In the Time of Greenbloom

by Gabriel Fielding

  “So you think it ‘a trifle odd’.” Extravagantly and with odious affectation she waved her hand in a burlesque of his gesture. “Well I think your opinions are a trifle odd. I suppose they might be borrowed ones; young men are always borrowing from each other; but it’s a pity that they never seem to borrow anything of any value—only shoddy little mannerisms and undergraduate glibness. I’ve had to watch my sons doing it for years; I’ve learnt a lot from dealing with them. I breast-fed them all in this chair, some of them before the Great War—long before you were born.”

  Boscawen-Jones cleared his throat. Mother’s threatening aspect coupled with the awful association of the Nursing Chair seemed to have a paralysing effect on him. His hands ceased shaking and he sucked in his thin cheeks nervously like a fish so that his face looked more fragile than ever.

  “And I think I ought to warn you, Mr Boscawen-Jones, that if any more books like that come into my house that’s where they’ll go—into the fire. There’s enough blasphemy in the World without people putting it between the covers of books. Oh I know you young men think you can afford to be clever! That’s the Devil! he always likes people to think that they’re clever; that’s how he catches them. He keeps on telling them that they’re clever; he whispers it to them at night just as they’re going to sleep and he’s there waiting for them in the morning to whisper it again when they first wake up. And after a time they begin to believe him; they get a superior expression, they use French words where an English one would do and they begin to imagine that they’re great actors or painters or—poets. But then I’m quite sure that you don’t believe in the Devil; you’re too young, you know too much, it’s only the old who believe in the Devil isn’t it Mr Boscawen-Jones?”

  Boscawen-Jones uncrossed his legs carefully. The length of her speech had given him time to erect some sort of a defence. To give himself further time he coughed into his handkerchief.

  “I’ve never given the Devil very much thought I’m afraid,” he said with an effort at loftiness.

  “Well it’s time you did,” she fired back at him. “It’s quite time you did, because I’m perfectly sure that he’s been thinking about you quite a lot.” She paused, “I’m only hoping that you haven’t come up here to write his sort of poetry, because if you have you will find that you won’t be able to write a line, not a single line. Other people have tried their hand at Black Art at Plas David; an evil woman last year; she took drugs and tried to paint the Copper Mines to look like Hell—and they did! and she very soon left. So you see you’re by no means the first person to be attracted by the beauty of our Island—we’re quite used to people coming here and setting themselves against it and we’re not frightened of them in the very least—”

  Putting a hand to his forehead Boscawen-Jones got up suddenly.

  “I’m afraid I do not feel very well. This sort of thing—” his voice fell away as he looked quickly at Greenbloom. “If you don’t mind Horab, I think I’ll go and lie down for a few minutes.”

  Greenbloom, like a person who has enjoyed the first turn in a good cabaret, waved at him lazily. “By all means, mon cher, go to your bed. Rest! Relax for a little while. But do not say that Greenbloom was not right, that I was wrong to bring you here. I told you that it would be an experience to meet Mrs Blaydon. Tomorrow, despite all she says,” and he smiled at Mother genially, “you will write better than you have written for a very long time.”

  Behind him Michael got up with alacrity. “It is rather close in here,” he said. “The Gulf Stream you know. If you like I’ll take you over to the other house and show you to your room.”

  “If you must,” said Greenbloom. “But I shouldn’t bother, Mick; Jane is enjoying himself immensely, he has crossed swords with your mother and now, as I warned him, he must suffer. But he is happy.”

  He shook Mother’s hand as Boscawen-Jones accompanied by Michael made stiffly for the door.

  “I congratulate you Mrs Blaydon. You were splendid.”

  She snatched her hand away with a swift smile, “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “I am not! You were splendid. Your contempt—quite beautiful! It disarmed poor Jane, he had no weapon, nothing at all save his naked pride. Magnificent! I can only thank God that I did not have the misfortune to be born one of your four sons.”

  “If you had, you would have been very different.”

