In the Time of Greenbloom

by Gabriel Fielding

  When they had gone the waiters, summoned by Alexander Flood, reappeared. He drove them before him anxiously like a collie mustering sheep, and people began to snatch glasses from their full trays and drink with the abandon of passengers rescued from a sinking ship. The group in front of the wedding-cake broke up. Mrs Cable, Major Albright, and the Reverend the Hon. Steven Counter and his wife made four backs with a talking centre from which the words ‘Madeirah’ and ‘weddin’s’ echoed out into the room. Father, finding himself alone, walked round to Mother and began to lead her slowly down towards the corner.

  In the front ranks nobody seemed to see them. The red-and-white men, the tall women with the lacy hats and pig-tailed daughters, were all apparently having difficulties with their digestion or else trying to remember some newly forgotten fact which had now become extremely important. But half-way down the room the atmosphere changed: people swept forward, loud Northumbrian voices boomed out greetings and Mother was seized by the hand and drawn into their midst. Mr Smith lighted his pipe and adjusted the gold watch-chain which spanned his waistcoat, while Lizzie could be heard ordering a cup of tea from one of the waiters:

  “And be sure it’s none on your Indian; it moost be China, the mistress doesn’t like t’other sort.”

  In a few minutes the room was as noisy as ever. There was much laughter from the wedding-cake end, sudden sharp society shrieks, and a steady boom of conversation, even of thigh-slapping altercation from the Boult end.

  Moving from his vantage point in search of Victoria John passed Mrs Cable’s group. She was looking very dashed, not really cold or alarming at all; Major Albright was being brotherly to her, like John himself sometimes felt towards Melanie, talking loudly and fast to the others but watching her drawn face with his eyes all the time and trying to persuade her to eat or drink something more.

  The other clusters of people he passed were the same, speaking in high jerks, embarrassed by silences which befell them with no warning, like those which afflict people who have been given bad news. One or two of them, but not many, were safely angry; he heard remarks like, ‘I’m told she writes,’ and ‘Appallin’ bad taste.’ These he was not sorry for; but his journey past the others confused him, bleeding him of his earlier elation and making him feel increasingly old; old, because their silences and embarrassment made them seem young.

  He thought of the boxing match with Marston and realised with dismay that what he had witnessed had been only a repetition of it in the world of the grown-ups. Mother and Mrs Cable had fought in public just as he and Marston had fought in private; and there had been no older proportionate ‘Toad’ to oversee the fight. They had mauled and hurt each other over their love for David and Prudence with no one to see fair play or establish a reason for their fight.

  The comparison sickened him; he did not want to feel sorry for anyone; he wanted to be a Fisher, happily taking sides, changing sides if necessary, sure of his sympathies and ready to champion Mother or Mrs Cable to the death; but he could not. He lacked both the self-confidence of the ‘Toad’ who had been sure of his reasons for calling the fight, and the partizanship of Fisher who had revealed himself as loathing Marston because he had loved him.

  This realisation weighted his step as, passing through the ruck of Mrs Cable’s supporters and beyond them into the silly and noisy elation of Mother’s Northumbrians, he reached the fern corner where Melanie and Victoria were talking jubilantly to each other.

  “Wasn’t Mother wonderful?” said Melanie.

  “You see?” said Victoria. “You see?”

  They were standing close together like Marston and Fleming in the locker room; he expected them to dance and taunt him.

  “Yes,” he said, “at least, I don’t know—”

  “It’s the North against the South, the North against the South,” chanted Victoria, “like the American Civil War; and your Mother’s quite right, people shouldn’t get married until they’re sure, should they, Melanie?”

  “Mrs Cable’s been horrid to Mother all the time,” replied Melanie, “telling her that she’s going to get her Bishop to make them live in the South so that she’ll hardly ever be able to see David.”

  “Horrible old South,” said Victoria. “They’ll never be happy if they live down here; after a few years they’ll start quarrelling over money and get divorced.”

  “They can’t do that because David’s a clergyman,” said Melanie. “And anyway God’ll beat Mrs Cable; He’s always on Mother’s side. She’ll pray about it and David will get a living in the North from Mother’s Bishop, won’t he, John?”

