In the Time of Greenbloom

by Gabriel Fielding

  She looked very worried; worried and sweaty. It was like questioning a pillow or expecting sympathy and understanding from a cushion. It was worse, because pillows and cushions could not sweat or feel; they could not really be loved. He patted her back and lied. “Don’t worry, Poo, I was only joking. I’m feeling very happy really and it was sweet of you to put in a word about the dinner party.”

  “That Mr. Churchill who’s always making trouble in Parliament, and a lot of other great men weren’t good at school, Dear; they were backward—very backward, and look where they’ve got to. I know you’re very clever and so does yer Mother; you’re just a”—she searched for the comfortable word—“late developer like Mr Geoffrey, that’s all; and one of these days we’ll all be proud of you.”

  “Do you really believe that? Honestly?”

  “We all do, yer Uncle Felix always said you was the cleverest of them all—now please go out to them. Yer Mother’ll be upset if she thinks you’re talking to me. Go and tell her how well you’ve done.”

  “Goodbye Poo.” He left her stooping over the oven in the bright heat of the kitchen fire and walked out onto the terrace.

  “Poo says we’ve definitely been invited over to Lady Geraldine’s.”

  “Yes, but you’re not to be late back, Daddy wants you to serve at the nine o’clock in the morning and there’s to be no pub-crawling with Greenbloom and his friend.”

  “That’s all right. There can’t be, not for Horab—it’s Schobbers.” He stopped. “Good heavens! He won’t be able to come, he’s not allowed to do anything until the evening star appears on Saturdays.”

  “Oh that’s all over. His family don’t know; but he’s lapsed, hasn’t he Teddy?”

  “He’s no longer Orthodox,” said Father, “he was telling us about it within five minutes of his arrival. Good thing too—they can’t eat pork you know, John.”

  Mother looked at him and then at John.

  “As if that mattered! I can see that it’s all going to be left to me. How are we going to get anything out of him for the new Rood Screen if that’s all you can say—” She mimicked Father’s slow rather portentous voice. “They can’t eat pork, you know! I really think you must be going senile, Teddy. What’s the good of all these Uppingham prizes you’re always swanking about and your First at Oxford and all the years of experience you’ve had if you only talk like that? This is our great chance; I told the old Vicar only yesterday that he should have the money for his Rood Screen in a fortnight at the latest.”

  Father winked at John. “Well how was I to know? I thought you were going to convert him! You never told me that I was to be ‘in on it’ as the current phrase has it, an Americanism I believe.”

  “Oh you make me tired.” Her vehemence was inexhaustible. “You know that I know nothing about doctrine and exo—ex—”

  “She means exegesis,” interrupted Father.

  “Well exegesis or whatever it’s called. I can only get him to the Church, arouse his interest, and perhaps before he knows where he is get him onto his knees. Of course I was relying on you to coach him on the theological side.”

  She sighed. “If only old Pall were still alive, between us we’d soon have won him round—enough money for the Crypt, the Church Hall, and the Rood Screen.”

  “Oh Herbert!” said Father scornfully. “A Durham man!”

  Mother got up. “Well let’s see if you can do better; at least my Father knew that it wasn’t just a question of Pork!”

  “I shall have to do a bit of reading if you’re really relying on me.” Father was pleased. “But you’ll have to give me a few days grace, pet. First of all I shall have to find my books; they were all turned out of the Study in the last great spring cleaning. Little Melanie said she thought they were in the loft at Plas David—in the loft!”

  Following Mother’s example he too got up and stood in the yellowing sunlight a little uncertainly just behind her. He was watching anxiously to try and determine in which direction she would move next; he did not want to be left there alone.

  Mother moved off round to the dog field and they followed her. She turned round impatiently:

  “You’d better go and feed the hens. They’ll be back any minute and I want them to have a glass of sherry before they go over to dinner—that is if they haven’t filled themselves up to the neck in the Rhosybol Arms! And don’t forget to wash your hands, Teddy. I don’t want you coming in covered in bran and with hen-dirt all over your shoes. John! go and ask Nanny for the sherry and get a tray ready and after that come and help me with the dogs; I want to know how you got on in the Exam today.”

