughter of a cooper from Saffron Walden, a woman of no particular interest except for her unlikely friendship with another woman, a certain Dolly Casters, who started out as an eleven year old housemaid in the cooper’s house in Saffron Walden, and ended up as Mayoress of Cambridge. Soon after my grandmother Gretel had married Grandpa, she sent for Dolly, saying that she had a good position in prospect for her. Indeed she managed to have her installed as a sales assistant in one of the leading draper’s shops in Cambridge, the under-manager of which had been a beau of Gretel’s when they were both children in Saffron Walden. Quite why Gretel should have taken such trouble over her father’s housemaid, or exactly what was the bond between them, no one ever found out. What is known is that under my grandmother’s tutelage, Dolly contrived to get herself knocked up, when she was still only fifteen and a half, by the draper in person (a distant cousin of Uncle Bill’s wife, Effie) and blackmailed him into marriage. In the course of time, the draper became Mayor of Cambridge, while Auntie Doll (as she was known in my family by courtesy) was elevated accordingly. She always swore that she had made lavish provision in her will for my grandmother, as founder of her good fortune, but when the will was opened (after both the draper and Auntie Doll had deceased in a defective lift in a Railway Hotel in Staffordshire) it was found that my grandmother had been left precisely five pounds, “as suitable recompense for her early services”. Granny took to bed and died of chagrin, while Grandpa died a year or so after, on the day of the 1939 Derby, having put up the entire four hundred quid which had been in Granny’s Post Office account when she died (including Auntie Doll’s fiver) at the very substantial ante-post odds available the previous autumn, on the winner, a horse called Blue Peter.
‘Apart from my mother, the only other child of Grandpa’s was Uncle Leslie, who became a tramp in 1950 and was last heard of–’
‘–Getting too near to modern times,’ said Carmilla as she and Theodosia rose. ‘Stick to the dead, Fielding: they don’t sue for libel. And now, if you’ll excuse us, tomorrow is Monday and I have to give a tutorial at ten thirty, which means an early start from the L’Estrange. We’ve very much enjoyed listening.’
‘With material like that to hand,’ said Theodosia, ‘you won’t need to invent much – now will you? A memoir, I think, not a novel. You might call it “Stranger than Fiction”.’
‘Too obvious,’ said Carmilla. ‘What about – yes, yes, it has to be – “The Grand Grinder”?’
When their taxi reached the School Arch at the end of the bridge, Tessa and Jakki paid it off, as regulations required. Since Jakki’s Domus Vestalis was some way off and she was already (as a first year girl) several minutes late, she ran straight off towards it, leaving Tessa to proceed to her Domus Vestalis (where, being in her second year, she was not due for nearly half an hour) in the opposite direction.
On the way Tessa met Marius, who was with a gaggle of boys but somehow alone in the midst of it. He was obviously glad of the excuse to peel off and talk to Tessa.
‘How silly they all are,’ said Marius. ‘We’ve been to the Sunday Film Club – which is another thing you miss by being only a weekly boarder – to see a revival of an old movie called Kind Hearts and Coronets. Very good and witty, I thought.’
‘So did I, when I saw it in the holidays.’
‘But not that lot I was with. They were saying just now that the plot was too “improbable”. When I tried to explain that there is a convention, both for stage and screen, whereby that kind of “improbability” is permissible, they looked at me as if I were something rather distasteful, like an habitual liar or even a petty thief. “It was untrue to life,” they said: “a dishonest trick”.’
‘Rosie disapproved of it too, I remember.’
‘I only hope she had some more intelligent reason. How was she over the weekend?’
‘Reproachful.’
‘I suppose she was. Thank God she’s got this pash for Oenone. That may fix her up for a bit.’
‘I hope so… Auntie Maisie was very cheerful and has forgiven Major Gray.’
‘Interesting. Why?’
‘Rosie didn’t know. I expect she’s just seen sense at last.’
‘Was he there – Major Gray?’
‘No. Working on a book in Norfolk. Or rather, trying to start a book. He’s short of material, Auntie Maisie says.’
‘He’ll dredge up something. Like the man in that French story with the brain of gold. Every time his mistress wanted some money, he had to put his hand inside his scalp and scrape around for a nice yellow chunk.’
‘But the point was, Marius, that in the end there wasn’t any gold left. When he withdrew his hand, there were only a few specks of gold dust mixed with the blood in his fingernails.’
‘Fielding’s too old a pro to get caught like that. He probably took a lump out years ago and has kept it hidden ever since, in that horrid little house of his at Broughton.’
‘I hope so,’ said Tessa indifferently.
‘You don’t seem to care very much. I thought you were so fond of the old brute.’
‘I was. I am. But it’s the same with him as with Rosie…and Jakki. She was a real pill on the train this evening. Same as Rosie only more so. “Why have you gone away from us?” she said. What can one answer?’
