by Angus Wilson
'Baldwin,' he assured them, 'will pull us through. He's a cautious old bird, but as wise as they make 'em. Just what we need. "You can't be too careful", that's got to be England's motto. Cheerio,' he said, 'see you in Angleterre.'
It was thus that they learned of England's going off the gold standard. Gerald, knowing Dollie's simple jingo responses to any national event - responses that had become more immediate, more violent, since she had become a 'bad woman' in the eyes of her family - decided to forestall her reactions. 'I'll get a paper,' he said, and then, scanning Le Temps, he worked out exchange rates on the back of an envelope.
She sat staring across the Square with that expression he called 'her forehand-drive look'. She kept it, he told her, for tennis and the National Anthem. They treated her being an ex-tennis champion as one of the private jokes that oiled the machinery of their life together, and she helped in this on occasion by parodying the role. Nevertheless, the joke on his side was in some part defensive; he feared the 'Stock Character' side of her, that it might engulf the individual person on whom he depended, and he avoided as far as he could the conventional responses she made to events she did not comprehend.
She sat smoking her cigarette for a moment and drank some of her cognac; she had never lost a manner of 'being rather fast' in her smoking and drinking, although both tastes were habitual to her. 'Do you honestly think we have to, Gerrie?' she asked. 'I can't see what earthly use it would be to anyone for me to be back at the flat, or you, for that matter. I mean it's not like the General Strike, is it?'
Slowly he explained the financial crisis to her in very simple terms, emphasizing the plain patriotic line to which she would respond.
'Yes, I see,' she said. 'It's pretty serious, isn't it? But then so's this holiday to you. Thinking out this new book and so on. And it is to me, too,' she added, 'very important. Couldn't you wire for some money?' she asked.
'I could,' Gerald answered.
'Well then, go ahead, old dear,' she replied; 'only do ask for enough to make a good holiday. I mean it seems so difficult, darling, to know what's enough, doesn't it, with all this pound falling business. It's better to be on the safe side.'
It was partly stupidity of course, as he knew, but not altogether, and he thought of the complaining, moralizing self-denial with which Inge would have greeted the situation - or else she would have made a terrible whimsical game of the economies needed to get home. 'Are you sure?' he asked.
Dollie did not answer the question. 'Pay for the drinks and let's move,' she said. 'I'm not going to let you off going round the wall. The view's quite stunning.'
For twenty minutes or more they leaned on the wall parapet, staring out southwards across the salt marshes and on to the Camargue.
'I've tried,' she said suddenly, 'but it doesn't work. The guidebook says it was a port and the Crusaders set off from here and I know what Crusaders looked like, I've seen them in books and churches, so I ought to be able to imagine it, but I can't. It isn't a port now, it's flat marshy land. Perhaps it was that heron flying by that distracted me. I like it, though.' When Gerald did not answer, she said, 'I suppose you can imagine Crusaders.'
'I expect I could if I tried, but I was thinking.'
'Oh, not about the Confessor, so far from Hastings!' She could never separate the Confessor from the Conqueror.
'No,' said Gerald, 'one of those things that seem so important and end up as platitudes. I was remembering the few times that I've been really happy like this and feeling that they were so much more intense than the rest of life that perhaps they were on a different plane of reality. I was wondering if it was only when we were really happy that we knew what was true. A nice bit of cosy egotism, I suppose.'
'It does seem a bit good-goody,' Dollie said, 'like those horrid little limp suede books Mother used to put by the spare-room bed for visitors. Full of great thoughts.' She pressed her finger slowly against his temple, running down to his chin, feeling the outline of his cheekbone. 'I'm very happy too, dear, you know,' she said.
The shops in the Square were open once more when they came down into the town. They bought postcards. Dollie found one with a feather skirt which you could blow. 'All the same,' she said, when she had blown it three or four times, 'it is a bit pathetic. And a bit foul,' she added. It was clear that she felt it; then she laughed and blew it again.