  He spread his hands. “But I don’t doubt it.”

  “And then perhaps,” she went on with a resumption of some of her previous intensity, “you would not always have been trying to steal my sons; they would have been your brothers.”

  “Steal your sons! Come come Mrs Blaydon!”

  “Oh I know, Horab. You can’t fool me. First of all Michael at Oxford, and look what happened to him—a pass degree—and then John, and he’s not got his School Certificate yet, and now John and Michael together. That’s why you’ve come, isn’t it?”

  “But you forget Jane! I have not yet finished devouring Jane; why then should I want to start on your sons?”

  “Oh,” she said, “that little man, if he is a man; Jane!”

  “It’s short for Janus,” said Father who had now finished digesting the scene of a few minutes before and was avid for a further display of her anger. “It is not a Christian name, it means the two-headed man, the deceiver.”

  But she was not with him, “That little creature couldn’t deceive a flea,” she said. “No wonder you had to come up here with him. I know why.”

  “Tell me,” said Greenbloom. “Please Mrs Blaydon! Dear Mrs. Blaydon! tell Greenbloom why he has come up here.”

  “Because you are looking for our religion,” she said. “That’s what you’re after. For all your talk of these half-baked philosophers you’re always turning up, that’s what really attracts you, that’s why you can’t leave my sons alone; it’s their Faith.”

  He considered it; his small face still trying to resist the pleasure of the smile he desired but dared not wear, Greenbloom nodded contentedly.

  “And that is why I am not your enemy?”

  “Not so far,” she said.

  “Not so long as I give them—your sons—back to you?”

  “Unharmed,” she said. “So long as you give them back to me unharmed, Horab.”

  “I see! I will confess that in a way you may be right. I do find your sons interesting, though not so interesting as yourself and for reasons other than those you suppose, and you may be sure that I shall always see that they are returned to you unharmed even if, as with John some time ago, I may not myself accompany them.” He sipped at his sherry and then looked up at her again smiling. “Tell me, do you want nothing in return for my interest? If I were to take Michael back with me to Paris for example during this vacation, you would demand nothing from me?”

  “Oh yes I would. That’s just where you’re wrong. You don’t imagine I’d let you have my sons for nothing, do you?”

  “Not for a moment I assure you. I suppose you may be banking on my conversion, yes?”

  “No,” she said. “That can wait. What I want is some money.”

  “Money?”

  “Yes.” She leaned forwards with her legs wide apart and her hands on her knees. “A nice fat cheque.”

  “How fat?”

  “That depends,” she said. “It depends on how your friend Jane behaves and the sort of poetry he writes and how you behave and how Michael and John behave while you are here. Say a hundred pounds, that would do very nicely for the Rood Screen.”

  “Kitty dear!” Father from the midst of his second glass of sherry leaned forward incredulously.

  “Oh be quiet,” she said, and turning caught sight of John. “And that’s not all,” her voice hardened. “John! Go over to Plas David and tell Mary that Horab will be over in a few minutes and that she can serve the dinner. There’s something else, something I’m worried about,” she lowered her voice again. “I’m worried about John.”

  He heard the words as
he closed the door behind him.

  How had she known? Mary had not been over again and Nanny would not have said a word. Father of course had seemed strange about the curate drowning himself, but not definite or sure enough to have mentioned his suspicions to Mother. So how had she known?

  He walked down the drive slowly. The curious thing was that none of it made any difference to his intention; although he had watched and listened to them all in there, no single thing that had been said had touched the hard centre of his intention at all. In some way it had even strengthened it; the fact that he had been able to see what moved them all, that nothing of what should have proved surprising in their behaviour had surprised him in the very least, had only confirmed him in his sense of isolation. None of them knew anything; neither Michael who was vaguely sozzled by the Benllwch beer, nor Father who suffered Mother, nor Mother who suffered her love of them all, nor Greenbloom nor Boscawen-Jones who were as remote as the Eiffel Tower. They knew nothing; they were all searching and seeking, chopping and changing, and he was tired of whatever it was they represented—if it were anything at all. They at least originally must have had a sense of purpose, had grown into their uncertainty by slow and relatively painless stages; but he—he permitted himself to think of Victoria for a moment as he turned into the Plas David drive. At the far end of it Mary was awaiting him coldly.

