“I think so. Except one thing. Why Daddy did it. . . .”
But that was a question to which I could give no answer.
5
My grandfather, who married the coal on which we have been living ever since, disliked entails. I am not sure really that he didn’t dislike Carlice Abbey; for, with the taste of his age, he coveted a house in the style of the Crystal Palace, and not all his additions and enrichments could turn the Abbey into one. It may be that the entail prevented him from leaving, or made it more difficult. At all events, it was broken at some time or other, and my father had the place in his own right, to bequeath as he chose. When it came to Claude the position was the same.
Claude’s will was dated the September before his death. He left the Abbey outright to Ronnie on reaching twenty-one. If he died before, it was to go to Joan on reaching twenty-five or marrying under that age with the consent of her guardians. If both children died before attaining vested interests it was to go to me. The bulk of the revenue from coal (which had sadly dwindled) was to pass with the estate, Dora and Joan each being given five hundred a year for life. While Ronnie was under twenty-one Dora, who was his guardian jointly with me, was to have the right to live at Carlice Abbey and to control the main funds subject to my consent. If we disagreed, the dispute was to be settled by Sir Thomas Hill, a legal friend of Claude’s. I was left a few things of sentimental value.
Gwen Rashdall was full of comments, when she heard the arrangements—or, rather, she tried to make me say the things she wanted to say. Her first impression was that Claude had treated Dora with unexpected shabbiness.
“Dora’s turned adrift with only £500 a year in ten years’ time,” she said. “Don’t you think she’d be wiser to go now? After all, she might marry fairly well now, but in ten years’ time—well, her face will hardly be a fortune then.”
I agreed that if I were Dora I should go at once.
“Do you think,” Gwen asked me, “that you ought to tell her, or let her know somehow, that you’d be ready to live here and look after the children? She may have a sense of duty in her odd way and feel she ought to stay.”
I said that that was the last thing I should like to let Dora know. It would be too like telling her that she ought to make way for me.
“Besides,” I asked, “what makes you think I should like to live at Carlice and look after the children?”
She laughed.
“Of course, the children might bore you. You don’t like the young.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Joan is sure to grow up into a Communist, and Ronnie will be an æsthete.”
(Here Gwen was wrong, but I couldn’t contradict her.)
“Still,” she went on, “living at Carlice would be a compensation for you.”
“To be turned away the moment Ronnie’s twenty-one, like Dora?”
“Except that you’d have more than five hundred a year—thanks to your Aunt Eleanor. You know, Isabel, you seem destined to live in a detective story—I mean, to have a perpetual incentive to murder people!”
“Explain yourself, Gwen.”
“Well, there was Honorine, your Aunt Eleanor’s daughter. Suppose she’d lived another three years, where would you have been? Nowhere. You’d have been like me, a sponger, trading on a kind of common sense of amiability—a superior lady-companion. You were with Honorine in Paris when she caught diphtheria, weren’t you?”
“You know I was.”
“Did you make her drink her bath-water?”
“As usual, Gwen, you’re verging on bad taste.”
“Anyway, I thought that with the serum diphtheria could always be cured nowadays.”
“Honorine had the serum. She had everything.”
“Have you been thankful enough, though, for the difference it made to you?”
“Whom should I thank? Aunt Eleanor?”
“No, God. Or something inside you. That power to get, somehow, what you want. Well, you’ve a chance now to use it again. Ronnie must go. Joan must go. Then—step on Dora.”
“Is this an argument to persuade me to look after my nephew and niece?”
“Oh, they mean less than nothing to me—less even than they do to you. You can’t convince me, though, that your one ambition is to see Carlice descending through the male line for ever and for ever. Besides, it won’t descend.”
“Why?”
“Because the world is misguidedly breeding something which will stop all that kind of thing. Another death, and after paying death duties, how could the family keep up Carlice—unless Aunt Eleanor’s money came to the rescue?”
“Ronnie might marry oil.”
“I bet he doesn’t.”
“Why are you so pessimistic about him?”
