by Angus Wilson
Inge would have been disconcerted to hear this description of her careful social democratic treatment of her maids, but Larrie was not concerned with fact or observation in life.
Vin Salad lay back on the divan and looked at his ornate wrist watch. 'She sounds a proper cow,' he drawled.
Larrie winked at Vin. 'That's right,' he said aside, 'but the old bitch doesn't see that there'll be someone else to play the grand lady now.' He flashed a grin of his white teeth.
Vin raised a manicured hand to his mouth and yawned. 'Get you,' he said.
Going straight was getting Vin down a little. He was a good waiter and kept his job, but regular hours and hard work gave him no reward but a sense of self-righteousness. A vinegary, spinsterish note had already crept into his lazy drawl. 'I notice,' he said, 'that you're not sleeping in the palace. It's the stables for you, isn't it? You may be the great Johnnie's new little friend but that doesn't mean they're having any common little slut smelling their grand house out.' Vin's idea of abuse was that of his grandmother. Larrie's departure from the house laid the way open for him to rule over Frank's little island of washed-up flotsam, to assuage his discontent on the other, less favoured, less quick-tongued lodgers; nevertheless he was jealous. Larrie knew this, of course; he did not answer Vin's abuse.
'I was telling Johnnie,' he smiled, 'that we must come to Giacometti's. He's not forgotten his meeting with you, Vin. I'll see that he leaves you a proper good tip.' Very slowly he began to walk across the room, his handkerchief over his arm, his legs bowed, his feet hitting the floor flatly. He was in a minute the image of a depressed, worn-out old waiter.
Frank pointed a fat little hand towards a chair. 'Sit down, ducks,' he said. 'That would be better if you were to work hard and earn an honest wage like Vin.' He turned towards the elegant lolling figure on the divan, but even he found Vin Salad's epicene languor an impossible example of simple thrift, and his sermon ended in mid-air.
Larrie was at once all boyish fervour. 'But it's just that I'm going to do, Frank,' he cried, his eyes ashine; 'I'm to drive the car and work in the garden. Oh, it'll be a fine life, a decent man's life. I know you meant it for the best, Frank, getting me that job in the pub, but it was killing me, Frank, honest it was, the smoke and the smell of it. It's the fine, clear air I need and the early rising.' He ran his hands through his scurfy, brilliantined hair in the excitement of the picture he was forming of himself. 'I've not had much education and I don't know much about things, but it seems to me a fine thing when people believe in you. I've been no good, Frank, I know that. Lying and fiddling, that's all I've been good for, it's all I was brought up to.' The little urchin face was near to tears at the thought of all the injustice. 'But I know this, Frank: it's grand when people believe in you like Johnnie and the old lady believe in me. You've been good to me, but you've never done that, Frank, never believed in me, and a bit of trust is worth all the sermons that ever were from the beginning of the world.'
Vin Salad stirred for a moment in his reptilian stillness, his long, dark eyes flickered. 'I believe in you,' he said; 'bloody crap.' He rose slowly from the couch and settled his coat around his hips, then he looked Larrie over very slowly, taking in the dirty, crumpled suit, the scruffy hair, and stained fingers. When he spoke again it was not in his usual cockney, but in his occasional Kensington drawl. 'I should think these Middletons could be very elegant people,' he said, and then he added, 'But of course I forgot, living among all those lovely flowers, they probably can't recognize the smell of shit any more.'
Larrie's face flushed and his eyes blazed. 'You're not going to take the mickey out of me, Vin Salad; I'll spatter you,' he cried.
Frank's fat little body bobbed up immediately. 'That's enough of that,' he cried. 'You get off to bed, Vin.'
Vin Salad paused by the door a moment and yawned, 'I should think it'll cost you a fortune in fumigation, Frank, after this lot's gone. The Council don't take kindly to harbouring vermin.'