  At Porth Newydd Lady Geraldine Bodorgan greeted them in the hall. In her green county hat she came up to them with great composure, smiling adorably beneath the dead-eyed stags hanging on the walls. She had the sweetest voice and at fifty-two was still a flirt in the way a child is a flirt. She flirted with life and everything in it; furniture, flowers, animals and people; even with her clothes. Her grey eyes, aristocratically exophthalmic, or seeming to be so by their size and pallor were like those of Edward the Seventh or George the Fifth and they welcomed everything and everyone as they conveyed the secret and graceful rapture of her life’s perpetual encounters. Such eyes would smile even behind closed lids, in sleep, or in death; and in all the years the Blaydons had known Lady Geraldine they had never seen them show grief anger or dismay despite the fact that she should have been most unhappily married to her angry little husband the Admiral.

  “My dears,” she said to Michael, “how dear of you to come!” And she seemed to include them all in her delight. “You must come upstairs and meet the girls, they’ve been so looking forward to seeing you.”

  Introductions seemed hardly necessary. They felt that she had not only met both Greenbloom and Boscawen-Jones before but even that she had long ago accepted them intimately and confided in them the untamed secrets of her heart.

  Michael and John kissed her pale saffron-coloured cheek and Michael then presented Greenbloom and Jane. She touched their hands affectionately.

  “And so we have a poet in Anglesey at last,” she said to Jane. “Did you know that poor Dickens once stayed at Llanallgo Rectory? We must take you over to see it—we’ll have a picnic there. I don’t think he liked it much—there are so many trees round the Church.”

  Still talking quietly she led them across the hall and through a door to a staircase with Greenbloom and Michael on either side of her. In some way she managed to make each of them feel that she was alone with him and that everything she said was especially for his ears. John knew this because he experienced a touch of resentment at being relegated to the back of the procession with Boscawen-Jones and realised suddenly that he liked always when at Porth Newydd to be beside Lady Geraldine. But he followed with a good grace up the wide staircase.

  “Don’t you adore this house?” she said. “I’m so very fond of it. Clive is always threatening to leave it and move into one of the farms at Wern but I don’t think I could bear that; I’d really rather starve and freeze in Porth Newydd than try and live away from all this. These are my cobras! Don’t you think they’re sweet?”

  They all stopped by one of the wooden cobras which with extended hoods coiled round and crowned the pedestals at the beginning of each flight of stairs.

  “Victorian Gothic! Charming examples,” said Jane, “and a little unusual too.”

  “I’m so glad you think so. Oh how sweet of you to think so when you’re so young. You see I am Victorian. Imagine, I was born in 1878 and I can’t get away from it; I don’t want to: it is home. Don’t you think it’s home, Mr Greenbloom? One leaves home, I know, at twenty wherever one is or whatever one does and ever since this century began I’ve been trying to return to the last one. That’s really, I suppose, why I married Clive.”

  “For his century!” asked Greenbloom. “You married a man for his century? Magnificent! Lady Geraldine I congratulate you.”

  “Thank you,” she said with a dewy lower lip. “It’s so amusing. When I was a young gel I used to think the choice of a husband was so important that I very nearly left it too late. But now I’m fifty I realise that it makes very little difference; they were all so sweet and so much men that I’d have been quite as happy with any one of them. After all, they were all Victorians though none of them was quite so Victorian as Clive poor dear—and then as I say there was the house. You must see all of it. Wander round anywhere you like: the Library, the Aviary, the Gun Room, the Gardens, the Lake, oh you must see the Lake and the Swimming Pool Mr Boscawen, it is charming. John will tell you all about it.”

  Crossing the Landing with its marquetry cabinets and rubbed floral carpets she turned and smiled at them hazily.