“I just have a feeling he’s going to be awkward for you all. But that’s nothing. It isn’t only death duties. It’s a world movement. Things as we know them may just last our time—if we don’t overstay our welcome. Having Carlice would only put Ronnie on the wrong lines. Claude would have been kinder if he’d left it to you.”
“Who am on the wrong lines already, you mean?”
I daresay she was right. There was a gay gloominess about Gwen which endeared her to people—enabled her to “sponge her way,” as she would have put it, from South Kensington to Cannes and back to Scotland. She read everything—all those disconcerting books and weeklies which I prefer to avoid. She was full of the 1926 General Strike months before the papers mentioned it. (Yet we had the General Strike and nothing so very terrible happened. As it turned out, it was waste of time to worry about it beforehand.) Now, in this month of February, 1936, she is full of the next war. Or rather, she’s got beyond the mere war, to a period of drab, intensive and compulsory industrialism which she says will succeed it—a period which she says will not only destroy our present values, but make even the memory of them illegal. In a crisis, of course, Gwen would be admirable. She would parry the bomb with one hand and shake a cocktail with the other. I think I have liked her, partly, because she has always been so unsuitable a friend for me. She goes with nothing that we stand for—or stood for—since now that my father, Aunt Eleanor and Claude are gone, there’s no we to stand for anything. Any standing has to be done by me alone.
But she was wrong about Joan. Joan is not a Communist. She’s a quite nice unattractive girl. I should like to have her as my maid. And she was wrong about Dora, who never showed any sign of wanting to leave Carlice—never even gave me a loophole for telling her that I could and would look after the children, if she preferred to start life afresh. This I found difficult to understand in her. It was almost as if something outside her had made up her mind to stay and “do her duty”—if anyone, knowing the facts, could use that phrase. And now she has about seven months to go, from this February till September the eighth, when Ronnie comes of age. And I suppose she’ll stay on after that, until he marries, managing the staff with a mixture of timidity and petulance, and leaving the coast clear for Ronnie’s friends, those not-very-nice young men with whom he surrounds himself. Bunny Andrews, whom Ronnie brought to tea with us at Leamington, was the best of them. But Bunny has suddenly come into a lot of money and has the wrong ideology, as Ronnie puts it now. Bunny ranges himself with the comfortable classes, about whom we are now not even supposed to read, as a reviewer told me only the other day. O Lord, preserve my egoism! If pressed, I will even say selfishness; for selfishness, in its broadest and fullest sense, seems to me to have been the mainspring of everything worth while. At least, it can hardly claim so many miseries and murders as mass-made fanaticisms.
It is Ronnie who goads me to such dicta, and makes me wish that I had beaten him well when he was a child.
6
Last time I was at Carlice—for ten days round Christmas—I was walking down
the lane to the pillar-box past the curved line of beeches which I have always loved so much, when I saw a tramp sitting on the grass verge and looking up at the smooth trunks and branches which still retained some of their coppery leaves. There was a little sunlight, a reminder that the sun did really exist somewhere, and I suppose it was just warm enough for a tramp to sit in the open without getting a chill. It was one of those encounters, like my more recent encounter with the fat woman who would be back in her flat at five, which meant a great deal to me. He didn’t look at me for a long time, which allowed me to look at him. There was nothing very remarkable in his expression—no ecstasy, no indignation, no distress even or resignation. He was just living at that moment like a vegetable, enjoying the vegetable world—that world which I secretly value so much more than the world of human beings. I felt and still feel, when I picture him sitting there, an intimate kinship with him, as if he were ultimately “on my side” in the modern battle of values. I hoped that it was not misfortune, but laziness or self-indulgence which had made him what he was. I hoped, too, that he would never regain his “self-respect,” but would struggle along, as he was, for many years, without