  It sounded perhaps more like a game of chess, he thought; if it was, it was the same thing, a fight just the same.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know whose side God’s on. Toad was on no one’s side—”

  “Toad!” Melanie looked scandalised. “Who’s Toad?”

  “Oh no one! You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I would,” said Victoria. “Tell me.”

  “Well,” he said, “it was the fight I was talking to you about, at the Abbey. The master who made us fight was called ‘Toad’ and he stood by while we were in the boxing ring. If you can understand I think he was like God—”

  Melanie interrupted. “Don’t listen to him, he’s being blasphemous, calling God ‘Toad’!”

  “Oh shut up Melanie,” he said wearily. “You don’t understand; you haven’t seen Mrs Cable, she’s looking miserable and ill. Mother’s ruined everything for everybody—”

  “She hasn’t! It’s just you, you always go against everybody. Mother was wonderful and brave—and you’re just being wicked. Come away from him Victoria, he’s only trying to get you on his side.”

  “I haven’t got a side,” said John. “I’m like Toad, or God—I just watch and feel sorry for everyone.”

  “There! He’s said it again: Goad—I mean Toad and God; I’m not going to stay with him and I’m surprised at you, Victoria; I suppose you like it because you believe in divorce; but we don’t.”

  This time they both turned on her.

  “Oh go away!” they said; and she went: flouncing off angrily in her party dress, her red hair glowing like hot coals.

  “Was Mrs Cable really looking sad?” asked Victoria, “or did you just say that to beat Melanie?”

  Delighted by her intuition he smiled at her. “She really was,” he said. “I wish you could understand, Victoria. I felt sorry for her. She looked so lonely, with only her brother, that Major Albright man, to cheer her up; her husband is dead and she’s only got Prudence and her sister and now she’s lost—”

  “Like Mummy! Like Enid!” said Victoria. “Poor Mrs Cable.” She craned on tiptoe to try and see her but she could not sustain the pose long enough. “Perhaps you’re right,” she went on, “and even if you’re not, I think Melanie’s a beast.”

  “She’s always like that,” he said. “She and Mary and Mother always stick together, that’s why Mother was being so nice to you—trying to get you on her side.”

  “Well I won’t be; don’t worry about that. You’re my friend; you understand me and I’ll always stick up for you.” She paused. “And now,” she said, “I’ll tell you the good news.”

  “Oh please do!” All his gaiety returned in a blaze. “You are wonderful, Victoria, to go on being the same. At first I thought—”

  “Never! It’s like we said; we’re the beginning of each other and we’ll go on and on, and nothing will ever separate us for long. I’ll tell you; it’s about the holidays.”

  “What?”

  “Well you know I was talking to your Mother at the Russell Hotel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, since she was in such a good mood—towards me I mean—although she did rather go on about that old bathing thing, I thought I’d ask her if you could have some of your holiday with us on the Moors. We’re going to George Harkess, his farm In Danbey Dale; you know, I’ve often told you about it.”

 
; He drew in his breath. “What did she say?”

  “She said that you could!”

  “No!”

  “As it happens she said it was a very good thing because it turns out we shall be at Nettlebed, that’s the farm, just when your family are making the move to go and live in Anglesey.”

  They looked at one another delightedly. For John, confusion receded, speculation was replaced by shining fact; but before he could speak again they felt the renewal of bustle behind them and they both turned round.

  David and Prudence had come in to say goodbye. Outside, through the wide glass door: the brightly labelled cases, the great bouquets of flowers and the hat boxes could all be glimpsed standing in the hall. Two pages and a porter were beside them, waiting expectantly; and inside there were swift greetings, kisses, the whiteness of handkerchiefs and the rustle of rose-leaf confetti. Alexander Flood threw wide the door, there was a surge and its silence; a pause, and the scattering of the sad syllables of the last goodbyes, and the wedding was over.

  Back at the Abbey, Saturday evening was nearly at an end. Very soon now, Kay, with her large face and golden centre-parted hair, would replace her Tatler on the occasional-table and show them all out of the drawing-room.