  Obediently they turned away and a little dejectedly walked down the steps onto the drive.

  “That’s done it!” said Father with satisfaction. “I’m in her black books again now. We shan’t hear the last of this for weeks.”

  “Oh I don’t know, Father.”

  “Did you know she was expecting me to coach this fellow in Christianity?” He was still savouring the aftermath of his pleasure in the very definite commission he had exacted from her. “I thought he was a follower of Nietzsche—I had a curate once who steeped himself in it. He started preaching the most abominable sermons, poor fellow!”

  “Why ‘poor fellow’?” asked John.

  “Interruptions at the end! I had to get in touch with my bishop about it. Got no sympathy from that quarter; he’d once been rather keen on Nietzsche himself and told me that I must be tolerant—that Pinch was only cutting his Theological teeth!” He sniggered. “Theological teeth! Did you ever hear such rubbish?”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Who, the Bishop?”

  “No, this curate fellow—Pinch?”

  “Oh, him? Your Mother got rid of him and he went to Birmingham—right place too; the Bishop there was a Modernist and that was too much for him—for Pinch I mean—he took a holiday at Saltburn and swam out too far and got himself drowned.”

  “Did he really?”

  Father looked at him blackly. Beneath the high white forehead his small eyes were as dark as a rook’s. “Of course he did. I don’t tell lies. Pinch was a coward. He was eaten up with himself and took to reading Nietzsche instead of the New Testament.”

  There was silence for a moment and John suppressed a shiver. “It might have been an accident,” he said hesitantly.

  Father was very dry.

  “It might have been, but it wasn’t. There were notices all over the place warning bathers about the current and he chose one of the worst possible days. It was suicide and everyone knew it.”

  “Oh.”

  They stood there for a moment longer. The sun had begun to fall behind the ‘Mountain’ and the blue shadows were thickening over the fields and the white-washed cottages which studded the green slope high above them. The little road from Pen-y-sarn dropped like a cobalt girdle to the hem of the narrow coastal plain.

  “Do you ever pray for him, Father?”

  “Of course I do. The War had poisoned his mind poor fellow.”

  He broke off and pointed at the mountain road. Father always broke off when he was questioned over-closely on matters of Faith, perhaps as a reaction to Mother’s volubility; for their religions, despite nearly forty years of marriage, were a little different.

  “We’d better hurry, John! There’s Greenbloom’s car. They’ll be here in a few moments and I’ve got to get water and corn for those hens.”

  “Yes Father. I say, what’s this other fellow like? This Boscawen-Jones man?”

  “Oh, he’s a gentleman I should say. I didn’t get much chance to talk to him with Kitty and Mick there; you know what she is, I never seem to be able to get a word in edgeways when she’s talking. He looks all right, John—bit pale and seedy—I’m told he writes.”

  “Was he clean? I mean is he one of these long-haired slovenly chaps that one reads about, sandals and corduroy trousers and so on?”

  “What’s that? Didn’t notice; he looks tire
d. Look here, I’m sorry John, I’ll have to get a move on if I’m to get a glass of sherry with you. You might go and get that bottle opened, I’m looking forward to it.”

  He moved off stiffly in the direction of the water-butt and John went into the house.

  Later, Mother sat in all her gardening dirt on the little chair known as her ‘Nursing Chair’ because she always said that one after the other she had breast-fed the family in it from the turn of the century. From the vantage point of this situation she talked intensively to Greenbloom while Mick Father and Jane Boscawen-Jones, who had been introduced as Jane B-J for convenience, sat round her and listened, lazily alert.

  Greenbloom after two years of living in Paris had developed his French self. There was a feminine quality about his clothes: a shirt sprigged with tiny flowers, very flat suéde sandals and smoothly tailored trousers. He wore his hair a trifle longer and his harsh voice had absorbed both the French gutturals and sentence-rhythm and he used his hands and shoulders more freely as he talked. He was, too, a trifle fuller in the face, more plump in his pauses as though the rich food and wine had conferred a certain judiciousness and deliberation upon him. Beside him, Boscawen-Jones looked frail; a hunched young man with old lines on his forehead hollow cheeks and fine hair of the sort which thins quickly in the thirties; very diffident and given to twitching his narrow foot as he listened to the conversation.