If there was an element of direct jealousy in Frank's attitude to Larrie's relationship with John Middleton, as Vin had once suggested, it was not conscious. What Frank felt more deeply was the wound to his philanthropic pride. He had recognized Larrie from the start as the most feckless, unreliable material that had ever come into his reforming grasp; that this prize among irredeemable material should be snatched from him was a dreadful blow. He saw it all so clearly - the hard way, the grind, the moral lesson, duty, all were losing out to the easy way, money, charm, a well-known name, for, without knowing John Middleton, he dismissed his appeal as no more than these. The easy way was Frank's horror in life, and he felt justified in his fight against it, for did he not confine himself to one bed-sitting-room in his three houses? Did he not leave untouched one half of his money and devote the other half to helping the unhelpable? Did he not do all his own housework? And here was John Middleton using philanthropy, unconventional philanthropy - and it was the unconventional approach to mission work that was Frank's peculiar pride - to make himself a celebrity, vaunting it on the radio and in the Press. That Larrie should leave the narrow path for the broad highway was bad enough; nevertheless, had it been some obvious debauchee who was guiding him astray, Frank might have been able to accept it; but that John Middleton, the well-known doer of good, should act as Larrie's guide down the primrose path was more than he could endure. There was, too, beneath all this, an aspect of Larrie's relationship to John that mirrored distortedly Frank's own past, that raked over all the ashes he had so carefully tidied away, that touched the deepest guilt in his conscience - the guilt whose expiation was the basis of his whole carefully constructed Sister of Nazareth existence. Even with Larrie's bags all packed, even when he knew that there was nothing now he could say to prevent him leaving, Frank was determined to make one more effort, was prepared to bring out into daylight that part of his own life that was so securely locked away. Characteristically he set about the task in his particular 'broad-minded' moralistic way. He went to the corner cupboard and took out a bottle of whisky. It cost him much to dispense expensive drink in this way.
'Well, Larrie,' he said, 'we mustn't part on hard terms.' He poured out two very large whiskies. 'It doesn't do any harm to get drunk now and again, dear,' he said. He paused for a moment and stared into the gas fire. His voice lost its usual snappish quality and took on a slower, more fatherly tone. All unknown to him, perhaps, there was something of Canon Portway's note in his voice as he approached this hidden subject.
'It's strange,' he said, 'how things bring back old times. You see that photograph,' and he pointed to the handsome features of Canon Portway. 'I don't hold much by religion. In my experience there are better ways of carrying out Christ's gospel than turning your collar round the wrong way, but there are saints in all walks of life, and that man was one of them. He was a father to me, Larrie, in the village where I was born. It happened I was a bit more clever than the other lads thereabouts, I fancied book study and I dreamed my dreams like you do. My folk were simple folk, good enough, but they didn't understand me. That man did and he helped me. He gave me self-respect. It might have happened I'd have gone to the university, thanks to that man, but the war came along - the First War, you know - and I had to go for the Navy. When I came back I went into that man's service. It was too late for study then, but I was secretary and general helper to him and he treated me like a prince. But after a while, Larrie' - Frank's voice grew more solemn - 'I felt the need to be free, the burden of that man's affection was too great for me. Oh! it wasn't what you're thinking. Those were simpler times in those days and men were simpler too. Don't think I'm moralizing upon your relation with John Middleton. I don't go much, as you know, for regarding those things as important. I measure a man's heart rather than his actions. But there was nothing of that kind in the Canon's mind; he'd have died if he'd thought it so. For all that he was a lonely man and he loved me, but that was more than I could bear, for, Larrie, that seemed to take my freedom away. I reckoned i
t like that and I was right. If I'd stayed I couldn't have grown. So I left him, and I left him to folk that I knew would treat him badly, and they did.'
Frank had so often rehearsed his story in his mind that it came out perhaps a little too glibly. He realized it, perhaps, for a note of his usual asperity came into his voice again. 'Well, anyway, I went. And when he died he left me his money. That wasn't so much as it should have been, for the folk I've spoken of had bled him over the years, but it was enough to keep me in comfort. That's how I have these houses.'