too much external wretchedness. I say external, because I had no doubt that internally he was all right. The Kingdom of Heaven was within him—as it is in me, at bedrock, whatever I say and do, however absorbed I may seem with trivial and silly things, however fearful I may be of the future, or distressed with past and present. We have learnt the great secret. We have found Grace. I use the word with the intensity, though without the orthodoxy, of a theologian. In some moods I might maintain that I mean an intimation of immortality, which has nothing to do with morality, or merit, but proceeds from an apprehension of the inner essence of material things. Wordsworth, I suppose, in part, or that modern man, J. C. Powys, whom I ought to read. Gwen has this “Grace,” but with too much conscious artistry for me, and Joan may be going to develop it. Sometimes I think that even Dora has glimmerings of it, while her ne’er-do-well half-brother, the dipsomaniac, has more than his fair share, from what I’ve gathered. Claude had none, my father had none, Ronnie has none, or like a fool has killed it. It is this, really, which makes the essential cleavage in the world. At present our side seems to be losing. Science, organisation, short-sighted experimentalism in search of efficiency carry the day. But we have cunning forces on our side. Though we batten on the past, our powers of adaptation to a changing environment are more durable than those engendered painfully in laboratories. We slink comparatively scatheless through the crash of scientific scheming and the breakdown of an over-elaborate order. For it is in disorder that we find our secret nourishment—in the waywardness of the first fiery particle that broke the law of perpetual monotony—and will from time to time break all the other laws to give us that calm anarchy which is our hidden joy.
This is a passage from my real autobiography—which I shall write still less than the one which I began with salpiglossis—a periodical iteration of my creed which may well mark the first February evening when I have had tea without electric light.
But it is now quite dark, and ever since the female novelist was shown out, full of the Abbey architecture and our gunroom, I have been sitting here telling snippets of my story to myself. Yet I could go back to the gunroom all over again, and tell the story again from there, with other touches and other colouring. The hope for the future is that it will one day be the past and part of the same story. Even this cramp of mine which I’ve got through sitting here so long, and this darkness which might be midnight though it’s only——
Come in.
Yes, Simmonds, you can draw the curtains now.
Chapter II: RONALD CARLICE
1
THE clocks of Oxford striking eleven, overlapping, jangling up the hour, on the last Sunday morning of my last term but one. A grey day, though warm. My books and papers scattered all over my big fake sofa-table. (Real sofa-tables were never made of walnut.) My gown, substitute for a pair of tongs, on the floor beside the ugly coal-scuttle. There is a clock still striking. Or is it a belated church bell? A memory to carry away—these clocks and bells of Oxford—and use when I’m being drilled for the next war, or putting on my gas-mask, or burnishing my spade in the labour corps. Dreaming spires. Compton Mackenzie. My little taste of the otiose elegances which even the last war didn’t quite kill.
I must clear those club fixture-cards from the mantelpiece. There is no reason why I should have their dust next term—if there is a next term. Philosophical Society. Musical Club. Liars’ Club. Prophets’ Club. All except this one—St. Peter’s College Labour Club (affiliated to the University Labour Club). Trinity Term, 1936. Proof. Please correct and return by Tuesday. 14th May: Mr. R. Carlise will read a paper on “Labour and Art.” Host: Mr. D. L. Cruttley.
I might as well correct that now. Cross out the “s” and turn it into a “c,” so that my father could recognise it. This was his chief small vanity. “Two ‘c’s’ were good enough for Henry VIII,” he said when he took me to school for the first time. “Don’t let them spell your name with an ‘s,’ even though it is pronounced Carliss.” Poor father! In his time, of course, people didn’t have cars. The boys didn’t bother to spell my name with an “s.” I wished they had, because they might have been less quick to call me Car-louse. “You’re singular, not plural. Your parents are car-lice. You’re a Car-louse. Aren’t you?” And so on, with physical proof of it. Nasty days.