  This foot-twitching gave him away in John’s eyes; it’s writhings registered his reaction to every nuance of the conversation, as he sat there perched on the arm of Greenbloom’s chair watching Mother exercising herself against the tolerant scepticism of his patron. Clearly, he was not liking what he saw.

  As a writer, and therefore presumably as an observant person, even ten minutes with Mother when she was like this should have been sufficient to convince him that her capacity for the sort of honesty which deceives, would be dangerous even to the dull. Greenbloom was not dull, he was an enthusiast; and Mother when she was sufficiently interested could carry away even the most discreet of people by loving their enthusiasms just a little less than she loved them, which was utterly and with the most beautifying discernment.

  Boscawen-Jones, if he were to profit from the encounter which he was watching so closely, would certainly have to be alert, John decided, as he circled round and filled up the sherry glasses.

  It occurred to him then that they seemed like a school of gamblers as they sat there—with Mother as the Banker; all with a private stake on the hazard of the conversation as they awaited the advent of their own particular advantage.

  Father, wanting only Mother’s attention and approval, was putting small stakes on a variety of different numbers, while Michael having drunk too much in Benllwch was plunging dumbly and more heavily on fewer fancies: the chance of returning with Greenbloom for a few weeks to the flat in Paris for example, or even of abandoning his Articles in London and accepting Greenbloom’s offer of some unspecified position in the family vineyard near Tours. The outcome of course depended entirely upon Mother’s reaction to Greenbloom; if she succeeded in liking him afresh now that his affair with Rachel was over and felt that his lapse from Judaism might imply a readier sympathy for Christianity; or if she were able to exact a promise of money from him for the Rood Screen, then all would be well for Michael and Father; if on the other hand they struck sparks between them as they had done in the past over his affair with Rachel, or if Greenbloom laughed at the wrong moment, then the whole family and the entire visit would suffer her displeasure and only Boscawen-Jones would profit from the disaster.

  Hostility was apparent in every particular of his behaviour: his careful silences, his refusal to smile; or worse, the swift effacement of any smile ultimately wrung from him by a direct appeal. He alone, John decided, must have something real to lose, or must fancy that he had; and he wondered what it could be.

  It could not be money, as according to Michael, Greenbloom had already spent far too much on his publishing venture to back out of it without any warning, and it was in any case far too soon for such a volte-face because Greenbloom had a certain loyalty to himself and rarely thought to abandon his past completely, holding that it was undignified to sever connections finally with any thing for which one had once entertained affection or respect.

  Perhaps Boscawen-Jones was in love with Greenbloom; that would explain everything. He might easily be in love with his exoticism his fiery enthusiasms his impatience and the sudden despair to which he was still subject when he would sit as he had sat four years ago, green and greyly impassive, while John shaved him in his rooms at Oxford. Perhaps, too, his great wealth did play its part in Boscawen-Jones’s attitude to him. There was something about a man as wealthy as Greenbloom; there was something about wealth itself; to have so much money taking an interest in one. Girls were right to let it count, John thought, to let it sway them; even to let it seduce them as once Danaë had been seduced by Zeus descending in a shower of gold.

  Certainly Boscawen-Jones was behaving like a lover; like a jealous woman who, knowing that her hold is insecure or fancying that it is so, is soured and alerted by enthusiasm or interest displayed in any direction but her own, even though they be accorded only to a picture a child or a poodle. His foot twisting, his spoiled delicate anxious face smoothed out to hide his concern, he was watching Mother hungrily intent on missing no opportunity of distaste as she sat there working on Greenbloom with her grubby hands gesticulating and her eyes shining out beneath her freshly hennaed hair.

  “And what about this horrible Wittgenstein man, Horab? Are you still backing him, publishing things about his anti-Christian books?”

  Greenbloom fell back in the big chair screeching with laughter.