He bobbed up and, waddling over to Larrie's chair, he refilled the boy's glass with whisky. 'To my way of thinking, this whisky and everything else I have has been badly got. But it would have been worse if I'd stayed with him, for I'd have lost my own will. There was no choice after I'd started the business, except between bad and bad. I don't say the cap fits you and John Middleton. I don't know. I've not met the man. I've tried to, but he wouldn't see me. But if you do decide to cut and run, you'd best do it early before he and his mother have got into the way of you.'
Any narrative as histrionic as Frank's met a ready response in Larrie. 'It's the very thing that's been in my mind, Frank. If you take their love, I've said, then you can't hurt them. Can you live up to it, Larrie boy? I've asked myself, and before God, Frank, I don't know. Now if I could think I could come and talk it over with you, Frank, if I was puzzled in my head what was right to do?'
'I'd keep your room for you,' said Frank, 'only I don't believe in something for nothing.'
'I wouldn't ask it,' said Larrie, and his eyes took on a dreamy look. 'It's bad enough going away owing you rent, but it's got to be. Johnnie would pay it and be glad, but I'll not ask him for money, no more than what I earn in the things I can do for him and the old lady. But I'll be paying, you'll see, one of these fine days, just when you've given me up, for I know it's a point with you to be paid what's owed you.'
'Only from those that have got it,' Frank snapped. 'For that matter, if you care to leave some of your things, duckie, there's no such shortage of rooms that you shouldn't keep yours for the time being.'
Larrie broke into such a tender smile. 'Well, now, Frank,' he cried, 'I'll accept that. It would be wrong not to. And there are old things I'd not care to take down there. It'd certainly be wonderful to come back to the old place when I need to think and see where my life is going to. And who knows, Frank,' he cried, and he came over and slapped the fat, little man on the back, 'the grand ways may not suit old Larrie boy after all?'
They finished the bottle of whisky that evening in talk that allowed Frank's underlying sentimental nature to break through his hard-baked, crusty surface. The drink freed Larrie too that evening, so that when he bade his host goodnight he let a sharp edge of his hard-baked soul appear through his usual treacly surface. 'Now wasn't that a wonderful thing?' he asked. 'And don't I envy you? You getting all the old Canon's money and not giving a bloody thing in return?' If Frank reflected on this later, it only confirmed him in his feeling that in Larrie he had lost a real hard case for his mission of reform.
'No, no, Middleton,' said Professor Clun, 'I don't care for any wine.'
Gerald asked, 'Are you sure?' before dismissing the wine waiter.
'Yes, yes,' said Clun irritably, 'I am not prone to make parades of polite refusals. If, that is, such nonsense can be counted a politeness.'
The luncheon was not going well. Arthur Clun had decided to be 'at a loss' - he was 'at a loss' to understand Gerald's acceptance of the editorship; did he feel so satisfied that his work on the Confessor was advanced enough to assume this further responsibility?' I doubt,' he said, 'if the exacting work of an editorship of this kind will prove compatible with the active pursuit of your hobby. I imagine that that sort of connoisseurship tends to become a full-time pursuit, if, that is, a man has the means to indulge such interests.' He was at a greater loss to understand the inclusion of so many inexperienced, younger scholars in a great work of this sort. He was the last to wish to stand in the way of new ideas or fresh talent; indeed, as far as the Bulletin went, he often felt that Sir Edgar was not open enough to, well, he would not say progress, because such abstractions were inapplicable to the study of history, but to change. He had been seriously vexed once or twice when Sir Edgar had incalculably refused remarkable contributions by brilliant Ph.D. pupils of his own. But the History was quite a different matter.