  “Clive’s a little eccentric about the sea and though of course being on an island we’re quite surrounded by it, he never goes near it if he can help it but insists on keeping his lake as a sort of Admiralty preserve—”

  There was a thistledown of grievance in her pause and Greenbloom was quick to recognise it.

  “Ah! an obsession, Lady Geraldine? That is good. One likes a man to have an obsession.”

  “Then you would adore Clive,” she said without rancour. “Fortunately he doesn’t often use his lake in the evening so I think it would be quite safe for you to”—she was gently emphatic—“but please don’t touch his Barge, he’s very funny about it.”

  “He has a Barge?” Greenbloom’s little head jerked up with delighted astonishment.

  She laughed prettily; a cascade of sound fell from her lips as perfectly modulated as a garden water-fall.

  “Oh dear,” she said. “Forgive me! We have this with everyone and I suppose I should have become accustomed to it—but I never have. It’s not a real Barge, Mr Greenbloom, it’s a punt; but Clive insists that it is his Barge—I’m afraid he’s never got over having had one in his last years in the Navy and one simply daren’t mention the other word. I’ve trained myself always to say Barge and never”—she whispered it—“Punt. But John will show you the Lake, he knows all about it.”

  “I think,” said Greenbloom seriously, “I would rather be shown the Admiral; he sounds a most interesting man. Your description of him revives my faith in England. I shall come and live here again.”

  “Oh no, Mr Greenbloom, I’m afraid that’s the one thing I can’t arrange. Clive never meets people nowadays. He’s most unsociable and of course he’s not really English, he’s very Welsh.”

  “Of course! That explains it. It is always the same: the Welsh, the Irish, the Scots—English history is founded on them.”

  “Oh don’t say that. There was always darling Nelson.” She moved over to the Drawing Room door. “Now please come in and rescue poor Sambo for me. He will be pleased to see you. He’s been trying to entertain the girls ever since they arrived. Clive of course is more absent than ever when what he calls the ‘closed season’ starts—he means my P.G.s—I often wonder where he hides. It’s very unkind of him to leave it all to Sambo because as you know the darling can’t talk about anything very much but Rugby Football and the girls never seem to be very interested in that.”

  They did know about Sambo; all that there was to be known: that he was about forty-eight, drank, and
had once played for the Army at Twickenham.

  Michael opened the door and they followed her into the enormous room which on two sides overlooked the lawns and terraces. The parquet floor stretched ahead of them like a still buff-coloured lake on which sofas chairs a grand piano china cabinets and vast cradles of flowers floated on their reflections.

  “This,” went on Lady Geraldine, “is my favourite room. Don’t you think it would be your favourite room?” She invited them to agreement with one of her loveliest smiles and then without awaiting an answer slid gently forward over the shining surface as though impelled by a soft and scented breeze of her own. They smelt her perfume floating back to them as she moved between flowers and furniture up the pale horizon of the floor in the direction of the marble fireplace.

  They realised then that someone had been playing the piano in the far distance. The middle chords of The Rustle of Spring died on the air as a girl rose from behind the keyboard, and simultaneously, they became sensible of the presence of other people disposed and dispersed amongst the great spaces and solids of the room.

  A middle-aged couple, distressingly well-groomed, detached themselves from a window-seat at the far end.

  “The Merryweathers.” Lady Geraldine’s voice floated back to them as though she had whispered. “They make safes and refrigerators in Birmingham—so interesting! You’ll love them.”

  John smiled to himself remembering how once he had overheard his own description from her lips, ‘John Blaydon, so sweet; such a simple boy. You will find him charming.’

  In different parts of the room they saw that there were girls in summer frocks scarcely distinguishable from the covered chairs and sofas on which they were posed. One was writing a letter on her knee, two others were playing chess; but Lady Geraldine drew them after her towards Sambo who was standing stiffly before the empty fireplace, his black hair, thinning at the crown, reflected in the great rectangle of the glass above the chimney-piece.