by Angus Wilson
'Oh, my dear Thingy,' said John, 'I'm afraid that's quite impossible. I've a full programme of radio work and speeches.'
'I see,' said Mrs Middleton. 'What a pity! Larrie will be most disappointed.'
'Larrie?' asked John in surprise. 'Have you been plotting something with him?'
Mrs Middleton did not answer the question. 'That's a nice boy,' she said. 'He is very fond of you, Johnnie. He is a bit fussy, perhaps. He thinks you don't look after yourself properly in London.'
John laughed aloud. He pictured his mother and Larrie blarneying each other into this scheme. All the same, there were a hundred reasons why he would be glad to see Larrie out of London, if he was willing; but to stay at Thingy's was out of the question.
'Did he not tell you how much he liked the flat?'
'What is all this about?' John cried. 'You are a couple of schemers.' But he was delighted that one afternoon together had brought his mother and Larrie into such agreement.
'That flat over the stables,' Mrs Middleton said, 'it seemed such a pity that it should go begging. I thought perhaps that you would like it.' She paused as though considering whether she should say more, but she only remarked, 'The sun has gone now. We should go in, I think.'
They walked between the box hedges that rimmed the rose-garden, and Mrs Middleton said, 'Larrie will be able to drive you up to London for your talks and so on.'
So that was all fixed, John thought, and, as so often, wondered what his mother would not swallow to accommodate him. 'Larrie never said a word of this to me,' he said.
'No?' said his mother. 'Perhaps he can keep secrets from you better than I can, Johnnie.'
As they passed by the drawing-room, they caught a glimpse of Marie Hélène's long face bent over her needlework. 'How is your secretary?' said Ingeborg immediately.
John smiled at the thought of how much his mother always knew. 'She's leaving me,' he answered.
'I'm afraid that her troubles are only just beginning, poor girl,' Ingeborg remarked. 'I have always tried, you know, not to be nationalistic about the French. It is a danger for anyone with German blood. But they are so practical, Johnnie, and so proud of it. It is strange to be proud of denying the truth of life. For it is the unpractical things which are the true ones, as you and I know.' John did not reply, he was not prepared to be led into a discussion of his sister-in-law. 'Perhaps it is just as well that that secretary goes. You do not want everything that you do reported all over the family.' Once again, John did not bite; he felt that Thingy should not accept Robin's relations with Elvira quite so easily. She was, after all, their beloved, wronged mother. It was all a little out of place.
'So now,' said Ingeborg, 'you will have a new secretary. I know!' she cried, 'we will get Miss Totton to come over from Reading. She is a very good secretary, I believe, and a most discreet girl. But that is wonderful!'
John laughed. 'I promise nothing,' he said.
Mrs Middleton's spirits, however, were quite restored when they got back to the drawing-room. 'Imagine,' she cried, 'my four little rosebuds have survived the frost. Do you know what I believe about these little rosebuds? No, Donald, you will laugh at me, but I don't mind. I believe they are four little roses that refused to grow in summer because they wanted to see that strange white world they had heard so much about. "We are not frightened," they said ...' Dutifully, the family listened, all except Timothy, who went on reading his book. Marie Hélène, so dexterous with her needle as a rule, pricked her finger.
As Mrs Middleton's mood of distrust melted back into her usual flow of whimsy, her children's rally to placate her dissolved and their natural antipathies came to the surface again. Gerald noticed the change and welcomed it. Apart from his unreturned affection for Kay, he could find no interest in their lives, but their united efforts to assuage their mother's ill-humour had depressed him. It recalled too vividly the whole pattern of his family life: a world of indulgent sweetness and syrupy intimacy. He had done nothing to reform it all these years; he could do nothing now. Nevertheless, the failure of his family life added to his preoccupation with his professional death and closed him round in a dense fog of self-disgust. It seemed to him that his whole life had grown pale and futile because it was rooted in evasion.