  These Saturday evenings, of course, were meant to give them the illusion of home. John remembered the kindly sensible way in which Kay explained to the parents of the new boys that, once a week, twenty or thirty of ‘the School’ were her guests in this drawing-room. He could imagine how pleased the parents must be at the thought of this one cosy evening marking the start of the week-end for the little new boy so far away from the familiar faces and comforts of his own home.

  But it was not like home, he thought angrily as he pedalled away at ‘Tit Willow’ on the pianola; it was worse than the Russell Hotel, which even Mother hadn’t managed to make cosy. Everyone in it was too quiet and formal, the boys were miniatures of the smart buttoned-up people at the reception. The furniture was wrong; and the papers. In the Vicarage, nobody took the Tatler, and if a Sphere or an Illustrated London News found its way there it was only because somebody had been on a long journey like this Wedding Week-End. And anyway, Kay herself was all wrong; like a magazine picture, like the Virgin Mary if she had taken up hunting as a girl, with a face like a great pink-nosed, blue-eyed horse. How he wished that he had Victoria with him standing behind the pianola and agreeing with everything he was thinking. No one like Kay would ever get into his home; they simply would not be there unless they were someone like Mrs Cable whom Mother had been forced to invite because she was David’s mother-in-law.

  His legs aching after the long stand during the service and the reception, his face tense with the fury of his determination to finish ‘Tit Willow’ before Kay dismissed them, he peered round the rosewood corner of the pianola and stole another glance at her as she sat there as stately and upright as she would have been in the hunting-field; as though at any moment she might be going to take a five-barred gate on her low blue chair.

  Toad’s wife, he thought; that meant they must have been married. A wedding years and years ago like the one he had attended that morning. He was sick of weddings; they weren’t true. They were as unreal as people fighting. People fighting did not hate one another, they only loved themselves and it was because they loved themselves so truly that they fought so bitterly. People at weddings did not love one another, they only loved themselves and what they thought represented themselves. The friends of the bride thought they loved the bride and they were suspicious of her husband; but the groom’s people thought they loved him and distrusted the bride. But then, of course, it had been a Priest’s wedding, and perhaps Mother had been right when she had insisted that the marriage of a Priest was different. How could a Priest have two wives? She had made it sound as though he only really had one. She had made the first wife and the first wedding sound beautiful as though it were something that no one could ever get at because it was above them all; she had made the love sound real. Victoria’s mother and father were divorced, neither the Toad nor Kay ever looked particularly happy; perhaps one day David and Prudence would end their marriage as he and Marston had ended their fight—with only themselves at the end of it. But that other wife, the one you could never reach—

  In front of him the pianola trilled. The willow-wren sat forlornly on its branch and called out of its agonising loneliness from the depths of the rosewood.

  He was back! but only for four more weeks, and then, Northumberland! Danbey Dale, Victoria, and one day the new home in Anglesey. He must get into the habit of not thinking again. From somewhere far behind his immediate consciousness he heard the scratchy gramophone on the kitchen-table in the Vicarage as the voice of some elderly light-opera singer sang out the words of the tune the pianola played:

  “Is it weakness of intellect birdie?” I cried

  “Or a rather tough worm in your little inside?”

  With a shake of his poor little head he replied:

  O willow! tit willow! tit willow!”

  3

  In Danbey Dale

  In what pale pastures leaning up to mountains

  Browsed her flock of sheep

  Whilst she the blue girl deep past counting

  Drowsy ewes slipped further into sleep?

  Why call them back who wandered from her dream

  To some white watershed of earth and sky

  Whence she herself streamed down in ringlets

  Like a lamb with heaven in her eye?

  In Danbey Dale

  Scuffing along the dusty white road that led from the village out towards the farm, he refused to allow himself to think of the School. His luggage, neatly labelled, JOHN BLAYDON, RUDMOSE’S HOUSE, BEOWULF’S SCHOOL, OXFORD, had been sent on well in advance and by now it would be awaiting him and the start of his first term, in some basement or day room he had never yet seen. In five days, at the end of this strange holiday with Victoria, when the time came for him to follow it South and eventually claim it from amongst the piles of the other new boys’ possessions, it would have a profound significance for him, even a sort of sanctity; for not only would it preserve beneath its labels and rope tangible and absurdly hurtful evidence of Nanny’s love for him: the boxes of chocolates and slabs of toffee smuggled in between the layers of folded pyjamas and shirts, but also, like some kingly sarcophagus, it would contain the very last of the air of the Vicarage and of his childhood that he was ever likely to breathe again.