‘Nothing. I have the same sort of thing from
Pally Palairet. Only he only looks it.’
‘I suppose,’ said Tessa in her small husky voice, compressing her two shoulders (as she tended to when in doubt or distress) so that she might feel, against the blade of one, the small lump which was on the blade of the other, ‘I suppose that we’ve grown past them all. Jakki and Palairet are childish things, to be put away.’
She did not say, because she did not really think, that the reproachful Rosie also came into this category; for Rosie, though tiresome of late, was different from Jakki and Palairet, she suffered with some style, not like a neglected mongrel puppy: and even if this had not been so, Tessa would not have included her among “childish things” for fear of hurting her brother.
‘Rosie says,’ said Marius, ‘that one cannot put people away without destroying one’s own soul. Although I think she exaggerates, I feel some truth in this. I feel, for example, that Jeremy, by deserting Major Gray, is at least belittling, besmirching himself. And yet…if, as you say, one grows past people, what is one to do? One cannot pretend that things are the same as they were before…no matter for how long they may formerly have been so. Indeed, the longer they have been so, the less easy it is to pretend they are the same when they start changing. And if one is caught out pretending, Tessa, one hurts people even more than by simply moving away from them.’
‘Perhaps…if you have only loved someone enough, you could keep up a pretence that you still did.’
‘What is the point? Why let people believe something that is false?’
‘Because it may comfort them,’ said Tessa: ‘just as many Christians have been comforted, at the last, by a false belief in a life after death.’
‘Once they are dead, they cannot know they have been tricked. But a live person will sooner or later see through any pretence…especially if it be a pretence of love. There is no answer to it, Tessa.’
‘It seems not. It is bound to happen all the time, this “going away”. Things must change: circumstances must shift: people must be hurt. Everything is in flux – which indeed brings some comfort, because if everything is in flux, so is the pain of being deserted and will itself be gone very soon, along with everything else.’
‘Everything…is in flux? Who told you that?’
‘Raisley Conyngham. It comes from a Greek philosopher called Heracleitos.’
‘And yet one had heard,’ said Marius, ‘that some people sorrow to the end. Which do you believe, Teresa?’
‘I think…that if one is to stay sane…one must believe Heracleitos and Raisley Conyngham.’
Fielding Gray sat at his deck in his common and horrid little house at Broughton and looked out across the golf course towards the sand dunes and the rotting gun emplacements. A sheet of white cloud drew itself over the sun and the snowflakes started skittering down on to the fairway, on to the rough just beyond his garden.
This is, at any rate, some sort of occupation, he thought, as he began to make notes of what he remembered of his mother’s tales about his grandmother’s relatives in Saffron Walden: Cousin Sue, who had opened the first fish and chip shop there; Auntie Jayne the suffragette; and Uncle Jeff the amateur rider, who had backed himself to win Ten Thousand (a hundred quid up at a hundred to one) and lost the race on an objection. His mother was at her best, telling these stories, he remembered: funny, animated, endowed with a happy turn of phrase which seemed to desert her completely once the tales were done – as indeed did all the fun and animation. Day to day, Mrs Gray had been an obstinate, narrow-minded, possessive and spiteful woman. Only when he had said, ‘Mama, remind me about Auntie Lettice, the one who became fashion photographer for The Stortford Mercury’ or something of the kind, did her eyes begin to glitter with jollity and not with malice, and her tongue to eschew the usual grizzling rebuke of his ‘squandering’, or low-bourgeois disapprobation of ‘the silly ideas which he was getting at that school.’ One must strike a balance, then: however shrill or dismal she usually was, he thought, I must be grateful to her for providing matter and memories at this time of need. Uncle Goddart, who collected neck-ties and finally achieved twenty thousand different specimens (from one of which he hung himself when his wife ran away with a Ticket Inspector of the LNER) was, on the whole, fair exchange for many hours of nagging about those ‘clever-clever friends you seem to have collecte’ – wait for it – ‘at that school’.
The one friend of his whom she had always liked and who, for whatever reason, purported to like her, had been Peter Morrison, who sometimes came over from Luffham during the holidays. She liked, she said, Peter’s ‘solid common sense’. She knew, she said, that Peter, unlike most of Fielding’s ‘mucky and deceitful’ companions, was ‘on the level’. It was not without irony, Fielding now thought, that Peter’s son, Jeremy, had behaved to him, Fielding, in such a particularly ‘mucky and deceitful’ way, quite definitely not ‘on the square’. What, he thought, would Mama have made of Jeremy? Words and phrases like ‘showy’, ‘pleased with Number One’, ‘devious’ (no, ‘devious’ was too sophisticated for Mama), ‘mouth crammed with lies’, and ‘clever enough to ambush himself’, hovered in Fielding’s mind. As usual, Mama would have been right and as usual, she would have missed the important points: the mountains of the moon smiling in the great round face; the huge, slow, lovable limbs; the lazy ironic asides; the easy, intelligent, soothing company. ‘Cuckoo,’ he thought, remembering the scholar Alcuin’s elegy for his favourite pupil, who had simply gone away one midnight and was seen by Alcuin no more, ‘where art thou, cuckoo? Wilt not come again?’ But did they have cuckoos, thought Fielding, where Alcuin was (Narbonne, was it, or even right down in Spain)? One cuckoo they had anyhow, one cuckoo whom they all loved and who went away one midnight, leaving neither explanation nor forwarding address, pursued only by a futile lament:
‘The old man Alcuin thinks long for thee.’