'Do you think Kay would like this?' Gerald asked, picking up a cicada brooch. 'It's very unattractive. But the taste of sixteen! You would know, Dollie, you were a girl once.' She did not answer. 'All right then,' said Gerald, 'girls have better taste than boys. They're born with aesthetic discrimination. You choose something for her.'
Dollie raised her eyes from the tray of postcards. 'No,' she said, 'I'd rather not,' and she went on absurdly blowing at the feather skirt.
'Well, I think a cicada brooch. You know what, Dollie! Some of this awful folky stuff would just suit Inge. What do you think - an Arlesian doll or a quotation from Mistral in poker-work?' and when she did not answer, he said again, 'Which do you think, darling?'
'I haven't the foggiest idea,' she said violently, and threw the feathered postcard back into the tray.
It was impossible for Gerald to interpret the silence she maintained on the drive to Aries as life-affirming. She could lose her temper on occasion at tennis or at bridge, but it was a momentary flare-up with inept partners; this was something more. He suggested that they left sightseeing in Aries for a cooler day, a day when they were less tired, any other day that she chose. Her answer was to drive to the Arena, and, without bothering to take her box camera out of the car, she made a complete circuit of the stadium with him in silence. He was not spared the ruins of the theatre or the traipse across the river and down the long avenue to the Christian tombs. Finally, the storm broke on the roof of the cloister of Saint Trophime.
'It's no good telling me about columns and carving, Gerrie,' Dollie said. 'I don't know Roman from Romanesque and I never will. Oh! I know you don't care, but perhaps half the trouble is that you like to pretend I'm not a fool.'
'Not knowing the styles of architecture isn't my criterion for judging fools,' said Gerald. 'In any case, what trouble? I shan't say that I thought we were so happy, because you obviously aren't. But I will remind you that you said you were.'
He was suddenly angry with her, but she was unaffected by his mood. 'I shouldn't take that line if I were you, Gerrie. You pretty near got your marching orders this afternoon. No!' she said, 'I mean it. But I care for you too much and it isn't as if you were to blame really. I shouldn't have agreed to it.'
'Agreed to what?' asked Gerald.
'To your keeping on with Inge,' she said. 'I should have insisted on your getting a divorce. Even the silliest little shopgirl has the sense to try to get an honest woman made of herself.'
Gerald put his hand on hers; she did not return the pressure but she did not move her hand away. 'We had a very difficult decision to make,' he said. 'Perhaps we were wrong. If so, I'm very sorry. But we had the children to think of. And, after all, Inge behaved very decently.'
'I don't know anything about Inge. I don't want to hear about her. Neither your complaints nor your praises. How do I know what's gone on between you? The rights and the wrongs of it. I don't want to know.'
She walked away from him and began to descend the wooden stairs to the cloister below. She was talking now over her shoulder, disregarding the other tourists. 'One thing - there's to be no more present-giving. I'm not going to choose all those damned presents for your family. Oh! I know you're not to blame. I should never have accepted the situation. With Inge ringing me up, "I knew it must be your choice, Dollie, Gerald would never have thought of anything so charming," and "the children looking forward to Auntie Dollie's gifts". It's disgusting, Gerrie, that's what it is.'
'Aren't you making rather a moral mountain of it all of a sudden?' he asked.
'Yes. That's true. It's nothing to do with morals, of course,' Dollie said.
'I'm past all that or superior to it or whatever you like. Anyway, right and wrong and so on never meant much to me and they don't touch me at all now. I'm sorry. I was dramatizing. It's just that so much of it has gone rotten on me, Gerrie. And Fitzroy Square and the good times together, dancing at Ciro's and Mrs Salad don't quite make up for that. I know it when I'm away from England and I know it's not going to get better. It'll get worse. It's all right for you. It's all one piece for you. That's why you're perfectly happy reading Mrs Salad's letter here and so on. Well, I can't. I can't give you up either and I don't want to. But I'm not being sweet Auntie to your family any more. No fear. It hasn't done any good. You're as much a stranger to the children as if you'd made the break. You say so yourself. And if that's how they feel about you, what do you really suppose they think of sweet Auntie Dollie? What does Inge make sure they think? No, I've no right to say that. It's not her fault, it's ours.'