After Inge's enormous Christmas dinner, he sat in a deep armchair in the drawing-room, hunched up as far as his great height would allow him, and remote. He seemed even to have barricaded himself from the rest of the family with little tables on which were his brandy glass, his coffee cup, his ashtray.
Marie Hélène felt a special reverence for him as head of the house, university professor, and homme du monde; but even her great pertinacity in maintaining social intercourse was no proof against his withdrawal. It was terrible that a stupid woman could age and impair a brilliant man to such a degree, she thought, but then he should not have married a peasant. In stressing her mother-in-law's peasant origin she found it easier to disregard her.
They were not origins that Ingeborg herself chose to disregard, as she was proclaiming at that very moment. 'But, of course, Johnnie must defend this Mr Cressett. He is a gardener, a good man, a peasant. Don't forget, Robin, because you are now the great master, that your ancestors were peasants. My grandfather was just an ordinary small farmer. All his life he lived on his farm in Jutland. He was very proud when his son became a deputy, and he used to come to Copenhagen and point Father out to people and say "That is my son"; but he remained always a peasant, a simple, wise man. And my mother's mother, dear Grossmütterchen, too. I can see her now; such a fine, old wrinkled face. She was a Bavarian peasant, a wine-growing peasant. That is the best kind, is it not, Marie Hélène?'
Her daughter-in-law did not answer her question, but merely said to John, 'I suppose you are very sure of your facts. It does not do to trust this kind of people too much. They will say anything for money, you know.'
'Oh, yes, thank you, Marie Hélène,' John replied. 'It's a pity that Robin's hero, Mr Pelican, didn't make as sure of his facts when he removed the wretched man's land from him under one subsection and then graciously decided to restore it under another.'
'I don't understand why you're so set against the existence of laws about these things,' said Kay. Since Donald had so far made no pronouncement about the Pelican affair, she felt free to side with Robin. 'If expropriations are necessary, surely it's better that they should be carried out under some carefully defined law than ...'
'Of course, there's got to be a law,' said John impatiently. 'What I'm objecting to is the tyrannical, uncontrolled use of these laws by unimaginative bureaucrats. The House passes laws with a certain honesty of intention behind them, an intention that reflects a certain social truth. It's absolutely essential for the interpreters of the laws to respect that truth. Judges do, bureaucrats don't. That's all.'
'It isn't all by any means,' said Robin angrily. 'That's a lot of nonsensical cant, John. Pelican and other useful civil servants like him have a job to do. They have to work hard. You'd know what that meant if you'd been in industry, where what you do affects thousands of people, instead of getting up on your hind legs in the House of Commons, where you can say what you like because it affects nobody.'
'All the same, I was always careful to say what was true,' said John.
'Oh! I've no doubt,' Robin stirred his coffee furiously; 'all sorts of little pinpricking, puking bits of candour that matter to nobody set against the wider truth of the situation the country's in. It's simply self-indulgence, all this John Hampdening about the place, and very dangerous self-indulgence at a time like this.'
Gerald, dozing away into a blurred haze of the past, heard the phrase 'the wider truth of the situation the country's in'. The mist before him receded until it diminished into one clearly defined picture - Professor Stokesay, grey Shavian beard, heavy tweed suit, parrot on his shoulder, and all the rest of his eccentric's paraphernalia in the book-lined study of his old, rambling house in Highgate....
'My dear Ge
rald,' the Professor said, 'I know what I'm doing. Oh, don't think that I'm not grateful to you for speaking the truth to me as you see it. It's the proper function of distinguished ex-pupils. Without it, there's always the danger that the old and, perhaps I may say, the eminent, can get cut off from life and life's criticisms. But, in this case, I think perhaps the boot's rather on the other foot.'
He shuffled across the great room, dragging his thin, tweed-clad legs as he had done ever since the slight stroke he had suffered in 1936. He brought a decanter of sherry and a small silver box of charcoal biscuits. 'I don't know whether you take these, Gerald? They're said to be good for constipation. I find them good certainly. The bowels are very important, you know, when you get as old as I am. Yes, but that's not the point. In a sense, my dear boy - and I mean this as no criticism of you, you've stuck to your scholarship and done excellent things - but, in a sense, I've been closer to life than a lot of you younger fellows. In touch with people of responsibility, you know, which forces one to modify one's attitude a certain amount. That's why I took the line I did with those young lecturers who wrote that absurd letter about Non-intervention.'