‘A scholar?’ said Raisley Conyngham, passing the port to Milo Hedley; ‘Marius Stern a scholar?’
‘Since you teach him individually, sir, I wondered how you assessed him in that line. One would wish to know today…everything possible…about him.’
‘Quite right. Well, in the real sense, Marius could never make a scholar. He is too restless; he must be cut out for a more active role in affairs. But in the sense of collecting a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge, he may very well become one. He made a very shrewd effort, the other day, at turning the beginning of the Morte d’Arthur into Greek hexameters. “A broken chancel with a broken cross” – not easy to find a Greek equivalent. He used the word “τεμενος” or precinct, an inner precinct it often implies, and pictured the statue of the god as broken and mouldering with neglect:
αντιχα χαι τεμενος πληγεν τε προσηλθον
ειδος αποθνησχον τ απολειπομενοιο θεοιο
“Forthwith they came to a ruined shrine and to the ruined and wasting image of the deserted god.” Too many “τε”s hanging about the place, but not bad for a boy of fifteen or whatever.’
"'τοαις δε αποψηφισμενοις ηδεως αν διαλεχδειην,"' read Marius to Raisley Conyngham: '"But with those who voted for my acquittal I should like to converse about what has happened, while the authorities are busy and before I go to the place where I must die."'
"'αλλΑ μοι, ω ανδρες, παραμεινατε,"' said Marius from memory: '"But wait with me, my friends; for nothing prevents our talking together while there is still time."'
‘I take it, sir, that for Marius to spend a few years at one of the better colleges would suit your purpose…whatever that may be.’
‘Yes, it would, dear boy. Let’s go and sit by the fire. Bring your port. There’ll be coffee presently. What time do you have to get back to your House?’
‘Any time, sir. I have the key.’
‘You won’t be wanted at Adsum? Or Prayers?’
‘They no longer happen in our House, sir. We have progressed to
a system of trust. No Evening Adsum, no Prayers other than private ones, no supervision of the younger boys’ baths and ablutions, no formal Lights Out.’
‘I strongly disapprove,’ said Conyngham.
‘So do I, sir. The older boys stay out in pubs, spending money their parents cannot afford. The younger ones stink, and chatter all night, and by day are as sullen as convicts.’
‘That is what freedom does for boys of a certain age.’
‘Agreed, sir, most heartily. They prefer – whether they know it or not – to obey. Perhaps we all do.’
‘Well…at least I shall not be deprived of your company, Milo. A good thing, as what I have to say will not brook interruption. Now then. Where to begin? Ah, yes. Did I not tell you, a few days ago, that you should start reading Proust, as a remarkable study of a diseased mentality? The Foie Gras of Fiction, I think I said,’ enunciated Raisley Conyngham primly, preening a little.
‘You did, sir.’
‘Well, I’m going to countermand the order. Don’t read Proust yet. For one thing, there’s a new and much better translation, by my old acquaintance Terry Kilmartin, due to be published in less than a year; and for another thing, I want you to read Balzac instead. Cruder, but in the end far more fascinating. Balzac is less concerned with mental disease (though there’s a certain amount of it) than with mental deviance, deliberate mental deviance, often allied with great mental subtlety and both mental and physical endurance. Take the character of the arch-crook, Vautrin, who figures in several of Balzac’s most important novels. Vautrin is a homosexual, and to that extent could be thought of, by some at least, as mentally diseased; but Balzac doesn’t linger on that. Vautrin may or may not go to bed and commit “unnatural” acts with his young men – that is a matter of indifference. What Balzac concentrates on is how Vautrin masters his catamites (if such they be) and then takes total control of their lives and careers. These are so colourful, vigorous and complicated, that they would leave very little time for bedding with Vautrin – one good reason for supposing they probably didn’t. By the time they’d seduced all the mistresses whom Vautrin prescribed – and through them conquered society up to the very throne; or by the time, on the other hand, that they’d explored the criminal hells to which he sent some of them to sweat and prosper; or by the time, yet again, that they’d struggled and triumphed in the professions to which he apprenticed not a few – they would not have had an ounce of energy left in them. Certainly not enough for pleasuring the ugly old Vautrin who, to do him justice, never seems to force himself on any of them. He just picks them out of ditches and pilots them through the perils and intricacies of the World’s Game until they finish up as the Champion Players.’