'As I see it,' he said, and he cut his roll into four equal pieces and placed on each of them an equal share of butter, 'the Medieval History will remain the principal repository for secondary statements for a decade or two. It will certainly be used extensively at home and abroad for university standard teaching. I can imagine only one, or, at a pinch, two qualifications by which the contributors should be judged. For myself, the primary, I would almost say the sole, requisite is depth of scholarship tried over years of organized research work. I cannot feel happy that men in their late twenties, assistant lecturers like Roberts, or even recently appointed lecturers like Stringwell-Anderson, have the length of experience necessary, the historical background required for such important work. I shall be told that they are brilliant - it may be so, I have never been a very happy judge of brilliance in vacuo - but, of this I am certain, brilliance that has not been tempered by the discipline of long years of apprenticeship to research will not give the History what it requires. We shall get flashy stuff, Middleton, brilliant, unsustained flashes in the pan, unsupported guesses. Such contributors will be straining to prove themselves - I don't blame them, they are not yet established as scholars, they have their future to make; I would have run the same risks at that age if it had not been for a climate of established opinion, now alas vanished, which discouraged such displays of pyrotechnics. The History is the last place for such things. British scholarship will be judged by it abroad for many years to come. In short, Middleton, I can only say that I regard many of your selections as little short of disastrous.'
Gerald's face had flushed deeper as Clun spoke, but he exercised great self-restraint. 'Are you sure that you really want that trifle?' he asked, for his guest had struck the pudding once or twice with his fork and regarded it no further.
Professor Clun wiped his little moustache with his napkin and stared at Gerald with his hard green eyes. 'I imagine so,' he said. 'Is there some reason for not eating it? If so, please order whatever is appropriate. I am indifferent to these things.' And when Gerald smiled, he went on: 'As I was saying, there is, I suppose, another qualification which might be held valuable in the compilation of the History. It is one which is highly prized today - the selection of yourself as editor bears witness to the regard of Sir Edgar and the Syndic for it. I refer to that general standard of culture, that breadth of humane study which commands literary ability, worldly experience, and all the other penumbra of scholarship. It is indeed a most valuable temper to possess, and those who have had the time and means to cultivate it are lucky indeed. It is hardly, however, by definition, an attribute of the young and inexperienced. No, on every ground, Middleton, it seems to me that some of your selections must be judged deficient.'
He paused and carefully placed two pieces of angelica on the side of his plate. He smiled a watery smile. 'I am past the age,' he said, 'when an unfamiliar diet appeals. Much of my best work must be done in the afternoon.'
'I've never been troubled with dyspepsia,' Gerald drawled untruthfully.
Professor Clun looked at him sharply. 'No?' he said. 'I'm inclined in general to regard it as the inevitable malady of any serious or lengthy application to study.'
It was over coffee, as Professor Clun obstinately blew clouds of smoke from his pipe into Gerald's face, that he revealed the greatest degree to which he was at a loss. It had seemed to Gerald that, having allowed the little man to vent his spite to the full, he might now begin the process of persuading him to co-operate.
'Look,' he said, 'you've told me all you disagree with, but if you will look at the list again
you will see that the chapters you complain of are not the principal ones. I'm not going to give way over them. You wouldn't if you were editor. But I am going to say that if you don't -contribute, you will produce exactly the result you warn me against. If this History goes to press without at least two major contributions by Arthur Clun - and I should like more - then indeed we may count on being a laughing-stock to foreign scholars. I cannot believe that one who has given so much to the study of English history as you have will allow that to happen. I have made no pretences to you, I make none now. I shall edit as I see fit, but I appeal to you not to sabotage this important work. I ask you, not as a favour to myself, but because the History should be all that you believe it should be, to give me your help.'
Arthur Clun removed his handkerchief from his sleeve and once again wiped his moustache. He stared at Gerald. 'You claim to be honest with me,' he said, 'I will be equally honest with you. I heard today - I shall not say from what source - something which I find it hard to credit, an action of yours which if it is true I am at a total loss to understand.' He paused, and pulled at the ends of his little moustache, blowing his cheeks out in a self-important way. 'I was told that you had asked Dr Lorimer to contribute the article on the Conversion of England,' he said.
'I did,' Gerald answered, 'and she refused.'
Professor Clun banged his pipe heavily on the ash-tray. 'Well,' he said, 'the Lord indeed mightily preserveth fools.'