Gerald laughed. 'But that's exactly why I am so anxious that you shouldn't be party to the Dresden conference,' he said. 'You know as well as I do that it's a Nazi Government stunt. There's no real historical work of value being done over there. It seems to me terrible that a man of your eminence should lend himself to what is pure propaganda.'
'Ah! Now look here, Gerald,' said the old man, and he bent down to allow his famous green parrot to hop on to his shoulder. 'It's true that there's a lot of nonsense being talked in Germany - all this Rassenkunde and so on - but it won't help if reputable historians in other countries cut themselves off. Will it, Joey?' he asked the parrot. 'I sometimes wonder how much that bird does know, Gerald,' he added. 'As a matter of fact, I'm not telling everyone, but the Government has particularly asked me to go to Dresden. No, no, to "opt out"' - he repeated the phrase, as though it was peculiarly realistic - 'to "opt out" at this critical moment would be quite indefensible. Of course you see, my dear Gerald, it's impossible for an outsider to judge of these things. I don't mean that offensively, but when I read the nonsense in the News Chronicle and some of these papers about a man like Simon, for example.... It's been the greatest privilege to me knowing Simon. People say "a legal mind" as though that was a criticism. They forget the extraordinary experience of life, of men and women, that a brilliant mind like that gets in the courts. No, the P.M. wants me to go to Dresden and I must go.'
'I see,' said Gerald. 'There's nothing I can say then.'
'My dear boy, I take it as the greatest compliment that you've said what you have. I wish you came here more often. I hardly ever see you. I do hope it's nothing to do with Dollie. Your relations with her, you know, shouldn't keep you away from me. We've worked a long time together and it does me good to see you. You were Gilbert's friend, and that's the most important thing I can say of anyone.'
Gerald felt sure that Professor Stokesay no longer really cared to see any of his academic colleagues, and, indeed, the next moment the old man said, 'Well, I don't want to hurry you, but the motor-car's coming for me at four. You've no idea of the busy life I lead. I've got to go and see Garvin now. I've promised to do him a few articles on all this nonsense about the Entente Cordiale. How these fellows like Churchill and Duff Cooper manage to talk all that fiddle-faddle about Anglo-French friendship, I don't know. Of course, only amateur historians could do it. Well, a medievalist can tell them something about our love of the French, I hope,' he chuckled. 'Shades of King Harry!' And suddenly his quavering voice was reciting, 'Dishonour not your mothers, now attest that those whom you call'd fathers did beget you.' The tears streamed from his red, rheumy old eyes. Then he wiped them away with his handkerchief, and said, 'But still, that's not the point. It's a battle for peace we're waging now, and a very hard battle. Don't think I can't appreciate what you feel, Gerald - integrity of scholarship and so on. I don't at all like some of the nonsense our friends in Germany call history nowadays myself. But that sort of thing, one's distaste for this and that, has all got to be set against the wider truth of the situation the country's in.'
The scene faded from Gerald's recollection in a haze of pathos and distaste. It had seemed the maundering end of a fine career. Two months later had come Munich, and by the time the war broke out Professor Stokesay had been paralysed by another stroke. He died in 1940, oblivious of the Battle of Britain overhead. But the rot had begun earlier, Gerald now decided, with a growing distaste for accuracy, a wider and wider canvas, a life of conferences and pious platitudes. Like one of his own heroes - Ramsay MacDonald - Lionel Stokesay had gone on and on and up and up. As though he was running away from reality. And as Stokesay's gas balloon had floated away into outer space, Gerald had found himself shrinking from his own high aspirations, refusing the wider implications of his own work, all out of distaste at the spectacle of such empty eminence....