As they passed down the steps of the church into the broad square, she looked back at the carved tympanum. 'Is that a Last Judgement?' she asked. 'It usually is. Well, that's when I'll judge Inge and I don't want to hear any more about her until then. Oh! don't worry. I know I've got to see them and I'll behave myself, but, for the rest, you've got to keep them out of my life.'
That evening in their hotel at Avignon she drank too much and apologized again and again in a maudlin way and was very amorous. Their relationship dragged on like that for the next three years. ...
Robin was telling a story now. 'I'll give you this one for your column, John,' he said, 'because if you use it everybody who's ever had to do any serious business will laugh at you. I'm telling you because it's time you knew what life was like, what real moral decision means. We have a supplier,' he said, 'of small parts. He wasn't very important before we took on prefabrication, but he is now. A funny little man, probably churchwarden of the local church - it's a South-West suburb. He only produces in a small way, but he was an old business client of grandfather's. Father probably knew him. Do you remember Grimston, Father?' he asked; 'a funny, sandy-haired little man?'
Gerald made no answer.
Robin laughed. 'He's asleep. Well, this chap can't produce on the scale we need, he's slow and unreliable but he's got an old-established name. We've offered him everything to buy the goodwill, a first-rate price for the business, even retirement with a good holding of Middleton shares - he couldn't possibly get them on the market. But he's an obstinate old fool; he insisted on holding out, partly from sentiment, partly from conceit. So we've busted him. We got him flooded with so many orders from important firms that he hadn't a chance of fulfilling them. I know just what you'll say about that, John, but in the next breath you'll say people must have their houses quickly. All right, what's your choice?'
He leaned back in his chair and smiled with satisfaction - he had made a confession of an action that troubled his conscience and spiked John's guns at the same time.
John smiled. 'You speak as though I accepted your premises,' he said. 'You probably think that everyone does. I'm all in favour of removing these moral burdens from your conscience. Nationalize you. That's the answer. And when you've done that, watch the national planners - our good friend Pelican and so on - like hell to see that they don't become the same dyspeptic, conscience-racked tyrants as you and your private-enterprise colleagues.' He raised his voice and smiled a little as though to a radio audience. He even underlined the naïve, self-satisfied tone of his voice to annoy Robin more. 'After all,' he said, 'it's simply a matter of checks, isn't it? The individual conscience is an imperfect machine at the best and needs checking.'
Donald smiled. 'I'm glad at least to hear that the Left recognizes human imperfectibility,' he said. 'I've always imagined that they thought we were living in a state of grace. I must confess, however, that I'm still on Robin's side.'
Robin caught Marie Hélène's eye. How right he was to have offered Donald this new job! It just showed Mother's extraordinary powers of judgement. Who but she would have thought of that solution to Kay's worries?
'You see, John,' Donald went on, 'in a land where centuries of Protestantism have broken down any satisfactory guidance for human frailty, I would prefer to trust myself to the decency and judgement of the educated individual than to be at the whim of the mass hysteria which you call a democratic check. I'm afraid, Robin, though,' and he turned to his elder brother-in-law with a prim smile, 'that some of us have a more satisfactory guide than our poor, troubled personal conscience, haven't we, Marie Hélène?'
His sister-in-law did not return his smile. She was always embarrassed at Donald's attempts at alliance. Anglo-Catholics were certainly not real Catholics, and that was that. So she said rather vaguely, 'I think that anyone who is born a Catholic is bound to find all this rather difficult to understand.'
Robin saw that his mother was about to spring at the rearing of Rome's ugly head, so he turned the conversation. 'One of the worst will-o'-the-wisps you dogmatic Utopians pursue,' he said to John, 'is the idea of human consistency. No human being can hope to be consistent.'
Kay was up in arms at once; her round, unmade-up face shone with high-minded, intellectual disapproval. 'Oh! I don't agree at all there, Robin,' she cried. 'At least not for bringing up children. No woman could, I'm sure. The one thing that matters with children is to be consistent. It's the only kind of truth you can give them. That's where Mummy was so wonderful,' she added, and patted Ingeborg's hand.