  “No, no, no, Mrs Blaydon. Wittgenstein has served his purpose very well; but he is a little démodé—an old flirtation. You are out of date, isn’t she Jane?”

  Boscawen-Jones smiled briefly.

  “A little, I think.”

  Mother caught his tone and cocked her head at him quickly; but she was too late. He had concealed his gaze by looking down at his hands, watching them as he wrapped his thin fingers carefully one over the other; and she switched her attention back to Greenbloom.

  “Tell her about Jean-Paul,” commanded Greenbloom. “My latest discovery.”

  “If you don’t mind, Horab,” he spoke pettishly, more like a spoiled child than ever. “Not just now—”

  “Very well.” Greenbloom smiled indulgently and looked round the room at the others. “Jane is what I call a very sick poet! he is not strong, he suffers from a condition which it would be indelicate to name, and sometimes we must humour him. Jane does not like to talk about certain things at certain times so I will have to tell you about my friend Sartre.”

  “And who is he?” fired Mother, releasing Boscawen-Jones from her scrutiny. “Another nasty atheist who’s going to start flooding England with black pamphlets like Bernard Shaw?”

  “Listen to her, listen to her!” shouted Greenbloom. “You should be taking notes Jane. I told you to bring a note-book with you.”

  Mother ignored him. “Teddy! What was that book I made you burn last week?” Father sat up and seized his opportunity with fatal clumsiness.

  “What book? You’ve burned so many.” He looked round in his clandestine way at Michael and John. He wanted to please her, but as always when he had the chance of it he automatically forfeited it; preferring to take comfort in the reality of her vexation rather than in the uncertainty of her affection.

  “Always burning my books,” he went on. “Only yesterday little Melanie was telling me that she saw a whole lot of ’em in the loft over at Plas David!”

  Mother flashed him an angry mock-angry smile: she was stalking more important game. “Oh never mind. Michael! you brought it home, you remember the one I mean?”

  “Oh the Blag—” Michael corrected himself, “The Black Girl,” he said with beery care.

  “That’s right.” She f
rowned. “But wasn’t there something about God in it?”

  “She means The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God,” said Father. “You didn’t make me burn that, you snatched it out of my hand before I’d got beyond the first page.”

  “Of course I did! The old fool’s going senile.”

  “I’m not!” said Father.

  “Not you! Bernard Shaw. Oh Teddy, don’t be so tiresome.”

  “You burned it?” Greenbloom gazed proudly at Boscawen-Jones in the manner of an owner whose dog’s reputation for fierceness has not let him down. “You hear, Jane, she ’as burned a first edition of the best thing Shaw is ever likely to write. This little woman has burned it unread.”

  “Extraordinary!” said Boscawen-Jones with great boredom.

  “I didn’t need to read it. I could see by Teddy’s expression that it was evil, couldn’t I Teddy?” Without waiting for an answer she glared briefly at Boscawen-Jones as she retasted the flavour of his comment.

  “What do you mean, ‘extraordinary’?”

  “Nothing!” Boscawen-Jones yawned. “Only perhaps that your action was a little—outré Mrs. Blaydon.”

  “Please!” said Greenbloom peremptorily.

  Mother ignored him. “Outré—did you say ‘outré’?” she asked Boscawen-Jones.

  Still careless of his peril, not realising that until now she had scarcely noticed him, that he had been set aside for quick scrutiny at a later time, Boscawen-Jones aped Greenbloom’s tired wave of the hand.

  “The wrong word perhaps,” he said, “but one does not like the flavour of philistinism—it is vieux jeu. Certainly though I should say that to have burned the book unread was a trifle odd.”

  Trembling finely like a terrier at a rat-hunt Mother leaned forward at him over the intervening space of the carpet. John knew that at last she had smelt out his latent hostility and that in a moment she would set her small jaws unerringly into the centre of his weakness and close them tightly together.

  Greenbloom’s violent nudge was lost on Boscawen-Jones as he recoiled a little by pushing his hunched spine against the back of the armchair. Around him with small movements the others closed in, watching sharply to see where she would strike.