Gerald came out of his memories, disturbed to think that it was his elder son who had reiterated the old man's evasive hypocrisy. He was, if anything, more cut off from Robin than from his other two children, but with less hostility and more respect. It was Robin, after all, who had taken on the family business, on whom they all depended for their dividends. He leaned forward in his chair. 'I don't imagine your grandfather would have agreed with you, Robin,' he said.
The conversation stopped and they looked at him in surprise as though it were the armchair that had suddenly spoken.
'Agreed with what exactly, Father?' asked Robin.
'Something you said about wider truths,' Gerald mumbled. He was embarrassed as he realized that the conversation had moved on as he had been day-dreaming.
'Oh!' said Robin, with a slight air of humouring the old. 'Grandfather was a very patriotic business man, you know.'
'Yes,' said Gerald, 'but he never allowed the interests of individual human beings, of his workmen, and so on, to be subordinated to more powerful interests.'
Robin smiled. 'I think that's hardly the point, Father. But in any case, that sort of patriarchal attitude was excellent enough when grandfather was in his prime, even in the twenties. If you number your employees in hundreds you can be a father to them. But it was getting the firm into an awful mess by the end of his time. And if the business suffers, the workpeople suffer too. No, no, that's not my sphere, that's the Union's job. And a fine job they do.' He tried to put a special affection into his smile towards Gerald to efface the impression of his curt speech.
Gerald was about to reply, but he reflected that he had no right to speak about the 'business'. He had elected so many years ago for scholarship on solid dividends, it would ill become him now to criticize the source of his misspent independence. He made no further attempt to bridge the icy waste that lay between him and his family that evening, but gave himself up to the surging sea of memory, washed hither and thither by the chance currents of the conversation that flowed around him.
It was his son-in-law's voice that he heard now. That thin, precise, over-cultivated drawl that he so disliked associating with his beloved daughter. 'Frankly,' Donald was saying, the arrogance and bitterness, that were usually masked by shyness, apparent when he spoke, 'I fail to understand why I should concern myself with the fates of Pelican or Cressett. I cannot find that the bureaucracy or the lower middle-classes have any particular call on my loyalty. If, of course, this country were what it professes to be - a Christian country with a Christian polity,' Donald always used words like polity, 'then these ethical considerations would be subsumed into a greater truth. Each Estate would have its own place and purpose. But as we've conveniently forgotten the ultimate purpose which makes any sense of man's being, I really must come down on Robin's side. We live in Leviathan; expediency and power must presumably be our guides. To try to cover all this over with John's sentimental, democratic sugar-coating seems to me peculiarly disreputable. It is perfectl
y clear that Mr Pelican may swallow as many Cressetts any day as he can conveniently keep in his pouch.' He laughed a dry, prim laugh. 'If your only truth is jungle law, then the greater must devour the lesser.'
Robin laughed loudly. He accepted his brother-in-law as a clever man, a bit extravagant in his views, a bit absurd as a husband for darling Kay; but nevertheless a genuine, up-to-date intellectual, a fashionable piece that the family could afford to maintain. When less-informed business friends spoke to Robin of intellectuals as communists or pinks, he liked to quote Donald to show them how out of date their knowledge was. 'All right, Donald,' he said, 'agreed it is a jungle, but I think you know that under any scheme of values, the lesser has to be sacrificed to the greater.'
Once again his elder son's voice burst through Gerald's haze. Elusive shapes, blurred objects, scraps and ends of past talk swelled and merged and faded in his mind; and one image that he had driven to the edges of his consciousness filled his whole vision. Dollie Stokesay came down the stairs of the old house in Highgate, still slight and boyish, but dragging her tired, worn-out little body over the faded, hideous red Turkey stair-carpet. She held a hot-water bottle in one hand, letting it bump against the banisters in listless depression as she descended. 'I can't go out, Gerrie, but if you don't mind a scrap supper, we can have something here. It looks as though he's going to sleep,' she added.
But to give her the lie came Professor Stokesay's voice, cracked and petulant. 'Dollie,' he called, 'Dollie, you've forgotten my barley-water.'