I hated them—and Peters, the headmaster. (Odd that I find myself at St. Peter’s College now.) I was frightened of him, and he was unjust—especially on the night my father died. Isabel, Dora and Joan had come to Leamington to see me at midterm. God knows why. I loathed them coming to see me at school, and I didn’t want to go and see them in their hotel on Sunday. I suppose I was afraid of being unsettled by the taste of two hours’ civilisation. It was good of Bunny to go with me. “May Ronnie bring a friend, Mr. Peters?” It was Dora doing her stuff, while Isabel listened critically. “Oh, certainly, my dear Mrs. Carlice.” Had Peters an eye for a pretty woman? I imagine she was rather pretty then. Meanwhile, I fidgeted and blushed and looked sideways, and wondered if we could show off with those damned fireworks we had made. It was the fireworks really which made us late in getting back. And Peters would choose that Sunday evening to read to the juniors. Had it been Meldrum’s turn, I shouldn’t have minded. I should have said, “I’m sorry I’m late, sir, but I couldn’t get away from my family earlier.” He’d have left it at that. But with Peters in charge, everything went wrong. We slunk in, or rather I slunk. Bunny probably was smiling very quietly to himself, with his blue eyes looking at nothing, knowing he wasn’t in any way responsible. I slunk in, followed by Bunny, and Treasure Island suddenly ceased to boom.
“Carlice?”
“Sir.”
“What is the time?”
“Ten minutes past six, sir.”
“Did I remind you to be back by six o’clock?”
“Yes, sir. I’m very sorry.”
“Why are you late?”
“We were playing about, sir, and got very hot and my stepmother said we must cool down before we went out.”
“Why must you be so mamby-pamby, Carlice? Sit down, both of you.”
And Treasure Island began to boom again.
The words stuck. Why must you be so mamby-pamby, Carlice? Even as I sat down, I felt that I was done for. Why must you be so mamby-pamby, Car-louse? What a slogan for my enemies, among whom I included the many who regarded me with indifference, or even liked me a little, but wouldn’t want to miss a bit of fun. As it happened, I needn’t have worried. I went to bed that night with the words still crawling over the raw stuff in my mind, but nobody used them at supper or in my dormitory. Perhaps the collective judgment was that Peters had been unfair. As Bunny put it, the man was a bit of a cad. He ought to have known what parents were by that time. Bunny cou
ld say amazingly adult things like that, and no one kicked him. And the next day, I gave them all something else to think about. My father had had his accident and died—probably just in those ten minutes by which I overstayed my leave. It was a very different Peters who saw me in his study the next morning and gave me the news—or, rather, the first instalment.
It was Peters, too, who gave me the second instalment a week later, after my father was buried. It was a long, painstaking account, almost illustrated with diagrams. “We must picture your dear father as standing there, my boy, while your butler, Eames, was here. Your father was about to hand the gun to Eames, when . . .”
I can’t remember now what was supposed to have happened next. The details embarrassed me, and meant nothing. It seemed ghoulish to insist on them. I’m sure that, as my eyes wandered to the huge globe on its stand near the window, Peters longed to shout “Attend!” I was attending, but not to the details. What did it matter exactly how my father held the gun, or how the safety-catch failed to work? It was a relief when we came to generalities again—to the exhortation with which the interview was rounded off. “Unhappily, my dear boy, you are now an orphan. This places peculiar and difficult responsibilities upon you—responsibilities towards yourself and your own moral and physical development.” And so on.
Was Peters right? Should I have grown up to be very different, if I had had a mother and father living? I remember, even while the news was fresh to me, thinking secretly: “Now I shall be able to do more as I like at home. There won’t be any more talk of getting a tennis or cricket Professional over to coach me in the holidays.” My father had been bad at school games, and wanted me to escape the humiliation his own failures had brought him. He had been good at tennis, and wanted me to be good too. I hated all games then, as much as I do now. I remember my first term being bullied for not knowing what a Test Match was, and thinking how unjust it was that I wasn’t bullying my tormentors, who didn’t even know the plots of Æschylus’ plays, while I had read them all twice in a translation in Everyman’s Library. But with all the tennis and cricket coaching in the world, I should never have excelled. I can’t put down my athletic feebleness to lack of a father. I don’t pretend the news of his death wasn’t a shock. I cried a good deal, and for a few days my grief brought me prestige.
Birthday Party Page 4