  He paused in his rather hurried walk from the village shop and placing the haversack on the grass, leaned against the moorland wall by a holly tree. Never to see the Vicarage again! It seemed impossible, like never seeing one’s parents again or even oneself; for it had reared him, had mirrored him in its wide windows and gleaming corridors. He had grown under its elms, sat in the sun astride the huge v-shaped tiles which crowned its roof and explored, on winter afternoons, every cobwebbed cranny of its attics. It was his home: unchanging, receptive, even merciful; it was his abiding safety at the end of every term, the sure star of his ultimate direction during his every absence; and at present he could not conceive of his life going on without it. Yet the rest of them seemed to have left it without any regrets, had set off on that memorable Wednesday last week for the new life in Anglesey with never a regretful glance nor even the semblance of a dropped tear.

  No longer swinging his legs, no longer worrying about the time, he allowed the insistent memory of that last morning at Beddington to rise unrestricted in his mind.

  He had watched them from the nursery window; Simpson piling the last of the cases into the trailer, Melanie suddenly appearing with a minute fir tree from the garden and insisting on having a place found for it, Mother here there and everywhere, telling Father that he must sit in the back, asking Nanny if she were sure she had brought the china tea, and chivvying the maids about the tongue sandwiches.

  Something had been forgotten and Simpson had been sent to find it. He had come clumpin
g up the bare stairs and discovered John as he stood there by the uncurtained window trying to look unconcerned.

  “Hello, what are tha doin’ here? Aren’t ya coomin’ down to see ’em off?”

  “No, I said goodbye after breakfast.”

  “Tha looks proper down, lad. Coom on with me and kiss’m all goodbye.”

  “No thanks Simpson, I’d rather not.”

  “Well cheer up anyway. Holy Moses! you’ll be going off to your little lass’s in half an hour, you know—what’sa name, the little gal at the wedding in Loondon?”

  “You mean Victoria.”

  “Ay, ut’s the one. Ya wouldn’t catch me lewking lak a Christmas dewk if I was laiking for a week int’ moors with t’ little lass whose nobbut me own, I can tell thee.”

  John had smiled. He liked Simpson and was glad he’d be coming down to see him off at the station.

  “It’s only that I don’t like leaving the Vicarage,” he had confided. “I don’t want to live in Anglesey. I want to live here where I always have lived, where they have red tiles on the roofs and red cows in the fields. According to Melanie all the cows in Anglesey are black or black and white, and there are no tiles, only Welsh slates, and I think it sounds stinking.” Simpson patted his back.

  “It’s a graët place—fishing, swimming and climbing. Tha wait till end of next term, Master John and tha won’t want ever to coom back to old Beddington again, I can tell thee. When ya see Anglesey ya’ll—”

  But he had never finished for the angry braying of the horn had cut him short.

  “Ech! listen to ’er. Ut’s Miss Mary again; fair time she got married to some big fella ut’ll wallop her three times a day and teach her the meaning of patience. ’Ave ya seen ya mother’s spectacles? She swears blind she left ’em oop in t’bathroom.”

  “No, but I bet she’s found them by this time or Mary wouldn’t be blowing the horn like that.”

  Simpson had left him at that and rushed down the stairs. Out on the drive Mary had given the horn one last triumphant opportunity and then as the waving arms came out of the windows in response to the farewells of Lizzie Susan and Simpson, the car and trailer had swept off round the berberis hedge on its long journey across the Pennines. Only Father, at the very last minute, had seen John. Something had made him glance out through the black rectangle of the rear window and for a moment John had caught his eye, the somehow comical sympathy of his smile as the three women drove him away, before Melanie’s absurd horse-tail of a tree swayed between them and hid him from sight.