Gerald felt a little shiver of distaste, but the emotion was now so worn out it hardly touched his brooding introspection. Kay's thankless affection for Inge was the only pill in the overstocked family medicine-chest that he still found bitter, but with the years you can accustom yourself to swallow anything. Two gulps now and he'd forgotten it. All the same, he reflected, the consistency which was one of Inge's chief prides was a somewhat doubtful legend. He wasn't prepared to give it more credence than - than, say, the Melpham burial. He rejected the simile with annoyance. It was becoming a King Charles's head. More profitable, he decided, to pursue the problem of Inge's consistency, since it seemed that the past was relentless tonight with his exhausted mind. ...
'The one thing that matters, Gerald, with the children,' said Inge, 'is to be consistent. We want their little bodies to grow straight and fine like the birch trees on the mountains. But that is not so difficult. They are good strong little animals without blemishes.' Gerald wondered if she really succeeded in forgetting Kay's hand. 'But it is more difficult with their little minds, their thoughts, their feelings. For these to grow straight and strong, there must be trust. And how can there be such if we tell lies?'
'That's all very well in theory,' Gerald answered, 'but it won't be so easy in practice.'
'Is the theory good?' Inge confronted him with it. The shingle, which fashion had forced upon her corn-coloured glory, removed the majesty from her; with her giant height and ample bosom it made her oddly like a guardsman en travestie.
'Yes,' said Gerald, 'as you've put it, in the void, of course it is,' and he laughed.
'Never mind about voids,' Inge declared. 'The theory is good. Very well. We must also make the practice good.'
'Which means, I suppose, that three small children should be told that their father has a mistress and that because their mother tells them so they must love their father's mistress and pray for her at night.'
'Now, Gerald,' said Inge, 'you know very well that the children do not pray at night. "If you do something good, then you are making a prayer," I tell them.'
'Well, then they will be busy doing good deeds to Dollie because we want it that way.' After eleven years of marriage, he met her theories and wishes with a touch of mockery: it absolved him, he felt, from full responsibility when, as was always the case, he acceded to them.
'Oh, Gerald,' Inge laughed at his strange incomprehension, 'how little you know your own children. They are not little slaves. If they make good deeds, it's because they are good children. Even poor little Kay
. She is so much better, Gerald, now. She does not try to fight against love and life so much. You know I even believe her little hand is better.'
'I doubt if medical opinion would support you there, my dear Inge.'
'Medical opinion. Pouf!' Inge literally blew it away. 'And so that is settled. No more of this nonsense that Dollie should not go to Kew with you just because I am taking the children there. You will tell her please to bring some stale buns. Johnnie is not happy unless he can feed the geese. I told him that they are not nice birds, that they have bad tempers and beaks that snap. "No, Thingy, you are wrong," he told me; 'they are the good birds that saved the Capitol." He is clever, Gerald, you know, and his little heart is so big. I think he will be a man to help humanity like Father. But he has a little will of his own, too, like me, Gerald. The other day when you were at Fitzroy Square, he asked, "Where is Daddy?" "He has gone to stay with Auntie Dollie," I told him. "I want to stay with Auntie Dollie." You will tell Dollie this, please, Gerald.'
From the broad street of Queen's Gate the sounds of 'Lady be Good' came floating through the summer heat into the spacious drawing-room. Execrable it sounded on saxophone and banjo. 'I'm just a babe that's lost in the wood, lady be good to me.' Gerald's face twitched with repulsion and he went across to close the french window.
'Oh, no,' cried Inge. 'Those are the poor unemployed men. That is bad, Gerald, to try to shut them out, because they are forgotten. You cannot so easily avoid unpleasant things. You must pay for living in the past with the Vikings,' she said with a smile suitable for a naughty child. 'Give them a shilling, my dear.' She followed her husband on to the balcony. 'Oh, they are my friends,' she cried excitedly. 'That is the little Welshman I told you about, Gerald, who has the boy like Johnnie. Wait!' she called into the street, 'wait! I come to talk to you.'
